The Nile Hilton Incident

Fares Fares

Tarik Saleh's The Nile Hilton Incident is an engrossing crime thriller with political overtones. Set in Cairo in 2011 amidst the fall of the Mubarak regime, the film chiefly follows the investigation by police officer Mostafa Noredin of the murder of a would be singer named Lalena. The film, an original screenplay by Saleh, is based on the real life murder of Suzanne Tamim in Dubai. As in that case, the murderer, who has Lalena executed by a professional, is a wealthy businessman with important connections amoung the powers that be in Cairo. The widespread corruption under Mubarak is stressed, even Noredin (Fares Fares), the film's ostensible hero, is not above filching cash from a stiff. As counterpoint to Noredin's investigation, the film chronicles the struggles of the case's star witness, a maid at the Hilton named Salwa (Mari Malek). Salwa lives with a group of Sudanese refugees lorded over by the cruel man who brought them to Cairo. The hovel Salwa lives in is in marked contrast to the funky bachelor pad that widower Noredin uses to watch TV while he drinks.    

A number of American critics compared this to Chinatown and LA Confidential, but it reminded me more of the crime films based in New York that were directed by Sidney Lumet. Like Lumet, Saleh is a socially conscious director who chooses to expose institutional corruption in his films. Both directors utilize an array of supporting performers in an effort to paint a broad portrait of a city's populace. One of the joys found in The Nile Hilton Incident is the gamut of memorable supporting performances that evoke the variety of characters one finds in a vast metropolis, from an opium smoking pimp and extortionist to a stone faced secret police officer. Hania Amar has a wonderful turn as a singer who seduces Noredin into a honey trap. Salwa is the only two dimensional character, verging on a damsel in distress. Noredin is not always the most sympathetic protagonist, but Saleh is able to humanize him with deft touches like having Noredin share a smoke with a picture of his late wife. I recommend The Nile Hilton Incident which is currently streaming on Netflix and has been issued on a handsome disc by Strand Releasing.

Razzia sur la chnouf

Lila Kedrova and Jean Gabin

Henri Decoin's Razzia sur la chnouf (roughly "Dope Raid") is an effective, if unspectacular French crime melodrama. The film was adapted from a novel by Auguste Le Breton whose canon includes novels which were the basis for the films Rififi and The Sicilian Clan. Jean Gabin plays Henri Ferré, who we meet returning from the United States where he has been reputably working for a narcotics ring. Ferré is recruited by a local crime boss named Liski (the always welcome Marcel Dalio) who needs a steady hand to run his drug operation. Liski arranges for Ferré to manage a club which serves as a front for the cartel. When Ferré needs to rub out weak or untrustworthy links in the organization, he calls upon Liski's gunsel, Roger the Catalan, embodied by the ever dependable Lino Ventura. A comely and very young barmaid (Magali Noël) does what women do in Jean Gabin pictures and tucks herself into his trench coat. Lila Kedrova, most famous for her role in Zorba the Greek, is featured as an unreliable dealer who has been dipping too regularly into her own stash. 

Kedrova is the only one in the cast who chews the scenery a little too much, but given the lurid nature of her role that may not be entirely her fault. Her character is so off the rails that she, after having a few puffs on a reefer, pulls a train in an "Arab" club. The whole film veers close to exploitation, reveling in a display of sexual proclivities and drug use not possible for a Hollywood film in 1955. Decoin's direction is workmanlike and efficient. There is little use for flashy stylistics in a piece of pulp like this. Decoin resorts to a whip pan at one point, but just to disguise the fact that his louche club set is a partial one. Gabin hold together the film with his unflappable presence. After the success of Touchez pas au grisbi gave his career a second wind, Gabin would spend the rest of his career gliding serenely through the gangster haunts of nightclubs and working class cafes. His stoic demeanor barely masks a macho vigor that puts the beta males in their place and proves to be catnip for the ladies. I particularly like the finale of Razzia sur la chnouf in which a lineup of the usual suspects serves as a fitting curtain call for the players. 

Train Dreams

Joel Edgerton

The duo of Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, the team behind Sing Sing, should be congratulated for having the good taste and gumption to adapt Denis Johnson's Train Dreams.

Johnson's novella, which chronicles the life of logger and homesteader Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) in the Idaho panhandle during the early years of the twentieth century, is his most beautifully written book, a landmark of 21st century American fiction. The film adaption is handsomely mounted, boasting gorgeous cinematography by Adolpho Veloso. I also enjoyed the narration by Will Patton which hews closely to Johnson's prose. Edgerton is well cast and effective as the taciturn Grainier. John Diehl and Paul Schneider contribute effective supporting turns. However, on the whole, I found this adaptation to be overly decorous. The changes made by Bentley and Kwedar to the material domesticates and softens it, neutering the film's impact.

I do not believe a film adaptation has to hew exactly to its source. However, in judging a film adaptation, comparing a film to its source displays the filmmakers choices for good and ill. The film virtually eliminate the book's vein of black humor. The film expands the roles of Grainier's wife Gladys, Claire Thompson, and storekeeper Ignatius Jack. This greatly increases the interactions Robert has with humans, but defeats one of the chief purposes of the book: to portray the life of a hermit who largely turns his back on mankind to live both within and against nature. However, nature in the film is not as fierce as that in the book. The hardships and loneliness of frontier life are watered down in the film. The costumes and sets are too tidy and clean. The homestead that Edgerton and his missus (a wan Felicity Jones) live in resembles a glamping cabin in a Magnolia magazine photo shoot. Likewise, the physical toll that logging takes on Grainier is deemphasized. The book goes into greater detail in picturing the dangers of logging. When the film shows the tragic mishaps that befall loggers, one resulting in the death of a key supporting character, the results are so tossed off that they have little visceral effect.

The film suffers from contemporary virtue signaling. In both the book and film, Grainier is haunted by the murder of a Chinese rail worker. However, in the book, Grainier is much more culpable for his role in the crime. Likewise, the book truncates the scene where Grainier, as a boy, encounters a dying man named William Coswell Haley. Haley's monologue is one of the novella's highlights, but I can understand excising it in an adaptation. However, the version the film provides eliminates the reason the moment haunts Grainier for the rest of his life. In the book, Grainier is so stunned by his predicament that he ignores the dying man's last request for a drink of water, a request he honors in the movie. These changes make Grainier more of a heroic protagonist, but less of an interesting and believable character. Finally, I thought the adaptation loses something by lessening the presence of wolves in the film. This not only eliminates the theme of an atavistic bond between the protagonist and nature, but renders the reappearance of a major character late in the film nonsensical. If you've never read Train Dreams, the film retains enough of the book's qualities to please the uninitiated, but I was disappointed.

Petrov's Flu

Semyon Serzin

Kirill Serebrennikov's Petrov's Flu is the most inspired Russian film I've seen since Beanpole. Released in Russia in 2021, the film is an adaptation of Alexey Salnikov's novel Petrov In and Around the Flu, a better title but one that does not fit snugly on a marquee. Salinikov has written a number of novels, but none have been translated into English. Both film and book center around Petrov (Semyon Serzin), a cartoonist who lives in the southeastern Russian city of Yekaterinburg. The film is mostly set in 2003 or so, but the film flits back and forth in time and space. We see the childhood memories of Petrov's, but also his fantasies and those of his estranged wife, Nurlinsa (Chulpan Khamatova). Nurlinsa's fantasies are chiefly the grisly kind, but are of a piece with the very dark and Russian humor of the film. 

We first meet Petrov on a grim and crowded bus during Christmas time. The garish ticket taker is done up seasonably as the Snow Queen, which we will soon learn is a link to Petrov's childhood memories. The central motif of the film is sickness. Petrov is coughing and hacking on the bus and throughout the film. The child he shares with Nurlinsa is also badly ill with the flu, worrying the couple to no good end. The film invokes this by shooting the 2003 sequences in a blue green blear, as if sickness permeates the land. Sickness is a common motif in Russian literature, most prominently in Dostoyevsky where the ills of crowded urban centers infect the populace. All this miasmic swampiness might get tedious, but the film shifts gears half way through and we witness the back story of a woman named Marina (Yulia Peresild) who played the Snow Queen in a holiday pageant that Petrov witnessed in 1971. These are shot in crisp black and white and include Marina's fantasies of what the objects of her desire look like naked. Other repeated motifs in the film are those of UFOs and the Soviet space program, the former suggesting a desire to escape the homeland and the latter a reminder of the faded glory of the USSR.

Petrov's Flu is going to be too much for some people at a nearly two and a half hour length. I found the animation sequence disappointing and would have pruned some of the tedious arguments between Petrov's parents. However, I was stunned by the invention displayed by Serebrennikov in the film's many transitions from consciousness into unconsciousness. Though it is extremely disjunctive and digressive, Petrov's Flu unspools relatively seamlessly. I was caught up in the film's momentum all through the film and loved the entire cast, including supporting performance by Yuri Kolokolnikov as the twisted Hades and Aleksandr Aleksandrovich as Marina's drunken, but philosophical brother. An imaginative treat for mature viewers.

Chulpan Khamatova X2

 

Ivan's Childhood

Nickolai Burlyayev and Evgeny Zharikov

Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, from 1962, is a striking debut feature. The film is set, primarily, in the western USSR during World War 2. The main character is a twelve year old orphan who seeks vengeance against the invading Germans by joining the partisans. His thirst for revenge is so great that he has escaped a boarding school he was put into to serve at the front. The film shifts back and forth between Ivan's experiences during the war contrasted with memories, dreams, and reflections of Ivan's peaceful and pastorale past. 

The landscape of the warfront is ravaged and macabre, an alienated environment. Ivan's Childhood has some of the standard elements of a Soviet film about what they still call The Great Patriotic War, but films by Tarkovsky look like no other. The full panoply of nature is always on display: from fertility to destruction, but shot as if by a metaphysical poet. Tarkovsky and cinematographer Vadim Yusov's compositions are always beautiful, but they are also disorienting. The vastness of the natural world, whether on earth or in space, is overwhelming for his characters. The images in Ivan's Childhood, whether they be of a crashed plane or a truck hauling apples in the rain. are defamiliarized. Tarkovsky's style is similar to the concept of Ostranenie or "making strange", as coined by Victor Shklovsky. The palpable textures of the imagery in Ivan's Childhood follow Shklovsky's dictum that in art "a stone must be stony."

Burlyayev and Irma Raush

Alas, film is more than the sum of its images, for some elements of the film's screenplay succumb to trite cliches. The barely sketched love triangle feels more like a commercial concession than a necessary element. Also, Ivan's devotion to the cause feels too super human. It is this element that led Jonas Mekas to denounce the flick in the Village Voice as "a fascist movie." Now Mekas, who was born in Lithuania and was imprisoned by the Nazis for his troubles, may have been overly sensitive when he encountered propaganda produced in countries headed by authoritarian regimes, but that was his right. Ivan's Childhood originated as a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov. It went through many iterations on its way to the big screen. Bogomolov was involved at every stage and there was much wrangling over the scenario. Future filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky, who plays a bespectacled soldier, was one of the many credited and uncredited screenwriters.

                                                               Spoiler Alert

The prime bone of contention during production was over the film's ending and I admit I have some misgiving over the final sequence. In the original story, Ivan survives the war. In the film, a Lieutenant who had befriended him finds his file, which indicates Ivan has been executed for being a partisan, while rummaging through the Nazi chancellory in defeated Berlin. Afterwards, we are treated to shots of torture devices used by the Gestapo. Shots from Soviet documentary units of Berlin in ruins feel tacked on as does ghoulish footage of the charred remains of Joseph Goebbels and the corpses of his children, poisoned by Goebbels and his Frau. It didn't sit well with me and I imagine the same was true with Mr. Mekas. Still, Ivan's Childhood has many moments that foretell an extraordinary career from Tarkovsky.

The actor who played Ivan, Nickolai Burlyayev, has subsequently had a successful film and political career. He was at one time married to Natalya Bondarchuk, daughter of Sergei Bondarchuk and Inna Makarova. After publicly supporting Russia's incursion into Ukraine in 2014, he successfully ran for the Duma in 2020. He has described himself as Orthodox and a homophobe. He has been sanctioned by both the UK government and the US treasury. Making strange indeed. 

Nouvelle Vague

Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck

I found Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague to be a charming, frisky, and light on its feet tribute to the French New Wave. The film focuses on Jean-Luc Godard's struggle to direct his first feature, Breathless. The script, written by a cohort of writers, places Godard within the ferment of the Cahiers du Cinéma magazine in which Godard and his fellow critics (especially Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, and Rohmer) formulated la politiques des auteurs. That critical stance became known, in English, as the auteur theory which is somewhat of a misnomer. The auteur theory is not some all encompassing method for evaluating film, but, originally, was a championing of a more personal approach to commercial filmmaking. The auteur theory was a response to a the stultifying "tradition of quality" that dominated the French cinema and was represented by such figures as Marcel Carné, René Clément, Claude Autant-Lara, and Henri Clouzot. In response to this, the Cahiers critics championed European auteurs who they felt offered a more personal and less stuffy vision of cinema such as Renoir, Ophuls, Becker, and Tati. The Cahiers critics also championed Hollywood directors such as Hawks and Hitchcock long before they were recognized as artists in the English speaking world.

Nouvelle Vague does a good job of providing a glimpse into the Cahiers crowd before Godard began shooting Breathless. All of the characters are introduced by titles which proves to be a good shorthand method for introducing the film's large cast. The film also shows Godard following the advice of esteemed film veterans before making his debut. There are wonderful cameos by figures playing Cocteau, Bresson, Melville, and Roberto Rossellini all of whom were venerated by the Cahiers crowd. Linklater's choice of shooting in black and white captures the feel of early New Wave films without mimicking Godard's style. There are no jump cuts or irises like those employed by Godard in Breathless. The editing is brisk and ebullient, fitting for the story of a film which was shot guerrilla style in less than three weeks. 

A number of Linklater's films revolve around a group of individuals who band together due to a common bond: the stoners in Dazed and Confused, the outlaws in The Newton Boys or the jocks of Everybody Wants Some!!. The cast and crew of Breathless are another little band united in a common purpose in this paean to cinephilia. The crew all play their part even when befuddled by the more cryptic pronouncements of the director. Nouvelle Vague displays the crucial contributions of cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) whose grounded efforts often provided a counterbalance to Godard's airy fancies. The cast are uncanny in their likeness to their real life counterparts and there is no weak link among them. No one quite has the charisma of Belmondo, but Aubry Dullin beautifully personifies his relaxed physicality and bemused demeanor. Guillaume Marbeck captures the intelligence, insolence, and insularity of Godard. The film wisely elides some, but not all, of the less laudatory aspects of his character. We root for him despite his nature because he is young and struggling to be a voice in the world of cinema that is his true love. Best of all is Zoey Deutch who is an uncanny twin of Jean Seberg. Deutch ably displays the steely resolve that lurked beneath Seberg's corn fed Iowa exterior.

Misericordia

Félix Kysyl and Jacques Develay

Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia (in France Miséricorde) is a wry and unsettling murder mystery set in the southern French countryside. The film, scripted by Guiraudie, combines an assortment of elements: a polymorphously perverse figure cons and bedazzles a small circle of patsies with his erotic allure (Teorema), a homophilic attraction and its attendant passion leads to murder (any Patricia Highsmith adaptation) resulting in a corpse being comically underfoot amidst gorgeous fall foliage (The Trouble With Harry). Guiraudie populates his film with a motley array of characters, nearly all harboring a secret or two. Most interesting are a not too grieving widow (Catherine Frot), an equivocal cleric (Jacques Develay), and a protagonist who is the object of desire for all who gaze upon him (Félix Kysyl). Misericordia is nothing earth shaking in terms of film dynamics, but I appreciated its droll aplomb. 

The film is not a whodunit, the audience witnesses the killing, but a will he get away with it.  Misericordia presents a series of mostly two handed dialogues with a constant vying for dominance between the combatants. It is the dialogues between priest and the perp that best display the range of the film, meditations on crime and punishment that limn the heights and depth of the human soul. Ultimately, the film rejects the rationalism of Cartesian dualism to celebrate the comforts of the flesh, while we can. The film's priest offer a rationalization for his moral stand, as a French priest would, but it is eros more than agape that compels him. 

Cold Fish

Megumi Kagurazaka

Sion Sono's Cold Fish is the sickest film I've seen in some time, but I mean that in the nicest way possible. This 2010 film is easily the best of the half dozen or so of Sono's films that I've seen. Still, the copious amounts of gore and polymorphous perversity contained within the film will limit the appeal of this picture. Viewer beware! The film is quite lengthy at 144 minutes, but I was not bored or repelled for a moment. I appreciated the film's pitch black humor. The protagonist is a repressed loser named Shamato who owns a tropical fish store. He leads an uneasy existence with a wife named Taeko (Megumi Kagurazaka) and a daughter from a previous marriage named Mitsuko (Hikari Kajiwara), both of whom hold him in contempt. Mitsuko, acting out, is busted for shoplifting at a drug store. The proprietor of the drug store,  Murata (Denden), who not coincidentally also owns a swankier tropical fish store than Shamato's, seemingly takes a kindly interest in Mitsuko and offers her a job. He employs "troubled teens" at his fish store where they reside. Mitsuko, eager to leave home, accepts the job and soon joins the all female crew who attend to their duties in skimpy tees and short shorts. Murata and his mate Aiko (Asuko Kurosawa) ingratiate themselves into the lives of Shamato and his family. Murata eventually seducing Taeko and tricking Shamato into joining in his criminal escapades.

Eventually, Shamato grows sick of doing Murata's bidding and turns the tables on him. This is not a political film per se, but it does seem like a meditation on the Japanese national identity. Certainly, the misogyny of the film seems to be a comment on women's second class status in Japan. This fits within the film's depiction of domination and submission as the basis of relationships. The characters, all two dimensional, seem primarily motivated by lust and greed. Denden, a stand-up comedian, hectors those around him like a sinister Don Rickles. Murata alternately belittles and pep talks Shamato. It is a performance that is both appalling and tremendously entertaining. Sono constantly films Denden from below, looming over the browbeaten Shamato. What Sono is seeking to portray is a dog eat dog world predicated on consumption. We are constantly being treated to shots of creatures in their aquariums being fed smaller creatures for their survival. The world depicted in Cold Fish is an anti-humanist one in which homo sapiens have hardly evolved beyond their amphibious ancestors. 

Frankenstein

Oscar Isaac

I was largely knocked out by Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein even though another go at this old chestnut was the last thing I desired to see. The film is impeccably cast and appointed, the rare sound spending of Netflix bucks. That said, the heroic cinematography of Dan Lausten and production design of Tamara Deverell is best suited to be enjoyed on a big screen, an opportunity not yet afforded the residents of my burg. I do admire the passion and scrupulousness that Mr. del Toro has applied to this project. Why though is this Frankenstein more effective than a similar del Toro Gothic fantasy, Crimson Peak, also lensed by Lausten. I think the primary reason is that the source material for Frankenstein provides a more interesting and involving plot.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was a singular woman, the product of two brilliant and radical parents, whose life story is incredible gripping, even during her post-Percy period. Her Frankenstein holds up much better than any other Gothic novel of that period (1818). Del Toro wisely pares down the book, eliminating one of the novel's narrators and some superfluous supporting characters. In order to do all of the book, one would need the length of a mini-series. An attempt that is not half bad is the 1973 mini-series Frankenstein: The True Story, directed by Jack Smight and adapted by Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. It enthralled me at twelve and is much better than the later Branagh film. Better than any previous version, del Toro captures the rebellious spirit of the Romantics. It is not just the matter of quoting PB Shelley and Lord Byron, though that helps, but it is also invoking the whiffs of Eros and Thanatos in their works and lives. Percy and Mary Shelley, after all, conducted their courtship by having clandestine midnight trysts beside her mother's grave. Del Toro also captures the Promethean rebelliousness of the Romantics. Oscar Isaac's Victor Frankenstein is all rock star magnetism and arrogance, but the audience knows he is heading for a fall. As he is warned by his benefactor, "I will be the eagle that feasts on your liver."

The director is true to Mrs. Shelley in his exploration of the religious themes in Frankenstein. The Romantics had rejected organized religion as calcified and contrary to nature. Nature is what made them fall into a swoon, so much so that one commentator wrote that they could "see the preternatural in a puddle." Under the sway of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, they also rejected scientific rationalism as a false god and any version of Frankenstein needs to acknowledge this. Del Toro utilizes a host of religious iconography and graven images, his Catholic upbringing I suppose, to buttress this theme. Most important is an icon of St. Gabriel who young Victor prays to. The saint later appears to an older Victor in a recurring and flame filled dreams. I think this represents the false god of science that Victor thinks will lead him to salvation. Instead, the apparition is a daemon who leads men astray, like the fiery angel of Bryusov's Gothic novel. 

One curious change that del Toro has made to the material is to place the main action of the film in the 1850s. There is no obvious reason to do this, but the period better suits the film's steampunk goth look. Certainly, the massive, yet disused water works that serve as Victor's lab could not have been imagined in 1818. This timelessness helps the visual dynamism of the mise en scene. The director structures the film, excepting a wraparound prelude and coda, into two parts. The first is Victor's story with Oscar Isaac narrating. In the second part, the story shifts to the creature's point of view with Jacob Elordi narrating. Victor's section is mostly made up of baroque interiors, like his lab which is the film's ultimate cabinet of curiosities. These knotty interior set-ups remind me of William Holman Hunt's paintings in their combination of baroque symmetry with Christian allegory. The exteriors in the film, especially the Polar sequences, offers a different sort of tableaux: polar landscapes with the grandeur of Caspar David Friedrich. 

Jacob Elordi

No matter the visual execution of a film, it is the acting corps that brings it to life. Del Toro continues to improve in his ability to give time and space to his players. I especially appreciated the efforts of two old timers: Charles Dance with another of his dastardly Dads and David Bradley getting to play a nice guy for once as the blind man. Mia Goth is saddled with a rote role which too bladly proclaims the film's moral condemnation of Victor. Yet, she is marvelous, projecting both a corporeal and an ethereal presence that reminds me of Lillian Gish. I always found Mr. Isaacs to be a little cold, but that quality dovetails with his character here. He is both suitably magnetic and mad, an Elon Musk of the 19th Century. As the creature, Elordi is sublime, maybe a little too sublime. I was enthralled by his mellifluous narration, but thought he was too buff.

I have a few issues. The film is a tad long and the score was unmemorable, but those are about all of my caveats. The film balances well practical effects, especially the recycled cadavers, with CGI. Mary Shelley saw no need for ravening wolves, but I can see why del Toro wanted to pump up the film's action. Overall, Frankenstein strikes me as del Toro's best film since Pan's Labyrinth.

Holy Cow

Luna Garret and Clément Faveau

Louise Courvoisier's Holy Cow is a promising feature debut from the young French director. The French title for the film is Vingt Dieux or "twenty gods" which is a common French exclamation akin to "good heavens". The phrase derives from the more blasphemous "vain dieu" or vain god. Darn, as it were, instead of damn. The title Holy Cow points to the film's setting which is in Jura, a rural region of France near the Swiss border, which is the main dairy producing area in the country. The film focuses on two siblings, the young Claire (Luna Garret) and 18 year old Totone (Clément Faveau) who are left to fend for themselves after the sudden death of their father. The film is chiefly a coming of age drama about Totone coming to terms with his newfound responsibilities.

The film presents a warm portrait of the youth of the region, though it implies that they have few outlets for entertainment after a hard day's work on the farm. One of the few dark notes of the film is the prevalence of alcoholism displayed in the region. That said, the film's tone is somewhat naive. There are no social services to be found to help or nettle Totone. The only hint at the daily struggle to survive is a brief scene of Claire and Totone dumpster diving. The film's narrative is chiefly taken by two strands. The first is Totone's desire to follow in his father's footsteps by becoming a maker of artisanal cheese. Totone's clumsy attempts at learning his craft are somewhat comical, but he finds mentors to further his education about fromage.  

The other strain of the narrative concerns Totone's sentimental education. Totone falls in love with Marie-Lise (Maïwene Barthelemy), the no-nonsense daughter of the owner of a large dairy. Marie-Lise is a fount of practical knowledge and she gives Totone lessons in a wide range of subjects, from how to birth a calf to the finer points of cunnilingus. The whole cast is terrific, but it is Ms. Barthelemy who makes the most indelible impression. What impressed me the most about Holy Cow was Ms. Courvoisier's skill at pacing individual sequences. The film never drags or lags, but moves along in a spritely and engaging manner. It reminded me of Breaking Away, but Holy Cow is a superior film to that one about a rural community and a young man's coming of age.

Red Rose White Rose

Joan Chen and Winston Chao

Stanley Kwan's Red Rose White Rose is a rapturous romantic melodrama from 1994. The film is relatively faithful to its source, Eileen Chang's novella of the same name, which was first published in 1944. Zhen-Bao (Winston Chao) has returned to Shanghai after finishing his education in the UK. Hired by a trading company, Zhen-Bao takes a flat with an old classmate who has an attractive and very Western wife named Jiao-Rui (Joan Chen). The old friend leaves for a business trip and the inevitable occurs. 

The first half of the film is, largely, one long tryst. Kwan separates his lovers from the world as they plunge into each other. The camera remains tightly fixed on the duo. The current events of the era are faintly touched upon. Shanghai is evoked by artifice such as miniatures and hand painted backgrounds which play up the unreal, fairy tale nature of falling into romantic tumult. Christopher Doyle's cinematography utilizes inky black and blood orange to depict the flames of love. Jiao-Rui's apartment walls are studded with tiles, like the background of a Klimt, which shimmer just the right way thanks to Mr. Doyle. The use of titles, quoting the novella, further distances the audience from this folie à deux. When Jiao-Rui tells Zhen-Bao that she wants to ditch her husband and marry him, he recoils and retreats from her. He cannot sacrifice his career by marrying a divorcee, so he discards the red rose of passion for the white rose of marriage.

Veronica Yip

There is an ellipsis of time in the film and we see Zhen-Bao on his wedding day, embarking on an arranged marriage. His new wife, Yen Li (Veronica Yip), is the opposite of Jiao-Rui, in almost every way. She is unsophisticated and unresponsive in bed. She bears her husband a baby girl, her meddling mother-in-law prattles that the next one will be a boy, but their union is discordant. Zhen-Bao drowns himself in alcohol and frequents prostitutes. While the focus of the first half of the film is on the two lovers, the second half focuses on Zhen-Bao's family milieu with a foregrounding of his brother and mother. The palette of the cinematography changes also. Darkness is banished and the images are over saturated with light. Pastels are substituted for vivid primary colors, all the better to highlight the Western kitsch of the married couples' flat. The decor is festooned with cherubs and pink roses highlighting the cognitive dissonance of the menage.

Joan Chen's performance here is so ferocious that it convinced me that Hollywood misused her as an actress. Ms. Yip has less to do, mostly play sullen, but is equally expressive. Inexpressive is what Mr. Chao is, he reminded me of Gregory Peck, but this serves to bolster a film about the transience of male desire. The film ends with Zhen-Bao vowing to keep to the straight and narrow, but I note a trace of mild irony with the pat ending of this under seen masterpiece.

 

The Miracle Woman

Barbara Stanwyck

Frank Capra's The Miracle Woman is an uneven, yet ultimately effective 1931 drama. It reunites Capra with Barbara Stanwyck who were on a winning streak for Harry Cohn and Columbia Pictures. The picture was based on a 1927 play, entitled Bless You Sister, by John Meehan and, significantly, future Capra collaborator Robert Riskin. The material was adapted by Jo Swerling, and functions as a critique of evangelism, equating it with  sports, carnivals, medicine shows, and the like. The main inspiration for the play was evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson whose "disappearance" was the most sensational news story of 1926. 1927 was also the year Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry. Since the birth of the Republic, each new spiritual awakening has elicited a backlash by America's writers and intellectuals. I just finished reading Hawthorne's superb The Blithedale Romance, published in 1852, which pictures American spiritualists as confidence men and scoundrels. The song has remained the same.

The picture opens with Stanwyck dressing down her father's congregation after they have defrocked him. This provides her an ideal opportunity to display her moxie and passion as an actress. A traveling carny named Hornsby(Sam Hardy) senses her charisma and takes her under his wing. Soon, she has been monikered "Sister Florence Fallon" and is ministering to a large congregation. Sister Fallon's show features stage lighting, a large band, a choir, and even caged lions. Shills are employed by Hornsby to fan the flames of the fanatics. The razzmatazz and ballyhoo employed by Hornsby brings lucrative rewards. The backstage aspect of The Miracle Woman is what is most saltily attractive about the picture. Hardy, in particular, excels at the rat-a-tat-tat dialogue that Riskin would become renowned for. Hardy amassed over eighty film credits before his premature death in 1935.

Stanwyck and David Manners

Unfortunately, the romantic angle of the picture nearly sinks it. David Manners, as a blind veteran named John Carson who wins the evangelist's heart and moves her towards redemption, is so stiff and lifeless he resembles a two ton anchor. Manners had some success playing Jonathan Harker in the 1931 hit Dracula, but his lack of affect would doom his career in films. The romantic ardor generated by Stanwyck and Manners is zilch. Manners was a stiff, but I'm not sure who could have redeemed this idiotic role. Carson wins over Stanwyck by employing racial epithets, a doll named Sambo, a toy clown that plays The Farmer in the Dell, and, most heinous of all, ventriloquism. The mind reels. 

However, there are moments of genius that redeem the picture. A good example is Capra's introduction of Carson: a four shot sequence briskly tossed off, but containing a trove of information about the character. Carson is seen in the background of the shot telling an apartment dweller, separated by a narrow alley from Carson's pad, to turn her radio, tuned to the Sister Fallon show, down. Then there is an overhead shot from the roof of Carson's apartment showing his head sticking out his window asking for quiet. The shot, which will be crucially repeated, shows how narrow the alley is separating Carson's building from his neighbor. The shot emphasizes the reduced circumstances of those living in these tenements. Capra then cuts to a head on shot of Carson closing the window. The next shot, from the inside of his apartment, shows Carson in profile with a Harvard pennant in the background. Why, the audience must ask, is an Ivy League grad living in penury. We soon learn that Carson was a World War 1 aviator who lost his sight in the conflict. He has struggled to make a living as a songwriter, but his failure compels him to attempt suicide. Capra repeats the overhead shot that now augurs doom. Instead, Carson hears Sister Fallon's voice urging her listeners to combat despair and never quit on life. The rest of the film pretty much writes itself. 

Stanwyck's diaphanous stage outfits are a wonder of Pre-Code cinema. The finale in which Sister Fallon's tabernacle is engulfed in a conflagration is a fiery ending that calls to mind the title of one of Capra's 1932 pictures: American Madness.

The Shrouds

Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger            

David Cronenberg's The Shrouds opened in competition at Cannes in 2024, but struggled to find a distributor. It eventually had a cursory theatrical run in the US this year. Critics were largely receptive, but this is a very personal film best appreciated by diehard fans of the director and writer. I must say I am a diehard Cronenberg fan and believe The Shrouds is one of the best pictures of the year, but I'm sure it will appear inscrutable to some. For those seeking cinematic adrenalin, this film is a hard pass. However, as with Crimes of the Future, I savored Cronenberg's serene, yet passionate meditation on mortality. The film is funnier than almost all recent comedies and sexier than any erotic thriller in many a moon. Cronenberg's perversity does not align with mass taste, but it is his singularity that is his genius.

The Shrouds was inspired by the death of Cronenberg's wife and features Vincent Cassel (done up to look like the director) as a Cronenberg stand-in named Karsh. Karsh is an industrial filmmaker and entrepreneur who is bent on opening a chain of cemeteries named GraveTech. The company wraps corpses in the titular shrouds that enables video of the decaying corpse to be streamed on the screens on the tombstone and on your phone if you buy the app. Karsh is haunted, literally, by the death of his wife (Diane Kruger), Becca. The first image of the film is of her moldering body in a dream of Karsh's. In the dream, he is literally separated from her and screams. Cronenberg cuts to another nightmarish vision, with Karsh, mouth open again, writhing in his dentist's chair. His dentist tells him his mouth is in bad shape with the diagnosis being the effects of his grief. We are firmly in the body horror territory which Cronenberg mapped out under The Shape of Rage rubric in The Brood. Karsh is devoted to GraveTech not for wealth or fame, but because a perverse romantic obsession drives him; a self-reflexive admission from the auteur.

Vincent Cassel and Guy Pearce

Cronenberg has never been fully appreciated for his black humor. The first major sequence in The Shrouds is a prime example with Karsh involved in a disastrous blind date set up by his AI avatar, voiced by Ms. Kruger and appropriately named Honey. Karsh decides to host the date at his flagship cemetery which boasts a gourmet restaurant. I suppose a goth chick might find this setting romantic, but Karsh's date, deftly played by Jennifer Dale, is appalled, especially when Karsh takes her to the graveyard to see the video of Becca's skeleton. Karsh does attract other female attention, though. He has a barbed and charged relationship with Becca's sister, Terry, also played by Ms. Kruger. Then there is Soo-Min Szabo ( a superb Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a Hungarian business man who is interested in opening a GraveTech franchise in Budapest. However, her designs on Karsh may be more sinister than romantic.

The picture changes tone, slightly, when Karsh discovers that his cemetery has been vandalized and that the video feeds of the corpses, including Becca's, have been highjacked by unknown hackers. The film morphs into a paranoid thriller wherein Karsh tries to find out what entities are bedeviling him. Terry, who has a conspiratorial slant, provides assistance and a bond between her and Karsh grows. They enlist Terry's ex, Maury (Guy Pearce), who is an expert computer programmer. Maury is a sullen nerd who has had previous fallings out with both Karsh and Terry, the latter characterizing Maury as a schmuck. However, Maury carries around grievances that makes him less than trustworthy. He functions within this film much as fellow computer nerd Harlan does in the cinematic twin to The Shrouds in the Cronenberg canon, Videodrome. In both films, unseen corporations or nation states coop cutting edge technology to usurp control over the bodies and minds of individuals. Who is there for Karsh to trust? His avatar Honey is certainly a dubious guide. Soo-Min is looking out for number one. Then there is the recurring dream Karsh has of Becca in which she seems to be incrementally losing body parts. Certainly, this bodes something sinister in store for Karsh.

I'm not going to spill the beans, but am going to say that I was enthralled with The Shrouds from beginning to end. The quality of the performances in the film is extremely accomplished, even the bit players. Guy Pearce has to tamp down his natural charisma to play a nerd, but he is effective and believable. I was astonished by the range displayed by Diane Kruger in her tripartite roles. I guess I tended to underrate her early in her career, probably because of her background in modeling, but I am now fully onboard the Kruger train. If the film has a flaw, it is Cassel. Like Léa Seydoux in Crimes of the Future, Cassel is saddled by Cronenberg with too many expository monologues for a thespian for who speaks English as a second language. That noted, Cassel is expert in using his body for the role. Cassel sculpts the outline of Karsh's body so that we see it as a steely carapace masking inner vulnerability.

The Shrouds was intended to be an episodic show for Netflix. Each episode would cover GraveTech franchises in separate countries enabling Cronenberg to explore an array of burial customs. Like David Lynch with Mulholland Drive, Cronenberg has fashioned fine cinematic wine from the sour grapes of television. 

Line of Demarcation

Jean Seberg and Maurice Ronet

Claude Chabrol's La Ligne de démarcation (Line of Demarcation) is a World War 2 French resistance drama that I found to be better than its reputation. It is one of those rare films that gets more interesting, deeper, and incisive as it goes along. The setting is a small French village bisected by a river which also serves as the line of demarcation between Vichy France and what remained, in 1942, of the German occupied French republic. We see various refugees, spies, and escapees from German terror try to cross into Vichy France during the course of the film. Eventually. the town's populace unites to help a wounded American. The film was based on a memoir by a hero of the Resistance named Gilbert Renault who published it under nom de plume, Colonel Rémy. The memoir has been streamlined and depersonalized by Chabrol with events conflated.

The initial section of the film drags, primarily because it focuses on the film's most lifeless characters, the aristocratic Count Pierre (Maurice Ronet) and his English born wife, Mary (Jean Seberg). Pierre has just come back from a hospital where he recovered from wounds received during the German conquest of France. He is crippled and embittered, epitomizing the defeatist attitude of Petain and his cohorts. Mary, however, has turned into the Mother Courage of the Resistance. So, their bisected union represents, all too baldly, the split between Vichy and the de Gaulle led Free French. The duo doesn't seem to be getting it on, as Pierre's limp signals, all too baldly, impotence. There is little the actors can do to animate these one dimensional placards, though Ms. Seberg seems to be acting only above the neck.

Happily, the other inhabitants of the village are well cast and memorably played. No performance descends into type, but transcends. I particularly enjoyed Daniel Gélin as the village doctor and Stéphane Audran as his wife who provide the film's only erotic spark. I also thought Jean-Louis Maury was delightfully slippery as a Gestapo fiend and Reinhard Kolldehoff was suitably ambivalent as a Wehrmacht major who tries to bond with Mary and Pierre in a tip of the chapeau to La Grande Illusion. 

Collective Solidarity

Line of Demarcation was initially targeted to be a Anthony Mann project, but Mann passed and recommended Chabrol to the producer. The film shoot, larger and more commercial than he was used to, was not a happy one for the director. However, I love the way Chabrol balances the demands of juggling over a dozen characters. I think the look he gives the 1966 film is not far from Mann's noir films, but with more of a gothic melodrama feel that is perfectly apt for a film about the horrors of Nazism. After Pierre sacrifices and redeems himself in the final reel, the town barman, a socialist and class opponent of Pierre, salutes him by leading the villagers in a rendition of La Marseillaise. This display of the collective solidarity of the French Resistance is a myth, given what we now know about the extent of collaboration during this period, but all countries need their own myths and Line of Demarcation is not a bad one.

Lisa and the Devil

Elke Sommer

 Mario Bava's Lisa and the Devil is an above average exploitation film from the Italian master. The film was made and released in Spain in 1973 as The Devil Takes the Dead but failed to find an international distributor. Producer Alfredo Leone then shot footage with actor Robert Alda as a priest in order to ride the coattails of The Exorcist. The results were released internationally under the title The House of Exorcism. Happily, the cut streaming on Tubi is the Bava cut. The stream does justice to the lustrous colors of Cecillo Paniagua's cinematography. This is a fairly brain dead film, but there are interesting layers to be found in the gorgeously ghastly mise en scène. 

Lisa and the Devil is a variation on the sick house subgenre of horror which spans from The Fall of the House of Usher to Hotel California. Elke Sommer stars as Lisa, a tourist who gets led astray to this film's house of horrors by the film's playful devil, Telly Savalas. Other interlopers are subsequently bumped off in the mansion presided by a blind matriarch played by Alida Valli. The plot, concocted by a phalanx of scriptwriters is a garbled mishmash of soap opera and Dostoyevsky. The performances are all dubbed. This was the second film in a row that Bava had done with Ms. Sommer and Leone after the rather dire Baron Blood. The dialogue is largely rot delivered spasmodically. I have never cottoned to Elke Sommer. She looks lovely, but is robotic in her bare competence. She seemed much more at ease at farce rather than horror. Alida Valli had been in more masterpieces than I can shake a stick at, but I think she is a stone faced bore. However, a stone face is perfect for a blind matriarch and Bava milks the most of her green eyes.

Alida Valli

Savalas was riding high on the success of the TV show Kojak after playing numerous psychos and villains through his career. Bava lets him coast off and toy with his image with trademark Kojak lollipop in hand. The numerous lollipops, reflections in cigarettes cases, wine spills, and mirrors attest to the playful nature of this film. Lisa and the Devil is a horror film than knowingly verges on burlesque. Still, there is some erudition and feeling on display in the way Bava's camera prowls the interior of the ridiculously rococo and rotting villa; certainly the byproducts of past productions. The manse is a house of the dead in which all who enter succumb. The green of Lisa's outfit is a symbol of her fertility. This is developed in a dream sequence triggered by a Day of the Dead music box. Lisa is transported to a green pastorale idyll which is presided over by a statue of Dionysus. Time's winged chariot comes for all though and Lisa is fated to join the rest of the house of the dead. Lisa and the Devil is no great shakes, but it director manages to extract beauty out of humble material.

A House of Dynamite

Rebecca Ferguson

Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite left me with mixed feelings though I did think this film was a marked improvement over her last one, Detroit. Noah Oppenheim's script, in three parts, depicts the response by various components of the US government and military trying to thwart an incoming ICBM that is poised to strike Chicago. The missile was launched by an unknown adversary, nettling a military response. The separate parts of the film all roughly cover the same time span, but focus on different command posts, such as the White House, SAC Command in Nebraska, and a missile site in Alaska. The three part structure has its advantages. Chiefly, the film displays the lack of time and options faced by those in positions of power when a nuclear threat is imminent. A House of Dynamite is a procedural film about the futility of procedure in such a situation.

However, this approach also has its drawbacks. There is so much leaping about from location to location that it tends to flatten out the efforts of the ensemble cast. There are memorable performances in the film, I admired the efforts of Greta Lee, Jared Harris,Tracy Letts, and Gabriel Basso, but too many of the characters come out under drawn and colorless, particularly Rebecca Ferguson's Captain and Idris Elba's President. Zero Dark Thirty did a much better job portraying military and government functionaries. Greta Lee's character, an expert on Korea, is attending a Civil War reenactment at Gettysburg with her young son and this gives Bigelow an opportunity to skewer the American tendency to look back nostalgically on war as spectacle. She makes it clear that America will have no opportunity to look back nostalgically on a nuclear confrontation.

Like Fail Safe and The Bedford Incident, A House of Dynamite bogs down in endless shots of officials intoning portents of doom while standing before video and radar screens. Bigelow and Oppenheim want to be Cassandras here, but this largely inert film will tend to lull viewers rather than spark righteous indignation. 

La Collectionneuse

Haydée Politoff and Patrick Bauchau

Éric Rohmer's La Collectionneuse, his first color film, is his first feature to truly bear his stamp. This 1967 release features his trademark mild sexual intrigue and lengthy verbal discourses. If you find, like Gene Hackman's detective in Arthur Penn's Night Moves, that watching a Rohmer picture is like watching paint dry, then this is skippable. However, you would miss the gorgeous summer colors summoned by Néstor Almendros who had previously collaborated with Rohmer on a number of projects. The writer and director claimed that the film's commercial success, it played over nine months in one Parisian theater, was due to the cast's long hair and mod glad rags. However, except for a sequence of girls in their summer clothes, a sequence essentially repeated in La Collectionneuse's twin, 1972's L'Amour l'après-midi, and a copy of Aftermath on a couch, there is little of pop culture. The film's success was also due to the bared bronze skin on display in one of Rohmer's most sensual works.

The film begins with a trio of vignettes, introducing us to the three main characters: Haydée (Haydée Politoff), Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle), and Adrian (Patrick Bauchau). The trio come together as guests or fellow layabouts at the French Riviera estate of a mutual friend. Haydée is presented, at first, as an object, wearing a bikini on a beach, glowing in Almendros' warm tones. She racks up an impressive number of bedmates, she "collects" them according to the jealous boys. Daniel is first portrayed polemicizing with a companion. This is his default mode. He is often a foil for Adrien in this way. When Daniel criticizes an older art collector, Sam, who is negotiating a deal with Adrien for a priceless vase, I feel Rohmer is illustrating the class conflicts in French society that would erupt in 1968 as they did during the 1789 revolution. The collector is played by "Seymour Hertzberg", a pseudonym for American critic and auteurist ally Eugene Archer whose premature death terminated a promising career. His performance is an acid etched one of a hustler and brute. Politoff and Pommereulle were given leeway by Rohmer to improvise their dialogue and that is why their own first names are used for their characters.

La Collectionneuse, like all of Rohmer's Moral Tales, was, at first, a novel. In both forms, Adrien is the main character and as an undependable narrator. Mr. Bauchau's character's did not get to be named Patrick and he was not given the leeway to improvise that his co-stars were. He is the villain of the piece, if such a term can be applied in an ambivalent oeuvre. This is established in the opening vignette when we meet Adrien trying to cajole his girlfriend Carole (Mijanou Bardot) to join him at the vacation villa. She has a modeling gig in London which provides the film with a final punchline. Our knowledge of their relationship colors our perception of Adrien's subsequent tortuous flirtation with Haydée. Adrien is both attracted to her and repulsed by that attraction. He ends up virtually pimping her out to both Daniel and Sam. Not for nothing does Sam label Adrien Machiavellian. Rohmer's sympathy, as always, lies with the femme. The pill had given women sexual freedom, but it had and has not eliminated the sexual double standard. Rohmer much prefers sexual license to hypocrisy and manipulation. A moral stand, if you will. A near masterpiece that portends further variations.

 

Battle Beyond the Stars

Sybil Danning and Jeff Corey

Battle Beyond the Stars is a Roger Corman production designed to ride the box office coattails of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. Empire opened in May of that year and Battle followed in July. The film was Corman's most expensive production to date, 2 million dollars, yet went on to yield a tidy sum for Corman. Part of the expense was the caliber of the cast which was quite high for a cheapie: George Peppard, Robert Vaughn, Sam Jaffe, John Saxon, Marta Kristen, and Jeff Corey whose eyebrows are the most out of control element of the picture. What elevates the film, slightly is not the pedestrian direction, but John Sayles' savvy script. The basic premise of the film is taken from Seven Samurai, mercenaries band together to save a menaced planet named Akir whose people are known as the Akira. Sayles also pilfers from The Tempest, Barbarella (see above), Star Wars, and numerous Westerns. Richard Thomas, John-Boy Walton on the hit television show The Waltons, applies his usual dithering awkwardness as the protagonist.

The Peppard character is the Han Solo role, here named Cowboy. Through this role, Sayles shows the link between cowboys and space heroes in the pantheon of US juvenile mythos, from Woody to Buzz Lightyear. Peppard seems more engaged than usual and is a hoot. The highlight of the film is his character playing "Red River Valley" on his harmonica to the comically disparate mercenaries as they await their final battle. Sayles shows himself to have been ahead of the curve with his takes here on internet dating, AI, and robotics. The score by James Horner wisely avoids aping John Williams, offering a splendid pastiche of Wagner and Debussy. The film's female lead, the late Darlanne Fluegel whose performance in To Live and Die is one of the best in all of 1980s cinema, has little to do except toss her tresses. I like the gravitas of Robert Vaughn's performance and I am not really a fan of his work. He essentially reprises his role The Magnificent Seven in a more mournful vein.

Unfortunately, overall, Battle Beyond the Stars is more crap than craptastic. Jimmy T. Murakami's direction emphasizes the cartoonish nature of the project rather than its mythic reach. It is telling that he went onto greater success as an animator. Like a lot of Corman productions, Battle Beyond the Stars was more successful retrospectively as a film school project than as a piece of film art. James Cameron got his first big professional break as the special effects supervisor of the film. Bill Paxton made important contacts working on the project as a carpenter.

American Mary

Katharine Isabelle

Jen and Sylvia Soska's American Mary is a superior exploitation film from the Canadian duo that was released in 2012. It is a body horror flick, laced with black humor, in which a medical student named Mary Mason (Katharine Isabelle) resorts to performing body modification surgeries in order to pay off her student loans. This plunges her into a subculture that, at first, nauseates her, but by film's end she has joined the ranks. Towards the end of the film, she rejects a potential customer as too "vanilla."

Mary stumbles upon her calling when she applies for a job at a strip club. The drunken manager of the club (Antonio Cupo) and his henchman (Twan Holliday) end up helping her with the more grisly aspects of her craft. Her clients range from a stripper who wants to look like Betty Boop to a gal who wants to resemble a human doll. The Soska twins treat their menagerie of supporting characters not as freaks but as humans with ridiculous foibles and fetishes like the rest of us. The characterizations and performances are a cut above most exploitation films of this level. Even the thug gets a winning monologue which Mr. Holliday nails. The visuals are restrained and attractive for a film featuring multiple amputations. The Soska sisters appear in the film as does their mother and father. Apparently, it was all hands on deck. 

The Soska twins were a little too early to get the praise that such recent feminist body horror films like Titane and The Substance have garnered. In my burg of Portland, body modification raises nary an eyebrow these days. Still, the sisters have soldiered on in their beloved genre and I urge horror mavens to visit their website. American Mary is streaming on Tubi.