THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS (Erick Zonca, 1998)

From France, Erick Zonca’s La vie rêvée des anges is one of the most infuriating working-class films imaginable. Its sentimental mythology distresses, even disgusts.
     Isabelle and Marie are joint protagonists. “Isa” has just arrived in Lille and lands a job where Marie works: a sewing sweat shop. Isa asks Marie for a place to stay the night; Marie takes her in—into a spacious flat that she is “sitting” as its inhabitants, a mother and daughter, lie in hospital following a road accident. Incompetent as a seamstress, Isa loses her job. When a club owner ends their love affair, Marie commits suicide. (The shot from Isa’s point of view when Marie slips out a window is the best one in the film.) Isa has lost the flat in addition to losing her friend; but miraculously, Marie’s death has made her a competent worker in another, more complicated sweatshop job. Only in the movies!
     Zonca’s decade-long experience at making television commercials (in New York) spares him the reason and logic, or possibly the conscience, to dispute his cut-rate view of work and working-class difficulties. This is an evil film, especially because its nonsense, at variance with what the homeless and the near-homeless must cope, is so seductive.
     Elodie Bouchez and Natacha Régnier shared the best actress prize at Cannes and the European Film Awards, with Bouchez also winning the César. Zonca won several prizes for co-authoring the script and directing. Does prejudice against workers and those struggling to survive really run that deep? Should more workers kill themselves to lift up the prospects of those they leave behind?
     Like Dietrich’s in The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930), Grégoire Colin’s performance as club owner Chriss grows richer and more ambiguous with each subsequent viewing.

EVENING (Lajos Koltai, 2007)

I was so moved by the freshness with which Hungarian filmmaker Lajos Koltai invested Imre Kertész’s Holocaust material in Fateless (Sorstalanság, 2005) that I am saddened by the dreary, hollow, sentimental mess of his second film: Evening, written by Susan Minot, from her novel, and Michael Cunningham. Koltai, of course, has been one of the world’s great cinematographers for nearly forty years.
     Add this to the film’s catalogue of disappointments: Vanessa Redgrave, likely the world’s greatest working actress in English, stars as Ann Grant Lord, who is dying and delirious, dreaming of herself and other characters from some fifty years earlier, when she made a “mistake” that still haunts her and proceeded with a careerless life as wife and mother that disappointed her. Now her two grown daughters, along with a nurse, are caring for Ann in her home. Koltai has done nothing to help Redgrave hit the standard of acting we are accustomed from her. Redgrave at least is watchable, though; Claire Danes, who plays the same character as a young woman, is ridiculously inept.
     From Cunningham’s novel, The Hours (2002) is the dreadful film this one is most like; but whereas Stephen Daldrey’s film trivializes at least two important lives, Evening further trivializes already trivial lives. Depressingly, none of its skeins of feminist and humane themes, including closeted homosexuality, register in the slightest.
     Near the end, there is, finally, something to move us: an exquisite scene between Ann and longtime friend Lila, bringing together Redgrave and Meryl Streep. (Streep’s daughter, Mamie Gummer, plays young Lila; Redgrave’s daughter, Natasha Richardson, plays Ann’s daughter Constance.) Finally, Ebon Moss-Bachrach is wonderful as Luc, Ann’s daughter Nina’s loyal boyfriend. You may recall that Moss-Bachrach, as the younger brother, outacted Keanu Reeves in The Lake House (Alejandro Agresti, 2006).

MOROCCO (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

After their triumphant The Blue Angel in Germany, Josef von Sternberg brought his star and mistress, Marlene Dietrich, home to Hollywood—along with his wife. (Dietrich also was married.) There, they made six films together, the last two of which are brilliant, The Scarlet Empress (1934), about Catherine the Great, and The Devil Is a Woman (1935), principally written by John Dos Passos. The first in the series, Morocco, is a middling matter, with a famous, stirring finish; but it was a big hit that garnered Oscar nominations for them both.
     Dietrich plays Amy Jolly, who arrives in Mogador by fogbound ship from Paris to perform her gender-bending act in a tuxedo at Lo Tinto’s cabaret. While performing, she asks a patron for the flower that the woman is wearing, kisses the patron on the lips and tosses the flower to caddish Foreign Legionnaire Tom Brown (Gary Cooper—Dietrich was also sleeping with him), who in the spirit of the gift, and a bit drunk, wears it behind his ear. Also in the audience is wealthy La Bessiere (Adolphe Menjou), who aboard ship offered to keep Amy. Amy will have to choose, then, between security and passion. (Meanwhile, the wife of his commanding officer is also romantically pursuing Tom.) At the last, flicking off her high heels, she is among those women who follow the legionnaires across sands into certain danger.
     Especially given how guarded Amy has been to let her heart feel again, this ending packs an enormous wallop; but, in the main, Morocco is more notable for Lee Garmes’s (also Oscar-nominated) black-and-white cinematography than for its discontinuous story (from a play by Benno Vigny) and modest filmmaking. In extreme sunlight, flickering deep contrasts conjure a poignant evanescence: love’s volatility; the quickness of death.

THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (John Huston, 1947)

Brilliantly written and directed by John Huston, who won Oscars for doing both, Treasure of the Sierra Madre begins in Tampico as a current of what appears to be good fortune launches an expedition for gold by three Americans, two young struggling laborers and old prospector Howard (Oscar-winner Walter Huston, John’s father), whose eyes tell us he has seen everything, including “what gold does to men’s souls.” In the aftermath of the 1910-20 Mexican Revolution, the countryside is alive with mirror-images: murderous native bandits and their police opponents, the Federales. The trio of prospectors find and mine gold but run into trouble also from within. Heretofore a model of fairness, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart, riveting) comes to believe that the other two seek to cheat him out of his share of the gold; like Nixon, Dobbs takes to referring to himself in the third person as he mentally unravels. Tim Holt, still in his twenties, gives the film’s most beautiful performance, one which perfectly captures an inflection of evil in a personality of resounding decency; his Bob Curtin is symbolically linked to James Cody, an outside prospector whom the trio decide to kill as a competitor (an expression of the novel’s and Huston’s hatred of capitalism), whose peaceful life home in Texas Curtin is prepared to take over once the bandits preempt the trio by killing Cody. The mysterious B. Traven (writer-director Huston), on whose book the film is based, appears dressed in white; he tells Dobbs early on, after giving him several pesos as handouts, “From now on, you will have to make your way through life without my assistance.”
     Poignantly, the prospectors lose all their gold to the winds of Fate—a cosmic joke and test of character.

KOKTEBEL (Boris Khlebnikov, Aleksei Popogrebsky, 2003)

An eleven-year-old boy stands alone in a field, crying. “Enough, enough,” he says aloud before bursting into tears again. He stops crying, hits the road.
     The boy leaves behind his travel companion, his father. Both go unnamed, are homeless, his father having lost his job as an aeronautics engineer, part of the price of the Soviet Union’s collapse; their wife and mother has died. Their destination is the village of Koktebel (Planerskoe) in Crimea, where the man’s sister lives—a very long way from their point of departure: Moscow. It is winter; the man wants to remain where they are until spring. “All you do is fuck one another,” the boy says to his father, referring to Xenia, the doctor in whose house they are staying. Hitching a ride, the boy finally arrives in Koktebel, but his aunt, he discovers, is gone until spring. The journey, then, turns up empty for the boy—except that he knows he made it on his own.
     Boris Khlebnikov and Aleksei Popogrebsky’s Koktebel is the first film for both. A Russia destabilized by its embrace of irresponsible capitalism is formally embodied in a visual strategy where seemingly objective shots either yield to subjective ones or turn out in fact to be subjective ones. One example: a lateral shot of the box-car in the train the pair have hopped finds father and son facing the open door; the next shot is the boy’s view of the landscape whipping by. Another example: an overhead long-shot shows the boy digging the ground; the next shot, of the boy’s father on top of a roof that he is repairing for their keep, reveals that the previous shot was a point-of-view shot.
     Father and son each has to adapt to a new life.