FILM REVIEW: AROUND THE BLOCK

Dino (Christina Ricci) in Around the Block.

Ab(out)original plays with the text

By John Esther

After a hiatus, American Dino Chalmers (Christina Ricci) has returned to Australia to be with her fiance, Simon (Daniel Henshall). A bright-eyed idealist, Dino takes a job at Redfern High School. Redfern High School is located in a particularly rough neighborhood in Sydney. 

In the first of the film's numerous too-convenient tropes, Dino notices one of the students, Liam (Hunter Page-Lochard), a teenager who she filmed in the streets the day before. He just happens to be in her class, too. 

Liam has troubles. He lives in a poor, violent neighborhood known as The Block. His Mum (Ursula Yovich) is unemployed; his father, Jack (Matt Nable), is in prison; and his older brother, Steve (Mark Coles Smith), plans to avenge his father's imprisonment and uncle's death. 

As the film points out in the beginning, Liam is headed down a similar path to that of his father and brother. However, Liam has a spark. If he can tap into his creative energies, Liam may just avoid a life of crime and despair (not that creativity does not often come with its own agents of despair).

This is where Dino comes in. She is the new drama teacher at Redfern and she wants the kids to learn and perform Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rather than instruct the old fashioned way of learning the world's most famous play by reciting the lines ad nauseum, Dino gets the kids to understand and appreciate Hamlet via comparing it to the lyrics of Tupac Shakur, examining the subtext, and how and why such an "old" English play could have relevance for the modern day immigrant living in Sydney.  

The existential themes of the play's protagonist strikes a chord in the heart of the Liam. To be or not to be in such a cruel world? Thanks to the former profession of Liam's deceased uncle, Liam was familiar with the words of Hamlet, but now he is beginning to understand something deeper.

Written and directed by Sarah Spillane, Around the Block may have its exasperating flaws, but it cannot be accused of not having its heart in the right place. Here is a film about a teacher who puts her energies into kids who society would soon just forget, even if it means giving up a comfortable bourgeois life with Simon. Meanwhile, the film lends an identity to those living in poverty and the dignity of struggle against it through art. 

Moreover, most of the cast is pretty good, especially Nable's subtle portrayal of a man who sees everything as he knows it disappearing. 

On the other hand, there are a few pretentious scenes involving standing on rooftops and incredulous "race baiting" over a meal at a restaurant. Was Dino just oblivious to the racism of Simon and his friends before she moved in with him?

Then there are the numerous, manipulative and insipid music selections that really grate on one's nerves. I realize the filmmakers are reaching for a younger audience here, but the songs are not only lousy, many of them are obvious attempts to manipulate the feelings and reactions of the audience. And the way Around the Block adapts and actually uses a cover of Mister Mister's "Broken Wings" is as banal and unwelcome as the original 1985 song (and video). 

Having written that, Around the Block is better fare geared for the youth than most movies out currently in theaters. At least Around the Block tries to address themes about adolescence, art and poverty. 

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 REVIEW: TRISHNA

Trishna (Frieda Pinto) in Trishna.

Another Tess of time and place

By Ed Rampell

English filmmaker Michael Winterbottom has adapted his countryman Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, which mostly takes place in 19^th century rural Britain. In Winterbottom’s updated version, Tess becomes Trishna and the film is set in contemporary India, with a mostly Indian cast, starring the preternaturally beautiful Freida Pinto (the female lead in 2009’s Best Picture Oscar winner, Slumdog Millionaire) in the title role.

Adaptations can be risky business. The good news is that Winterbottom’s reworking of Hardy’s classic is inspired. His update hews somewhat close to Hardy in terms of plot, but is especially true thematically, more faithful to the original in spirit than in letter.

The changes currently sweeping India parallel those in Hardy’s novel set against the backdrop of England’s 19^th century industrial revolution, as economic upheavals forced the peasantry away from the countryside and into the cities. Trishna (Pinto, arguably motion pictures’ prettiest actress today) is a simple country girl whose beauty attracts Jay (as in Gatsby!)Singh, the son of an upper class family of Indian ancestry who has lived abroad. Jay is depicted by Oxford educated Riz Ahmed, who is of Indian/Pakistani heritage and starred as Shafiq Rasul, one of the railroaded Tipton Three in Winterbottom’s 2006 searing indictment of torture, The Road to Guantanamo.

Besotted by Trishna’s beauty, Jay pursues her, using his class advantages to lure her away from her ancestral village in Rajasthan, first to a luxury resort owned by his worldly wise if blind father (Roshan Seth). But the hotel biz is not for Jay; as he has show biz aspirations Jay moves to Bombay (Mumbai), where he and Trishna can live openly as an unmarried couple. The couple gets involved in Bollywood, but as one artist points out, Jay’s main talent is that his father is rich.

Trishna, on the other hand, not only has beauty, but can dance, and it seems as if this slumdog might become a millionaire by appearing in Bollywood musicals. But talentless Jay, who wants to keep her all to himself, discourages her. As a lower class -- or caste -- female Trishna is curiously passive. The story shows how in patriarchal society, all too often young women have little recourse for social advancement other than their looks, sexuality and youth. A tragic predicament, to be sure, especially in pre-feminist developing nations (although India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have all had female heads of government and of state, while America is yet to have a woman president, so perhaps our ladies are not that much freer than their Third World sisters?).

Complications ensue and the couple must relocate to another one of Jay’s family’s resorts in the countryside, where social mores are more traditional and out-of-wedlock relationships are taboo. The property formerly was a palace, and Jay is ensconced in the bedroom of a medieval maharajah who had about 18 concurrent concubines. Meanwhile, it never seems to occur to Jay to wed his social “inferior” Trishna, who must pretend to be just another servant girl, as she becomes the Kama Sutra-reading hotelier’s virtual sex slave. Sometimes, beauty can be a curse.

The uprooted, cosmopolitan Jay seems to yearn for what he supposes is Trishna’s simplicity, rooted in ancient Indian culture. On the other hand, Trishna sees in Jay her entrée -- or, more crudely put -- ticket to that modern world beckoning to India’s rural masses, as urbanization, outsourcing and the like rock their age-old society. They are caught between two worlds. Opposites may attract, but they can also repel. Trishna’s humble origins have denied her an education, but beneath her passivity a fire is being stoked. Unable to verbally express herself, let’s just say that all hell breaks loose.

D.W. Griffith believed film photographs thought, and the Pinto wears her character’s inner life upon the sleeve of her exquisite face. She is such a natural thespian that we can virtually read her mind in close ups, an expressively eloquent actress in the tradition of the great silent screen artistes, like Mae Marsh and Lillian Gish. In films such as 2010’s Miral and Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, whether playing an oppressed Palestinian or a London beauty who bewitches Josh Brolin’s married writer, Pinto demonstrates a range and depth. Imparting a Third World aesthetic on the screen, the Bombay-born actress and former model heralds a breakthrough in world cinema.

Winterbottom’s relocating of Tess of the d'Urbervilles to India is an eureka! movie moment, enhanced by its on location shooting in the subcontinent. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, I extend a laurel and Thomas Hardy handshake to Winterbottom.