Kings of Pastry - 9/26, Film Forum

This movie is as cute and charming as you'd expect, which makes me self-conscious of being overly critical, as though I were appraising a child's artwork. Of course this is a film by respected artists, not a kid's picture, nor a reality TV show or a commercial (which it also resembles) so I'll try to get over that and just be honest.

Kings of Pastry is a documentary about the Meilleurs Ouvrier de France*; more particularly, one Chicago-based pastry chef's experience in that illustrious competition. Two other contestants are also interviewed/followed, but get far less screen-time. This confuses the narrative and causes one to wonder why our chef was chosen among the three to be the protagonist of the film. The only reason I can think of is that he's located in America, and he's also the only one of them to speak English in the film. As can be expected, the skeleton provided by the classic "going for the goal" structure is filled out with people making cakes and talking about making cakes.

Aesthetically everything about the movie runs opposite to my tastes: it uses the most cliché French music imaginable; its subjects visibly try not to act awkward in front of the camera but, inundated with reality TV etc, are better at that than people were in the past and are consequently less interesting, inhabiting a middle-zone of dull simulacrum; it's punctuated by quotes about being the best, having the drive, and that kind of crap. The video quality is terrible: my assumption that the big screen is the best place to see any film was called into question, and given the incredible leaps in quality DV has made in the past ten years as well as the high profile of the filmmakers, I was definitely taken aback. Even the font of the captions gives it a cheap made-on-my-PC feel.

Poor image quality is never too hard to adjust to. What's worse is that all the information presented in the film comes from interview footage and text on the screen, two things I find irritating (particularly the latter) and surprising from director D. A. Pennebaker, whose Dont Look Back is very much concerned with building a kind of narrative out of action-footage fragments alone. By "information" I don't just mean facts about the contest, the chefs, or France; the very story itself is spelled out through captions and expository dialogue like a bad comic book.

As far as I can tell, most of the enjoyment in the film comes from two things:

     1. quirkiness of French people, particularly how much they love food and the way they speak English
     2. delight in looking at elaborate, fragile, and hideous post-nouveau things sitting, breaking, and being eaten
  Both of these have their limits, and for me those limits are low.

Having been subjected to many hours' worth of the Food Network by various girls throughout my life, I can say that this movie is almost identical to the ever-popular pastry programs on that channel. The Kings of Pastry trailer*, which I've seen four times (every time I've come to Film Forum, in fact), contains all the charm and humor of the film itself, as well as the best lines and none of the boring narrative, so unless you have a hardcore interest in cakes/pastries I'd recommend just sticking to that.

Bram Stoker's Dracula - 9/19, BAM

Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula: over the top, vivid, Brechtian, crafty, hilarious, definitely not "Bram Stoker's".

It follows the novel no less closely than all the other adaptations I've seen, but its deviation is highlighted by the use of voiced-over text directly from the novel and many authentic details which contrast with a sense of style that seems rather out of place in a Victorian setting- but maybe it isn't all that much. For example, Gary Oldman as our favorite Count appears on the London scene with a decadent lavender suit and top hat with matching sunglasses. It turns out, sunglasses did exist in the 1890s, and some historians believe that doctors would commonly prescribe them to victims of syphilis due to sensitive eyes the disease supposedly incurred. The thought of syphilis is bound to sex: a sex-disease, not hard to connect to vampirism  (as a Ms. Chou does here), another famous cause of sensitivity to light. This amounts to just one of many little detail loops that create this translucent curtain of sexual nightmare, tying together the perceived excesses in the final decade of two different centuries.

The extravagance of Dracula's costumes and decor is matched by the acting, especially Oldman's classic Romanian accent (complete with dramatic pauses as jolting as some people's impersonations of William Shatner) and Anthony Hopkins' cackling portrayal of Dr. Van Helsing. Tom Waits gets a surprising amount of screen time as Renfield, Drac's insane servant. Some people dislike highly theatrical acting in films, but  I enjoy seeing a strong actor really go "out there".  Also, it's hard to take issue with a lack of realism in a movie so expressionist in technique (not to mention the plot), and none of the weird performances have the dull ring of poor quality except for Keanu Reaves', who always sucks. Old-fashioned cinematic tricks with mirrors, autonomous shadows, and superimposed eyes add to the playful intensity.

While for most of the movie, at least, the narration is directly from the novel, much of the accompanying dialogue is not. This sometimes makes for humorous counterpoint, like when Mina(Winona Ryder)'s voice explains that "Lucy is a pure and virtuous girl" as Lucy fondles a man's bowie knife and exclaims "oh it's sooo big" etc., all this after the two girls giggle over illustrations of intercourse from Burton's 1001 Nights. The sexuality that the novel so obviously drips with is made beyond explicit by new inventions/interpretations:  the girls' garden frolic in a storm becomes a make-out session (ambiguously under Dracula's influence); victims of the bite moan and convulse in orgasmic seizures; Dracula in some kind of batfaced gorilla monster form fucks Lucy on a stone alter before Mina's eyes; we are treated to an excerpt from a humorous Van Helsing lecture on venereal disease; and a passionate love scene between the villain and heroine wherein she hungrily licks and suckles a cut on his chest to become one with him, one like him. This last item is the culmination of an entire romance between Drac' and Mina (where the narrated text veers sharply from the original), perhaps long divined between the lines by close readers and deviant fans, which along with the origin story is the most significant departure from the novel. This original concoction has Vlad the Impaler's wife commit suicide during the Crusades, for which he curses God and is thus consigned to his demonic fate. Hundreds of years later he believes Mina is his wife's reincarnation or something (details here are vague), and certain aspects of the film seem to confirm this. But Dracula is highly hypnotic, and with the shadow of his claws and outline of his eyes plastered ubiquitously across the screen comes the constant suggestion that all of this is somehow under his control, the extent of which even he may not be aware. Whether or not Mina truly loves him or is just under his spell, they both believe it's genuine-- even in the end when she cuts off his head.

The Mina of the novel is an incorruptible paragon of virtue whose purity mobilizes and strengthens the small group of men who battle Dracula, her opposite, who is not portrayed as nearly so alluring or seductive as he is here. Simply put, she would not want to sleep with him. Hence my biggest qualm with the movie: its title. Bram Stoker, in his puritan angst that so informed the dark visions of the novel (which, mostly because of all this purity and virtue, goes downhill from roughly the same point the movie begins to turn away from its source) would have been disgusted. It's wonderful that the same myth can be told so often with such variety, and I believe top-billing should go to the storyteller: this is Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula.

On Dangerous Ground - 9/17, MOMA

Written by Buzz Bezzerides (Kiss Me Deadly), Nicholas Ray's cop classic begins at a simmer and accelerates to a kind of explosion not quite midway, when it comes almost to a full stop. It's hard to adjust to the changes: the scenery goes from black to white; the narrative goes from a straight line to a meandering stagger; the cast of characters, save for the protagonist, is exchanged entirely for another of a very different sort. The division into two acts is as striking as in, say, Kurosawa's High and Low, but where that film takes a suspenseful closet drama as far as it can go and replaces it with a welcome foray into an action-packed noir underworld, On Dangerous Ground disappointed my interest in the original storyline and my excitement about its setting by going the other direction.

The first act is the smoldering story of three NYC cops trying to find a gang of killers. It slowly dawns on Robert Ryan's character that his job is thankless, lonely, and hard, and he takes his frustration out on the stoolies and minor crooks he encounters along the line. Packed with incredible details (too-good-to-be-true "Chandleresque" noiralogue; handheld shots to simulate confusion and adrenaline; torrents of sexual tension; every glance, gesture, facial expression, and object is significant and conveys the pathetic horror of this man's life), it all ends too soon when our man goes too far (moving toward us slowly, exasperated, teeth grit, these words drop gruffly then explode from Ryan in a voice like frustrated Kirk Douglas': "Why do you make me do it? You know you're gonna talk... I'm gonna make you talk. I always make you punks talk! Why do you do it?! Why?!!" -beating commences-) and is relocated to a murder case upstate, in a snowy small town.

Every Nicholas Ray film I've seen deals on some level with force. The boiling anger of Ryan's justice-meting motherfucker brings up some basic questions about morals, specifically those of the inheritors of the monopoly of violence, a difficult duty that is apparently necessary for the survival of society. The other major Ray theme is the psychological confinement to a certain path or way of life that his characters experience, often symbolized by physical entrapment like Ryan's narrow city beat, and it's obvious how nicely the two themes fit together.  But after crashing his car in the woods in pursuit of the small-town killer (accompanied by the bloodthirsty father of the victim), Ryan's character is suddenly free of any social or physical barriers, and is alone in the snow with his task and his tendencies. Free will is measured as ability to defy fate- will he cross the line, let his anger dictate his decision, or will he manage to overcome his own psychology and follow through with the case based on a system of ethics?

Unfortunately this discussion becomes only more and more obfuscated until by the end it seems to be abandoned entirely. First there is the shotgun-wielding hillbilly dad, who continues to announce his intention to execute the murderer immediately upon apprehension. It's unclear whether he is meant to represent the bad side of Ryan's character or act as a sort of foil- perhaps both, but the protagonists' position is inconsistent when not totally vague. It isn't long before they come to the house of a young blind woman, played by Ida Lupino, who of course happens to be the killer's brother. While her performance is sublime and the attention to detail that makes the first act so wonderful still provides much interest, the now-meandering story falls apart completely with her introduction and the rest of the movie is a slow resolution of the pursuit, punctuated by monologues and culminating in Ryan's out-of-nowhere conviction to become less of a hardass.

For all that, the second half isn't bad, and while sometimes boring it offers its own pastoral splendor. The first half, taken separately, could be the best film noir I've ever seen-- highly recommended.

Renoir Double-Feature - 9/17, MOMA

Boudu, Saved from Drowning     deserves its classic status

I always forget how aggressive Renoir can be with his satire. I was troubled by the problem-solving violence of Carne's Port of Shadows (still an excellent film!), so I couldn't help but smile a little bit when I read that Renoir was telling people it justified fascism- a man so hardcore in his humanism he wages his own kind of war with the other side. The "other side" is a long shore that encompasses cynicism, hopelessness, and all kinds of chauvinism.

If you want to see a film about people who are insipid, lustful, self-centered, and bigoted that still manages to affirm the spirit of mankind and ultimate beauty of the world Boudu, Saved from Drowning is just the thing. The print they showed at the MOMA was badly damaged, but the story pulled me in so much I quickly got used to it. The wall-to-wall comedy includes slapstick, mismatched sex pairings, and a wonderfully out-there performance by Michel Simon as a retarded drifter. Sex (including an affair and a gray rape) is dealt with pretty frankly, and there is a certain ominousness that lurks behind the joyful farce the film has become by its conclusion.

A Day in the Country     minor and great

This pretty, nostalgic 40-minute film was cobbled together from fragments of an unfinished project Renoir shot in 1936. A Parisian bourgeois middle-aged couple take their daughter and her fiance on a trip to "the country" where two young fishermen jocularly conspire to "make love" to the mother and daughter. They manage to distract the men with fishing poles and row the ladies down the river in little boats. The Hemingway lookalike who courts the daughter gets her in some bushes and pounces - she resists strongly but once he has his lips on hers, her mind seems to have changed. A similar scene occurs in Boudu, and the coincidence certainly raised my eyebrow. We fade back on the couple lying together, the girl upset and the man uncomfortable. A very brief scene tacked on at the end shows her return years later with her husband. The one-time lovers re encounter each other and proclaim their everlasting love, then she reluctantly leaves again and the film ends abruptly. Lightly-scathing satire on the clueless city folk and a gruff cameo from the director add to the joy created by the images: gorgeous shots of natural scenery fill out the bare narrative, and there are some particularly fine examples of Renoir's noted affection for the movement of water- inherited from his father, perhaps?

While in no way a masterpiece, its beauty and conciseness have me rate it just a little higher than "worth seeing".

Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King - 9/14, Anthology Film Archives

Who Is Ludwig?

Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-86), "the last Bavarian king", also called "the fairy tale king", an eccentric ruler and major patron of the arts who died mysteriously the day after being deposed on grounds of mental illness.

By Way of Comparison

Ludwig is unlike any film I've seen. The things I felt while watching it were similar to feelings I had watching Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Jubilee, the more experimental of Herzog's '70s movies, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and some things by Peter Greenaway.

Tech Spex

German, 1972. Dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Color. 2 hours, 20 minutes; broken up into two parts of roughly equal length. 28 scenes, each introduced by an intertitle. Low-grade film stock, projected at the Anthology Film Archives theater from a DVD that was clearly mastered from videocassette. It was full-screen and didn't seem trimmed, but I can't be sure. 

More Importantly

The movie consists mainly of Ludwig ranting over the music of Wagner. We become familiar with his favored court, a small group of men, and his favored topics, a small group of complaints. Sometimes the Wagner melts into pop music from the thirties, and there are moments when bits of American radio serials like "The Shadow" and "Superman" can be heard. Some actors play multiple characters, and some characters are played by multiple actors. Some scenes are more surreal than others, and at one point there is a dancing Hitler.

The shots are composed and lit like paintings. Nude human-statue babes hold torches or lounge in almost every scene. The entire thing was shot on a stage with lots of smoke, minimal props, and 19th Century art back-projected onto a sheet behind the action. This makes the depth of field odd, especially when Ludwig's shadow is cast onto the open world behind him. The art thus projected includes landscape painting, wallpaper, and architectural sketches/designs. Sometimes the result looks pretty crappy, but sometimes it's sublime.

Three unexplained color-tinted blurry handheld close-up interview-style monologues from minor characters are really wonderful.

What the Author Said

"The story of the last Bavarian King with his euphoria, his anxieties, his dreams told in a style of an oratorio or a medieval passion. Present and past are combined in a film of Wagnerian scenes, music of the thirties, Bavarian legends, ‘Oktoberfest’ waxworks, magic lantern, still life, surrealism, elements of silent films, guillotine, quotations from Goethe, Brecht, Valentin, and Shakespeare" --director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

I missed most of that stuff but I still liked the movie.

A Challenge

While being able to appreciate a good shot here and there, I was bored by the mostly static shots, I was baffled by the poetry, I rolled my eyes at the theatrics. Then about halfway through something clicked and I figured out how to watch it. After a particularly melodramatic monologue, the king walks away from the camera, then stops and kneels. Snow pours down and a beam of light falls directly on him. The shot is among the most gorgeous I've seen in any movie, and it holds while the Wagner swirls and swells. I'd guess the shot is nearly five minutes long, totally still except for the falling snow. I was able then to follow the music as if what I were doing was listening to music, and to see the image as if I were looking at a painting, like I would in a gallery, listening to music and enjoying a painting at the same time. This was the key, to approach each scene as a combination of other art forms: drama, poetry, historical literature, painting, sculpture, orchestral music, and kitsch. I've never thought of a movie in those terms before, but with this in mind I was able to navigate through the world of Ludwig, and in this way my sensibilities, patience, and approach to cinema were all  expanded.

Past is Still Past to the Past

I still missed a lot, though, because of my minuscule knowledge of German history, which is what the film is actually about. From what I've read, Syberberg's theme is always along the lines of "what made the Nazis?", and Ludwig writhes under the shadow of German history between his death and World War II. I excitedly await this film's return to me, when I shall be more ready to access it- though I'm not sure I could handle this type of material for seven hours, which is what his later Our Hitler, also playing at Anthology this month, seems likely to be.

Martin - 9/13, BAM

Martin...

is the only film by George A. Romero that's truly amazing, among the greatest works of American Grindhouse.

is very smart, very tragic and very beautiful.

has a cast made up of average-looking people rather than the abnormal beauties eternally populating Hollywood worlds.

includes tongue in cheek humor that doesn't disrupt the seriousness of the story.

leaves everything to the viewer.

is a highly sympathetic character.

slides into dreams/memories(?) without boundaries, sounds from different scenes overlapping.

has gore so tactful you cringe or look away despite the fact that the blood is bright orange.

has a slightly out-there synth soundtrack.

manages to be sexy in spite of everything.

delivers, without any of the serious problems that are mainstays of grindhouse like bad dubbing,  long boring montages, unbearable dialogue, terrible acting, or blooper-reel material (boom mic in frame, etc.)

has a fucking sweet ending.

begins with no fanfare, or logos, or even black leader- immediately the screen is filled with people getting on the train. In this first quick shot a brief exchange occurs and the story is already rolling. The credits appear sporadically over what can either be called a very long prologue or a kind-of-short first act wherein  a very young man prepares, then attacks and murders, then drinks the blood of a girl on the train.

has cameos by Romero and special effects man Tom Savini that both impress in their naturalism and humor.

is a neorealist document of the suburbs, streets, and alleys of poor Pittsburgh in the mid-seventies.

is definitely a vampire movie, whether or not you think it has any actual vampires.

My Uncle - 9/11, Film Forum

My Uncle begins and ends with a pack of dogs, playing in the charming dilapidation and waste of the old alleys of Paris. One of them, clad incongruously in plaid, is permitted to enter a garish gated modern home in the suburbs where he is cleaned and fed by his owners, the nuclear family Arpel. The dynamic between worlds is immediately set up, and the going between the two so successfully managed by the dog is what this film is all about.

The version I saw at Film Forum is a newly-restored English language version shot simultaneously with the same cast as the classic Mon Oncle, and was preceded by a bad short made up of clips from M. Hulot's Holiday juxtaposed with ugly super-8 footage of beaches over a cheesy soundtrack.

Having never seen Mon Oncle, I can't report on the differences, but I guess they're mostly minor; the film is extremely light on the dialogue, emphasizing the physical action that is its focus. Some of the scenes were clearly shot with the actors speaking English, but they're still dubbed, and always very poorly- occasionally so poorly it's difficult to understand. Some of the dialogue is still in French, but a keen eye and a knowledge of the language are not necessary to see that they don't sinc either. Sound seems to have been added entirely in post-production, and while the numerous effects and noises are superb, the dialogue is very shoddy.

Writer/director Jacques Tati plays Hulot, committed to a carefree lifestyle in charming old-fashioned Paris, strolling distinctively around the produce vendors and cafes that make up his world. We get quite a look at this world, and it's very much a social one. These scenes are all about characters communicating with each other, and whether it's in French or hard-to-get English really doesn't matter because their gestures are what we focus on-- what's important is not what's said but how these people say it, or even just the fact that they have so much to say at all and that they're saying it to each other. 

This is the most striking of the many contrasts between the living city and the mechanized suburb, the visual ones being of course more obvious: jagged vs. straight, smooth vs. textured, vibrantly messy vs. painfully ordered. The dialogue between the members of this other class is stilted, brief, and extremely awkward, but everyone continues to play their part except for the Arepl's little boy Jimmy. Hulot happens to be Jimmy's uncle, and when he picks him up from school Jimmy gets a chance to immerse himself in the flesh-and-blood world outside his walls.

The Arepl's absurd house is comedic by itself, but most of the movie's gags result from Hulot's entrance into the environment. Irritated and unaccustomed, he wages a slapstick war with modernity. The soundtrack swells with constant electric hum and white noise as well as more jarring industrial sounds; characters awkwardly find themselves in stasis, clearly uncomfortable but apparently with no alternative; the bizarre technology and hyper-modern decor are so exaggerated as to be totally surreal: it's no surprise this film is cited as a major influence by David Lynch.

Besides the presence of both French and English languages, there are a variety of accents within the English dialogue. Many minor characters have strong French accents, and there seems to be a distinction made between English and American. The names of the family are Anglicized (even Americanized, as for instance Jimmy, whose name in the French version is Gérard), whereas others are not (the French-speaking maid and Hulot himself). From these details we realize that the Arpels are an American family living in France. Thus in this version more is contrasted than class or era lifestyles: Jimmy's excursion becomes a bored American child joyfully engaging with French culture, and Hulot's intrusion the disturbance of hearty French living upon soulless American industrialism. The attack on the American consumerist lifestyle that was only implied in the French version becomes concrete as the targets of ridicule go from Hollywood-influenced French people to actual Americans. The fact that this version is the one which was prepared specifically for an American audience may say something about Tati as an artist- a last joke from M. Hulot.