THE CYNEPHILE

Vincere means victory, and Bellochio’s latest is a win from start to finish. I saw this film last year at the New York Film Festival and was blown away — almost literally by the Italian Futurist supertitles that whoosh in from above and nosedive their way onto the screen. The film paints a thrilling historical portrait of Ida Dalser, Il Duce’s first wife and suppressed love interest who bore him a child. Aside from its stunning visuals, the film is enlivened by an absolutely bravura performance by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who is widely known in Italy, and should be more well-known here. An opening shot/reverse shot sequence reveals her attraction for Mussolini as she watches him denounce God in his characteristically overbearing oratory.

A young Mussolini [Filippo Timi] addresses the crowd.

Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida Dalser is aroused by his singular vision.

She is among the many who fall under his rhetorical spell.

This sequence makes it pretty clear that the qualities that make her lust after Mussolini are the same that compel the Italian people to fall for fascism, and that we are to read Dalser’s seduction and subsequent betrayal by Mussolini as allegorical. While it’s entirely possible to read this movie as *only* a historical portrait, you’d be missing half the fun, because Vincere is among the most biting satire that Bellochio has ever produced. The sheer pompousness of some the newsreel footage, the grandiose media gestures and spectacles — Bellochio ushers them in like gangbusters in this condemnation of the state. And yes, Il Duce is an easy target (perhaps too easy) but that doesn’t mean Vincere isn’t worth applauding. Bellochio’s arrows never lack sting, especially in light of contemporary media fascists like Berlusconi.

And for those who love the aesthetics (er, not the politics!) of Italian Futurism, the film offers of a visual feast of fashion, fonts (including the aforementioned supertitles above), and historical footage.

An Italian Futurist Study Guide (To brush up before you go).

Or you can just take a cue from F.T. Marinetti:

“We will glorify war — the world’s only hygiene — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.” –The Futurist Manifesto

art + video
It’s Armory Week, and the number of openings, events and parties in the next few days makes my head spin. Aside from the usual mainstays, the new kid on the block this year is the Independent. Born out the ashes of X-initiative, it offers an alternative to the inescapable shopping mall ambiance of the art fair — there’s even a panel on gluttony! And a film program too. Check it out here.

Scope also has a video program, with work by Martha Colburn, George Kuchar and fashion-y films. Sashay!

design
Check out the next generation of Polish film poster design.

fashion
Look who’s copying a page from the Vezzoli playbook: Agyness Deyn deigns to appear in a McDermott and McGough film.

film reviews
Andrew Grant (nom de blog: filmbrain) reviews The Ghost Writer, and thinks it’s pretty good.
You should see it, especially since all proceeds from the film go to the Roman Polanski legal defense fund. (Kidding!)

mystery flavor
My favorite posthuman Andrei Codrescu is anti-Avatar, and pro-zombie. Deliciously brainy as always.

My friend Ziyan and I as zombie-vampire hybrids. Kristen Stewart, eat your heart out.

new york
Movie program ephemera from the 8th street Playhouse, which I remember going to as a little girl. Thanks to reader Jack for the tip.

photography
Andy Warhol: Unexposed Exposures just opened at Steven Kashar.
If the Factory had had a facebook page, these would be the pictures that they would post to their wall. Lots o’ pics online too.

watch online
The first and only truly Beat film Pull My Daisy (Frank and Leslie, 1959) is on Google Video.

“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” – Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

“It was about time that Fuck the police! replaced Yes sir, officer! In this sense, the open hostility of certain gangs only expresses, in a slightly less muffled way, the poisonous atmosphere, the desire for salvational destruction by which the country is consumed.” -The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

Un Prophète has the rare distinction of having been in the right place at the right time. When droves of cinephiles line up to see it when it opens this Friday, they will unfortunately be rather late to the party, for its impact was felt in France last year (and indeed, all the important European film societies showered it with awards quite some ago). If it wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, that will only add a shiny American feather to its amply decorated hat, and maybe Audiard will make a film in the U.S. as a result.

Newcomer Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebana

But what makes this film a cause célèbre in France has nothing to do with the quality of the film itself, although the film will undoubtedly become a classic — it has French Goodfellas written all over it. Un Prophète is important the same way Entre Les Murs [The Class, 2008] was important, because it touches on the changing racial and class dynamics that have been the subject of heated controversy lately, particularly since the appointment of conservative Éric Besson as Minister of Immigration, and his accompanying xenophobic agenda: he is anti-Burka, pro-immigration quotas and re-patriations and thinks that immigrants should have to pass a French language test. (Oh, and schoolchildren should sing La Marseillaise at least once a year.) His policies have led him to be deemed “the most hated man in France” (more hated than Sarko?) and things have only gotten worse since Besson was discovered, in true repressed-politician fashion, to have a secret Muslim girlfriend.

Malik and Corsican mob leader César Luciani [Niels Arestrup]

So what does this have to do with Un Prophète? The film is the coming-of-age story of a young Arab delinquent Malik, who learns to survive in prison by successfully wheeling and dealing with members of the Corsican and Arab gangs that are engaged in a brutal turf war. The socio-political commentary is indirect but it’s pretty damn clear: if the prison is a microcosm of society, the open hostility between the two clans mirrors “in a slightly less muffled way” the conflict between ethnic groups and their struggle for domination. The Corsican gang in particular is threatened by the influx of Arab prisoners; the sheer number makes it hard for them to maintain control. Malik is an interesting figure to put at the center of all of this: ethnically ambiguous, he is forced to kill a fellow Arab at the bidding of a Corsican mafia boss [played wonderfully by Niels Arestrup]. That man comes back to haunt him and suffuses the film with a vaguely preternatural / quasi-religious aura (as do the biblically-inflected chapters and the title of the film itself). Un Prophète has started a national conversation about prison reform, and that’s momentous and necessary, especially when Sarkozy himself refers to the institution as “the nation’s shame.” But what Un Prophète really dramatizes, through its parable of an Arab outsider becoming the ultimate insider, is the ascendency of a new polyglot, multi-racial national identity.

The ghost of Reyeb [Hichem Yacoubi]. This strangely reminded me of the ghost who haunts Gena Rowland’s character in Opening Night.

Titles with Biblical references are interspersed throughout the film.

U.S. viewers are likely to only get a sense of the political overtones, as Un Prophète is also a genre piece that also calls to mind recent gangster films such as Gomorrah, Canet’s Ne Le Dis à Personne, and the two-part Mesrine. But Un Prophète also deserves to be included in that slippery category of “zeitgeist” films, because it takes on a flammable topic, however obliquely, and acutely presages circumstances to come.

Steve McQueen’s Hunger comes out on DVD today from Criterion, and I can’t think of an art-house title from the past year that is more deserving of the “Criterion” treatment (including what must surely be a harrowing Blu-ray release). A video artist turned feature filmmaker, McQueen refuses to talk about his work in convenient, journalist-friendly soundbytes, or define what it’s about for the viewer. In an interview, he cites a conversation between Pauline Kael and Jean-Luc Godard as a source of inspiration for Hunger:

“I found this interview that Godard did with Pauline Kael two days after Bobby Sands died, where Godard essentially said, “The reason why Bobby Sands is important is because he’s childish.” I got this image in my head of this child sitting at the table with some food, and the parents saying, ‘You’re not leaving this table until you finish eating it.’ The kid says no, wrongly or rightly. What time a child goes to bed, or the clothes a child wears, those things are dictated to by experience, and it’s a common situation that the only power a kid has is to refrain from eating. It’s a situation all of us know.”

I love how that one word “childish” spurs an image that allows McQueen to take a specific historical moment — the hunger strike of Bobby Sands — and translate it into a common experience. Here’s what Godard said in the actual interview (Pauline Kael is asking him about film being used a a political weapon):

JLG: …I think a good example is La Chinoise…It was made in 1967 before the 1968 events in France, before the Weatherman here, before the Baader-Meinof in Germany, or the Red Brigade in Italy. At the time it was hated by the left, who said, “These people are ridiculous.” And today, after seeing it fifteen years later, we discover that all of those people, even Bobby Sands a few days ago, are childish, and it’s because they are childish that they are important people.

“Childish” here isn’t used as pejorative — Godard seems to be using it as an adjective to encapsulate a strength of conviction, an uncompromising will, and a sense of stubborn refusal. In La Chinoise, there is a pivotal scene in which the university student Veronique has a conversation with Francis Jeanson, a leftist professor. He repeatedly questions her morals, her anger, and what he considers to be her childish revolutionary actions.

It is evident that the second part of Hunger, in which Bobby Sands confronts a priest who tries to dissuade him from becoming a martyr, is directly inspired by this train conversation. Like La Chinoise, they argue in a very long take, almost in silhouette, forcing the viewer to focus on the dialogue.

Other McQueen news: I recently dropped by his show at Marian Goodman, and despite having missed Yoko Ono by mere moments, I was a bit underwhelmed by Giardini (his film from the Venice Biennale). There is a lovely piece called Static in which McQueen circles the the Statue of Liberty from a helicopter, that transforms the tourist trap back into an object of awe and wonder. It’s a must-see for video art enthusiasts and McQueen completists.

His next project? A biopic about the Nigerian singer Fela Kuti, which will hopefully sidestep the clichés of the genre and will undoubtedly be visually and sonically arresting.

Dennis Lim’s review of Hunger in The New York Times

A nice breakdown of important moments in McQueen’s career from New York Magazine

In Pedro Almodóvar’s latest mise-en-abîme of a film, the protagonist is a director who makes a movie called Chicas y Maletas (Girls and Suitcases). This film is a tongue-in-cheek remake of the movie that put Almodóvar on the map, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988]. The plot of the latter anything but simple, but the film revolves around Pepa (played by Carmen Maura) who frantically looks for her former lover Ivan in order to give him a suitcase full of his things and to tell him some very important news. The suitcase is a textbook MacGuffin –and it’s worth noting that in Hitchcock’s original explanation, the MacGuffin is literally a piece of baggage — while also symbolizing the emotional baggage of a past relationship, which Pepa must eventually ditch in order to free herself from him. (She ends up throwing the suitcase in a dumpster.)

Carmen Maura as Pepa: on the verge of a nervous breakdown. (Don’t mind the French subtitles.)

In Broken Embraces, Penelope Cruz takes on the Pepa role in the film-within-a-film, with one crucial difference: she’s on crutches. The crutches are not a prop: In the principal plot of Broken Embraces, her husband pushes her down the stairs when she tries to leave him for the director. She is both emotionally and physically crippled by him, but goes on to finish the film despite her disability. The interesting thing about this is that the Spanish word for “crutches” is muletas, which is almost identical to maletas (suitcases). The meaning of the play on words is clear: Her former lover is a crutch that she too must cast aside in order to move on.

Penelope Cruz as Lena, wearing red and leaving with a suitcase of her own.

Carmen Machi as Chon, visiting Lena. [What a fat big toe!”] Lena’s crutches are in the background. (P.S. I  love her dress.)

Another layer: the director of the film (Mateo Blanco, who changes his name to Harry Caine) is also impaired: he becomes blind in the car accident in which he loses his lover (Cruz as Lena). Fourteen years later, he re-edits Chicas y Maletas in order to repair himself and move on. Almodóvar, when speaking about this character, mentioned that he recently had been afflicted with crushing migraines and wondered what it would be like to make a film as a blind man. The underlying message of this film, in which life and cinema are fully intertwined? We must live and love despite all handicaps (emotional, physical and everything in between). The last line: “Films must be finished, even in the dark.” This is a fitting metaphor for the creative process as well.

Lluís Homar as the blind Harry Caine: His lack of vision is momentarily overcome by touch as he caresses the screen.

Barry Jenkin’s Medicine for Melancholy is many wonderful things.

1. It is not a mumblecore film.

2. It is an understated homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle [Breathless, 1960]. The film’s cinematography emulates Breathless in its look and feel, and there are several direct (but not derivative) references to iconic scenes:

The most obvious allusion is to Michel making faces at Patricia in the bathroom.

Wyatt Cenac as Micah, mimicking Belmondo’s trio of expressions in his bathroom mirror.

And then there’s the t-shirt that Patricia wears as she hawks newspapers up and down the Champs-Élysées.

Tracey Heggins as Jo, with her short, short hair, and yellow Loden t-shirt  (as in Barbara Loden, director of Wanda).

And finally, a scene in which Michel and Patricia lounge around endlessly in bed, having an intimate and often meaningless conversation — as only lovers can.

It is a something of a cliché in film school to cite Godard as one of your favorite filmmakers. But Barry Jenkins has managed to evoke his love of Godard — and these quintessential, beloved moments from a film that cinephiles hold so dear — and make them his own. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Read an interview with Barry Jenkins from efilmcritc.com.

Neytiri (from Avatar) vs. Anthony Mackie (from The Hurt Locker). Who would you rather spend two hours with?

As an occasional mainstream moviegoer, I find the Oscars increasingly irrelevant in shaping my multiplex digressions. The field is predictable; the ceremony is excruciating. Nevertheless, I do think it’s compelling that Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and James Cameron’s Avatar both lead with nine nominations, because the movies come from opposite ends of the filmmaking spectrum. While the gossipmongers are twittering over the fact that the pair used to be married, I think these two films going head to head could be one indicator of the types of films the big studios will consider worthy investments in the future. Let’s compare the two:

AVATAR

• Biggest budget in film history (undisclosed amount; estimated at $200 to $500 million. That’s one hell of a range, J.C.)
• Highest Grossing B.O. ever (but not ticket sales! I find this extremely heartening)
• CGI spectacle with different tiers of engagement: 2D, 3D, IMAX, etc.
• Utopian, apolitical sci-fi storyline set in the future
• Made for merchandising (Teenage boys who read my blog, take note of this and this)

THE HURT LOCKER

• $15 million dollar budget, independently financed and produced
• Respectable B.O. (about $16 million worldwide to date)
• Character-driven, highly calibrated drama
• Politically relevant, contemporary storyline about the Iraq War (a subject that has not fared well in movie theaters)
• Little to no merchandising potential (although I would totally buy an Anthony Mackie action figure)

There’s no question as to which of these films will make more money. But hopefully Hurt Locker’s coup will convince the studios that low-budget films (in the $10 to $20 million dollar range) are worth greenlighting again, and can distinguish themselves in an overcrowded marketplace. Thanks to the sheer number of nominations, The Hurt Locker stands to do well in the aftermarket, and DVD / VOD sales will be strong. Not every film can be Avatar; the studios simply can’t afford to outlay prodigious amounts of capital for each individual production. If anything, the success of The Hurt Locker proves once again that sure-fire blockbusters with commensurately-escalating budgets aren’t the only game in town.

James Gray’s Two Lovers is among other things, an austerely beautiful portrait of NYC-neighborhood that doesn’t get much screen-time: Brighton Beach. Gray manages to capture the distinctive look and feel of this largely residential Russian enclave, which also resonates with the Dostoevsky-inspired plot of the film. When asked what attracts him to the location, Gray responded:

“It has the surface texture of urban life. The layers of Brooklyn are fabulous. You can sense the history of the community. Brighton Beach is so ugly that it’s beautiful. History is an accumulation of detail, and I want to make a film with a sense of it.”

These beautifully ugly true-to-life details — these are what we risk losing when New York succumbs to hyper-gentrification, and the unique flavor of different neighborhoods evaporates into thin air. I can’t think of a film from the recent past that records these surface details of the city so well. Could this be because fewer films are being shot on location in New York or because these details are being eradicated all together? I think we all know the answer to that one.

Gwyneth Paltrow and the dark, smoky patina of a subway platform

Joaquin Phoenix in front of Cafe Volna and Tatiana, two mainstays along the boardwalk

Brighton Cleaners, where Joaquin Phoenix’s character Leonard works, is a real-life business. The facade bears the mark of grime, soot and weather.

Téchiné’s latest film, loosely based on a real-life story in which a woman fakes an anti-Semitic attack, ultimately disappoints because it stops short at addressing political issues in favor of an all-too vague character sketch, producing nothing more than a hazy portrait of a traumatized young woman. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if the character was as intense and sensitive as say, Maïté [Élodie Bouchez] from his earlier film Wild Reeds, but Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne, who also played the title character in Rosetta) is dazed and disconnected and she rollerblades effortlessly through the banlieues of Paris, headphones firmly planted upon an abundance of flowing curls.

Émilie Dequenne: Dazed, Confused, Online Dating

The film is divided into two parts: Circumstances and Consequences. The circumstances that lead up to the event just as shocking as the staging of the event itself; it’s the aftermath that is resolved all too easily. After the alleged assault, Jeanne and her mother name (played by Catherine Deneuve) visit friends in the country to escape the media scrutiny and to reflect on what happened. Now maybe I am jealous that I can’t be en congé all the time, but I have seen too many French films lately in which a trip to the seaside or mountain resort cures all, and it’s starting to rake on my nerves. (Staring moodily at the paysage doesn’t always put things in perspective for me.) Besides indulging in this well-worn cliché, the film also includes two Highly Symbolic Sequences (a Bar Mitzvah, a dangerous boat ride in the rain) that detract from Téchiné’s free-flowing, anti-determinist style.

Summer hours pass by quickly in La Fille du RER

It’s worth noting that we had a similar occurrence in the U.S. recently, when a McCain voter carved a “B” into her face, claiming that she had been attacked to stir up ire before the election. She was almost immediately discredited and the media rightfully downplayed her story, and her stunt did not have its intended effect of tarnishing Barack Obama or his supporters. While these two fabricated hate crimes are obviously very different, I think they’re both interesting because they reveal society’s prejudices: who we readily believe, the burden of proof that justice requires, and the media’s role in the frenzy that inevitably follows. La Fille du RER barely touches on all of these issues, and therefore is more evasive than eye-opening.

Move over, Ryan Trecartin: Omer Fast is the current video artist taking over New York. His solo turn at the Whitney, combined with a show of recent work at Postmasters, reveal that he is eminently qualified and more than ready to undertake a feature film. Like the British video artist Steve McQueen, whose Hunger wowed the film world, Fast’s work deserves to be seen by a wider audience. His work is largely in the vein of simulated social documentary that exploits the surface effects of the Hollywood film, pushing the format to a well-tempered extreme to strengthen the irony and distance from that which it critiques. Fast doesn’t shirk from the big issues of today: the aftershocks of war and combat, refugees and displaced persons, racial stereotyping, and the tyranny of the modern police state. But the worlds that he creates are marked by reversals, distinctions, nuances and contradictions, and thus his work does not fall prey to the trap of the “issue” film. Technically accomplished, his films evoke more than they explain, in keeping with Fast’s multi-layerd approach to his subject matter. Formally Fast makes use of split screens, green screens, lush film stocks (most of his work is shot on Super-16) and exaggerated sound effects: this is film-as-artifice, all the way. Yet it is so much more than that: each film manages to probe its connections to mainstream media stereotypes, fictions of the self and nation-state, and constructions of a linear time unburdened by memory.

A still from Nostalgia, 2009. In a hypothetical role-reversed future, an English man is being interviewed for asylum in an unspecified African country.

Fast’s multi-channel pieces, taken together, are approaching feature-film length. I really do think we have the next important auteur on our hands here, and Fast’s quick ascent in the art world closely mirrors that of McQueen. Other potentially useful comparisons: he addresses social concerns similar to the Dardenne brothers. His hybrid approach resembles Isaac Julien’s melding of fiction and documentary. And he is skillful at invoking a self-reflexive critique of media discourse that adds another layer of interpretation to the narrative, like almost all the work of Amos Gitai. Omer Fast is too prodigiously talented to be confined to the white walls of the art world — let’s see his work up on the big screen.

From De Grote Boodschap [The Big Message, 2007]. A Belgium beat-boxer is a unnerving combination of both man and machine.

Holland Cotter’s review of Fast’s two shows, from The New York Times

An interview with Fast and a clip from The Casting, his tour-de force at the 2008 Whitney Biennial