USA

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

André Crous

Beasts of the Southern WildUSA
4*

Director:
Benh Zeitlin
Screenwriters:
Lucy Alibar
Benh Zeitlin
Director of Photography:
Ben Richardson

Running time: 93 minutes

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a masterfully directed piece of naturalism that puts under the microscope nature and the people who treat it as a friend, even a relative, as it weaves together their daily routines in a way that integrates magical fantasy with hard reality. If you are looking for a strong narrative, you will not find it here, but the power of the film’s intimacy with its characters and their dreams is outstanding.

The film is all the more remarkable for being the début feature of Benh Zeitlin, who co-wrote the screenplay and contributed to the majestic score that often adds a very distinct dash of optimism to the events. Zeitlin’s film, set on the bayou around New Orleans, shows an encouraging affinity to George Washington, David Gordon Green’s strong and perceptive first feature released in 2000, which took place in North Carolina and whose plot was limited to small but meaningful interactions between children. Green’s film generated a lot of critical praise at the time for its honest depiction of children living in poverty and the world they create for themselves to make their physical and social circumstances bearable.

Zeitlin approaches his subjects — a 6-year-old girl called Hushpuppy (played by the astonishing first-time performer Quvenzhané Wallis) and her sickly father, Wink — with understanding and curiosity, and the story never seems contrived or judgmental. Such compassion for the characters is not seen very often on film, but Zeitlin has the gift to evoke our empathy with his interest.

The plot is almost secondary to the cohesive network of very naturalistic overtones onscreen, though the events are certainly significant. Around the time of a hurricane, which may or may not be Katrina, on a bayou around New Orleans called “The Bathtub”, Hushpuppy and Wink do their best to survive the daily turmoil of living in poverty. As Hushpuppy’s mother is no longer with them, the girl speaks to her mother’s clothes, which seem to speak back in very unsentimental tones.

The film contains one of the most tension-laden hurricane scenes I have ever seen. Short though it is, mostly relying on the sound of the constant rush of water from the ceiling of Hushpuppy’s and Wink’s makeshift shack in the forest, it packs a punch and reminds us of the profound effect a strong soundtrack can have on the audience.

The reality of the characters comprises their immediate surroundings but also their fantasies and their memories, and the representation of these is captivating, even hypnotic. We are introduced, early on in the film, to enormous fabled creatures called Aurochs that pique Hushpuppy’s interest in the mythical. Whether they are real, and what exactly they might represent, is open to interpretation, but their presence is a surprising yet wholly justifiable tactic that supports an ever so slight magical-realist ambience. This is strengthened by imagery such as characters constructing a houseboat on the high waters brought by the hurricane, calling to mind Noah’s Ark.

The young Wallis never sets a foot wrong as her character is self-confident and focused without being smart-alecky or playing older than her age. It is a shame, however, that the screenplay doesn’t expand her character so that we may know more about her friendships beyond the confines of the crude quarters Hushpuppy and her father call home.

But the way in which her point of view is communicated to us cannot be faulted. It is her own — rather than a generic “childlike” — perspective, as very intimate details are related with images and sounds that echo her own emotions. When Hushpuppy puts her ear to the chest of a pig or a chicken, she (and we, too) can hear the heartbeat of the animals. And the fragments of memories that she has of her mother, that she either personally witnessed or was told of by her father, are infused with a very openly romanticized sensibility that tells us something about the characters as well as the actual events.

From what we can gather, Hushpuppy’s father tries to raise her as a boy, always calling her “dude” or “man” and engaging in arm-wrestling matches with her. This line of thought isn’t really pursued by the director, but certainly contributes to a feeling that these individuals have more history and complexity to them than films generally tend to demonstrate.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is very moving most of the way and elicits wonder and admiration rather than excitement, especially when the action moves to less gritty locations such as an underground nightclub or a FEMA shelter.

As the ice caps melt, Hushpuppy tells us in voiceover that the world relies on its many parts fitting together just right. The narration is well-executed and effective, but the words don’t cast quite the same spell as those of characters in David Gordon Green’s films.

The film is a remarkable achievement for a first effort, and though a tighter narrative would have helped the viewer latch on more firmly to the events onscreen, this is an auspicious start to a great career in storytelling.

This is a slightly modified version of the writer’s review that first appeared in The Prague Post.

Prince Avalanche (2013)

André Crous

Prince AvalancheUSA
4.5*

Director:
David Gordon Green
Screenwriter:
David Gordon Green
Director of Photography:
Tim Orr

Running time: 94 minutes

Prince Avalanche marks a triumphant return for David Gordon Green. Rumours had been making the rounds for a while that the director had all but committed artistic hara-kiri when he started making big-budget films, first with Pineapple Express (which was quite enjoyable, but already a far cry from his previous film, Snow Angels). The broad comedy of the latter was in direct contrast with his gentler approach to the human condition in his early films, especially the crown jewel of his career so far, his 2004 film Undertow.

What sets Green’s filmmaking apart from that of all of his peers, especially when he behaves like a serious filmmaker, is the quality of the writing, and in particular the beauty of his dialogue. While Green has ditched the voiceover that aligned some of his films very closely with those of Terrence Malick (who served as executive producer on Undertow), he still very clearly demonstrates his skill as a writer and a fine observer of human emotion and thinking with some beautifully wrought lines about love and loss.

In an early scene with an old woman who has lost her house to a wildfire and is digging through the white ash of her former possessions, we share road worker Alvin’s (Paul Rudd) astonishment as she says, “Sometimes, I feel like I’m digging through my own ashes.” The woman’s words are expressed with a combination of truth and sincerity, yet they also have a powerful aftertaste that we cannot ignore. This comes after she relates a story of such simplicity and pride we cannot help but well up with tears at her predicament, and yet she is by no means presented as any kind of a victim.

Prince Avalanche is a remake of the Icelandic Either Way (Á annan veg) but has fleshed out some of the characters a bit more than the original, including that of the lady mentioned above, making her more human without taking away any of the mystery she had in the earlier film.

The two main characters of the film, in whose company we spend most of the running time, Alvin and Lance (Emile Hirsch), are out in the Texas countryside in 1987 repainting the yellow traffic lines on the road that leads through a forest, devastated by a wildfire a few months earlier (there was no such fire in Texas in 1987) and now reduced to a wasteland of charcoal.

Lance, who is Alvin’s sister’s boyfriend, got Alvin the job in part because he wanted the young man to make something with his life instead of wasting away at home. Alvin is not focused much, and Lance, who himself is on prescription medication, opines that Alvin ought to be, too. Alvin spends his time reading Lance’s comic books and only half-heartedly participates in the task of repairing the road cutting through the forest. Recently out of school, he is exceptionally horny and spends his nights masturbating in his tent.

Although Green no longer has the lush backdrop of Georgia to work with, as he did in Undertow, he and his DP, fellow University of North Carolina School of the Arts graduate Tim Orr, nevertheless present us with rich visuals that radiate with the green of the fresh foliage, the sparkle of water drops, the yellow of the lines, the orange of the sunsets, the red of the pickup truck and the blue of the boys’ jumpsuits. Despite there only being two characters, the vibrant colours and equally colourful dialogue produce a broad tableau to draw us in and keep us interested.

With multiple shots showing us the forest and its smaller inhabitants, Green emphasizes the peace of the space regardless of the burned pieces of wood that never let us forget a more brutal past. We can understand both of the young men’s desire, at various points, to have the silence to think, to pick up the pieces and reassess the direction of their lives.

Prince Avalanche, whose title fits in very well with the comic-book / superhero element, heavily depends on dialogue, and the back-and-forth between Alvin and Lance is perfectly suited to the talents and facial expressions of Rudd and Hirsch. But Green also adds some excellent visual gimmicks along the way that alternate between gag and poetry. At one point, the lines painted on trees suddenly serve as a line for writing, and Green proceeds to write. It is a gorgeous and unexpected moment that seems not at all like showing off but rather affirms the courage and the skill of the filmmaker, whose Undertow also benefited from several moments of visual experimentation.

In the end, it seems like Green wants to show us dynamic life is possible even amid apparent destruction. Although he never really puts much despair onscreen, his characters certainly have their fair share of difficulties to confront, and they rise to the task — even if it means they have to chug the vodka an old truck driver has given them and dance around in slow motion like fools in the wilderness.

Green shows again why he was called one of the most promising directors of his generation when his début feature, George Washington, was released in 2000. While his worst films make us shake our heads in dismay, his finest films enrich our lives like very few others out there.

This is a slightly modified version of the writer’s review that first appeared in The Prague Post.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)

André Crous

Martha Marcy May MarleneUSA
3.5*

Director:
Sean Durkin
Screenwriter:
Sean Durkin
Director of Photography:
Jody Lee Lipes

Running time: 101 minutes

Martha Marcy May Marlene doesn’t do anything wrong, but there is just not enough to hold on to for the film to become beloved. Its main character, Marcy May, real name Martha and telephone name Marlene, has just escaped from a cult on a farm in upstate New York where she has spent quite a bit of time being “purified”, what many in the audience will call “brainwashed”.

The girl has become a young woman who feels comfortable in her own skin but is now faced with a number of problems that need to be resolved for her to integrate into normal society again. The first is the people she left behind, people who seem to be folk of the land, working on the farm to sustain themselves, but whose rare interactions with the rest of society are cold and haunting.

In one of the film’s very first scenes, we see a group of men eating dinner. In the meantime, the women of the house sit and wait patiently on the steps, only making their way to the dinner table once the men, led by Patrick, have finished and left the dining room. Everything is done without question, as if it is the most normal thing in the world.

We struggle to understand the dynamic here. The film offers very little to explain the relationship between Patrick and his men, though it is clear the women are all damaged in some way. However, the main focus is Marcy May, who takes this name when Patrick tells her she doesn’t look like her actual name, Martha. Especially at the beginning, she is the only person on whom the shots focus, even when other people are in the room with her. And yet, we know nothing about her life before she joined.

Most of the film is spent in the company of Marcy May’s sister, Lucy, and her husband of only a few months, Ted. Their beautiful, spacious home next to a lake in Connecticut would seem to be the perfect refuge for the girl they know as Martha to recuperate after her ordeal, but she is haunted by memories of the events on the farm, and her behaviour often veers from the merely awkward to close to the sociopathic. One can laugh when she takes off her clothes to go and swim in the lake, but it becomes a bit disturbing when she can’t sleep and therefore decides to curl up in bed next to Lucy and Ted while they are having sex.

We realise over time how her words are mere copies of what she has been told by the cult’s psychologically affecting Patrick, who also took her virginity while she was drugged — an act, she is told by the other women, in which she should rejoice, because Patrick is such a great guy who purifies her. 

If the film had dug a little deeper, we could easily have been disgusted at the underlying goings-on. At one point we realise Patrick has fathered only boys with the girls, and the question remains open what happened to the women who were pregnant with girls. But the film has its eye on other things, like the visual motif of the empty room in which Marcy May is consoled after losing her virginity, and the same empty room, later on, in which she tries to console, drugged drink in hand, a girl before she goes to meet Patrick one dark night. In this way, the full story is revealed from many different angles while being visibly, securely grounded and connected by the visuals.

This is the first film of director Sean Durkin, and he treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves, with the exception of one particularly grating outburst of Marcy May during some celebration at Lucy and Ted’s, when the dramatic music takes over the scene completely.

But Marcy May’s past haunts her less than it haunts her sister, who is the real victim here. Having worried for years about her, she now wants to patch things up, but Marcy May won’t let her. Instead, although she is already imposing on her by staying comfortably at her house, she also makes some rude comments about her to Ted and laughs out loud when he tells her they are trying to have a baby.

“If you’re going to live here, you need to be a part of things,” are words of wisdom Patrick had told her that she could have kept in mind, but her lifeless eyes reveal her as being lost and confused. Yet it is frustrating to see Lucy also being too afraid to ask her why she is the way she is, and what had happened to her during all that time they didn’t see each other.

Viewers will talk about the ending, and it is one that isn’t entirely clear. Little of substance happens, but that is a general observation about the film itself, whose events can be read as an ineluctable journey towards tragedy, or merely small coincidences that Marcy May hysterically, but not without reason, interprets out of proportion.

It is possible she is merely hallucinating everything from before she arrived at Lucy’s place, though such an interpretation is itself perhaps a little far-fetched. The many L-cuts (sound that starts in one shot but is actually connected to the shot that starts, in a different time and place, a few seconds later) suggest this might be the case, but you can judge for yourself. 

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a very competently directed, but not entirely solid story that is nonetheless a powerful, memorable film.

Within Our Gates (1920)

André Crous

USA
4.5*

Director: 
Oscar Micheaux
Screenwriter:
Oscar Micheaux
Director of Photography:
Oscar Micheaux

Running time: 78 minutes

A landmark film, Within Our Gates is not the oldest film made by a black director, but it is the oldest one that has survived. It was Oscar Micheaux’s second film, made one year after his début, The Homesteader, but more importantly five years after D.W. Griffith’s racist epic Birth of a Nation. Within Our Gates does not merely try to redress Griffith’s depiction of blacks in the United States: The film is edited in a way clearly influenced by Griffith, but in terms of its narrative, Micheaux’s film is vastly superior to most films of the era, demonstrating a storytelling skill that is particularly suited to the cinema. In one instance, he even anticipates the revolution of Kurosawa’s Rashomon by more than 30 years.

In 1920, Sylvia Landry, who hails from the South, is visiting her cousin Alma in the North, where “the prejudices and hatreds of the South do not exist—though this does not prevent the occasional lynching of a Negro.” Sylvia is an educated young woman, who is romantically involved with Conrad Drebert, a soldier stationed in Canada who has asked for her hand in marriage.

However, Alma, a divorcée, has her eyes set on Conrad and through a series of events Conrad discovers Sylvia in a compromising position and has an outburst full of rage. Sylvia returns to the South – Vicksburg, Mississippi, to be precise – where she briefly helps out at a school that educates black children, but when the school’s money runs out, she goes to Boston to secure additional funds. At this point, the film really picks up speed, because it becomes clear Micheaux has no intention of neatly distinguishing between black and white characters as good and bad, respectively.

A charismatic black preacher, Ned, and a servant in the South, Efrem, are represented as backstabbers who would do anything to retain the ear of the white man. In other words, Uncle Toms. On the other hand, while many white characters are violently opposed to any kind of equality for blacks, there are a number of educated people, most importantly a Boston sociologist named Dr Vivian, who are sympathetic to Sylvia, in particular.

Dr Vivian is the only character whose development is problematic. We are shown a number of scenes, revealed as fantasies on his part, between him and the young Sylvia, and while the initial reason for his interest is stated as purely scientific, the so-called study he is undertaking sounds like a crock. In a close-up, we see one of the articles he is reading: “The Negro is a human being. His nature is not different from other human nature. Thus, we must recognize his rights as a human being. Such is the teaching of Christianity.”

What is fascinating about the film is its very rudimentary camerawork: The shots are all static. There is not a single pan in the whole film and very few close-ups, the latter usually saved for moments of intense emotion, such as Alma’s heaving bosom when she concocts an evil plan. But what Micheaux lacked during recording, he made up for during the editing process, not only by means of constructing parallel storylines, as Griffith had done, but by having these storylines metaphorically complement each other, as Abel Gance would do in Napoléon‘s “double storm scene” in 1927. He even includes two scenes, one apparently showing the real events and one the events as recounted by an unreliable witness, which anticipates the work of Akira Kurosawa’s famous Rashomon in 1950. Furthermore, besides the fantasies of Dr Vivian, there is a scene in which Efrem’s greatest fear is quickly realized when the image in his mind becomes the image on-screen.

The film is also broken into two time-frames, as the final 20 minutes are set in the South many years prior to the rest of the plot. It is a flashback that explains the context within which Sylvia has had to survive – a context we were completely unaware of, in which the lynchings of the South and the inequity of life as a black woman or man at this time in this place are made very clear. It is a brutal sequence, full of attempted sexual assault and physical violence that culminates in an amazing revelation comparable to the infamous final coup de théâtre of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.

Within Our Gates is a told with limited means yet very well put together and truly remarkable considering it was the filmmaker’s second film and it was made during the infancy of the cinema. Micheaux has a real sense for storytelling and though his actors often behave in exaggerated fashion, the viewer is more accepting because of the lack of sound, and what we have is a film that serves as a concise but very powerful counterweight to the pro-white vision of the South as made popular by D.W. Griffith. At a moment of great tension in the film, the viewer cannot help but sympathize with an appeal made by Sylvia’s mother, when she asks:

Justice! Where are you? Answer me! How long? Great God almighty, HOW LONG?

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

André Crous

USA
4*

Directors:
Maya Deren
Alexander Hamid
Screenwriter:
Maya Deren
Director of Photography:
Alexander Hamid

Running time: 14 minutes

Though she directed it with her husband Alexander Hammid (credited as Alexander Hamid), Meshes of the Afternoon has come to be firmly associated with Maya Deren. An amazingly solid surrealist film, it easily inhabits the space that is usually filled with the pompous ego of Un Chien Andalou.

From the outside, Meshes of the Afternoon seems to tell the tale of a slightly disturbed woman, perhaps with suicidal tendencies, who goes to sleep in a chair (it what might or might not be her own house) and proceeds to dream an equally disturbing dream, before, well, it’s not clear at all what happens at the end of the film because over time the apparently clear distinction between dream and reality is elided to the point where Inception would be straightforward.

A few symbols, most prominently the key and the knife, are constantly evoked over the course of this 14-minute film, and it is the way in which they feature and the way Deren and Hammid make them manifest onscreen that turn everyday objects, inanimate as they may be otherwise, into objects of uneasiness. A few jump cuts (and remember, this was 15 years before À Bout de souffle) are used to great effect to unnerve the viewer and another impressively staged sequence involves the main character slithering through the air, or perhaps across the ceiling on her back, in ways that seem possible in a dream.

The film is silent and it goes not for visceral horror, as in Buñuel and Dali’s film, but for a sweet darkness that plays with light and shadow, has an appearance by the Grim Reaper whose face is a mirror (another symbol that will reappear towards the very end of the film) and drags us ever deeper into the hole of uncertainty regarding the clean separation of realities. A bizarre number of close-ups involving feet are also there to interpret as you wish.

What is most admirable about the film is its deft transition between points of view and its seduction of the viewer by making us comfortable with one kind of reality while positioning us to accept another much less definable reality almost immediately. The film certainly succeeds in holding our attention, though towards the end, after shards of a mirror abruptly fall into the ocean (though, unlike the end of Un Chien Andalou, the action does not suddenly shift to the seaside), the film does become slightly less compelling.

The use of the camera is astounding and such simple motions as rolling it from side to side to simulate the sensation of being on a boat, even while the action is inside the very stable confines of a house, is perfectly suited to the material and evokes a slight nausea that is useful if not essential to the viewer’s experience.

The film has more shadows than actual characters and the lack of character names is a fact as interesting as it is significant. The well-known image of the central character looking out of a window, seemingly trapped by a transparent sheet of glass, has been used by many subsequent films and is one of the rare images where the intention and the meaning seem to be apparent.

Meshes of the Afternoon is a rabbit-hole film that would be endlessly fruitful for discussions of the subconscious and the way in which our light and dark desires can manifest themselves in our dreams, not only in images but in movements and, most importantly, in atmosphere.

I Confess (1953)

André Crous

USA
3*

Director:
Alfred Hitchcock
Screenwriters:
George Tabori
William Archibald
Director of Photography:
Robert Burks
 
Running time: 95 minutes
 
In I Confess, Alfred Hitchcock tries to pull the wool of one problem over our eyes so we are blinded to the easy resolution of another. He suggests the problem of a priest who would rather risk hell on earth than hell in the afterlife is perfectly credible and would inject a valid fear in the viewers of his film. He is only about half-right.
 
Father Logan, a very handsome priest (it’s Montgomery Clift, after all)  in Quebec City, is visited by a German refugee, Otto Keller, late one night. Keller is distressed, and the previous scene had shown us the reason: Keller has murdered a lawyer named Villette and unburdens himself in the confessional to Father Logan. Relieved of this weight around his neck, Keller keeps working at the rectory, where he runs into Father Logan every day, and so does his wife Alma, who also knows about her husband’s dark secret. But Father Logan can’t tell anybody about this confession because in his capacity as priest, he is bound by the confessional privilege, in the same way as a doctor, to respect the confidence his interlocutor places in him.
 
Of course, this secrecy is bound to become an issue, and this process has a few sides to it. Father Logan becomes complicit in keeping very important information from the police. Now, he has the training to do this with legion personal secrets which his parishioners confide in him, so Hitchcock turns the screws by, firstly, having Keller commit the murder wearing a cassock, so as to avoid suspicion, and secondly, having Logan keep his own secret, which is revealed halfway through. This personal secret puts him in a lot of trouble because it could easily result in his reputation being tarnished and therefore his credibility undermined, even though we know, from the very first scenes, that he is not the one who committed the murder.
 
This theme of guilt would play well with a 1950s Catholic audience, but when seeing it today, most viewers would be puzzled, if not outraged, by the main character’s decision to keep a secret (about a mortal sin, no less) rather than protect himself by telling the truth. Rather than honourable, this just seems weak. It is a situation whose gravity and absurdity is compounded by the disgust Keller evokes in us by constantly hovering around Logan, making him more and more uncomfortable. Keller clearly has no regard for the actions taken by Logan to protect him and instead tries to pin the murder on Father Logan — his patron and the man who saved him and his wife from misery by providing them with jobs at the church.
 
The beauty of Quebec City isn’t fully utilized either, and many street scenes could have taken place anywhere. The famous Château Frontenac does appear now and again, and the first glimpse we have of this magnificent building, during the opening credits, has it under dark clouds, a perfect visual metaphor for the film’s plot, and, unfortunately, its execution. One very smart visual move is the stitching on Father Logan’s cope: in one of his first scenes, with his back turned to us, we see a big cross across his back — evidently, the one that he prepares to bear for the rest of the film.
Clift is as good as he always is, which is to say in a class of his own, but he seems a bit too stable, too certain of himself: While he conveys some distress when he clasps his face, his voice never wavers, even under the immense strain of his seemingly hopeless situation. 
 
I Confess is a failed film for Hitchcock, since there is very of the little dark humour that otherwise made many of his films so enjoyable. The murder takes place before the start of the film, which admittedly happens in other Hitchcock films as well, but the notion of our hero being framed for a crime he didn’t commit is something Hitchcock does not successfully exploit. Instead, he opts for flashbacks in soft focus (!) and a love story that, despite its considerable running time in flashback, never lives up to much in the present. And although they have picked a priest as their prime suspect in the case, has it not occurred to anybody that his silence in many key scenes — most significantly his testimony in court, when, with the ridiculous flourish of a fade-out, an important part is done away with by means of an ellipse — is the result of his duty as a priest to keep matters of confession in the confessional?

The Best Man (1964)

André Crous

USA
4.5*

Director:
Franklin J. Schaffner
Screenwriter:
Gore Vidal
Director of Photography:
Haskell Wexler

Running time: 95 minutes

Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, which dates back nearly half a century, is as relevant to our understanding of the American political system as ever. As of this writing, the 2012 GOP candidates have not been narrowed down to a single front-runner yet; since many have speculated about the likelihood of a brokered convention, I thought a film that deals with this term might be rather apropos.

What is a brokered convention?

A convention is the party in the big tent with all the delegates (and, if it is the Democratic Party today, all the superdelegates as well), usually held in August or September in a big ol’ sports arena or convention centre, where the candidate who has survived six months of primaries and caucuses formally accepts his party’s nomination as candidate for the presidency and the election in November.

A brokered convention occurs when no such candidate has obtained a majority of the votes and has to undergo the added stress of being put on a ballot during the convention and surviving round after round, with candidates dropping out one by one, until one candidate remains. The delegates of candidates that drop out have to realign themselves with the remaining candidates; thus, a lot of dealing inside back rooms goes on in the process.

In The Best Man, there are two clear front-runners for the presidency: A former Secretary of State, William Russell is a careful politician who seems to overthink every problem before making a wholly informed decision and therefore is perceived to be passive, even weak. Think Obama without the charisma. The other candidate is Joe Cantwell, an anti-communist anti-mafia, religious activist whose rhetoric is enough to hordes of screaming fans who mistake fundamentalist zeal for patriotism.

In the film’s first minutes, we learn that the former president, still a major force in this political party, which is never named and whose platform is never stated, is about to endorse either Russell or Cantwell, and obviously both candidates are courting his approval.

It is also made quite clear that Russell has been a very unfaithful husband, though his wife is prepared to become first lady and therefore go along with Russell’s bid for the White House for the time being. Cantwell has also discovered some unsavoury records of Russell’s mental state (think Thomas Eagleton), which he is ready to release if it would be politically expedient.

Despite Russell’s philandering, his questionable mental stability and his atheism (oh, yes, a big negative for a presidential candidate in the 1960s and arguably even worse today), he is a likeable character who seems to want to lift the country up, not just himself. It certainly helps that the character is played by Henry Fonda.

Eagleton, Clinton, Obama and the 2012 Republican candidates for the presidency are just some of the real-life political figures I had in mind while I was watching the film. The succession of 36 faces during the opening credits, from Washington to Johnson, all leading up to a full-screen shot of the White House, always impresses the historical scale of the office on the viewer, and in this case we are reminded again there are no perfect candidates: only candidates who will be more preferable or less embarrassing holders of the office.

The film’s background is peppered with catchy slogans (“Hustle with Russell”, “MerWIN to WIN”) and the action is set over a very short period of time: less than 48 hours. The characters and the party they belong to are vague, but being politicians this quality makes them specific enough to be entirely credible and representative of all kinds of recognizable political personas.

With a screenplay written by Gore Vidal, based on his play, this film has an ear for great dialogue and a very vivid sense of reality. One excellent moment among many others belongs to the former president, Art Hockstader, who, upon learning of Cantwell’s devious plans, gives him a look full of hate and proclaims: “It’s not that I object to you being a bastard… It’s your being such a stupid bastard that I object to!”

This film is better than the other well-known political films from the early sixties, such as The Manchurian Candidate or Seven Days in May, because it comes to the point very quickly, is filled with people and events that we recognize, even today, and the story contains a big conundrum that the characters need to resolve before a satisfactory conclusion can be reached — and this is exactly what the film pulls off, with significant consequences. There are few scenes between the candidates and their wives, but what we see is to the point and reveals a great deal about the domestic politics of the presidency.

The mudslinging and the possibility that a ludicrous attack just might stick also hit close to home, as the recent (2012) GOP primaries have shown. In one comment, a character mentions that once, in the South, “a candidate […] got elected for claiming his opponent’s wife was a thespian.” This comes on the heels of a discussion about the alleged homosexuality of one of the candidates for the presidency, and Vidal’s use of this theme shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone — it is handled well, discreetly, but the scenes with a, erm, whistleblower, a guy called Sheldon Bascomb, are excruciatingly uncomfortable and make the film drag at the only point during its 95-minute running time.

Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson are both excellent in the main roles, but it is charming former president played by Lee Tracy who really makes an impression as someone who is playing the system with a good political head, even as he loses faith in the system because he knows what corruption is possible (and permissible). Fonda’s character has some of the same insights, though he is slow to react and it is very sensible on the part of Vidal to make us wonder whether we should support him despite our misgivings — a timeless question.

The War Room (1993)

André Crous

USA
4*

Directors:
Chris Hegedus
D.A. Pennebaker
Directors of Photography:
Nick Doob
D.A. Pennebaker
Kevin Rafferty

Running time: 96 minutes

D.A. Pennebaker knows how to pick the right candidate – a political candidate who is not the favourite to win but who brings with him a sense that things are about to change big time.  He became the father of political American “Direct Cinema” in 1960 when he filmed John F. Kennedy’s campaign in New Hampshire, which ended in a win, propelling him forward and enabled him to capture the nomination of the Democratic Party. The film was called Primary and it changed the face of the documentary film.

The War Room starts in New Hampshire in January 1992, where William J. Clinton, former governor of Arkansas, is preparing to win the state, but he loses to Paul Tsongas from neighbouring Massachusetts. It is curious to see all of the names of the candidates who participated in this primary back on screen. I was too young at the time to be caught up in the minutiae of the process, but it is wonderful, as we approach another election cycle, to look back at this field and their obstacles and be reminded of the repetition that is nonetheless always exciting because the participants bring new baggage every time.

The film opens with the accusations made by Jennifer Flowers against Governor Clinton, complete with the tape recordings to prove it; she alleged that Clinton had had an affair with her reaching back many years. Of course, we now know today that she should not have been ignored as quickly as she was, and it does appear rather odd that his own campaign never questions their own candidate, but I guess that is normal for presidential candidates’ campaign staff. It is made obvious, and his senior adviser James Carville acknowledges as much, that everybody thinks Bill Clinton is the perfect candidate, the only one they would spend their time and their energy on to promote, and they believe in him so completely that they prefer not to get involved in any negativity about him.

Perhaps he never would have been elected if they had questioned him, and the country would have been worse off as a result.

Besides Carville, who is the main attack dog and chief strategist for the campaign, there is the young George Stephanopoulos, his communications director, who would later act briefly as Clinton’s press secretary in the White House. These two guys have total confidence in Clinton’s abilities and inspire us with their attitude of getting the message out that (George H.W.) Bush has been a failure as a president, despite his skills as a politician.

The film follows the campaign from New Hampshire through the primary process to the eventual nomination at the Democratic Convention and ultimately ending on November 3 with the general election. A lot of material has to be squeezed into this film and obviously, when the film was released in 1993, many things could be left unsaid. Today, that is a problem because we are left with questions that go unanswered and expectations that are often unfulfilled. We don’t know what the pay-off was, because we are looking at a kind of shorthand that is difficult to decipher after nearly twenty years have passed.

For example, while much is made of the upcoming appearance of his Democratic competitor Jerry Brown at the convention (he was going to make like Ted Kennedy in 1980 and ruffle feathers because he had not collected the most delegates), we never see his speech. We also learn that Perot withdraws from the race only to re-enter a few weeks later, without much fanfare either in the media or in Clinton’s campaign headquarters. Bush is like a barking dog in the background: we are aware of him but we don’t see him all that much. We know he seems hesitant to debate Clinton (citing issues with the format of the debate), but there too the film puts very little information on the screen.

The most important thing to remember while we watch this film is that it is about the “war room”, in other words, it is about Carville and Stephanopoulos and their tactics, and not really about Bill Clinton. It is fascinating to watch Carville come up with a political barnburner on the spot, the product of his passion for the moment, his enthusiasm for Clinton’s candidacy and his political savvy.

The camera’s mobility is a great advantage for putting us in the “present” with the events – in particular, when we run through the corridors backstage with George Stephanopoulos after the presidential debate, when he has to make his way to the media gaggle as soon as possible to comment on the evening’s proceedings.

For anyone who follows politics, it is also nice to see much younger faces of those who are still ubiquitous on television. People like Paul Begala and John King.

Finally, on the election night, the film comes to an end. And while we all know how the story ends, it is the team behind the scenes that make this a story to really appreciate. The emotion of team Carville-Stephanopoulos at the last war room meeting is beautiful and pure and the film should be studied by every political campaign against an incumbent. For the rest of us, it offers a moment of reflection. Are all these fights important? Would it have made a difference? And how is it possible that Roger Ailes still peddles so much influence?

Niagara (1953)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
Henry Hathaway
Screenwriters:
Charles Brackett
Walter Reisch
Richard L. Breen
Director of Photography:
Joseph MacDonald

Running time: 85 minutes

Niagara is all about Marilyn Monroe — everything happens as a result of her, and the effect of this blond goddess on the people around her is blood-curdling. This film proved that film noir was not limited to colour, nor was star-studded suspense limited to Hitchcock.

Shot mostly on location in gorgeous Technicolor, Henry Hathaway’s Niagara demonstrates the talent of a young Ms Monroe (she was 26 years old during production of this film) and her ability to play — but never overplay — the role of the wily femme fatale: Rose Loomis.

And while Joseph Cotten, whose portrayal of Leland in Citizen Kane arguably engages us as much as Charles Foster Kane, stars as her husband, George Loomis, he is not nearly as memorable as Monroe. There is another couple, the Cutlers, who arrive at the Niagara Falls just as things start to fall apart for the Loomises, but they serve more as a sideshow to the fun than anything else — the viewer’s companions, compared with the shining stars of Monroe and Cotten.

This couple, Ray and Polly Cutler, is spending a few days in a luxury resort opposite Niagara Falls. They are on a delayed honeymoon, having just moved here in order for Ray to start working at a Shredded Wheat Company plant. But on their arrival, making the acquaintance of Mr and Mrs Loomis, they soon discover that all is not well – Mrs Loomis, for one, leaves her husband, who seems to be mentally ill, at home, while she flirts her way into another man’s arms at the Falls.

The Falls, shown so often from up close, and appearing in the background on many occasions, serve both as a nice backdrop to the story and as a very ominous reminder of the destructive power of beauty. In one very frank conversation between Ray Loomis and Polly Cutler, he anticipates the story’ developments:

Let me tell you something. You’re young, you’re in love. Well, I’ll give you a warning. Don’t let it get out of hand like those falls out there. Up above… d’you ever see the river up above the falls? It’s calm and easy, and you throw in a log, it just floats around. Let it move a little further down and it gets going faster, hits some rocks, and… in a minute it’s in the lower rapids, and… nothing in the world — including God himself, I suppose — can keep it from going over the edge. It just… goes.

Niagara does a neat job of combining both suspense and surprise, and in one of the film’s key moments, the suspense is accomplished by a deafening silence – one that would have made Hitchcock proud. In another moment of audiovisual ingenuity, reminiscent of the famous scene in North by Northwest when a conversation is obscured by an airplane engine, the sound of the Falls drowns out an important bit of dialogue between George Loomis and Polly Cutler.

The Cutlers are in way over their heads: Polly, though a goody-two-shoes, is still bearable, but her husband, Roy, has a constant smile on his face that shows there is nothing going on upstairs. The two make a quaint couple, far removed from the emotional turmoil in the relationship (and the characters) of George and Rose, and at times this disparity between the two couples is a little too much to take. But the film sketches the situations and the motivations well enough and Hathaway’s direction is exactly what is needed to tell this story coherently and effectively. I was also impressed by the very good quality of the scenes that use rear projection — coming only two years after The African Queen, whose green screen made for some terrible pictures on the rapids, Niagara is brilliantly staged and photographed to create the impression that all of these scenes on the roaring waters are taking place outside a studio.

The Wedding Banquet (1993)

André Crous

Taiwan
4.5*

Director:
Ang Lee
Screenwriters:
Ang Lee
Neil Peng
James Schamus
Director of Photography:
Jong Lin

Running time: 106 minutes

Original title: 喜宴
Transliterated title: Xǐ yàn

The Wedding Banquet, Ang Lee’s second feature film, was released in 1993, right in the middle of a movement in American filmmaking that would come to be known as New Queer Cinema, consisting of films with gay themes, treated openly, mainly produced by gay filmmakers such as Todd Haynes and Gregg Araki. The Wedding Banquet is quite different from the rest of the films of the time in that it is infinitely more accessible to a mainstream audience and was not made by a gay director.

However, as Ang Lee would prove more than a decade later with his elegant adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story, Brokeback Mountain, he is perfectly attuned to the human complexity of his films’ gay characters and seeks to portray them as ostracised despite their similarity to the average straight viewer, rather than pretending that they are different in any particular way. Another point that is noteworthy, given the film’s release in 1993, is the lack of any reference to AIDS – instead, the filmmakers have decided to make a film about secrets and the unnecessary tension (indeed, chaos) that develops when someone is more ashamed of themselves than they are afraid of their parents’ potential reaction to the news that their son or daughter is gay.

In New York, Wai Tong is a Taiwanese American who’s been with his American boyfriend, Simon, for the past five years. Wai Tong has not told his parents, who are living in Taiwan, that he is gay, but since they want a grandchild, they constantly sign him up for singles’ clubs, and forward the questionnaires, which he dutifully fills out, albeit with criteria that seem impossible to meet.

The film does not concentrate on the issue of sexuality as much as it draws our attention to the ubiquitous – and unnecessary – secrecy, from all sides. Everybody has secrets and yet they all refuse to share these secrets for fear that they will be rejected as a result of their honesty. Naturally, when Wai Tong and his tenant Wei Wei decide to get married – he so that his parents can see their son married, she so that she can get a green card – and his parents turn up for the big day, this secrecy eventually leads to tension between him Simon, who only wants to impress his boyfriend’s parents, even though they have no idea what role he plays in their son’s life.

“It’s kind of stupid – all these lies. But I’m used to it,” admits Wai Tong to Simon, but once his parents arrive the situation quickly spins out of control and he becomes entangled in his own web of lies. Luckily, most of these scenes are in Taiwanese, for actor Winston Chao is very unconvincing in English, having a painful elocution of simple words that have no emotional resonance coming from him. But while the acting might be sub-par, Ang Lee’s direction is flawless, as shown by his masterful handling of giant groups of extras during the scenes at the wedding banquet, as well as his decision to film many important dialogues (between Wai Tong’s mother and Wai Wai; between Wai Tong and his mother; and between Wai Tong’s father and Simon) in single takes.

What makes the film so special is the care it takes with its characters – and not just Wai Tong’s parents. The small gestures that Simon makes, sometimes in the background, barely visible to the camera, are striking when seen within the context of his place in the film. He has been marginalised by his boyfriend, for the sake of pretending that all is well even though the whole narrative that develops – including his presence at his boyfriend’s wedding to a girl – is close to farcical, but he keeps a straight face and always wants to make sure that Wai Tong is feeling as comfortable as possible, that he is taken care of. The interaction is beautiful and the fact that Ang Lee focuses on such details is impressive and enriches the human dimension of a film that could easily have been filled with comical caricatures.

It’s not always easy to empathise with Wai Tong’s self-pity, but Ang Lee’s story is full of twists and turns, and even the smallest scenes have either narrative of physical energy. It is a film that anticipates the director’s subsequent work on the plains of Wyoming and while it might not confront LGBT issues as aggressively as other filmmakers from the early nineties, it makes gay characters seem more human than they do in the films of these other militant filmmakers.