Filling in the Blanks

Culture influences how we see a film. I know this basic tenet and yet I have been deceived by my beliefs more than once into thinking a movie was saying one thing when the director actually meant the opposite. Recently, this occurred with Fill the Void (Lemale et ha'halal), the Israeli movie by first time director Rama Burshtein. I won’t define my culture (it is, like all cultures, too complex to even try), but I will say that I embrace values of equality, especially among sexes, as I think has been made pretty evident in many of my posts. I therefore saw Fill the Void as a movie that denounced arranged marriages. In Fill the Void those marriages are imposed upon women by a closed religious group, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community in modern day Tel Aviv.

The movie tells the story of Shira, a devout 18-year-old girl who is pressured to marry Yochay, the husband of her late sister.  Shira and the other non-married women in the movie (those that can still expose their hair), are basically engrossed in finding a spouse. Shira’s hope is to marry someone her age that has never been married. The movie makes it clear that women who don’t marry are pitied by the community.  Shira’s mother and the unmarried aunt present the conflict: will Shira be allowed an iota of choice in the matter or will she follow the mother’s wishes and, ultimately, those of religious law, and the absolute word of the rabbi? In my perception, when Shira finally gives in to the community, it is with anxiety and sorrow.

Fill the Void

This is not, it seems, what Rama Burshtein, who also wrote the screen play, wanted to show. In interviews I have read since, this director indicates she was actually praising arranged marriages, something she is looking forward to do for her own children. While she does admit that she did show the complexity of Shira’s feelings about marrying her sister’s husband, ultimately she was just showing us the world she is a part of and the passion that can arise even within the boundaries of strict religious tradition.

I find this fascinating. It also reminds me of how culture is such a complex and difficult thing when we address the issue of women’s equality. When confronted with traditional cultures –religious or not- many within and without the culture feel that in order for it to survive, it must retain very ancient mores, upholding, among other things, practices that diminish and discriminate against half the members of the culture: the women.  And many times, like with Ms. Burshtein, it is the women themselves that are the strongest proponents of maintaining the traditions that bind them.

For presenting this complexity and for many other reasons I recommend the movie. It is an amazing first movie for any director. It is an authentic portrait of this Orthodox Hasidic community. Ms. Burshtein’s camera is intimate, delicate in capturing feelings and expressions.  And, yes, it seems that Shira was expressing sorrow and anxiety, just for different reasons than those that I believed. The acting is subtle yet powerful.  This is, most certainly, a film worth seeing.

There are many movies that do denounce the practice of arranged or forced marriages (however one wishes to call them), many from different cultures other than the western American one, where we view these types of marriages as a thing of the past. Movies like Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern (China), about the fourth wife of an elderly landlord, a college student who is married off by her stepmother; a woman who had hoped to broaden her horizons thanks to her education, but is now trapped behind her luxurious surroundings, reduced to a life of being at the beck and call of her husband.

Raise the Red Lantern

There is Deepa Metah’s Water (India) which tells the story of Chuyia, a child forced into marriage that becomes a widow. By tradition, she is left at an impoverished widows' ashram, where she meets a follower of Gandhi, who falls in love with her. Jane Campion presented the issue in The Piano (New Zealand), about a mute woman who arrives with her daughter for an arranged marriage to a wealthy landowner.  I am just mentioning a few. There are many others.

Water



Fill the Void is a work of art and, like all art, once it leaves the author’s hands it is exposed to interpretations and different readings. Rama Burshtein has opened a window onto a culture so very different from many and so her movie will be subject to many elucidations.  Interestingly, she mentions in one of her interviews that her rabbi has never seen a film in his life and will most likely not see hers; in fact, most of her community members won’t see her movie in theatres.  This is, in a way, a shame.  It would be interesting to know what the women members of her community would see when looking upon this film that shows and says so much about them.

 

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The Life and Times

A movie biography (biopic) can be a wondrous thing. Or it can be little more than a TV soap opera, cardboard all the way.  Behind the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh’s feature film swan song, despite having been in competition for the Palme D’Or at the Cannes film festival, falls into the soap opera type. The Palme D’Or, by the way, went to another film that deals with a same-sex relationship, Blue is the Warmest Color , and we hope that one lives up to its hype.

It is unfortunate that Steven Soderbergh didn’t do more with the rich material and actors he had. Above all the material; Behind the Candelabra is about the five-year relationship between the pearl and diamond-studded pianist Liberace and Scott Thorson.  Sounds simple enough, until you get “hints” from the movie about what some of the more complex issues at hand were that could have made for an amazing biopic. Scott Thorson was 16 when he met Liberace, he was already seeing older gay men (the one who introduced him to the pianist) and was living in foster homes. Liberace was extremely successful, a closeted gay man and 58 years old when he began this relationship with Scott.  Just up to there is a complex biopic: the millionaire, ultra eccentric entertainer –he walked around in a Norwegian blue shadow fox cape with a 16-foot-long train and rode in a mirrored Rolls-Royce-  with tremendous mommy issues, and the 16 year old gay foster boy. And right there Soderbergh goes at it wrong casting 43 year old Matt Damon to play the 16 year old in this relationship. Damon may have boyish good looks, and his acting is actually the best thing in the movie, but he does not begin to convey the strangeness in a sexual relationship between a 58 year old man and a 16 year old boy.

Matt Damon and Michael Douglas

But that’s not all the story in this relationship, the five years that Thorson lived with Liberace completely transformed the life -we could even dare to say destroyed- of this man who now, in his early fifties, is a recovering drug addict in jail. The pianist had Scott undergo plastic surgery so he would look like him and was drawing up papers to adopt this young man he was having sex with. It’s like a plot straight out of an Almodovar film (o.k., maybe a tad less that The Skin I Live in, but this is real life!).  It was going through this physical transformation that Thorson was also introduced into drugs by the plastic surgeon that worked for Liberace, played by an alien-looking Rob Lowe in this movie.

This entire plot is ho-hummly skimmed over in the film. Liberace, who was into all kinds of sex excesses, ultimately and pretty quickly grew tired of Thorson and discarded him. Thorson sued and settled. The 22 year old young man received $75,000 from a man whose fortune, by the 1970’s, was estimated at $115 million.

Liberace, played well enough by Michael Douglas, died of AIDS and did call Thorson back to his death bed. There is so little feeling in this movie, that even this scene is heartless. Did Liberace ever have regrets? The man who, when Thorson asks him how he feels after his mother dies, responds “free”, probably did not. Did Thorson? Most likely too many. Does Soderbergh?

It could have been a contender.

Biographies in movies can be fascinating, especially with such material to work from. The list of wondrous biopics is long. Martin Scorcese, one of my favorite directors, has excelled in them with movies like Raging Bull about the boxer Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro gained around 50 pounds to play La Motta), The Aviator, about Howard Huges or Goodfellas.  In fact, many biopics have been Oscar winners for the movie, the director or the actors: Steven Spielberg’s Shcindler’s List about Oscar Schindler, Richard Attenborough‘s Gandhi, both won Best Picture Academy Awards; Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, Gus Van Sant’s Milk about Harvey Milk, for which Sean Penn won the Academy Award, Bennett Miller’s Capote for which Philip Seymour-Hoffman won, Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot for which Daniel Day-Lewis got one of his…I  most certainly could go on. The point is made. The opportunity lost.

 

 

Cannes 2013

I've written about some of the movies I'm most looking forward to seeing that are competing this week in the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Check it out clicking on the Film News tab in this blog.

No Two Replicants

One of the most questionable aspects of cinema as an art form is the opportunity (or should I say temptation) for sequels or “prequels”, those so many times disastrous Part II (III, IV…VII?).  If a movie is great, it is also complete in every way. I guess you could say that repeating elements of a work of art does exist in other art forms; I mean Claude Monet did paint over 200 Nymphéas, but I can think of very few artistic movies that have an equally artistic sequel.  If it has occurred, it is usually where the work of fiction that the film is based on couldn’t be captured in just one movie, like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and The Godfather II (and it stops there in that trilogy); or Claude Berri’s duology Jean de Florette, which was followed by the equally well accomplished Manon des Sources.

In film, sequels tend to exist more for commercial reasons. They also usually appear with annoying frequency in the action, science fiction, horror and children’s movie genres. There are, after all, 23 Bond movies, eight Star Wars, and quite successful sequels to movies like Shrek, Toy Story, Batman and Iron Man. I really can’t say, however, how I feel about a sequel to my favorite science fiction / action movie: Blade Runner.  Since the release of Prometheus last year (Ridley Scott’s movie that “shares DNA” with his Alien), Ridley himself has announced work on a Blade Runner 2. The internet has since been full of movie magazines that announce release dates, chats and discussion rooms about its content, screenwriters and stars, and even fake trailers to the Blade Runner sequel.

I’ve dedicated a post to Ridley Scott, one of my favorite directors (see: The Insightful Ridley Scott), but I could easily dedicate more than one post to Blade Runner, which I consider to be his best piece. The movie was filmed in 1982, based on the novel by Phillip K. Dick “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” published in 1968, long before there was even the dream of carrying around an Android in one’s purse. 

The movie takes place in Los Angeles of the year 2019, where genetic engineering has led to the creation of robots called replicants, virtually impossible to distinguish from human beings. They are banned from use on Earth to basically be exploited on off-world colonies. When they manage to escape and come back to Earth, they are hunted down by special police known as Blade Runners. The main character in the movie, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford at his best) is one such Blade Runner, a sort of retro-detective in this neo-noir film.  With old-fashioned voice-over narration (removed in the director’s cut released in 1992), Deckard has the wry humor of a retired cop who has seen too much and now has that who-gives-a-damn attitude that fits well with Ford’s movie persona.

Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard

 The replicants have been perfected by humans to the point that they are given artificial memories, they are highly intelligent, extremely strong and, as computers tend to do in science fiction movies, have developed feelings. To ensure that they won’t eventually dominate humans, they have also been given an “expiration date”… much like the one we have.  And so begins their fight for survival. It is us against them, where we humans are both the creators and the created, hunters and hunted, oppressors and oppressed; androids and humans living under the shadow of greedy and inhuman corporations, those non-persons which are a constant in many of Scott’s films.

Blade Runner is about what it means to be human, more so in an era where we are overrun by technology, technology that we have to struggle to control so that it won’t destroy us. Maybe that is why this movie has become so famous in the many years after its release.

The complex story line is bathed in great set design and special effects (I saw the model of the Tyrel Corporation building in the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens and the monster of a building we see in the movie is incredibly small), with wonderful camera work, editing and directing, most particularly towards the end of the movie in J.F. Sebastian’s apartment, especially in the final face-off between Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer as the amazing replicant leader of the rebels, Roy. The movie is made whole the moment Roy speaks his final lines. It is a moment of climax, which leads wonderfully into the final scenes. We’ve held our breaths during those dark and violent scenes and slowly let them out as the movie winds down.



Rutger Hauer as the replicant Roy

How, then, to replicate this in a sequel? It is hard for me to imagine a Blade Runner 2. It is my hope that the brilliant, creative mind of Ridley Scott will be able to do so without letting us down. We know it can’t be for commercial reasons that he will be making a sequel. It might be out of nostalgia or because he has something new to say about this Android filled, corporation dominated world of the twenty-first century.

 

 

Mothers

Volver and Good Bye Lenin!

I went to see Baz Lurhmann’s The Great Gatsby yesterday, despite all the negative reviews from my favorite critics (see Film News).  One can always hope.  No dice.  It seems I won’t be writing a post about this disappointing movie because the critics were right.  I can only add to those reviews that what disappoints me most is that the young audiences today seem to like it so much. The comments from folks exiting the packed theatre I saw it at and the tweets my daughter has told me about would so indicate. Are we really in such an age of frivolity and superficiality that this movie that goes so only-skin-deep can be seen by youth as something worth their while, is it just that Gatsby’s parties are shown to be the 1920s version of college spring breaks, or is it the 3D?

Anyway, it frees me to write about a topic closer to my heart today, Mother’s Day here in the US.  I want to dedicate this post to films that touch on the mother /child relationship, one that has inspired volumes of poems and Mothers’ Day cards, thought quite a few less films, from how hard I had to think some up.  

Curiously enough and spanning many generations, it’s not that hard to find movies where the mother is little short of a monster: Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, Nicole Kidman in The Others, Angela Lansbury or Meryl Streep in The Manchurian Candidate, Katherine Hepburn in Suddenly Last Summer, MoNique in Precious, Julianne Moore in The Hours…the list is long, regrettably.

Mothers seem to be more warm and loving on television than on the big screen. There are, however, many great exceptions.  Actually, by simply turning to Meryl Streep we can find enough good mother roles for the rest of Hollywood: The River Wild, Prime, Mamma Mia, It’s Complicated, The Hours, The Bridges of Madison County, A Cry in the Dark and, most notably, as the mother in the most nightmarish situation that any mother could ever find herself in Sophie’s Choice; debatable where the mom falls in Kramer vs. Kramer.

Streep in The River Wild, Sophie's Choice, Mamma Mia and The Hours

But the two movies I would like to highlight in this post, where the mother/child dyad is at the heart of the movie and which are truly great films are Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver and Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye Lenin!  Both happen to be European films, Volver from Spain and Good Bye Lenin! from Germany. Both happen to be quite dramatic but they are also comedies, where the comedic element is inserted in the most delicate of ways, sort of how it happens in life. They are excellently well directed, so much so that Good Bye Lenin! won all the most prestigious European film awards and was nominated for a Golden Globe, much like Volver.  They are, however, most memorably great because of the acting.

Volver stands on the shoulders of three fabulous Spanish Actors: Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura and Lola Dueñas. Cruz was nominated by the Academy for Best Actress for this movie and most certainly should have won (she later won for her role in Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona).  Daniel Brühl is the actor that shines in Good Bye Lenin!

Sole, Paula and Raimunda

In Volver Penélope Cruz plays Raimunda, the mother to Paula, a young woman assaulted by her step father, sister to Sole, a divorced woman who works clandestinely as a hairstylist for women, and both are daughters to Irene. The two sisters lost their parents in a fire in a village in La Mancha years ago, and their aunt still lives there and continues to speak about her sister Irene as if she were alive.  Raimunda, Paula and Sole return to their village to unravel the mystery surrounding their mother’s death, and to ultimately reconstruct the relationships between them. This very moving and at the same time suspenseful movie is all about mothers and daughters, the everyday challenges women face in a sexist society, and how they help each other and survive.

Good Bye Lenin! is also about a mother /child relationship, this time between Christiane, the devout socialist in East Germany 1989, and her son Alex, played fabulously by Daniel Brühl. Alex is one of the youth marching in an anti-Berlin Wall demonstration, when his mother sees him being dragged away by the police. She suffers an attack and enters into a coma. While Christiane is in the coma, the Wall falls and Germany changes drastically, as does the lives of her family. I won’t go further so as not to spoil the plot in this great film, but will add that Alex probably embodies the dream son, the one that any mother would hope to have. Maybe this movie is less about the mother than it is about the child, but it is still a testament to that relationship celebrated around the world on days like these.

Good Bye Lenin!

Many of the more popular Hollywood movies about good mothers for some reason tend to be about one in the dyad dying. We cry in excess watching as the mother buries her child or vice versa in movies like Steel Magnolias, Terms of Endearment, Imitation to Life, Madam X, Stepmom and many more like these. Volver and Good Bye Lenin! are refreshing, in this sense. They are movies about how deep and rewarding the relationship between a mother and her child can be, without anyone having to die in the process to prove it.

 

 

 

 

 

A New/News Section

There are always one or two bits of news in the film arts and industry that stand out to this blogger. Not enough to merit a full post, but things I want to share with fellow film aficionados. So much goes through our computer or mobile screens these days, it's easy to miss a good story.  For this purpose I've created a new section to this blog: Film News, straight and simple. My hope is to post film-related news but also to  get comments on film news that readers want to share. So happy to start this section with news on a favorite director: Michael Haneke! I invite you to see the new Film News tab on the blog.

Heroes for All the Ages

The university town in upstate New York where I lived as a child had this “hippie” co-op store walking distance from my house. It contained the usual things you’d find in stores of the sort at the end of the sixties, colorful tie-dyed or embroidered clothing, incense, felt hats, posters, artsy smoking products, and the one thing that attracted us kids to the store almost daily during our lazy summer vacations: comic books. There were stacks of them available for our perusal. We’d stand there reading for extensive periods of time and would leave buying the most recent releases. I would get my Betty and Veronica reading done at the store but, having an older brother, would end up buying and reading a lot more of the Marvel and DC Comics superheroes magazines.

I grew to love these comics; they were nothing short of thrilling. My favorite superheroes were Spiderman, Iron Man and Batman. The first two had their wry humor in common; Iron Man and Batman shared that their alter egos, Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne, were both very rich, handsome and  flirtatious men, but with a passion for righteousness; all three were science and innovation-driven. Of course,   I also secretly preferred the comics where Pepper Potts, Vicky Vale and Mary Jane Watson showed up on more pages and story lines.

We had to be patient with the mediocre TV shows and cartoon versions of our heroes back then, since they fell so short of how those heroes read and how we’d imagine them if they came to life. I didn’t, in fact, feel that I was really watching one of the comics I had read in my childhood on a screen until I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight in 2008.

A lot of things have happened to the men of iron and steel since those childhood comic book days. Marvel and DC Comics now belong to mega billion dollar corporations Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros. Entertainment. Scientific and technical achievement in movies, those incredible special effects, photography and editing, have brought the impossible to the screen.  And, a little more recently, the directors that make these films, such as Guillermo Del Toro or Christopher Nolan, as well as the actors that participate in them, are first-rate professionals who don’t seem to mind donning the cape and mask.

No superhero movie has won a best film award to date, thought I contend that The Dark Knight could have, but the actors that have now participated in superhero movies, while mostly male,  include an incredible cadre of talented, award-winning ones: Michael Caine, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman , Russell Crowe, Anthony Hopkins, Mickey Rourke, Ben Kingsley, Gary Oldman, Christian Bale, Morgan Freeman,  Philp Seymor Hoffman,  Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Downey Jr., Guy Pierce, Heath Ledger, Terrence Howard, Don Cheadle, George Clooney, Hugh Jackman, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt,  and more. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if we were to see Daniel Day-Lewis or Denzel Washington in these movies one day soon.

Mickey Rourke, Ben Kingsley, Gary Oldman

The balancing act that superhero movies face these days is no small feat. They are trying to be true to the feel of the comics from which they derive their characters, while updating to our times, they have to be serious enough for the boomer-adults-former-comic readers that come to see them, while being super-fast paced and explosion-filled enough to interest the milleniums.

More and more are succeeding these days. Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises are probably among the best (and The Dark Knight the best of the three). Del Toro’s Hellboy has managed the detective noir feel of the comic and has done an excellent job in character development; Ron Perlman is great at capturing the suave yet brutish personality of this hero. The Iron Man Trilogy, while increasingly full of the fireworks and machines  more typical of the Transformer series, in particular towards the end of the Iron Man 3 movie,  does continue to include interesting twists and turns, and keeps Tony Stark from taking himself too seriously.  In the Iron Man 3 movie, recently released, the greatest mistake may have been to break from the previous two Iron Man movies and follow the plot line introduced by The Avengers movie, where Iron Man was included, with its space portals and alien attack.  It makes it harder to reconcile those space portals and aliens with the too close to reality characters like the Mandarin, with his scraggly beard and terrorist bomb attacks. Even in comic books these heroes weren’t all that great when they were thrown together.

Christian Bale and Heath Ledger

Superhero movies have done a good job catching up with the comics on which they are based. It is now as thrilling to see them in 3D as it was to read them on paper when we were kids and we let our imagination race along side them. These movies are not meant to be perfect, though they can certainly be artistic, and we can now admire the acting, photography, make-up, directing and special effects they contain,  while rooting for our favorite hero to defeat evil and wishing, maybe now more than ever,  that these heroes were real.