MELANCHOLIA lacks anything as disgusting as Willem Dafoe ejaculating blood instead of semen in ANTICHRIST (2009), Lars von Trier’s previous, sensationalist film.

Instead of ejaculate, we have the near-psychotic bad behavior of Justine (Kirsten Dunst), who is but one of the “melancholics” in the film. The other is the fictional, hidden-behind-the-sun planet, “Melancholia.” Only von Trier would think to create a threatening, invented planet, when climate change is already destroying the one we live on at an accelerating pace.

Von Trier rather gives away the game of this end-of-the-earth movie by showing two planets colliding in his opening sequence – anticipating Melancholia looming up to burst our planet at the end.

But the picture is not really about this silly, dual premise. It gives the misbehaving Justine (Dunst) a showy part to display her gifts for those who failed to catch her brilliant, spoiled title character in MARIE ANTOINETTE, Sofia Coppola’s 2006 flossy, cotton candy historical film. Dunst’s Justine (no – not the de Sade nor the Durrell ones) is the show-piece that garnered Ms. Dunst the Best Actress Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Now Ms. Dunst can be taken more seriously than as Spider Man’s recurring girl friend.

There are a number of scenes that stay in the memory along with the calendar-art long shot of Ms. Dunst, lying nude on the greensward, displaying her bountiful breasts, which are amazing, if you like that sort of thing. (Dunst’s ripe melon breasts echo her expansive apple cheeks.)

Part One of MELANCHOLIA takes place at the expensive, up-scale wedding party of Justine and Michael (Alexander Skarsgard), who is tall, lanky and stunning, if you like that sort of thing. “First you say you will and then you won’t” is the on/off, hostile game Justine plays with her hubby during the party (when she urgently pulls his hand to her crotch) and after the party (when he undresses for their wedding night, only for her to reject him.) Both scenes are memorable as is Justine’s subsequent, alternative congress with the little twerp nephew of her big shot, ad-man boss. The ad-man torments the twerp by saying he will only give him an entry-level job if he procures the tag line from Justine for a new product line’s ad campaign.

In turn – as a wedding present – Justine is promoted from copywriter to art director, a promotion she throws in her boss’ face. (With von Trier, dramatic conflict is usually about very bad public behavior. Instead of giving the young twerp the tag, Justine has it off with him in a sand trap of the nearby golf course. (Surprisingly von Trier only shows the coupling in long shot, although the twerp, in later proposing to Justine, says the sand-trap sex with her was his best ever.)

The film begins with a curtain of falling autumn leaves, but there are two subsequent showers of heavenly droppings (petals? seeds? planetary debris?) that possibly signify the impending planets’ collision.

The Love/Death theme from “Tristan and Isolde” is featured prominently throughout the film. “I desired to dive headlong into the abyss of German romanticism,” says von Trier.” “Wagner in spades!” Oh, is that why von Trier plays the Liebestod not once, not twice, not three times, or four times, until I lost count. “Headlong” indeed. This tiresome re-use instead of using another lush Wagner motif, might well be von Trier’s dumb repetition, rather than immersion.

For a change of pace, von Trier has cast Charlotte Gainsbourg, the viciously vindictive wife (responsible for the bloody ejaculation in ANTICHRIST), as Justine’s infinitely sweet and maternal, comforting sister, Claire, for whom the second half of the film is named. (Claire’s husband is played by Keifer Sutherland in a singularly ungrateful, secondary part.) Gainsbourg plays sisterly/matronly responsiveness perfectly, despite our visual discomfort at her inherited French singer-father’s horse-faced silhouette.

Von Trier is helped, at almost every turn, by the contributions of his dazzling cinematographer, Manuel Alberto Claro, whose name and credits are unknown to me.

Well, at least von Trier has gotten away from the two-dimensional, Brechtian, cardboard cut-out sets and malevolence of DOGVILLE (2003) and MANDERLAY (2005).

Justine, like the melancholic von Trier, loves to make a spectacle of him/herself. I might be equally intoxicated if only I could, simultaneously, quaff good champagne along with the wedding guests and reside in the posh, paneled halls of the Sutherland-character’s great Swedish castle.

To think that just 15 years ago, when I was introduced to von Trier’s work (at a Montreal Film Festival) by his brilliant BREAKING THE WAVES (1996), I thought he was going to be a major talent. Now he’s dismissed by me, and a number of other like-minded critics, as a mere theater-of-cruelty sensationalist who doesn’t travel – even to the New York Film Festival which keeps on promoting his increasingly trivial work.

After four hundred plus years, Shakespeare’s ‘Melancholy Dane,’ “Hamlet,” supersedes von Trier’s MELANCHOLIA to the nth degree.

The intricately plotted, bittersweet THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER is more memorable than its hard-to-recall title. It is drawn from a classic 17th Century novella (1662) by the elegant wit, Madame de Lafayette, the author of the better known, equally mordant, “The Princess of Cleves” (which is still available in Penguin paperback).

Bertrand Tavernier, the film’s director/co-author (with two others) has previously made fine historical films, such as the splendid LET JOY REIGN SUPREME (1975), but he is in his historical element with the 16th Century, courtly PRINCESS.

It is always a mystery as to how a director can achieve a sense of period authenticity – whether it’s the brutal fighting between the royalist Catholics and the Protestant Huguenots (there are lots of horrific mutilations, including the deadly stabbing of a pregnant woman) or the Montpensier household’s intrusive levee: poised, just outside the bridal bedroom, awaiting evidence of the bride’s bloody sheet as proof of her deflowering. (The virgin Prince has a first- timer’s awkward difficulty in penetrating his wife.)

Tavernier and his swordplay choreographer convey a sense of unusually dangerous risk by the erratic swordsmanship of the rivals for the beautiful Marie – the Prince Philippe and the scar-faced Henri de Guise. In the old costume flicks, we always knew that Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power was going to prevail against the villain; but there is neither a hero nor a villain in this film, merely rival courtiers in love with the same beauty. The realism of the fighting has everything to do with the youths’ awkward misses on their thrusts. The sound of blade against blade is also amplified to a dangerous-sounding level.

THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER is a romance with four besotted suitors seeking the hand (or the nether parts) of the rich, young, uneducated, provincial beauty, Marie, played by Melanie Thierry. Ms. Thierry is obviously older than 16, which the script requires, but she has the current French Cinema’s most perfect “pair” (displayed at length, in two scenes, under golden lighting), since Bardot displayed her belle poitrine in AND GOD CREATED WOMAN (1987).

The suitors include the sensual scarface, Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel), Marie’s childhood sweetheart, versus Philippe, the sweet, introverted Prince of Montpensier (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet), who is forced into marriage with the unwilling Marie by his ogre father (the scene-stealing Michel Vuillermoz).

A third claimant is the outcast scholar-warrior Compte de Chabannes, (the handsome French star, Lambert Wilson, now silver-haired), who has mentored Philippe, who, in turn, engages him to tutor his clueless bride in a castle, remote from the raging Religious Wars, in which the Prince is obliged to fight.

The fourth would-be partner is the darkly handsome Duc d’Anjou (Raphael Personnaz), the future king, Henri III, who professes interest in Marie, but whose kohl-rimmed eyes suggest he may prefer the more available male courtiers wearing revealing tights.

The most intriguing aspect of the film is that we remain in the dark as to who will wind up with the beauty. It’s truly a surprise ending, but it’s most likely faithful to the Lafayette short story.

Tavernier sets the stage with a sweeping, widescreen vista of the battlefield, in which scavengers make off with valuables from the bodies of fallen warriors, only to be felled, in turn, by royals on horseback who sword-swipe them.

In retrospect, I realize that nearly every scene in the film is a favorite of mine.

There is a moonlit interlude between the tutor Chabannes and his adoring pupil, Marie, in which he teaches her a mixture of astronomy/astrology, which he says will prove useful to her when she reaches the Paris Court. You can sense that the tutor has fallen for his pupil, the wife of his royal protector, the Prince of Montpensier, who has saved him from ostracism as an outcast from both warring factions. Chabannes’ gratitude to his royal protector keeps him from speaking out.

In turn, Marie doesn’t recognize her introverted husband’s deep-seated feelings for her, any more than she glimpses Leprince-Ringuet’s adorable tush, which we glimpse from the open back of his nightshirt, when he leaves their bed to study documents in the outdoor, terrace light. Oddly, their somewhat recessive screen personalities make them a perfect match. And though the Prince is madly in love with his Princess, he cannot forgive her for an illicit night with his rival, the sleazy climber, de Guise, who has a rich and titled wife in mind, other than the married Marie.

Perhaps the most amazing scene shows the corpulent, bushy-browed Medici Queen at the Paris Court with a swarm of children and grandchildren perched on the tiers of her throne, speaking French with a heavy Italian accent. This startling image stays in one’s mind.

Tavernier is so scrupulous about period authenticity that he has even invented fuzzy background shots of children at their games, playing with some period, 16th Century balls and hoops.

To my mind Bertrand Tavernier is the most eclectic and interesting French director at work today, including Resnais and Techine. He is surely worthy of a complete, New York retrospective.

Werner Herzog’s CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS is the eccentric, German documentary maker’s first foray into 3-D and it is, as usual, off-the-wall. In this case, Herzog’s typically difficult-to-film subject is a celebrated cave-wall in Southern France, buried for 32,000 years and only visited previously, since its’ discovery in 1994, by archeologists and paleontologists.

I wish I could comment authoritatively on how 3-D shapes the curved configuration of the cave, but my trifocal lenses plus prisms (reducing my double vision) made me feel fortunate to see the film in 1-D shades of green and pink.

I was grateful to see the Chauvet Cave’s splendid animal drawings close up, as Herzog lets us view them in the closing moments of the film. To think that these cave paintings are twice as old and perhaps twice as fine as the famed Lascaux Caves, (now closed from the accreted-mould of human breath) is miraculous enough, without Herzog’s own heavy breathing,

Herzog’s speculation as to whether a boy is walking in amity with a wolf or is being pursued by one, is as fallacious as his comparing the cavemen’s aesthetic taste to the German 19th century Romantic era and love of Wagner. This comparison drew titters from the audience, as the director held on a rocky arch in the area.

However, these primitive artists concentrated only on “the beasts of the field,” not Romantic crags. (Sure, that arch is a sublime subject for a 19th Century Romantic landscape, and is clearly a favorite of the director’s).

Herzog’s fleshing out the film by having a paleontologist play “The Star Spangled Banner” on a primitive flute (I tend to think that caveguys never knew our anthem) or whether the albino crocodiles, created by warm run-off water from a nearby nuclear reactor, will be sentient in years to come, strikes me as profoundly dumb. I think that in addition to writing, directing and narrating (with his luscious, schnitzely accent) this documentary, Herzog should find himself an editor with a down-to-earth bent (less caught up in the cavemens’ purported dreams) who would cut the loony speculations out of Herzog’s script.

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

“The Diving Bell and The Butterfly” is the poetic title of the acclaimed, 1997 autobiography of a leading French fashion editor, Elle’s Jean-Dominique Bauby, as well as this film adaptation (Miramax) by the noted painter turned filmmaker, Julian Schnabel, which led off the Festival’s screenings for critics in mid-September.
‘Jean-Do’ (in the film, the piquant Mathieu Amalric of “Kings and Queens” and “Munich”) as he was known, had a devastating cerebral stroke, at 43, which left him a victim of “locked in syndrome,” able to communicate only by blinking the remaining, working muscle of his left eye-lid. (My partner quipped that Schnabel’s film might be aptly titled, “My Left Eyelid.”)
That is, in order to utter a single word, Jean-Do’s therapists had to verbally run through the French alphabet to gather every letter of every word for his blinks, a brutally tedious business that makes Bauby’s creation of an entire literary work something quite miraculous.
“The Diving Bell” nearly replicates Alejandro Amenabar’s 2004 “The Sea Inside,” which featured Javier Bardem, as the eminent-but-totally paralyzed-Spanish author, Ramon Sampedro, who wrote his way out of his 30-year physical straight jacket by, ultimately, obtaining euthanasia. “The Sea Inside” won the Best Foreign Language Oscar of 2004)
In Schnabel’s film, Bauby becomes reconciled to his fate long before expiring due to a clogged tracheal breathing tube.
Schnabel is nothing if not inventive in lolling the camera over to pan vistas approximate to Bauby’s ‘butterfly’ point of view or interpolating whimsical photos of the handsome young Brando in place of the less than dashing M. Amalric. Schnabel’s final image, reversing Antarctic glacier slides by running them backwards, is ironic, but it fails to work for me as persuasive reparation. Such global warming catastrophes can no more be repaired than the life of an ingenious stroke victim.
I appreciate the authenticity of New Yorker Schnabel’s working in French (from a translation of Ronald Harwood’s English screenplay) at the hospital where Bauby was treated and featuring the therapists who worked with him, even though Schnabel claims to dislike films set in hospitals, as I do.
Schnabel’s first choice of Johnny Depp (who played two screaming queens for Schnabel in his previous film, “Before Night Falls”) for Jean-Do would have been a more commercial one for Miramax, but Mr. Depp did better for Disney, Miramax’s parent company, by repeating his inspired pirate queen in “Pirates of the Caribbean.”
Two footnotes. The flashback scene of the pre-stroke Jean-Do shaving his invalided, crotchety, 92-year-old father (Max Von Sydow, age 77) is the best scene in the film for me. Every stroke of the safety razor is amplified on the soundtrack by boosting the scraping sound. The scene becomes surgical, anatomizing their father-son co-dependency and showing the vibrancy of Amalric possessed of all of his physical faculties. It is also a tribute by Schnabel to his own beloved father, who died at 92, while living in his son’s West Village home.
Schnabel had a flood of film offers following his marvelous “Before Night Falls,” (2000), which starred Javier Bardem as the fugitive gay Cuban poet, Renaldo Arenas. In the long interim since that film, Schnabel wrote a screenplay adaptation of the popular novel, “Perfume,” but fell out with the producer and got bounced from that production. He understandably loathes the 2006 film of “Perfume,” which he thinks truly stinks.
It strikes me that Schnabel’s three films, including his first, “Basquiat” (1996) are all biographies of tormented figures in the art worlds of three nations.
Schnabel claims that before signing on to direct “The Diving Bell (of death) and the Butterfly” (Bauby’s flitting mind and wandering eye), he turned down a slew of commercial projects including “8 Mile” and “American Gangster.” I don’t think Schnabel should have rejected all of those opportunities. Although he won the Best Director award at Cannes for “The Diving Bell,” he coveted the Palme d’Or, which went to the Romanian abortion drama, “4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 Days,” which was also shown at the New York Festival.

MARRIED LIFE

“Married Life” (Sony Pictures Classics) is as prosaic as its title. Writer-director Ira Sach’s third film is leaden and feels considerably longer than its 90-minute length, despite its excellent cast of Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, and a new blonde yum-yum, Rachel McAdams.
The picture is a highly conventional sexual rondelet of infidelity, with husband Cooper attempting to poison his wife Clarkson in order to marry McAdams, possibly because divorce is unheard of in their bourgeois set. The year 1949 is conveyed by the style of the autos; the Pacific Northwest setting I only gleaned from the program notes.
When the author-director acknowledged, at the press conference, that he was a gay man, I subversively thought, “Is that why the film lacks the slightest hetero lubricity?” I tabled that too personal supposition, and realized that you can’t have homely Chris Cooper as the sexual fulcrum of such a lusty comedy when he is, of course, bound to be trumped by the handsome Brosnan. Moreover, you can’t play off a genre flick like “Sudden Fear,” as Sachs said he had, (in which Joan Crawford is fearful of her hunk husband, Jack Palance, as a potential poisoner), when “Marriage”’s lame script (from an obscure 1952 English novel) seems much more a Feydeau sex farce than a thriller.
Sach’s says his last two films have been “realistic,” (his previous, “40 Shades of Blue” – 2005, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance), but, frenzied infidelity has, of course, its own reality. Comedy may simply not be Sachs’ bailiwick. Patricia Clarkson, however, is “a sunny, funny, honey” treasure of the American film, as this picture is not.

I JUST DIDN’T DO IT

“I Just Didn’t Do It” is the not-guilty plea of a slender, mop-haired Japanese youth (Ryo Kase), falsely accused of groping a 15-year old schoolgirl on a jam-packed Tokyo commuter train.
This honest kid is told at the outset of this excessively long, 143-minute procedural, to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and pay a small fine, or face protracted jail time and a judiciary that is less interested in his innocence than its near-perfect record of convictions.
The boy refuses to cop a plea and demands exoneration. (We see in the opening scene that the offending hand hiking up the girl’s skirt is much more powerfully veined and older than that of the slender, tapered hand of the young accused.)
This near-documentary of Tokyo’s penal and judicial system marks a notable change for writer-director Masayuki Suo from his delightful hit, “Shall We Dance,” (1996), but the poor lad’s ordeal and the ultimate, terrible wrong done him makes the audience suffer with him because of the film’s length and its’ successive repetitions.
The attempt by the youth’s defense to recreate the precise configuration of the train door’s overcrowding, for an exonerating video presentation to the court, struck me as both wonderful and absurd.
It is miraculous that the lad’s defense team could find the vanished woman who witnessed the incident on the train and came forward to protest the lad’s arrest, only to be dismissed by the police. That the judge refuses to accept her testimony, prior to convicting the wretched young man, is a heartbreaking injustice as great as the youth’s false arrest and imprisonment.
Poor boy. He should have paid the fine, but he “just didn’t do it.”

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS

I felt obligated to see “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (IFC First Takes) because it was the buzz film of this year’s Cannes Festival and earned for its Romanian writer-director, Cristian Mungiu, the Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.
I knew the title signified the length of term prior to an illicit, late abortion in Ceaucescu’s repressive Romania of 1987, and that it was shot, by Oleg Mutu, the cinematographer of “The Death of Mr. Lazauescu,” a great, but deeply depressing Romanian film of two Festivals ago, in gray-green dun color. So I knew the picture would not be pleasurable.
The Festival screening began at 10 a.m., an unfavorite hour for this late-nighter, in an as-yet uncooled Walter Reade Theatre. So my receptivity was not great. In the opening scene, as the young women dorm mates (four to a room) discussed obtaining black market Kent cigarettes with their male, dorm fence, prior to the lead, blonde Otilla’s (Anamaria Marinca) obtaining a clandestine hotel room to relieve her close friend, the dark Gabita’s (Laura Vasiliu) four-months-gone pregnancy, I knew I would simply have to endure the ordeal. Indeed, the film was just as wintry and oppressive as being in the, bleak, iron curtain country which Romania was in those days.
Abandoning the important birthday party of her boyfriend’s mother (shown us in such tedious, tightly-framed bourgeois, gemutlichkeit torpor you could plotz), she deserts her boyfriend’s family gathering to tend to her friend.
And then a miracle occurs, rather like the epiphanies of the Dardennes Brothers’ films, in which love is transcendent–transforming a seemingly immoral tale into a sublime morality. The comradeship and solidarity of the women, complicit in an act that could have sent them both to prison along with the abortionist, transcended the awful deed. (Mungiu, 39, whose third film this is, shows part of the bloody, aborted fetus’ umbilicus, enough to make us severely chastened.)
Mongiu told us he had deliberately eschewed quick cutting in favor of long takes, as well as use of any sophisticated equipment like a Steadicam. He wanted the film to look bare and ultra-spare.
Anamaria Marinco is a truly marvelous actress, but Mungiu, who flew her in from London, (where she made a TV series, “Sex Traffic” which won her a BAFTA Award in 2005) disliked her audition, as he had all the women her age he had seen, and only came to admire Marinco as she became the part of Otiilla on film. Evidently, she speaks perfect English in order to appear on the British telly, as did the former English major, writer-director-producer, Mungiu, at his Festival press conference.

The Film Festival screenings commenced on September 14, 2005–9 days before the public performances began. They are something of an ordeal–31 films in 3 weeks–and, if you don’t arrive ahead of time for the 10 a.m. screenings, which is difficult for me, the press kits as well as the pastries, have all been appropriated.

Worst of all, I got off on the wrong foot with the press rep–a most peculiar person. She told me, by phone, on September 13, the day before commencement, that the screenings began at noon, which I challenged, only to discover, on the 14th, that they had begun at 10.

Why the Film Society declines to send out a preliminary schedule to accredited press is beyond me, but I have learned my lesson–arrive early. (The Film Society has recently mailed a screening schedule of their New Directors/New Films series, so there is hope for this year’s fall Festival.)

The press rep and I were surly to one another for the rest of the screenings, merely acknowledging each other with steely glares. In fact, we never exchanged a word subsequent to my preliminary phone inquiry.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center, which sponsors the Festival (over and above the 31 featured films), honored “Japan’s Shochiku Company at 110″ with a lengthy, sidebar retrospective of nearly 40 films. The opening night film of this remarkable series was a new, samurai film, in color, “The Hidden Blade,” (Japan/Tartan Films) by Yoji Yamada, who is in his 70s and whose 78th film this is. (Read that statistic and weep, Yankee helmers.)

At 132 minutes, “Hidden Blade” is a trifle overlong, but it is both handsome and subtle, revisiting the theme of the rifle outmoding the samurai sword (in the 1860s) in charting the decline of a disillusioned warrior, Munezo (the superb Masatoshi Nagase), in obliging him to hang up his sword and dagger for good. The ‘hidden blade’ is a stiletto concealed in his sword’s scabbard, and Munezo buries this dagger after two, final, lethal uses. These involve rub-outs of Yaichiro, his military academy friend and his superior as a swordsman, who is now a fugitive from his prison cell. This is followed by a deft stabbing of the wicked chief overseer who tups the renegade’s wife with a promise of calling off Yaichiro’s assassination by Munezo and his corps of riflemen.
The romance between the retiring Munezo (Nagase) and his true love, the lovely, but lowly, servant, Kie (played by the touching Takako Matsu) takes the entire two hours and 12 minutes to unfold, but its predictability dovetails as neatly as that cunning dagger hidden in the scabbard.
The scenes of oafish, provincial samurais being trained in the new, cannon-era militarism are far more comic than the solemnities of Tom Cruise’s “The Last Samurai.” However, the romantic score for this Japanese sword flick, by Isao Tomita, is a trifle disconcerting–it’s much too Occidental for my taste.

“Beyond the Rocks” (USA/Milestone Films) is a rediscovery–a lost 1922 Paramount film directed by Sam Wood (“A Night at the Opera,” “Kings Row”) and starring two greats of the silent era, Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, in their only screen duet. (They were friends off-screen.)
That such a star vehicle, written by the noted Elinor Glyn (“It”), was not preserved by the studio, and only resurfaced last year in a cache of films from a Dutch collector given to the Nederlands Film Museum, is testimony to Hollywood’s contempt for its product once a picture had completed its run.
“Beyond the Rocks” may be a forgettable trifle, according to one eyewitness (I was misinformed of its early, first-day screening and so missed seeing it.) Swanson was rather mature for the ingénue role, and the not-yet-well established Valentino was far too subordinate to her in this film. However, the chance to revisit the beauty of Valentino and Swanson in their heyday makes this retrospective item an occasion. (Incidentally, the distributor, Milestone, is the company that brought us the delectable silent “Piccadilly,” two Festivals ago.)

The early show for critics on September 16 consisted of two near-hour-length novelties. The first, “Haze,” at 49 minutes, was a new, quasi S-&-M flick by Japanese horror-master, Shinya Tsukamoto, who starred, wrote, edited, photographed and directed. Tsukamoto buries his protagonist Man (himself) in a cement tomb, with no way out except in lateral directions that involve either being cut or crushed. Man finally encounters Woman (Kaori Fujii), who is similarly trapped. They attempt to escape together but, at the close, Man finally wakes alone, in a lighted room, severely bloodied (proving his entrapment and wounding actually occurred), but, presumably, glad to be out of his all-too-real nightmare.
Mr. Tsukamoto is just about the whole show, although his acting mainly consists of mugging in a highly exaggerated manner. Moreover, he has a very unappealing face, so I don’t think it’s wise of him to celebrate it with quite so many close-ups. But as they say, “It’s your picture.”

“Haze” was shot in digital video for camera mobility in tight spaces, according to its maker. But to show a film so nearly pitch dark, quite so early in the morning was sleep inducing. Near-sleep mitigated against the intentionally horrifying S-&-M pageant that unfolded. (The film was scheduled for its single, public performance at a more appropriate, midnight hour.)
An occasional pool of blood is the only color in this de-saturated, claustrophobic, and generally repellent picture.

The second matinee screening, “The Green Cockatoo” (1937), was a great rarity–a British Fox “quota quickie,” drawn from a Graham Greene story, directed by the celebrated American production designer, William Cameron Menzies (“Gone With the Wind”), and produced by the noted American director William K. Howard (“The Power and the Glory.”) The fine score of “Cockatoo” is by the 30-year-old Miklos Rozsa, at the beginning of his illustrious film career, and a master from the get-go.
“The Green Cockatoo” is the name of an intimate nightclub in London’s West End (a canvas, studio set), at which the 29-year-old John Mills entertains by singing and dancing expertly, as Mills did in revues, before his discovery by his mentor, Noel Coward. Tough guy James Cagney, whom Mills emulates in this film, had a similar theatrical song-and-dance background before he entered movies. (Mills had been acting in films since 1932, and only died in April 2005, approaching 97–blind, but still active until very near the end.)
This 65-minute, would-be Hitchcock thriller, of a guy and a gal on the lam, a la “The Thirty Nine Steps” (1935), gets off to a good start with Mills’ crooked brother (young Robert Newton) double-crossing a gang of greyhound-race fixers by taking their money and betting on the favorite, instead of disabling the favored dog so that the gang’s long shot will win.

For his treachery, Newton gets repeatedly stabbed and an innocent bystander (Rene Ray) gets caught with a knife in her hand. (I do love the screen name Rene Ray. Women were given such alliterative names then, although Ray was soon eclipsed by the similar-looking Celia Johnson, who was a vastly superior actress.)
Mills shepherds Ray to safety by taking on the pursuing gang as well as the police. But this sluggish, old buggy runs out of petrol long before their final clinch.

Though Graham Greene had naught to do with “The Green Cockatoo,” except to furnish its source material, this lost work was appended to English film scholar Adrian Wootton’s Festival program, “Greeneland: Graham Greene and the Cinema,” which contained excerpts from such actual Greene screenplays as “Brighton Rock” and “The Third Man.” I wish I had seen his entire presentation, as “The Green Cockatoo” occupied only one third of his program.

At 154 minutes, Cristi Puiu’s “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (Romania/Tartan Films) becomes an especially hard day’s (Saturday) night in Bucharest. Curiously, the ordeal of “Death” unfolds quite similarly to a Frederick Wiseman documentary, like “Hospital,” for example. Except that Mr. Lazarescu is the film’s sole protagonist and, amazingly, all of the doctors and nurses and neighbors in this Romanian cast are played by actors. In contrast, Wiseman only uses actual “civilians.” In short, “Death” is far closer to a documentary than most so-called docu-dramas. (Only the catty CT scan practitioner can be seen over-acting.) This is verismo acting of a very high calibre, with occasional snatches of ultra-black humor.
Mr. L, who is not raised from the dead like Lazarus, but is mishandled by a succession of overrun civic hospitals, is an unusually wretched looking, 63-year-old (Ion Fiscuteanu). A retired widower, Lazarescu has only his filthy cats for company in his cramped apartment. At the start of the picture, he is medicating himself with strong spirits to quell a splitting headache and nausea, but no one is overly sympathetic to these symptoms, as everyone knows he drinks far too much.
The film takes a full hour for an ambulance to get Mr. L. to the hospital, and the next hour and a half consists of Mr. L’s being dressed and undressed in order to find an available CT scan at 1, 2 or 3 a.m., and to eventually find a willing surgeon to stanch his subdural hematoma. Mr. L. is just about to receive the requisite surgical intervention, but it comes too late. Just when he is finally comatose and incapable of withholding his consent from the one surgeon willing to operate at 3 a.m., he drops dead.
The only truly admirable character in the picture is the sorrowfully played ambulance nurse (Luminta Gheorghiu), who, against her will (she deeply needs to get some shut-eye) shepherds her failing charge through admittance and examination at each successive hospital all night long, as neither Mr. L’s sister nor his neighbors will accompany him. She becomes the sacrificial, martyred agent of Lazarescu’s passing.
“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” fails to equal the pathos of an old man’s aging and incipient death in DeSica’s great “Umberto D.” (1952). However, it reminded me of the indignity and enforced solitude of one’s mortality, as it does of the incivilities of modern urban existence.
(This film, Puiu’s second, took the prestigious Un Certain Regard award for new directors at last year’s Cannes Festival.)

When I received a call last August (2002) from a Los Angeles producer, Eric Young, asking me to provide commentary for the forthcoming Fox DVD of ALL ABOUT EVE, I leapt at the opportunity. I figured that if I didn’t take it, it would go to Sam Staggs, the author of the misnamed but recent “All About ‘All About Eve.’” “All About” obviously should have been a compendium of all the significant writing on “Eve” from 1950-2000, including Mankiewicz’ own, superior memoir, “More About ‘All About Eve’” (1972), which Staggs disdains as stylistically inferior to the gossip he re-visits. Its inclusion would have permitted readers to judge how Mankiewicz and Staggs measure up as writers.

While my critical biography of EVE’s writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz,’ “Pictures Will Talk,” dates from 1978, Staggs’ opus came out in 2000. (‘coming out’ is a tiny in-joke alluding to Staggs and his all-gay, Texan, viewing circle.) The 22-year age difference in pub dates tends to make Staggs’ work appear more contemporary and, therefore, more authoritative than my book and Joe’s (which are both out-of-print). My chapter on ALL ABOUT EVE, Mankiewicz’s finest film, is my shortest because I directed readers to the stories in Joe’s preface, which I could just as easily have rewritten and appropriated as Staggs did. (A Scribner’s editor told me that my deferential reference to a rival publication was gauche, and she, therefore, deleted it.)

I had a better right than Staggs to the tales because Joe and the other EVE subjects were then alive and had told all of their tales directly to me. Staggs appropriated all the remaining, first-hand gossip in my chapter, Biblically-titled, “And Joe Created Eve,” but failed to write a word about my original views on the rivalry between the old and the young Mankiewicz brothers as the origin of the conflict between the aging Margo and the rising Eve. As a friendly wag commented, “He [Staggs] stole the dish but left the meat!”

Little did I dream that Eric Young would give Mr. Staggs his own commentary track on the DVD to further explain why EVE is self-evidently a gay camp classic, nor that my own derogatory comment on Staggs’ book, “it’s quite awful,” would be retained, in isolation, when I had so much else to say in throwing dirt on Staggs’ casket-case of a book. Knowing my highly negative views, Mr. Young ought to have intercut me with Staggs fore scorching debate. That way I might have, authoritatively, set the record straight.

Instead, he paired me with two other voices (producer Christopher Mankiewicz, Joe’s argumentative older son, whom I recommended, and now whispery-voiced Celeste Holm, 83, the last survivor of the cast of EVE) on my track. Our commentary track has been ably edited by Mr. Young to suggest that we were all in the same studio, but ‘twas not so. On THE GHOST AND MRS MUIR DVD, also produced by Eric Young, my coeval, Jeanine Basinger keeps reintroducing me every time she finishes her long-winded spiels, “and now, critic Kenneth Geist” so you may be sure that we have never set eyes on each other.

To this date, I cannot bring myself to listen to the Verbal Version According to Staggs. It was irritating enough for me to read and to painstakingly annotate his text for review. However, every gay friend of mine who knows Staggs tells me he is a real sweetheart. I have declined two opportunities to meet him as his work continues to cause me so much superfluous grief.

Of course, my well-received biography of Mankiewicz was precisely the reason I was assigned Staggs’ book (in galleys) by a senior editor of the New York Times Book Review staff who was reciprocating a number of crucial favors I had done for him on the biography he was in the process of writing. ALL ABOUT EVE seemed like a slam dunk to a Mankiewicz scholar.

Now this editor and I both knew Staggs’ book was dreary as we had both read the long excerpt, totally devoid of novelty, which appeared in Vanity Fair more than a year before the book appeared. (All books are previewed by The Times to determine whether they merit review at all, and, if they do, whether they should be covered in long or brief form.)
I solved the problem of recycling the previously recycled by dismissing the book as a repository of all-too-well-known tales, and then writing a provocative essay on ALL ABOUT EVE based on my original views of its genesis. So, in short order, I dismissed Staggs’ book as poorly and pretentiously written; filled with trite trivia and anecdotage: and grievously padded by Staggs’ monumental-only-to-him discovery of the actual stage-door intruder who insinuated herself into Elizabeth Bergner’s life, thereby inspiring Mary Orr’s short story, “The Wisdom of Eve,” which, in turn, formed the basis for ALL ABOUT EVE. This self-impressed archeology is about as significant to Mankiewicz’ film as Staggs’ detailed chapter on “Applause,” the 1970 musical based on the plot and characters of ALL ABOUT EVE, but with all of Mankiewicz’s zingers replaced by the less elegant, musical comedy wit of Comden & Green.

This was not sufficient for my editor, however. If I was going to make such disparaging remarks, I would have to detail exactly what was wrong with every chapter. My deeply offensive male Gorgon, as I thought of him, lacked the politeness of other literary editors. When, for example, the Gorg requested a plot summary of “Eve,” he didn’t call me a numbskull nor a cretin in failing to supply one, but something far more wounding. In fact, all of the Gorg’s edits, great and small, were accompanied by hugely insolent comments on my illiteracy, stupidity, and ill-usage. And I absorbed this body-blow punishment for three, castigating edits. (I am pleased to see that the Times’ top film critics have recently employed the term “nexus,” which the Gorg thought only fit for Henry Miller and yours truly.)

Actually, I was the one being ill-used, but I had such a large investment of time in the damned review, that I swallowed my Gorgon’s contumely and pointed out why Zsa Zsa was only trashing Marilyn as a bimbo, because her then husband, George Sanders, was overinterested in MM. This was why Staggs had used a slanderous passage from Zsa Zsa’s autobiography to punch up the uneventful shooting history of EVE. The only bit of scandal on AAE was that Gary Merrill and Bette Davis, playing lovers in the film, fell for each other so completely that they quickly divorced their respective spouses in order to wed each other and make their lives a continual shouting match. This, in itself, was very, very old news. Fifty years old, to be precise.

By analyzing the sins of each chapter at my editor’s behest, I transformed my initial bored dismissal into a hatchet job. In fact, I made every change required of me by the Gorg, but for two:

I could never find a more apt nor witty summation had I tried
.
This conclusion seemed perfectly just for the loopy prose stylist who had written, “The subtext [of “All About Eve”] has beguiled several generations of devotees, largely gay men, who have ‘read’ the film as though it beamed a limelight into the closet of their hearts.” Ed Wood could have written that incredible sentence himself, but the Gorg said I could not defame a writer so definitively. “Subtext” my ass to gays’ appreciating the film even more than straights. Mankiewicz’ significance is in the lines, not beneath them.

As the Gorg never told me he was not running the piece until long after the pub date, I could not place it with another important book review. I am most grateful to my friend Roy Frumkes, who commended it, published it on his filmsinreview website, and commissioned the present essay.

My unfamiliarity with DVD commentaries caused me, at first, to decline the producer’s initial offer to speak to picture all through a full-length screening of EVE. Not knowing that the soundtrack would be muted for my remarks, I feared competing with Joe’s elegant dialogue and, also, that I would not have enough to say to cover the film’s running time of 138 minutes.

Initially, I chose only to make isolated comments on various aspects of the film to the producer Young’s Nagra tape recorder, placed on my travertine dining table in New York City. This accounts, possibly, for the inapposite scenes shown while I recount Joe’s explication of the fleeting shots which revealed Eve as a Lesbian (which were hard to slip by the censors, in 1950, when there were no Lesbians in the movies). My/Joe’s observations are, curiously, not synced to the shot of Eve and her roommate, arms linked, triumphantly climbing the boarding house stairs after luring the playwright from his marriage bed to tend the supposedly sick Eve; as well as the scene at the end, where the disgruntled Eve only warms to her young fan, Phoebe (who has snuck into her apartment) after persuading her to stay the night.

The second session, to record my opinions of THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR, (with additional comments on ALL ABOUT EVE) was conducted nearly two weeks later in a sound studio in Los Angeles with one technician running a large sound-monitoring board and another slowing or speeding through MRS. MUIR. Even though early morning is not my best hour, being able to comment to the picture and having it slowed or rewound as I directed was a boon to me as commentator.

My one grief was that I had made copious notes while screening MRS. MUIR in my hotel room, but I could not watch the monitor and look down to read my notes as, apparently, did Jeanine Basinger, my opposite number, who, I confess, puts me to sleep with her detailed, lengthy, reader’s precision. In comparison, my off-the-cuff comments are genuine while Professor Basinger seems like a pedant and supreme apple-polisher in commending every last one of Fox’s gifted technicians’ skills and vastly overpraising the limited gifts of Gene Tierney.

I knew I had done something perceptive when a noted editor in the publishing world told my partner, recently, that, “I should ease up on Gene Tierney,” I forget exactly what I said about the somnolent vacuity of this former cover girl with perfect cheekbones whom Fox made one of its wartime stars. I must try once more to endure Professor Basinger’s lecture to determine whether I only confined myself to Tierney’s monotonous line readings. Mankiewicz claimed that the Fox stars Tierney and Jeanne Crain were imposed upon him by Zanuck very much against his will.

Now, while it is perfectly true that Tierney and Crain could scarcely act a lick, neither could the Fox star Linda Darnell. One fundamental difference among these stunning women is that Darnell became a favorite Mankiewicz bedmate, and did well for her mentor-lover in A LETTER TO THREE WIVES and NO WAY OUT. Tierney was married to the zealously protective and successful designer Oleg Cassini, while Jeanne Crain was a fervent Catholic mother producing multiple bambini with a virile fellow named Paul Brinkman, as I recall.

Tierney is wiped off the screen by the flamboyant theatricality of Vincent Price in DRAGONWYCK, Mankiewicz’ first directorial effort, and Rex Harrison, polished in theater, film and life as a cad, does a neat job of scene-stealing from his titled co-star. However, Joe liked to play leading man to his leading ladies, and when they rebuffed him–he bridled. Jeanne Crain is perfectly swell in A LETTER TO THREE WIVES.

These epithets of recurrence apply both to Claude Chabrol’s fiftieth film, THE FLOWER OF EVIL, which is yet another murder mystery, and his previous, PASS THE CHOCOLATES. As usual, EVIL concerns conniving among a coven of haut bourgeois provincials who practice those social no-no’s, incest and murder, which keep recurring in successive generations of the old, middle-aged, and young of two securely rich families. Even the oldsters (represented by the great French actress Suzanne Flon) and the easy-on-the-eyes, amorous young (Benoit Magimel, with a superb aquiline nose, and Melanie Doutey) fail to redeem the hard-to-follow back-story of this creaking effort.
Whether EVIL is an homage to Chabrol’s tenacity or to the profligate number of his films, I couldn’t say. But it seems to me unworthy of a Festival which could have booked Sofia Coppola’s LOST IN TRANSLATION in its stead.
I hadn’t realized that anyone, but the old-fashioned Chabrol, still shot day-for-night. But in this one, there is a hint of brilliant blue sky at the top of the frame, reminding us of why this filmmaking convention has become so outmoded.
When Chabrol attempted to imitate his idol, Hitchcock, he paradoxically came into his own. Now, alas, he is only imitating himself.

The Festival revival this year was the British Film Institute’s brilliant restoration of PICCADILLY (UK, 1929/ DVD – Milestone Film), by the noted, ex-patriot, German director E.A. Dupont. Ewald Andre (E.A.) made this Jazz Age drama in London, on the cusp of the sound era, following his greatest success, VARIETY (1925), a German sexual triangle set backstage at the circus. Both VARIETY and PICCADILLY manifest all of the characteristics of Germany’s shadowy UFA style, although the latter’s sexual triangle has a London cabaret background.
Although I disagree with Festival Chairman Richard Pena, who termed this picture one of the landmark late silents, (equivalent to Murnau’s SUNRISE), PICCADILLY is a glorious treat, featuring the 21-year-old, Chinese-American Anna May Wong as a sinuous exotic dancer. Ms. Wong is discovered dancing on the counter of the vast scullery of London’s Club Piccadilly. When she is spotted by the Club’s impresario (Jameson Thomas), he promptly throws over his mistress, the Club’s star (Gilda Gray), for the erotic hand gestures and wide eyes of the truly stunning Ms. Wong, whom American racism doomed to mere crossword-puzzle fame.
Two highlights of the picture for me were the early screen performance of the young stage great, Charles Laughton, as the “Greedy Nightclub Diner,” vehemently protesting a dirty dish, and the elegant ballroom dancing of Cyril Richard, known in the 50s and 60s as the superb musical star and director he became in New York.
Famed novelist and playwright Arnold Bennett receives credit for the clichéd, romantic-triangle script, although it seems unworthy of him. However, the print of PICCADILLY is so vivid and the new jazz score by Neil Brand so good (for a 7-piece orchestra, with Brand playing grand piano) that the DVD is bound to become a collector’s item.

YOUNG ADAM (Scotland/Sony Pictures Classics) is a wan, although reasonably accomplished first film about a sexual cad, Joe, played by the hot Scot, Ewan McGregor. The film’s writer/director is the 36-year-old Scottish, David MacKenzie, adapting a popular Scots novel of the Fifties. The picture has been cannily publicized for its steamy sex scenes and for McGregor’s brandishing his great “sword” once more. In fact, the only unusual sex scene is the one in which Joe pours a white custard he has made (his only accomplishment of the day) all over Cathie (Emily Mortimer), his bedmate of the moment. Not pleased with the pallid look of the all-white custard cutie, he adds a bottle of ketchup to make Cathie more colorful and edible. As for McGregor’s mighty member, I only saw it briefly, at half-mast, in dim light.
Full frontal male nudity is still a no-no for American distributors who apply their fig leaves by dismemberment – not the rapier itself, of course -but the offending shots of one. Colin Farrell in “A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD, is the most recent to be snipped, (after every interviewer asked the new star about having displayed his piece). We, the public, are infinitely curious yet prudish about penises, which are, after all, as common to men as noses.

There is, however, a lot of rutting by Joe, a love’em-and-leav’em bloke, who quits Cathie the moment she announces her pregnancy. Joe is also inadvertently responsible for Cathie’s death, when she accidentally falls into a Glasgow quay, after being rudely brushed aside by Joe, who is fleeing her pursuit. Conscience-stricken, Joe delays writing an anonymous letter to exonerate Cathie’s innocent boyfriend (after Joe), who is condemned to hang for Joe’s deed. Joe sends the letter to the court, only after a fatal sentence has been pronounced, so that he will be cleared of any wrongdoing. By playing such a despicable bloke, the affable McGregor challenges his usual, engaging screen persona. Among Joe’s conquests, Tilda Swinton as a worn-out captain’s wife, and Emily Mortimer as the beauty who gets terminally wet, are both outstanding. However, there is an implicit conflict between Joe’s indecent character and the decent craft of MacKenzie’s filmmaking.

“Chihwaseon” (South Korea/Kino International) is a handsome snooze of a flick by the venerable Korean director, Im Kwon-Taek, who gave us the even prettier fairy tale “Chunhyang” in NYFF 2000. This more recent work actually won the best director award at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, shared with Paul Thomas Anderson for “Punch-Drunk Love,” about which I will say more later. (The Cannes panel of movie pros must have been selecting one from country A and one from country B, as both films are indifferently directed.)

“Chunhyang” was infuriating to Western ears by the nasal voice of a beloved folk singer rasping native pansouri. “Chihwaseon,” is a more earthy tale about the booze and babes of the celebrated 19th century Korean artist, Jang Seung-Up—played by the dumpy, middle- aged Choi Min-Sik, who, for all I know, is as beloved in Korea as Edward G. Robinson was here. But when you set off Min-Sik’s homely face with all the lovelies he beds (his favorite whore-with-a-heart-of-gold comes back to him in the end), his weathered face and form grow increasingly unappealing over two hours.

The famous Korean artist the film celebrates, popularly known as “Ohwon,” may well have been great, but nothing about this film biography is. The flick seems like a would-be “The Last Emperor” on a limited budget.

Remarkably, “The Magdalene Sisters” (Scotland, Ireland/Miramax) is only the second feature film by Scotch actor James Mullan, although it is, surprisingly, a highly accomplished and affecting study of a notorious Sisterhood’s exploitation of young, Irish, unwed mothers, as well as the sexually inclined and the sexually assaulted. (As of July 2003, Mr. Mullen has made two new films) “Sisters” snared Best Film at last year’s Venice Film Festival, which usually honors excellence accurately.

This “women’s prison picture” is drawn from the case histories of several young unfortunates judged to be “loose,” or for giving birth without benefit of wedlock, and then pressed into the slave labor camps of the Magdalene Sisters’ horrific laundries. In these odious scrubs, there was no talk, no pay, and no joy, which was the fate of some 30,000 wretched Irish women in their prime, oppressed by this sadistic Order of older nuns.

Although not mentioned in the film, the Magdalene Sisters Asylums stretched across Ireland, and, albeit under different names, to such former English colonies as Australia and America.

2002 has been an annus horribilis for the Church by revealing how both priests and nuns have scarred the young forever due to their own repressed sexuality. So much for vows of chastity.

The superb quartet of oppressed young women who are the protagonists of this film, are played by two experienced stage actresses (Anne-Marie Duff and Eileen Walsh) and two thespic novices (Dorothy Duffy and Nora-Jane Noone). This quartet gives such empathetic performances that they serve to make Mullan’s black and white case against their wicked elders in black and white clerical garb.

The picture is filled with memorable scenes and one remarkable extended sequence which begins with Anne-Marie Duff gathering something like poison sumac which she proceeds to use, rather than detergent, in a clothes washer, though we don’t know whom she’s getting even with. Subsequently, a young priest, at an outdoor service, begins to tug at his clothing until he tears all of it off and runs buck naked across a field displaying a fearful rash. As he does so, the simpleton played by Eileen Walsh (whom we now understand to be the sexually abused inmate we have glimpsed in a basement window which does not reveal the participants) continues to shout, “You are not a man of God!” at the top of her lungs. This is complex, surprising, and wonderfully economical filmmaking.

The saucy beauty, played by Nora-Jane Noone, gives a splendid performance as an unsuccessful runaway who has her gorgeous hair sheared bloody by the sadistic headmistress, played by English theater great, Geraldine McEwen. (McEwen was an eleventh-hour replacement for Vanessa Redgrave, who left the film to nurse her injured, elderly mother, but this proved no loss. As a stand-in, McEwen is a stand-out – a fiendishly wicked delight).

As you may gather, writer-director Mullan has a flair for the melodramatic. Although the film is set in 1964, the last of the Magdalene Asylums only closed in 1996. The Church, of course, denies all of Mullan’s allegations of abuse and condemns the film as a complete misrepresentation.

“Ten” (Iran, France/Zeitgeist Films) is a claustrophobic aggravation by the famous Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who previously made “Through the Olive Trees” (1994) and “Taste of Cherry” (1997). It all takes place in the front and rear seats of a fashionable car driven by a chic Iranian housewife and her passengers. The lady, who is driving nowhere, engages in ten tiresome conversations with her riders. (You now understand the title, which took me a very long time to grasp. Unless there were actually ten passengers.)

I chiefly remember two arguments between the woman and her handsome, though accusatory, 10-year-old son as well as with her sister, dressed in a traditional chador. The other passengers include a prostitute, and a poor, old, religious woman to whom she gives a lift. These characters were so fascinating that I found it extremely difficult to keep my eyes open.

The film’s budget would appear to be less than a miniscule $100,000. We are trapped in the housewife’s car—her home away from home–whose exterior we are never shown—for the 94 minutes of this soporific endurance test, written, directed and edited by Kiarostami!

Kiarostami evidently has some fixation on driving-as-a-living-death. Only critic John Simon, seated in the middle of a row in front of me, had the nerve to disturb his colleagues by walking out after half an hour. We other, too-patient fools kept waiting for something to occur—like some significant dialogue. But no. This is mise-en-scene as nullity—using a remote-controlled, little video camera and some concealed, miniature spotlights. It’s all miniature, including the intellect of its creator on display.
Kiarostami is now so self-important that he feels he has the right to impose on us; and, indeed, the Village Voice critic had kind words for the film, as did the distinguished critic, Phillip Lopate, writing in Film Comment, the journal of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Festival’s sponsor. Lopate terms “Ten” “My favorite film at the festival.,” and contends “that the austere visuals leave us no exit from the situational tensions affecting the characters.” This opposition critic of Lopate and Hoberman cries foul. The festival’s truly inaccessible films are, inevitably, the delight of intellectuals like Lopate or The Village Voice’s J.Hoberman—i.e., those who go to the cinema to find enlightenment in the profoundly obscure, boring, or dreadful, in order to be superior in print to us mere entertainment-seekers.

Of course, the level of censored discourse in contemporary Tehran may be as dreary and prosaic as portrayed here, but from the old lady hitchhiker babbling about the efficacy of her blessed rosary to the complaints of the driver’s sister, we are talking about stock character whiners. The only variety in the film is that there are some night scenes outside the car’s window, but that is variety of the most minimal visual sort.

The impoverished state of contemporary Italian cinema is shown by “My Mother’s Smile” (Italy), a tedious, dark comedy by the once-promising Marco Bellochio, now 63, who made both the distinctive “Fists in the Pocket” and “China is Near” in the 1960s.
“Smile” concerns the hypocrisy of the Church for canonizing the murdered mother of Ernesto, a children’s book illustrator (Sergio Castelitto, who resembles a 40ish Al Pacino). The unfunny joke is that mamma accepted the murder (by another son) as her due. Apparently, her resignation qualified her with the Church as a martyr, although she was an otherwise despicable woman.

Ernesto, the illustrator, whose work is shown to us via frequent computer graphics, is a confirmed atheist and socialist. By the end of the film he is compelled to fight a saber duel with a 70-year-old Super Catholic. (Prior to this film, I had only known of Lenny Bruce’s Super Jew wearing cape and tights. Whether a Super Catholic is merely ardent or furiously orthodox is a mystery to me.) The dueling ground features a huge TV mast antenna opposite St. Peter’s dome, a shot which amused me more than almost anything else in the picture.

Bellochio throws in a Felliniesque sprite, a pretty and willing blonde (Ciara Conti). But the heavy handed Bellochio is in no way comparable to the blithe Fellini. The picture is groaningly ponderous. It would seem there is no one in the contemporary Italian cinema capable of doing a shrewd satire of the Church’s covering up their widespread molestation of the young. Of course, the influence of the Vatican in one’s own backyard must be inhibiting.

PBS’s dean of documentaries, Frederick Wiseman, has a lot to answer for in setting a bad example. Wiseman’s documentaries now are uniformly long and taxing. They have made it the norm to spend three or more hours with subjects you would not usually want to grant five minutes.

Obviously, choosing the right subject(s) is the sine qua non of the documentarian, in this case, Jennifer Dworkin, in “Love and Diane” (USA,France/Zeitgeist Films), who found a black mother (Diane, 42) and daughter (Love, 18), with suitably fraught histories crying out for documentation.

Love and her five siblings were abandoned as children because of Diane’s crack addiction, from which she has recovered by the beginning of the film. She is now ready to make a home for her kids and to underwrite it by entering the job market, for which she is singularly ill-equipped, having lived off welfare for her entire adult life.

Desertion has condemned Love to a succession of traumatic foster homes and to young motherhood. Like Diane’s brood of kids, Love’s love child is meant to substitute for the void of her absent parents. As a souvenir of her tough life in the streets, Love’s baby (whom she loses and regains in the course of the three-year period the film covers) is infected with HIV.
Obviously, the picture is a reduction of the three years it takes Love to recover her baby and to find a docile man to play house with her. While this documentary only lasts 155 minutes, it seems like a Wiseman endurance contest of far more than three hours.

Oddly, the infant’s infection is medically corrected in the course of the film, while the status of Love’s presumed HIV infection goes unmentioned. Although feisty Diane successfully graduates a job-training program, it is evident that both mother and daughter have been crippled by the social welfare system.

Despite its liberal intentions, this impassioned if protracted film confirms rather than refutes the right wing prejudice against welfare mothers.

And, in spite of Diane’s recovery and joie de vivre as well as Love’s devotion to her infant, these are both women who, I (not FIR, but I) believe, should have been denied the right to bear children—a right, which should be largely restricted to the financially and emotionally stable single parent, if that is not a contradiction.

Inevitably, the pro-life Republicans, who privately abhor blacks, may come to appreciate that their perceived good in multiplying the black population is contradicted by the statistic that nearly one-third of this country’s young, African-American men are incarcerated in the nation’s swelling prison system. The towering budgetary costs of our prisons and the danger to themselves and their property at the hands of jobless blacks may, in time, give even the pro-lifers pause. Their reproductive advocacy and their racial prejudice fundamentally contradict one another.

Diane and Love are both haunted by the suicide of Charles, the collegiate son who supported the family with his earnings (in Diane’s absence) and then blew his brains out prior to the start of the film, and one year shy of his graduation from college. For me, Charles is, potentially, the most interesting character in the film, but, given his suicide, there is no footage of him.
Jennifer Dworkin may have learned filmmaking in the course of the three years she spent with this indigent family (talk about on-the-job training), but I resent the experience of having to endure the filmmaker’s bonding with them. Were “Love and Diane” on PBS, where it most likely will be shown, I would have watched only a fraction of it, as I do of the Wiseman epics. But as the New York film critics greatly admired “Love And Diane,” Jennifer Dworkin has been launched as a documentary maker.

“About Schmidt” (USA-New Line Cinema) opened the 40th New York Film Festival and deserved its top slot. It confirms that Alexander Payne, its director and co-author, has a unique talent for quirky social satire, maturing steadily from “Citizen Ruth” (1996) about abortion politics, to “Election” (1999) about high school politics, to “About Schmidt.” All are exceedingly droll and memorable films of conflicts waged on both social and familial battlegrounds.

Significantly, all three pictures have been set in Payne’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. During the Festival press conference for “Schmidt,” Payne spoke about rediscovering his city while scouting new parts of it for location filming. He also talked about Omaha’s heritage in spawning major film talent (Astaire, Fonda, Brando). To these film immortals of Omaha, we must now add the name of Payne.

From the get-go, the director finds humor even in Omaha’s lack of architectural distinction, by shooting progressive close-ups of a dowdy insurance tower. But it’s the “leggo log” archway over the thruway at Carney, Nebraska, towards the end of the film, which gives Payne his supreme sight gag. Tourist visitors, at this shrine to our Westward pioneers, ascend an escalator into a clouded Technicolor panorama, which forms an utterly surreal union of the present merging with the past.

Jack Nicholson gives a surprisingly reticent performance as a depressed, retired, and suddenly aimless actuary, Warren Schmidt. (Nicholson’s once handsome face, at 65, is now a suitably wrinkled ruin, used for the film’s ad campaign.) Schmidt is swiftly widowed from his domineering, henpecker of a wife (the perfect June Squibb), who has ruled his life so completely that he is no longer allowed to urinate standing up. The shot of a naked, humiliated Nicholson on the throne is an audacious bathroom hilarity—as is Schmidt’s hand-waving, look-ma-no-hands liberation at the toilet, after he is widowed. Only later do we realize that Schmidt’s wife, who has died in the act of shampooing the bedroom carpet, has fulfilled her “cleanliness is next to godliness” carping.

Schmidt’s toilet training submission gets howls from the audience as huge as those, throughout the film, for Schmidt’s five, extended, voice-over complaints, in the form of anguished letters, in which he pours out his heart to the off-screen, never-seen Ndugu, an illiterate 6-year old African orphan whom Schmidt subsidizes for $22-a-month, solicited by an imploring, charitable print ad. (Even Nicholson’s pronunciation of the name Ndugu is a scream.)

With a vast, unused Winnebago camper in back of his house—in which Schmidt had planned to spend his retirement years traveling—his sole, remaining mission is to, unsuccessfully, prevent his only child’s (Hope Davis) wedding, in Denver. Her despised choice is a conniving water bed salesman (Dermot Mulroney), who promotes obvious Ponzi schemes. Ironically, the awful Mulroney character holds Davis in thrall because he is, allegedly, great in bed.

Although Nicholson said at the press conference that his screen behavior is 85% the same from film to film, the eerie character of Schmidt contains none of his usual high spirits or raised eyebrow shtick.

It may be that Nicholson is one of the screen rarities who, like Sinatra, can traverse the bi-polar extremities from the extroverted obsessive-compulsive in “As Good As it Gets” (1997) to the bitter depressive of “Five Easy Pieces” (1970).

Nicholson’s Schmidt is a generic Common Man with a ravaged face and a senior’s shuffle, but we were privileged to see the old, boisterous Jack at the press conference following the screening. I had the temerity to ask him to outline “the considerable differences” he had mentioned between Louis Begley’s novel and the Payne-Jim Taylor screenplay of “About Schmidt.” Nicholson roared that a film contained only a fragment of any novel; that everything about “Schmidt” had been changed; and that if it were easy to convert a novel into a screenplay, he would have played “Henderson the Rain King” during the 30 years he had owned the book and still had the vigor to enact that Saul Bellow protagonist.

Mr. Payne specializes in sending up fraudulent American institutions. His set pieces in “About Schmidt” include the retirement banquet, which begins the picture; high-pressure casket salesmanship at a mortuary; and an elaborate, contemporary wedding with wretched Carpenters chestnuts and other dreadful golden oldies replacing the traditional hymns.

The film reaches comic heights when Schmidt goes to Denver and is crippled by spending the night in one of his sleazy son-in-law’s unfamiliar water beds. Dermot Mulroney, his good looks defaced for the role, is as richly contemptible as the certificates for two-week correspondence courses which the odious salesman has framed and hung in his bedroom.

Kathy Bates’ turn as the once-and-future Hippie mother of Mulroney, with whom he still lives, is sublime, improving on her tough but secretly tender spin meister in “Primary Colors.” (Ms. Bates won the 2002 Best Supporting Actress from the National Board of Review for her performance in “About Schmidt.”)

The monster mom retains her drug habits, her sexual voracity (for Schmidt), and the evidence of every popular hobby, from crocheting to the harp, at which she has ever tried her hand. When Bates doffs her mu-mu and reveals her nude, twelve-hourglass figure, in the course of sharing her hot tub with the injured Schmidt, the audience cheered as if it were at a ball game. It takes supreme sang froid to strip naked when you appear to weigh over 300 pounds.

Many people disliked “Schmidt” because all of its characters are faintly horrid or downright loathsome, in an amusing way. However I look forward to seeing it again [and I certainly did], which is more than I can say for many of the more self-serious Festival offerings.

For the Times’ Stephen Holden to proclaim “Russian Ark” (Russia, Germany/Wellspring) “a magnificent conjuring act” rather than the somewhat tedious, though sometimes impressive whimsy that it is, required a set of detailed production notes he received at the Festival, but which I lacked. (I attended the picture’s New York premiere in late December, three months after its Festival press screening. It opened at the narrow Cinema Village, where it ran for an unprecedented six months, which could be achieved only by favorable word-of-mouth.)

From the program notes, Mr. Holden was convinced that thanks to the use of a High-Definition Video camera, Russian director Alexander Sokurov and his German cinematographer Tilman Buttner (“Run, Lola, Run”) had achieved a 96-minute film in a single take. (A single take implies only one, continuous shot.) The film’s finale alone involves hundreds of costumed dancers gliding to a Tchaikovsky mazurka, conducted by the Met’s Vladimir Gergiev leading his Marinsky (Kirov) Symphony Orchestra. Such an ending could only have been captured perfectly in one take, after any number of misfires—although at the close, the departing, formally dressed dancers appear to be walking with extreme caution as they make their stately, “one-take” exit.

An anonymous critic writing in the January 20003 Film Comment, the publication of the Festival’s host, has wittily termed “Russian Ark,“ “ the first home movie ever to employ a steadicam.”

I believe the one-take claim is “mere propaganda,” as Russian Premier Putin dismissed English Prime Minister Blair’s gung-ho enthusiasm for the forged, MI6 intelligence allegation of Iraq’s instant, nuclear arsenal.

“Russian Ark” is spiced with historical episodes from the court of Catherine and Peter The Great, and is anti-climaxed by the pageantry of Czar Nicholas’ imperial guard massed in formation (for a too-perfect, tracking shot), as well as the monumental ballroom scene mentioned before. (Does the extended tracking shot qualify as part of the alleged single take or is it “mere propaganda”?) I should guess Buttner turned the video camera on and off for the better part of a month, without leaving a single, digital splice mark. But in any case, shooting an elaborate hour-and-a-half film in a single take is just a Guinness-Record-Book stunt of no more significance then Hitchcock’s gimmick, demanding that the cast of “Rope” (1948) perform without stopping until his ten-minute reels of film ran out. This only achieved numbed, walking-on-eggs performances from veterans James Stewart and Sir Cedric Hardwick as well as the pretty-boy killers Farley Granger and (the dull) John Dall. Hitchcock never again repeated such a foolish experiment.

The specific historic vignettes in “Russian Ark” are, occasionally, as piquant as Catherine The Great desperately seeking a chamber pot to relieve herself during the rehearsals of her play, which she interrupts by her quest. (One only appreciates that it’s Catherine’s own play with the aid of the production notes,)

Such historic anecdotes are interspersed with the film’s central argument between a snobbish visitor (in 18th century dress), who has lost his way in the present-day Hermitage, debating with the voice of an off-screen ghost the merits of the vast museum’s holdings. This debate between the incorporeal interlocutor and the antiquated snob defies my comprehension, except as a tedious and increasingly irritating device for showing off many of the museum’s many different rooms and dazzling art works. As the Russian film’s subtitles of this talkative “opera” were insufficient for me, I felt I needed the full libretto.

The intermittent, off-beat, historical cameos enliven the script’s deadly construct of an 18th-century Marquis continually trashing the museum’s famous art works and the décor of the three palaces (which comprise St Petersburg’s magnificent Hermitage). The detractor’s opponent in debate–an unseen spook–is as rotten a device as that of our theatre’s falsely economical one-character plays in which the audience is addressed by a celebrated dead party arbitrarily talking to a theater audience as a collective auditor. It dawns on us, eventually, that the Hermitage itself is the titular ‘Russian Ark’ repository of the nation’s history and culture.

Of course, it helps to know that the great formal ball at the end of the film was the last ever held at the court of Czar Nicholas in the Winter Palace, but that information is only in the production notes’ crib sheets. One requires those notes or the Holden review to know that this lavish display, in 1913, so antagonized the populace that it lead to the Czar’s overthrow in 1917.
The magnificence of the refurbished Hermitage and the film which celebrates it suggest that worship of the Czar and his luxurious residences remains the fervent fantasy of the Russian imagination while the contemptible socialist art and architecture of the long Communist winter is a thing of the past.

As a new, Jewish employee of CBS, in 1965, I was utterly appalled by its new sit-com, ‘Hogan’s Heroes,” about the shenanigans of a German POW camp with a silly Nazi commandant, stupid guards, and a wisecracking American prisoner, Capt. Hogan (Bob Crane), who outwitted the Germans every single week. That the pompous commandant was played by the cultured Werner Klemperer, the son of Otto, the famous Jewish conductor driven from Germany by the Fascists, was more appalling to me than amusing. That the American public, who evidently lacked my knowledge of POW camps, devoured it, just 20 years after World War II, but only 12 after Billy Wilder’s grim POW film, “Stalag 17” was an astonishment. (Except for “60 Minutes,” the public only came to love reality shows 37 years later.)

Paul Schrader’s latest, and one of his best, films, “Auto Focus,” follows the downfall of Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) from a genial L. A. radio show host to the star of “Hogan’s Heroes” and his subsequent descent into sexual obsession. (I understand that Mr. Schrader’s repressive Lutheran background makes him leech all of the joy from human sexuality in his pictures, although it’s comforting to learn, from the Times’ “At The Movies,” that Schrader, in private life, enjoyed such personal, fleshly pursuits as Nastassia Kinski, the star of his remake of “Cat People” in 1982.)

It was dismaying for me to learn that, just 13 years after the start of his series hit, Bob Crane had been bludgeoned to death, in 1978, at the age of 50, in an Arizona condo surrounded by the home videos of himself with the images of hundreds of naked women he had compulsively video-taped.

Greg Kinnear is perfectly cast as the innocent opportunist, Crane, who successively destroys his marriages, family and career, as he becomes an insatiable satyr.

In charting the ignominious disintegration of Crane, Schrader has made a film about an unappeasable sexual appetite as fascinating as Billy Wilder’s movie about a degenerate alcoholic, “The Lost Weekend” (1945).

As Crane’s satanic, yet dependent companion and instructor, John Carpenter – training Crane, his grateful acolyte, in the 60’s novelty of video-taping naked women and then bedding them – Willem Dafoe gives one of his memorably creepy though needy performances.

What is most fascinating about the Crane-Carpenter symbiosis is its latent homoerotic element, which is entirely subliminal. But, if Carpenter was Crane’s assassin, as seems likely, the murder was, clearly, the outgrowth of Crane giving his fellow-swinger the gate. (Carpenter was twice tried for the murder and twice exonerated, so Schrader only shows an anonymous hand on the phone receiver bashing in Kinnear’s head, as opposed to the gruesome death scene photos of Crane impaled, by his murderer, on his video camera’s tripod–which would have been too lurid for this soft-focus film.

Ron Leibman, who has been well over the top as an actor ever since “Where’s Papa,” gives an unusually restrained performance as “Lenny,” Crane’s kindly agent who remains open to his client and friend even after he has become an unemployable disgrace. At the press conference, Leibman said his role was a departure from the way that actors’ agents are usually depicted: as crass and venal by the very actors and directors for whom they have done so much.

The Film Festival’s Centerpiece, “Punch-Drunk Love,” (USA, Columbia Pictures) Paul Thomas Anderson’s much anticipated romantic comedy starring Adam Sandler–seasoned with Anderson’s usual, scatter-shot bursts of violence)– is a total dud (for me, at any rate).

Sandler, one of the most successful alumnae of “Saturday Night Live,” evidently satisfies less sophisticated comedic tastes than mine. The similarly featured David Schwimmer, of “Friends,” makes Sandler look amiable by comparison. (Both men have their limitations—only one facial expression—blank. Of course, Schwimmer has charm and likeability. I imagine Sandler’s appeal must be to grubby, clumsy boys. His ability to snare the attractive girl at the end, despite his maladroitness (although it costs him a pile to schmear his conquest by expensive dinners and gifts) reassures these ill-favored chaps that there is hope for them too.

The current stinker could well equal the pathetic grosses of Sandler’s recent “Little Nicky” (2000), which ended Sandler’s run of high grossing comedies in which he plays the sweetly inept schmuck. My forecast was right on target, though I’ve never perceived what kids find so endearing about Adam Sandler except that he is witless in a non-witty culture.

Sandler and the English rose Emily Watson “failed to connect” or to make an interesting pairing as her character (Lana Leonard) is refined (Watson is, after all, drama schooled), while Sandler, as Barry Egan, plays his usual uncouth Neanderthal. It is difficult to see what Watson sees in the Sandler character (he’s uncouth but passionate, I suppose) and it’s equally hard to accept Sandler as a sweet guy who, just occasionally, goes into such berserk, violent rages that he destroys a picture window and an entire men’s room. Sandler’s screen anger, of course, is all trumped up grimacing.

Sandler’s character has seven identical sisters (this is the level of Anderson’s invention) and the team of vicious hitters, who comes after Barry, are played by four, actual, blond brothers. Mr. Anderson finds some irony in multiple siblings, but fails to show us the seven sisters, which should now be easy to create by computer graphics.

The film’s logo, a remarkable shot of black foreground figures (in a dance clinch) silhouetted against a pastel-colored, sun-drenched, Hawaiian passing parade is a truly superb image–but one great shot hardly makes for an entire feature film.

Anderson regular Philip Seymour Hoffman contributes another notable performance as a raging bully, but he’s only in a couple of scenes.

One of the film’s ultra-whimsical plot strands involves Sandler (who has a large, San Fernando Valley warehouse of unamusing toilet novelties) buying shelves full of Healthy Choice pudding mix in order to get a million free miles from an unnamed airline. The Sandler character is taking advantage of a loophole in the pudding-airline tie-in, although he has never flown previous to his pursuing Emily Watson’s Lena Leonard to Hawaii.

The pudding packages are piled in Egan’s warehouse but there is no pay-off to this limp sight gag, nor to the mystical, symbolic harmonium, which falls off a truck early in the film, and which Sandler takes in without ever playing (though we see and hear it late in the film).

The film does feature the greatest imaginable cautionary to having phone sex via a credit card – a situation which may been based on a real-life experience of Anderson’s but which is turned, by him, to typically unfunny account. In short, the much-heralded, young Mr. Anderson, who shared best director honors at Cannes with Im Kwon-Taek, the venerable Korean filmmaker, has no gift for romantic comedy or whimsy. In fact, except for the first half of “Boogie Nights,” I’m not sure that Anderson has any ability. The award from the Cannes jury is the kiss of death, and “Punch-Drunk Love” vanished soon after its commercial run coincided with its Festival premiere.

I think Anderson should bring back the plague of falling frogs in the San Fernando Valley from the 3-hour “Magnolia” (1999)–they were ludicrously funny (The Valley is Anderson’s pet location, as Omaha is Alexander Payne’s.)

I longed to ask Anderson and Sandler where the idea for the confiscatory phone sex/credit card rip-off came from, at their dismaying press conference, but they were too busy cavorting as dorks –a character the seemingly brain-dead but pompous Sandler plays authentically in real life.

The suspenseful plot device of the new film, “The Son” by the Belgian Brothers Dardenne (Belgium, France/ New Yorker Films) is that a vocational school carpentry teacher, Olivier (Olivier Gourmet), who is highly selective of the young men he will train, unwittingly, takes in a diffident youth, just out of reform school. He lavishes his care and attention on this skittish young man (Morgan Marinne) in order to compensate for his profound grief over his recently murdered young son.

Before long, we grasp that his favorite new pupil is, ironically, his son’s inadvertent strangler. By the time the teacher’s ex-wife grasps who he is, she thinks her ex is demented to have any contact with the youth whose deed has devastated their marriage.
It is our anticipation that when Olivier learns what his pupil has done, he will justifiably slay him, except that the Dardennes make their religious parables in grubby, working class milieus and this one is a variant of the Old Testament tale of father Abraham sparing his son Isaac’s life through the mediation of divine mercy. The picture’s title implies that if you endow any youth through the power of paternal love you have made the young man your “son.”

“The Son” is a splendid film, as fine as the Dardennes’ previous “La Promesse” (1996) and “Rosetta” (1999). All three films concern the life and death interactions of perfidy and fidelity of children and parental figures in squalid settings. The father/teacher, played by the Dardennes’ regular, Olivier Gourmet, is familiarly called Olivier in the film. (M. Gourmet beat out Jack Nicholson in “About Schmidt” (the heavy favorite) for the best actor award at Cannes 2002.)

The spying teacher (who is always running into his shop room intending to catch his students at some forbidden frivolity) is most often photographed from the rear in a close-up of the back of his thick neck and head. The shot is vaguely amateurish, like the Dardennes masterful “home movies”.

Most commercial directors would have artificially hyped the suspense of the sequence where the aggrieved father and the guilty boy are alone together in a lumber warehouse. But by being so non-Hitchcockian, the no-hiding-place situation becomes almost unbearably intense and our dread increases while the pair play cat and mouse among the stacks of freshly-cut lumber.

The Times’ Elvis Mitchell calls the Irish documentary “Bloody Sunday” (U.K, Ireland/ Paramount Classics) “magnetic and impassioned melodrama.” In fact, all of the New York critics that I read were impressed with this rousing recreation of a fatal Catholic activist march against trigger-happy British troops in Derry, Northern Ireland, on January 30, 1972.

One major problem with the picture is that it is usually spoken in the thick Irish accents of the region, which made most of the film incomprehensible to me and my companion. Paramount Classics, aware of American audiences antipathy to reading sub-titles, failed to title this “foreign language” film because it is, after all , in English. (The recently issued [4/22/03] Paramount DVD features English sub-titles. Using this feature would be the ideal way, for American audiences, to view this worthy film.) (“Bloody Sunday” won the 2002 Berlin Festival best picture where it was sub-titled in German.)

By the critics’ unearned comparison of “Bloody Sunday” to the brilliantly suspenseful “ The Battle Of Algiers” (1965), to date the foremost documentary-style feature on Colonial oppression, we are reminded that American audiences know the Gillo Pontecorvo’s great “Algiers” from its sub-titles.

The film’s commercial run in New York, (coinciding with its Festival premiere), proved short-lived despite the good reviews. New York audiences are evidently bored by now with the endless Irish “troubles” and didn’t want to see a black-and-white account of a film they intuited, despite the Times’ rave, would be hard to understand, about an incident famous in Irish history but little-known here.

The film dramatizes, in annoyingly choppy black-outs which make the eyes eventually close, a recreation of the Londonderry massacre in which 27 unarmed civil rights marchers were shot (13 were killed) by British militia. The film was given a context for the Festival audience by the writer-director Paul Greengrass telling the audience that the shooting occasioned decades of armed reprisal by the IRA against the British military occupation.

The advance buzz on this year’s New York Film Festival was that it was “unusually weak” — top heavy with Asian films as 8 out of the 27 selections — while the featured, opening night film, Lars von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark,” was proclaimed (in mid-May, by Time’s Richard Corliss) a ludicrous “factory musical” with a rock star, Bjork, who “could neither sing, dance, or act.”

Such predictions proved inaccurate as they were made by those who had no first-hand knowledge of the films — except for Corliss, who filed before “Dancer” had been awarded the Palme d’Or and Bjork the Best Actress at Cannes. Of course, it is easy to mock a picture like “Dancer” with a penny-dreadful plot worthy of a silent film melodrama, and preposterous musical sequences compiled from the coverage of one hundred, fixed, video cameras. (More on “Dancer” to follow.)

I found it an unusually rich year, enhanced by the participation of most of the films’ directors and a number of their stars at the press conferences following the screenings.

For a moviegoer like me, increasingly starved for foreign films, even in New York City, the Festival has become a great source of cinematic nourishment. While it lacks the abundance of offerings at Cannes, Montreal, and Toronto, in a year of worthy selections, like this one, you can well believe that you have savored the cream of the world cinema’s crop. Most of the critics’ screenings were held at the Walter Reade Theater, the one Lincoln Center venue built especially for film projection, in which all but the front rows have excellent seats. When one compares the sound system at the Walter Reade to that of Alice Tully Hall, (the chamber music and recital auditorium where the public screenings and a number of the critics programs are held), you truly appreciate the privilege of a press pass. One could only wish for increased air conditioning at the usually stifling Walter Reade.

Covering all but five of the Festival offerings, with accompanying press conferences, proved a stimulating exhaustion, to coin a phrase.

For his new outrage, “Dancer in the Dark,” [Denmark/Sweden - Fine Line Features] writer-director-cinematographer Lars von Trier has juiced up the formula that made him famous in his English-language debut “Breaking the Waves” in 1995. “Dancer” also visits calamity upon calamity on a sweet, naive young woman, ending in fatality; and it executes the victim in the most grotesque manner possible. In “Dancer,” it’s done by hanging the heroine, strapped to a back restraint, in order to ridicule capital punishment in America. (I’ve always thought that capital punishment cried out for musical treatment, didn’t you?)

The star of this endeavor is not Emily Watson, the trained Royal Shakespeare Company actress of “Waves,” but rather the inexperienced, Icelandic rock goddess, Bjork. She plays Selma, a near-blind factory worker and musical comedy fantasist. Selma’s fantasies are meant to justify the MTV-style musical numbers which intrude, periodically, on the deeply dopey melodrama, the most ludicrous being Selma’s aria before she is hanged. While I think “Dancer” has to be seen to be disbelieved, I find Bjork the prime reason to see the silly thing. Bjork gave von Trier fits when he called “Action” and she could not perform on cue, but only after she had worked herself up for the take. As an actress, I find her touchingly believable in an impossible role. Her singing is a matter of taste, which, certainly, isn’t mine.

Bjork had the nerve to trust her acting instincts over von Triers’, and is every bit as affecting as Emily Watson in “Waves.” I think she richly deserved the best actress award she received in Cannes (and the NBR Special Achievement Award in January, for which she didn’t show). At the N.Y.press conference, Bjork’s dark, greasy hair, topped by an appalling green, curled hair ribbon to go with her light yellow dress, showed that her fashion sense is every bit the equal of her singing voice — that is, positively Icelandic — and quite comparable to the formal shmatta she wore to the award ceremony in Cannes. Evidently, outlandish sells. Undoubtedly, it also speaks to the looks of many of Bjork’s idolators. I am amused by the uncredited, program annotator who claims that “The musical numbers, built on the neo-realist style pioneered by Stanley Donen, were photographed with a system of more than 100 mini-DV cameras positioned around the set.”

I assume that the neo-realism alluded to is not the black- and-white verismo of Rossellini and DeSica, but the brawny, macho dances of choreographer Michael Kidd in Donen’s “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” which one of “Dancer”‘s dance numbers strives to resemble. There is, of course, a clear difference between Donen/Kidd and Von Trier as cinematic choreographers. The former “neo-realists” designed their coverage of dances with one camera because they were veterans of stage and film musicals, and knew how to design camera angles to best display their exceptional choreography. The so-called “gifts,” as the novice von Trier describes the gleanings from his 100 fixed cameras, are not designed but accidental. While there are quite a few directors who hope for accidents in their shots, they have never been directors of musicals, until now.

According to an interview in “Dancer”‘s press kit, Von Trier believes that “West Side Story” was the last serious filmed musical, though he is, seemingly, unaware that “Story”‘s choreographer, Jerome Robbins, was America’s outstanding ballet and musical theater artist, nor that “Story”‘s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, has gone a lot further in advancing the serious musical than a contemporary “Romeo and Juliet,” which premiered in 1957. Of course, Sondheim has had 43 subsequent years to hone his skills. The sight of the still gloriously beautiful Catherine Deneuve playing Bjork’s dear friend and factory sidekick is as great a treat as the opening satire on amateur theatrics. The theater group is rehearsing “The Sound of Music,” with Selma in the leading role of Maria. Only Deneuve keeps Bjork, the blind diva, from falling off the stage. The extreme literalism of staging of “My Favorite Things,” with every single item of the lyric being brought onstage by Deneuve, is almost a definitive satire on community theater. However, the “professional” musical numbers which follow are also hoots in themselves.

It was a treat to see Joel Grey, as Selma’s father, playing a hostile witness at her murder trial, and tap dancing on a courtroom bench as brilliantly today as he did on Broadway in “George M.” more than 30 years ago. In fact, the entire cast of “Dancer” is excellent, so we should give von Trier a few cheers. Perhaps one day on a double bill in Cinema Heaven they will show “Dancer in the Dark” with James Brooks’s “I’ll Do Anything” (1995) with all of “Anything”‘s musical numbers (written by Prince and other pop luminaries) restored. Then we can truly judge which songs and dances were more out of place, ill-executed, or just inappropriate.

“Yi Yi” (A One and a Two) [Taiwan/Japan - Winstar Cinema] won this year’s best director award at the Cannes Festival for Taiwanese director Edward Yang. At just under three hours, this thick slice of bourgeois family life in Taipai is self-indulgently long (like a number of other films in the Festival) although it has its felicities.

The family’s 8-year-old son and documentarian (he photographs the back of his subjects’ heads) is delightfully grave and a stunner to look at. His father, NJ (Nienjen Wu), the film’s protagonist, is actually a noted screenwriter in Taiwan. Mr. Wu is convincingly morose throughout the flick. NJ’s dejection is due, in part, to his wife’s trip to a funny farm; his technology business’s imminent failure; and his abortive romance with a high school sweetheart who reenters his life while his wife’s away.

The film is punctuated with two feigned suicides; the real, transcendent death of its grandmother, the family’s matriarch; and a melodramatic murder which caps this study of ultra-quotidian, Americanized-Asian lives. Most family sagas, even those with elements of magic realism, bore me to somnolence. I liked best the film’s poetic abstractions: a panning shot of lighted glass office buildings at night to a lyric piano score; the overhead shot of a railroad yard which looked like a hideous, urban excavation scar; and the sound of heavy rain on an overpass during a meeting of the film’s young lovers. (I mistook the young woman of this couple as the daughter of the family, because she is the next-door neighbor and is always in the family’s apartment.) But this was only one of the many errors I made from having my eyes glued to the sub-titles of a long film.

So

Nagisa Oshima, now 68, who gave us the 1975 sexual shocker, “In the Realm of the Senses” returns from a 14-year absence from filmmaking with “Taboo” (Gohatto) [Japan-New Yorker Films]. It concerns Kano (Ryuhei Matsuda) an effeminately pretty recruit to a samurai regiment, who, despite his thin wrists and long hair combed prettily forward, wields a wicked practice sword. The picture’s novelty, which would have appalled Kurosawa, is that all the grizzled veterans in this world-without-women lust for beautiful Kano. Of course, baby-faced Kano proves to be a true Samurai executioner, which gives him the equivalent of cajones.

We are woken from “Taboo”‘s snooze-making dialogue scenes by the violence of lots of hand-to-hand combat with both wooden practice swords and razor-sharp steel blades for execution. But even the simulated, under-a-blanket anal sex is excruciatingly dull.

It is mighty confusing when pretty boy Kano puts to death a balding retainer who looks just like the baldy who has been buggering him. In a subsequent scene, the bugger proves to be quite alive. Homosex among samurai warriors as late as 1865 (Kurusawa’s samurai pictures date back to Europe’s medieval era) may have a certain frisson, but there is absolutely nothing erotic about Matsuda’s passive, painted and combed boy-toy.

Pansori is the Korean song form of narrative sung speech similar to the German sprecht stimme. To a Korean, these croakings lift the spirits. To a foreign ear, this caterwauling is a repellent..

Pansori first generated the 18th Century, Cinderella-like fable of “Chunhyang,’ which moved from song to novel to drama, to no-less-than-14-Korean films before the present one. To summarize, Chunhyang, the beautiful daughter of a Korean prostitute (the lowest of the low in ancient Korean society) is wed to, and then separated from, the handsome son of an aristocrat. After long separation and torture (Chunhyang refuses to oblige a lascivious local governor who treats her as though she were her mother), Chunhyang is rescued by her beloved who makes their union royal in a state ceremony.

This is an atypically lavish production for a Korean film utilizing 12,000 costumes and 800 extras. It had an unusually lengthy, six-month shoot, the first two of which were scrapped by the veteran director, Im Kwon Taek, whose list of films goes on for an astonishing number of pages. Taek’s difficulty was in harmonzing the singing narrative with his pristine images and soaring crane shots. Mine was enduring earfuls of grating pansori. “Chunhyang” could have been an international success as a hot, date film, a la Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet,” with two very attractive young lovers (Lee Hyo Jung as Chunhyang and Cho Seung Woo as Prince Mongryong). But it is fatally marred by the agonizing pansori, declaimed “a national treasure” according to director Taek, whose cracked-voice wailing makes Tom Waites’ sound silken-toned. Only a Korean aficionado would purchase the soundtrack to “Chunhyang.”

The foreign nature of Asian music is what makes so much Asian theater intolerable to this world theater fan. At the end of “Chunhyang,” a theater audience was shown roaring its approval of the film’s famous pansori cantor. Not only was this audience participation jarring to the film’s fairy-tale setting, but it seemed crassly self-congratulatory. This is a strictly parochial film which only Koreans will cheer.

By Sam Staggs
Revised 4/04/00 / Illustrated. 369 pp.
New York: St. Martin’s Press / $24.95

Half a century after its 1950 release, All About Eve endures as “one of the most enjoyable movies ever made,” in Pauline Kael’s estimation. In part, this is because the film features a truly bravura performance by its star, Bette Davis, as a theatrical diva whose temper tantrums towards others are as much fun to watch as are her savage misgivings about herself.

But it is the remarkably literate and witty screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz which makes All About Eve a rarity among American film classics. Mankiewicz’s text is studded with bon mots a la Oscar Wilde, in addition to allusions to a host of historic theater figures. A backstage comedy of ill manners, played by a sterling cast, the film concerns the rise of a scheming actress (Anne Baxter)–the eponymous Eve–who plots to supplant a reigning Broadway star (Davis) by betraying every member of the star’s coterie after they have befriended her. All About Eve is really all about succeeding as well as succession.

Sam Staggs’ “All About ‘All About Eve’” is not nearly as comprehensive a work as its title suggests. It leaves out Mankiewicz’s own, elegant, 1972 essay on the film’s creation combined with his brilliant screenplay, titled “More About ‘All About Eve.’” Mr. Staggs denigrates Mankiewicz’s book as “turgid and meandering” while praising his own work by writing, “I had unified the contradictory narratives and random gossip into an authentic account of All About Eve and all those connected with it.”

Mr. Staggs commits such turgid sentences as, “The subtext has beguiled several generations of devotees, largely gay men, who have ‘read’ the film as though it beamed a limelight into the closet of their hearts.”

Despite his current book’s many charts and sidebars (every esoteric theater figure receives at least an introductory paragraph), this volume is composed almost entirely of stale gossip and marginal trivia in lieu of any significant analysis. (Mr. Staggs’ only previous publication is the obscure novel, “MM II: The Return of Marilyn Monroe.”)

Much space is given to such peripheral subjects as Mary Orr, the author of the 1946 Cosmopolitan short story, “The Wisdom of Eve,” on which All About Eve was based. Staggs also profiles Martina Lawrence, the real-life prototype of Orr’s Eve, who was befriended and then rejected by the actress Elisabeth Bergner. Though Staggs appreciates that Orr’s fiction is “a second-rate story in a forgotten magazine [sic]” and merely “the embryo” for Mankiewicz’s magisterial script, he gives Orr a parity with Mankiewicz which she does not deserve.

In this hodge-podge of a book, Staggs analyzes the coffee and ink stains as well as the lipstick blots in the archival copy of Bette Davis’s script at Boston University so portentously, that you can never take him seriously again.

Staggs discovers a “sacra conversazione ” in one of the film’s best-known production stills of Anne Baxter, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe and George Sanders at the “Fasten-your-seat-belts” party scene. But since the photo lacks a Virgin and Child, Staggs quickly changes his pretentious designation to one of “three types of female beauty.”

In Staggs’ most useful discovery, he cites seven lines from All About Eve which made their way into Edward Albee’s equally bitch-witted play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, (1962).

The only notable but well-worn story of the uneventful production–the scripted romance between Bette Davis and Gary Merrill becoming real–is expanded by Staggs to inordinate length. To spice up his tired gossip, the author reprints a scurrilous and highly implausible anecdote from Zsa Zsa Gabor’s autobiography depicting Marilyn Monroe as an insatiable nymphomaniac.

As if it weren’t very old news, Staggs outs Eve as a gay cult film.. This tiresome way of interpreting the picture may seem significant to Staggs, but such an appreciation is irrelevant to the film’s intrinsic merits.

By magnifying the subtly implied lesbianism of Eve and terming “bi-sexual” both Eve’s conqueror, the vicious theater critic Addison De Witt, as well as the actor who portrayed him (George Sanders), Staggs gives All About Eve far more of a gay spin than it warrants.

Though Staggs calls Mankiewicz “a heterosexual trapped in a gay sensibility,” the writer-director would have deplored any “hint of mint.” Mankiewicz was a noted womanizer who was highly contemptuous of both male and female homosexuals. When I had occasion to compare him with George Cukor as a famed director of actresses, Mankiewicz cracked that “George only befriended female stars. I fucked them!” This may be one of the reasons why Mankiewicz made the hateful Eve a lesbian.

Manifestations of Eve’s lesbianism are only twice briefly discernible. First, after a duplicitous late-night phone call to lure the married playwright to her room, Eve links arms with the caller (her rooming-house mate) and, both dressed in night wear, they joyfully climb the stairs together. Second, in the final scene, Eve’s hostility towards a young intruder melts after “Phoebe” offers to spend the night.

A more important topic in the film concerns the conflict between Broadway’s prestige and Hollywood’s lucre. It was a source of profound ambivalence to Mankiewicz and it keeps cropping up throughout All About Eve, although it is overlooked by the author of this supposedly authoritative study.

The film was actually a valentine to the theater community which Mankiewicz yearned to join, rather than the poison-pen letter many mistook it for. Although Mankiewicz moved to New York in 1952, he never realized his great ambition to become a Broadway playwright. He did complete one full-length play, Jefferson Selleck–contrary to Mr. Staggs’ claim that he never finished one–and began many others which he failed to conclude.

Staggs perceives that “in structure, Eve is the offspring of Citizen Kane,” but he refers only to such similarities as their multiple narrators and duplicated scenes shot from different perspectives, which Mankiewicz envisaged for Eve but which Darryl Zanuck (the film’s producer as well as the head of Twentieth Century Fox) deleted. A more significant correspondence between Citizen Kane and All About Eve can be found in the rivalry between the films’ respective writers. Herman Mankiewicz won a 1941 screenwriting Oscar for Citizen Kane, which his younger brother, Joe, greatly coveted. (Significantly, All About Eve is framed by a gilded awards ceremony.) Joe owed his film career to Herman’s bringing him to Los Angeles in 1929 when he was only 20. In the 1940s, as Joe ascended the ladder of success which Herman was skidding down, the highly competitive Joe was continually nettled by being known in the film colony as Herman’s “younger and less witty brother.” Though a role reversal with his brother had taken place, he could never forget this sobriquet as Herman’s junior and lesser.

All About Eve may be based, in part, on Orr’s short story, but the ongoing competition between the younger and older Mankiewicz brothers provides its unconscious vitality. The picture’s combat between an aging star, Margo Channing (Bette Davis), and a gifted, ambitious, and strikingly younger upstart, Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), is remarkably similar to the rivalry between Herman and Joe.

While Mr. Staggs puts Citizen Kane in his “pantheon of classic screenplays,” he fails to note how remarkable it is that the disparate but similar Mankiewicz brothers wrote two of the greatest American screenplays within a single decade.

Staggs claims that the film’s final image of Eve’s successor bowing to countless self-images, is a “mirror sequence” wholly “borrowed” from Orson Welles’ shattered mirror shoot-out at the end of The Lady from Shanghai. While Welles’ sequence is characteristically dynamic, Mankiewicz’s is static–albeit reverberant as a metaphor of youth’s inevitable succession. As usual, Staggs gets it wrong, and proves that he is to film journalism what Ed Wood was to filmmaking.