#weekend watching

[ucflibrary]

A languid trip to Hong Kong for today’s Weekend Watching.

~

Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai, 1990)

A plot summary of any Wong Kar-wai film is almost beside the point. His movies tend to be about mood and tone, more sensory experiences than classically structured stories. His Hong Kong drama Days of Being Wild is no different and what does exist of a plot need only be mentioned in broad sketches. Yuddy, a playboy, who lives with his adopted "Auntie" strikes up a brief romance with Su Li-zhen, who runs a concession stand at a soccer stadium. He eventually leaves her for a dancer named Mimi. Su Li-zhen begins a tentative friendship with a local cop, Tide. Yuddy continues to push Auntie for info on his biological mother, who gave him up at birth.

These are all wanderers. Yuddy seems to sleepwalk through life, haunted by the knowledge of his birth mother somewhere out there. His relationships with Su Li-zhen and Mimi feel like mere placeholders. The women, too, feel adrift and are similarly rootless. Tide quits his police job to become a sailor so he can wander the world. Even Auntie accepts a marriage proposal and may move to the States. Wong's camera embodies the restlessness that pervades the movie.

It makes sense then that the film's most notoriously enigmatic scene, which ends the film, appears to lean into this transience. In it, a character we have yet to see at any point in the movie appears in a tiny room not unlike Yuddy's, primping himself in a dapper suit ready for, presumably, a night out. The scene does little to contextualize the story we had seen for the previous hour-and-a-half. So why is it here? The most noted reason is metatextual: Wong was setting up a sequel starring Tony Leung, the actor featured in the scene. Characters, names, and actors throughout Wong's films show up in later works. They may or may not be the same people in the previous films—Wong would never do something that prosaic. Instead, these are wayward souls who travel in and out these stories, their specter hovering over others as a memory of the past (and sometimes future).

Time is fundamental in Wong's movies. It slows down and speeds up. It's both ephemeral and everlasting. ("I used to think a minute could pass so quickly. But actually, it can take forever," one character says.) Yuddy and Su Li-zhen's entire relationship seems based around the ticking of a clock. And so much of his work suggests parallel timelines or narratives, as if time could be blurred between one world and another.

These are all ideas Wong would return to time and time again. Days of Being Wild wasn't his first movie, but the first that codified his themes and visual language. It was a bold cinematic proclamation for what was to come from one of the great cinematic artists of the last 30 years.

Days of Being Wild (1990) is available through Alexander Street Press.

[ucflibrary]

Putting the pieces together in this edition of Weekend Watching.

~

Puzzle (Marc Turtletaub, 2018)

Puzzle sets up its heroine's plight in an elegant, if also quite sad way. Agnes is a housewife hosting a large party at her house. While her husband Louie is on the couch drinking with friends and others are casually socializing around the home, Agnes is busy making sure everything runs smoothly. When she mentions bringing out the cake soon, we get the idea it might be her husband's birthday, or perhaps one of her sons'. But the cake she presents to everyone gathered around the table has her own name on it. She's slaving away at her own birthday party.

If this premise about a wife and mother struggling to break free from the doldrums of domesticity sounds overly familiar, it probably is. But it certainly finds new life in the specificity of the world (and people) Agnes finds herself escaping to. One of the presents she receives is a jigsaw puzzle. Though she initially puts it away, she's drawn to it and, as it turns out, so brilliant at it that she can complete large puzzles in no time. To satiate her urge for more puzzles, she finds a specialty store in the city to buy more, also to find a champion competitive puzzler's ad looking for a new partner.

If you've been reading these reviews for a while, you'll know I love it when movies go into process, examining the minutiae of how people do the things they're good at. Agnes is certainly a savant at puzzle solving, but Robert, the semi-recluse with the ad introduces her to his technique and strategies, honing her skills to maximize her innate talent. Before sitting down, he says, you must walk around the table to get a broader perspective of the pieces. It allows you to see the pieces in a different light, noticing different colors and shapes you might not have noticed from your original point of view. It's not difficult to see that Agnes needs to apply this approach in her life as well.

Her relationship, too, with Robert feels quite nuanced. It exists in that nebulous and tentative space between friendship and something more. He is constantly watching the news and every time Agnes arrives at his house, he's alerting her to some international tragedy, causing Agnes herself to be more interested in world events. She also allows him to open up to more possibilities after the dissolution of his own marriage.

Agnes's flowering also has a trickle-down effect, forcing her to realize that one of her sons, Ziggy, is too living a stifled life and should be following his own path. Working at his father's garage, Ziggy feels he has no purpose and is good at nothing, before admitting he has a passion for cooking. To the regressive views off his father, it isn't a manly job. Of course the slightest change in routine or any idea out of the box completely throws Louie out of sorts and that certainly include what to him feels like Agnes's silly interests in puzzles.

The ending, which I won't spoil here, doesn't necessarily glide in for the easy landing. Sure, as expected, Agnes comes to learn the hard lessons of years of stagnation. But there's a slight twist to how we might imagine everything turns out and Agnes has to make decisions that are probably more difficult than meets the eye. At first I was left unsatisfied by this, but upon further reflection, I think it's closer to what's right for her own growth. Because by that time, she finally realizes her only obligation has always been simply to herself.

 Puzzle (2018) is available on Alexander Street Press.

[ucflibrary]

A love story of a slightly different sort for today’s Weekend Watching.

~

Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2014)

When you're a vampire couple, you've got enough days in your calendar to spend a significant time away from each other. So, while the appropriately named Adam and Eve have been a couple for centuries, they begin of Only Lovers Left Alive in separate parts of the world—he in Detroit, she in Tangier. But when Adam goes through a depressive, existential crisis--brought on mainly by the human "zombies" who have wasted their much more limited time on earth--Eve pays a visit to the Motor City.

Having lived for so long, they often must assume other identities just to get around in the world. That they can get away with such fake names as Stephen Dedalus, Daisy Buchanan, and Dr. Faust is both hilarious and points to the idea—particularly Adam's—of society's gradual unculturing. Zombies, as he continually calls them, fear their own imagination. When Eve tries to cheer him up by reminding him of all the good things in the world, including the great scientists, he counters that they were often ridiculed, saying that people are still "bitching about Darwin."

Adam's concern about what the zombies are doing to the world is an existential crisis in an even more urgent way. As the world continues to be polluted, people's blood begin to become more and more contaminated, which of course just happens to be their source of food. As evolved creatures, they've long resisted taking their blood directly from people and have found alternative ways of getting their fix.

Only Lovers Left Alive certainly refers to the two in a romantic sense, lovers who have stuck together through the course of literally several lifetimes. But I think the title refers to their love of life and what it has to offer as well. Adam's depression is brought on by seeing people sleepwalking through their lives, not appreciating the greatness and beauty that surrounds them every day. It would be easy to dismiss Adam and Eve's love of the classics and the great totemic works of art as empty nostalgia, but this feels like longing of a different sort.

It makes sense that the film is set primarily in Detroit, a once vibrant cultural and economic center that was going through a terrible decline in the years leading up to the movie's release. "This place will rise again," Eve says of the city in one of the many times Adam takes her on a drive in the middle of the night through empty streets. "When the cities of the south are burning, this place will bloom." She was kind of right as Detroit would see somewhat of a resurgence in the years since and I think the film itself is a love letter not only to this city in particular, but to all places that once thrived as centers of culture and commerce alike. Vampires themselves are the epitome of death and rebirth and I think writer/director Jarmusch is suggesting that it's the lovers, and lovers only—of art, science, culture, and each other—that will continue to keep the world spinning.

Only Lovers Left Alive (2014) is available through Alexander Street Press.

[ucflibrary]

Streaming movies at home is a lovely convenience during these times, but it can’t fully replace the experience of seeing them in a theater. As movie houses, like every other business, begin to cautiously consider re-opening, we take a look at two movies that celebrate the magic of going to the cinema.

~

Cinema Mon Amour (Alexandru Belc, 2015)

Romania had a peak of over 400 cinemas before the fall of Communism, all state-run. By 2015, which saw the release of the documentary Cinema Mon Amour, there were less than 30. One of these is the Cinema Dacia and Viktor Purice has been managing it since 1970.

The theater is both falling apart and seeing dwindling attendance. In one scene Viktor goes outside and offers a bunch of loitering teenagers a two-for-one offer to get them to come in. When a TV reporter asks him during an interview how he's doing, he simply says, "Surviving." He even travels to Germany to see how a bigger, more successful theater is run so he can get new ideas.

Cinema Dacia is quite a gorgeous theater, but it is indeed rundown. They have to offer blankets and give out cups of tea to keep their patrons warm during the colder months. Viktor himself also must do most of the renovations as he's not getting help from the poor management of Romania Film.

Cinema Mon Amour is less an elegy for a dying movie culture than it is a document about the passing of time and an examination of a man doing everything he can to keep what he once knew from slipping away. Viktor is a generally even-keeled person, but the most moving moment in the movie is when he admits to not being able to sleep, that it hurts him when people don't pay attention to him. He's mainly talking about his Romania Film superiors, but I think he also means the audience. He hopes he'll be remembered for what he brought to the community.

Late in the film, Viktor is rocking out to a song on the radio that after a few bars I slowly began to realize must have been some Romanian cover of "Hotel California." Throughout these final sections of the movie, he begins to wonder to the rest of the crew if it's worth continuing trying to preserve the theater, to stop making big sacrifices and trying to be some sort of folk hero. But after 40 years, it proves difficult to leave something that is such a big part of what defines him. Old movie houses like these tend to have a magic that even the newest, shiniest theaters can't even begin to approach. As the final line in "Hotel California" states, "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

Cinema Mon Amour (2015) is available through Alexander Street Press.

~

Shadow Magic (Ann Hu, 2000)

Shadow Magic tells the story of cinema's arrival in China at the beginning of the 20th century. Liu Jing Lun is the chief photographer at Feng Tai Studio in Peking. When Englishman Raymond Wallace arrives, he is there to spread the gospel of a new technology: cinema.

Liu is a curious young man, often distracted by new technologies. The opening shots of the film see him fascinated by the phonograph, to the point he brings it to the studio to play music while taking photos. But when Raymond lets him into his new attraction--also called Shadow Magic--Liu has found a new obsession and gets himself a second job recruiting skeptical audiences to fill the house.

Much of the conflict comes as these outside influences begin to encroach on Chinese traditions. Lord Tan, a famous opera singer, sees his audience dwindle as more people begin to go to Shadow Magic. The movie imagines what it must have been like to see pictures that move for the first time. Many of what we see on screen are the famous silent shorts of the Lumieres and other early cinema pioneers. It even recreates the apocryphal story of Arrival of a Train at La Ciota, the urban legend that audiences once ran from their seats thinking the approaching locomotive would plow through them.

But the movie also works at inverting the trope of the Magical Asian, wherein the sole character of color exists only to provide wisdom or guidance to the white protagonist. Here, Raymond is the only white character and his service to the story is overtly to provide "magic," passing onto Liu the ability to spread cinema to a wider audience in China. Even within the broader historical context, the final titles of the film mention that many foreigners brought cinema to China during this time and that "the first Shadow Magic showman remains unknown,” literally making this person a mystical, mythical figure.

At Feng Tai, Liu would go on to direct the first movie made in China—starring Lord Tan, no less. Liu and Raymond realize that the appeal of the cinema isn't just to see people from far off lands as a form of escapist entertainment, but to see what's in your own backyard through a different lens. Cinema can be both a mirror and a prism through which to see the world we're living as we're living it. It was true then at it is now.

Shadow Magic (Ann Hu, 2000) is available through Alexander Street Press.

[ucflibrary]

In honor of the late RBG, another story of women who stood up for equality.

~

Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, 2010)

Made in Dagenham dramatizes the 1968 all-female sewing machinist strike at a Ford plant just outside of London. At the time, Ford was the biggest manufacturer in Europe and a huge employer in the town of Dagenham and, in part because their positions were reclassified as "unskilled" and in part because simply they were women, the machinists were paid at a vastly lower rate than their male counterparts.

The strike is led by a fictionalized character, Rita O'Grady, an unassuming woman who needed to be pushed into leadership by her colleagues. But an early, unrelated incident with her son's teacher seems to spark this desire to stand up to power. When Rita finds out the teacher bruised her son's hand with a ruler for not being prepared in class, she confronts him for an apology. He responds condescendingly by saying that his poor upbringing hasn't properly provided him the structure for success at a nice private school. It informs the way she sees how her colleagues are treated by the men in power at Ford.

Perhaps more than anything, Dagenham shows all the tinier sacrifices—both directly and peripherally--that pile up on the way to reaching the larger goal. Sure, these women are giving up a stable wage and, for many, risking their entire livelihood in the name of equality. But they are also compromising their relationships with their families, their community, and even with each other. Husbands make their wives feel like they are unfairly prioritizing the cause over their roles in keeping the house. Men in the community, particularly at the factory, blame them for cratering the economic prospects of the town. And the resulting backlash causes rifts in the solidarity between the women themselves.

Rita's plight is a familiar one for most women despite the specificity of her labor situation. The union lawyer who's supposed to be on her side is simply just another man who tries to sweep her complaint under the rug. Her husband thinks he's a hero for never raising his hand to her or having an affair and therefore demands she refocus on their home life. Ford and everyone else are surprised that they even go through with the strike because it is assumed unladylike to simply stand up for their rights at all.

The women of the Dagenham strike were neither the first nor the last to experience this type of discrimination. But their story is certainly indicative of this type of struggle, showing how the fight ends up coming from all sides instead of directly in front of you and the consistent indignities that come along with it. And it's as good a template to follow for any fight that might be coming our way.

Made in Dagenham (2010) can be streamed through Alexander Street Press.

[ucflibrary]

As debates rage across the country on whether we should open schools, this weekend we’ll take a look at two movies set in vastly different school environments, the refined world of higher learning in Jerusalem and the grittier world of a Paris high school.

~

Footnote (Joseph Cedar, 2011)

Two Talmudic researchers and professors—Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnik, father and son--are at the center of Joseph Cedar's Footnote. A movie about the virtues (or lack thereof) of academic rigor and filial piety may sound dry, but the ingenious plotting and smart editing pulls a juicy soap opera out of this story's dusty shelves.

One of the clever narrative gambits the movie pulls is providing exposition through footnotes themselves. In both these men's cases, we see on the screen, "A few things worth knowing about..." before going into an annotated rundown of their professional and personal lives. The movie turns into an almost dual biography, a filmed explication of the book about these men's lives as if they were real and not characters in a story.

Footnote is also a curious examination of professional rivalry, specifically in the realm of academia. Among its chief themes are academic integrity and the validity of different types of research. That idea proves to be the main wedge between the father and son, and the point at which loyalties begin to fracture. In a newspaper interview, Eliezer says Uriel is very good at what he does. It just so happens he doesn't really respect it as legitimate scientific research.

This constant disappointment at the hands of his own father causes Uriel to blow up at his own son. We can see how the dysfunction in one relationship manifests itself in and is displaced onto other relationships. And we can see how the pettiest of grievances take their toll on the weightiest of bonds.

 Footnote (2011) is available through Alexander Street Press.

~

The Class (Laurent Cantet, 2008)

The Class follows teacher François Marin over the course of an academic year and his class of mostly foreign-born students in a working-class area of Paris. Jumping back and forth between scenes of Marin arguing with his often insolent students and him commiserating with his colleagues over their shared frustration, we can certainly empathize with the plight of the modern teacher. It's quite apparent that the term “teacher” encompasses a lot more than that word would suggest.

But in the same way that parents and their children can make up pretty quickly after having a fairly big row, the same can be said about Marin and his students. A couple of scenes after a student named Khoumba writes Marin a letter saying she will no longer engage with him after having a big fight in class, they are seen discussing classwork as if nothing happened. His relationship with Souleymane, a particularly difficult student, ping pongs between outright contempt and Marin being his most outspoken supporter.

Many of the scenes are uncomfortably tense, not only for how personal and heated those arguments get, but how the movie often refuses to spell out who is right. Students challenge him in manners typical of rowdy teens, but also in unexpected ways. When Marin always uses the name Bill for example sentences, they question why he always uses "whitey" names, especially when his class is full of African and Arab students. And they argue that since everyday, common speech is always evolving, they wonder why they should dwell on an impractical adherence to strict rules of language.

The question of who's right all leads to the final big confrontation of the movie between Marin and Souleymane. And it's to the movie's credit that though the structures of power in the school system inevitably force decisions to be made in one direction, it doesn't necessarily ask the viewer to assign blame to either side. We get to know these kids and their points of view and we're hinted at problems in their personal lives. We're also shown the unenviable position so many teachers are put in just by coming into work every day. It is then, perhaps, a lesson in empathy from which we can still learn today.

The Class (2008) is available through Alexander Street Press.

[ucflibrary]

The sad passing of director Lynn Shelton last week underscores both the rich lineage of female directors she belongs to as well as the immense progress the industry still needs to make in giving these filmmakers the deserved opportunity to give us such wonderful movies. So in honor of Shelton, it’s as a good a time as any to highlight a couple of her legendary predecessors.

~

The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953)

In 1953, actress-turned-filmmaker Ida Lupino became the first woman to direct a film noir, The Hitch-Hiker. It follows the story of two friends, Roy Collins and Gilbert Bowen, on a fishing trip to Mexico who pick up the hitch-hiking Emmett Myers, a murderer trying to escape into Baja. The film is somewhat rare among noirs in that it isn't set in a big city, instead taking place mostly in the wide open desert roads of California and Mexico through which Myers is trying to make his escape. This highlights their isolation; the bleaker the landscape, the more urgent the captives' despair becomes.

The movie is a taut and lean 71 minutes and Lupino is quite efficient at getting us to understand everything we need to know about these characters. She may be sketching with broad strokes but she quickly defines and distinguishes these three men. Bowen tries to remain level-headed, knowing that the key to survival is keeping your head down as long as necessary. Collins becomes increasingly desperate, ready and waiting to pounce on their captor as soon as he can. And Myers is a menacing villain, controlled on the outside with a just barely visible rage coiled to burst out at a moment's notice.

But by defining these men in such elemental ways, she's able to undercut some of the inherited tropes of masculinity within these hard-boiled genres. In that way, she's much closer to her contemporaries such as Nicholas Ray or Samuel Fuller than the earlier practitioners film noir.

Lupino was already a movie star by the time she tried her hand at directing and the fact that she was doing so for her own production company is what likely gave her the freedom to do so at a time when so few women were helming productions (she also wrote or co-wrote many of these films). This period of artistic freedom lasted not even a decade and she went back to a successful career as an actress. But it served as a model for one way women could wield agency in the industry—a model, 60-plus years later, Hollywood still needs to catch up with.

The Hitch-Hiker is available on Kanopy through November 13, 2020.

~

Cléo From 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)

The influence the French New Wave movement of the late 50s and early 60s had cannot be understated, and its effects are still felt today. Their progenitors read like a murderers’ row of cinephile gods: Chabrol, Truffaut, Rivette, and of course Godard. And though Agnès Varda would be perhaps belatedly regarded in the same company, she would firmly establish her bona fides by 1962's Cléo From 5 to 7.

The film follows in real time a beautiful singer wandering Paris, nervously awaiting the results of medical tests that will reveal whether or not she has cancer. Beauty is often the currency by which women have to navigate the world and Cléo is fully aware of that. "Ugliness is a kind of death. As long as I'm beautiful, I'm even more alive than the others," she says early in the film to pacify herself. We see this quite strikingly every time she walks on the street. In a vérité-style typical to the French New Wave, scenes play out in the city amongst a public, who either don't realize or don't care a movie is being shot in their midst. And as Cléo (as portrayed by an impossibly beautiful Corinne Marchand) glides down the streets of Paris, she catches every man's eye, leaving no head unturned. But self-worth based on another's gaze has its price, as the several men she encounters dismiss her existential dread as merely attention grabbing. "Everyone spoils me. No one loves me," she laments.

If Varda was atypical among her New Wave counterparts simply for being female, she was also different in that she did not emerge from the ranks of the French critical elite. She was by trade a photographer and while other early New Wave films had a purposefully unvarnished aesthetic, Cléo From 5 to 7 shows the keenly astute eye for framing and editing that would become a hallmark in the director's later works.

Where Cléo ends up, while primally important to her, feels less significant to the movie than all the seemingly random tangents that brought her there. She sees Paris, and herself, with a fresh set of eyes. Perhaps others she will encounter will do the same. With Varda it's about refreshing our gaze; it's not about what we see, it's about who we see.

Cléo From 5 to 7 is available on Kanopy through August 21, 2020.

[lena-in-a-red-dress]

I also watched two christmas movies today, and neither were very good:

Spirited: a musical interpretation/riff on A Christmas Carol, starring.... Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds. Neither of whom I really enjoy in general. The dancers were pretty good, but the songs lacked luster and the film otherwise lacked soul.

Oh. What. Fun. - Michelle Pfeiffer got my hopes up, but honestly this movie's potential fizzled out in the style of The Family Stone. Very meh. No one was really likeable, not even the mom, and I didn't really feel any connection to it. Major bummer, because I actually was excited to watch Michelle Pfeiffer in something new.