76: Underground

            It’s difficult to know if the jury at the 1995 Cannes film festival expected their choice for the Palme D’or to be controversial.  Since its exhibition at that festival, Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995) has been denounced by Bosnians for an alleged pro-Serbian subtext, and described as a lengthy piece of propaganda in support of an untied Yugoslavia.  Being unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the political stances of Eastern Europe I’m certainly not qualified to make any such judgments.  However, I am certain that this film is hilarious, though admittedly in the darkest of ways.  Somehow it manages to be both a startling portrayal of war and a subtle farce that briefly glorifies those who would profit from the suffering of others during such times.

            This is yet another film that had my mind reeling for a way to describe it; composing a pitch in hindsight.  It’s Soldier of Orange (1977; #85) meets Blast from the Past (1999).  It all begins on the night before the Nazis invade Belgrade.  Two smalltime conmen, Marko (Miki Manojlovic) and Blacky (Lazar Ristovski), drunkenly gallivant through the streets.  They are followed by a parade of musicians who seem to function as both the men’s entertainment and a subtle Greek chorus.  Marko drops Blacky off to his suspicious and pregnant wife before making his own way to a whore house.  The German Blitzkrieg strikes the following morning, just as both men reap the consequences of the seeds sown the night before.  Lost in the attack is the Belgrade zoo, which Marko’s younger stuttering brother Ivan was the caretaker of.  Overcome with grief, Ivan wanders the streets, still burning and covered with rubble, carrying an infant chimp. 

After the surrender, locals are recruited to help rebuild the destroyed city under German authority.  In this environment of deprivation, Marko and Blacky become players in the city’s black market, smuggling luxury items and running guns to various pockets of the resistance forces.  Both men are wanted, but Blacky evokes particular ire from the local Nazi commander as the two men compete for the affection of Natalija (Mirjana Jokovic), a famous stage actress. 

When searches for Marko and Blacky become too difficult to avoid, they are forced to hide in an elaborate bunker in Marko’s Grandfather’s home.  They take friends and family into hiding with them, including Ivan and his chimp, but the difficult process of going underground causes Blacky’s wife to die in labor.  His infant son Jovan becomes the youngest resident of the bunker. 

After several years of quietly continuing their smuggling operation, Blacky resolves to bring Natalija to live with him in the underground chamber.  He steals her right off of the stage and attempts to kill her Nazi beau in the process.  When this plan goes awry, both Blacky and Marko bumble their way to hero status, somehow surviving a kidnapping plot and several instances of torture.  When Blacky is injured in the process he descends to the bunker to manage a subterranean arms manufacturing company, leaving Marko to handle the business end of things above ground.

The operation runs smoothly enough until Marko falls for Natalija, and decides he’ll stop at nothing to have her.  The deceptions that play into the middle segments of the film are both hilarious and heartbreaking.  For nearly twenty years Marko convinces the residents of the bunker that the war hasn’t ended, all the while making profits from the weapons they manufacture.  He marries Natalija publicly, but has her occasionally return to the bunker to relay stories about the Nazis rape of the country, always encouraging her to lead Blacky on in the process. 

This is only about half of what Underground has to offer.  Indeed it is one of the more complex plots I’ve had the pleasure of describing in these writings.  It takes unconventional turns and rarely has a definitive tone, choosing instead to ride the line between nostalgic patriotism and quirky irreverence.  It is a film that plays its cards close to the chest, never descending into all-out farce until long after the audience is hooked. 

Though comical throughout Underground is a film that begs serious questions about the nature of family, war, friendship, betrayal, and the lengths people will go to deceive both themselves and others.  It is a war film that never glamorizes death, but never takes it too seriously either.  It accepts the fact that in a world of madness, sanity is crazy.  Underground gives us characters to love and sequences to cherish (Natalija’s drunken pole dance on a tank barrel is delightful, as is Blacky’s escape from a mental hospital) without forcing either on us, letting us decide for ourselves how we feel about them.  And through it all are those musicians, never fully present or totally absent from the action.  I’m sure that they could be interpreted several ways, but I prefer to think of them as Marko and Blacky do, as the accompaniment to their magnificent parade through life.

Language: Serbian/German/French/Russian

Runtime: 167 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off

77: A Tale of the Wind (a.k.a. Une histoire de vent – Original French title)

            Classifying Joris Ivens’ A Tale of the Wind (1988) is not an easy task.  It is a documentary which seems to include scripted scenes of fiction and it openly acknowledges the challenges to its own production.  Indeed some of its best scenes come when everything that has been planned suddenly falls to pieces.  More than anything, it functions as a cinematic journal of its maker, Ivens.  Making no secret of his failing health the 90 year old documentarian sets out to make a film about something that cannot be seen.  With the challenge of filming the wind itself set before him, he drags cameras and crews around the world.

            This is a visually remarkable film, and the ways by which Ivens achieves his odd task are often both creative and stunning, particularly in the scenes in which the process of achieving them accompanies the final product.  Ivens himself was a remarkable man.  He turned to filmmaking at the young age of thirteen, and fought for his native Holland in the First World War.  During his long career he made films for the soviet government, documented the Spanish Civil War, and chronicled Roosevelt’s New Deal.  Footage from several of his early films is peppered throughout A Tale of the Wind, and seems to confirm Ivens seen-it-all demeanor.  He is a quite man in his old age, with long white hair blown over tired eyes.  His ideas are loud enough that he never raises his voice, except at the wind itself.

            His crew follows him to China, where legends of dragons accompany many myths about the winds.  He describes his own asthma as an inability to draw enough wind, and though the metaphor is overplayed by the film’s conclusion, it does serve to convey just how personal this project was to him.  Did he know it would be his epitaph?  He seems to.  Ivens’ preoccupation with filming the Terracotta Warriors, the eternal guardians of the tomb of an ancient emperor, convey an acceptance of death.

            Not every segment of A Tale of the Wind works, particularly the oddly repetitive appearance of a jester-esque figure in traditional Chinese opera makeup, but When Ivens quietly uses his camera to display the achievements of the human race juxtaposed with the forces of nature it can be breathtaking.  I was momentarily transfixed by a wide shot of satellites, used for charting solar winds, moving in unison against the backdrop of the sunset.  This isn’t the most engaging of films on the whole, and I never felt fully connected to Ivens’ odd determination, but as a series of vignettes portraying the human capacity to achieve even the strangest of things it does have some strong moments.

Language: French/Dutch/Mandarin

Runtime: 80 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 2 Hats Off

78: Celine and Julie Go Boating (a.k.a. Céline et Julie vont en bateau – Original French Title; a.k.a. Phantom Ladies Over Paris)

            There are infinite ways by which a promising premise can be transformed into an awful movie.  Unfortunately the reverse is never true.  A bad concept cannot become a good film, no matter how much talent or money a producer throws at the problem. Such is the case with Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), a film that should have been left on the cutting room floor in its entirety.  Andy Warhol said that he thought the outtakes of movies would be much more entertaining than the intended film.  He may have been a fan of this picture, which concerns the quirky lives of two liberated Parisian women with little better to do than drink, smoke, and otherwise act like children.

            There is a mystery subplot to this three hour plus film that is neither resolved by its conclusion nor engaging when it is introduced in the first place.  By the time it appeared I couldn’t have cared less.  The fact that it is a hallucination, based on visions brought on by hard candy, doesn’t make it any more compelling.  Obviously it is based in suspicions that one of the women has about a childhood neighbor. However, despite taking over the film’s second half it all adds up to nothing but an excuse for the two performers (Juliet Berto & Dominique Labourier) to act juvenile.  Think about some of the less successful Hollywood comedies of the past few years – many of them starring Adam Sandler and his ilk – and tell me: has adults acting childish ever been a funny premise?

            During the initial years of the French New Wave movement directors embraced cinematic quirkiness, often turning run-of-the-mill movies into good ones and promising films into great ones.  However, at about the time these directors started making films in color they seemed to run out of good stories and just focused on the quirks.  As a result, their films suffered.*  Rivette, though he did not hit his filmmaking stride until later in the movement, is considered a founding father of the French New Wave.  He and his colleagues made films that flew in the face of traditional cinema.  He eventually came to his senses enough to drop the quirks for the spectacular La Belle Noiseuse (1991; #132), but this earlier work is likely to be embraced only by the most devoted of cinefiles.

Language: French

Runtime: 193 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: .5 Hats Off      

*See 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967; post #166)       

79: A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian – Original Mandarin title)

            It’s telling that the full-page write up in the 1001 text of Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (1991) mentions not a single performance in the film.  Yang worked primarily with nonprofessionals on this lengthy project, and few went on to star in other films.  Speculation can be dangerous in film reviews but is often necessary, and I’d be willing to bet that he cast his film hoping to avoid any chance that a single performance might overshadow the somewhat complex story.   This is a plausible side effect of casting name actors in any film, but such talents can also anchor a story and give it its center.  As it stands, A Brighter Summer Day is without any such focal point.

            At nearly four hours, this is a movie that tries to be about so much that it ends up being about very little.  It concerns the lives of adolescent immigrants in 1960 Taipei, the children of men and women who escaped mainland China and communism only to find new hardships on the coastal island.  Much of the film’s underlying tension comes from a cultural emphasis on education.  The boys on whom it focuses are under pressure from their parents to pass exams that would allow them to transfer from military-sponsored night school into a collegiate-prep day school.  While individually most of them disregard the importance of their education, a few do take their parents’ wishes seriously.  Still, academics often take a back seat to the activities of the street gangs that most of them belong to.  While the actions that these groups engage in range dramatically in the scope of their legality, the basic emphasis on belonging to a group of any sort, particularly as members of a Diaspora, is clear.  Even street nicknames, some as juvenile as “Cat,” “Airplane,” and “Honey,” note the importance of status within their youth subculture.

            Adolescence in 1960, in Taipei or otherwise, seems to be a hallmark of cinema.  Both sex and Rock n’ Roll have their part to play in this film, and its title is taken from the verses of Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” which the youngest member of the gang tries ceaselessly to translate.  The presence of these elements in A Brighter Summer Day has drawn critical comparison to Rebel without a Cause (1955), but I noted a stronger connection to West Side Story (1961), particularly in a powerful scene in which a long-absent gang leader returns world weary and with a message of peace.  Both films end with a tragic death and – musical difference aside – are about the questions of loyalty that arise when a woman somehow infiltrates a male-dominated conflict.

            Thematically, loyalty is the center of the film, but it nevertheless lacks a character lead.  Though one boy’s story may receive the most attention he is not necessarily the most engaging figure here.  Perhaps this can again be explained through speculation.  Though the events portrayed in A Brighter Summer Day are true, they are not specifically the story of the characters we see.  Yang himself lived through this story, and was thirteen in 1960 when these events took place.  His parents too had immigrated to Taipei from mainland China to flee Mao’s reign.  I think that essentially, what the audience sees here is his own speculation, after personal  experience and intense research, into what happened in that city at that time. 

            I don’t think that this is a good film.  I think that perhaps Yang’s close proximity to the story, physically and emotionally, prevented him from cutting its lesser elements.  As such, it is multiple stories and subplots adrift in a four hour ocean.  There are two, maybe even three, good films within A Brighter Summer Day, but totaled it is much less than the sum of its parts.  Yang went on to make a film that far outshines this one.  At 173 minutes I wanted still more of his Yi Yi (2000), his final movie before succumbing to cancer in 2007.

Language: Mandarin

Runtime: 237 Minutes

Available @Video.google.com

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off

80: Rosetta

                  There is only one brief moment of sentiment in Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s 1999 effort Rosetta.  It’s not a long film – 95 minutes – but for being so committed to keeping their picture nearly free of ploys for sympathy the Dardennes deserve acknowledgement.  Rosetta took home the Palme D’or at Cannes in 1999, but I don’t think it to be a masterpiece (as is often my feeling about Cannes winners).  I think it is simply different enough from the contemporary conventions of the film industry that it could not be ignored.  I haven’t seen much of the Dardenne’s catalogue, but I get the impression that all of their films defy these conventions.  Less than a minute into Rosetta I recognized their handiwork.

            Characters in Dardenne films always seem to be on the move.  A handheld camera always follows them, sometimes curiously, and sometimes because their films create an impression of loneliness, that there is no one else to follow.  Here it follows Rosetta, a teen whose just been fired from another job.  She heads home to her trailer, traversing busy highways and muddy forests, only to find her mother drunk when she arrives. I doubt that a kind word is spoken between these two characters throughout the film, and a role reversal between them is obvious.  It seems to take all of Rosetta’s energy to keep her mother from spending the money she gives her on booze, and choosing then to supplement the insufficient rent with sexual favors to the trailer park landlord.

            Rosetta is clever for a teen.  (Why are teenagers in European films so smart when they are so dumb in American movies?)  She is also proud, and refuses gifts from her mother’s suitors, opting instead to rely on her innovative fishing system to provide the occasional meal.  Things would be better if she could keep a job.  Or would they?  The film is never certain.  It’s too cautious, as if wounded deeply, to make any clear statement.  I’m not sure if this is its strength or its weakness.

            When Rosetta asks about work at a waffle stand she’s given a job as a batter mixer.  She starts to talk with the boy, Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione), who sells the waffles.  He’s smitten and invites her for dinner.  At his apartment he makes her French toast and she listens to tapes of his garage band.  Not wanting to go home, she sleeps there.  The moment of sentiment comes, but not between the two characters.  Alone on a spare bed, she holds a conversation with herself:

Your name is Rosetta. My name is Rosetta. You found a job. I found a job. You've got a friend. I've got a friend. You have a normal life. I have a normal life. You won't fall in a rut. I won't fall in a rut. Good night. Good night.

It is the first time her name is spoken in the film.

              Compare this scene to a later one in which she is forced to make a choice that would seem second nature to most.  Riquet is drowning.  He calls to Rosetta for help.  She may have intentionally let him fall into the water, or she may have not, but for reasons that become clear to the audience at this moment she has a legitimate cause not to save him.  I can recall few scenes in all of the films I’ve seen in which I was less certain of what a character would do.  Both of these scenes suggest a loneliness that transcends the scope of typical human capacity.  That she would let him drown is unthinkable, and yet at this moment wholly plausible.

              Rosetta is a film without an ending.  It isn’t supposed to have one.  The audience decides for themselves what becomes of this girl.  Externally, the film was effective in getting Belgian legislation passed to ensure fair employment for teens, but internally it’s missing something.  Again, I think it’s supposed to be missing something, but in either case I didn’t find it as fulfilling as the Dardenne’s subsequent The Son (2002).  That picture takes its time with its own moral questions, but I feel it engages its viewers before posing them.  As I said, the directing brothers deserve acknowledgement for Rosetta, but I wasn’t quite sure until now that it was to their credit that they made such an emotionally distant film.

Language: French

Runtime: 95 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 3 Hats Off

81: The Traveling Players (a.k.a. O Thiasos – Original Greek title)

            There is a lingering sense of connectedness that accompanies Theodoros Angelopoulos visually ambitious but narratively ambiguous The Traveling Players (1975).  At almost four hours, the film has room enough to build up the intertwined relationships of its characters, but Angelopoulos opts instead to never quite solidify anything.  At its conclusion I still wasn’t quite sure what I was seeing, and I felt a distinct inkling that I was missing something; that my limited knowledge of Greek history and language prevented an informed interpretation of the picture.  Looking to the net for answers, I’m now inclined to believe that this was in fact the director’s intention.

            The plot of The Traveling Players isn’t simple.  It traverses close to fifteen of the most tumultuous years in Greek history (1939-1952), and the experiences of fascist rule, Nazi occupation, and communist conflict through the lives of the eponymous group.  In a conventional film these events would unfold sequentially or in an easily digestible series of flashbacks.  The audience would build an understanding of these turbulent happenings while developing an intimate relationship with individual members of the troupe, growing to sympathize with their personal trials.  However Angelopoulos has no interest in conventional storytelling.  He chooses instead to keep these characters at arm’s length, while blurring together different periods of the various political conflicts.

            How does he do this?  Consider how his – and DP Yorgos Arvanitis’ – unique approach to photographing his characters might contribute to such a tone.  In a film of 230 minutes, he uses just 80 shots.  That’s an average shot length of almost 2.9 minutes.  Within those minutes the camera often moves from one character to another, unveiling moments of their lives without any set-up.  There are no typical close-ups contained within these movements.  At several points the camera stops on a medium shot of an individual.  Superfluous activities seem to cease in these moments, and the character, as if delivering a soliloquy on stage, speaks directly to the audience about a tragic personal experience.  This happens numerous times and yet I could not tell you the name of a single such character.  Their stories instead seem to represent the group as a whole, allegorical as opposed to individual.  In these moments, without cuts or a scene change, the mood of the film is considerably altered.

            Similarly, the camera seems to possess the ability to alter chronology.  Exterior shots often begin in one year, on one group of people, before abandoning them to pan or float on to another, meeting up with a different set of characters in a different time.  This makes an attempt to dissect the film literally nearly impossible, until this confusion over setting gives way to the notion that this story is much more concerned with place than it is with time.  Once this perception takes hold the film becomes less a connected narrative and more of a collection of sequences.  Some of these sequences are remarkable.  Others are simply heartbreaking.  Consider the episode in which a young woman is coerced into performing a striptease so that she might obtain the wine for her family dinner.  The moment is simultaneously disgusting and evocative of the desperation the woman feels.

            As I watched The Traveling Players I was struck by its ironic connection to another film, Yasujirô Ozu’s masterpiece Floating Weeds (1959).  Ostensibly, there are few films that might seem so similar, if only described in terms of basic concept.  In execution, they could not be more different.  Both are films about troupes of actors whose lives are nomadic in nature.  Both achieve a quality that deceives or debunks our perceptions of time in order to make a larger statement about a culture.  But Floating Weeds achieves this with a camera that is relentlessly still (as with all Ozu), while Angelopoulos holds shots only occasionally.  Through no camera movement Ozu gives us a deep understanding of his human subjects.  Angelopoulos, through almost unyielding movement, gives us so little of his.  Usually these choices have the opposite effect.

           

Patterns and connections to other films are somewhat obvious in The Traveling Players.  They can be overdone, but occasionally are refreshing, as with a cantina momentarily transformed into a political pulpit via song, à la Casablanca (1943).  The Traveling Players itself is directly referenced in Angelopoulos’ own Landscape in the Mist (1988; #158), when the group entire, included the members who expire during the course of this film, return in full to play a small part in that one.  As if needed, this later appearance confirms the statement of timelessness and connectedness evident throughout Players.  This film is not a masterpiece, and its odd structure, epic length, and relative difficulty to be found in a fully subtitled version render it less seen in U.S. film circles.  However, it is certainly a worthy entry into the 1001 canon.

Language: Greek (primary)/English

Runtime: 230 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 2.5 Hats Off

82: Man of Marble (Czlowiek z Marmuru – Original Polish title)

            Almost 100 posts ago I reviewed Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Iron (1981; #180) and referenced its “thematic prequel,” the polish director’s Man of Marble (1977).  I find now, having seen the film, that it is a prequel in the commonly accepted parlance, and not simply a grouping of related themes and tendencies with a recognizable title structure.  The two films could not be more conventionally linked, and the protagonist of Man of Marble, Mateusz Birkut, is in fact the eventually reclusive father to the hero of Man of Iron, played by the same actor, Jerzy Radziwilowicz.  Krystyna Janda appears here as well as Agnieszka, the tenacious media student whose presence I found confusing in the 1981 picture.

            Her appearance is justified by the earlier film, as her story frames the rise to prominence of Birkut.  In the contemporary 1977 of Man of Marble she is a film student, hoping to direct a thesis project on the life of a man whose marble statue lies in the basement of the Warsaw Museum.  He is Mateusz Birkut, an educated bricklayer who was picked at the height of Stalinism by the soviet propaganda machine to star in a film about the glories of the housing worker.  Through a series of flashbacks reminiscent of the structure of Citizen Kane (1941) Agnieszka searches for clues as to why Birkut, who briefly rose to the status of a national hero, faded into obscurity.

            In her inquiries, Agnieszka meets with the director – now an international star – whose film initially brought Birkut notoriety in the 1950s.  The filmmaker debunks many of the publicly accepted truths that his documentary spawned.  He reveals that, as a brick mason on a government housing project, Birkut was selected almost arbitrarily to “star” as a man who proposes and demonstrates a system of construction that allows a five man team to lay 28,000 bricks in a single eight hour session.  Wajda intercuts elements of Agnieszka’s interview with the director with flashbacks to the filming of Birkut’s miraculous feat, balancing them well with the footage itself, shown to Agnieszka in a screening room.  These scenes do much to reveal the manipulation of facts possible through filmmaking and serve in a way as Wajda’s commentary on his own art form: that truth is subject to what the camera sees.

            Further interviews reveal that Birkut’s prominence as a national symbol after the release of the film gave way to an uneasy social conscience that caused him to question the communist leaders, although privately at first.  After an accident prevented him from continuing on his publicity tour, his assigned political attaché began to detect a hesitance to cooperate with the pro-soviet propaganda mechanism, and suggested that his image be removed from public display. 

            As Agnieszka’s interviews begin to uncover more about Birkut’s post-censored life, her government funding for the movie is cut.  An epilogue suggests, as Agnieszka confronts Birkut’s son (also played by Radziwilowicz here), that after years of political persecution the outspoken laborer was eliminated by the government.  In a case of life imitating art, Man of Marble was censored by the pro-soviet Polish government for its own implications about their practices.

            Much of Man of Marble is concerned with the concept of truth, and cinema’s ability to distort it.  Often, seeing a film can alter our perceptions, regardless of whether the film is based in fact. Having seen this picture I’m not particularly inclined to alter my assessment of its squeal, but I do feel that comparison between them is warranted.  I believe that Man of Marble is superior to Man of Iron, both technically and tonally.  Where Man of Iron is a search for answers, Man of Marble seems to be much more concerned with the questions.  Films about questions so often unite and intrigue us, while films about answers so often divide and enrage us. As I said, conventionally these films are linked, but one is of much higher quality, and I can’t help but liken their differences to those of the initial and most resent installments of the Indian Jones canon.

Language: Polish

Runtime: 165 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 2.5 Hats Off    

83: The Horse Thief (Dao Ma Zei – Original Mandarin title)

            Internet streaming of video can be a great thing.  Through Youtube I was able to view a classic “Roger Ebert and the Movies” episode in which Ebert and guest Martin Scorsese named their favorite films of the 1990s.  Upon hearing that Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Horse Thief (released in China in 1986 but not imported to the U.S. until the 90s) was my favorite director’s pick for the best film of the decade, I immediately wanted to see the movie myself.  Unfortunately, streamed video has its downside as well.  Though I was able to find a subtitled version of The Horse Thief online, I’m afraid that its pixilated quality left something to be desired, all the more disappointing when I realized how visually expressive of a film it is.

            I’ve viewed several films lately without the assistance of subtitles.  This has garnered mixed results, but my commitment to finish the 1001 titles is strong, and I’m always searching for the best viewing experience possible.  In the case of this film, I would have gladly traded subtitles for higher quality video.  The story needs little superfluous explanation.  A man, Norbu, is exiled from his Tibetan tribe when he is convicted of horse theft.  The elders believe that he will bring poor favor from the mountain god.  He is cast out and takes his wife and young son to live in the remote wilderness.  Though he tries to reform, the harsh realities of the brutal winter and ensuing disease take hold.  In order to feed his family and cure his son, Norbu is forced to steal again.  One son dies and another is born.  The cycle seems destined to continue.

                Zhuangzhuang is relatively unconcerned with plot.  Though Norbu’s story is heartbreaking, his presence is allegorical rather than literal.  His suffering is the suffering of all.  Zhuangzhuang suggests this through long wide takes that pit Norbu and his family against devastating and bleak backgrounds.  Yet images of nature here are not entirely restricted to the brutal.  Quite moments near mountain springs imply Norbu’s eternal hope.  These elements of vastness are juxtaposed with images of the tribe’s religious architecture, and hint at a balance to be found between the natural and manufactured worlds.  Movement and superimposition are Zhuangzhuang’s tools and he uses them with great effectiveness. 

            The camera, as in a Scorsese picture, always seems to be moving, even if only subtly, suggesting our involvement in Norbu’s life.  However, in perhaps the film’s most striking shot it holds steady on Norbu, who having given up all hope slaughters a holy lamb to feed his wife and child.  The animal bleeds to death from the throat as it gasps its final breaths, squirming to fight off death.  For a brief moment Norbu and the lamb are one and the same, fighting the same inevitability.  The shot wasn’t created in post-production or with special effects.  The non-actor Rigzin Tseshang performs the act, killing the lamb for the sake of the picture in the way animals have been slaughtered for millennia.

            Life is a struggle; much less so now than ever before.  The Horse Thief is a film dedicated to a portrayal of that struggle, and to that end it is a success.  Personally, I must – for now at least – count it as a great disappointment.  Given the opportunity to see the film again in better quality I would certainly take it, but the muddled version I saw left much to be desired.  I suspect that even in pristine quality this film might be difficult to engage, but such is life. 

Language: Mandarin

Runtime: 88 Minutes

Available @dailymotion.com

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off

84: Tampopo

            It is human nature to love food.  It’s the only one of the three basic human vices that isn’t assigned taboo status by most Western religions.  I had a professor at a religious college who once said that American Christians tend to be overweight because while the church vilifies sex and alcohol, it out and out encourages us to stuff our faces.  Even holidays that require fasting end with a pig-out session.  Gluttony may be a sin when it comes to sermons, but I’ve been to more church potlucks than I could possibly count.  This irony would seem odd, to say the least, in many Eastern religions, where culture dictates an almost spiritual connection to indulging in food.  This connection is the subject of Jûzô Itami’s Tampopo (1985), a film that begets hunger, and then satisfaction, in more ways than one.

             Itami’s film may just be the cure for anorexia nervosa.  While it’s certainly not the only piece of Southeast Asian cinema to focus on food, it is one of the finest examples of this cinematic trend.  The film centers on Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki), a truck driver compelled by his copilot, Gun (Ken Watanabe in an early role) to pull over to a humble noodle stand in metropolitan Japan.  Upon entering, Goro, a visual marriage of Indiana Jones and the Marlboro Man, immediately falls for the widowed noodle chef Tampopo.  Though her cooking leaves something to be desired, Goro feels compelled to defend the honor of the shop and picks a fight with the rowdy patrons.  He vows to help the noodle mistress to perfect her recipes and to reopen the shop to great success.

            As Goro and Gun enlist the help of several aids, including a so-called “noodle master” and a jovial chauffer, Tampopo meanders around the city, following whomever seems to be invested in seeking pleasure from sustenance.  In a particularly humorous scene a number of business executives plan to lunch at a French restaurant.  When the eldest among them wishes to save face by not admitting that he does not read French, he orders a simple meal.  The others follow suit.  Down the line they each utter variances of “I’ll have the same,” until the youngest, fluent in French, breaks the sequence to order an elegant feast.  The speechless shock in the room is a priceless moment, and left me as satisfied as any French delicacy could.

            Focus shifts for several brief interludes to a flashy local Yakuza who, along with his mistress, likes to mix his vices.  Much has been made of a scene in which they sensually share the contents of a raw egg.  Along with these elements there are moments of pure joy in Tampopo that convey a deep love for cinema.  A short scene, nearly free of dialogue, in which a tramp cooks an omelet for Tampopo’s son is a clear homage to Chaplin’s The Kid (1921).  In another inspired gesture the structure of the film is not unlike that of the prototypical Western.  Goro rides into town and stirs up trouble, but vows to help the widowed shopkeeper to keep her business.  Her son comes to idolize him, and an unspoken love blooms, but the hero rides out into the sunset, just as he came. 

            Indeed Goro and the unlikely, almost comical, team he assembles do save the day.  Through countless hours of training, and a bit of scheming as well, they make Tampopo’s stand the best in the city.  Throughout this process I got so hungry I almost went out for noodles myself, and gave serious contemplation to a cup-o-ramen in my pantry.

Good films make you wish that you were living them, or least that you had the courage to live through them.  Tampopo loves movies almost as much as it loves food, and it’s a treat for any movie lover.  It regards food as a necessity, but one that should be enjoyed in any and all ways possible.  It is a film that is ridiculous in nature, but one that is honest enough with itself to understand the truth which it contains: food is life.  In a prologue, the Yakuza explains that a movie of our life flashes before our eyes just before it ends.  As this film ends a life is shown at its beginning, and it’s no surprise that it’s hungry.

Language: Japanese

Runtime: 112 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off

85: Soldier of Orange (Soldaat van Oranje – Original Dutch title)

            After viewing Paul Verhoeven’ Turkish Delight (1973; # 88) I was looking forward to his 1977 depiction of WWII era Holland, Soldier of Orange.  Here Verhoeven reunites with Rutger Hauer to tell the story of the war from the perspective of Dutch students who are forced to make difficult decisions during the European conflict.  While the film is a toned down Verhoeven vision it’s certainly not tame by any standards.  What’s ultimately striking about it is that the affection for his characters that the director has here also transcends to the audience, not always a given with the Dutch iconoclast.

Hauer plays Erik Lanshof, aide-de-camp to Holland’s Queen Wilhelmina as her plane touches down on Dutch soil after her exile to Britain during occupation.  The film traces his journey to this lofty position, recounting his humble beginnings at university in the late 1930s.  Verhoeven has a tendency to embarrass his protagonists early in films (perhaps to engender sympathy) and Erik is no exception, being drenched with soup by an upperclassman while forced to sing a fraternity song in front of classmates.  Transcending the incident, he makes fast friends at school, many of whom are indifferent to the war at its outset.

            However, as the conflict continues and Holland is invaded, each of Erik’s friends finds himself in a different position, putting them at odds when they begin to choose sides.  Unlike many of the others, Erik remains somewhat neutral for a time, trying to join the army only after Holland has been requisitioned.  As the occupation continues, his anti-Nazi beliefs swell, eventually leading him into the Dutch resistance movement.  After several failed, and sometimes humorous, attempts to reach England and join the RAF, he finds that his network of friends is already deeper into the underground movement than he could have imagined. When he finally does reach London, he realizes that he may have been used as a pawn of the counter-resistance movement, and that some friends may be compromised. 

At the request of the queen he makes the journey back to Holland, hoping to smuggle out several key resistance leaders under cover of night.  Even the best laid plans can go awry in war and Soldier of Orange acknowledges this fact with a resoundingly frank tone.  Through both misadventures and odd turns of fate (including several encounters with females) Erik survives the war, but is left to lament over lost friends.

            The relationship between Erik and Guus (Jeroen Krabble), his tormenter at university, is often at the center of the film.  Original animosities are quickly dismissed and though Guus disappears and reappears throughout the movie, he is the one constant in the various happenings of Erik’s life.  It is perhaps their sympathy and love for one another that encourages the audience’s love for these characters.

Soldier of Orange isn’t a family film by any means, but it does not contain the relentless gross-out moments that cause many viewers to shy away from Verhoeven’s work.  It is a balanced and historically accurate depiction of the War from a perspective not often touched on in Hollywood filmmaking, and a reward for any viewer looking to explore Dutch Cinema.  Soldier of Orange portrays the realities of life during occupation and the complexities of the choices that coincide with that life.  In a way it is an exploration of Dutch society throughout the conflict, in which each of the primary characters represents his or her own faction.

Language: Dutch (primary)/English

Runtime: 165 Minutes

Available @ Youtube.com*

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off

*Soldier of Orange is well-hidden, but it is on Youtube and can be found if you search creatively.

86: Ceddo

            Again, I’ve attempted to tackle a film while fully acknowledging my language limitations.  This time it was Ousmane Sembene’s tribal drama Ceddo (1977), with its primary language Wolof.  I must say that my minute understanding of French, in which the film is subtitled, wasn’t as helpful as I had hoped.  As such, this occurrence served as an informative juxtaposition to my experience with Turkish Delight (1973; #88).  Still, I believe I came away from Ceddo not having completely missed its occasional finer points.

            In seventeenth century Senegal a tribal king has converted to Islam, while his warriors, the Ceddo, have retained their tribal religion.  As both Muslim and Christian leaders attempt to convert further numbers, members of the Ceddo class kidnap the daughter of the king, hoping to ease religious pressure.  The tribal village is also under the watchful eye of slave traders, who use the buildings as bases of operation to capture non-tribal natives.  The kidnapping only incurs further religious tension, and members of both sects grow uneasy when attempts to rescue the girl result in deaths.  Eventually councils and meetings give way to violent conflict. The struggles culminate in the princess returning to the village, only to use one of the white men’s guns to kill the Imam, just as the Ceddo are being forced to convert. 

            I think that the problems of this film are structural; it’s unbalanced to say the least, with most of its best material coming after the half-way point of its runtime.  Some very good films have this same problem, but here the lopsided action runs in conjunction with the issue of approach.  Most good films about religion focus on a single individual struggling either to come to terms with God, or to worship Him in a way condemned by an external system.  Their best moments focus on small elements of ritual or aspects of an individual’s faith.  Ceddo tends to focus on the macro political elements of religion, largely ignoring individuals and ritual until its later scenes. 

            By the time it gets around to its best moments this film may have lost the better part of its audience.  The motivations of the characters are never explored on a personal level, making their grandstanding during councils seem inauthentic at best.  Granted, the language barrier may have contributed to this opinion, but I rarely felt compelled to believe in any of the film’s early moments.  The camera work of Georges Caristan may have contributed to the flat emotions of these scenes, as he rarely employs angles or movements that engender any such stirrings. 

            Sembene covers some of the visual shortcomings of his film with uses of unconventional music. Contemporary gospel renderings of American Negro spirituals foretell and comment on the potential future for the Bushmen captured by the slave-traders, simultaneously likening the religious persecution onscreen to the racial persecution of 19^th and 20^th century America.  Again, these segments are powerful, but don’t balance well with the narrative aspects of the lopsided picture.

Language: Wolof

Runtime: 120 Minutes

Available with French subtitles @ Youtube.com

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off