We hear a lot about the American Dream, but it is only an illusion (as illustrated by Leo Sweetie, the character here who nominally has achieved it), and Americans (like all others) are left to negotiate reality with real dreams, the ones they have when they close their eyes and go to sleep. Emir Kusturíca’s almost entirely English-language Arizona Dream, which is almost entirely set in Arizona, is not the Sarajevo-born artist’s best film, but it is certainly his funniest (both slapstick and behavioral comedy abound), and it is, like all his best work, strangely and profoundly moving. Kusturíca, you may recall, twice won the Palme d’Or (for When Father Was Away on Business, 1985, and Underground, 1995) and best director at Cannes (for Time of the Gypsies, 1988). Arizona Dream won him a Silver Bear at Berlin. The story is by him and David Atkins, who wrote the script.
The protagonist dreams of Innuits in Alaska and of a ubiquitous flying fish. This is 23-year-old Axel Blackmar, adequately played by Johnny Depp, both of whose parents were killed in an automobile accident where Uncle Leo was the driver. Leo (Jerry Lewis, who is screamingly funny until a tactful, touching deathbed scene) is a Tucson Cadillac dealer whose “dream” is the haunting nightmare of the tragic accident. Elaine Stalker (Faye Dunaway, as usual painfully affected) has dreamt of flying since childhood, and Axel, who becomes her lover, wholeheartedly throws himself into building a flying machine for her so that she can realize her dream. Giving the best performance, Vincent Gallo plays Axel’s cousin Paul Leger, an aspiring actor whose dreams are waking ones: the movies, whose dialogue he can recite, playing all the parts, and who, in a brilliantly shot, acted and edited passage, “plays” Cary Grant in the crop-duster scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) as Elaine, airborne, tries to mow him down. (The flipping back and forth between Grant and Gallo devastates the funny bone.) Finally, Grace Stalker (Lili Taylor, dreamy), Elaine’s stepdaughter whose father, Grace knows, Elaine murdered, dreams of suicide. Her Russian roulette-duel with Axel, whom she loves, terrifies. Her mass release of pet turtles—with Kusturíca, always such love of animals!—is heartrending.
Some things deliberately don’t add up—as though “reality” were the dream: that Axel could have taken out an apparently older Paul on the latter’s twenty-first birthday; that Axel, Leo and Paul all have different family names. The U.S. is a nation of invention and reinvention, all a part of trying to escape reality and chase—or fly—after dreams.
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.
BROKEN LULLABY (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)
September 13, 2009About 45 years ago, when I was in college, I saw on the big screen The Man I Killed, directed by Ernst Lubitsch. This was not a sophisticated comedy with a light “touch” but an anti-war melodrama, emphatic and a bit sentimental. Over the years, my growing familiarity with Lubitsch’s marvelous comedies and with that celebrated “Lubitsch touch” of his convinced me I had made a mistake and that Lubitsch hadn’t made the film I remembered. Published lists of his work did not include The Man I Killed. What I did not know is that this was the British title of a Lubitsch film that was originally titled Broken Lullaby. What I saw with that college audience that cheered and applauded was a British print of a Hollywood movie. Decades later, the Internet informed me that the two movies were one and the same; I had remembered correctly the title and the filmmaker. Over the weekend I viewed the movie on DVD—my first viewing of it since all those many decades ago. The movie exists, and Lubitsch made it; Broken Lullaby is The Man I Killed.
It’s not a good movie—no Trouble in Paradise, Angel, Ninotchka or The Shop Around the Corner. But our reacquaintance restores a scrap of my youth.
Tags:Lubitsch/Grunes
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