Rosalba takes a powder

Pane e tulipani (Bread and tulips) 2000 Italy (116 minutes) directed and cowritten by Silvio Soldini

An Italian housewife on a tour bus holiday with her boisterous extended family and friends comes out of a highway rest area bathroom just in time to see the bus depart without her. 

Rosalba Maresanto Barletta (Licia Maglietta) is the perfect housewife. She prepares the meals. She cleans the house. She does the laundry and irons the shirts. She is a sympathetic listener.

She has done these things so well for so long that her quiet, uncomplaining efficiency is automatic to paterfamilias Mimmo (Antonio Catania), owner of a bathroom supply company in Pescara, to her two teenage sons Nicola (Tiziano Cucchiarelli) and Salvo (Matteo Febo), to her own family and in-laws.

Sitting on the steps waiting for the bus to come back, Rosalba thinks of all the household things she could be doing at home. A bohemian woman (Daniela Piperno) passing her on the steps offers her a ride. Rather than hold up the tour, Rosalba decides to get herself home from outside Salerno (the tour’s last stop had been the classical site Paestum) to Pescara on the Adriatic coast, roughly 350 kilometers away. This way, she could have a little quiet time to herself.

But it is summer vacation, after all. If quiet time is what she wants, and she is on the road, she has never been to Venice. When she mentions this to a subsequent driver headed north, he tells her that Venice is not far out of his way and offers to take her there. Then he asks her to drive while he sleeps.

As Rosalba nears her home exit behind the wheel, she sees a boy in the back seat of a passing car hold a hand-drawn sign against the window, with a cartoon bubble pointing to his mouth in which he wrote ‘Cercasi nuovi genitori’—seeking new parents. She passes the Pescara exit and keeps heading north.

The story that takes shape is like something Pedro Almodóvar cooked up in his early films, complete with the lollipop colors. It has some of Almodóvar’s effervescence, many of the same kind of characters, and a lot of the fun.

In Venice, Rosalba meets there is Fernando Girasole (Bruno Ganz), a waiter at the Marco Polo Chinese Restaurant. Fernando, originally from Iceland, speaks a formally correct and floridly polite Italian. The deeply depressive Fernando offers to put her up at his apartment when she misses her train home. Fernando’s neighbor Grazia Reginella (Marina Massironi) is holistic beautician and masseuse with man problems.

Rosalba is in touch with her husband by telephone, but keeps missing her train home by minutes. Fernando invites her to stay. Fermo (Felice Andreasi) an old anarchist florist who eats garlic like candy, tells Rosalba through narrowed eyes that she looks like the 19th century Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich and hires her as his assistant.

Rosalba's life begins to assume the contours and colors of a contemporary Cindarella story. The only problem is, of course: no one is preparing food, cleaning the house, and ironing shirts back in Pescara. Italian menfolk are constitutionally unable to do these things at home and Mimmo’s mistress of five years, Aunt Ketty (Vitalba Andrea)—Rosalba’s sister—makes it clear to Mimmo right away that she don’t do no stinkin’ ironing.

The story rounds the zany bend when Mimmo hires a private detective to get to the bottom of the matter.

Costantino Caponangeli (Giuseppe Battiston), a mother-ridden plumber and amateur detective whose main qualification is that he has read 285-and-a-half detective novels, is an Italian John Candy.

            He is also about as inconspicuous as John Candy would have been in Venice in summer in a trench coat, floppy hat, and flip-up shades.

An effective device Soldini uses to share Rosalba’s thoughts and give us her backstory is to animate these in waking visions, with figures such as her mother-in-law, the bohemian woman who gave her the first ride, and Mimmo and her sons appearing from nowhere to speak to her from the back of her mind.

This is a fun comic ensemble piece that tells a serious story in an entertaining way. Enjoy the ride!

Fatih Akin’s In July, a hip take on A Midsummer’s Night Dream, is another fun summer European vacation road trip romantic comedy by a skilled auteur.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr7WImqnKBM

Blog link: http://moompitchers.blogspot.com/2011/03/goody-two-shoes-sees-double.html

My Great Big Fat Gay Greek Adolescence

Κυνοδοντας (Dogtooth) 2010 Greece (94 minutes) directed and cowritten by Yorgos Lanthimos.

A stereotypical Eastern Mediterranean pater familias and his wife impose the father’s traditional views of sexuality upon their three teenagers—a boy and two girls—by isolating them from the world in a gilded cage.

This predictably becomes a recipe for disaster, as the clueless teens grow more and more desperate and distressed. It seems in general like the same idea as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004) but without the big budget, costumes, context and back-story—as much on the movie parents’ part as on that of the filmmakers.

There is a sense in this radically joyless and unfunny film that Sexuality is a thing that comes in a big brown paper bag and, at a certain age, we get bonked over the head with it and covered in shit. Dr. Freud did not think that way, and I am no Freudian, but I don’t either.

Something did not ring true about the kids. Children, especially adolescents, may look and act like autistic spastics to adults—and even feel that way to themselves—but they find ways to relate quite intelligibly to each other in a code adults do not get. Kids have to get around adults before they can become them. Here, they are more like robotic ‘Stepford’ kids gone haywire.

The parents’ strangeness—they clearly come across as strange, though likely well within the range of what passes for ‘normal’—appears to be wrapped up in what feels like an ‘alien’ heterosexuality. This suggests that what this movie is really about are the bitter memories of someone’s gay adolescence upsetting his straight parents’ traditional applecart.

The film would make better sense if one were to imagine the kids as three adult gay men in the bodies of teenagers, along the lines of a My Great Big Fat Gay Greek Adolescence.

It might actually have been effective and even quite funny if these ersatz kids had been given instead the voices of actors or celebrities like John Waters in that Bugs Bunny way that Hollywood sometimes gives babies and young children the voices and knowing adult points of view of well-known character actors or comedians for a ‘comic’ effect.

Or just left alone with their own voices.

Poor devils

Девятая рота (Devyataya rota—Ninth Company) 2005 Russia/Ukraine (139 minutes) directed by Fedor Bondarchuk, screenplay by Yuri Korotkov.

Ninth Company is a very good war movie: seven young men are ground in the maw of Soviet airborne training then spit out into the hellish quagmire of the last year of the war in Afghanistan.

It also is a very good paradox. While its images do all the things that make war movies great to watch, its words tell us that war is hell, that the lives lost are wasted, and that this was nowhere truer than in the last Soviet war in Afghanistan.

The seven young men—‘Lyutyi,’ [fierce] (Artur Smol’yaninov), the group’s natural leader; ‘Chugun’ [cast iron] (Ivan Kokorin), a bully with something to prove; ‘Dzhokonda’ [Giaconda] (Konstantin Kryukov), the artist; ‘Ryaba’ (Mikhail Evlanov); Vorobei (Aleksei Chadov); ‘Stas’ (Artem Mikhalkov) and ‘Pinochet’ (Soslan Fidarov)—have volunteered for two-year hitches in Afghanistan. They report for duty in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, where they stay long enough for an army sour baldy.

As in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), the first half of the movie shows this group of boys being broken down and remade as combat troops; the second half places them in an intense combat zone and shows us what they are made of.

The boys are flown to an airborne unit’s training camp in Uzbekistan’s Ferghana Valley near the Soviet Union’s border with Afghanistan. There they meet their drill sergeant who, in their young lives—as in the lives of most men (and now women) entering military training anywhere—must seem like the devil incarnate.

Like Full Metal Jacket’s Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Erney), this devil breathes sulphurous smoke and packs a right like a sledgehammer.

Starshii Praporshchik ‘Sashka’ Dygalo (Mikhail Porechenkov) is an intense blonde and blue-eyed fireplug of a Ukrainian non-commissioned officer and seasoned Afghan veteran. This is of course a stereotype; but anyone else in this role would be like an American drill sergeant without the starched fatigues and southern accent.

Dygalo’s view is that the better a job he does of beating the civilian nonsense out of his ‘klouny’ [clowns], the harder a time the enemy will have trying to kill his soldiers—surely an attitude taken by every drill instructor, at least from the time of the Romans. Naturally, this is not quite the way it looks or feels on the receiving end after one hears the words ‘ehto zalyot,’ or ‘that’s a breach of military discipline,’ which the subtitle simply renders, ‘that’s a fuck-up.’

This cauldron once more produces a band of brothers from a disparate group of boys. Porechenkov is compelling in this role, and the film portrays the process well, touching lightly upon the abuse and hazing chronic in the former Red Army.

The second half of the movie shows the seven as part of a group of replacements flown to Bagram Air Base near Kabul. A soldier named Kolya (Mikhail Efremov), on his way home after ‘four extra tours of duty and 28 firefights’ without a scratch, passes on his lucky amulet to arriving fellow Krasnoyarsk paratrooper Lyutyi.

What follows is a completely different kettle of fish.

            The narrative and soldiering from this point are gripping and look terrific, but they seem more informed by the conventions of military action in films like Full Metal Jacket and Saving Private Ryan (1998) than what we see in the documentary Restrepo (2010).

The boys are assigned to or end up in Ninth Company. This was a company of the 345th Independent Guards Airborne Regiment that did a lot of the heavy fighting during the Soviet Afghan war, like Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, the American unit portrayed in Restrepo.

Their new praporshchik, or company first sergeant, is Khokhol, a Russian epithet for a Ukrainian on order of ‘redneck’ or ‘cracker.’ Khokhol is played by director Fedor Bondarchuk, son of Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk (to whom he dedicated the film). The company commander is Captain Bystrov (Alexei Kravchenko), another intense fireplug whom the boys are told the Afghans call ‘Korgaman,’ a local word for ‘Evil Giant.’ In one striking shot, the camera holds this officer’s steady stare.

The movie’s combat climax is based very loosely on a legendary battle that Ninth Company fought to hold Height 3234, an elevation overlooking a stretch of road between Gardez and Khowst in Paktia Province, secured to protect convoys. Paktia Province is south of the Korengal Valley area in Kunar Province portrayed in Restrepo, but has much the same terrain and is also adjacent to the insurgent-friendly tribal areas of Pakistan.

However, this battle was fought during the final Soviet ‘surge’ in the last year of the war (January 1988)—not in the last days (January 1989), as the film portrays. (The last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan on February 15, 1989.) In the event, the unit fulfilled its mission, taking heavy casualties from a nearly overwhelming enemy onslaught.

Nevertheless, the movie looks great. Its Afghanistan is actually in Crimea (Ukraine), with long mountainous vistas and enough hardscrabble rock to give it the right feel. The credits thank the Ukrainian armed forces and a large body of Ukrainian military personnel. There are thousands of military extras and the authentic equipment—BMP and BTR-60 armored vehicles, T-72 tanks, batteries of BM-21 multiple rocket launchers and squadrons of MI-24 Hind helicopter gunships, make the movie look like pictures from the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda of the period. Unfortunately, the music tends to overswell, feeling at times a bit more heavy-handed than necessary.

Soldiers make reference to ‘foreign’ enemy elements in both Ninth Company and Restrepo, but the indigenous people clearly are the main problem and danger. These people seem not a lot unlike those in the film Winter’s Bone (2010): they are all kin, they have a violent and complex dynamic of their own, and no outsider is welcome. Just replace the crystal methamphetamine with Islam.

The English subtitles have Soviet soldiers calling their enemy ‘muj’, short for mujahid (ﻤﺠﺎﻫﺪ), the Arabic word for ‘holy warrior’ best known in the West. What they actually say is dukh/dukhi, Soviet military slang for dushman/dushmany, a word for ‘enemy’ common to all the languages of Afghanistan and its neighbors, which Soviet soldiers adopted.

This is a good war movie. Restrepo would give one a better sense of what foreign soldiers are up against in a very violent corner of Afghanistan. Best of all is Sebastian Junger’s War (Twelve, 2010), his carefully researched, thoughtful, insightful, and well written reporting during the year he and cameraman Tim Hetherington spent with a platoon of Bravo Company in Korengal Valley in 2008.

Cockfights and cantantes down Mexico way

El Imperio de la Fortuna (The Realm of Fortune) Mexico 1986 (131 minutes) directed by Arturo Ripstein.

Billed as ‘una ironía clásica’ and based on a short story by Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, this movie plays like a folk tale with the devil gallivanting through the details.

Dionisio Pinzón (Ernesto Gómez Cruz), a simple and somewhat eccentric poor peasant, lives with his ailing, elderly mother (Socorro Avelar) and works as a town crier and odd jobs man in a small Mexican town that signs indicate to be Palenque in Chiapas.

Dionisio finds luck in the person of Bernarda ‘La Caponera’ Cutiño (Blanca Guerra), a singer with a travelling band. He goes from rags to riches to rags again, and Bernardita, ‘La Pinzonsita’ (Zaide Silvia Gutierrez), the daughter he has with La Caponera, follows in her mother’s footsteps.

The film opens with Dionisio and his mother asleep on the dirt floor of a one-room dwelling, along two sides of an unoccupied bed in a space lit by the tiny blinking red lights of a large wreath with a ribbon that says ‘Merry Christmas’ in English.

A cockcrow awakes Dionisio. He rises, gargles, spits, then gives several full-throated warbles at himself in a small piece of mirror, which awakens his mother. After she gets up, he goes into the street, blows a whistle, beats a drum, steps up on a platform the size of a milk crate, and starts crying various public announcements. But rather than to suspect that I am experiencing the work of a Mexican David Lynch (Luis Buñuel was Ripstein’s mentor), in an odd way all of this falls into place, as though I am seeing everyday occurrences so ordinary that they barely rate mention.

As master of ceremonies at a cockfight, Dionisio saves a fancy fighting cock injured in a fight and given up for dead. He takes the bird home stroking it lovingly and talking softly to it, and sets about nursing it back to health in the dirt yard in front of his house. At the same time, his ailing mother, thrashing about inside the house, dies.

Dionisio seems more concerned about giving his mother a proper burial than he was about her condition when she was alive, but gets this taken care of; his recovered cock wins the first of a series of fights that begin to lead him to the ‘realm of fortune.’

The cockfighting scenes look genuine. The sets and crowds look like live entertainment at village fairs that seem to be mainly for adult males—culturally, and not necessarily because of the content. The fairs feature carnival rides, prize cockfighting in small arenas surrounded by cheering and wagering aficionados, and variety acts staged on the beds of small trucks, such as comedy skits and music.

La Caponera is one of the truck bed performers, accompanied by a mariachi band, alone on a small stage framed by a neon proscenium. She also performs offstage in the background while the cockfights take place. Dionisio falls in love with her, as do many men, because she is young, beautiful, and sings folk songs with a lovely voice.

Her appearance in the story coincides with the beginning of Dionisio’s long run of luck. After he becomes prosperous, she gives herself to him—though it is not clear why a beautiful young cantante with many admirers would favor a middle-aged, unsophisticated rustic with a bound hand who is closer to animals than people.

Eventually, Dionisio, Bernarda and their daughter Bernardita end up in an enormous rococo mansion in the middle of nowhere, filled with faux classical sculpture and art, which looks like a dusty, moth-eaten Mexican Addams family house. The central feature is the enormous baize-covered poker table where Dionisio won the house from his mentor, and where he will lose it.

In the end, Bernarda’s true golden egg is the adult Bernardita singing her mother’s songs in a new day as La Pinzona. The quirky but catchy ‘Las roses de mis rosales/de los colores del mar’ (The roses of my rosebushes/of the color of the sea) was going through my head long afterwards—like the rest of this curious and interesting movie.

Killing time

Lebenszeichen (Signs of Life) 1968 Germany (87 minutes) written, directed and produced by Werner Herzog; includes a kibitz version with Herzog watching and commenting on the film with Norman Hill.

A young man serving in the military in wartime in a country far from home comes slowly unglued under the steady, indifferent gaze of an alien place and its people, its history, and the hot sun.

In his first feature film, Werner Herzog employed what would become his signature method: take an inspiration to a place, combine a cast of professional actors with friends, film crew and local people, and shoot in and among the lie of the land and found objects to create an of-a-piece work of art.

Stroszek (Peter Brogle), a German paratrooper wounded in combat in Crete, is sent to Kos, one of the Dodecanese islands near Turkey, to recover and to guard an ammunition depot. Nora (Athina Zacharopoulou), the Greek nurse who treated Stroszek and whom he marries, and two lightly wounded comrades, Becker (Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg) and Meinhard (Wolfgang Reichmann) accompany him.

The depot, in the citadel of the long-abandoned but still imposing Castle of the Knights built by the Knights Hospitaller in the late middle ages, is of minimal military value to the Germans because they cannot use the ammunition in their weapons. The German command is concerned that partisans may try to take the stockpile.

But the war is far away. The prospect of having to defend the position against partisans or anyone else is slim. The young men’s main foe is every soldier’s chronic occupational hazard: boredom. It is their duty to rise and shine every morning and spend each day finding ways of going through the motions of something that does not make much sense to begin with, fortunate to be in the rear.

They smoke and talk a lot, eat and drink, paint things, and make fireworks of the antiquated ordnance. Meinhard fishes, designs a contraption to catch roaches and hypnotizes a chicken. Becker (a non-actor friend of Herzog and scholar of antiquities) deciphers classical inscriptions found at the site. Stroszek and Nora play house.

They kill time.

            The soldiers’ boredom is heightened by the impassive, sun-beaten setting. One senses eyes on the Germans everywhere they go, but few of the local people besides small boys appear to be watching them. The islanders seem to carry on with their lives as usual, content to let the non-Greek-speaking whomevers go about whatever business has brought them there.

Animals and people in old photographs appear to be watching the foreign soldiers the same way: steadily, with patience; indifferently, without judgment.

            One even gets the sense that the past is watching the young men. The fortress grounds are littered with artifacts of antiquity. Successive cultures incorporated pieces former ancient structures and statuary into their masonry as they built on the old, speaking for the many centuries in which this place has seen foreigners come and go about their brief vanities and then disappear.

            Stroszek’s nerves begin to fray. Relieved to be detailed to a safe patrol with Meinhard to break the monotony, Stroszek is undone when they suddenly come upon a valley filled with the sight and sounds of hundreds of windmills. 

            The German authorities intervene after Stroszek takes sole control of the depot and threatens to blow it up. From this point on, we see him only from the distance, bounding madly along the parapets like an antic mountain goat in an unusual, effective portrayal of madness by the young Herzog which could echo from the writings of Joseph Conrad.

            The kibitz version in which Herzog discusses the film with Norman Hill as it runs also is worth seeing. Among other things, Herzog says that his interest in Crete and Kos was inspired by his grandfather, Rudolf Herzog, the archaeologist who discovered and excavated the renowned Asklipieion at Kos at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is where Hippocrates, the traditional ‘father of medicine,’ practiced and taught his art. Achmed Hafiz, an old Turk who appears as a local in the film, worked at the dig as a boy with Rudolf Herzog.   

            Other than the surname, there is no connection between the Stroszek in this film and the title character in Herzog’s eccentric 1977 classic Stroszek, in which Bruno S., his girlfriend Eva and an elderly neighbor Scheitz have a series of bizarre misadventures in their odyssey from contemporary Berlin to rural Wisconsin.

            Herzog told Hill that in both instances he used the name to honor a promise to a fellow university student named Stroszek, that if Stroszek wrote a history paper for Herzog, Herzog would make his name ‘immortal.’

Talk, stalk, and one smoking barrel

Schussangst (Gun-shy) 2003 Tatfilm Germany (101 minutes) directed and cowritten by Dito Tsintsadze, from the novel Schussangst by Dirk Kurbjuweit. 

 

She is the first woman you see on the Schnellbahn, but you may not remember her when she turns up several days later on the same tramway line and drops a note in the protagonist’s lap that says: ‘Help me!’

            Isabella (Lavinia Wilson) is mysterious and attractive, more alluring than movie-star beautiful. Her premeditation suggests that the protagonist, Lukas Eiserbeck (Fabian Hinrichs), is an ideal mark.

 

But a mark for what purpose?

 

Lukas is a lonely, thoughtful young man who lives by himself in Halle, delivers meals for the government daily meal service to needy and elderly people as an alternative to national military duty, and sculls alone on the river for exercise. The story unfolds from his point of view. Lukas came to Halle from ‘a small town’ to be in ‘the big city.’

 

It turns out that Lukas’ father, who left his mother when he was small, lives in Halle with his new family, though Lukas is not in contact with him and his father does not know that Lukas is there.

 

Other than Frau Sieveking (Ingeborg Westphal), an aging prostitute who offers him sex for half price, most of the people to whom Lukas delivers meals live in dreary isolation: one old woman shares her meals with her lapdog and another hanged herself. Lukas does not seem interested in socializing with coworkers his age, nor they with him.

 

Isabella appears like a bolt from the blue. She speaks frankly and humorously with Lukas about sex and asks to go home with him. This sets in motion a passacaglia that swings from tease to intimacy to tease, with Lukas trying to follow her capricious leading steps. 

 

‘No of course I don’t want to have sex with you!’ he says, acting shocked with himself (though nearly jumping out of his skin) after she has taken her first long bath in his apartment and teases him for wanting to ‘fuck’ her when he tries gently to snuggle with her sitting next to him on his bed with fresh damp hair, in a tee shirt and panties. 

 

Isabella has father issues of her own. Her stepfather, Romberg (Johan Leysen), a motivational speaker, has had sex with her since she was an adolescent. She does kendo, a Japanese fencing discipline, to ‘learn not to move your heart. To keep control. Not to run away, even if it sometimes hurts,’ she tells Lukas.

Isabella’s push-and-pull bewilders Lukas. After he sees Romberg having rough sex with Isabella after-hours at the gym where she does kendo, he drinks too much, sneaks a scull out on the river at night and wrecks it. This attracts the attention of Johanssen, a cheerfully obnoxious policeman (Christoph Waltz—six years later the merry sadist Colonel Hans Landa of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), who keeps popping up as though a stand-in for Lukas’ bad conscience.

Lukas understands only that Romberg is the source of the hurt Isabella feels, which causes her distance from him. He sets about to remedy this. He obtains a silenced high-powered rifle with a scope and hollow-tip bullets from a garrulous underworld Albanian (Lasha Bakradze) who claims that he taught himself German by reading two Thomas Mann novels 20-30 times. 

 

When Lukas tells an elderly man and former Wehrmacht sniper (Rudolf W. Marwitz) to whom he delivers meals that he is having problems hitting targets, the man tells him how to breathe.

 

‘But I always close my eyes just before I pull the trigger,’ Lukas says.

‘Ach, schussangst ist diese,’ the man replies. Snipers he served with during the war (though he was grievously injured while parachuting into Crete and never shot at anyone) had the same problem. It means one is gun-shy, afraid to shoot, he says.

 

‘I am not afraid,’ Lukas says. He gets reinforcement—and the story sets up for its dénouement—when he attends one of Romberg’s talks.

 

            ‘Besiege deine Angst,’ Romberg exhorts his audience—Conquer your fear. ‘When something stands in the way of your happiness, then rip it out of the way. Kill it…’

 

This is a nicely put-together movie, bold in pictures that keep one’s eyes busy. The narrative flows smoothly from scene to scene, providing enough information to keep one curious about what comes next. 

 

The characters hold a viewer’s attention because they have interesting, expressive faces and always seem to be in motion. Isabella reveals little about herself, but in a scene after one of her baths at Lukas’ apartment in which she may reveal the most, she is talking to Lukas in another room while lying on the bed, but the camera is turned 45°, giving the effect that she is speaking to Lukas rather than answering his questions to the ceiling.