Lingering Darkness



The dictatorship that came to power in Chile via a coup d’état led by General Augusto Pinochet  on September 11, 1973 is probably one of the most known Latin American dictatorships, though sadly it was far from the only one. Its notoriety is not surprising, given that it was one of the most repressive, with tens of thousands of Chileans "disappeared," tortured and killed, and an estimated 200,000 forced into exile; it was also one of the longest lasting (1973 to 1990); and, what is more, one that had an impact on the military and economic policies in the region for many years to come.  What is surprising is that so few movies have been made about it.  No, the most recent film about the Chilean dictatorship joins a short list of feature films, to which No’s director, Pablo Larraín, has contributed three movies.

The first noteworthy feature film about the coup came rather quickly in 1975, Il pleut sur Santiago  (Rain Over Santiago), a French – Bulgarian drama by Chilean director Helvio Soto staring French greats  Jean Louis Trintignant, Annie Girardot, Bibi Andersson,  and more. The movie’s focus was on the events leading up to the election and overthrow of Salvador Allende, the socialist who became the President of Chile, and on the conspiracies that took place to bring about an end to his rule and his life.

Jean Louis Trintignant in Rain Over Santiago

 There was a Russian–Danish film Noch nad Chili (Night Over Chile), also by a Chilean director, Sebastian Alarcon, in 1977, which didn’t draw too much international attention; and then, in 1982 came Missing, to date probably the best film made about those first months of the dictatorship.

Missing was directed by Konstantinos Gavras, better known as Costa-Gavras, a truly great Greek director (Z, State of Siege, Amen). It presents the events through the narration of the real life story of Charles Horman, an American journalist who was one of the people disappeared by the dictatorship, presumably one of the 40,000 that were held in the Stadium in Santiago after the coup. The remarkable actor Jack Lemmon plays Ed Horman, a conservative businessman from New York who arrives in Santiago to seek out his missing son. Alongside Lemmon, the wonderful actor Sissy Spacek plays Beth, the missing journalist’s wife.

Jack Lemmon in Missing

 Missing won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Costa-Gavras, and Jack Lemmon won the Best Actor award. At the Academy Awards Costa-Gavras won the Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium Oscar, and both Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek were nominated in the Best Actor and Best Actress categories.

Now there is Pablo Larraín’s No which has already also won the top prize in the Directors’ Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival and was presented to compete in the Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards. No, however, lacks the emotional strength, powerful direction and acting of Missing, but it also lacks depth.

No presents Chile in 1988, when the dictator had been in power for 15 years, and revisits the moment in Chile’s history when 56 percent of the country voted “No” in a plebiscite to oust Pinochet from power.  The film’s focus is on the ad campaign that helped persuade Chileans to cast their ballots against Pinochet. The film uses archival footage and fictionalized characters, being an adaptation of a play written by Antonio Skarmeta, a Chilean novelist whose work was also the basis for the Italian movie Il Postino. Gael Garcia Bernal, the Mexican actor, plays the central character, the son of an exile and a modern ad man who gets persuaded to make TV commercials for the "No" campaign.

The film has been criticized in Chile for not including the broader context of the “No” campaign and the tremendous and massive grassroots effort to register 92 percent of the electorate, which is what made the electoral results possible.  This is no minor flaw. The film is overall well done and entertaining, with the archival footage (Betacam) blending in very well with the film, which was purposefully filmed using old video equipment. This makes the movie feel like the period it depicts (at least technically), but otherwise and because it does not consider the broader context, it doesn’t quite resonate as being real. It ends up lacking the complexity of this moment in Chile's history.  It was an oversight not to include all the effort displayed by thousands of Chileans to make voting possible so that the ad campaign could contribute to the success of the "No";  also not present in the film is the complex negotiation among the political parties that came together for the campaign –these party leaders are mostly portrayed as naïve and caricature-like folk with  old fashioned views in the movie. Why the director chose to go the simple route we'll probably never know, but it certainly detracts from the movie as a whole.



Gael Garcia Bernal as the modern ad man in No

In any case, it is still a movie worth seeing. No has become part of an unintentional trilogy by Pablo Larraín, in as much as it is one of three films that take place during the Pinochet dictatorship. Larrain’s debut film Tony Manero (2008), although dealing with a serial killer obsessed with John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever, takes place during the height of the dictatorship. Post Mortem (2010) takes place during the last days of President Allende’s presidency and is about an employee at a morgue’s recording office who falls for a dancer who disappears.  In all three films, the main characters feel that the political situation surrounding them is not going to affect them directly, but they end up immersed in the terror and repression of the dictatorship anyway.

Larraín has indirectly spoken to why he’s chosen to make films about this period in his country’s history.  Despite the time that has elapsed, the dictatorship is, for so many, a lingering darkness; in one of his interviews (NPR) Larraín states: "He [Pinochet] died without ever stepping in the courthouse, and [as] a millionaire. So it's quite sad, because we never really achieved justice. And most of the people who actually killed and tortured others in my country, they are still walking on the street. That is why this issue, the whole human-rights violation issue, is still ... an open wound."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Wrong Brother

Unless you live in a big city that has many art house theatres, summer is a time of angst and waiting for cinephiles in smaller towns; waiting for the good, foreign movies to come out on DVD or waiting for the more serious fall movies from the studios to hit the theatres. Summer is the time when the movie industry makes money and rolls out the, for the most part, loud and uncreative blockbusters. For every Frances Ha there are ten action blockbusters like Star Trek, Fast and Furious, Man of Steel, White House Down, World War Z or The Lone Ranger.

I’ve skipped many of this summer’s blockbusters, but I feel motivated to write about one, albeit shortly, The Lone Ranger. It’s not that I believe this film qualifies as anything but an action blockbuster (an extremely expensive one at that), but because I’m rather baffled at how bad the reviews from the movie critics have been, how they have lapidated  this film more than any of the other ones mentioned above; in my opinion, unfairly so. 

Peter Traverse from Rolling Stone Magazine wrote: Unfortunately, this two-and-a-half hour obstacle course of cinematic horse turds resists redemption even from Depp. The Guardian’s said: The Lone Ranger staggers drunkenly from antic comedy to soulful solemnity to bloody horror without ever quite settling, or deciding what it is. And other critics are pretty much in the same tenor.  It could be the blockbuster phenomena per se, as Ethan Coen has said: Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

I love to see Johnny Depp, so I most certainly had The Lone Ranger on my "to see" list, even if it was directed and produced by the Pirates of the Caribbean series team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski.  I was not let down. I most certainly think Depp is worth seeing in this movie. He is compared to Buster Keaton by more than one review, and it's true he is funny in many scenes, but he's still incomparably Johnny Depp in make up, with his incredible facial expressions and eye language.

Overall, The Lone Ranger is a movie made to entertain, with no pretentions beyond that. It does, however, end up doing a little more than that and, I believe, it is thanks to Johnny Depp. In particular, the film finally flips the whole “cowboys & Indians” genre on its head, making this film, with a mostly preposterous script, actually more historically accurate than most others in this genre as it relates to what happened to Native Americans. As one of the reviews accurately stated, the Indians are the ones railroaded by the railroad. It is their land that is taken, their lives lost. And Tonto, who has been the lone ranger’s sidekick forever, is in this version the central narrator and character of the film, very well played by Johnny Depp, despite not having completely let go of the “me-Tonto-you-pale-face” stereotype.

In an interview to Rolling Stone Magazine (where, curiously, and very unlike Traverse, the writer calls the movie “impressively subversive, painting the United States Cavalry as the bad guys and the Comanche as the doomed heroes, with Arnie Hammer’s Lone Ranger essentially a sidekick to Tonto”), Johnny Depp says: “I wanted to maybe give some hope to kids on the reservations, they’re living without running water and seeing problems with drugs and booze. But I wanted to be able to show these kids ‘F…that! You’re still warriors, man’”. Depp, by the way, has Native American blood, on his mother’s side.

Johnny Depp with members of the Comanche Nation

Too bad that this kind of action movie, the one that actually depicts an episode of the colossal discrimination/extermination suffered by Native Americans, is the kind that “flops” at the box office. Verbinski, in the same interview on The Lone Ranger, was hoping to do some more damage from the inside, in terms of shaking people up with respect to the plight of Native Americans, taking it to a summer blockbuster. I guess this is one reflection audiences in the United States don't really want to see.

 

Coping with Plan B

It is fun to see a movie that is enjoyably simple and quite straightforward in its narrative, yet holds enough layers in story and characters that there are many ways to read it. Frances Ha, directed by Noah Baumbach with a screenplay by Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, the movie’s main star, is one of those movies. It is a pleasure to watch and even more fun to write about.

The basic story is as simple and as old as the dream-catcher city in which it develops: a young woman follows her dreams of becoming an artist to New York, establishes relationships with other young dreamers, but is surely enough confronted with the reality of life... or its statistics, like how few of the millions who aspire to be artists actually make it.

Lucky for us, both Baumbach and Gerwig are among those few.

The layers are there from the start. To begin with this is a comedy, not a drama, though it plays as both throughout the film. Frances Halliday, the character played by Gerwig, comes from what seems to be a secure and happy enough rambler-house middle class back in California. She’s gone to college in the east and there has met the person with whom she develops the strongest relationship of the film, her friend Sophie, a writer aspiring to become an editor, and someone from a higher income class than Frances. We catch them in New York at the beginning of the film, both in their late twenties, slowly coming off their college high, paving the way to their brilliant futures, or so they hope.  Frances apprentices for a dance company but doesn’t really have the talent to be a great dancer, but she’s happy because she and Sophie “are the same person”.  We, the spectators, know right from the beginning that they are not, thanks to the great and very subtle acting by Gerwig and Mickey Sumner, who plays Sophie.

Mickey Sumner and Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha

Theirs is no ordinary friendship, or at least this is what Frances thinks. And Frances is no ordinary person, or rather, she is ordinary in the sense that she is like all of us, all who are not part of an elite in the world. She’s like us in our youth, people with bigger dreams than possibilities; people who believe that relationships can be that self-less, strong and wonderful; that everyone is (or should be) the same in terms of opportunities to succeed.

We are taken through the diminishing of Frances’s and Sophie’s dreams, each for very different reasons.  But the freshness in this story, besides the comedic perspective and Gerwig’s acting, is how Frances copes with the changes in her circumstances (and addresses).  There is a scene in the film where Frances does this rather slap-stick fall while running to get cash from an ATM; she picks herself up and keeps running. It's without a doubt a metaphor. Curiously enough, it seems that Frances, the one who isn’t from the elite, is the one who is able to keep 'running', and this makes everything fit. I won’t go much further into the story, not because it would give anything away but because there really isn’t anything extraordinary about what happens; so like life.

 Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg) has not really directed an original with Frances Ha since he does quite some borrowing. The film is in black and white and of course Woody Allen’s Manhattan comes to mind, because this is New York and many of Frances’s friends are elitist hipsters with apartments in Tribeca, Paris or cute $4,000 “holes” in Manhattan itself, living a sort of existential or quarter-life crisis.The coloring works because it focuses on the people (Frances) more than the city, through Sam Levy’s good camera work. The score borrows from Georges Delerue’s King of Hearts, and so on. Yet, again, Gerwig’s roller coaster acting through almost every emotion possible makes it its own movie, as does the more up to date dialogue.

I believe there probably are different interpretations to Frances and her hipster friends. Some might find her annoying and extremely naïve; others fresh and sweet; some even truly “undateable”; which only proves, in any case,  that the movie has layers. In my read of the movie, the underdog (all of us) finds a way to cope with plan B and, in the end, has the last laugh.

 

 

 

Killing the Dead all Over Again

As far as zombie movies go, World War Z is a good watch. I must now confess that this is a sentence I never thought I’d write in this blog, given that zombie movies aren’t something I’m prone to watch. The horror movie genre is not at the top of my list of preferred genres and the zombie movie sub-genre tends to be at the bottom of that short one. This week, however, thanks to my daughters and to my favorite movie critics, I actually saw two zombie films: Warm Bodies and World War Z.

World War Z, directed by Marc Forster, is in the vein of Danny Boyle’s 28 days Later or Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend, where the suspense and action supersedes the gore and bad makeup of many zombie movies; hence, they are fun to watch. The plot has its similarities to those movies as well, in particular in constituting a caution against meddling and altering viral and bacterial genomes, something it seems we humans are increasingly prone to do.

Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later

In 28 Days Later, a mysterious virus called “Rage”, which stemmed from chimpanzees being used for medical research, spreads to humans  in the UK and basically turns most everyone but a handful of survivors into rabid zombies.  In I am Legend, a genetically-engineered variant of the measles virus is created as a cure for cancer, but mutates into a lethal strain killing almost everyone or turning others into vampire-zombie-like predators.  In World War Z no explanation as to the origin of the virus is given, although many “clues” are spread throughout, linking it to rabies, animal flus and genetic experimentation; this time the virus spreads faster than the Rage virus –about 12 seconds- and the zombies transmit it by biting their victims. Oh, and it is also world-wide.

Will Smith in I am Legend

In the American movies, World War Z and I am Legend, the hero who works towards finding a “cure” is endowed with very particular survival skills. Will Smith is Lieutenant Colonel Robert Neville in I am Legend, a military virologist and apparently the last survivor in New York City. Brad Pitt is Gerry Lane in World War Z, a former United Nations employee involved in high risk missions. Both are family men and predisposed to martyrdom. In 28 Days Later, the heroes are refreshingly women, though Jim, played by Dark Knight’s Scarecrow Cillian Murphy, the lone survivor rescued, is still the central figure in the movie.

Brad Pitt and Will Smith - Family Men with a mission

I think this is why I enjoyed Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies all the more. This is a zombie movie with a twist: it is a romantic comedy.  There are human-flesh-eating zombies, there are still a bunch of military guys determined to shoot at zombies (I never get that: if they are dead, how is shooting bullets at zombies going to make a difference? You’d think an amphibious rifle or flamethrowers would be more effective at slowing them down), but the zombies in this movie have a comedic voice over by actor Nicholas Hoult which really brings them to life (pun intended). What’s more, Warm Bodies is actually a sort of zombie Romeo and Juliet (“R” and “Julie” in the movie), with a balcony sequence and all! As corny as it sounds, it is love that “warms” the zombies and starts their hearts beating again. It is caring human beings and not guns that actually “exhume” the world; it is tearing down the walls built to keep the zombies out that serves to create a new world; if only the Israeli’s in World War Z had known that!

Teresa Palmer and Nicholas Hoult in Warm Bodies

Maybe Warm Bodies is part of a shift in young audience’s attitude and attraction towards the undead, also present in the Twilight vampire series. Throughout the years, because of the fear of our own mortality, the stories about those who refused to die were cautionary ones, ones of terror, in fact, of the monsters and creatures that refuse death becoming predatory vampires and zombies; like scientific tinkering with mortality that gave rise to Frankenstein or such monsters. This fascination has led good directors and actors into the horror movie genre, producing great films, which I hope to write more about in this blog.

Zombies and monsters aren’t what they used to be, it seems.  And that’s a good thing too.  Again I am in gratitude to my young daughter who had me see Warm Bodies, and who actually took me to see the monster movie that I most enjoyed this week: Disney’s Monsters University!

Mike Wizowski (Billy Crystal) in Monsters University

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.