ANASTASIA (Anatole Litvak, 1956)

Despite its uncertain tone that unexpectedly resolves itself in comedy and romance, Anatole Litvak’s Anastasia touches on momentous subjects: historical ambiguities; the exploitation of these due to greed and the spirit of adventure; the problem of identity, including the eternal mystery of identity; however embroiled one is in history, an individual’s right to self-determination. However muddled and indistinct it may be, this film is likely to fascinate us, if only around the edges.
     The play on which it is based, by Guy Bolton and Marcelle Maurette, and adapted by Bolton and Arthur Laurents, is in turn based on (considerably amended) actual events. A patient in a German asylum came to be considered an impossibly surviving daughter of the Red massacre of Tsar Nikolai II and his imperial family—in certain quarters, an index of public fancy and nostalgia. Anna Koreff, the film’s central character, is based on this “Anna Anderson”; destitute and suicidal in Paris streets in 1928, she is “rescued” and trained to convince the world—or at least who would be Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov’s grandmother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna—that she is who her promoters, a group of White Russian exiles, say she is. In the course of his training her, however, General Sergei Pavlovich Bounine himself comes to wonder whether Anna isn’t indeed Anastasia. In any case, he falls in love with her—or with whoever.
     Ingrid Bergman won best actress prizes for her vivid, remarkable work: the David di Donatello Award, Oscar, Golden Globe, the prize of the New York critics. (In an irritatingly overly technical performance, Helen Hayes is considerably less effective as the Dowager Empress.) But the film’s cold, distanced and (what he saw as) disdainful nature drew young critic François Truffaut’s contempt.
     Yul Brynner strikingly plays Bounine.

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STRAY DOGS (Marzieh Mishkini, 2004)

On the bombed streets of Kabul, on their own, a young brother and sister, Zahed and Gol-Ghotai, along with countless other children, scavenge to survive. The pair discover a charred book; like wood scraps, this can be sold for burning—for heat. The U.S.-Taliban war in Afghanistan—punctuating shots show a U.S. plane high in the sky—has purged books of their informative, educational and sacred uses: a transformation of the children’s future. Zahed and Gol-Ghotai rescue a little dog that, in a scene suggesting James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), is being targeted by a mass of torch-wielding children who want to burn it for being a “foreign dog,” a U.S. invader, a Russian invader, whatever—really, a painful reminder of the childhood that has been ripped from their lives. Everything is ripe for burning. Both of Zahed and Gol-Ghotai’s parents are in separate prisons. A Taliban, their father is being moved to a U.S. prison; his five years’ absence led their mother to remarry, making her in the eyes of the law “a whore.” She pleads with her children to get their father to withdraw the charge against her without revealing the reason for her desperation: it is likely she will be stoned or possibly burned alive for her “crime.”
     Sag-haye velgard is the second of three films by Iranian writer-director Marzieh Meshkini, about whose The Day I Became a Woman (2000) I have already written. (Meshkini is Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s wife and Samira Makhmalbaf’s stepmother.) Its subject is a mainstay of cinema: for children especially, the dislocations of war.
     Much of the film is taken up, sometimes wittily deadpan, by the two children’s efforts to get themselves admitted into prison, first, as their mother’s overnight cell-mate and, later, as prisoners themselves, for which Zahed attempts a series of public thefts. The children simply want to be close to their mother; but, for the longest time, Zahed’s actions get him beaten a lot but not arrested and jailed. Repetitious sequences will remind Westerners of the myth of Sisyphus—Meshkini’s principal means of shortcircuiting sentimentality. One bravura sequence elliptically conjoins one snippet after another of the children’s efforts to join their mother for the night.
     This strong, elegant piece of work envisions children’s adaptability and resourcefulness, on the one hand, and the limits to these, on the other. With the assistance of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), Zahed is finally imprisoned; but he is inadvertently separated from his younger sister, who is left entirely on her own, and he himself winds up in a prison other than the one he had set his sights on. It is all funny in a way, but not in any way we wish to contemplate. Meshkini comes close to devastating us.
     Zahed (who plays Zahed) is wonderful, and Gol-Ghotai (who plays Gol-Ghotai) is even more amazing (best actress, Paris). Twiggy, as the pooch, is a constant reminder of childhood innocence, especially in closeup inserts.
     Prize of the international critics at Singapore; Open Prize, Venice.

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SHUTTER ISLAND (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

“Is it better to live as a monster or die as a good man?”

Some facsimile of this facile question, which pessimistically resolves itself in an impending lobotomy, is tossed out at the end of Martin Scorsese’s slippery thriller, Shutter Island, but not before the film has entertainingly, but without any kind of depth, dragged us through shifting identities, tortured memories and considerable backtracking of plot. The script by Laeta Kalogridis adapts Dennis Lehane’s novel.
     Grimly exhilarating, this is one of Scorsese’s better films—so long as one doesn’t take it seriously. But some will find that difficult, given the Medea-character who (perhaps) drowns her three young children, the point-blank marital shooting that (perhaps) follows, and the detours into Dachau, which evidence either hallucination or haunted memory. It may be impossible to get one’s moorings on Shutter Island.
     There, isolated from mainland Boston, Ashecliffe Hospital provides care for the criminally insane—or performs federally sanctioned experiments on them, like the Germans performed a decade earlier. Dr. Jeremiah Naehring (Max von Sydow) could be the hospital’s own Mengele, appropriated by the U.S. government after the war. Moreover, Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley) might even be the establishment’s Caligari, given a certain gleam in his eye toward the end suggesting that protagonist Teddy Daniels’s “insanity” lays some claim to the truth. Damned if I know.
     With his disappearing partner, U.S. Marshal Daniels is ostensibly investigating a patient’s disappearance. Throughout this film, women characters mostly appear as flickering apparitions. Amidst a raging storm that prohibits the marshal’s return to the mainland, Scorsese conjures spectacular images on the island, which is awash in fear and paranoia.
     Normally not a favorite of mine, and greatly helped by his role’s ultimately insubstantial nature, Leonardo DiCaprio is magnificently anguished as Teddy Daniels.

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THE MILK OF SORROW (Claudia Llosa, 2008)

You may recall I was taken (as were many others) with Peruvian writer-director Claudia Llosa’s first film, Madeinusa (2006), a raw assault on neocolonialism’s assault on indigenous people that I described as being, before rigid determinism thins it out, “coarse, vulgar, vivid, at times visually and emotionally spectacular.” For me, a filmmaking star was born. Llosa’s second film, La teta asustada, reconfirms her talent, but at a sophisticated remove and with daunting technical refinement. The vulgarity, which had reminded me of the brio of Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961), is gone. I admire Llosa’s second film (much) more, but I like it a little less.
     The film opens in darkness, in the space of death where the woman whose voice we hear is headed. She is singing—lyrically, liltingly, but about having been raped when giving milk and consigned to other atrocities during the 1980s, when Peru was deeply embroiled in civil war. (The communist “Shining Path” still hangs on in 2010.) Light suddenly allows us to see the bedridden indigent, one of whose daughters, Fausta (superlative Magaly Solier—best actress, Lima, Guadalajara, Montréal), attends to her passing. Will Fausta’s fate be the same as her mother’s? Will she also become afflicted with the “milk of sorrow”—note: throughout, English subtitles indicate fear, not sorrow—that pregnant women acquire when they are raped? Fausta has planted a potato in her vagina to ward off this possibility. She plans on marrying soon.
     There is an ironical tension between these bizarre allegorical activities, including the harsh legacy of the “milk of sorrow” (or of fear), on the one hand, and the film’s circumspect nature, delicate, muted imagery, and silken style, on the other. Llosa’s film is very quiet, perhaps suggesting that much of what we see and hear is an emanation of Fausta’s fertile young mind.
     A potent relationship exists between Fausta and her employer, concert pianist Aída, in whose mansion Fausta works as a domestic. Aída always seems cold, but she does seem to encourage Fausta, against whom she turns with a polar blast, exposing the gap between indigent and colonial descendant, dark skin and white, primitive culture and high-toned sophisticate. But Fausta is struggling to free herself from her mother’s superstitiousness.
     Best film prizes: Berlin, Havana, Quebec, Guadalajara.

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HOTEL TERMINUS (Marcel Ophüls, 1988)

“He looked like an ordinary man.”

“Do you know I’m Jewish?” Marcel Ophüls, son of Max, asks when a former associate of Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” insists that Barbie didn’t dislike Jews. This moment electrifies in the brilliant, intricate 4½-hour Ophüls documentary Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie; it splits open the mask of journalistic curiosity and objectivity. Ophüls digs in, referring to Nazi stereotyping, when he further asks, “Did Barbie teach you how to identify Jews?”
     A master torturer, Lyon’s Gestapo chief also contributed to the implementation of Hitler’s “final solution.” When confronted in another interview by someone’s insistence that the roles of Mengele, Eichmann and Barbie were all “exaggerated,” Ophüls dryly quips, “Will you please name someone whose contribution was not exaggerated?”
     Barbie remained useful after the war, having been recruited as an informant by the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps in its anti-Soviet “Cold War” efforts. It is from Bolivia, in whose national politics he became involved behind the scenes, that Barbie was extradited to stand trial in Lyon for crimes against humanity. In 1987, Barbie was sentenced to life-imprisonment.
     The film takes its title from the name given to Gestapo headquarters in Lyon during the war. The filmmaker, celebrated for The Sorrow and the Pity (Le chagrin et la pitié, 1969), about France’s collaborationist Vichy government, was himself German-born.
     Punctuated by offscreen choral German folksinging (so benign it becomes ironical—perhaps linked to the orphans Barbie sent to their death), the film mixes interviews and archival materials, and will repeat a snippet when this helps. The assemblage, precise and light, as richly entertains as it engrosses. It evolves into a sublime comedy of conflicting memories and testimonies.
     Won the Oscar, the prize of international critics at Cannes.

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