Reviews

A guy (just a guy, you know, nothing more) claims to be a well-known filmmaker (Mohsen Makhmalbaf) and the people seem willing to believe him very easily. Is he a scammer, or a man living his illusions to the extreme? (at the end, the real filmmaker appears, and the confusion seems to be total). A reporter notices the possibility of a journalistic hit and determines the police to arrest the guy: the newsman will practically direct the action, while recording everything. Another well-known filmmaker (Abbas Kiarostami this time) asks to film the trial, and his request is approved immediately. The trial fails to clarify anything (in fact, at the end the plaintiffs withdraw their complaint), but the ciné-vérité feeling is overwhelming. Vanity Fair. We are in the Tehran of the 1990's, and the people there seem obsessed with turning their lives into a movie show. After all, is the movie art struggling (and probably failing) to create the illusion of reality, or the other way around?

Parajanov starts here from a short story by Lermontov to go further in his own way, sometimes very far from the original. It's true, both novel and movie end with the same promise for the two lovers (happy together for ever and ever), but along the film Parajanov follows his own instincts and abandons some very important points that are present in Lermontov's story.

Actually the story is in the film only a pretext. Well, in all the great movies of Parajanov, starting with the Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, the story is more a pretext for the master to immerse in a traditions' universe and to enjoy there the view. But here in Ashik Kerib, even the traditions' universe becomes a pretext! The master simply plays with all kind of artistic genres from all kind of traditions' universes, to see how they fit. All kind of treats or tricks, that may leave you in total perplexity. At a certain moment it's like you attend a Kabuki theatre. Some other times you seem to visit an exhibition of Azeri or Persian art. It all seems gratuitous, only to see at the end that Ashik Kerib is dedicated to the beloved memory of Tarkovsky: a dedication like a joyous present.

She is waiting for him naked, he takes off his clothes to join her in bed. That's porn you'd say. Well, here's the thing: during five minutes (presumably the intercourse duration), what we see on the screen is a chaotic float of mundane household objects, and what we hear is a chaotic dialog (or rather two intertwined monologs, each one chaotic in its own right) about very mundane activities. Well, we can talk about the way in which the choice of the household objects could suggest a correspondence with different moments of the intercourse, but I'll leave that to connaisseurs. The male personage is perhaps right, "love in some ways is not always simple."

It was the third movie made by Willard Maas (this time co-director was Ben Moore, a constant collaborator of Maas). And putting Mechanics of Love in relation with the first film created by Maas (Geography of the Body - as the second seems difficult to find), both try to respond to a question tormenting many modern artists: what is the correpondence between image and the reality that it claims to represent.

Better said, what is the reality of the image? Magritte enonciated it in his famous Ceci n'est pas une pipe: the image of a pipe is just an image, you cannot smoke with it. Kiarostami and Panahi also are preoccupied in their movies with that question (to the point that Kiarostami's movies seem sometimes meta-movies).

Here, at Maas, it is about what image to be chosen by the artist to represent the intimacy of the body (Geography of the Body), or the intimacy of a couple (Mechanics of Love). The couple gets intimacy both in sex as in their day-to-day routines. We are very far from a porn movie, indeed.

It was the first movie created by Willard Maas, in 1943; his next film (Image in the Snow) would come in 1952; bur let's go back to 1943, the year of the Geography of the Body; a 7 minutes black and white; Marie Menken did the cinematography, and George Barker authored the poem to be recited off-screen; two nude bodies (seemingly Maas and Menken themselves); the camera browsing them without any haste in extreme close-ups, from ear to nombril to eye to knee to mouth to tow, and so on, and so on; no genitalia showed (it was 1943, c'me on!); meanwhile George Barker (a poet considered a genius in his prime, largely forgotten nowadays) is heard reciting without any haste a strange litany, about ultimate experiences lived on ultimate settings; image and sound in counterpoint; a geography of the human body as a site of miriads of small exotic mysteries; a geography of the earth as a site of miriads of exotic spots of mysterious initiations.

Maybe it is interesting to stay a little more on the relation image-sound here in this movie. It seems to me that here the relation is paradoxical. R. Bruce Elder comes with a great interpretation (A Body of Vision: Representations of Body in Recent Filme and Poetry, Wilfried Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 1997, pages 36, 37): we would expect from the text to emphasize the meaning of the image, but here, the extravagance of the poem leaves the language in almost meaningless ruins, signaling the impulse to deal with energies that have a preverbal source; the image of a human body is an experience of a more primal sort than lenguages can accomodate.

And maybe we are not far from the universe of Rudolf Otto with his theories of Numinous.

Is the universe of Maite Alberdi also the one of ours, or a world of herself, with other geometry and other rules of logic? At the beginning it seems that's our known universe, however something is weird, and calls in mind the non-Euclidian. Says she, estoy obsesionada con lo insólito de la realidad (I am obsessed with the insolite of reality), which means it is our world, only she has the craft to discover the non-Euclidian here, in our day-to-day geometry.

Sometimes this non-Euclidian means just kindness and empathy, like in La Once (Tea Time): five ladies meet each month around the tea, in a ritual that's taking place for sixty years. Each time they repeat the same small stories, kind memories of a time bygone; they repeat the same small stories each time, in almost the same words, and the others listen without interrupting, because these small stories, like the cups of tea and the cakes, and like themselves, are part of the same ritual of a time bygone.

A boy of about ten or eleven must spend the summer at his grandfather (the boy barely knows his grandpa). The boy comes from a big city where the universe has smartphone, cable TV, and Internet as natural coordinates. The grandpa lives in a remote village in the mountains, where the universe is deprived even of electricity and bathroom. People in the village look like from another planet, and boys of his age are overtly hostile. Generally everything seems to be charged with an incomprehensible level of brutality. Add to this the traumas the boy carries with him from the city: the father has left the family to come back only in very short flashbacks in the boy's nightly dreams. All this makes the little boy very reluctant towards his grandpa and towards everybody and everything there. Well, the grandpa is patient and tactful, and little by little he succeeds to communicate his own balance to the boy. And so the boy starts progressively to open himself to the new universe and get more and more fascinated by the knowns and unknowns there. There is something beyond the incomprehensible brutality: a genuine collective solidarity against the potential evil coming from outside. Once you are accepted, you'll bee protected. This grandpa seems to carry wonderful mysteries, the same as the blue apple tree near the house. It's for the boy the beginning of a lifelong fascination for the place, and he will come back in the years that follow, and will marry the girl he met here in the village during that summer of long time ago. A simple and beautiful story that is recomposed through the memories of the adult who once was a boy of about ten or eleven, and who has inherited from his grandpa that wonderful balance in approaching the knowns and unknowns in life. That is El Manzano Azul (The Blue Apple Tree), the 2012 movie of Venezuelan director Olegario Barrera. The grandpa is played by an unforgettable actor, Miguel Ángel Landa.

We'd expect a Soviet movie to be framed in some Soviet canons. Well, with many Soviet movies of the twenties, simply it's not the case. Look for instance at this Bed and Sofa, created by Abram Room in 1927. It's the story of a ménage à trois à la russe, started (and keeping on) due to the huge housing problems of those years, and evolving into something that could suggest kind of a same-sex resolution.

It's Moscow of the twenties, housing problems are huge, it's far from the period of continuous development of huge ugly projects with myriads of small anonymous apartments. Right now it's just that, an old city with an ever growing number of people coming in, and it's impossible to find a dwelling for everyone. It comes that anyone finds a solution on its on, sharing bed and sofa and even more.

Some say that this movie alludes to the tempestuous story between Majakovsky and Lilya Brik. I don't know whether it's the case. Simply the Soviet mentalities of the twenties were unexpectedly free when it was coming to the gender issues, putting men and women on an equal footing on anything related to family, attitude toward sex, conjugal fidelity and ejusdem farinae. All this would radically change a few years later, but by then it was just the decade of the twenties. Anyway a wonderful comedy, full of tempo, and full of warmth, of sympathy for each hero, the wife and the two men.

A bit about the actors. Let's mention firstly Lyudmila Semyonova, playing with wonderful subtlety in the role of the wife. I saw her also in a much later movie, from 1961, The Steamroller and the Violin, the first oeuvre of Tarkovsky. Nikolai Batalov was in the role of the husband. He was an interesting actor, unfortunately he died too young and played only in ten movies throughout his life. I already watched three of them. His namesake, Aleksey Batalov (no relation between the two) would make a much, much longer career. And Vladimir Fogel in the role of husband's friend and competitor, he was one of the leading actors of his generation (the best, as Pudovkin would state later). He died tragically in 1929, being only 27 years old. Despite his brief life he played in fourteen movies.

I watched this movie on TV one evening, sometime in 2000 or 2001. I didn't know anything about the director or the cast. Actually I didn't pay attention to the title either. Very curious, because the movie impressed me, and it came back to my mind often during the years. A film I couldn't remember the title, any name from the cast, anything, while remembering perfectly almost every detail. An Israeli family where for some time things were far from running well. The husband owning a body shop, the wife teaching Spanish, their girl at the difficult age of fifteen - sixteen. An unknown guy appearing out of the blue, pretending that he had come from Argentina to inherit a dying aunt here. Meanwhile being without money, dying of hunger. The husband offering him shelter, a torrid affair exploding between the wife and the stranger, the husband incapable of doing anything against. It's 1967, the war erupts between Israel and his neighbors. The stranger leaves the house, presumably to join the military, and simply vanishes. The wife enters a deep depression, and the husband understands that in order to save her he has to find the guy. For a week or so he searches for the guy everywhere (here the story takes a picaresque turn, with unexpected turns and funny episodes, like many stories of this kind). The aunt is far from dying, a schoolmate of the girl wants to start her sexual life and pushes the husband to commit, the girl herself starts her sexual life with the husband's apprentice (a very young and very nice Palestinian, otherwise helping the husband in his search) - and meanwhile the wife going on with her depression. Eventually the stranger is found, the scoundrel had just entered an orthodox community to avoid drafting. Why did this movie remain so deeply in my memory? I think because I found in it a deep understanding of what true love is: the husband's love for his wife. In order to cure her for the depression the only thing to do was to find the vanished stranger. Thus, I knew anything about the movie's story, nothing at all about title, cast, production year. We are now approaching the end of 2018, and one evening I felt that I needed to find the movie, by any cost. I searched on the web for three or four hours, browsing various sites of any kind, trying various search tips, till I found it! The Lover, made in 1985.

I watched this movie on a flight over Atlantic. I had plenty of time, and an impressive choice of movies of all kind. I didn't know anything about this particular movie (as was the case with many others in the selection). I saw that the language was Romansh. This made me eager to see the movie immediately. My information about Romansh was scarce and a bit contradictory and I wanted to understand more the thing. In the movie the language appeared to me like a mix of Italian and German (or maybe some dialects / neighboring idioms), with a few words that were sounding strangely similar to their correspondents in Romanian. Well, I couldn't say that I increased my knowledge in this domain, but anyway it was my first contact with the idiom spoken in the Engadine region.

Now leaving aside my interest for Romansh and the whole group of Rhaetian languages, the movie was very interesting per se, very well made, with a good balance, having a point that was subtly followed.

A village someplace in the Engadine region, surrounded by woods and mountains, everybody knows anybody, a traditional universe of traditional families. The husbands are passionate by hunting and enjoy a beer or two in the evening, the wives keep the household, all of them attend the mass on Sunday morning. Traditional ways: very soon we can see that tradition has its limits, keeping unsolved some abnormal realities. It's a comedy, so it's not about gender identity or abusive behavior, that kind of things. Just the fact that the husbands, for one or another reason, don't fulfill properly their sexual responsibilities anymore. Various reasons: one of them has a secret affair, another one practices intercourse in the missionary position just once a week, after the Sunday mass. As I said, it's a comedy: the women start to take attitude, and the guy who coalesces the women will be no other than the new priest (who came from India, as the Catholic Church in Europe lacks sacerdotal vocations more and more). A priest from India, advising the women (and subsequently their men) to read Kama Sutra, in order to get the full picture. And little by little, the husbands (along with their wives) begin to realize what's expected from them in a normal (rather than traditional) universe.

It's during the Russian Civil War; she is a sniper in the Red Army; he is an officer at the Whites and her prisoner; she must shoot him is he to escape; these are the orders; suddenly a storm leaves them alone on a deserted island; the two fall in love (you'd say it's kind of Stockholm syndrome avant la lettre, somehow turned upside-down, whatever); the occasion for him to escape arrives, will she follow her orders or rather her heart? add to this his uncanny gift of retelling the story of Robinson; add to this the strange magic of the Karakum desert - blue sky infinite over yellow sand infinite - and of the Aral sea - yellow sun infinite over blue sea infinite; all this magic can make you falling madly in love, or simply falling mad. Boris Lavrenev wrote this story in 1924; it was published in Zvezda (a literary magazine led by that time by Ivan Maisky, who would later become one of the most outstanding Soviet diplomats of the epoch); in 1927 Yakov Protazanov adapted the story to film; Grigori Chukhrai made a remake in 1956. I took contact with the three oeuvres in reverse order. Firstly I saw the movie of Chukhrai, sometime by the 1960's. I had already watched his Ballad of a Soldier and Clear Skies and I was very impressed by his his way of telling the stories, distancing from the official artistic dogmas, being simply natural. Obviously I was interested to see also The Forty-First, made earlier than the other two. I wanted to make a comparison, to see if his attitude towards life had been free at the same degree. As for the movie of Protazanov, it was impossible to find it. The memory of Chukhrai's movie came to my mind recently, and I watched it again, on youTube. A great director, a great cinematographer (Sergey Urusevskyi) producing hallucinatory imagery. And Oleg Strizhenov was unforgettably telling the story of Robinson, setting with it the frame for the magic. This time I watched immediately also the movie of Protazanov on youTube. Another great director, another great cinematographer (Pyotr Yermolov, I did not know much about him). Ivan Koval-Samborsky was in the role of the White officer, an actor with a dramatic biography. Surely I wanted to go further, to the original story. I found a very well written summary on the web, then I ordered an English translation of the book on Amazon. I read it in one day. Though I knew now the plot very well, the book could not be left up to the last page. Lavrenev, Protazanov and Chukhrai, three artists telling the same story, while contemplating it differently. Let's begin with the movie created by Chukhrai. It was his first movie, made in 1956. The Soviet society was beginning a painful process of freeing itself from the Stalinist referential, of opening the windows toward fresh air. Though this process was tightly controlled and had very strict limits, for many people living in those years the effort was genuine. And the movie of Chukhrai was trying just that: to find out what was beyond the political datum. The director set the story under a deep humanist credo: Soviet musts could not be absolute - beyond them life was claiming its rights to exist. The story of love, yes, that was absolute, and it was tragic, because the political chains could not be broken. The tone of the story seemed very personal: the effort of the love story to liberate itself from the political realities was the same with the effort of Chukhrai to go beyond the dogmas of the regime. Lavrenev's story (and Protazanov's film) had a different tonality: a fact of life observed from afar and told with a good dose of detachment. This time the political realities constituted the absolute, with their two totally separated universes, the Reds and the Whites. Anything that appeared beyond, like the story of love, was just absurd. But this meant that life in general was absurd, which ultimately implied even the political reality. The two universes were not only hostile, each one was perceiving the other without any correspondence in the reality. It was not clear at all (to use Anthony Loyd's way of telling things) whether they were fighting the good cause for the wrong reason or the wrong cause for the good reason. His Holiness the Paradox seemed to be in control of the whole circus. There is in Lavrenev's story (well reproduced by Protazanov's movie) a subtle sense of Swiftian irony. But all this irony is greatly balanced by a feeling of empathy for each personage and each fact. From the story author, as well as from the movie director. As absurd as they could be these facts and these people, everything is observed with a great science of the human - human naivete, weaknesses, illusions, absurdity - the whole is wrapped by something like a charm. And actually this charm links all three artists, Lavrenev, Protazanov and Chukhrai, beyond their different tonalities in telling the story. The magic of the infinite dialog of the sun with the sky, the desert, the sea. Paradox at Lavrenev/Protazanov, tragedy at Chukhrai, it is beyond the same magic, following its unknown laws, maybe unaware of our struggles, however sending us, through these artists and their books and movies, discrete signals of sympathy.

WARNING: I HAVE MANY SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW:

Benny Garcia had left Mexico as a young fellow to find his fortune in US. What happened with Benny during his stay in US nobody told us, maybe it was good, maybe it was not so good, suffice it to say that after twenty years they deported the guy back to Mexico. To be again home after so many years had its charm, there were the guitars and sombreros, and all the good stuff, plus Benny had the gringo experience, which meant he was able to ride on both worlds. Not exactly, as the gringo experience proved kind of confusing in what he found home. His younger brother had been killed and he had to find the authors and take revenge, actually killings looked very common, the brother's girlfriend, Guadelupe by name, was making ends meet as a prostitute at Café México, her son was rising up as a loose cannon, plus Benny was irresistibly attracted by Guadelupe (who was terribly hot, no question about). Was that the hell or what? A childhood friend helped him adjust. The hell was rather a paradise, provided you were in the gang of Don Reyes. El Infierno was El Paradiso, more exactly El Narco (that was the definition of paradise: being in the narcotic business). All you had to do was to execute the orders of Don Reyes (including to kill now and then), and you had plenty of money, plenty of drinks, a big car, any women you wanted, the order you had them was your choice. Wasn't that splendid? Everybody, the mayor, the police, the priest, all the others, were under the authority of Don Reyes. Well, it was also the rival gang, of Don Pancho, the two bosses were actually brothers, and the war between them had ups and downs, sometimes it was hot, with mutual killings and disfigurement of victims, some other times the war was put on hold. All this was keeping the men in that village very busy. The kids dreamed to enter one of the two gangs, as for the women and old men, it was another story, they weren't living in the paradise, rather in limbo, and sometimes they were unexpectedly shot for unknown reasons, because also the limbo had its rules.

And pretty soon Benny found out that the paradise was just a stage to hell, nobody could remain in the cards for too long, for each one the bell was ringing and the turn was coming to be tortured, disfigured, then killed. Hell and paradise mocking each other, playing a common black farce, for what was life other than a black farce? The movie stirred extremely controversial reactions in Mexico, for obvious reasons. As the whole movie had not been enough, by the end Benny was shown coming to the Mexican Bicentennial celebration and killing everybody from the official tribune (Don Reyes surrounded by all authorities of the village). Thus many protested against El Infierno saying it was profoundly unjust and unfair to depict their country as a grotesque caricature. Luis Estrada (director, writer and producer) defended his movie, saying that, firstly, a caricature was just a caricature, secondly, a caricature was a very legitimate artistic approach, like all other legitimate artistic approaches, thirdly, he agreed that obviously not all Mexican society was made of drug dealers and corrupt politicians, while this Mexican society had to be aware about the serious problem of having so much criminality and corruption in their country, all these leading to the conclusion that a grotesque caricature was sometimes necessary for its cathartic effect.

I'm just wondering how would I react against a movie depicting in this way my own country. Honestly I wouldn't take it easy at all, but my reaction against it would prove the power of the message. An artist has the duty to say the truth he believes in, with all risks, even with the risk of stirring ardent passions against him. Luis Estrada is politically intense and his movies cannot be but politically intense. His extreme sarcasm calls in mind the movies of Berlanga, and generally the Spanish and Hispanic-American movies are often very tough.

I would add to all this that the value of a movie cannot stand only in what it speaks to its country; it should go beyond and transmit something universal. I think this is the case with El Infierno. It's the drama of returning to your home after many years and realizing that for everybody there you look like an ostrich joke, because that's what you are. It's the tragedy of having illusions till you realize that your life is just a black farce. It's a parable saying that our whole world became a hell in all respects.

Bert Williams is director, writer and star. The cinematographer is Billy Bitzer. Both of them are known today mostly by guys passionate for vintage movies and vintage records: they were great names in their times.

A group of black gentlemen, organized in some sort of fraternity or lodge whatever, meets regularly in the back room of a bar to discuss matters of interest, their reunions ending in drinking or gambling or both. However gambling seems to be forbidden those days, so the guys have to be careful not to be discovered by the police. Among them the Honorable Bert Williams, kind of a walking delegate, which means big mouth and vague duties, always in debt and in need of money, always trying to cheat for the pleasure of game, always loosing. On the wall a torn-out image of President Lincoln, like a Deus Otiosus no longer interested in the daily operation of this rapidly decaying world, while seemingly taking pleasure in watching this very movie (he from the wall where's hanging, we from this other side of the screen). Watching this movie is like visiting a nostalgia shop: each scene looks like an incredible memorabilia.

Of course the police discovers the gamblers and brings them in front of the judge. The only one put in jail is (you gotcha) no other than our main hero (only for ten days, it's a comedy, not a drama). While in prison, he plays imaginary poker games, where he keeps on loosing: his pantomime is genial.

The movie comes with all racial stereotypes of the epoch: the rule by then was that the interpret of a black personage had to do minstreling, which meant to shoe-black his face and whiten his lips for the contrast; the inter titles followed another rule, to spell the fractured English supposed to be the blacks' parlance; and many other things like that. No wonder, the movie was made in 1916. It looks now completely anti-PC, but in those days the political correctness was just the opposite.