A bird’s eye view — with some well-deserved attention to detail — of 2011’s best flicks
By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald staff
With few exceptions, movie distribution and exhibition do not always meet filmgoers’ expectations. You see, apart from quality, timeliness is also of utter relevance when it comes to film openings.
The general impression is that the higher the expectation and the longer the wait, the highest expectations will run. Correct as the perception may sound, technology has made it possible — over the last few years — to abate cinephiles’ burning desire for promised, long-awaited goodies.
It’s the fast, easy access to HD trailers and samples on the Web we’re talking here. Availability having gone global, distributors would do well not to hold back new releases until the filmgoing season is in full swing — namely, autumn and winter, and the early months of spring.
True, distributors do not conduct their business based solely on a whim — they depend on screen availability and tough competition for a slot in the exhibitors’ schedule. The sinergy between both sectors, if and when it materializes, normally works wonders.
Looking back on as far as January and February this year — feels like ages ago, doesn’t it, so much has happened here and elsewhere — we were blessed by the sages, who gave a proper release date to two extraordinary movies: The King’s Speech and Somewhere.
SPEECHLESS
It was a royal treat to see British actor Colin Firth on back-to-back winning performances: in Tom Ford’s A Single Man, a memorable adaptation of a Christopher Isherwood novel-memoir. Come Oscar time, Mr. Firth was pitted against Jeff Bridges in the unremarkable Crazy Heart. Firth lost his statuette to Bridges, and this year they were once again vying for the trophy.
Justice was made when Firth won Best Actor for his role as Albert, Duke of York, the future King George VI, the royal stammerer who overcame his speech impediment to steer a nation and an empire toward leadership in times of world turmoil.
Plagued by dreaded stammer and unsure personality, and considered unfit to be king, Albert was never expected to reach the throne. His elder brother, the easy-going and charming Edward (Guy Pearce) was first in line to the crown.
For Bertie, the Duke of York, Edward’s abdication was sheer tragedy. He had never expected or wished to be King, in the same manner that his wife, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (Elena Bonham-Carter) loathed any prospective royal duties.
As retold in The King’s Speech — and this is one of the film’s wisest choices — Elizabeth comes out as an adoring, downright, practical and courageous woman. Indeed, Elizabeth, accurately reckoning that there was no honourable way out for her husband to avoid the duties of a King, bravely decided to give her husband the support he couldn’t muster for himself.
The extraordinarily gifted actor Colin Firth makes the transition from stammer to aplomb, turning The King’s Speech into a moving account of how a man, divested of his royal dignity, accepts medical treatment and vocal training.
But The King’s Speech is much, much more than a moralizing story of how good will leads to success. It is a long, arduous and painful journey — the transmogrification of an unsure man into a true leader.
Rather than a drill in elocution and proper enunciation, The King’s Speech, with its royal command of narrative and extraordinary ensemble performances, is a profound lesson in humanity.
SOMEWHERE.
Literature students at any level are almost always asked to define in one sentence what a novel, short story, play or poem boil down to beyond plotline twists and characterization. In this regard, Sofia Coppola’s little cinematic gem Somewhere (2010) may prove a hard nut to crack. Somewhere is so richly minimalistic that it may well be condensed as “glamorous action movie star learns to see the emptiness of his life through the eyes of his 10-year-old child.” No more, no less.
Far from contrived, Somewhere may be deemed pedestrian in terms of linear storytelling. However, reflecting as it does Ms. Coppola’s own Hollywood / nomadic upbringing courtesy of her father, Francis Ford Coppola, Somewhere leaves self-referential games aside to examine, with rarely seen depth, the musings of a man on the edge of 40 who refuses to grow up.
In Sofia Coppola’s world there’s an impersonal yet comfortable element called a non-place, the epitome of which are, of course, hotels, synonym with things transient and life on the move. As a lifestyle choice, hotels — the ones you stay at temporarily or as a permanent home — are the closest embodiment of the Billie Holliday aching assertion that she’s travelling light to unburden the heavy weight of loss. Delightfully convenient and cozy, Sofia Coppola envisions hotels as a strange combination of non-place and home.
Looking back to Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2005), in which the Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson characters find their true selves in the empty shell of an ultramodern concrete and glass hotel tower in neon-lit Tokyo, Somewhere is the logical closure to a splendid duology about existential malaise and the mutual comfort shared by two strangers who create a tight bond out of their need for human connection.
Briefly told, Somewhere’s plotline is disquietingly and comfortably close to Lost in Translation: Ms. Coppola’s affinity with non-places and her sweetly ironical view of mundane affairs collides with her characters’ unease.
In Somewhere, two people (part-time father and part-time daughter) rejoice in their shared taste for leisure and guilty pleasures. But Leo (Elle Fanning) is a rather neglected ten-year old child, and Johnny, her movie star father (Stephen Dorff), in his late 30s, still plays make believe on and offscreen.
When his daughter Cleo arrives for a weekend stay with her dad, there’s not much of a change in Johnny’s routine, save for the addition of Cleo’s Playstation and other toys. But Cleo’s short stay is stretched to several weeks after her mother unexpectedly announces that she needs some time off for herself. Ever the roguish kind, Johnny takes Cleo on a life-changing and mutually affecting journey.
It is through the eyes of Cleo that the infantile Johnny begins to understand that his carefree, homme jeune lifestyle cannot last forever, and that he’s been missing out on his daughter’s childhood.
Ms. Coppola’s social and personal observation powers are seen through chunks of individual lives’ routines. These are present as much in L.I.T. as in Nowhere, er, that is, Somewhere, which could, in turn, be Johnny Marco’s own Everywhere. There’s no two ways about Somewhere: you either hate it viscerally for its apparently motionless pace, or you embrace it for its loveable candor and sweetly aching intensity.
FLYING COWS.
After his directorial début La suerte está echada (2005), screenwriter-producer-director Sebastián Borensztein came up with the highly original Un cuento chino, a perfect example of how to turn a trite, cliched and formulaic story into an appetizing commodity.
Defying almost every narrative convention, Borensztein clearly calls the shots when it comes to rethinking and reshaping the simplest plotline into the synthesis of all that’s needed to make an old sales pitch as fascinating as when first heard.
Borensztein’s Un cuento chino, starring the amazingly versatile actor Ricardo Darín, has all the makings of just another conman’s tale: it is grandiose at the outset, and impressive and jaw-dropping as it moves on.
Like any efficient narrative, Un cuento chino negotiates the terms of mutual understanding between filmmaker and audiences by laying out the bare facts in the simplest of manners.
The lead character, Roberto (Darín) is presented for who he is: your average guy from the block, around 50, the owner of a hardware store who goes grumpily about business in general and about life in particular.
Ordinary man, ordinary life. Unbelievably odd circumstance makes the irritable Roberto and a newly arrived Chinese immigrant the strangest bedfellows. What follows is the essence of Un cuento chino — an intriguing, risible comedy with perfect timing, impeccably choreographed by director Borensztein.
Unjustifiably passed off for consideration as Argentina’s submission for the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture (it lost to the horrendous Aballay, el hombre sin miedo), Un cuento chino spins an expected yarn, adding new textures of drama to a sidesplitting comedy. In classical fashion, the two genres (drama and comedy) converge on a place called “perfectly executed drama-cum-comedy.” A true winner.
THE MORAL DILEMMA.
With no publicity machinery behind it and relying only on word-of-mouth praise and recommendation, Santiago Mitre’s independently-produced El estudiante took no time to become the hottest ticket in town in spite of its limited release.
At a time of political apathy and disbelief, it is as though El estu - diante, with its poignant story about political activism, elicited an irrepressible need to discuss it at length, to check out whether or not one’s views coincide with one’s peers, regardless of political leaning or affiliation.
At first glance, El estudiante, scripted by the director himself, is structured around the same good old narrative pattern: rise and fall, loss of innocence, the apparently inexorable road to corruption of somebody who learns the hard way that there’s no room in this world for utopias or ideology. As if the ghost of Francis Fukuyama had returned to haunt us back.
The estudiante in question, Roque Espinosa (a rousing, moving performance by actor Esteban Lamothe) is the embodiment of William Blake’s Lamb, to give you an obvious literary reference.
Neither lamb nor tiger, Roque Espinosa must find a way to shake off his all-pervading apathy. At first, his only obsession is jumping from bed to bed with fellow students. But there comes a fateful day when he stumbles upon a beautiful assistant teacher, Paula Castillo, an ardent believer in action as the engine for social change. Paula informs Roque with the kind of self-questioning that shakes anyone’s convictions. Roque, now lover-student, feels the imperative need for commitment to a cause.
An accurate depiction of students’ political activism and struggle for power El estudiante has a thought-provoking kind of analysis that, without overemphasis, sends us back to the days when consensus and dissent were the two faces of sociopolitical concern, opening half-closed eyes to the shattering realization that conviction grows as much from honest belief as it does from personal convenience. The social phenomenon surrounding El estudiante is due, most likely, to the self-questioning that reflects the audiences’ very own need for commitment.
WOODY MEETS SCOTTY.
Once the definitive Manhattanite who never crossed the Brooklyn Bridge — as if Brooklyn and farther off territories were off bounds — filmmaker Woody Allen, due to personal problems made public, had to flee to Europe.
Allen-Paris is a match made in Heaven (remember his remarkably alluring love paean to Paris entitled Everyone Says I Love You?). Leaving behind his neurotic, self-inflicted misanthropy, his half-comic fear of imminent death at every turn and his profoundly anti-American bitterness, Mr. Allen’s Midnight in Paris is a gem you do no want to miss.
At first sight, the film looks no different than a glossy tourism brochure. Nothing wrong with that, for Mr. Allen bathes Paris in a glowing light, so magical and spellbinding that it makes viewers promise themselves that their next travel destination will be Paris. Mr. Allen’s Paris, that is.
With slight variations, most Allen characters during his US phase were self-replicating, ruminating little men for whom New York functioned as an umbilical cord located at the centre of the universe.
Perennially typecast as a moronic loser, comedian Owen Wilson landed the role of a lifetime in Mr. Allen’s Midnight in Paris, as a novelist suffering from near-chronic writer’s block.
In Mr. Allen’s imaginary Parisian scenario, his alter ego ambles the streets of Montmartre and makes the acquaintance of the whole roster of the artists and intellectuals who sought refuge there in the 1920s. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda? They’re there, of course, as are Picasso, Dalí, Gauguin, Toulouse Lautrec, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway. Avoiding the repetitious foibles and eccentricities of his previous alter egos, Mr. Allen presents us with ridiculously obvious scenes in an enrapturing manner.
An unforgettable odyssey and epiphany, if you ask me.
IL VERO NANNI.
Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti (Caro diario, 1993; La stanza del figlio, 2001) has often been compared with Woody Allen, mostly on account of his humorously self-deprecating leads, almost always played by himself. If Moretti’s summertime scooter rides-ruminations were as pervasively insightful as they were hilarious, then Habemus Papam (2011) is heresy in that it posits psychoanalysis as the last resource to cure a depressed Pope.
Moretti’s take on the Catholic Church’s unbreakable mandates starts out as a comedy full of pungent, sardonic, acid humour, and goes on to perform all the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church with an earth-shattering approach.
Habemus Papam, fortunately, is an intelligently articulated vision of things sacred. In veritable Catholic fashion, the film starts out with interior monologues easily equated with the culpable musings of bishops gathered to get to pick a new Pope from among themselves.
Enter Moretti’s unorthodox psicoanalista and the new Pope, frightful and emotionally unstable, tries to confront his demons. Once again, Mr. Moretti proves that he has been blessed with an uncanny talent to turn the trite into an appetizingly sinful dish.
A benediction, anyone?
FATHER & SON REUNION.
Made on a shoestring budget by a crew of two (director and cameraman-sound recordist), Alamar, by Mexico’s Pedro González Rubio, is a delicious, beautiful, deceivingly simple depiction of a rite of passage.
Shot in the breathtaking Chinchorrillo coral reef reserve, Alamar stars three generations of real-life folk — granpa, dad and grandson — as they enjoy the first, and may be the last, opportunity to spend time together. Alamar is about a blissful reunion and the painful, inexorable fact of life that all things, good and bad, must pass. If tears roll down your eyes by the time Alamar’s 73-minute run come to an end, it’s simply because the film is laceratingly beautiful.
DANCE AWAY THE HEARTACHES.
The sinergy between dancer-choreographer Pina Bausch and filmmaker Wim Wenders is like an angelic conversation between two larger-than-life artists.
Tapping into and then adapting German expressionism, which swept all art forms in Weimar Germany and 1920s Vienna, Bausch, with her innovative technique and creative process, created an elaborate form of composition and performance that came to be known asTanztheater, or “dance-theatre.”
In spite of the understandable efforts to conceptualizeTanztheater, Bausch’s creation is more than just a “blend” of dance and dramatic elements traditionally associated with the theatre.
Bausch’s best known dance-theatre work is perhaps the nostalgia-ridden, melancholy Café Müller (1978), an unconventional piece in which dancers swirl around themselves and their fellow performers, crashing against tables and chairs — the material representation of everything that grounds our bodies and souls. No less remarkable and thrilling is Rite of Spring (1975), a suavely provocative staging introducing the notion that carnal urges and spiritual quests are not necessarily at odds.
Wenders’ Pina, is a compact, eloquent biopic that, in formal terms, does not seem to veer off the trodden path. On closer scrutiny, however, you realize that the combination and editing of footage of Bausch in conversation and talking straight to the camera, and the devastatingly beautiful fragments from the seminal Café Müller and The Rite of Spring are one single, dazzling piece about loss and sorrow, affliction and resurrection.
Pina is palpable evidence that Wenders has reached the pinnacle of his creativity and craftsmanship, leaving any form of accoutrement aside.
Pina Bausch was quoted as asking, “What are we longing for? Where does all this yearning come from?”
Although her collaboration with Wenders provides no explicit answer, Pina does come close to elucidating existential questions we rarely dare ask ourselves.
MEDITERRANEAN CINEMA.
The three films hailing from the mediterranean province of Córdoba — De Caravana, Hipólito and El invierno de los raros — are the ones that nearly got away.
Spearheading the threesome release, Rosendo Ruiz’s De caravana resorts to an often used — sometimes overused and misused — narrative device.
De caravana, set against the background of a show by the legendary cuarteto singer Carlos “La Mona” Jiménez, follows an upper class young man turned impromptu photographer in search of an answer to social stratification issues. De caravana, with its unpretentious yet pungent exploration of an underworld close to the surface — too close for comfort — is a wild, joyous travelogue through the divides that hold together the multidimensional sides of folk like us.
The second feature in the Córdoba “trilogy,”Hipólito, by Teodoro Ciampagna, switches from cuarteto celebration of the here and now to a historical event — the so-called “década infame,” during which political confrontation resulted in horrendous bloodshed. Odd as it may sound, Hipólito is no different from De caravana in its distant-close approach to different themes and genres.
Wrapping up the trilogy, Rodrigo Guerrero’s El invierno de los raros bears a mesmerizing title but carries a forthright message, if you like the kind of introspection commonly associated with the New Argentine Cinema. El invierno de los raros, however, does not quite fit the mould.
Strangely formatted but irresistibly compelling, the “raros” in question are ordinary townsfolk who choose to perform rather than question their actions. Although none of these people could be labelled “non-conformists,” it’s quite evident that, deep inside, they’re all seeking some form of fulfillment that constantly eludes them. Dull and grey on the surface, El invierno de los raros comes full circle with an unexpected final outburst of “cuarteto” joie de vivre.
Need we say that we want more, ye Córdoba filmmakers?
