Wednesday, March 30, 2011

What day is it?


Los lunes al sol (Mondays in the Sun) 2002 Spain (109 minutes) directed and co-written by Fernando León de Aranoa.
Javier Bardem is former welder Carlos ‘Santa’ Santamaria, a first among equals who leads this fine ensemble piece about a group of out-of-work, middle-aged shipyard workers in a town on Spain’s Atlantic coast.
As an actor, Bardem has the virile magnetism and intensity of Marlon Brando that makes both actors fascinating to watch, but Bardem also conveys a rich and warm sense of humor that charms men and women alike. As Santa, he is the heart of this group of men, their pride. He is the fresh rascal they love and would love to be, as ready with an amusing quip or cock-and-bull story as he is to listen when one of them needs to talk.
At the same time, Santa is as uncertain and uneasy as his friends.
‘Mondays in the sun’ are weekday mornings of unemployment passed outdoors by these men skilled in trades who once defined themselves and measured their lives by the work they did. One of the men compares the group to Siamese twins: ‘We’re stuck together. If one falls, we all fall. If one of us gets it in the ass, well, that’s it, so do the others. Because we’re the same thing.’
Santa also is angry. One of the only things he has to show for all the heart he gave first to his work, then to try to save his and his coworkers’ jobs, is an 8,000-peseta judgment against him for admitting that he destroyed a streetlight during a demonstration outside the shipyard. Santa’s inability to resolve this matter makes no sense to his lawyer and less to the court because it is less than $100, but it is money he does not have—and in truth he has no intention of paying it, on principle.
The film opens with actual footage that director Fernando León de Aranoa shot of a violent confrontation between police and shipyard workers threatened with layoffs at a shipyard in Spain’s northeastern most province Galicia. The story begins several years after the shipyard has closed its doors for good, with an instrumental version of Tom Waits’ ‘On the Otherside of the World’ as its theme.
With no real job prospects for skilled senior heavy industrial workers, Santa and his former coworkers: Paulino ‘Lino’ Ribas (José Ángel Egido), José Suarez (Luis Tosar), Amador (Celson Bugallo) and Reina (Enrique Villén), hang out at the Bar La Naval owned by Rico (Joaquín Climent). Rico, also a former shipyard worker, bought the bar with his severance pay. Occasionally they go through the motions of looking for gainful employment. A seventh man, Serguei (Serge Riaboukine), a Russian émigré, is another regular, along with Natalia ‘Nata’ (Aida Folch), bar owner Rico’s 15-year-old daughter, who absorbs what the men say and listens with amusement to their backchat while she does her homework.
The men share an easy intimacy as though they have known each other all their lives. This ensemble of actors also manages convincingly to convey each of these lifelong breadwinners facing extended joblessness and uncertainty under ongoing financial pressure.
Lino, with two teenagers and a disillusioned housewife at home, serially waits to interview for jobs among younger men whom he is sure are more likely to be hired than he. José drinks too much and plays the daily lottery by picking numbers which appear at random in his surroundings; his beautiful but haggard wife Ana (Nieve de Medina) works a low-paying graveyard shift on a production line at a fish cannery. Amador spends most of the time at his corner spot at Rico’s bar, telling his friends that his wife is out of town caring for her ill mother.
The shipyard itself is a character: a silent, brooding presence with an unfinished sea-going hull left abandoned and its machinery and equipment divided into lots for auction, guarded by its last employee, a halfwit with a German shepherd. Santa tells the others that the excavators at work in the background are a sure sign that the lot, ‘worth a fortune because it is on the sea,’ is being converted to luxury apartments. The unfinished hull and ‘repurposing’ of the yard speak for the loss of dignity these men feel in unemployment that is more than just a loss of income or their manhood.
Reina, the only man besides Rico with a full time job, is a ‘técnico de seguridad’, or ‘security technician’—a fancy name for a rent-a-cop—at the local professional football stadium.
The men most often appear engaged in group activities. Reina lets them into the stadium for football games which they watch from the roof, though an overhang blocks their view of one of the goals: they lean together on a bench in rapt animation when the players disappear from view, waiting for the crowd to cheer ‘GOAL!’ to celebrate.
Nata gives Santa one of her babysitting jobs so she can go on a date on a school night—and because he needs the money. Santa, Lino, José and Serguei hang out at the luxurious house shooting the breeze and drinking the owner’s good scotch on the back patio while the four-year-old whom Nata was supposed to babysit contentedly watches television inside.
The friends also ride the ferry that takes them to the unemployment office, and regularly visit the unemployment office together.
A woman in the unemployment office waves to Santa standing in line and he nods and smiles back; his friends express surprise that she recognizes him. He tells them he saw her at his last visit, then quickly mumbles: ‘Ya que no nos consiguen trabajo, al menos que nos chupen la polla, joder,’ which the English subtitle renders in the same sense and spirit: ‘If they can’t give us a decent job, we’ll take a blow job.’
Santa’s bravado amuses his friends and hides what they really feel, which we see when Lino gets closer to where the unemployed are interviewed.
Lino sees a middle-aged man, Samuel (Pepe Oliva, who appears only in this scene), tell an official that he can’t receive benefits until he provides a proof of discharge, which he does not have. Samuel’s voice breaks when he asks the official please to call his wife and explain this to her, and when the official declines, he breaks down into tears: ‘Tell her and see if she understands,’ he pleads.
There are moving and also amusing vignettes. This film tells a tale that makes it well worth seeing, and we get to know and like each of these characters. The quality of the acting is such that the characters’ gestures and facial expressions are often more eloquent than their words, and convey things for which they cannot find words.
What makes the story of these six men and their families and friendships poignant is the sense that there are unique cultures among those who make a living in skilled trades and professions.
When these trades and professions are gone, these cultures disappear too and society loses something important and essential. It is not simply a matter of ‘retraining,’ ‘repurposing,’ or just providing people gainful employment in another job to pay their bills.  

Saturday, March 26, 2011

When you’re down in Juarez and you’re lost and it’s Easter time too…


Aventurera (The Adventuress) 1950 Mexico (101 minutes) directed by Alberto Gout.
It’s not hard to imagine that there was way too much passion and sexual melodrama in this film to have made it far in the American mainstream of its day.
Elena Tejera (Ninón Sevilla), the ‘adventuress’ of the title, is a talented singer and dancer with great body and a dancer’s legs. She lives by her wits, shakes her booty, and clearly has a lot of fun doing both.
This fun Mexican film noir features great character actors, classic Latin American musical numbers and terrific dancing in a passionate and sexy melodrama lead by two strong and beautiful female antagonists. It comes a lot closer to showing what Hollywood censorship at the time would allow American filmmakers only to hint at, and does so in a refreshingly straightforward way. 
Elena (Ninon Sevilla) and Rosaura (Andrea Palma) play for keeps in Aventurera 1950
Elena, a young Mexican woman living at home with her well-to-do parents in Chihuahua, finds herself ‘alone in the world’ after her middle-aged mother, whom she catches making out behind a closed door with a younger lover, runs off with the lover. This event causes her disconsolate father to shoot himself in his study.
Elena resolves to make it on her own in Ciudad Juarez. She has difficulty holding down secretarial jobs because male employers can’t keep their hands off her, shown in a quick and amusing succession of campy vignettes.
Lucio Saenz (Tito Junco), an older acquaintance briefly seen earlier in the film, whose smooth talk, fancy clothes and gigolo barbering mark him for trouble, gets Elena a ‘night interview’ for a ‘secretarial job’ with Rosaura de Cervera (Andrea Palma). Rosaura looks like an earthier, film noir version of Kristen Scott-Thomas. She turns out to be the madam of a fancy Juarez brothel with a club that features nightly floor shows. Saenz turns out to be one of her ‘talent’ scouts.
At the end of the ‘job interview,’ Rosaura slips a date-rape mickey in Elena’s tea which knocks her out. She sends a customer up for a ‘date’ with a [sleeping] virgin, and then pays Saenz his finder’s fee for bringing in Elena, whom she plans to put to work.
Elena objects when she awakes to this grim prospect, but she appreciates that Rosaura and her enforcers have the upper hand for the moment. But Elena clearly has ideas of her own. She sings, dances, and sashays her way through the rest of the film getting even for these indignities.
What we see of Elena’s work mainly involves performing in sumptuous sets fantastically oversized for the cabaret-boite setting, beautifully choreographed, lit and shot.
Her numbers include some of the best known Latin American mambo and samba bands and musical performers of the time: Pedro Vargas, Ana María González, Los Angeles del Infierno (not the later Spanish heavy metalistas), Perez Prado and his Orchestra, Trio Los Panchos, Ray Montoya and his Orchestra and Tona La Negra.
The rest of the story needs to be seen to be believed—and enjoyed. This picture has every bit as much the dramatic studio lighting and photography, snappy dialog (in Spanish, with English subtitles), and wildly improbable but entertaining plot twists as classic American movies of the same era.
One of only things that separates it from the great American icons of that period is the very end which, unlike the preceding hour and a half of sharp and dramatic interior and exterior scenes, gets lost in the night fog of Juarez, probably the result of a degraded print. Good as this film is, it would be as close as movies of this era came to perfect with a Casablanca-like resolution as sharp as the rest of the picture. 

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Way uptown from Gone with the Wind


Moon over Harlem 1939 U.S. (68 minutes) directed by Edgar G. Ulmer.
This is a ‘race picture,’ as feature films with all black casts were known during Hollywood’s Golden Age.
The story opens with the wedding reception of Harlem mobster Dollar Bill (Bud Harris) and Minnie (Cora Green) at Minnie’s apartment, with Dollar’s gang and Minnie’s churchgoing crowd, her grown daughter Sue (Izinetta Wilcox) and Sue’s beau, the earnest Bob (Earl Gough).
The central dramatic conflict is whether Minnie and her daughter can prevail over the depredations of the skirt-chasing spendthrift mobster Dollar Bill.
A deeper theme engages two views of the black future: Dollar Bill’s desire to take full control of Harlem from white racketeers he answers to, opposed to Bob’s proto-civil rights era vision of a Harlem free of gangsters preying on black businesses so that hard working black business people can claim a place in an integrated mainstream.
Bob (Earl Gough), Minnie (Cora Green) and  Dollar Bill (Bud Harris) in Edgar G. Ulmer's Moon over Harlem 1939.
The sound and black and white picture quality are uneven, but director Edgar G. Ulmer spins a watchable yarn.
Watch for Sidney Bechet, who plays his clarinet among the guests at the opening wedding reception; Christopher Columbus and his Swing Crew take the bandstand for the dance numbers. 

Monday, March 21, 2011

Goody Two-Shoes Sees Double

Im Juli (In July) 2000 Germany (96 minutes) written and directed by Fatih Akin.
Akin said in an interview that he modeled this film on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the mother of modern romantic comedy.
The result is an entertainingly eccentric road movie across central Europe, with the open road from Hamburg and Istanbul—and some tricky border crossings in between—as an enchanted forest filled with fairies, hobgoblins and madcap adventure on the way to true love.
To start with, Daniel Bannier (Moritz Bleibtreu), a young man in the middle of nowhere with only the clothes on his back, manages to get a ride with Isa (Mehmet Kurtuluş), a young man with a dead body in the trunk of his car. With a long but unspecified car ride ahead, Daniel relates the events which got him where the two met.
Daniel is a nerdy single student teacher of physics at a Hamburg high school on summer break. He meets Juli (Christiane Paul), a free spirit with blonde corn rows, a lovely face and an infectiously happy smile, at a street market in Hamburg where she sells New Age trinkets with a friend.
Having decided that Daniel is the man for her, Juli sells Daniel a silver ring with an image of the sun. She tells him that the ring will bring him luck and that he will meet a woman wearing the same image who ‘is destined to bring him happiness’. Juli invites him to hear music with her that evening, but despite her attempt to be the woman of his destiny, Daniel first runs into the beautiful Melek (Idil Üner—‘melek’is Turkish for angel), in town briefly from Berlin on her way to Istanbul.
Daniel spends the rest of the evening into the night walking around the Hamburg talking with Melek, puts her up for the night at his apartment, and comes away from taking her to the airport the next day thinking that he has a date to meet her in less than a week near the bridge over the Bosphorus in Istanbul. Against his rational, rules-following character, Daniel resolves to drive in a car a neighbor serendipitously has loaned him to Istanbul to meet her.
Juli, disappointed to have missed Daniel the night before, decides to hitch a ride out of town to wherever the first driver who stops is going. In the context of this story, that driver of course could be no one other than Daniel.
The car breaks down in southern Germany, but the couple’s resourcefulness (along with her winning smile, Juli can hotwire cars), aided by chance encounters along the way as though placed by a higher power, keep them moving toward their destination.
A Puckish truckdriver named Leo (Jochen Nickel) gives the couple a lift and treats Daniel’s love blindness by making him lose his eyeglasses in a bar fight; the wildly unpredictable and beautiful Luna (Branka Katic), fairy queen of Budapest, slips a mind-bending potion in Daniel’s soft drink and takes him on a wild ride.
The director turns up as a gruff but pliable border guard in Romania playing chess with the Bulgarian border guard; his brother (Cem Akin) is a gruff border guard in Turkey.
Drug use in the spinning of the tale stands in for Shakespeare’s love philtres which help characters see that reality is often a lot different and more interesting than things as they first appear. Daniel’s first joint provides for an amusing, Lebowski-like scene with Juli on a moonlit barge on the Danube.
The story plays like a rollicking grand caper that everyone is winkingly in on except Daniel, with Juli always bright-eyed and game, a dynamo of positive energy guided by an abiding faith, and inspired by an intuition that Daniel ‘has something deep inside waiting to get out.’

Recipe for mayhem

Gun Crazy 1949 United Artists (87 minutes) directed by Joseph H. Lewis.
Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins), billed by a circus barker as ‘So appealing! So dangerous! So lovely to look at!’ is a prim English gal who trick shoots for a circus, a modern-day Annie Oakley. Bart Tare (John Dall), is a gee-aw-shucks boy-next-door with a thing about guns. 
Start with a nice-looking all-American kid who loves his guns and a petite cool blonde who’s a pretty good shot herself, looks swell in slacks and wants more out of life than a steady paycheck provides.
Beat well together in a fairy tale romance of sticking up filling stations, small businesses and banks across the mythic American West, with car chases shot from the vantage point of an anxious back seat passenger at their shoulders as they lurch, buck, wobble and tear into back projected scenery.
Shoot with the studio conventions that made black and white B-pictures film noir, making sure to mix in a lot of neon-lit narcotic American night and charting their derring-do in series of newspaper front pages with banner headlines.
Fold in a dollop of postwar camp, such as tailored dude cowboy togs, and season with gratuitous gunplay. Let rise about 90 minutes.
The result proved irresistible to a generation of French filmmakers who took it seriously and made it work like a charm in films like À bout de souffle (Breathless) and Band à part (Band of Outsiders)—not to mention Jack Kerouac, whom one can imagine seeing the movie by himself in the back of an all-night movie theater in Denver with a jug of cheap wine and a lot of blue neon words racing through his head. 
Jack Kerouac in Greenwich Village in 1958. Photo by Jerry Yulsman AP