Two Weeks in Another Town: 1986

It has become increasingly obvious that I won't be enjoying any big trips this summer, but there are always new methods for taking matters into your own hands. Needing a break from all of the high-intensity academic writing of the last year, and a different kind of break from the big Oscar projects, and inspired by all the fascinating coverage that came out of this year's Cannes Film Festival, I decided to take unusual advantage of working at a major research university and reassemble a Cannes Film Festival from the past for my own enjoyment. Some people like to restage Civil War battles or the Lewis & Clark Expedition, and I really can't speak to that, but if you want to resuscitate two weeks on the Croisette, here's what you do:

• Visit the official page for the year you have picked at the Cannes Film Festival website, remembering to click the "All Selections" tab since, as we re-learn every year, the main competition film are often rivaled in quality by the sidebar selections and other out-of-competition titles. This will also entail visiting the relevant sites for the Directors' Fortnight and the Critics' Week pages, since these programs aren't archived on the Cannes page. Polish up your own page devoted to the Cannes festival you are revisiting, making sure to expand the archive past the Palme competitors. Draw up your ranked preferences of which films you are most intent on seeing, as though preparing to buy tickets at any other festival. As happens in real life, you occasionally will have already seen some of the titles before this new festival begins, so it's fair to record what you think about those films already, even if you saw them eons ago and plan on re-screening them.

• Retrieve as many of the programmed films as you can get your hands on, through a combination of the public library system, the Interlibrary Loan office, MUBI, Odd Obsession, and Facets—since you still think other rental agencies besides Netflix deserve to have loyal (and local!) customers, and since a lot of what you're looking for may only be available on long out-of-print VHS tapes. Used media shops like Chicago's splendid, three-location Reckless Records may also come in handy here.

• Do your best to ascertain the order in which the Competition films debuted, because it's fun to simulate the particular sequence, contexts, and suggestive associations among different films that a Cannes journalist might have experienced at the time. This can be tricky, but some reading ability in French will help, since Le Monde is usually pretty diligent about reviewing these titles the day after each one premieres, and you can search their archive to find out when these columns appeared in print. If you pick a year before 1987, as I did, a lunch hour at the Microfiche station is the way to crack the case. Occasionally, you will find an article that actually lists the calendar for the whole upcoming festival, but you cannot count on this. You can cheat a little on the Out of Competition titles, since records here are blurrier, and they typically play more often and get reviewed in a less systematic fashion. Besides, you have to draw a line somewhere.

• For added historical context, read a little of the initial Cannes coverage in Le Monde, Figaro, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and especially Film Comment to learn what was in the air, culturally and politically and cinematically, at the time your festival fired up. This always yields fascinating tidbits, and if you wind up getting a little advance sense of which films flew and which ones bombed, that's fine, because usually when you show up to a festival, you already have some sense of the buzz around certain titles, including the ones about which everyone stays oddly silent. Just take it as a bad sign if, without variation, you always wind up agreeing.

• Buy a small piccolo of champagne and a lot of coffee, wake up early in the mornings since you still have work to accomplish later in the day, and start your itinerary!

I decided to return to the 1986 Cannes Film Festival in honor of its 25th anniversary, which also happens to be the 25th anniversary of my beginning to see movies on my own and attending grown-up dramas with my parents. I hadn't seen a lot of the Competition selection before, although the actual Palme winner, Roland Joffé's The Mission, is maybe my least favorite recipient of this prestigious prize. Turns out this was both a popularly applauded and a viciously contested win, with rampant rumors of jury manipulation even before the festival opened. The scuttlebut: Gilles Jacob really wanted to premiere the movie, which Joffé and his ambitious producer David Putnam weren't finished editing; wags maintained that Jacob told Putnam, if you bring us the film, we'll tell the jury to feel very, very, very grateful for the opportunity.

In general, the Palme was seen as a two-way race between the picturesque pop of The Mission and the austere, differently picturesque, semi-penetrable spiritual agonies of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice, which I've also seen though I don't remember it all that well. Both movies grabbed multiple prizes from different bodies beyond just the main jury, controversially chaired by the devoutly mainstream Sydney Pollack. The Ecumenical Jury and the FIPRESCI International critics gave their annual citations to Tarkovsky, while the Technical Grand Prize council, who often cited films by director rather than singling out individual craftsmen, bestowed their plaque on Joffé. Pollack's crew did what they could to distribute the wealth of prizes in other ways, partly by divvying up Best Actress and Best Actor to two performances apiece from different films—the only time that has happened in Cannes history. Still, 1986 is remembered as one of those two-racehorse years on the Croisette, sort of like the 1994 Oscars and, possibly, the 2010 Oscars. Note which side always comes out on top in these situations.

Aside from these two films plus Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train and Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa—Oscar nominees and Golden Globe winners for Best Actor in 1985 and 1986, respectively—the main competition will all be new to me. This includes off-center work from Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Nagisa Ôshima, and Bruce Beresford; divisive outings from name directors to whom I've had at least some exposure, including André Téchiné, Margarethe von Trotta, Jim Jarmusch, and Franco Zeffirelli; and little-seen work by important figures whose movies I've never seen, including India's Mrinal Sen, Brazil's Arnaldo Jabor, France's Bertrand Blier, and Russia's Sergei Bondarchuk. The sidebar programs include Spike Lee's debut, the punk classic Sid and Nancy, the completion of a trilogy by Axel Corti and the beginning of one by Denys Arcand, a sexually provocative Tennessee Williams adaptation, rarely screened titles from Chantal Akerman and Amos Gitaï, a Carlos Saura dance film, and an Australian movie I've never heard of where Isabelle Huppert has a starring role as a blind woman. Plus, encore screenings of Hollywood favorites that hadn't yet opened in Europe (Hannah and Her Sisters, The Color Purple) and the big, four-film coming out party for a tremendously exciting Down Under talent named Jane Campion.

Campion won the Short Film competition for her peerless student film Peel, making her the first woman to win a Palme at any level of Cannes, seven years before she also became the first woman to win the Palme for feature films. Led by Mona Lisa, The Mission, and Sid and Nancy, I have read that the UK had more official selections in and out of the main derby than they ever had before. (Sid, the best reviewed of the lot, was relegated to Un Certain Regard.) Meanwhile, a single, Israeli-owned production company called Cannon Films, previously the industrial plant for such exquisite art works as Hot T-Shirts, Schizoid, and Exterminator 2, spent millions of bribes dollars becoming the first outfit to place three different and notably disparate titles in the Palme line-up: Runaway Train, Altman's Sam Shepard adaptation Fool for Love, and Zeffirelli's attempt to bring Verdi's all-singing Otello to the screen.

The biggest story at Cannes that year, proving that some things never change, is that the U.S. had recently commenced a major bombing campaign in Libya, which had already claimed the life of one of Muammar Qaddafi's children (although this report was later exposed to be false). Security was at maximum intensity at Cannes, which gleams just across the Mediterranean from Tripoli, and virtually all the American talent that had previously planned to support their films in person wound up canceling their visits: Scorsese, Spielberg, Shepard, Whoopi Goldberg, Rosanna Arquette, Walter Matthau, Jon Voight. The casually fearless Robert Altman, the more bullishly fearless Eric Roberts of Runaway Train, and Griffin Dunne, the heavily invested star and producer of Scorsese's After Hours, were the only Yanks to hit the Croisette. By all accounts, the paparazzi were pissed, though the jury wasn't impressed enough by the intrepidity of Altman, Roberts, or Dunne to give a prize to any of them (though Scorsese did win Best Director). Military ships patrolled the shoreline at all hours, as did a giant replicated galleon commissioned to advertise the Opening Night film, Roman Polanski's comic farrago Pirates, which I'm not ashamed to say I'll be skipping.

Among the 20 Palme entrants, I've been able to scrounge up all of them except for Raúl de la Torre's Argentinean political allegory Poor Butterfly; Marco Ferreri's I Love You, a story about a man who literally falls in love with a talking keychain, which was all but booed out of town; and Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina's French-Algerian production The Last Image. The latter I am sorely disappointed to miss, since Lakhdar-Hamina's Chronicle of the Smoldering Years is one of my favorite Palme victors of the past, and certainly the least well-known of the really great ones. The only available DVD of Bondarchuk's Boris Godounov doesn't seem to have English subtitles, but it's also not clear how much dialogue it's got, so we'll see whether or not I can hang in there with it. It's a festival tradition to get punked by translations or the absence of needful translations, as it is also a festival translation to bail out when the going gets too tough.

Otherwise, stay tuned for some reviews soon. I plan on enjoying my two-week "trip" tremendously, and I hope you'll be along for the ride!

My Own Medicine: Peel and Gasman

As the first exercise in my reprised course English 386: The Film Review as Genre, I've asked my students to watch two of my absolute favorite short films, Jane Campion's Peel: An Exercise in Discipline (which I've reviewed more extensively elsewhere) and Lynne Ramsay's Gasman, and write a three-sentence review of whichever film they prefer. One sentence should encapsulate the scenario or project of the film, and the other two should concisely encompass a more editorial appraisal. I figure I'll take a stab at my own game, and you can, too, since the films are screenable here and here.

Peel: "Discipline" connotes two meanings in Peel: while a young boy fulfills a comically ridiculous task assigned by his father as punishment, the film itself manages a rounded portrait of family tensions and eccentricities through bold, economical formal choices. While Campion laughs heartily at paternal discipline, which seems all the more absurd after the kid sweetly fulfills his mindless chore, her own discipline with image, sound, structure, and tone are nothing to snigger at. Indeed, with its electric color palette, tautly arranged frames, and inventively odd camera angles inside a very cramped space, Peel discloses a major young talent, all the more charming for emphasizing the humor and vitality of this family's hotheaded perversity.

Gasman: Gasman begins as a Campionesque scrapbook of bright, off-kilter images inside a small Scottish household: patent-leather pumps, toy cars plowing through mounds of sugar, the bony nape of a father's neck, though hardly any glimpses of faces. Then, as Dad takes the kids to a downmarket Christmas party, stopping along the way to pick up another pair of nervous-looking moppets, Gasman becomes looser in sound and image but darker, even heartbreaking in tone. "Get off my Dad's knee" becomes a wee lass's cri de coeur, and though Ramsay typically withholds the details of domestic secrecy, what starts as a memorable but mannered exercise concludes as a remarkably sobering snapshot of how we're sometimes forced, inside a single instant, to grow up.

2009 Honorees: Best Actress

Those of you who have pieced together that my Twitter account is the only reliable place to find me during this very busy summer and fall have already heard me acknowledge that I couldn't well move forward with my usual mid-year progress report of favorites without at least some quick tips of the hat to the cream of last year's movie crop. All of my End-of-Decade hoopla usurped all the time and energy I would have needed to single them out at the proper moment. But, in case you're still wondering where I wound up by year's end, I'm at last coughing up some very quick overviews.

It's cheating a little to start with Best Actress, since it's the one category where you may already know the names of my five champion causes from 2009. But nonetheless, at Twitter length, my late-arriving bouquets belong to...

ABBIE CORNISH for Bright Star, because she found a way to make Fanny potent and smart but not quite prodigious, a bit blunt around the edges but vibrant at her core;

TILLY and MAGGIE HATCHER for Beeswax, because they know every damn thing about these spunky, aching, complex but quotidian women, and they don't need Big Scenes to show it;

CATALINA SAAVEDRA for The Maid, because her ferocious agitation is sympathetic and unnerving, without any overplaying, and she still finds room for surprising vulnerability;

GABOUREY SIDIBE for Precious, because her spirit and voice are on full lockdown, but instead of fancying herself a butterfly, she plays an inchworm, slowly making her way; and

TILDA SWINTON for Julia, because she's a one-woman China syndrome, but she makes you feel the weird, graceless athleticism required to be this drunk, and this crazy.

Extremely honorable mention to Kim Ok-vin in Thirst, who bounded into a vampire-crazed moment in pop culture and acted so bold, bruised, wicked, and wronged that she felt utterly one-of-a-kind.

My next rung of contenders were quiet, tense Arta Dobroshi in Lorna's Silence, loose and insouciant Meryl Streep in It's Complicated, proud but humiliated Hiam Abbass in Lemon Tree, and two indelible teenagers: Ellen Page, who blossoms but not without paying some costs in the delectable Whip It, and the much-maligned but very affecting Kristen Stewart, who conjures a hideous self-contempt and a narcotized boredom in Adventureland while still projecting an attractive, low-frequency charisma that allows the story to work.

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art -

You've still got It, Jane. You've never not had It, and Bright Star offers further, subtly risky, occasionally frisky, unabashedly romantic proof. Would that all period dramas had greasy hair and restless kitty cats. Would that every love story recognized that two people can grow respectful of each other's talents, even besotted with them, without necessarily entering into them, or fully adopting them as one's own. Would that every under-tested actor in the world got a role in a Jane Campion movie to demonstrate her mettle, or his. And if anything, would that all the critics who are relishing Bright Star will recognize in retrospect that In the Cut was already working toward these exciting dares in variable focus and semi-subversion of literary tropes, and that The Portrait of a Lady is as strong, rich, and evocatively idiosyncratic as this one is, but times ten.

Here's to the global resuscitation of Jane, even if she never should have needed "resuscitating." I'm still clapping in the front row, just like Holly, Anna, and I did back in the day. Granted, they were in the front row of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and I was in the front row of my living room, but the principle was the same!

IFC Marks the Spot

One of the perils of my staying off so many websites, unless they're linked from the handful I visit every day, is that I am often The Last to Know, so I only have myself to blame for the fact that I've only recently understood that when David Hudson left GreenCine Daily, he took up shop at IFC and spectacularly enriched and expanded the coverage at the The Daily @ IFC.Com, currently (as had been the case at GreenCine when David managed it) the most comprehensive, trenchant, and thought-provoking blog of film news that I have found anywhere on the web. It's taken me a while to catch up on lots of back entries, but the IFC Blog is especially crucial now, since it's bubbling with fantastic and frequently updated Cannes coverage. Economics being what they are, almost no one who usually covers Cannes is doing a very good job this year, or any kind of job at all: the New York Times' attention has been pitiful and distant, and it wasn't until yesterday that the newly imagined GreenCine, compelling though it is in its different, non-Hudsonian way, even acknowledged that Cannes is taking place.

If you want to know the scuttlebut about the new Campion (great news, it turns out!), the new Audiard, the new Kore-eda, the new Coppola, the new Bong, the new Costa, the new De Van, the Up premiere, the European bow of Precious, about anything else Cannes-related (beyond what's on their own delicious but complicated site, including press conferences and great photos), or about anything else movie-related, IFC is an indispensable pit-stop. But then, you probably knew that already. (And thanks, David, for plugging my own plug for this book!)

Nashville Film Festival 2009: Live Action Shorts, Part 3

Moving up the ladder of quality, here's the middle of my more-or-less "Top Ten List" among the live-action shorts booked in Nashville. I keep seeing more of them every day, incidentally, and nothing's come close to challenging these:

#7: Walnut
(11 min., Australia; IMDB)
Rest assured, the conspicuous, capital-letters "Thank You" to Jane Campion did not in and of itself assure this film of our Grand Jury Prize in the student filmmaking category. Of course it didn't hurt, but it's a bit of a double-edged sword: you can see how Campion's example and a larger tradition at the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School might well have nourished writer-director Amy Gebhardt's unembarrassed embrace of bright color, her unusual blocking and visual angles, and her fluency at blending stifled or restless characters with images that are simultaneously expressive and beatifically soothing. She doesn't need all of her shots, and sometimes, as when a young woman's bare feet pad over the carpet surrounding a bed, they exist mostly to telegraph that Walnut has a fondness for unexpected impressions, whether or not they deepen the movie profoundly. And yet, many of these eccentric shots do deepen the movie and endow it with detail. It ain't Peel, but Gebhardt sidesteps so many of the sentimental pitfalls that a dying-dog movie inherently invites that you can't help noticing and admiring how she does it. And whether my fellow jurors thought I was kidding or not, I think the dog playing Walnut may have given the single best performance in any of the live-action shorts we screened—possibly best since the piggie(s) who played Babe. Look at that soul-searching gaze, and how pitifully, and yet with what dignity, he eases himself down during his last field trot! What are they feeding these Antipodean animals? How are they trained? The human actors aren't slouches, either: the lead actor gets enough out of a spontaneous but slightly embarrassed shrug when his mother reaches out to comfort him that we've got most of what we need to know about this relationship right off the bat. Doubtless some viewers will find the emotional pitch of the extreme close-ups on the animal's snuffling nose and the younger brother's lonely sorrow and the girlfriend's pleading, affectionate incomprehension. But Walnut got me, and I feel I was honestly gotten.

#6: Jerrycan - preview
(14 min., Australia; IMDB)
Another Australian triumph, and this one a prizewinner at Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, and the Australian Film Institute awards. With that track record, I doubt writer-director Julius Avery is bemoaning his prizeless tour through Nashville; does this make us laudable free-thinkers or comically out of synch with the world's experts? I really liked Jerrycan, obviously, and had I not felt even more strongly about another handful of films, I would have pushed harder to keep it in the jury conversation. Avery employs lots of the same basic techniques that we saw in lots of films: rack focusing, desaturated colors, significant foreground-background separation, inexorable build-ups to climactic crises. The scraped visual texture, detailed sound design, and prematurely solemn child's-eye view reminded me more of Scottish cinema than Australian work; Jerrycan could play side by side with Lynne Ramsay's shorts on the Ratcatcher DVD and there'd be few dead giveaways. Even if the climactic payoff is predictable entire minutes in advance, the film isn't as determined to be bleak as it would seem, and the shoving dynamics of rivalry and agitation among this gaggle of down-and-out schoolboys assumes more and more nuance right through the final moments. Almost every cut, framing, and audio accent makes the movie richer, going a long, long way toward revitalizing the earnest but non-distinctive core material.

I adore the top five live-action shorts that I've seen here, so rather than hop up one more rung, I'm ditching the rankings and saving them all for a final post. Stay tuned, but don't stay mum—talk to me, folks!

From Sir with Love

Am I the only one who would love to read or hear a little more often about the day jobs and non-bloggish projects being conducted week-in and -out among our little school of fish. I probably talk about it more than most, partly because my job isn't always such a far cry from what I'm up to on this site, but I still think it's funny sometimes that even among many of the frequent commenters, I know who you think is going to win Best Supporting Actor from the New York Film Critics Circle but I don't really know what you do of a workday. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Either way, even if you don't want to show me yours, I'm showing you mine, because I'm so excited to teach this newly expanded Contemporary Women Filmmakers course next quarter (i.e., starting in January). I tried to bring the pretty with this flyer I made, which would be hard not to do, given the luscious and/or otherwise compelling images that my selected directors have so generously furnished in their films. Here's the write-up for the course, in case it's too fuzzy in the jpeg:

In recent years, more and more women film directors have risen to global prominence, producing important bodies of work and winning major prizes around the world. In saluting this diverse and expanding tradition, this course nonetheless poses the question: what (if anything) is gained and what (if anything) is lost by reading these films with regard to the directors' gender? In what ways do these films confront and complicate longstanding debates about gender and authorship, representation, sexuality, chauvinism, beauty, violence, voyeurism, and pornography? Alternatively, what is at stake in sidelining questions of gender and critiquing these films as "just" films? In this course, we will closely examine work by several modern directors whose films cover a wide range of genres and modes, including action, drama, satire, horror, comedy, political allegory, and the avant-garde. They also hail from such disparate areas of the globe as North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific. While mastering some basic concepts of film analysis, we will also consider some key ideas in feminist theory and trace some of the public debates that shaped these films and their reception.

Huge kudos to anyone who can name all the films or makers based on these snapshots. But my question for you is, who else would you have wanted to see included as part of this class? I can sneak in plenty more stuff in lectures and through on-line clips. You know you want the undergraduates of Northwestern to be seeing all the best stuff. For the purposes of this class, "contemporary" means the last ten or fifteen years (though I'm cheating for Peel).

I already have a list of who I was sad to leave out, but I'll learn more from hearing your suggestions. Let loose! Just, you know, don't suggest Twilight.

Strange Fruit

But in the best possible way. And it's the family that's strange, not the fruit. Actually, it's not the fruit or the family, it's the lusciously offbeat way they get filmed:



By the way, speaking of superior short films, my friend Jeff Middents has been leading his students at American University through a course in short films, which has required them all to contribute to a Short Films Blog. Each week, the students post about short films that satisfy a given rubric, often including embedded YouTube footage or other links to the films they're discussing as well as their own appraisals. As a two-time guest judge on the students' work, I've been really impressed by their insights and delighted to have a chance to see so many wide-ranging shorts. I hope you'll feel inclined to have a look—and if you're feeling so inclined, leave an admiring comment, and help Jeff's hardest-working students earn some extra credit. The week-long focus on award-winning shorts, including several Oscar winners, may be especially interesting to many of you; I particularly enjoyed the footage and the write-ups in the entries about Glas (entry by Drew Rosensweig) and Der Fuehrer's Face (entry by Lindsay Z.). Plus, as an ardent lover of The Danish Poet, I can't fail to mention Trinnyallica's spiffy reflections on that one.

To Jeff's students, if you're reading: great job! And since you're newly able to relish the art of the short film, here is Peel in its eight-minute entirety!

Thanks for the Memories, Jane!

December 3: To you, just a Wednesday, with perhaps a gleam of specialness for being Julianne Moore's birthday (very commendable of you to remember). But for me, the 15th anniversary of the first time I saw The Piano, alone, at a matinée screening across the street from my public high school in Fairfax, Virginia. Nothing was ever the same afterward, and it still isn't. A giant (tuning?) fork in my road. My "mind's voice," in Ada McGrath's terms, is still hugely influenced by this film.

So, please permit a day-long interruption in the Favorites entries while we celebrate 15 gorgeous and clickable images from my actual favorite movie ever made, which would certainly top the countdown if it weren't disqualified by also being one of the best movies ever made.

Goddesses, Pianos, Princes, and a Book You Should Must Buy

After being on quite the roll there for a minute, I haven't posted in over two weeks, so I may as well pack a lot into this entry. Yesterday was, after all, a High Holy Day: the birthday of my grandfather, but also of the late, impossibly great Katharine Hepburn, who would have turned 101 if she hadn't died five years ago. (Has it really already been five years?) I believe I have already made clear my semi-religious feelings about Katharine Hepburn here. May 12 is always a delicious day for me, but then Nathaniel came along to make it even sweeter, even as I sat languishing in bed with an illness so bad I had to cancel my classes and stay home from work. Telepathically aware that I needed as much restorative bliss as I could get, Nathaniel offered this sterling tribute to Jane Campion's The Piano, and though I still don't understand how or why Nathaniel loves eight movies even more than this one, I of course thrilled to his evocative, beautifully illustrated ode to the film—especially since it sounds as though he might like it even more now than he once did! Nathaniel's subsequent blog posting is about princes, but he is obviously a prince himself to be this publicly and appropriately worshipful of the most important movie in my life, and surely one of the best ever made.

I've shown even less restraint on my own list of the 100 greatest movies (a feature that needs a qualitative as well as a formatting overhaul), where The Piano still reigns at #1. Yes, I grant that its crucial arrival at the absolute, most poignant onset of my movie-loving life has a great deal to do with this unusually robust claim on the film's behalf, and I've never gotten around to writing the public defense of this position that I obviously owe. I'm getting there; I always mean well. Happily, another prince of the blogosphere, Tim R. of MainlyMovies—who keeps even more mum on his blog lately than I do on mine—furnished me with a brilliant occasion to celebrate The Piano in print. That occasion was a book he co-edited called The DVD Stack, now in its 2nd Edition, and not to put too fine a point on it, YOU HAVE TO BUY THIS BOOK. Within, you'll find succinct but searching reviews of over 350 movies that are either masterworks in themselves, or the welcome recipients of brilliant presentations on DVD, or both. The writers are mostly staffers of major British publications like the Daily Telegraph, Time Out London, the Sunday Times, and Sight and Sound, but they found room for me in that august group. I got to wax awestruck about 16 of my favorite movies, from Persona to The Cell to Daughters of the Dust to Singin' in the Rain to Harlan County, U.S.A.. If that small sampler doesn't sufficiently convince you that The DVD Stack breaks significantly from the usual All-Time Best roll call—but without petulantly avoiding some objects of universal and deserved adoration—then you haven't experienced the back-to-back tributes to DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story (a surreally inspired DVD, apparently) and La Dolce vita. I would absolutely buy and treasure this book even if Tim hadn't edited it, and I would absolutely shill it even if I weren't in it. As an appetizer course, and as a reciprocal gesture to Nathaniel's lovely tribute, here's what I have to say about The Piano ... and yes, we are absolutely talking about that spectacular and affordably priced R2/PAL edition that completely wipes the floor with the despicable and un-extra'd U.S. print. I was limited to 400 words (a first time for everything!), but I hope you get the drift:

The film: Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) is a 19th-century Scotswoman who has refused to speak since she was six years old. She arrives in New Zealand as the purchased bride of a taciturn colonist, but neither she nor her fatherless daughter (Anna Paquin) make any easy concessions to domestic custom. Ada's proud resolve is shared by the film, which forges ahead into tense, exotic circumstances and allows us, indeed forces us, to fend for ourselves within its fertile landscape of desire, violence, envy, and enigma. The piano in Jane Campion's magisterial film is an instrument, a voicebox, a prize, a symbol, a concept, a thing-in-itself, a means of communication, and a bulky rampart against it. Campion's ingenuity is to read all the same paradoxes into human personality and sexuality. Her film looks askance at daily life, brimming with unexpected angles and an almost subconscious language of images and tones, and yet it stares forthrightly into extraordinary conflicts: the worst of what people do to each other, and the remarkable, ambiguous ways in which we save each other. None of this, of course, would be possible without the flawless cast, the superb locations, the eccentrically beautiful score, and the utterly persuasive production design.

The DVD: Heretofore available only in an undistinguished and feature-free version, The Piano finally attains a proper showcase, with an impressive gallery of key creative personnel gathered for the occasion. Campion and producer Jan Chapman provide a chummy but detailed commentary track, but even more illuminating are the generous interviews with both women as well as composer Michael Nyman, all furnished on the second disc. Campion speaks for a full, congenial hour about her creative process (including glimpses at her sketchbooks), her casting decisions and varying methods with different actors, her close collaboration with her cinematographer, and her charmingly ambivalent response to the film's Oscar successes. Chapman elucidates with passion the role of an independent film producer, specifically when securing international funds for a risky screenplay, and Nyman, without winning any trophies for modesty, sheds valuable light on how and why the film was tailored to the score, rather than the more customary reverse. A shorter making-of featurette from the time of the film's production expands to include the lead actors' perspectives. Best of all, the print transfer exquisitely captures the rolling waves, the plashy mud, the burnished glow of the interiors, and the eerie, aqueous light of the New Zealand bush.

Thanks, Nathaniel; thanks, Tim; thanks, Jane; thanks, Holly, Harvey, Anna, Sam, Jan, Stuart, Veronika, Michael, Janet, Andrew, Tungia, Kerry, Genevieve...; thanks, Katharine; thanks, Opa; overwork and underpay and all-nighters be damned, all is full of love today on Nick's Flick Picks.

Photos © 1993 Miramax Films/Ciby2000; and © 2007 Canongate Ltd.

Bitter "Sweetie" Is Still a Beauty

Is the image at left an unconsoling one of a slender sapling utterly constrained by its barren environment of weary, eroded concrete and cropped, disembodied (non)caretaking? Or is it a hopeful, even a cheerfully irreverent portrait of the wee tree's dogged insistence on itself: a living implausibility in a world defined for better and for worse by cracked asymmetries, where every plash of color is a sensual delight and maybe even a spiritual victory—good news for the tree, surely, but also for whomever this is, gardening (if that's the right word) against all sartorial odds in her lavender skirt, her striped black stockings, her navy blue shoes, and some suggestion of a burgundy sleeve?

I have culled this emblematically vibrant and paradoxical frame from Sweetie, director Jane Campion's first and personal favorite of her six features. It says everything about my constant, giddy awe before this admittedly inconsistent but underratedly brilliant director that a movie this brave and astonishing—a confident, eccentric debut to put even Blood Simple to shame—still takes a Bronze Medal in my own inner Olympics to her gorgeously brazen apex of modern literary adaptations and to the best movie ever made.

Still, Sweetie is an absolute corker, genuinely unnerving and reliably hilarious, and also a movie that was practically invented for the Pause button, since each and every frame has been so wittily, punctiliously composed. Campion's estranging perspectives, her appetites for the alien bloodstreams inside domestic bodies and spaces, and her affinity for mannered performers and unlikely faces make her an especially glorious heir of photographers like Diane Arbus—although, much more than certain audacious but addled "imaginative portraits" I could name, Sweetie's exaggerated visual ideas and its proclivity for psychic binarisms writ garishly large actually dictate the look, rhythm, and structure of the film at all levels, instead of jittering inside an implausibly but increasingly commercial narrative structure.

For more of my enthusiasm about Sweetie—encompassing not just the film but the delicious and exquisitely detailed new DVD package from Criterion—I invite you over toward the website of Stop Smiling Magazine, which has generously farmed out another plum reviewing gig to me. Let this stand as partial proof that I am still writing somewhere even as I neglect this poor blog—which perhaps sees, in that trapped and stunted sapling, a pitiable image of its current condition. And by all means, rent or buy the DVD. I can attest first-hand that if you've only seen the catastrophically cropped and miserably color-timed VHS, you haven't really seen the film. Sweetie might unnerve, frustrate, or agitate you—indeed, it's hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't at times feel goaded and tested by this piece—but unlike virtually any movie that has opened on any American screen this year, it bespeaks a major artistic talent and it demands a complex critical reckoning. (Come back to the 5 & Dime, Janey C, Janey C!)

(Images © 1989 New South Wales Film Corporation, reproduced from DVDBeaver's glowing review of the DVD and from the Criterion Collection.)

A Trip to Mt. Olympus

A few posts ago, I alluded to a project that kept me busy through much of last week. Here's the scoop: I spent an hour and a half of last Thursday morning interviewing Lynne Ramsay, whom I consider the most interesting young filmmaker working in the English language, and whose Morvern Callar is still my favorite film of this decade, give or take Russian Ark. (The Scene Stealer is also on record as a big fan.)

Ramsay was an absolute delight to talk to, remarkably humble and accessible for someone who, at least for me, inspires such total awe. I had a great time asking her about her experiences in film school, her working method with her brilliant cinematographer, her three impeccable short films (all of them available on the Criterion DVD of her first feature, Ratcatcher), and her pair of upcoming projects, both of which sound like bold new choices for a director who seemingly can't put a foot wrong.

All of this was sublime enough for me without the cosmically ordained moment when I asked her about the last occasion when a movie really blew her out of the water, and she described watching Ingmar Bergman's Persona, deep in the Australian bush, in a tent she was sharing with Jane Campion. Most of you will understand immediately why I experienced this confession as pure delirium, verging on phone sex, but if you're confused, click here and take note of #1 and #5.

The interview will appear in the May '06 issue of Stop Smiling Magazine, for whom my next assignment will be a review of the forthcoming 7-disc set of Tennessee Williams adaptations. What I ever did to or for Stop Smiling to prompt all this kindness, I will never know.

I Love the World, I'm So Happy!

Heard that one before? It was initially delivered in a climate of teary, jubilant thanks, just as I'm delivering it now. Truly, this blog is not specifically intended as an open-ended paean to Tim R., but as soon as one of y'all sends me a Region 2 DVD of The Piano—available Stateside only in this meager and frequently bargain-binned version—I'll start gushing over you too, m'kay?

Suffice it to say that, while I've been kicking around the idea of a region-free DVD player for many years, and feeling grumpy and wallflowery about all those unreleased foreign titles that we don't get to see in Region 1, I didn't actually splurge and make the commitment... until encountering the phrase "Commentary from Director Jane Campion and Producer Jan Chapman." At that point, it was about 45 seconds before I 1-Clicked over on Amazon.com and bought this reasonably priced little beauty, which also shows easy, uncomplicated love to those DVD-R's which my normal Toshiba unit so haughtily rebuffs. Anyway, the Piano DVD arrived yesterday in the mail (Tim, you are A DOLL), the player tonight, and...

Reader, I really wouldn't be so asinine as to post about splurge purchases if it weren't such a huge thing for me to see how this movie is finally, at long last, presented. I haven't even listened to the commentary track yet, but the separate on-disc interview with Jane Campion, dating from 2003, involves a full hour of her talking, with no intrusive questions, just reflecting on her film and how and why she made it and what it says to her. I cannot quite describe how this feels to me, given the movie's pivotal role in my life, except to say that I feel a little like Hortense in Secrets & Lies, finally meeting my mom face-to-face (except that Jane, praise heaven, doesn't turn out to be a half-sunken and atrabilious mess).

Showing us her workbook sketches of Ada and Flora from a full decade before shooting started, describing how you summon confidence when working around people much more experienced than you are, laughing about how "this film has probably fucked up heaps of women!" because it describes a mythic reality about possible empathies achieved through surprising channels, showing off her Palme d'Or from Cannes with the relish of proudest possible show-and-tell, and describing how much more it means to her than her Oscar... Jane is an angel. Reader, Nick'sFlickPicks wept. Producer Jan Chapman is also an absolute love in her own 15-minute interview, among other things elucidating what an independent film producer working across continents actually does. (Fact: CiBy 2000, the now-defunct French corporation that financed The Piano, as well as other personal pets like Taste of Cherry, Georgia, The Straight Story, Lost Highway, and yes, Secrets & Lies, was an industrial construction company, owned by un homme who happened to love the arts. I love that homme! Find me that homme!)

Is it wrong that I am leaping all the way to a sweeping conclusion, based only on anecdotal evidence, that obviously the rest of the world truly loves movies and only the U.S. subliminally and neurotically hates them, based on the fact that The Piano (still the greatest movie ever, clearly) is showcased so lovingly and evoked in such telling detail on R2/PAL, whereas the R1/NTSC Artisan disc basically shills it out as though it were Universal Soldier or Earth Girls Are Easy?

Whatever. I am going to go watch my favorite movie again and just hug myself. Later, I'll file an order for one of the few other movies in the world that makes me feel this giddy. Thanks, all, for your stamina through this gush.

Sweet Jane

Yesterday, me pal Nathaniel got to wax idolatrous about his own cine-heroine, Michelle Pfeiffer, who turned 47. Today, it's my turn to genuflect, since my favorite director in all the world also has a birthday. Jane Campion turns 51 today, and let's hope she's got 51 more left in her. Few directors have seen their public perception go up and down the way Jane has. Her Cannes history is a good index of this: from the first woman to win a Palme d'Or in the Short Film category (1986) to having her debut feature booed for long minutes at the same festival (1989), and then becoming the first woman to win a Palme d'Or in the main race (1993) before falling off the Cannes radar completely for her subsequent features. That's pretty much been the fate of her post-Piano movies across the world market, but it ain't fair, man. Campion's an artist the way Buñuel was—and bully for her, since she often lists him as her favorite auteur. Her sensibility doesn't really change, even as audiences blow wildly hot and cold about it.

Now, I'm gonna tell you how to celebrate this auspicious day, especially if you're all, "Yeah, I've seen The Piano." For my buck, that's the greatest movie ever, so watch it again, people. That cream never spoils, and I should know, having seen it 34 times.

Most likely, though, you haven't seen her short films, but you should. Peel (the Cannes prizewinner) and Passionless Moments, the two shorter shorts, are especially delicious: laugh-out-loud funny, surprisingly poignant, and full of that askew visual sense that makes all of Campion's longer flicks so memorable. Act quick and get that out-of-print copy that some fool is selling on Amazon.

As I blogged when Stuart Dryburgh turned 53, The Portrait of a Lady is one of the great, unsung movies of the last 10 years, with Nicole Kidman's best pre-'01 performance (and maybe her best performance, period). The score by Wojciech Kilar is also pantheon material.

Finally, don't be scared of In the Cut, which died in a handful of theaters in 2003, but features some typically brilliant Campion cinematography (c/o Chicago and Collateral D.P. Dion Beebe), another rousing score, more absurdist throw-ins, and a powerfully reckless erotic charge.

If you want to read about some Jane, Virginia Wright Wexman edited a diverting anthology of interviews that reach all the way through the Portrait era. (Meryl Streep, with whom Jane is pictured here, was one of her two original choices to play Merle in that movie. The other anointee who turned her down was Susan Sarandon. Susan said no to make Dead Man Walking, but I dunno why Mary Louise Streep couldn't get with such a terrific part. No prob, though, since Barbara Hershey rocked the joint and enjoyed a long-overdue Oscar nod and some critics awards.)

But back to Campion literature. Dana Polan has a book-length study of Jane's films which I actually haven't read. Maybe tonight is the right moment to shake up the white-chocolate martini, fill up the tub, and see what Dana's got to say. I'm sure y'all will be celebrating Jane's genius in your own ways. If I had my druthers, I'd be tapping out that screenplay I've been working on for years that I'd love Jane to direct, but that's gonna have to be her 52nd birthday present or her 53rd. (Trust me, her present this year is not to have to read my wack, scribbled notes and outlines.)

Still, Jane is the only person I've never actually met whom I thank in my dissertation Acknowledgments, because her films and her sensibility, and The Piano in particular, basically changed the entire direction of my inner life and all of my personal goals when I was a wee 16-year-old. If I ever meet this woman, I hope it's not too public, 'cause that junk is gonna get embarrassing really fast. Just knowing she's somewhere out there, hopefully working on some new gem, is rewarding enough in the meantime. Happy birthday, Baby Jane, and praise be to you!

Man with a Movie Camera

As in, does anybody put one to better use than Stuart Dryburgh, the English cinematographer who celebrates his 53rd year today? At least in his two collaborations with director Jane Campion, Dryburgh managed to create startlingly modern images that nonetheless hearkened back to the earliest days of photography—not just in the stop-motion trick shots in The Portrait of a Lady or the wedding-picture scene in my all-time favorite movie, The Piano, but in all of the tight close-ups, gleaming skin tones, aquefarious blues, sepia mists, and daguerreotype purples. These are easily two of the most gorgeous English-language movies of the 1990s, and aside from a weakness for wild angles and a few self-quotations (like Barbara Hershey framed at her piano in Portrait), their styles are admirably distinctive. Don't tell me you can look at these images...



...and not want to see the movie that they are from. In fact, don't admit to me that you haven't seen the movie that they're from. Don't even live like this. LOG. OFF. and go rent it. Really, you should be renting out the 35mm reels and projecting those babies on the side of your house, because the available DVDs for both Piano and Portrait are hair-risingly careless in their transfer quality and packaging materials. But that's a fight for another day. Just savor these images. Look at that closeup of Holly Hunter's hand caressing her piano keys through a crack in the packing-crate. Tell me that isn't from a silent movie.

Meanwhile, my man Stuart has not exactly had the career I would have expected since the two-shot with Campion. The same year as Portrait, he lent some nice photography to John Sayles' sprawling and subversive Lone Star (another great rental), but for some reason, he's been dicking around ever since in a bunch of romantic comedies, whether agreeable (Bridget Jones's Diary), forgettable (Kate & Leopold), or downright execrable (Runaway Bride, whose look was as garish as the writing, the performances, and the premise). The forthcoming Aeon Flux may or may not inspire confidence.

Come back to the 5 and Dime, Stuart D, Stuart D.! Obviously, this dude works well with women directors and he's a genius at the 19th century, so I'm hanging my hopes on Liv Ullmann's forthcoming adaptation of A Doll's House, starring Kate Winslet (!), John Cusack (?), and Tim Roth (mmmm...). Meanwhile, I can't be playing favorites, so here's some luscious Portraiture to look at on your way out, including the most remarkable dying scene in recent memory, when John Gielgud's character yawns himself into permanent sleep. Happy birthday, Stu. You changed my life, man.



Photo of Dryburgh © 1996 by Samuel Goldwyn Film. Photos from The Piano © 1993 by Miramax Films/Artisan Home Entertainment. Photos from The Portrait of a Lady © 1996 by Gramercy Pictures/Polygram Filmed Entertainment.

Screening: Hideous Kinky

Y'all, I am touching the void up here in Ithaca. Yesterday it was only 1°F (-32°C) at 7pm, without wind chill. Today, we're in the midst of a 10" snowfall. I just walked a mile in this mess to get to the library to diss it up. And yeah, it was uphill the whole way. If you know Ithaca, you'll believe me.

One good way to combat weather like this is to rent movies that take place in more temperate climes. If you turn off all the lights and draw the blinds, you cna forget. I didn't rent Hideous Kinky for that explicit reason, but it turned out to be a bonus side-effect. The whole movie takes place in Marrakech, Morocco, where 25-year-old "Julia" (a surrogate figure for Esther Freud, Sigmund's daughter, and the author of the novel Hideous Kinky) has absconded with her two young daughters in search of enlightenment, independence, and something a little cozier than the English fog. Julia will look anywhere to feed her appetites—Sufism, itinerant tourism, a casual love affair with an Arabic street performer. It's never altogether clear that she's going to find what she's looking for, nor is it clear that she won't. The distinguishing achievement of Hideous Kinky is that, compared to several movies about young sojourners—especially when those sojourners are women, and even more especially when they are mothers—this film does not exist to judge Julia. Neither an endorsement of her free spirit nor a condemnation of her behavior, Hideous Kinky manages to represent the texture, risks, and pleasures of this lifestyle without much editorializing, and the characterizations of everyone involved, including the young daughters, is pretty compelling. It helps to have Kate Winslet in the lead role of Julia; as we've come to expect, her performance is as committed, lucid, and notably unglamorous (despite her startling radiance, even when she's sweating, which is a lot). Saïd Taghmaoui (La haine) is also a bonus in the key role of Julia's sometime paramour Bilal.

If the tone and characterizations of the movie are kept nicely ambiguous, the visual motifs and the soundtrack straddle their own fences in less persuasive ways. The heavy reliance on 60s and 70s anglo-rock (America, Neil Young, Crosy, Stills & Nash) threatens to collapse the movie into kitsch a couple of times, and director Gillies MacKinnon is not invulnerable to Orientalist temptations. Though several shots imply that Hideous Kinky is a sort of dream-record of the characters' experiences—and that the archetypal exoticism of certain Arabic places, people, and spectacles might thus be taken as character points rather than simple weaknesses of the film—it's still a little distancing. (Jane Campion did something similar with the "Holly Holy" opening of Holy Smoke, also starring Winslet, but the visual technique and sound design made her intentions a little clearer.) Still, this is the kind of movie that you enjoy as you watch, appreciate even more as it continues to reveal new layers, and continue to reevaluate in the hours after you finish. Check it out: it's neither hideous nor kinky, and that's probably for the best.