jürgen fauth’s muckworld

You may have heard French lounge cover act Nouvelle Vague’s version of Eisbär, but nothing beats the original 1981 Grauzone version of the song, a Neue Deutsche Welle hit in 1981. At least that’s what I thought until I saw Valeska Grisebach’s Sehnsucht (Longing), in which a German small-town couple plays it on their dinky keyboard after dinner. In their incapable hands, the song’s NDW ironic reserve (this is the period that brought us Trio’s “Da Da Da“) turns into real heartache that perfectly encapsulates the movie’s mood of awkward tragedy.

Like Christian Petzold and Robert Thalheim, Valeska Grisebach gets lumped into the Neue Berliner Schule — and I guess I just did it, too. Movement or not, every film by these directors that I’ve managed to catch so far has been outstanding. Sehnsucht, the story of an ill-fated love affair between a locksmith and a waitress cast with non-professional actors and set in a tiny village, feels absolutely lifelike. The characters and the tired, cliche-ridden things they say in hopeless attempts of bridging the gaps between them are depressingly real and instantly familiar to anybody who has spent any time in small-town Germany. Bold direction and editing add an artful dimension to the sparse, elegant story. There’s a fantastic sequence involving a Robbie Williams song, and then there’s that Eisbär.

• signandsight
• Sehnsucht - Laien werden Berlinale-Stars
• “Sehnsucht”: Realismus des Wünschens
• Arne Hoehne Presse | Sehnsucht
• Sehnsucht (Schnitt Online)

Sehnsucht. Valeska Grisebach, 2006. ****

This post is dedicated to the polar bear at the Central Park Zoo, who swims laps tirelessly to everybody’s endless delight. Too bad about that whole warming thing.

Occasioned by There Will Be Blood, this revisit was slightly disappointing. My childhood memories of this film were absolutely devastating — I’d probably never seen a tragic anti-hero before — but some of the changes the characters go through feel forced by contemporary standards. Walter Huston’s Oscar-winning turn as leathery gold digger is very amusing and certainly informs Plainview.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. John Huston, 1948. ****

• Stinkin’ Badges
• Roger Ebert
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre on Wikipedia

From highly enjoyable exercises in pop style (8 Women) to over-conceptualized constructs that left me completely cold (5×2), Francois Ozon’s films are hit-or-miss. Misgivings about his adaptation of the novel by Elizabeth Taylor arose the moment the snooty Berlin box office dude made fun of our choice of movie — was this really going to be “Rosamunde Pilcher hoch zehn,” a terrible melodrama that we hadn’t packed enough tissues for?

Yes and no. The story of Angel Deverell (Romola Garai), the precocious grocer’s daughter who transforms herself into a successful writer only to lose it all to love, war, and the unpredictable currents of taste is indeed what we used to call a Schmonzette, an overblown melodrama that should be the object of our ridicule, and that of ticket takers everywhere. Anybody with a hankering for rustling fabric, lavish sets, trembling bosoms and tragic turns of events is certainly welcome to enjoy Angel at face value.

But Ozon manages to keep a generally winking attitude even while he’s presenting a fully functional romantic epic. Through the use of rear-projection, a lush score, and especially Romola Garai’s finely tuned performance, Angel has its melodramatic cake and keeps its post-ironic distance, too. The movie itself very much resembles the preposterous stories with which Angel Deverell makes her fortune — and is thus also a target for the snide comments of smarter people within the movie. With the help of an editor’s wife played by Charlotte Rampling and grim painter Esmé (Michael Fassbender), Ozon provides sophisticated commentary on the film from within the film. As recreation of a (mostly) defunct genre, Angel feels less self-conscious than Todd Haynes’ faux-Sirk Far From Heaven; thanks to Romola Garai, it is also more engaging.

Angel does not have a U.S. release date yet.

Angel. Francois Ozon, 2007. ****

The trailer:

Bonnie and Clyde are the names of the cats we’re currently staying with, so there was no way around rewatching Arthur Penn’s 1967 classic. The film is still horrifying and hilarious in its casual depiction of murder, love, and grand theft Ford Model T, and it’s this last part I found most curious: Bonnie and Clyde provides the blueprint for a gazillion crime-spree romances to follow, and the car already occupies a central role, as if American lawbreaking in the 20th century wasn’t even possible without the automobile — even when there weren’t roads to drive on. You know Ms. Parker and Mr. Barrow are doomed when their escape vehicle is hit by a hand grenade, and the final machine-gunning riddles not just their bodies but also their “death car” with bullets. This movie has led to many ruthless but gentle mock machine gun executions of our feline friends.

Bonnie and Clyde. Arthur Penn, 1967. *****

• Bonnie and Clyde on Wikipedia
• Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow on Wikipedia
• Bright Lights on Pauline Kael and Bonnie and Clyde
  
• A review of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Lester D. Friedman (ed.)
• Bonnie and Clyde on All Things Considered
• Greenbriar Picture Shows on the film’s 40th anniversary (via)
• Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg: Bonnie & Clyde

The Internet Movie Database lists 48 adaptations of Macbeth–give or take a few TV versions–but Geoffrey Wright’s contemporary gangster take on the Scottish play doesn’t resemble any of them as much as a low-budget remake of Scarface. There’s lots of gunplay between drug dealers, the witches are a bunch of doped-up goth chicks, and some of the Bard’s best soliloquies are abbreviated in favor of extended orgies (some literal, some merely orgies of bloodletting.)

Fresh off of Slings & Arrows‘ pitch-perfect second season, in which the New Burbage Festival takes on the cursed play, Marcy and I were more than eager to see a fresh take on Mackers, but there’s precious little to praise here. In the title role, Sam Worthington gives most of his speeches in voice-over without changing his expression at all, and Victoria Hill looks like she would be more comfortable in a prime time soap than as literature’s most cruelly ambitious woman. She gets to do “Out, out damn spot” topless.

The contemporary updating–Duncan and his men are Melbourne drug lords–is supposed to make the drama more accessible but only distracts instead. (Macbeth’s gated estate bears a sign identifying it as Dunsinane, Banquo likes to ride motorbikes just so he can ride something when he gets whacked, and Burnham Wood is a logging company.)

Worst of all, the direction lacks the go-for-broke pomo gusto that made Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet such a success: everything about this adaptation, including the slow-motion finale, feels unconvincing and lackluster, and the beauty of the language never takes wing. How could it if you cut “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” before the punchline? Stick with Orson, Roman, and Akira. Opens July 6.

Macbeth. Geoffrey Wright, 2006. *

Videos: Geoffrey Tenant takes on Macbeth at the beginning of Slings & Arrows S2E2, newsreel footage from Orson Welles’ 1936 all-black stage version, and trailers for Polanski’s 1971 and Kurosawa’s 1957 adaptations.

“One day, they won’t say ’speak French to me,’ they will say: speak to me in the language of Molière!” Says Molière, played by an exuberant Romain Duris, waving his tankard before he falls of the tavern table, much to the amusement of the assembled Parisians. But we all know it’s true. And once a country’s Greatest Writer has been canonized, it’s only a matter of time before he gets a movie that conflates his life with his work in the style of Shakespeare in Love and Factotum. Unrestrained by fact, the liberties taken by this approach are more shapely and palpable than the usual flabby biopic. Molière turns out to be an especially endearing attempt at the budding subgenre.

The film uses an undocumented period in Molière’s life to imagine the genesis of his play Tartuffe–which allows writer and director Laurent Tirard to have fun with the classic comedy. The story begins in 1658, when the actor is offered a deal he can’t refuse: Monsieur Jordain (Fabrice Luchini), a wealthy merchant, will pay off Molière’s debt if he trains him as an actor to impress the haughty widow Célimène (Ludivine Sagnier). For this task, Moliere takes the name of Tartuffe, pretends to be a priest, and moves into Jordain’s house–which leads to all sorts of farcial and amorous hijinx involving Jordain’s wife (Laura Morante), daughter (Fanny Valette), dog, and scheming society friends.

Accomplished and witty, the film even manages to wring morsels of truth out of the highly entertaining complications: who knew Jean-Baptiste Molière was the artistic forebear of Preston Sturges’ Sullivan, endlessly distraught over the value of comedy? Molière is scheduled to open on July 27.

Molière. Laurent Tirard, 2007. ****

• The official site has the trailer

Prompted by a comment at The House Next Door, here’s a contribution to Edward Copeland’s Star Wars blogathon: a close reading of the opening minute and a half of Attack of the Clones.

The beginning of Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones isn’t quite in the league of the overhead star destroyer of the original film or the bravura extended space battle take of Episode III, but it sets the scene for a moody second act. The very first shot, the traditional pan toward a planet that follows every Star Wars crawl, moves upward, toward the city planet Coruscant. We see two Naboo fighters and Amidala’s royal cruiser. (In The Phantom Menace, she flies a “yacht” and in Revenge of the Sith a”star skiff,” but they’re always silver.) I adore the deep growl of Amidala’s ship–this sound is the first thing that makes me happy to be watching this movie.

The ships begin spinning around their axes, putting the lie to our idea of up and down. By the second shot, the camera has spun too, and now we descend toward the surface of Coruscant. Right away, this introduces the theme of Attack of the Clones: nothing is what it seems. The Star Wars cycle consists of a tragic half and a comic half (otherwise known as “the prequel trilogy” and “the classic trilogy“), and Episode II is the second act of the tragic half, a time of schemes, subterfuge, and confusion.

Next, in the first of the film’s many stagy interiors that I like to enjoy as intentionally campy allusions to Flash Gordon, a person we only see from behind is addressed as Senator. This makes the first word spoken in this film a lie.

In Star Wars, everything keeps repeating, but with variations. In this case, whenever somebody’s name requires a honorific, it will be unique: Emperor, Boss, Vice-Roy, Supreme Chancellor, Hutt, Princess, what-have-you. By the same token, there are always new planets as well as new vistas of old ones: this time, Coruscant, which we’ve already seen, is covered in fog, again hitting the theme of deception and mystery. The trails left in the clouds by the tips of the cruiser’s wings please me. This shot also echoes the approach to Cloud City, in the second part of the comic half.

The following shot of the landing spaceships plays a peculiar trick on our attention: we think we’re looking at Amidala’s ship, but as it passes, we realize that we were watching the fighter flying alongside all along. And of course: here comes, announced by his signature noise, the first recognizable character in the film, the comic sidekick who knows as much as anyone in the series, the guy who has the first word in Episode IV and the last in Episode III: the real hero of the show, R2-D2. (The mindboggling first shot of Revenge of the Sith comes, after an actual kitchen sink explodes on screen, to rest on him.)

My minute and a half is about up now, but the rest of the scene continues the theme of deception and duplicity. It also caps the decoy storyline that was central to The Phantom Menace. Next to its visual imagination, the iconic success of Star Wars rests on its rigorous but inventive structuring: Lucas often begins and ends familiar stories in unpredictable ways. The belated death of Padme’s double exemplifies this Star Wars principle. For instance, Revenge of the Sith begins with what could have been the climax of Clones--much like the opening forty minutes of Return of the Jedi could have provided a more upbeat ending to The Empire Strikes Back. Each act of the two halves (which wrap around like Moebius strips) corresponds to its counterpart: Menace/Hope, Attack/Strikes Back, Revenge/Return.

My point is this: the first 90 seconds of Attack of the Clones, ominously scored by John Williams, set up the next 8430 very well. They promise more visual splendors, more games played with archetypal structure, more explosions, more tacky dialogue delivered to the hilt. Clones was the film that got me excited about Star Wars again after initial disappointment with Phantom Meance. It satisfies by itself, makes Episode I a better movie, and lays the groundwork for the superlative payoff of Revenge of the Sith.

Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones. George Lucas, 2002. *****

• Previously: Cleopatra, Sith, Death Proof
• My original review of Revenge of the Sith
• Digg This

The first two acts of this W. Somerset Maugham adaptation are fantastic: Naomi Watts plays a woman who marries stodgy bacteriologist Ed Norton out of desperation and cheats on him with Liev Schreiber as soon as they arrive at his home in Shanghai. To punish her and himself, Norton takes her into the interior, to a village ravaged by cholera. The way the two steer their wrecked relationship through the lush landscape stalked by death is terrific–it’s sort of a grown-up version of Battle Royale, in which the stakes of love are ratcheted up to 11: if you leave me, you’ll die a grisly death. Toby Jones (Truman in Infamous) provides the cynical but helpful foreigner, and there are nuns.

I was less fond of the third act, in which Chekhov’s Law is adhered to much too slavishly: if there’s cholera around, somebody’s gonna get it! Still, The Painted Veil is big classic Hollywood cinema, splendidly engaging, marvelously acted and shot, sumptuous and emotional. The real mystery is why this film, far better than The Departed and most of the other nominees, didn’t get any kind of attention at Oscar time. In decades past, this would have been exactly the kind of thing the Academy would’ve gone gaga over. As a sign of how much times as changed, the The Painted Veil wasn’t even technically released by a major studio but by their “indie” distributor Warner Independent. It was drowned out in December’s mad movie rush, and now the official site is hocking the DVD as “just in time for mother’s day!”

The Painted Veil. John Curran, 2006. ***

• Rotten Tomatoes: 75%