ROLLING FAMILY (Pablo Trapero, 2004)

Familia rodante, one of the most brilliant films of the new century, finds Argentinean writer-director Pablo Trapero (Mundo grúa, 1999; Leonera, 2008) invisibly along for the ride on a family trip in a camper van. Four generations cram the van, ranging from an infant to Emilia, the infant’s 84-year-old great-grandmother. At her birthday celebration in a rural part of Buenos Aires, her sister telephones from Misiones, inviting her to a family wedding in her hometown. This sets up the trip, with the entire Buenos Aires part of the family participating at Emilia’s command, but Trapero’s virtually plotless film homes in on the transport, with a payoff at the end that is both emotionally sweeping and witheringly ironical. Trapero captures a rhythm of life and a bounty of familial disappointment—the predictability/unpredictability of life. In his early thirties, Trapero has created a masterpiece, richly deserving the prizes he won for it: best director, Gijón; prize of the international film critics, Guadalajara.
     What then does Trapero give us in lieu of plot? Various activities along the way, including washing a family dog, the preparation of a meal, work on the vehicle after it breaks down, and so forth. One soul’s dental emergency accounts for a necessary detour; where at night is everyone going to sleep? We are also given, pressured by the vehicle’s mechanical problems, eruptions of ancient quarrels, and of old and new romantic realignments, one of which, igniting jealousy, sends a trip member into ignominious exile. Emilia herself, once the Buenos-Aires crowd makes it to Misiones, sees again an old boyfriend whose name she no longer quite recalls.
     Trapero’s fiction, then, gravitates toward a dramatically heightened documentary-style presentation. At its center is a touching performance by a nonprofessional: Graciana Chironi as Emilia (best actress, Gijón).

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ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON (Leo McCarey, 1942)

“Now make with the dialogue, like Cary Grant makes with Ginger Rogers.” — post-Honeymoon, a line from a ’40s film

Knew it! All this talk of Missouri and Texas: nonsense! Ginger Rogers was a Brooklyn babe—at least she is one in Once Upon a Honeymoon, which writer-director Leo McCarey made in between his four Oscars. Sheridan Gibney co-wrote the script from McCarey’s and his original story. Cary Grant and Rogers, dreamy in romance and superbly comical to boot, star as war correspondent Patrick O’Toole and former stripper Katie O’Hara, who, social-climbing in Europe beginning in 1938, naïvely marries Baron Franz Von Luber, who is on the political make, preparing the way for Nazi invasion of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Norway, and eventually headed for the United States. Suggesting a bit Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), McCarey’s film—the better, more powerful of the two—certainly strikes up the most intriguing honeymoon path in cinema while showcasing with remarkable complexity for this sort of froth Grant’s Pat’s falling in love and Ginger’s O’Hara’s transformation from self-involved political apathy to patriotic activism. McCarey orchestrates one of Hollywood’s best blends of wartime propaganda and entertainment—a much better one, say, than Casablanca or Yankee Doodle Dandy (both Michael Curtiz, both 1942).
     Some take exception to Grant’s line of dialogue, “Now they think we’re Jewish!” when in fact the context neuters the alleged grotesqueness: O’Toole and O’Hara on the run together, O’Hara having given her doctored passport to Anna, a Jewish maid, so that Anna might try to escape with her children. (“Where?” Anna wistfully, poignantly, rhetorically asks when at their parting O’Hara advises, “Go somewhere safe.”) Indeed, the accursed line plays with Cary Grant’s own rumored Jewish background, much as O’Toole’s referencing “the way you look tonight” to O’Hara—in broad daylight, mind you—recalls the Oscar-winning tune in Ginger’s Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936) with Astaire. This is a postmodern work full of “in”-references and self-reflexivity: the ironical mirror-imaging of the Baron and the Baroness in their separate ambitiousness.
     Here is a star-powered wartime romantic comedy that’s worth a second look, if only for the terrific scene where O’Toole convinces O’Hara in a restaurant that vodka is the Polish word for water, and he gets smashed while she, learning that her spouse is a Nazi, stays uproariously sober drink after drink after drink.