FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY (Asghar Farhadi, 2006)

Reminiscent of Delbert Mann’s films in the U.S. in the 1950s (Marty, The Bachelor Party), Asghar Farhadi’s Chaharshanbe-soori is simplistic and melodramatic—yet another instance of how unrewarding cinema can be when it is plot- and character-driven. With all the great films coming from Iran, how does this downcast, “slice-of-life” mediocrity about a housemaid’s domestic travails rank a best film festival prize in Chicago? If this is the sort of Iranian cinema that plays in Chicago, it should only stay there.
     Just two points. One, all the hifalutin camera angles are purely decorative; there is scarcely a single expressive use of film in Fireworks Wednesday. Secondly, it’s in color. Why? Today, processing laboratories are set up for color, so filmmakers use color as a matter of convenience, to save expense. However, color—like any other artistic element—should be used only when there’s a specific reason for it. There is no reason for Farhadi’s use of it in his miserable little film. Color contradicts what puny artistic purpose Farhadi can lay claim to. Black and white would have served the material better. (Does someone like Farhadi even care?)
     As long as I live, nothing will motivate me to see anything else by Farhadi—certainly not something so schematic as a piece about a soon-to-be-married taking in at work how poorly a marriage can turn out. (As if she otherwise didn’t know?)
     Isn’t it funny how movies often turn out like marriages?

BRINGING UP BABY (Howard Hawks, 1938)

Susan: Your golf ball. Your car. Is there anything in the world that doesn’t belong to you?
David: Yes, thank heaven: You!

The “Baby” of the title is a leopard; this is a tale of two lookalike leopards, one tame, the other vicious. Embedded here in a “screwball” romantic comedy, they underscore the need of making the correct choice. David Huxley (Cary Grant), a fussy young paleontologist, is about to marry museum assistant Alice, who explains to him, “I see marriage purely as a dedication to your work.” Upon meeting David by accident, though, Susan (Katharine Hepburn, dizzyingly hilarious, radiant, gorgeous), intrigued, cannot let this marriage happen. She wants David for herself and will go to any lengths, however risky, to get him. Susan’s idea of marriage includes fun. She more or less kidnaps the boy, steals his clothes while he is showering and exquisitely torments him with her ardent pursuit. Meanwhile, Susan’s dog has confiscated and hidden the rare bone that will complete the brontosaurus skeleton that David has been working on. This artifact of a stodgy past will be sacrificed so that David and Susan, who has exhausted his resistance, can face together a more interesting future.
     Brilliantly written by Hagar Wilde and Dudley Nichols from Wilde’s story, and directed by Howard Hawks even more brilliantly, this dark, dazzling, almost alarmingly funny film submits its two lead characters to considerable danger to underscore the degree to which reality constantly threatens romance. This is one Hollywood film where the final clinch isn’t just a generic formality; it is an earned event. Susan has worked incredibly hard and adventurously to bag her David, and David deserves Susan more than he knows. In each other’s arms: for the time being, both are where they belong.

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THE OBERWALD MYSTERY (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1980)

Experimenting with video, Michelangelo Antonioni based his Il mistero di Oberwald on L’aigle a deux têtes, which its playwright, Jean Cocteau, himself filmed (boringly) in 1948. Gorgeously videographed by Luciano Tovoli, this color work—a symphony of filters—reunited Antonioni with Monica Vitti, who is brilliant as a nineteenth-century queen whose King Frederic, age 25, was assassinated on their wedding day ten years earlier. Now the Queen is the object of an assassination plot.
     Sebastian, who might be a time-transplanted member of the Brigate Rosse (indeed, Antonioni throughout reflects on current politics), has penetrated the Queen’s castle retreat at Oberwald to murder her. The Queen herself spins the tale that seemingly assigns the 25-year-old this role. Moreover, she solidifies this role assignment by announcing she will kill Sebastian if he does not kill her. Between the two, the Queen seems to be the playwright, Sebastian her captive audience. This is certain: Sebastian is the very image of the young Frederic. Perhaps Mystery’s most phenomenal shot is the quick one that introduces the trespassing boy’s face in the same frame as a portrait of the King.
     Who can doubt that Pirandello is an influence here? Yet the shimmering, spooky effects by which Antonioni turns the castle into a haunted place suggest Strindberg in his later expressionistic mode. In another phenomenal shot, the Queen’s ghost—someone else’s memory of her shortly after Frederic’s assassination—diaphanously moves down a corridor toward the camera. Like so many others here, this shot is ineffably sad, a distillation of the reality and hope with which the King’s death robbed this woman. (Her ongoing contest with her vicious offscreen mother-in-law perpetuates the theft.) Her taking the boy as her lover is a futile attempt to reverse time and reclaim the past.

THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (Orson Welles, 1947)

The narration of Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai is ambiguous. One has no way of knowing the extent to which one should believe Michael O’Hara (Welles, excellent).
     I set Welles’s film noir in two contexts: “waterfront agitator” O’Hara’s participation in the Spanish Civil War; Welles’s marriage to Rita Hayworth, which was already beginning to end when Welles embarked on this project starring her. O’Hara’s Leftist sympathies suggest his likely profound disillusionment, and indeed O’Hara at no time seems to fit into the current world. With its visual distortions, the celebrated fun-house sequence, including the Hall of Mirrors where Elsa and her husband try shooting one another dead amidst their countless deceptive images, may ultimately imply O’Hara’s cockeyed view of reality. It is he, after all, who falls down the winding chute into the fun-house. It is even possible that the entire narrative consists of a madman’s ravings. Welles, though, buys into the theme of human sharks in such a blood-frenzy they end up eating themselves.
     Hayworth, of course, was the forties’ most radiant star. For her role as Elsa, Welles cut her gorgeous locks and made them blonde, which, given her dark complexion, works as strangely for her as it does for Olivier’s Hamlet. Let’s say it suits Elsa’s ambiguity, as does the fact that she is a tsarist Russian descendant who speaks fluent (and thinks of love in) Chinese. There’s little hope of fathoming this predatory female, but, truth to tell, it has always seemed to me that O’Hara all but invites her to ensnare him in her deadly intrigue. Perhaps he seeks confirmation of how unlucky he is or how rotten the world is.
     The end of the Welleses’ marriage, which it symbolically incorporates, accounts for the film’s unexpected poignancy.

B(U)Y THE BOOK

MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

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PIZZA, BEER, SMOKES (Bruno Stagnaro, Adrián Caetano, 1998)

Adrián Caetano, the gifted young Argentine who wrote and directed Bolivia (2001), earlier co-wrote and co-directed, along with Bruno Stagnaro, Pizza, birra, faso. The culture of boys in their late teens, pressure-cooked by their environment, a Rio de Janeiro slum, is colorfully and convincingly presented—careless lives, steeped in petty crime, amidst slang and obscenities. Sandwiched between police radio broadcasts, the misadventures shown humanize statistics: those of crime and cop-kills. In a move to seize some degree of self-determination, two boys who work as thieves for a taxi cab driver, who exploits their assistance by providing little pay, generate their own plans for robberies, attracting other boys to shore up their own lack of experience. The incompetent result is a store of street tragedies.
     One of the boys, called Cordobés because he comes from Córdoba, promises his pregnant girlfriend, Sandra, to steer clear of crime. They plan on leaving for Uruguay together, to stay with Sandra’s mother. Pablo, his friend, is asthmatic—a mark of the terrible vulnerability of all these youths. Indeed, not just the two boys, but also others who join the fated gang and, above all, Sandra, who is routinely beaten by her father, draw our concern and interest.
     On two scores the film triumphs. One is its elastic tone, which skirts outright comedy as the gang botches up one crime before their next, fatal crime. The other is its reeking aura of pollution of one kind or another. Pablo’s asthma speaks to this, as does a cop’s bribe-ability. The long-held closing shot is brilliant: no longer “silver,” the sickeningly polluted Rio de la Plata—an upshot of Argentina’s privatization of water management, and an index of the indefensible experimentation that private corporations inflict on already disadvantaged human lives.