The Camorra is an actual criminal mob whose base of operations is Naples, Italy. Matteo Garrone’s sober, unblinking, coolly observant Gomorra is pulsatingly contemporary, riveting, unsentimental and, cumulatively, massively moving. It is based on the 2006 book by 26-year-old journalist Roberto Saviano; since its publication Saviano has needed constant police protection. We learn at film’s end that the Camorra, a money-making colossus, has invested in the rebuilding of New York’s World Trade Center.
The film juggles five plot-lines, two of which remain unresolved, the others testifying to gangland’s decisive spirit of retribution. In the latter group is a haunting, powerful plot-line revolving around 13-year-old Totò, a grocery store delivery boy whose acceptance into the Camorra leads to disaster: first, one-time playmate Simone’s becoming his “enemy” after Simone joins a rival gang; secondly, after a street killing, his reluctant set-up of Maria, his customer and Simone’s mother, for a response-kill. Yet even here there’s a loose end: Totò’s immediate group has acted thusly without official instruction.
The Camorra “manages” industrial toxic waste by illegally dumping it. Franco, the gang’s agent, bullies educated Roberto, his increasingly distressed young apprentice. When some of the waste spills on one of the transportation crew, Franco refuses to call an ambulance and the men in turn refuse to work. Franco exits the scene, leaving Roberto in charge; when he returns, he brings with him the new crew: children. Roberto’s conscience churns.
Whereas Totò turns in to the gang drugs and gun dropped by dealers in a police pursuit, two reckless older teenagers horde a stash of arms and are dealt a death sentence.
Garrone’s camera moves deliberately, often very briefly. No violence titillates here; it is all dreadful.
Grand Prix, Cannes; best film, director, script, European Film Awards, David di Donatello Awards.
Archive for November, 2009
GOMORRA (Matteo Garrone, 2008)
November 26, 2009THE CITADEL (King Vidor, 1938)
November 23, 2009Robert Donat gives a brilliant performance—leagues beyond his Oscar-winning one the next year in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (Sam Wood, 1939)—as Andrew Manson, an idealistic young doctor who, investigating the linkage between silica inhalation and lung disease, is opposed by miner-patients and mining board members. After his research laboratory is deliberately destroyed, Andrew and wife Christine relocate to London, where the private practice he opens struggles until Andrew falls in with a crowd of mercenary doctors who minister to the self-indulgent rich, who cultivate hypochondria to make themselves the center of attention. On his way up, Andrew leaves more and more of his humanity behind. Whereas after he delivered his first baby, who seemed doomed but under his care survived, he said, aloud to himself alone in the street, “I’m a doctor,” his eventual career poses this question: What is a doctor?
Intelligently written by Ian Dalrymple, Frank Wead, Elizabeth Hill and Emlyn Williams (who also enacts an important role), The Citadel (best film, New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review) is based on A. J. Cronin’s popular 1937 novel, which in turn was partially based on Cronin’s own experiences as a medical doctor beginning in his twenties. In 1924, Cronin was appointed Britain’s medical inspector of mines, in which capacity he published research such as Manson pursues.
King Vidor directs—in spots, with bravura skill. Memorable indeed are Andrew’s soul-searching walk at night, interrupted by piercing slivers of flashback, following the death in surgery of a dear friend, and Andrew’s stirring speech before the medical board, both of which contribute to a coda of reintegration following a fissured narrative structure correlative to Andrew’s moral disintegration.
The heart-walloping close consists of Andrew and Christine—a couple—walking toward us and their future.
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THE LAST TRAIN (Pierre Granier-Deferre, 1973)
November 22, 2009Based on the 1965 novel by Georges Simenon, Pierre Granier-Deferre’s Le train is an exceptionally powerful extramarital love story beginning in May 1940 during the German invasion of France. Attempting with countless others to flee the Germans, radio repairman Julien Maroyeur (Jean-Louis Trintignant, excellent) is in a freight car of “the last train,” where he meets, bonds and eventually makes love with Anna Kupfer, a German Jew, while his nine-month-pregnant wife, somewhat glibly also named Anna, and their young daughter, are in a passenger car. Held for the duration of an extra heartbeat, the subjective shot showing Julien’s first glimpse of Anna Kupfer, who is on the floor of the “cattle car” in the dark, persuasively communicates two things: that Julien will indeed fall in love with this almost painfully beautiful woman; and why he could scarcely do otherwise. Among other things, Anna is intensely mysterious, her long-held silence encapsulating her mysteriousness, which—pardon; I don’t know how else to express this—corrects the mundaneness of Julien’s life thus far, in effect completing the upheaval of this life that the invasion and his flight from near the Belgian border began. In La Rochelle, while his wife is at hospital giving birth to their son, Julien identifies the other Anna as his wife in order to protect her, in answer to the silent plea in her eyes. While he momentarily leaves her to find out about his wife, Anna Kupfer slips away. Three years later, she reappears as a captured Resistance fighter in an office of the French police, an extension by this time of the Gestapo. Will the summoned Julien acknowledge his connection to this woman at the cost of his life?
Romy Schneider brilliantly plays Anna Kupfer, who is both strong and heartbreaking.
TO CATCH A THIEF (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)
November 21, 2009Amiable, sexy, witty, lighthearted entertainment, Alfred Hitchcock’s romance on the French Riviera, To Catch a Thief, nevertheless contains elements that stress this description of it. The principal element of this kind has to do with the past of John Robie, whose inconspicuous retirement from notorious jewel thievery is interrupted by a series of “cat burglaries” that duplicates his old modus operandi. But that is not the element of Robie’s past to which I refer; for, before becoming a jewel thief, Robie was a member of the French Resistance during the Occupation. Robie’s parole, as well as that of confederates in the Resistance who also turned to crime after the war, acknowledged his status as national hero.
I am not sure why this aspect of Robie’s past is so often overlooked, but it means everything to me. John Robie is not French; perhaps he is American. When in the film he assumes a false identity, he claims to come from Portland, Oregon—the birthplace of John Reed, who as a journalist covered the Mexican and Bolshevik Revolutions, and who, committed to its cause of social justice, closely involved himself with the Bolshevik government. However, Robie’s wartime activism more strikingly resembles that of Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s forces.
The opening shot is of the store window of a travel agency; it is adorned by posters advertising France. I feel it may be somewhat condescending to attribute Hitchcock’s making the film to his love of foreign travel. His desire to visit the French Riviera coincides with the graver reason to relocate to a foreign country that his protagonist’s past reflects. Hitchcock the artist, even here, trumps Hitchcock the tourist.
The film, it seems to me, asks us to consider the fate of such wartime heroes as the current and former criminal characters in it demonstrate. Their lives and activities were ones of terrific risk; what “second act” was then possible? A suggestion of causality arises; John Robie became “The Cat” to revive the riskiness of his wartime activities for which, with the end of the war, he had become nostalgic. Indeed, the plot he pursues to prove his innocence of the current rash of hotel and palatial home jewelry heists revives the old spirit of danger. He feels alive again, focused, purposeful; but a shift in times may also shift allegiances, and one-half of the danger he faces—the other half of it comes from the police—comes from old confederates in what was once their common cause.
As Peter Bogdanovich points out in his often brilliant commentary for the DVD of To Catch a Thief, Hitchcock, preferring suspense to surprise, generally disdained “whodunits”—and, no doubt about it, To Catch a Thief is a whodunit. However, its being so perfectly suits the thematic material at hand. To Catch a Thief is very much a film about identity, about false identity and usurped identity—about “knowing” who you are when, absorbed in momentous or pressing activity, you don’t have time or the inclination to think about it, and suddenly not being so sure of yourself in another time, in other circumstances. Keep in mind that Robie’s “retirement” has been forced upon him by officialdom. In an imaginative sense, Robie is responsible for the new crime wave because it speaks to his heart’s desire to be emphatically himself again, and it provides the opportunity for his reconstitution and re-integration. Yes, yes, the film is charming and delightful beyond measure, one of Hitchcock’s most entertaining movies, but it isn’t just that.
Robert Burks won an Oscar for his gorgeous VistaVision color cinematography, which achieves its deepest, loveliest results on rooftops at night when either or both the burglar and, in pursuit of the burglar, Robie are prowling like cats. (There is even an actual black cat that also is shown on the hotel roof.) (Perhaps it is the coincidence of my recent film-viewing chronology, but these dreamy, borderline fantastic scenes remind me of the dark, spacious room in which the solitudinous Queen, moving slowly like a cat, confronts her Magic Mirror in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937). Abetted by Burks, Hitchcock thus finds the visual means of conjuring an eerie and even melancholy realm where identity is hidden, lost and pursued.
Cary Grant and Grace Kelly are both breathtakingly beautiful, each in more than one way, in the lead roles. Indeed, Kelly, as Bogdanovich points out, steals the movie, as a sophisticated, opinionated socialite from Philadelphia (where else?). Her mother, played wonderfully by Jessie Royce Landis, is the kind of rich widow that Uncle Charlie dispatched in Hitchcock’s own favorite among his films, Shadow of a Doubt (1943)—but here she is viewed largely sympathetically. Hers is the character, though, that extinguishes a cigarette in a breakfast egg yoke, as a not-so-sympathetic woman extinguishes a cigarette in a jar of cold cream in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), whose first movement opens on the French Riviera.
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.
WATCH ON THE RHINE (Herman Shumlin, 1943)
November 26, 2009Mostly relying on Lillian Hellman’s expanded stage melodrama and some terrific performances, Watch on the Rhine is a stirring entertainment. Herman Shumlin’s first film—Shumlin had directed the Broadway production—has me crying so hard I can barely breathe whenever I watch it.
On the train to Washington, D.C., Sara Muller, who has been in Europe for eighteen years, is accompanied by her very ill German husband, Kurt, and their three children. Another passenger asks Kurt what his trade is. His stirring—and honest—response: “I fight against fascism.” Also visiting Sara’s mother, Fanny Farrelly, are Marthe and Marthe’s husband, Teck de Brancovis, a former Rumanian diplomat who, prying into Kurt’s activities and identity, hopes to ingratiate himself with Nazis at the German Embassy. This is April 1940, and one European nation after another has fallen to invading Germans.
The New York critics named Watch on the Rhine the year’s best film. Repeating his stage role, Paul Lukas won best actor accolades from A.M.P.A.S., the New York critics and the National Board of Review. While I prefer the brilliant actor in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), in which he plays a surgeon and urbane Nazi, and George Cukor’s Little Women (1933), he is wonderful as Kurt Muller. Despite a few naggingly sentimental moments, Bette Davis is superb as Sara, Kurt’s ideal life-partner, who has traded in her childhood wealth to dedicate herself to the cause of humanity. George Coulouris, however, is best of all as Teck, who mirror-images Kurt as a refugee with secrets. Ruthless and reckless beneath a calm, polite exterior, Teck wants only to find a way back to Europe. Only Lucile Watson is a washout; as Fanny, her few authentic notes are drowned in a swamp of dismal theatricality.
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