BITTER SWEAT (Sonia Valentín, 2003)

From Puerto Rico, Sudor Amargo (Bitter Sweat), by Sonia Valentín, is about the responses of women workers to the imminent closing, due to high operational costs, of the fish-cleaning factory at which they work. The U.S. owner is shipping the factory down to South America, where, among other benefits to him, wages are lower. The enrobing irony, of course, is that the factory’s placement in Puerto Rico rather than in the States was based on similar calculations.
     Valentín’s film has been widely compared to Erin Brockovich. How odd. That shallow film mines the bankrupt vein of how much one person (with a plunging neckline) can improve the world. Sudor Amargo is all about group protest and worker solidarity—what people can accomplish socially and politically by working together.
     The scenes of the women at work, and at cleaning themselves after work, reek of fish odor and the sheer unpleasantness of what they do to eke out a living.
     But what is most extraordinary about this positive, moving film is its focus on the humanity of these various and very different workers, each with her own life. The film careens from pseudo-documentary to soap opera to wicked farce to whodunit, all in an effort to flesh out the women’s lives at, about and away from work. Moreover, Valentín, an agile, expressive artist, marshals jump cuts, freeze frames, daydreams, nightmares and anything else she can think of to get the job done, punctuating her eclectic, here hilarious, there piercingly touching narrative with scenes of demonstrating workers outside the factory and shots of the factory’s fence being locked forever. The narrative’s rendezvous with dire destiny is subverted by a finale that will have you cheering and wiping away tears—one that’s perfectly logical, I might add, and in keeping with the film’s political stance.
     I could have done without certain shots—this woman stepping on glass, that woman puking, etc. But, overall, this film delightfully twists and turns.

I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD (Mike Hodges, 2003)

Mike Hodges’s I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, a depressed, no-key South London noir about rape, suicide and fraternal revenge, is one of the most dispiriting movies I’ve seen. The spectacle of Malcolm McDowell buggering Jonathan Rhys-Meyers tramples on too many sacred movie memories and adds a loathsome draught of homophobia into the mix. Clive Owen lacks the resources to sustain the engine of a modern-day samurai. His performance is pitiful.
     The atmospherics remind me of Mike Figgis’s Stormy Monday (1988), a film that gives one, at least, a rooting interest in some of its characters. The only soul we care about in Hodges’s film is the boy that Rhys-Meyers plays, and his suicide comes fifteen minutes into the film. I kept worrying about the parakeet that the boy’s death orphans.
     Others say that the film is a rehash of Hodges’s much earlier Get Carter (1971). I have never seen Get Carter. Am unlikely to.

CHILDREN OF THE CENTURY (Diane Kurys, 1999)

Children of the Century (Les enfants du siècle), directed by Diane Kurys, is about one of the most famous and most tumultuous love affairs of all time. The participants, both French Romantics, are the dissolute, brilliant poet and dramatist Alfred de Musset and the Baroness Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, whose novels, written under the pseudonym of George Sand, influenced, among others, Dostoievski, Tolstoi and Proust. Sand’s writing is perhaps best known for its critiques of married life for women, but no less than her British contemporary, Alfred Tennyson, her work also adventurously grapples with the impact of evolutionist thought on the religious mind of humanity. For us today, she is certainly a substantial literary figure. One would scarcely guess either this or Musset’s (lesser) literary importance from the swooning confection that Kurys has concocted, in part derived from Musset’s memoir of the ill-fated affair. The script is by Kurys, François-Olivier Rousseau and Murray Head, who, in an earlier career incarnation, played the boy-toy of both Peter Finch’s and Glenda Jackson’s characters in Sunday, Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger, 1971).

I suppose there is nothing wrong with the film’s sexual emphasis, especially since an amour fou, all-consuming, can throw a monkey wrench into one’s work habits and literary productivity. As it happens, though, in between his opium binges, upon which the film copiously dwells, Musset was inspired by his passion for Sand to write his most exquisite verse. To be fair, at many junctures, one lover is telling the other that he or she must be left alone to work now, but one is dubious as to how much could possibly get done, and of what depth or quality, in the midst of so much mental exhaustion and sexual distraction. Musset and Sand weren’t Yeatsian “automatic writers,” you know, and each was engaged in exceedingly hard intellectual work—work of a sort with which Kurys (Peppermint Soda, 1977; Je reste!, 2003) is likely unfamiliar.

Children of the Century, like François Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H. (L’histoire d’Adèle H., 1975), is about obsessive love, except here it isn’t one-sided; Kurys’s lovers take turns obsessing on the other and giving one another the cold shoulder. Moreover, the Truffaut film contextualizes the obsession in a complex consideration of history and myth; Kurys gets no further than having her romance epitomize a time and place. It’s fun to watch luxuriantly costumed stars taking off their clothes, and we get to see one’s bare breasts and the other’s bare bottom in a heady atmosphere of unbridled passion. There is also pleasure to be had from the gorgeous color cinematography by Vilko Filac and from the balanced, lucid compositions that Kurys devises. On balance, though, one feels a want of depth.

Still, the passions that Kurys portrays strike real sparks, and surely this derives in part from the lusty casting: Juliette Binoche as Sand and Benoît Magimel as Musset. (Binoche gave birth to Magimel’s child in the year following the film’s completion.) These two, as they say, light up the screen and hold nothing back. Binoche, with her Mona Lisa-smile, is fascinating in her warm maturity, and her decade-younger real-life lover—Musset was six years younger than Sand—is cinema’s “It”-boy of the moment: at least if one goes by his good looks, a reincarnation of Gérard Philipe. In terms of acting ability, however, Magimel may be closer to Sean Penn. Magimel is completely different in each role he plays, but something at the core always seems to be missing. Binoche is a wee bit mysterious, but that adds to her mystique; Magimel, like Penn, is vacuous, and this detracts from the impression he makes of having some talent. Of course, he may get better, as only very recently Penn has done; he is still, after all, young. In the meantime, I remain unconvinced by the world’s highly premature canonization of him.

For the record, the Sand-Musset affair lasted a rocky two years, in the mid-1830s; but the film has Sand still obsessing over Musset at the time of his death, in 1857. By then, Sand’s even more famous love affair with someone else, Frédéric Chopin, had been over for a decade and she was now keeping company with engraver and dramatist Alexandre Manceau. Writers do move on better than the movies seem to think that they do.

UNCONSTITUTIONAL (Nonny de la Peña, 2004)

The documentary Unconstitutional, by Nonny de la Peña, gives the Patriot Act a sound drubbing. It is beautifully structured. The most difficult thing involved in structuring such a work is to order its parts in such a way as to do two things simultaneously: achieve continuity, with each component leading logically to the next, and achieve thematic unity and purpose, which requires that the addition of each component enlarge and expand the material in the direction of what must be achieved at the last: the fullness of a single argument. De la Peña accomplishes all this. His is a model of clarity; each part is clear, and each part clearly contributes to a clear wholeness, to wit, that the Patriot Act is unpatriotic, that it violates one tenet after another of basic U.S. Constitutional principle.
     I was deeply affected by the film’s thematic purpose: to make the U.S. Constitution come alive as a document by relating violations of it to the adverse consequences on actual individual human lives. The film goes about its thematic purpose so modestly, patiently, methodically, quietly that one is quite overwhelmed by the finish, by which time the film has reached its thematic goal.
     The film is a joy—and this sort of film rarely is that. It is a conventional documentary, not a creative one, but it’s beautifully put together. It is leagues beyond other documentaries on the same topic I have seen on PBS.
     I presume “sponsored by the A.C.L.U.”—a construction I have never encountered in the credits of any other movie (”sponsored by . . .” some organization)—means that the American Civil Liberties Union underwrote the film in whole or in part and is using it as a recruitment tool. It should work!