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Volume
II
Issue 15 Early Fall 2000 |
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Warfare and other Social Phenomena - The New York Film Festival, Part II by Therese Schwartz [An artist and art writer, Therese Schwartz took some time away from her studio this fall, to attend the 38th New York Film Festival. Of the 25 films screened, she chose to write about ten. Her first five reviews appeared recently in the Newsletter, and Part II follows below. Ed.] A 1950's Western Seven Men from Now, directed by Budd Boetticher, was made in 1956 and it was shown in the Festival as a piece of movie history. Boetticher made low-budget westerns of a kind acceptable then and not possible now. Although this film is brilliantly constructed, pointed, spare, articulate and clear, it also carries the prejudiced burden of the time. There are good and bad white folks but only wild Indians.
Randolph Scott in Seven Men from Now, 1956, directed by Budd Boetticher.
The still handsome Randy Scott plays the part of an ex-sheriff searching for the killers of his wife, and when he finds two possibly guilty ones, shoots them on site. While he is no philosophic dawdler, he is also a man with a heart; when he and a homesteading couple in a covered wagon are accosted by a dangerous party of natives, he throws them one of his horses. It is understood that it will be used for food because the Indians, having been ousted from their own territory, are having a hard time. As in all old westerns, there is a happy ending - the ex-sheriff tracks down all those involved in the murder, justice is done and all the bad guys are dead. Israel Kippur is a film about the 1973 Yom Kippur War in which Syria and Egypt attacked Israel. It was directed by Amos Gitai, who witnessed and was wounded in the conflict. This is no standard war movie - there is heroic action but no star heroes, tragedy but no pointedly heartstring-pulling incidents. When war breaks out, two young officers are called out of civilian life to rejoin their unit. They arrive to find their company has already gone, and it seemed unusual that they could then easily join up with a unit just being organized. Apparently rigid discipline doesn't rule this army - also noticed by the fact that there is no formality in the relations between officers and ordinary soldiers. Perhaps because everyone feels related? The two men are now in a medical team that helicopters in to rescue the wounded, and from there the film loses all political allusion while it shows war scenes of suffering men and the team working desperately against time - supplying oxygen, applying tourniquets, and trying to lessen pain with morphine. There are no jokes, no brave souls smiling through tears. The dry, open country is shown with all its scars: the dead bodies, abandoned tanks, and the ravaged lunar-like landscape.
A curious erotic episode opens and closes the film - an Abstract Expressionist painting is in process. A close-up of it fills the whole screen, with no hand visible. Gradually the scene opens to an entwined couple rolling about on a huge wet canvas. Their bodies are smeared with paint, and they are decorating each other with great globs of red, black, blue and green. (I assumed the stuff was acrylic, which is water-soluble.) Mexico From Mexico comes the debut feature-length film, Amores Perros, by the director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. It runs almost three hours and is about a three-car crash in Mexico City and the people affected. The color is garish, the squalor pervasive, and the traced lives of the victims fit the picture. In the first sequence, there is an abused wife who commits adultery for money but clings to her cruel husband, along with scene after scene of dog fights: there are close-ups of defeated animals, bloody and dying, and victorious owners counting their winnings. In the second, a high-fashion model, blonde and beautiful, whose provocatively posed figure appears on billboards all over the city, ends up with an amputated leg. Also, her beloved pet dog disappears in a hole in the floor, and it is hard to understand why an elegant, expensive apartment should have such a flaw. In the third, a former revolutionary guerrilla, now a street person and occasional commercial assassin, is hired by a man to kill his brother. With what I suppose is meant to be a noble motive, the killer kidnaps the intended victim, handcuffs him to a post, stuffs a gag into his mouth, and abandons him there overnight. Then he captures the evil one, gives him the same treatment, and leaves them face-to-face to solve their problem. After which, the hired gun shaves off his ragged beard, cleans up, puts on a business suit, and rides off into the sunset. The connections between the car-crash victims are minor; the highlights are the brutal but unrelated incidents. Nonstop action and relentless rock propel the story, but the characters remain opaque. There is almost no trace of human understanding or pity, just a laundry list of titillating sensations. France A brilliant actress who can't make the big time, a rich businessman trying to buy his way into "culture," his wife who has no sense of style but fancies herself a decorator, a sometime barmaid with a most liberated love life, and two bluff characters who are bodyguard and chauffeur to the art-loving capitalist. These are the characters in the French film The Taste of Others. Agnès Jaoui, who directed and co-authored the screenplay and plays a lead role, has an intimate understanding of the tight rules of "correctness" that govern the art world: certain attitudes and people are acceptable and others are not.
Castella, the entrepreneur, falls in love with Valerie, who plays the lead role in a small classical company's production of Racine's Berenice. The forty-year-old actress, who has a long, low-income past, agrees to give him English lessons. Although she pushes off all his attempts to show his feelings, she recognizes his sincerity, and when the rest of the company demonstrates its obvious contempt, she comes over to his side. Clearly, a man who loves her and is also rich would be a good alternative to a dreary future. She is now attracted to him in spite of her colleagues, and he has shaved off his foolish moustache. The chauffeur and the barmaid start a loose sexual connection, which turns serious on his part when his absent fiancé, temporarily studying abroad, writes to tell him the deal is off and she's staying in the USA. Now he wants a tight domestic tranquility, including laundry, cooking and fidelity. But the barmaid is also having her own sideline thing with his colleague the bodyguard. All the characters play out their fantasies, in which other people take the parts assigned to them and perform faithfully. This movie is a kind of updated Jane Austen novel - quiet, but not sentimental. It takes a sharp analytical knife to the mish-mosh of human relations and digs in. Brazil Chronically Unfeasible, a film from Brazil directed by Sergio Bianchi, is designed as a social-conscious semi-documentary, but it doesn't propagandize, has no built-in ideology, and doesn't see hope for the future. The director, speaking at a press conference, said that the work took five years to complete because, although there is government funding available, money was given to him in small bits over long intervals. The nature of this film did not please the authorities, who offered the reason that the public overwhelmingly prefers Hollywood blockbusters.
Dan Filip Stulbach as Adam in Sergio Bianchi's Chronically Unfeasible. Bianchi filmed all over the country, from the capital cities to remote, primitive sections, and the story is loosely held together by six characters connected with an upper-class restaurant. There is the pseudo-liberal woman filled with pity but glad to be far from the poverty and the dirt, the easy-going proprietor given to exploiting whatever he can and conducting secret illegal deals. All the rest lead two lives - one is surface, one is real, and neither is admirable. The story line goes off in quirky directions - in one instance there are two versions of a scene. In one, hungry men raid the garbage cans in back of the restaurant and take the food; in the other, the kitchen help chases them away before they can grab anything. Choice of two poisons? At a club there are homosexual beauty contests much like cattle shows with the men being prodded and measured by spectators. Without conventional comment, the distance between social classes and the prevailing poverty are made as vivid as fire. But the director's insistence on not turning the movie into standard social protest has the last word. The protagonist, a writer who is traveling and recording the information, turns out to have a sideline - he buys human organs in the small villages and sells them to an illegal dealer in São Paolo. About the Author:
Resources: The website for the 38th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center is at http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/nyff.htm For a detailed list of all the movies screened, including brief descriptions, use this link: http://www.filmlinc.com/ny ff/nyfffilms2000.htm |
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