June 8: Steam:The Turkish Bath/Hamam (1997 -- Ferzan Ozpetek)

★★★

June 3: Midnight Express (1978 -- Alan Parker)

★★★★

March 18: Topkapi (1964 -- Jules Dassin)

★★

The takeaway from watching this heist farce is that some cultural sensibilities change a lot over time.  Ustinov’s Arthur and Schell’s Walter still have some humor and pathos more than 50 years after Jules Dassin directed this film, but the same can’t be said for Morely’s Cedric or Hahn’s Hans <ouch!>, whose humor is tired and hammy.  But it’s Melina Mercouri’s Elizabeth who kills most of the fun for today’s audience.  Her lines are a series of tedious, obvious flirtations: Do you mind that I am a nymphomaniac? .... Don't waste it; use it!  And she drapes herself over each of the men at some point despite not having the screen charisma to make it seem like she’s being effective at teasing or manipulating them.  In scene after scene, such broad humor falls flat.

More’s the pity that Dassin didn’t drop the farce element of Topkapi and focus on the elements he’d mastered so thoroughly in Rififi because that’s where the great strengths here lie.  Like Paris was a major character in his 1955 film, Istanbul stars here.  An opening montage of the city shows us the wood houses, the street markets, the crowded bridges and boats, and the exotic architecture that makes the city so special, and Dassin even includes unique Turkish elements like the traveling carnival and a large oil wrestling tournament.    And the heist itself, with its Rififi-like silence and execution of an elaborate scheme, captures us with its suspense and its imagery.  It’s hard not to imagine that de Palma had this heist in Mission Impossible.  With de Palma, we watch Tom Cruise dangle above the temperature-sensitive floor while the director cuts between the main character and those supporting him; in Topkapi, we watch Giulio dangle above the pressure-sensitive floor while Dassin cuts between the main character and those supporting him.  The thieves in the two movies even wear similar gloves.

But for whatever reason, whenever tension begins to mount in this film, Dassin lets the steam out.  The little bird that unknowingly triggers the alarm of the Topkapi Treasury could have been an instrument of fate, but in this film, it’s the punchline for the authorities.  “A little bird told me” isn't even clever.  And we’re left with a pretty farce that isn't very gripping.

 

February 23: The Artist and the Model/El artista y la modelo (2012 -- Fernando Trueba)

★★★★

February 22: Terraferma (2012 -- Emanuele Crialese)

★★★

Terraferma is a sweet film that wears its heart on its sleeve.  Illegal immigrant boats are turning up in the seas off a Sicilian island, Linosa, and the locals are trapped between their core, humanistic values of respect for any life and those of the nation, which doesn't want to welcome the illegals any way.  The state, in the form of the police, persecutes Filippo and his grandfather Ernesto for plucking nearly-dead refugees from the sea, among them a pregnant woman near delivery.  The woman has her child at Filippo’s house shortly after she’s rescued and eventually wins over Filippo’s mother, the pragmatic sceptic Giulietta.  These circumstances sum up the ethics of the film as Terraferma stacks the deck against the state in an almost melodramatic way.

Director Emanuele Crialese also gets some mileage out of the tacky tourism that many in Linosa seem bent on selling their hearts to.  Filippo’s uncle wants to pretend the refugees don’t exist so he can continue to make money by taking drunken tourist parties out on his boat so they can have a good time.  One effective device in the film contrasts his boat crammed with tourists waving in celebration of music with a similar shot of refugees waiving from their overcrowded raft.  Other shots contrast the spreading of a fishing net from an underwater angle with an underwater angle shot of drunk tourists diving into the water.  It’s all clear if a little obvious.

The ethical examination in the film centers on Fillipo.  This cute, unsophisticated, 20-year-old accepts his grandfather’s humanism until their ship is confiscated by the police because they had pulled struggling refugees out of the sea.  The youth then decides to follow the law rather than his personal code and, in one of the most effective scenes of the film, he beats away a refugee group that tries to cling to his small boat, and motors off into the night.  The next day at the beach, he sees the horror of the refugees’ suffering and death as they wash up on the beach.  Realizing that his actions have contributed to this pain, Filippo re-embraces his humanism and helps the Ethiopian woman and her children off the island and on to Italy.  While the film invites us to follow Filippo’s character arc as the center of the questions at play in Terraferma, the wholesome actor at this center, Filippo Pucillo, unfortunately can’t quite engage us.  We don’t see nuance in this performance, and we don’t have a sense for the flow of the stages of his moral evolution as he moves through them.  A professional actor might have been able to carry us through all the forces at play in Filippo’s life and thus sold the pounding message in the film, but Pucillo isn’t able to do this.

Ultimately, Terraferma feels heavy-handed.  Well-intentioned, but heavy-handed.  The film offers some nice cinematic moments and has some merit because of these, but it could have been a much more effective movie.

February 20: Skyfall (2012 -- Sam Mendes)

★★★★★

After the rebooted Bond franchise took a bad detour with  Quantum of Solace, Sam Mendes brings it firmly back into place with Skyfall.  This film is a sure return to what made Casino Royale so effective: updating and intensifying the classic elements of Bond while giving us a central character that’s more than a cliché.

Mendes brings an complex double track to Skyfall.  On the thematic level, we start with a Bond who is tired and outdated.  Photographed by Roger Deakins, Daniel Craig's face shows us an aging spy who is scruffy, worn and wrinkled, a look emphasized by frequent low-key lighting.  And more than appearing spent, the character feels tired and has much less agility and strength than a virile Bond would.  Skyfall follows this Bond as he becomes reinvigorated by the challenges that come his way until, by the time he’s a captive of Silva, his white stubble is gone and high-key light has eased his wrinkles.  Bond’s arc in this film is from tired and worn to competent and effective.  That issue of datedness is the central concern of the film.  Bond and Q parry about the old vs the new, Moneypenny teases about age, and M battles her ministerial supervision over whether old-style, flesh-and-blood spies are even needed anymore.   Skyfall questions the past ways of doing things and finds it still has a very important role today.

And while the plot and characters are developing this them of old vs new, on another level entirely, Mendes is giving us a film that is renewing the old Bond conventions and showing how they work in our contemporary moment.  Fifty years old, these conventions can still touch us today if updated.  Moneypenny is no longer just a secretary but also a field agent who proves her worth to Bond, and she isn’t white.  Q is a skinny computer nerd instead of a middle-aged engineer, and M is an older woman.  In addition to these updates, Agent 007 himself is not a flat caricature in this film but has psychology, feelings and vulnerabilities; he even hints that his vaunted heterosexuality might not be consistent.  And the indomitable Bond twice experiences defeat in Skyfall, first in failing to get the computer drive and dying while trying, and the second time in failing at his ultimate goal, to protect M.  Mendes effectively melds theme, character and genre into a tight-knit whole in this Bond outing.

Other elements of Skyfall also bring this Bond into our moment.  The style and imagery of the opening credits use recognizable Bond imagery, but in Skyfall, they creatively segue into the action and even become part of the narrative.  Bond is shot and falls into a river in the film's opening sequence, and the credits end that sequence and continue with images of water and death.  Also, Adele’s strong, sleek theme song, “Skyfall,” recalls Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger theme, but Adele’s arrangement, melody and rhythm are all 2012.  And Deacon’s cinematography is eye-grabbing and profoundly contemporary.  His nighttime helicopter shots weave among illuminated Shanghai towers, and an assassination scene and ensuing struggle are boldly set on the upper floors of a skyscraper with a dark foreground against a garish video display of jellyfish swimming.  And this huge space is compressed when the glass walls break and Bond and Severine stare at each other across the few meters of space between the buildings.   Deakins also uses mist and fog effectively, as when Bond comes into Severin’s shower and we see them through condensation on the glass.  Deakins also has Bond frequently assume a feet-apart posture facing away from the camera and into some future challenge off into the frame.  This cinematographer brings  a thoroughly modern look to Skyfall.

At the 50-year mark of the Bond franchise, Mendes brings us a film about renewal of a man and renewal of a franchise.  And he does both while talking about renewal.  Skyfall is a sophisticated, self-reflexive use of the 007 film language, and it brings viewer pleasure back into the films is wonderful, contemporary way.  With so many new characters established and old ones gone, Mendes leave 007 with a bright, original future.

February 18: Quantum of Solace (2008 -- Marc Forster)

★★

Extending Casino Royale’s update of the Bond formula, Quantum of Solace provides contemporary takes on elements like the beauty of its actors, the athleticism of Bond, and the internationalism of the franchise.  It also avoids the easy parody that earlier Bond films lapsed into, the same way that Casino Royale did.

But Quantum embraces some of the other Bond elements a little too fervently.  Bond films have action, and lots of it, but Quantum is one extreme action sequence after another.  It starts with an intense car chase sequence that segues into an extended on-foot pursuit in Siena across clay tile roofs and into a restoration project, whose scaffolding echoes that of the opening of Casino Royale.  Shortly after this chase, we’re launched into yet another extended action pursuit, this time in boats in Haiti.  Then there’s a long fight sequence at an opera, a dogfight between a large vintage plane and some faster fighters, and the final fight at the hotel in the Atacama Desert.  Thrilling as all these are individually, so much chasing ultimately has a numbing effect since we get used to the breakneck pace, like we do in any action movie.  The more successful Casino Royale turns to action sequences more judiciously and, at the same time, it uses these sequences to move the plot and character development forward rather than stopping the story for an action pause.  Bond takes real hits in the action sequences of both films, showing us a modern Bond who lacks the invulnerability of the earlier on, but while Casino Royale gives us a Bond who becomes more human or shows us aspects of his character like his growing love, the action Bond of Quantum is something of a punching bag.  He hurts, but he takes his punches and goes on with little to no character development.

Which points to another problem with Solace—this Bond character is flat and uninteresting, and he shows very little growth through the film. He starts as a man who has been deeply hurt, and Solace takes him through a series of action scenes that lead him to his revenge.  But there’s no change in his character through the film, and he doesn't seem to learn or to suffer.  Director Marc Forester has also included a parallel character who is also motivated by revenge, Camille Montes, but  he then makes nothing out of the pairing. Both characters want revenge, both characters get revenge, and neither seems to have an arc of development through the film.  Ultimately, the revenge theme seems clever and perhaps gratuitous since it does't lead to any particular outcome.  Park Chan-wook gets far more from his Vengeance Trilogy.

Some elements of Solace please.  Many stunts are wonderful, like the leaps  from roof-to-roof Siena and the parachuting into the desert after the airplane duel.  And there’s great intercutting in some action sequences as that between the on-stage Tosca performance and the back-stage fight.  The finale action sequence also effectively cuts between Bond’s fight in one part of the hotel and Camille’s in another part.  But despite all the high-quality action and editing in this Bond installment, it's missing the human Bond that makes Casino Royale so successful.  And the result is a collection of fun action scenes that don’t have much to say.