64: Dear Diary (a.k.a. Caro Diario – Original Italian title)

            Diary films comprise a genre that can yield a vast array of tones and emotions.  Upon hearing the note that Nanni Moretti’s Dear Diary (1994) covers his battle with cancer, certain audiences might be compelled to avoid the film altogether for fear that the content might be unbearably depressing.  What a shame that would be, as I can think of few films that cover such material with such evocative, and ultimately optimistic, humanity. 

            Perhaps Dear Diary is a misnomer, or at least a sore thumb in the diary genre.  It is a scripted film, and this makes it unique in that category, but the words and thoughts it displays are genuine.  After all, are the words of a diary not scripted as well, preplanned before they meet the page?  Clearly Moretti felt that there was no loss of authentic emotion.

            His film exists in three portions; “chapters” for his purposes.  The first concerns his thoughts as he traverses the streets of Rome on his Vespa.  His fascination with the architecture of the city often takes cognitive president.  He laments for the times in which these buildings were erected and bemoans the slow progression of Italy toward sensationalism.  He searches for simple pleasures, and exposes his disappointment that he never learned to dance.  He goes to the movies, wishing that they made more pictures like Flashdance (1983), and when he stops Jennifer Beals on the street, the resulting conversation does not seem scripted.  

            In the second chapter he decides that he would benefit from working for several days in the quite offered by the islands, only to find when he visits a scholarly friend that his particular islet has become chaotic with modernization.  The two men set out to find an island village not thus affected, but at each stop find themselves more and more disturbed.  The friend denounces television as a cause, claiming that he hasn’t watched in years, but by the trip’s conclusion is asking American strangers about the happenings of “The Bold and the Beautiful.”  There’s additional humor when he tries to convince a woman of the legitimacy of a comparison between Ulysses and “Italy’s Most Wanted.”

            The third portion of the film concerns Moretti’s own odyssey of a diagnosis of lymphoma and the resulting chemotherapy.  Cancer is a tragedy in life and it is perhaps the only killer in films that every audience member can understand and relate to.  It is amazing here how Moretti accepts his own diagnosis not as a death sentence but as the answer to so many questions.  Yes, he is told that his condition is treatable, but I’m not certain that the tone of this film would be soured were that not the case.  I can’t help but think of the humanity that the dying Jean Vigo expressed with L'Atalante (1934).

            Ultimately, I’d say that Dear Diary is a film better experienced than described.  It is a joy to watch and includes enough inside nods to film fans that any cinephile is sure to find something in it for them.  It’s humorous, and sad, and serious all at once, but it never takes itself too seriously.  I get the feeling that it was a joy to make as well, perhaps cathartic for Moretti.  What it displays in the end is a spirit of endurance; the ability to take life as it comes and to remember to cherish the small blessings.  Yes, the modern world is full things to be disappointed by, but we gain nothing from dwelling in our disappointment.  Often, typical diary films do just that, and it is to their determent.  Moretti falls victim to no such complacency.

Language: Italian

Runtime: 100 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off

Annual Update

            I want to take this opportunity, one year into this endeavor, to thank all of my readers and those of you who’ve posted any comments.  It means quite a bit to me that anyone reads my thoughts on these films, and it’s always good to read your thoughts as well.  This project has meant so much to me, and I’m encouraged by the fact that in one year I’m two thirds of the way through a task which I gave myself two and a half years to complete.  It’s going to get harder from here on out.  Finding the final 64 films will be difficult.  Still, I’m hoping that anyone who reads these pieces gleans my commitment to this task.  Thank you all again for your support.  

-Sam

65: Beau Travail (“Good work” in English)

            Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999) is a perplexing film.  I was almost certain that I hated it until its final shot, which seems to come from out of nowhere and possibly changes the entire meaning of the film.  Up until this point the movie consists basically of sequences surveying members of the French Foreign Legion as they do laundry and calisthenics at their remote African post.  Oddly enough these sequences are set to sweeping non-diagetic opera music.  Both these shots and the actions they display are meticulous.  They are intercut with wide landscapes, many of which are beautiful, but that often have no narrative purpose.  This is a story told with images, but not every image is integral.  Quentin Tarantino was highly praised for a similar tactic applied to the dialogue of his Pulp Fiction (1994).  I make such a connection for the purpose of juxtaposition.  While Tarantino’s film is an audience and critical favorite, Beau Travail is largely unseen by American audiences.  Is it on par with Pulp Fiction? No.  But it is one of the better films that I’ve seen to be adapted from a work by Herman Melville (Billy Budd, Sailor).  It is a tedious film, based on the work of a tedious writer, and its low on the watchabilityn scale.*  However there was something about that final shot, which caused considerable debate about the film’s homosexual undertones upon its release, that just made me smile and laugh.

Language: French

Runtime: 92 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com (hidden well)

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off

 

*Even for the diehard Terrence Malick fan this one might seem slow.

66: Man of the West

            It’s amazing that as filmgoers we come to know that certain genres and directors have conventions that they are supposed to follow.  It can be just as amazing when we see a film that breaks away from these rules to blaze a new trail.  I love Westerns, and have a special place in my heart for the Westerns of Anthony Mann, who often seems to be overlooked when the great directors of the genre are discussed.  His Man of the West, released in 1958, wasn’t an out-and-out groundbreaking film, but I do believe it helped to pave the way for the revisionist Westerns that would break all of the genre’s conventions in the following decade.  Watching it, I questioned why I hadn’t seen it until now – it’s not available from Netflix – but it did feel good to be reminded that there are still gems to be found, even within genres I thought I’d fully combed.

            Working from a screenplay by Reginald Rose, Mann manages to skew slightly some of the Western tenets his films had helped to create.  To help him do so he employed the talents of Gary Cooper, pushing the star into a performance darker than many of those he’s now remembered for.  Mann’s heroes were always men trying to escape or avenge their past, and here Cooper, at 56, has the weathered face to convey the rage boiling just below the surface of Link Jones.  Link rides into town with a gun on his hip and a pouch full of coins.  He seems mild-mannered enough, and he tries to avoid trouble, but there is something about the way he clams up when the sheriff starts asking him questions.  He buys a train ticket to East Texas, and as the locomotive leaves the station we learn that he’s been sent to collect a schoolteacher for his small settlement. 

            When the train stops for wood Link gets out to help, leaving the teacher’s salary and his gun in his carpetbag.  Before he can get back on board, the train is robbed by four men on horseback.  In the gunfight that ensues the hired guard kills one of the would-be thieves and the others ride away, but not before the engine resumes along the tracks.  Link is left behind with a shifty-eyed gambler and a quick-tongued dancing girl, Billie (Julie London).  The gambler’s ankle is broken and the nearest town is at least a hundred miles away.  Knowing that the small band needs shelter before nightfall, Link decides to lead them to a secluded cabin he knows is nearby.  When they arrive his hesitation is evident, and upon meeting the gang inside that just robbed the train, it becomes clear that Link used to ride among their ranks, though most of the faces are new. 

            A familiar face is their leader, Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb), who once thought of Link like a son.  Reunited, he now wants Link to help him with one final job, and he uses Billie, whom Link has said is his woman to protect her from rape, as persuasive collateral to convince his reformed protégé.  Both Cooper and Link have to walk a thin line here, the actor needing to slowly hint at the anger that once made his character a murderous scoundrel so that he might pull more weight in the gang.  I’ve never seen a Cooper character use violence in the way link Jones employs it. 

As the men plan an assault on a corporate bank in the town of Lasso, Billie begins to fall for Link.  She knows he has a wife and children back West, but his efforts to protect her are nobler than most dancing girls get from their typical male companionship, and she can’t stifle her feelings.  Though Link’s domesticity is unseen, this extra dramatic tension is tangible.  Even though I knew that Hays code censors would never allow it, I became enthralled.  Could Gary Cooper really cheat on his wife!?

            This dramatic strand and many others are the strong points of Man of the West.  Though I wanted more interaction between Link and Dock before the Lasso robbery and the film’s final sundrenched showdown, the moments with Cooper and Cobb, playing a man Link calls “Uncle” despite being ten years Cooper’s junior, are valuable as they are.  Both men were great actors, but I get the sense here that Cobb was trying to upstage the older thespian.  It adds a tone that evidently lends itself well to the tension herein.  Also evident is the strong theme of family relations, often found in Mann’s films, even if that family is an adoptive group of murderers.

Unfortunately Mann’s own professional connections weren’t as true.  Jimmy Stewart had wanted the lead in this film, but having fallen out with Mann, with whom he’d done several Westerns, they found their differences irreconcilable.  Cooper is no downgrade, and perhaps such things happen for a reason.  I’m somewhat astounded that this hasn’t become one of his most noted performances, and that the film isn’t more widely acknowledged.  The Internet Movie Database notes that without the support of Jean-Luc Godard, who named it his favorite film of the year, the picture might have faded into obscurity.  What a tragedy that would have been.

Language: English

Runtime: 100 Minutes

Available for purchase from TCM.com

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off

67: The White Balloon (a.k.a. Badkonake Sefid – Original Persian title)

            I am consistently baffled by Iranian films.  I don’t dislike the so-called “Iranian new wave”, but I’m still not quite sure that I understand what this movement – if it actually is one – stands for.  It has the makings of other great film renaissances: consistent moods and structures, key players, and one emerged “great artist”.  Abbas Kiarostami has been at the forefront of the Iranian film industry for two decades now, and has become the godfather of this emerging artistic sect.  He’s directed many of the new wave’s seminal pictures, including The Wind Will Carry Us (1999; #70) and Taste of Cherry (1996), and shows up in former assistant Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon (1995), sharing a screenplay credit with the director.

              Like most of Kiarostami’s stories, The White Balloon has a simple premise.  Seven year old Razieh wants a new fat goldfish for her family to help celebrate the Iranian New Year.  It’s the only present she really wants because it “looks like it’s dancing when it swims.”  Razieh and her older brother finally convince their mother to let them buy one.  She gives Razieh the family’s last 500 rial note with strict instructions only to spend one hundred.  On the way to the fish shop Razieh losses the note to swindlers, recovers it, and then losses it again.  When she finds that the money has fallen below a basement ventilation grate, she doesn’t know what to do.  Tethered to the money by the prospect of it being reached by others, she is stuck in the streets of Tehran.  Eventually her brother comes to find her and the two children are forced to rely on strangers for help to retrieve the note. 

            This film has a strong thematic relation to Bicycle Thieves (1948), but not nearly the emotional pull, particularly after Razieh’s whining about the fish becomes annoying.  Where the movie does succeed is in its ability to convey the confusing nature of the world through the eyes of a child.  Razieh has a conversation with a soldier who asks her if she’s been told not to talk to strangers.  She can’t reply without breaking the rule.  She knows that she isn’t supposed to, but she can’t turn down offers for help, even if she is suspicious of the offer.

             Panahi and Kiarostami were right in keeping this material short.  At 85 minutes this story doesn’t have time to overreach.  The 1001 text alludes to some greater social meanings, but being unfamiliar with Iranian norms of the mid 1990s, I’ll refrain from any speculation.  Still, I suppose the befuddlement I mentioned before comes from wondering what it all could mean.  

Curiously, most of the information online about the film notes that the story takes place in real time, counting down to the Persian New Year, Nowrūz.*  Even an initial viewing of the film yields this untrue, as it is plainly stated at the outset that the New Year is over an hour and half away.  Though this isn’t the most engaging material, it could serve that small niche of introducing older children to the world of Middle Eastern cinema.

Language: Persian

Runtime: 85 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 2 Hats Off

* Nowrūz is the celebration of spring at the Vernal Equinox and therefore happens at midday.  This may confuse viewers wondering why this countdown to the New Year takes place in daylight.