Beggars' banquet

Viridiana 1961 Spain (91 minutes) directed by Luis Buñuel and written by Buñuel and Julio Alejandro.

This movie, perhaps one of Buñuel’s most accessible, tells a straight-laced story of the human condition, filled with sexual obsession and repression, religious ardor and its bawdy parody, and Buñuel’s wicked wit.

Viridiana (Silvia Pinal, a Mexican actress something of a composite Kim Novak and Catherine Deneuve) is a pious young woman preparing to take vows to enter a religious order. She is urged against her will by her convent’s Mother Superior to visit Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), a wealthy uncle she has met only once, but who has provided for her maintenance and education. 

 

Don Jaime is a lonely old man who lives with his housekeeper Ramona (Margarita Lozano), her daughter Rita (Teresita Rabal) and his small household staff on a large and long neglected rural estate. Don Jaime leads the life of a male Miss Havisham, haunted by the memory of his bride—Viridiana’s aunt—who died on their wedding night. He keeps her trousseau in a trunk at the foot of their bed, and obsessively tries to slip into articles of her white wedding attire, her veil, corset and silken shoes.

Viridiana’s strong resemblance to her aunt fires Don Jaime’s desire to keep her with him on his estate: if not as his wife, then as the focus of his obsessive veneration, a picture of purity framed between bare breasted caryatids supporting his fireplace mantle. In a sense, the manor house with its barred windows would be a ‘convent’ of his obsession.

It is not difficult to imagine how this intensely self-absorbed, bizarre prospect would horrify anyone. When Viridiana declines to stay, Don Jaime hangs himself with Rita’s jump rope, high from a tree outside the house. 

Guilty, confused and ‘changed’, Viridiana decides to stay at this ‘convent’ rather than return to the one she left, to try to find practical ways to lead a devout life. The household expands when Don Jaime’s bastard son Jorge (Francisco Rabal), who inherits the estate, turns up with a girlfriend Lucía (Victoria Zinny).

Jorge wants to improve the estate’s building and grounds; Viridiana wants to improve herself and others by her example. In trying to secularize her religious practice, Viridiana becomes a ‘limousine liberal’ when she invites a motley crew of beggars and homeless men and women to join her in a community at the estate. 

In the same spirit, Jorge notices a dog tied under a moving carriage and asks its owner why it does not ride in the carriage. ‘It’s a dog,’ the owner replies. Jorge buys the dog to rescue it from callous humanity, and as he walks away self-satisfied by his act, another carriage passes by behind him with a dog trotting tethered beneath it.

Like Viridiana’s notion of secularizing the ideal she envisions in her religious practice, her own project backfires when smudged with greasy human fingerprints.

One day when left at the estate to their own devices, the beggars decide to explore the life of the temporarily absent owners. A scene of beggar women admiring a fine linen tablecloth dissolves to a glass of wine knocked sideways, splashing across that same fine tablecloth spread on an aristocratic table groaning under a true beggars’ banquet.

In a sense, the tableau of this Bruegelian beanfeast mocks the pretention that fostered it when the diners pose to be ‘photographed’ aping Leonardo Da Vinci’s iconic painting The Last Supper. But rather than blaspheme, the scene offers a folk rendering of a well known religious image—as drunken Americans might recreate the iconic images of the Flag-Raising at Iwo Jima or Washington Crossing the Delaware.

This beggar’s banquet and the pose they strike is shockingly funny but, as in the rest of the film no less than its conclusion, Buñuel seems to be saying over and over that he is more interested in observing and celebrating human nature than in making fun of human institutions like the church or the Franco dictatorship, or of humans in themselves.

The film stands out most notably for its independence of thought and spirit.

Buñuel, who had been living in exile from the Franco dictatorship in Mexico and briefly in the United States since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, enraged other exiles and anti-fascists when he returned to Franco’s Spain to make this film in 1961.

The film passed Franco’s censors and won acclaim at Cannes. However, its allegedly blasphemous content outraged the Vatican, prompting the Franco government, with its close ties to the church, to withdraw its support and ban its screening in Spain.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMyyBVX6DAk

Win Win

Win Win 2011 U.S. (106 minutes) written and directed by Tom McCarthy.

For anyone who hopes there is a special corner in hell for those who use the expression ‘win win’, this well-made family drama may be for you.

Though no one in the film actually uses that Dilbertism, Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), an attorney with a solo elder care practice in New Providence, New Jersey, comes across as a harried family man surrounded by ‘win win’: he has heard it and seen it work so often for others that he decides to give it a whirl.

The story’s central dramatic problem grazes in the hypothetical shady ethical area of ‘whatever the fuck it takes,’ which comes down to taking a flyer on a thing that seems like a great idea at the time and then dealing with the unseen consequences.

Life gets sticky. Director and writer Tom McCarthy thrives in its stickiness in his work here, as he did writing and directing The Visitor (2007) with Richard Jenkins and The Station Agent (2003) with Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, and Bobby Cannavale. Cannavale plays Mike’s best friend Terry Delfino in Win Win. McCarthy, an 'actors’ director' who can write and act, may be best known to viewers for his own acting work, memorably as Scott Templeton, an unethical newspaper reporter in the fifth and last season of the HBO series The Wire (2008)—a very sticky business.

Win Win begins with Giamatti's Mike jogging on a frosty morning—jogging at a doctor’s suggestion to reduce stress. His daughter Abby (Clare Foley) climbs into bed with her mother Jackie (Amy Ryan) and asks Jackie where daddy is.

‘He’s running,’ Jackie says.

‘From what?’ Abby asks.

Sharp kid: Abby watches her parents as a mirror, listening as though an electronic bug fine-tuned for tone. And she has a knack for finding exactly the right moment to play back the most telling—and least flattering—parts.

Abby plays a small but integral part among a convincing ensemble of actors that also includes Nina Arianda in a small role as Mike’s secretary Shelly. In a recent profile in The New Yorker (Backstage Chronicles: The Natural, Nov. 7, 2011), drama critic John Lahr compared Arianda’s stage presence to that of Meryl Streep. Here, she is more like Streep and Marisa Tomei tossed in a blender—not a bad blend.   

Mike is not a bad guy. He has his law practice and he coaches high school wrestling with his officemate Stephen ‘Vig’ Vigman (Jeffrey Tambor). His problem is that business has been slow and he is strapped for cash.

One of Mike’s clients, Leo Poplar (Burt Young), is a comfortably-retired blue collar white ethnic with dementia and no family besides a daughter from whom he is estranged and has not seen for twenty years. Where’s the downside in taking a $1500-a-month maintenance fee as Leo’s guardian? Win-win, right?

There is a niggling detail in Mike telling the court that he will see to his client’s care in Leo’s own home, when actually he plans to put Leo in a nearby assisted living facility at Leo’s expense. But Oak Lawn is a nice place that will give Leo the round-the-clock care he needs, Leo easily can afford it, and he does not seem much to notice the difference.

Then it turns out that Leo has a grandson. Mike discovers Kyle Timmons (Alex Shaffer) waiting outside Leo’s empty house one morning. Kyle is no more a space alien than most teenage boys, he just grew up with a lot less earthly supervision. He has come from Ohio by himself by bus to visit his grandfather (and to get away from his mother). Mike and Jackie decide he can stay with them until he goes back home.

There’s a deft shot of Mike depositing his first guardianship check at a bank ATM, standing behind glass on which an image of Benjamin Franklin’s portrait on the $100 bill is reflected and superimposed on Mike’s smiling face. Mike calls Jackie to tell her to mail their health insurance premium, presumably held awaiting funds.

Mike’s and Ben’s smiles are win-win writ large.

And it turns out that Kyle can wrestle (Shaffer evidently is a wrestler). He is so good a wrestler, and so content to stay with Mike and Jackie near his grandfather, that Mike and Jackie let him stay and Mike enrolls him in school so he can wrestle on the team. That mantra again…

After wowing his coaches in his first match, Mike asks Kyle in practice to share what he did with his teammates. There’s no specific knowledge it turns out; there’s a philosophy: one must do ‘whatever the fuck it takes’ to stay in control and win.

The table is laid for Kyle’s hypothetical mother, Cindy (Melanie Lynskey), to materialize at Mike’s office in the flesh and represented by counsel (Margo Martindale), scenting her estranged father Leo’s money.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci_I6n2j5Uw

Hit and run

Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) 1955 Suevia, Spain (88 minutes) directed by Juan Antonio Bardem.

This is beautifully shot classic Spanish melodrama satirizes the ruling class under Franco in the 1950s, filmed in the black and white of Italian neorealism.

The basis of the story is a love triangle among Spanish society people. Juan Fernandez Soler (Alberto Closas) left Maria José (Lucia Bosé), his first love, to fight in the Spanish Civil War. While Juan was at war, Maria José, a woman of a distinguished family but limited means—and expensive tastes—married the wealthy businessman Miguel Castro (Otello Toso). In the decade after the war, Juan and Maria José de Castro have an affair.

One of the key themes is the ‘egoismo’ of the ruling class—an I’ve-got-mine self-absorption, contrasted with people who work together to serve a common good for the benefit of all.

The story opens when, driving together from an assignation at an inn on a plain outside Madrid, Maria José behind the wheel, the car hits the title cyclist in a desolate stretch of road. Fearing exposure of their affair and looking out for their own interests, the couple leaves the cyclist to die on the shoulder of the highway.

Juan is a geometry professor who owes his academic position to Jorge, his powerful but also rather pompous and ridiculous brother-in-law (Emilio Alonso)—‘un gran muchacho!’ as someone chimes in jovially—a Francoesque ‘good old boy.’ Miguel seems willfully ignorant of his wife’s affair. Curiously, Bardem’s camerawork shows Juan and Miguel gradually appear to lose distinction from Maria José’s perspective.

There also is Rafael “Rafa” Sandoval (Carlos Casaravilla), a social climber with a chip on his shoulder who has insinuated himself into this circle of society people. Rafa cynically games with people’s bad consciences to tease out their peccadilloes, trying to make them think he knows more about them than he actually does.

This tactic works with nearly devastating effect on Juan and Maria José, whose self-absorption leads them to imagine he knows about their affair and the hit-and-run.

Their apprehensions get wing when Rafa makes sure to display himself speaking intimately with Miguel out of their earshot. Later, at an overheated, foot-stomping, hand-clapping, smoke-filled, all-night flamenco session for clueless, rich, visiting Americans, we see Hitchcockian close-up shots of Rafa’s lips moving first near the wife’s, then near the husband’s ear.

The story circles karmically back to where it started, with Juan following his conscience to serve the greater good, inspired by Matilde Luque Carvajal (Bruna Corrà), a geometry student he has wronged, and Maria José in mad pursuit of her self-interest—‘egoismo’.

Director Juan Antonio Bardem is the uncle of actor Javier Bardem.

The Red Balloon

Le ballon rouge (The Red Balloon) 1956 France (34 minutes) written and directed by Albert Lamorisse; cinematography by Edmond Séchan; music by Maurice Le Roux.

This short film for children is a masterpiece of form that can be as light or as deep as a viewer wants to make it—a little boy’s adventure story or an allegory of the soul.

Pascal (Pascal Lamorisse) a small, lonely boy in 1950s Paris, finds and befriends a large bright red helium balloon and has adventures with it in the streets and narrow passages of Ménilmontant, an old Paris neighborhood in the east of the city, northwest of Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Pascal claims the balloon that he finds moored to the top of a light post; but the balloon also claims Pascal, playfully but faithfully following the boy and keeping him company. 

The opening shot sets the mood: Pascal, heading to school slapping his small satchel against his side, pauses at an impasse in Ménilmontant which overlooks the city to pet a cat at the head of a flight of steps leading to a passage below.

The dominant colors are shades of slate grey and burnt umber. The streets of this now long-ago postwar Paris will seem remarkably free of motor vehicles by today’s congested standard. Also, the only residents one sees are white and French.

As the story unfolds, the boy and balloon navigate the wonderland that the urban adult world can be to a child, its familiar and also its threatening aspects. Adult strangers tend to be friendly to Pascal, or easy to get around if not; a loose pack of slightly older and bigger street kids who would take Pascal’s balloon pose a bigger problem.

Director Albert Lamorisse won the 1956 Oscar for best original screenplay, but there is a minimum of dialog. Lamorisse, a documentary filmmaker, tells a satisfying story in pictures; he lets Maurice Le Roux’s score, which has the light, sure touch of a classical pop concert for children, provide a commentary.

Attractive jiggle

Anatomy of a Murder 1959 Columbia (160 minutes) directed and produced by Otto Preminger, written by Wendell Mayes, original soundtrack by Duke Ellington.

‘Attractive jiggle’ is at the center of this authentic mid-century courtroom drama.

Laura Manion (Lee Remick), a provocatively attractive young Army officer’s wife, contacts Paul Biegler (James Stewart), a small town bachelor lawyer, to defend her husband, charged with shooting to death a civilian bar owner whom she claims raped her.

It’s a tough case: there is no question that Lt. Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara) came into the cocktail lounge and shot Barney Quill five times with a ‘war souvenir’ German Luger pistol in front of witnesses.

It’s also a tough case for the lawyer Biegler to resist: it is a heady professional and intellectual challenge, and it pits Biegler against District Attorney Mitch Lodwick (Brooks West), to whom Biegler lost the county prosecutor’s job in a recent election. His practice could use the potential fee it would bring.

The facts and the law are the easy part. The mystery, and what makes this two-and-a-half hour movie fun to watch, is the people at the center of the case. Lt. Manion comes across at first as arrogant and contemptuous. Biegler senses Manion’s intelligence, but is the lieutenant intensely jealous? Does he have problems controlling his anger? Is he a wife beater? Or is he a calculating killer?

Laura repeatedly is on display from the moment we see her meet Biegler—with a lovely high riff from Johnny Hodges’ trumpet. When Biegler asks her if she is afraid of her husband, she tells him that Manion ‘likes to show me off. He likes me to dress the way I do. But then he gets furious when a man pays attention to me. I tried to leave him but I can’t. He begs and I give in.’

Is Laura’s flirtatiousness quirky, fun and unselfconscious, or is she manipulative? Was the alleged sex a rape or consensual? Was there any sex at all? Is Laura trying to help Biegler get her husband off the hook, or did she set the lieutenant up to get rid of him?

Biegler sums up his problem when trying later to persuade a reluctant witness to testify: ‘As a lawyer, I’ve had to learn that people aren’t just good or bad; but people are many things. And I kind of had a feeling that Barney Quill was many things,’ he said—and not only the victim Barney Quill.

The story comes from a best-selling novel of the same title, written by an upstate Michigan retired judge named John Voelker writing under the name Robert Traver. The trial preparation and legal proceedings, tailored to the drama, move a lot more quickly than in real life.

One of the things that make the movie courtroom work so well is that a real trial lawyer plays presiding Judge Weaver. Joseph N. Welch was a senior Boston lawyer and became a household name as lead counsel for the Army in the nationally televised Army-McCarthy Senate hearings earlier in the decade. (His wife is one of the jurors). Welch’s role undoubtedly is informed from practicing in front of many variations of the figure that find its way into Judge Weaver’s black robe. Welch brings gravitas, a sharp mind and a fine sense of humor to the role.

Joseph N. Welch, James Stewart, Brooks West and George C. Scott in Anatomy of a Murder.

Another interesting detail is that Preminger skips the closing arguments, the summation each side gives at the end of the case, which often provides high dramatic moments both in court and in movies. Trained as a lawyer, perhaps Preminger found the facts more compelling.

There also are strong supporting performances. Arthur O’Connell plays Parnell Emmett McCarthy, Biegler’s senior associate and alcoholic mentor, who talks Biegler into taking the case, then whom Biegler makes swear to lay off alcohol. Comedienne Eve Arden is Maida Rutledge, Biegler’s arch secretary, and George C. Scott is Claude Dancer, a hard-driving assistant Michigan state’s attorney ‘sent up from Lansing’ to help prosecute the case.

Duke Ellington’s score comments on the action like a hip Greek chorus and it has seasoned well with age. Ellington, as pianist-bandleader Pie Eye, and four of his band appear in one scene as the Pie Eye Five in a roadside tourist joint.

The music in the place swings way too well to be just background. The camera finds two pairs of hands at the piano: one pair from ornate sleeves belongs to Pie Eye; the other hands are Biegler’s, sitting in as a jazz fan and musician. But Biegler has to get up when he sees his client’s wife dancing drunkenly with other military officers. 

‘Thanks for letting me sit in, Pie Eye.’

‘You’re not splittin’ the scene, man?’

‘Huh?’

‘You’re not cuttin’ out?’

‘No, I’ll be back.’

But Biegler doesn’t come back. He knows that his job is to keep his—and especially, a jury’s—focus on the case he is trying to win. When he gets Laura outside, he tells her:

‘Look Laura, believe me: I don’t usually complain about attractive jiggle, but… just… you save that jiggle for your husband to look at, if and when I get him out of jail.’

Zaftig bombshell

Quai des Orfèvres 1947 Majestic, France (91 minutes) directed and cowritten by Henri-Georges Clouzot; the DVD set includes a 1971 interview for French television with Clouzot and three of the stars.

The French classic Quai des Orfèvres combines a plain man’s violently obsessive jealousy over his voluptuous music hall singer/actress wife with the murder of a powerful but nasty old hunchback.

Quai des Orfèvres is the location of police headquarters in central Paris. The murder investigation actually functions more as a vehicle for the chief inspector and his associates to crack wise about the victim, suspects and human nature in general, with each other, the suspects and a troupe of minor characters.

A large and lively cast of music hall performers, crew and management, cops, criminal detainees, reporters, performing dogs and a variety of men- and women-in-the-street all get to toss in their sou’s worth of snappy comments and eye rolls as the story develops.

As in Hollywood pictures of the same era, dramatic studio lighting heightens the mystique of this long-ago time and place; the milk bath of light gives the actors’ skin a warm, rosy glow.

The story takes place in December 1946: the coats, scarves and hats worn inside and an unconscionable lack of cars on the streets all speak to the fact that this is Paris in the first year after the war.

The film opens with the zaftig bombshell Jenny Martineau/Lamour (Suzy Delair), a kind of French Mae West, listening to a middle-aged musical talent agent singing a song for her. Her pianist husband, Maurice Martineau (Bernard Blier) seen through a glass door, is playing the piano in the next room. The agent keeps time by patting Jenny jovially on her fluffy fox-furred knee, a liberty which enrages Maurice. Jenny and the agent dismiss his jealous outburst—the silly boy knows she flirts with middle-aged sugar daddies who she thinks can help her career—and she sings what turns out to be her hit song, ‘Avec son tra-la-la,’ pushing the story along from the agency to the Paris music hall where she and her husband perform.

Enter Dora Monnier (Simone Renant), a photographer with a studio and apartment near the Martineaus’ apartment, who is the couple’s best friend. We see Dora taking publicity photos of Jenny in a frilly black bustier and an oversized hat with a large white plume, her shapely legs in black nylons.

Jenny rebuffs Dora’s physical interest in her, and the session is cut short when another client, Georges Brignon (Charles Dullin), the rich hunchback, arrives with a lovely young ‘starlet’ he wants photographed in nothing but her shoes for his ‘personal collection’. As Jenny leaves, the grotesque Brignon proposes meeting her for lunch ‘with his director’ to discuss a film role for her.

Maurice disrupts the subsequent lunch meeting in jealous rage, with a passionate death threat heard by all the restaurant staff; Jenny later manages secretly to meet Brignon in the evening; the housekeeper discovers him dead on his hearth the next morning. Now it is the job of Detective Lieutenant Antoine (Louis Jouvet) to work out whodunit.

Very little surprises the droll Antoine, a gravelly voiced ex-legionnaire who served in the colonies and is raising a mixed race adolescent as a single parent. The pipe-smoking Jouvet, a fixture in French detective movies along the lines of Humphrey Bogart, has a manner that is appealingly direct and I’ll-be-damned! that makes him and his interactions with the other actors fun to watch.

The result is a classic: a sexy and entertaining French detective movie deftly narrated in pictures with an appreciation of human frailty and a wry sense of humor.

This was the first film Clouzot made after serving a two-year professional ban for purportedly having collaborated with the Nazi occupiers during the war. Clouzot made Le Corbeau (The Raven) in 1943 in occupied France for a German production company set up in France under the auspices of Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

This wartime film examined human nature by showing the residents of a small town reacting to the scurrilous accusations of an anonymous poison pen writer.

The work was taken to have cast the French people in a negative light, in line with the Third Reich’s characterization of the subjected French as a craven and emotional people. It angered the French Left and Right, the Catholic Church—and the Nazis themselves evidently were not all that happy with it either.