Western Novelty, which markets “patriotic nick-knacks,” is moving its operation, including the call-center that Todd Anderson manages, from Seattle to Gharapur, a town near Mumbai, for the sake of the company’s bottom line. (Don’t stress trying to find Gharapur on a map; it’s made-up.) Todd, an American smart-aleck, must bring his replacement, Purohit N. Virajnarianan, the soul of decency, up to speed. In India, Todd amusingly is a fish out of water, although he finally reconciles himself to his mission at a critical (and touching) moment in a local river; moreover, he and Asha, whom he grooms to become Puro’s assistant, fall in love. When he says about her, “Asha can do anything,” it is the inspirational moment of her life. One thing Asha may not be able to do, however, is divert the course of the marriage that her traditional parents have arranged for her.
After considerable training of the Indian workers, and the elevation of their dreams, the company’s dogged pursuit of lower overhead shifts the outsourcing from India to China.
Outsourced, co-written by George Wing and the director, Seattle-based John Jeffcoat, is a charming, delightful comedy laced with satire and gentle tugs at the heart. Young boys love Todd and throw their arms around his legs to hug him—and to lift either his wallet or cell phone; an adult street vendor pushes onto strangers and tourists a liquid refreshment that Western digestive tracts cannot handle. By degrees, Todd’s American arrogance relaxes; back home, he adds a bindi—a “third eye”—on the forehead of the image of George Washington embossed on his Western Novelty plate!
Josh Hamilton, adorable Ayesha Dharker, and Asif Basra all shine in the principal roles; Matt Smith is as unpleasant as he needs to be as Todd’s boss.
Archive for February, 2009
OUTSOURCED (John Jeffcoat, 2006)
February 28, 2009LADY IN THE DARK (Mitchell Leisen, 1944)
February 27, 2009Unlike the stage play, with book by Moss Hart, music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, Hollywood’s Lady in the Dark is not so much a musical as a dramedy with lavish musical interludes. It is also one of Mitchell Leisen’s two or three best films, one that is more entertaining about Freudian psychoanalysis than Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound the following year. Ginger Rogers plays Liza Elliott, who doesn’t suffer fools, male or otherwise, as the accomplished editor-in-chief of Allure magazine. Something is blocking Liza’s desire to compete romantically with other women. She may want to be a sexual knockout, but her whole image, as hard and efficient, denies this. Liza has been having debilitating headaches and suddenly cannot make crucial decisions. What’s wrong with her?
Like the play, Leisen’s film doesn’t leave Liza in the dark. Her glamorous mother’s early death and her grieving father’s rebuff of her at a critical moment conspired to prevent Liza from normally working her way through her intense affection for her father, leaving her with an unresolved Electra-complex. Her psychoanalyst suggests happiness might come to her if she chooses a man who will dominate her, thus breaking her habit of dominating men. This is worrying—but not for long; ultimately Liza makes a better choice—one that doesn’t raise our feminist hackles.
Rogers is good playing a vulnerable bully in the heat of work, a bedeviled soul since childhood now intent on coming into the light of emotional health, a successful woman growing in humanity before our eyes. Moreover, she sings (in a bowdlerized version) the legendary “Saga of Jenny” with electrifying snap and astounding versatility, and dances entrancingly with Don Loper, the film’s choreographer. Ray Milland, as Liza’s ad whiz Charley Johnson, also well plays an increasingly mature role. Warner Baxter is solid as Kendall, the married suitor onto whom Liza has projected her feelings for her father. Jon Hall (in Victor Mature’s stage role) is at his best as the movie star who is a helpless boy behind his action hero-image. Indeed, this is a movie about the discrepancy between image and messy human reality, and therefore the setting of a glossy fashion mag’s offices dispenses ongoing irony.
Mischa Auer plays the role of the gay fashion photographer that made Broadway’s Danny Kaye a star. Auer is very funny.
Liza’s dream sequences—or, as Liza describes them, hallucinations—are as memorable as these things get. In particular, during the Circus Dream, there is that haunting image of her childhood self peering at her animal-caged adult self and wondering how she got that way.
This Technicolor beaut is not to be missed. Many complain of all the deleted songs, but, in truth, the film is complete as it is.
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.
I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE (Michael Gordon, 1951)
February 27, 2009Joseph Weidman gave his 1937 novel I Can Get It for You Wholesale a great title, and Hollywood ran with it, attaching it to Michael Gordon’s very different film from Abraham Polonsky’s odd script. The changes in gender and ethnicity from Harry Bogen to Harriet Boyd account for some of the softening of Weidman’s book about a sexist, anti-Semitic Jew in New York’s garment district; but the lion’s share of difference, surely, can be attributed to the transplanted time frame. The thirties Depression underscores Harry’s ruthless determination to deny kinship with the rest of his species as a means of survival, while the postwar boom absorbs the harsh edges of Harriet’s scheming rise from model to independent dress designer, making it all look a lot like laudable pluck. And with an extra dose of Susan Hayward’s awesomely curled fiery mane on display, albeit in black and white, one may be hard pressed to believe that the script is justified in finding such fault in Harriet’s dedicated, hardworking pursuit of wealth. I swear: Harriet’s sanctimonious mom seems to have gotten her bitch-switch stuck.
Here is one of those Hollywood films that tries to have everything every possible way. For each glint of socioeconomic criticism there is an equally bright glint of posh complacency. It is impossible to know where the film ultimately stands because it is a strikingly orchestrated, undeniably entertaining piece of balanced positions and dueling compromises. Harry’s sleaze has vanished into Hayward’s interior battle between career ambition and essential decency.
As Harriet, Hayward is alternately slack and radiant, riveting and dull; as Harriet’s production-end partner, Sam Jaffe woundedly compensates for the film’s general purge of Jewishness from setting and action; as the ruler of the reigning fashion house who wants to make Harriet his queen, George Sanders gives the best and certainly the most subtle performance—and Dan Dailey as Harriet’s sales-end partner who wants to marry her? The year before, Daily was plain wonderful in John Ford’s When Willie Comes Marching Home (1950). Here, he is as dreadful as Harriet’s Charles Le(Night)Maire gowns.
Adapting his novel for real, Weidman wrote the book for the 1962 Broadway musical that made a man again of the protagonist, played by Elliott Gould, but is best remembered for you-know-who’s supporting role as Miss Marmelstein.
B(U)Y THE BOOK
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A TALE OF THE WIND (Joris Ivens, Marceline Loridan, 1988)
February 26, 2009Ninety-year-old Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens’s last film, which he co-wrote and co-directed with wife Marceline Loridan, is set in China. Ivens died the following year.
Une histoire de vent mixes various elements, including encounters, travelogue, dreams of childhood, film allusions, conjurings of Chinese myth, as Ivens pursues his lifelong attempt to film the invisible wind—a “foolish plan,” he admits.
From a radio—think Cocteau’s Orpheus (1949)—Ivens hears about floods and fires worldwide, and about “a Mexican woman [who] was carried 100 meters by the wind.” Other scenes suggest Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus (1959). Ivens himself appears in what had seemed a Méliès clip, one of a handful of black-and-white passages. Ivens also reconstructs the waves and cross-waves of wheat in Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), only in color instead of black and white.
Asthmatic, Ivens has half a lung’s capacity with which to breathe. For most, breathing represents life. An old man tells Ivens, “For you, breathing represents death.”
We follow Ivens into a dark tunnel. When he emerges from the tunnel, he is coming toward us. “We’ve been expecting you,” he is told by two different souls. Indoors, a case is opened, promising the wind. There is a mask on the case. Cut to the mask-maker, young and strong, who tells Ivens, “May this mask give you the strength to carry on.”
Beauteous and haunting is the imagery accompanying this text: “One drunken night, when he wanted to touch the moon, a rebellious poet drowned.”
The wind is given voice: “Van Gogh went mad trying to paint me.”
A woman in the desert says she can draw a magical figure in the sand that will call up the wind. It all happens.
Somewhat disjointed; captivating; mortality, masks, ritual, magic.
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.
THE ROMANCE OF ASTREA AND CELADON (Eric Rohmer, 2007)
February 28, 2009In fifth-century Gaul, shepherdess Astrée is willfully blind to shepherd Céladon’s chaste love and unwavering fidelity; she allows herself to become jealous by the sight of rival Semyrus pressing her lips against Céladon’s. It is Astrée who pressed Céladon to feign romance with Semyrus to deceive his parents, who loathe her (Astrée); now she tells Céladon not to bother her again. The whole village, including Astrée, believes that Céladon is dead, having drowned himself in the river, but nymphs have meanwhile rescued him and nursed him back to health. What can he do, however? Astrée has said she never wants to see him again; if she never does, how can she know he is alive, how can they forgive one another, how can their romance continue? In a pristine forest, a Druid priest concocts a masquerade that aims for the couple’s reunion and reconciliation; Céladon, who is at least as pretty as Astrée, will become the priest’s daughter, Alexia, and in that disguise approach Astrée and win her back—well, front and back.
Adapting Honoré d’Urfé’s 1610 L’Astrée, writer-director Eric Rohmer has said that Les amours d’Astrée et de Céladon is his final film. It is an enchanting, beguiling one, and a deeply moving one, too. This vision of his is at once troubled and serene, a meditation on duty, loyalty and love. As the Roman multiplicity of gods yields to the more abstract notion of a single God, the myth of chaste and perfect love crosses the modern reality of confused and contradictory—and anxious—love. For Rohmer, this is a summary work—and a personal one which is dedicated to a deceased friend and in which the priest who is engaged in holy work stands in for Rohmer himself.
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