Plot: Elderly woman with Alzheimer's is put in a nursing home at her own request and finds love, again. Her husband feels abandoned, rejected while still loving his mate of years gone by.
AWAY FROM HER
Sarah Pollack
There is something about being old that draws a wide appeal to this film about an elderly couple in flux.
Away From Her capitalizes, explores, brings to the fore an image of being old, of "loosing it" that attempts to defy the ordinary concept of an asexual dried up old age. It is a slow moving film, well, being old is the moment when slow motion becomes the norm rather than the exception, and it is emotionally demanding because it is hitting on an unusual theme of "sex and the elderly".
But there is an assumption that emotions should be muted, that intense reactions such as, to the immediacy of one's spouses diminution of mental faculty, is a quiet moment of agony rather than a raging movement to be loudly, flamboyantly defied. Your wife's dumping you for another man is to be taken with quiet protestation when one is old, or so this film suggests but I object. I don't think being old will mute my feelings and certainly my capacity to express them will be less bound by the dictates of civilized restraints than ever before.
If you are comfortable with nature being used to symbolize inner feelings of unbound torment and raging rage, if you are comfortable with many truncated smiles, with seemingly forced performances, if you are comfortable with interactions between people, spouses of all too long standing, being portrayed with soft almost non verbal glances and body motions, if you are able to project yourself, your imagined feelings onto the scene where Julie Christie the wife and Gordon Pinsent the husband battle it out, (sort of) in a plush nursing home setting where Julie Christie's character finds another man while her husband is left to the barren existence of an empty nest, then this film is for you
But I found it contrived and emotionally too controlled. There was very little if any humor, or outward expression of spontaneous happiness.
I found the stereotypical portrayal of the old not as true today as it was in the past. I don't know if in fact people are living longer now but the elderly are asserting themselves as being alive, with full command of their emotional realities albeit sexual or argumentative or whatever. Senior citizen is okay but elderly connotes decrepit and I think today's septuagenarians are anything but decrepit in body. in mind or spirit.
And octogenarians are often still "dirty old men".
For a counter image of my view of old age, I recommend the Award winning 2003 French film, The Barbarian Invasions, directed and written by Denys Arcand
I found the husband and wife in Away From Her to be people of privilege, self-centered, without a hint of remorse for a seemingly empty life nor joy of a past full live.
It is difficult to like a film when I don't like the characters, don't empathize with the conflict. That said, I dare to be almost sacrilegious in admitting that, for me, this film was not enjoyable, nor worthwhile.
But since everyone else liked it, I recommend you see it and judge for yourself.
LindaZ
WBAI Women's Collective
AGORA: Dragged from her chariot by a mob of fanatical vigilante Christian monks, the revered astronomer was stripped naked, skinned to her bones with sharp oyster shells, stoned and burned alive as possibly the first executed witch in history. A kind of purge that was apparently big business back then.
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1/14/08
Nanny Diaries On DVD: Girlfriends Rule In This Girl Fight Class Warfare Class Act.
The Nanny Diaries DVD Review
By Prairie Miller
The road to the real world after college graduation can be one of exciting possibilities, or on the other hand, just plain terrifying. In The Nanny Diaries, Scarlett Johansson is precocious but also naive Jersey girl Annie, fresh out of college and with a major in anthropology. And more than eager to apply that academic knowledge to explore the rest of the planet that lies just across, say, the Hudson River.
Little did Annie imagine that her wanderlust would in fact take her no further than the Upper East Side of Manhattan, when she allows her own trepidation about the future to sweep her up passively into an easy destiny as nanny to a dysfunctional wealthy Fifth Ave.
family. Annie's journey through hard knocks life experience among the pampered and cruel elite there, is imaginatively framed as an anthropological study, a mock but insightful diary detailing an encounter with a powerful and savage tribe far from where civilization lies in, well, the Jersey suburbs. Directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (Harvey Pekar bio-fantasy pic, American Splendor) lead us along on this rarely-a-dull-moment expedition into the upscale urban wilds, and it's filled with immense zesty humor and irony, while also tinged with solemn reflections about families and what most divides them.
Scarlett is feisty and also vulnerable, sustaining that delicate balance in this coming of age struggle specific to the female experience, as a confused, directionless young woman caught between two opposing generations of female elders. On the one hand, there's Annie's mother (Donna Murphy), a divorced single working mom and nurse with feminist tendencies, whose own difficult survival through the years raising her daughter alone, has blinded her to her daughter's needs and yearnings. And she attempts to push a resistant Annie into the business world so she'll never experience the same financial insecurity. Then there's Annie's dragon lady boss, designated as Mrs. X (Laura Linney). She's a domineering socialite housewife who seems to exist simply to indulge her own every whim, while studiously avoiding any meaningful work or even bonding with her own understandably troubled young son Grayer (Nicholas Reese Art), for whom Annie cares deeply and substitutes as a surrogate mom.
The Nanny Diaries, based on the 2005 novel by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, is alternately touching and funny, with an ample infusion of wry comic relief courtesy of Paul Giamatti's devilishly workaholic honcho absentee spouse Mr. X, and Alicia Keys as Annie's tough love aspiring shrink best girlfriend. There's also plenty of wise and candid back talk from the army of immigrant nanny lifers, who view Annie skeptically as a temp tourist in the exploitative, luckless biz. Though the weighty conflicts brewing throughout.
The Nanny Diaries are tied up a bit too neatly and hastily in the end, the heady excursion along the way through modern day girl fight class warfare is a witty class act, and extremely charming.
The Weinstein Company/Genius Home Entertainment
PG-13
4 stars
Prairie Miller
By Prairie Miller
The road to the real world after college graduation can be one of exciting possibilities, or on the other hand, just plain terrifying. In The Nanny Diaries, Scarlett Johansson is precocious but also naive Jersey girl Annie, fresh out of college and with a major in anthropology. And more than eager to apply that academic knowledge to explore the rest of the planet that lies just across, say, the Hudson River.
Little did Annie imagine that her wanderlust would in fact take her no further than the Upper East Side of Manhattan, when she allows her own trepidation about the future to sweep her up passively into an easy destiny as nanny to a dysfunctional wealthy Fifth Ave.
family. Annie's journey through hard knocks life experience among the pampered and cruel elite there, is imaginatively framed as an anthropological study, a mock but insightful diary detailing an encounter with a powerful and savage tribe far from where civilization lies in, well, the Jersey suburbs. Directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (Harvey Pekar bio-fantasy pic, American Splendor) lead us along on this rarely-a-dull-moment expedition into the upscale urban wilds, and it's filled with immense zesty humor and irony, while also tinged with solemn reflections about families and what most divides them.
Scarlett is feisty and also vulnerable, sustaining that delicate balance in this coming of age struggle specific to the female experience, as a confused, directionless young woman caught between two opposing generations of female elders. On the one hand, there's Annie's mother (Donna Murphy), a divorced single working mom and nurse with feminist tendencies, whose own difficult survival through the years raising her daughter alone, has blinded her to her daughter's needs and yearnings. And she attempts to push a resistant Annie into the business world so she'll never experience the same financial insecurity. Then there's Annie's dragon lady boss, designated as Mrs. X (Laura Linney). She's a domineering socialite housewife who seems to exist simply to indulge her own every whim, while studiously avoiding any meaningful work or even bonding with her own understandably troubled young son Grayer (Nicholas Reese Art), for whom Annie cares deeply and substitutes as a surrogate mom.
The Nanny Diaries, based on the 2005 novel by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, is alternately touching and funny, with an ample infusion of wry comic relief courtesy of Paul Giamatti's devilishly workaholic honcho absentee spouse Mr. X, and Alicia Keys as Annie's tough love aspiring shrink best girlfriend. There's also plenty of wise and candid back talk from the army of immigrant nanny lifers, who view Annie skeptically as a temp tourist in the exploitative, luckless biz. Though the weighty conflicts brewing throughout.
The Nanny Diaries are tied up a bit too neatly and hastily in the end, the heady excursion along the way through modern day girl fight class warfare is a witty class act, and extremely charming.
The Weinstein Company/Genius Home Entertainment
PG-13
4 stars
Prairie Miller
1/12/08
The Silence Before Bach: Art And Male Autoerotic Voyeurism A Murky Mix
By Prairie Miller
The cinematic new kid on the block - the hybrid documentary - is apparently here to stay, and not just a momentary quirk or aberration, while expanding the film medium visually and technically. Just as Brian De Palma and Lynn Hershman-Leeson demonstrated so skillfully and inventively last year, with Redacted and Strange Culture respectively, as they delved topically, and ironically, into war and domestic terrorism.
The hybrid documentary also challenges the boundaries of how we see, feel, absorb, digest and make sense of the world around us. And Spanish filmmaker Pere Portabella's The Silence Before Bach is certainly no exception. While the veteran surrealist anti-Franco screenwriter and director - who produced Luis Bunuel's screen classic Viridiana - challenges and perhaps confounds us with the film's title, the silence in this case may refer not only to the composer's revolutionary musical inception, but also to the far from insignificant silence preceding inspiration. And it is the very backdrop of that passive reflection prior to creative conception, not just in historical time but also organic to musical formulation and the space between sounds, that likewise fascinates the filmmaker, both musically and cinematically, in the determined pauses surrounding concepts and images.
Portabella sets the stage for this remarkable creative composition in its own right, as a piano glides by itself without beneift of human participation, through a series of empty rooms. Later, a blind albino piano tuner enters with a seeing eye dog and proceeds to explore the keyboard, as the canine's ears flutter rhythmically in response to sounds. The radically conceived opening perspective juxtaposing the absence of human energy and color with a keen sense of musical tapestry, establishes the unique pleasures of the many astonishing, self-consciously imaginative and meditative, when not eccentric or even comical momentum to follow throughout.
Though some images presented are simply disconnected or distracting, such as the filmmaker's overly preoccupied obsession with a nude female musician not quite so casually, gratuitously indulging in her habitual daily showering and grooming routines, many others lift the film whimsically and lyrically beyond their mundane backdrops. Including long distance truckers enamored of Bach, who reminisce about playing his chamber pieces at home with the family, or engage in impromptu harmonica fugues on the road; period vignettes featuring introspective portrayals of Bach and Mendelssohn, and the discovery of Bach's blood-soaked music sheets as wrapping for the purchase of brains from freshly slaughtered animals at the local butcher back then; a present day subway car full of cellists gathered silently to play Bach in unison; and, most poignantly, a piano that tragically falls through space into an ocean and drowns.
And perhaps there's a solemn reflection here around memory and loss. This, as the film swings back through history with its own delicate meshing of enchantment and mystery, contemplating a Europe whether before Bach or in our own time "of emptiness with no resonance." The Silence before Bach, a study in sound that both transcends and illuminates a complexity of ideas.
A Films 59 Production
No Rating
In Spanish. Catalan and German with English subtitles.
3 stars
The Silence Before Bach opens at the Film Forum in NYC on January 30th. More information is online at:
FilmForum.org and PerePortabella.com.
Prairie Miller
The cinematic new kid on the block - the hybrid documentary - is apparently here to stay, and not just a momentary quirk or aberration, while expanding the film medium visually and technically. Just as Brian De Palma and Lynn Hershman-Leeson demonstrated so skillfully and inventively last year, with Redacted and Strange Culture respectively, as they delved topically, and ironically, into war and domestic terrorism.
The hybrid documentary also challenges the boundaries of how we see, feel, absorb, digest and make sense of the world around us. And Spanish filmmaker Pere Portabella's The Silence Before Bach is certainly no exception. While the veteran surrealist anti-Franco screenwriter and director - who produced Luis Bunuel's screen classic Viridiana - challenges and perhaps confounds us with the film's title, the silence in this case may refer not only to the composer's revolutionary musical inception, but also to the far from insignificant silence preceding inspiration. And it is the very backdrop of that passive reflection prior to creative conception, not just in historical time but also organic to musical formulation and the space between sounds, that likewise fascinates the filmmaker, both musically and cinematically, in the determined pauses surrounding concepts and images.
Portabella sets the stage for this remarkable creative composition in its own right, as a piano glides by itself without beneift of human participation, through a series of empty rooms. Later, a blind albino piano tuner enters with a seeing eye dog and proceeds to explore the keyboard, as the canine's ears flutter rhythmically in response to sounds. The radically conceived opening perspective juxtaposing the absence of human energy and color with a keen sense of musical tapestry, establishes the unique pleasures of the many astonishing, self-consciously imaginative and meditative, when not eccentric or even comical momentum to follow throughout.
Though some images presented are simply disconnected or distracting, such as the filmmaker's overly preoccupied obsession with a nude female musician not quite so casually, gratuitously indulging in her habitual daily showering and grooming routines, many others lift the film whimsically and lyrically beyond their mundane backdrops. Including long distance truckers enamored of Bach, who reminisce about playing his chamber pieces at home with the family, or engage in impromptu harmonica fugues on the road; period vignettes featuring introspective portrayals of Bach and Mendelssohn, and the discovery of Bach's blood-soaked music sheets as wrapping for the purchase of brains from freshly slaughtered animals at the local butcher back then; a present day subway car full of cellists gathered silently to play Bach in unison; and, most poignantly, a piano that tragically falls through space into an ocean and drowns.
And perhaps there's a solemn reflection here around memory and loss. This, as the film swings back through history with its own delicate meshing of enchantment and mystery, contemplating a Europe whether before Bach or in our own time "of emptiness with no resonance." The Silence before Bach, a study in sound that both transcends and illuminates a complexity of ideas.
A Films 59 Production
No Rating
In Spanish. Catalan and German with English subtitles.
3 stars
The Silence Before Bach opens at the Film Forum in NYC on January 30th. More information is online at:
FilmForum.org and PerePortabella.com.
Prairie Miller
1/11/08
Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn! in This Political Season
by Nancy Keefe Rhodes
If we didn’t already compare Iraq to Vietnam, this 1969 movie would conjure the parallels for us with its proxy story of 19th century colonialism. It’s 1855 on the island of Queimada, a fictional former Portuguese colony in the Caribbean. A British “military advisor” to the embattled young republic, sent by the Royal Sugar Company to quell a six-year insurgency by former slaves, coolly surveys the smoking ruins of a village and its surrounding blackened forest. A decade earlier, Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando) first approaching this island to instigate revolt, stood on a ship’s deck as the captain explained that Queimada translates from the Portuguese as “burnt,” commemorating how the first Europeans there rid this island of its resistant indigenous people before replacing them with slave labor, half of whom died on the voyage from Africa.
Sometimes, Walker observes now, as much to himself as the soldier beside him, you have to destroy a village to save it.
Even with Brando in the lead – a performance he called his best, in a project he chose over Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid– Burn! was just a short blip on a few US screens when United Artists quietly released an “American version” in 1970, excised of twenty minutes from Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo’s own final cut. A 1991 VHS of that version still surfaces in a few rental shops.
Then, after the US invasion of Iraq, Pontecorvo’s monumental, better-known film about a pivotal moment in the end of French rule in North Africa, The Battle of Algiers (1966), began screening at US festivals, and Criterion’s three-disc DVD set followed in 2005. Bedfellows as strange as the IRA and the Pentagon have used The Battle of Algiers for training in guerilla warfare. That film’s resurgence surely pulled Burn! along with it, boosted further by a reappraisal of Brando’s work after his 2004 death and then Pontecorvo’s death in 2006.
Pontecorvo filmed The Battle of Algiers with a cinema vérité look at the scene of historical action less than five years after Algeria’s independence – real-life rebel leader Saadi Yacef sought Pontecorvo to propose making such a film and largely plays himself in the movie – while Burn! instead recapitulates the process of colonialism costumed as an adventure yarn.
Brando does affect long blond curls and a series of blue and lavender silk neck scarves, but there’s little swash-buckling. Instead, we join Walker with his own late arrival in Queimada. He has come seeking to aid the rebel leader Santiago, whom he sees executed gruesomely, first by garrote and then beheading, in the courtyard below his hotel room. This is the first of several executions foretold by gallows on the beach in the opening montage. Walker follows Santiago’s widow and headless body to a remote mountain village. (One the film’s most stunning shots encompasses a close-up of this resolutely silent woman and her small children hauling the cart that bears Santiago’s body beneath a bloody shroud, with the fore-shortened Portuguese fort rising massively behind them next to the ocean and beyond, on the horizon, the tiny silhouette of Walker on horseback.) But Santiago’s fighters have melted back into everyday life.
So Walker improvises: having lost his rebel, he sets out to identify a promising replacement and create a new one. This will be Jose Dolores (Evaristo Márquez, in his only film role), the porter who first carried Walker’s bags when he arrived.
Walker tricks Dolores into revolutionary action and consciousness by degrees, turning a sham bank robbery into a real village defense. Surprising himself (but surely not Walker), Dolores even blurts out a sort of stump speech rallying the villagers to be “real men.” Later Walker explains to Dolores what he has done. (This neatly illustrates a favorite Western assumption that enslaved peoples would not think of freedom on their own). Walker persuades assassination, installs Queimada’s first puppet president in the person of Teddy Sanchez (Renato Salvatori), and brokers English take-over of the sugar plantations.
A decade later, the people starve. Dolores has again taken up arms. Teddy Sanchez, actually swayed by some genuine liberal ideal, balks at English instructions and their distasteful consequences. Located mid- brawl in a London pub, Walker returns and addresses all these parties with dispassionate, lethal dispatch. His next assignment will be Indochina.
Though Brando rated this his best performance, Pontecorvo found the actor difficult. They quarreled over noisy sets (Brando wore ear plugs) and close-ups (Brando didn’t want them), but mostly over the character of Walker. Their perseverance produced a masterful, many-layered performance.
In Brando’s mouth Walker’s dialogue is convincing as real human speech rather than political theory. Walker the operative reduces most things to “a simple calculation.” In explaining his plan to burn the island’s forests and mountain villages a second time, he notes that a guerilla has “20, 30, maybe 50 times as much” commitment as a regular solider. Earlier, recruiting Teddy Sanchez and the other plantation owners to establish their republic and abolish slavery as their first act, he compares the economic advantage of hiring whores over marrying wives to the long-term benefit of paying wages over keeping slaves. Walker’s intriguing recognition of common ground between the lot of women and slaves, of course, is a mirror image reversal of the alliances stirring at the same time to the north in the US abolitionist movement.
But Walker’s emotional attachment to Jose Dolores – Brando’s contribution – is equally powerful as Walker’s instrumental view of policy. This bond lights up their triumphant horse-back meeting on the beach amidst Dolores’ ragtag army, later prompts Walker’s gesture to let the defeated rebel ride rather than stumble behind on foot and deepens such various moments as when Walker is willing to simply shoot Dolores and begs him to flee rather than accept hanging.
Film critic Amy Taubin likens Walker’s methods to seduction, suggesting that Brando plays him as a closeted gay man, echoing his own role two years before in Reflections in a Golden Eye. Their eyes do lock across a crowded marketplace as Walker cruises likely prospects. Whether we accept Taubin’s reading literally or take the sexual undercurrent as something more suggestive, it contributes to fleshing out the film’s politics and it builds on other sexual images already there. In this light, for example, when Dolores puts on the vanquished Portuguese general’s fancy jacket, it becomes a kind of political drag as much as the more obvious reference to Franz Fanon’s notion of the oppressed copying their oppressors.
Not a bad film for this Primary season, as we ponder what “change” really means. Come back next week for Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo’s visual sweep and Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/10/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
If we didn’t already compare Iraq to Vietnam, this 1969 movie would conjure the parallels for us with its proxy story of 19th century colonialism. It’s 1855 on the island of Queimada, a fictional former Portuguese colony in the Caribbean. A British “military advisor” to the embattled young republic, sent by the Royal Sugar Company to quell a six-year insurgency by former slaves, coolly surveys the smoking ruins of a village and its surrounding blackened forest. A decade earlier, Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando) first approaching this island to instigate revolt, stood on a ship’s deck as the captain explained that Queimada translates from the Portuguese as “burnt,” commemorating how the first Europeans there rid this island of its resistant indigenous people before replacing them with slave labor, half of whom died on the voyage from Africa.
Sometimes, Walker observes now, as much to himself as the soldier beside him, you have to destroy a village to save it.
Even with Brando in the lead – a performance he called his best, in a project he chose over Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid– Burn! was just a short blip on a few US screens when United Artists quietly released an “American version” in 1970, excised of twenty minutes from Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo’s own final cut. A 1991 VHS of that version still surfaces in a few rental shops.
Then, after the US invasion of Iraq, Pontecorvo’s monumental, better-known film about a pivotal moment in the end of French rule in North Africa, The Battle of Algiers (1966), began screening at US festivals, and Criterion’s three-disc DVD set followed in 2005. Bedfellows as strange as the IRA and the Pentagon have used The Battle of Algiers for training in guerilla warfare. That film’s resurgence surely pulled Burn! along with it, boosted further by a reappraisal of Brando’s work after his 2004 death and then Pontecorvo’s death in 2006.
Pontecorvo filmed The Battle of Algiers with a cinema vérité look at the scene of historical action less than five years after Algeria’s independence – real-life rebel leader Saadi Yacef sought Pontecorvo to propose making such a film and largely plays himself in the movie – while Burn! instead recapitulates the process of colonialism costumed as an adventure yarn.
Brando does affect long blond curls and a series of blue and lavender silk neck scarves, but there’s little swash-buckling. Instead, we join Walker with his own late arrival in Queimada. He has come seeking to aid the rebel leader Santiago, whom he sees executed gruesomely, first by garrote and then beheading, in the courtyard below his hotel room. This is the first of several executions foretold by gallows on the beach in the opening montage. Walker follows Santiago’s widow and headless body to a remote mountain village. (One the film’s most stunning shots encompasses a close-up of this resolutely silent woman and her small children hauling the cart that bears Santiago’s body beneath a bloody shroud, with the fore-shortened Portuguese fort rising massively behind them next to the ocean and beyond, on the horizon, the tiny silhouette of Walker on horseback.) But Santiago’s fighters have melted back into everyday life.
So Walker improvises: having lost his rebel, he sets out to identify a promising replacement and create a new one. This will be Jose Dolores (Evaristo Márquez, in his only film role), the porter who first carried Walker’s bags when he arrived.
Walker tricks Dolores into revolutionary action and consciousness by degrees, turning a sham bank robbery into a real village defense. Surprising himself (but surely not Walker), Dolores even blurts out a sort of stump speech rallying the villagers to be “real men.” Later Walker explains to Dolores what he has done. (This neatly illustrates a favorite Western assumption that enslaved peoples would not think of freedom on their own). Walker persuades assassination, installs Queimada’s first puppet president in the person of Teddy Sanchez (Renato Salvatori), and brokers English take-over of the sugar plantations.
A decade later, the people starve. Dolores has again taken up arms. Teddy Sanchez, actually swayed by some genuine liberal ideal, balks at English instructions and their distasteful consequences. Located mid- brawl in a London pub, Walker returns and addresses all these parties with dispassionate, lethal dispatch. His next assignment will be Indochina.
Though Brando rated this his best performance, Pontecorvo found the actor difficult. They quarreled over noisy sets (Brando wore ear plugs) and close-ups (Brando didn’t want them), but mostly over the character of Walker. Their perseverance produced a masterful, many-layered performance.
In Brando’s mouth Walker’s dialogue is convincing as real human speech rather than political theory. Walker the operative reduces most things to “a simple calculation.” In explaining his plan to burn the island’s forests and mountain villages a second time, he notes that a guerilla has “20, 30, maybe 50 times as much” commitment as a regular solider. Earlier, recruiting Teddy Sanchez and the other plantation owners to establish their republic and abolish slavery as their first act, he compares the economic advantage of hiring whores over marrying wives to the long-term benefit of paying wages over keeping slaves. Walker’s intriguing recognition of common ground between the lot of women and slaves, of course, is a mirror image reversal of the alliances stirring at the same time to the north in the US abolitionist movement.
But Walker’s emotional attachment to Jose Dolores – Brando’s contribution – is equally powerful as Walker’s instrumental view of policy. This bond lights up their triumphant horse-back meeting on the beach amidst Dolores’ ragtag army, later prompts Walker’s gesture to let the defeated rebel ride rather than stumble behind on foot and deepens such various moments as when Walker is willing to simply shoot Dolores and begs him to flee rather than accept hanging.
Film critic Amy Taubin likens Walker’s methods to seduction, suggesting that Brando plays him as a closeted gay man, echoing his own role two years before in Reflections in a Golden Eye. Their eyes do lock across a crowded marketplace as Walker cruises likely prospects. Whether we accept Taubin’s reading literally or take the sexual undercurrent as something more suggestive, it contributes to fleshing out the film’s politics and it builds on other sexual images already there. In this light, for example, when Dolores puts on the vanquished Portuguese general’s fancy jacket, it becomes a kind of political drag as much as the more obvious reference to Franz Fanon’s notion of the oppressed copying their oppressors.
Not a bad film for this Primary season, as we ponder what “change” really means. Come back next week for Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo’s visual sweep and Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/10/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
the witnesses: a slice of life film
the witnesses
Andre Techine
In 110 minutes Andre Techine’s the witnesses creates a mosaic of adult men and women connected through their personal search for self realization, love and professional and financial furtherance.
It is a story so compelling that despite its slow evolution I felt as I watched this film that the actors, the characters they portrayed were not just indelibly imprinted into my psyche but that they were more than acquaintances. They became my friends even though I knew none of them and never will.
It isn’t that any one line stuck in my mind, nor was it the cleverness of this simply plot of what happened when one of their own becomes sick and eventually dies. It was the way they related to each other, the selection of images to convey the ordinary life of people who are actually very different from me in their life styles and yet……..I felt so connected to them.
The success of each of our life forces is revealed in the last section of this film as each one of the actors seems to pick up the pieces of their lives following the death of one of them and they go on to fulfill their personal missions at a higher a more focused and successful way. Their goals seem so much simpler, so much more within their grasp once they set about to mend the wounds of loss.
When my sister died I wanted to hold onto that excruciating pain forever. Now even that is gone but I am now more the person I had wanted to be than I had been while she lived.
It is a sad truth that death may actually bring rewards we never dreamed possible.
This film, witnesses, is so beautiful, captivating, engrossing and rewarding for the viewer who wants a slice of life film that doesn’t feel or sound contrived.
I recommend the witnesses without reservations.
lindaZ
wbai women's collective
member:wfcc
2007 Strand Releasing
French: with subtitles
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