Countries

Isle of Flowers (1989)

André Crous

isle-of-flowersBrazil
4.5*

Director:
Jorge Furtado
Screenwriter:
Jorge Furtado
Directors of Photography:
Roberto Henkin, Sergio Amon

Running time: 13 minutes

Original title: Ilha das flores

This short film appears to be a documentary, but it doesn’t really matter whether the characters are real individuals or not. The very loose storyline follows the journey of a tomato and examines the implications of human intervention while trying to capture exactly what it is that makes us human. The conclusions are rather pessimistic.

Isle of Flowers is set, if such a simple term may be used here, at a tomato plantation in Porto Alegre, where a worker named Suzuki (the recurring, matter-of-fact narrator informs us that he is Japanese) picks the vegetables. These tomatoes will be sold to a supermarket, where Mrs Anete, a perfume saleswoman, will buy them. When she prepares the tomato soup, she deems one of the tomatoes unsuitable and throws it in the garbage. One of Porto Alegre’s garbage dumps is situated on an island called the Isle of Flowers, where pigs and humans vie for a chance to retrieve items from the garbage in order to feed themselves.

The film’s importance lies not in its ability to trace the very banal journey of a tomato from the plantation to the garbage dump, but in its evocative presentation of human desperation at the heart of consumerism. Isle of Flowers uses the red vegetable as a red herring: The film, via many detours, finally deals with the poor of Porto Alegre who have to scavenge for food; they find themselves, in the scheme of things, situated even lower on the socioeconomic ladder than pigs. Everything has a price and can be exchanged for money, as the film clearly indicates, and since a pig can be bought for food, it is worth more than the poor scavengers, who cannot.

The Isle of Flowers, moving as it does from one train of thought to the next, is comical in its apparent digressions but ruthless in its depiction of the lives of human beings. When mentioning Jews, all we see are images of the Holocaust. A human being is defined, for example, as an entity with a highly developed brain and opposable thumbs. These traits are accompanied onscreen by an image of a mushroom cloud (a consequence of the workings of the brain) and the forbidden apple, picked by the opposable thumbs.

My only qualm with the film is its definition of the family as a unit that consists of a father, a mother and two children. While traditionally true, this convention is purely arbitrary and wholly simplistic. But this flaw does nothing to detract from the film’s enlightening and thoroughly entertaining perspective on the impact of exchange.

The Inheritance (2003)

André Crous

Denmark
4*

Director:
Per Fly
Screenwriters: 
Per Fly
Kim Leona
Mogens Rukov
Dorte Warnøe Høgh
Director of Photography: 
Harald Gunnar Paalgard

Running time: 110 minutes

Original title: Arven

It is regrettable that I have come to associate Danish cinema too readily with the work of Lars von Trier and his Dogme brothers-in-arms. There are many other films from this small country that are (at least) equally capable of tugging at our heartstrings, and Per Fly’s The Inheritance is one of them. Along similar lines, one may look to Susanne Bier’s After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet), released in 2006, a film whose images, like those of The Inheritance, were exquisitely lit and filmed with handheld cameras.

The Inheritance is set up as a tragedy from the start, and the film’s bookended structure is perhaps the only element that is worthy of harsh criticism. Director Per Fly makes it very clear from the start that Christoffer and Maria are no longer together, but as a result, he eliminates the tension that might have resulted from a linear telling of the story. After the opening scene, the film cuts to three years earlier (although, over the course of the film, the math doesn’t work out: It is in fact longer than three years), and we see the couple happy together in Stockholm.

The rest of the film would show us the deterioration of their relationship and, since we know how it will end, the film removes any hope of a successful resolution to the drama. This indication of a tragic outcome is mirrored in the plays performed by Maria, who is a theatre actress at the Royal Dramatic Theatre: At first, she stars in comedies, As You Like It and The Twelfth Night, and as the story develops, she becomes involved in a production of Shakespeare’s tragic Romeo & Juliet.

Ulrich Thomsen, who is cast as Christoffer, is an actor I’ve seen twice before, as the ice-cold white-collar terrorist in Tom Tykwer’s The International, and a decade earlier as the emotionally damaged central character of the first Dogme film, The Celebration (Festen). The Inheritance provides him with a golden opportunity to show his range, for his is not a simple character: As the only son of the family patriarch and big businessman, his mother sees him as the natural successor to his father’s steel company, even though he had distanced himself from the operation years earlier because of the pressure.

When his father commits suicide at the beginning of the film – a bad omen for anybody who contemplates the idea of taking over his job – he is shoved into the limelight by his mother and Nils, the chief financial officer, even though his brother-in-law Ulrik had, for all intents and purposes, been the second-in-command. But when Nils tells Christoffer that Ulrik has been spreading rumours about him and his mother tells him that Ulrik doesn’t have the talent to take over from her late husband, Christoffer feels it is his duty to captain the ship. In the process, his marriage gets torn apart.

The film’s depiction of the business world is relentlessly bleak, and while this world does have its benefits, even the most faithful employees sometimes need to be sidelined. Christoffer’s first act as managing director of the steel company is effectively a betrayal of his own wife: He goes against the decision he took with her moments earlier. And these betrayals, justifiable as they might be in the business context, have terrible consequences for human relations. Slowly but surely Christoffer is pulled into the world that he had sworn he would never (and later, only temporarily) be a part of.

The film does jump around from one point on the timeline to another, but in general, the flow is consistent enough for the story to feel like it is developing at the appropriate pace. Per Fly handles his actors with great insight and manages to convey the correct image of the most important figures without resorting to clichés.

Machete (2010)

André Crous

USA
4*

Directors: 
Robert Rodriguez
Ethan Maniquis
Screenwriters:
Robert Rodriguez
Álvaro Rodriguez
Director of Photography: 
Jimmy Lindsey

Running time: 100 minutes

Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil was released in 1958. Essentially the most stylish B-movie ever made, with an opening tracking shot that would be studied in film schools decades later, it famously stars Charlton Heston as a Mexican called Vargas, in spite of him having no accent whatsoever. The choice of Heston, who had played Moses two years earlier in Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments and would portray the title character in the award-winning Ben-Hur the following year, was contrary to all common sense, but it worked because the film permitted such casting lunacy.

Machete offers a similar performance that initially takes the viewer aback but succeeds in grabbing the viewer’s attention for exactly the same reason as in Welles’s film: Steven Seagal, starring in one of the best films of his career, is cast as a Mexican crime boss named Torrez. I’m not suggesting that Seagal is equal to Heston by any stretch of the imagination, and perhaps he realises as much because at least he tries to go for the accent.

Of course, a review of Machete must pay homage to the work done by Tarantino, starting with the two Kill Bill films and, in particular, the Grindhouse double feature that consisted of his Deathproof and Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. In fact, Machete is a feature-length adaptation of one of Grindhouse‘s fake trailers, which accompanied the full version (as opposed to the separate films) and are available on the DVDs. In terms of the physical action, Rodriguez continues to relish in his exaggerated representations of bloodletting.

The story is set up as a clash of cultures between the Mexicans, who cross the border, and the Americans who lie in wait, ready to shoot ’em up the moment they set foot on Uncle Sam’s soil. A representative of the xenophobia gripping America, but also, we learn, merely a politician, is Senator John McLaughlin, played by Robert de Niro – his best role in more than 10 years (at least, since Great Expectations). McLaughlin is involved in target practice on Mexicans who cross the border during the night, but he himself is betrayed by an over-ambitious deputy, whose involvement in an assassination attempt causes him to become entangled in Torrez’s affairs.

It all might seem like a big mess, but Machete, played by the very ugly Danny Trejo (an amazingly prolific actor, I learn: His profile on the IMDb claims that he starred in 18 films in 2010 alone, including Machete), separates the wheat from the chaff, or the head from the body, with his big machete.

The film’s B-movie feel naturally helps to create the illusion that everything is permissible, and mistakes in continuity or visual effects may be ascribed to the film’s aspiration to be something unconventional. That is a very clever strategy, and it does cover a lot of ground, but the film is not an entirely homogeneous production, and therefore there is still room for improvement. Don Johnson’s role as Von Jackson, the leader of the group of vigilantes patrolling the border, did not shimmer with the kind of rough energy of any of the other characters, and the directors allowed themselves to be carried away by their own desire to produce something better than a B-movie: During a shoot-out at a church, the bloody action is accompanied by a rendering of “Ave Maria”, which is more reminiscent of the baptism in The Godfather, or scenes from The Boondock Saints, and does not fit with the rest of the filmmaking approach in this film.

Machete is bloody bucket loads of fun. The novelty does wear off after a while, but at least Rodriguez tells his story simply and effectively, without the many metafilmic flourishes that Tarantino would have added, and consequently, it feels like the product of someone who is more interested in the story than the format in which it is presented. The machete is a brutal weapon of choice, and even if we have never seen it used in real life, Machete shows us how it is done – as well as other uses for intestines.

Shirley Adams (2009)

André Crous

South Africa
4.5*

Director:
Oliver Hermanus
Screenwriters:
Stavros Pamballis
Oliver Hermanus
Director of Photography:
Jamie Ramsay

Running time: 90 minutes

Shirley Adams is a proud woman trying to cope as well as she can with her domestic situation. Nine months before the film starts, her teenage son, Donovan, had been hit by a stray bullet while he was returning home in a crime-ridden low-income area of Cape Town, South Africa, known as the “Cape Flats”. The incident left Donovan paralysed, a quadriplegic. A few months later, Shirley’s husband abandoned them, never to be seen again. From time to time, they do receive an envelope with some money, but Shirley never questions the origins of the support, having accepted the responsibility of caring for Donovan all on her own.

In the film’s harrowing opening scene, which takes place in the dead of night, the camera nervously hovers over Shirley’s shoulders while she tries to resuscitate Donovan; he is unconscious, and foaming at the mouth, and in the following scene, in case we couldn’t guess, a doctor tells Shirley that Donovan had tried to commit suicide.

Shirley has devoted herself to the well-being of her only child, but Donovan, who is frustrated by his own helplessness and ashamed at being cared for (his mother has to wash him in the bathtub, an event that Donovan considers the ultimate form of his own debasement), is already in a downward spiral – and his suicide attempt at the beginning of the film is a good indication of how low his self-image has fallen. As a result of his own demons, and probably without any cruel intentions, Donovan lashes out at this mother, and their relationship clearly suffers because of his apparent ingratitude for her help.

The word that best describes the film’s camerawork would be “intimate”. Director Oliver Hermanus and his DP, Jamie Ramsay, tend to show the events from behind Shirley and this stubborn focus on intimacy can cause some frustration in a viewer who – admittedly, by convention, but with good reason, in my opinion – expects an establishing shot now and again. However, despite this unrelentingly close experience of events, a number of self-conscious shots in which we only see the back of main actress Denise Newman’s head, and a story that is very simple, first-time director Hermanus succeeds in gripping his audience thanks to his self-assured direction that steers the film away from any fake sentimentality. His approach is entirely appropriate for the story he is telling, and it is plain to see that the film was a labour of love.

Shirley Adams does not contain any picturesque views of the Mother City (the locals’ nickname for Cape Town), but the accents and the slight shifts between languages make it a very clearly defined story from South Africa; at the same time, it seems odd to label it a South African film, not merely because it mostly eschews any mention of politics, but because, frankly, the country has never before produced anything like it. If any specific influence is to be discerned, it would be the films of the Romanian New Wave: The film contains a number of single takes, but one shot in particular, which occurs during Donovan’s birthday, is very reminiscent of the famous shot around the dinner table in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Hermanus’s Shirley Adams is an example of exceptional filmmaking and ranks amongst the best films his country has ever produced.

Police, Adjective (2009)

André Crous

Romania
3.5*

Director: 
Corneliu Porumboiu
Screenwriter: 
Corneliu Porumboiu
Director of Photography:
Marius Panduru

Running time: 110 min

Original title: Poliţist, Adjectiv

Cristi is a policeman, but he does not have the kind of life we have come to associate, through the American film industry, with the cop genre. He has been assigned to a case of teenage marijuana consumption, and by the looks of things, this is going to be about as exciting as watching paint dry. The opening scene consists of Cristi following a teenage boy between his school and his home. Perhaps another film would have created some mystery about Cristi’s intentions – I’m thinking of the Dardennes brothers’ The Son (le Fils). But Cristi’s lack of self-consciousness indicates that he has probably done this kind of thing before and that he is very likely a policeman.

Our suspicions are confirmed in the following scene, at a meeting between him and one of his superiors. This is also one of the rare times that Cristi, whose face is generally expressionless, betrays any emotion. He has been following the teenage boy and his friends for a while, and he has dutifully written up and submitted his detailed reports, but he finds the mission rather senseless since no other country in Europe would prosecute anybody for smoking marijuana. He suggests they go after a friend, who might be a dealer, but his superior dismisses his suggestion.

The rest of the film contains many more scenes, often filmed in long takes, of Cristi tailing one of the schoolchildren. Sometimes he is lucky: They smoke something, and he gets to recover the butt, to determine whether it was tobacco or marijuana. But more often than not, he just makes a note of the vehicle registration number or a visitor’s times of arrival and departure.

As far as long takes are concerned, the film seems to have a Tarr-esque obsession with recording the passage of time, and in two scenes director Corneliu Porumboiu films actor Dragoş Bucur, who plays Cristi, eating alone at his small kitchen table. The one takes place in complete silence, the other is accompanied by the very bad music (“Nu te părăsesc iubire” by Mirabela Dauer) played on YouTube by Cristi’s wife, with whom he is clearly not very enamoured. And we are not much taken with her either, given her choice of song and her choice to repeat the song ad nauseam.

The film is ultimately an intellectual exercise about the use of language. It is, by no means, the kind of film one has in mind when thinking of a “police film”, which demonstrates the conventional use of “police” as an adjective, but which this film does not exemplify. So what? The scenes showing Cristi’s anxiety at challenging the status quo, namely his superiors, are infinitely more illuminating and constitute the only real points of dramatic interest in this film.

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
George Nolfi
Screenwriter:
George Nolfi
Director of Photography: 
John Toll

Running time: 105 minutes

This film, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, is first-rate entertainment and right up there with Inception and Dark City, although it is less complicated than the former and less intelligent than the latter.

The important point about the film is that it is set in a very recognisable world and that this is the film’s primary world. Whatever takes place “upstairs”, where the agents of control and change reside, is shown in very short scenes, whose interiors are either completely empty, not unlike the prison in THX 1138, or they resemble the actual world, as in the library scenes. The fact that the setting is so close to our world obviously suggests that we interpret events as possibilities, and the story, despite our better judgment, as realistic, at least for the duration of the film.

Writer-director George Nolfi does a very good job of focusing and keeping our attention. In the very first sequence, he places David Norris, a young representative campaigning for the position of senator for New York, next to a vast array of famous and influential political figures: Madeleine Albright, Michael Bloomberg and Jesse Jackson are some of the faces we see. He seems to be a shoo-in, but then, as in the real world, mud is thrown in the death throes of the campaign, and this mud sticks: pictures of the senator in his college days with his pants down. The image communicated is one of immaturity, and Norris loses by a landslide.

Norris quickly rebounds, however, after meeting – and making out with – a total stranger, called Elise, in the men’s restrooms. They lose touch, but this fateful meeting inspires Norris to reconceptualise his concession speech by doing something very unpolitical: telling the truth. His brand is immediately revitalised, but he can’t get Elise out of his head.

We discover (and eventually, so will Norris) that this meeting between him and Elise was never supposed to take place, and her place in his life would infinitely decrease his ambitions and his stature in the American society. And this is the question he needs to answer by the end of the film: Does he choose Elise, even if this choice means that his political life would take a turn for the mediocre as a result?

A group of agents in grey suits and hats follow Norris around, trying to make sure that his relationship with Elise does not prevent him from reaching his potential, and they want to do this by “adjusting” his life in small ways that cause the fewest ripples to the lives of those around him. But, this being a film, we know that there will be significant ripples, not least because Norris is so determined to take on the people who tell him he can’t have Elise.

Elise, played by Emily Blunt, is perfectly fine, but the two characters seemed like they were pushed together by circumstance, i.e. the film’s screenplay, rather than by desire. They clearly make a connection, as is evidenced by that first kiss, but what the reason for this connection is, we can only guess. Their subsequent conversations do little to convince us of the authenticity of their love.

But then, stories of rebellion against powers greater than ourselves, or the people we fully empathise with, are exciting. I thought of Neo’s meeting with the Architect in Matrix: Reloaded and of John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate and the power of saying ‘no’.

The Adjustment Bureau is highly enjoyable. Nolfi is an excellent director and in spite of a relatively small cast, his film never feels like it is too small. Some questions are left unanswered, most important among them the possibility of changing “the plan” if the “Chairman” is supposed to be omniscient. But the film is light and engaging enough to sidestep such issues and will be remembered for its high concept and its great style.

El Norte (1983)

André Crous

USA/UK
4.5*

Director: 
Gregory Nava
Screenwriters: 
Gregory Nava
Anna Thomas
Director of Photography: 
James Glennon

Running time: 139 minutes

At the house of a Guatemalan plantation owner, a dirt-poor worker betrays his friends for a wad of bills. These friends, meeting up at an abandoned hacienda, an old manor on the plantation that has all but crumbled to the ground, are taken out by a special force of men with machine guns. One of these men who are killed is Arturo Xuncax, but before he leaves for his last meeting, he has a very meaningful conversation with his son, Enrique – a conversation that makes it impossible not to empathise with him and the other plantation workers. Arturo says to Enrique:

It’s the same everywhere. For the rich, the peasant is just a pair of arms. That’s all they think we are, arms for work. They treat their animals better than they do us. For many years, we’ve been trying to make the rich understand that poor people have hearts and souls… that they feel. We are human, all of us.

Shortly after this scene, Enrique and his sister Rosa leave their small town of San Pedro, go across the border into Mexico and head north (El Norte means “The North” and refers to their end destination: the United States of America). Of course, the journey isn’t going to be easy, especially for these two youngsters who have almost impossible fantasies of the country up north. In a very well-chosen sequence in which the chaos of Mexico is juxtaposed with the green lawns, the sprinklers and the cars of suburban USA.

The film proceeds much faster than expected, which allows every scene to count. The editing is quick at times, although the director makes the very interesting decision to shoot many scenes in which a character delivers many lines of dialogue in a single take. This shows the director has a mind for connecting images into a comprehensible whole that enables the audience to grasp the physical nature of the story while slowing down the action on a human level to make us understand their words and their feelings.

Interestingly enough, the part of the film that evokes the most danger is the second half, which takes place in the USA. There is tension built into the premise that the main characters are working illegally, and while Immigration Services haven’t been successful in discovering them, the mere presence of these government officials, in very quick scenes that remind us of their function in society, plays on our fear that Enrique and Rosa will somehow be found out or reported.

No, the USA is not as easy as the brother and sister from Guatemala had expected; one scene that is clear in this regard takes places during Rosa’s first day cleaning a big house. The lady is nice, but when she explains how the functions of the washing machine should be used, she completely disregards the fact that she is speaking to someone for whom electricity is a foreign concept and whose English is less than rudimentary.

What is remarkable about the film is that it doesn’t paint its characters as victims of an unjust American context but shows how difficult life can be for a foreigner even when most things seem to be going smoothly. There are cultural, linguistic and historical chasms to overcome, and if these are not bridged before a green card is in the mail, there could be serious consequences.

The film is staged with amazing clarity, and while the situation is simple, and some of the events are predictable, the execution of the story delivers a very engaging experience. The only point at which the film falters is during the border crossing from Mexico to the USA. After what the characters have been told, we expect a sewer scene such as the famous one from The Shawshank Redemption. What we get, in comparison, is almost light enough to be laughable, and that is why the difficulties that they do face on this journey cannot be taken very seriously; and yet, their reaction is to be frightened to the point of being paralysed. This scene, stretched beyond its limits, is the only bad chord in an otherwise brilliant piece of work.

El Norte is an excellent film, its journey aspect similar to the one in Michael Winterbottom’s In This World; both films demonstrate the difficulty of international movement, especially when you look or speak in a certain way. As director Gregory Nava’s debut film, which he co-wrote with producer Anna Thomas, the film is consistently entertaining with wonderful characters who want to realise their fantasies. Though it was made 30 years ago, its central assessment of the life of a foreigner from south of the border still seems entirely credible and heartbreaking, and it should serve as a wake-up call to all those anti-immigrant rabble-rousers.

Sullivan’s Travels (1941)

André Crous

USA
2.5*

Director:
Preston Sturges
Screenwriter: 
Preston Sturges
Director of Photography: 
John Seitz

Running time: 90 minutes

This is my first Sturges film, and I like the Capra quality of the thing. There is something very warm and fuzzy about the story, even though it deals, albeit obliquely, with the idea of poverty. I also like films that deal with the film industry, and Sullivan’s Travels is a comedy about the commercial infeasibility of making films that deal with socially relevant topics rather than straightforward comedies, which almost inevitably do better at the box office. However, whereas Capra had a comedic way of presenting dramatic and important messages (Mr Smith Goes to Washington: “Stand up for what is right!”; It’s a Wonderful Life: “Don’t ever think that you haven’t made a difference!”; It Happened One Night: “Down with the walls of Jericho! We are in love!”), this film by Preston Sturges doesn’t quite rise above its comedic simplicity.

The film was made at the beginning of the Second World War and was released at the end of 1941, around the time of the Pearl Harbor attack that escalated the American military’s participation. Social issues, such as unemployment and low income, are raised in the film (this was at a time when U.S. unemployment figures, of a population still rattled by the Great Depression of the 1930s, were around 15%), but the central character regards everything from a comfortable distance. Sure, he mingles with the hoi polloi and even shares a table with them, but there is very little – if not a complete lack of – interaction between him and those he wants to represent on the big screen.

In fact, one can easily forget that Sullivan is actually a director. He doesn’t seem very awkward in his scenes with the homeless, and such moments of uneasiness as there are (at the communal dinner table, for example) have very little screen time and do not communicate much except a little comedy. Chaplin dealt comically with the life of a tramp, but even his films have emotions and insight into the life of someone who is homeless to a much deeper degree than anything in Sullivan’s Travels.

Sullivan’s Travels opens with a marvellous scene: Two men, accompanied by very loud, very enthusiastically bombastic music, are fighting on top of a train advancing at full speed through the dark night. This turns out to be the final scene of another film, screened for some producers. Such metatextuality is refreshing, considering the banal nature of most of the rest of the film.

The film contains at least one very bad scene. In prison, where there is a lot of hardship (although the only real hardship we ever see inflicted on anybody is on John Sullivan), the prisoners go to watch a movie one night: cartoons by Walt Disney. The moment the picture starts, the prisoners burst out laughing, to such a degree you might think they are having seizures. It is an absolutely ludicrous way to communicate the message (comedy works, even in hard times), and I found it thoroughly simpleminded.

Based on my experience of Sullivan’s Travels, a film that is supposed to be Preston Sturges’s masterpiece, it is very easy to come to the conclusion that he was no Frank Capra, and while there is some amusing banter between Joel McCree and Veronica Lake, in the spirit of screwball comedies, the film never seriously investigates the social milieu its main character wishes to study.

Vertigo (1958)

André Crous

VertigoUSA
3.5*

Director:
Alfred Hitchcock
Screenwriters: 
Alec Coppel
Samuel A. Taylor
Director of Photography: 
Robert Burks

Running time: 128 minutes

I’ve always considered Vertigo to be one of those acclaimed works of art that are accessible and even enjoyable from a distance, like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but if you try to approach them from the beginning and have an immersive experience, the effect is often frustration.

I understand the film. It is about obsession. But Hitchcock doesn’t approach his material with the intention of having us share the experience of the main character, Scottie, and obsessing with him; rather, he chooses to subtly warn us of the dangers that lie ahead if Scottie stubbornly proceeds along this path. We know that things won’t end well, because the whole atmosphere of the film is indicative of this inevitability.

Now, I realise that many viewers would disapprove of my slight dissing of one of Hitchcock’s best-known films, a film that even managed to reach the No. 2 spot on the coveted Critics’ Top 10 Poll of the British film magazine, Sight and Sound, in 2002, but let me tell you why the film doesn’t work for me.

In this film about obsession and illusion, Hitchcock’s primary concern should have been the viewer’s identification with Scottie, played by Jimmy Stewart, including his point of view. Unfortunately, the issue of point of view is the film’s big flaw.

Consider the following scenes and the shots out of which they consist:

1) The famous restaurant scene, where Scottie sees Madeleine for the first time. He is seated at the bar and looks to his far right, where Madeleine is seated at a table, her back turned towards him. Hitchcock introduces Madeleine by first focusing on Scottie, then panning to her and physically tracking in onto her. This shot is intercut with a shot of Scottie at the bar, followed by his point of view – a shot that contains Madeleine, filmed from his position. Later in the scene, when Madeleine leaves the restaurant, she pauses behind Scottie, whose face is turned away from her. Her face is framed from the side, we only see the right side of her face against the red backdrop of the wall behind her, but Scottie doesn’t see anything.

2) In the moments before Madeleine’s apparent suicide, Scottie runs after her. At first, he looks up at the Mission’s bell tower and we get a shot that we perceive to be his point of view. Madeleine runs into the church, followed by Scottie. There is a chase up the staircase, but Scottie looks down and is struck by his acrophobia (vertigo). Madeleine leaves through a trapdoor at the top and we see her, through an opening in the wall, falling back down to earth, having supposedly jumped to her death.

The first scene, as I described it, is mostly from an external perspective, except for the one or two brief shots taken from Scottie’s position at the bar, which may be labelled his point-of-view shots. But in a later scene in Scottie’s car, he flips through the museum catalogue and while looking at the painting of Carlotta Valdes, there is a flash, very clearly meant to be subjective, of Madeleine’s face as she stood behind him. This shot is impossible since he could not witness this particular image, having had his face turned away when it happened.

After Scottie’s first visit to Judy, the actress who played Madeleine, Judy, has a flashback to the events at the Mission. She “sees” the same shot that we had attributed to Scottie, namely the bell tower, and there are other external shots that seem altogether inappropriate in a flashback scene that ultimately ought to be very subjective.

Hitchcock’s failure to orientate his film successfully with regard to its presentation of perspective creates fluidity that does not allow the viewer to align himself/herself with the character of Scottie. However, one scene that is successful in this respect is the scene at the cemetery, in which Hitchcock often intercuts a lateral tracking shot, meant to indicate Scottie’s trajectory, with a reverse tracking shot that frames Scottie himself moving forward, towards us.

The film’s obsession with power and death, especially towards the end of the story, becomes a bit tedious, and while Scottie’s intentions are quite clear (he wants to get the woman back whom he loved and for whose death he feels responsible – even though he’s not responsible and calling their relationship “love” is a bit grand), Judy seems masochistically determined to endure Scottie’s near-abusive behaviour when he restricts her choices in clothes, hairstyles, and so on. This aspect of the film alienates the viewer from both characters because the idea of “conditional love” is very unappealing.

I found one particular scene’s editing frustratingly bad, namely the scene in which Scottie, in his car, pursues Madeleine’s car through San Francisco. There is a very clear lack of continuity from one shot to the next and generally feels like a choppy editing job, with the car turning in one direction while the driver is clearly turning the steering wheel in the opposite direction. Jimmy Stewart has a less pathetic character than in many of his other films, but he still seems to be one step behind the viewer. Also, being a former policeman, Scottie should be able to follow someone (in the cemetery, in an art museum) without being spotted. But the only reason he didn’t seem to be spotted is that Madeleine/Judy knew he was there and pretended not to notice. Such bad tailing diminished his value as a character in my eyes.

But the film will be praised for its meticulous attention to detail, and the choice of colour (in particular, the various traces of green) the film is beyond reproach. My favourite scene, in terms of the character’s interaction with the soundtrack, is the scene with the sequoias: Bernard Herrman’s music is almost distressingly calm and quiet, even though Scottie is aggressively interrogating Madeleine. But in a film of this kind, dealing with real and illusory psychological problems, his music is at times unnecessarily loud and screeching – just consider the moment when Madeleine leaps into San Francisco Bay.

Vertigo is cold and analytical; a more immersive approach would have suited the material better, especially as a film. Kim Novak is wonderful, and the design of the film is well-chosen (the many instances of rear projection may be read as another hint at the real/illusory dichotomy of Madeleine’s character). But it is far less enjoyable than Hitchcock’s other great films, and for me, Vertigo will always be more of a cerebral joy than an engaging work of fiction.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

André Crous

Germany
4.5*

Director:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenwriter:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Director of Photography:
Jürgen Jürges

Running time: 93 minutes

Original title: Angst essen Seele auf

Xenophobic sentiment is part of the fabric of Fassbinder’s classic, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but the film is by no means a political drama: It rather occupies a grey zone between politics, romance and a straight-faced delivery of very bad grammar. The speech pattern is even reflected in the grammatically incorrect German title, which translates as “Fear eat up soul”.

One of the two central characters is an immigrant worker from Morocco, whose real name, El Hedi ben Salem M’Barek Mohammed Mustapha, is too complicated for Germans to say, never mind remember, so he is called “Ali” by his German co-workers. Emmi Kurowski is a much older German woman, with Polish roots, who stops for a coffee at a local restaurant one rainy evening, where she sees Ali for the first time.

Both outsiders in their own way, both in need of love, their friendship quickly transforms into much more, to the great disapproval of their separate groups of friends. The setting is Munich, shortly after the chaos of the 1972 Olympic Games, and anti-Arab sentiment is rife among all members of society: Foreigners who have lived in Germany for a long time even forget that they themselves had been new immigrants once upon a time.

Fassbinder’s film was clearly an inspiration to Todd Haynes during the conception of his 2002 film, Far From Heaven, in which a 1950s middle-class white woman from New England strikes up a relationship with her younger, black gardener. Both directors, Haynes and Fassbinder, are gay, and the inevitable interpretation of their films as a pamphlet against prejudice is difficult to avoid. But Fassbinder is much more relaxed about his subject matter than Haynes, whose film dealt with both racism and the marginalisation of homosexuality.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is rather comically staged: Scenes sometimes consist of mere gazes that go on for a little too long. In this respect, the editing is well executed and very effective in its own unique way.

The film is as relevant and as entertaining today as it must have been upon its release in 1974. Socially, the same gossip is still the order of the day when there is an interracial – and in this case, also, an intergenerational –relationship between two people. Fassbinder does not go for heavy drama but focuses considerable time on the other women living in Emmi’s building and their responses to different situations that involve foreigners. His train of thought is clear but not too simplistic – and perfectly credible.

Fassbinder features as Emmi’s lazy son-in-law and, as all reviews will mention, the role of Ali is played by Fassbinder’s partner at the time, El Hedi ben Salem. While the film never reaches the melodramatic heights of an Almodóvar, a comparison between them might not be such a bad idea.