Monday, April 30, 2012
"She's a force of nature that results in cataclysms."
In countless interviews, several excerpted on The Criterion Collection two-disc edition DVD of Jules and Jim, François Truffaut repeatedly admits that what attracted him to the story in Henri-Pierre Roché's semi-autobiographical novel lay in the concept of a love triangle where a film portrayed neither man involved as better than the other. He tells the interviewer questioning him at any given time that intrigued him because the cinematic tradition always paints one of the suitors as inferior. The film critic turned director certainly succeeded with his third feature film, aided immensely by those he cast as the triangle: Oskar Werner (his first name spelled as Oscar in the credits) as the Austrian Jules, Henri Serre as the French Jim and, most indelibly, the intoxicating Jeanne Moreau as Catherine, the French-English object of the title characters' affections. What wows you about Jeanne Moreau's performance though is that for all the brash acts that Catherine commits, Moreau doesn't play Catherine as a stereotypical nut. That "calm smile" referred to that relates Catherine to that statue exists in her performance most of the time as well. When you try to think of new ways to describe her work, it doesn't help when her director used to be a film critic and gave a great summary of it in a 1965 interview: "Jeanne Moreau's acting was like a slalom run against all the possible clichés. I left her free like the other actors to do as she saw fit." Man, I wish I'd written that. It wasn't enough that he made an all-time great film, he has to come up with better review lines as well?
Things move fairly swiftly once Moreau's Catherine enters the picture even though the film does cover a great expanse of time almost from the moment she appears. After the dinner, the narrator informs us that Jules more or less vanishes for a month, spending every day with Catherine, only encountering Jim at the gym. In a steam room meeting, Jules finally invites Jim to hang out with him and Catherine and as the two head up to see her, Jules admits that she inquires about Jim quite often, wondering what he's like. Despite the fact that Jim has been nothing if not generous to Jules when it comes to women, Jules makes a point of stopping him before they go in to meet her and says the line that originally made the film speak so personally to me, "But
not this one, Jim. OK?" I almost spoke those exact words to someone, not that it mattered, and my antennae proved to be tuned correctly to pick up that signal far in advance of my real-life story (of which you will receive no further details). Upon that first "real" meeting, Catherine seems eager to join the boys' club, losing her dress to put on the costume of a man who Jules calls Thomas. She wants to see if she can fool others out on the street so the three depart and, sure enough, before too long a man asks "Thomas" for a light. For many, it would be easy to leap to a feminist interpretation of this scene, seeing it as Catherine's bid to be treated as a man's equal back in 1912 and to be judged by the same rules, but once you've seen Jules and Jim in its totality, that conclusion doesn't quite ring true. Catherine (a) doesn't get judged by anyone within the film and (b) operates under her own set of rules, unique to her and her alone. As the trio continues to wander, "Thomas" thinks that a bridge offers a great spot for a footrace and challenges Jules and Jim. She makes her first mention of rain or water, as Catherine also frequently bring associations with fire. Truly, the woman represents an elemental force (or a James Taylor song). To watch the clip of the race, I suggest going full screen because the image plays very tiny. YouTube offers other clips of the scene but so many of them lack subtitles, I thought it best to go with this one.In that clip, though we'd earlier seen Jules express a mild fear that Jim could woo Catherine from him, we see that it doesn't matter much what Jules or Jim wants — the great friendship has become a threesome and Catherine controls what the group does, immediately deciding that all three will be departing for the shore the next day and selecting Jim to help her get her bags to the train station. (It's also telling that she not only proposes the foot race, but she cheats in it to win as well.) The clip cuts off before we get a few more important lines courtesy of our omniscient narrator who says, "Jim considered her to be Jules' and didn't try to form a clear picture of her. Catherine once again wore that calm smile. It came naturally to her and expressed everything about her."
When Jim shows up at Catherine's apartment, she hasn't completed packing yet and still wears her flowing white nightgown, telling Jim she must put her dress on. Catherine chastises him immediately for not following the superstition and placing his hay on the bed. "Never put a hat on a bed," she chides. First, other things need taking care of before they depart. She dumps a pile of crumpled papers onto the floor from a porcelain bowl and requests a match from Jim who complies and asks what she's doing. "Burning these lies," she tells him. It's not stated explicitly, but I've read references that identify the papers as love letters but doesn't identify either the author or recipient. The pile quickly turns into a tall blaze that leaps on Catherine's nightgown, but Jim leaps to extinguish the flames rapidly. We had the first reference from Catherine to rain, now we have her first connection to fire. She goes behind her
changing screen and asks Jim to hand her the dress hanging on the wall by her bed. When changed, Catherine realizes that she almost forgot to add a bottle to her suitcase. Jim inquires what liquid it contains. "Sulfuric acid, for the eyes of men who tell lies," Catherine explains. Jim warns her that the bottle could break in transit and end up burning through her things. Besides, she can get sulfuric acid anywhere. Reluctantly, she empties the bottle down the sink. "But I promised I would only use this bottle," she tells him as he gathers her luggage. She places hit hat back atop his head and affixes her own to hers and they head off for the train station to join Jules. I can't say with any sense of certainty how many times in the past 25 years I've watched Jules and Jim, but each time I notice something new or view a scene in a new light and that's a trait common to many of the greatest cinematic gifts we've been handed. For instance, I don't recall observing the large number of locomotives, actual, figurative or near where trains run. We've seen Thérèse show off her "steam engine" skills and heard the sounds of a train nearby before Catherine selects the bridge beneath the track for the foot race. We see obvious stock footage of a train rolling by the countryside. Once again, Michel Subor describes the journey to us. "They searched up and down the coast before finding the house of their dreams. Though too big, it was isolated, imposing, white inside and out, and empty."That describes the house but none of those adjectives remotely apply to the movie itself. Many of the greatest films often include a magical ingredient that no matter how many times you've watched them, you forget the exact order in which scenes come. Usually though, that only applies to films that don't follow standard chronological order (the most famous and obvious example being Orson Welles'
Citizen Kane), but somehow Truffaut accomplished that trick in Jules and Jim as well and its narrative follows a straight line and contains nary a flashback. I think any movie that can pull that off should be considered a film critic's best friend since it stamps out any risk of slipping into synopsis. As I prepared for this tribute, taking my notes and marveling at the available YouTube clips, part of me wanted to make sure that I wasn't showing scenes out of order, forcing me to check my chronology again and again. Finally, there came a point where I said, "What the hell am I doing?" First off, I want people to watch Jules and Jim. Secondly, while I'd love to show all these great scenes and repeat the memorable lines, I'd much rather readers discover them for themselves (or be reminded again if they choose to pay a return visit to the film). To give you the briefest update of what occurs after the three settle in at the house, Jules almost immediately asks Jim if he thinks he should propose to Catherine. Jim expresses skepticism, wondering if Jules pictures Catherine as a wife and mother. "I'm afraid she'll never be happy on this earth," Jules responds. He goes ahead and pops the question to Catherine anyway, telling her that if she doesn't answer, he'll ask her again every year on her birthday. "You haven't known many women, I've known lots of men. It balances out. We might make an honest couple," Catherine replies. It isn't exactly a yes or a no, but eventually they do wed. Soon though, The Great War intervenes to separate all three of them.
The war and post-war sections interested me the most in this viewing with the intercutting of stock footage (which isn't actual World War I footage, since there wasn't a lot of filming in that conflict so Truffaut had to use clips from re-creations of the fighting from old films)
with scenes of Jules and Jim — fighting on opposite sides — worrying about accidentally killing the other during a battle. It's with relief that Jules writes Catherine that he's being transferred to the Russian front which he figures makes it less likely he'll face his friend in battle. Everyone returns from the war safely. Jim spends some time visiting some war memorials and cemeteries before eventually reuniting with Jules and Catherine, who have added a third — their young daughter Sabine (Sabine Haudepin, who still acts to this day, mostly on French television, and appeared in one of Truffaut's final films, The Last Metro). Jules confides that his home isn't as happy as it appears, though he has accepted Catherine's frequent infidelities. He just fears the thought that she'll leave sometime and not return. Jim assures him that she'll always come back to Jules because she loves his "Buddhist monk quality." However, the war has changed Jim and it's easy to tell it's more difficult for him to maintain his distance from Catherine for the sake of his friend. One of the more interesting post-war sequences occurs when Jules and Jim chat about the experience of war, joined by Albert (Serge Rezvani/Boris Bassiak), who has been one of Catherine's recurring lovers.Jules and Jim provides so many points of entry, so many possible paths for discussion, that you could choose a topic a day and keep busy for quite some time. That's partially why it's taken me so long to complete this piece. The rest of the blame falls on illness and the calendar. Honestly, if I could put myself into a self-induced coma for the last couple of weeks of April each year, I would. One final clip I'd like to share (which again works better if you watch it full screen) doesn't have as much importance plotwise as it does in terms of filmmaking and one of Truffaut's trademarks.
On the Dec. 2, 1965, episode of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps titled "François Truffaut ou L'esprit critique," Truffaut spoke at length on the topic of freeze frames and this particular use. He pointed out that in part the scene poked fun at Moreau's previous roles in films such as Antonioni's La Notte that tended to be deadly serious. However, the process isn't as easy as one might think.
"It was hard freezing her expressions there. In the editing room, it looked very sharp and nice so I did it elsewhere in the film, but it can quickly get to be a habit. I stopped doing it after a few films. I stopped using it as a visual effect. Now I use freeze frames only for dramatic effect. They're interesting providing viewers don't notice. You sense them, but an image is only perceptible — it takes eight frames for a shot to register. Fewer than eight frames and it's virtually unreadable, unless it's a tight close-up."
One thing I've noticed while comparing the various YouTube clips (when they actually have subtitles) and the Criterion version of those scenes is how frequently translations differ, For example, in the clip above when Catherine asks for someone to scratch her back, Jules replies, "Scratch and Heaven'll scratch you." On the Criterion translation, his response reads much better and, I imagine, more accurately, "Heaven scratches those who scratch themselves."
I keep thinking back to the comment François Truffaut made in 1977 about being "too young" when he made Jules and Jim. If he'd made it at any other age, it wouldn't be the same movie and probably wouldn't hold the same appeal for so many. Granted, critics of an older age appreciated and praised the film at its release, but for Jules and Jim to grab you, really grab you, and maintain that grip over the years, I think you need to be young when you see it the first time, and that's why Truffaut, not yet 30 but captivated by the novel since 25, had to be young as well. I found this clip on YouTube and knew I had to include it. It's the great actor John Hurt extolling the virtues of Jules and Jim and what an impression it made on him. He was 22 when it opened.
As for Truffaut himself, I don't know what attracts me to him as a filmmaker so much. The obvious answer would be the critic-turned-filmmaker aspect, but it's not as if he stands as the only film critic who made that leap and I certainly don't carry affection for the others as I do him. I'm very mixed on Godard and think Peter Bogdanovich made a single masterpiece. It might be that he seems as if he's the heir to Jean Renoir. On the other hand, my list of favorite filmmakers runs on awhile and few resemble the others exactly. I did think of one connection to another director that I never would have thought of before when watching Jules and Jim this time (or more specifically its extras). As Truffaut time and time again referenced his love of literature and film and why he felt the need to include as much of the novel's prose in the form of narration as he could, that may mark the first time I connected Truffaut to Scorsese, specifically with his wondrous adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, where Joanne Woodward served the Michel Subor role.
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Labels: 60s, Antonioni, Bogdanovich, Criticism, Foreign, Godard, John Hurt, Movie Tributes, Ray Top 100, Renoir, Scorsese, Truffaut, Welles
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Monday, January 23, 2012
The Trier of strife
By Edward Copeland
As Lars von Trier's Melancholia opens, I thought for a moment that the DVD I was watching wasn't his movie but some sort of mashup of images merging von Trier's film, Terrence Malick's more cosmological portions of The Tree of Life and perhaps a little Return of the Jedi thrown in for good measure. (How else do you explain scenes of Kirsten Dunst cavorting beneath a dark hood and sending lightning bolts from her fingers unless it's an homage to Emperor Palpatine?) As for Lars von Trier himself, Melancholia provides more evidence that this emperor has no clothes or, at best, covers his privates with a fig leaf occasionally.
I haven't seen the complete Lars von Trier filmography. I haven't even disliked all of his films I've seen (I did like Dancer in the Dark) and someday I actually would like to watch The Kingdom. I also admit that the idea behind The Five Obstructions intrigues me, since it's not a traditional remake and Martin Scorsese plans to take part in a new version of the experiment.
Now that I've said a few nice things about von Trier, let's get to my problems with the Danish director: Must he make most things such a chore? It's miraculous Emily Watson delivered such a good performance in the teeth-gnashing Breaking the Waves. I think the course for my cinematic relationship with von Trier was set the first time I saw a work by him — Zentropa. My good friend Matt Zoller Seitz summed up that film best when he said he kept expecting Max von Sydow's voicover to start intoning, "You are getting very sleepy" because that's the overriding way Zentropa affected me. It only lacked the image of a swaying pocket watch to put me in a hypnotic trance, but not in the good way some films can but like professional tricksters do where afterward you recall absolutely nothing that transpired.
Last year, von Trier gave us Melancholia, which has been on an awards and nominations spree since the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, hailed by those who confuse piss-poor screenplays lacking the depth of '80s TV perfume commercials as profound, and believe half-baked ideas and cookie-cutter metaphors are insightful. Melancholia reaps rewards from the type of critical reviews that drive me up the wall. While it's true that all opinions about movies are subjective, so no one's positive or negative take on a film can be wrong, these types of assessments put that truism to the test. When boiled down, these write-ups scream, "I have no idea what [insert film here] is about — it must be genius." When you read between those laudatory lines, you detect the whiff of people not being truthful for fear they'll be ridiculed by the intelligentsia if they don't lionize movies such as Melancholia.
Melancholia revolves around two sisters — Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). The film divides itself in two halves, one devoted to each sibling. Part I is titled "Justine" and details the reception being thrown for her and new husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) at the mansion belonging to Claire and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland).
Many consume too much liquor and say things they shouldn't. All sorts of strangeness seems to be transpiring. Justine's boss (Stellan Skarsgård) interrupts the beginning of the reception to try to get all the guests to think of a tagline for his ad campaign. Justine keeps making excuses to disappear and notices a bright star in the sky which John, a noted astronomer, identifies as Antares — only the star eventually vanishes. John explains it's because the "rogue planet" Melancholia has passed in front of it, but he doesn't get around to explaining that to Justine until Part II so her mood just gets worse. One of the many things that amuses me about the pomposity of Melancholia stems from the notion that a new planet would be discovered by astronomers on Earth and they'd name it Melancholia. That's simply because whenever people on Earth find new planets and label them, they always give them cheery names such as Melancholia. I assume it resides in the small Woeisme galaxy that also includes the planets Anhedonia, Fullofhimself and Onemoodysonofabitch.
At least the wedding reception half of the movie includes the two most welcome presences in the film: John Hurt as Justine's sloshed father Dexter and Charlotte Rampling as her bitter, divorced mother Gaby who makes a speech about why she didn't attend the wedding because of her opposition to the institution of marriage. Her character eventually locks herself in a bathroom (perhaps hoping that no one noticed she agreed to appear in the movie) alienating hosts John and Claire because the reception's strict scheduling requires cutting the cake at a certain time. John knocks on the door and pleads with Gaby to come downstairs to view the slicing of the dessert. "When Justine took her first crap on the potty, I wasn't there. When she had her first sexual intercourse, I wasn't there. So give me a break, please, with all your fucking rituals," Gaby tells John through the door.
All of the chaos, much of which Justine causes herself, prompts the wedding planner, played by director/iconoclast Udo Kier, to declare, "She ruined my wedding! I will not look at her!" Besides being badly written, this section reminded me of two vastly superior films. Toward the beginning, the sculpted trees arranged in rows in front of the mansion brought to mind Alain Resnais' incomparable classic Last Year at Marienbad, in which I've been immersed of late in preparation for an upcoming tribute. The second, and more generalized, similarity belongs to a very good work by one of von Trier's fellow Dogme 95 practitioners, Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 film The Celebration. What happened to Vinterberg anyway?
In Part II, titled "Claire," Justine has sunk deep into depression, presumably because she assumed that she was the sole lead of the movie and now her sister has taken over. Claire, who in Part I was annoying and a bit high maintenance about the details of a wedding reception (Justine didn't even throw the bouquet fast enough for her schedule, so Claire took it from her and tossed it herself), now has become obsessed with this rogue planet Melancholia. John assures her that while Melancholia now can be seen by the naked eye, it will pass Earth safely and she needn't fear collision. Claire isn't convinced and fears for the lives of John, Justine and her son Leo (Cameron Spurr). It's an interesting coincidence that two films released in 2011 — this and Another Earth — should both have Earth-like planets appear in the sky out of nowhere, except Another Earth, with a budget of less than $200,000 and no major stars versus Melancholia's $9 million budget and well-known cast, told a better, more moving story and grossed almost exactly half what Melancholia has in the U.S.
John keeps on a brave face for his wife, but he has his concerns as well. Justine thinks that the possibility of the end of the world sounds sort of cool. The two sisters have one exchange of dialogue so ridiculous that I actually laughed out loud at it because it reminded me of the scene in Woody Allen's Love and Death between Woody's Boris and Diane Keaton's Sonja the night before he's going to fight a duel. Boris confesses his love as they discuss death and God, but somehow the talk keeps coming back to closeups of Woody rambling about the harvest and various forms of wheat. "The crops, the grains. Fields of rippling wheat. Wheat. All there is in life is wheat.…Oh, wheat! Lots of wheat! Fields of wheat. A tremendous amount of wheat!…Yellow wheat. Red wheat. Wheat with feathers. Cream of wheat."
I couldn't believe that someone actually put down the Melancholia exchange between Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg in IMDb's memorable quotes section.
JUSTINE: The earth is evil. We don't need to grieve for it.
CLAIRE: What?
JUSTINE: Nobody will miss it.
CLAIRE: But where would Leo grow?
JUSTINE: All I know is, life on earth is evil.
CLAIRE: Then maybe life somewhere else.
JUSTINE: But there isn't.
CLAIRE: How do you know?
JUSTINE: Because I know things.
CLAIRE: Oh yes, you always imagined you did.
JUSTINE: I know we're alone.
CLAIRE: I don't think you know that at all.
JUSTINE: 678. The bean lottery. Nobody guessed the amount of beans in the bottle.
CLAIRE: No, that's right.
JUSTINE: But I know. 678.
CLAIRE:Well, perhaps. But what does that prove?
JUSTINE: That I know things. And when I say we're alone, we're alone. Life is only on earth, and not for long.
What differentiates the sequence in Love and Death from the one in Melancholia though (besides the humor that is) is that Allen's 1975 spoof of Russian literature actually has more significant things to say on the big philosophical issues than Melancholia does. The comedy holds deeper thoughts in its hilarious head than the emptiness of the Melancholia vacuum. Trust me: Rent Love and Death instead of this von Trier time-waster. You'll be better off.
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Labels: 10s, Diane Keaton, Dunst, John Hurt, K. Sutherland, Malick, Rampling, Remakes, Resnais, Scorsese, Von Sydow, von Trier, Woody
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Monday, January 16, 2012
It's about which master you've been serving
By Edward Copeland
I've never read a single novel by John le Carré and I remember when the TV miniseries Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy aired starring Alec Guinness, who was Obi-Wan to me at the time (as well as the blind butler from Murder By Death — I was starting sixth grade — sue me!), but I didn't see it. In college, I did see the movie adaptation of le Carré's novel The Russia House starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, which I thought might be an aberration. I liked it quite a bit, but movies reared me to think spies meant James Bond. Now, that I've seen the outstanding new film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (no commas please), I'm getting the impression that, like Rick and the waters in Casablanca, I was misinformed as to the nature of le Carré's novels. Looking at the film adaptations of his books, I wish I had time to read them now. I can't compare the new film to the TV miniseries or Gary Oldman's performance as George Smiley to Guinness', but I can say that Oldman and the new movie both are damn good.
Tomas Alfredson directed this version of le Carré's tale, marking the Swedish filmmaker's first English-language movie and his first feature since 2008's creepy and moving vampire film Let the Right One In, remade in the U.S. two years later as Let Me In.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy takes place in the early 1970s in the upper echelons of British intelligence (referred to as "The Circus.") The top man, known as Control (John Hurt, in an excellent performance), receives word that a Soviet operative in Budapest wants to switch sides so Control sends agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to Hungary, but the operation goes awry and in the fallout, Control is forced to retire and so is Smiley. Control, already ailing, dies soon afterward. Word gets to Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney), the civil servant in charge of British intelligence via Ricki Tarr, a discredited agent in hiding (Tom Hardy, unrecognizable when compared to his role in Warrior) that the Hungarian mission's objective truly had been to ferret out the truth about Control's suspicions that one of the top men in The Circus actually works for the Soviets as a mole.
Lacon approaches the retired Smiley and asks him to lead a secret probe to determine if the mole exists and, if so, who he is. Smiley enlists the help of a young, still-working agent, Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), and another retired intelligence official Mendel (Roger Lloyd-Pack). Their search of Control's flat uncovers the code names he had given to his suspects, based on the old rhyme, attached to photos taped to chess pieces. Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), who took Control's job as chief, was called Tinker. Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), now Alleline's deputy, was christened Tailor. His close allies Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds) and Toby Esterhase (David Dencik) were Soldier and Poorman, respectively. Smiley, whom Control also suspected, had been named Beggarman.
Bridget O'Connor wrote most of the screenplay until her death from cancer and it was completed by Peter Straughn. Through the taut direction by Alfredson and the carefully constructed screenplay that doesn't always play out in strictly chronological order and lacks major action sequences, Tinker Tailor drips with suspense, helped in no small part by the great ensemble assembled. If the film contains a weakness, it's that the four potential moles aren't developed well enough, particularly Hinds' character. Toby Jones acts his part very well, especially considering that they almost try too hard to make him look guilty. It's interesting to see Jones in a fictional role for a change after playing Karl Rove in W., Swifty Lazar in Frost/Nixon and being the best screen Truman Capote in Infamous. In addition to those already mentioned, there is a brief but memorable appearance by Kathy Burke as another operative who was purged. Burke just doesn't appear in enough movies, but her most memorable performance might be Queen Mary Tudor in Elizabeth opposite Cate Blanchett. If you look closely, you'll spot le Carré himself playing a drunk in a Christmas party scenes. The most amazing thing for viewers of Boardwalk Empire is the chance to hear Stephen Graham use his actual British accent in his role as Jerry Westerby, an intelligence officer monitoring the teletype the night of the Hungarian mission. His look also doesn't remind you remotely of Al Capone. Interestingly enough, one of the film's more important characters, Smiley's wife, never actually appears. The two performances that deserve the most praise are Hurt's brief work as Control, which frankly I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned much in awards talk. The MVP prize undoubtedly goes to Oldman's quiet, reserved work as Smiley.
Since Oldman took the film world by storm in 1986 in Sid & Nancy, he's made some bad movies and been over-the-top at times but he's also done a lot of great work yet his performances seem resistant to recognition from his peers. Granted, I haven't seen all of the top 2011 best actor contenders as of yet, but of what I have, Oldman belongs in that list. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy deserves more notice than it's been receiving as well.
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Labels: 10s, Blanchett, Boardwalk Empire, Books, Capote, Colin Firth, Connery, Fiction, Guinness, John Hurt, Oldman, Pfeiffer
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Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Sailcloth makes final 10
By Edward Copeland
A little while back, when I did a post on three short films in the running for the Academy's live action short Oscar (a minuscule sampling since 107 shorts in total were eligible), I ended up liking two out of the three, but thought that Sailcloth starring John Hurt and written and directed by Elfar Adalsteins was by far the jewel of the three.
The Academy has announced its short list of the 10 films from which the final nominees for the Oscar in the live action short category and Sailcloth is the only of those three films to make the cut and, I might add, deservingly so. Of course, I haven't seen its nine competitors, but I'm glad it's still in the running.
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Labels: 10s, John Hurt, Oscars, Shorts
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Tuesday, November 01, 2011
Short walks on different piers
By Edward Copeland
Throughout the years when I truly harbored an Oscar obsession, I seldom had an opportunity to see any of the nominees for best live action short or even the winner. Recently, I happened to have been contacted by representatives of three short films that have all qualified to be a potential nominee for the 2011 award, though we have no idea if any or all of the shorts will even make the preliminary cut let alone the final list at this point. Rather by coincidence or something in the air, the three films share some common traits: each features an Oscar-nominated performer (in one case, a winner), each deals, to some extent, with ways people escape and all three feature piers and bodies of water, even if only in passing. What fascinated me the most was the huge differences in running times. To qualify in the category, you have to be less than 40 minutes long. These films clock times that run about a half-hour, 18 minutes and six minutes in length. I'm reviewing them alphabetically, which happens to coincide from shortest to longest.
AFRICAN CHELSEA
Six minutes wouldn't seem like much time to tell a story or create a character, but writer-director Brent Roske more or less accomplishes this through the use of the third skill he employs on his short African Chelsea: editing. (He filmed it as well.) In that brief amount of time, Roske manages to tell his complete story through the judicious cutting of quick shots whose juxtaposition and order let us know what we need to about the character of Chelsea (Corinne Becker), a young woman who fled her dysfunctional homelife to live alone and work as an exotic dancer.
The home she ran away from is headed by her overbearing mother Anna (Sally Kirkland, 1987 best actress nominee for a completely unrelated Anna). Playing the third character who carries any significance is Tosa Oghbagado as Tosa, the bodyguard for the dancers at the club in which Chelsea works. Kirkland also wrote and sings the short's recurring song "Indian Man."
While you might expect the editing to be frenetic from beginning to end, African Chelsea contains frequent slow, sometimes moving passages. The short played at Cannes and has earned praise from a wide-range of sources, including none other television pioneer Norman Lear (All in the Family), who hailed it as a "wonderful film" and called Baker "a lovely actress."
Roske received a Daytime Emmy nomination in 2006 with director Chuck Bowman in the category of outstanding achievement in video content for nontraditional delivery platforms for Sophie Chase. Anyone who would like to watch African Chelsea can see it for free at IMDb here.
SAILCLOTH
While writer-director Elfar Adalsteins' Sailcloth might be nearly three times as long as African Chelsea, the six-minute short could contain about 300 times as much dialogue. Actually, I'm not being mathematically truthful with that statement for there isn't any dialogue in Sailcloth. Then again, when your film focuses on the wonderfully expressive face of the actor John Hurt, who needs words anyway?
The 71-year-old two-time Oscar nominee (for best supporting actor in Alan Parker's 1978 film Midnight Express and for best actor in David Lynch's 1980 take on The Elephant Man) plays an unnamed resident of a nursing home in Sailcloth. Our first glimpse of him pans on his aged hand as a nurse checks his pulse while he lies in bed. Her simple action awakens the man to a fully vibrant state and soon he's out of bed, shaving, dressing and doing some other things I best not share because part of the short's joy comes from deciphering the man's motives and the movie's direction.
Granted, eventually what the man has in mind becomes clear, but until we get there, Adalsteins steers us between moments of humor as well as poignancy, all played pitch perfectly through Hurt's masterful facial expressions. He never utters a word, though he does let out a laugh at one point. Adalsteins' writing and direction couldn't be better served than they are by Hurt. The filmmaker also gets help from Karl Oskarsson's cinematography.
If Sailcloth contains any element that works against it, that would be the original score by Richard Cottle, which has a tendency to underline the mood of every moment in which its music plays. Sailcloth would work just as well — if not better — if its score were less obvious or not noticeable at all. In one of the film's best sequences involving Hurt, a bathroom, a cigar and an umbrella, the score isn't used at all and by using solely the natural sounds of the environs, the sequence delights even further.
Sailcloth received the Grand Jury Prize as best short film at the Rhode Island Film Festival and was an official selection at the Raindance Film Festival in London. It has been named an official selection for the Brest European Short Film Festival to be held Nov. 8-13 in France. The short, which was filmed in the coastal village of St Mawes in Cornwall will return to the region for the Cornwall Film Festival this Friday-Sunday for a screening and Q&A. It also has been named an official selection of the St. Louis International Film Festival to be held Nov. 13-23.
THE SEA IS ALL I KNOW
The longest of the three shorts stars Melissa Leo, last year's Oscar winner for best supporting actress for The Fighter and an Emmy nominee this year for her work in the HBO miniseries adaptation of Mildred Pierce. (Of course, Leo was snubbed by the Emmys for the second year in a row for her best work — as Toni Bernette on the criminally neglected HBO drama Treme.)
Leo plays Sara, the primary caregiver for her daughter Angelina (Kelly Hutchinson), who is dying of an unspecified disease. Sara gets an unwelcome visit from her estranged fisherman husband Sonny (Peter Gerety). The Sea Is All I Know marks a reunion of sorts for Gerety and Leo as both were regulars on the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street, though not at the same time. However, the story that introduced Gerety's Stu Gharty character did have Gerety as a guest interact with Leo's memorable Detective Kay Howard.
As if Sara and Sonny's relationship weren't already fraught with tension, a new debate and crisis arises as Angelina begs her parents to help her end her life. It not only sparks a new argument between the two over the issue of dying with dignity but ignites questions of faith and spirituality within each of them as well. Leo, as you would expect, turns in a solid performance, but for me Gerety ends up as the standout here. It especially comes out when he's discussing his problems with fellow fishermen Ghent (Michael Graves). Sonny says that it just isn't right for a child to die before the parent and Ghent comments, "Who are we to understand the reason for our suffering? Jesus suffered." This sets Sonny off and Gerety performs the speech masterfully. “Fuck that! Fuck that! I don’t want to hear about Jesus suffering. For how long? A couple of hours? Just for a few hours? You know what I think? Jesus suffered because his friends abandoned him. Jesus suffered because God abandoned him for a few hours. You look at my baby up there — suffering in that house for months. You look over, you see people eatin’ shit all their lives — that’s suffering. Jesus suffered — it ain’t natural to send your own son to the gallows.” Gerety’s speech, for me anyway, ends up being the film’s best moment.
The Sea Is All I Know was written, directed, co-produced and even partly scored by Jordan Bayne who, prior to turning to filmmaking, worked as an actress since the 1990s. Anyone who has read me on a regular basis knows how important a topic Death With Dignity is to me, being bedridden myself. While the short certainly has strong performances, I believe it has the misfortune of coming on the heels of two superior works that looked at the subject: You Don't Know Jack, the HBO biographical film about Jack Kevorkian starring Al Pacino and the superb HBO documentary How to Die in Oregon.
What separates the long-form biographical feature and the documentary and make them superior to The Sea Is All I Know while covering similar subject matter is that the other two films tackle the issue without getting bogged down in melodramatic flourishes. The short film does it to such an extent that the issue becomes a sidenote. Sara mentions Angelina's desire to Sonny once and he objects. The two then have separate theological moments, a confrontation about their own relationship, end up in bed together and then seem to be feeding her a fatal elixir. If there were a ccnversation between them settling the matter or even something that said explicitly what state they lived in or how they would obtain the lethal dose, the short omits that scene. There is no volunteer from any agency assisting them with their daughter's final exit as there would be in most states that have had the foresight to legalize Death With Dignity.
Perhaps The Sea Is All I Know plays differently to people who aren't as familiar with the issue as I am, but the distractions and discrepancies took me out of the short with the exception of that one great Gerety speech. When it premiered at the Palm Springs International ShortFest, it was awarded Best of Fest by the audience and Melissa Leo won the Grand Jury Prize for best actress at the Rhode Island Film Festival, the festival where Sailcloth won the Grand Jury Prize for best short. I believe those Rhode Island voters recognized the same things I did since of the two shorts (though I assume others I haven't seen also competed), the better short won.
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Throughout the years when I truly harbored an Oscar obsession, I seldom had an opportunity to see any of the nominees for best live action short or even the winner. Recently, I happened to have been contacted by representatives of three short films that have all qualified to be a potential nominee for the 2011 award, though we have no idea if any or all of the shorts will even make the preliminary cut let alone the final list at this point. Rather by coincidence or something in the air, the three films share some common traits: each features an Oscar-nominated performer (in one case, a winner), each deals, to some extent, with ways people escape and all three feature piers and bodies of water, even if only in passing. What fascinated me the most was the huge differences in running times. To qualify in the category, you have to be less than 40 minutes long. These films clock times that run about a half-hour, 18 minutes and six minutes in length. I'm reviewing them alphabetically, which happens to coincide from shortest to longest.
Six minutes wouldn't seem like much time to tell a story or create a character, but writer-director Brent Roske more or less accomplishes this through the use of the third skill he employs on his short African Chelsea: editing. (He filmed it as well.) In that brief amount of time, Roske manages to tell his complete story through the judicious cutting of quick shots whose juxtaposition and order let us know what we need to about the character of Chelsea (Corinne Becker), a young woman who fled her dysfunctional homelife to live alone and work as an exotic dancer.
The home she ran away from is headed by her overbearing mother Anna (Sally Kirkland, 1987 best actress nominee for a completely unrelated Anna). Playing the third character who carries any significance is Tosa Oghbagado as Tosa, the bodyguard for the dancers at the club in which Chelsea works. Kirkland also wrote and sings the short's recurring song "Indian Man."
While you might expect the editing to be frenetic from beginning to end, African Chelsea contains frequent slow, sometimes moving passages. The short played at Cannes and has earned praise from a wide-range of sources, including none other television pioneer Norman Lear (All in the Family), who hailed it as a "wonderful film" and called Baker "a lovely actress."
Roske received a Daytime Emmy nomination in 2006 with director Chuck Bowman in the category of outstanding achievement in video content for nontraditional delivery platforms for Sophie Chase. Anyone who would like to watch African Chelsea can see it for free at IMDb here.
While writer-director Elfar Adalsteins' Sailcloth might be nearly three times as long as African Chelsea, the six-minute short could contain about 300 times as much dialogue. Actually, I'm not being mathematically truthful with that statement for there isn't any dialogue in Sailcloth. Then again, when your film focuses on the wonderfully expressive face of the actor John Hurt, who needs words anyway?
The 71-year-old two-time Oscar nominee (for best supporting actor in Alan Parker's 1978 film Midnight Express and for best actor in David Lynch's 1980 take on The Elephant Man) plays an unnamed resident of a nursing home in Sailcloth. Our first glimpse of him pans on his aged hand as a nurse checks his pulse while he lies in bed. Her simple action awakens the man to a fully vibrant state and soon he's out of bed, shaving, dressing and doing some other things I best not share because part of the short's joy comes from deciphering the man's motives and the movie's direction.
Granted, eventually what the man has in mind becomes clear, but until we get there, Adalsteins steers us between moments of humor as well as poignancy, all played pitch perfectly through Hurt's masterful facial expressions. He never utters a word, though he does let out a laugh at one point. Adalsteins' writing and direction couldn't be better served than they are by Hurt. The filmmaker also gets help from Karl Oskarsson's cinematography.
If Sailcloth contains any element that works against it, that would be the original score by Richard Cottle, which has a tendency to underline the mood of every moment in which its music plays. Sailcloth would work just as well — if not better — if its score were less obvious or not noticeable at all. In one of the film's best sequences involving Hurt, a bathroom, a cigar and an umbrella, the score isn't used at all and by using solely the natural sounds of the environs, the sequence delights even further.
Sailcloth received the Grand Jury Prize as best short film at the Rhode Island Film Festival and was an official selection at the Raindance Film Festival in London. It has been named an official selection for the Brest European Short Film Festival to be held Nov. 8-13 in France. The short, which was filmed in the coastal village of St Mawes in Cornwall will return to the region for the Cornwall Film Festival this Friday-Sunday for a screening and Q&A. It also has been named an official selection of the St. Louis International Film Festival to be held Nov. 13-23.
The longest of the three shorts stars Melissa Leo, last year's Oscar winner for best supporting actress for The Fighter and an Emmy nominee this year for her work in the HBO miniseries adaptation of Mildred Pierce. (Of course, Leo was snubbed by the Emmys for the second year in a row for her best work — as Toni Bernette on the criminally neglected HBO drama Treme.)
Leo plays Sara, the primary caregiver for her daughter Angelina (Kelly Hutchinson), who is dying of an unspecified disease. Sara gets an unwelcome visit from her estranged fisherman husband Sonny (Peter Gerety). The Sea Is All I Know marks a reunion of sorts for Gerety and Leo as both were regulars on the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street, though not at the same time. However, the story that introduced Gerety's Stu Gharty character did have Gerety as a guest interact with Leo's memorable Detective Kay Howard.
As if Sara and Sonny's relationship weren't already fraught with tension, a new debate and crisis arises as Angelina begs her parents to help her end her life. It not only sparks a new argument between the two over the issue of dying with dignity but ignites questions of faith and spirituality within each of them as well. Leo, as you would expect, turns in a solid performance, but for me Gerety ends up as the standout here. It especially comes out when he's discussing his problems with fellow fishermen Ghent (Michael Graves). Sonny says that it just isn't right for a child to die before the parent and Ghent comments, "Who are we to understand the reason for our suffering? Jesus suffered." This sets Sonny off and Gerety performs the speech masterfully. “Fuck that! Fuck that! I don’t want to hear about Jesus suffering. For how long? A couple of hours? Just for a few hours? You know what I think? Jesus suffered because his friends abandoned him. Jesus suffered because God abandoned him for a few hours. You look at my baby up there — suffering in that house for months. You look over, you see people eatin’ shit all their lives — that’s suffering. Jesus suffered — it ain’t natural to send your own son to the gallows.” Gerety’s speech, for me anyway, ends up being the film’s best moment.
The Sea Is All I Know was written, directed, co-produced and even partly scored by Jordan Bayne who, prior to turning to filmmaking, worked as an actress since the 1990s. Anyone who has read me on a regular basis knows how important a topic Death With Dignity is to me, being bedridden myself. While the short certainly has strong performances, I believe it has the misfortune of coming on the heels of two superior works that looked at the subject: You Don't Know Jack, the HBO biographical film about Jack Kevorkian starring Al Pacino and the superb HBO documentary How to Die in Oregon.
What separates the long-form biographical feature and the documentary and make them superior to The Sea Is All I Know while covering similar subject matter is that the other two films tackle the issue without getting bogged down in melodramatic flourishes. The short film does it to such an extent that the issue becomes a sidenote. Sara mentions Angelina's desire to Sonny once and he objects. The two then have separate theological moments, a confrontation about their own relationship, end up in bed together and then seem to be feeding her a fatal elixir. If there were a ccnversation between them settling the matter or even something that said explicitly what state they lived in or how they would obtain the lethal dose, the short omits that scene. There is no volunteer from any agency assisting them with their daughter's final exit as there would be in most states that have had the foresight to legalize Death With Dignity.
Perhaps The Sea Is All I Know plays differently to people who aren't as familiar with the issue as I am, but the distractions and discrepancies took me out of the short with the exception of that one great Gerety speech. When it premiered at the Palm Springs International ShortFest, it was awarded Best of Fest by the audience and Melissa Leo won the Grand Jury Prize for best actress at the Rhode Island Film Festival, the festival where Sailcloth won the Grand Jury Prize for best short. I believe those Rhode Island voters recognized the same things I did since of the two shorts (though I assume others I haven't seen also competed), the better short won.
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Labels: 10s, A. Parker, Awards, Documentary, HBO, Homicide, John Hurt, Lynch, Melissa Leo, N. Lear, Oscars, Pacino, Shorts, Treme
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