[Moderator's note: I am splitting these reviews up by country, because I have to split them up some way. I am not trying to be provincial. -ecl]
SIFF Reviews
(European Continent)
Film reviews by Jeff Meyer
Copyright 1991 Jeff Meyer
DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER (Germany, 1922, silent):
A film I have long wanted to see, this is Fritz Lang's four-hour story of a heinous criminal mastermind who manipulates the fate of post-war Germany with his genius and his incredible mental powers. (Yeah, it's a hoot.) While five hours (there's a one-hour intermission) is a bit lengthy for most viewers, the film has a number of impressive scenes, and the first half-hour, in which Mabuse pulls off a MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE-like theft which allows him to exploit the chaotic German economy to his profit, is extremely well-timed and exciting to watch.
The first half will be of enjoyment to fans of the old FANTOMAS novels -- the European pre-pulp feel is much in evidence; the second half tends towards melodrama (as Mabuse kidnaps the heroine and destroys her husband), but is full of neat trick effects (for the time) and certainly action-packed. Robert Israel played live accompaniment during the film, and did a splendid job -- he received an ovation during the film when his hands matched the hands of a piano player in a gambling den! Certainly the most enjoyable silent film I've seen yet at the festival.
TWILIGHT (Hungary, 1990):
This year's nomination for The Film From Hell. A movie so static, that most slide presentations look like THIS IS CINERAMA in comparison.
TWILIGHT opens with a gray, slow moving shot over the Black Forest, with incredibly menacing and forboding music on the soundtrack. The film is in black and white, and the image is impressively spooky. Knowing that the plot concerns a serial killer of children around the woods of Budapest, it seems to be a promising start -- one's mind goes back to NOSFERATU and VAMPYRE and some other impressively spookily B&W films set in these parts. As it turns out, one's mind has a lot of time to consider this, as the slow moving shot goes on for about five minutes. Without dialogue. Foreshadowing...
The film continues in these visual spurts. Shot of field where body of child was discovered; camera pans at the rate of about a degree every 5 seconds. Finally, some people arrive; thank God, maybe we'll get some dialog. Well, a few words; the rest of the time, the actors are apparently communing with nature. It turns out they're detectives; maybe they're trying to find the killer psychically. They're definitely not saying much. And after about 10 minutes of this -- BAM! Back to the flying-over-the-black-forest shot, with the same ominous music, for another five minutes.
Well, the film continues to be regular as clockwork. There are scenes where the cameraman set up the camera to take a particular shot (the face of a man which is *absolutely* *immobile*, or the view of rain falling on the windshield of a car from the driver's seat), and then leaves it running while he goes down to the sound truck for a drink, or something. Honestly, I would have left, but I had four people on either side of me, and most of them appeared to be asleep.
An agonizingly boring film; the cinematography was good, but they'd need to pay me a year's wages to sit through this mental taffy-pull again.
LANDSCAPE WITH A WOMAN (Yugoslavia, 1976 (released 1990)):
One thing about films made in those Balkan countries during Communist rule: most of their films seem to have a budget which was approximately 60% of that of an average American high school film production class. Thus, certain technical limitations common to both crop up, e.g., jumping between medium close-ups of the actors speaking directly into the camera, e.g.
JAN: Isky Pisky Palamero. [Your cow will not mate with my bull.]
OTTO: Palamero Isky Pisky. [Your bull will not mate with my cow.]
JAN: Finko Chaderleech. [This is not good.]
*sigh* OK, OK, low blows. However, the film isn't much to speak about; a forest ranger (responsible mostly for keeping locals from filching wood from the state-protected woods) creates suspicion due to his love of painting and art, but slowly begins to win the natives over. The ending was rather surprising and abrupt, and not to my liking. There is a constant strain of folk music, like that sung by the Bulgarian Women's Choir, throughout the film, and it makes me want to claw the theater seats.
WINGS OF FAME (Netherlands, 1990):
This is one of those films with an absolutely wonderful concept, some of which is realized on the screen, and some of which isn't. Peter O'Toole plays a famous movie actor whose work is being shown in a retrospective at a European film festival. Colin Firth plays a young writer who is desperate to see him, apparently due to something O'Toole's character has done to him. At the opening of the festival, frustrated because he cannot talk to O'Toole, Firth shoots and kills the actor -- and is subsequently killed himself by a falling spotlight.
Well, they're both dead, and end up being ferried by a Charon-like boatman to an island, surrounded by swimming, moaning souls. On the island is a hotel reserved for those whose fame still lives on Earth, even after their deaths. Of course, when your fame begins to fade... out for a swim you go.
The vision of the afterlife has any number of attractions and neat ideas, some of which are realized, some of which aren't. There are some tedious moments in the beginning, but once O'Toole and Firth confront one another, it improves markedly. At times, it's sort of a reversed, relatively superficial twist on WINGS OF DESIRE; but the film has well-timed bizarreness, a good sense of desperateness, and a strong ending. Firth is his usual strong character, and O'Toole surprised me by only walking through about half of it -- he really woke up at points. Worth taking a look at, really.
LA GLOIRE DE MON PERE, LA CHATEAU DE MA MERE (France, 1990):
These are two separate films which tell one whole story, and they are both two of greatest and most enjoyable surprises of this year's festival. Both are directed by Yves Roberts and are based on the autobiographical books of Maurice Pagnol, which describe growing up in his loving and eccentric family at the turn of the century. LA GLOIRE DE MON PERE (being released in the US of either MY FATHER'S GLORY or THE GLORY OF MY FATHER) takes Marcel from his birth through his unusual childhood -- he is a boy prodigy, reading at a remarkably early age, and encouraged to be precocious by his enthusiastic, technology-loving and religion-hating schoolteacher father (a complete delight as portrayed by Phillipe Caubre), and his beautiful, doting mother.
The second half of PERE, and almost all of LA CHATEAU DE MA MERE (MY MOTHER'S CASTLE), deals with Marcel's experiences and adventures in the hills of southern France, where his family spend their summers. This is an old-fashioned film; characters you like in comic but realistic situations, where half of the audience's delight is due to their liking for the characters involved. The topic is hardly different than CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN, but Roberts' two films are handled with a much finer, gentler hand; they appeal to a modern audience without ever compromising the subject for a modern sense of humor. This is very much a family film; if not for the subtitles, I'd recommend it to parents as a good film to see with their children.
Relevance? Message? Moral? None is attempted, nor is any needed. Like a good book meant for and read in adolescence, but appealing long afterward, these two films exist on their own out of sheer affection for their subjects. I doubt you will learn anything from Marcel Pagnol and his family, but I will be greatly surprised if you don't enjoy the four hours you spend with them. Thumbs up, smiles on.
ESCAPE FROM THE LIBERTY CINEMA (Poland, 1990 (US Premiere)):
Those of you who were discussing films within films, and particularly THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO, will *love* this film. It's got a film within a film within a film -- one of which is the PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO, to boot! But I'm getting ahead of myself...
The film details (obliquely) the life of a Polish film censor, who must decide which parts to excise out of films to be shown in Poland. A former artist, he is drinking heavily and having vicious headaches as his job gets harder and harder; he must second-guess his superiors and the press as to what can be shown to the public -- what is subversive, what appears to be subversive, what might be construed to be subversive, and what can make it through the process. And then one evening he is called to the Liberty Cinema, where there are rumors that the characters up on the screen are refusing to perform the script as it was filmed...
There's a good deal of fourth wall irony (not humor) here, particularly when the authorities accidently mix up THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO with the rebellious film; let's just say that the Jeff Daniels character (it isn't Jeff Daniels) gets around a lot in that pith helmet. (Woody Allen MUST have given permission for this film to be used this way.) However, this film is first and foremost a political commentary, and a rather dark and heavy one at that; I was unable to pick up a number of the situations being shown. The humor is a by-product, and except for the extremely funny CAIRO scene, it's all rather bleak. Interesting at points, but not enough to sit through the whole thing.
URANUS (France, 1990 (US Premiere)):
Claude Berri, the director of JEAN DE FLORETTE and MANON OF THE SPRING, has picked a fascinating setting for his latest film: a small village in France that was under the rule of Vichy during World War II, and is just recovering after the conflict in Europe comes to a close. It is chaos for many; those in the Resistance rule the city, and an accusation of collaboration can be a death sentence. Various political parties, particularly the Communists (who are just coming to power), are using such accusations to their own ends. The center of the film revolves around the house of Archambaud (Jean-Pierre Marielle), an engineer who went along with the now-discredited Vichy government, and now houses a number of refugees while waiting to see what the new government will do with him. He shares his house with his family; the family of a local Communist who believes in his cause but draws the line at smearing political opponents; a collaborator, hidden in Archambaud's childrens' bedroom; and finally Watrin (Phillippe Noiret), a schoolteacher whose wife and house were lost in the bombings, and who has a philosophical outlook on the situation. One other character, Leopold (Gerard Depardieu), the local bartender, a great bear of a man who is a drunkard, poet, bully, and is fiercely independent of any and all political parties.
The events of the film center on the growing storm in the village after the end of the war, the political and moral repercussions of the collaboration, and the way it draws both the guilty and the innocent into the turmoil. While I found the subject fascinating, it was difficult to become very attached to URANUS; the characters are difficult to sympathize with, except for Leopold (the scene at the opening as Leopold sits in on Watrin's school lessons, being held in the tavern, are a treat), and even he seems rather monochromatic, if not as low-key as the rest of the cast. On the other hand, the elements that would trigger intellectual interest don't seem to flower, either; it explores the situation through the individual characters, but the microcosm doesn't seem to shed much light on the why and how of things in post-War France. As a tableau of events for that period, it's a success; but that wasn't enough to fully engage my interest.
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
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