A couple of short films on DVD showed up in my mailbox this past week, both of them very well made and beautifully acted.

In SAILCLOTH (Academy Award nominee for best short feature, 2011), an old man (John Hurt) escapes from his nursing home, and, using his purloined sheets as a sail, goes out to sea to take care of some final business. The film has no dialogue, but the lonely beauty of the coastal village in Cornwall where it was shot and Richard Cottle’s haunting but not overwhelming score, coupled with John Hurt’s superbly nuanced performance make this a very fulfilling 18 minutes.

The plot of this little film encompasses some nice surprises, which I would be loath to give away. Suffice it to say that it is about triumphing over loss in a very personal way, which makes it sad, uplifting, and, also, funny. There’s Hurt, going through the lonely ritual of readying himself for the day in a sparse, single room. And, there’s Hurt, trotting briskly down the flooded hall of his nursing home, while holding aloft an umbrella. It is a logical development of the plot, and yet it’s an amusing, almost absurdist image.

Hurt plays the only major character in this production; and how much story, how much character we gather from the emotions that cross his aging face! In a December 2011 review of Hurt’s performance in the Beckett play Krapp’s Last Tape, Times reviewer Charles Isherwood wrote that the actor’s expressions reveal a “scarifying picture of the man’s shuffling, tormenting thoughts.” Hurt’s masterful ability to convey fleeting and conflicting emotions imbues this project as well. The corners of his eyes crinkle, and his face lights up when he makes eye contact with a young boy playing on the shore and then, suddenly, a mask of grief overtakes his visage. In a very unforced way, the inner life of the character is revealed.

Watching Hurt, one feels that one is observing a person with a real history, not an actor taking on a character. We see an old man, determined to accomplish one final, meaningful act, but we also observe the vigorous and efficient way he carries it out: the almost jaunty precision with which he executes his escape from the nursing home, the calm determination with which he defies the whipping wind while raising the bed sheet sail. Although this bereft pensioner has been put out to pasture, inside he’s still a quick, feisty, and independent man.

Director Elfar Adalsteins dedicated this short to his own grandfather. Adalsteins has said that he never intended to make another short (after his first, SUBCULTURE), but following the death of his grandfather, he had a flash of an idea–his grandfather’s bed sheet transformed into a sail. This image quickly evolved into a script. The story may be fictional, but the film is a lovely tribute to a man’s spirit.

THE PALACE

I am not one to watch action films. Scenes of violence, chase scenes, even scenes of psychological tension, send me flying to the corner of the room (if we’re lucky enough to be watching at home–into the Ladies Lounge if we are in a multiplex) where I stand with my back to the screen, crying out, “Mark, what’s happening? Is it over?” If this occurs in the multiplex, then, obviously, Mark is still in the theater watching the movie, while I am beseeching my image in the restroom mirror. I know, it’s ridiculous, but it’s because, to me, such movies are like giant nightmares that I cannot get out of.

So, imagine how I felt while watching THE PALACE, which is a fictional account of a real nightmare–the 1974 invasion of Cyprus. According to press materials, the story is based on the confession (later recanted) of one of Turkey’s most respected actors, who said that as a young conscript in the Turkish army, he had been forced to murder ten Greek Cypriots.

THE PALACE presents, in real time, fifteen horrifying moments in the life of a little family in Cyprus. The four are trapped inside their bombed out home as soldiers strafe the city, until father Taki (Christopher Greco) urges them out into the street, where they dodge more bullets, until they enter an ancient, solid palace, which seems a haven. Unfortunately, others have already sequestered themselves there and are terrified that the cries of the infant in mother Stella’s (Daphne Alexander) arms will alert the soldiers to their whereabouts.

The soldiers arrive moments later, and everyone scrambles to hide in closets, trunks, and armoires. Stella holds her hand over her infant’s mouth, as she watches through the slats of the closet as the troops swagger around, destroying and looting. When there is a noise from an armoire, Sergeant Akilan (Kevork Malikyan) orders his soldiers to shoot through the doors. They open the portals, and bodies tumble out. The sergeant is completely desensitized and does not see the poor unarmed victims as human beings; they are merely inanimate things, with rings and cash for the taking.

Throughout the scene, the camera shifts between the point of view of the soldiers and the partially obstructed view of the Stella, watching through the closet slats. This split POV is a terribly effective way to create tension. In spite of the shifting POV, emotionally, this film is not the soldiers’ story; the viewer’s guts are churning for the mother and her family. We experience her grief and fear.

I would not call THE PALACE an actor’s movie, as there are no sharply focused close-ups of actors running the gamut of emotion. The tension is sustained by the editing, and by cinematography that, in its graininess and muted focus, evokes the harshness and the depersonalizing effects of war. And yet the performances are both raw and deep. Although we almost always see Daphne Alexander through slats and dust, half obscured by shadows, her embodiment of the mother’s anguish and terror is palpable. The actors playing the antagonists, the Turkish soldiers, economically embody a hierarchy of men of war–from the hapless conscript Omer (Erol Afsin), to the inured sergeant–with very few lines and very little time on screen.

According to the film’s official site, THE PALACE was shot on location in Cyprus, “along the United Nations Green Line in Nicosia, in buildings and streets still ravaged by the 1974 Cyprus conflict.” An international crew and cast collaboration between Australians, Cypriots, Turks, Germans, Moroccans, Brits, Greeks, and South Africans, THE PALACE is a succinct and harrowing antiwar statement

The beautifully titled and cinematically striking short THE SEA IS ALL I KNOW is almost unbearably sad. As its star, Melissa Leo, said in a press conference following the screening I attended, it is about a subject that is as “unspeakable” as it is common: the illness and death of a beloved family member. Having recently been through this experience with my mother, I am particularly attuned to the universality of this condition–almost all of us will end up as either the caretaker or the one who is cared for; many of us will experience both roles. What makes THE SEA IS ALL I KNOW even more heartbreaking, however, is that it is about parents enduring the demise of a child.

Sara (Melissa Leo) welcomes her terminally ill adult daughter Angelina (Kelly Hutchinson) back into her old bedroom. Although the doctor observes that Angelina would be better off in the hospital, Sara wants to give her the succor of mother love and the comfort of memory, stuffed animals from childhood; a window view of the sea. We first see Sonny (Peter Gerety), Angelina’s father and Sara’s estranged husband, afloat on the Long Island Sound. He is a fisherman and more comfortable on a boat than he is dealing with Angelina’s illness (it’s a line of his dialogue that gives the film its title), but his need to spend time with his precious daughter overcomes his fear and reluctance. Angelina asks Sara and Sonny to assist her in committing suicide. Both parents grapple with anger, guilt, and loss of faith. In the end, their daughter’s bravery in the face of death not only convinces them to help her, it also helps them to forgive themselves.

The locations, art direction, and cinematography of this film give it a melancholy beauty, enriching the story telling. The small, cluttered house is the archive of a once happy family. As Melissa Leo said after the screening, “that window in the girl’s bedroom seemed so problematic. It was a double paned window that had all this condensation, but somehow Jordan [the director] invited that in, to be an integral and vastly important part of the production.” And it’s true; when the camera tracks Angelina peering through that window–her view of the sunny day and the sparkling water marred by smudges, glare, and her own reflection–we get a sense of what it’s like to be looking out at the “regular” world from within that marred and weakened body. Another lovely moment: the camera watching the clock on the sickroom wall; watching the time slowly and yet inexorably run out. The trees outside continuously rustle in the sea breeze, oblivious to the grief within.

The three actors are truthful and moving in their roles, and they look and behave as if they are a family unit. Their physicality tells us more than words can about their feelings and their relationships. When Angelina arches in pain, Sara embraces her and holds her to her breast, as if the young woman had regressed to infancy. Sonny puts the heaviness of his emotions into the way he drags a fishnet out of the water, into the savagery with which he guts the fish.

It’s impressive when a film this short can feel so layered and so complete. If I have one caveat, it’s that I don’t think the film ends up being about quite what the people who made it think it’s about. The tagline on the official poster states: Love never fails. At the press Q&A, Melissa Leo said, “As much as it is about the passing of our daughter, it is about the reuniting of us, of our love.” And Jordan Bayne, the filmmaker, said, “Somehow the daughter’s dying was a healing for them. And brought them back around to seeing each other for maybe what they originally saw each other for.”

In the film, the estranged couple does come together in a moment of grief, which turns into sexual passion. It’s not overplayed in the film, and it seems like a very natural unfolding of events. But as it is played, I am not really sure how hopeful it is. That it is a momentary assertion of the life force over death, yes, I can see that. But if it’s meant to indicate that this couple has overcome its mistrust of each other and through the daughter’s death will gain a new lease on life, well, I don’t buy it. Although I guess there is something hopeful about a fractured family coming together to ease each other’s unbearable pain.

A short film is like a poem, the structure needs to be in place, but it doesn’t need to be filled out with the details of a novel. As Melissa Leo said, “this is a thirty minute film, there’s not a feature here. Just like in the O’Henry story ‘The Gift of the Magi,’ you don’t want that story to be longer than the seven/eight pages that it is. That’s it. You find out what matters to these people, and you get to the middle where they both make their so beautiful mistake, and the end when they find out that each of them has made this grand and beautiful mistake for the other. That is all you need. . . That’s probably the most important thing about filmmaking, that you really know what your story is, and you restrict it to only the things that are necessary to tell that story.” THE SEA IS ALL I KNOW is a complete, short story about loss–and, perhaps, a little hope.

THE MILL & THE CROSS is about the painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but in terms of content and style, it is anything but a biopic. Although there is an actor portraying Bruegel (Rutger Hauer) and we watch as the artist and his contemporaries go through some of the mundane, and the dangerous, events of their daily lives, this is not a dramatic exposé of an artist’s quest for inspiration and/or recognition. This film, like the book that inspired it, is a meditation about the creation and meaning of one particular painting, “The Road to Calvary,” Bruegel’s rendering of Jesus Christ’s journey to the place of his execution.

If you have never seen this famous painting (and you will see it many times, from many different perspectives, if you watch this movie), it depicts a large crowd of people who have come to watch as Christ and two ordinary thieves are executed. In fact, before we even see the opening credits, we see Bruegel and his patron Jonghelinck (Michael York), walking through what seems to be a life-sized, life-filled model of the composition. Bruegel begins to explain the picture’s meaning. The people are in a rather fantastical landscape, which includes an improbably high and twisty rock outcropping, at the top of which a windmill sits (God’s vantage point). Bruegel explains that he has dressed the people in the red uniforms of 16th century Spanish soldiers, and in the peasant costumes of his homeland, rather than in the garb of 33 AD, because he wants to allude to the current oppression of Flanders. These forces form an impressive crowd of the busy and the self involved, as they march, straggle, and throng toward the right, barren side of the canvas–the execution site. Almost obscured, and certainly ignored, by the crowd, the Christ figure struggles to carry the instrument of his own demise.

The film interweaves the events of the painting with the daily lives of Bruegel’s contemporaries. In the early dawn, we watch as torch-carrying peasants cut down the tree that will become the Cross. We observe Bruegel when he chances upon a spider’s web, the circular construction of which will prove the basis for the architecture of his composition. We laugh at clownish figures, who prance and play goofy tunes on their quaint instruments, until we realize that their comic antics are harbingers of doom. They precede the soldiers, who arrive at a gallop, and with arbitrary cruelty chase down one man, beat him to a pulp, and string him up on a Catherine wheel. As the crows peck out his eyes, his wife and a young calf wander helplessly below, both bawling. While this tragedy transpires, Bruegel’s young children squabble, make a mess, and create a chorus of naughty fart sounds, and we, the audience, are privy to the internal monologue of Mary (Charlotte Rampling), the mother of the soon to be martyred man, as she reassures herself that her son will not be murdered.

Although the story does follow a timely sequence of events (pre- to post-execution) Majewski does not provide us with a conventional story arc. What he does is to reveal this picture and its symbolism, and to affirm its lyrical but unsentimental view of human existence. To achieve that, he and his collaborators created what they call a tapestry, a film about art that artfully weaves together multiple locations, actors against blue screens, and CGI. The film is put together so that, imagistically, the brutal and the ordinary always abut what is lovely and good.

On the aural end of things, with the exception of the characters played by York, Hauer, and Rampling, the characters do not speak, and yet, Majewski is committed to real sounds–trees being cut down, ducks clucking, millstones churning, bells ringing–and these provide a powerful, yet noninvasive, soundtrack.

Ultimately, this nearly wordless film reveals a good deal to us of the “bruegelian approach” that the filmmaker embraces. “The wind blows, the wheel turns, and the gigantic merry-go-round of life moves on.”

Lech Majewski is a Polish visual artist, novelist, stage director, screen writer, film director, cinematographer–in short, a 21st century Renaissance man. His mostly wordless films are strange and stylish, from the Gospel According to Harry, a slick, absurdist comedy starring Vigo Mortensen, about domesticity, discontent, and death in a suburban desert (literally); to the lush and nightmarish Glass Lips, a series of hallucinatory vignettes ripped from the experiences of a dysfunctional young man. I spoke to him at the Kino Lorber offices in NYC. Below is a portion of our conversation.

Nicole Potter: Maybe you could talk to me about how this project started; how it came together.

Lech Majewski: I fell in love with Bruegel when I was a kid. My uncle was teaching in a conservatory in Venice, but he lived in Milan, so during the summer we were this poor family from Poland that could use my Uncle’s apartment in Venice. That was always a trip that went from where I was born, to Vienna, and in Vienna we switched trains and then on to Venice. And I always had this day in Vienna, which I mostly spent in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. There is a particular room there, room number 10, devoted to Bruegel. The immense world that he created, it was like a magnet that he created, and I was living inside his paintings.

Gradually I was able to peel the layers of this painting, and find all the underlying symbols and philosophy and the great wisdom of this man–apart from the obvious, the craftsmanship.

NP: So, you had this interest in Bruegel in your background, but would you have done a Bruegel project had the former writer for the Herald Tribune not approached you?

LM: Well, funnily enough, I made a number of Bruegel projects. I used his philosophy. I have to say a few words about his philosophy. Very often he shows the hero of his paintings almost drowned in the crowd of people. And you really have to look very closely in order to discover where the main character is.

For example, look at “The Fall of Icarus” and “The Road to Calvary,” because in a certain way these paintings are very similar. Both show very famous subjects. Usually the painters of that day made those subjects very dramatic. You saw the painful face. You see the fall of Icarus as the beautiful body of this young, godlike man falling from the sky; convulsions, disintegrating wings, and the wax melting. Obviously when you have Jesus Christ on the way to Calvary, you have all this pain and wounds and all that. If you look at the Bruegel paintings, you don’t see these characters. You have to search for them.

So what is he saying to us? What was he saying to his contemporaries? He is saying something multilayered. First of all, he was saying, look, when those acts were happening, the people didn’t notice it. And if it would happen today, you wouldn’t notice it as well. Because you are concerned with the tiny little problems of your everyday life.

That’s on one level. On a second, deeper level, he says look, I am showing them at the nadir, at the lowest possible physical position. Because in “The Fall of Icarus,” you basically don’t see Icarus, you see the farmer in the foreground plowing the soil, and a little bit in the background, you see a shepherd with a flock of sheep, and to the right you see a fisherman, catching fish. And there is a big frigate coming into the bay, and then, to the right you see this little splash of water and two legs sticking abstractly out of this green water. So you don’t see the main character, he is already disintegrating in the water.

And the Christ in “The Road to Calvary”, he is fallen under the burden of the cross. So, they [the main characters] are defeated.

And yet, Bruegel says, they are defeated, they are vanishing, they are at the lowest, and yet for some reason their acts are the salt of our civilization. How strange. Nobody even noticed what has happened, and yet it is so important.

NP: You’re saying that it’s not just the statement that everybody disappears and nobody cares–okay, that is also part of it–but there is also this part of it being about very special people who do have resonance, yet who also disappear.

LM: Yes, but also Bruegel says, look, maybe these normal, daily routines are also heroic. Showing the plowing action, the shepherding action, and the fishing action. These people are taking the fruit of earth and they sustain our life from that. So they are heroes in their own way. So he also, mythologizes, or enhances, the importance of a daily life. This is, the daily life gets more weight out of this situation because it is concurrent with these mythical scenes.

NP: So, how did you get the chance to make this film?

LM: Michael sent me the book, he saw my film Angelus–and he wrote a review of it–he was an art critic who wrote for the Herald Tribune, although he’s retired now. And, in the review he said that I had a Bruegelian mind. He sent me this book. And I read the book. I had read a lot of history of art and his book was particularly beautiful and incisive. No smoke, but facts. It’s just fantastically clear. I thought I was good with Bruegel but Gibson showed me a real dimension of Bruegel. And instantly I saw the images in my head. And that’s usually what happens is that I get the images in my head, and I am spending whatever years I need to spend in order to bring them to life.

So I met with Gibson in Paris, and he thought I was crazy, wanting to do a feature film based on an art essay. He said, this cannot be done. And after a while he scratched his head, and he said, “the impossible is the matter for gentlemen.” So that is how we started to work.

NP: And so, you wrote the screenplay together with him?

LM: Yes.

NP: Is the original vision that you put down on paper when you wrote the script, is that what we see on the screen, or did it change?

LM: No, no, it evolved, and I don’t know how many times I changed the editing. It was really a process, it was like I grew up with this, because technology grew up at the same time, and all those new plug ins, and the development of special effects, and the camera that I was able to use, the Red, was at the time coming into the industry. It was possible only because the technology at the same time was making a big leap, the technical aspect of it. I didn’t know much about it [the technological developments] before this, I only knew about the esthetic goals that I had.

That was my measuring rod. It has to be told in the language of Bruegel. I am visiting him. I am his guest. He is the master. I am just the medium. So therefore you look closely at his art, you just follow it. He invites you and leads you.

NP: There is this shot in the field, near the end, when Rutger Hauer and Michael York are surrounded by people who are frozen, as if they were in Bruegel’s painting, and those people look almost like two dimensional cutouts, but Hauer and York are moving and look real. How did you do that?

LM: Well that is real life. The people are real. The rock isn’t real. And the background isn’t real.

NP: But the people are real, and the landscape is real?

LM: Well, half of the landscape is real, and half of it is not real. But the people are real, they are just motionless. They are just standing still. But you can see a number of children are actually playing in the back, you cannot get them to hold still. And the horses of course.

This is a completely new technology. Developed for this particular movie. It’s merging the various elements in a very painstaking way. The least amount of layers in our shots is 40 and the maximum is 147.

NP: How is it 40? When there are 40 layers, what does that mean?

LM: Well the first layer is the actors against the blue screen. And then we have a layer of what is basically fog photographed by a moving camera. Because when you are using fog that is electronic it didn’t produce the right effect.

NP: So that’s natural fog?

LM: Yeah.

NP: Why do you need the fog layer?

LM: It creates distance. Because everything is layered. Like it is 3D almost. Because without the fog, it would flatten.

And then you have elements that were painted by Bruegel. And then you have, we shot various landscapes, or pieces of landscapes, going around and looking for something that looks like a Bruegel. Then we created various 3D objects in post-production. Like the rock, like various trees. Like the tree that I extended from the Bruegel painting, and then we had this to be set the leaves and branches and we had to animate the whole tree. So that you had the Bruegel tree moving in the wind.

And then you have various birds that are flying. Some of the birds are real, but some of the birds are created as 3D objects. And then you the clouds, which were shot in New Zealand, they are merged with the clouds that were painted by Bruegel and extended by my hand. The Maori call the place where we shot the clouds the Island of the Long Clouds. So, layers and layers and layers and layers. The most complicated shot comes right after the shot you mentioned, where we shoot up the rock, and then come back down. It has 147 layers. [Assembling] that shot took eight days, on 26 connected computers. And always there was something to correct in at least one of the layers. And then it would take us another 8 days to re run it. And then, we move a person or we move a cloud, and again 8 days. Altogether, nine months. The same as a pregnancy.

NP: Wow, one doesn’t have an idea how much work goes into this.

LM: One doesn’t have an idea how much work Bruegel put into one of his paintings. At least I was working with a large group of people. I was just guiding them, and they were doing the majority of the work. But Bruegel was working alone.I have a real respect for those masters. They didn’t have agents, nonsensical art fairs, or critics. These were men.

Approximately thirty seconds into watching Dover Koshashvili’s film of Anton Chekhov’s The Duel, my husband Mark turned to me and said, “This sure looks like Chekhov!” I had to agree. On the screen a few men in officer’s uniforms were carousing on a dark porch, to the accompaniment of a cacophonous trumpet. They were performing a drunken game of William Tell, only in reverse, throwing apples at Laevsky (Andrew Scott), who was holding two knives in the air. When he succeeded in impaling the apples, everyone applauded and drank vodka. As it turned out, this scene did not come straight out of Chekov’s novella, but it was key to establishing the tone of the film and the plight of its antihero. Recklessness, drunkenness, hilarity, discontent, hysteria, uselessness. Back in college, my professor of Russian literature had a favorite saying, which he attributed to Chekhov. “You live badly, my friends,” our professor would say, and because it was drama school, he would take on the character of Chekhov, the wise country doctor, shaking his head and smiling mournfully as he leveled this reprimand at humanity.

Koshashvili’s THE DUEL does a fine job of revealing the universal comedy that underlies man’s angst, while remaining faithful to Chekhov’s late nineteenth century milieu. In fact, if you are familiar with this prolific writer, you will have met some of these characters and situations, even if you’ve never read The Duel. Laevsky, a self-loathing and self-deceiving narcissist, is reminiscent of Vanya, in Uncle Vanya, of Konstantin Treplev, in The Seagull, or Andrei in The Three Sisters. Von Koren (Tobias Menzies), the pragmatic, slightly superior Darwin-loving zoologist, seems a lot like Dr. Dorn, in The Seagull, or Dr. Astrov, in Uncle Vanya. And the fact that THE DUEL is set in a provincial town (here, by the Black Sea in the Caucasus), while the main characters fervently wish they were anywhere else, is reminiscent of a longing that repeats in Chekhov, and is a prominent theme in all four of his major plays: The Seagull, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, and Uncle Vanya. Although I guess it isn’t necessary to travel to nineteenth century Russia to find characters who are disappointed, dissolute, and disillusioned. If this story had been updated to the 1950s and moved to Connecticut, it would be mistaken for the work of John Cheever. But the delightfully specific design and art direction firmly establish this world at the penultimate moment of both the nineteenth century and the Russian empire.

In THE DUEL we encounter Laevsky having an intimate conversation with his friend Dr. Samoylenko (Niall Buggy) in a very public seaside café. His problem is intolerable. Two years earlier, he and his married paramour Nadia (Fiona Glascott) ran away from Moscow, and settled in this seaside town, with the intention of working hard and building an ideal new life (another persistent delusion of Chekhovian characters). Instead, he’s spent his time playing cards, drinking beer, and getting into debt–and now, he can’t stand Nadia anymore, and longs to run away. He is desperate for the money it will take to get out of there and implores Samoylenkov to lend it to him. In the meantime, Nadia, pretty, vain, and bored, has been toying with the attentions of other men, without giving any consideration to the consequences. The indolence and failings of these characters are tidily summed up by the filmmakers–Laevsky lying on a chaise with a handkerchief over his face, when he is supposed to be working as a government clerk, Nadia, trying on a fetching hat in front of a shop mirror, while the smirking clerk suggests that perhaps they can find a way to settle her debt without cash changing hands.

Although he is a doctor and a decorated government worker, Samoylenko is most concerned with cooking meals for his boarders, two strangers of very different philosophical backgrounds. In addition to the scientific, and social, Darwinist, Van Koren, who is investigating the fauna in the Black Sea, there is the Deacon (Jeremy Swift), a lazy churchman who has been posted to the town, and spends his days in prayer and idleness. Van Koren despises Laevsky, whom he has come to regard as a weak, yet dangerously insidious type of human being, who ought to be destroyed. Van Koren walks in on an argument–concerning borrowing money–between Laevsky and Samoylenko and impulsively challenges Laevsky to the duel referred to in the title. No spoiler alerts necessary, as I won’t reveal the outcome of said duel, except to say that the filmmakers do a great job of capitalizing on the tension, and the outcome is unexpected.

The screenplay, written by Mary Bing, captures the essence of Chekhov’s story, which, on the one hand, must have been very difficult because Chekhov’s omniscient narrator expends quite a few words explaining his characters’ internal ambivalences. This is something you cannot do in a film script, unless you use the (often deadly) voiceover. On the other hand, I should say that Chekhov as a playwright never presents more than the tip of the iceberg, pairing his character’s sometimes banal and sometimes bizarre actions with enigmatic and disjointed dialogue. Here Bing uses quite a lot of the dialogue provided by novella’s author, and, the actors use the slightly old-fashioned sounding idiom to good effect; their formal and sometimes melodramatic sentences at comic odds with their characters’ impulses and behavior.

The music, by Angelo Milli, which underscores much of the film, enhances the atmosphere without being obtrusive. It is orchestral, with strings and a minor-key Russian-folk-song feeling to it. It softly augments a character’s solitude, or adds anxiety and a pulse to tense encounters, but the filmmakers are wise to let it fade into natural sounds–the buzzing of flies, the murmur of the waves–rather than allowing it to take over. It’s been a while since I found a film score so pleasantly effective–thank goodness, no montage accompanied by a quirky, clever folk/rock song.

The art direction and the cinematography are first rate, the shots perfectly framed. The atmospheres–blazing seaside, stuffy drawing room, rainy, pre-dawn gloom–are palpable. The novella is set in a resort town in the Caucasus; however, the film was shot in Croatia. In his thoughtful review of THE DUEL (May 10, 2010) New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane was critical of the choice of locale, writing, “In Chekhov [the mountains] are craggy and hostile, a fitting backdrop to the dried-out souls who dwell below, but Dover Koshashvili’s film lingers on green slopes. They suggest fruition and escape. . .”

It’s true that the scenery depicted by Chekhov is forbidding and almost lunar, while Koshashvili’s is often verdant and swelling, but the meaning of the surroundings doesn’t suffer. Both sets of mountains are towering and Sublime creations of Nature, which dwarf and mock the petty sorrows of Laevsky and Nadia.

Vito Bonafacci (Paul Borghese)–successful contractor, negligent Catholic–is driving away from his McMansion one morning, when he suffers a heart attack. His mother’s spirit (Emelise Aleandri), wearing the traditional black dress and veil of a little old Italian woman, comes to inform him that he is dead, and, because he’s paid too much attention to success in this World, and too little attention to God, he is headed straight for Hell. Fortunately for Vito, this turns out to be a nightmare, from which he awakes. Unfortunately, his mother’s hectoring continues.

As a result, Vito goes on a spiritual journey, trying to ferret out the meaning of life and death through conversations with his maid (Carin Mei), his wife (Tisha Tinsman), his gardener (Louis Vanaria) and others. The scenes in the beginning of the film are a series of dialectics. For example, Vito asks his maid Maria if she thinks he is a good person, which leads to a discussion of what “good” is; is it something that can only be decided in a context (relative) or is it a fixed value (absolute)? When his barber (Ralph Squillace) pays a house call, a discussion of the afterlife leads to consideration of life without an afterlife. From each conversation, Vito gets a different take on belief and what’s important in life, but none of the answers that he gets is sufficient to shut up the Mom’s nagging voice. Vito is not having a good day–he is having a spiritual crisis. Afraid to leave the house, lest his dream become a reality, he summons a priest (Father Richard Dellos, playing himself). Father Dellos arrives, and encourages Vito to confess and take communion right there at the house. And so, Vito’s spirit becomes whole again, and Mom can rest in peace.

First time filmmaker John Martoccia–who wrote, directed, and produced–says he made this film because he felt a calling to do so, and I believe him. He also says that the film is “a contemplative film challenging the viewer to reflect on life’s purpose and the afterlife, which in our complex and secularized culture, is oftentimes not pondered to any significant degree.” That sounds like an interesting premise. But if you look at my synopsis above, you’ll understand that that is not what this film does. It never really challenges Vito, or the audience, to go through any sort of a spiritual struggle, because what it says, in the end, is that if you return unquestioningly to the Catholic faith, then everything will be fine. There are no real stakes here; no risk has to be taken, no epiphany achieved in order for the character to find the answer.

In addition, the filmmaking is pretty static. The script is wooden; long scenes of didactic dialogue. These are intercut with weird, lengthy montages–the maid assembling a sumptuous breakfast, or Vito’s wife looking at herself in the mirror as she applies makeup (I thought maybe these were supposed to be indictments of the pleasures of the flesh, but was not at all sure). The filmmakers try to make up for the non-dramatic nature of the film by adding lots of music, but I found that suffocating, rather than enlightening.

The actors do have life, however; Paul Borghese gives Vito a sense of humor and a simmering frustration, and his conversations with Maria, his barber, and with his gardener (Louis Vanaria) are all made more human and complex by the actors’ interactions. A flashback of young Vito (Marcantonio Mei) and his boyhood priest (William Demeo) has nice warmth and contact.

There is also a neat montage of the fish in Vito’s aquarium. His fish are big, gorgeous, and carnivorous, and the camera captures them devouring the smaller fish that Vito is putting into their tank. Writing about that image now, it seems like the filmmakers ought to exploit it to say something about the meek versus the strong or something. But they don’t. It’s a compelling bit of film, but I am not sure why it is there.

A few months ago I was asked to write an article about training programs for actors. The research involved speaking to a score of teachers. These were experienced and, in many cases, legendary people. I hung on their every word. What better way to write an article, I reasoned, than to string together the pearls of wisdom I had gathered?

My editor didn’t think so. As he explained, the average reader, who might not be familiar with the philosophy or approach of all of these trainers, was going to get lost in the welter of words. Without context, the quotes would be meaningless.

I raged; then I re-wrote. Of course the editor was right. Watching Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm for the first time, I had the same problem my editor had when he read my first draft. I knew that Kenton was a Big Band guy who had a strong connection to jazz. I’d heard some of his music. But I knew little about the music scene he was associated with, and really nothing about his legacy. And that proved to be a problem coming into this documentary, because it assumes that the viewer already has a context. Although the filmmakers do include archival photos, lots of snippets of Kenton’s music, and an impressive number of interviews with musicians who knew and worked with Kenton, there is no over-arching narrative for the uninitiated. The super-imposed lower-third identifiers that we viewers usually use to anchor ourselves to time and meaning–oh, that’s Bill Holman–are employed meagerly, which means that if you don’t fix a speaker in your mind at his first appearance, and commit his significance to the Kenton story to your short-term memory, you are going to be at sea every time he reappears on the screen.

The music is mostly used as background–Kenton’s voice introduces a piece, we see grainy footage of musicians playing it, and after a few seconds, the image is supplanted by a talking head, and the instrumental volume fades. Except for one seventies-era concert. That fuzzy de-saturated footage keeps reappearing like a bad penny and synching with the sound track for a few minutes, before the music recedes once again to the background and interviewees dominate the foreground. This concert footage has way too much prominence.

Overall the interviews are hagiographic, more accolades than information, which is frustrating to the non-aficionado. I should note, however, that the juxtapositioning of archival pictures of the interviewees back when they were cocky young cats with the film of their twenty-first century alta-cocker selves is predictably unsettling.

Repeated viewings of this documentary do begin to make its structure clearer, and its story more poignant, however. There is a narrator, Ken Poston, founder of the Los Angeles Jazz Institute, who is obviously very well versed in the history of Kenton, jazz, and Big Bands. It’s just too bad that the filmmakers don’t ask him to spend more time providing the uneducated with a musical and historical framework. Still, one does begin to appreciate the passion and the drive that made this piano player from Kansas and California commit his life and soul to leading a series of big bands. There is quite a bit of thoughtful narration in Kenton’s own voice–obviously re-purposed from earlier recorded interviews, since Kenton died in 1977.

The DVD is divided into chronological chapters, and after repeated viewings, you begin to understand what Kenton was exploring in his Artistry in Music phase, what he meant by the term Progressive Jazz, why he wanted to work with mellophoniums. Listening to the musicians from various eras of the Kenton band talk about their experiences, it’s easy to picture the grueling, unglamorous, yet compelling life of being perpetually on tour – from ballroom to concert hall to high school auditorium.

The DVD is also intriguing for the issues that it does NOT address, which brought up areas of inquiry for me. For example, when the seventies band footage first came on the screen, my husband Mark, who was watching with me, said, “Man, that is the whitest jazz band I have ever seen!” No one in the documentary ever says anything about race. However Jack Costanzo, a percussionist from Kenton’s 1947 band, reminisces about how he was never happy with a piece that was written for him by Kenton’s arranger Pete Rugolo. “Bongo Riff” was supposed to have a Cuban beat, but, says Costanzo, “We sounded like an American band playing Latin music.. . . Kenton made me play [Bongo Riff] every place. . . And there’s no Latin in it. . . I wish he’d written something I would have been more comfortable with. . . I could have really cooked.”

To me, this implied an unintended racism. Along with Mark’s comment, this anecdote made me dig deeper. Well, not really that much deeper. Not much further than Wikipedia. Apparently Kenton made some remarks about being part of the “white minority” in jazz, after musicians like Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie received more praise than he did. This led to the music critic Leonard Feather questioning Kenton’s racial views–although in fact, Kenton later worked with or toured with many black artists, including Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughn, and Ella Fitzgerald.

Two other areas of inquiry exposed but unexplored by this documentary are addiction and dysfunctional family. Not that it’s necessary to dwell on gossip or armchair psychology, but when these issues surface, like the tip of the iceberg, it is difficult not to wonder about them. Two of Kenton’s four former wives participated in this documentary, although the viewer only surmises that they are former wives because the supertitle hovering over them contains the surname “Kenton.” JoAnn, wife number three (I think) says, in an off the cuff way, something like Stan really liked to socialize with all the guys on the bus (when they were touring) but when we were home alone we never went anywhere because if he drove us somewhere he wouldn’t have been able to drink. Wife number four, Audree, blithely tells of waking up to find herself married to Kenton following a “leisurely, three martini lunch in Tijuana.” These sort of casual mentions of alcoholism, and elusive references to family made me really curious about Kenton’s personal history.

Which led me to Leslie Kenton’s 2010 memoir, Love Affair. Leslie is Kenton’s daughter by his first wife, Violet. (He had two other children with his second wife, Ann Richards-Kenton.) The book contains a lot of remembrances of a disjointed childhood, spent alternately in the company of her strict grandmother while her parents were on the road, or, in a chaotic series of cars and hotel rooms when she traveled with them. Her father comes across as a troubled character, perpetually at war with himself: his drive and ambition constantly battling self-torturing doubt about his talent as a musician and his abilities as a band leader. But the book is really centered around memories Leslie recovered after attaining adulthood. She discovered suppressed memories of her father, who raped her a number of times when she was child, and also of her father’s mother, who apparently enlisted her in Satanic rituals. I am not sure what to make of this. Ms. Kenton also underwent LSD therapy during the sixties, so draw your own conclusions, I guess….

Getting back to Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm, the more often I watched it, and the more I thought about it, the more resonance it had for me, and the more interest I had in its subject. I wish that in and of itself it had had more educational value–more information about Progressive jazz, more about East coast versus West coast, black and white, more about Kenton’s life, deeper examinations of Kenton’s music. On the other hand, it certainly piqued my curiosity.

When the first Beatles movie opened in New York City in 1964, my cosmopolitan, older friend dragged me to it. She was 11, going on 18, and we were accompanied by her mother. (Actually, my sophisticated friend was probably pressured into inviting me because our parents were friends.) I wore a homemade badge that read “Beetles, yes! Beatles, no!” I pinned it to my blouse because I did NOT want to mistaken for a teeny bopper. I had the belief–which experience has proved at least partially true–that children are wise, cautious, and communicative, whereas teenagers are everything other. As I was eight, short, chubby, and wearing orthopedic shoes, it was probably unnecessary for me to separate myself from the herd by wearing a sign, but I wanted to make sure that my belief was visible to all.

But whether or not I was ready to admit it, the Beatles got to me. I’d heard a couple of their songs previously, when a friend’s mother bought the 45 of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” with “Saw Her Standing There” on the B side. Both were catchy, although I wouldn’t have admitted I felt that way. Watching the movie, I was filled with a kind of chest-opening happiness, combined with a gut-deep hunger, which I also wouldn’t have admitted to. It was exciting; it was SEX–but I would have washed my own mouth out with soap had I realized what my incipient feelings portended.

John immediately became my favorite Beatle. I imagined that I was one of the few young girls who really appreciated him–he was so witty, and so smart, so sardonic and so–cute–although not in a Pretty Boy way, like Paul. I was trying so hard not to be typical of girls my age; I was oblivious to the fact that my feelings were, in fact, absolutely typical of girls my age.

Later, like many other people, I hated Yoko for wrecking the Beatles and messing with John’s destiny (although, if his original destiny was to tour perpetually for the next five decades, I can now see that Yoko rescued him), and I cried in shock and horror, realizing that an era–my youth?–ended with his death. I was living on the Upper Westside at the time, and I walked down to the Dakota on 72nd Street and bought a John Lennon memorial T-shirt from one of the entrepreneurial street vendors who materialized for such events. Later, shocked by my own lapse of judgment, I put the T-shirt into a drawer and never wore it. But I kept it. Perhaps now is the time to sell it on E-Bay?

But I was never a Beatles fanatic. I knew little about their personal lives, unless it came up on the six o’clock news. The teeny bopper magazines (yes, I read them, although I NEVER was one) of the time purred about how cute, soulful, and boy-next-door the Rock Idols were, but never revealed the sordid details of their childhoods. Mainstream popular culture hadn’t met Oprah at the time.

This walk down memory lane is all to say that, while I had a sentimental attachment to the long-gone lad, I knew nothing of John Lennon’s family history when I saw the DVD of NOWHERE BOY. Certainly, discovering the history of a revered figure, years later, brings its own patina of nostalgia, but I believe that the wonderful performances in this film, along with the specificity of its historical locations and art direction, will be evocative for anyone who enjoys a “coming of age” film.

NOWHERE BOY charts John Lennon’s (Aaron Johnson) course from school boy to nascent rocker, and it shows us how the Beatles came together (all present, except for Ringo by the end of the film) but it’s only incidentally about the birth of one of the most influential bands of the 20th century. The central conflict is between John’s aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) and his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), both fighting in their own ways for John’s affection. Buttoned-up Aunt Mimi has taken charge of John for years, and it’s only when he is midway through his teens that he yearns to learn whom his mother is, and what that has to do with his bad dreams. He finds Julia–his impulsive, sexy, troubled Mum–and drama, revelations, rapprochement, and tragedy ensue. Also, both women encourage his musical development, although Mimi isn’t at all fond of rock and roll.

NOWHERE BOY is beautifully designed and art directed. The clothes–whether enveloping reluctant public school boy, starched British matron, or Across the Pond Elvis wannabe–are well rendered. The representation of English countryside in the ’50s is spot-on “BBC Presents.” But the best things about NOWHERE BOY are the casting, directing, and performances. And the cinematography, lighting, and the editing, which cannily capture said performances, and give them the screen time to unfold. Time after time, the camera stays with the actor for seconds, allowing viewers to fathom the complexity of a reaction shot.

Aaron Johnson captures a teenaged Lennon, a mixture of arrogance, youthful angst, and narcissism, tempered by sensitivity, enthusiasm, and wisdom. Kristin Scott Thomas has a plum part in Mimi–what actor would NOT like to play a character who is very emotional but is perpetually constrained by a stiff upper lip? Scott Thomas’ beautiful features have aged into an enigmatic mask that sometimes slips–especially at the eyes–and it serves her very well in this role. The camera is always capturing her restraint about to give way, her sensitive beauty at war with the stern dowager trappings. Anne-Marie Duff, whose work I was unfamiliar with–does a fabulous job of sliding between self-confident sexuality, winsome neediness, and desperate depression. The rest of the actors–including Thomas Brodie-Sangster as an impossibly young Paul McCartney–are just as good. NOWHERE BOY is a testament to the craft of acting for film.

A couple of comments about the add-ons that are packaged with this DVD. The special features, while pleasant enough, do not add much to the experience of the movie. The deleted scenes don’t reveal new dimensions of character or story, and the “featurettes” are really lengthy trailers for the movie (something that seems to be happening a lot lately). I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Sam Taylor-Wood (the director) is a woman, but I think I would probably have learned that by going to IMDB. (In fact, IMDB reveals something that the featurettes do not–the 44 year old director and 21 year old Aaron Johnson [Lennon in the film] have been a couple since they made NOWHERE BOY!)

There was one extra that I did truly appreciate, however. English is my first (be honest, ONLY) language, but my ability to instantly translate British into American is waning as I age. So the subtitles were a most welcome bonus.

In 1940 the German filmmaker Veit Harlan directed and co-wrote Jew Süss. The film was based on the life of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, an 18th century Jewish banker and advisor to Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg. Oppenheimer’s brief life–after the Duke’s death he was accused of treason and executed, his body hung up as an “example” for six years–had been used as source material before, but it should come as no surprise that the story of a powerful Jew thus tried and condemned should have become a pet project of Joseph Goebbels.

The film, which depicted Oppenheimer as a hook-nosed, conniving, greedy rapist, garnered the highest German cinema accolades. Harlan’s own young wife (his third), the Swedish actress Kristina Söderbaum portrayed the tragic rape victim, who, having been sullied, goes off and commits suicide.

Heinrich Himmler made it a mandatory cinematic experience for members of the SS. Many of the background players were from the Prague–Jews given an opportunity they couldn’t refuse, a last chance to “defend” their religion in this film before being shipped off to concentration camps.

After the war, Harlan was tried as a war criminal, but he was acquitted on the grounds that his work was under the iron-fisted control of the Nazis, and he was therefore not responsible for the result.

Since the documentary HARLAN – IN THE SHADOW OF JES SUSS was my first encounter with the filmmaker and his oeuvre, I would have liked to have seen the actual movie, but only bits of it are in the documentary. Harlan was considered a very good filmmaker and a powerful propagandist, and yet what I saw of his films here (snippets of JEW SUSS and others) was bombastic and melodramatic, with some over-the-top histrionic performances, particularly those of his wife, Kristina Söderbaum. So, I never got the full flavor of the films that he made, nor was I given an understanding of why they were so effective in their own time.

But Harlan’s life, political beliefs, and prowess as a propagandist are not what HARLAN – IN THE SHADOW OF JEW SUSS is about. I think I was expecting a jolt of outrage, potent as caffeine, but that kind of emotional manipulation isn’t the intention of filmmaker Felix Moeller. He isn’t interested in whipping us into a lather about a movie that was made seventy years ago. Instead, he interviewed members of Harlan’s family (Harlan died at the age of 64 in 1964) in order to discover what impact his legacy has had upon members of subsequent generations. This is a complex family tree, containing divorces and re-marriages, Jews as well as gentiles. Amongst those interviewed are the offspring of Harlan’s second and third marriages, their children, and his nephew and niece. They bring a variety of points of view to the table. The surviving children of Harlan’s second marriage, Thomas and Maria, see their father, whom they adored, as an opportunistic filmmaker first, although they are almost willing to accept the fact that he was also a conscious perpetrator of anti-Semitic propaganda. Maria is quick to add that her father loved Jews and they loved him.

The sons of Harlan and Kristina Söderbaum, Kristian and Kaspar, cling to the idea that their father was coerced, that he had no choice except to make the film. They just wonder why he had to do such a good job.

One grandchild, Jessica Jacoby, doesn’t cut her grandfather much slack. Her mother, Susanna, sister of Thomas and Maria, married a Jew. While Veit Harlan was living in the lap of luxury, she muses, her paternal grandparents were dying in a concentration camp. She believes that Harlan’s anti-Jewish feelings, combined with a narcissistic compulsion to make films, no matter what, rendered him incapable of making a moral decision.

The younger grandchildren, who look like they are barely thirty, do not have the connection with their grandfather’s life that the older people do. They see JEW SUSS from a contemporary viewpoint, and find it melodramatic and not terribly impressive. They have to remind themselves of the historical context, but even then, the emotional connection that they have to this person and what he’s done is weak. It has nothing to do with them.

Initially, I was disappointed by this film. I think I wanted to see a fairy tale, or a Greek tragedy, where the descendents of the fatally flawed hero must pay for his wrong-doing in perpetuity. But I found that my thoughts were continuously drawn back to this matter-of-fact portrait of people getting on with their lives, in spite of a complicated and tainted family history.

On the box containing this DVD the publicity copy states that HARLAN – IN THE SHADOW OF JEW SUSS is “a searing story of a German family.” But I think the film is really looking at something much broader and more universal: how and why do human beings get on with their lives when, in a sense, we all have ancestral blood on our hands?

Moeller has made a contemplative and thought-provoking film.

THAT EVENING SUN is a beautiful and sad film about love, loss, and betrayal. Since it addresses these archetypical human conditions from the point of view of a very senior citizen, this quiet little piece may cause impatience in anyone younger than a Boomer. Still, those who have witnessed the diminution of a beloved relative (and with that, a heightened awareness of one’s own mortality) will be moved by this thoughtful story.

Hal Holbrook stars as Abner Meechum, a Tennessee farmer whose son Paul (Walton Goggins) has consigned him to a nursing home. A very few, well chosen shots reveal the kind of life the facility provides. It’s not horrific, just days and days of useless boredom, surrounded by the meek, the weak, and the shell-shocked. As soon as Abner gets his strength back, he breaks out, headed for home.

But when he gets there, the old homestead ain’t what it used to be; a sultry teen is sunbathing on the lawn. Abner learns that his son has rented the place to local “white trash,” the Choat family. Undeterred, he moves into an ancient sharecropper’s shack on the property, obstinately believing that he will oust the intruders. Ludie Choat (Carrie Preston) and her sunbathing daughter Pamela (Mia Wasikowska) try to keep things on an even keel, but husband Lonzo (Raymond McKinnon) wants Abner gone. There’s a lifetime of bad blood between Choat and Meechum. In their confrontations, the palpable hostility is always just about to tip into violence. When it finally does tip, the story takes a surprising turn.

Both the settings and the relationships in this film feel so specific, so lived-in, and so deeply understood, that it’s surprising to learn that the shoot took only twenty one days. The bonds between the actors are strong, and the interactions feel authentic, whether it’s the gruff/tender exchanges between puppyish Pamela and bemused Abner, or the steely antipathy that ties Abner and Lonzo together. The lush, overgrown fields that surround the farm, the late summer sunlight that rakes the frames, the worn out objects that fill the rooms, even the dirt roads that lead to these humble destinations, seem to be heavy with memories. And then there are the actual flashback scenes, Abner’s remembrances of younger days with his now-dead wife, her face always tantalizingly obscured. The wife is played by Dixie Carter, Hal Holbrook’s wife, who died in April of this year, adding another layer to the patina of memory, love, and loss.

The extras on this disk include a documentary about the making of the film, a podcast that “deconstructs” one scene from the film by looking at it from the point of view of all the artists and technicians who were involved in creating it, and interviews with cast and crew. Since this was a low budget film, many of the people involved wore double or triple hats–producer/writer/actor, writer/director, etc. They’re so deeply engaged in the project that it makes them imminently watchable, and of course, it means they have insightful things to say about it. One of the most unforgettable interviewees, however, is author William Gay, who wrote the short story “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down,” upon which THAT EVENING SUN is based. There’s just something so haunted and Southern and still, something so simultaneously revealing and hidden, about his persona. I can really imagine this movie beginning in the mind of this guy.