Bon Appétit!

There is a delicious movie out there called Chef by the ever more vital director Jon Favreau. The movie is much more than just another comedy. It’s one of those increasingly rare movies that really has a heart to it. The plot is simple enough, a chef in search of his creative independence who, in the process of finding it, also discovers the significance of his relationships. But it is told with gusto and vitality.

Favreau is showing that he is a multi-faceted director with quite an interesting voice all his own. He is the director behind two of the Iron Man movies (in which he also plays the part of Happy Hogan), as well as the director of two younger children’s films that have quite a following: Zathura: A Space Adventure, and the delightful comedy on its way to becoming a Christmas classic Elf. His is an enticing voice, always youthful and humorous, but, as he shows in this movie more than in the previous ones he’s directed, a voice that connects with the everyday person and is capable of communicating depth of feeling very well.

Jon Favreau and Emjay Anthony in Chef

The movie, though, will probably also remain in your mind for the amazing and scrumptiously well photographed food it presents. During the movie one only wishes that instead of popcorn and a diet soda, we held a Cubano and a cerveza! Thus Chef joins some very fascinating films that make food a central character to the film, a key element of the plot and constitute a friendly reminder that food can and should be a celebration, a part of life and connections; something of an art and also something of a passion.

Two other films come to mind that fold food into the story in this way: Babette’s Feast and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. There certainly are others, including Julie and Julia, Mostly Martha (remade in the US as No Reservations), Big Night, Chocolat, Ratatouille, Like Water for Chocolate, but none as majestic and well-made as the two I want to write about.

Babette's Feast

Babette’s Feast was made in 1987 by Danish director Gabriel Axel. It is the story of a small and very austere protestant community in Denmark of the 19^th century, where Babette, a Catholic and a foreigner, is taken in as a servant by two sisters that have devoted all their lives to caring for their father. Babette comes upon some good fortune and decides to prepare a dinner for members of the church, who are re-awakened to a world of pleasures, friendship and connections through food.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

Yin shi nan nu or Eat, Drink, Man, Woman in English, comes from a vastly different culture and deals with very different time period and subject matter. This film was made in 1994 by the now very famous Taiwanese director Ang Lee, who has gone on to win many awards for his great films, like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, The Ice Storm, The Life of Pi and others. This one is a little more like Chef in that it deals with a senior chef in a famous Taiwanese restaurant, a widower who lives with his three grown daughters. It is through the elaborate Sunday dinners that he cooks for his girls that he feels he can connect to them and hopes he can hold on to them, only to have to face the changes that come with a new generation and young women at a moment when they are blossoming.

All three films are beautifully shot and the food presented in them is truly mouthwatering.  But what connects the three is that they present unambitious yet complex plots about real and profound relations (none of them romantic, really) in which food takes on the special role that it has in many cultures and families.

It is easy to forget that our relationships, like good food, take time, passion and a loving hand to cultivate, more so in this our fast-food world of social-media-deep acquaintances. Thank heavens for these beautiful, unambitious yet deliciously good films that remind us what life and living is really all about!

One Man Act

Here’s a novel idea: film as short story. This is the feeling I got seeing Locke, a movie written and directed by British auteur Steven Knight, more known for his very good screenplays –Eastern Promises, Amazing Grace- than his directing – Redemption. The whole movie takes place in a BMW, at night, on a freeway in England, and the only character we ever see on screen is Ivan Locke, the driver; all others are presented to us via his car phone.

The idea is different, for film, but I can say with certainty that if the hour and twenty minutes of this film do not drag it is a credit to the man that plays Ivan Locke in the movie: British actor Tom Hardy. With a screenplay like this there is not much a director can do in terms of making a very visual movie, for how many shots of a car on a freeway at night can you take, after all, before you've shown all there is to show? And because there is a need to get the dialogue between Locke and the other characters in the film as clear as possible, given that he is talking to them over a car phone, there’s not much to be done in terms of score either. What’s left is the acting and Tom Hardy proves his worth.

Tom Hardy in The Dark Knight Rises and Inception

American film goers are probably more familiar with Hardy from the Christopher Nolan films he has acted in. He played Eames in Inception, not quite a main role, but one that got him noticed, but more importantly to his career, he played a quite central role in Nolan’s The Dark Night Rises, that of the masked villain Bane. Still, he was behind a mask, so he may still not be a familiar face to American moviegoers. Personally, I was more impressed with his acting in Warrior, as Nick Nolte’s fighter son, and even in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, although he is not as well remembered for those films. Altogether, however, they reveal that this actor is capable of tremendous range. He is nothing like any of these other characters in Locke. He’s also not like himself, since he is only 37 yet he plays a man who seems so much older, made so by the weight of the responsibilities he carries with such grace.

Tom Hardy in Warrior and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

The story is that of a man who wants to be as unlike his father as he can possibly be, shaped into “goodness” by his suffering as a child and haunted by this past. The ghost of his father is the silent passenger in the backseat. What a solid performance we get! It is exciting that there is an actor that can make time in a car pass quickly as we are immersed in the different facets of Ivan Locke’s life.

But the movie feels like a short story and not a novel. This most definitely could be because we are in a car with this man for the duration of the film and can only imagine the other people in his life, those we get to know only through their voices. It could also be because this is just a snapshot of Ivan Locke’s life, and there are no flashbacks here, no scene setting, no places or events to piece together in our minds. We don’t really ever get a full picture of his past and can only guess at where he is headed in the future. So we are there only for the short ride into London, although what a ride it is and how it changes this man’s life forever!

Since Feeling is First

The difference between films made in the United States and those made in Europe is probably as deep as the historical differences between the so called Old and New worlds. American films will probably never shake themselves completely of the view that this is a land where anything is possible and achievable; one that immigrants have come to for years in search of a fresh start, a break from oppression by class, religious and political structures, and one marked (and, quite frankly, somewhat marred) by the prominent “pursuit of happiness” which Americans take as a mandate.

So no matter how “dark” an American movie is in terms of subject matter, or how much it tries to be “realistic”, there is always the proclivity to the “happy ending” that has characterized Hollywood films for decades; the uplifting message, the triumph of good over evil, or something of the sort that basically signifies a break with reality. Movies are a form of escapism from what life’s really all about. In Europe, they are a reflection on life.

Mind you, I am simply stating an observation, not choosing one type of film over another, though I admit to being influenced by the country I live in much more than I wish I was. But I count among my favorite directors Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, the Italian masters Visconti, de Sica, German directors Murnau, Herzog… the list is long and wonderful! And all of this is but a preamble to my writing about two recent European films that I add to my long list of favorites: Jagten (The Hunt) by Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, and The Broken Circle Breakdown by Belgium director Felix van Groeningen. Two remarkable and poignant films which I highly recommend.

La Grande Belleza

Both films were nominated for Academy Awards this year under the Best Foreign Film category. Not surprisingly, the Italian film La Grande Belleza (The Great Beauty) directed by Paolo Sorrentino won over both, although it is far from the superior one of the three. The members of the Academy, quite an elite by any standards, probably related to the plight of Jep Gambardella, the protagonist of La Grande Belleza, a writer at the center of Rome's decadent upper class, one who has traded in his art as a writer for the seductive yet banal life of the rich and pseudo artists. It’s not a bad movie and Felliniesque to the point of including midgets and wild masquerades, but it is not a film deserving of the award, not when compared to the other two.

Jagten

The Hunt is a movie about a school teacher in a small town, an everyday person in a town like millions of others, whose life is turned inside out by a rather innocent lie. But it’s really about relationships, about friendship, trust, loyalty and, ultimately, forgiveness. The film stars an actor I love to see in movies, Mads Mikkelsen. Mikkelsen, who is a tremendously well-known star in Denmark for his mastery as an actor for such movies as A Royal Affair, After the Wedding or The Pusher, is probably best known in the United States as James Bond’s rival Le Chiffre in Casino Royale or, more recently, as Dr. Hannibal Lecter in the TV series by the first name. Mads speaks with his eyes in this movie, and what pain and betrayal he tells with his gaze!  Very deservedly, Mikkelsen won the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor award for this movie.

Mads Mikkelsen in The Hunt

Thomas Vinterberg, The Hunt’s director, is co-founder, with Lars von Trier, of the Dogma movement in cinema, which strove for a minimalist aesthetic to filmmaking. Every shot in this film is well thought out, but to ensure that we become engulfed in the story and are not paying attention to the camera, the music or the set design (like in The Great Beauty). It is a beautiful narrative style, plain and simple, but deep and moving. As the director has stated: “I wanted this film to be as naked and truthful as possible, because this was a film about truth and lies.” This is a movie that makes you reflect about how quick we are to judge, how close to the surface darkness lies in human beings, waiting to make aggressors out of friends and neighbors. This is basically a movie about a modern day witch hunt.

Johan Heldenbergh and Veerle Baetens in The Broken Circle Breakdown

The Broken Circle Breakdown is a love story, a beautiful love story wrapped in misery. But there really isn’t an ounce of exaggeration or melodrama in this movie. It’s hard to watch simply because it is so real. The lovers in this film are Didier, a bluegrass musician in love with this American musical genre and the hopeful pragmatism it represents to him, and Elise, a tattoo artist whose life and past romances are impressed into her skin and heart. Their passionate love is encircled by the wonderful score of bluegrass music that plays throughout the film. We are carried away by both the music and their passion.

Everything about the film feels real. Johan Heldenbergh, who plays Didier, is the author of the play on which the movie is based, and Veerle Baetens, who plays Elise, won Best Actress in the European Film awards. They are both so true in their love and despair. The band of musicians, which are Didier and Elise’s friends, are almost like the chorus in Greek tragedies, a loving chorus of Cowboys.

 These are not flawless human beings and when life hits them, like it does everyone at one point or another, we are witness to their desperation and their search for understanding. Because life and feelings are not linear, the narrative in this film isn’t either. The movie moves back and forth in time and touches on different themes. It is not just the complexity of relationships, but also the conflict between faith and pragmatic realism. How we are able to cope or not with the seemingly insurmountable trials we are given.

Art isn’t always about enjoyment. I think this is the bottom line. The artist shares his or her feelings, experiences and thoughts and they aren’t always feelings of happiness and contentment. But then, neither is life. In America we are steeped in a culture that holds happiness as the ultimate prize in this race called life, undercutting so many other feelings in the process. We wrongly –as the experts in the field are telling us- make our children aspire to constant happiness and enjoyment, only to have them later be unable to cope with the disillusions and challenges that come with life and living.  These films make us look into ourselves, they haunt us with their realism, but ultimately they make us feel deeply. And that’s what life is all about. 

The Rites of Spring

Sweet spring is your time is my time is our time / for springtime is lovetime / and viva sweet love!, e.e. cumming wrote. Who doesn't love spring? Exhibitions of color everywhere on trees, in parks; nature shining! Spring also brings blossoms to film lovers everywhere. In the United States the Tribeca Film Festival began showing its buds last week, with the announcement of many fascinating films. But it is to Europe that most of us film lovers look at this time of year for our goodies, because this is the time of year that Cannes announces its competitors. 

The retro poster for the Cannes 2014 Film Festival may be mirroring the films announced this week in competition for this coveted prize. The poster features the Italian actor Marcelo Mastroianni in Federico Fellini’s Film 8 ½, which was entered into the Cannes competition back in 1963. This year the directors up for competition include some legendary directors of old. To begin with, non-other than Jean-Luc Godard, who is 83, is among the nominees with a very modern 3D film Adieu au Langage (Farewell to Language). Judging from the trailer on YouTube, Godard continues his New Wave style, but with a very present-day feel. No aging there.

Jimmy's Hall

Not quite in the same generation, but in a similar league, two British directors are also up for competition this year: Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. Leigh, the director behind such wonderfully rich yet at the same time every-day-person oeuvres like Vera Drake, Secrets and Lies, Happy Go Lucky and Another Year is presenting his film Mr. Turner about the painter JMW Turner; hence going further back in time to 19^th century England when this –back then- controversial Romantic landscape artist lived. Ken Loach has already won the Palme for The Wind that Sakes the Barley, in 2006. This time he presents Jimmy’s Hall, which is rumored to be his last film, a movie set in 1930 Ireland that deals with James Gralton, the political activist who challenged the Catholic Church’s restriction of free speech.

Mr. Turner

Cannes darlings, Belgian directors and brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are back, which is always good news. The Dardenne brothers won the Palme d’Or for Rosetta (1999) and L’Enfant (2005), as well as best screenplay 2008 for Le Silence de Lorna and the Grand Prix 2011 for Kid with a Bike. The film they present is Two Days, One Night, starring the fabulous Marion Cotillard (Academy Award winner for La Vie en Rose) who plays a woman who has a weekend to convince her colleagues to give up their bonuses so she can keep her job.

Two Days, One Night

Canadian director, David Cronenberg (Eastern Promises, A History of Violence) takes on the topic of the culture of celebrity in Hollywood and our modern day infatuation with it in his movie Maps to The Stars. The movie includes, among others, Julianne Moore, Robert Pattison, John Cusack, Mia Wasikowska.

Maps to the Stars

Moving down in North America, two acclaimed American actors come to Cannes as directors this year. Tommy Lee Jones, who has directed three movies before this, two for television and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada in 2005, directs and acts in The Homesman, a western about a claim jumper and a pioneer woman who team up to escort three insane women from Nebraska to Iowa. His cast even includes Meryl Streep.

The Homesman

The other actor is the much younger Ryan Gosling and this is his first time behind the camera. Lost River is the name of the film for which he is participating in the Un Certain Regard section. The movie has quite an amalgam of actors; it stars Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks, young Dr. Who himself Matt Smith, and Saoirse Ronan, among others. It deals with a single mother of a troubled teen age boy and their journey into a dark underworld.

Also from the United States, New York born director Bennett Miller (Moneyball, Capote) is in competition with Foxcather. The movie stars Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffallo and deals with the story of wresting champion Mark Schultz, who won Olympic gold with his brother Dave in 1984. Dave was murdered by multimillionaire paranoid schizophrenic John Eleuthère du Pont, the founder of "Team Foxcatcher".

Jane Campion

But I’ve left the spring flowers for last. Cannes has received criticism in the past about not favoring films directed by women. This year, to begin with, Jane Campion, the New Zealand director, producer and scriptwriter (her film The Piano won the Palme d’or in 1993) will preside the Jury. Additionally, Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s is in competition with her film Still the Water; Italian director Alice Rohrwacher is participating with The Miracles; and Austrian director Jessica Hausner is participating in the Un Certain Regard section with Amour Fou.

The festival takes place from May 14-25 but its influence shapes movies and audiences for the rest of the year. Let the fun begin!

Wes Anderson Shines

Cinema is, above all, a visual art. Yes, there is the screenplay, the music, the acting, dancing or singing, but ultimately we are drawn to the images on the screen. There is probably no master of the visual art in cinema among today’s directors like Wes Anderson.

I have not written about Anderson before because sometimes it takes one movie to bring to the forefront the majesty of all of an artist’s work. In my case, it is his latest film The Grand Budapest Hotel which has done this. Like with many of his other movies, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, and, to a lesser degree, Rushmore (I’ve yet to see Bottle Rocket), it is my feeling that Wes Anderson movies are to other great drama films or comedies much what naïf art is to classical art, in more ways than one.
 

Moonrise Kingdom

To begin with, the stories in Wes Anderson’s movies are metaphors to reality. His characters are eccentric and idiosyncratic sometimes to the extreme. Some of the situations and people are silly or ridiculous to a fault. Yet, even in his comedies there is an undercurrent of darker, deeper themes. We find reality by approaching it from the bizarre.

In many of his movies, the eccentricity of the characters hides deep loneliness and alienation, which are recurrent themes in Anderson movies. This is pretty evident in The Royal Tenenbaums, especially in characters like Margot, but also in The Grand Budapest Hotel. The character of M. Gustave, played brilliantly by the great Ralph Fiennes, carries the loneliness in his expression and in the always short-lived relationships with which he has filled his world. It is no wonder that Bill Murray is an actor that has appeared in most all of Wes Anderson’s films, for who is a more deadpan comedian than Murray, who can convey more sadness and desolation with his eyes? Owen Wilson, an Anderson collaborator from the beginning, is much the same. Certainly Anderson knows how to bring out the best in these actors.
 

Bill Murray in Rushmore, Life Aquatic, Darjeeling Limited

Yet another certainty we find in Wes Anderson’s movies is that there is always someone who will come to the rescue of such loneliness. M. Moustafa, the bell boy and heir to M. Gustave in The Grand Budapest; Suzy to Sam in Moonrise Kingdom; Herman Blume and Max Fischer in Rushmore. Eventually, the characters in his films form a “family” of sorts, even if it is a clan of concierges from the different hotels of Europe.
 

The Royal Tenenbaums

So to this backdrop of eccentric characters (none more so than in The Grand Budapest), a tangled and creative story line is woven. But the final touch of genius to his films are the images. Anderson is a visual master. His shots are incredibly meticulously prepared. Each shot is a tableau, with amazingly creative set design, fascinating color schemes and tremendously precise camera movements. Wes Anderson’s obsession with symmetry has become common knowledge, yet it does not detract from how much work is put into every frame, quite the contrary.

Darjeeling Limited

All this visual mastery is never more apparent than in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Because of the time period, because of this work with sets and colors, and because in this film Wes Anderson shifts frame sizes (the movie went out to theaters with instructions on different aspect ratios), at times it feels as if we’re watching a zoetrope (those devices that produced the illusion of motion from a rapid succession of static pictures). This movie sparkles! It is hard to take one’s eyes away from the screen for an instant.

Oh how right M. Gustave is when he says, in The Grand Budapest Hotel: “You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” Without a doubt, Wes Anderson’s movies are among these glimmers.

Hitch

I went to see Rear Window last night, during one of those “Classic Movie” showings at the local movie theatre. I have most of my favorite Hitchcock movies on disc, but nothing beats seeing one of his films on the big screen. And that’s kind of the beauty of this director’s work, because his films are so very visual and yet they are all about the interior, the person’s mind in all its terrifying complexity. His art lies in devilishly taking us into his characters’ thoughts and feelings, while weaving a suspenseful and vibrant film around them.

Alfred Hitchcock seems to be making a comeback these years, in biopics like The Girl or Hitchcock, and series inspired by his movies, like Bates Motel. He certainly is present by means of his influence on directors like Pedro Almodovar or Darren Aranofsky. This might just lure the younger generation of movie goers to his films; or maybe not, given young people’s appetite for blockbusters.

The Rope - Dial M for Murder - Marnie

Alfred Hitchcock is the anti-blockbuster director par excellence, yet his movies provide more thrill and suspense than any of the multi-million dollar, loud and flashy modern day films of this type. Many of Hitchcock’s greatest films take place in a room or similar confined space; they are all about the acting, the sets and location and his singular camera angles and movements. And they are not movies made to simply entertain, nor are they the type that take on broad social or political issues; his are movies that deal in the everyday person, in their psyche and in deep human relationships.

In Rear Window, with the first wide-screen shots of James Stewart’s face, his beautiful blue eyes, we are drawn into his feelings and thoughts and move through the movie seeing everything this voyeur sees from his room, where basically all the action takes place. Spellbound, The Rope, Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, Rebecca, Marnie and, of course, Psycho all have this common thread of the action and thrill being the protagonists’ minds and the tension between the dark and twisted mind of one of the characters as seen by the other, which is us, his audience, caught in the terrifying grip of those tangled minds.

Salvador Dali designed dream in Spellbound

Even those other famous films, the suspenseful ones that deal more in the story of the wrong person at the wrong place and time, like North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew too Much, The Birds or Notorious, strong human relationships are still at the core. 

North by Northwest

And though he dealt with the everyday man and woman, in reality the Hitchcock protagonists of the films I’ve mentioned are not really ordinary folk, unless you consider people that look and act like Cary Grant, Lawrence Olivier, James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Ingrid Bergman or Tippy Hedren ordinary. Yet he sort of made them so. He was able to draw these beautiful, yet great actors into his movies more than often; Cary Grant and James Stewart both made four films with Hitchcock, and Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman made three each.

It is well known (or rumored) that “Hitch” was sexist, quite harsh with his female actors and never gave enough credit to his wife and long-time collaborator Alma Reville. Also that he showed preference for “cool” blondes. While this may be true, if one hadn't read these rumors, we could easily think the opposite, because the female leads in Hitchcock’s films are not just beautiful, they are strong, intelligent, witty women; none of them are “housewife” like. They are not “the other” in his films, they go tête-à-tête with the male characters. In fact, in many of his films, like The Birds or Rebecca, they are the main protagonist.

Grace Kelly-Kim Novak-Tippy Hedren in Hitchcock films.

The male and female relationships in his movies, while many times very romantic, are light years away from the sorry ones we see in “rom-coms” today. They are mature relationships, these are adults, they are complex, and at the same time, they are full of humor and in no way dull. They are also not easy. Vertigo, of course, comes to mind as the most complex of all, but in Notorious or even in Rear Window, the romantic relationship between the protagonists is real and deep. These are not cliché romances.

Hitchcock directed 69 films. He considered Shadow of a Doubt his favorite. This movie, which starred Joseph Cotten, had a screenplay by Thornton Wilder and the author of the story, Gordon McDonell was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story. This was another art of Hitchcock: to bring out the best in the writers and the actors that worked with him. Many of the most famous films of the Hollywood legends mentioned were made by Hitchcock.

It speaks volumes of Hollywood that despite his contributions to cinema, Alfred Hitchcock was never awarded a Best Director Academy Award. He was nominated five times and Rebecca won Best Picture (so the producer got the Oscar), but Hitch only got the “lifetime” kind of awards. No matter; forty-four years after he directed his last film, Family Plot, his influence is everywhere and his fine director’s eye is still on the big screen.

Leaves of Grass

Comentary on the 86th Academy Award nominees posted on The Oscars tab (in Spanish).