Pretentious Favorite Films: an invite for discussion

 

            In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had some discussions with friends and students about favorite films (which is essentially what anyone is talking about when they discuss movies, I know).  Not the best films, but favorites.  Talking about Citizen Kane, I noted that no one ever seems to cite it as their favorite movie, though it often makes “top tens’ or “top twenties” of serious film lovers, as it should.  I have however heard of someone who claimed Orson Welles follow up, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) in their personal top spot.  To me this claim smacked of pretention.  Ambersons is an interesting film, but to say that it’s your favorite is an obvious attempt at more-knowledgeable-than-thou priggishness.  Anyway, these conversations got me thinking about what some of the most pretentious favorite film choices might be. 

After Ambersons, the first film that came to mind was Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), certainly a great film, but not exactly one that has posters flying off the shelves (although, now that I think of it, I would buy one).  I can think of at least five Bergman pictures that are more enjoyable, and at least comparable in terms of artistic and technical achievement.  So, in my mind, the film snob who notes The Seventh Seal as his favorite movie is deliberately choosing a picture that the average moviegoer isn’t going to sit through because it is what critics of its time might have called “opaque.”  They want to make sure that everyone who likes Lord of the Rings knows just how smart they are.  Is there anything wrong with this? Or untrue?  Well I suppose that I’d choose the Seventh Seal guy over the LotR fella if I needed a partner for a film trivia competition, and I think that the snob is entitled to his snobbery if he’s earned it by sitting through Shoah (1985) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980).  He just doesn’t need to falsely claim supreme affection for a movie that serves to deliberately set him apart from Twilight fans.  That difference should be apparent after even the briefest of conversations about movies anyway, particularly if it isn’t interrupted by Twitter updates. 

So below I’m looking for other titles that it would be pretentious to claim as a personal favorite.  List and rant if you will.  Change names if you wish to protect your snobbish friends (they’ll know anyway).  I look forward to your thoughts.  # teamBjörnstrand     

17: Keeper of Promises (a.k.a. The Given Word; a.k.a. O Pagador de Promessas – original Portuguese title)

            Roger Ebert says that you can’t finish a review until you’ve started it – that you have to sit down and begin to write before any words will show up on the page.  He’s certainly right, but his philosophy doesn’t feel helpful when you don’t know how to begin the review.  Obviously I didn’t know how to start this one.  The more I think about Anselmo Duarte’s Keeper of Promises (1962), the more favorably I feel toward it, but I’m still not sure that I liked it…at least not in the traditional sense of the word.  I know that there were things I liked about it, but because I’m not sure exactly what its message was I can’t say that I took from it anything particularly moving.  I’m not of the opinion that all films need to be direct in their message.  That would make for boring cinema and even more boring conversations about cinema. 

However, there are some subjects that I feel can’t be addressed without being candid about what it is that you’re using cinema to say.  Obviously Keeper of Promises is a criticism of the Catholic Church and the position of power that it held in Brazil at the time of the film’s release.  I have two problems with this, neither of which stems from my own religious beliefs, but rather my beliefs about film.  First, I often feel that criticism of religion has been overdone in movies.  Luis Buñuel relied on it so heavily that it often overshadowed the better ideas that were present in his films.  Second, I feel that if you’re going to use art to criticize the church you should be specific in your criticism.  Call me a protestant (and so I am), but I think Luther got at least this right with his 95 complaints. 

Creating art that exists simply to criticize religion in general is like using Nazis or Wall Street sleaze balls as your villain.  It’s a cop out.  Who doesn’t have some issue with an aspect of organized religion?  Religion is necessary for individuals to collectively organize their faith.  It’s scary to many people because they don’t know quite where their faith fits in, but almost everyone acknowledges the need for spiritual guidance of some kind in life.  In this particular line of reasoning, religion reminds me a lot of the Internal Revenue Service.  Most of us have unfounded fears about what goes on there, but if we pay our taxes we have no reason to be afraid.  It isn’t something that we enjoy every aspect of, but as taxpayers we acknowledge its viable and necessary function.  Movies that cast religion as an immense but nonspecific evil feel like they’re taking the easy way out because no one wants to see a movie where the bad guys are the IRS.*

            I’m not advocating the unquestioned acceptance of religious principles.  On the contrary, I feel that religion serves best the person who questions why they believe.  Keeper of Promises succeeds, I believe, where other films have failed because it focuses is on a character with steadfast faith, who appears to have examined his reasons for acting as he does.  This man of faith is Zé do Burro (Leonardo Villar).  He’s walked a number of miles to Salvador, carrying with him a life-sized cross as a token of sacrifice to St. Barbara.  Along for the journey is his wife, Rosa (Glória Menezes), who is exhausted when they arrive in the hours before dawn, hoping to place the cross in the Church of the saint.  When they find the doors locked Zé is determined to wait with the cross, but Rosa is convinced by a local hustler that he will take her to a nearby hotel.  His intensions are obvious, but Rosa and Zé are naïve. 

            As the sunrise breaks over the massive flights of stairs that lead up to the church’s doors the priest arrives.  He’s impressed with Zé’s story of sacrifice until he learns that these actions were inspired by the peasant man’s belief that St. Barbara saved his donkey from certain death.  He denies him entrance to the cathedral, rebuking him for having prayed for the animal’s soul.  Incensed, Zé decides to wait out the priest, determined to keep his promise to the saint.  As the hours pass, a media circus descends on the great steps.  An atmosphere of Carnival develops that is reminiscent of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951)**.  Reporters form the television station arrive, and the leaders of the church are forced to meet to discuss the ramifications of the decision that must be made, all leading toward a startling and disparaging climax.  So great is this film’s cynicism regarding humanity, the 1001 text points out, that the righteous man’s only friend is his donkey.

            What’s truly interesting about the film is how good it looks.  On what I would assume was a limited budget, cinematographer H.E. Fowle, who made his name shooting documentary shorts in the 1930s and 40s, creates a vivid world using the black and white palette.  Staging and Mise en scène appear to have been taken into great consideration, particularly when it appears that much of the film was shot with natural light.  Fowle uses small architectural elements of the city to great effect as well, framing shots with intricate details of shaped rod iron and giving the impression that we a peaking around a corner to get a better look at the action.

            Much of the film’s religious symbolism is laid-on rather thick, but Keeper of Promises is still a compelling story of a man’s belief in his word.  The segments that follow Rosa’s interactions with the pimp are powerful as well, and serve nicely as a counterpart to the scene at the church.  While I can’t say that I understood the details of Duarte’s complaints against the church here, I’m willing to acknowledge that they may be contextually rooted in the religious practices of Brazil, and thus lost on me.  I can say that I don’t feel that I wasted 95 minutes on Keeper of Promises, as its images proved to be powerful.

Language: Portuguese (limited subtitles)

Runtime: 95 Minutes

              

Grade: 2 Hats Off

*although it is somewhat entertaining to internally speculate about what types of weaponry the bean counters might wield

**and the great staircase seems to be a clear reference to Battleship Potemkin (1925)  

18: Voyage in Italy (a.k.a. Voyage to Italy; a.k.a. The Divorcee of Naples; a.k.a. The Greatest Love; a.k.a. Love is the Strongest; a.k.a. The Strangers, a.k.a. The Lonely Wife – U.K. version; a.k.a. Viaggio in Italia – Original Italian title)

            Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy (1953) is a film that is utterly devoid of memorable moments.  In an attempt to further separate himself from the movement of neorealism that his 1940s films had essentially created, the director continued to move away from social issue pictures and toward cinema’s emerging emotional realism.  As a result, this film, his third collaboration with wife Ingrid Bergman, serves more as a testing ground for his talents in the latter movement rather than a solid or cohesive work.  From a narrative standpoint nothing much happens, and neither Rossellini nor Bergman are yet adept enough working within the emotional realism palette to offset this lack of plot.  

            Bergman plays Katherine Joyce, a woman who’s come to Naples with her husband, Alex (George Sanders) for a holiday and to sell the villa of a deceased uncle.  From the film’s opening they are at each others’ throats, with an uneventful car ride providing the setting for subtle jabs and twists of emotional daggers they seem to have long ago buried in one another’s backs.  They don’t scream obscenities or shout accusations.  To do so would break a code they seem to have adopted without a single necessary word of agreement.

 While the early scenes get the point across that the marriage has all but evaporated, the dialogue doesn’t escape from the performers mouths with the joy it might if the script were better.  Sanders, who could deliver an unassuming but fatal verbal blow better than almost anyone in cinematic history, is kept in his cage, his powers reduced by a screenplay that counted heavily upon the actors’ ability to improvise.  This likely sat well with Bergman, who trusted her husband’s ability to make it work and whose lines would be dubbed in post production as with most Italian films of the time, but Sanders was mortified.  There was a quality of his speech in his best performances that required him to be “in the moment,” and the ADR technique robbed him of much of his panache.

For several days the husband and wife live all but separate lives.  She’s intent on seeing the sights and he’s concerned with socializing, trying desperately to stave off the boredom brought on but what he sees as the unbearably slow pace of Italian life.  They bicker when their paths cross in the villa, with conversations about art and philosophy somehow always morphing into arguments that never quite explode into full on fights.  Rossellini tends to side with Katherine, and uses Sanders – who he had grown to dislike – to paint an unflattering picture of Alex.  By the time he picks up a prostitute in the city we’re hardly surprised, and his declaration that the girl is a “shameless, brazen hussy” seems to fit (while lewd by Hollywood standards of the day) within his standard dismissive tone.  The character of Katherine, alone for much of the film, is established in an even less subtle way, relying on monologues as she drives to and from museums and catacombs.   

(Spoilers Below)       

In these and many other aspects Voyage in Italy is heavy-handed, and as such it becomes predictable in its structure.  Most of the emotional cues, accept for the final one, can be seen from miles off, making them wholly ineffective.  And then there is the final scene.  Katherine and Alex have decided to divorce.  She can’t stand him anymore, and she lets him know it.  Their car is caught up in a religious parade.  They get out and Katherine is swept away into the crowd.  She calls for Alex.  He catches up quickly and the two glance something in the Catholic throng that causes their hatred to melt.  In fifteen seconds of screen time they fall in love again.  This didn’t work for audiences upon the film’s release and it doesn’t work now.

 I applaud Rossellini and his actors for not laying on the romanticism throughout the film, but to bottle it all up for the final shot feels more like selling out the picture’s established emotional tone rather than artistically shifting it.  Exchanges like (Katherine) “Life is so short”, (Alex) “That’s why one should make the most of it” could have been overplayed for schmaltz.  They weren’t, and the film could have stuck to its tonal guns, subtly growing toward a real confrontation or justified reconciliation.  Life is indeed too short to have an unfounded and shallow happy ending tacked on.    

Language: English

Runtime: 87 Minutes

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off

Oscar Nominations (and "F-words"): How I see it

            No I haven’t made my final picks yet, but with a full week now elapsed since the nominations were announced, I felt my thoughts starting to logjam.  Best to get them down in digital form for the sake, at least, of filing them.  I came away from reading the nod list feeling first, not that an individual or even a film had been snubbed, but that the audience had.  I’m still not quite sure how I feel about this whole “up to ten” Best Picture nominations switch, but four years in I’m surprised that this was the year to only put up nine films for the industry’s highest honor.  Most of us are smart enough to know that only about three films each year actually have a chance, and with critics in near unanimous agreement that 2012 was a good year for movies, why not fill each available spot?  Would it be a transparent ploy to get more viewers of the telecast? Yes.  Does Oscar care? No.  High moral standards don’t come around these parts often…at least not in this regard. 

            One area that they do seem to hold up in – not that this is a bad thing – leaves me a bit incredulous though.  Like everyone who writes about movies, and the Oscars in particular, I have my favorites.  This year, though I’ve tried to convince myself otherwise (probably because I want to hate Bradley Cooper, but can’t), Silver Linings Playbook tops my list of personal favorites (my #2, Prometheus, got only one nod, for visual effects, and Life of Pi seems to have that all wrapped up).  While I have a number of reasons to believe that Silver Linings’ producers won’t walk away with the gold statue, one stands out. 

It took more than 40 years from the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927 for the “F word” to make its debut in mainstream American cinema, which it did with M*A*S*H in 1970. I looked over the list of Best Picture winners from 1970 on; convinced I wouldn’t remember a single instance in which a female character in any of those films uttered that four letter combination.  I was wrong, at least twice.  It’s said, nay screamed, by Annette Bening in American Beauty (1999) and yes, she’s saying it in that way.  It is also, while not totally audible in my recollection, let loose by Helena Bonham Carter in The King’s Speech’s montage sequence.  I’m willing to believe that it’s escaped the lips of other actresses in Best Picture winners as well, but these were the two cases I remembered immediately. 

            Now consider the character of Tiffany in Silver Linings.  Played by Jennifer Lawrence (who I think will take home a statue), she says that word in a way (yes that way, again) that is fabulous, remarkable, the way I’d want to say it if I were a woman who’d gone through what Tiffany has.  And yet I have a sneaking suspicion that the Academy isn’t ready, or ready yet again, to award its highest honor to a film in which a female character uses the word to such effect.  Of the two instances I remembered, both were played for humor, the comic outburst of women who have, for their reasons, held it in and now feel liberated by it.  Tiffany says it like it’s part of her everyday lexicon.

            In the Kodak Theatre (now I think it’s called the Dolby Theatre), where the Oscar are held, the name of every Best Picture winner is chiseled into the massive stones that line the stairs.  Etched into those rocks are titles that, rightly or wrongly, have achieved movie immortality.  The voters often don’t pick the film that will last in our minds, but those stones tell a different story, and will likely last much longer than I will.  I don’t think Oscar is yet willing to put Jennifer Lawrence’s “F-word” into granite.  I can think of performances, some worthy and some questionable, that have garnered Best Actress gold which portrayed much more devious actions, as well as some words, than what we see from Lawrence’s Tiffany.  But I think that when it comes to the Best Picture category, for this year at least, the revisionist gender politics that her performance, and the way in which she uses that word, insinuate won’t help Silver Linings in Oscar’s biggest category.  David O. Russell will win the consolation prize of Best Adapted Screenplay, and the Oscars will continue their tradition of honoring only the words, controversial as they may be, of the year’s best film, and not how they were captured on screen.  (See 1941 and 1994 for eaxamples.)      

19: The Fourth Man (a.k.a. De Vierde Man – Original Dutch title)

            Paul Verhoeven’s filmography, though praised by many, hardly reads like a list of films critics have swooned over.  Indeed his Showgirls (1995) is often cited as one of the worst films of the 1990s – it is a favorite among the developing rank of trendy “bad movie” societies.  Yet he has made some culturally significant films and is often financially successful in his endeavors.  How strange then that, with his final Dutch-language work before departing for Hollywood, he choose to make a film aimed directly at his critical detractors.  He infused The Fourth Man (1983) with enough religious symbolism to make them certain that it was a legitimate work of art, and for his efforts was rewarded with a commercial disappointment.

            Many have noted that The Fourth Man plays not unlike a Hitchcock film.  It’s likely that Verhoeven knew what he was doing when he cast his frequent collaborator Renée Soutendijk and dyed her hair a vibrant blonde as his leading lady.  She plays Christine, and independently wealthy woman who owns a salon and has eyes for Gerard (Jeroen Krabbé), the bisexual author who comes to lecture at her literary society.  When he misses his train back to Amsterdam after his lecture, she offers him a night of seduction at her spacious apartment above the beauty parlor.  As they pull up, the neon sign that illuminates the building is on the blink.  It’s supposed to read “Sphinx,” (the name of the parlor) but instead spells “Spin,” the Dutch word for spider, and the viewer already knows that Gerard is being pulled into a dangerous web. 

            This is not the first time that a spider has appeared in the film.  The title sequence shows a Saint Andrews Cross variety (featuring a white cross on its back) wrapping its prey for later consumption before the camera pulls back to reveal that it’s web has been spun on a crucifix.  Gerard is himself a religious man, and he feels guilt about his sexual desires, but he nonetheless pursues them.  He and Christine make love in a scene that Verhoeven somehow infuses with just the slightest comic touch, always remembering still to flaunt his Euro-perv directing chops.  Then, the next morning, the story takes a strange turn.  Gerard, having accepted Christine’s invitation to stay several days, finds in her desk a love letter with a photo of a man he tried to approach in the train depot as he departed for the lecture.  He devises a plot to have Christine bring the man to the salon with the secret hope of seducing him himself. 

            Through a ruse he learns that the man’s name is Herman, and that he is a lover Christine discarded before she married the husband who left her a wealthy widow.  Gerard claims that he might be able to help Christine with the sexual problems she experienced in her relationship with Herman, and she agrees to bring him to the apartment.  While she travels to meet Herman, Gerard makes a discovery that may explain both Christine’s poor luck with men and the grotesque dreams that he hasn’t been able to escape since the film’s outset. 

            Most of this synopsis I’m sure sounds somewhat boring, because the film is in many ways conventional in its structure while at the same time outrageous in its imagery, which must been seen to comprehend.  For much of the first half of the film the dream sequences keep the viewer’s attention and not the story.  Then, as the strange elements of Christine’s life become more apparent to Gerard, her mystery essentially becomes the plot.  Why is she drawn to Gerard, and he to her?  Why hasn’t she remarried?  Is Gerard’s lust for her a misplaced attempt to quell his homosexual urges, or does she perhaps represent some deeper evil that he must resist?

            The film, as stated, is full of mixed religious imagery that often combines the sacred with the profane.  I’m surprised in fact that I hadn’t heard about some of its more graphic sequences in discussions of sacrilege in cinema.  Regardless, it’s still somewhat unclear exactly how Verhoeven intended many of his images.  He’s stated that he wanted to include the artistic elements to get the attention of the critical set, but whether confusion or profundity was his ultimate goal I cannot say.  What is clear is that the picture proves to be about half as interesting as it is intriguing, which isn’t a terrible ratio when considering the par.  It’s also a film that manages, in the way Verhoeven films often do, to retain a sliver of legitimate sexiness under the veneer of trashiness he so frequently applies.  I think, in a way, Hitchcock would have been proud.

Language: Dutch

Runtime: 102 Minutes

Grade: 3 Hats Off