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Film Festivals

THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2003

By Kenneth L. Geist • Oct 10th, 2003 • Pages: 1 2

Were you to ask how I liked the latest film by Pedro Almodovar, “Talk To Her” (Spain/ Sony Pictures Classics), the Festival’s prestigious Closing Night entry, I would tell you how much I enjoyed Almodovar’s early and middle work when he was a truly anarchic Spanish rebel. That is to say, I deeply dislike his protracted, sentimental later work, although my Spanish-speaking colleague, Rene Jordan, thinks the world of it. The last picture of Almodovar’s I truly enjoyed was “Kika” (1993). Beginning with his mawkish and contrived later work, “All About My Mother” (2001) my gorge began to rise until I began talking back, inside my head, to “Talk To Her. “

I should add that the popular wisdom about Almodovar’s most recent films is quite different from mine. “All About My Mother” won the 2001 Oscar for best foreign film and Almodovar’s screenwriting won him a second Oscar, in March, for “Talk To Her.” As most everyone I know admired “Talk To Her,” I gave it a second chance. But I maintain my original view, that it is preposterous, soap-operatic twaddle and more alienating than affecting..

The protagonists, a sweet hairdresser/nurse, Benigno (Javier Camara) and a macho travel correspondent, Marco (Dario Grandinetti) “meet cute” in the film’s opening scene when the older, grizzled writer, inadvertantly rests his head on the younger man’s shoulder while weeping at a dance-theatre performance by Pina Bausch.

This sends us at least two false signals. I have yet to see anyone cry at a Pina Bausch program, although I personally think this German avant-garde choreographer is a theatrical marvel. From the get-go, we are convinced that this is going to be a gay romance from the very gay Almodovar, while both men, as it turns out, remain in love with their female love objects, even after they lapse into symmetrical comas.

(The nurse is a virgin who says he might possibly be a homosexual as he’s “a momma’s boy” from having nursed his sickly mother for 20 years. However, gays, except for ballet queens, are rarely fixated on female dancers as is Camara’s Benigno as he watches his adored, pretty one practice each day from his apartment window. Even ballet queens tend to favor men in tights to women in tutus.)

“Talk To Her” is as highly stylized as “All About My Mother,” although it chiefly contrasts the characters of the two, central men rather than the succession of hysterical women in “Mother.” It is, however, a similarly contrived, absurdly symmetrical film, as the two male caregivers, by coincidence, just happen to continue their one-way, non-stop conversations with comatose women lying next door to each other in the same hospital.

The film, unusually, has its two excellent male principals supplanting the usually female-populated Almodvar universe. Interestingly, the grizzled Grandinetti is meant to be the more sexually prepossessing of the two, although it’s the full-faced, sweet Camara who is the more attractive (and is oddly reminiscent of the fleshy, younger Almodovar), who becomes more and more attractive to me.

Although the use of talkative men as principals (the women’s comas render them absolutely silent) is a pleasant change for Almodovar, the writer/director’s own homosexuality keeps on intruding. By inserting a seven-minute black-and-white silent film spoof, titled “Shrinking Lover,” in which a women’s alabaster white breasts and sprayed white pubic hair assume grotesque proportions, and the tiny, shrinking male delicately pleases the woman giantess by tiptoeing in-and-out-of her all-white vagina, I can clearly read Almodovar’s sexual signals. I know that what is really at issue is Mr Alvodovar’s repugnance to female genitalia, which he spoofs, and the miniature man “shrinks,” as gay men do when confronted by vaginas, even though this orifice resembles a white, sculpted forest.)

It is the sexually inexperienced Benigno who impregnates his comatose inamorata while she is in his round-the-clock care. (That is, he can only have sex with his coma-girl while she is senseless.) Benigno denies responsibility for the pregnancy, although he is the only one who wants to marry the totally docile, unconscious young woman with sensational breasts. Ergo, Begnino is not so benign although he is virtuous in his matrimonial and prison (for rape) appeals.

Ironically, Marco’s loved one is a comically gruesome, black-curled female bullfighter (Rosario Flores). Her horse face could easily intimidate bulls, though her gay director deals from a very queer deck in casting her as the loved one of the supposedly attractive, hetero Marco while giving Benigno such a genuinely attractive love object in Leonor Watling. Ms. Flores, an oddly grotesque-looking woman reminds me of the gargoyle-like, Picasso-sculpted profile of Rossy De Palma, the brilliant comic weeper in Almodovar’s 1988 masterpiece, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”

I no more believe that a sexual mouse could impregnate the one he adores while she lies unconscious than I do in the girl’s miraculous recovery (after giving birth) and return to ballet class. This is all a fanciful plot contrivance or another of Almodovar’s weird fairy tales, but what do I know?

Although scenes from two different Pina Bausch dances, which open and close the film , were made at actual performances, they are badly truncated and the indifferent camera angles from which they were shot is irritating to a Bausch fan like me. Almodovar shows them from the audience’s point of view, except that you would have to be sitting near the lip of the stage to have this vantage point. The average viewer needs to have seen these unfamiliar dances in longer form to comprehend the excerpts or to appreciate how meaningless they are in snippets. They do little to honor the genius of Pina Bausch, whom Almovardo clearly admires, beyond pointing to the violence and eccentricity of her art.

I say bring back Pedro the Wicked. The Academy Award- winner has become pompous and supremely self-satisfied. But again I have to admit, lots of folks like this movie, and again, for reasons that escape me.

I endured Jia Zhang Ke’s four-hour study of a traveling theatre troupe, “Platform,” at the 2000 NY Film Festival and found it a crashing bore. I was only induced, initially, to sample this director’s work by the advance puffery of J. Hoberman in the Village Voice, who enjoys profoundly boring features, which he deems meritorious because they are inaccessible to the layman.

It was Mr. Hoberman’s advance, capsule puff of “Unknown Pleasures,” (China, Japan/New Yorker Films) a phrase from a potent liqueur ad, which Hoberman termed, “sensational filmmaking that sets it’s own pace and agenda . . . A triumphant blend of documentary and drama.”

That’s what lured me to the screening of this profoundly ugly [an ill-used digital video camera] and boring study of idle youths wasting their time in littered locations. The only “sensations,” if such they are, is a scene in which the pretty boy, played by Wu Qiong, is repeatedly and viciously slapped, and another in which the thin model, Zhao Wei Wei–(in Uma Thurman’s “Pulp Fiction” black bangs)–is repeatedly shoved back into a bus seat by her attractive captor. Why the man is being slapped and why the girl is confined to her seat is unclear to me, just as I confuse the film’s two young men as suitors for the model (who is actually the steady of the guy with a similar mop of hair).

They are all attractive, but faceless young’uns despite the irritation of their constantly-falling hair. As I forsaw that the male mop-top was going to be severely punished for borrowing 15,000 Yen from an unscrupulous money-lender without repayment, I didn’t stay to see how badly he was treated. I thought the punishment might be as painful and cluttered as this messy turn-off of a film, which I refer to as a Hoberman, the defender of pretentious bores.

“Monday Morning” (France/Italy) has no American distributor, which is rare for a Festival entry, but not unusual after you’ve seen the flick. When I later came upon my review of this film, I had, at first, no recollection of ever having seen it. That’s just how innocuous it is.

It is not nearly enough for a new writer-director, Otar Iosseliani, to have a tubby transvestite in a big wig and drop-earrings serve as the coat-check at a provincial dance hall in nowhere France. Nor for the trannie to take the rowdy, workman protagonist, Vincent (Jacques Bidou), home to treat his wounds. At the tran’s humble abode, he/she keeps three large, tame rats as pets. This is meant to be exceedingly bizarre, but bizarre conked out with Dali, and I find these pet rats more improbable than sensational.

The oscillation between the rats, and a fanciful welding extravaganza (the protagonist is a provincial French welder with painterly ambitions) is rather pitiful. It is an especially unfortunate coincidence that the welder’s transformation, once he hits Venice and is allowed to express himself artistically, is very similar to that of the frumpy housewife who finds romance with Bruno Ganz in Venice in the vastly superior, Italian film “Bread And Tulips” (2000). Here, the depressed welder’s joyous escape to Venice only makes for a curiously schizoid film that oscillates between comic high spirits and working class drabness.

One source of unnecessary and unreleased tension is the satchel containing all of the welder’s cash savings for his Venetian trip. (Perhaps the film could serve as a cautionary for travelers to stock up on American Express checks.) This stash is constantly at risk from the moment the welder (Bidou) counts his dough in front of his pretty coach mate on a train. Although the cash case is never lost, it is pointlessly at risk throughout the trip to Venice. We know from previous films that it is going to be snatched, thereby preventing a comfortable stay or a safe trip home. But it never is, unfortunately. It would be too conventional for Iosseliani.

The prospect of the Nazi insider reminiscences of Traudl Junge in “Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary” (Austria/ Sony Pictures Classics) had an understandable fascination for me. But at the end of this 90-minute feature I had learned nothing truly substantive.
The fraud perpetrated is that Junge had never before revealed her “secrets.” In fact, she was so desperate for publicity or cash that she gave N.Y. Post gossipist Cindy Adams nearly five hours of videotape, years before this film was made. Adams would have sold it for a TV special if Junge had any actual revelations. (The world is, after all, full of Jewish Nazi junkies like Mel Brooks and me.)

At 81, Junge still remembers the sights and sounds of the Wolfsschanze [Wolf’s Lair], Hitler’s headquarters in the above-ground bunker just above Salzburg, where, in 1942, she was picked from the secretarial pool, age 22, to take the dictator’s dictation. The excitement of being in the inner circle of the war machine is contrasted with the final, fearful months in a bunker buried under the Berlin Chancellery, in 1945, as Soviet guns and bombs pounded above and suicide capsules were circulated among the Nazi hierarchy.

Both the optimistic beginning and the harrowing final weeks, when hopelessness took hold, were curiously forecast in “The Downfall of the Gods” (“Gotterdammerung”) the prophetic, fifth opera of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. (The Romantic, furiously anti-Semitic, and German nationalist Wagner was naturally Hitler’s favorite composer.)

Miss Jung tells us, with a very straight face, that Hitler never once expressed to her his hatred of the Jews or his scheme to exterminate them. Presumably a key secretary’s failure to be aware of the ongoing Final Solution and her boss’s rabid hatred of the Jews was Traudy’s “blind spot.”

She finds her subsequent knowledge of Nazi horrors inconsistent with Hitler’s love of his only friends, Eva Braun and his adored Alsatian bitch, Blondi.

(Don’t you just love the unawareness of Nazi party members until after the fact? It’s positively Mel Brooksian.) Was Ms.Junge, who was married to a German officer, merely the Fuhrer’s social secretary? She doesn’t say so. Perhaps this now haughty lady, who’s made a post-war living from her propinquity to the Nazi brass, never read what she was typing or comprehended the chief’s dictation, but it’s unlikely.

The documentary’s interviewer asks her if Hitler loved Blondi so well, why did he try out his cyanide capsules on her, and thus kill his beloved pet. That’s true, the secretary acknowledges, with some surprise at the inconsistency of her hero’s contradictory behavior.

Miss Jung rationalizes her job as both prestigious and sought-after, in its day, with no true awareness of the human consequences of aiding the Fascist regime’s ideologue.( She was with him to the very end when he dictated to her his final will.) She has, she claims, devoted her life to atoning for the actions of her superiors, although I believe she has been living off her limited and unsatisfying remembrances of these monsters.

Ms, Jung died at age 81, soon after this film was first shown at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival. One could say that the filmmakers (Andre Hellerr & Othmar Schmiderer) with their limited vocabulary of close-ups, featuring Ms. Jung’s restricted, rose and orange scarf wardrobe, had done her in even before she was shown her false testimony. Certainly, the innocuous admissions of this Nazi underling fail to provide any.audacious new insights. Traudl Junge only echoes the selective memory of all those Austrians and Germans who never realized what their leaders were up to until their side lost big.

Claire Denis’ “Friday Night” (France/ Wellspring Media) is arguably her slightest work—trivial is too strong a word for it. It’s an adaptation of a French novel about a fiancée, Laure, caught in Friday night Parisian traffic gridlock who, just for the night, abandons her car and her intended for a one-nighter with a Gallic stud, Jean, in a cheap hotel.

Ms. Denis told us at her press conference that the logistics of creating gridlock on familiar Paris streets was a logistical nightmare. I couldn’t care less, coming from the director of such profound works as “Beau Travail.,” “I Can’t Sleep,” and the non-Miramax, bitter “Chocolat.” This triviality is compounded by a treacly piano score, by one Dickon Hinchliffe, which is only slightly salvaged by the great director’s clever decoupage (editing) and the performances of its French stars (unknown in the US) Valerie Lemercier, a French comedienne noted for her one-woman shows), who proves an excellent actress, and Vincent Lindon, a fine, Gallic leading man, in the Daniel Auteuil, joli laid (humpy/homely) mode.

Bertrand Tavernier’s “Safe Conduct” (“Laissez-Passer”/ France/Empire Films) is another treasurable film from this important French director.

Although it is nearly a year ago (August 2002) that I first attended a press screening of this wondrous film, this study of the endurance of the artisans of the French film industry, despite the strictures of the German Occupation, remains immensely vivid to me. The nostalgic Tavernier has crammed it with a wealth of fantastic anecdotes from two of his elder, now-deceased filmmaker friends, who were both survivors and acquaintance of war time, whom Tavernier cultivated for their great adventures.
Though Paris during the Occupation has been the setting of many films, such as Truffaut’s “The Last Metro” (1980), which rarely wanders out of doors, to recreate the Occupation’s restrictions, none has been as well-imagined or as startling as this one.

I knew, of course, that French films like “Children Of Paradise” were being made during the Occupation, but I had no idea that there was a German film company operating in Paris with French personnel like “Safe Conduct’s” two protagonists: Don Juan-like screen writer Jean Aurenche (Denis Podalydes) and loyal family man, assistant director Jean Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin).

Though neither of the names of these film workers of the Forties and Fifties is familiar to us as the directors they worked for, they were revered by Tavernier who in culling their wartime histories has stunningly captured Paris during the Occupation with for-the-first-time freshness.

More than most 3-D films, this is a real poke-in-the-eye picture with objects jutting out at us continuously. The film is frequently jolting, and I don’t mean that in the usual critic’s usage. I mean that the sight of formerly well-to-do people selling their possessions on the street is wrenching and that the camera literally runs into a lamp post as well as dashes along the street to avert a German squad car racing around the corner. These startling punctuations are the visual equivalent of administering adrenalin to the eye.

The wildest anecdote in the whole astonishing picture is of the assistant director, Devaivre, being flown overnight, across the Channel to England, amidst heavy anti-aircraft fire, to account to the English high command for the top secret German blueprints he has stolen from the file cabinet of his Nazi superior at the studio.

Devaivre is disbelieved and sent packing, although his German blueprints prove mighty handy to the Brits later on.
With no previous training as a parachutist, Devaivre is obliged to jump out of a plane so that he can return to his job at the studio the next day without detection. Moreover, he is suffering from a fearful head cold for which the Brits have given him a medicinal box of English tea (which proves incriminating when he is arrested by a patrol) and these are only some of the key ingredients in this amazing sequence.

The sight of Gamblin, as Devaivre, nearly bursting his calves peddling a bicycle back and forth to the country (150 km. from town), where he has stashed his wife and children for safety from the Paris bombardments, is memorably harrowing.

At nearly three hours (170 minutes) “Safe Conduct” is over-long and uneven. However, in addition to the above-described night flight, “Safe Conduct” (a title which becomes progressively ironic) contains an astonishing opening scene of the womanizing Aurenche trying to entertain a movie sex pot in his small hotel, where all his neighbors want to peek at the vedette, that is, when they are not fending for life and limb during a ferocious German bombardment. This is one of the most frenetic and astonishing opening scenes of any film I know because it is both funny and frightening.

These are but two of the scenes which make “Safe Conduct” and Bertrand Tavernier treasurable to me. So where’s the DVD already?

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