March 11: La Soledad (2016 – Jorge Thielen Armand)

★★★★

Although it’s rooted in the current social situation in Venezuela, La Soledad goes beyond that in its reach.  Venezuela is a country in crisis, and the film shows us that as we watch a young man, José, struggle to keep his family together.  When his grandmother runs out of medicine for her hypertension, he can’t locate any more for her as her condition worsens.  Getting milk for his daughter’s breakfast turns into a day-long ordeal as he first has to get a coupon to buy it and then has to wait for hours to get into a store with little stock.  His brother becomes involved with a criminal gang and has to move in with José’s family to escape a vendetta, and José’s friends are constantly pressuring him to work with them in crime.  Meanwhile, he has trouble finding work.  He helps his white childhood friend Jorge, when there's work, and he carries materials at a construction site on occasion, but sometimes José can only stay home with his daughter when his wife goes to her job.  She is a housekeeper for a wealthy family, who works for low wages, but she eventually gets a better offer in Colombia though taking that job would break up the family.  All these pressures on José reflect the current situation in Venezuela.

To worsen matters, José and his family live in the decaying villa his grandmother once worked at and where José grew up.  The white family that owns the villa has long since moved, and Jorge, a member of that family who also grew up there, confides in José that the family is planning to raze the villa and sell the property.

All this would lend itself to melodrama, but as these external pressures mount on José, director Jorge Thielen Armand moves La Soledad into a mystical and psychological space.  From television, José becomes interested in finding a possible hidden cache of gold on the property, and his grandmother tells him a similar tale concerning La Soledad, although her story has a warning about a spectral guardian.  Meanwhile, his daughter becomes interested in playing ghost with him, pulling a sweatshirt over her head and waving her hands.  And José dreams of an old slave watching him in his sleep.  These elements dovetail nicely with the old photos José finds around the house and with his childhood memories of being in the house. As we learn early, some of José’s recollections are only memories of photos and family films; for example, though he remembers his grandfather, the man had already when José was born.  In the crumbling villa of La Soledad, these memories and ghosts blend and feel much like a García Márquez gesture, a magical realist flourish that expresses the psychological and social pressure on José.

Rodrigo Michelangeli's cinematography here adds to the atmosphere.  Scenes, particularly in La Soledad, often have a vaguely washed-out look to them that keeps us from seeing every detail clearly.  And Michelangeli also preserves some visual mystery by backlighting or underexposing shots.  In one scene, the young daughter dances around a statue in a dark room, backlit by a line of windows.  In another, the film underexposes José lying in bed so we see only a few unclear contours until the man’s face emerges from the pattern, and Michelangeli uses strong, single-source light in the the film's many night scenes to preserve some of the mystery of the scene.  Ironically, the choice to move to a graphic clarity at the end of the film amps up the tension and ambiguity of the concluding sequence.  Throughout, the cinematography is an important element of La Soledad.

This film gives us an evocative blending of social reality, psychology and drama, which makes the achievement of its 25-year-old, first-time director all the more impressive.  Armand was a recipient of a 150,000 euro Biennale College grant from the Venice Film Festival, and he had only a few months to complete the movie.  He based the story on his own experience, and he introduced a documentary element by having people play themselves in the film.  The director himself plays the autobiographical character Jorge, and José plays Jorge’s friend because he was the director's childhood friend.  This element adds yet another level of significance to La Soledad.

Armand directs this film in a delicate balance.  La Soledad takes us into a specific set of circumstances with specific people, but this specificity ultimately shows us something that is timeless and universal.  There are some technical weaknesses here, but there’s also a keenly-observed truth.

Atlanta Film Festival: Saturday, April 1, 2:30 pm at the Plaza Theater.
Worth your time.

March 10: Rat Film (2016 – Theo Anthony)

★★★★★

Atlanta Film Festival: Thursday, March 30, 7:15 pm at the Plaza Theater.
This is not one to miss.

March 9: Cortez (2017 – Cheryl Nichols)

★★★

Co-written by the co-stars and directed by one of them, Cortez has a lot of the strengths of a good indie production.  Notable among the assets here is the way the West is a character.  You certainly see it in the landscapes, but it’s also present in the décor of the interiors and in everyone’s stylistically-heightened clothes.  Kelly Moore’s cinematography and F. Rocky Jameson’s editing add to the distinct local color.  Moore's camera is still during still moments and moves when the pace picks up, and the way she lets light work contributes to the sense of place, whether nighttime bonfire images of a machine beast crushing a burning structure or a daytime exterior with highlights washed out by the bright ambient light.  She also frames images to allow more space for the world around the actors.  Supplementing all this, Jameson allows enough room in a shot for the action to be clear, but he cuts away when we have enough information rather than lingering overlong.  And he jump cuts to move action along quickly.

For all this strength, the two creative principals show a less sure hand.  Cheryl Nichols and Arron Shiver both have strong careers in acting, but the dialog they’ve created here doesn’t make for compelling cinema.  It shifts quickly in tone from consciously over-eloquent to mundane, and it’s laden with heavy-handed symbols and even exposition, just in case we don’t get the symbols.  You can’t fight everyone the way a ninja does, Jesse tells us so we recognize the evolution of his character.  Jameson's editing compresses action and moves the story of Cortez quickly, but Nichols’ and Shriver’s dialog bogs down this movement into long scenes of discourse, often allowing characters to deliver extended orations that become tedious, no matter how good the acting.  As director, Nichols bears no small of amount of responsibility here.  She lets scenes of dialog run like theatrical productions rather than a movie, relying on language instead of images and action, and she does little to break up long narrative speeches.  The opening of Cortez sets up this aesthetic as a man tells Jesse a long story while the two are sitting in a hot spring with nothing to interrupt our view of the speaker's face and the flow of his words except an occasional reaction shot.

Cortez has many strong elements, especially its evocation of the West as enhanced by expert cinematography and editing.  Stronger direction and a more focused script would have made this a very fine film indeed.

Atlanta Film Festival: Saturday, April 1, 5:15 pm at the Plaza Theater

March 6: Too Late for Tears (1949 – Byron Haskin)

★★★★

March 5: His Girl Friday (1940 – Howard Hawks)

★★★★★

This Howard Hawks’ version of "The Front Page" is just fun.  Unlike Lewis Milestone’s 1931 talkfest, Hawks brings this play to the screen as a full-fledged screwball comedy that works as cinema.

In addition to the repartee that informs the dialog, there’s always something worth looking at in the frame in His Girl Friday.  In Hawks’ version, the camera is more fluid than in Milestone’s, which helps engage us with what we’re seeing and hearing.  The contrast in the opening sequences of the films points to that difference right away.  While both films open with a newsroom tracking shot, Hawks lets newsroom items loom suddenly into the frame and pass out, just as he has the newsroom personnel bustle in and out of the frame.  By contrast, Milestone’s pan is rather monotone.  One particular Hawks update on the opening is the way the camera tracks to the elevator, engages Hildy, then tracks back across the newsroom again as she walks to see Walter, greeting people as she goes.  Hawks tells us in this opening scene that it’s same story, but done in a more active, cinematic way.

There are other camera and action flourishes in Friday, too.  At one point, the camera pans around to a series of phones as they start ringing, replicating how the eye might move as one phone after another sounds.  And rather than simply learning that Hildy has discovered that Sheriff Hartwell's gun was used in the escape, which is what happens in Front Page, Hawks shows us Hildy chase down and tackle the sheriff.  The ironic humor in a woman of this era performing a running tackle adds to the audience engagement that camera and action are already creating in Friday.

To the dialog-heavy script, Hawks also adds action within scenes so there’s usually something interesting to look at while we're listening.  Early in the film, for example, as Hildy, Walter and Bruce go into a bar for lunch, the conversation among the three is continually supplemented with other input.  Hildy, for example, exchanges greetings with the waiter during their conversation, and as they walk to the table, the silhouette of a wood column momentarily splits up the three, attracting our eye.  With the dialog never pausing, Walter maneuvers Bruce to sit at the far end of the table away from Hildy, and when they’re sitting and still talking, Hildy is removing her coat, another action that keeps the film from becoming visually stale.  In a similarly animated scene after Walter’s physical, the editor is putting on his shirt and tying his tie while the dialog between him and Bruce unspools.  As the conversation continues, Walter puts his hand on Bruce’s shoulder, and Duffy pokes his head into the office to give a visual comment on the dialog he’s overhearing.  A long, two-person conversation like this could fall flat, but Hawks animates it with action and with having ancillary characters break up any monotony.

The cinematic wit here also adds to our experience of Friday, especially the way Hawks winks at Milestone’s version.  Hawks is clearly one-upping Milestone with his take on the earlier film’s opening tracking shot, and his embellishment of Hildy’s revelation about Sheriff Hartwell shows a similar wit.  And changing Hildy’s gender here, with the subsequent fun of having Bruce as the character with the mother, opens the door for lots of humor that Milestone could hardly access.  The intertextuality between these two productions is another fun element of Hawks' Friday.

Although Hawks’ version of "The Front Page" is more cinematic than Milestone’s, Friday keeps the social critique of the original play.  Government is corrupt, and officials are mostly interested in keeping their jobs even if it means scare-mongering or outright bribery.  Experts are cluelessly self-important; the press is uncaring and unreliable.  And the people who bear the brunt of this pervasive self-serving attitude are the poor, like Earl and Molly.  In His Girl Friday, Hawks imbues the strong play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur with the director’s command of the cinematic, and the result is a thoroughly engaging, deep social critique.

March 4: The Front Page (1931 – Lewis Milestone & Nate Watt)

★★★

Four years after The Jazz Singer, Lewis Milestone and Nate Watt pack The Front Page from start to finish with nonstop, fast dialogue.   It’s a smart, fun movie that takes joy in skewering public and domestic institutions with wit and satire, all the while feeling like the directors are trying to make up for the previous silent decades by keeping dialogue going at a wild pace.  The Front Page is one of the earliest screwball comedies and sets a standard to judge the rest by.

The satire here is as funny as it is over-the-top.  The press is a cynical lot whose reporters embellish events with outrageous false information and, when they can’t get a story, simply make one up with extensive verbal dexterity.  They criticize whatever they encounter and pass their time in self-absorbed card-play if they’re not making the dullard jailer go out to get their lunch.  They cynically demand that an execution occur earlier in the morning so they can make their reporting deadlines, scoff at the sadness of the woman whose friend is facing execution, berate every government official they encounter and mock institutions from family to respect for the elderly.  However, they do all this with such joyful abandon that the audience can’t help but laugh.  Among them, Edward Everett Horton’s Bensinger stands out as a gullible hypochondriac, but it’s Adolphe Menjou’s Walter Burns whose merry disdain for decency lights up many scenes.  This editor ceaselessly promotes his newspaper and does everything he can to undermine the life of his reporter, Hildy, in order to keep him working at the Post.  Burns’ relish in sabotaging Hildy at the end of film brings an especially big smile.

Beyond the press, The Front Page takes aim at government and municipal elections.  A corrupt mayor and incompetent sheriff want to hang an innocent man to shore up their support in an upcoming election.  The sheriff falsely links the man with Bolshevism – to the delight of the sensationalist press -- and when a pardon arrives from the governor, both try to suppress the news until after the execution.  They fawn over higher authority, bully their underlings and make error after error when pursuing the convict the sheriff has inadvertently let escape.  Government here is as bungling as it is self-serving.

The Front Page is a lot of fun, but it’s not without its drawbacks.  While it condemns hypocrisy and ineptitude, it doesn’t know what to do with goodness.  Molly’s suicide, for example, injects stakes into the movie that makes the film’s overall satire feel trivial.  And we discover a complexity to Earl, who is both innocent because he’s mentally ill but also dangerous that doesn’t fit into the good guy/bad guy ethical structure of The Front Page’s mockery.  And on a technical level, the film begins to seem monotonous at its midpoint due to the consistently high-pitched banter of the characters.  The movie could benefit more vocal variety for its first two-thirds.

But overall, this is a fun and funny film, many of whose satirical flourishes still feel timely.  And it sets up the genre of screwball comedy well.

March 3: J'accuse! (1938 – Abel Gance)

★★★★