Though the word remains untranslated in the film’s English subtitles, Tulpan—the title of Sergei Dvortsevoy’s first dramatic feature—means “tulip.” It is also, of course, the name of the object of protagonist Asa’s desire, a beloved glimpsed only once, through the slats of a goat-pen (and not at all by the viewer). “God, is she beautiful!” exclaims Asa, a former sailor who dreams of being a shepherd with a flock, family, and yurt of his own on the vast flatlands of the Betpak-Dala (also known as the Hunger Steppe) of southern-central Kazakhstan. No tulip will grow here, so Asa scratches a crude drawing of one into the dry earth of the steppe, and later, with a ballpoint pen, he draws one on the underside of the collar of his sailor’s uniform, where he has similarly depicted all the things he longs for.
Dreams and aspirations linger below the dusty surface of Tulpan, and each of its characters expresses a secret desire for something that seems to lie just beyond the arid landscape’s distant horizon. Click here to read the rest of Leo Goldsmith’s review of Tulpan.
The film has yet to begin, but the foreboding is already underway. A moody, bluesy sax plays over the production and distribution cards, then the words “A true story” appear against a black screen. The music continues somberly, plaintively, as if a funeral were about to commence. And as it happens, that’s what Changeling will inadvertently channel. Trudging forth with an ominous gait, haunted from the outset by its own narrative and formal inevitability, Changeling is a musty lament for something long gone—a lost child perhaps, but more so this sepulchral cinema of quality. Watching it, one can only try to locate whatever semblance of life remains, then tramp the dirt down.
With metronomic efficiency our protagonist appears, kisses her nine-year-old boy awake, trolley-cars him off to school, works a hard day, and brings her son home, each beat deliberately declared to echo later in the story. As Christine Collins, a single mom who works as a telephone dispatcher in Los Angeles in 1928, Angelina Jolie seems amiss: fashionably decked in a tube dress and black bobbed weave, roller-skating through rows of phone operators, her super-sized lips burning crimson as she answers a portable receiver holstered around her neck; she’s all set for a Smithsonian historical diorama. She’s also, especially when lost in a calf-length trench coat, positively skeletal. So from the outset she looks stricken (with anorexia and portent), even though the script demands that an eternal bond be established between Christine and son Walter in fifteen minutes or less, which they forge through the emphatic repetition of the breezy, it’s-the-1920s greeting “Hey, sport.” On the weekend, Christine gets called into work and has to leave her son home alone. “I’m not afraid of the dark,” he says, as if prodded by an off-screen animal trainer. “I’m not afraid of anything.” Uh-oh. Then Jolie departs, looking back at the house one last time, the camera pulling away from Walter standing sadly at the window, music swelling. This is no ordinary goodbye. Indeed, this is how the film dispatches with Walter—right at the fifteen-minute mark, right on schedule.
For Kiyoshi Kurosawa, obliqueness often seems to be the order of the day. But hiding beneath his more forthrightly abstract films, like Barren Illusion, Charisma, and Bright Future, and lying closer to the surface of more generically situated works like Cure, Pulse, and Doppelganger, is the beating heart of a true melodramatist. If a film like Bright Future, with its loaded but still hard-to-suss-out metaphors (jellyfish equals social malaise…what now?), keeps its central character conflicts floating in a pool of visual expressionism and abstract ideas on generational anxiety, one could say it does so mostly to curb its own underlying moralism. The same could be said of Cure and Pulse, expertly crafted horror films, respectively, of the serial killer and ghost variety, that make grand, sweeping statements about the state of contemporary Japan, mainly its apathetic citizenry, which in both cases point towards apocalypse. Cure posits murder itself as a contagious social disease; and Pulse, though its ability to spook the viewer is nearly unparalleled (its game of withhold and reveal pays off the best horror dividends of any film this decade), is both naïve and chastising in its prophesizing of a technological doomsday, and, unsurprisingly, it has not aged well.
That Kurosawa masks his social critique in ghostly, vague affectation often gives him the tag of Abstract Auteur, though compared with willfully obscure directors like Lucrecia Martel and Claire Denis, he’s far more digestible. His latest film, Tokyo Sonata, moves away from his recent forays into toying with horror and sci-fi conventions, but it’s no less generic. Playing off the Japanese domestic drama, even seemingly purposely referencing Ozu in its title, Tokyo Sonata applies the trademark Kiyoshi Kurosawa tactics (hazy character motivations, eerily alienating mise-en-scène) to distract from an essentially straightforward narrative. Surely this is a film of immense misdirect, but Kurosawa’s always been something of a trickster, and Tokyo Sonata tricks us in an occasionally edifying way: it makes us look so closely at recognizable people—in this case one urban family living in quiet malcontent—that they become unfamiliar, only to then remind us that they were not all that different from us in the first place. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky’s review of Tokyo Sonata.
Forget the anxiety of influence: Steven Soderbergh’s anti-epic Che is haunted from first frame to last by the anxiety of legend. Against the unshakable confidence exhibited by his subject, Soderbergh evidences a conspicuously nervous and hesitating appreciation of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. This approach likely results from such a project’s unavoidable confrontation with the pop culture legacy of Che, as exemplified by the multiple generations of college-aged (very) would-be revolutionaries commodifying their dissent by sporting classic Chewear (featuring That Photo), likely manufactured in some third- world sweatshop. There’s probably no other 20th-century political figure, and symbol, as widely recognized and less understood than Guevara, and the gap between image and person is so wide that Soderbergh’s seemingly courageous decision to address it by being oblique and indirect leads him to the very place he wishes to avoid: mystification.
Soderbergh has spent so much of his filmmaking career creating a body of work more theoretically curious than experientially rewarding that it comes as no surprise that the back story to the production and exhibition of Che—the title of the four-hour-plus (with intermission) diptych of disparate jungle warfare actioners The Argentine and Guerilla—threatens to overshadow the actual content of the film. Not only do we have to contend with the special circumstances of Che’s release, both in the “road show” version referred to above and as separate films, but we have to take into account its place as the first ever film to employ the Red One, a digital camera with the build of a 16mm that’s able to anamorphically capture widescreen compositions. As with Soderbergh’s experiments with new technology and marketing strategies for Full Frontal and Bubble, the bells and whistles of Che fail to redeem a less than groundbreaking result.
Just over 50 years after his death, Max Ophuls may well be having his moment. Despite the continued unavailability of his Hollywood films (including, most frustratingly, Letter from an Unknown Woman), this year has seen the DVD releases of three of his greatest movies (La Ronde, La Plaisir, and The Earrings of Madame de…). These lovely Criterion Collection discs have provided a serendipitous prelude to the American debut of Rialto’s definitive, restored print of his infamous, magnificent final film, Lola Montes. It is tempting to try to make something of this surge of interest in Ophuls. Like Kenji Mizoguchi—the great Japanese director whose own oeuvre has also recently become more available on DVD, and one of only a handful of directors worthy of a comparison to Ophuls—his is a cinema of elegant, precise camera movement, where tracking shots reveal and negotiate complex chronologies and social hierarchies, particularly as they relate to questions of gender and femininity.
For those seeking to answer the question, “Why now?,” Ophuls’s preoccupation with woman, as subject and social category, provides the most obvious talking point: to a culture that has been forced in the past year to engage in a national political conversation about sexism, Ophuls must be as relevant now as ever. Andrew Sarris, the American writer probably most responsible for securing Ophuls’s reputation in this country, has made the point explicitly, positing an analogy between Lola Montes‘s deconstruction of America’s empty celebrity obsession and the political ascendance of Sarah Palin. But Sarris’s knowledge of and appreciation for Ophuls’s work is too deep to allow him to push heavily on the point. While we should rightly celebrate the renewed interest in Ophuls, there is a danger in straining too hard to find significance in its timing—of course, Ophuls is always relevant, but we do him a disservice by somehow reducing his movies to a comment on the present. His themes are persistent; his command of craft is practically unrivaled; his films are endlessly rewarding and enduringly watchable.
Syndicate this site