LITTLE WOMEN (Gillian Armstrong, 1994)

Gillian Armstrong, whose sensitive, delightful High Tide (1987) starring glorious Judy Davis is among my favorite Australian films, has done nearly as well with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Unlike the 1949 version by Mervyn LeRoy, which is treacle, Armstrong’s version bears comparison with George Cukor’s 1933 sentimental classic. No less than Cukor, Armstrong brings to vivid life the Marches, an independent Concord, Massachusetts, family—a mother, four daughters and a housekeeper—making do while the family head is away fighting in the American Civil War.

To be sure, Cukor’s black-and-white film for producer David O. Selznick is more profoundly steeped in an atmospheric sense of Americana, and it’s conceived far more poetically. Nor are the two films at all similar thematically. Whereas Cukor’s exquisite film distills time’s passage, human growth, loss and transience (the Wordsworthian ball of wax), Armstrong’s stabler and more prosaic piece stresses the continuity of life, especially family life, that mitigates these shifts and tolls. As a result, Armstrong’s Little Women isn’t even remotely melancholy, which Cukor’s most expressively is, drawing much of its frayed feeling from two events: the Civil War, which tore at the American fabric, and the Great Depression, during which time the film was made, and which tore again, however differently, at this fabric. Unconcerned with the first matter, and understandably finding the second, for her, totally irrelevant, Armstrong has been able to make a more narratively detailed film than Cukor’s, one that better suits telling a story than describing a mood. Still, her film is at least as graceful as Cukor’s and even more gracious. Indeed, this latest Little Women is especially alert to the visual beauty of the seasons—again, not to stress the changes but, instead, the round, the cycle encompassing and stabilizing them. In Armstrong’s film, one season doesn’t yield to the next but merely follows; rather than participating in a flux, each season, equally lovely, seems full, firm and complete.

A comparison of the two casts, though, confounds. Perhaps this is impossibly neat, but it pretty near seems to me that whatever part is well played in Cukor’s film is not well played in Armstrong’s, and vice versa. For instance, Gabriel Byrne is too worried about his character’s German accent to bring much credibility to the transplanted philosophy professor, now a struggling tutor—a role that Paul Lukas played so memorably, and in such an authentic Old World fashion, some sixty years earlier. On the other hand, Susan Sarandon and Claire Danes, as Marmee and Beth, are more felicitously cast than were Spring Byington and Jean Parker, both of whom remain settled in the cloying style of the 1930s. Douglass Montgomery, who played Laurie in Cukor’s version, also was infected with that style, but Armstrong’s Christian Bale is sturdier and far more plausible as the boy who is so drawn to Jo. But, of course, the centerpiece of any production of Little Women is its Jo, and here Cukor’s version wins decisively. For Cukor had at his disposal the young, brash, intelligent, beautiful and emotionally brilliant Katharine Hepburn (Best Actress, Venice), whereas Armstrong must make do, somehow, with the wooden, shallow Winona Ryder, whose ungainly appearance only makes worse her apparent lack of acting ability. (It seems incredible, but Jo was Hepburn’s second-best 1933 performance; her finest was her Eva Lovelace, the heartbreaking epitome of brave youth facing life’s uncertainties with bravado, for which Hepburn won her first Oscar, in Lowell Sherman’s Morning Glory.) Only twice is dead-heart Ryder able to animate her Jo—and the two occasions are telling as to the kind of actress, and person, Ryder is: first, to spew venom at Amy (meanness is never hard for Ryder to project); and, at the end, to welcome the Professor into her heart, whereupon, like Natalie Wood, Ryder flagellates herself on a dime into another hysterical state—here, one of euphoria rather than viciousness. Otherwise, Ryder is a blank—something Hepburn’s Jo never is.

Armstrong has made a strong, gentle, touching film for which Ryder is all wrong. Ryder therefore helps us to hold by contrast Hepburn dear: at her best, a splendid actress; and very near her best, an incomparable Jo.

MY NAME WAS SABINA SPIELREIN (Elisabeth Márton, 2002)

Including letters, photographs, other documents, dramatic reconstructions in the form of vignettes, Elisabeth Márton’s Ich hiess Sabina Spielrein comes from Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland. Spielrein was a Russian Jew who, as a teenager in 1904, became the patient of Carl Jung before becoming a psychoanalyst herself, in particular, a pioneer in the field of child psychology. Spielrein may have imagined she and the married Jung were lovers, and indeed Jung had feelings for her that he either did or did not act upon. Spielrein’s correspondence with Sigmund Freud, “the father of psychoanalysis” and Jung’s mentor, contributes to the mostly black-and-white film’s alternately dreamy and cut-and-dried fabric.
     Working from a script by herself and three other women, Márton has created a brilliant documentary. It locates Spielrein at a number of points of stress and conflict. Invisibility as a child growing up is one. Example: Her father spanked her older brother on his bare buttocks in front of her—for Sabina, a traumatizing event. “I, too, was a human being,” she later writes in her will as response to having been much overlooked or ignored.
     Sore points: the intellectual center of her life, psychoanalysis, was partly constructed on the male notion of hysterical female neuroses; Jung apparently plagiarized her original ideas, frustrating her professional advancement. In any case, the profession wasn’t eager to embrace a woman as one of their own. In addition, Spielrein had to cope with poverty and an unhappy marriage. She returned home to Rostov from Germany when the Nazis declared Freud verboten; Soviet Communists, also anti-Freud, shut down her school there; invading Nazis killed her and her two daughters.
     Complex, fluid, kaleidoscopic, gorgeously backlit in (mostly) black and white, Márton’s mesmerizing film reclaims from obscurity Spielrein’s accomplished existence.

THE IDIOTS (Lars von Trier, 1998)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Dazzling, brilliant, hilarious, poignant, Lars von Trier’s Danish Idiots is the masterpiece of Dogme 95, the movement Trier helped found that chooses naturalism and realism over artifice or technical manipulation in order to contest what its adherents see as the falsifying tendencies of individual and technologically obsessive cinema. Thus, location shooting is in, studio shooting, out; films, which must be in color and video recorded, can use no special lighting apart from a single lamp attached to the camera, nor can filters be used, nor can optical work of any kind be applied; no sound can be used apart from sounds that correspond to the images being presented; the camera must be hand-held; the action, contemporary. Trier’s creation of both Dogme- and non-Dogme films suggests he may have been putting us all on (that is, acting like an idiot), but the movement has stuck. Impishly, Trier’s off-screen voice can be heard “seriously” interviewing his fictional characters as though this film is a documentary. Indeed, few films collapse so decisively the difference between fiction and documentary.
     The Idiots portrays a commune whose members in public pretend to be mentally challenged—for instance, in a restaurant, at a home insulation factory they tour, at a public swimming pool. Each is searching for his or her inner idiot; idiots, one opines, are the people of the future.
     Of course, these young persons are having a blast with their antics. We, however, also get to see the responses they provoke—and, in some cases, the responses ordinary people keep themselves from having. Trier skewers the reactionary social tendency that in the U.S. goes by the name “political correctness”—“liberal” fascism.
     It’s exhausting acting like an idiot. Eventually, commune members test the waters of the mainstream. Some make it; some are left behind.

AIMÉE & JAGUAR (Max Färberböck, 1999)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

“Aimée” and “Jaguar” are code names for two women living in Berlin during the latter part of the war, 1943-44. Aimée’s real name is Felice Schragenheim; she is Jewish and a Resistance fighter, her risky cover, working for a Nazi paper under an assumed identity. Jaguar’s real name is Lilly Wust; she is married to an officer at the front. The two become lesbian lovers—verboten activity in Nazi Germany. Begun triflingly, their love affair becomes all-consuming. Co-written and directed by Max Färberböck, from a book by journalist Erica Fischer, who interviewed the real “Lilly,” Aimée & Jaguar is structured as Lilly’s reminiscence. Lilly is in her 80s now; the love of her life, we surmise, perished in a death camp.
     Here is one of the saddest, most fear-fraught films in creation—reckless passion in a maelstom, recollected in poignant tranquility. The exquisite nature of the visuals, their rich, dark colors, suggest things burned in the memory—atypical ghosts contributing to the haunted memory of a nation.
     Some commentators quibble about this or that. For instance, how realistic is it that the Nazi newspaper’s editor would help protect Felice’s cover? I take this as an index of how decadent Nazism had become by this late date; its form had outlasted its fervor. What about Lilly’s husband’s frequent trips home from the war? I take this as being emotionally expressive—an index of how intruded-upon Lilly felt her affair with Felice to have been. Where either history or memory is concerned, literalism may not be the best interpretive tack to take.
     Impossible love affairs happen. In Nazi Germany, lovers of any kind would have had to retreat into their own world—and all the more so with this pair.
     Maria Schrader is extraordinary as Felice.

THE LEGEND OF RITA (Volker Schlöndorff, 2000)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Brilliantly co-written by Wolfgang Kohlhaase and the director, Volker Schlöndorff’s Legend of Rita meditates afresh on the division and reunification of Germany. Rita Vogt, its protagonist, is a West German radical whose group commits robberies and murders to destabilize an unfair capitalistic society. Rita herself has killed a policeman. East Germany gives her a new identity as a textile factory worker, but her fear of discovery continues unabated, and German reunification leads to her capture. Among other things, the fall of the Berlin Wall provides a metaphor for the collapse of political idealism.
     Sober and analytical rather than “exciting entertainment,” the film is also sufficiently nonpartisan to have drawn protests from both Left and Right. This is how I would describe its political viewpoint: Only the Left had any moral standing to lose. The film’s worn, weary tenor encapsulates not only exhaustion from a life on the lam but also disillusionment. Upon her entrance into East Germany, Rita is allowed to keep her gun but not bullets. We tend to think of Germany as having been divided between East and West, but Kohlhaase and Schlöndorff compel us to think of each side as being self-divided.
     Rita’s decency is plain. However, her personality is as self-divided as either Germany. She continues to be, in some sense, who she no longer is; and the decency of her nature may reflect past political motives rather than past political acts. Kohlhaase and Schlöndorff provide a complex, ambiguous human portrait. In a way, neither East nor West will permit Rita’s departure from her political past.
     German reunification: an unassailably wonderful thing? Once the sentimental dust settles (the fact that fractured families could become, at least superficially, whole), there remain national/political problems that, instead of being resolved, have been driven underground.