Flicks with The Film Snob

I’ve long been interested in Russian film, including films from the Soviet era. But I’ve only recently begun to explore the work of one of the giants of Russian cinema, who is still with us at the age of 87—Andrey Konchalovsky. He started as a screenwriter in the ‘60s, then moved to directing. And he reached the peak of this phase of his career in 1979, with Siberiade, an epic 4-hour achievement released in two parts, originally for Soviet television.

Siberiade tells the story of two families, through three generations, in a Siberian village, from the turn of the 20th century to the 1960s. The title evokes Homer, and of course we also think of Tolstoy. But they wrote about princes—Siberiade is an epic of the common people: rough and ungainly, romantic and sentimental, yet refusing to celebrate history, grieving instead.

One of the families in the story is well off, in a small town way, and the other family works for them. The patriarch of the poor family becomes obsessed with chopping through the thick forest to make a path to a legendary swamp nicknamed “The Devil’s Mane,” dreaded by the superstitious villagers.

This man’s young son Nikolai encounters by chance an escaped revolutionary, who is soon recaptured, but not before influencing the attitude and thinking of this boy forever. When he grows older, he falls for a beautiful member of the prosperous other family, stealing her away and causing permanent hostility between him and that clan. Then the revolution arrives, and the power balance changes.

The story coalesces in Part 2, when Nikolai’s son Alexei (played by Konchalovksy’s older brother, Nikita Mikhalkov, a director in his own right) returns to the village in the 1960s, having survived the horrors of World War II and its aftermath, to drill for oil and thus obliterate his home in the name of progress. It is here that the cumulative emotional effect of the multigenerational saga meets bitter historical irony. The socialism of the Soviet Union is not portrayed here as a great blessing, but as a destructive impersonal force that threatens connection to the past. The censors eventually had trouble with this when the film was set to be released in theaters.

The point of view in this later part of the film is shared by the man who was the rival lover with Alexei’s father for the hand of the young beauty back in the beginning of the film. Filipp, played by Igor Okhlupin, has become an important Party official in Moscow. He is sent to his Siberian homeland to find out how the search for oil is going, and if it doesn’t look promising, to direct the entire area, including the village, to be flooded as part of a plan for a massive hydroelectric power station. Like Alexei, he has mixed feelings about all this.

The women in the story are its heart, and they suffer the most. The men are violent and contentious, and they frequently misbehave. Historically, the film presents a pessimistic critique of the Soviet experiment, right in full view, but too subtle for the censors to understand. Yet the substance of this film is the texture of people’s lives, mysterious and ungovernable, always greater than the theories meant to confine them. Siberiade is clamorous and messy. It’s also a real epic.

When considering the progress of gay rights, it’s important to remember how long LGBT people have had to hide their sexual identities from family, employers, and government in order to avoid discrimination and persecution. The taboos have a persistent and damaging effect on people’s minds, and it would be a mistake to think this is all in the past now, despite the obvious gains that have been made. British writer-director Georgia Oakley doesn’t see pride as a way to avoid dealing with queer shame and conflict, nor a way to pretend that gay people are no longer under threat from social forces that promote hate against them. Her debut film, Blue Jean, tells a story from a time, the 1980s, when the perils of coming out were especially acute.

Rosy McEwan plays Jean, a PE teacher in a secondary school in the Newcastle area of northeastern England. She also happens to be a lesbian, with a social life outside of work that includes a lover named Viv, played by Kerrie Hayes. We observe Jean as part of a close-knit group of women who are part of the local gay bar scene, and we see her relationship with Viv as fun, playful, and loving. But she’s closeted at work, which in 1988 was just how it was for LGBT people in public facing jobs such as teaching.

In Jean’s class, a new student named Lois, played by Lucy Halliday, appears to have some behavioral problems, but Jean chooses to be patient and understanding with her. She’s a talented basketball player, and Jean encourages her in that. Lucy also becomes the target of some bullying by other girls, ostensibly because she acts differently than they do, and jealousy is maybe part of this too. But Jean isn’t really showing favoritism—she is determined to be fair, whereas these high school girls are often very unfair. One night, Jean sees Lois at the gay bar she frequents, and Lois sees her. That one of her students knows her secret now stirs up a lot of anxiety for her. Further events, and Jean’s response to them, only make her more vulnerable.

McEwan’s lead performance beautifully conveys her character’s confusion, self doubt, and tense hyper-vigilance in the midst of a culture where it’s not OK to be herself. For instance, Jean’s sister asks her to babysit her son, which she loves to do, but when he tells Mom later that Viv was there, the sister (who knows that Jean is lesbian) gets uptight about it, as if exposing her son to Jean’s queer life poses a danger to him. At work, she silently endures homophobic statements made casually by colleagues that don’t know she’s gay.

The brilliance of Oakley’s story lies especially also in how Jean and Viv and all the characters have internalized the conflict presented by the system, trying to navigate impossible contradictions while being unforgiving to one another or themselves. The color blue is a recurring element, which I took to represent the happiness and self-acceptance possible for lesbians living freely. Blue Jean is a vision of how it was in one of the darker moments of struggle, but it rings true for our present uncertain time as well.

With each new film, Christian Petzold increases his stature as the foremost 21st century German director. His latest is called Afire. It’s a different kind of work for him, in that here Petzold turns a critical eye on the figure of the lonely artist, the kind of person employing the symbolism and emotional dramaturgy that Petzold himself has displayed in some of his previous films.

Two young men: Felix, a photographer, played by Langston Uibel and Leon, a writer (Thomas Schubert), go to stay at a house near the shore of the Baltic Sea, owned by Felix’s mother. The car breaks down on the way, which gets everything off to a bad start. When they arrive, they’re surprised to find Nadja, a young woman played by Paula Beer, renting a room there. Leon has trouble sleeping because he can hear Nadja in the next room apparently having sex. Going outside to sleep, he sees a man leaving the house in the morning. It’s a fourth character, Devid, who works as a lifeguard at the beach nearby. When Felix and Leon meet Nadja that day, she turns out to be very confident and friendly, full of humor and good spirits, and beautiful as well. Leon seems both attracted to and repelled by her.

It took a little while for me to realize that the film has a main character, the “point of view” character as they say, and it’s the person that in most stories like this would be a supporting role—it’s Leon, the depressed writer. Leon wants to finish his second novel on this trip, but everything that has happened so far annoys or upsets him. He’s a lumpish disagreeable kind of guy, who seems challenged or nonplussed by the behavior of Nadja, Felix, and Devid. Petzold pulls off an interesting narrative trick here. All the intrigue one might expect from the set up, three men and a woman in a summer cottage, is completely muted, in effect only existing in the mind of the self-involved, suspicious Leon.

This “point of view” colors and distorts everything the audience sees—it is Leon who rejects everything offered, and all we can really see are his weird introverted reactions. When they go swimming, for example, he says he can’t go with them because he needs to work. But left alone at his typewriter, he mostly just fusses, paces around, and stares into space.

Afire is a good poetic choice for a title. The German title literally translates as “Red Sky.” In the evenings, the characters observe a wildfire in a nearby forest that turns the sky red. The summer wildfires have become frequent in Europe as they have around the world. The  real question in this film is how the artist should respond. Leon is too busy being the center of the world to recognize and truly appreciate the human beings sharing the space with him. Afire is about personal barriers coming down in spite of all denial, when we’re forced in the end to see past ourselves.

A gang of women steal oil from Brazilian pipelines, refining it into gas to be sold on the black market.

On a firelit night in an unnamed town, we see people taking oil from a tapped pipeline and pouring the stolen oil into containers. A gang of outlaws, primarily women, operate an illegal oil refinery in Brazil, in a favela, a slum near the city of Brasilia. Above the building is a flag that says, “The Oil is Ours.” The film is called Dry Ground Burning, written and directed by Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta, and it takes place during the recently ended reign of right wing nationalist president Jair Bolsonaro.

We first see Léa, a tough former drug dealer, when she returns home after serving a long prison sentence. Everything has gotten worse. The favela is now constantly patrolled by police helicopters. A huge new prison complex is being constructed there by incarcerated labor. Léa goes to work with her half sister Chitara, who is more low key, but is in fact the person who first thought of siphoning oil from pipelines and refining it into gasoline to be sold on the black market, with the local biker gang her primary customers. With the success of her pirate operation, Chitara has become legendary, with poor people in the slums actually singing songs about her. Chitara and Léa are daughters of a wily and brutal local gangster, now deceased, whom they reminisce about with a mixture of contempt and admiration.

Some of the women also work regular jobs, in a factory turning the wood being cut every day from the Amazon rain forest into building materials. The film intently and patiently depicts the experience of physical labor. The life of poverty we witness is one where there is little freedom to consider higher goals than survival. One of the women, Andreia, belongs, along with other characters, to a small Pentecostal church where the affirmation of Jesus’ power provides a sense of purpose otherwise lacking. But this turns out to be a glimpse from Andreia’s past. In the present she’s an activist for a group called PPP: the Prison People’s Party, which opposes the theft of national resources and destruction of the environment by the owning class.

Queirós and Pimenta defy the usual narrative techniques. They use a steady focused approach showing the entire environment of a scene at length rather than chopping it up. The film is constructed with a kind of intentional disorder, a documentary type realism combined with improvisation by non-professional actors, with the main ones actually playing versions of themselves, even stepping out of character at times to talk about their real lives outside the film. Everyone chain smokes. The night scenes are an incredibly vivid display of black and gold.

We also follow a miserable group of policemen in an armored vehicle patrolling the favela at night with guns drawn and a little drone leading the way. One extended sequence takes place at a real life Bolsonaro rally where we witness the mindless slogans and rituals of this neo-fascist mass movement. The gas hustlers are a counter to all this, as is the film itself. And as dangerous and dirty as their lives are, they represent the power of indigenous people, the poor, and the people of color. Dry Ground Burning is a bold film about a world on fire.

Mami Wata, a film by Nigerian writer-director C.J. “Fiery” Obasi, is subtitled “a West African folklore,” and it does explore the tension between ancient myth and the secular realism of the modern world. In the village of Iyi near the Atlantic Ocean, an older woman named Efe acts as intermediary between the people and Mami Wata, a water goddess or spirit. For generations this role has been passed down through the women. Efe has two daughters who help her in her ceremonies and healing rituals. All three wear headdresses, seashell jewelry and tribal face paint which the high contrast black and white photography lends a striking effect. The villagers supply food and money to support them and to win favor with the goddess, but trouble is brewing.

Mama Efe’s daughter Zinwe, who is destined to inherit the role of intermediary, becomes angry when her mother says she cannot help a woman find her missing daughter. Zinwe has struggled to believe in Mami Wata, and now her doubt drives her into exile. We see her standing on the seashore, trying to make contact with the goddess, and giving up in despair. Meanwhile, things come to a head when Mama Efe’s efforts to cure a sick village boy fail and the boy dies. There’s a group of men who want the village to enter the modern age and get roads, schools, and hospitals. They accuse Mama Efe of cheating everyone by promoting baseless superstition.

All this seems very plausible, and Efe’s other daughter Pesca, who is adopted, wavers in her belief as well. But she had fled from violence as a child, and Efe had taken her in, nurtured her, so out of a sense of love and duty she remains loyal. With so much of the drama about Mama Efe and Zinwe in the early going, it’s a surprise when we notice the second daughter Pesca, played by Evelyne Ily, taking center stage in the story. It is she who rescues a stranger from drowning, a man named Jasper, that she thinks might be an answer to her dilemma from Mami Wata. Jasper acts grateful and respectful to her and her mother, but he also agrees that the region needs schools and hospitals. An attraction develops between Pesca and Jasper, but the story never goes the way we might expect it to.

And that’s one of the strengths of Obasi’s filmmaking—we’re always being thrown back on her heels, never really sure of the truth, living in a kind of  suspended mystery state, until our eyes are opened to new insights at the end.

To reveal any more would be to spoil things. Suffice it to say that the stakes are higher than a simple conflict between religion and science. Without special pleading or romanticism, Obasi explores a matriarchal way of feeling and seeing, and its conflict with male power reveals a social reality that is deeper even than the injuries from the colonial past. The characters speak a mix of Fon, a major West African language, and a pidgin English clearly inherited from their former British colonizers. The story, suffused with a mystical sense of connection to the sea, escalates from one unexpected emergency to the next, ultimately reaching an epic scale. Although not everything Obasi tries to do works, the act of trying shows courage. Mami Wata is an impressive stylistic feat, resonant with meaning.

I’ve seen plenty of documentaries about musicians, some very good—usually you get a biography of the subject; interviews with friends, colleagues, and others; and of course performances. But there’s a movie I watched recently called Rewind & Play, featuring the great jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, and it’s unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Monk was a brilliantly innovative composer and performer from the 1930s on, highly regarded by fellow musicians but not one of the big names in jazz, until his albums finally started selling in the ‘60s. In 1969, after a European tour, he was interviewed in Paris for a TV show.

Now, all these years later, and with Monk having died in 1982, the Senegalese-French director Alain Gomis dug into the archives of this French TV series called “Jazz Portrait,” and found all the rushes and unseen outtakes from the interview with Monk. It is his edit of this footage that constitutes the film Rewind & Play. None of this background information is fully explained in the movie—only gradually can we understand the nature of what we’re watching.

We see Monk arriving by plane in the city with his wife Nelly and an entourage. We watch them talking in the back of the car that’s taking them to the studio. They stop at what appears to be a Paris bar, and everybody continues to talk while Monk looks thoughtful, smoking cigarettes and having a drink. With his beret and goatee-style beard, he is unmistakable, but he hardly does any talking. Your usual film might’ve cut all this, but Gomis keeps all the footage in, and the effect is kind of strange. Monk is like an island of quiet stillness in the midst of noise. He smiles while staring dreamily into space. We wonder why he seems so distant, as if he’s in some other reality, not paying much attention to this one.

This puzzling effect continues when they arrive at the studio. There’s a piano, and people setting up all the lighting for the interview, but Monk isn’t yet being told what’s going on or what to do. Eventually he just sits down and starts playing. And as he plays in his distinctive improvisatory style, with this amazing sound flowing out from his fingers on the keyboard, we realize that *this* is his reality, his beautiful world—the music is where his mind and spirit have been living inside of him, and only now do we know who he is.

Then the interview begins. The host, Henri Renaud, asks questions that try to simplify Monk for a mainstream French audience. But Monk is unable to play along. He smiles in apparent disbelief as Renaud tries to get him to describe his marriage, why he put a piano in his kitchen, and why people didn’t seem to understand his music on the first tour in Paris in 1954. The answers he manages to give are not considered interesting enough, and so they keep reshooting the questions while Monk gets more and more restless. In hindsight it’s funny, because obviously Renaud, who claims to be a friend of Monk, doesn’t really get him at all. But at the time it was clearly uncomfortable, as the artist’s intense involvement in his music prevented him from engaging with such a superficial approach.

We feel relieved when Monk finally plays again, and we are transported once more into his amazing inner realm. Rewind & Play lets us experience the vast gulf between our normal critical mind and the unexplainable truth of creation.

British film comedy came into its own in the years following the Second World War. Maybe the extremity of that experience caused something to shift. In any case, there was a new spirit of satire in movies, a flippant disregard for the old values of class snobbery and the stiff upper lip. In the late 1940s and continuing into the ‘50s, the Ealing Studios in west London produced a series of comedy films that are still admired today, many of them featuring an up-and-coming new talent. Alec Guinness.

A good example is a film from 1949, directed by Robert Hamer, called Kind Hearts and Coronets. A summary will give you an idea of how outrageous this film was for its time. A young man, a minor figure in an aristocratic family, wants to become a duke. But there are eight family members ahead of him in the line of succession, so he decides to kill them one by one in order to inherit the title. And here’s the kicker: all eight of them are played by Alec Guinness.

Dennis Price stars as our murderer, Louis Mazzini, a man of refined culture, suave and sophisticated, trapped against his will in the English middle class. His mother was a D’Ascoyne, a family whose eldest member is a lord, the Duke of Chalfont. Mama was disowned by her family after she eloped with an Italian named Mazzini, who died shortly after the birth of their son. She brought Louis up with a consciousness of his noble heritage, cruelly robbed from him, and tells him that her final wish is to be buried in the D’Ascoyne family vault. But the Duke rejects this request with contempt. After the burial of his mother in an ordinary graveyard, Louis’ mind is bent on revenge. His plan to eliminate all the D’Ascoynes ahead of him in line begins at that moment.

In a subplot which becomes important, Louis is staying at the house of a local acquaintance, a doctor, and his daughter Sibella, played by Joan Greenwood, she of the marvelous husky voice that sounds a little like a cat’s purr, or as I read somewhere, like someone gargling champagne. Louis wants her, she loves him, but she decides to get married to a boring but very wealthy rival. So in this way as well, class—which more often than not, also means money—prevents Louis from attaining what he’s sure he deserves.

Dennis Price’s performance as Louis is great. We first see him in prison, awaiting execution for murder, while writing the memoir that explains everything he did, and his narration of this memoir becomes the narrating voice of the film. Louis is witty, yet impeccably polite. Because of his manner of behaving, scenes that might be horrifying in a serious drama are hilarious here. The calmness and aplomb with which he disposes of his rivals is strangely funny in itself, and then much more so because of Alex Guinness’s portrayal of each victim. Guinness has a distinct voice and appearance for each character, one of whom is a woman, and all of which satirize the silliness of the upper classes, the idiocy concealed behind the pretentious veil of dignity. Secretly we enjoy seeing them getting bumped off.

The movie’s title, Kind Hearts and Coronets, is a quote from Lord Tennyson, England’s most respectable poet. The film actually respects no one, except the audience. It is a classic.

A woman is released from Rikers Island prison in New York in 1994 after doing time for a theft charge. Inez, played by Teyana Taylor, is a hair stylist trying to scrape by in Brooklyn. One day she sees a 6-year-old boy and approaches him. He is silent and reserved. It’s her son Terry, who entered a foster home when she went to jail. Inez discovers that he is unhappy in the foster family, and decides to somehow get him out and have him live with her.

The movie is A Thousand and One, the remarkable debut feature by A.V. Rockwell that won the grand prize at Sundance last year. Let me preface what I’m going to say by noting that whoever put together the preview for this film stuck all the high note drama together in the trailer, which made it look like a big loud melodrama about the triumph of the human spirit. I guess that sells tickets—I’m not sure. But A Thousand and One is in fact a carefully measured, well-written, and beautifully paced drama about people that seem as real as life.

Inez does eventually spirit her young son Terry out of the foster home where he’s being neglected. She concocts a new name and history for him so that Child Protective Services won’t discover what happened. And then the movie covers the next twelve years of their life together, years of struggle and endurance.

Terry, who is played by three different young actors at ages 6, 13, and 17, remains quiet and insecure, while his mother seems like a whirlwind, a force of nature, pushing him to get his education and become somebody. Mother and son are not at all idealized. Inez is moody, erratic, and controlling. She cuts corners. Terry never acts like the sweet optimistic kid that we usually get in movies. He’s troubled, and never seems less than authentic. An ex-boyfriend nicknamed Lucky, played by Will Catlett, moves in. He is not idealized either. He’s neither an abusive stepfather, nor a sensitive caregiver, but a complicated person with a history. That’s one reason this film is so good. Rockwell writes nuanced characters instead of types. The context is straightforward—the environment of black people and their communities in New York, which includes an ever-present awareness of oppression, as well as pride and steady resolution.

This is a powerful performance by Teyana Taylor as Inez. I had not been previously aware of her. She’s also a singer-songwriter, and apparently a fashion icon. Judging by this film, she’s also an excellent actor. She shows us subtle changes in her character developing through the years. The youthful recklessness becomes tempered, motherhood makes her toughness more authentic, yet she’s essentially the same woman. It turns out that she has some secrets that lend her character an almost tragic dignity.

While the charcters’ life stories go on, Rockwell—a New York City native—also provides an oblique history documenting the deteriorating state of New York City, and Harlem in particular, up to 2005. Inez’s landlord, instead of repairing her apartment, tries to push her out so he can “gentrify” his building.

A Thousand and One is Inez’s apartment number—actually 10-01, but the dash, for some reason, has been stolen. Maybe it hints at the number of challenges she and her son must face to survive—or the stories that she, like Scheherazade, must tell. The movie invites us to witness the difficult truth.

As the film Perfect Days begins, the morning light awakens a man named Hirayama, who sits quietly on his sleeping mat for a while before rolling it up, then brushes his teeth and shaves in his tiny bathroom, finally emerging from his home, smiling as he looks up at the sky. After getting a coffee from a vending machine in the courtyard, he gets into his van, chooses the cassette tapes he will listen to that day, and goes to work, cleaning a series of public toilets in Tokyo. As the film proceeds, we watch him go through this very same routine, day after day.

Here’s an idea that you’d think would never work: a drama about the daily life of a man who cleans toilets. But German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who directed and co-wrote the picture with producer Takuma Takasaki, pulls off a little miracle in Perfect Days. The gentle repetition of Hirayama’s routine (and of course not every day is exactly the same) manifests his humility and attention to each moment. The carefully paced editing keeps us gently in the present. Yet some things do happen. A young eccentric co-worker doesn’t share Hirayama’s work ethic—he’s more interested in social media and hitting on a young woman working at a bar. One day, he persuades Hirayama to let him use the van to pick up the woman. Nothing terrible happens. It’s not that kind of movie.

Later, Hirayama’s teenage niece shows up unexpectedly, having run away from her controlling mother. They share some nice moments together, until the mother, his adult sister, arrives in a limousine to retrieve her daughter, and in the process we learn a little more about the past of our main character.

The main reason all this works is that Hirayama is played by the great actor Kōji Yakusho. Americans might remember him from Tampopo, Shall We Dance, or Babel, all films over a decade old.  He’s 68 now, but still an incredibly vibrant actor and handsome man.  For most of the movie, he doesn’t even talk. His body language and facial expressions are enough. When he finally does say things, thoughtfulness and sensitivity are evident, but also pain and sorrow.

The toilets Hirayama cleans have some trash and dirt in them, but audiences will immediately note that you don’t see the kinds of disasters common in public restrooms in the States. I don’t know if this is meant to be culturally accurate or significant. I do know that Wenders was inspired by the Tokyo Toilet Project, a redesign of 17 facilities in the upscale Shibuya neighborhood. Authorities asked him if he would be willing to do a series of short documentaries about the project. He declined, instead deciding to do this fictional treatment.

Sometimes Wenders swerves close to whimsy, but always pulls back in time through the repeated motifs and the feelings evoked from the gentle rhythms of attention. Hirayama’s choice of songs is for the most part all too familiar—but nothing can spoil the film’s overall effect of profound simplicity and beauty.

Perfect Days takes the radical position that a simple working life can be a blissful one, while at the same time touching our hearts with loneliness. A perfect day is any day you feel free.