Black & White World

You can tell by the lines I'm reciting, I've seen that movie too.

foreign

Saturday, December 28, 2002

Otto e Mezzo (1963)

Plot outline:  Guido Anselmi (Mastroianni), a film director who has just come off a huge critical success, grapples with the challenge of making his next picture, while juggling women, producers, craftsmen, journalists, and his own memories and fantasies.

Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical film about filmmaker making a semi-autobiographical film—it’s tough to wrap your head around this movie. What’s real, what’s imagined, what’s part of the movie and what’s part of the movie within the movie?

Mastroianni deftly walks the tightrope between genius and hack, sympathetic husband and philandering dog, hard working and hard living.  The film’s most striking moments occur during Guido’s moments of fantasy, for example when he imagines his wife and his lover meeting and getting along like a house on fire—which leads to the further fantasy that every woman he’s ever known in his entire life all live together in a great big house, and Guido himself is king of the castle.  There is only one rule—when a woman reaches a certain age, she must go live upstairs with the rest of the old women.  Despite a minor revolt when Guido enforces this rule (with a literal crack of the whip), the women live together very harmoniously, and indeed are glad to share him.

Overall:  I won’t lie to you, I could probably watch this movie twenty more times and still not understand all of it, but it’s thrilling and enchanting, every minute of it.  Also—Marcello.  Yum.

 

Ladri di biciclette (1948)

Plot outline:  Antonio Ricci (Maggiorani) and his family have fallen on hard times, but things are looking up.  After a long time out of work, he lands a good city job putting up posters around town.  The only prerequisite for this job is his bicycle—and it’s stolen on his first day of work.

I’ve watched this movie twice in the last year and I was awed by it each time.  At its core, the story is so simple:  guy’s bike gets stolen, guy tries to get bike back, so he can support his family.  The major theme, the struggle of the working man in post-war Italy, is in the background at all times, but never intrudes on the story.  The performances are breathtaking, particularly young Enzo Staiola. The finale is heart-rending and honest.

Carabiniers, Les (1963)

Plot outline: two men (Juross and Mase) are coerced into military service in defense of their king, seduced with promises of wealth, power, looting, pillaging, etc.  Their letters home tell of the horror and destruction at the front.

An absurdist parable of war shot on a very low budget.  Godard splices in stock newsreel footage of war scenes with shots of the two men (Michelangelo and Ulysses are their names) crawling through fields and waving guns around.  The sound mix was deliberately off-kilter as well, with sounds of footsteps sometimes drowning out dialogue, etc. The result was disorienting, but I think intentionally so. There is a fist-fight early on in the film, and in the middle of it the two men stop grappling with each other long enough for one of them to pick up his cigar and put it back in his mouth before they start pounding each other again. It all seemed to be a filmmaker’s wink to the audience: “It’s just a movie, folks.”

However, the film occasionally moves from absurdism to just plain silly.  There is a scene where the carabiniers capture a woman in the woods and before they get a chance to execute her she starts to recite a poem by Mayakovsky.  The scene takes forever to play out and the effect isn’t evocative or ironic or anything else—just pretentious and silly.

Overall, though, the pace moves along quickly and there’s enough humor in the film to sustain it for its short 78-minute running length.

Saturday, September 28, 2002

Krieger und die Kaiserin, Der (2000)

WARNING:  This review contains spoilers.  If you don’t want the ending ruined for you, do NOT read on.

Haunting and stylistic tale of a would-be bank robber (Furmann) who saves the life of a psych ward nurse (Potente) and her subsequent obsession with him.  There are many things I liked about this film—I liked the way it looked and the way it sounded, I think the actors all do a fine job.

But there was a great big cheat in this movie that totally spoiled it for me.  Towards the end of the movie, Sissi brings her bank robber back to the asylum to hide him.  When they’re discovered, they go up to the roof of the building (there’s more plot stuff involved here but I’m not going to get into all of it).  In any case—they’re cornered by the police, and they take hands and jump off the roof—into a pool of fucking water that no one in the audience knew was there.  That is CHEATING.  It made me angry.  Plus I thought the movie was going to end there, and instead they swam out of the water and continued on their journey for another ten minutes or so.  By that time I was too angry at the movie to care whether they got away or not.