As I stated in my earlier post, I wanted to post some reviews of earlier films at this year’s 45th New York Film Festival.
One of these is ‘Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon, or ‘The Romance of Astrea and Celadon,’ by the 87-year-old Eric Rohmer. Rohmer’s adaptation of the book by Honore d’Urfe (which many of us read in high school) is incredibly gorgeous; this early-17th century imagination of “what life was like in the 5th century” is as close to an idyll on screen as you may ever see. The shepherd Celadon flirts with another girl at a dance, devastating his love, the shepherdess Astree. Her dismay breaks his poetic heart, and he washes himself down-river, only to be awakened by the daughters of a Druid priest. He gradually is coaxed out of his melancholy and reunites with his love, all while living in self-imposed exile and dedicating his misery to his love. The film’s stylized acting and scenery may not be everyone’s idea of an evening or afternoon at the movies, but this is a real gem in what may be Rohmer’s last film.
Another adaptation of a well-known book, Ira Sachs’ ‘Married Life,’ shared a different level of stylization from Rohmer’s film, setting what is a very English story in late-1940’s Seattle. The book, ‘Five Roundabouts to Heaven,’ was written by John Bingham, who was John Le Carre’s mentor at MI5, and later became the model for the Le Carre character Smiley. Sachs’ adaptation is so incredibly forced, and his period touches overblown (why is it that every music supervisor working in the industry today has to ensure that characters are listening to music on their car radios that would never have been played on radio, let alone actually listened to by its characters?), like the hot boogie-woogie music and late-deco clothes and interiors that almost threaten to swallow the performances.
Great screen talent goes wasted here, as Pierce Brosnan plays the narrator and friend, Richard, of Chris Cooper’s Harry Allen, who is having an affair with young war-widow Kay, played by Rachel McAdams. The long-suffering wife of Harry, Pat, played by Patricia Clarkson (who said, at the Q&A, that she has played so many period movie wives that she practically has “whale-bone corset” woven into her frame) is reduced to a stock character. Essentially, what is an English story is unsuccessfully transplanted to the Pacific Northwest, with none of the charm, wit, and dash that would bring out the characters’ sly interior motives. I found it hilarious that Patricia Clarkson confessed that she took the job mainly to work with Pierce Brosnan, as that was certainly our draw for seeing the film. Anyone who has caught Brosnan’s work in recent years, particularly in films such as ‘Matador,’ ‘The Tailor of Panama,’ and his masterful remake of ‘The Thomas Crown Affair,’ will not be disappointed by his seductive turn as a womanizer who can still be a true “friend.”
Chris Cooper does not particularly shine here; no fault of his own, given the direction and the character he plays, which is wrong for his intense delivery. It is hard to see an actor who is so inherently combustible play a slow-burning, spiraling (again, very British) character of this sort. His performance is reminiscent of Dennis Quaid in the soppy ‘Far From Heaven,’ in which a strong type is made to play a 1950’s suburban husband and father (who, in that film, is secretly homosexual). ‘Far From Heaven,’ directed by Todd Haynes, imagines that the post-war middle-class striving family has more than a few skeletons in its closet and stretches credulity to make extreme points about the status quo. With ‘Married Life,’ another revisionist work by Ira Sachs seeks to, in this case unsuccessfully, comment on (his mother’s) milieu through the distorted lens of a quintessentially British story. I would like to see a moratorium placed on gay American film directors making hackneyed commentaries on how “everyone lived” in America before the Stonewall riots. If they should choose to do this, they should at least watch the excellent ‘Mad Men’ series on the AMC cable network (created by the very gay Matthew Weiner, of ‘Sopranos’ fame, who has no problem unsentimentally showing life as it was in 1960 New York).
On another plane altogether, the Romanian film ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,’ received its first U.S. screening at the festival. The harrowing tale, set in the latter days of the Ceaucescu regime, details characters Otilia and Gabita trying to carry out an illegal abortion in a hotel room in an undisclosed Romanian city (the film was actually shot in Bucharest). The tension that is established in the opening scene carries throughout, as time plays a crucial role in determining how the characters escape detection by the police, and their friends and families. Abortion was outlawed in Romania for most of Ceaucescu’s regime, and setting the film just prior to the dictator’s downfall in 1989 makes for an even more compelling environment of paranoia and repression.
Anamaria Marinca, who plays Otilia, displays the frightened lead character as a revolutionary, aiding her best friend and college roommate, Gabita, played by Laura Vasiliu, without sentiment. She is able to balance her relationship with boyfriend Adi, and his family in a manner that requires her to suppress real emotion while, at the same time, betraying herself constantly. She seems to be the only person who understands the real import of her surroundings; deft, defiant, and loyal to a fault. The backyard abortionist who cons the two girls in the hotel room epitomizes the Soviet system, in which lawlessness is only buffeted by brutality.
This harrowing scene is book-ended by Otilia having sex with the abortionist, as part of the underground bargain, and Gabita’s anxiety over the procedure. The use of natural light, and the feeling of eternal darkness are wonderfully captured by director Cristian Mungiu, who conveys the reality of persistent suffering Twenty years after the film’s setting, Romania is now perhaps best known as a center for “runaway” Hollywood productions, and success as a back-office for European I.T. services. Having visited Romania in 1998 – when the Romanian lei was on the verge of collapse, and prior to the country’s entry into the European Union – I can attest that the tone of Mungiu’s film resonates strongly with a country searching for identity and trust in any kind of future. He has made as powerful a portrait of life under Soviet dictatorship as we may ever see, and the film’s award of the Palmes d’Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival may herald a new wave of Romanian filmmakers, not least of which is Mungiu himself.
Mungiu’s capture of a birthday party scene, at which Otilia visits his boyfriends’ parent’s apartment, is masterful, with off-camera dialogue woven into the title character’s claustrophobic place at the table. The silence of the public Romania is contrasted with wildly outspoken views at the dinner table. Mungiu and Marinca appeared at the film’s Q&A, and Mungiu explained the setting for the film, with the background of a rampant black-market and grey-market economy, rampant poverty, and official silence. The abortion sub-text, he explained, was both literal (estimates are that illegal abortions caused more than 500,000 deaths) and figurative (Ceaucescu wanted a large country of “soldiers” to fight for his regime). He also noted that, in Europe, only Poland today has outlawed abortion. We will be hearing more from him in coming years.
In another look back to the 1980s, with strong contemporary resonance, Ridley Scott’s “definitive” director’s final cut of the seminal ‘Blade Runner’ was screened at this festival, and it is worth seeing on the big screen.
While Warner Bros. has been flogging its tireless restoration work and its 5-disc DVD (available in standard definition, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray) set due out for the holidays (that’s right, count ‘em, 5 discs – original theatrical film, working print, 1992 restoration of the film, 2007 “definitive” cut, and a documentary disc, all packaged in a replica of the briefcase carried by Harrison Ford’s character, Rick Deckard)), the brilliant colors, sound re-mix, and effects work make this as timeless a piece of cinematic art as any work in the past 30 years. ‘Blade Runner’ could be released today without hesitation and, yet, may only reach the same number of people who saw the original film. It needs to be seen, heard, and felt from the best big screen experience that one can find. The Ziegfeld in New York is showing it now, and it is showing in L.A. as well. It you want to truly understand what all the fuss was about (I dare say that many people today are more familiar with endless screenings, and YouTube postings, of the infamous Apple ‘1984’ commercial, which Scott directed and borrowed liberally from his then-current ‘Blade Runner’), go see this on the big screen.
I will make two more posts from the festival, including the closing night film, in the coming days.
Happy moviegoing!
