directed by Baz Lurhmann
starring: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman
Australia/USA 2008; screened 29 November 2008 at AMC Theatres

originally published 11 January 2009 on Jandy’s Meanderings

I admit that I haven’t read many reviews of Australia in toto, but the snippets I have read and the general critical feeling indicates that most critics didn’t think it was very good. At all. And in fact, in many ways, they’re right. Australia is a mess. But it’s a gorgeous, sloppy, enjoyable mess.

Australia is not the great epic of the Australian people, or indeed, a great epic at all. It is not a particularly innovative piece of filmmaking. It is not indicative of a specifically Australian filmmaking sensibility, nor a very strong example of Baz Lurhmann’s own flamboyant filmmaking style. There’s a bit of a sense of failed ambition hanging about the film, because you can tell Lurhmann wanted at least some of those things to be true, especially the first one.

An English noblewoman travels to Australia to get her husband to sell his plantation there and return to England. Instead, her husband is killed and she stays on to run the plantation with the help of an Australian cowboy known only as Drover (because that’s what he is, a cattle drover). Meanwhile, she takes a young aboriginal boy under her protection. Lurhmann’s attempt to bring together a uniquely Australian family pulled from each of Australia’s roots (English, aboriginal, and outback drifters) is obvious to an extreme, which is part of why it fails as a national epic – it’s too calculated.

In addition to the overdetermined theme, the film suffers from tonal inconsistency. It can’t decide whether it’s a farce (the first half-hour is full of Luhrmann-esque quick close-ups and exaggerated facial expressions, as if he wanted to remind us that he’s the one who directed Moulin Rouge before settling into a much more staid style for the rest of the film), western, romance, war, family drama, elegy, social rights message picture, travel brochure or national epic. The western and war sections, especially, are so divisively separated that Lurhmann might have been better off making two films instead of one.

But even after that laundry list of defects, and I could think of more if I wanted to, I can’t get past how much I plain enjoyed watching the film, and I would go see it again in a heartbeat. It’s old-fashioned classic filmmaking in the Hollywood tradition. I hate to keep bringing up David Bordwell’s The Way Hollywood Tells It all the time as if it’s the only film theory book I’ve ever read, but it’s applicable here again – elements in the narrative are carefully placed so as to lead the audience to expect certain things to happen, and they do. So yes, it’s predictable, but satisfyingly so. Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman play their characters as larger-than-life mythic figures rather than real people, because that’s what they are. Kidman especially works in her role not because she turns in an outstanding acting performance (she’s done that far better in other films), but because she channels old Hollywood star quality so well when she lets herself.

I’ll grant you I’m a sucker for westerns, and I definitely loved that part the best – there’s nothing revisionist about it, and the first half of the film could easily have been made during the golden age of westerns, full of gorgeous vistas, sweeping music and laconic hero figures. Then, suddenly, World War II starts, and it’s almost a whole different movie, which I didn’t like quite as much as the western, though it’s not particularly bad.

So Australia is a mess, yes, trying to pack too many varied things into one film that never quite meshed into a cohesive whole. But it was a very comfortable-feeling mess, and I unabashedly loved watching it. As a compromise between knowing it’s nowhere near objectively good and my subjective love for it, I give it an Above Average.

[Weird side note - according to IMDb, the aspect ratio is 2.35:1, but I would've sworn I saw it in 1.85:1. Anyone else see it in the narrower ratio, or was I just on crack? I even made a note about it in my notebook at the time, that it seemed odd to shoot an epic in 1.85:1.]

Originally posted at Row Three on 2 August 2009.

[xrr rating=5/5]

“I‘m Clyde Barrow. And this is Bonnie Parker. We rob banks.” This line comes early in Bonnie & Clyde, and though short, though obvious, it has a surprising amount to say about the film. Bonnie, impressed by Clyde’s impromptu hold-up of a general store, has agreed to accompany Clyde wherever he decides to go, and they’ve just spent the night in an abandoned farmhouse. The farm’s owner and his family have been foreclosed on, and they drive by to take a last look at the place. Clyde’s statement “we rob banks” is a direct response to the farmer’s frustration at losing his home to the bank. It’s technically untrue (they haven’t yet robbed any banks), and thus its placement becomes an attempt to tie the couple’s illegal activities to some larger purpose – a Robin Hood-type stealing from the rich (though, tellingly, without giving to the poor). That idea pops up again briefly when Clyde, mid-robbery, tells an ordinary man to keep his money, they’re only there for the bank’s money.

The line secondarily functions as part of Bonnie and Clyde’s sense of theatricality – throughout their career they constantly brag about their exploits, take breaks for photo-ops (including with law enforcement personnel), make sure everyone knows who they are, and enjoy the press they receive. The Robin Hood guise is really only part of that – it’s difficult to argue that Bonnie and Clyde truly care about anyone outside their gang and immediate family. They’re in it for fame mostly, fortune some, each other a fair amount, and very little else. Yet we’re drawn closely into their relationship and we care what happens to them, despite our knowledge that they are not good people.

That strange-yet-effective combination of emotional investment and distance is a direct inheritance from European film movements of the early 1960s, especially as exemplified by Cahiers du cinema critics/New Wave filmmakers like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and Italian modernist Michelangelo Antonioni. These filmmakers were interested, to one degree or another, in a) bringing genre stories and art styles together, b) bringing their insatiable love of film itself front and center through quotation and pastiche, and c) exploring sexual and social tensions from a sympathetic but uninvolved distance. Actor/producer Warren Beatty and director Arthur Penn had attempted to bring New Wave sensibilities to an earlier film, 1965’s Mickey One, but though interesting, that film was ultimately unsuccessful at combining European emotional distance with American brashness.

It’s a fascinating juxtaposition, since the New Wave itself was based on bringing the freshness and vitality that the critics of Cahiers du cinema admired in American films into a distinctly French sensibility (and marrying it with the European art style pioneered by Italian neo-realism). With Bonnie & Clyde and the New Hollywood films that followed it in the 1970s, American filmmakers brought it full circle, combining quintessentially American stories with European art style and the expansive love of cinema inherited (directly or indirectly) from French cinephiles. Though many equate the beginning of New Hollywood with the devil-may-care, open-ended rebelliousness of Easy Rider and the raw vitality of the 1970s generation of filmmakers, I’d argue that Bonnie & Clyde is at least as worthy of the honor.

With the story of Bonnie and Clyde, Penn and Beatty are tapping into a uniquely American story, a legend of Depression-era larger-than-life bank robbers. In the tradition of gangster films both American and French, there’s a nobility to characters like these, a sense that they have the courage to do what most of us don’t in standing against restrictive society and corrupt institutions and making their own rules to live by. There’s a romanticism around them that Penn plays up by shooting Faye Dunaway in luminous closeup, her blonde hair and beret marking her as an American Brigitte Bardot (though her accent is pure rural southern – an initially jarring yet perfect combination). Their status as folk heroes is substantiated by the helpful treatment they receive from dust bowl farmers after getting ambushed by the law.

But these are also characters who fight constantly, who can’t resolve their sexual hangups for most of the film (it’s no accident that Clyde is only able to consummate their relationship after Bonnie immortalizes him with a poem, ensuring his lasting fame), and who can’t ever get anywhere because they’re always running away. They’re pursuing a twisted version of the American dream – getting out of the backwoods, leaving dead-end jobs, making something of themselves, but through criminal activity that ultimately is only destructive. We can’t write off or explain away the bad things they do, though, the way we can with Paul Muni’s I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang; there’s no indication that the Depression economy has done anything specific to hurt Bonnie or Clyde. It’s more of an excuse for essentially amoral people to indulge their criminal tendencies and create themselves as folk heroes while doing it. It’s almost a game for them until right at the end, just as the theft in Godard’s Bande à part is a game, until it isn’t.

And yet, and yet. We DO care about Bonnie and Clyde, and when the inevitable ending comes, it’s like a few dozen punches to the gut. Bonnie & Clyde is one of the very few films that I consider to be essentially perfect, and a large part of it is the way that Penn maintains both our emotional connection to Bonnie and Clyde as well as our emotional distance from what they do. It would’ve been much easier to either make them unlikable villains or give us some reason that explains their actions – abusive childhoods or mistreatment at the hands of societal institutions – but Bonnie & Clyde doesn’t let us off so easily. We must face the fact that we feel sympathy for characters who don’t deserve our sympathy, and live with the tension created by our simultaneous desire for them to escape and knowledge that they shouldn’t.

Penn also perfectly balances our knowledge of what must happen (the unavoidable end of Bonnie and Clyde due to both the historical reality and the narrative needs) with our shock when it does. Everything is perfectly done in this film: the conscious use of cinematic space, using extreme close-ups, mid-shots and long shots carefully and intentionally; the repetition and alteration of the Foggie Mountain Breakdown chase music so that what is jaunty and joyous during the gang’s early successes becomes a limping melody in a minor key when they start losing shootouts; the scene with Gene Wilder and his girlfriend that shows how sinister the Barrow gang is when juxtaposed with normality; the lovely picnic near the end that shows what might have been and yet what never could have been; the evocation of cinematic history from the quoted screening of Gold Diggers of 1933 to the more subtle echoes of Bande à part, Contempt and The Seven Samurai; the ending that stops right where it should, no denouement or lesson or follow-up. There’s never been another American film that succeeds so spectacularly on every level of cinema, and every time I rewatch it, that opinion is reinforced 100-fold.

Originally posted at Row Three on 1 July 2009, as part of a double-review with 42nd Street, in a series on the 1930s.

[xrr rating=3.5/5]

Gold Diggers is both more explicit about and less infused with the Depression than 42nd Street. It begins with Ginger Rogers singing “We’re in the Money” (which includes lines like “Old Man Depression you are through, you done us wrong” and “we never see a headline about a breadline today”), but it turns out to be a rehearsal that gets interrupted by creditors shutting down the show for lack of payment for the theatre. From there we find three showgirls lamenting how few jobs there are and how they can’t afford food and clothes – but their spacious New York apartment is almost less believable than Bebe Daniels’ in 42nd Street. After all, these are chorus girls, not established stars.

Anyway, they learn a producer friend is putting on a show and the songwriter (Dick Powell again) across the courtyard somehow has the money to back it, with the caveat that his sweetheart Ruby Keeler (again) play the lead. From there, though, the story sort of devolves into a brief mystery regarding Powell’s true identity and where his money comes from, and then a REALLY contrived and unbelievable plot involving Keeler’s friend Joan Blondell (who’s far better than the material she’s given) and Powell’s rich brother, who doesn’t want Powell to get mixed up with showgirls. It also loses the undercurrent of the Depression, as it focuses on the backstabbing and role-playing and inexplicable falling-in-love of the characters, who start living up to the title of the film even though most of the point is supposed to be that they don’t.

By the time it’s over, there are so many unmotivated character shifts and unprovoked decisions that it’s really better to ignore the plot altogether and focus solely on Busby Berkeley’s dance routines and the one-off zingers that Blondell, Rogers, and Aline MacMahon can deliver so well. The last number finally remembers that the movie originally wanted to be about the Depression and ties it into the veterans of WWI, lamenting the fact that so many men who fought for their country are now in breadlines. Thankfully, the film ends with the strong visuals and emotion of “Remember My Forgotten Man” rather than with any silly pleasantries of the plot.

Yet even with its silliness, I still have a huge soft spot for Gold Diggers of 1933. Maybe it’s Ginger singing in Pig Latin, or dialogue exchanges like “If Barney could see ME in clothes…” / “He wouldn’t recognize you!” Or maybe it’s the shameless extravagance of Berkeley’s choreography, which would never fit on an actual stage – the routines are actually quite a bit better and more polished here than in 42nd Street. Or maybe it’s Warner Bros’ willingness to keep harping on the Depression, however sporadically and unevenly, and allow Harry Warren and Al Dubin to pen minor-keyed songs about it rather than allow people to just pretend everything’s all hunky-dory for a couple of hours in a cinema.

Originally posted at Row Three on 1 July 2009, as a double review with Gold Diggers of 1933 in a series about the 1930s.

[xrr rating=4.5/5]

42nd Street isn’t known as the granddaddy of backstage movies for nothing – it opens with word spreading around Broadway that famed director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) is putting on a show, continues through auditions and rehearsals, setbacks and last-minute casting changes, and finishes with the opening night extravaganza.

Marsh is just recovering from a nervous breakdown, and this show may be his comeback or his downfall. He’s really the central character of the story, though he’s surrounded by a large supporting cast: Ruby Keeler as the bright-faced wanna-be chorus girl, Dick Powell as the peppy juvenile actor, Bebe Daniels as the big star who brings the money to the show in the form of infatuated checkbook-weilder Guy Kibbee, George Brent as the man who threatens the show by coming between Daniels and Kibbee, and Ginger Rogers and Una Merkel as the wisecracking comic relief. There’s a lot going on, and a lot of subplots, but it all holds together rather better than you’d expect.

But let’s make sure we’re a little honest here. 42nd Street isn’t a great movie because it has a cast full of great actors. Warner Baxter holds it together dramatically as Marsh, and Rogers and Merkel keep it sarcastically funny, but no one else can act at all. It’s not even a great movie because it has the best singing and dancing ever – Keeler made a lot of tap-dancing movies in her time, and compared to, say, the dancers in 1920s movies, she’s not bad, but just wait until Ginger actually got some real dancing parts, or Eleanor Powell started hoofing at MGM. That spelled the end for the relatively heavy-footed Keeler.

42nd Street works because it has a vitality and freshness that actually revitalized the musical as a cinematic form. It works because choreographer Busby Berkeley is a genius of some sort. You can’t really call a lot of what he does dancing – it’s more like geometric manipulation that has to be seen from the top or bottom or other views that could not possibly exist in an actual live theatre, but that’s just the thing. He liberated the cinema musical from its dependence on stage-bound design. And it works because of its inspired mix of cynicism and optimism that could perhaps only come out of the Depression.

It’s not five minutes into the movie that Bebe Daniels tells her wanna-be lover/investor that she can’t have her pick of shows, “not with this Depression,” but the thought is belied by her incredibly large and well-appointed apartment. Later, Marsh gives Keeler (who predictably gets bumped up from the chorus into a leading role) a pep talk largely based around how many jobs would be lost if she fails to win over the audience. Though the characters don’t constantly harp on the Depression verbally, it’s sort of a background constant, and the climactic title number – a mini-story in itself, though not as epic as some of Berkeley’s later extravaganzas – brings out the desperate mood of the times with its minor key, depictions of murder and death, and yet gives a sense of the vibrant life that continues and will continue as long as Broadway itself stands. As the song goes: “The big parade goes on for years; it’s the rhapsody of laughter and tears. Naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty, 42nd Street.”

Originally posted at Row Three on 1 April 2009.

[xrr rating=4.5/5]

Once in a while, a first-time director jumps onto the scene with a film that is so assured and so well-made and has such an air of vitality and realism that it’s difficult to believe he hasn’t made a dozen films already. Cary Fukunaga has pretty much done that with Sin Nombre, a favorite at this year’s Sundance Film Festival that’s now in limited theatrical release.

The story is relatively straight-forward. In one thread, teenage Sayra travels with her uncle and estranged father from Guatemala through Mexico toward the United States, where the father has started a new family in New Jersey, riding illicitly along with hundreds of others on the tops of freight trains. In the other, Caspar, a young member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, tries to balance his loyalty to the gang with his love for a girl from the right side of town. The threads inevitably come together, and while it’s not difficult to figure out most everything that happens, suspense is not what keeps you interested in the film and the lives of the people it depicts. The delicate balance of emotional involvement in these individuals and their situations with the unsentimental, unwavering style (not to mention flawless visuals, camera setups, and editing) kept me rapt for the entire film, and I wanted to keep the experience with me all day.

For the most part, Fukunaga tells his story sparely, not adding in very many extraneous details. We learn who people are and what they want by just following them around and overhearing their everyday conversations – Sayra’s uncle convincing her to undertake the dangerous and illegal journey, Caspar recruiting a barely adolescent boy into the Mara. Nothing is out of place in this narrative, and yet it all feels natural. The non-plot-related sequences that Fukunaga does include, such as ones that illustrate the transient community aboard the train and the outposts that serve them, lend a pathos to the world surrounding our characters that’s welcome and real rather than sentimentalized. After getting tired of seeing film after Hollywood film that gives unnecessary backstory, exposition, explanation, and resolution, it’s extremely refreshing to see a film that knows exactly how much to tell and exactly when to stop.

The topic of illegal immigration is omnipresent in the film, as Sayra is trying to cross the border illegally and we are unequivocally intended to root for her to make her way into the United States uncaught. That said, Fukunaga does not get explicitly political – he shows us the lives of particular people whom we grow to care about. Certainly there’s an implicit message there, especially right now as it’s such a political hot topic. I don’t want to get into it – however you feel about the US-Mexican border, Sin Nombre tells its story well, and that’s all I really ask of a film.

Originally posted on Row Three on 12 March, 2009

[xrr rating=3/5]

Near the beginning of indie noir homage The Perfect Sleep, the nameless Narrator drives off after having brutally killed an enemy and his voiceover warns us: “Some of you clever types might think this was one of those stories where everything kinda makes sense in the end. Wrong.” When I first heard that line, I thrilled a little inside, because there should always be some level of non-sense-making in a noir film, especially one that sets itself up as a cross between the hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and the moody thoughtfulness of Fyodor Dostoevsky. And especially one whose director, Jeremy Alter (directing his first feature), co-produced David Lynch’s Inland Empire, one of the most deliriously amazing pseudo-incomprensible films of all time. But when the narrator speaks these words, what he really means is that very little is going to make any sense, ever – and that’s not necessarily as good a thing as I was hoping. On the good side, what the film lacks in narrative flow it very nearly makes up for in visual panache.

In The Perfect Sleep’s self-contained nowhere-world, the Narrator (played by Anton Pardoe, who also wrote the film) returns to his dysfunctional thug-ridden family after a ten-year absence to settle an old score and protect his long-time love Porphyria (Without a Trace’s Roselyn Sanchez, who is undeniably gorgeous but whose acting here is a bit telenovela-ish). She’s threatened by her uncle Nicolai and his henchman the Rajah – they all bear grudges against each other for various betrayals and killings that the Narrator explains to us in a breathless flashback. After watching the film twice, I think I can lay out the whole plot, but even so, I’m muddled on a few points. Knowing Alter’s connection with Lynch, I’m sure that the muddled, unclear plot is purposeful, but in contrast to Lynch’s intriguing incomprehensibility that leads the viewer to tease out thematic and spatial unity, The Perfect Sleep is mostly frustrating and self-contradictory, especially when it comes to character motivations. It’s relatively clear why the Narrator does most of the things he does, but the one pulling all the strings is Nicolai, who may or may not be the Narrator’s father. And I was never quite sure what Nicolai’s endgame was – everything I came up with as a potential purpose for his actions could have been accomplished with far less effort and far less convoluted plotting. The filmmakers are trying to be clever with the way they use flashbacks to conceal and reveal information, but it’s not wholly successful – in fact, the flashback device manages to make the film both overly expository and overly confusing.

Yet there’s still a lot to enjoy about the film, especially its arresting visual style and in-joke references to classic noir and literature. Whether you think the plotting is clever or muddled, you can’t deny that Alter has a great eye for camera setups, blocking, and lighting. There are so many screencappable shots, it’s almost ridiculous. And the fact that the film knows that it’s using a very specific visual language delighted me, though some may find it a bit ingratiating. At one point, the Narrator stands facing away from us in a full shot, striking a laconic pose in a high-contrast, beautifully-framed shot and says in voice-over, “You probably think this is one of those stories, a study of the shadows. Dark and dirty and utterly immoral. Say, nice shot. So it seems kind of cliche, but the French dig this kind of visual. And I dig the French.” That sort of reference to the 1950s French film critics that basically created the category of “film noir” is exactly what cinephiles eat up – but it may be too overt for its own good.

Similarly, there are a lot of individual scenes that I loved – the first time we see the Narrator off someone, for example, is very darkly humorous, with a perfect “oops” from the Narrator as he holds up the cartridge from the handgun he left within the downed man’s reach. In another bit, the beat-up Narrator is asked if he’s able to walk, and he responds with a cocky “sure,” takes a few steps, and collapses. The comic timing in these scenes is gold, and helps offset the overwroughtness of the rest of the plot. The music (by David Vanian of the The Damned) also provides a good counterpoint to the visuals, alternating between moody and incongruously jazzy; a perfect incongruity, I mean. I really loved a few of the fight scenes as well, which combined crime movie brutality with martial arts agility to good effect.

As a former literature student, I enjoyed the literary references that Pardoe threw in constantly, as well. The Narrator’s mentors growing up are named Gogozhin and Ganya, two characters in Dostoevksy’s The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamozov gets a mention as well. The Narrator’s murderous doctor friend (who is amorally awesome in his brief sequence) quotes Hamlet, and Nicolai himself is obsessed with Othello. The name Porphyria refers to Browning’s poem “Porphyria’s Lover,” and, not to leave the noir roots too far behind, one character recounts a side story originally told in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. There are more, and I’m sure I didn’t catch them all. What I’m not sure about is whether these references have any deeper meaning. As far as I can tell, they’re references without content, either an attempt to tie the film to greater literary predecessors through mere quotation, or a perfect example of postmodern pastiche, which Frederic Jameson defines as imitation of an original without the weight or context of the original (my loose paraphrase). I hope it’s the second one, because that’s more interesting, and I don’t agree with Jameson’s dismissal of pastiche as a legitimate practice.

And that gets at my real dilemma with The Perfect Sleep. As an homage/pastiche of film noir I find it very interesting, especially since it’s clever enough to include noir’s literary heritage as well as its cinematic forerunners. As an example of striking visual style and interesting musical scoring, I enjoyed looking and listening to it (and I certainly look forward to seeing what Alter comes up with next). But as a self-contained narrative, it just doesn’t add up its pleasing moments and elements into a convincing whole. Still, those first two things do carry an awful lot of weight with me, and the further away I get from watching it, the more I’m thinking of things I liked about it.

The Perfect Sleep opens in Los Angeles tomorrow (3/13/09) for a limited engagement at Laemmle’s Sunset Cinema, and will play a limited engagement in Quad Theatres in New York starting on 3/27/09.

Originally posted on Row Three on 9 March 2009.

Update: It is now possible that this film will never be completed/released; director Beeban Kidran has left the project.

Oz magazine was a leading publication of the 1960s countercultural underground press, using satirical humor, psychedelic art, and scathing anti-establishment political articles to critique the status quo of the time, first in Australia and then in London. Its envelope-pushing content and endorsement of the expression of free love in pretty much any form landed its editors in obscenity trials in both countries. After being acquitted upon appeal in the Australia trial (1964), main editor Richard Neville and editor/artist Martin Sharp headed to London in 1966 to recreate the magazine in the center of the countercultural movement. They were joined there by Neville’s girlfriend Louise and other contributors, notably Germaine Greer, who would later become very well-known for her feminist literary critical work The Female Eunuch. By 1970, Oz’s editors again found themselves indicted for obscenity and intent to corrupt minors.

The upcoming film Hippie Hippie Shake, adapted from Neville’s memoir, focuses on London Oz from its inception (Neville and Sharp’s arrival in London) through the obscenity trial. I saw the film at a work-in-progress preview, so it wouldn’t be fair to give a definitive review on it at this point, but I’d like to at least give some impressions of the film as it is now. Most of the issues I had with the film were pacing and narrative issues – I’m interested to see if director Beeban Kidron (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) will be able to iron those out before the film is released (it currently has no release date set).

The first half of the film covers the rise of London Oz, as Richard (played by Cillian Murphy) and Martin (Max Minghella) join Louise (Sienna Miller) in London and gather contributors for the magazine, which include David Widgery, an earnest young political activist who wants to write only about things like the horrors of Vietnam, and Germaine Greer, of course focused on feminist issues and sexual equality. Soon they are joined by business whiz Felix Dennis, and rifts begin to form that eventually threaten Oz nearly as much as the obscenity trial that takes up the second half of the film. Felix is quickly typed as one who is interested in the magazine for the amount of sexual material it allows him to work with rather than its serious countercultural aspirations. Other interpersonal conflicts occur when Martin wants to do an all-image issue, and when Louise feels as though Richard cares more about an increasingly ill-defined cause than he does for her.

Unfortunately, none of these conflicts really go anywhere – they just sort of go away when the trial starts. There was a real opportunity here for the trial to reunite the Oz editors behind a renewed sense of their joint purpose, but that gets lost in the series of overly episodic scenes that make up the first half of the film. We’re never shown anything of Oz’s time in Australia (not even a hint of the earlier trial), and we’re given almost no information about Neville’s background, making it difficult to get an idea of who he is and why he’s interested in running a countercultural magazine. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of stories that start in media res, but Hippie Hippie Shake just feels like it left out important background details. The whole first half is fairly disconnected and scenes are thrown together in roughly chronological order, but without a whole lot of narrative logic. To be fair, the second half is much tighter and most of the trial scenes are electric – Neville’s main defense speech is powerful and still relevant today. However, the emotional high I got toward the end isn’t completely deserved. We want to feel like we’re behind these characters and their magazine, but if we are, it’s because of the stirring speeches and rising music, or because we already have a bias toward the countercultural movement and in this case especially, the sexual freedom it represented – not because Hippie Hippie Shake has given us a credible reason to think that Oz was all that. The first half of the film, in its current edit, is too rushed and disconnected to get a handle on what Oz stood for before Felix and Richard and Martin starting pulling it in different directions.

There are several very good scenes – a spontaneous skinny-dipping scene captures the freshness and vitality of the time period, and a plot-central argument between Richard and Louise is very well-written and perfectly enacted by both Murphy and Miller. A brief segment with Richard’s father raised many intriguing questions about Oz’s purpose and whether Richard and his friends were really representing what they wanted to represent (“if you’re all about love, why is everything so aggressive?”) – questions that come up again with at least tentative answers during the trial. A section set at the 1970 Isle of Wight music festival does a great job of evoking the feel of the time (and includes a gorgeous fly-through long take moving from the deserted landscape into the backstage area and finally onto the stage, revealing a sea of concert-goers), though the rest of the film seems surprisingly non-time period specific. The person introducing the film indicated that the music wasn’t completely finished yet – a few more distinctively late ’60s tracks would go a long way toward making the film feel grounded. The trial, as I’ve said, is pretty tight, with good dialogue both humorous and serious. Yet as a whole, the film isn’t fully satisfying on a narrative level due to the somewhat chaotic first half, and it also feels strangely flat much of the time – again, something that post-processing on video and audio may help. I couldn’t help comparing it to Across the Universe in my head, and while Across the Universe certainly had its fair share of flaws, it had a vigor and experimental nature that Hippie Hippie Shake could’ve done well to emulate. Oz was a cutting-edge, experimental magazine. Hippie Hippie Shake is a bit too staid by comparison.

All the actors carry their parts well, though Cillian Murphy would’ve benefited if the writers had given him a stronger characterization to work with as Richard; I especially liked Max Minghella as Martin (but I also liked Martin as a character the best, so I may be biased there) and Sienna Miller fits in well as flower-child Louise. Lee Ingleby impressed me with his comic timing and delivery as Jim Anderson, one of the more endearing members of the editing team. If they recut the beginning of the film to be more cohesive and less rushed, a lot of my major issues would disappear, because the second half really is quite good, and more alive than the first half. So keep in mind that these concerns are based on a work-in-progress print, and since there’s no release date in sight yet, they may well improve it into quite a decent ’60s biopic.

The real Felix Dennis, Richard Neville, and Jim Anderson, in 1970

Director: Victor Erice
Story & Screenplay: Victor Erice and Ángel Fernández Santos
Producers: Elías Querejeta
Starring: Ana Torrent, Isabel Tellería, Fernando Fernán Gómez
Year: 1973
Country: Spain
MPAA Rating: Not rated
Running time: 97min.

Originally posted on Row Three on 31 August 2009.

[xrr rating=4.5/5]

A gaggle of excited children chase a van into the center of a tiny Spanish village – a movie has come to town, a rare occasion that brings nearly everyone in town to check it out. It’s 1940, World War II is going on elsewhere in Europe, the country is in recovery from their own civil war, but the movie is 1931’s Frankenstein, and the village’s attention is riveted. Based on this opening, it seems as if The Spirit of the Beehive is going to be a movie about the movies and the effect of movies on small-town populations – like a Cinema Paradiso or Shadow Magic. And though the rest of the film unfolds based on the catalyst of two little girls, sisters Isabel and Ana, seeing Frankenstein, it quickly transcends cinema and becomes about something far more primal – imagination itself.

Young Ana has two questions for her older sister Isabel: Why did the monster kill the little girl, and why did the villagers kill the monster? The fact that she doesn’t wholly connect the two events together perhaps makes it less surprising that she soon identifies much more with the monster than the villagers (the lack of perceived causal connection between the two also indicates to the audience that we shouldn’t look for exact 1:1 correlations between Frankenstein and the events of The Spirit of the Beehive). Isabel’s answer is that neither the girl nor the monster died, firstly because it’s a movie and the movies aren’t real, but also because the monster is still alive – she’s seen him at night in an abandoned house nearby. This response is very telling. Isabel’s imagination is good at creating stories, especially ones with a cruel edge that mislead others for her amusement, but she herself knows what’s real and what’s made up. She doesn’t get lost in her own imaginings the way that Ana soon will.

Isabel effectively replaces the mythology of the movie with mythology of her own, fundamentally affecting Ana’s imagination and actions through the rest of the film. Ana becomes obsessed with finding Frankenstein, returning to the abandoned house time after time. She feels that he would be a friend to her – though it isn’t clear in the film, her quiet shyness seems to make her something of an anomaly among the village children. A few events involving a deserter soldier eventually occur near the house that drive Ana even further into her imagination, and perhaps into madness. The thing that makes all of this so fascinating is writer/director Victor Erice’s understanding of imagination – everything Ana does and sees is filtered through her imagination and her imaginative perception of the film, and as such, everything makes perfect sense, even though trying to make direct connections with Frankenstein is usually pointless.

The title refers to the girls’ father’s occupation as a beekeeper; various vignettes of his life and their mother’s appear interspersed with the main story of Ana’s odyssey. These parts are far less clear – the mother writes a letter to an unknown person who seems to be involved in the war (brother? lover?); the father tends his bees and writes about them in his journal. Similarly, the overarching metaphor involving the beehives is incredibly obscure. The father journals about the endlessly varied and yet totally repetitive nature of a beehive, and the fact that looking at a beehive’s activity at first yields fascination but soon sadness and horror. This voice-overed statement is obliquely applied to Ana’s indomitable need to seek out Frankenstein (who Isabel refers to as a spirit), and is eventually repeated at the end, when Ana’s fascination may in fact have turned to sadness and horror, but like most everything in the film, the metaphor is not spelled out and is more of a mood or feeling than an explicit reference.

In fact, perhaps the greatest thing about the film as a whole is Erice’s extremely subtle approach. In one violent scene that is a turning point in the film, he shows nothing but distant gunfire, then cuts to the aftermath. When Ana first visits the abandoned house, the forbidding darkness inside contrasts so strongly with the bright outdoors that it looks like an impenetrable barrier to entrance, creating through a basic visual an intense sense of mystery and dread. Whatever the mother is doing with her letter-writing is never made clear – we retain the children’s in-the-dark viewpoint on adult matters. This subtlety yields a moody, mesmerizing quality, with the sense that everything is happening just under the surface – reinforcing that the driving force in the film is not anything that actually happens, but what happens in the imagination.

Amélie
France 2001; dir: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
starring: Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz
screened 4/6/08; DVD

Previous Viewing Experience: I’ve seen this at least four times, but most of them were pretty soon after it came out on DVD, so it’s probably been four or five years. Wow, that makes me feel old.

Previous Reactions: I pretty much fell in love with this movie when I first saw it (hence the seeing it again so often so soon). The colors, the music, the quirk, the charm. Mostly the colors, if I’m honest.

Brief Synopsis: Amelie Poulain lives and works in Montmartre, but doesn’t connect very deeply with other people. When she finds a long-lost box of toys and successfully finds the overjoyed owner, she decides to do random acts of kindness (and meanness, in one case) – one of which may lead to romance if she doesn’t chicken out first.

Response: Interesting reaction this time. I’m still charmed by the film, and for all the same reasons as before. But I found myself also a little disappointed at its obviousness. Which I think is a function of having seen several Krzysztof Kieslowski films over the past year. Jeunet’s use of vibrant color seems directly borrowed from Kieslowski’s later films (the French ones), and since the cinematography is one of my favorite things about both Amelie and Kieslowski’s work, I couldn’t help comparing them in my head. And Kieslowski is better. Amelie’s problem is that she’s afraid of connecting meaningfully with other people. That’s why she spends more time pulling pranks and tricking everyone else in the story (whether for their good or ill) rather than concentrate on her own life. Ultimately, that’s why she constructs elaborate schemes and false identities that keep her in contact with yet also distanced from Bobo. And that’s great, it’s a fine storyline. But then Jeunet introduces a brittle painter who can’t quite capture one girl’s expression in the Renoir he’s copying. Why? Because she’s in a group of people and yet not connected to them. Over and over the fact that this girl and Amelie are the same is reiterated. Over and over the painter explicitly pushes Amelie to take the risk, to open herself up to others. Again, not a bad thing in and of itself, but Kieslowski takes a similar storyline of people who have cut themselves off from the world emotionally in Red and carries it out with much greater subtlety and ambiguity. Perhaps that’s why Amelie is #92 on this list and Red is down at #39.

I still love Amelie, don’t get me wrong. It’s delightful, and it remains one of the two or three best introductions to foreign films for the subtitle-phobic. But it’s a gateway drug to world cinema, and if you like it, move on to the harder stuff.

Overall Rating: Well Above Average

Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel)
Germany 1931; dir: Josef von Sternberg
starring: Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich
screened 7/5/08; New Beverly Cinema

Previous Viewing Experience: Never seen it, nor anything else directed by von Sternberg or starring Jannings, though I’ve seen several later Dietrich films.

Knowledge Before Viewing: In a meta sense, I’m aware that von Sternberg and Dietrich are a well-known actress-director team, and that Dietrich made waves for her masculin costuming in this and/or her other films with him. More specifically, I know the basic story has something to do with I’m not looking forward to this one too terribly much. It sounds like an offputting combination of dirty old man lechery and moralizing. Add in early sound era awkwardness, and yeah. Sorta ambivalent. Hopefully seeing it in a theatre (fortuitous timing on the New Beverly’s part!) will help.

Brief Synopsis: My pre-viewing synopsis is fairly close, actually. The Professor (Jannings) finds his students sneaking off to the local cabaret, but when he goes there to catch them at it, he ends up falling for Lola Lola (Dietrich) himself. She encourages him and eventually they marry. But when the show goes back on the road, he’s reduced to performing clown parts to earn his keep and stay with her.

Response: I wound up liking this a lot more than I initially expected to. One of my favorite films it probably won’t ever be, but it was definitely worthwhile at least seeing once to experience such a young Marlene Dietrich. She’s absolutely delightful from start to finish (outside of, perhaps, a few scenes near the end where she gets to be quite the little bitch). The story is far more focused on the Professor, though, and his fall from esteemed academic and community leader to pathetic joke after he marries Lola. And this being to some degree a Gemran Expressionist film, his decline gets a little on the overwrought side at times. I did particularly like the recurring bird imagery – both the Professor and Lola keep birds, linking them before they’re, um, linked, and an early shot of a dead bird provides a foreshadowing glimpse of how this is all going to work out. In terms of moralizing, the message is apparently “don’t marry flighty showgirls much younger than you because it’ll ruin your life.” Which, actually, is probably good advice.

Overall Rating: Above Average