UTAMARO AND HIS FIVE WOMEN (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946)

Based on Kanji Kunieda’s 1931 novel Utamaro o meguru onnatachi, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Utamaro o meguru gonin no onna is delicately “split,” a fiction about an actual person: Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806), the Tokugawa Era woodblock portraitist. Mizoguchi, who trained as a painter, himself identified with Utamaro’s dedication to his art. From the outset, however, Mizoguchi posits a tension between reality and illusion. An angled shot surveys, outdoors, a long, leftward-facing line of people; the line may not be advancing, but the rightward movement of the tracking camera imparts the illusion of advancement to the stalled procession. The “illusion,” we may say, penetrates a superficial reality to suggest a deeper reality. Here, in one glorious shot, is the essence of art.
     This was Mizoguchi’s first film under the postwar U.S. occupation, with its maze of rules and restrictions Mizoguchi hoped to navigate while still exercising some freedom of expression. Thematically, though, Mizoguchi himself was occupied by a division that all artists, whatever their political predicament, strive to navigate: the tension between their commitments to art and life, imagination and experience.
     This remarkable film, written by Yoshikata Yoda, dramatizes this tension by splitting its opposing sides into two distinct characters: Utomaro and Seinosuke, Utomaro’s young assistant who embraces the more traditionalist school of art that Utomaro openly scorns. Women—prostitutes—are the subjects of one’s art; these same women are the objects of the other’s sexual activity. The appetites of both men are insatiable.
     This is perhaps the first film about an artist to conclude with a montage of the artist’s work. Here, though, the montage, more than a closing gesture or a conspicuously documentary coda, unifies the “split” nature of the film by underscoring the sexually sublimating nature of certain kinds of art.

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THE HORSE OF TURIN (Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011)

“Look, imagine this horse, if it was your whole life, your whole livelihood, and if your horse doesn’t work anymore, you die with the horse, because your life is gone and everything is over. These words: allegories, metaphors—it’s none of that. It’s just a simple horse.” — Béla Tarr

When dance critic and cinéaste Mindy Aloff e-mailed me she would be attending a press screening of it in New York, I asked her to let me know about this film. Tarr’s last film has become Mindy’s first experience with his work. Below, in a slightly edited version, are the comments that Mindy e-mailed me this morning.

Devastating. If A Torinói ló, from Hungary and four other countries,* weren’t a valedictory effort by someone who is obviously one of the masters of moviemaking today, I’d call it an insufferable masterpiece, too. Over its 2 ½-hour running time, it magnificently conveys in black and white the actions and feelings of a time a century ago—including, in several close-ups of a horse, animal feelings. The tonal subtleties between light and blackout darkness are extraordinary. So is the soundtrack—a great, great homage to Foley sound. Throughout the movie, a mammoth windstorm is going on. Whenever the front door is opened so the characters can go to the barn to look after the dying horse (enigmatically, she won’t eat; she just won’t), the wind roars like a blast furnace; in interior scenes, the wind sound is still omnipresent, just a little more remote. At the end, one moment of a jaw crunching tells us that the potatoes that the characters are eating—feeding on, would be more accurate—are raw; we know why they haven’t been cooked: the well has gone dry, and the fire has mysteriously gone out of the lamps and the stove; and, so, these people and their horse are doomed. We know this even before the sudden and permanent (the credit crawl comes on in silence) blackout in their rude house, even though it is morning. We know about the potatoes even before the entire earth is apocalyptically shuttered.
     The film is by the spousal team of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky; the script, by László Krasznahorkai and Tarr. (The film took the international critics’ prize at Berlin; Fred Kelemen won the cinematography prize at the Brothers Manaki International Film Festival.) The story, which takes place over five consecutive days, concerns a handsome old farmer, whose right arm (the result of a stroke) doesn’t work at all, and a young girl, who dresses and undresses him, cooks, launders, helps more than 50 per cent attending to the horse, and generally makes life possible in their remote stone house. We see the daily chores in excrutiating detail, every button buttoned, every bucket of water brought in from the well. They are, to this observer, riveting. Excrutiatingly painful—Tarr makes you really feel the oppressive regularity, almost unrelieved by joy or evident pleasure in existence. (I say “almost” because, from time to time, we hear, as if from another century or continent, a three-or-four-chord modal tune wheezing from a harmonium under the wind—the last, sorrowful fragment of beauty in this constricted world.**) During this or that day, there are visitors to the house: a band of Gypsies who simply take water from the well over the owners’ protestations and who try to get the girl to come with them “to America.” One man, in return for the water, presses a book into her hand. Later, she reads it, slowly sounding out the syllables: some sort of religious tract. On another day, a neighbor, clean-shaven, makes his way to the house to get more vodka (which the old man seems to produce and sell). This neighbor launches into a disquisition on the nonexistence of God that sounds an awful lot like Nietzsche speaking***; at the end, the old man, astonished, says simply, “That’s nonsense.” The visitor packs up his vodka and walks back into the windstorm. One day, the horse refuses to eat. The next day, it turns out that the well has run dry. The next day, even though the oil lamps are full of oil, the wicks just won’t take the fire. And the last day—a breakfast of raw potatoes, then, suddenly, complete darkness.
     The camera occasionally advances for a close-up or pulls back to give a larger visual context to an action; but the movie is speeding internally and relentlessly into a Last End. It is something to see once—once that will last forever.

* France, Germany, Switzerland and the U.S.

** Mihály Vig scored the film.

*** The film is providing an imaginary account of the subsequent fate of the horse that Friedrich Nietzsche encountered while visiting Turin, Italy, in 1889. The horse was being whipped; trying to protect the animal from further blows, Nietzsche collapsed. For the remaining eleven years of his life, the German philosopher, mentally ill and bedridden, was mute.

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YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU (Frank Capra, 1938)

Frank Capra won his third directorial Oscar for the zany, frequently hilarious social comedy You Can’t Take It with You, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Robert Riskin wrote the film, which also won the best picture Oscar, to neutralize the tart Leftist politics of the original and to release the original from its single set, which included admitting grim melodrama at a heartless bank, the scene of Capra’s masterpiece, American Madness (1932). Capra, of course, was a Republican for whom even the New Deal was too radical, and Riskin had worked with this director before, having written Capra’s American Madness, It Happened One Night (1934) and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), among others. The result this time was a vibrant entertainment, with a class-crashing romance at the center, but one that’s far folksier than the compact, biting, sophisticated play by Kaufman and Hart.
     It is a tale of two families: the eccentric, fun-loving Sycamores (suggesting the “tree of life”) and the straight-laced, fat-cat Kirbys, each of which contributes a member to the workplace romance that will ultimately unite the families across the barrier of disparate social standing, as well as certain opposing business interests, dividing them. Alice is secretary to Vice-President Tony Kirby, a dutiful son and reluctant banker whose father, Anthony P. Kirby, owns and runs the bank. Alice’s grandfather, Martin Vanderhof, refuses to sell his home, which the elder Kirby is seeking to buy in order to build a munitions factory in pursuit of a munitions monopoly that potential war will make enormously profitable for him. Meanwhile, in a bit of comical mirror-imaging, the Sycamores, in their basement, are illegally concocting fireworks for their neighborhood Fourth of July celebration. Meanwhile meanwhile, Grandpa Vanderhof refuses to pay his federal income tax, while Kirby, no doubt, more skillfully manages not to pay his. Make of this what you will: Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You was filmed in Nazi Germany.
     Forthright Alice and spoiled rich kid Tony are played by Jean Arthur and James Stewart with dreamy charm and terrific comedic flair. Lionel Barrymore, as Grandpa, gives a rare good performance—given his abysmal track record, a real tribute to the director’s skill with actors. Edward Arnold is outstanding as Anthony P., giving also one of his best performances; it turns out that the greedy banker genuinely loves his son more than he does money (yeah, right), and that as a former harmonica enthusiast he can join Grandpa Vanderhof for a folksy duet. Hold on to your handkerchiefs!
     The funniest performance is delivered by Mischa Auer as Kolenkhov, the Russian exile who ballet-tutors Ann Miller’s Essie, Alice’s sister (“Confidentially, she steenks”). The most dramatic turn comes from Jesus Christ himself (The King of Kings, Cecil B. DeMille, 1927), H.B. Warner, as Ramsey, who is driven to suicide by Anthony P.’s cut-throat business tactics, sparking the latter’s conscience and helping to redeem his soul. They don’t call it “Capracorn” for nothing.
     This isn’t exactly a bad film; but how on earth did it take the Oscar against King Vidor’s The Citadel, which both the New York critics and the National Board of Review named the year’s best English-language film?

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50/50 (Jonathan Levine, 2011)

Although it lays claim to a few genuinely funny bits, 50/50 is an excrutiatingly bad comedy about a 27-year-old writer’s bout with spinal cancer—he got it from a bad mattress, he quips to a bar pick-up—that (he learns from the Internet) gives him little hope of survival. Since Adam, who works for National Public Radio, is based on the author of the script, Will Reiser, who is still with us, life itself determined the film’s happy ending, although I’m not entirely clear as to the extent to which Adam’s medical experience matches Reiser’s. After an extremely long 100 minutes, however, I was glad for Adam, who is more of a mensch after his ordeal than he was at the outset. The agency of his transformation is two-fold, and convincing: the humbling ordeal itself; the acute, spectacularly good work done by his 24-year-old psychotherapist-in-training, with whom he falls in love and who falls in love with him first—almost immediately, in fact. However unprofessional it may be, the slowly blossoming romantic relationship between Katherine (heavenly Anna Kendrick, highly reminiscent of the young Liza Minnelli) and her patient is an element of the material much in its favor.
     Three other factors, though, help deposit 50/50 in the trash: despite its prize from the National Board of Review, the mostly stupid and lugubrious script that Reiser concocted; intersecting with this, the loud, misogynistic character of Kyle, Adam’s best friend, played without any redeeming nuance by Seth Rogen; and, above all, the worst filmmaking ever applied to a U.S. comedy. Discredit director Jonathan Levine with this: Exactly one shot in this film rises above the level of crap (a reaction-shot focused on Skeletor, Adam’s lookalike pet greyhound).
     And yet, as lousy and tasteless as this cancer-comedy is, I must recommend it resoundingly on one score—a seamless, thoroughly realistic performance of sheer brilliance: Anjelica Huston as Diane, Adam’s quietly heroic, worried mother who takes care of her Richard, who has Alzheimer’s, as well as copes as best she can with their son’s sickness while he, Adam, withdraws from her self-acknowledged “smothering.” I know, I know: Huston has given so many great performances, and so many of them have been in worthy films—then why endure a moronic movie even to see her great yet again? Well, this may be the finest performance of her career. It is certainly the best film performance of 2011.
     Philip Baker Hall (Robert Altman’s Richard Nixon), as a sick old man whom Adam befriends, is also excellent. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Adam, continues to stake his claim to being the most flexible, most versatile American film actor of his generation.

ILLEGAL (Olivier Masset-Depasse, 2010)

In 1998, successive attempts to forcibly expel Semira Adamu from Belgium led to her death at the hands of police officers. Adamu had fled Nigeria to evade a forced marriage to a man 45 years her senior who already had four wives. She also feared being beaten to death by her family, which had arranged the marriage. The destination of Adamu’s flight to asylum was Berlin, but a stopover launched her confrontation with Belgian authorities. Ultimately, she was brought onboard a flight to Lagos, Nigeria, in shackles, and her resistance prompted officers to stuff her face into a cushion, to quiet her, they would explain at their subsequent trial, so as not to disturb the other passengers. Adamu thus suffocated; she was twenty years old. While her death stirred debate in Belgium and forced the resignations of Interior Minister Louis Tobback and Luc Tempels, chief of security at Zaventem, only five of the eleven officers involved faced criminal charges. One was acquitted; the other four received suspended sentences.
     It is with this incident in mind that a gripping, powerful film, Illégal, was made in Belgium, with additional support from Luxembourg and France. It won the Directors’ Fortnight Prize at Cannes for writer-director Olivier Masset-Depasse, whose wife, Anne Coesens (best actress, Palm Springs), superbly, with utmost conviction and emotional fluency, plays Tania, a former French teacher in her Russian homeland who lives illegally in Brussels, under constant threat of exposure and deportation, with her young son, Ivan. One day, when the two are not together, Tania is arrested and sent to a detention center pending some legal resolution of her situation, most likely, deportation. To protect Ivan, Tania refuses to disclose her identity.
     This is a grim and somber film. While it lacks the dazzling complexity of the Dardenne brothers’ Lorna’s Silence (2008), also from Belgium, about the misfortunes of Albanian immigrants, it is almost as urgent and exceedingly atmospheric. Its mainspring, though, is the terrific lead performance by Coesens, which her husband and his editor, Damien Keyeux, succeed in keeping from unbalancing the film. Tania’s humanity takes center-screen; Coesens is no phony-baloney Meryl Streep demanding and getting attention for herself. Indeed, the material seriously matters to Masset-Depasse, Coesens and the film’s wonderful cinematographer, Tommaso Fiorilli, whose constrained lighting and subdued colors seem to ache as much for release and freedom as does Tania. Illégal’s unity is clear and compelling.
     Perhaps the pivotal relationship in the film is that between Tania and Aïssa, an inmate at the detention center who is repeatedly beaten and brutalized by the police—be forewarned: this is not an easy movie to take—because she continually resists deportation. The two women become compatriots, realistically, by guarded degrees, with Esse Lawson giving an excellent performance in a harrowing role. Aïssa, a black African, cannot help but recall Semira Adamu and her fate; but here also Masset-Depasse applies restraint, shrewdly gauging that, although the viewer’s association of Aïssa with Adamu benefits the film, the viewer’s identification of the fictional character with the actual victim would destroy it.
     Overall, documentary realism describes the style of the film. The narrative, because of the prolongation of Tania’s ordeal, subtly shifts to melodrama; but the style remains consistent, conveying that it is this woman’s life, not the film which imagines it, that is becoming “melodramatic.” Hers is an increasingly extreme and horrific situation.
     But hold onto your hope; the finale achieves in full the most moving cinematic reunion of mother and son since David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986).

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