SCREENING LOG - 1/21-1/27, 2003

Back to 2003 Index

I watched MURIEL, THE PIANIST, THE CLOCK, NOSFERATU, RUNNING ON EMPTY, A CANTERBURY TALE and ALPHAVILLE. In order of preference:

The Pianist (2002, Roman Polanski)

I don't know if this is the best film I saw this week, but it's the one that paid the most immediate returns. Septuagenarian Roman Polanski's latest film is a commercial effort, and yet strangely un-commercial in its matter-of-fact telling of the horrors faced by a Jewish pianist who miraculously survived the Holocaust. Polanski strikes me as a cold filmmaker, which is why I havne't always liked his films. But here I think his unsentimental coldness and clinical powers of observation are incredibly well-applied -- it's practically a slap in the face to a more "entertaining" film like SCHINDLER'S LIST. There are no clever movie tricks involved in the storytelling, it's very straight, capturing both the terror and the banality of the protagonist's quiet struggle to survive, in a honest and purposeful way (and Adrien Brody's brilliantly understated performance is crucial to the film's success in this regard). It's a film that revives the critical question, "How do you make a movie about the Holocaust without compromising or disrespecting the reality of what happened?" Polanski's reverence for his subject matter is profoundly moving, and the result is perhaps the most mature film he's ever made.

A Canterbury Tale (1944, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)

An odd but alluring bird. Wartime preparations bring a Montana G.I., a young woman from London and an English officer together to the English countryside. Based on the other, more plot-driven P&P films I've seen, I wasn't prepared for the film's essentially non-narrative movement; through a series of haphazard circumstances the unlikely trio intermingle until all find a mutual enlightenment of a distinctly spiritual kind in each other's company, aided significantly by P&P's inventive visualizations and cinematographer Erwin Hillier's remarkable play with reflection, light and shadow. You almost wish that the Archers had never discovered color; what they do here is so much more gracefully understated and mysteriously moving than their overheated color films. A strange experience of elusive charm, well worth seeing repeatedly.

Alphaville (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)(third viewing)

In a sense, this may be Jean-Luc Godard's most conventional film, since it delves in the familiar genres of film noir and sci-fi, if only to rip them apart. The opening line of the film sets the terms: "Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world." What follows can be seen as an exploration as to the alluring power of legends, myths, or any conventional system of communication, including technology and human language, while also ruefully considering their limiting effects on the mind. If anything, this is a film of great visual beauty that totally transforms the "found" locations, objects and everyday interactions of Paris into something completely bizarre, and for that alone its brilliance is evident. The entire first half-hour is perfect in instilling a state of disbelieving hilarity on the part of the viewer opening a world of new sensations and perceptions; what happens from there is not as easy to defend nor enjoy as consistently, but the feeling of active unease is not something to take for granted.

Muriel (1963, Alan Resnais)

A film I like more in theory than in practice, this chronicle of a widow and her stepson who play host to the mother's old flame and his new love (disguised as a niece) investigates the power of haunted memory to affect the experience of the present. The theme in itself is nothing new from the maker of HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR and LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD but here the flashbacks are even more unpredictable -- cutaways to buildings and random images without much explicit explanation as to what or whose memory they correlate. Very difficult to get through on a first viewing, but the technique employed and what it suggests about the fragmentation of one's ordinary experience of the world is inspiring and enticing enough to encourage a revisit.

The Clock (1945, Vincente Minnelli)

Early black & white non-musical effort by Minnelli in which a soldier boy falls in love with a girl he bumps into in New York's Central Station, 2 days before he's to be shipped off. I was surprised and disappointed by the awkward staging of actors, the rather functional use of New York City locales (most of which were impressively recreated on sound stages), and the faux-na·ve line readings on the part of both leads Robert Walker and Judy Garland (though Garland's strained attempts at emoting have fascinations all their own, you can't help but want to give her a hug for trying). Ironically, it's when the transient world shared by these lovers starts to constrict that Minnelli's willful optimism begins to earn its stripes. The last half hour is flawless, and the way it ends, the way the two lovers say goodbye so casually, it can't be better.

Nosferatu (1922, F. W. Murnau) (third viewing)

I had a special opportunity to watch this silent vampire classic on the big screen with the wonderful Alloy Orchestra lending accompaniment. While the music was terrific, the film didn't hold up as well as I expected it -- I found myself making historical allowances for many of the special effects, and too much of it feels unintentionally campy. Nonetheless it was interesting seeing Murnau actively experimenting with the medium, sowing the seeds for his later, more storied achievements with special effects integrated in the storytelling.

Running on Empty (1987, Sidney Lumet)

The premise is immensely promising: a young man (River Phoenix) struggles to find a future of his own, having run all his life from town to town with his parents, a fugitive couple wanted by the FBI for bombing a napalm plant in the 70s. Perhaps the novelty of the scenario is the film's undoing, because it hardly ever feels convincing: the family dynamic has a straining, self-conscious eccentricity reminiscent of '30s Capra, the parents' activities are treated more like a plot device than as an occasion for ideological inquiry, and Judd Hirsch fails miserably in his role as the father, coming off as a hollow caricature of burned out pinko, barely registering as a human being. The film is far more focused on 80s baby boomer parenting issues and dramatizing the young man's growing pains, endowing him with an untapped gift for music that feels more like a gift from the screenwriter to pump the pathos and the justify the need for him to break out of his life. Lumet, the quintessential New York filmmaker, feels out of his element in the New Jersey suburbs; the school scenes feel so wholesomely whitebred that I'm tempted to read it as being subversively sarcastic. In any case, it's disappointing to see how a difficult life and societal situation is dealt with in safe and easy moralizing movie terms.

Back to 2003 Index