Strange mob, you whites

The Proposition 2005 Australia/U.K. (101 minutes) directed by John Hillcoat, screenplay by Nick Cave.

Erin’s larrikins scaring settler and native alike, leading Anglo lawmen in a merry dance through vast uninhabited rocky dryscapes on horseback: 1880s Australia sounds something like the late-19th century American West.

The 19th century legends made colorful latter-day Robin Hoods of men who probably did not much differ from the hard-living outlaw motorcycle gangsters of our time or Australia’s futuristic movie ‘road warriors’.

This stylish, watchable Australian Western (it actually takes place in the Outback of Queensland, then a territory, now a state in eastern Australia) nods Eastwoodward. A hard man with a conscience is called on to do a tough job that softer moralists are unable to do, though seldom are they without strong opinions and directions as to how he should proceed.

Captain Morris Stanley (Ray Winstone), a former British imperial soldier serving as a territorial law officer, must bring in the rogue Burns brothers. The Burnses allegedly raped and massacred three settlers, including a pregnant woman, and burnt their homestead.

Captain Stanley surrounds and wipes out part of the gang, capturing two of the brothers, Charlie—Guy Pearce, nearly unrecognizable as an Australian incarnation of Clint Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’—and teenager Mikey (Richard Wilson) Burns.

But these are not the brothers that Captain Stanley and Crown legal authorities really want. Charlie left the gang to keep his kid brother away from the outlaw life. Arthur (Danny Huston), the eldest brother, a highly literate psychopath, is holed up with his remaining henchmen in caves in a mesa deep in the Outback, ‘a God-forsaken place’ where ‘the [natives] won’t go, nor the trackers’.

 
Becoming more inventive in his methods, Captain Stanley offers Charlie the ‘Proposition’ of the title. Charlie can go free; but Mikey will remain as a hostage and hang on Christmas Day, nine days away, if Charlie does not find and kill Arthur by that time.

Captain Stanley believes this private, extrajudicial arrangement to be the most effective way of getting Arthur out of the picture. He appears to be willing to keep his word if Charlie comes through.

Thus, the Australian ‘Man with No Name’ lights out across the flats after Arthur and his gang, crossing increasingly desperate terrain that includes hostile natives and bounty hunter Jellon Lamb (John Hurt), a free-versifying Shakespearean clown handy with a knife and ‘ligatures’. For Lamb also is on the hunt for Arthur.

Captain Stanley has his own fish to fry after his ‘proposition’ becomes public knowledge. Restive townspeople, angered that he let Charlie Burns go, want to lynch Mikey outright; his officers question his authority. Eden Fletcher (David Wenham), a Crown representative and epicene Victorian hypocrite, disdains the lowly soldier. The captain’s dear wife Martha (Emily Watson), a porcelain Victorian dam whom he tries to shelter from ‘police business’, expects retribution to be exacted for the deaths of the Burnses’ female victims. 

The outcome is not a surprise. Most of the characters get what they asked for which, true to the genre, turns out to be another thing apart from what they would have wanted.

The landscapes are splendid: the flats of the great Australian Outback in their vast, sun-bleached rawness, seen with an eye informed by the cinematography of the American West. But this new terrain would require a different eye.

In pursuit of a band of renegade Aborigines, Jacko (David Gulpilil), a Maori police tracker, reports to Sergeant Lawrence (Robert Morgan) that he sees smoke as casually one might note a passing detail, though the smoke he sees is literally as far as his native eye can see. An Australian Eastwood or John Ford surely would find a way to show this difference, rather than simply point out the White Man’s grunted inadequacy.

Eastwood’s narrative style also would have given an audience more insight into what put these characters in this story. The strong cast draws one in; but, despite tantalizing snippets here and there, the characters raise more questions than they resolve. Who are these Irish brothers? Where did they come from? Why did they kill the settlers in the first place? What are the Captain and Mrs. Stanley doing here? Who exactly is Fletcher?

The stirring music may make for an overabundance of riches. The film opens with the traditional There is a Happy Land sung over photos of nineteenth century frontier Australia interspersed with photos in a similar style of the film’s cast on set in costume. This plaintive hymn knocks on to screenwriter Nick Cave’s haunting, contemporary The Rider. One of the gang croons Peggy Gordon; Jellon Lamb warbles a rude version of Danny Boy to taunt the Irish Charlie Burns, though several decades before the actual song was penned.

Literati might chafe at a better-known anachronism. Looking into the unrelenting landscape, Captain Stanley remarks: ‘What fresh hell is this!’ It is indeed ‘fresh’ and ‘hell’ and it sounds right at first, but it is Dorothy Parker who is best remembered for this line a good fifty years later.

Yet despite these shortcomings, the movie holds a viewer’s interest because it puts a good story in the hands of an able cast in an incredible landscape.

 

 

Pigskin Pygmalion

La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In) 2011 Spain (120 minutes) adapted for the screen and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, from the 1995 novel Mygale by Thierry Jonquet.

The ancient Greeks would have loved this story.

A man highly skilled in the arts and sciences of his day uses his expertise to try to save his wife’s life and restore her beauty, horribly disfigured by an automobile accident fire, and then to try again when fate gives him a chance to right another wrong.

After saving his wife Gal’s life, Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), a world-renowned plastic surgeon, devoted his expertise to fully restoring her disfigured body to her pre-crash condition in a state-of-the-art surgical theater and medical research laboratory in his home.

Ledgard keeps Gal literally in the dark for months while his treatments almost miraculously restore her to human form, though not yet to her original beauty. At last able to stand, one afternoon Gal goes to a window and draws aside heavy curtains when she hears her daughter Norma (Ana Mena) outside singing a song that she taught her. But Gal is horrified when she sees her ravaged image for the first time, reflected in the window glass; she throws herself from the window into the courtyard below.

Norma becomes psychologically deranged when her disfigured mother suddenly falls to her death next to where she is playing outside. She requires years of psychiatric care.

Ledgard subsequently takes the unstable and heavily medicated teenage Norma (Blanca Suárez) to a wedding reception where she is raped, and thus further psychologically damaged.

The doctor identifies the rapist, Vicente Guillén Piñeiro (Jan Cornet); he makes him disappear and keeps him as a prisoner.

Because her father found her unconscious on the ground where she was raped, the awakening Norma evidently confuses Ledgard with the rapist. Mentally unhinged, she later takes her own life by throwing herself from a window, like her mother.

Ledgard exacts his revenge by using his art to perform a sex change operation (vaginoplasty) on Vicente. The predator becomes the prey.

But he does not stop there. Ledgard continues to experiment to give his creation, with whom he has fallen in love and given the name Vera (Elena Anaya), a perfect body and ‘the best skin in the world’—actually a transgenetic pig-human hybrid much stronger and more beautiful than human skin, which he calls ‘Gal’ after his former wife (and likely an allusion to Pygmalion’s Galatea, his ivory carving given life by Aphrodite).

An existential Pygmalion, Ledgard uses his skill to fashion a dream from his worst nightmare. His craftsmanship exceeds the material, but this does not make the dream any more real, nor diminish the nightmare. 

Curiously enough, Gal’s accident and the story’s resolution both are triggered by Ledgard’s half-brother, Zeca (Roberto Álamo), a base id-man whom we see dressed as a tiger.

Despite the judgments of our courts of law, social mores and modern psychiatry, one of the things that make this story interesting is that Ledgard is not ‘obsessional’ or ‘perverse’, rather preconscious like a figure in classical myth.

This is a fact: not a legal defense, sociological excuse or psychological rationale. As a figure in myth or a dream, Ledgard methodically follows a rational process, albeit to what society, any medical board or court of law should deem a criminally insane end.

But Ledgard is not a god. His hubris lies in what moderns would call his ‘delusion’ of imagining that Vera, the beautiful thing of his creation, is equally beautiful in mind to Vicente, the ‘material’ from which he rendered her. As in Greek myth, the gods restore the mean.

This synopsis takes several kinks out of the main plot twists, but there is plenty more to see and look for in this rich and involved family tale which has all the verve, color and drama of Greek tragedy.

The story, which Almodóvar adapted from Thierry Jonquet’s 1995 novel Mygale (2003 English translation Tarantula), fits the stuff of myth neatly into contemporary tailoring. José Luis Alcaine’s cinematography of the actors, especially the women, is exquisite, as are Antxon Gómez’s sets.

Almodóvar’s signature lollipop colors glisten in the sets like spring flowers in the rain—or Toledo artist Jorge Galindo’s flower paintings. A full sized pair of Titians—the Venus of Urbino and Venus with and Organist and Cupid on the landing outside Vera’s door contrast with her live image in a flesh colored body suit on a rich red duvet via closed circuit camera on a huge plasma screen television in Ledgard’s room.  

Almodóvar also uses images and alludes to the work of American sculptress Louise Bourgeois. He thanks her in his credits as someone ‘whose work not only moves me, but was the salvation of the character Vera.’

The original music, composed and conducted by Alberto Iglesias in an elegiac romantic style for a six-piece chamber ensemble, intimates a haunting fusion of Bernard Herrmann and Johannes Brahms.

The two versions of the wedding party scene are introduced by Inoidel on tenor saxophone deeply purring Sidney Bechet’s Petite Fleur like Lester Young; the Afro-Spanish singer Concha Buika fronts the jazz band at the wedding party.

Altogether, this film is the work of an accomplished master, a gripping story beautifully refined in every detail.

Footnote

 הערת שוליים‎ He'arat Shulayim (Footnote) 2011 Israel (103 minutes) written and directed by Joseph Cedar.

This movie is a family affair that feels as though it is about a lot of things besides a successful academic’s difficult relations with his unsuccessful academic father and his non-academic son.

The story is set in contemporary Jerusalem. Professor Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba), the father, and Professor Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), the son, are secular professors of Talmud studies. The Talmud is the classic body of Jewish civil law and ceremonial tradition derived from the first five books of the Old Testament.

The narrative works something like a scholar parsing variant readings and sources to establish a definitive recension, in this instance limning the characters and history of this father and son.

The movie opens with a camera close-up on the impassive face of Eliezer Shkolnik as his son gives a speech at his induction into the Israel Academy of the Sciences.

Uriel Shkolnik is in his prime. He is a successful, much published and popular professor, respected by his senior colleagues as ‘one of them,’ attractive to women and thus on all counts envied and resented by his academic contemporaries. Eliezer takes pride in the abstract concept of his son’s ‘success’, though he disparages the things on which this success is based.

In his acceptance speech, Uriel gives credit to his teachers and mentors, chief among which his father. He tells the audience that as a small boy he had had to enter his father’s profession on a school form, and that Eliezer, then a university professor, insisted that he put down simply that he was a ‘teacher,’ and that Uriel had been proud to do so.

But this story turns out to have been a sentimental speaker’s anecdote. We hear Uriel later tell his wife Dikla (Alma Zack) that Eliezer insisted all along that he was a philologist, and that he did not see what business the school had asking about his profession in the first place. In the end, Uriel never turned in the form.

Eliezer and Uriel don’t speak as adults. It seems even less likely that Eliezer, who appears to communicate only with sympathetic colleagues and his few students, ever had much to say to his son—or his wife Yehudit (Aliza Rosen). Rosen and Zack play nicely understated and nuanced supporting roles as the wives.

The received version goes that Eliezer is a ‘brave scholar’ who refused to bend to the prevailing winds. In contrast, Uriel is a ‘coward’ who played the game and succeeded thereby—albeit guiltily in the long wake of his father’s lack of success.

According to the recital, the young scholar and researcher Eliezer believed that by closely analyzing thousands of texts of the Talmud for homeoteleutons, or scribal errors and omissions—a process akin to carding fiber to remove impurities prior to spinning into thread—it would be possible to establish a definitive text of the Jerusalem Talmud closest to the ancient original. This obsession occupied thirty years of his life.

But just as he was preparing his magnum opus for publication, Professor Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewensohn), his lifelong rival, discovered an entire early Jerusalem Talmud text in the binding of a medieval book in a European monastery library and rushed it into publication ahead of Eliezer.

This academic coup de théâtre purportedly made Grossman’s career and ruined Eliezer’s, whose only claim to fame is his mention in the footnote of a scholarly book by Eliezer’s and Grossman’s teacher and mentor, Professor Yonah Naftali Feinstein—the ‘footnote’ of the film’s title.

Thereafter, the proud and disdainful, insulted and injured Eliezer apparently literally scattered his work to the wind. He continued private research and taught the handful of students interested in what he calls ‘mapping the branches of text versions of the Talmud,’ while Grossman accumulated academic gravitas and authority, and later Uriel enjoyed his own [guilty] academic success.

There is a big hole in this story, though. Eliezer gets far too much mileage out of his pose of ineffably noble scholarship unjustly wronged. One would think that a work of the scope, depth and uniqueness that Eliezer’s purportedly was should stand on its own as a valuable contribution to scholarship, regardless of Grossman or anyone else’s showmanship.

The rub comes when a bureaucratic screw-up prompts the Minister of Education to call Eliezer to congratulate him for winning the prestigious Israel Prize—and a newspaper publishes the leaked news—when the award actually went to Uriel.

Eliezer had been passed over for the prize in each of the past nearly twenty years that Uriel, true to the family narrative, dutifully had recommended him for it. Uriel also had asked his colleagues not to nominate him for the prize while Eliezer was a candidate. Someone on the committee selected Uriel anyway.

Grossman and the Pharisees summons Uriel to a secret meeting round a table in a supply closet in the expansive Ministry of Education to work out how to resolve this dilemma in the film’s pivotal and most remarkable scene: seven heavy hitters whose very ‘heaviness’ is belied by this ridiculously small space.

Their decision sets up the film’s dénouement.

Father and son employ their formidable skills, working simultaneously without the other’s knowledge, each in his own way, to sift the personal facts from the variant readings and sources. In a sense, Uriel’s ‘guilt’ is his saving grace: it shows him his own pose for what it is and spares him from taking himself too seriously. And Eliezer? What they find—and their true characters—will determine how they respond.

The film ends as it begins, at an award ceremony: the moment is just before the ‘moment of truth,’ but the whole story is told. 

Boy leaves girl

Летят журавли (Letyát zhurávli—The Cranes Are Flying) 1957 U.S.S.R. Mosfil'm

(95 minutes) directed by Mikhail Kalatozov; cinematography by Sergei Urusevsky; edited by Mariya Timofeyeva.

A young couple in love dance along a Moscow river embankment early one summer morning as they return to their parents’ apartments after spending the night out walking city streets.

The opening shot would make for a classic start to any Hollywood love story.

It is a lovely long take: the embankment barrier bisects the frame diagonally, rising from the lower right corner and following the river’s bend in a long lazy curve from left back to right, through a distant bridge centered near the top of the frame. A young woman runs into the lower frame, leans over the barrier and scissor kicks her legs in the air, centered in the frame. A young man follows and takes her hand; they skip away from the camera, along the embankment up the left side of the frame.

This must have surprised and delighted Soviet audiences seeing this movie for the first time: a ‘boy and girl’ alone in the heart of the capital, light and happy, officially sanctioned and free of political content or reference, after two decades of the leaden fog of Stalinism.

Then the camera picks up the couple from a reverse angle, entering the frame as they near the bridge. When they stop to catch a breath, the girl—Veronika ‘Belka’ [Squirrel] (Tatiana Samoilova)—sees a ‘V’ of cranes overhead and recites a ‘chastushka,’ a couplet that conveys more in sound than in sense, and might sound to English speakers like a nursery rhyme:

‘Zhurávliki-korábliki letyát pod nebesámi, i byéli-ye, i syéri-ye, i s’dlínnymi nosámi,’ or ‘Cranes like little ships/Sailing through the skies/Some white, some grey/And some with long beaks fly!’*

A passing truck watering the street sprays the couple. They continue their romp, in part through a park on the grounds of the Kremlin.

Later that day, public loudspeakers broadcast that Nazi Germany has invaded the U.S.S.R. It is June 22, 1941. The Second World War has just begun in Russia.

The story is simple. The ‘boy’—Boris Borozdin (Alexei Balatov)—and his factory coworkers immediately volunteer in the Red Army to turn back the Nazi menace. Boy leaves girl.

Before long, Borozdin is missing in action. The audience would have known all too well that few of the pitiably ill-trained, ill-equipped hundreds of thousands of eager young patriots whom Soviet dictator Josef Stalin threw at the rapidly advancing Wehrmacht in the opening months of the war made it back to their loved ones.

When Veronika’s parents are killed in an air raid on Moscow, Borozdin’s father, Fedor Ivanovich (Vasily Merkuriev), a physician, invites her to live with his family. Veronika ends up giving in to the importunities of Boris’ cousin Mark (Alexander Shvorin), a classical pianist curiously exempted from military service, also living in the family apartment. Veronika marries Mark.

The family is evacuated to Siberia for the duration of the war, where Fedor Ivanovich heads a hospital. His daughter Irina (Svetlana Kharitonova) is a doctor and Veronika works as a nurse. The war ends. Boris never comes home.

Again, it is hard to imagine what Soviet audiences thought when this film, a powerful and beautifully made work of art in its own right, first ran in theatres in the fall of 1957.

It was the first time people in a country which sacrificed so much in that war had seen naturalistic stories of real people who took part in it, similar to what American audiences saw in films such as William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Prior to this had been only bombastic ideological cheerleading for the Motherland and its Great Leader to which Soviet citizens had become inured.

The history aside, what makes this the first great Soviet classic set during the country’s ‘Great Fatherland War’ is a terrific cast in a great story set in momentous events that many people had experienced—not to mention exciting and imaginative camera work and editing that makes the movie fun to watch.

After the opening scene along the Moskva River, there is an energetic tracking shot of Boris bounding up the broad five-story flight of stairs to Veronika’s parents’ apartment—a scene that recurs in a fantasy sequence at a poignant moment later in the film.

In several instances, the director and cinematographer get a lovely effect shooting their subjects from a dolly on overcast days against broad wet Moscow pavement,which gives them animated liquid shadows.

There are also two remarkable scenes in which a well edited combination of hand-held shots amid the crowd and crane shots right above it follow Veronika through crowded streets. The first is when she races to try to catch up with Boris at the collection point before he leaves the city. The second is when she hurries to meet a train of soldiers returning to Moscow after the end of the war, hoping against hope that Boris will return to her.  

The scene in which Mark overcomes Veronika’s resistance is passionately gothic: Mark pounds out a romantic piece dedicated to Veronika on a grand piano high in a city building, recklessly exposed to the perils of a night air raid after Veronika refuses to shy from her parents’ fate. 

Later, in Siberia, an imaginative sequence of combined tracking shots shows Veronika running through snow after a train, possibly to throw herself under it like Anna Karenina. One camera tracks her through a storm fence and another up-from-under just in front of her; then she clatters up steps to a bridge crossing the railroad tracks, leaning over the railing into the passing engine’s belching black smoke.

Veronika’s ‘chastushka’ gives her solace during the war; at the end of her run through crowd in the final scene, a bystander points to a flight of cranes overhead in skies to which peace has returned.

*Журавлики-кораблики летят под небесами,

И белые, и серые, и с длинными носами!

A Little Girl Lost

Martha Marcy May Marlene 2011 U.S. (101 minutes) written and directed by Sean Durkin.

Subtly acted, beautifully shot, crisply paced, cleanly edited, deeply disturbing: this quiet, tense thriller is a remarkable sketch of a communal cult and its leader, and the traumatic effect these have on an impressionable young woman.

The four female names are actually three names given to the same woman (Elizabeth Olsen). Martha, Marcy May and Marlene (M3) signify distinct identities as well as stages of initiation. Martha is the given name of the seeker, a woman who becomes Marcy May as an initiate into the cult, and then a generic Marlene Lewis as a member answering the commune’s land line.

Calm naturalness makes this movie affecting and scary. With the exception of the closing credits, there is no theme music. There is folksy ambient acoustic guitar music on the commune, Sarah Vaughn at a party, and Kabuki-like electronic sounds that stand for passions of the mind. Otherwise, the action is steeped in the rural sounds of nature, a kind of silence that can be indifferent to the point of threatening.

Early one summer morning we see a young woman—M3—quickly leave a New England farmhouse on foot through the woods. Others pursue her, but she makes good her getaway to a nearby town. Watt (Brady Corbet), a man from the commune, later finds her in a diner, but does nothing to prevent her departure.

M3 calls her elder sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) to pick her up in the town. We find out later that Lucy drove three hours to pick up her sister ‘in the Catskills’ and bring her to an affluent summer house on a lake in Connecticut that she shares with her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy), an architect or real estate developer in Manhattan.

M3 and Lucy’s parents are long gone. Lucy was in college while M3 was still living at home and going to school when their mother died. They never mention their father. An Aunt Dora moved into the family home and raised M3. Lucy had not seen or heard from M3 in at least two years, nor had been able to reach her by M3’s cell phone. M3’s long absence was strange but apparently not out of character: Lucy appears not to have contacted anyone in authority that she was missing.

The story takes place roughly within a ‘present’ of Ted and Lucy’s two-week summer vacation at the Connecticut lake house. The narrative moves forward, intercut seamlessly with scenes from M3’s past as a cult member. Strange things happen at night. Successive segments fill in critical pieces of information about M3’s experience with this group, steadily building tension to the end.  

The acting by this cast of young actors is notably good. Their facial expressions and gestures speak more eloquently than their words, and Jody Lee Lipes’ camera appraises them the way people size up their interlocutors and watch each other in conversation. On the other hand, Lipes does not find the values that Sven Nykvist would have shooting in natural light, thus the picture seems literally a lot darker than necessary.

M3’s post-traumatic stress at first comes across as eccentric, ‘hippy-dippy’ behavior, but its effects echo causes. She has witnessed terrifying events. A small scene that seems almost bizarrely comic in shocking Ted and Lucy underlines the deep trauma this young woman is facing, which reduces her to a scared child. It makes for a stunning, heart-breaking dramatic moment.

As much as M3 presents a portrait of a post-traumatic stress, Patrick (John Hawkes), the soft-spoken cult leader, is a chilling sketch of a psychopath, along the lines of clinical descriptions in Hervey Cleckley’s classic The Mask of Sanity.

Patrick is the one-eyed king in his self-made land of the blind. He sucker-punches his young and easily impressionable flock with logical fallacies which make him sound wise and caring. Yet like I Corinthians’ ‘sounding brass, or a tinkling symbol,’ he has not charity. The community he fosters is the common delusion in which they reinforce each other. Patrick gives M3 the name Marcy May when she tells him her name is Martha, just as later he calls a new initiate Sally when she introduces herself as Sarah (Julia Garner). 

His special power lies in his gift for intuitively homing on and manipulating others’ weaknesses, even divining their potential insecurities and creating weaknesses. Patrick has no equals, only followers. Katie (Maria Dizzia), his elder woman enforcer, would not have been out of place supervising concentration camp guards.

The movie this work brings to mind is the Austrian director Götz Spielmann’s 2008 Revanche (Revenge), which likewise calmly relates an intense story with great acting under the steady gaze of a camera and nature’s sounds of silence. 

The DVD set includes Mary Last Seen (2010) a fifteen-minute feature also written and directed by Sean Durkin on the theme of a man (Brady Corbet) bringing an unwitting young woman (Stephanie Estes) from New York City into a rural communal cult.