New Israeli film and two Spanish-language films on DVD
I went to see Eytan Fox's Walk on Water at the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas. I was touched by his sweet little movie about gays in the Israeli army, Yossi and Jagger. This one, about the gay grandson of a Nazi war criminal who tries to lure his sister back from a Kubbutz for their industrialist father's birthday party and who becomes involved with a borderline-homophobic Mossad hit man along the way, tries to do too much and to resolve everything too easily, but it deserves credit for at least attempting to bring together disparate but related topics. Not recommended unless you have a special interest in gay and/or Israeli and/or Holocaust themes.
Sundays in the Sun (Los Lunes al Sol) and Japón were both recommended by regulars on FilmWurld, I think Oscar primarily, and I got them indirectly through Netflix and watched them at home, with mixed results.
Fernando León de Aranoa's 2002 Sundays in the Sun, which deals with the issue of unemployment in the shipping industry in Spain, is a well acted, if fairly conventional movie, with Javier Bardem strong as the lead in an ensemble production focusing on a group of friends who gather at a pub started by one of their number with his severence pay. The movie is of conisiderable social and political significance and hence is well coverred on the World Socialist Web Site and was the Spanish candidate for the Best Picture Oscar a couple years ago. Don't look for much action; don't look for good outcomes; don't look for feel-good elements. This is a rather depressing piece and was something of a chore to watch at home with the fast-forward and eject buttons near at hand. I didn't use them though, and I acknowledge that Sundays in the Sun is a powerful evocation of how it feels to be pretty hopelessly out of work in a western European country.
Japón by first-time Mexican director Carlos Reygados and starring two non-actors is quite another story. It may not have been much seen in the US but RottenTomatoes indicates a hugely positive critical reaction for obvious reasons. In a glowing review in April 2003 Manohla Dargis (then still writing for the LA TImes) described Japón's subject matter as "love, death, sex, faith, redemption and mankind's domination over nature..." Shot in 16 mm. CinemaScope, it loses in a small viewing format but still soars and amazes with its originality and poetic vision from the first few frames. Like Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry, Japón focuses on a man going off to commit suicide, only this one goes to a remote part of the province of Hidalgo in Mexico among country people. The protagonist, a lean, Christ-like, craggy-faced middle-aged man with a limp, gets permission from a stone-faced old lady called Ascen to stay in her barn far above the town. He goes on long walks (tireless, with a cane), stands in the hot sun, sips tea, listens to Bach cantatas on a portable CD player, masturbates, gets badly drunk in the town bar on mescal, privately contemplates shooting himself in the chest with an old pistol he has brought. The old lady serves him refreshments, does hand laundry, and plays the role of polite and modest hostess. These old fashioned courtesies bring the man closer to her and to life. All around are sounds of animals and other creatures, some of which we see or hear brutally dispatched; we also see a group of laughing little boys watch two horses copulate. It rains. The skies are filled with beautiful light. The man forgets his plan for self-slaughter and becomes concerned for the old lady and her barn, which a mean nephew comes to destroy for the stones. The last half hour is surprising and apocalyptic.
Even on DVD Japón leaves a strong impression. Reygadas shows great pure cinematic talent here. With limited means he has produced something strong and beautiful and fresh. I'm obliged to my FilmWurld friends for leading me to this memorable cinematic experience.
GIANNI AMELIO'S "THE WAY WE LAUGHED"
Gianni Amelio: The Way They Laughed (Così ridevano, 1998) watched on Italian DVD for the first time March 2005. Winner of the top prize "Leone d'Oro" at Venice.
The title, referring to an old joke column, is ironic. The film's review of Italian post-war economic miracle years is deeply tinged with sadness and a sense of the price paid in innocence lost to gain security and status. The whole focus is on the love between two Sicilian brothers, Giovanni and Pietro. The angel-faced Pietro (Francesco Giuffrida) from the first appears devious. When his brother arrives at the station, he slinks off and hides from him. He's lazy, a dandy, a liar, a faker, a bad seed. Yet he's worshiped by the innocent, muscular, illiterate Giovanni (Enrico Lo Verso), who has turned up with other southern immigrants at the Turin railway station intending just to visit his baby brother as the film opens and then stays on in the North to support him. The mise-en-scène is visually beautiful but conventionalizes the period into a kind of grimy poetry more worthy of twenty or thirty years earlier, no doubt consciously echoing Italian neorealist films (Amelio has been called the new De Sica) or becoming a glossier color version of Visconti's mournful epic tragedy of southern Italians in Milan, Rocco and His Brothers (1960). My DVD's Italian jacket copy translates a paragraph from Stephen Holden's 2001 NYTimes review expanding one of its key ideas: "Così rideveno has the power to keep its own secrets," this Italian version reads. "Without ever being moralistic, by the end it becomes the metaphor for a whole society that makes a kind of tacit pact with itself never to look too deeply into the hidden effects social processes have on individuals and their destinies." The interest -- and yet the frustration -- of the film is that its sequences each appear revelatory, but shed little light on the intervening periods of time. It is organized in a "rather elegant" manner (Rosenbaum) into a structure of microscopic views of single days out of each year from 1959 through 1964, each day designated by a key word: "arrivals," "deceptions," "money", "letters, "blood," and "families." This neat structure masks a surrounding mystery in the relationship between the two brothers, and we deduce for ourselves from the way they seek out and avoid each other how alike and interdependent they are. Each cherishes illusions about the other; one is proud, the other ashamed. Vivid and touching as the film is, it's also highly artificial, notably in how little of the two characters' lives is made clear, how little the world outside their relationship is explored. Metaphorical indeed, Così ridevano explores an inseparable (and ultimately false) dichotomy between innocence and experience, naiveté and sophistication that may go to the heart not only of North-South relations but of the Italian soul. Both actors, Amelio regular Lo Verso and newcomer Giuffreda, are remarkable, and the scenes between them are heartbreaking.
A near-masterpiece, highly recommended. Actually available on a US code DVD.
So far the only other Amelio film I've seen is The Housekeys (Le chiavi di casa, 2004), which being a documentary-like chronicle of a short stretch of contemporary time, seems so different, and yet on reflection is so similar in feeling. Obviously Amelio is an extraordinary director and I must see Lamarica and Stolen Children (Il ladro di bambini), both also starring the intense, soulful Lo Verso, which have received higher praise on this site and elsewhere.
