100 Great Foreign Films

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Day 49/51 - A Heavenly Vintage (The Vintner's Luck, 2009)

One side of my family came from Lorraine, France, so I have often found myself drawn to French themed works. In 1998, I read New Zealander Elizabeth Knox’s book, The Vintner’s Luck, a book in diary form about a French vintner named Sobran Jodeau, who in 1808 Burgandy gets drunk and encounters an angel Xas (Yes, a real angel), and begins a life-time relationship with him. They meet each year, as the vintner learns to make outstanding wine and develop a love-hate relationship. The book centers on  the two and also Sobran’s relationships with two women, his wife Céleste and his business  partner, Aurora de Valday, the Baroness.  

I was enchanted with the book’s discussions on philosophy and theology. [Xas, we learn part of the way through, doesn’t live in Heaven but in Hell and the why of that was a significant discovery of the book.] In 2009 New Zealand director/writer Niki Caro adapted Knox’s book into what was later called, A Heavenly Vintage.

The film is visually beautiful, having been filmed in New Zealand, France, and Belgium. The costumes by Mark Bennett and Elaine Grainger, while set in the early 19^th century, have a 17^th and 18^th century feel to them, appropriate for Burgandy, France.

Jérémie Reier makes an attractive Sobran. Keisha Castle-Hughes, superb as the child-lead in Whale Rider and as Mary in The Nativity Story, is a stunningly beautiful Céleste. It was an interesting directoral decision to keep her looking the same age as Sobran ages. Vera Farmiga plays Aurora and also is fascinating to watch. Gaspard Ulliel is not called Xas in the film, but listed as The Vintner’s Luck. Of the main characters, he may the weakest, but the writers have chosen not to give him much of the interesting philosophy from the book. 

Nonetheless, I was definitely drawn into the story. At one point the Baroness has suffered a 19^th century mastectomy and Xas suffers a similar loss, each character in their own way dealing with the loss of part of themselves.

The film is on Netflix streaming and was worth the viewing. The film is R rated for nudity and sexual situations. 

A Heavenly Vintage (2009) ****

Day 47/50 - Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Mexican director/writer Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is a film which merges fantastic images of a mythological world “underworld” with the realistic story of a young girl who must learn to accept her mother’s new evil husband, a leader of the Fascist Franco army. The year is 1944 in Spain after the Civil War. Resistance fighters are still hiding in the mountains.

As the film opens we see a young girl dying and the narrator tells us:

A long time ago, in the underground realm, where there are no lies or pain, there lived a Princess who dreamed of the human world. She dreamed of blue skies, soft breeze, and sunshine. One day, eluding her keepers, the Princess escaped. Once outside, the brightness blinded her and erased every trace of the past from her memory. She forgot who she was and where she came from. Her body suffered cold, sickness, and pain. Eventually, she died. However, her father, the King, always knew that the Princess' soul would return, perhaps in another body, in another place, at another time. And he would wait for her, until he drew his last breath, until the world stopped turning...

We have two plots in this film: one dealing with myth; the other dealing with reality.

Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) reads books about fairies. As she and her pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) are driven to join the mother’s new husband, Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), the mother becomes sick and they have to stop. Ofelia wanders off and finds an old runic stone with a face carved on it. Nearby is a missing stone with an eye. When she puts it in place, a stick insect flies out of the stone’s mouth. Ofelia believes she has found a fairy.

Later in the story, Carmen is restless and asks Ofelia to tell her unborn baby brother a  story. She tells him:

Many, many years ago in a sad, faraway land, there was an enormous mountain made of rough, black stone. At sunset, on top of that mountain, a magic rose blossomed every night that made whoever plucked it immortal. But no one dared go near it because its thorns were full of poison. Men talked amongst themselves about their fear of death, and pain, but never about the promise of eternal life. And every day, the rose wilted, unable to bequeath its gift to anyone... forgotten and lost at the top of that cold, dark mountain, forever alone, until the end of time.

When she finishes her story, she tells him she will always protect him.

In the real world, Vidal is the embodiment of sadistic evil and all things bad on earth. Early on he questions a man and his father who he believes are resistance fighters. The old man maintains he was only in the woods at night trying to get rabbits for food. The young man argues with the Captain who takes a wine bottle and smashes in the young man’s face, killing him. When the old man protests, the Vidal shoots him. Later, going through the old man’s bag, Vidal finds a rabbit. The danger of illogical violence becomes ever-present in the film.

Throughout the Captain’s story in reality, he threatens everyone around him, terrorizes his new wife and daughter, fights resistance fighters allowing no mercy, shows his brutality toward everyone, is finally punished himself by one of the female servants who he has bullied constantly, gets routed by the fighters, and eventually gets his “just rewards.”

In the myth story, the insect does turn into a fairy who leads Ofelia through Pan’s Labyrinth to the underground world. Pan (Doug Jones) who says he is the faun greets Ofelia as the princess that will bring life back to the underworld. He tells her she must be tested and do three things in order to return as a princess. The first is to find a key which has been swallowed by a huge toad. (This she does.) 

Next she is to find a knife kept by the Pale Man (also played by Doug Jones), a terrifying human-like monster with shark-like teeth, long sharp nails, and eyes he inserts in the palms of his hand. She has been instructed not to eat anything in his realm, but she eats two grapes before leaving and is chased and almost eaten by the monster. Pan rejects her at this point because she has disobeyed him.

Evil appears in the world of myth where monsters like the Pale Man can exist and where the Faun can turn from being kind to threatening in a moment.

[Spoilers] Eventually Ofelia’s mother dies in childbirth and Ofelia is instructed to take her baby brother to give to Pan. When she realizes that Pan plans to shed the boy’s blood to open the portals, she refuses to allow it. Blood must be shed, and in the real world, she is shot by the Captain. 

[Spoilers] Shedding her blood allows Ofelia/Princess to “return” to the land in the Underworld where her father and mother await her. According to director Del Toro, the film is about Soren Kierkegaard’s quote which says “the tyrant’s reign ends with his death, but the martyr’s reign starts with his death. I think that is the essence of the movie; it’s about living forever by choosing how you die.”

The film is one of the most haunting films I have seen. The special effects are unforgettable. The violence in the film is sometimes hard to take, but the lyrical beauty of the film often transcends it. There is danger in the world, but Ofelia learns that protecting another weaker than herself is worth all risks.

I smiled when I learned that at the Cannes Film Festival, the film received 22 minutes of applause.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006) *****

Day 46/49 - Little Women (1994)

Is there any film more joyfully Americana than Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women?

In 1933, “women’s director” George Cukor directed a black and white version with Katharine Hepburn (Jo), Joan Bennett (Amy),  Jean Parker (Beth), Frances Dee (Meg), Spring Byington (Marmee), and Douglass Montgomery (Laurie). Costumes were by Walter Plunkett, who later designed the award-winning Gone with the Wind and Singing in the Rain.

In 1946 David O. Selznick began a production to star Jennifer Jones (Jo), Diana Lynn (Amy), Bambi Linn (Beth), Rhonda Fleming (Meg), Anne Revere (Marmee) and John Dall (Laurie), but because of the ordeal of filming Duel in the Sun, the property and script were sold and the film was scrapped.

 In 1949, Mervyn LeRoy directed an MGM color version with June Allyson (Jo), Janet Leigh (Meg), Margaret O’Brien (Beth), Elizabeth Taylor (Amy), Mary Astor (Marmee), and Peter Lawford (Laurie).  Again costumes were designed by Walter Plunkett in lush but often anachronistic 1860-1870s costumes. (In one of the scenes, a zipper closure can be seen in the back of Marmee’s dress). The script changes the birth order so that young Margaret O’Brien can do the Beth death scene. The film is in the broad MGM classic style. In many ways, the early scenes of the film are the most memorable, especially the Christmas scenes which look like early Currier & Ives prints. [Note how the same musical theme has been reused from the 1933 film.]

Today, I rewatched one of the latest incarnations of the book, directed by Gillian Armstrong in 1994, and starring Susan Sarandon (Marmie), Winona Ryder (Jo), Trini Alvarado (Meg), Kirsten Dunst & Samantha Mathis (Amy), Claire Danes (Beth), and Christian Bale (Laurie). Sarandon makes a strong Marmee and although Ryder seems a little weak in her role, the ensemble acting works. Danes gives a touching death scene.

The last version of the film expands on the book and becomes truly a woman’s perspective of the Civil War Period. Women throughout the film are seen naturally doing women’s activities: folding clothes, baking and cooking, sewing, living with and loving cats and little dogs, gardening, arranging flowers, admiring fabrics, tending children, painting china and later oil painting, writing, entertaining themselves. The film is filled with period quilts, dolls, historically faithful clothing, glorious attics and parlors, and Concord, Massachusetts, environments. The set interiors of the house are patterned after Louisa May Alcott’s family home, Orchard House.

According to the IMDB article on the film regarding Colleen Atwood's costumes:
Costumes are handed down from older sister to younger, to underline both the family's poverty and the connections between sisters. Jo's red plaid dress worn to the ball where she meets Laurie is worn the following Christmas by Beth when she comes down the stairs after being ill; Jo and Beth are close to each other, as Meg and Amy are close to each other. Meg's blue striped dress that she doesn't end up wearing to Belle Gardiner's debut ball is worn years later by Amy in the scene where she announces she's going to Europe with Aunt March. 

I have seen this version at least five times, and find I continue to enjoy it more each time I see it.

Little Women (1994) *****

Day 46/48 - The Bourne Legacy (2012)

Jason Bourne of the Robert Ludlum novels is loose, but AWOL in this new thriller. Built to function as an adrenaline pump, I found the film a riveting two-plus hours. 

The covert operations of all the Bourne-like programs are being shut down, and one by one the operatives (called outcomes) are dropping dead from the yellow pills they have so trustingly taken. As in the X-Files universe, the operative catch-phrase is “Trust No One.”

Jeremy Renner as Outcome No. 5, Aaron Cross, is one amazing superhero.  We first see him rise from sub-zero water (a nod to 007?), climb sheer mountain ranges, leap crevices and evade and eventually outsmart wolves.  A new chemically altered spy, with super hearing, he can hear a drone strike in a snow storm just in time to save himself. 

Back at the labs where all the outcomes’ meds are distributed, one of the scientists begins shooting all the lab doctors, but kills himself before he gets head Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz). Later, when additional operatives arrive at her hideaway home to wipe her out, she is saved by Cross who has come to get more of his meds, since he believes he will die without them.  

How the two escape and how “they,” led by Edward Norton (Retired Co. Eric Byer) and Stacy Keach (Retired Adm. Mark Turso) try to capture them makes up the remainder of the film.

Tony Gilroy is credited with directing, story and co-author of the screenplay. It takes awhile, as is true with most Bourne films, for us as the audience to figure out exactly what’s going on, but once the sides are clearly drawn and the fights and chases begin, this is a truly satisfying adrenaline rush. The motorcycle chase at the climax is like riding a roller coaster. 

We get enough back-story and character development for us to root for Renner and Weisz.

Reading some of the reviews, I didn’t expect to enjoy the film as much as I did. For me, it was worth the ride.

The Bourne Legacy (2012) ****

Film term 101: Save the Cat

Listening today to NPR's Fresh Air Sunday edition, Terry Gross interviews Ira Glass and comedian Mike Birbiglia. They bring up a film term I hadn't come across: "Save the cat." According to the discussion when filmmakers want to get an audience to identify and bond with a character, they throw in a scene that is merely there to show what a character is like. You want the audience to feel the hero is a nice guy, have him "save the cat." In Glass and Birbiglia's new film, Sleepwalk with Me, in order for the audience to feel Birbiglia and his girlfriend had a strong relationship, they added a short scene where they merely bond. The purpose of the scene was merely to "save the cat."

[Update: I bought Blake Snyder's Save the Cat on Amazon. Billed as the ultimate insider's guide which "reveals the secrets that noone dare admit, told by a show biz veteran who's proven you can sell your script if you can save the cat!"]

Day 45/47 - Pretty Poison (1968)

Dennis Pitt: Boy. What a week. I met you on Monday, fell in love with you on Tuesday, Wednesday I was unfaithful, Thursday we killed a guy together. How about that for a crazy week, Sue Ann? 
Sue Ann Stepanek: "Unfaithful Wednesday?" 
Dennis Pitt: I was just joking, Sue Ann. That was in another country. Forget it. I do. . . .
Sue Ann Stepanek: Marry me.

The Music Box in Chicago has been running films in the Film Noir tradition. One of their offerings today was Pretty Poison.

By 1968, thirty-six year old Anthony Perkins had become so identified with his 1960 Norman Bates role that it seems only natural that his character, Dennis Pitt, is just getting out of an institution for having burned up his aunt in a house fire when he was 15. Dennis, given to outlandish lies, may or may not believe all the stories he tells. When he meets Sue Ann Stepanek, a flag carrier for her high school band, he appears quirky enough to get her interest. Eventually he convinces her he works for the CIA and that she must help him. He believes the chemical plant he works for is poisoning the water  with their colorful red discharge and he plans on sabotaging the plant by bringing down the metal discharge ducts. Sue Ann gets carried away and as they set about in their plan, she kills a night watchman by drowning him between her legs, holding him under water. This is definitely not the innocent Dennis thought she was. 

Later that same night, the two are picked up by the police who assume that Dennis is trying to rape her at the local make-out area in the woods. Her mother tells the police to forget it and then tells Sue Ann she can never see him again. And the resulting actions show that the "Pretty Poison" of the title is not referring to the chemicals found in the lake.

Perkins gives us a sustained role without reprising the quirkiness of Norman Bates. Twenty-five year old Tuesday Weld is fairly convincing as a 18 year old who seems more dangerous than her paroled boyfriend. At times, the film feels like it had made for TV, including some of the musical bridges used. The plot remains interesting enough to keep our interest. 

I found it interesting how a film that is 44 years old could show clearly one of the changes in today's culture. The clothing and houses could be today, but pay phones have disappeared from the side of the road. Today, Sue Ann would probably not be able to spend 10 minutes without texting Dennis.

I enjoyed the film as much for seeing the film noir aspects as the performances of two capable and underused actors.

Pretty Poison (1968) ***

Day 44/46 - Cosmopolis (2012)

It’s not a good sign when you give your ticket to the ticket-taker at the movie and hear his boss say to him, “Cosmopolis is a really crappy movie.” I guess I was prepared for the worst and that’s what director David Cronenberg gave us.

Landmark Century Centre Cinema’s newsletter explains the plot this way:

Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a 28-year-old finance golden boy dreaming of living in a civilization ahead of this one, watches a dark shadow cast over Wall Street. As he is chauffeured across midtown Manhattan to get a haircut, his anxious eyes are glued to the yuan's exchange rate: it is mounting against all expectations, destroying Eric's bet against it. Meanwhile, an eruption of wild activity unfolds in the city's streets. As the threats of the real world infringe upon his cloud of virtual convictions, Packer's paranoia intensifies as he pieces together clues that lead him to a most terrifying secret: his imminent assassination.

That is certainly a much more coherent idea than what we as an audience were given.

The film reminded me of what I know of  Dadaism, a post-World War I movement that stressed the absurdity of art and ideas by using nonsense words in mock didactic speeches and collages of discarded materials. André Breton defined it as, “Dada is a state of mind… Dada is artistic free thinking… Dada gives itself to nothing.” A piece of film I saw once of a Dada performance was of a man banging on an upright piano while three women dressed in white gown performed nonsense movements and said words that made no sense. I think a cuckoo clock was singing at the same time.

I bring these up because that’s what I felt the film was doing. There were big pompous speeches about the economics of the world and how rats might become currency, but everyone seemed to be reading a teleprompter. Pattinson, who I know can act—check out Water for Elephants or Little Ashes but avoid the Twilight series—seemed in catatonic state where he registered virtually no emotion until one moment at the end. His character has sex a couple of times, gets a prostate exam which talking about sex with someone who works for him, shoots a character with no motivation apparent, loses his tie and then his coat, gets a pie thrown in his face, keeps meeting his wife at various stops, and gets the worst possible haircut from the family barber. I'm sure we are supposed to see the disintegration of the person, but we as an audience should care. I found myself wanting to talk back to the film.

I think one of the clues to the film is this bit of dialogue between Pattison and Paul Giamatti:

Packer:  My prostate is asymmetrical. Do you think that means anything?
Levin: No.

I thought the same thing of the film.

Cosmopolis (2012) 0 stars

[Note: I liked last year's A Dangerous Method, directed by Cronenberg, a lot.]

Day 43/45 - Following (1998)

If you are a person who has trouble following a movie when things are told out of chronological order, this isn't the film for you. But if you like Christopher Nolan's work (The Dark Knight Rises, Momento, Inception), you'll want to see this film.

I was blown away with Momento (written and directed by Christopher Nolan), where a man has no memory of what has happened before so that he has to write down immediately what has happened so he can remember it. The film becomes layers of onions peeled away to an ultimate core.

But in 1998, the year before Momento was released, Christopher Nolan wrote, directed and filmed Following, where he experimented with the same technique. Nolan’s film makes for really cerebral filmgoing, ultimately exciting and satisfying.

Start as a viewer with the premise that the images you see are reflections of various times and moments in the main character’s life, but jumbled as in working a jigsaw puzzle. Nolan does give us all the answers we need, but ultimately we have to put all the pieces together.

The film follows “The Young Man”—who may or may not be named Billy (Jeremy Theobald)—who tells us that he likes to follow people. Eventually he follows Cobb, a handsome guy in a suit and tie (Alex Haw) who confesses to being a day burgler.  He takes Billy with him on some robberies. Eventually, the two even rob Billy’s own apartment (which Billy doesn't tell Cobb because he wants Cobb evaluate him by what he owns). Billy does follow others. Drawn to The Blonde (Lucy Russell), ex-mistress of a sadistic and dangerous nightclub owner. She has been robbed and Billy becomes obsessed with her.

Filmed in a “neo-noir style” [the rich black and white look of the 1940s film noir], the film reminds me visually of Laurence Harvey’s Room at the Top. The clothes even all look sixties. As classic film noir, we know that the main character is being played and the woman he is involved with can’t be trusted. But the hows and whys are what we have to wait for.

One of the ideas of the film is an obsession of investigating the victim’s psyche by studying the clutter of their lives. In Billy’s case, a large portrait of Marilyn Monroe hangs on his wall and could easily be the Blonde he falls in love with. At the end she is coiffed and costumed like the 1960s Marilyn in one her famous later portraits, upswept hair and black turtleneck. Astute viewers might also smile when they see also that Billy’s door has a Batman logo on it, a nod to Nolan’s future as The Dark Knight’s director?

This is film definitely worth seeing. I loved the experience.

Following (1998) *****  (on Netflix streaming)

Day 42/44 - Identity (2003) - extended cut

The film begins with a patient quoting on tape a poem he says he made up as a child, “Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d go away.” [This first part of a longer poem by Hughes Mearns.] In a well paced opening montage, the director gives us the background on a major character of the film, mass murderer Malcolm Rivers (Pruitt Taylor Vince), who the psychiatrist Alfred Molina is trying to save in a last minute appeal to the Nevada state commission.

The set up appears to be an homage to Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians formula (which is referenced in the film): in a blinding thunderstorm which has washed out all roads, ten people end up in a isolated Nevada motel. There is no escape to anywhere else. The motel is wonderfully creepy and suspenseful, filled with 10 connected rooms, an Indian burial ground, a deserted restaurant, and other outbuildings. As people begin to die—murdered by an unknown person--the surviving characters begin to ask why these specific ten have been brought together? One of the ten is a prisoner brought in by a cop. Is he the murderer or is someone more “innocent” guilty? Is it significant that they are all the same astrological sign? [I kept hearing Laymont Cranstan, "What evil lurks in the hearts of men?"]

While we try to make connections with the clues we are given, we begin to assume the person they are waiting for at the murderer's hearing is someone at the motel. The psychiatrist says he wants to prove that his client’s body might have committed murders, but that his mind didn’t do it.

The best thing about this thriller is the way the plot twists. I thought I had it figured out and then the writer Michael Cooney just kept taking me somewhere else.

As each of the ten in the motel dies, we begin seeing that each has a secret that makes him or her guilty, and we begin rooting for which will survive. About two-thirds of the way in the film though, writer Cooney pulls the rug out from under us (think the kind of thing Hitchcock did to viewers with Psycho) and what we think is happening suddenly may not be. For example, after the first five die, bodies begin to disappear along with any evidence of mayhem . What’s going on here? Well, the director James Mangold keeps us along for the ride and gives a satisfying and surprise ending.

I always like the work of John Cusack and Ray Liotta and they give their usual strong performances. Amanda Peet as a hooker who just wants to buy an orange grove in Florida and John Hawkes’ Larry who runs the motel are also memorable. If you like thrillers, you will like the ride and the exercise of just figuring out exactly what’s happening.

[Note: I’m assuming the extended cut, no pun intended, is just more violent and bloody than the original release.]

Identity (2003) ****