Countries

Ulysses’ Gaze (1995)

André Crous

Greece
2.5*

Director:
Theo Angelopoulos
Screenwriters: 
Theo Angelopoulos
Tonino Guerra
Petros Markaris
Giorgio Silvagni 
Kain Tsitseli
Directors of Photography:
Giorgos Arvanitis
Andreas Sinanos

Running time: 176 minutes

Original Title: Το βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα
Transliterated title: To Vlemma tou Odyssea

Theo Angelopoulos has a very seductive visual style that often consists of long scenes and little dialogue, not unlike the work of Béla Tarr. But whereas Tarr uses mud, rain and small episodes presented as very long takes, Angelopoulos’s films are visually very clean, less episodic, and the long takes are fewer and farther between.

When a film isn’t episodic, in other words, when there is a macroplot rather than many microplots, then the overarching narrative better be worth the viewer’s time. In the case of Ulysses’ Gaze, an unnamed director (no, he does have a name: “A”) travels across the Balkan countries to locate three film reels of the first directors in the area, the Manakis brothers. The Manakis brothers worked there at the beginning of the 20th century, and their very first works, according to this film that rewrites history for the sake of drama, as many good films have done, are somewhere in the Balkans, waiting to be discovered. Why have they not been the object of more interest by the different film archives in the Balkans? The film doesn’t say.

A, played by Harvey Keitel, is a director who had grown up in the Balkans and does speak Greek, but he has spent most of his life in the United States producing films that many Greeks, for whatever reason, deem extreme and even “evil”. He learns of the missing film reels and decides to undertake the journey to find these elusive traces of the origins of the Balkan cinema.

In the process, he travels across Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The film’s title hints at an Odyssean dimension to the journey, but this is wishful thinking. At one point, he ferries a woman wearing a black cloak across the river, where they find the first signs of destruction in the former Yugoslavia, and of course, this scene is meant to evoke the episode in Hades, either of them being Charon, but the metaphor is tenuous, if not altogether confusing.

He meets various women, all played by the same actress (Maia Morgenstern), but the roles and the acting are below standard as the actress frequently has to portray a woman who is drawn to A without knowing why, and more often than not breaks down in tears for no apparent reason.

No reason for A’s stubborn desire to find these missing reels is provided either, and yet he risks life and limb to track them down, all the way into a war zone. The film was made in the Balkans in 1994, so it’s not very difficult to guess which war I’m talking about. But even though we know that A is on his way to Sarajevo, upon his arrival in a big city that is completely devastated, building shots down to their skeletal remains, armoured UN vehicles, and people running down the streets to avoid sniper fire, A stops to ask these people, “Is this Sarajevo?” It is, of course, a question of identity, a theme that is relevant to the film, but the question seems ludicrous in the context and makes A seem rather thick-headed.

A is a very alienating figure, especially when he recites some of his lines like a grave incantation of some sort. The only moment where his character really seems human is around the halfway mark, when he meets an old friend on the banks of the Danube in Belgrade, who piggy-backs him for a few paces. For the rest of the film, A is a very serious character who almost never smiles.

The film is interested in identity across the Balkans, and there are many scenes where the past slides in and out of the present, as characters change and seem to channel figures from the past. Angelopoulos is going for a kind of magical realism, I suppose, but he doesn’t tell the story very well, and we are left with many questions and never get a firm grasp on A’s heritage.

Ulysses’ Gaze does contain remarkable scenes staged so that they may be noticed as such, including a shot at the beginning of the film in which an audience watches A’s latest film, captivated, standing in the rain as if frozen, everyone in black clothes with identical black umbrellas over them. In another scene, in which A is transported back to the end of the Second World War in Bucharest, Romania, a single shot in the foyer of the family home suggests the passage of five years by means of different small events in the background.

Angelopoulos could have been a great filmmaker if he had spent as much time cultivating his story as the staging of his images. At one point, an enormous statue of Lenin is transported in various pieces on a barge that goes upstream. We don’t know where the statue is headed, and for some strange reason Angelopoulos’s camera seems to worship the colossal monstrosity – even allowing it to face in the same direction as the barge, a strange choice indeed. Overall, the film is thin, plodding along through its more than two and a half hours, but the images are gorgeous. However, compared with his other important film, Eternity and a Day, I prefer the latter.

And one final note: For those who suspect me or the filmmakers of making a mistake: the possessive form of Ulysses is indeed Ulysses’ – without another possessive s, because it is a mythological/classical name. For all other names that end in an ‘s’, spelling depends on your chosen style (i.e. an apostrophe only, or an apostrophe and another ‘s’, are both valid).

Bambi (1942)

André Crous

USA
3*

Director: 
David Hand
Screenwriters:
Larry Morey
Perce Pearce
Gustaf Tenggren
Director of Photography:
Max Morgan

Running time: 70 minutes

I grew up without ever watching Bambi. I had heard about the fate of Bambi’s mother, of course, and I’ve known about it for 20 years, but having been exposed to many other Disney films over the years – The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and The Lion King, all of which had villains that really scared me, not to mention the film made of Pinocchio – I decided to wait it out. The wait turned into more than a decade, and now that I have finally seen the film, I am a little conflicted about my response.

It is a film of its time, coming shortly after the groundbreaking work initiated by Walt Disney in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and continued, in spectacular fashion, in Fantasia (1940). Its animation rather resembles a moving picture book and very often the animals are the only elements of the frame that are in movement. As the deer play among the tall grass, the grass barely moves, and even though the treetops seem to sway, the grass remains firmly rigid. But these are not my primary objections to the film.

The film starts with the birth of Bambi, a young stag, deep in the forest. He is lying next to his mother, but his father is absent. And his father’s absence is never explained or justified. The father is alive and well, named the Great Prince of the Forest, but he is distant – regal and silent – and only makes an appearance when his wisdom or experience is called for. Bambi’s mother isn’t very actively involved in her son’s upbringing either, and he spends most of his time – including an outdoor trip, when he says his first words! – with his friend Thumper the rabbit, whose father is mentioned repeatedly but never seen, unlike his mother. Bambi spends very little time with his mother: The most significant incident takes place at the meadow, when she warns him that danger lies beyond the forest and that he should take care.

The meadow would be the place where his mother is killed by the humans (whom we never see), but this central event of the narrative occurs offscreen, and since we hadn’t seen Bambi in his mother’s company very often, her subsequent absence in his life wasn’t going to upset our idea of his world all that much.

The most noteworthy scene in the film has to be the big forest fire that breaks out and forces many different animals to flee. The role of humans in this desperate situation is unmistakable, and it is this scene, much more than the death of Bambi’s mother, that would inspire sympathy in the viewers and make us aware of the point of view of the animals.

Without giving away too much, I must say here that the final scene, though meant to be a joyous occasion, has a very eery feel to it, since it can easily be interpreted as another beginning, similar in kind to the beginning of the film, and therefore it plants the idea that the future will be a repetition of the past.

The film has a very appropriate soundtrack, which also tells us when danger is approaching since we don’t see the humans, and I particularly enjoyed the rhythmic effect of the simultaneous appearance of raindrops on screen and “April Shower” on the audio track. However, this film is too short, and it skips over important moments (the death of Bambi’s mother; his grief; his subsequent growing up) while it focuses a long time on relatively insignificant details (playing with Thumper on the frozen lake; and his strange relationship with Flower, a young male skunk who clearly fancies him).

The death of a mother is sad, but in this case, the film cares little about her or her relationship with her son, and therefore it is difficult for the viewer to care much more, beyond a general, universal desire for innocent mothers not to get killed.

Fateless (2005)

André Crous

Hungary
4.5*

Director: 
Lajos Koltai
Screenwriter:
Imre Kertész
Director of Photography: 
Gyula Pados

Running time: 140 minutes

Original title: Sorstalanság

If you have any sense of compassion, films about the Holocaust are very difficult to watch. And yet, the stories that they tell must be acknowledged and absorbed by a generation that could easily forget the events of more than 70 years ago.

At the time I am writing this review, I haven’t seen a Holocaust film, either fictional or documentary, since I sat down to watch Claude Lanzmann’s staggering multi-disc Shoah (1985) six years ago. Lanzmann and Alain Resnais, whose Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) is considered to be an equally impressive achievement reminding us of the need to remember, both constructed films of the Holocaust as reflections of the past that still have striking resonance in the present.

Fateless‘s main character, who features in every single scene and is somehow involved in every single shot, is Gyuri “Gyurka” Köves (played by Marcell Nagy), a teenage boy with a mop of curly black hair, who lives in Budapest with his father and stepmother, part of a Jewish community in Budapest at the beginning of the Second World War. First, his father is sent to a labour camp, and then he himself is picked from a bus and sent to concentration camps, where he stays for the duration of the war, along with thousands of other Jewish Hungarians.

The young actor playing Gyurka is perfectly cast: Exactly on the verge of adulthood, he conveys innocence without childishness, and sometimes he seems to look straight at us, engaging our sympathy without soliciting it. His ideas are still evolving, and during a conversation about the essence of Jewishness, he wants to comfort a girl he has a crush on, who doesn’t understand why being a Jew makes her the object of so much hatred, but he doesn’t quite have the experience to do that yet. It is a touching moment, despite the evident political slant (fortunately, the only time the film hammers home the point) and one that obviously relates to the film as a whole.

Fateless is beautiful. It is the debut film of cinematographer Lajos Koltai and is clearly the work of someone with an eye for visual impact. The film’s colours are very muted: Mostly, the images resemble sepia photographs, and often the colour scheme is almost completely monochrome, with only hints of colour in the frame, especially the colour yellow, which of course is the colour of the infamous Star of David badges sewn onto the clothing of the Jewish population.

The film’s many different moments are not filled with the horrors one usually associates with Holocaust films but add up to a very human portrait of the people in the concentration camps and their desire to support each other. The fragmentary nature of the narrative, especially in the second half, is not always entirely effective, but the fragments themselves are like small gems in the mud of the Second World War.

A few scenes stand out for the emotion they are likely to evoke and very often the soundtrack of Ennio Morricone (one of the best he has ever scored, with the always incredible Lisa Gerrard adding her voice to some very emotive pieces) plays a significant role. At one point, the prisoners are asked to entertain their fellow inmates, and they sing a song whose relevance to their plight is difficult to miss:

What does a girl dream on a moonlit night?
That her prince will come on a steed of pure white

It’s a dream so sweet, but soon she must wake
And princes are scarce, so it’s all a mistake

Fateless ends on a very different note from most of these kinds of films and may rub some people the wrong way, but the point that the film makes illuminates the human ability to find light in the darkness and to hold on to the goodness in some people and use it as a shelter against the dreadful acts of others.

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
Rob Epstein
Screenwriters:
Rob Epstein
Carter Wilson
Judith Coburn
Director of Photography: 
Frances Reid

Running time: 91 minutes

This film, which won the Best Documentary Oscar, has always been considered the No. 1 document that condenses the life of Harvey Milk and reminds viewers around the world of his importance in the gay rights struggle. In 2008, Milk, Gus van Sant’s fictional account of Milk’s life, with Sean Penn as the gay rights icon, heavily relied on information gleaned from this documentary by Rob Epstein, who would go on to direct an outstanding documentary on gay representation in the cinema, The Celluloid Closet.

Watching The Times of Harvey Milk, it is very clear that Dustin Lance Black, who wrote the screenplay for Van Sant’s film, was inspired not only by the content of the documentary but also by its structure; the two films have exactly the same book-ends – a tape recording of Milk’s will in case of assassination, the announcement by Dianne Feinstein that Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone had been assassinated, and Milk’s famous “Hope” speech. I was a little disappointed by Black’s stencilled duplication of these parts in his screenplay for Milk instead of integrating them into the fictional quilt in some other way.

In touching interviews with many of the people in Harvey Milk’s life – though, unfortunately, many of the important ones, such as Cleve Jones, Dianne Feinstein and Scott Smith, are not included – we get a sense of Milk’s achievements and his perseverance against great resistance, especially during the debacle of Proposition 6, in his first year in office, which would have allowed the Department of Education to fire teachers who self-identified as homosexual. Here, I learned about Sally Gearhart, a gay rights activist with an intimidating intelligence, who debated Jon Briggs in a very factual manner during their televised debates, and I believe her collaboration with Milk helped to defeat the proposed anti-gay initiative. Her words on the role of fear in the campaign explain the central issue very succinctly and are still relevant to anti-gay movements today.

The film provides a lot of detail about the political co-operation between Milk and Moscone, and we can easily understand how it came to be that Harvey Milk was given the opportunity to be elected city supervisor (redistricting provided the city with a much more representative combination of politicians than had ever previously been the case).

However, the film focuses too much on the role of Dan White, who had served on the board with Milk and, after certain disagreements between him, Milk and Moscone, killed the two men. The film spends its final 20 minutes going over perceived discrimination in the trial, the jury selection and the verdict. Of course, one has to keep in mind that the film was made five years after the death of Milk and shortly before White’s release from prison (he would commit suicide a year later, in 1985). But all the talk of White, his conservative values and the lenient sentence that he was given after killing two men in a very obviously premeditated act of violence should not have taken up so much time in this documentary.

Pixote (1981)

André Crous

Brazil
4*

Director:
Hector Babenco
Screenwriters:
Hector Babenco
Jorge Durán
Director of Photography:
Rodolfo Sanches

Running time: 128 minutes

Original title: Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco

Pixote is gritty and tough and wholly credible as a faithful representation of the lives of street children in São Paulo. Whereas the title, unfortunately, focuses on one specific character, the film itself is interested in the larger group of individuals of which the young João Henrique, nicknamed “Pixote” (pronounced “pee-shaw-che”), forms an important part. It is a well-known fact that the boy who played the title character and whose living standards were comparable to those of his character in the film was shot and killed by police in August 1987.

The film’s extradiegetic opening is remarkably simple but entirely appropriate and manages to highlight the urgency of the plight of São Paulo’s street children: Director Hector Babenco, with one of the city’s favelas very visible in the background, speaks directly to the viewers and informs us that stories such as that of the film we are about to watch still happen every day. He even points to a small house where Fernando Ramos Da Silva, the actor who plays Pixote, lives with his family.

Pixote follows the lives of a group of young boys who, having committed crimes, can’t be sent to prison but are locked up in a reform school instead. At 10 years of age, Pixote is the youngest, and during his first night in the dormitory, a few bunks from him, a boy is raped by an oversexed teenager.

The image of Pixote sniffing glue is powerful, and we recognise this character’s desperation in a single shot. When circumstances around him become even worse (at times, the school may be confused for a prison, and a very corrupt prison at that), he decides to free himself from this restrictive environment.

But, as a relative of Pixote had warned him, life outside the school can be even worse than life on the inside. Even though there are a few wonderfully dynamic scenes in which we see the young boys snatch purses and mug unsuspecting seniors of their wallets, their eventual involvement in the world of drug dealing, which they know nothing about, is tense and leads to very bad things.

Pixote is not really the main character, and a title that made it clear that the focus is on the group rather than the individual would have been truer to the spirit of the film. The cinematography is excellent, and the acting is flawless. However, the story does not have the tight focus it could have had if the centres of interest had been more clearly defined. At one point, the film digresses into a musical number that only relates to a single character, who never really features again. However, the themes that the film does raise, including issues of poverty, sexuality and power, are all handled admirably, and it is clear to see why this socially conscious film caused such a sensation when it was first released.

Planet Terror (2007)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Robert Rodriguez
Screenwriter: 
Robert Rodriguez
Director of Photography: 
Robert Rodriguez

Running time: 105 minutes

It’s a bad night in Texas: The zombies are out. Planet Terror‘s take on the zombie film is much grittier (read: more steamy, more violent, more bloody and less funny) than commercial ventures such as Shaun of the Dead, and what it sets out to do it does very well. The film is made as an homage to zombie movies and the kinds of violent films shown at “grindhouse theatres” in the 1970s. In combination with Quentin Tarantino’s Deathproof, these two films constitute Grindhouse.

The film starts with a fake trailer (which would later be done for real and released under the same name) for Machete, in which one of Mexico’s Federales hacks off limbs with a machete. The trailer sets the tone for the movie we are about to see, although very quickly the main feature reveals itself to be even more blood-soaked, and while there are some moments of comedy by actors who deliver rather witty lines deadpan, the film’s dialogue overall is quite serious.

We meet a number of characters who will soon come together to defeat the zombie uprising, including gogo dancer Cherry Darling. On the night she decides to call it quits at the strip club, she runs into El Wray, a former boyfriend, at a steakhouse with the best meat in Texas. Cherry Darling is played by Rose McGowan, while Freddie Rodriguez is El Wray, who is much more talented in the art of mass murder than he lets on, especially when the victims are undead.

Bruce Willis also makes two brief appearances as a general who wants to immunise himself against the green vapour that turns everybody to zombies; he is presented in a way that evokes a kind of alienation (as far as I can remember, he never interacts with another character in the same frame).

The story, which takes place during one night, is very simple: Zombies arrive; some fight the zombies while others turn into zombies; lots of explosions and bloodletting, led mostly by the unlikely hero El Wray; survivors escape to Mexico. There is also some domestic drama with a doctor (Josh Brolin), his unfaithful wife who is also a nurse (Marley Shelton) and their young boy.

The film was made for its visual effects, and the zombies’ bubbling epidermis is consistently revolting. So too are the instances of cannibalism (although zombies don’t seem to eat other zombies, they do like the taste of human flesh) and the drops of blood on the lens of the camera. The scenes of violence are disproportionately bloody compared with the bodies being decimated, and often the bodies seem to disintegrate on impact with a slow-moving motor vehicle, releasing an amazing amount of blood that gushes in every direction.

Planet Terror contains numerous jump cuts, often timed with specific actions in the film itself, and in this way, the film diverges from the films it pretends to emulate since Rodriguez makes visible his evident manipulation of the film itself, instead of the latter being a work that is affected by random factors such as time, heat, friction, etc. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, the viewer will have to decide for himself or herself.

This world is clearly a part of the Grindhouse world that is otherwise defined by Deathproof, and a number of characters appear in both. Also, the show hosted by Jungle Julia, a character in Tarantino’s film, is mentioned here on the radio. But while Tarantino’s universe was conceivably a slightly manipulated version of a world close to our reality, Planet Terror makes a mistake when it mentions Chris Rock by name, thereby pretending both that the world is close to ours and (in being made with the conventions of a zombie film, including the presence of zombies) that it is not. Whatever the viewer’s reading of these finer points, it remains a very entertaining film, though if one took away the fire and the blood, there wouldn’t be much left standing.

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

André Crous

USA
5*

Director:
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Screenwriters:
Gore Vidal
Tennessee Williams
Director of Photography:
Jack Hildyard

Running time: 114 minutes

It is truly remarkable that this film, whose subject is always implied but never mentioned by name, can have such a strong impact on a viewer who has grown up in a much less restricted era of movie-going. I knew this film from a Gore Vidal interview in The Celluloid Closet, in which he, the screenwriter, admitted that the finale was overblown, and the very visible reference to the demise of Frankenstein’s monster in the film by director James Whale was a bit over-the-top. I knew that the unseen protagonist was gay and killed because of his sexuality, so I did go into the film suspicious of the words about him, wary of things said and particularly of things unsaid. Perhaps this knowledge made me susceptible to a positive bias towards the film. On the other hand, the film pretends to look for the truth and yet persists in obscuring this most basic component of the story, always putting up a smokescreen in front of the viewer. And nonetheless, the film is intriguing from beginning to end.

A young woman named Catherine Holly has been diagnosed with dementia praecox following the death of her cousin, Sebastian Venable, at the hands of a street mob in Cabeza de Lobo, Spain, the previous summer. The reason for the death and the exact way in which he died remain a mystery until the very end, but our suspicions grow about the exact nature of the relationship between the two cousins when Sebastian’s overprotective mother, Violet, wants to have Catherine lobotomised for “babbling” about the events of Sebastian’s final hours. The doctor who is to perform this operation is Cukrowicz, who tries to piece together the puzzle from the fragments given to him by the supposedly insane Catherine and Sebastian’s snobbish mother.

While the screenwriters were obliged to remove references to homosexuality, it is significant that Montgomery Clift was chosen to play Dr Cukrowicz, whom Violet mistakes for her own son. Clift was gay, and even though nothing is intimated about his character’s sexuality, his casting could not have been unrelated to his sexuality. Perhaps that is a sweeping statement, but it makes perfect sense in this film where so much had to be suggestive rather than overt.

By means of imagery such as the Venus flytrap and the painting of Saint Sebastian, the film prepares us for the swallowing of poor Sebastian by the angry mob in the film’s final act. “Nature is not created in the image of man’s compassion”, says Dr Cukrowicz, and this statement, made early in the film, after Violet’s account of the “flesh-eating birds” that ravage the young sea turtles on the Galápagos Islands, paints a truthful though ominous picture of the world that will be revealed to us. “[T]he ones who eat flesh, the killers, inherited the earth. But then, they always do, don’t they?”

Cukrowicz is a serious man who barely ever blinks and is aware of the experimental nature of the work he does. In his very first scene, in the hospital’s operating room, director Mankiewicz heightens the tension with small details, both visual and auditory, that include a constant buzzing in the background. Katherine Hepburn is marvellously stiff-upper-lip as Violet Venable, who has a borderline incestuous obsession with her late son. The character of Catherine is the only place where the film and the story trips up, ever so slightly: She is put, under Cukrowicz’s care, in what seems to be the least protected mental institution in the world, where she roams freely, provoking all kinds of riots among both male and female patients. Elizabeth Taylor, who plays this role, is also in the unenviable position of appearing onscreen for the first time after we have spent a long and poignant scene in the company of Clift and Hepburn, and her acting (or her character) is no match for theirs.

Suddenly, Last Summer is a joy to behold, even more so today, because the care with which Vidal (and Williams, although he distanced himself from the film) removed the references to Sebastian’s homosexuality while leaving in just enough to make us wonder. The casting of Clift and the image of Sebastian being devoured by a mob of young men are equally impressive and give ample food for thought, as they imply what could not be said outright.

Lolita (1997)

André Crous

USA
2.5*

Director:
Adrian Lyne
Screenwriter:
Stephen Schiff
Director of Photography:
Howard Atherton

Running time: 137 minutes

Adrian Lyne’s 1997 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel plays as a farce, with Jeremy Irons headlining as Humbert Humbert, the middle-aged gentleman infatuated with his teenage daughter-in-law, Dolores, aka Lolita. While the problem of paedophilia – or more accurately, hebephilia, the love of children in early puberty – is certainly serious and consequential, the film deliberately undermines its own seriousness. This self-subversion is sometimes funny, but often it is rather pointless fun. No review of Lyne’s film would be complete without reference to the Kubrick adaptation in 1962, and I shall come back to such a comparison later in this review.

We all know the story of Lolita. Humbert Humbert arrives in New England and prepares to teach French at the university. He moves in with Charlotte Haze, a widow, and her teenage daughter Lolita (a sexually assertive Dominique Swain), with whom he proceeds to fall head over heels in lust.

But the story, as presented by Lyne, is both more complicated and also less interesting. Lolita, who is supposed to be around 14 years old, looks much older. She has a sexual confidence that is lacking in any other female character in the film, save perhaps her mother, and enjoys manipulating Humbert to the point of locking lips with him barely 30 minutes in the film. At the same time, Humbert, who is quite indecisive and weak, allows himself to be dominated by the little nymphomaniac dominatrix whom he first sees in the garden, lying under the sprinklers on the grass, flipping through a magazine, her loose-fitting dress stuck to her wet skin.

Humbert is presented as a much more feeble character than the one in Kubrick’s film. In a scene at the hospital, late in the film, when Humbert finds that Lolita has left him, his behaviour is as erratic as it is pitiful, and one can’t help but laugh at the events onscreen.

According to numerous sources, Lyne’s adaptation is closer to Nabokov’s original novel than Kubrick’s version. Of course, that shouldn’t matter to anybody, since films are judged on their own terms and do not become better because they are closer to a different medium. In terms of character development, the most significant difference from Kubrick’s film is found in the character of Clare Quilty, who, here, cuts a much sillier figure and prances around his mansion in his night robe (which doesn’t always cover him as much as one would have liked).

I would argue that Humbert is taken advantage of by Lolita, who knowingly sexually harasses him for her own entertainment. This fact is the reason why I find one of the film’s final scenes, when Humbert tracks her down, so phoney because Lolita somehow seems to think that she had been wronged by her stepfather and had had no part in her own loss of innocence. Ennio Morricone’s sweeping music also seems completely out-of-place at this point.

The film is comedy, not drama. Sex is as absent as it was in Kubrick’s film, but as far as nudity goes, we get a full frontal of Frank Langella as Clare Quilty – not a pretty sight, trust me. The story has its twists and turns that almost make the whole thing bearable, but the quiet desperation of Humbert in Kubrick’s film has disappeared (because they have sex…off-screen) and, with it, the tension that kept the viewer’s attention.

Linha de Passe (2008)

André Crous

linha-de-passeBrazil
3.5*

Directors:
Walter Salles
Daniela Thomas
Screenwriters:
George Moura
Daniela Thomas
Bráulio Mantovani
Director of Photography:
Mauro Pinheiro Jr.

Running time: 108 minutes

An 18-year-old boy, who desperately wants to be a professional soccer player, and his three brothers in Cidade Líder, a suburb of São Paulo, go through the motions of growing up in this film by one of the country’s most internationally renowned directors, Walter Salles, co-directing with longtime collaborator Daniela Thomas.

The rite of passage (or “line” of passage in the title) that the characters must go through is different for each of them, and while their stories are slow to pick up speed, they all crash over the line in the film’s final act.

The brothers are the soccer-mad Dario, the charming playboy Dênis, evangelical Dinho and cheeky little Reginaldo, much blacker than his stepbrothers, who wants to find his real father. Their mother, Cleuza, is about to have her fifth, who she hopes will be a daughter, and this would be the third time (as far as I could tell) that a child has a different father than those of its siblings. Cleuza is an angry woman, understandably frustrated by her family’s abject living conditions and the apparently carefree attitudes of many of her children.

Dinho has the most visible character arc and is arguably the most likeable of the four brothers. Even though it is still unresolved by the end of the film (most of the characters’ stories seem to continue into uncertainty when the end credits roll), his thoughts are made visible by his actions. When he fancies his brother’s girlfriend – or rather, sex partner – this interest is subtly made evident by his hesitation as well as a beautiful, understated shot in the shower when he presumably tries to wash himself clean of such thoughts.

The other brothers have their own problems while trying to scrape together enough money or to find themselves a new family, and their different approaches are cleverly stitched together by very good editors Gustavo Giani and Lívia Serpa. As usual, the music, by maestro Gustavo Santaolalla, consists mostly of strings and never takes centre stage. In terms of cinematography, the most exciting scenes are certainly the ones on motorcycles that speed through the sometimes hair-raising traffic of Brazil’s largest city.

Linha de Passe is no Central Station (Vinícius de Oliveira, the boy from the latter, also stars in this film): The lead female character is very unsympathetic, and we never get to know her as well as we can understand the factors that push and pull her sons. Fortunately, although the film’s characters don’t always get what they want, and there is a fair amount of disillusionment, the film itself is never as negative about life as the similarly themed early films of Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu.

The Rules of Attraction (2002)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Roger Avary
Screenwriter:
Roger Avary
Director of Photography:
Robert Brinkmann

Running time: 110 minutes

Rules of Attraction is mostly about sex. It’s set on the campus of some liberal arts college in New England, where student life consists of parties, intercourse and drugs; in the film’s opening scene, one of the lead characters wakes up while she is being raped by a stranger who proceeds to vomit all over her. We never see any of the students in class, and we see very little class in the students. But the film’s editing is mildly stylised, and one particular shot is unlike any other we have seen before. More below.

Roger Avary co-wrote Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino, and Rules of Attraction is an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel of the same name. Ellis, of course, created the world of American Psycho, which is an extension of the world of The Rules of Attraction. Avary’s film has retained Pulp Fiction‘s playfulness in subverting the time continuum and Ellis’s dark humour mixed with sex and violence. While the film is a succession of parties, the one more debaucherous than the last, we only realise, once we get to the last party, that it is actually the first party and that we have come full circle. This structure, and the presentation of the material (the events often play out in reverse as well), may well be visually associated with the numerous hallucinogens that the students consume over the course of the film.

The four main characters are Paul, Sean, Lauren and Victor. Paul wants Sean, Sean wants Lauren, Lauren wants Victor, and Victor, well, he will take whomever he sees first.

It’s college, students are horny, and people get hurt – physically, emotionally, or both. Ian Somerhalder is perfectly cast as the slightly androgynous Paul Denton, but while Avary might have wanted Dawson’s Creek’s James Van Der Beek to break out of his shell with the role of ultraviolent Patrick Bateman’s drug-dealing brother, Van Der Beek’s character, Sean, is physically presented as a vampire, which turns his performance into something of a farce.

The split-screen is sometimes used to show us two different realities (one really taking place and the other a fantasy), but the film’s most romantic moment is conveyed by means of a breathtaking use of this technical gimmick, when it unites two characters in(to) a single frame. The film has many other clever little tricks up its sleeve, including a gun pointed straight at the camera during a very tense exchange between Sean and his drug dealer.

The Rules of Attraction also contains a horrifying suicide scene, which is more than a little sensational, since the character ending her own life is not a very important character. The film does try to justify itself by pointing out how peripheral she was in the life of the boy she admired, and subsequently also in ours, but the gruesome nature of the act provokes repulsion at the visual instead of the emotional that one would have expected to be concomitant.

The characters’ dialogue sounds right, especially when Sean and Paul leave a party together to go and smoke weed, and the other party guests try to determine whether they have really “left the party together”.

The film is as haunting as Mary Haron’s American Psycho, with the ubiquitous hunger for sex replacing the other film’s desire for violence. Technical gimmicks like the scenes played in reverse do become a little bothersome, but Avary’s approach to his characters is not superficial, and I would love to see what Avary pulls off the next time he is behind the camera, which is way too infrequently.