LAFF 2013: AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS

A scene from Ain't Them Bodies Saints.

Miss take

By Don Simpson

Writer-director David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saintsis a cinematic meditation on poor, rural Texas life in the 1970s (though it often feels like the 1920s or 30s). It is Bob’s (Casey Affleck) desperate economic situation and intense desire to support Ruth (Rooney Mara) that has driven him to become an outlaw. There is presumably very little work available, so Bob’s only available option is to steal from others. These perceived external pressures at work against Bob are somewhat similar to Kit’s situation in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973). Both films also allude to psychological issues at play within the minds of their male antiheroes. The men are blindly obsessed with their girlfriends to disastrous proportions.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints ain’t just about obsession; it is also about the deteriorating effects of guilt and secrets on one’s soul. Unlike Bob, Ruth seems to understand the grim reality that she and Bob will never be together again, so Ruth has sentenced herself to a loveless life of chastity to punish herself for the crime for which Bob is doing time. Ruth will never be happy because she knows that Bob has offered up his life for her freedom, while Bob will not be happy until he is reunited with his family. All because of one simple mistake — for which nobody died — Ruth and Bob are destined to be unhappy for the rest of their lives.

Like that of an early Malick film (Days of Heaven), cinematographer Bradford Young showcases iconic rural landscapes in transcendent magic hour photography. Lowery’s film is obsessed with the textures and degradation of rusting metal, peeling paint and splitting wood. Everyone and everything is covered with a thick layer of dirt.


Ain't Them Bodies Saints screens at LAFF 2013: June 15, 7 p.m., Regal Cinemas; June 17, 4:50 p.m., Regal Cinemas. For more info: www.lafilmfest.com

FILM INTERVIEW: OLIVIER ASSAYAS

A scene from Something in the Air.

Enough for Ahead

 

By Ed Rampell

 

Following the Boston Marathon bombing the new rightwing mantra is “radicalization.” French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’ new feature Something in the Airis about the process of radicalization -- but by revolution, not religion. Set shortly after France’s historic worker-student mass strike of May 1968 Something in the Air’s politicized protagonists encounter anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists and the counterculture as the young militants come of age when, as Assayas says, “everything was political” and many of his generation felt that world revolution was imminent. With this film and his 2010 epic Carlos --about the Venezuelan terrorist known as “Carlo the Jackal” -- Assayas shows he is one of the planet’s top political directors. We interviewed Assayas at, of all places, Beverly Hills after an advance screening of Something in the Air.

 

JEsther Entertainment: Recently we’ve seen huge revolutionary upsurges in the Middle East, North Africa; here in America we had the Occupied movement and the indignant in Spain and Greek general strikes. Does part of you still dream and hope there could be a revolution?

Olivier Assayas: Yes. But as much as I believe in those political movements, as much as they give one hope, because it gives a notion that youth again believes that it can have a collective effect on society, the way they envision politics is very different from whatever the 1970s’ were. Because for good or bad the 1970s were utopian. The 1970s believed in the possibility of turning society upside down, of taking over. It was utopian, but then it had some sort of reality because at least in France we had a model, which was May ’68, which was like three years old, and it comes as close as it gets to being an actual revolution. So, yes, this dream of a revolution, it was utopian, but then it was also grounded into something that had actually happened, that had a solid reality. Today, people don’t think of a revolution. They think of adapting society, of making the hope of more fairness, more justice, more social justice, more generosity, which are old things -- the modern world has become so brutal that of course, you have to recognize and endorse. But in the 1970s it would have been called “reformist,”which was an insult.

JE: What role can cinema play in today’s politics?
OA: Cinema in general plays a very modest role in politics. Politics are connected to real life, to real struggle, to the actual pain of real life people, and movies are very, very minor compared to that in terms of the effect they can have. The only thing movies can do is, eventually, a movie like this is have some sort of dialogue with youths who would be attracted to some kind of involvement into politics. Because often, they idealize the 1970s and movies don’t really represent the 1970s. It’s a way of giving some kind of portrait to that period that can be understandable, can be some sort of reference point and which also could remind that they could be in a generation not so, so, so far from us. The conscience that a specific generation could change the world.

JE: Can you discuss some of the other specific rock songs used in your film and how they express the politics and other inner meaning you were getting cross, as a “layer of illustration,” as you put it?

OA: I wanted to use specifically, protest songs to be present. So I used this Phil Ochs' song ("Ballad of William Worthy") that Johnny Flynn sings, because it’s from another era. But it was still around. Wherever you were, some guy would pop up and he’d be playing a song that came from that history of protest songs. It was very present. The actual song is more a song of the early ’60s, mid-’60s at the latest. And we are six or seven years but still it was just part of, those songs carried in terms of politics, in terms of involvement in politics, and was something that was extremely important in those years, yes, that I needed. In terms of the way I use songs, they all have a specific meaning, so it would be long and tedious to go through every single one of them. Maybe one way of dealing with this would be saying it’s the difference between the party in this film and the party we created in my movie called Cold Water, which I made in the mid-’90s, where I use a completely different soundtrack. Which was also pretty much a soundtrack of the 1970s, but used big names, it used the songs, my whole generation could relate to, like Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Credence Clearwater Revival, so on and so forth. Here, it’s a completely different ambient. For instance, when I’m recreating the similar party scene in Something in the Air we are at this country house, villa, which belongs to this rich family, and they’re having this kind of hip, cool party. You would not have music like Credence Clearwater Revival, it would be just uncool, right? You could have Captain Beefheart -- Captain Beefheart was believable in that context. Or Soft Machine or Incredible String Band, because they were underground, they were this avante garde thing.

JE: What kind of music do you like to listen to today?
OA: I listen to a lot of indie rock. But the thing is now it’s everywhere. It’s in fashion shows, it’s in commercials, when you go to a washroom in a hotel, it’s what you listen to. It’s everywhere and it’s becoming problematic in many ways for me. In the sense that my love of music, was also because the music carries something that’s not exactly revolutionary but it’s about values that are not the values of society. The world I come from is a world that is defined by the relationship between art and politics in a certain way. I think that’s something that’s getting lost now and so I have difficulty adjusting to that…It has do with the innocence of youth which I think the modern means of communication, the obsession with consumption is erasing, is destroying in a certain way. One essential aspect is that there was a belief in the future. People trusted the future. There was this hate, dislike, suspicion of the present, of anything that had to do with the material value of the present in the name of something that would be coming in the history. That’s also why people were so obsessed with political history, because political history of the 20^thcentury told them the lessons that would make them be successful with the revolution that would obviously happen in the very near future. Again, hope means belief in the future, literally. Today it’s something that’s gone. Because this kind of despair or loss of faith because the world is not changing. When you are kids today who grow up listening to politicians on TV or on the radio or in the newspapers, saying how important they are, how they have no grasp on the big issues of the world, how are they going to believe in politics? How are they going to believe that they can do something and change the world for the better? It’s not surprising that they lose faith in that and they lose faith in the future.

JE: Does Gilles sell out at the end of the film?
OA: I don’t think he does. Gilles discovers his true path. He realizes that making movies in the industry is not for him, and eventually there’s an answer in something that has to do with experimental or independent cinema. Maybe I’m deluding myself, but the reason why I ended up making movies is because somehow movies are about some kind of collective utopia, something you do together. It’s collective; it’s art you can share with people from all parts of society. In the context of independent filmmaking, when you are on a film set you’re working with people who are there not because they’re doing a job, it’s because people love what they do, and they want to be part of something bigger than them. I found a way through cinema, through independent cinema, to find a way to pursue the hopes of the utopias of the ’70s.

JE: What’s next?
OA: Next for me is a movie I will be doing with Juliette Binoche. It’s not the ’70s again; it’s today, it’s contemporary. [Laughs.] …It’s about acting, it’s about the relationship between reality and acting. Juliette plays a stage actress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

  

 

 

 

 

 

  

                  

 

                       

 

 

 

AFI 2012: SOMETHING IN THE AIR

A scene from Something in the Air.

The Dreamers outsiders

By Ed Rampell

We often label and lump the turmoil that swept America and the world with a series of assassinations, Civil Rights, the antiwar movement, Black Power, China’s Red Guard, the Prague Spring, feminism and so on under the broad rubric of “the ’60s.” Auteur Olivier Assayas’ Something in the Air sets the record straight, showing that the era’s radical fervor continued well into the 1970s.

The film follows the trajectory of a number of French youths as they wend their ways through the tumult of this insurgent hangover, when it seemed there was a world to be won. At the center is Gilles (Clement Metayer), a high school student whose life alternately intertwines with various friends, comrades and lovers like Laure (Carole Combes) and Christine (Lola Creton). Along the way is street fighting with the CRS/SS pigs; tossed Molotov cocktails; and the factional infighting that those who believe in “workers of the world unite” often specialize in. (It’s truly astonishing how people who profess solidarity frequently fight with one another, as if the revolution is their private property.) Air chronicles the faction fights between various leftwing tendencies -- anarchists, Maoists and what the subtitles unfortunately refer to as “Trotskyites.” (To use a racial analogy, this is akin to using the “N” word to describe adherents of Leon Trotsky, denigrating them as fifth columnist saboteurs. Whereas “Trotskyist” is a respectful term like “African American” is; it simply refers to followers of the Bolshevik apostle of world and permanent revolution. Two demerits for counterrevolutionary nomenclature, comrade translator!)

Along with extremist leftist ideology, youth of that generation also grew their hair long and contended with the counterculture’s bohemian influences in the form of drugs; Rock music (Something in the Air has a good period soundtrack); psychedelic light shows; underground newspapers; etc. There is even a strain of mysticism, as Jean-Pierre (Hugo Conzelmann) and Leslie (India Salvor Menuez), an American diplomat’s daughter, make the journey to the East, seeking enlightenment and what Leslie calls “the sacred dance.” Did any other revolutionary generation have to deal with such intense alternate lifestyle stimulus and choices?

Gilles, an aspiring artist, manages to keep his cool and not lose his head by pursuing painting and then filmmaking. An independent thinker, Gilles takes both his screenwriter father and a collective of militant moviemakers (a la Jean-Luc Godard during that period) to task for the same cinematic sin: Bourgeois pictures. Gilles criticizes the latter for using conventional film forms to try and render revolutionary subject matter and consciousness to the masses, which reduces their artistry (or lack of) to trite sloganeering. As Gilles pursues his destiny, does the not so proletarian protagonist sell out in the end?

The gifted Assayas also directed 1994’s Cold Water (a sort of forerunner to Air); 1996’s Irma Vep; a segment of the 2006 omnibus film Paris Je T’Aime; and the riveting 333-minute Carlos, about the ultra-left hit man, which flew by without a dull moment.

Something in the Air is, of course, a feature film with actors, Assayas’ script, production values, etc., yet it is among the best chronicles -- fictional or nonfiction -- of that heady heyday of radicalism and the young revolutionaries who tried, albeit imperfectly, to change the world for the better. Although I of course had nothing to do whatsoever with this work and grew up in New York, not near Paris, Something in the Air is probably the closest thing I’ve seen onscreen to “my” own biography. Indeed, on the exact day I left America to pursue my destiny (I’m still waiting, BTW) in the South Seas, Chairman Mao died.

In any case, if you weren’t alive or of age then to experience those days of rage and hope, when world revolution seemed imminent, the highly recommended Something in the Air will vividly, brilliantly bring that era alive for you. And if you did participate in that period when for a brief moment all things seemed possible, you can relive them during this movie masterpiece that helps us to remember when we were able, perchance, to dream.


Something in the Air screens Nov. 2, 7 p.m. Chinese 1 Theater; Nov. 4, 4:30 p.m. Chinese 5 Theater.

  

 

  

 

 

FILM REVIEW: DARK SHADOWS

Barnabas Collins (Johhny Depp) in Dark Shadows.

Sinking to Lower Depp

By Don Simpson

Way back in the mid-1770s, Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) -- master of Collinwood Manor -- falls in love with Josette (Bella Heathcote), thus shattering the heart of his voluptuous chambermaid, Angelique (Eva Green). Unfortunately for Barnabas, the scorned woman is a real bitch of a witch. In retaliation, Angelique turns Barnabas into a vampire and buries him alive (well, technically undead).

Just shy of two centuries later, Barnabas is freed from his tomb and unleashed upon the strange glam rock world of the 1970s. The Collinwood Manor is horribly dilapidated and the remaining Collins family have fallen into financial ruin. Barnabas makes it his primary goal to help the family matriarch, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer), restore the economic vitality of the Collins name. In the meantime, Barnabas falls in love with Victoria (Heathcote, again) -- who looks a heck of a lot like Josette -- and must once again face the jealous wrath of Angelique, who is known in this century as Angie.

Dark Shadows is director Tim Burton’s eighth collaboration with Johnny Depp (Edward Scissorhands; Sleepy Hollow; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street; etc). While most critics cite Alice in Wonderland as their low point, I would save that distinction for the Dark Shadows because despite their supposed interest in making this film, the duo seem to have not expended any effort on the story at all. Rather than developing a more reverent film, Dark Shadows is a mockery of the source 1960s television series -- turning a serious and subtle evening soap opera into a mindless spoof. In the television series, Jonathan Frid’s restrained portrayal of Barnabas is what adds an air of creepiness to the show. Depp, however, decides to play Barnabas with a level of camp that is rivaled only by his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in The Pirates of Caribbean franchise. In Depp’s hands, Barnabas is nothing more than a buffoonish clown -- no thanks to the embarrassing immaturity of Seth Grahame-Smith’s screenplay -- who recites one ridiculous line after another. Considering the infantile intellectual level of some of the sight gags, I can only imagine that Dark Shadows was written for a pre-pubescent audience. This also explains why Burton chose to go with absolutely no plot, opting for a two-note joke: Look at the silly vampire! Listen to what the silly vampire is saying!

Despite being Barnabas’ object of desire, Victoria disappears from the story for long stretches of time, yet somehow we are supposed to accept that Barnabas loves her. Allusions of her connection to Barnabas’ first love are dropped almost immediately, as if Burton and Grahame-Smith could not wrap their heads around such a “complex” concept. As with Angie -- who is purely a sex object -- Victoria’s purpose in Dark Shadows is merely a physical one. Another example is Chloë Grace Moretz’s seductive portrayal of Carolyn Stoddard, which is nothing more than a pedophile fantasy. Then, there is the live-in psychiatrist of Collinwood, Dr. Julia Hoffman (Burton's wife and regular performer Helena Bonham Carter), who is defined only by her alcoholism and cartoonishly colored hair. In Burton and Grahame-Smith’s hands, the women of Dark Shadows have no depth. They are only objects for us to see, but never know or understand.

However, the men of Dark Shadows do not fare much better. Elizabeth’s brother, Roger (Jonny Lee Miller) and his 10-year-old son, David Collins (Gully McGrath), get so little attention that I can only assume that they were only included to fill up some space in the  mansion. Jackie Earle Haley -- who plays Willie Loomis, the caretaker of Collinwood -- is really the only actor who seems to be trying to do anything in this film.

Further exemplifying Burton’s favoritism of images over story or dialogue, he uses a vibrant 1970s color palate as a backdrop. One could only assume that Burton thought a 200-plus-year old vampire would blend in too much in any other decade, so he chose to set this story in the 1970s. This also allows Burton to pummel us into submission with a cheesy 1970s pop soundtrack, including a shameless cameo by “No More Mr. Nice Guy” himself, Alice Cooper!

THEATER REVIEW: THE PRISONER OF SECOND AVENUE

Mel Edison (Jason Alexander) in The Prisoner on Second Avenue.

A road of broken dreams

By Ed Rampell

I decided to take a break from all the political theater I’ve been reviewing lately and to go see some purely escapist entertainment, so I attended the premiere of The Prisoner of Second Avenue, a period piece set in early 1970s New York. I mean, it’s written by bourgeois lightweight Neil Simon and starring Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander; I’ll just be able to kick back, put my mind in neutral and laugh my head off. Right?

Wrong. On second look The Prisoner of Second Avenue is not only full of serious themes, but it has a political subtext. Alexander’s Mel Edison is one Manhattanite who doesn’t see the light. During the course of this play -- which premiered on Broadway back in 1971, starring Peter Falk, Lee Grant and Vincent Gardenia -- the Madison Avenue advertising executive suffers from insomnia, drinks too much, loses his job, has a nervous breakdown and needs a shrink. The romance has long left Mel’s marriage to Edna (Gina Hecht) behind, but what of the bond, the solidarity of their marital union? When his wife steps into the breach and becomes a secretary, Mel is only further diminished when the onetime housewife he supported turns into the family breadwinner.

Okay, it’s Simon, and most of this is played strictly for laughs, and these prisoners aren’t exactly storming the Bastille and Alexander is one of show biz’s best zinger slingers, and the award-winning Hecht, who’s also a sitcom veteran (Mork & Mindy, Seinfeld, HBO’s Hung), isn’t exactly a slouch in the one-liner department either. But during Mel’s extended period of unemployment he starts listening to talk radio and in one of the dramedy’s funniest and most harrowing scenes, this conned Edison delivers a rant on the “the conspiracy” aimed at eliminating the middle class.

Yes, the lines are droll and Alexander’s dead on delivery is high-larious, as is Edna’s reaction to her unraveling husband’s ravings. But on second thought, maybe Simon was onto something and had his pulse on the zeitgeist to come. The displacement of America’s white middle class (and middle aged) males by a confluence of forces – downsizing, outsourcing, feminism, gay lib, minority rights, the influx of immigrants, etc. – is now well-documented. Mel reveals what happened to the Mad Men after their heyday. This rage – which, as in Mel’s case is misguided, fuels and propels movements such as today’s Tea Party.

In Simon’s dramedy there’s much more comedy than drama, especially as the former finds lots of its laughs in the latter. Glenn Casale nimbly directs an expert ensemble cast that includes Ron Orbach as Mel’s more successful, but less beloved brother, Harry, and their trio of sisters – Carole Ita White as Jessie, Annie Korzen as Pearl, Deedee Rescher as Pauline. (The perils of Pauline?) Like Alexander and Hecht, their cast-mates skillfully pluck the humor out of the dialogue and situation with all the finesse of a humming bird extracting nectar from flowers. Simon provides lots of witty repartee here, ripostes ridiculing the American obsession with money and materialism. Orbach is especially touching as the wealthier, blustery brother who nevertheless envies the broken down Mel because he was the -- well, see it for yourself and find out what. 

The Prisoner of Second Avenue runs through May 15 at the El Portal Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Boulevard, North Hollywood., CA, 91601. For info: 866/811-4111;Prisoner.

FILM REVIEW: POTICHE

Suzanne (Catherine Deneuve) and Maurice (Gérard Depardieu) in Potiche.

Strike de jour


By Ed Rampell

In the past few years the movies have been prophesying and mirroring social upheavals. Cut in the merry mode of Karel Reisz’s 1966 Marxist madcap Morgan!, Canadian writer-director Jacob Tierney’s uproarious 2009 film, The Trotsky, stars Jay Baruchel as a Montreal high school student who fantasizes he’s the reincarnation of the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky. The deluded teenager tries to organize a union at his dad’s factory, then leads a movement to form a student union, using social media to rally pupils for their high school’s class struggle. Baruchel’s droll The Trotsky is a “holy Tehrir.”

The 2010 British film, Made In Dagenham, stars Sally Hawkins as a factory worker who leads a real life strike for equal wages and women’s rights. Even a re-mastered version of Sergei Eisenstein’s immortal 1925 masterpiece, The Battleship Potemkin, about a sailors’ mutiny that triggers a mass strike in Odessa was theatrically re-released this month.

Now, that quintessence of French femininity, the exquisite Catherine Deneuve, is getting into the act. Writer-director Francois Ozon’s Potiche, based on the play by Barilet and Gredy, is the latest addition to the growing cinematic strike wave. Like Baruchel’s The Trotsky, Deneuve’s Suzanne Pujol is related to the owners of an umbrella factory in a French provincial town, formerly owned by her late, paternalistic father, and now run by her despotic, reactionary, philandering hubby, Robert (Fabrice Luchini, whom I last glimpsed in 2008’s highly enjoyable film, The Girl From Monaco).

No, the French word, "Potiche," is not some sort of Gallic corruption of “Che” as in Guevara. The closest translation is "Trophy wife," although it could mean anything that is suppose to be decorative (and quiet). I suppose it represents Suzanne’s role as a bourgeois homemaker (with the help of the help, but of course) and mother. When first seen in character onscreen, Denueve, long renowned for her unearthly beauty, looks positively schlumpfy, like a very ordinary hausfrau. Initially, I felt disheartened to see the Chanel shill and actress who’d starred in Luis Bunuel’s 1967 surreally kinky classic, Belle de Jour, and who exemplified “class” and elegance for a generation of viewers looking so plain.

But as strikes sweep her family’s factory in 1977, Suzanne finds inner resources of resolve, and there’s more to this ornamental madam than meets the eye. She seeks out Babin (Gerard Depardieu, another heavyweight of French cinema -- both literally and figuratively, as the actor has become morbidly obese), the mayor who is a member of the French Communist Party (PCF), to amicably settle the brewing brouhaha. Here, the story takes an unexpected turn, in terms of the relationship between the proletarian man of the people and the bourgeois goody two shoes.

The umbrella factory resuscitates the lusciousness that first graced the screen in Jacques Demy’s 1963 musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Suffice it to say that once Suzanne enters the fray she becomes transformed -- psychologically as well as physically, as the renowned radiance Deneuve has been known for emanating once again illumines the silver screen, and it’s wonderful to bask in her effervescent presence again. Finding her footing, Suzanne transcends the economic realm and, in our day and age of Sarah Palin, enters politics. This is not to imply at all that she’s a reactionary like Alaska’s lobotomized, vicious ex-guv, that Godzilla from Wasilla.

In fact, Potiche’s politics are peculiar. Suzanne rejects rabid rightwing austerity economics (a knowing nod to today’s dire crises). But the film does not see Babin and the PCF as an alternative, either. Depardieu -- who once portrayed the French revolutionary Georges Jacque Danton in the Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s 1983, Danton -- depicts Babin with empathy, and he has a few good lines about being a devoted lifelong leftist who may never live to see the revolution he’s dreamt of and worked for, but he has his problems, too.

Like Daniel “Danny the Red” Cohn-Bendit’s Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative, written in the wake of the historic May 1968 worker-student revolt in France, Potiche seeks a third way, another path between the traditional right and left. But instead of opting for anarchy like Dany le Rouge did, Potiche chooses a combination of feminism combined with the paternalism of Suzanne’s late father -- a sort of matriarchal maternalism.

Even if Potiche’s politics aren’t your cup of tea, it is a heady brew of comedy, romance, class struggle and song. And it’s a kick to see those French cinema stalwarts Depardieu and Deneuve – who first co-starred in Francois Truffaut’s 1980 anti-Nazi, The Last Metro -– reunited onscreen. Along with The Trotsky and Made In Dagenham, the delightful Potiche tackles the class war in an extremely entertaining, thought provoking, funny way. Don’t miss it.