TINGYA (Mangesh Hadawale, 2008)

The human misery incurred by brutal globalization: this is the premise of young writer-director Mangesh Hadawale’s Tingya (best film, Maharashtra State Film Awards), from India. Tingya is a 7-year-old boy who begs for the life of his pet bullock, Chitangya, which his father, a poor farmer, feels he must sell to the butcher if his family is to survive. Injury has robbed the animal’s capacity to contribute to the family’s livelihood. Can the father ignore his son’s pleas, which his wife supports? This is a terrible situation, much darker and more intense than the one in which the lawyer-father finds himself in Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944); but the same outcome is necessary insofar as it preserves two things: the cohesiveness of family; humanity in the face of an inhuman economic and political system determined elsewhere, and imposed from there, in the West.
     Producer Ravi Rai dedicates this Marathi film to the memory of those farmers who, under the duress of globalization, committed suicide at the rate of 26 a day, 9,360 a year, from 1993 to 2006. Myself, I do not feel that globalization is headed anywhere, except to realize its aim of lining the pockets of rich, vicious corporate leaders and their entities; but those who honestly believe that globalization is “lifting all boats” surely have sold their souls to the notion that the end justifies the means.
     Except for one stunning lengthwise indoors shot, with one figure in the foreground and the boy, in the distant background, in the door open to the outside, this is a film of meager visual content. It is rudimentary—and in color, whereas the material cries out for the urgency of black and white. Despite its shortcomings, however, it beautifully portrays the impossible situation into which forces beyond his control places Tingya’s father, who finds the claims of family on both sides of this bind. It makes the suicides of farmers comprehensible—and therefore impossible (for us) to live with.

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ALIBI (Roland West, 1929)

Until the contrived ending where vicious young gangster Chick Williams turns sickeningly cowardly, Chester Morris gives a crackerjack performance in Roland West’s engrossing, visually exhilarating Alibi. Indeed, one of the things that interferes with our pleasure while we watch this famous film is precisely the play on which it is based: Nightstick, by John Griffith Wray, J.C. Nugent and Elaine S. Carrington—from what we can gather here, a rigidly plotted affair and a sanctimonious, reactionary endorsement of police malfeasance. Another of the film’s liabilities is its wildly inept acting in various roles; Purnell Pratt ridiculously exaggerates one worthless cop, Pete Manning, the father of the girl whom worthless Williams marries, and Regis Toomey gives one of the two or three worst performances I have seen as another cop, this one undercover, who pretends that he is a society drunk in a manner that invites disbelief, but with everyone here apparently falling for his act. Eleanore Griffith plays Joan, Manning’s “rebellious” daughter; she is as good as Morris until the plot turns on her, too, making her character unappealingly conventional. Ultimately, Joan is as worthless as both her father and the cop she walks off with romantically: in my book, two bastards no less vicious than Williams, the purported “bad guy.”
     However, drawing upon German Expressionism and utilizing the stunning Art Deco designs of William Cameron Menzies, the film’s visual aspect enthralls. Shots move forward from the urban streets straight into a nightclub, where a chorus line of girls are kicking up their legs; this movement metamorphoses into a point-of-view shot as a cop car penetrates the area, the urban environment, in an effort to disprove Williams’s alibi for a robbery and murder. Images: a human figure disappears from the frame, leaving his shadow behind; the shadow of a hand is raised. This spooky, suggestive stuff suggests that West was as uncomfortable with the moralistic, cut-and-dried plot as much as I.
     Silent and sound versions once existed. Regrettably, I saw the latter.

THE CHILDREN’S HOUR (William Wyler, 1961)

Please see my piece on William Wyler’s first version of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, which is called These Three, and which Hellman herself adapted for the screen—in particular, paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6, and also the asterisked note at the end.

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER (Marc Webb, 2009)

There is considerable discussion in (500) Days of Summer, which Marc Webb directed from a script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, about coincidence versus destiny, which is to say, fate, as they apply romantically to what brings a couple together. It is all nonsense and a total distraction in this rueful, wonderful comedy, in which the boy, L.A. greeting-card poet Tom Hansen, a descendant of Riskin and Capra’s Longfellow Deeds, and the girl, Tom’s boss’s assistant Summer Finn, a descendant of our most cherished loner, Huckleberry, quarrel almost as soon as they meet. Summer doesn’t believe in love; according to how she feels, based on parental divorce, it is all a “fantasy.” A co-worker of theirs suggests, “The lady doth protest too much”; but the same could be said about Tom, who really, really, really believes in love. He falls in love with Summer, who responds with a confounding combination of like and sex, almost instantly—quickly enough, indeed, to suggest that Tom isn’t exactly—really—falling in love with her. I kept thinking of Lorenz Hart’s lyric to a Richard Rodgers melody: “Falling in love with love is falling for make-believe./ Falling in love with love is playing the fool;/ Caring too much is such a juvenile fancy.”
     Summer, beautifully played by Zooey Deschanel, warns Tom that she isn’t interested in a “serious” relationship and, smitten, he pretends neither is he. (This movie is smart enough not to dwell on this shift from traditional gender roles.) They break up a couple of times, finally for good, and Tom is in agony to understand why. His overwhelming feelings blot out objectivity. The film comes to us a-chronologically, in numbered bits of their relationship, as Tom tries piecing together the puzzle (for him) of the outcome of this. Crestfallen, he no longer believes in love; but, ultimately, we discover, he hasn’t learned a thing and probably never will. He starts in again with a girl named Autumn.
     If the script somewhat suggests Eric Rohmer (as revised by defeatists), Webb’s poignant filmmaking suggests Wong Kar-Wai.
     How does Joseph Gordon-Levitt do it? He plays the near-infantile neurotic lightly, charmingly and yet to the bloody bone.

A MATTER OF TIME (Vincente Minnelli, 1976)

Many of us recall the scandal. Vincente Minnelli, who had such high hopes that A Matter of Time would be his masterpiece, repudiated the result after the studio re-edited his material, making nonsense of the plot, which became a string of loose beads revolving around an ornate hand mirror, which more or less became the film’s protagonist. Martin Scorsese, the year of Taxi Driver, took out a huge ad in Variety supporting Minnelli and condemning American-International. Of course, we would all prefer to have Minnelli’s cut; but A Matter of Time is a lovely thing even in its mutilated state. It is intermittently affecting and even moving (and gorgeously photographed by 2001’s and Cabaret’s Geoffrey Unsworth); and, as everyone agreed at the time, Ingrid Bergman gives a vivid performance as mad Countess Sanziani, whose memories of her fabulous life may or may not comport with reality. “The Contessa” lives in Rome, in what was once an elegant hotel, by pawning jewelry, and she is down to her last piece. Fortunately, Nina, the chambermaid who befriends her, discovers that some of The Contessa’s paper money is worth something; but it hardly matters when the old woman is hit by a car in traffic
     Minnelli’s last film, set in 1949, is based on Marcel Druon’s 1955 novel La volupté d’être (The Voluptuousness of Being), which was published in the U.S. as Film of Memory. The Contessa shares her “memories” with Nina by replaying her mental film of them, the object being to infuse the scattered 19-year-old girl with her passion for life; Nina takes to this “film,” sometimes appearing in it (to our eyes) as a substitute for The Contessa, and to real films thereafter, becoming a popular movie star. Regrettably, The Contessa’s philosophy of life is cornball-Auntie Mame-ish, and one wonders whether Vivien Leigh transcended this element of the role in a 1960s stage adaptation. Bergman doesn’t quite.
     Minnelli mines the same theme here as he does in Gigi (1958): old age’s generosity in yielding to youth. In Gigi, the baton is passed from uncle to nephew; here, spirit is passed between the two women, a figurative aunt and niece.
     Liza Minnelli, the director’s daughter, is the star of the film; her Nina—a role that twenty years earlier Bergman herself had wanted to play—is delicious and delightful; she is very nearly as good here as Bergman is, if a bit theatrical at times. (Or is it mock-theatrical?) Charles Boyer, in his one long scene as Count Sanziani, who has been estranged from his wife for forty years, is effortless.
     Isabella Rossellini, beauteous Bergman’s beauteous daughter, plays Sister Pia, who tends to The Contessa in her last hour. Scorsese would have an affair with Liza and would marry Isabella. Hm.
     Of Russian Jewish origin, Druon was the nephew of Joseph Kessel, with whom he wrote the lyrics of the song that the French Resistance embraced as its anthem: “Chant des Partisans.”

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