Slavic damsels in distress

Das Fraülein (The Young Woman) 2006 Switzerland (75 minutes), written and directed by Andrea Štaka.

This film, director Andrea Štaka’s first narrative feature, looks at life from the perspective of three very different women.

Each woman’s story is compelling, but the film is too refreshingly direct and emotionally honest either to be a ‘feel-good’ movie or a tearjerker.

Reža (Mirjana Karanović) is a Serb who immigrated to Zurich from Belgrade twenty-five years before the story begins. Disappointed in love, she resolved to make a successful, independent life for herself and never look back.

We first see her as an attractive but severe, restrained middle-aged woman who owns and runs a popular, well-run cafeteria and speaks only a correct German with her mostly male, Serbian- and Croatian-speaking staff. As several characters tell her, ‘If there’s one thing you’re good at, it’s counting.’

Mila (Ljubica Jović), a Croatian immigrant and the employee who has been with Reža the longest, seems satisfied to play a subordinate role to Reža similar to the one she plays to her husband Ante (Zdenko Jelčić). Ante is unable to work because he has an ‘injury.’ He stays at their apartment, obsessed with the house where they plan to retire, forever ‘under construction’ somewhere on the Adriatic coast that he and Mila once called home, though their family, their children and grandchildren, now are all in Zurich.

Reža and Mila confine themselves within each her own narrow vision of the possible, troubling to keep ‘the feeling when you think you’re thirsty and then you realize what you’re feeling is longing’ in a mental ‘tin’ where it can be counted and rest assured.

Ana Tanovic (Marija Škaričić), the ‘fraülein’ of the title, hitchhikes into the orderly women’s kingdom that the cafeteria represents.

Ana, in her early twenties, is a drifter, a homeless Bosnian from Sarajevo. She survived war and her brother’s suicide afterward but, we learn early in the film, knows that she critically needs hospitalization and a bone marrow donor. Her flight is a fanciful attempt to outrun what she otherwise knows to be inevitable; she does this in what looks like one long, confident stride at a time.

Ana is charismatic because she is young and attractive, self-assured and glows with fun. She also is scared out of her wits.

She ends up in the cafeteria for coffee on her first morning in Zurich, having partied and spent the night in a nearby industrial loft with artists she met on the street the night before. When she hears Croatian spoken and sees a need, she comes behind the counter and gets right to work. The rest of the story flows from this moment, a beautifully acted narrative well told in pictures, though the farmers shown polling trees before the title are a bit of a mystery.

Like the blues and many Irish airs, one gets the sense in this movie that the music and dancing these women do is a way of making the best out of each her own pain and disappointment—though each perhaps receives an intimation of fulfillment.

Economy-sized happiness

Happiness 2006 (11 minutes) written and directed by Sophie Barthes (distributed by Film Movement with the feature film Das Fraülein)

The unnamed protagonist (Elzbita Czyzewska) is an older woman who lives alone and works at a factory with other middle-aged women quality controlling condoms.

We see the women in long white laboratory coats and longer faces, in white hairnets and gloves, working silently in this sterile environment, filling condoms with water, stroking, kneading and massaging them, presumably to ensure that they do not leak. An alarm sounds when a condom leaks water, and a supervisor (Elizabeth Bennet), a broad beamed, middle-aged woman with large glasses and a disapproving square jaw appears with a clipboard.

The only thing that separates the supervisor from the other workers are the fancy white patent leather high heeled pumps she wears—with band aids on the backs of her heels.

One evening after work, the protagonist notices something in a Brighton Beach shop window and enters the shop to ask the shopkeeper (Lelyana Gashkova) to show it to her. It is a white box with a gold seal that says on three sides in Russian, in plain black Cyrillic letters: СЧАСТЬЕ (schast’ye—happiness).

The shopkeeper tells the protagonist that she must purchase the box to open it, and when the protagonist asks how long it lasts, the shopkeeper says: ‘Depends who use it. Can last years, or couple of seconds.’

The protagonist buys the box and has it gift-wrapped—‘It’s not for myself,’ she makes sure to tell the shopkeeper…

Harry and Sally run silent

A Cottage on Dartmoor, England, 1929 (87 minutes) written and directed by Anthony Asquith, from a story by Herbert C. Price.

Black and white and silent is tough to beat when a murderous madman’s afoot and the director is a master like Alfred Hitchcock or his contemporary, Anthony Asquith.

The stories are simple and the form is effectively interactive. The viewer contributes the complexity from personal experience, cued by a montage of suggestive images and the actors’ facial expressions and gestures.

In this story, the passionate jealousy of Joe (Uno Henning), a barber’s assistant, turns near lethal when Sally (Norah Baring), a coworker with whom he is infatuated, falls in love with Harry ‘the Dartmoor farmer’ (Hans Schlettow), one of the shop’s customers.

This is an old tale about the green-eyed monster told in images that make it easy to read as the story moves along. It opens with Joe, who has the face and profile of an Egon Schiele dandy, jumping down into the frame from his prison window, fleeing across the moors to the ‘cottage on Dartmoor’ of the title, intent on wreaking a mad vengeance on Harry and Sally.

In a flashback, we see the morning of the crime when Sally came to work wearing Harry’s engagement ring. Two shop girls gossip loudly about Sally’s news, which we see in a dizzying succession of shot/reaction shot of the women’s mouths moving on either side of Joe as he rhythmically strops a straight razor between them.

Asquith gives the razor in Joe’s hands the same attention as would Hitchcock. It gleams; we know it has a very sharp edge and that Joe has every intent to use it; but there is no violence. One quick stroke, others’ horrified reactions, and circumstantial clues, such as small bottle on its side on the floor spilling liquid, tell us what we need to know.

One of this film’s most entertaining and inventive scenes comes when Harry takes Sally to a double feature. Joe creeps in tailing them. A ten-minute sequence shows individual audience members responding first to a silent action comedy, then to a dramatic ‘talkie’, without once showing the movies they are seeing.

The audience smiles and laughs, comments to each other, shows concern, gasps and grabs the arms of their seats as the movies run. The comedy is Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last!—Lloyd’s name and part of the title appear on a ticket stub. This is the 1923 film with the iconic shot of Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock on the bygone International Savings & Exchange Bank Building high above downtown Los Angeles.

A boy in the audience nudges another boy, pointing to a clean cut young man with round spectacles in the audience who resembles the character Lloyd plays in his films. Quick cutting makes the musicians in the orchestra pit appear to be keeping the film’s madcap pace.

We know that the drama that follows is a ‘talkie’ because the musicians lay down their instruments and sit in their places eating sandwiches and drinking beer once it starts.

Everyone enjoys the comedy, and all are gripped by the drama; everyone, that is, except Joe, who stays focused on the couple throughout the show—and a man whom the drama put to sleep.

How to stuff a wild chorizo!

Cruzando (Crossing) 2008 U.S. (95 minutes) Written and directed by and starring Mando Alvarado and Michael Ray Escamilla.

This is no country for old men.

Like a Cormac McCarthy story, it is a taut, life-and-death drama about fathers and sons in an arduous trek that crosses the Rio Grande from Mexico to the heart of Texas, through the vast dryscapes of the Tex-Mex border area.

But rather than an austere, sun-bleached middle-aged Anglo sparing of words, the narrators of this story are a pair of Mexican-American filmmakers informed by a young man’s blithely dark sense of humor at having to start from difficult circumstances to accomplish the all but impossible.

Manuel Montes (Michael Ray Escamilla, who also shares the writing and direction credit) lives in a small Mexican town not far from the Texas border with his pregnant wife, Maia (Maria Helan), near the end of her term.

He and his wife live on what he makes cleaning a local sex club, a job that includes wearing yellow rain gear and heavy rubber gloves to clean out peep-show booths. The club is owned by a nasty Anglo bully named Earl (Tony Campisi) and managed by Earl’s nasty, half-Mexican bully son, Ignacio (Gerardo Rodriguez). A coworker (J. J. Perez) dressed as a giant chorizo bops with the b-girls as part of the club’s ‘floor show’.

Manuel’s father, who he last saw as a small child, sends Manuel a newspaper clipping that he is to be executed within a week in Huntsville, Texas, for murdering a rancher. He includes the missing half of a snapshot he took of himself with his son; the other half Manuel has kept all his life as the last thing linking him with his father.

Manuel feels that he must get to Huntsville before the execution because he cannot let his father slip away for good for a second and last time without having seen him.

But Huntsville is 450-500 miles away, across the Rio Grande River and U.S. border; Manuel has no money and only a bicycle. He visits a friend who he thinks might know a ‘coyote’—a person who guides illegal immigrants across the border.

Diego (Mando Alvarado, Escamilla’s writing and directing partner), an overweight slacker with peroxide blond hair and a goatee, knows such a person. He also insists on going along ‘to make his mark’ by filming a documentary about this story: ‘I want to capture your shit on film,’ Diego tells Manuel, ‘¡Como Spielberg!’

As for the money, the only one in town with anything near the amount they need is Earl, the nasty Anglo bully who owns the sex club…

A viewer under the age of twenty-five, especially a male, might follow the logic of where all this is hurtling merrily along with a keen sense of fun and adventure. Since this is who is telling the story, this is what the story becomes. I did not take to the protagonists right away, but they grew on me because Escamilla and Alvarado each do a grand job of developing Manuel and Diego as the story unfolds.

The other characters also are well done: Manuel’s wife, Maia; Earl and Ignacio, who make a good father and son; The Matador (David Barrera), the coyote, a ne’er-do-well, has-been professional wrestler; Grace (Janis Dardaris), an Anglo human trafficker who finds the boys dehydrated in the bush and helps them; and the Garza family who mistakes Manuel for its prodigal son, as well as many people with smaller parts. 

A number of scenes shot in black and white appear as though intended to be part of Diego’s documentary, though a lot of the color film also looks as though shot with handheld cameras. There is the chaos of hand-held alongside and linking shots so nicely framed and composed one almost does not notice them: someone here knows what he is doing.

Also of note is the original soundtrack of contemporary, hip Tex-Mex mariachi music composed, orchestrated and performed by Enrique ‘Hank’ Feldman.

In the end, the story is the process of Manuel’s journey to see his father. His response to the hardships he faces teach him who he is and what he is made of, in order to start to be the father he never had to his own new son.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0nVYQILu2M

A woman of vision

Vision—Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen (Vision—From the Life of Hildegard of Bingen) 2009 Germany (110 minutes) written and directed by Margarethe von Trotta, cinematography Axel Block.

Y1K: the full moon is on the horizon above a snowy plain in central Germany on the last night of the first millennium.

People gather in a small candlelit stone church crudely decorated with apocalyptic figures. Women are praying, several men are flagellating their naked backs; all await the end of time. Mankind would have to wait another thousand years for people to get this worked up over 999 turning to three zeroes, with the same result: a sunny January 1.

Near the end of the first century of that new millennium, the girl who would become Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was born in Bermersheim, not far from Mainz, to a family of the German middle nobility.

After the harrowing candlelit eve of the second millennium, the story opens with the eight-year-old Hildegard (Stella Holzapfel) brought to the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenburg by her parents to be assigned to the care of Jutta von Sponheim (Mareile Blendl), a beautiful, kindly and severely pious anchoress enclosed—committed for life—in the monastery.

Jutta is the 16-year-old daughter of a nobleman who granted land and money to the monastery. Besides Hildegard, Jutta has another eight-year-old charge who took her name, Jutta (Nina Littman). Over time, the girls’ pious practices would attract a following of other well-born girls and young women.

The key to what makes this movie work is its simplicity. The skill with which von Trotta introduces a modern viewer to the life Hildegard was getting to know in this remote time is achieved with what is surely a deceptively easy simplicity. The sets, design, and costumery are richly plain, the lighting appears to be entirely natural, and the actors’ faces are from medieval paintings. But the unusual atmospheric stillness of the frames and meditative calm that the clear eyed, pious characters emanate occasionally is jarred by the jerk or swing of a hand-held camera.

Once the mood and pace are set, the time shifts to her middle age, from when Hildegard (Barbara Sukowa) succeeded the senior Jutta as magistra of the nuns when Jutta died in 1136, to when Hildegard set forth on her first preaching tour in about 1158.

In this period, Hildegard had her first vision that she reported to the women’s priest, Volmar (Heino Ferch) in 1141. In this vision, she saw what she described as a ‘living light’ which ‘flowed through my brain and my breast and my heart… like a flame that didn’t burn but warmed like the sun,’ and that a voice instructed her ‘to reveal that which is hidden.’ She told Volmar that she had been directed to write down everything she had seen and heard.  

Modern medical science suggests that migraines could have caused the sensations Hildegard experienced as ‘living light’, but her work and achievements speak for themselves. She taught her nuns medicine and music; she won a battle with hostile churchmen over setting up an independent convent in Rupertsberg in 1150, oversaw its construction, guaranteed its economic viability, and ran it; and she did most of her writing and composing during this time.

She was a gifted, inspired and able woman as an artist and administrator at a time when women had low status, but circumstances conspired to help her. The Gothic Age was an age inspired by vision. A person with bona fide visions was an asset for a religious institution that relied on attracting pilgrims and receiving endowments and land grants from the powerful. Abbot Kuno of Disibodenburg (Alexander Held) and Volmar supported Hildegard’s visions before a synod ordered by Pope Eugenius III. The pope held that her visions were God-sent and instructed her through Archbishop Heinrich of Mainz (Wolfgang Pregler) to write everything down. (She also got help by a direct written appeal to her contemporary, the influential cleric Bernard of Clairvaux.)

Abbot Kuno later changed his tune when Hildegard announced that a vision instructed her to leave the monastery to found an independent convent for women in nearby Rupertsberg. She achieved this vision—or ambition—with the support of the archbishop and the wealthy mother (Sunnyi Melles) of her favorite protégée, the striking Richardis von Stade (Hannah Herzsprung).

Hildegard developed a bond with Richardis which the adult junior Jutta (Lena Stolze) envied and Richardis’ mother, and brother, Hartwig von Bremen (Christoph Luser), ended by appointing Richardis abbess of Bassum in Saxony in 1151.

The rub came where the divine nature of Hildegard’s visions conflicted with her human nature; where what she said God had ordered conveniently aligned with what the steel-willed Hildegard wanted. Sukowa colors her intensely devout—and subsequently beatified—Hildegard with the self-awareness to recognize her potential human frailty, but not to stand in the way of what she was driven to achieve in the face of daunting odds against her.

A notable feature of the movie is performances of Hildegard’s music, including parts of her musical play Ordo virtutum [Play of the Virtues] and liturgical music she wrote for the community’s masses. Sukowa, a performing soprano, sings her own parts with mezzo soprano Salome Kammer, who appears as a nun, and alto Judith Schmidt (presumably singing for Herzsprung and not listed in a dramatic role).

Sabina Flanagan, whose work was consulted in preparing this review, is the author of a life, Hildegard of Bingen; a Visionary Life (Routledge, 1989), and Secrets of God, Writings of Hildegard of Bingen (Shambhala, 1996).

Beginners

Mike Mills’s Beginners entertains viewers with two essential questions of classical philosophy: What is The Good Life, and how does one live it?

Oliver Fields (Ewan McGregor) is emotionally at sea. In his mid-thirties, he feels his life has yet to start and he has no idea where even to begin. He is a graphic designer who has had a series of girlfriends. He knows for sure only that he does not want a marriage like his parents Hal (Christopher Plummer) and Georgia (Mary Page Keller), which he witnessed as 44 years of passionless duty that ended when Georgia passed away quickly from cancer.

But his mother’s death brings an unexpected development: His father, a retired museum director aged 75, discloses to his only child that he is gay:

“I don’t want to be just theoretically gay,” Hal adds with fervor, “I want to do something about it.” And Hal sets about doing so. He finds a boyfriend, Andy (Goran Visnjic), becomes socially and politically active in the gay community, and radiantly happy.

Hal’s new life feels true to his nature—The Good Life. He lives this new life to the full in his remaining years, particularly in the genuine affection he shares with his younger partner that he never had with his former wife. In this time Hal gives Oliver his last and truest parental lesson: How to get on with his own life. (Plummer earned an Oscar for best supporting actor in this role.)

Scores of graphic images and references from popular culture fly by in Oliver’s narration throughout the film, both in the background and illustrating his thoughts; Arthur (Cosmo), the Jack Russell terrier he inherits from his father, gets subtitles. These devices speak for the “meta” state of mind which may be one source of Oliver’s confusion, in which things reference other things ad infinitum rather than existing each in and of itself and he projects his feelings on things outside himself.

Enter Oliver got up as Sigmund Freud at a Halloween costume party with friends from work. His Freudian beard and mustache extend the irony in that they enhance his similarity to his father. (McGregor and Plummer are a good father-son match.)

Oliver’s Freud sits at the head of a couch holding a pipe, engaged in a meta-ironic psychoanalytic interview with a man lying on the couch dressed as a witch. The “meta” gets a twist when a woman in a short wig and a man’s jacket, tie, and waistcoat—Anna—takes the witch’s place. Anna (Mélanie Laurent) tries to communicate with ‘The Doctor’ in short handwritten notes, claiming that she has laryngitis; Oliver surprises her when he seems disinclined to play along. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.

 

“Why are you at a party if you are so sad?” Anna writes Oliver. And when he asks her how she can tell he is sad, she draws two eyes. This is one of many short, lovely, understated and unspoken moments between pairs of this fine cast that make the film a gem, moving and effective moments which reveal things-in-themselves and people as individuals and not characters or demographic identities.

Looking to solve her own life problem, Anna, a French film actress free so long as there’s another hotel but afraid of ending up alone, finds common cause with Oliver, who learned from his mother how to take refuge drifting inside himself, keeping the world out while remaining a part of it. Oliver and Anna live in a present unsure as to what comes next as they work out what does.

The narrative, told from Oliver’s point of view from the present with flashbacks, opens with him clearing out his father’s house. It shifts smoothly between present and past as Oliver considers the puzzle of his life: as a child with his mother and watching his parents interactions; as an adult watching his widower father, his partner Andy, and their gay friends; alone after his father’s death; and his time with Anna.

Parfois ceci est vraiment une pipe.

The story has a clean, simple finish and shouldn’t be missed.

Beginners 2010 U.S. (105 minutes) Universal/Focus Features/Olympus Pictures/Parts and Labor. Written and directed by Mike Mills; cinematography by Kasper Tuxen; editing by Olivir Bugge Coutté; casting by Courtney Bright and Nicole Daniels; production design by Shane Valentino; costumes by Jennifer Johnson.

(4 Aug 2011 review revised with photos 16 Dec 2022)