TOP TEN OF 2012: DON SIMPSON'S PICKS

A scene from Attenberg.

Grouch the Oscar

By Don Simpson

Attenberg -- One might say that Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenbergis like the mellow chaser used to calm the crazy rush after experiencing the sheer frenzy of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth(which Tsangari produced), but it is certainly no less meaningful and pervasive. Attenberg may not be quite as fantastically absurd as Dogtooth, but the two Greek films do share a certain cinematic kinship in farcically discussing the aftereffects of overly restrictive parenting, specifically the social and sexual repression of the offspring.

 

Bad Fever -- The dark and intimate mood that writer-director Dustin Guy Defa is able to develop during the 77 minute-long Bad Feveris intoxicating. Defa’s timid approach to his characters — and the narrative as a whole — forces the audience to observe the world from Eddie’s (Kentucker Audley) perspective. Eddie carefully flirts with adjectives such as creepy and deranged, yet he always seems deserving of our sympathy and affection; occasionally he hints of a slight mental handicap, but refrains from utilizing such a “burden” to tug at our heartstrings.

 

Beasts of the Southern Wild --A masterful blend of neo-realism, magic realism, Southern Gothic and children’s fantasy, Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild is told from the childlike perspective of Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) with wandering eyes wide open engulfing the natural magnificence of the world. Beasts of the Southern Wild never once purports to exist in our world; instead, like any good fantasy or science fiction story, it functions as an otherworldly critique of our reality.

 

Cosmopolis -- I cannot imagine a better writer-director to adapt Don DeLillo’s dense-yet-dreamily-poetic dialogue. David Cronenberg nails DeLillo’s token tone, rhythm and pacing that has differentiated him from his peers. DeLillo and Cronenberg saturate every single word, sound and image with significance creating a presumably impossible-to-crack puzzle, not unlike some of Cronenberg’s most challenging films: Existenz, Crash, and Videodrome.

 

Green -- Writer-director Sophia Takal’s Green approaches female relationships and jealousy with a dreamy haze of obliqueness. The densely forested environs are not only suffocating and ostracizing but they also lend Green the spooky and menacing air of a horror film. Greenis a purely psychological horror film — the violence is all in the mind -- and one of the best I have seen in ages.

 

Holy Motors -- Like David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, Leos Carax’s Holy Motors shuttles us through its narrative in a white limousine, allowing us a tour of the decaying moral fiber of our post modern world. Holy Motors might be a film about playing roles and fulfilling the fantasies of others, but there is so much more to it than that.

 

Only the Young --Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet’s film is kind of like a punk rock Real World but more gritty and authentic; and like Real World, authenticity is in the eye of the beholder. Some viewers will accept Only the Young as fact, while others will probably believe that it is fiction. Regardless, Only the Young works extremely well as a visual essay on post-suburbia, contemplating the effects that regional economic downturns have on teenagers that are left floundering in the wake.

 

Oslo, August 31 -- With the visual poeticism of Robert Bresson, Joachim Trier creates an incredibly complex 24-hour character study with the intellectually insightful panache of Camus and Sartre. In this modern day example of existentialism, Trier avoids the Hollywood cliche of drug addiction — which informs us that drug addiction is perpetuated by financial woes and unstable families — revealing that wealthy, intelligent and resourceful people can become addicts too.

 

Tchoupitoulas -- The Ross brothers’ Tchoupitoulas functions as both a documentary that borrows from narrative storytelling techniques and a narrative film that paints a realistic portrait of its protagonists by utilizing documentary devices. The narrative unfolds like an improvised jazz album with various tangents that flow seamlessly away from and towards the forward-moving primary thread. Tchoupitoulasis a cerebral experience that continues to reverberate in my subconscious like a fading childhood memory.

 

Wuthering Heights --Writer-director Andrea Arnold de[con]structively whittles down Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to its core elements of cruelty and violence. A strange Frankenstein-like creature that combines the distinct cinematic worlds of kitchen sink realism, art house and slow cinema, Wuthering Heights truly is a beautiful beast.

 

Honorable mentions: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry; Alps; America’s Parking Lot; Blancanieves; Cabin in the Woods; The Color Wheel; The Comedy; Girl Model; The Island President; Magic Mike; The Queen of Versailles; Turn Me on, Dammit!; You Hurt My Feelings

FILM REVIEW: WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Cathy (Kaya Scodelario) in Wuthering Heights.

On the lower half

By Ed Rampell

A while back audiences experienced a series of screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s 19^th century novels. Now, we seem to have a cinematic cycle of revivals of the Brontë Sisters’ Gothic romances. Charlotte’s oft-filmed Jane Eyre (the first movie version was shot by 1910) returned to the big screen last year. Now it’s the turn of Emily Brontë’s likewise much made (originally in 1920) and much-remade Wuthering Heights (published in 1847) to be reincarnated on the silver screen. So what’s different and new about English director Andrea Arnold’s rendition, which she co-wrote with Olivia Hetreed (Girl With a Pearl Earring)?

At first blush, one might think that adding an interracial dimension to this tale of thwarted love is a brand new 21^stcentury brainstorm. I hate to dampen the Eureka! moment, but William Wyler’s 1939 version -- the most famous adaptation, this Best Picture Oscar nominee was co-written by no less than Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur and John Huston -- co-starred Englishmen Laurence Olivier and David Niven, who played opposite Merle Oberon. While her character, Catherine Earnshaw, is certainly of pure British pedigree, Ms. Oberon herself was reportedly born in Bombay and of Welsh-Indian ancestry. So the inter-ethnic element was already arguably implicit in Wyler’s Wuthering Heights, although to be fair it is far more explicitly explored in Arnold’s film.

Solomon Glave, who plays young Heathcliff, and James Howson, who portrays Heathcliff as a young man, both appear to be black, UK-born actors who make their acting debuts in this tragedy about unrequited love. The lead male character is a foundling, brought to Wuthering Heights by the erstwhile Bible-thumping Mr. Earnshaw (Paul Hilton), owner of the eponymous remote farm located in northern England near windswept, mystic moors. Although Heathcliff’s color is much remarked upon (especially by Cathy’s older brother, the harebrained Hindley, roguishly played by Lee Shaw), his precise ethnic origins are never fully explained. Although if I heard correctly, at one point he’s referred to as a “Lascar,” which -- if that’s the case -- would make Heathcliff from India or another country east of the Cape of Good Hope at South Africa. However, I do think this Heathcliff is meant to be of indeterminate African ancestry.

Be that as it may (or may not), his dark skin complicates matters greatly and amplifies why he is “unworthy” of being loved by Cathy. Heathcliff grows up in close quarters with Cathy, portrayed as a young female of indeterminate age(s) by newcomer Shannon Beer, then as an adult by Kaya Scodelario, both of them apparently Caucasian British actresses. Living a hard scrabble existence at the farm, she and Heathcliff romp on the moors -- away from civilization’s restraints -- together, sleep in the same room and develop deep bonds for one another, unhindered and unimpeded by the taboo of incest (unlike Hindley, which may explain part of his brutish antipathy towards Heathcliff, who unlike him, is free of that social constraint).

As Heathcliff and Cathy mature he is deemed to be her social inferior (not least of all because he’s like, you know, black) and they are torn asunder, becoming arguably the most star-crossed lovers in English literature. The wild child becomes a “lady” and marries properly, at least according to 19^thcentury stuffy status conscious British standards. Heathcliff doesn’t exactly sit still for it as he is shunned because he started out life as a mere servant, a stable boy, who in this retelling is black.

Before Sigmund Freud evolved his scientific theory of the id versus superego, the Brontë Sisters did so on the artistic level in their Gothic classics. Heathen Heathcliff represents the unbridled id, the unrestrained instinctual self. Cathy’s id is at war with her superego, the constraints and inhibition imposed upon her by society. As aboriginal heathenism clashes with Christian original sin, their saga encapsulates what Freud would later call “civilization and its discontents” in a scientific book of that title written only a mere 82 years after Em wrote her epistle.

At the heart of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights is the thwarting of sexuality. It remains open to speculation as to whether the very youthful Heathcliff and Cathy indulge in actual sex play, or if they never ever act on their sexual impulses, including even kissing, until adulthood (and when it is too late). Take your pick; it’s subject to intepretation. In any case, 165 years after Emily’s classic was published, one would hope that the notion of sexual repression would by now be an extinct “Brontë-saurus.” Alas, the brouhaha surrounding birth control, “legitimate rape,” and so on -- that actually began during this election cycle with Obama’s refusal to allow “underaged” females over the counter access to so-called “Plan B” morning after pills -- proves that those puritanical dinosaurs still trod the Earth.

The supernatural angle of Emily’s novel and the 1939 classic film is played down in Arnold’s film. Emily’s literary device of a character named “Lockwood” demanding that Nelly (Simone Jackson) relate the saga of Heathcliff and Cathy is not used in this adaptation, which is largely told from Heathcliff’s point of view. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s moors, shot on location in the Yorkshire Dales, are appropriately moody. (BTW, of the eight Oscars Wyler’s 1939 version was nominated for, the sole Academy Award it won was for the cinematography by the immortal Gregg Toland, who in the next couple of years went on to lens John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.) Ryan’s close-ups of flora and fauna are also very elemental, rooting 19^th century humans firmly in the Earth, as much a part of nature as the insects, beasts and plant life of their very rustic surroundings. However, there’s one too many a close-up a la early D.W. Griffith of a caged canary, an all too obvious metaphor of poor Cathy, who palpably yearns to fuck the daylights out of poor Hetahcliff but is restrained Mr. Linton (Oliver Milburn) and the other trappings of the civilized self. Hail Britannia!

Beer is flat and not particularly appealing as the child/early teen Cathy. Scodelario is more attractive but sometimes stagey as grownup, sexually frustrated Cathy, the epitome of the conflicted, divided self. However, both Glave and Howson as the younger and more mature Heathcliff, always strike the right note, from snarling to defiance to howling at the moon. Sex, after all, cannot be denied, when all is said and done (and undone). Even -- perhaps especially -- in regards to forbidden love.