© 2014 by James Clark

      Lars von Trier’s archipelago of a movie, Nymphomaniac (2013), spreading across about five hours and ranging toward us in two (time) zones of ticketed statement, could, if aptly engaged, be one of those “trips of a lifetime.” But it takes us to a place as far as you could go from relaxation.

It shows us a protagonist, Joe, a woman we’d hesitate to call an ordinary Joe; and yet, when all is said and done, we might conclude she has failed (though certainly not without giving it an exceptional shot) to get out of the rut we all know, at some level, we suffer from. Does her one-girl-assault upon that citadel of the constrictions of intimacy inadvertently whisper to us (and here perhaps the length of the exercise proves its worth)—whispering being an odd concomitant of such high-volume (would-be) subversiveness—a far better (but, alas, an even more daunting) approach?

For those many hours, we’ve seen her recounting memorable events of her life to a man who has found her badly injured on a street near his home and has kindly taken her in for repairs and for attention to her devastating story. He claims to be “asexual;” she claims: that “telling my story has put me at ease at this moment;” that “ridding myself of sexuality is now my goal;” and that he is “my very first friend.” Soon after they go to bed in separate rooms, he returns to her, attempts to mount her, and when she protests he notes, “You’ve fucked thousands of men already…” She shoots him and, as the screen goes totally black, we hear her leaving.

What this impasse means, exactly, requires sifting through her self-exploratory revelations. It’s perhaps advisable to begin with two episodes of transparent distemper—one from her adolescence, and the other from just before the shooting victim rescues her—where the seemingly obvious and not all that remarkable motives collapse into a mineshaft of horrific malignancy, to send us scurrying for the documented exposure of the forces—salient but not readily comprehensible—underlying Joe’s condensed version of the Arabian Nights. When she was 15, Joe had a friend, Betty, whom she describes as “always coming up with the ideas…” (ideas including augmentation by the popular, and most ambiguous [here in fact registering as mawkish] anthem, “Born to be Wild”). Somewhat to the left of anecdotes wherein plucky girls learn life lessons by which to become solid and fun-loving pillars of society, we have a Betty (aka, B) who proposes they board a train and compete for getting the most cocks spirited away to the bathroom, the prize being a bag of rounded candies. The pace is hectic and Joe finds herself trailing. Having cut quite a swath through the economy seating, they barge into a First Class compartment where, first of all, they are met by the conductor collecting tickets, whom Betty, after tearing up two documents imposing fines, informs (that variation on sucker), “I’ve never bought a ticket for your shitty train. And it’s always late…” A bemused oligarch pays their fines and it is clear he would have no interest in their revolution. But Betty, a born recreational pro, dares Joe to bring the Good Samaritan onside, a coup that would tip the scales in her favor. Despite his telling her that he and his wife have enlisted medical science to overcome an infertility problem (“We miss having children after all”) and that his wife has started ovulation, making that night very propitious, she manages to give him a blow job, leaving him in tears; and she, interestingly, goes on to critique the cheap gift he has bought for his wife. Rounding off these disjointed manoeuvres with a view to “Wow!” less cheap than her exclaiming that term while wiping semen from her mouth, she gobbles down her winnings as B watches with a bit of consternation. With her chivalrous benefactor, Joe rounds out her graphic depiction of reeling in fish, with indication that its zoological silliness fails to impress. She refers to this escapade—and her remaining totally without remorse regarding her prey—as proof she is “reprehensible,” a “terrible human being.” (On hearing this harsh self-assessment, the host, far from a captain of industry [living in fact in a grotty, soot-covered-brick district [at one wall of which there opens up a black void] where David Lynch’s Eraserhead might have been a neighbor, though the book-lined walls of our current geek would not presage much conversation with the worm-ridden loner] offers her an apologia—that the overly-withheld sperm would have been ineffective and that she helped him getting back into a fresher brand—that Eraserhead would have applauded. The host’s name is Seligman [literally, Happy/ Blissful Man. He also offers the idea that the actions on the train were exactly like “feeding frenzy” amongst a school of fish, completely validating her conveying the invasion in the form of “a very pleasurable story.”)

The incident where Betty disses the trainman has been covered in such a way as to make palpable the latter’s harboring homicidal solutions to societal roadblocks. Our second kick-off locates such feelings in Joe herself. Many years after turning her back on B—who had gone on to another vein of confidence, to wit, “The secret ingredient to sex is love”—due to a cherished premise that “love was just lust with jealousy added” (she will come to elaborate that campaign [“rebellion”] against love, in the very questionable terms, “Love distorts things. Love is something you’ve never asked for…”), Joe marries, has a baby (inept birth control) and deserts her family in favor of a jag of sadomasochist wildness. She finds employment as a debt-collecting expert, specializing in discerning the blackmailable sexual secrets of rich deadbeats. Having taken on an intern whom she becomes attached to for drawing from her gentle priorities she had given short shrift, she is startled to discover that her ex (having, like her, dumped the baby [though Joe does send a steady stream of money for the child’s maintenance]) is on her caseload, has her intern do her stuff, finds they have become very fast friends and (her free-floating hostility making a turn into jealousy), she readies a gun for ambushing the new lovers along those Industrial Revolution alleyways, only to have it jam at the climax (due to her not understanding how to prime such a nozzle—a problem Seligman later on clears up for her, ultimately allowing her to kill him). Therewith the unpleasantly surprised ex kicks her along the cobblestones, and the intern (upping the hate temperature over Lee Daniel’s Paperboy and other contenders for dealing with murderous contempt) pees over her face, the warm urine smoking in the cold night like relentless acid.

    Nymphomaniac is an almost endless volley of destructive self-assertion. So, von Trier clearly wants us to digest, is world history. And the means he chooses to sustain his examination of such perversity is the blissful gentleman and scholar, Seligman, who spends the whole film smoothly fielding Joe’s multifaceted sense of primal wrongness the better to toss back bromides in the form of sunny-side-up wonders of rational culture having, presumably, lifted humankind far above bestial confusion. (Lynch would undercut his Eraserhead—a head, like that of the bookworm of the present film, erasing messy cares along lines of sophistry—by having him visit his flat’s radiator [in sync with that aforementioned black hole] to be braced by the vision of an overweight angel singing, “In heaven, everything is fine… You’ve got your good things and I’ve got mine.” Seligman’s offering the victim/ [would-be perpetrator] of street crime a pastry he had been returning from buying when he stumbled upon her, he indicates to her [and us] that it is a staple stemming from his Jewish childhood—a means, thereby, of spotlighting an extraordinary zeal for good and tidy news emanating from a cadre of pacesetters. The practising humanitarian tells her that he maintains no ties to Jewish religion or any other of its institutions (and he berates her for being so morbidly suffused with the notion of “sin” when she, like him, has no religious credulity).

The long dialogue between them explores (on her part) a rich and tangled territory of a freedom immersed in a pitch of sensual primordiality; and (on his part) a leeway for pretense to lucidity immersed in self-incarceration against that sensual beauty and shock (there comes a point when Joe refers to his apartment as a “cell,” a “monk’s cell”). Von Trier’s filmic study—for that is what it is, a well-honed reflection—has, for very good reasons, exposed itself to being misunderstood as, one, some, or all of: pornography; misogyny; misanthropy; nihilism; cynical greed; artsy obscurantism; mindless violence; mindless sensationalism; terroristic irrationality; hate-mongering, especially toward the venerable foundations of civilization as we have come to cherish it; and anti-Semitism (Seligman tells her, “I’m not an anti-Semite, just an anti-Zionist;” by which von Trier would be ironically touching upon dull advantages he himself won’t touch). The most obvious booby-trap here we have to defuse, in the course of availing ourselves of what he has worked very hard to discover, is that graphic and abundant rutting which Joe has taken up as a matter of definitive pride in taking a stand in sheer and rare physicality as countering self-evidently flawed idealistic procedure. The irony of her sniping at Seligman’s “cell” is that she herself (as portrayed by the not simply great but one of a kind, Charlotte Gainsbourg) is a profoundly ascetic centre of devotion—as far from a good-time-girl as you could ever imagine. (The snotty, smug rebelliousness of her childhood soon leavens into a strange form of workaholism.) At the outset of their dialogue, she (totally inexperienced about conveying her vocation to others) ridiculously feels compelled to tell her interlocutor, “I discovered my cunt as a two-year-old.” This misrepresentation has been sparked by her finding affinities with Seligman’s fondness with for 17^th century writer, Izaak Walton, and his book (also involving interlocution) about the phenomenon of sport fishing, namely, The Compleat Angler. Rather than have us take at face value her being a totally calculating predator (a mere angler), the cast into this (fly-) fishing metaphor has—with the qualifying term, “Compleat”—given us a chance to see the vast world of such qualifiers (in Nymphomaniac) to the filmic provocation (most memorably put into gear by that disappointing auteur, Pier Paolo Pasolini) of a world of reflexive brutes, where intimations of integrity have faint chance of becoming effective. Lighting upon a recollection (spurred by Seligman’s having a fly fishing hook stuck to the wall of the bedroom where Joe is resting), of Joe and another Kindergarten-age girlfriend (B—“…one of her classics…”) slithering (their pubic area soaped; the floor a soapy mire) across her parents’ bathroom floor like a pair of minnows, we have her father (far from immune to dipping into the classics) telling her mother (miffed by the hubbub behind the locked bathroom door), “For Christ’s sake, leave them alone!” “He was a darling,” she recalls; and, to set in relief that individual choices count, she adds, “My mother was what you’d call a cold bitch…” The real bite of individuation, though, is reserved for her, in her confusion about solitude, along lines of her mother’s annoyingly being wrapped up in a card game, Solitaire.

Joe has contrived that some form of sensual uprising aptly meets the deadness of an ascetic, domineering dispensation (“bitchy”—think Jesse’s calling card, “Bitch!” in Breaking Bad). As such her wherewithal is enmeshed in a beckoning of sensuous delight (a loving) and at the same time being fashioned into an acrid weapon by which to keep at bay an ocean of enemies. She rounds out her effort to make comprehensible the early days of a joyless devotion to carnal joy, by declaring, with latent hostility and self-satisfaction (linking to her being unable to stomach solitude) that, “I’ve always demanded more from the sunset. That’s perhaps my only sin…” Her response, “You wouldn’t understand,” to Seligman’s riposte about “sin,” comes as an opportunity to realize we’re dealing here not with a dead-end, doctrinal sensation-addict (like Bad’s megalomaniac and old-fashioned, Walt) but with a very confused work in progress (like Jesse), who, we can see, has her heart in the right place but can’t put it into effective motion, whereby she would get her puny personality out of the way of being graced by the sunset.

If we can reach a measured appreciation of that total—not compleat—passage which the film actually shows and thereby get over a disposition of beholding a freak show, there is a thread of Joe’s formative experience which we will not underestimate. On the heels of Joe’s citing Seligman for failing to see the validity of her sense of gross errancy pertaining to using school gym apparatus to rub between her legs (“I don’t see sin anywhere… I don’t understand…”), she rolls out an episode someone who sits reading all the time could never seriously contact. Her easy-going and beloved father, also a medical doctor, introduces her to physical forces to be derived from giving time and energy for the sake of realizing that a forest is far more than a biological mechanism—“…part of a good education…” Near their home, there is a pre-Industrial-Age stand of deciduous trees amongst which he comes into his own, standing breathlessly with her in their still and silent presence. Notably though, that man of science does not hold fast in that moment, but instead presents to the little girl a fantasy about the ash tree, with its heart-shaped leaves, being the most beautiful kind and eliciting from the other trees a degree of jealousy which they develop into malice in mocking the bare winter branches with their black (bug-resembling) buds. (“Oh look, the ash tree has its finger in the ashes!”) Seligman won’t touch the mystical, uncanny thrum of that recollection, but he’s happy to tell her about the lady bug being born pregnant (biologically, not reflectively), at which she relates her supposed biological imperative to “get rid of my virginity,” courtesy of a guy with a sputtering moped in his repair shop/bedroom, and with a nuts and bolts malaise (“It’s the fucking carburetor”—where, that is, a synthesis of air and fuel [current and matter] is supposed to take place.) Completing—but far from compleating—this pestilence which destroys the epiphantic initiatives of the greenery, Seligman exclusively takes into account the three vaginal and five anal kick-starts and feels compelled to note the mathematical patterning derivable from that basis. Her remark, “It hurt like hell,” goes nowhere with him, of course (pain being something to conjure away); and it goes somewhere with her, though only in the sense of grim bravado within a discounting of carnal grace. Later on, her father at a palliative stage of cancer, she finds him initially stoic. (“I’ve seen so many die. When death comes, we are not…”) In that antiseptic, no-fault hospital atmosphere she draws the inference that her mother is a “cowardly bitch” for avoiding visiting him, to which he demurs, “She hates hospitals. I don’t want her at all. Kate and I said good-bye at home…” His quantity of disinterestedness here sets a keynote against which the subsequent moments of the deathwatch play out. After a solitary walk in the dark on the landscaped hospital grounds, she returns to his bedside with a couple of ash tree branches and pretends she needs reminding about exactly what the foliage does for them. In fact she very desperately has missed most of the point; but her father is in no position to bring to bear what disinterestedness he possesses. The very name, “ash,” being an indicator of flourishing being harshly overtaken, is eclipsed by his whimsical account. Joe’s face, however, as he recites—“Oh, look, the ash tree has lumps like ashes!—brings to us her being caught up in an inexpressibly intense situation where sneering at cowardice would be unworthy. But later that night, she asleep in a chair by his bed, he wakes up screaming in pain, falls on the floor and the staff has to tie him into bed. She’s shaken out of her incipient, volatile composure, and she’s told by someone amidst that ugly scene, “You should take a break,” exactly the wrong advice to someone only too prone to power failure. She ends up at the laundry/heating plant area and she attempts some ineffective warmth and cleansing in the form of fucking one of the night staff. From that processing of body fluids she returns to her dad’s room and finds that he’s messed the bed, whereby a graphic cleanup takes place, further challenging her being on the spot to get some poetry going. Her noting, amidst this pain and terror, “When he died, I had no feeling left,” becomes, within the deftly marshalled sightlines of this film, an abrogation in face of creative powers brooking no excuses.

Providing an inadvertent glimpse of a vital structure of traction amidst that death spiral, Seligman seeks to medicate her sense of hopelessness (“I know you like to present yourself in desperate light…”) by noting that Baroque composer, J.S. Bach, much beloved by the host, would turn conflicting forces toward harmony by means of a musical (poetic) device (so soporific that Bach’s partisans would consider Beethoven’s deployment of the resource terrifying and offensive), namely, polyphony, by which a fabric of musical energy could be enlivened by appropriate pulling together (synthesis) of disparate initiatives you might imagine not being able to cohere. The well-enough-meaning man promptly circumvents the factors of passion and pain in Joe’s toil (not to mention the toil of Bach and Beethoven), by turning to the mathematical nature of the progressions Bach had in view. But, notwithstanding this sedate flim-flam, Joe (drawn into the increasingly intuitive usage of objects ready to hand in the room—instruments of self-evasion for the Blissful Man; evocations of milestones of humiliating retreat for her—[here a tape deck with an appropriate Bach composition ready to go—“not,” the host admits, “an entirely complete tape”]) runs through her memory/rolodex of studs to put together her own rendition of polyphony.

Her very different sense of convening energy-levels has been anticipated by the interchange with the host at the conclusion of her account of her father’s delirious demise—a vignette sparked by Seligman’s having on hand Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” to which he typically affixes a homily about the author’s death by way of the biology of delirium tremens: “…I had no feeling left”/ “That’s very understandable”/ “No. It was very shameful”/ “In literature there are many worse examples of lust in crises…I don’t understand…” [your sense of failure]/ “I knew you wouldn’t.” She knows of an “F,” a stout, baseline sort of guy, very scrupulous about being on time and with which see benefits from “a kind of telepathy”; she then brings to bear “D,’ a figure “smooth like a cat… a leopard…” By way of a split screen with a Bach organ fugue on the soundtrack, she blends a leopard having its way with an antelope, along with less violent scenes—her baby steps toward feeling something, steps far more heavily steeped in nausea than élan.

A coda to that angling for “compleation,” which presents many more headaches than does fly fishing, concerns her reconnecting with a figure who could hardly be called an old flame, namely, the moped mover, one, Jerome, whom she met when he was a bit less school-truant and did not, on that occasion, believe her when she claimed he represented her first orgasm. The extensive, initially farcical, melodramas featuring that far from stellar constellation comprise a factor of tonal flaccidity, trailing with a vengeance into the Second Volume. Volume One has offered exciting brushes with an incipient shift in the power-centre of world history and nature itself. Volume Two will make more clearly apparent the magnitude of the tiger Joe has by the tail. Her reconnecting (a series of reconnections, actually) with Jerome involves a resort to one-track, synthesis-ditched comprehension—(unofficial) marriage, a child, her deserting them (after myriad extra-curricular tune-ups) and her attempting to kill the ex—the domesticity of which comes, at this point, with cheap romance coincidence, noted by both Joe and Seligman as a fanciful means of progressing with the exigency of a tale of implacable toxicity. The approach to this flood of capitulation involves her attempt to find magic in the woodlands, only to have her rambles become a routine and to have Jerome’s home in close proximity to that site of a mechanical fallback not so very unlike the freight of mechanical sex she musters like a chain smoker with a barely functioning lighter. The charge of cowardice she was so quick to nail her mother with swirls ironically throughout this miasma. Volume One closes with two moments of enfeeblement to prime the dismaying retreat that predominates in Volume Two: her musing, in the formerly up-tempo woods, “We’re all waiting for permission to die;” and her crying out to Jerome, after a long spate of fired-up genitals—as eliciting her vast and pointedly mawkish overstatement, “You own my heart”—“I can’t feel anything!”

Mrs. H, the wife of one of Joe’s particularly smitten partners, stages with her children an invasion (the antithesis of her and B’s invasion of the train) of the lab/flat (prior to the owner’s moving in with Jerome), effectively expressing the pain being caused and stressing that Joe’s cannot but be a life of “loneliness,” in no way, that is, touched by serious interpersonal intimacy. Declaring that she felt no concern for her detractor (though her body language here registers concern for the shabbiness of her own performance)—“You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs” (Seligman agreeing with her)—Joe does incisively take up the phenomenon of being alone, a moment prepared for by the recoil from her mother’s Solitaire in its fudging a solitude that could stand up to Joe’s exceptionally professional skepticism. Therewith she puts into play, however feebly, a keynote for reversing her entropic, nausea-eliciting nosedive, a keynote comprising polyphony, and devolving to the diamond-in-the-rough, indeed, that is Jerome.

    She recalls the preparatory, sedation-stage of some minor surgery she went through as a child. Within this repositioning of sensibility, the still-to-come nymphomaniac came to see herself as having to enter the operating room as uninhabited space. “It was as if I was completely alone in the universe.” This spoken account of startling reorientation is visually accompanied by telescopic scenes of the ravishing forms and colors of outer space, drifting galaxies fantastically beautiful and sustaining. That Seligman could quickly follow up her observation about uncanny (not, as we all have seen, canny) aloneness with, “And I’m still not allowed to feel sorry for you?” vividly presents the gulf extant throughout this correspondence and the astronomical difficulties she has brought into her longstanding resort to crude (however industrious) collisions involving a failure of courage and its finesse.

There is a way to thread the needle concerning the rocky saga pertaining to Jerome, a way of making its homely pace take a new lease on life. Our approach is predicated on the whip-cracking crater at the center of Volume Two, one “K.” Joe—for starters, sensation-neutralized (taking to paddling her vagina with a wet rag and shoving ice cream spoons therein, at a restaurant), and then accidentally becoming pregnant, thereby becoming a mockery of her former instance of radical researcher (admittedly going nowhere)—becomes markedly disenchanted with Jerome (who, in an earlier incident, had impressed her with the [polyphonic?] clutter of his work station). “I love you, Joe,” the domesticated dude tells his love-culture-scourge of a wife. “At the moment, I don’t…” is what he hears by way of response. “I have a tiger on my hands…” So, in a last-ditch bid, she goes for a black stud, gets an unscheduled pair of them, instead, who converse about her body in an indecipherable dialect, like a pair of car-wash jockeys, twisting her about as if she were a manufactured knock-off (or a beast of burden up for sale). (Seligman, on hearing her utter the word “Negro,” chastises her for cultural insensitivity; but she fires back her loathing for political correctness as dull censorship [to which he rattles off the priggish motto, “Political correctness is a concern for downtrodden minorities”]. Her feistiness in this moment arcs well into the motif we are about to deploy.) K comes into the picture at this point. But for all the nasty hardware and pest-exterminator game-face, he fails to stanch the slide to banality of a profoundly domestic stripe. On the other hand, K, who had been far less than thrilled to see Joe turn up at his office—clearly lacking the bovine appearance of the other women in his waiting room—may have instinctively got to that nub of the matter she continues to retain, when prefacing the treatment, “I don’t think this is for you…”  (She had—surely not like a cold bitch!—recently tended to dictate to Jerome his conjugal duties, in these rather disconcerting terms: “Jerome could forget about a break. When you buy a tiger, you also have to feed it.”) The babysitter failing her, and Jerome away on business, she rushes off in the middle of the night to the sado-masochist centre; and the toddler—reprising the prefatory movement of von Trier’s earlier work Antichrist—heads for the lovely, snowflakes-adrift night and the balcony; only to be saved (in romantic melodrama fashion) by Jerome’s fortuitous return to the nest. (The earlier astronomical moment also looks back, in that case, to Melancholia. As with our imagery about to spread out, the introduction of others’ insights serves to speak to the unique preparation that is Nymphomaniac.)

Joe’s falling under the sway of K recalls the systematic whipping administered to the routinely and not so routinely dependable donkey, Balthazar, chained to a millstone by a grist mill owner. When we look closely, we find that “saintly” beast (borrowed by a remarkable number of filmmakers) peering out from many twists and turns of this film, and acting as a reservoir of integrity and, remarkably, innovation, against which to measure the struggle of our protagonist. How could Betty (a B you’d be more apt to describe with another B-word) remind us of the donkey? Well, she’s frisky, enough, like the baby beast; and she does become, if not a paragon, a promoter of the powers of love. And she has all the makings of a first-class ass of a different stripe. And she’s drawn to Joe, sustaining a mutual vein of contesting, however feebly, mere savagery. Another of Joe’s best friends, “P,” the intern/apprentice with a taste for betrayal, has a deformed, prominent right ear and (like Joe being tied into a humiliating position at K’s clinic of shocks) she often wears her hair in a pony tail. She develops a natural affection due to Joe’s kindness, and she resembles the blonde, broad-faced, large-eyes handsomeness of Marie, Balthazar’s young mistress who doesn’t exactly break his heart but hurts us a lot in watching her indifference where once there was soaring and playful attention. That she pees all over Joe’s face is one thing; that she pees all over her coat is something else, because it reminds us of the coat Gerard (close to Jerome), sometime boyfriend of Marie and sadistic tormentor of Balthazar (by way of which to bring K into the fray), fixes upon the donkey to carry contraband over the border, only to leave him for dead when he’s shot by border guards whose guns don’t jam and leave him blood spattered. (Joe firmly refuses Seligman’s offer to have the body-fluid filthy but still hallowed garment cleaned up.) Speaking of shootings, Seligman would very deservedly fit under the designation, “the Mathematical Donkey”—his obtuseness leaving him, taste wise, in the same league as the carnies who thought they had a great thing going with Balthazar on the run. Not only would he be an avatar of sensational calculations that don’t add up, he would also have a particular interest in that drainage of empirical rationality that is never more satisfied than when thinking to discover no significant differences between reflexive beasts (like fish, like birds) and the appetitiveness of humans. Near the outset of Volume Two, Joe recalls a moment of ecstasy when on a school field trip in the country; and she chafes, particularly at this moment, on hearing Seligman turn the phenomenon into an exercise in pedantry displaying his Jeopardy-level data base of historical factoids. Joe putting him on the spot for lacking interest in her (carnal) story, in favor of dry and dynamics-averse intellection, he rallies, sort of, by telling her he’s read extensively about such story lines. The reading list is arresting, inasmuch as it indicates von Trier’s feeling compelled to settle scores with the Marxist calculation entailed in filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s, animalistic take on sensual human adventures. Seligman cites, as sources of erotic energy, the literary formats of The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales,and The Arabian Nights—which, however, constitute the cinematic formats of Pasolini’s so-called “Trilogy of Life.”

In some ways the most intriguing brush with Robert Bresson’s Balthazar at Risk to be seen in Nymphomaniac, pertains to Jerome. His name is a smudged but very operative pathway to Gerard, the moped gang leader, utterly dead soul (church choir soloist), sociopath and sadist who takes a casual interest in Balthazar’s hitherto loving owner (thereby killing all love there) and an intense interest in torturing the animal whose physical composure (physical magic) is a palpable torture along lines of making obvious the worthlessness of the boy’s life. Like Gerard, Jerome, in his first incarnation as the 3+5 boy, is very attached to his wild optics moto, in hopes of overcoming a pampered rich-boy’s wimpiness. He has an in with an indulgent, businessman-relative—this time not the baker’s wife as pressured by the priest; but instead his uncle—who, though knowing him to be incompetent, lets him take over the reins during the elder’s medical leave. Joe’s coming into his orbit and eventually getting deposited by him on a lonely stretch sets in relief her stubborn, mulish durability and her range of transformative efficacy (however atrophied). She functions throughout in the shadows of both a male (Balthazar) and a female figure (Marie)—hence the ambiguity of her name.

Unlike Gerard, both Jerome and P are not without interests in grace. But they are, when all is said and done, self-sparing mediocrities within a cinematic scrutiny of the farthest reaches of challenge to human sensibility. Joe discovers “her tree” (a figure of inspiration her father had raised), when deliberating, in a rocky wilderness, about leaving town, “going South,” in face of P’s taking up with Jerome. She comes to a rocky hilltop and sees across from her foothold, on another crag, a small weather-ravaged and singular presence. (At the abortive culmination of a therapy regime to rid her of her urge, she tells her classmates and a teacher who has declared, “We’re all alike”: “We’re not [alike] and never will be. All you want is to be filled [to gobble down bathetic triumphs]. You’re society’s morality police. I’m a nymphomaniac and I love myself. I love my cunt….” But, as the stridency and self-aggrandizement of that declaration of independence suggests, she accommodates that “candy” of venting arrogance and violence. The thrum of Volume Two masterfully shows her ever-so-slightly caving in to middle-aged attachments (tolerating Jerome; shepherding P; finding middle-aged Seligman more a correspondent and less an alien). While waiting for P to return to their conjugal bed after her debt-collecting laying down the law, Joe takes up Solitaire—and there’s no imagining that the solitude factor is in play. She surrenders to her jealousy, shit happens; and it happens again with an unremarkably unstable Seligman, who had a few moments before listened to her declare she’ll (supposedly following the inspiration of her tree), be that one in a million (easy odds, in fact, with respect to her real labor of love) who will become asexual (like him). He tells her, “You have only demanded your rights to happiness…” (Rights?!) As she fumbles around in the dark to leave the crime scene, we’re trying to get past the semi-shock to see where she could go from there. We get something resembling a hint, in a surprising way. The credits start, and also we start to hear Charlotte Gainsbourg singing a song called, “Hey Joe” [Where You Gonna Go?] (Based on the very fine Jimmi Hendrix melodrama, about a man who has shot his unfaithful lover and is running [“South”] to Mexico [a situation replete with mano e mano ego, the Speaker being the new guy], the dilemma we hear now gives us a space full of more zip than a police chase. It also refers to an “old lady” victim. At one point Seligman prides himself on always tending to his right-hand nails first, getting done the “hard” step. She, by contrast prefers to get the easy left hand done first, in order to devote more time and effort to the “hard” part. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he says, “old lady” written all over him. [Joe also cites his “feminine” predilection of using a fork to eat that pastry—exactly what Jerome and his uncle likewise do.]) It’s as if she’s gone back to her tree, and this time, with winds at gale force, she really sees it, for the first time. So you go, girl!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ddEkj-7qA8

by Sam Juliano

The vital importance of water in everyday life is given center stage in a sublime new picture book authored by Olive Senior and illustrated by Brooklynite Laura James.  Senior, born and raised on the Caribbean island of Jamaica, moved to Europe and then to Canada after the capital city of Kingston was ravaged by a hurricane in the late 80′s.  Senior is renowned by her poetry and adult novels and short stories, but was supremely flattered when publishers chose Anna Carries Water and the 2012 Birthday Suit as worthy of the picture book treatment.  Senior credits Laura James and Eugenie Fernandez -the illustrator of the earlier book- for transforming her material into such exquisite works, but the veteran writer is certainly to be credited for half the acclaim for her wholly exhilarating ideas.

Anna Carries Water focuses on the young girl of the title, who wants to follow in the footsteps of her older siblings in sharing the task of carrying water on her head from a well at a spring located across “Mr. Johnson’s” field.  Ms. Senior’s narrative stresses the central role of water for cooking and drinking, washing faces, dishes and dirty feet.  Senior states that the family members did not carry water for bathing or washing clothes as those activities were performed in the river.   This particular variation on the coming-of-age theme is the acquired aptitude for learning how to balance a container of water on one’s head, which translates to a sure sign of responsibility and the skills associated with adulthood.  Early in the fable Anna carries around a coffee can while her five older siblings used large metal cans, plastic buckets and an empty cheese tin to gather the water.  Unwilling to concede defeat she must endure the trials of tribulations associated with such a simple yet profound act that will ultimately define her transformation from child to young adult.  In one such attempt she tears off a piece of a dasheen leaf, and floats it on the top of the can of water she puts on her head, but it falls off, necessitating that she carry it in front of her.

As is the case with many stories of a person finally attaining their most desperately sought after goal, Anna’s initiation into adulthood is rather accidental.  Terrified by the peaceful cows that graze in Mr. Johnson’s field, and the realization that she is alone, she frantically places a can of water on her head and dashed off to meet the family who were looking for her.  Miraculously she didn’t spill a drop, while simultaneously it registers that the cows were never any kind of a threat to her in any manner.  Anna Carries Water examines sibling rivalry, the power of determination and conquering fear while attaining a long-elusive objective.

Ms. James, herself of Antiguan heritage, employs eye-popping and colorful acrylic paintings with shimmering tropical textures that enhance the beautiful Jamaican countryside being showcased.   The book is comprised of a series of stunning full page spreads that would tell the story without Ms. Senior’s still lovely and poetic prose and which boast a three-dimensionality and ethnicity that properly conveys to young readers that the story takes place in a different part of the world. My personal favorite collage tapestries include the various cascades of water coming down to fill all the containers, with young Anna and her coffee can at the forefront; the picture of mom preparing a dish in the kitchen with a mosquito and red layer cake and casseroles in the oven; Anna lagging behind the line of her brothers and sisters near “Christie’s”; the overjoyed family looking on as Anna arrives with the can on her head; the cover photo reprized in the book with Anna smiling with can on head and birds and butterflies flying around her head and the final exhilarating capture of Anna doing a cartwheel in jubilation.

Though the book’s unique setting and daily chores shed a new light on what is most urgent in daily existence, there is a universality in how one advances to the next level in their domestic maturation that rings through this charming story.  All people have challenges and the need to develop the skills that will enable them to assimilate and gain the confidence to overcome insecurities and the feeling that they are not skilled enough.  We’ve seen this kind of theme in American books like The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls and more benignly in A Chair For My Mother by Vera Williams when a young girl faithfully saves coins over a long period to buy a chair that means so much to an impoverished family living in an urban zone.  When nearly all readers could never relate to the difficult chore of carrying water -unless they experienced camping outdoors- they could certainly relate to the matter of working to attain a watershed.

It might seem a stretch to believe that Anna was spooked by grazing long-tongued cows, but that is another part of her age and immaturity.  It is also a story device to further illustrate her increased understanding and blossoming wisdom. In any case Anna Carries Water is a sterling example of how multi-cultural literature can appeal to all, and how the craft of a great artist can elevate a worthy narrative into a picture book masterpiece that will appeal equally to adults and art lovers everywhere.

Note:  This is the first in a series of picture books that will deal with new releases, classics and works from other countries.  ‘Anna Carries Water”, published in 2013 is Canadian, and as such was ineligible for Caldecott consideration, but is richly deserving of any ten best list of that year.

Illustrator Laura James with some of her renowned secular artwork.

Author Olive Senior

by Allan Fish

(USSR 1965 189m) DVD0 (Russia only)

Aka. Mne dvadtsat let

Stand up, damned of the earth!

p  Viktor Freilich  d  Marlen Khutsiyev  w  Gennadi Shpalikov, Marlen Khutsiyev  ph  Margarita Pilikhina

Valentin Popov (Sergei Zhuravlyov), Nikolai Gubenko (Nikolai Fokin), Stanislav Lyubshin (Slava Kostikov), Marianna Vertinskaya (Anya), Zinaida Zinovyeva (Olga Mikhailovna Zhuravlyova), Svetlana Starikova (Vera Zhuravlyova), Lev Prygunov (2^nd Lt. Aleksandr Zhuravlyov), Lev Zolothukin (Anya’s father), Aleksandr Blinov (Kuzmich), T.Bogdanova (Lyusya Kostikova), Gennadi Nekrasov (Vladimir Vasilyevich),

There is no better barometer of the cold winds of change that swept through Soviet Russia in the years 1959-1965 than Marlen Khutsiyev’s I am Twenty.  It’s a film that should be remembered with the best of Soviet films of the period, but by the time it was ready for release, a deep freeze had set in.  From the mid-late fifties, after the death of Stalin, Russia moved to a less extreme position with regards to the arts under Nikita Khrushchev, allowing such films as Kozintsev’s Don Quixote, Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying, Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier, Bondarchuk’s Destiny of a Man and Heifits’ The Lady With the Little Dog to play successfully at western film festivals.  It was in 1959, at the height of this period, that Khutsiyev’s masterpiece entered its gestatory stages.

Sadly, the film’s production rolled on and on, an originally planned 90 minute movie expanded to over three hours, constant delays in production, so that while the majority of filming was completed by early 1962, it wasn’t deemed ready for release until 1965.  Worse still, the Bay of Pigs affair had led to a deep frost in relations between the Soviet Union and the west.  Khutsiyev’s film could not have emerged at a worse time.  It was banned, then given the go-ahead but only with the film butchered, in one of many ironies, down to 90 minutes.  It passed by almost unnoticed and wasn’t really heard of until the final Glasnost amnesty of the late eighties when it was released from captivity, like so many other Soviet classics of the 1960s and 70s.

What emerged was one of the greatest Soviet films of its period.  It would prove remarkable in many ways, not least in the fact that its artistic debts were so western.  The link to the French nouvelle vague was obvious – and would be enhanced even more in the Godardian July Rain made by the director straight after.  Yet there were other branches to the ancestry, to Fellini’s I Vitelloni and to the British new wave and the kitchen sink films in particular (a sort of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Comrade!).  This can’t be too surprising when one considers the lengthy production, European cinema having been turned on its head since 1959 by Antonioni, Fellini, Resnais, Godard, et al.

Several scenes stand out in the memory.  Take the opening sequence which plays out over the credits.  Three soldiers come slowly towards the camera to the strains of ‘The Internationale’.  They briefly turn their heads back over their shoulders to look at the camera, before walking away.  It’s a scene that deliberately evokes the young recruits in All Quiet on the Western Front.  Their departure dissolves into another three people coming towards the camera, before a huge sweeping crane shot (worthy of Welles or Ophuls) follows various people up to a higher street in Moscow’s Ilyich’s Gate district.  The other is a scene in which a daughter squares up to her father about not wanting to live with her boyfriend in her father’s flat.  The father bemoans that “I don’t believe in people who are too witty at such a young age.”  It’s a quote that recalls Khrushchev’s own feelings on the film in 1963, “that young people ought to decide for themselves how to live, without asking their elders for counsel.”  Now it’s finally available for viewing, don’t be put off by the length, for it’s one of the great films about a young generation trying to avoid a terrible future in a state where they are expected to pay lip-service to their elders but not necessarily betters, going with the flow and wearing out one’s days.  Little wonder one of the last shots is of soldiers in Red Square stopping at Lenin’s tomb.  The dream of 1917 was dead.

Screen grab from outstanding Swedish film ‘Broken Hill Blues’ screened at Tribeca Film Festival

by Sam Juliano

Note: I trust all celebrating Easter Sunday had a great day!  Thanks as always to Dee Dee for her fabulous sidebar holiday tribute!

The late April Easter has come and gone amidst a nagging cold spell that performed an uneasy tango with the Spring temperatures that ruled the day-time hours on the day of Purple and Yellow.  The unusual tardiness of the holiday allowed it to clash with the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, which launched on Holy Thursday, and will continue until Sunday, April 27th.  Lucille and I have taken full advantage of the press passes we have enjoyed for the past several years, and found ourselves cabbing back and forth between the Bow Tie Cinemas on 23rd Street and the East Side Loews Village 7, with even a single stop at the SVA, a block down from the aforementioned Bow-Tie multiplex.  The madness will continue through next week, and attendance will be challenging, what with school re-convening today.  But I have four unused personal days (I am rarely absent, and have over 200 sick days in the can) and will be using two of those this week on Tuesday and Friday to allow for better options and more movies.

After attending the final Tout Truffaut feature of the well-attended Film Forum retrospective of the iconic New Wave French director (Small Change) we rested up for a few days, knowing that the 11 day Tribeca event would have us in cinematic overkill, and partaking in the cut-rate -for-Tribeca-patrons veggie burger program at Lucky’s next to the Bow-Tie multiplex.  As always, the festival has featured some most impressive films that deserved full distribution, and some others that left us indifferent.  But what a fun time this experience allows for and you could feel the excitement in the air on the streets around the theaters.

I have listed the feature films that I have seen so far on this past Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and have provided brief notes and ratings.  Time does not allow me to do more right now, but as always I will be presenting a comprehensive Top 10 and reflections on the festival, in addition to some other Tribeca related posts being planned.

Something Must Break      * 1/2       (Thursday)      Bow Tie  81 min.

Manos Sucias          ****                        (Thursday)       Bow Tie  84. min.

Art and Craft            *** 1/2                 (Thursday)        Bow Tie 89 min.

Ice Poison                   **                             (Thursday)        Bow Tie 95 min.

Beneath the Harvest Sky   *** 1/2   (Thursday)   Amazon 116. min.

Below Dreams        *                                (Friday)                Bow Tie 72 min.

All About Ann       ****                        (Friday)                SVA 82 min.

Broken Hill Blues    **** 1/2          (Friday)                Bow Tie 72 min.

Summer of Blood      *** 1/2            (Friday)                 Bow Tie 86 min.

About Alex                  *** 1/2              (Saturday)           AMC 96 min.

Dior and I                     ****                     (Saturday)           Bow Tie 90 min.

Love and Engineering  ** 1/2      (Saturday)           Bow Tie 81 min.

Black Coal, Thin Ice   **** 1/2      (Saturday)           Bow Tie 106 min.

Super Duper Alice Cooper  ***     (Saturday)           AMC 86 min.

Alex of Venice  *** 1/2                       (Sunday)              AMC 86 min.

An Honest Liar   ***                             (Sunday)               Bow Tie 90 min.

Brides   ****                                                (Sunday)              Bow Tie 90 min.

In Order of Disappearance ****   (Sunday)             Bow Tie 115 min.

Silenced   ****                                            (Sunday)            Bow Tie 90 min.

Tomorrow We Disappear  ****       (Sunday)             Bow Tie 82 min.

also:

Small Change ****  (Tuesday)                                   Tout Truffaut at FF

Note:  Lucille saw GABRIEL (84 min.), which I will also see on Tuesday when she will not be with me.  She rates it with ****.

Obviously the best films of the first four days of the Festival include the Berlin Golden Bear winner, the impressionistic Chinese thriller BLACK COAL THIN ICE, two outstanding Scandinavian features, the poetic fable of adolescent angst, BROKEN HILL BLUES, and the perverse crime thriller IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE that stars Stellan Skarsgard; MANOS SUCIAS, set on the Pacific coast of Columbia and chronicling drug smuggling, directed by a former film student of Spike Lee, and executive produced by the famed director; BRIDES, an intimate Georgian film about a harsh penal system and a woman’s marital struggles in its aftermath; and four outstanding documentaries about Ann Richards, fashion designing, a puppet troupe in India and a government worker and his family purged the former GOP administration.

I will have plenty more to say about these individually and some others here that were good.

Berlin Golden Bear winner ‘Black Coal Thin Ice,’ Chinese film screened at Tribeca

Outstanding documentary ‘Dior and I’ about fashion designing.

by Allan Fish

(UK/USA 1930 120m) not on DVD

Of cabbages and kings, and cockroaches on whisky

p  George Pearson  d  James Whale  w  Joseph Moncure March, Gareth Gundrey  play  R.C.Sheriff  ph  Benjamin Kline  ed  Claude Berkeley  m  none  art  Harvey Libbert

Colin Clive (Capt. Dennis Stanhope), David Manners (2^nd Lt. Raleigh), Ian MacLaren (2^nd Lt. ‘Uncle’ Osborne), Billy Bevan (2^nd Lt. Trotter), Anthony Bushell (2^nd Lt. Hibbert), Robert Adair (Capt. Hardy), Charles K.Gerrard (Pvt. Mason),

Ask most people of my generation about World War I and there’s a strong chance they will have first become acquainted with it through TV comedy; if not by the Python sketch ‘Ypres 1914’ (“how about ‘one potato, two potato’, sir?”) then by the adventures of Blackadder and co..  Yet for comedy to work, especially small screen comedy, there must be a familiarity with the setting or else much of the humour is lost.  More than from any other source, the familiarity came from R.C.Sheriff’s play Journey’s End.

Set entirely in the dugouts and trenches on the front and supply lines in Saint Quentin, France, in March 1918, it follows four principal officers over a four day period.  Captain Stanhope has just returned from furlough.  He’s well respected by his men but three years on the front lines have exposed understandable cracks in his façade and he’s turned to drinking to keep his nerves in check.  His right-hand is the older Osborne, nicknamed Uncle, who tries to keep him going.  With them is Trotter, a salt of the earth type who’s risen to the rank of officer through the ranks.  To this motley trio is added Raleigh, a wet behind the ears public school type who answers every request with either “I say”, “right-o” or “rather” and who is delighted to serve under Stanhope, the man he worshipped at school and who had been in love with his sister before the war.

The play had been a massive critical and audience hit in the West End in 1929.  James Whale had directed it there with Colin Clive playing the lead.  Whale was then chosen by Michael Balcon and Arthur Pearson – who himself had made a World War I pacifist tract, Reveille, in 1924, now assumed lost – to direct the film version, and Whale insisted on Clive to reprise the role of Stanhope.  With UK sound equipment not quite polished enough, the majority of the film was shot in New York.  It’s generally perceived to be a primitive beast by most film writers, but it’s certainly not helped by the deplorable state of the majority of prints – it hasn’t been on British television since the 1980s – which make the camerawork seem even jerkier than it is.  And while it’s true that it cannot help but be stagy, set as it is virtually entirely on stage-like sets in the trench bunkers, it does still maintain a real primitive power.  The play is only opened out slightly for a couple of sequences in no-man’s-land, but the biggest changes to the text come in the form of cuts to Sheriff’s moving speeches.  It’s unfortunate that they were edited, but Whale nonetheless manages to keep the spirit of the play intact.

The biggest reason for the film’s relative anonymity today, however, is an unfair comparison with All Quiet on the Western Front.  It’s true that Milestone’s film is more fluid and has the greater scenes of trench warfare, but Whale had served in the trenches for 18 months before being taken a prisoner and knew no film could come close to the reality.  Where Whale’s film scores is not in its use of sound, of incessant Howitzers and field artillery, but in the eerie sound of silence that sent men insane far quicker than the incessant shelling.  He’s also helped by his cast.  Manners may be a little annoying, but that’s the character, the epitome of the British upper class officer going over the top with the same nonchalance as if opening the batting on the village green.  MacLaren is superb as the kindly Osborne and the inimitable Billy Bevan was never better as the no-nonsense Trotter, more disturbed by the lack of bacon in his fat than by the German bullets whistling past his ear.  As for Clive, he’s definitive, and the success assured Whale would give him the part in a certain Universal film 12 months later.  One can only dream of a proper remastered release, for no other film captured the spirit in which men sardonically sang “we’re here because we’re here…” during mankind’s most horrific bloodbath.

by Allan Fish

(India 1973 135m) not on DVD

Aka. Garam Hava

Should I stay or should I go?

p  Abu Siwani, Ishan Arya, M.S.Sathyu  d  M.S.Sathyu  w  Kaifi Azmi, Shama Zaidi  ph  Ishan Arya  ed  S.Chakravarty  m  Aziz Ahmed, Aziz Ahmed Khan Warsi, Ustad Bahadur Khan

Balraj Singh (Salim Mirza), Gita Siddarth (Amina Mirza), Jamal Hashmi (Kazim), Yunus Parvez (Fakraddin), Farook Shaikh (Sikander Mirza), Jalal Agha (Shamsad), Abu Siwani (Baqar Mirza), Badar Begum (Salim’s mother), Dinanath Zutshi (Halim), Shaukat Azmi (Kaifi), A.K.Hangal (Ajmani Sahab), Vikas Anand,

Considering the availability of so many Bollywood classics of this and previous eras, the other side of Indian cinema can still be difficult to track down.  Satyajit Ray, of course, is now becoming available in Hi Def, while Ritwik Ghatak will doubtless soon follow.  But it’s the next generation of directors who joined those two erstwhile masters in the late sixties and seventies that can be hard to appreciate.  Where can one find decent prints of films by Mrinal Sen, Mani Kaul or the director of the film in question, M.S.Sathyu.  Any that are on DVD are in deplorable condition and interrupted by those God-awful logos so prevalent in Indian DVDs that float in and out of vision like the mother ship in Space Invaders.

One should be grateful then, I suppose, that in an age when British television channels ignore film and its history completely, that occasionally Indian classics pop up in the small hours on Channel 4 in one of the sporadic celebrations of Indian culture.  It’s how I first saw Hot Winds.  Not ideal, perhaps, but you take what you’re given.                         

The film focuses on the plight of the Mirza family.  For generations they have called this part of India their home.  But as the credits tell us, independence has been declared and, after the assassination of Gandhi, the relations between Hindustanis and Moslems have never been more volatile.  Many local Moslems have gone west across the border into Pakistan, while those that stay behind find themselves if not victimised then marginalised.  Graduates cannot find work, and businessmen can’t get loans.  One such businessman, Salim Mirza, owner of a shoe factory, finds contracts being lost and his business going to the dogs.  One of his sons has already left while his daughter, Amina, sees her chances of marriage go up in smoke.

There haven’t been too many major Indian films dealing with the fallout of the partition, but Hot Winds – the title referring to the winds of change that would scorch an entire people – is surely the most powerful.  The fate of the Mirzas is as wrenching as it is inevitable.  Indeed, it would have been easy for the continual heartbreaks to have veered into parody, and it’s only through the sheer professionalism of the piece, and its heartfelt intent, that it doesn’t do so.  It’s not afraid to be a little unconventional, though, not least in its use of overlaid sound; Sathyu using applause, train whistles, gunshots, dialogue and a narration in such a way as to leave the audience dangling between the real and the make believe.  And if it naturally would mean more to someone who recognises the time and place, it does have a universal sense of moral outrage at the humiliation of a community seen through the microscope of this single family.  Indeed, the scene where the matriarch is only happy when she’s allowed to die in her old home recalls scenes with old men in such disparate classics as The Grapes of Wrath and Dovzhenko’s Earth.  This connection with the earth one calls home and fear of displacement and loss of identity cannot be overstated.  As one character puts it, “they’re uprooting many flowering trees.”  And yet Sathyu goes further, commenting on the corruption that inevitably follows when a people unaccustomed to power are suddenly given it.  He’s also helped by his cast, with Shaikh in his first key role, Siddarth excellent as the unfortunate Amina and, at its centre, the wonderful Balraj Singh in a performance of such humane delicacy as to move a heart of granite.  It’s one of the great films of the sub-continent.

by Sam Juliano

After Lucille and I watched the emotionally enthralling documentary Keep on Keepin On at the Bow Tie Cinemas on Friday night we both agreed that we had seen the best film of the Tribeca Film Festival.  The Heinecken Audience Award standings at that point had the film sitting in the Number 3 position behind two other excellent documentaries - All About Ann: Governor Richards of the Lone Star State and Djor and I.  Less than 24 hours after proclaiming this inspiring film about a blind young pianist and his special relationship with a 91 year-old jazz legend, festival audiences named the film their absolute favorite documentary of the entire event.  For Lucille and I it was not only the best documentary of the festival, but in fact the very best film period, and it will lead my Top Ten list that will be published at Wonders in the Dark this coming Thursday.  As per annual tradition that post will include comprehensive capsule reviews of all ten films seen by this writer as the cream of the 2014 crop.

Mind you, there are still four films for us to see today, so the final placements can still change.  Today on the final day of the festival we will see Point and Shoot (Tribeca jury prize winner as Best Documentary), Chef (Heinecken Audience Award for best narrative feature), the Italian Human Capital and Amy Berg’s Every Secret Thing. (which received an unexpected additional screening at the SVA at 6:30 P.M.)  Lucille will probably pass on Point and Shoot and instead take in 5 to 7, a film that we are assuming took second place in the Heinecken Best Narrative Film competition.

With firm plans to see Vera: A Blessing and Ne Me Quitte Pas online over the next few days, I will be able to claim seeing 52 films over the 12 days of the festival which translates to a persuasive argument for committal.  Still, it does give me the credentials to put together a Ten Best list that will be decided having seen just about every essential film shown during the event.

On Saturday we had our most torrid day, seeing six films, of which the gripping American inde Five Star and Roman Polanski’s Cannes carry-over Venus in Fur were the best.  We were far less enamored with Lucky Them and Zombeavers but both have their fans for sure.

Masterful Italian drama ‘Human Capital’ is one of the very best feature films of Tribeca Film Festival.

Young Samuel Lange in exceptional Venuzuelan film ‘Bad Hair’ screened at Tribeca Film Festival.

by Sam Juliano

Lucille and I saw more films on the big screens this past week than any other comparable period in our lives, and we are still alive to talk about it.  The count for the seven day period is thirty-one (31) bringing the Tribeca total (with a second online at-home viewing) to 51.  But heck, this year’s Tribeca catch-phrase that is seen on the cover of the official guide booklet and on posters around the city and on-line is appropriately Film Festivals: The Original Binge-Watching, and indeed such an event has taken place in the three prime locations around the Big Apple that are hosting the festival.  Of course seeing 51 films fully entitles me to compile a Top Ten list, what will hardly any essential films not being seen, and it will be posted at the site this coming Thursday, May 1st.  We would like to extend our deepest thanks to Pete Torres at Tribeca for his usual hospitality and all those troupers at the theaters who worked their tails off to make Tribeca 2014 the huge success it was.

The Tribeca Jury awards have been announced as has the final standings for the Heinecken Audience Awards, and many of these will be placing in my own Top Ten and honorable mention.  Here is the full list and star ratings for the films seen this past week at the festival:

The Search for General Tso’s Chicken ***  (Monday)  Bow-Tie

1971   *** 1/2          (Monday)    AV7

Mala Mala   ****      (Monday)      AV7

Bad Hair      **** 1/2   (Tuesday)     AV7

Gabriel    ****           (Tuesday)      Bow-Tie

Misconception   **    (Tuesday)    Bow-Tie

Gueros         ****        (Tuesday)    Bow-Tie

Traitors        ****      (Tuesday)    Bow-Tie

Miss Meadows  *** 1/2    (Wednesday)    AV7

The Battered Basterds of Baseball  ***    (Wednesday)  SVA

Maravilla     ** 1/2         (Wednesday)   AV7

Starred Up    ****   (Wednesday)   AV7

Palo Alto   * 1/2          (Thursday)    SVA

Bright Days Ahead  *** 1/2   (Thursday)   Bow-Tie

Zero Motivation     **** 1/2   (Thursday)  Bow-Tie

Electric Slide    *** 1/2     (Friday)   AV7

Land Ho!    ** 1/2        (Friday)  AV7

Regarding Susan Sontag **** 1/2  (Friday)  AV7

Keep on Keepin On   *****    (Friday)  Bow-Tie

The Kidnapping of Michele H.  ****  (Friday) Bow-Tie

Ne Me Quitte Pas  ****   (Saturday morning) streaming

Lucky Them  *        (Saturday)   Bow-Tie

Five Star  ****       (Saturday)   Bow-Tie

Garnett’s Gold  ** 1/2    (Saturday)     Bow-Tie

Venus in Fur  ****      (Saturday)      AV7

Glass Chin   *** 1/2            (Saturday)     AV7

Zombeavers  **         (Saturday)     AV7

Point and Shoot  **** 1/2  (Sunday)  Bow-Tie

Human Capital  *****   (Sunday)  AV7

Every Secret Thing  ***  (Sunday)   SVA

Chef   ****               (Sunday)   SVA

I will be presenting a comprehensive Top Ten of the Tribeca Film Festival post this coming Thursday, complete with a photo layout.  Suffice to say that I was extremely impressed this past week with KEEP ON KEEPIN ON, HUMAN CAPITAL (both five star films) REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG, POINT AND SHOOT, BAD HAIR, ZERO MOTIVATION, CHEF, STARRED UP, GUEROS, FIVE STAR, THE KIDNAPPING OF MICHELE H., NE ME QUITTE PAS and VENUS IN FUR, all which will either place in the Top Ten or the honorable mention listing.

 © 2014 by James Clark

      It’s a wedding reception out in the sticks (somewhat like that wedding party in Fellini’s La Strada). But we notice its far heavier acidic content, as compared with the child-like food-fight at the table where Gelsomina and Zampano relax a bit before once again putting their show on the road. A local woman has staged a quite startling invasion in the course of sending a message to one and all, a touch of theatre with no qualms about upstaging the principals. The happy complement of her entrance involves one male pig and two females, decked out in appropriate headgear, and she gets things rolling with, “Here come the brothers!” (The bride is from a farm.) She can barely keep from falling over from delight in her indiscretion, as she moves the animals toward the bridal party, amidst appreciative laughter from the guests. She refers to one of her companions as “Regina, the Pervert…If you only knew what she does!” The father of the bride stands up to deliver a seemingly heartfelt paean to the value of farming life, only to have the lady with the pigs call him a “hick,” which gets the company going on the speechmaker’s being out on bail. Someone asks her, “Why don’t you sing for us, a song from the heart?” perhaps with regard to re-establishing the moment of romance. She declares, as if emphasizing that it is her passionate nature which has brought about the creepiness wafting over the event, “When I sing, I sing with joy!” But, in going on to tell everyone that, “If you knew the whole story, it would ruin this celebration,” this disruptive entity alludes to a life of conflict unsuited for mainstream gratifications. She fires off a musical statement particularly unflattering to Carmine, the groom, whom she obviously has known for a long time; and the bride stands up and sings (in the impromptu operatic-rap at which the whole party seems to excel), “You sing and act so happily, but your heart’s bursting with rage…” To which (and to the charge that she’s jealous, being no longer the groom’s lover) the center of attention patronizingly addresses her, O Flower of Shit…” The bride is a frumpy blob with missing teeth and the groom resembles a weasel; but the invited intruder is a smartly turned out, no longer young but not yet old woman, with the kind of broad-faced handsomeness bringing to mind a dark, punchy, 40-ish version of Monica Vitti, who was radioactive at the time. However, on second thought, we should mention now that our protagonist needs no buoying by resembling a celebrity. She’s embodied by super-formidable, Anna Magnani, one of the most richly explosive presences in the history of cinema.

General insults aside, she gets down to a husky ballad specifying the locale of her joy, somehow not quite of this world. “I’ve freed myself. I’m no longer his servant… [Here the pigs come to bear] No hard feelings. I’m free!” And then she laughs uncontrollably, sending a little frisson through the hall, where the dining table resembles that in Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco, “The Last Supper.” She plays with some of the children in attendance—making a moustache of a swatch of her dark hair (a faint reminder of [far more vulnerable] Gelsomina entertaining the children, particularly a slow boy, at the reception in that provincial backwater). Then she turns back to the newlyweds: “I hope you have lots of children, so you’ll be in God’s grace all your lives. I wish you all the happiness…” This euphoric and very engaging launch is a stunner in the context of Pasolini’s generally sallow communications. We’ve recently come through his Arabian Nights (1974) and its bell-bottoms miasma. So, what, we might ask, makes such a difference here? The inclusion of “The Last Supper” could, as usual, be allowing for a characteristically schizophrenic Marxist swipe at supposed corruption in the heart of religious culture while, at the same time, be maintaining saintliness (of some order) in the ways of the rural and unlettered poor. Having seen that first scene we don’t have to wait for explicit references from the protagonist (addressed by her fans as Mamma Roma) which reveal detachment from both jackpots, in order to be on notice that, unlike the quirky, important but dreary mechanism of Arabian Nights, no hybrid of the auteur’s hobby horses is going to win, place or show in the steeplechase we have on our hands here. This striking bit of self-immolation can be readily traced to an actress who, in Rome Open City (1945), by Roberto Rossellini (to which Mamma Roma is dedicated), fitted in nicely with a political, sentimental, neorealist study of victimhood, but had moved far beyond such platitudes and was ready for mature exploration. Pasolini, thinking to send forward a scenario containing his donnish and palpably dead-on-arrival morphology (in no way rising to the polyphonic considerations of von Trier’s Nymphomaniac), had put in the driver’s seat a protagonist who had (in the ensuing 17 years) become somewhat larger than life and certain to explode an idealistic package meant for small people. Unsurprisingly, the director and his star were at each other’s throat from beginning to end. (Pasolini, in damage-control mode, has been quoted as saying, if doing the film again, he’d still cast Magnani.)

Needing a team-player with plucky optics to bring about a saga demonstrating a law against all bids for well-being along lines of urban, free-lance, profitable work, what Pasolini got was a performer who could only live with herself when portraying a freedom as dangerous as it is exciting. We’ve come upon Mamma Roma at a moment when her sense of freedom—so buoying that it leaves her almost delirious—can be put into motion as never before (she having fulfilled all obligations to Carmine within their sex trade association). Her plans for a new life with traction that could lead to heights of financial and social rewards have two significant phases: leaving the provincial coastal town where the action begins, in favor of the metropolis of Rome where she has arranged to maintain a vegetable stall in an outdoor market; and reassembling her link with her son, Ettore, an adolescent who had been living in the now unacceptable town, fairly near to her but under the auspices of a guardian, presumably financed by her late-night earnings. Cutting from the wedding—where she virtually holds court, being a guest at that ominous and ambitious table, but a guest with mobility far outstripping all the others—she is at an outdoor fair (childsplay in view of her outdoor destination) beholding her presumed bundle of joy—during the reception she had declared, “Children, they’re really something…”—sitting inert in a carriage seat on a carousel going round in circles. Right from that get-go, then, Pasolini’s embedding his baroque take on dynamics (perhaps the teen is gloomy in face of being removed from the healthy wilderness where he could drift at a portal where help is apt to magically materialize) has come as a slo-pitch for her own slashing and smashing mode of motion.

Mamma Roma’s, Ettore (Hector, recalling the greatest fighter for Troy in the Trojan War), is someone with little fight in him, a cute, shiftless slug who would be a speed bump for a mother looking to move ahead by channels muddied by his priorities—she comes to tell him at one point, “You won’t get ahead if you hang around with losers”; and at another point she warns, “We won’t get along if you turn into a comrade.” But for Magnani in the catbird seat, Ettore’s unsurprising shortfall cues a Mamma who is so much more than a Mamma, thereby endowing the action with implications the screenwriting could not have aimed for. On first beholding the gangling, scowling lump in that toddler’s ride, she is restrained, a bit anxious. On seeing no sign of him at a new revolution of the play station, she seeks him out, catches a glimpse of him shoplifting and says to herself, “Son of a bitch!” He catches up with some friends, likewise in Sunday best clothes, magnetized, thereby, by ancient ways; and she calls to him, “Don’t you have a kiss for your [newly minted] mother?” He doesn’t; and she says, “Damn it!” with growing misgiving but hardly with heartbreak. When he asks, “Why are you taking me to Rome?” her reply is more on the order of squelching a jerk than building something special, to wit, “To keep the Pope company!” She gets out of him that he’s dropped out of school (“I get by…”). Her candid approach to getting off on the right foot is more redolent of vetting a mortgage than an elicitation of mutual affection. (Clearly she has had nothing directly to do with him and so she’s taken on a virtual stranger—“How you’ve grown! I hardly recognize you. I’ve been waiting 16 years, and it hasn’t been easy!” “Did you think I’d stay the same?” is his riposte, unaware of its irony.) From out of this orientation, with more resemblance to warring picket sentries trading insults than to the promising beginning of family intimacy, Magnani’s enactment of a hapless overreacher makes pretty clear that he is more like a shard of her exuberance than a vital necessity. (Whereas Pasolini lived with his sainted mother till the day he died, Magnani never knew her father and when she was 3 she was taken from her mother and brought home by her impoverished maternal grandmother, then striking out from what could hardly be called a family when she was 14.) She tells Ettore at this commencement of uprooting him from beachcomber ways: “I didn’t have a child to turn him into a hick.”

Magnani was often referred to as “La Loupa” [She-Wolf], and before getting her and Ettore’s show on the road she is visited by that newlywed/weasel, “Carmine,” who could be referred to as “Singer.” His songster status here involves the threat of singing to Ettore about his mother’s workload during the years the boy was busily avoiding school and busily shoplifting. Carmine’s in-laws failing to follow through on a job they promised him, he decides that pimping on her energies until she earns 200,000 lire has become his next milestone. The protagonist, as written into the script, would of course cave in, being totally intent on domestic advantages. But La Loupa would imbue that shakedown with considerable suspense. It being for only “…ten days if you put your mind to it,” Mamma Roma plays along, not insomuch as the disruption is brief (her way of cherishing her freedom clearly stems from a hard-won coherence seriously obviating her former way of life), but rather that she would require an untroubled period to play along with Ettore’s not very promising kinetics, which is to say, we are here about attentiveness to mutual interactive contributions that could satisfy her wider range of freedom, however unsteadily perceived. While pinned down at the beach/port, she chafes at Ettore’s slurred speech, the local dialect, “like those hicks down there” (kids his age who play cards in the stairwell). Out of the blue (or, as portrayed, out of an instinct to share carnal equilibrium; and, as written, out of an instinct to express being cool), she induces him to dance with her to one of her tango records, and the optics are fascinating. So many commentators regard that moment as Oedipal disarray; and yet the virtual hopelessness of this, what amounts to, abduction of a not reliable stranger has to be seen as an important factor. Starting with the hardly seraglio-salient request, “Watch out for my corn,” she proceeds toward fun-with-a-purpose and notes—far more the talent scout than the doting mother—“What a stick you are!” (The amateur actor playing Ettore has in fact an old man’s stiffness and awkwardness of physical presence.) The reconnoitre goes rather well—“Do you like it?”/ “I sure do…”—and, true to the script’s being about trying to patch up an old and large gulf between them (open to various angles), she tells him that, as she has demonstrated, she would sing the song on the turntable while dancing with his father. (The coda of this episode, her seeing Ettore, unaware of her presence, practicing tango steps, covers the real point[s] of this movingly designed and performed vignette. Mamma Roma says, sotto voce, “How you like to dance, my son.”)

But the thing about Ettore, which soon becomes abundantly apparent on their making good the traverse to Rome, is that he never sticks to anything very long. He soon drops out of school, again—“I’m already sick of it,” he tells a promiscuous young woman, Bruna, who is but one of many distractions and has become a laughing stock of the outer suburbs where they live, while in fact she exudes a poise and steadiness of purpose far exceeding his and works a stall close to Mamma Roma’s, noting, “She’s so beautiful. Her hair is still black,” a generosity that our protagonist cannot muster, saying, “She looks like a monkey…” He comes to hanging out with “losers” his mother hoped would be less prevalent in the big city. When his mother refuses to give him a whack of money (to buy a gold chain for Bruna), he steals and sells many of Mamma Roma’s records, including the tango number. In what amounts to a last ditch effort to right this segment of her renaissance by way of co-habiting with someone gainfully employed, the would-be eclectic approaches the priest at whose church she has become a parishioner, far less out of piety than as a networking hotbed. The priest does not subscribe to that form of social media, advising, instead, that the boy (and she) “start at zero” and find an honest money-making place wherever it appears. She is not reluctant to tell him, “I didn’t bring him into this world to be a laborer.” The holy man’s mantra, “Send him to school. Teach him a trade,” fails to coincide with her having been touched by the “Italian [post-War-economic] Miracle,” and its impetus toward entrepreneurial, heartfelt designing, architectonics. Therefore, Mamma Roma—and let’s recall that she is known by that rubric years before (tentatively) tending to Ettore, during her first (abortive) involvement with entrepreneurial excitement including dreams of shifting her activities to Rome—reaches back to her previous way of making waves to position her now virtually hopeless (at least as Magnani plays it) associate in a cool hub where networking could overcome lack of distinguished spirit and wit. She zeroes in on a leading restaurateur (and fellow-parishioner) along lines of paying a friend and former colleague in the sex industry, namely, Biancofiore, to, first of all, seduce the church-goer and, then, be interrupted by her “husband” (Biancofiore’s pimp) and blackmailed into acceding to Ettore’s becoming a waiter at his carefully crafted concern. The bite of the social arena where Mamma Roma had hoped to spread her wings –“It’s a different world here…” she tells Ettore as they approach their new home—is underlined by the rural pimp recognizing the devout, big city mover to have been the pimp of “Big Tooth Maria.”

Still undeterred, Mamma Roma goes on to relish her son’s seemingly having a natural swagger when serving tables in the happening square which the establishment takes over. His coordination and conviviality are a surprising change of pace, a study, in fact, of how close (and how slippery) getting real can be. In the lead-up to this dynamic promise, she buys him a motorcycle. “Come and see the sun,” she urges him, to get him out of bed. During this light-hearted moment she dreams on: “Soon you’ll be driving a car and you’ll take me for a drive!” Here the protagonist, in the midst of her troubled hopes, falls within the screenplay’s motive to demonize consumer vigor. But Magnani—hanging on to Ettore’s waist as the bike races ahead of other vehicles and yelling out, to those being surpassed, “Jerks!”—squashes the mousetrap in the course of reasserting her own priorities as La Loupa. She had also enlisted Biancofiore to take Ettore to bed, the point being, “Next time he sees her [Bruna] he’ll spit in her face!” But, when all the schemes are well-completed—he wanting to take Biancofiore to the zoo on Sunday “to see the elephants”—the lump she’d invested in soon quits his job, returns to the feeble drifting and petty crime he can’t do without, gets entangled with Carmine coming back for more, gets arrested for attempting to make off with the radio belonging to a hospital patient played by the same actor who gets ripped off in Bicycle Thieves, gets deliriously ill, gets strapped to a bed and dies as seen from a perspective recalling Mantegna’s “Lamentation over the Dead Christ.”

The special work we’re put through, by this vastly divided film, concerns where all that chaos and desperation leaves a protagonist who could very easily be mistaken for a simple, easily readable, grief-stricken “Mamma.” On completing her first farewell tour (the 200,000 lire sprint) as prompted by the deadly Carmine, she strides in semi-darkness along the hookers’ track, triumphant and full of witty observation. “So long, Dolls, she salutes her colleagues. She tells a soldier, who materializes from out of the darkness, “I’m not hustling;” and when he replies, “About time,” she laughs uproariously. Then she tells him—after declaring, “I like you”—“In all my years here, nobody ever knew who I was.” Though she goes on to tell the soldier about being married, at 14, to an old (70) fascist friend of Mussolini, allowed to indulge in graft as a developer, and that is Pasolini’s tightening the noose on the character’s range of sensibility, the way Magnani, ebullient as only she could be, short-circuits that pap in turning it into her veering away from her real mysteriousness (abetted by the nocturnal cinematography) represents her variegated stellar contribution to inducing from the morose Pasolini—She could have been assailing him , on the occasion of one of those fights with him, in terms of, “What a stick you are!”—an upgrade of his terminally prudent and abashed brush with primordiality. In the scene following that, now at a church service in Rome, she whispers to her (alien) son, “It’s a different world here.” And though she attempts to throw herself from her kitchen window (in the aftermath of that weirdly supplemented death) and her manner is one of seemingly total devastation, if you’ve been following her closely you won’t buy into that for a moment, but instead will take seriously her sense of “different world” (as including the craft/design “miracles” far more vitally representative of real Italian modern history than the loopy fantasy our academic antiquarian wants to install).

Magnani’s performance, for all its rebellion (and the DVD Supplement gives us Pasolini loyalists [including Bernardo Bertolucci] in rabid denial of any depth at all coming from the actress [matching Bertolucci’s excising Fellini and Antonioni from an account of the history of modern cinema where we’re supposed to see Pasolini’s being the only incisive Italian filmmaker in sight, amidst Spaghetti Westerns and “Italian comedies”), instinctively coheres with a cinematographic strategy here light years beyond the writing. Pasolini (Bertolucci notwithstanding) put on notice to deliver, by La Dolce Vita (1960), La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962), sets up his cameras on those suburban Roman “wastelands” which—particularly in the sightlines of Antonioni—happen, for anyone with an alert design sense, to be cauldrons of gorgeous, quite miraculous spatiality. The scrubby fields adjacent to new, quite (architecturally) nondescript apartment buildings (but catching the light impressionistically) afford remarkable studies of composition, texture and light. There is a particularly memorable marshalling of these sensuous vintages near the outset of Ettore’s meandering while his mother hits the ground running in getting her outdoor vegetable stall (with glimpses of those fields) into satisfactory animation. On being teased by another salesperson nearby for her loudly calling out, “Buy my fava beans!” she shouts, “Hey, potato vendor! Let me shout! I’m happy!” Ettore has been excluded from his friends’ pillaging a local hospital and, as he stands in the fields wondering what to do with himself, a panning camera shot embraces the sunlight upon hills in the misty distance, the new structures in the near distance, the sandy pathways with their foliage nearby—and, there also,  stone ruins of ancient structures. With visual buoyancy in the air, Ettore chooses to flop down near a shaft of at-least-medieval formation, and he, too, seems somehow extinct, his dead weight, his inertia, being a visual affront to the encouragements going for nought. Barely able to keep his eyes open, he shambles over to a pillar and rests his head sideways upon its uppermost point, winding up like a Brancusi sculpture; or, perhaps, a gargoyle. He then clumps along the dusty path, accompanied by the classical musical composition, Concerto in D Minor (Largo), by Antonio Vivaldi, aptly sustaining the call to be alive to a part to play well. Encountering a few girls his age sitting in tall grasses, he flirts by passing behind the ruins and then extending his back and head backwards like a gargoyle without malice. We see, way off, a viaduct shattered by time. Bruna arrives, and he gives her a locket with a little cameo of the Virgin Mary. “I find it better than the skull” [she tried to cadge from one of the other guys the previous day], she tells him. “Death is horrible. Are you afraid of death?” (Such an earthy matter being very compatible with that countryside, we come to see with special force Ettore’s rootlessness in face of a task of coherence that, Pasolini would say, is impossible in such a hell-hole; but which Mamma Roma would say, happily, is doable by virtue of the vastly encouraging forces at their present address.) Ettore brags, “No [I’m not afraid]. When I was a kid I almost died a few times, from pneumonia…” [a bid to turn the blame on the environment?]. On a walk, along what was perhaps a canal bed, now drained for development, he charms her with knowing the names of the insects and birds they hear. And the culmination of this ragged idyll has them entering an abandoned garage—in flight, sort of; but not very playable due to those who shun the darkness of that track where Mamma Roma caught sight of her “happiness.”

In a follow-up incident to that day of spurious promise, Ettore tells Bruna about his dispensing with school (and thereby shutting a major approach to a beckoning cool easily glimpsed but seldom seen). “What’s the use? I don’t understand a thing…It’s boring [to him, struggle’s boring—RIP] and it gives me a headache…” Bruna—partly devious, partly consulting her ace-in-the-hole of robust affection—reminds him that this escapism is hard on his mom. “Your mother cries…” He, candidly settling into the abortiveness of the very late construction of domesticity (and its confusedly being a factor of diversification, far from all-absorbing), snaps back, “Don’t worry. I didn’t ask her to cry.” Bruna presses on, “But you love your mother, don’t you?” “What do I care about her?” is his first standpoint. Then he modifies it to, “I love her a little, though… I’d cry if she died…” [anticipating her tears about murderous traction, at the end]. The stunted, misdirected affection of that gesture speaks to the imminent crisis represented by Carmine (who addresses her—no longer rooted in her A-game, as she was, on the short-term [faux-comeback] track—“Hey scumbag…You ruined me [she should have got a big laugh out of that!] I didn’t even know women like you existed…” [very true, from the Magnani perspective]), its (from a sluggish sense of “family”) scandalously obtuse option of letting both hopeless pests get lost. The decisiveness of her disruption of Carmine’s wedding party includes a killer instinct concerning such figures, the subsequent cordiality, near the end of the event, notwithstanding. Back on the midnight track, with Biancofiore (a persona from the provincial past, now having become an inflected form of metrosexuality), she acknowledges her solitary besiegement. “How you end up is your own fault… This fog rusts your bones…” Fatigue and self-hatred take over (for a while); and she tells the younger and more easily buoyant woman (who cracks, “Have a drink! You’re not that young any more…”), “When Ettore was born he didn’t want to walk down this road” [infants get a pass; no one else does]. Responding in the only way to keep her Mojo intact, Biancofiore bids her adieu on that dynamic flood plain, alertly having in view the best way for her to continue, “…Who put all this garbage in your head?” In a thrilling thread of dramatic dialogue (casting an MRI-like vision tracing the recovery of her guts), Mamma Roma laughs—not a completely bitter laugh—and calls out, “A priest!” Her young friend tells her, “Do your soul-searching by yourself!” The reluctant sex-trader declares, “God, I’ve got an awful stomach ache…Like I ate my heart out…” She traces whole families of criminals going back many generations and wants to believe (fortunately, only for a short while), “If they’d had money, they’d have been good people…Whose fault is that? Who’s responsible? Explain to me why I’m a nobody!” And so it is that, Ettore’s death confirmed, after staging a histrionic breakdown at the food stall (paparazzi sniffing out one of their golden moments) and racing home through the streets with many anxious well-wishers in tow, she is restrained from throwing herself from that moderate height. And from that height her face hardens to a game-face and she glares at the dome of the church in the distance.

She had told Ettore, on his being en route to a questionable career of looting the hospital, “Stupid loafer without an ounce of brains. You don’t have a shred of pride! Irresponsible fool!” This would be the screenplay’s depiction of a weak protagonist duped into a bourgeois death trap. But—as with films as disparate as Kiss Me Deadly, The Misfits, Roman Holiday and Last Year at Marienbad—someone else on the set, someone getting no credit for having the balls to fire off some thrilling and hard truths, has rendered that scenario a true work of genius and a gift to those of us having more than stilted needs.

by Sam Juliano

Mid 70′s degree weather and one sound drenching have ushered in May with at least a parting salute to April in the long-anticipated weather transition in the northeast and midwest.  Speaking of transitions, the WitD hierarchy would like to extend our very best wishes to Laurie and Len Buchanan, who have recently relocated from Crystal Lake, Illinois (outside of Chicago) to their new beautiful home in Boise, Idaho.  After twenty years paying their dues in one of the toughest winter zones in the US, I’d say it’s high time our good friends have moved on to more hospitable environs, at least in terms of more benign atmospherics.  May is normally a fabulous month for those who love gardening and the outdoors, and the preparations are on for proms, graduations, and closing exams in college classes.  In the Juliano household, it has always been amusing to note that four of our five kids have May birthdays (Sammy on the 15th, Danny on the 17th, Jeremy on the 27th and Melanie on the 30th).  Always tough when you want to stage parties, and yes I have played those numbers repeatedly with little success.  Only our dear Jillian who turns 14 in December is the odd one in this scenario.  I’d like to take this opportunity to extend my very best wishes to my friend Craig Kennedy of Living in Cinema who will be attending the Cannes Film Festival for the second year in a row.  I hope he has a great time, sees some extraordinary films, and enjoys the acclaimed food and weather in the beautiful French resort.

Our very dear friend Pat Perry is heading over to Germany this week, while other dear friends, the artist Terrill Welch and her husband Davis are touring Europe in the vacation of a lifetime.  The very best to them all.

This coming week will have me once again chaperoning for the school’s annual trip to Washington D.C. – with a brief stop en route to the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia – from early Wednesday morning (May 7) to late Friday night (May 9).  Unlike last year when my son Danny attended at an eighth grader, I won’t have any of my own kids on the trip (Jillian attends next year and Jeremy the year after that) but I’ll be having some fun touring the sites and walking up a storm with my lifelong friend Steve Russo, who has chaperoned for well over a decade.  Hence, next year’s MMD will largely feature the activities and photos connected with this wonderful trip.  Word has it that the final day of the trip will have temperatures breaking 80.

The Romantic Film Countdown will be launching on Monday, May 19th, with the appearance of the film that placed in the Number 101 position and will continue five days a week well into September.  The Fish Obscuro series will move to Saturday of every week, with some even on Sunday on weeks where picture book reviews are not posted.  Any opera, music or theater reviews that are written will be posted on the weekends accordingly.  Jim Clark’s magnificent film scholarship will continue to post on every other Wednesday.  I would like to extend my deepest thanks to Tony d’Ambra for his sidebar navigation of the past weeks.  The beautiful countdown banner and the poster on the Take 2 publishing venture on Steven Spielberg are up and look great!

Lucille and I (and two of the kids-Jeremy and Danny) attended the latest concert edition of the Rutgers Symphony Band on Thursday night at the Nicholas Hall of the Mason Gross Performing Arts Center at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.  Lucille’s sister Elaine’s son Eric -the youngest of her three sons -is the ‘principal’ saxophonist, and was part of a terrific performances that took in some rather eclectic, if  works by noted if obscure composers.

The 3rd annual Montclair Film Festival was held this past week to excellent attendance and acclaim in various locations in the culturally-attuned town Lucille and I visit quite often.  This is the town where we met out very good friend, the author John Grant (Paul Barnett) and where we attend art house features at the Bow-Tie Cinemas on Bloomfield Avenue.  The festival was held at the Bow-Tie, Wellmont, Bellevue and Kimberly Academy, and the town was hopping with trolleys, a talk lounge on the site of the old Screening Room a few blocks from the Bow-Tie, lines of people and banners and balloons lining the various locations.  This festival is for real, and as New Jersey residents who live nearby we are proud they are moving forward with more films, events and talks with acclaimed artists.  We do not at this time have passes of any kind for this festival, and what with the jet lag from Tribeca, we only caught two films, both were ones we missed at Tribeca.  One, the sports comedy INTRAMURAL, was one of the silliest and juvenile films I’ve ever seen (it amazes me that people actually pay to see such sub-mental drivel, but heck we both forked over $14 each, so we can’t talk) but this is one the level of the worst of the stoner comedies.

However, the other film, the documentary THE OVERNIGHTERS was absolutely masterful, and I discuss it at length in the 4,200 word post that will be appearing over this MMD very shortly.

A mistake on the Film Forum website led us to believe that the spectacularly reviewed IDA was sold out on Saturday night.  As a result we came up empty, but plan to see this over the upcoming week.

The Overnights  **** 1/2     (Friday night)    Montclair Film Festival

Intramural  *     (Sunday afternoon)  Montclair Film Festival

Prodigy Justin Kauflin, 91 year-old jazz legend Clark Terry and “Keep on Keepin On” director Alan Hicks pose at Tribeca Film Festival press conference.

by Sam Juliano

You know the routine.  Every ‘ten best’ list I have ever compiled, whether it be for a year, a decade or a special event like the Tribeca Film Festival always has a caveat.  My tenth place slot is regularly occupied by two films that means to accentuate the eternal difficulty in culling down a list of films to just a tenspot, but beyond that it allows me to sneak in an extra film to better frame the quality of a particular group of films or event.  Tribeca 2014 was without any question the finest since Jane Rosenthal and Robert DeNiro founded the hugely-successful venture in response to the 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center towers.  The festival launched in 2002, evolving from its initial base in the Tribeca section downtown to its present base in Chelsea, and the programming has steadily gained in prestige.  Tribeca is one of the most comprehensive festivals for documentary fare, and some of its features are premiered here.  Other films arrive from Cannes, Sundance and Toronto, and more and more each year are winning distribution a short time after there first appearance at Tribeca.  As per my usual manner of preference I concentrated solely on the features that comprise better than 90% of the offerings, leaving the shorts go completely.  This year’s event was mainly staged at the Bow-Tie Cinemas and SVA Theater on 23rd Street and am the AMC Loews Village 7 on Third Avenue and 11th Street.  It was a challenge to criss cross Manhattan mostly by car, but in some instances by cab and subway when time was really tight.  When three online viewings and two Tribeca films I watched at the Montclair Festival are factored in, the total number of films seen is 54, and it is from that vast poll that I choose my Ten Best list and honorable mention list.  Like every year there are duds and some other films that fail to live up to expectations, and the frustration that accompanies a wrong decision in opting for one film over another when they run at the same time.  And when its over there is frustration that a few films were inexplicably missed completely.  2014 represents the first time I am confident I managed to see nearly every must film, hence my ‘Best of’ list is presently with a degree of satisfaction.  I find it hard to imagine that each and every film in my ten best will not be receiving distribution in the coming months.  Though we saw nearly every single “essential” film screened (we caught two that I did miss this past week at the Montclair Film Festival) there are a few that did escape our grasp: Slaying the Badger, This Time Next Year, This is Illmatic, The Newburgh Sting, Just Before I Go, I Won’t Come Back and Night Moves.  The latter opens wide in two weeks.

1.  Keep On Keepin’ On (USA, Alan Hicks)

For the second consecutive year the winner of the Heinecken Audience Award for documentary feature at Tribeca was handed over to a film funded by kickstarter.   But the similarities between this year’s winner – Keep On Keepin’ On and last year’s - Bridegroom do not end there. Neither of the directors of these films attended film school, and the subjects of both are profoundly emotional, with some irresistible audience appeal.  Keep On Keepin On focuses on now 91 year-old jazz legend Clark Terry and his inspiring blind piano student Justin Kauflin.  The charismatic Terry was the first teacher of Quincy Jones, and helped launch his career as well of fellow jazz icon Miles Davis.  Terry was the first African-American musician to appear on The Tonight Show, and played alongside Count Basie and the legendary Duke Ellington.  As lovingly directed by Tribeca New Documentary Director Award winner, Al Hicks (who hailed from Australia, but moved to New York City when he was 18) the gravely-voiced, charismatic octogenarian Terry is seen functioning as a kind of surrogate father to the young 23 year old Kauflin, a prodigy who lost his vision at age 11 to a progressive, hereditary disorder.  The dynamic bonding between teacher and student,  both who must endure adversity – Terry’s own impaired vision and the severe diabetes that leads to the amputation of both feet – brings about a common understanding and tutorial maturation for the half-Oriental, half Caucasian Kauflin, who is now working on a new CD with Jones in Los Angeles.  Director-musician Hicks, who worked with Terry at New Jersey’s William Patterson University, demonstrated a natural feel for his subject and how to incorporate live performance into this delicate material, and miraculously averts suffocating sentimentality.  This is one of the most genuine and heartfelt documentaries about music, and it leaves one wholly exhilarated.

2.  Bad Hair  (Venezuela; Mariana Rondon)

Winner of the top prize Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival, the Venezuelan Bad Hair (Pelo Malo) was one of the best films of Tribeca 2014.  American film maker Todd Haynes presided over the San Sebastian jury, which included Italian actress Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, a star of Paulo Verzi’s Human Capital.  Ironically titled, this delicate and affecting film isn’t at all about the style of one’s hair, but the matter of identity in a hostile, gender-fixated world.  When a young boy Junior (Samuel Lange), who lives with his single mother in a Caracus housing project, begins to dance and style his hair, he invites scorn, and the belief he is homosexual.  The mother must turn sexual favors to secure and regain employment, and is unable to show her son emotional support or positive reinforcement for the child’s imaginary inclinations.  But even if she weren’t distracted the matter of social conditioning would still leave the mother as indifferent and even hostile as the overpopulated city around them.  Some critics have suggested that the film “deals with the theme of pre-sexual queer awakening, with all its resultant confusion, shame, embarrassment” but it is impossible to determine if such character development is heading in that direction, or to a more open ended self discovery molded by upbringing.   Still, I do agree with the generally prevailing perceptions of the early signs. Homophobia for sure does thrive in the unforgiving streets where poverty leaves little room for feminine traits, especially in households like this one who are struggling to put food on the table.  Hence their are outside forces that prevent the mother from trying to understand her son, and the films depicts a child’s innocence with the harsh neo-realist conditions that leave no room for escape.  Complicating the story further is the boy’s black paternal grandmother (the mother of his dead father), who not only understands the boy, but is making repeated offers to raise him herself.  But the deeply poignant ending makes it clear where Samuel’s own sentiments lie.  As the mother, Samantha Castillo gives a fierce and uncompromising performance, while young Samuel Lange is heartbreaking.  Mariana Rondon uses a relentless hand held camera to document an unsentimental story set in impoverishment, and there’s a fine score and excellent use of a Latino song at the end.  Bad Hair is a haunting film that left this viewer thinking about for days afterward.

3.  Human Capital (Italy; Paulo Virzi)

Moving between overlapping stories is hardly an original device these days.  Famed as far back as Citizen Kane, it achieved more contemporary notoriety in Pulp Fiction and Memento, and  after films like Babel, Amores Perros and Crash it became commonplace.  What sets apart Paulo Vierzi’s engrossing Human Capital is that the stories are far more intricate than a narrative connecting of the dots – but rather how characters caught in their own private dilemmas make some crippling errors of judgment that lead to some dire consequences.  Unlike the Japanese classic Rashomon, each of the three episodes are seen through different characters with varying specifications, but in the end the cause and effect are the same.  Each of the three stories presents a fascinating study of characters.  Two adults – a middle-aged woman who has lost her self-esteem and a social climber who lacks pride, and a more responsible teenage girl with a far more meaningful romance than the aforementioned Celia – are integral to the central story of a road accident concerning a SUV that seriously injures a biker (he later dies) and the identity of who was driving that fateful night.  The film is exceptionally acted, particularly by acclaimed Italian actress Valeria Bruno-Tedeschi, who plays the middle-age mother of the suspected driver, the impetuous Massimiliano and the trophy wife of a successful but conceited businessman who treats his wife and son shabbily.  Like all the best films with interlocking stories Human Capital’s chapters add more layers and nuances to the narrative and provides a most satisfying conclusion.  In its simplest moral constriction the film is a cautionary tale of the effects of greed, but Virzi’s film ,based on a well-regarded bestseller is also a unmasked satire on society, and a potent one at that.

4.  Broken Hill Blues  (Sweden; Sophia Norlin)

Eschewing any kind of a conventional plot structure, Sophia Norlin’s Broken Hill Blues makes superlative use of its alluring Nordic locales and some captivating metaphysical imagery from cinematographer Petrus Sjovik that seems to say more than the screenplay.  But that is not meant to aim even a slight criticism, as it is clear the mode of presentation here is primarily cinematic and its easy enough for even the casual viewer to fill in the holes.  The film is set in the northernmost outpost in Sweden, a town called Kiruna where the economy is fully dependent on ion ore.  The earth under the town is unstable and has claimed the lives of a number of veteran miners, and some geologists have even predicted that Kiruna will eventually cease to exist.  The film’s despairing tones, etched in teenage angst are partially relieved by some spectacular norther landscape vistas, but such a dreary terrain where days are short and sunlight scarce has a built in gloom that underlines physical beauty.  Gratefully there is are no final platitudes, leaving this slice of life drama of a seemingly  hopeless predicament to suggest some hope of relocation.  The pristine digital camerawork owes at least a salute to Ingmar Bergman for it’s dreamy textures and stark close-ups, and the minimalist score by Conny Nimmersjo and Anna-Karin Unger helps to define the film’s sense of aimlessness.  The young actors Sebastian Hiort af Ornas (as Marcus), who obsesses over a beat up Chevy and an indifferent girlfriend and Alfred Juntti (as Daniel) who resents his alcoholic father and his failure to engage in the violence demanded by the gang he’s joined, are an effective fit, and the lovely actress Lina Leandersson, who was last seen as Eli, the young vampire in Tomas Alfredson’s popular Let the Right One In is the happiest of the troubled teens as Zorin, the daughter of Balkan immigrants.  Broken Hill Blues is proof parcel that a theme can be powerfully conveyed with character sketching and setting at the expense of sparse dialogue.

5.  Regarding Susan Sontag  (USA; Nancy Kates)

She was dubbed ‘the dark lady of letters, and derided by her right wing critics as a communist and promoter of leftist ideologies.  She was a political activist and a critic of the Vietnam War and once stated “the white race is the cancer of human history.”  She elaborated by contending that  “America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of White Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent” and concluding that  “today American hegemony menaces the lives not of three million but of countless millions who, like the Indians, have never even heard of the “United States of America,” much less of its mythical empire, the “free world.”  American policy is still powered by the fantasy of Manifest Destiny, though the limits were once set by the borders of the continent, whereas today America’s destiny embraces the world.”   One of her most published quotes is that in which she contends that “America had the most brutal system of slavery in modern times.”  Yet, even while she lived abroad in Europe, leaving behind the son she has with a husband she divorced, literary icon Susan Sontag was culturally linked to America through her theories, letters, reviews and groundbreaking work like On Photography.  Nancy Kates’ superlative documentary Regarding Susan Sontag takes an intimate and provocative look one of the 20th century’s most supreme intellects and greatest writers.  The film moves to and from her professional output and her personal life, calling on the friend, family and colleague talking heads who give first-hand information on her her influence, passions and character flaws.  One was her long time lesbian lover Annie Liebowitz, whose own admissions both revealed and confirmed aspects of Sontag’s life that were generally known but rarely discussed.  The documentary is spirited and visceral, and the use of actress Patricia Clarkson to read the quotes was a terrific decision, as she brings emotional depth to the material.  Sontag was rightly lauded for encouraging others, especially women to stand up for themselves.  One of her most famed quotes to this end is: “Don’t allow yourself to be patronized, condescended to, which, if you are a woman, happens, and will continue to happen all the time, all your lives. ..Tell the bastards off!”  Sontag was a quintessential New Yorker, and there was no better venue to feature this exceptional documentary than at Tribeca.  Sadly, after Sontag had beaten cancer twice she was again diagnosed with the leukemia that ultimately killed her at the age of 71 in December of 2004.  This final stage of her life -the personal devastation that consumed her- is chronicled in the final section of the film. Yet in many ways the documentary is both a celebration of her life and influence both culturally and intellectually (Sontag was one of the greatest of film critics as well) and director Kates effectively weds some arty images to frame her her iconic status.  Kudos to Laura Karpman and Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum for the excellently employed period-conscious musical score and to the deft, unobtrusive editing by John Haptas.  “D “Don’t allow yourself to be patronized, condescended to; which, if you are

6.  The Overnighters  (USA; Jesse Moss)

North Dakota is now the nation’s second largest oil producer behind Texas, and this fact has been ably reflected by the spike in population and employment opportunity.  The over-abundance of oil field workers provides for the basic premise of a riveting and all together stirring documentary by Jesse Moss titled The Overnighters, that has been making the festival rounds after it’s big success at Sundance.  Critics have rightly referred to the film as Steinbeckian and a modern day version of The Grapes of Wrath, the screen masterpiece about migrant workers who set up camp in areas where work was temporarily available.  The “camp” in The Overnighters is the Concordia Lutheran Church, located in the western part of the state that is pastored by the Rev. Jay Reinke, a happily married clergyman with a big heart and the determination to build community.  The plan runs awry when workers with criminal pasts take refuge, and a Montana school teacher is found dead.  Two men from Colorado are suspected, and the natives become hostile with the overnighters program and Reinke’s impassioned support for it.  Reinke attends council meetings and goes door to door to allay fears with the townspeople, but eventually the wavering support erodes, especially after a shocking personal revelation the pastor makes to his “long suffering” wife Andrea.  Another move creates animosity when Reinke moves a sex offender named Graves out of the church.  While appeasing the townspeople it undermines his own sense of loyalty with a few others he gained confidence of.

Reporting from Sundance, Sachin Gandhi wrote:  A local pastor, Jay Reinke, puts up as many workers in his church as possible and helps find accommodations for others. But some of the workers are ex-convicts or felons which causes the town residents to fear them more. Reinke goes out of his way to treat every worker equally but that puts his reputation on the line. As the film progresses, the pressure of the town and the overnighters takes its toll on Jay Reinke, who is almost on the brink of losing everything, his faith and reputation. In fact, events threaten to make Reinke an overnighter as well.

Moss’ decision to maintain the trust and the intimacy of the filming by serving as a one-man crew was a stroke of genius, at it allowed for a more revealing portrait of various characters and the escalating crisis.  His probing camera makes even keeled observations in featuring humanity at its best and worst.  The Overnighters is powerful stuff – a shattering experience that is guaranteed to leave no one unmoved.

Note:  Lucille and I saw this on Friday night at the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey, where it showed once after screening twice at Tribeca the week before.  Unfortunately I had missed both the TFF showings, but was extremely lucky to get another chance.  As it did play at Tribeca I have of course opted to include it as such, having seen the majority of features in advance of my final round-up.  Moss had the audience riveted during a fabulous Q & A after the film at the Montclair Bow-Tie Cinemas.

7.  Starred Up  (UK; David MacKenzie)

For the second time in the past few years the Tribeca Film Festival has featured a ferocious prison movie patterned after the 1979 British borstal film Scum by Alan Clarke.  In 2010 Canadian director Kim Champiron won the ‘Best New Narrative Director” at Tribeca for his director of the uncompromising Dog Pound, an intense drama set inside a correctional facility in Montana that features shocking brutality and stomach-churning acts of violence.  David MacKenzie’s British incarceration flick Starred Up is one of the best films of its kind, though it sometimes leaves you shielding your eyes.  Episodes involving a razor blade and the prison showers do establish a kinship with other genre works for sure, but there is a spontaneous and raw authenticity -not to mention an electrifying lead performance by Jack O’Connell as a very difficult youthful offender- that elevates the film.  O’Connell’s ‘Eric’ is a hot-wired volatile youth who is seen by prison staff to be beyond hope, especially after he nearly bites off a guard’s appendage.  As coincidence would have it he is shepherded up a floor where his father is also serving time, and some father and son therapy becomes part of survival-of-the-fittest equation.  The father soon understands that his son’s prospects for continuity are dependent on the parenting he was never able to engineer on the outside.  The use of the hand-held camera in this claustrophobic environment heightens the sense of immediacy, and there are some striking turns from other actors, especially Ben Mendelsohn as the father Neville Love and Rupert Friend as the skittish prison therapist Oliver who tries relentlessly to overcome the young man’s trust issues.  Written by Jonathan Asser from his own experiences as a former prison counselor Starred Up is as intransigent as its main characters and as infuriating as any film that has dealt with social injustice.

 8.   In Order of Disappearance (Norway; Hans Moland)

Though produced in Norway and set firmly on Scandinavian terrain the splendid, often uproarious comedy-crime thriller In Order of Disappearance owes its very existence to the American cinema that has long established this kind of film as a favorite of film makers and audiences.  One harkens back to Dirty Harry for the central deceit, but it’s hard to deny that the specter of Quentin Tarantino is alive and well in the way the film is choreographed and structured.  Of course Tarantino has yet to work with the exceptional thespian Stellan Skarsgard or in the specious snowy expanses that give In Order of Disappearance its unique flavor.  The film’s plot is certainly over-the-top, but this is all part of the fun.  Skarsgard’s son is dispatched by drug dealers who try and make it seem that he overdoes, and the actor gains revenge one by one over those who engineered the tragedy.  Black humor abounds as all the deaths are announced by displaying the names of the victims on a black screen with white cemetery markers, and Skargard ropes up the bodies and sends them down a waterfall.   Even the great actor Bruno Ganz shows up as a member of a Serbian cartel seeking revenge for the murder of one of their own.  There is some Coenesque atmosphere that recalls the wintry Fargo, and director Hans Peter Holland impressively paces the film’s formidable running length with a chaptered construction.  Skarsgard is a natural playing the quiet man pushed to the extreme, and the script contain some very funny exchanges.  The acoustic fatalism of the terrific score by Kasper Kaae and Kare Vestrheim and the film’s production design turn up aces in one of Tribeca’s most entertaining features.

9.  Chef  (USA; Jon Favreau)

Winner of the Heinecken Audience Award for Best Narrative Film, Jon Favreau’s irresistible Chef can certainly be regarded as one of the festival’s most entertaining films.  But the film is no guilty pleasure at all, and has deservedly won across the board acclaim from the critical fraternity for its depiction of male camaraderie in the kitchen and how an insatiable thirst for creativity can pay sturdy dividends as a confidence builder as well as a business boon.  Favreau steps in front of the camera as well, to play Carl Casper, an ace chef at a restaurant overseen by Dustin Hoffman’s controlling owner.  After he publicly berates a famous food critic who trashes the ‘safe’ menu Hoffmann insists on, Casper quits his job and at the urges of his wealthy divorced wife he makes his new kitchen an old food truck that he uses to tour across country, inevitably attracting enthusiastic foodies at every stop.  Even his old nemesis, the blunt critic (wonderfully played by Oliver Platt) who was responsible for Casper’s vocational fall out, makes a surprise road appearance and offers his former sparring partner a sweet deal.  Bringing along his young son helps enrich the father-son bonding and the film’s charm, and both Bobby Cannavale and John Leguziamo are on hand to further liven up the proceedings.  Food lovers will also be salivating over all the delectable dishes that are seen in this culinary delight.  Yes, there a few minor plot-related flaws, but anyone not connecting to this is being mightily stubborn.

10.  Black Coal, Thin Ice (China; Diao Yinan) -TIE-

A bleak but riveting impressionistic Chinese film noir and crime thriller, Black Coal Thin Ice, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival this past year, and the decision (it edged out Wes Anderson’s Budapest Hotel for the top prize) perplexed a lot of people, some of whom thought the Chinese film was opaque and contained a number of plot holes and unanswered questions.  To be fair, some of these reservations are not completely off the mark, but director Diao Yinen was more concerned with employing some wry humor to  his pessimistic tale of human body parts and the resurfacing of a crime committed a decade earlier.  Stylistically this visceral film is altogether dazzling and the central performance by the comical Liao Fan (as Zhang) is fabulous.  The film is set amidst neon lights, tall builds and snow covered roads that harken back to Hollywood noir.  The fact that it appeals as much as it does despite a seemingly incomprehensible story is testament to the power of cinematic imagery.

10.  Brides  (Georgia; Tinatin Kajrishvilli)  -TIE-

Despite its third place audience narrative win at Berlin, I’ve seen a few complaints against the Georgian drama Brides that the subject matter is too irreproachably personal and parochial to appeal to wider audiences.  Yet I found its thrust quite affecting and well within the realm of universal truth.  Claustrophobic and filmed in appropriately drab tones the film concerns a 30ish woman and mother of two children, who marries her partner in prison so that she can gain the right to visit him once a month while he is behind bars.  The film’s atmosphere contributes powerfully to the theme of loneliness, and there is an inevitable hopelessness, accentuated when the offer of a bribe to a local prosecutor leads to the latter’s arrest on fraud.  The director’s debut film was drawn upon her own experiences with her husband when he served time, and they have collaborated on the enveloping screenplay.  Slowly and inexorably Brides paints a picture of gloom amidst societal oppression.

Honorable Mention:

Five Star (USA)

Dior and I (Frederic Tcheng)

Gueros (Mexico; Alonso Ruizpalacios)

All About Ann: Governor Richards (USA; Keith Patterson)

Manos Sucias (Columbia/USA)

Zero Motivation (Israel)

Point and Shoot (USA)

The Kidnapping of Michele H. (France)

Silenced (USA; James Spione)

Gabriel (USA; Lou Howe)

Mala Mala (Puerto Rico; Dan Sickles, Antonio Santini)

Venus in Fur (France; Roman Polanski)

Electric Slide (USA; Tristan Patterson)

Miss Meadows (USA; Karen Leigh Hopkins)

Traitors (Morocco; Sean Guilette)

Beneath the Harvest Sky (USA; Aaron Gaudet, Gita Pullapilly)

Glass Chin (USA; Noah Buschel)

Alex of Venice (USA; Chris Messina)

by Sam Juliano

The vital importance of water in everyday life is given center stage in a sublime new picture book authored by Olive Senior and illustrated by Brooklynite Laura James.  Senior, born and raised on the Caribbean island of Jamaica, moved to Europe and then to Canada after the capital city of Kingston was ravaged by a hurricane in the late 80′s.  Senior is renowned for her poetry and adult novels and short stories, but was supremely flattered when publishers chose Anna Carries Water and the 2012 Birthday Suit as worthy of the picture book treatment.  Senior credits Laura James and Eugenie Fernandez -the illustrator of the earlier book- for transforming her material into such exquisite works, but the veteran writer is certainly to be credited for half the acclaim for her wholly exhilarating ideas.

Anna Carries Water focuses on the young girl of the title, who wants to follow in the footsteps of her older siblings in sharing the task of carrying water on her head from a well at a spring located across “Mr. Johnson’s” field.  Ms. Senior’s narrative stresses the central role of water for cooking and drinking, washing faces, dishes and dirty feet.  Senior states that the family members did not carry water for bathing or washing clothes as those activities were performed in the river.   This particular variation on the coming-of-age theme is the acquired aptitude for learning how to balance a container of water on one’s head, which translates to a sure sign of responsibility and the skills associated with adulthood.  Early in the fable Anna carries around a coffee can while her five older siblings used large metal cans, plastic buckets and an empty cheese tin to gather the water.  Unwilling to concede defeat she must endure the trials of tribulations associated with such a simple yet profound act that will ultimately define her transformation from child to young adult.  In one such attempt she tears off a piece of a dasheen leaf, and floats it on the top of the can of water she puts on her head, but it falls off, necessitating that she carry it in front of her.

As is the case with many stories of a person finally attaining their most desperately sought after goal, Anna’s initiation into adulthood is rather accidental.  Terrified by the peaceful cows that graze in Mr. Johnson’s field, and the realization that she is alone, she frantically places a can of water on her head and dashes off to meet the family who were looking for her.  Miraculously she didn’t spill a drop, while simultaneously it registers that the cows were never any kind of a threat to her in any manner.  Anna Carries Water examines sibling rivalry, the power of determination and conquering fear while attaining a long-elusive objective.

Ms. James, herself of Antiguan heritage, employs eye-popping and colorful acrylic paintings with shimmering tropical textures that enhance the beautiful Jamaican countryside being showcased.   The book is comprised of a series of stunning full page spreads that would tell the story without Ms. Senior’s still lovely and poetic prose and which boast a three-dimensionality and ethnicity that properly conveys to young readers that the story takes place in a different part of the world. My personal favorite collage tapestries include the various cascades of water coming down to fill all the containers, with young Anna and her coffee can at the forefront; the picture of mom preparing a dish in the kitchen with a mosquito and red layer cake and casseroles in the oven; Anna lagging behind the line of her brothers and sisters near “Christie’s”; the overjoyed family looking on as Anna arrives with the can on her head; the cover photo reprized in the book with Anna smiling with can on head and birds and butterflies flying around her head and the final exhilarating capture of Anna doing a cartwheel in jubilation.

Though the book’s unique setting and daily chores shed a new light on what is most urgent in daily existence, there is a universality in how one advances to the next level in their domestic maturation that rings through this charming story.  All people have challenges and the need to develop the skills that will enable them to assimilate and gain the confidence to overcome insecurities and the feeling that they are not skilled enough.  We’ve seen this kind of theme in American books like The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls and more benignly in A Chair For My Mother by Vera Williams when a young girl faithfully saves coins over a long period to buy a chair that means so much to an impoverished family living in an urban zone.  When nearly all readers could never relate to the difficult chore of carrying water -unless they experienced camping outdoors- they could certainly relate to the matter of working to attain a watershed.

It might seem a stretch to believe that Anna was spooked by grazing long-tongued cows, but that is another part of her age and immaturity.  It is also a story device to further illustrate her increased understanding and blossoming wisdom. In any case Anna Carries Water is a sterling example of how multi-cultural literature can appeal to all, and how the craft of a great artist can elevate a worthy narrative into a picture book masterpiece that will appeal equally to adults and art lovers everywhere.

Note:  This is the first in a series of picture books that will deal with new releases, classics and works from other countries.  ‘Anna Carries Water”, published in 2013 is Canadian, and as such was ineligible for Caldecott consideration, but is richly deserving of any ten best list of that year.

Illustrator Laura James working in her studio.

Author Olive Senior

by Allan Fish

(USSR 1965 189m) DVD0 (Russia only)

Aka. Mne dvadtsat let

Stand up, damned of the earth!

p  Viktor Freilich  d  Marlen Khutsiyev  w  Gennadi Shpalikov, Marlen Khutsiyev  ph  Margarita Pilikhina

Valentin Popov (Sergei Zhuravlyov), Nikolai Gubenko (Nikolai Fokin), Stanislav Lyubshin (Slava Kostikov), Marianna Vertinskaya (Anya), Zinaida Zinovyeva (Olga Mikhailovna Zhuravlyova), Svetlana Starikova (Vera Zhuravlyova), Lev Prygunov (2^nd Lt. Aleksandr Zhuravlyov), Lev Zolothukin (Anya’s father), Aleksandr Blinov (Kuzmich), T.Bogdanova (Lyusya Kostikova), Gennadi Nekrasov (Vladimir Vasilyevich),

There is no better barometer of the cold winds of change that swept through Soviet Russia in the years 1959-1965 than Marlen Khutsiyev’s I am Twenty.  It’s a film that should be remembered with the best of Soviet films of the period, but by the time it was ready for release, a deep freeze had set in.  From the mid-late fifties, after the death of Stalin, Russia moved to a less extreme position with regards to the arts under Nikita Khrushchev, allowing such films as Kozintsev’s Don Quixote, Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying, Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier, Bondarchuk’s Destiny of a Man and Heifits’ The Lady With the Little Dog to play successfully at western film festivals.  It was in 1959, at the height of this period, that Khutsiyev’s masterpiece entered its gestatory stages.

Sadly, the film’s production rolled on and on, an originally planned 90 minute movie expanded to over three hours, constant delays in production, so that while the majority of filming was completed by early 1962, it wasn’t deemed ready for release until 1965.  Worse still, the Bay of Pigs affair had led to a deep frost in relations between the Soviet Union and the west.  Khutsiyev’s film could not have emerged at a worse time.  It was banned, then given the go-ahead but only with the film butchered, in one of many ironies, down to 90 minutes.  It passed by almost unnoticed and wasn’t really heard of until the final Glasnost amnesty of the late eighties when it was released from captivity, like so many other Soviet classics of the 1960s and 70s.

What emerged was one of the greatest Soviet films of its period.  It would prove remarkable in many ways, not least in the fact that its artistic debts were so western.  The link to the French nouvelle vague was obvious – and would be enhanced even more in the Godardian July Rain made by the director straight after.  Yet there were other branches to the ancestry, to Fellini’s I Vitelloni and to the British new wave and the kitchen sink films in particular (a sort of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Comrade!).  This can’t be too surprising when one considers the lengthy production, European cinema having been turned on its head since 1959 by Antonioni, Fellini, Resnais, Godard, et al.

Several scenes stand out in the memory.  Take the opening sequence which plays out over the credits.  Three soldiers come slowly towards the camera to the strains of ‘The Internationale’.  They briefly turn their heads back over their shoulders to look at the camera, before walking away.  It’s a scene that deliberately evokes the young recruits in All Quiet on the Western Front.  Their departure dissolves into another three people coming towards the camera, before a huge sweeping crane shot (worthy of Welles or Ophuls) follows various people up to a higher street in Moscow’s Ilyich’s Gate district.  The other is a scene in which a daughter squares up to her father about not wanting to live with her boyfriend in her father’s flat.  The father bemoans that “I don’t believe in people who are too witty at such a young age.”  It’s a quote that recalls Khrushchev’s own feelings on the film in 1963, “that young people ought to decide for themselves how to live, without asking their elders for counsel.”  Now it’s finally available for viewing, don’t be put off by the length, for it’s one of the great films about a young generation trying to avoid a terrible future in a state where they are expected to pay lip-service to their elders but not necessarily betters, going with the flow and wearing out one’s days.  Little wonder one of the last shots is of soldiers in Red Square stopping at Lenin’s tomb.  The dream of 1917 was dead.

Screen grab from outstanding Swedish film ‘Broken Hill Blues’ screened at Tribeca Film Festival

by Sam Juliano

Note: I trust all celebrating Easter Sunday had a great day!  Thanks as always to Dee Dee for her fabulous sidebar holiday tribute!

The late April Easter has come and gone amidst a nagging cold spell that performed an uneasy tango with the Spring temperatures that ruled the day-time hours on the day of Purple and Yellow.  The unusual tardiness of the holiday allowed it to clash with the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, which launched on Holy Thursday, and will continue until Sunday, April 27th.  Lucille and I have taken full advantage of the press passes we have enjoyed for the past several years, and found ourselves cabbing back and forth between the Bow Tie Cinemas on 23rd Street and the East Side Loews Village 7, with even a single stop at the SVA, a block down from the aforementioned Bow-Tie multiplex.  The madness will continue through next week, and attendance will be challenging, what with school re-convening today.  But I have four unused personal days (I am rarely absent, and have over 200 sick days in the can) and will be using two of those this week on Tuesday and Friday to allow for better options and more movies.

After attending the final Tout Truffaut feature of the well-attended Film Forum retrospective of the iconic New Wave French director (Small Change) we rested up for a few days, knowing that the 11 day Tribeca event would have us in cinematic overkill, and partaking in the cut-rate -for-Tribeca-patrons veggie burger program at Lucky’s next to the Bow-Tie multiplex.  As always, the festival has featured some most impressive films that deserved full distribution, and some others that left us indifferent.  But what a fun time this experience allows for and you could feel the excitement in the air on the streets around the theaters.

I have listed the feature films that I have seen so far on this past Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and have provided brief notes and ratings.  Time does not allow me to do more right now, but as always I will be presenting a comprehensive Top 10 and reflections on the festival, in addition to some other Tribeca related posts being planned.

Something Must Break      * 1/2       (Thursday)      Bow Tie  81 min.

Manos Sucias          ****                        (Thursday)       Bow Tie  84. min.

Art and Craft            *** 1/2                 (Thursday)        Bow Tie 89 min.

Ice Poison                   **                             (Thursday)        Bow Tie 95 min.

Beneath the Harvest Sky   *** 1/2   (Thursday)   Amazon 116. min.

Below Dreams        *                                (Friday)                Bow Tie 72 min.

All About Ann       ****                        (Friday)                SVA 82 min.

Broken Hill Blues    **** 1/2          (Friday)                Bow Tie 72 min.

Summer of Blood      *** 1/2            (Friday)                 Bow Tie 86 min.

About Alex                  *** 1/2              (Saturday)           AMC 96 min.

Dior and I                     ****                     (Saturday)           Bow Tie 90 min.

Love and Engineering  ** 1/2      (Saturday)           Bow Tie 81 min.

Black Coal, Thin Ice   **** 1/2      (Saturday)           Bow Tie 106 min.

Super Duper Alice Cooper  ***     (Saturday)           AMC 86 min.

Alex of Venice  *** 1/2                       (Sunday)              AMC 86 min.

An Honest Liar   ***                             (Sunday)               Bow Tie 90 min.

Brides   ****                                                (Sunday)              Bow Tie 90 min.

In Order of Disappearance ****   (Sunday)             Bow Tie 115 min.

Silenced   ****                                            (Sunday)            Bow Tie 90 min.

Tomorrow We Disappear  ****       (Sunday)             Bow Tie 82 min.

also:

Small Change ****  (Tuesday)                                   Tout Truffaut at FF

Note:  Lucille saw GABRIEL (84 min.), which I will also see on Tuesday when she will not be with me.  She rates it with ****.

Obviously the best films of the first four days of the Festival include the Berlin Golden Bear winner, the impressionistic Chinese thriller BLACK COAL THIN ICE, two outstanding Scandinavian features, the poetic fable of adolescent angst, BROKEN HILL BLUES, and the perverse crime thriller IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE that stars Stellan Skarsgard; MANOS SUCIAS, set on the Pacific coast of Columbia and chronicling drug smuggling, directed by a former film student of Spike Lee, and executive produced by the famed director; BRIDES, an intimate Georgian film about a harsh penal system and a woman’s marital struggles in its aftermath; and four outstanding documentaries about Ann Richards, fashion designing, a puppet troupe in India and a government worker and his family purged the former GOP administration.

I will have plenty more to say about these individually and some others here that were good.

Berlin Golden Bear winner ‘Black Coal Thin Ice,’ Chinese film screened at Tribeca

Outstanding documentary ‘Dior and I’ about fashion designing.

by Allan Fish

(UK/USA 1930 120m) not on DVD

Of cabbages and kings, and cockroaches on whisky

p  George Pearson  d  James Whale  w  Joseph Moncure March, Gareth Gundrey  play  R.C.Sheriff  ph  Benjamin Kline  ed  Claude Berkeley  m  none  art  Harvey Libbert

Colin Clive (Capt. Dennis Stanhope), David Manners (2^nd Lt. Raleigh), Ian MacLaren (2^nd Lt. ‘Uncle’ Osborne), Billy Bevan (2^nd Lt. Trotter), Anthony Bushell (2^nd Lt. Hibbert), Robert Adair (Capt. Hardy), Charles K.Gerrard (Pvt. Mason),

Ask most people of my generation about World War I and there’s a strong chance they will have first become acquainted with it through TV comedy; if not by the Python sketch ‘Ypres 1914’ (“how about ‘one potato, two potato’, sir?”) then by the adventures of Blackadder and co..  Yet for comedy to work, especially small screen comedy, there must be a familiarity with the setting or else much of the humour is lost.  More than from any other source, the familiarity came from R.C.Sheriff’s play Journey’s End.

Set entirely in the dugouts and trenches on the front and supply lines in Saint Quentin, France, in March 1918, it follows four principal officers over a four day period.  Captain Stanhope has just returned from furlough.  He’s well respected by his men but three years on the front lines have exposed understandable cracks in his façade and he’s turned to drinking to keep his nerves in check.  His right-hand is the older Osborne, nicknamed Uncle, who tries to keep him going.  With them is Trotter, a salt of the earth type who’s risen to the rank of officer through the ranks.  To this motley trio is added Raleigh, a wet behind the ears public school type who answers every request with either “I say”, “right-o” or “rather” and who is delighted to serve under Stanhope, the man he worshipped at school and who had been in love with his sister before the war.

The play had been a massive critical and audience hit in the West End in 1929.  James Whale had directed it there with Colin Clive playing the lead.  Whale was then chosen by Michael Balcon and Arthur Pearson – who himself had made a World War I pacifist tract, Reveille, in 1924, now assumed lost – to direct the film version, and Whale insisted on Clive to reprise the role of Stanhope.  With UK sound equipment not quite polished enough, the majority of the film was shot in New York.  It’s generally perceived to be a primitive beast by most film writers, but it’s certainly not helped by the deplorable state of the majority of prints – it hasn’t been on British television since the 1980s – which make the camerawork seem even jerkier than it is.  And while it’s true that it cannot help but be stagy, set as it is virtually entirely on stage-like sets in the trench bunkers, it does still maintain a real primitive power.  The play is only opened out slightly for a couple of sequences in no-man’s-land, but the biggest changes to the text come in the form of cuts to Sheriff’s moving speeches.  It’s unfortunate that they were edited, but Whale nonetheless manages to keep the spirit of the play intact.

The biggest reason for the film’s relative anonymity today, however, is an unfair comparison with All Quiet on the Western Front.  It’s true that Milestone’s film is more fluid and has the greater scenes of trench warfare, but Whale had served in the trenches for 18 months before being taken a prisoner and knew no film could come close to the reality.  Where Whale’s film scores is not in its use of sound, of incessant Howitzers and field artillery, but in the eerie sound of silence that sent men insane far quicker than the incessant shelling.  He’s also helped by his cast.  Manners may be a little annoying, but that’s the character, the epitome of the British upper class officer going over the top with the same nonchalance as if opening the batting on the village green.  MacLaren is superb as the kindly Osborne and the inimitable Billy Bevan was never better as the no-nonsense Trotter, more disturbed by the lack of bacon in his fat than by the German bullets whistling past his ear.  As for Clive, he’s definitive, and the success assured Whale would give him the part in a certain Universal film 12 months later.  One can only dream of a proper remastered release, for no other film captured the spirit in which men sardonically sang “we’re here because we’re here…” during mankind’s most horrific bloodbath.

by Allan Fish

(India 1973 135m) not on DVD

Aka. Garam Hava

Should I stay or should I go?

p  Abu Siwani, Ishan Arya, M.S.Sathyu  d  M.S.Sathyu  w  Kaifi Azmi, Shama Zaidi  ph  Ishan Arya  ed  S.Chakravarty  m  Aziz Ahmed, Aziz Ahmed Khan Warsi, Ustad Bahadur Khan

Balraj Singh (Salim Mirza), Gita Siddarth (Amina Mirza), Jamal Hashmi (Kazim), Yunus Parvez (Fakraddin), Farook Shaikh (Sikander Mirza), Jalal Agha (Shamsad), Abu Siwani (Baqar Mirza), Badar Begum (Salim’s mother), Dinanath Zutshi (Halim), Shaukat Azmi (Kaifi), A.K.Hangal (Ajmani Sahab), Vikas Anand,

Considering the availability of so many Bollywood classics of this and previous eras, the other side of Indian cinema can still be difficult to track down.  Satyajit Ray, of course, is now becoming available in Hi Def, while Ritwik Ghatak will doubtless soon follow.  But it’s the next generation of directors who joined those two erstwhile masters in the late sixties and seventies that can be hard to appreciate.  Where can one find decent prints of films by Mrinal Sen, Mani Kaul or the director of the film in question, M.S.Sathyu.  Any that are on DVD are in deplorable condition and interrupted by those God-awful logos so prevalent in Indian DVDs that float in and out of vision like the mother ship in Space Invaders.

One should be grateful then, I suppose, that in an age when British television channels ignore film and its history completely, that occasionally Indian classics pop up in the small hours on Channel 4 in one of the sporadic celebrations of Indian culture.  It’s how I first saw Hot Winds.  Not ideal, perhaps, but you take what you’re given.                         

The film focuses on the plight of the Mirza family.  For generations they have called this part of India their home.  But as the credits tell us, independence has been declared and, after the assassination of Gandhi, the relations between Hindustanis and Moslems have never been more volatile.  Many local Moslems have gone west across the border into Pakistan, while those that stay behind find themselves if not victimised then marginalised.  Graduates cannot find work, and businessmen can’t get loans.  One such businessman, Salim Mirza, owner of a shoe factory, finds contracts being lost and his business going to the dogs.  One of his sons has already left while his daughter, Amina, sees her chances of marriage go up in smoke.

There haven’t been too many major Indian films dealing with the fallout of the partition, but Hot Winds – the title referring to the winds of change that would scorch an entire people – is surely the most powerful.  The fate of the Mirzas is as wrenching as it is inevitable.  Indeed, it would have been easy for the continual heartbreaks to have veered into parody, and it’s only through the sheer professionalism of the piece, and its heartfelt intent, that it doesn’t do so.  It’s not afraid to be a little unconventional, though, not least in its use of overlaid sound; Sathyu using applause, train whistles, gunshots, dialogue and a narration in such a way as to leave the audience dangling between the real and the make believe.  And if it naturally would mean more to someone who recognises the time and place, it does have a universal sense of moral outrage at the humiliation of a community seen through the microscope of this single family.  Indeed, the scene where the matriarch is only happy when she’s allowed to die in her old home recalls scenes with old men in such disparate classics as The Grapes of Wrath and Dovzhenko’s Earth.  This connection with the earth one calls home and fear of displacement and loss of identity cannot be overstated.  As one character puts it, “they’re uprooting many flowering trees.”  And yet Sathyu goes further, commenting on the corruption that inevitably follows when a people unaccustomed to power are suddenly given it.  He’s also helped by his cast, with Shaikh in his first key role, Siddarth excellent as the unfortunate Amina and, at its centre, the wonderful Balraj Singh in a performance of such humane delicacy as to move a heart of granite.  It’s one of the great films of the sub-continent.

by Sam Juliano

After Lucille and I watched the emotionally enthralling documentary Keep on Keepin On at the Bow Tie Cinemas on Friday night we both agreed that we had seen the best film of the Tribeca Film Festival.  The Heinecken Audience Award standings at that point had the film sitting in the Number 3 position behind two other excellent documentaries - All About Ann: Governor Richards of the Lone Star State and Djor and I.  Less than 24 hours after proclaiming this inspiring film about a blind young pianist and his special relationship with a 91 year-old jazz legend, festival audiences named the film their absolute favorite documentary of the entire event.  For Lucille and I it was not only the best documentary of the festival, but in fact the very best film period, and it will lead my Top Ten list that will be published at Wonders in the Dark this coming Thursday.  As per annual tradition that post will include comprehensive capsule reviews of all ten films seen by this writer as the cream of the 2014 crop.

Mind you, there are still four films for us to see today, so the final placements can still change.  Today on the final day of the festival we will see Point and Shoot (Tribeca jury prize winner as Best Documentary), Chef (Heinecken Audience Award for best narrative feature), the Italian Human Capital and Amy Berg’s Every Secret Thing. (which received an unexpected additional screening at the SVA at 6:30 P.M.)  Lucille will probably pass on Point and Shoot and instead take in 5 to 7, a film that we are assuming took second place in the Heinecken Best Narrative Film competition.

With firm plans to see Vera: A Blessing and Ne Me Quitte Pas online over the next few days, I will be able to claim seeing 52 films over the 12 days of the festival which translates to a persuasive argument for committal.  Still, it does give me the credentials to put together a Ten Best list that will be decided having seen just about every essential film shown during the event.

On Saturday we had our most torrid day, seeing six films, of which the gripping American inde Five Star and Roman Polanski’s Cannes carry-over Venus in Fur were the best.  We were far less enamored with Lucky Them and Zombeavers but both have their fans for sure.

Masterful Italian drama ‘Human Capital’ is one of the very best feature films of Tribeca Film Festival.

Young Samuel Lange in exceptional Venuzuelan film ‘Bad Hair’ screened at Tribeca Film Festival.

by Sam Juliano

Lucille and I saw more films on the big screens this past week than any other comparable period in our lives, and we are still alive to talk about it.  The count for the seven day period is thirty-one (31) bringing the Tribeca total (with a second online at-home viewing) to 51.  But heck, this year’s Tribeca catch-phrase that is seen on the cover of the official guide booklet and on posters around the city and on-line is appropriately Film Festivals: The Original Binge-Watching, and indeed such an event has taken place in the three prime locations around the Big Apple that are hosting the festival.  Of course seeing 51 films fully entitles me to compile a Top Ten list, what will hardly any essential films not being seen, and it will be posted at the site this coming Thursday, May 1st.  We would like to extend our deepest thanks to Pete Torres at Tribeca for his usual hospitality and all those troupers at the theaters who worked their tails off to make Tribeca 2014 the huge success it was.

The Tribeca Jury awards have been announced as has the final standings for the Heinecken Audience Awards, and many of these will be placing in my own Top Ten and honorable mention.  Here is the full list and star ratings for the films seen this past week at the festival:

The Search for General Tso’s Chicken ***  (Monday)  Bow-Tie

1971   *** 1/2          (Monday)    AV7

Mala Mala   ****      (Monday)      AV7

Bad Hair      **** 1/2   (Tuesday)     AV7

Gabriel    ****           (Tuesday)      Bow-Tie

Misconception   **    (Tuesday)    Bow-Tie

Gueros         ****        (Tuesday)    Bow-Tie

Traitors        ****      (Tuesday)    Bow-Tie

Miss Meadows  *** 1/2    (Wednesday)    AV7

The Battered Basterds of Baseball  ***    (Wednesday)  SVA

Maravilla     ** 1/2         (Wednesday)   AV7

Starred Up    ****   (Wednesday)   AV7

Palo Alto   * 1/2          (Thursday)    SVA

Bright Days Ahead  *** 1/2   (Thursday)   Bow-Tie

Zero Motivation     **** 1/2   (Thursday)  Bow-Tie

Electric Slide    *** 1/2     (Friday)   AV7

Land Ho!    ** 1/2        (Friday)  AV7

Regarding Susan Sontag **** 1/2  (Friday)  AV7

Keep on Keepin On   *****    (Friday)  Bow-Tie

The Kidnapping of Michele H.  ****  (Friday) Bow-Tie

Ne Me Quitte Pas  ****   (Saturday morning) streaming

Lucky Them  *        (Saturday)   Bow-Tie

Five Star  ****       (Saturday)   Bow-Tie

Garnett’s Gold  ** 1/2    (Saturday)     Bow-Tie

Venus in Fur  ****      (Saturday)      AV7

Glass Chin   *** 1/2            (Saturday)     AV7

Zombeavers  **         (Saturday)     AV7

Point and Shoot  **** 1/2  (Sunday)  Bow-Tie

Human Capital  *****   (Sunday)  AV7

Every Secret Thing  ***  (Sunday)   SVA

Chef   ****               (Sunday)   SVA

I will be presenting a comprehensive Top Ten of the Tribeca Film Festival post this coming Thursday, complete with a photo layout.  Suffice to say that I was extremely impressed this past week with KEEP ON KEEPIN ON, HUMAN CAPITAL (both five star films) REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG, POINT AND SHOOT, BAD HAIR, ZERO MOTIVATION, CHEF, STARRED UP, GUEROS, FIVE STAR, THE KIDNAPPING OF MICHELE H., NE ME QUITTE PAS and VENUS IN FUR, all which will either place in the Top Ten or the honorable mention listing.

 © 2014 by James Clark

      It’s a wedding reception out in the sticks (somewhat like that wedding party in Fellini’s La Strada). But we notice its far heavier acidic content, as compared with the child-like food-fight at the table where Gelsomina and Zampano relax a bit before once again putting their show on the road. A local woman has staged a quite startling invasion in the course of sending a message to one and all, a touch of theatre with no qualms about upstaging the principals. The happy complement of her entrance involves one male pig and two females, decked out in appropriate headgear, and she gets things rolling with, “Here come the brothers!” (The bride is from a farm.) She can barely keep from falling over from delight in her indiscretion, as she moves the animals toward the bridal party, amidst appreciative laughter from the guests. She refers to one of her companions as “Regina, the Pervert…If you only knew what she does!” The father of the bride stands up to deliver a seemingly heartfelt paean to the value of farming life, only to have the lady with the pigs call him a “hick,” which gets the company going on the speechmaker’s being out on bail. Someone asks her, “Why don’t you sing for us, a song from the heart?” perhaps with regard to re-establishing the moment of romance. She declares, as if emphasizing that it is her passionate nature which has brought about the creepiness wafting over the event, “When I sing, I sing with joy!” But, in going on to tell everyone that, “If you knew the whole story, it would ruin this celebration,” this disruptive entity alludes to a life of conflict unsuited for mainstream gratifications. She fires off a musical statement particularly unflattering to Carmine, the groom, whom she obviously has known for a long time; and the bride stands up and sings (in the impromptu operatic-rap at which the whole party seems to excel), “You sing and act so happily, but your heart’s bursting with rage…” To which (and to the charge that she’s jealous, being no longer the groom’s lover) the center of attention patronizingly addresses her, O Flower of Shit…” The bride is a frumpy blob with missing teeth and the groom resembles a weasel; but the invited intruder is a smartly turned out, no longer young but not yet old woman, with the kind of broad-faced handsomeness bringing to mind a dark, punchy, 40-ish version of Monica Vitti, who was radioactive at the time. However, on second thought, we should mention now that our protagonist needs no buoying by resembling a celebrity. She’s embodied by super-formidable, Anna Magnani, one of the most richly explosive presences in the history of cinema.

General insults aside, she gets down to a husky ballad specifying the locale of her joy, somehow not quite of this world. “I’ve freed myself. I’m no longer his servant… [Here the pigs come to bear] No hard feelings. I’m free!” And then she laughs uncontrollably, sending a little frisson through the hall, where the dining table resembles that in Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco, “The Last Supper.” She plays with some of the children in attendance—making a moustache of a swatch of her dark hair (a faint reminder of [far more vulnerable] Gelsomina entertaining the children, particularly a slow boy, at the reception in that provincial backwater). Then she turns back to the newlyweds: “I hope you have lots of children, so you’ll be in God’s grace all your lives. I wish you all the happiness…” This euphoric and very engaging launch is a stunner in the context of Pasolini’s generally sallow communications. We’ve recently come through his Arabian Nights (1974) and its bell-bottoms miasma. So, what, we might ask, makes such a difference here? The inclusion of “The Last Supper” could, as usual, be allowing for a characteristically schizophrenic Marxist swipe at supposed corruption in the heart of religious culture while, at the same time, be maintaining saintliness (of some order) in the ways of the rural and unlettered poor. Having seen that first scene we don’t have to wait for explicit references from the protagonist (addressed by her fans as Mamma Roma) which reveal detachment from both jackpots, in order to be on notice that, unlike the quirky, important but dreary mechanism of Arabian Nights, no hybrid of the auteur’s hobby horses is going to win, place or show in the steeplechase we have on our hands here. This striking bit of self-immolation can be readily traced to an actress who, in Rome Open City (1945), by Roberto Rossellini (to which Mamma Roma is dedicated), fitted in nicely with a political, sentimental, neorealist study of victimhood, but had moved far beyond such platitudes and was ready for mature exploration. Pasolini, thinking to send forward a scenario containing his donnish and palpably dead-on-arrival morphology (in no way rising to the polyphonic considerations of von Trier’s Nymphomaniac), had put in the driver’s seat a protagonist who had (in the ensuing 17 years) become somewhat larger than life and certain to explode an idealistic package meant for small people. Unsurprisingly, the director and his star were at each other’s throat from beginning to end. (Pasolini, in damage-control mode, has been quoted as saying, if doing the film again, he’d still cast Magnani.)

Needing a team-player with plucky optics to bring about a saga demonstrating a law against all bids for well-being along lines of urban, free-lance, profitable work, what Pasolini got was a performer who could only live with herself when portraying a freedom as dangerous as it is exciting. We’ve come upon Mamma Roma at a moment when her sense of freedom—so buoying that it leaves her almost delirious—can be put into motion as never before (she having fulfilled all obligations to Carmine within their sex trade association). Her plans for a new life with traction that could lead to heights of financial and social rewards have two significant phases: leaving the provincial coastal town where the action begins, in favor of the metropolis of Rome where she has arranged to maintain a vegetable stall in an outdoor market; and reassembling her link with her son, Ettore, an adolescent who had been living in the now unacceptable town, fairly near to her but under the auspices of a guardian, presumably financed by her late-night earnings. Cutting from the wedding—where she virtually holds court, being a guest at that ominous and ambitious table, but a guest with mobility far outstripping all the others—she is at an outdoor fair (childsplay in view of her outdoor destination) beholding her presumed bundle of joy—during the reception she had declared, “Children, they’re really something…”—sitting inert in a carriage seat on a carousel going round in circles. Right from that get-go, then, Pasolini’s embedding his baroque take on dynamics (perhaps the teen is gloomy in face of being removed from the healthy wilderness where he could drift at a portal where help is apt to magically materialize) has come as a slo-pitch for her own slashing and smashing mode of motion.

Mamma Roma’s, Ettore (Hector, recalling the greatest fighter for Troy in the Trojan War), is someone with little fight in him, a cute, shiftless slug who would be a speed bump for a mother looking to move ahead by channels muddied by his priorities—she comes to tell him at one point, “You won’t get ahead if you hang around with losers”; and at another point she warns, “We won’t get along if you turn into a comrade.” But for Magnani in the catbird seat, Ettore’s unsurprising shortfall cues a Mamma who is so much more than a Mamma, thereby endowing the action with implications the screenwriting could not have aimed for. On first beholding the gangling, scowling lump in that toddler’s ride, she is restrained, a bit anxious. On seeing no sign of him at a new revolution of the play station, she seeks him out, catches a glimpse of him shoplifting and says to herself, “Son of a bitch!” He catches up with some friends, likewise in Sunday best clothes, magnetized, thereby, by ancient ways; and she calls to him, “Don’t you have a kiss for your [newly minted] mother?” He doesn’t; and she says, “Damn it!” with growing misgiving but hardly with heartbreak. When he asks, “Why are you taking me to Rome?” her reply is more on the order of squelching a jerk than building something special, to wit, “To keep the Pope company!” She gets out of him that he’s dropped out of school (“I get by…”). Her candid approach to getting off on the right foot is more redolent of vetting a mortgage than an elicitation of mutual affection. (Clearly she has had nothing directly to do with him and so she’s taken on a virtual stranger—“How you’ve grown! I hardly recognize you. I’ve been waiting 16 years, and it hasn’t been easy!” “Did you think I’d stay the same?” is his riposte, unaware of its irony.) From out of this orientation, with more resemblance to warring picket sentries trading insults than to the promising beginning of family intimacy, Magnani’s enactment of a hapless overreacher makes pretty clear that he is more like a shard of her exuberance than a vital necessity. (Whereas Pasolini lived with his sainted mother till the day he died, Magnani never knew her father and when she was 3 she was taken from her mother and brought home by her impoverished maternal grandmother, then striking out from what could hardly be called a family when she was 14.) She tells Ettore at this commencement of uprooting him from beachcomber ways: “I didn’t have a child to turn him into a hick.”

Magnani was often referred to as “La Loupa” [She-Wolf], and before getting her and Ettore’s show on the road she is visited by that newlywed/weasel, “Carmine,” who could be referred to as “Singer.” His songster status here involves the threat of singing to Ettore about his mother’s workload during the years the boy was busily avoiding school and busily shoplifting. Carmine’s in-laws failing to follow through on a job they promised him, he decides that pimping on her energies until she earns 200,000 lire has become his next milestone. The protagonist, as written into the script, would of course cave in, being totally intent on domestic advantages. But La Loupa would imbue that shakedown with considerable suspense. It being for only “…ten days if you put your mind to it,” Mamma Roma plays along, not insomuch as the disruption is brief (her way of cherishing her freedom clearly stems from a hard-won coherence seriously obviating her former way of life), but rather that she would require an untroubled period to play along with Ettore’s not very promising kinetics, which is to say, we are here about attentiveness to mutual interactive contributions that could satisfy her wider range of freedom, however unsteadily perceived. While pinned down at the beach/port, she chafes at Ettore’s slurred speech, the local dialect, “like those hicks down there” (kids his age who play cards in the stairwell). Out of the blue (or, as portrayed, out of an instinct to share carnal equilibrium; and, as written, out of an instinct to express being cool), she induces him to dance with her to one of her tango records, and the optics are fascinating. So many commentators regard that moment as Oedipal disarray; and yet the virtual hopelessness of this, what amounts to, abduction of a not reliable stranger has to be seen as an important factor. Starting with the hardly seraglio-salient request, “Watch out for my corn,” she proceeds toward fun-with-a-purpose and notes—far more the talent scout than the doting mother—“What a stick you are!” (The amateur actor playing Ettore has in fact an old man’s stiffness and awkwardness of physical presence.) The reconnoitre goes rather well—“Do you like it?”/ “I sure do…”—and, true to the script’s being about trying to patch up an old and large gulf between them (open to various angles), she tells him that, as she has demonstrated, she would sing the song on the turntable while dancing with his father. (The coda of this episode, her seeing Ettore, unaware of her presence, practicing tango steps, covers the real point[s] of this movingly designed and performed vignette. Mamma Roma says, sotto voce, “How you like to dance, my son.”)

But the thing about Ettore, which soon becomes abundantly apparent on their making good the traverse to Rome, is that he never sticks to anything very long. He soon drops out of school, again—“I’m already sick of it,” he tells a promiscuous young woman, Bruna, who is but one of many distractions and has become a laughing stock of the outer suburbs where they live, while in fact she exudes a poise and steadiness of purpose far exceeding his and works a stall close to Mamma Roma’s, noting, “She’s so beautiful. Her hair is still black,” a generosity that our protagonist cannot muster, saying, “She looks like a monkey…” He comes to hanging out with “losers” his mother hoped would be less prevalent in the big city. When his mother refuses to give him a whack of money (to buy a gold chain for Bruna), he steals and sells many of Mamma Roma’s records, including the tango number. In what amounts to a last ditch effort to right this segment of her renaissance by way of co-habiting with someone gainfully employed, the would-be eclectic approaches the priest at whose church she has become a parishioner, far less out of piety than as a networking hotbed. The priest does not subscribe to that form of social media, advising, instead, that the boy (and she) “start at zero” and find an honest money-making place wherever it appears. She is not reluctant to tell him, “I didn’t bring him into this world to be a laborer.” The holy man’s mantra, “Send him to school. Teach him a trade,” fails to coincide with her having been touched by the “Italian [post-War-economic] Miracle,” and its impetus toward entrepreneurial, heartfelt designing, architectonics. Therefore, Mamma Roma—and let’s recall that she is known by that rubric years before (tentatively) tending to Ettore, during her first (abortive) involvement with entrepreneurial excitement including dreams of shifting her activities to Rome—reaches back to her previous way of making waves to position her now virtually hopeless (at least as Magnani plays it) associate in a cool hub where networking could overcome lack of distinguished spirit and wit. She zeroes in on a leading restaurateur (and fellow-parishioner) along lines of paying a friend and former colleague in the sex industry, namely, Biancofiore, to, first of all, seduce the church-goer and, then, be interrupted by her “husband” (Biancofiore’s pimp) and blackmailed into acceding to Ettore’s becoming a waiter at his carefully crafted concern. The bite of the social arena where Mamma Roma had hoped to spread her wings –“It’s a different world here…” she tells Ettore as they approach their new home—is underlined by the rural pimp recognizing the devout, big city mover to have been the pimp of “Big Tooth Maria.”

Still undeterred, Mamma Roma goes on to relish her son’s seemingly having a natural swagger when serving tables in the happening square which the establishment takes over. His coordination and conviviality are a surprising change of pace, a study, in fact, of how close (and how slippery) getting real can be. In the lead-up to this dynamic promise, she buys him a motorcycle. “Come and see the sun,” she urges him, to get him out of bed. During this light-hearted moment she dreams on: “Soon you’ll be driving a car and you’ll take me for a drive!” Here the protagonist, in the midst of her troubled hopes, falls within the screenplay’s motive to demonize consumer vigor. But Magnani—hanging on to Ettore’s waist as the bike races ahead of other vehicles and yelling out, to those being surpassed, “Jerks!”—squashes the mousetrap in the course of reasserting her own priorities as La Loupa. She had also enlisted Biancofiore to take Ettore to bed, the point being, “Next time he sees her [Bruna] he’ll spit in her face!” But, when all the schemes are well-completed—he wanting to take Biancofiore to the zoo on Sunday “to see the elephants”—the lump she’d invested in soon quits his job, returns to the feeble drifting and petty crime he can’t do without, gets entangled with Carmine coming back for more, gets arrested for attempting to make off with the radio belonging to a hospital patient played by the same actor who gets ripped off in Bicycle Thieves, gets deliriously ill, gets strapped to a bed and dies as seen from a perspective recalling Mantegna’s “Lamentation over the Dead Christ.”

The special work we’re put through, by this vastly divided film, concerns where all that chaos and desperation leaves a protagonist who could very easily be mistaken for a simple, easily readable, grief-stricken “Mamma.” On completing her first farewell tour (the 200,000 lire sprint) as prompted by the deadly Carmine, she strides in semi-darkness along the hookers’ track, triumphant and full of witty observation. “So long, Dolls, she salutes her colleagues. She tells a soldier, who materializes from out of the darkness, “I’m not hustling;” and when he replies, “About time,” she laughs uproariously. Then she tells him—after declaring, “I like you”—“In all my years here, nobody ever knew who I was.” Though she goes on to tell the soldier about being married, at 14, to an old (70) fascist friend of Mussolini, allowed to indulge in graft as a developer, and that is Pasolini’s tightening the noose on the character’s range of sensibility, the way Magnani, ebullient as only she could be, short-circuits that pap in turning it into her veering away from her real mysteriousness (abetted by the nocturnal cinematography) represents her variegated stellar contribution to inducing from the morose Pasolini—She could have been assailing him , on the occasion of one of those fights with him, in terms of, “What a stick you are!”—an upgrade of his terminally prudent and abashed brush with primordiality. In the scene following that, now at a church service in Rome, she whispers to her (alien) son, “It’s a different world here.” And though she attempts to throw herself from her kitchen window (in the aftermath of that weirdly supplemented death) and her manner is one of seemingly total devastation, if you’ve been following her closely you won’t buy into that for a moment, but instead will take seriously her sense of “different world” (as including the craft/design “miracles” far more vitally representative of real Italian modern history than the loopy fantasy our academic antiquarian wants to install).

Magnani’s performance, for all its rebellion (and the DVD Supplement gives us Pasolini loyalists [including Bernardo Bertolucci] in rabid denial of any depth at all coming from the actress [matching Bertolucci’s excising Fellini and Antonioni from an account of the history of modern cinema where we’re supposed to see Pasolini’s being the only incisive Italian filmmaker in sight, amidst Spaghetti Westerns and “Italian comedies”), instinctively coheres with a cinematographic strategy here light years beyond the writing. Pasolini (Bertolucci notwithstanding) put on notice to deliver, by La Dolce Vita (1960), La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962), sets up his cameras on those suburban Roman “wastelands” which—particularly in the sightlines of Antonioni—happen, for anyone with an alert design sense, to be cauldrons of gorgeous, quite miraculous spatiality. The scrubby fields adjacent to new, quite (architecturally) nondescript apartment buildings (but catching the light impressionistically) afford remarkable studies of composition, texture and light. There is a particularly memorable marshalling of these sensuous vintages near the outset of Ettore’s meandering while his mother hits the ground running in getting her outdoor vegetable stall (with glimpses of those fields) into satisfactory animation. On being teased by another salesperson nearby for her loudly calling out, “Buy my fava beans!” she shouts, “Hey, potato vendor! Let me shout! I’m happy!” Ettore has been excluded from his friends’ pillaging a local hospital and, as he stands in the fields wondering what to do with himself, a panning camera shot embraces the sunlight upon hills in the misty distance, the new structures in the near distance, the sandy pathways with their foliage nearby—and, there also,  stone ruins of ancient structures. With visual buoyancy in the air, Ettore chooses to flop down near a shaft of at-least-medieval formation, and he, too, seems somehow extinct, his dead weight, his inertia, being a visual affront to the encouragements going for nought. Barely able to keep his eyes open, he shambles over to a pillar and rests his head sideways upon its uppermost point, winding up like a Brancusi sculpture; or, perhaps, a gargoyle. He then clumps along the dusty path, accompanied by the classical musical composition, Concerto in D Minor (Largo), by Antonio Vivaldi, aptly sustaining the call to be alive to a part to play well. Encountering a few girls his age sitting in tall grasses, he flirts by passing behind the ruins and then extending his back and head backwards like a gargoyle without malice. We see, way off, a viaduct shattered by time. Bruna arrives, and he gives her a locket with a little cameo of the Virgin Mary. “I find it better than the skull” [she tried to cadge from one of the other guys the previous day], she tells him. “Death is horrible. Are you afraid of death?” (Such an earthy matter being very compatible with that countryside, we come to see with special force Ettore’s rootlessness in face of a task of coherence that, Pasolini would say, is impossible in such a hell-hole; but which Mamma Roma would say, happily, is doable by virtue of the vastly encouraging forces at their present address.) Ettore brags, “No [I’m not afraid]. When I was a kid I almost died a few times, from pneumonia…” [a bid to turn the blame on the environment?]. On a walk, along what was perhaps a canal bed, now drained for development, he charms her with knowing the names of the insects and birds they hear. And the culmination of this ragged idyll has them entering an abandoned garage—in flight, sort of; but not very playable due to those who shun the darkness of that track where Mamma Roma caught sight of her “happiness.”

In a follow-up incident to that day of spurious promise, Ettore tells Bruna about his dispensing with school (and thereby shutting a major approach to a beckoning cool easily glimpsed but seldom seen). “What’s the use? I don’t understand a thing…It’s boring [to him, struggle’s boring—RIP] and it gives me a headache…” Bruna—partly devious, partly consulting her ace-in-the-hole of robust affection—reminds him that this escapism is hard on his mom. “Your mother cries…” He, candidly settling into the abortiveness of the very late construction of domesticity (and its confusedly being a factor of diversification, far from all-absorbing), snaps back, “Don’t worry. I didn’t ask her to cry.” Bruna presses on, “But you love your mother, don’t you?” “What do I care about her?” is his first standpoint. Then he modifies it to, “I love her a little, though… I’d cry if she died…” [anticipating her tears about murderous traction, at the end]. The stunted, misdirected affection of that gesture speaks to the imminent crisis represented by Carmine (who addresses her—no longer rooted in her A-game, as she was, on the short-term [faux-comeback] track—“Hey scumbag…You ruined me [she should have got a big laugh out of that!] I didn’t even know women like you existed…” [very true, from the Magnani perspective]), its (from a sluggish sense of “family”) scandalously obtuse option of letting both hopeless pests get lost. The decisiveness of her disruption of Carmine’s wedding party includes a killer instinct concerning such figures, the subsequent cordiality, near the end of the event, notwithstanding. Back on the midnight track, with Biancofiore (a persona from the provincial past, now having become an inflected form of metrosexuality), she acknowledges her solitary besiegement. “How you end up is your own fault… This fog rusts your bones…” Fatigue and self-hatred take over (for a while); and she tells the younger and more easily buoyant woman (who cracks, “Have a drink! You’re not that young any more…”), “When Ettore was born he didn’t want to walk down this road” [infants get a pass; no one else does]. Responding in the only way to keep her Mojo intact, Biancofiore bids her adieu on that dynamic flood plain, alertly having in view the best way for her to continue, “…Who put all this garbage in your head?” In a thrilling thread of dramatic dialogue (casting an MRI-like vision tracing the recovery of her guts), Mamma Roma laughs—not a completely bitter laugh—and calls out, “A priest!” Her young friend tells her, “Do your soul-searching by yourself!” The reluctant sex-trader declares, “God, I’ve got an awful stomach ache…Like I ate my heart out…” She traces whole families of criminals going back many generations and wants to believe (fortunately, only for a short while), “If they’d had money, they’d have been good people…Whose fault is that? Who’s responsible? Explain to me why I’m a nobody!” And so it is that, Ettore’s death confirmed, after staging a histrionic breakdown at the food stall (paparazzi sniffing out one of their golden moments) and racing home through the streets with many anxious well-wishers in tow, she is restrained from throwing herself from that moderate height. And from that height her face hardens to a game-face and she glares at the dome of the church in the distance.

She had told Ettore, on his being en route to a questionable career of looting the hospital, “Stupid loafer without an ounce of brains. You don’t have a shred of pride! Irresponsible fool!” This would be the screenplay’s depiction of a weak protagonist duped into a bourgeois death trap. But—as with films as disparate as Kiss Me Deadly, The Misfits, Roman Holiday and Last Year at Marienbad—someone else on the set, someone getting no credit for having the balls to fire off some thrilling and hard truths, has rendered that scenario a true work of genius and a gift to those of us having more than stilted needs.

by Sam Juliano

Mid 70′s degree weather and one sound drenching have ushered in May with at least a parting salute to April in the long-anticipated weather transition in the northeast and midwest.  Speaking of transitions, the WitD hierarchy would like to extend our very best wishes to Laurie and Len Buchanan, who have recently relocated from Crystal Lake, Illinois (outside of Chicago) to their new beautiful home in Boise, Idaho.  After twenty years paying their dues in one of the toughest winter zones in the US, I’d say it’s high time our good friends have moved on to more hospitable environs, at least in terms of more benign atmospherics.  May is normally a fabulous month for those who love gardening and the outdoors, and the preparations are on for proms, graduations, and closing exams in college classes.  In the Juliano household, it has always been amusing to note that four of our five kids have May birthdays (Sammy on the 15th, Danny on the 17th, Jeremy on the 27th and Melanie on the 30th).  Always tough when you want to stage parties, and yes I have played those numbers repeatedly with little success.  Only our dear Jillian who turns 14 in December is the odd one in this scenario.  I’d like to take this opportunity to extend my very best wishes to my friend Craig Kennedy of Living in Cinema who will be attending the Cannes Film Festival for the second year in a row.  I hope he has a great time, sees some extraordinary films, and enjoys the acclaimed food and weather in the beautiful French resort.

Our very dear friend Pat Perry is heading over to Germany this week, while other dear friends, the artist Terrill Welch and her husband David are touring Europe in the vacation of a lifetime.  The very best to them all.  I am greatly looking ahead to pictures.

This coming week will have me once again chaperoning for the school’s annual trip to Washington D.C. – with a brief stop en route to the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia – from early Wednesday morning (May 7) to late Friday night (May 9).  Unlike last year when my son Danny attended at an eighth grader, I won’t have any of my own kids on the trip (Jillian attends next year and Jeremy the year after that) but I’ll be having some fun touring the sites and walking up a storm with my lifelong friend Steve Russo, who has chaperoned for well over a decade.  Hence, next year’s MMD will largely feature the activities and photos connected with this wonderful trip.  Word has it that the final day of the trip will have temperatures breaking 80.

The Romantic Film Countdown will be launching on Monday, May 19th, with the appearance of the film that placed in the Number 101 position and will continue five days a week well into September.  The Fish Obscuro series will move to Saturday of every week, with some even on Sunday on weeks where picture book reviews are not posted.  Any opera, music or theater reviews that are written will be posted on the weekends accordingly.  Jim Clark’s magnificent film scholarship will continue to post on every other Wednesday.  I would like to extend my deepest thanks to Tony d’Ambra for his sidebar navigation of the past weeks.  The beautiful countdown banner and the poster on the Take 2 publishing venture on Steven Spielberg are up and look great!

Lucille and I (and two of the kids-Jeremy and Danny) attended the latest concert edition of the Rutgers Symphony Band on Thursday night at the Nicholas Hall of the Mason Gross Performing Arts Center at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.  Lucille’s sister Elaine’s son Eric -the youngest of her three sons -is the ‘principal’ saxophonist, and was part of a terrific performances that took in some rather eclectic, if  works by noted if obscure composers.

The 3rd annual Montclair Film Festival was held this past week to excellent attendance and acclaim in various locations in the culturally-attuned town Lucille and I visit quite often.  This is the town where we met out very good friend, the author John Grant (Paul Barnett) and where we attend art house features at the Bow-Tie Cinemas on Bloomfield Avenue.  The festival was held at the Bow-Tie, Wellmont, Bellevue and Kimberly Academy, and the town was hopping with trolleys, a talk lounge on the site of the old Screening Room a few blocks from the Bow-Tie, lines of people and banners and balloons lining the various locations.  This festival is for real, and as New Jersey residents who live nearby we are proud they are moving forward with more films, events and talks with acclaimed artists.  We do not at this time have passes of any kind for this festival, and what with the jet lag from Tribeca, we only caught two films, both were ones we missed at Tribeca.  One, the sports comedy INTRAMURAL, was one of the silliest and juvenile films I’ve ever seen (it amazes me that people actually pay to see such sub-mental drivel, but heck we both forked over $14 each, so we can’t talk) but this is one the level of the worst of the stoner comedies.

However, the other film, the documentary THE OVERNIGHTERS was absolutely masterful, and I discuss it at length in the 4,200 word post that will be appearing over this MMD very shortly.

A mistake on the Film Forum website led us to believe that the spectacularly reviewed IDA was sold out on Saturday night.  As a result we came up empty, but plan to see this over the upcoming week.

The Overnights  **** 1/2     (Friday night)    Montclair Film Festival

Intramural  *     (Sunday afternoon)  Montclair Film Festival