Enmeshing in a postmodernist form shards of the earliest Sanskrit epic poem, Valmiki’s The Ramayana, whose story takes place, now, some 7,000 years ago, Sita Sings the Blues is a complicated film that nevertheless feigns an air of the primitive. In truth, it bombards the viewer with aural and visual overloads that keep it busy-busy. Nina Paley’s animated film gave me a nasty headache.
Much has been made of the fact that Paley made her film at her home computer. Alas, that’s precisely what it looks like she did. Her film lacks all savvy, all elegance. The credits boast that hers is a near one-woman show; but Paley disfigures her source material with her self-indulgent autobiographical framework detailing her abandonment by her husband in San Francisco for a new love and a new life in India. Unconvincingly, Paley presses a connection between her own fidelity and that of Sita in The Ramayana, whose “purity” is no longer trusted by Lord Rama after her abduction by the evil king of Lanka, Ravana. Rumors circling around the rescued Hindu goddess press Rama’s hand in a suspicious and punitive direction, with Paley herself pressing for Sita’s and, of course, the movie-Nina’s gender equality. Nina takes off for India to reclaim her absentee spouse; when she discovers his new life, she eventually shifts direction, stops moaning and bemoaning, becomes a student of the ancient literature involved, and ends up self-sufficiently alone, except for her cat, in Brooklyn.
Paley would have done better, and would have emerged sympathetically, had she not made her impetus for making her film a part of the film’s narrative.
Even the punctuation of Sita’s singing early twentieth-century blues songs is monkeyed with. For some bewildering reason, instead of hearing the delicate, beauteous songs sung with great voice, we are given thin, monotonous renditions. This all but kills the delightful incongruity of having an ancient goddess singing songs that represent modernity, which is enjoined, ironically, to a forlorn femininity over time.
Archive for July, 2010
SITA SINGS THE BLUES (Nina Paley, 2008)
July 30, 2010HIGH TIDE (Gillian Armstrong, 1987)
July 29, 2010Gillian Armstrong’s beautiful High Tide, from Australia, begins with a bravura shot: a tracking camera seems to be showing fleeting landscape, perhaps through a car window, in the deep of night. We are pulled up short when the camera stops suddenly; backed up by three blonde-wigged backup singers, an Elvis impersonator is performing on stage. What appeared to be woods outdoors, it turns out, is a curtain—a performance backdrop. The camera reverses direction, seemingly “on the road” again. Armstrong’s film is about one of the backups; how Lillie (as she now calls herself), we are visually “told,” would love to get the hell out of there. She is part of this cornball act only for the money; soon enough she gets fired and is really out on the road.
Lillie’s car breaks down. While it is being repaired, Lillie finds herself in a mobile home park in a faded, sleepy beachside town. There, she chances across 16-year-old Ally, whom she abandoned as an infant after the death of the love of her life, Lillie’s father; Ally’s guardian, her paternal grandmother, has told her that her mother is dead. Neither yet knows who the other is. Once she does know, Lillie has the opportunity to reverse her knack for sabotaging her own happiness.
Brimming, loose-ended lives: High Tide breathes with these. Armstrong directed from a script by Laura Jones; what gorgeous dialogue! “I did not choose to stop loving you,” Lillie tells Ally, who has discovered the truth. “It just happened.” Burrowing believably, unsentimentally, into people’s lives, this honest film evidences a great generosity of spirit.
Judy Davis (best actress, National Society of Film Critics, Australian Film Institute) is tremendously moving as Lillie works her way out of a tangle of contradictory emotions and behaviors.
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GALLIPOLI (Peter Weir, 1981)
July 28, 2010Young Mel Gibson is brilliant (best actor, Australian Film Institute)—clean, deft, quick, poignant—as sprinter Frank Dunne in Peter Weir’s antiwar historical fable, Gallipoli, an antidote now for any bad feelings that his public comments and private actions may have engendered some three decades hence. In the intervening time, Gibson has been one of the few players to invite comparison with earlier charismatic Hollywood stars such as Gable, Cooper, Cagney, Grant. Alas, his acting reflexes have slowed down over the years, seemingly at times to an indifferent standstill, and his alternate career as producer-director, while winning him Oscars, hasn’t generated worthwhile results—although in the case of Braveheart (1995) it did spark his lead performance, adding it to the roster of his very best work.
Although Gibson gives (by far) the best performance in Gallipoli, Dunne isn’t the protagonist. This is Archy Hamilton, also a runner, only younger, more confident and more talented. (Mark Lee, whose continuing career has claimed a lower velocity than Gibson’s, is most appealing here.) Competitors in a race that Hamilton wins, the two become fast friends, with farmboy Archy convincing the cynical Dunne, against Dunne’s better instincts, to enlist along with him in the freshly created Australian and New Zealand Army Corps during World War I. Hamilton, pegged to be a runner, suggests Dunne instead and joins fellow combat soldiers in the trenches facing machine-gunning Ottoman Empire soldiers—Turks—whose massacre of them would owe a good deal to British military bungling, although Weir and scenarist David Williamson also stress unfortunate timing as Dunne speeds between his troop and the tented local command center in an effort to have the futile charge called off. Hamilton’s death while running towards the enemy, reminding us of the peacetime Olympic career that ought to have been his, accounts for one of cinema’s most piercing freeze frames: the culmination of a heart-walloping lament for slaughtered youth.
Indeed, the power of this finish owes much to Weir’s thematic preparation. Perhaps the central relationship in Archy Hamilton’s life is with Jack, his dedicated coach and uncle. Early on, we see and hear their ritual for inspiring Archy to do his best—their collaborative “pumping up.” The ritual consists of a script by which Jack supplies prompts to each one of which Archy responds:
Jack: What are your legs?
Archy: Springs. Steel springs.
Jack: What are they going to do?
Archy: Hurl me down the track.
Jack: How fast can you run?
Archy: As fast as a leopard.
Jack: How fast are you going to run?
Archy: As fast as a leopard!
Jack: Then let’s see you do it!
We see this shared ritual performed again prior to a racing competition. It reappears near the end of the film, just prior to the charge that will take so many lives, including Archy’s. In its last incarnation, however, Archy assumes both roles, both voices. This assumption of Uncle Jack’s role in the ritual, besides intensifying our sense of his monstrous solitude and his disconnect from all manner of support, is a shattering indication of Archy’s premature growing up, his loss of innocence, as poet Alfred Tennyson’s speaker in Maud had put it with reference to the Crimean War, his acceptance of his fate: “I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,/ I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned.” In effect, tragically, Archy’s maturity comes under the gun and only in the shadow of death. War has diverted—aborted—what would otherwise have been the normal course of a human life.
The warm, burnished, haunting colors of much of Gallipoli can be credited to Russell Boyd (best cinematography, Australian Film Institute); the thing is lit with sorrow and melancholy. However, Weir’s film is not perfect. Bill Kerr’s performance as Uncle Jack, for instance, is sentimental, tortuously selfconscious, ham-fisted. A greater problem is the klutzy structure, in particular, stretched-thin middle; we are thus set up for the ending’s sobering reversal of the earlier (although outdoors) locker-room, adolescent frolicking. These are boys, you understand. Yes, I understood, and I didn’t need the manipulative emotional highlighting. And neither will you.
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HOME (Ursula Meier, 2008)
July 28, 2010“Home” is one’s defense against the outside world. But what is the upshot when “home,” including spouse and children, becomes one’s whole world? Michel (Oliver Gourmet, giving the best performance) and Marthe (Isabelle Huppert, fluent and fragile, if less complicated than usual—best actress, Mar del Plata) are long settled into their happy marriage, “apart from the world” in a rural setting, along with their two teenaged daughters, young son, and cat. They are liberal parents, and the whole family seems to be without hangups in their family adventure under a roof. But things change. Michel starts raging when the abandoned highway adjacent to their modest Swiss paradise is rebuilt and reopened, flooding their refuge with din, dust and alienation. Now there is heavy traffic endangering the lives of their children when they are coming home from school. Marthe calms Michel, but it is she who eventually goes into a psychotic tailspin. One of the girls has already just left “home” behind.
Although it somewhat peters out as it pursues a pat conclusion, this is a mostly terrific movie. The premise fascinates. After all, for as long as the couple can recall, the highway’s re-opening has been threatened/promised, although their inwardly drawn focus on family, not to mention the European Union’s slowness in plowing through its agenda of things to do, has lulled them into a false sense of security that things would continue as they are. Life is change, however, and one—even couples—must adjust, adapt. Families disintegrate.
Ursula Meier has humorously and patiently directed from her own fine script, to which Antoine Jaccoud, Raphaëlle Valbrune, Gilles Taurand, Olivier Lorelle and Alice Winocour also contributed.
Best script, best film, Swiss Film Awards. Home—that’s the name of it—is from Switzerland, Belgium and France.
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.
KINAMAND (Henrik Ruben Genz, 2005)
July 31, 2010Keld, though kind, is dull. Rie, his wife, has had enough. When she announces she is leaving and divorcing him, Keld musters what protest he can: “Couldn’t we buy new furniture instead?” Guess not; Rie is out in an instant, right after telling Keld that he must admit to adultery, although she knows he has been faithful, to expedite the divorce. Rie can’t wait to get on with the rest of her life. Keld, on the other hand, falls by accident into the rest of his when he marries Ling, the younger sister of Feng from the Chinese restaurant across the street, so that she can remain in Denmark. It is strictly intended as a “pro-forma” arrangement; as Feng puts it to Keld: “No hanky-panky.” An eventual divorce is part of the plan; ah, but in this tender gem of a romantic comedy—wouldn’t you know?—Ling and Keld fall in love.
Bjarne Henriksen, Vivian Wu and Wu Lin Kun, as Keld, Ling and Feng, all act beautifully.
Chinaman—the title of the film and what Keld comes to be called—is a quiet, very gentle comedy in which even Rie turns out to be a supportive ex-wife. When we see him last, Keld is following tradition; in China, he is consigning the ashes of his beloved to a golden river. It turns out that Ling had come to Denmark for reasons of health. She had an enlarged heart. Scenarist Kim Fupz Aakeson and director Henrik Ruben Genz’s romance turns bittersweet.
The complacent Danish plumber grows emotionally and spiritually as a result of his contact with another culture, even before meeting Ling. We are sad to lose Ling but are deeply joyful that she and Keld came together for whatever time they had together.
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.
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