movie IMPRESSIONS

On Vanessa Redgrave's 'Julia'

2011-11-06T00:10:00.000-07:00

'Spoilers' towards the end...

Fred Zinnemann’s Julia is as much about the moral crisis of mid-20^th century Europe as it is about the dichotomy between its two central characters; American writer Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda) and her politically active friend, the elusive Julia (Vanessa Redgrave). The point of view is Lillian’s, and we get a firsthand account of her writers’ block, her long days of typing and isolation by the beach, and her subsequent success as a playwright, leading up to the blinding glitz of fame. The backdrop to all this is a growingly violent Europe, where somewhere Julia is involved in the fight against fascism.

In our first glimpses of Julia – all in brief flashbacks, tenderly lit – she is endowed with such incendiary high spirits that it’s easy to reduce her entire self to a passionate symbol of rebellion. Yet Julia’s romanticism is but the great initial impression of her character; it stems from Lillian’s worshipping memory and is very much a construct of ideals frozen in time. Vanessa Redgrave, a natural fit to support these elevated feelings, goes beyond being an outsider’s realization. She is her own towering ideal, and when she recites the poetry that's been written with her in mind, she knows herself to be fully worthy of it.

Through these memories, we come to know a bit about Lillian and Julia’s childhood and the latter’s emerging social conscience in the midst of an oppresively aristocratic environment. Julia grows to become an intellectual, and finally, an activist and fighter, widely viewed as a raging communist by the society from which she sprang. But the passion that drives her in these melancholy remembrances is not merely for the communal. Redgrave expresses, too, the individualistic fervor that comes with knowing one’s place and one’s worth in a time of great significance. The belief in a future that would soon be dead both excites and fuels her; she is almost too airy, too possessed by exalted notions, when she tells Lillian about Vienna and the glory of its possibilities, as if she were repeating them to herself.

The bulk of the film takes place in 1930s Europe, chronicling Hellman’s creative struggle, but the movie really gets going when Julia asks Lillian to smuggle money into Berlin to support one of her causes. Lillian is Jewish, and at this point in the film, Germany is already under Hitler’s grip. The journey to Nazi Germany is fraught with tension on a character level; Jane Fonda sees us through it, with the natural uneasiness and hesitation of someone who has been out of the real world for too long. Everyone is suspicious of one another to the point where she becomes physically suffocated. It is Fonda’s interpretation that grounds the film and in a way makes sense of Julia.

It is only when Lillian and Julia finally meet again that one becomes aware of the fullness of Redgrave’s creation. The Julia near the end is the aftermath of the life of active participation that she'd dreamt of all her life. Movingly, the idealism is gone, but in its place there is a humanity - a kind of tirelessness - that is transfixing in its simplicity and knowingness. She becomes a poetic creation in a new, deeper way: experience has grounded her and expanded her understanding. Though a world of suffering is delineated in her face, she is more striking than ever, and in her conversation with Lillian she shows a heightened empathy and awareness. When she casually mentions her child, she overwhelms the screen with feeling, oddball laughter suddenly springing from her. And yet something about her seems doubly as unreachable as before. She gently but forcefully reminds Lillian that time is running scarce, that there's none for tears and hardly any for friendship. A lonely struggle has wounded her; she's accepting of her fate but it haunts her all the same. She is someone who's been abandoned. Life has deprived her of self-aggrandizement, but it has, in turn, made her inaccesible to others and to Lillian in new ways. Lillian, meanwhile, has become a kind of tool for purposes that to Julia might seem vastly more urgent (though no less dear) than any friendship.

Despite the layers and the evolution in Redgrave’s perfomance, there is still a temptation to understand her character in basic “Romantic heroine” terms. Even the film may encourage this view, which on the whole is not on Redgrave’s level - it is too delicate, too polished, and too disorderly to have the devastating effect it seeks to impart on us. But it holds one hell of a gem inside it, a character who remains a mystery (but by the end no longer a fanciful or unbelievable one), solitary proof of human fortitude in a time when cowardice and inaction thwarted humanism.

Perpetual Western: Unforgiven (1992)

2010-12-16T14:00:00.000-08:00

Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven strips the Western of all the things that make it enjoyable on a pulp level. He gives us haunted figures instead - real people made out of the heroes and myths of the past – and leaves them to play in all the familiar settings. But even the landscapes have ceased to be playgrounds for heroism; the empty skies are reminders of what once was, while thunder haunts like Sin from youth. More than mere deconstruction, Unforgiven comes close to being that very rare monster, the humanist Western.

It’s not humanized simply because the violence is no longer enjoyable in a visceral way; it’s human because it acknowledges the inner rage and the unstoppable cycle of violence in all its characters down to the last whore in the house. It’s there in Frances Fisher’s eyes when she demands the cowboy who’s cut up the prostitute’s face be hanged; it’s there again in Gene Hackman’s face, whose desire to be done with violence only ends up giving it continuity; and in the desire of the young to prove themselves and in the hopeless conviction of Eastwood’s character to get away from it forever.

But because Eastwood gives these people real scars and real fears and desires, Unforgiven isn’t just a moral thesis on an ancient genre. It’s alive and enjoyable like the best of them and almost as lived in as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, though it distances itself from that movie’s thoroughly modern temperament. Unforgiven feels more like watching the death of an old myth, and despite the level of realism achieved, it has a pictorial mythic grandeur.

Then it’s all turned against us. In a perversely long and static sequence – the movie’s best – the film’s spirit seems to morph from the inside out. As the Schofield Kid tells Eastwood how it feels to kill a man for the first time (alternatively laughing and weeping, his adolescent feelings all mixed up) a lonely rider approaches them both from the distance, slowly. Eastwood cuts between the young man and the rider intuitively; the rider almost seems like a ghost. What is this thing riding towards us just as the final horrifying implications of violence are being thrown at us in what seems like the end of the Western as we know it? Turns out to be a woman carrying news Morgan Freeman’s character Ned Logan – Eastwood’s best friend - has died in the most vicious way imaginable.

Before you know it, the Western is back, and the movie’s driving force is no longer melancholia, but the eternal thirst for vengeance. The movie’s final moments are like an explosion of violence long repressed, though I don’t know if it’s catharsis or tragic inevitability; probably both.

This is Eastwood at his most detailed and complicated. He has, at least partially, humanized the Western, but in the same movie at the same time there are unnerving implications that the Western can never be humanized or it ceases to exist as such. It lives on in a kind of perpetual, closed in state, as suffocated by the sun and the wind as its dwindling heroes.

Los abrazos rotos (2009)

2009-12-01T18:59:00.000-08:00

A great director's ode to cinema is nearly always a source of fascination for everybody else, but perhaps this confusing, terribly incomplete film can only go as far as to fascinate Almodóvar himself, whose direction seems assured even when the story has none to speak of. Los abrazos rotos is meant to be Almodóvar at his most obsessive and passionate, but he tries to squeeze melodrama out of drama that isn't even there to begin with; there's no tension to anything, rendering all bombastic emotion weightless. Lluís Homar and Blanca Portillo are the movie's earthbound protagonists, while Penélope Cruz plays movie star. Three years after earning with Volver a place in movie lore, and now an Oscar winner and a power to be reckoned with in her own right, Almodóvar here mysteriously chooses to reduce her to "mere" iconography. She's Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale, but she's only wearing their masks. When her performance comes to life, the movie, too, becomes a movie and not just an obsession; and there's a terrific scene where, in all out Magnani mode, she viciously and maniacally assaults the camera that is shooting her. (It quite explicitly suggests the love/hate relationships that movie stars have with images, fame, and their own reflections.) The fragmented nature of the story may make it hard for the film to soar, but when it does work, one gets glimpses of what the director is so powerfully drawn to: the affectionate way with which he references the folly of the movies (its tendency to glamourize); its transformative nature, turning ugliness into beauty, drama into comedy; and the eternity of the image itself, making it possible to relive and to return. Most haunting of all is an image of Homar and Cruz kissing, with that unmistakably grainy, blurry VHS quality to it, the stillness of the moment seeming both palpable and out of reach.

From "Wall E" (2008) to "Up" (2009): Pixar's Earthly Gesture

2009-07-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

Is there something more suggestive, more expressive of the times, than the initial scenes of Wall E, the camera zooming in on a wasted, rotten Earth? The view is both post-apocalyptic and sweetly nostalgic for the lost humanity, the city sounds. And at the same time, it has nostalgia for the forgotten expressiveness of the silent cinema, a cinema of feeling through images. Wall E has, for the first half of its running length, no human faces, but it is full of feeling and humanity to a degree that maybe no other movie this decade can make claim to (give or take a Miyazaki movie), and its preoccupation for the future is in no way overshadowed by its lament of the past (and present).

Surely, Wall E embodies this era of global warming and capitalism gone mad with the humor and warmth that is so characteristic of Pixar, but most of all and most terrifyingly, Wall E is about the mechanization of the human condition. What's so frightening and so enchanting about it is that the feelings are all post-human: the humans themselves no longer feel anything; it is Wall E, with a Chaplinesque sense of humanity, that is not robotized. Wall E represents us all, or at least the best about us; he's a decaying little thing, broken down and isolated, but with a fundamental, special curiosity about him that makes him alive. He's the remnants of humanity; the robot is the only thing that has survived mechanization. This sweet little commentary on man's irrational fear of machinery --while the real robotization is happening right now, to our own human experience-- runs through the whole movie masterly, delicately; it's a grand, beautiful gesture. And it's also about contact with the universe: though the post-human humans of Wall E live off grand technology and spaceships on autopilot, the beauty of space is hardly corrupted by their inanity. It becomes the playground for Wall E and EVE to make love, as it were, in a sequence of celebration of the universe. If we're on the verge of a grander, cosmic era, Wall E, too, carries a current uncertainty, a sense of joy and mischief mixed with a fear of ourselves when we get there.

The movie isn't as strong in the spaceship sequences; the "humans" are all too crudely written, and the rhythm sometimes changes abruptly, but maybe it's logical for the scenes of crazed consumerism to just not have the poetry of the others (it would be a lie if they did). Wall E and EVE are such great characters, and their romantic entanglement is so new and amazing, that it doesn't much matter anyway (Wall E brings back the comic invention of the silent era; EVE's what Katharine Hepburn would be like if she were an iPod). It's slapstick comedy reinvented. And who can forget the last scene, when Wall E has lost his memory, and all of a sudden he's no more than an inert, useless piece of metal; maybe the haunting underlying is that without the memory of what was lived, the humanity is killed, its feeling eradicated. In the end, EVE brings him back to life, of course, just as it should be.

It's a curious, but welcome choice for the animators behind Pixar to have switched their attention from the vast space and the wasted Earth of Wall E to the exuberant blues and greens of the South American jungle in their latest, Up. Up is shrouded, like the previous movie, with a sense of urgency, but moreso than Wall E, it has an awareness of mortality. It openly acknowledges death, not just in the figure of Carl Fredrickson's wife, whose memory pushes him to go on his adventure, but also in the story of Kevin, the strange, supposedly prehistoric bird on the verge of becoming extinct. Up doesn't have the magic or the almost avant-garde edge of Wall E, but it's more current that many people give it credit for. Its commentary on adventure, and the different kinds of adventure to be had, is quite lively and enchanting. Part of the beauty of this flawed film is how it grows to show adventure as both the most wonderful and joyful thing imaginable, fueled by imagination and curiosity; but also as a thing of potentially great evil, which happens when ambition goes wrong. In an ironic gesture worthy of Pixar, the misunderstood idolized hero of the protagonist ends up being the villain; the villain, too, shares the love for adventure, but he functions in much the way a conquistador works, his joy is in domination, while Carl's joy is in life. And once again, much like Wall E, our hero is a fragile old thing in danger of becoming mechanized; the only reason he doesn't become a cynic is because of the memory of life. (What Pixar shares with traditional animation is that curiosity creates life, but the morals are more complicated). Up explodes with the full colors and raging sunsets of the jungle; none of the smog and death of Wall E shows through, and the rhythm is faster, more traditionally adventurous. But its adventure's shaded with mortality; maybe it's not just Kevin the bird who's in danger of becoming extinct, but something rather entirely bigger. And it's beautiful to see Pixar register in Up the world with all its vitality just as in Wall E it paints its most critical side, a kind of restless worldly melancholy seeping through.

Aparajito (1956)

2009-06-12T01:06:00.000-07:00

[Spoilers ahead]

A new rhythm emerges in the second part of the Apu trilogy. The lost in time spaces of Pather Panchali are replaced by cities, crowds, buildings, and the feel of machinery. But Satyajit Ray's vision, far from becoming mechanized, thrives in this new environment. It's edited faster, shot more vividly, accompanying the new sensations and ways of life experienced by the young Apu and his parents (the actors are all excellent). The core of the movie is the tension between family and the security of the old life, and youthful ambition and the uncertainty of the future. Because Ray is a masterful director, this tension is always present, and it imbues everything with extra meaning, but it's never made explicit; the scenes just breathe and keep adding up.

There are scenes of simple, exuberant joyfulness as Apu plays in the city and initiates contact with the world; they are juxtaposed with the fears and weariness of the mother, who wishes the best for his son, but expects him to become a priest like his father. In one sequence the father lies ill in bed as Apu sits by his side; there are fireworks outside and the father tells him to go and join the other kids. The simplicity of such exchange can leave you elated when, a few moments later, the father dies and Apu's childlike gesture, the desire to go see the fireworks in the sky, is tingled with the face of death. And so the movie keeps evolving before you, in very simple touches, and one starts to realize the true scope of the tale; a tale of a country in a period of change, torn between tradition and a modern world, a new world imposed, perhaps, a little too quickly. But the world has changed and the movie is also about the way the desire to get to know it and get to take part in it begin to form inside Apu.

The shockingly human characters in Aparajito are also compassionately incomplete. In the most haunting sequence, the mother rises from the old tree in the countryside, believing to have heard Apu's voice back in the house (at this point he's been absent for a long time). But nothing is there; she searches the house and the trees, but they're dark and silent, except for the fireflies that begin to fill the screen. It may be the only moment in the trilogy when reality becomes confused; there's something sublimely sad about it, inexplicable, about this empty nature, filled by fireflies where once there was her son. The mother dies without seeing Apu for a last time, and having never told him about her sickness; and Apu, in turn, is broken, but immediately goes back to Calcutta to his exams, and to the future. The mother's death suggests the lonely passing of the ancient grandmother in Pather Panchali, which was in turn like the passing of an era. And now the mother too, closes another chapter. Apu's roots have died out, except, perhaps, in himself. But Ray's artistry has only become magnified: the two movies, Pather Panchali and Aparajito, nurture each other wonderfully, and now the sense of magic is twofold: in the first movie, the train in the fields signaled another world coming, and in the context of the jungle and the life there it had the feeling of something new and strange. And now we get to know the new and strange, and the old world keeps coming back to us: in the traditions, the spirituality, in the tree of the ancient roots where his mother dies and where Apu laments her death before returning to his studies. The different feelings, the distinct worlds that seem to not quite fit, become increasingly confused and in turn, richer: they respond fully to one another.

Forgotten Silver (1996)

2009-06-11T19:19:00.000-07:00

Peter Jackson's so-called "mockumentary" on the life of largely ignored (fictitious) New Zealander film pioneer Colin McKenzie is first and foremost a celebration of moviemaking. The movie is about this revolutioner/genius who in the first years of the 20th century -- as films are just taking their first steps -- constructs his own camera at the age of 12, soon after invents tracking shots, and then proceeds to add sound as well as color to his movies way before anybody else. He then embarks on the grandest, most exuberant of all epics, the biblical "Salome" -- which seems like Eisenstein, Griffith, De Mille and Ed Wood all lumped into one -- with the financial aid of Stalinists and bigshot (Catholic!) American businessmen alike, only to bury the finished footage under a monstrous set built over some godforsaken New Zealand jungle. The whole enterprise may have had a hallucinatory feel to it if it wasn't so utterly funny; what's funnier is that some of the obstacles faced by McKenzie seem to suggest The Lord of the Rings. The finished version of "Salome", restored in the 90s and released to a select audience in New Zealand, is abysmally, grotesquely bad, but perhaps a little endearing; it's instantly hailed as a masterpiece.

Peter Jackson directed the movie right after Heavenly Creatures, that masterpiece of feverish romanticism and ambitious emotional grandeur, and Forgotten Silver is an ode to the romantic spirit he associates with the medium. Jackson has always turned this passion for filmmaking into an epic theme on its own terms, and nowhere is this more evident than here. But it's also a full and masterly view on the most typical of the documentary forms, where archival footage and interviews are used to give any kind of nonsense a ring of truth. Jackson piles up nonsense after nonsense for us, but all of it comes from his very rich imagination (everything that happens to McKenzie is so exultingly epic). He portrays McKenzie as this force of nature, the artist-inventor as tormented torrent of creativity; the artist as impassioned romantic whose life is a succession of mad, delirant obstacles. And Jackson, like McKenzie, is in love with the technological possibilities of the movies and their great storytelling power. No one in modern cinema is more of a romantic than him, but he also has enormous intelligence as a filmmaker: he understands intuitively how to get intimate, and visceral responses out of us (and he does it all at once). Not only that, but he has a superb technical control of the medium; even this low-budget mockumentary is put together rather breathlessly.

Lastly, but not least important, Forgotten Silver, like Heavenly Creatures, is terrific comedy. Jackson has passion to spare but he can distance himself from it and underline the hilarity in it. Indeed, as the movie progresses and Jackson (playing himself) delves into the mystical forests of New Zealand in search of the lost sets and footage of "Salome", one can't help but associate his quest with the archaeological significance of someone looking for the forbidden treasures of an ancient Pharaoh or something equally cosmic. That same exhilarating love and affection for the movies fills every frame. It becomes intoxicating.

Harold and Maude (1971)

2009-05-27T21:17:00.000-07:00

A humorous, loving look at the relationship between Harold (Bud Cort), a teenage boy with a love for suicides and funerals, and the life-loving, combustible 80 year-old Maude (Ruth Gordon). It isn't really a comedy; it's life and death treated as comedy. The movie is a towering example of those blossoming 60s ideals of happiness, fulfillment and freedom; indeed, old Maude seems like the ultimate hippie. The characterizations by the two leads are wonderfully full. Bud Cort's Harold grows and begins to become infatuated with life as he gets to know Maude, and it shows, in distinctly detailed, spontaneous ways. And Ruth Gordon, no doubt a great actress, makes you believe in her passion. She revels in contact with life, and of course she's a rebel, though most importantly she's a great listener, and Cort and Gordon interact marvellously. Gordon has a special talent for mischief, but she even finds time for sadness; she transcends the script. This may be one of the most delicately constructed romances I've seen put on film; the actors form a remarkable bond. The movie as a whole isn't quite on their level though. Firstly, it initially seems condescending towards the other characters; everyone who isn't Maude or wouldn't understand Maude. But as the movie develops one begins to accept these walking caricatures as rather endearing. They're more hopeless than corrupt, and the director Hal Ashby doesn't treat them with disdain. But secondly and most importantly, though the movie keeps wanting to be about liberation and the joys of being yourself and all that, it isn't remotely full in its conception. The great masterpieces about freedom (Truffaut's Jules and Jim, Cuarón's Y tu mamá también, to cite a couple), are so great and so expressive precisely because they're not afraid to show the limitations of such freedom. These limitations are nowhere to be seen in this movie, except in the secondary characters that represent the trappings of society. But Maude exists in a parallel universe where everything is well and happy. (It's suggested that she is a concentration camp survivor towards the end. Is this supposed to be a rather crude explanation for something?) This lack of complexity and duality become the movie's own limitations. It believes in its freedom so much that it paints an incomplete image of it, one that is all too facile. It isn't a great movie, but it's most certainly one of a kind, and watching young Harold and old Maude fall in love has a sort of magic in itself. For the entirety of the film, the ideas on the cycle of life and love for nature and following one's instincts seem as compelling as ever. It's too bad they're not given the impact, the fullness that they deserve and need to carry them with you after the film comes to an end.

Repulsion (1965)

2009-05-22T23:31:00.000-07:00

Swinging London turned into psychological horror. Catherine Deneuve's Carole is the embodiment of feminine fragility, yet there's something very specific and detailed about her; her tormented innocence feels chic. She's the antithesis of Julie Christie's Diana Scott, that other 1965 movie icon, the amoral, shameless model who sleeps her way to the top; taken together, they're quite the virgin/whore complex of their year. Deneuve's insufferable delicacy is extremely expressive here. As the perceived vulgarity of the fast, "swinging" city begins to take its toll on her fragile, foreign self, she is revealed to be just as vulgar as her environment in her fears and demons. The descent into madness is where Roman Polanski excels at, and the scenes of sexual depravation --which all take place inside her mind-- are deeply, inexplicably funny. He finds the violent, primitive humor inherent in Carole's fear of men and the loss of innocence and brings them out to the surface. The perspective becomes distorted, with a hallucinatory quality that blends brillianty with the realism of the exteriors. Polanski both adores and is disgusted by this image of complete, almost animalistic innocence; it's this conflicted fascination what's great about the movie, to watch those two feelings go at each other with rage. Tension and rage are his ways of being passionate. It doesn't achieve the greatness of Rosemary's Baby, which expands on some of the themes here; it's less ambitious, but for what it is, it's a treat all the same.

My Blueberry Nights (2007)

2009-05-21T10:24:00.000-07:00

Wong Kar-wai's style --full of melancholy, longing, yellows and oranges-- as well as his rhythm --the episodic nature of the scenes, the fragmented shots-- leave me exhausted after about five minutes. Ninety minutes of that aren't really my idea of a good time, and this one in particular borders on amateurishness. If you can survive the asinine dialogue and the pseudo-profundities scattered from time to time, there's still a hoard of thinly drawn characters to contend with --namely, all of them-- and performances that never feel complete. Maybe Wong's fans will argue that this film doesn't aim to be complete; that the theme is incompleteness, and that the dissasociated style works in its favor. But that doesn't excuse the banality of it. The film's in a constant state of heartbreak, but it's much too in love with it and its post-romantic feelings to transcend it or illuminate something about it. The details one would think would save this kind of movie are all kinds of perfunctory here; way too many doors are closed and opened in a symbolic manner that is excruciating. And half the time, Wong seems to use his actors for purely pictorial purposes; he embellishes them with his color palette, his sensuous camera movements, and in doing so has tendencies to suck the life out of their performances. The only satisfying turn comes from David Strathairn, a very human, expressive actor. The lead, Norah Jones, isn't very interesting or appealing, but she doesn't need to be: the main characters are composition and lighting, anyway. Rachel Weisz can be a resoundingly sensual, earthy actress; but here, her stylized Sue Lynn fails to convince. Natalie Portman does have some life in her, and Jude Law does what he can with what little he's got. I suppose I sound too negative, but I don't hate this film, nor do I think it's entirely insufferable. At his best Wong Kar-wai suggests a modern mood, a world of great fleetingness that I think has value in itself; I wish it was integrated more interestingly to the whole.

Pather Panchali (1955)

2009-05-10T16:06:00.000-07:00

Satyajit's Ray brilliantly sensitive portrayal of life in what I assume is the Indian jungle (it doesn't really seem like a jungle or a forest; maybe a jungle with magical qualities). There are bits and pieces that seem caught by the camera for the first time, a strange sort of aura that you don't see in most other movies, which may be explained partially by the fact Ray was the first major Indian director to use the richness of his country for film art. Already the initial sequence, when the ancient grandmother gleefully accepts the fruits her granddaughter has stolen for her, is magical and all kinds of new to Western eyes like mine, yet the images seem inhabited, as if they'd been happening for a thousand years. The character of the old grandmother (whom one grows to love as the film goes along), would probably be reduced to the role of the prophetic old lady in any other movie. Here, she is as humanly, wickedly flawed as anyone else; she's got at times a perverse picaresque quality, and in her final scenes, a hint of sadness and a mysterious acceptance that are almost terrifying (convinced there's no more room for her as she is old, she disappears into the woods).

The movie is in essence a full, vivid view of a way of life that today is probably lost or vastly transformed; the Swedish The Emigrants is a good comparison, if we take into consideration how both these movies have nature play the most vital role of all (the human characters seem to emanate from it). There are no calculated instances of lyricism, but there's lyricism alright; when Apu's mother drives her daughter, who has been accused of stealing, away from the house, throws her into the mud and closes the door, Ray's camera watches them both from outside the house, divided, but together in their pain; there's a kind of amazing matter-of-fact irony in seeing the mother through a gigantic hole in the wall; she's closed the door but her home is always open, anyway.

Some say the Indian people have gained their world famous peaceful philosophy partially by having been at the terrible mercy of the weather (and an interminable list of invasors) for centuries. This movie, which transpires almost entirely in a sunny calm, ends with thunderstorms and pouring rain. The children greet this change joyfully, though it brings along destruction, too. (I don't want to be explicit and spoil the ending). The ending (hardly an ending) has a note of sadness but also one of expectation; it's a departure from the woods and the leaves and the tradition that we've been part of the last two hours. Us Westerners would have made it a tragedy; to Satyajit Ray, it's a transformation, a continuation. The sense of loss and destruction are ingrained into life. The settings look medieval and timeless but in one of the film's greatest scenes while Apu and his sister play in the fields a train passes by, swiftly and inexorably into the distance. It seems an image taken out of the future, and throughout the movie we hear things that hint at a world changing not very far away. I can only hope that the transition into modernity (as shown in the next film of the trilogy) is as curious and alive as this one.

Ménilmontant (1926)

2009-05-08T22:57:00.000-07:00

A 38 minute experimental film by Dimitri Kirsanoff starring his then wife Nadia Sibirskaïa as the girl who after having just arrived at the big city falls in love, loses love, and finally, in one of the greatest, simplest, most expressive scenes I've ever seen, has her faith in life restored by an old man in a bench who gives her some of his food. The movie is wordless; there aren't even intertitles, and it goes by fast (it's dizzyingly, suggestively edited), and each scene is an embarrassment of riches. There is the madness of a new era expressed here, of sensuous urban rhythms, of fast emotions finding each other and losing each other and becoming out of control. It's got a concept of time and space (merged through the use of superimpositions) all its own, and at times it seems to hint at a frightening, chaotic view of the future. In another of the many great moments, the girl -- the astonishing woman-child Sibirskaïa -- seemingly contemplating suicide in the borders of the city stares at the distant forest and has memories of her old life there. They seem like impressions of an old time, a lost time, of sensations that are no more in this new urban frenzy. The movie constantly experiments with the possibilities of the cinema in ways that are organic to its intentions (the fabulous score of the 2005 edition, which sounds like something Angelo Badalamenti would compose, adds to the effect), but it's the film's magnificent, detailed sense of humanity (not sentimentality) that leaves such an impression, a feeling of both tragedy and excitement. The film has been called impressionistic, futuristic, even surrealistic by some, but it transcends all of the standard avant-garde definitions, because it has as much love and melancholy for the past (which a Futurist work would not) as it's fascinated by the almost dreamy but vivid, violent undertones of the present and future.