PHAEDRA (Jules Dassin, 1962)

Florid, arty updating of the ancient Greek myth that feeds off of the celebrity love affair between shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and opera diva Maria Callas. Director Jules Dassin can find no other basis for tackling the tangled material. Mass deaths, suicide, lesbianism, adultery with a hint of incest: with all this, how did he make such an incredibly dull movie?
     The acting of the three leads, Melina Mercouri, Anthony Perkins and Raf Vallone, is ludicrous; and except when she widely smiles—and, of course, this film gives her exceptionally little to smile about—Mercouri isn’t much to look at, either. I had (mis?)remembered her as being gorgeous. But her face is slack and ugly through most of this movie!
     This one is as soporific as Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981).

TIME STANDS STILL (Péter Gothár, 1982)

I am contemplating adding this entry to my list of the 100 best films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe, which would also require, of course, dropping something that’s already on the list. In the meantime, here is the entry.

Lucid yet also elusive, Péter Gothár’s Megáll az idö presents a social vision of a Soviet satellite. Its focus is a Budapest family. The father flees during the 1956 Hungarian uprising rather than face prison, or worse, as a “counterrevolutionary.” His wife chooses to stay behind with their two sons. The film covers the next ten or twelve years.
     One brother, Dini, loses his girlfriend, Magda, to his older brother, Gábor, after a teacher convinces him that sexuality, which he is profaning by his adolescent interest in it, is “sacred.” A more liberal new order replaces that teacher with one who encourages class participation—a ploy to catch them in a political trap, their father’s understandably paranoid comrade, released from prison, insists. The boys’ struggle with adolescence, then, is compounded by issues of political authority: a state too repressive for their ache towards freedom and independence; the quarrel between different “orders” of Hungarian communism. Indeed, the attitude of the entire high school comes to a head when the kids openly deride the school head’s solemn “patriotic” speech. Paul Anka singing “You are my destiny . . .” is for them both a sexual and a political anthem.
     Connections must be courted, state favor curried, to ensure a professional future. Because of their father’s politics, the brothers are stuck in a black hole.
     The opening movement, in 1956, blends fictional and documentary elements; thereafter, the film’s style veers toward a nostalgic, and heartbreaking, expressionism. Tight frames; pans and tracking shots that inevitably come to a hard finish; backlighting that darkens human faces, their individual features indistinct or blotted out: various elements contribute to a palpable portrait of oppression. Even in the streets, Gothár and color cinematographer Lajos Koltai convey a world in which people draw only quarter-breaths.