Tokyo Olympiad (1965)

Japan

3*
Director:
Kon Ichikawa
Screenwriters:
Kon Ichikawa
Ishio Shirasaka
Shuntarō Tanikawa
Natto Wada
Director of Photography:
Kazuo Miyagawa

Running time: 170 minutes

Original title: 東京オリンピック
Transliterated title: Tōkyō orinpikku

Made in the years before cameras were strapped onto the backs of motorcycles to follow runners or cyclists in ways that make it seem like the viewer is literally taking part, Tokyo Olympiad is a mammoth film that tries to condense the sporting events of the famous 16 days of glory that are the Olympic Games into one viewing experience. Filmmaker Kon Ichikawa approaches his subjects, with its many disparate parts, in an equally incoherent fashion and the result is a work that, while it certainly gives a good idea of the 1964 Olympics, pales in comparison to more recent productions, and is at best a catalogue of events rather than a representation of them by one man with a specific vision.

When it comes to films made about the Olympic Games, Bud Greenspan’s  ”16 Days of Glory” television films have set the standard for many years, and while he only focuses on a small part of each four-year celebration of the Olympic spirit, he does so through the eyes and experiences of a number of athletes with very attractive stories of perseverance and beating the odds. Ichikawa tries his hand at one such story, without ever getting close to his subject, before simply dropping him and moving on to the next event.

This lack of a human connection to the games is an important failure. Ichikawa shows many pictures of the spectators’ reactions to the events on the field or on the track, but the only person who ever speaks is the invisible commentator Ichirō Mikuni. It would be unfair to say Mikuni doesn’t bring human emotion to the account of events, but the fact he is the viewer’s only link is unsatisfactory and cannot substitute the real athletes and their stories.

Ichikawa begins his film with the opening ceremony and ends with the closing ceremony, while the first half is set almost entirely inside the athletics stadium and the second half is dedicated to all the other sports. He looks exclusively at the finals of every single sport practised at the games, with the exception of discus throw and judo, but where a sport is subdivided into many separate sections, for example wrestling or weightlifting, he only casts a very brief glance at one or two categories.

That is understandable, since it is impossible to bring together every single event and still make a film that would shine with excitement and rhythm. There are moments in Ichikawa’s film that are quite brilliantly depicted. Besides the details his camera picks up, from the athletes ducking to avoid the doves when they’re released during the opening ceremony to the freeze frame on the tense face of Soviet shot putter Irina Press at the moment before she launches the ball, or the ritual of fellow countryman Adolf Varanauskas who rolls around the ball against his neck in anticipation of the big throw.

Another freeze frame shows us the moment when 10,000 meter American runner Ben Larrieu is lapped and his faces tells a story of shock and disappointment. These are the kinds of characters who merit more attention, but Ichikawa limits the focus of the film to a far-off glance at the events and the participants as they behave on their big day.

The film has a multitude of shots dedicated to the raising of flags and the playing of national anthems, as is to be expected in such a film, but his artistic transformation of certain moments could have made a greater impact if he’d had the courage to pursue this approach more determinedly. During the 10,000 meter race, for example, the camera looks out onto the pack of athletes from far away, then pans away from them and follows an empty track before reaching them again.

Ichikawa sometimes focuses on specific athletes, like the physical and mental preparation of Japanese athlete Ikuko Yoda before her 80 meter hurdles race, or the runners who come in last in the big races – the Ceylonese Ranatunga Karunananda in the 10,000 meters and the Nepalese Bahacur Bhupendra in the marathon. They add a necessary human veneer to the greatness of the Olympics.

But beyond the all-too-rare moments of genius, like the opening of the gymnastics sequences, in which a female gymnast does a vault in a Muybridge-like image, the complete silence in the presentation of the hurdle race, save the crashing thud when the first hurdle is knocked over, and the silence of the open division wrestling final interrupted only by the breathing of the wrestlers, the film displays little artistic sensibility and rather opts for a dry recounting of the events as they occurred, without the human component. By and large, that human component, hinted at in examples above, in short mentions of the marathon runners’ professions, and in a very brief bit about a young Chadian with the interesting face, Ahmed Issa, who competes in the 800m and advances to the semifinals, is missing from the film and makes the production uninteresting from numerous points of view.

In terms of politics, the film also completely avoids the interesting tension, visually and ideologically, of the USSR following the contingent of American athletes into the stadium, or of India and Pakistan’s meeting in the field hockey finals.

The land of the rising sun (the latter a symbol often repeated in the film), the first country in Asia to host the Olympic Games, staged a very competent Olympics that, going by this film, seems completely peaceful and devoid of the politics that would make the future games so rife with tension, but at the same time the peace limits our engagement with the film’s narrative as almost no characters are really examined. As a document of the games, the film is good, but Bud Greenspan’s human-oriented documentaries about the games are infinitely better.

Once Upon a Time There Was a Singing Blackbird (1970)

Georgia

3*
Director: 
Otar Iosseliani
Screenwriters: 
Dimitri Eristavi, Otar Iosseliani, 
Sh. Kakichashvili, Semyon Lungin,
Otar Mekhrishvili, Ilya Nusinov
Director of Photography: 
Avtandil Maisuradze
Running time: 78 minutes

Original title:
იყო შაშვი მგალობელი
Transliterated title: 
Iko shashvi mgalobeli

It’s not an objection critics often have, but in this case it is absolutely valid: Once Upon a Time There Was a Singing Blackbird is a nice enough film, but could have been a truly engaging film had it only been about 30 minutes longer. At 78 minutes, the film tells a small story of about 36 hours in the life of young orchestra percussionist Guia Agladze (Gela Kandelaki), whose charm might or might not be illusionary, but it skips between so many different parts of the story that no firm connection with anyone else is ever established, except his mother with whom he shares an apartment.

The film has an energetic opening, where the main thrust of the plot is also quickly set up and Guia’s character is sharply drawn as one who likes to take chances and usually gets away with being so flippant about serious matters. This is, of course, something that will come back in the final scene. Rushing up the grand staircase of a theatre in Tbilisi with a girl, Guia leaves her behind and worms his way through backstage corridors while putting on his jacket en doing his wait and finally reaches the door that leads onto the stage, where the number performed by a large orchestra is reaching its climax. He sits down in an empty seat, some of the musicians knowingly snicker at him and his antics, and then he takes on an air of seriousness, picks up his beaters and beats the kettle drum in front of him at exactly the right moment.

Guia quickly gets rid of the girl, as we assume he done so often before, and decides to try to find a place for him and his friends to drink. He fails to make up to another girl who has a big place but who hasn’t forgiven him yet for some past indiscretion and he ends up going to bed alone, the very intrusive sounds of planes, trains and automobiles outside his window.

He seems to be a composer, but having drawn the clef on the left of the sheet, he quickly loses interest and decides to go looking for fund outside, where he either notices girls he fancies, or meets girls he has been with in the past. The crisp black and white images certainly contribute to the impression one has the film is taking place in the 1950s rather than the 1970s, but the very happy-go-lucky attitude of the central character also harkens back to characters such as Fellini’s I vitelloni.

Two incidents are important and keep us interested: The first is Guia’s constant tardiness and our fear he might once be too late and cause total chaos. The other is the appointment between him and the theatre director that keeps getting pushed back but which ought to be, by all accounts, a very important meeting and should provide the film with some fireworks.

But we get no fireworks, except for one very funny but out-of-place scene in which the camera cuts wildly from an apartment whose tenants are fighting and one guy is pushed, his back hits the railing and sends a pot plant flying off the balcony, to the street where Guia narrowly misses the plant that comes crashing down to earth. In general, director Iosseliani’s camera thinks of itself as having omnipresent powers and easily cuts between walls and even between floors, creating shots with unknown characters that also result in a complete lack of anticipation, since the viewer always knows what is coming.

Again, the lone exception is the final scene, but although it is visually well-presented, it does not make up for the very loose, jumpy character of the rest of the film, in which characters come and go and we have no way of figuring out Guia’s connection to most of them. Guia shows absolutely no character development and while the film is short enough to enjoy, despite some bad acting and rather inept use of the camera (in one scene, the camera pans and zooms in on faces as if testing out this new technology), there is far too little substance to the production.

I Confess (1953)

USA

3*

Director:

Alfred Hitchcock

Screenwriters:

George Tabori

William Archibald

Director of Photography:

Robert Burks

 

Running time: 95 minutes

 

In I Confess, Alfred Hitchcock tries to pull the wool of one problem over our eyes so we are blinded to the easy resolution of another. He suggests the problem of a priest who would rather risk hell on earth than hell in the afterlife is perfectly credible and would inject a valid fear in the viewers of his film. He is only about half-right.

 

Father Logan, a very handsome priest (it’s Montgomery Clift, after all)  in Quebec City, is visited by a German refugee, Otto Keller, late one night. Keller is distressed, and the previous scene had shown us the reason: Keller has murdered a lawyer named Villette and unburdens himself in the confessional to Father Logan. Relieved of this weight around his neck, Keller keeps working at the rectory, where he runs into Father Logan every day, and so does his wife Alma, who also knows about her husband’s dark secret. But Father Logan can’t tell anybody about this confession because in his capacity as priest he is bound by the confessional privilege, in the same way as a doctor, to respect the confidence his interlocutor places in him.

 

Of course, this secrecy is bound to become an issue, and this process has a few sides to it. Father Logan becomes complicit in keeping very important information from the police. Now, he has the training to do this with legion personal secrets which his parishioners confide in him, so Hitchcock turns the screws by, firstly, having Keller commit the murder wearing a cassock, so as to avoid suspicion, and secondly, having Logan keep his own secret, which is revealed halfway through. This personal secret puts him in a lot of trouble, because it could easily result in his reputation being tarnished and therefore his credibility undermined, even though we know, from the very first scenes, that he is not the one who committed the murder.

 

This theme of guilt would play well with a 1950s Catholic audience, but when seeing it today, most viewers would be puzzled, if not outraged, by the main character’s decision to keep a secret (about a mortal sin, no less) rather than protect himself by telling the truth. Rather than honorable, this just seems weak. It is a situation whose gravity and absurdity is compounded by the disgust Keller evokes in us by constantly hovering around Logan, making him more and more uncomfortable. Keller clearly has no regard for the actions taken by Logan to protect him and instead tries to pin the murder on Father Logan — his patron and the man who saved him and his wife from misery by providing them with jobs at the church.

 

The beauty of Quebec City isn’t fully utilized either, and many street scenes could have taken place anywhere. The famous Château Frontenac does appear now and again, and the first glimpse we have of this magnificent building, during the opening credits, has it under dark clouds, a perfect visual metaphor for the film’s plot, and, unfortunately, its execution. One very smart visual move is the stitching on Father Logan’s cope: in one of his first scenes, with his back turned to us, we see a big cross across his back — evidently the one that he prepares to bear for the rest of the film.

Clift is as good as he always is, which is to say in a class of his own, but he seems a bit too stable, too certain of himself: While he conveys some distress when he clasps his face, his voice never wavers, even under the immense strain of his seemingly hopeless situation. 

 

I Confess is a failed film for Hitchcock, since there is very of the little dark humor that otherwise made many of his films so enjoyable. The murder takes place before the start of the film, which admittedly happens in other Hitchcock films as well, but the notion of our hero being framed for a crime he didn’t commit is something Hitchcock does not successfully exploit. Instead, he opts for flashbacks in soft focus (!) and a love story that, despite its considerable running time in flashback, never lives up to much in the present. And although they have picked a priest as their prime suspect in the case, has it not occurred to anybody that his silence in many key scenes — most significantly his testimony in court, when, with the ridiculous flourish of a fade-out, an important part is done away with by means of an ellipse — is the result of his duty as a priest to keep matters of confession in the confessional?

Videocracy (2009)

Italy / Sweden

3*
Director: Erik Gandini
Screenwriter: Erik Gandini
Directors of Photography:
Manuel Claro
Lukas Eisenhauer
Running time: 85 minutes

Videocracy, a documentary by the Italian-born filmmaker Erik Gandini, looks at the extent to which Italian television culture has become Italian culture tout court: it is a culture based on the most extreme kind of artifice and ignores the strides women around the world have made for their rights in the past century. In short, the current Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has shaped a culture that applauds the debasement of women – relegating them to the kitchen and rendering them mute and big-breasted – and he has used his many television stations to promote this idea over the past few decades.

Of course, this is not the first time Berlusconi serves as inspiration for a film – in 2006 Nanni Moretti memorably depicted him in Il Caimano - but Videocracy uses people close to Berlusconi, such as talent scout Lele Mora and celebrity Fabrizio Corona, to present us with a very good idea of the vast media empire that Berlusconi controls, and the power he exerts – not only politically, but ideologically and even culturally.

Italian television systematically presents women as objects of desire – no more, no less. Young Italian women want to conform to this figure of the silent mannequin, so that they might become objects of desire and (the dream!) marry a footballer. The apex of such stardom is the figure of the “Velina”: the silent blonde, who appears onstage during a talk show or a game show always hosted by a male presenter. From time to time she might break out into a 30-second dance routine called a “Staccheto”, before returning to her pose. The film paints a very tragic picture of the extremes of a heteronormative society in which there is no gender equality.

Director Erik Gandini has collected a great deal of material to show us this artifice in all its gaudy glory, but he does not dig much deeper. For example, I thought the character of Lele Mora, an old talent scout who invites young male celebrities to his house so that they can lounge around the pool and he can spy on them from his bedroom window, had great potential as a counterbalance (or at least a contradiction) to the very explicitly heterosexual foundations of Italian society. The fact that such an influential figure has what amounts to a harem at his house in Sardinia presented a wonderful opportunity to Erik Gandini, but rather than pursue this avenue, Gandini gives us Mora’s comparison of Berlusconi with Mora’s own idol, Mussolini. It is a silly moment that lasts much longer than it should (Mora has a Mussolini ring tone on his mobile phone), but Gandini picks up this train of thought again later in the film during a scene of a military parade, with the expected close-ups of boots marching and Berlusconi looking on as the artillery passes in slow motion.

Neither does Gandini succeed in tying his different threads together. Berlusconi is certainly at the centre of events, but in this 85-minute film we get a story of sad idealism in this society, where a 25-year-old mechanic named Ricky wants to impress the girls by singing Ricky Martin songs while performing karate, but he fails (because of Berlusconi’s television society, the film would have us believe, but it’s actually because he is bad at what he does). He has a firm belief that television ensures “that you’ll be remembered forever” and that an appearance on television puts you “10 steps above everyone else”, making it possible for you to compete with the football players for the hearts and bodies of those sought-after Italian women, i.e. the Veline.

We also get a glimpse of the sad life of Fabrizio Corona, an oversexed narcissist whose business dealing with the powerful elite in Italy is the stuff of gangster films. He memorably refers to himself as a modern-day Robin Hood who takes from the rich and gives to himself, but the storylines of Corona, Ricky, Lele Mora and Berlusconi are never really properly tied together.

Gandini also provides a very awkward voice-over that is annoying because Gandini speaks in English, which is not his native language, and there is no apparent reason why a better trained English speaker could not have delivered the narration.

The film lacks a tight focus on its subject and is happy to make us laugh at the madness of this television society, whenever the film is not relying on our admiration of its access to a forbidden world. One moment that does stand out is Berlusconi’s campaign video, a karaoke song about the excellence - nay, godliness - of this man who calls himself President (a label perpetuated by Gandini himself, who never calls the man “Prime Minister”).

Viewed at the Jihlava International Film Festival 2011

The Fall (2006)

USA

3*
Director:
Tarsem Singh
Screenwriters:
Dan Gilroy,
Nico Soultanakis,
Tarsem Singh
Director of Photography: 
Colin Watkinson

Running time: 117 minutes

The abilities of Tarsem Singh (or just “Tarsem”, as the credits refer to him) as storyteller have not improved since he gave us his debut feature The Cell in 2000, but he has continued his fascination with the representation of images in the mind and The Fall is filled with breathtaking visuals that send a shiver down your spine.

It is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but few would argue with the view that The Fall contains some of the most spectacular locations ever put on film. The Pyramids, Charles Bridge, the Taj Mahal, the Blue City of Jodhpur, and many others are scattered throughout the film, and compose a unique world in which the mythical story-within-a-story is set.

This particular story is told by Roy – a stuntman who is lying in his hospital bed in Los Angeles after a stunt in which he was supposed to jump from a bridge onto a horse – to a gap-toothed young Romanian girl named Alexandria, who is recovering after her family’s house was burnt to the ground. The story he tells her is “epic” in nature and concerns the adventures of five men who, having been banished by the evil Governor Odious, decide to track him down. They are a mixed bunch of fellows, from Charles Darwin who struts around in what seems to be a peacock fur coat (!) to a burly Italian explosives expert, Luigi, who wears a long bright yellow coat.

The filmmaker’s only interesting tactic in terms of telling his story is the slow integration of elements from Roy’s own life in the development and composition of the story he tells. However, this tactic would have had much more impact if it had not been present from the very beginning. The transition between the world of the story and the world of the hospital is very often made by allowing the words of the characters of both worlds to overlap. The film is also quite unclear about the point of view from which the story is told, and individuals from either Roy’s or Alexandria’s life feature as characters at various stages. It is fun to recognise other entities in both worlds, but we get spectacle instead of functionality. When Alexandria says that she likes elephants, Tarsem gives us a scene with an elephant swimming in tropical waters, and no more.

The Fall has been criticised for its total focus on the visual aspect while completely neglecting its content and I tend to agree. The film is rather shallow and while the beautiful images do keep our attention, most of the time, the filmmakers have paid very little attention to the film’s narrative and music. The only piece of music that is well-chosen is the Second Movement from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. In terms of acting, little is expected of the adventure story’s characters, since their world plays as a fragmentary, wholly imagined realm of imagined adventures, but unfortunately a great deal of the film is devoted to this story.

That being said, the story that takes place “in the present”, that is at some point during the early days of the motion picture industry, probably around the time of the First World War, is not uninteresting. Alexandria is not irritating and Roy, played by Lee Pace, is accommodating, generous, friendly, and thoroughly likeable. I had some difficulty believing him as a man tortured by love, because his face is happy even when it is sad, but this was a minimal objection to his performance.

The film has a satisfactory resolution, though hardly the kind of ending we were looking for in a story that ought to be “epic”. Many images will stick with the viewer, in particular one moment when a keyhole serves as a pinhole camera and draws the shadow of a moving upside-down on the wall opposite. However, given the lack of substance, and despite the pleasant interaction between Lee Pace and first-time actress Catinca Untaru, the film itself has very little purpose except as a kind of travelogue about the country of India.

Black Narcissus (1947)

UK

3*
Directors:
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Screenwriters:
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Director of Photography:
Jack Cardiff

Running time: 100 minutes

Nuns on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Deborah Kerr is the sister superior tasked with establishing a convent on a cliff in the Himalayas, “at the back of beyond”, overlooking a valley hundreds of feet below. This convent, Saint Faith, is housed in Mopu Palace, which used to be the harem of a general who lives nearby. Sister Clodagh (Kerr) is trying to keep it together, but the winds are howling 24 hours a day and the crisp mountain air has awakened “nature” inside the newcomers. The sisterhood is losing its nerve and it is up to Sister Clodagh to get everybody back in line, but to do this she must first deal with her own “ghosts”.

These “ghosts” refer to Clodagh’s flashbacks, seen now and again, whenever she spots something that reminds her of a specific incident in her former life. These objects that facilitate the transition from present to past are very awkward and quite simplistic, but the flashbacks themselves do serve an important purpose, namely to show us that Clodagh’s path has had its twists and turns and that she joined the order so as to escape something else; if she were to be confronted with the same situation once more, what decision would she make this time?

Clodagh is joined by four other sisters, each of whom lose their minds over the course of the story, and at least two of them, Sister Honey and Sister Ruth, become absolutely hysterical. This hysteria becomes unbearable, and while Kathleen Byron (starring as Sister Ruth) does a fine job of seeming possessed, her eyes bulging out of their sockets, she is also the object of the camera’s affection, and Cardiff lights her face beautifully, accentuating her eye-line while obscuring the rest of her visage.

Black Narcissus earns its place as a landmark Technicolor production and the film’s director of photography, Jack Cardiff, who would go on to light and shoot the equally breathtaking Red Shoes the following year, doesn’t disappoint for a moment. However, for all its colourful images and exquisite lighting, the film is rather bland, perhaps because some of the emotions are so extreme that one easily becomes indifferent to the nuns’ emotional turmoil.

While Sister Ruth snaps at all the women around her, finding fault with everything they do, a new girl arrives at the convent – Kanchi, a young girl with many piercings, played by Jean Simmons – who needs to be educated, since she has arrived on the doorstep of the General’s agent, Mister Dean, and expects to be made his bride. Fortunately, for his and for our sake, he has no interest in the girl. Her character is terribly irritating and cannot be taken very seriously: in every scene, she has a lascivious look on her face that drips with heat and while her appearance is clearly meant to be juxtaposed with the nuns and their white habits, her slithering around the General, who quickly gives her what she wants, is rather embarrassing. Luckily, when Ruth imitates Kanchi in a later scene, she is not successful in her attempts at seduction and therefore only embarrasses one of the parties – herself.

Throughout the film, we wait for the inevitable. We get a few very beautiful shots of the bell being rung at the top of the precipice and it is rather obvious what all of this is leading up to. The power play between the nuns themselves and between the nuns and the natives, including the General and Mister Dean, has the most resonance, and directors Powell and Pressburger, together with Jack Cardiff, compose beautiful shots, particularly notable in some of the first scenes, in which ceiling fans, or their shadows, may be spotted in every frame.

Black Narcissus, shot almost entirely inside Pinewood Studios, with painted backdrops standing in for the actual Himalayas, wants to tackle the conflict between human nature and the restrictions of an order such as that found at a convent, but given the influence of the Catholic League of Decency at the time, this film was not allowed to go very far in its investigation, and falls short of communicating anything of real substance. But Cardiff, as he would do in The Red Shoes, creates images that  sear into one’s memory, and manages to elevate the film into the realm of the “must-sees”.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

USA

3*
Director: Terrence Malick
Screenwriter: Terrence Malick
Director of Photography: John Toll
Running time: 163 minutes

The most distracting thing about Terrence Malick’s longest film is not the length, nor is it the extremely slow pace of the narrative or the reflective, fragmentary voice-overs we are treated to by many different characters – it is the amount of celebrities, almost all of whom unfortunately draw our attention away from the film’s desire to approach the characters of its soldiers as intimately as possible. Forget Grand Hotel; this film features Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Tim Blake Nelson, Adrien Brody, Jared Leto, John C. Reilly, Ben Chaplin, John Travolta, Nick Nolte, Nick Stahl, John Cusack, George Clooney, and a few others. It is ludicrous to pack a film as sensitive as this one with names like these, and while the celebrities almost certainly secured Malick the budget he needed, the effect on the film’s appreciation is devastating.

If you’ve ever heard of Terrence Malick, then you shouldn’t be surprised that The Thin Red Line is not your average war epic. Malick’s voice-overs fill the soundtrack as much as actual dialogue, and despite the battle waged between the Americans and the Japanese, nature is the real character of the film. Set almost entirely on the island of Guadalcanal, part of the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean, the film focuses on the experiences of a group of soldiers who are fighting the Japanese and coming to terms with formerly abstract terms such as “death” and “danger”.

One of these soldiers is Private Witt, who went AWOL and is living on an island with native Melanesians when his country tracks him down at the beginning of the film and makes him join Charlie Company, an outfit whose mission it is to take out the Japanese on Guadalcanal. His idyllic life on the island had been beautiful and carefree, but he is about to be confronted up close with the loss of life and the loss of natural innocence, as a streak of blood on a blade of grass subtly informs us early on.

Nature, interior reflection, in the form of voice-overs, and reactions to death are what this film mostly concerns itself with. As Private Witt, Jim Caviezel delivers a performance that draws the viewer like a magnet. He is cool, calm, and wise, with a spirit much older than his youthful face could ever reveal. Witt is one of the few characters that we can hold on to while others slide in and out of view, without reason. Admittedly, Malick does make an explicit point that it is possible for all men to somehow share a big spirit, and that we, like nature, are all connected by a spiritual thread we fail to recognise. But very little is done to develop this insight, which quickly disappears.

There are many voice-overs, always delivered dispassionately, but since the story is not tied to a particular individual, it is often very difficult to establish whose voice we are hearing; sometimes, the speaker doesn’t even appear in the scene. In this way, we hear the disembodied voices of (at least) Privates Witt, Bell (Ben Chaplin), Private First Class Doll (Dash Mihok), First Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) and Lieutenant Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte).

Some actors deliver stellar performances, most notably Jim Caviezel and Ben Chaplin, who absorb the chaos around them without being overly shaken by it and yet portray absolute humanity and a dignity that is beautiful. I also want to acknowledge the strength of Elias Koteas’s character, Captain Staros, who seems to possess divine force when he speaks his native Greek, and Nick Nolte’s Lieutenant Colonel Tall, who is euphoric at his first taste of real war and doesn’t flinch even while grenades explode around him. Some actors are quite bad, such as Dash Mihok (an actor who has played wonderful roles in other films), who seems to be scared when he is not shocked and who never loses his slightly childlike demeanour. And then there are many actors who were not given any opportunity to develop their characters. Adrien Brody, always wide-eyed in this film, is seen but almost never heard, and George Clooney pops up in an interesting role… in the film’s final scene.

As usual for a Malick film, the audiovisual elements are simply stunning, and the director has included a romantic angle, which in this case does not serve the film well. One feels slightly embarrassed when Private Bell (Ben Chaplin) receives a letter from his wife, the context having been sketched previously with simple flashbacks that do not present us with a concrete picture, but Chaplin copes exceedingly well. For all the weaknesses of the screenplay (the entire plot can be summarised in a very short paragraph), the camera does some amazing tricks with its pitch perfectly coloured images, and the Melanesian choir music is unforgettable. Look out for an early scene, after the death of two soldiers, when sunlight turns the grass from dark-green to yellow.

Malick gets at the complexity of war and there are many interesting moments scattered throughout the film, including a captain’s desire to see his men protected, no matter what the effect on the battle, the awkwardness of battle depicted by soldiers running into each other while fleeing gunfire, and the universality of suffering, when a Japanese prisoner cries for the dead friends around him. But these moments, while rich and insightful, do not cohere into a strong narrative and ultimately we get the sense that Malick is meticulous but unable to move beyond the abstract and give us a physical experience of his world. The film has an abundance of water and greenery, and a sharp eye for human emotion, with some strong performances, but these are lonely elements in a film that gets caught up in its own rhetoric.

Bambi (1942)

USA

3*
Director: David Hand
Screenwriter: Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Gustaf Tenggren
Director of Photography: Max Morgan
Running time: 70 minutes

I grew up without ever watching Bambi. I had heard about the fate of Bambi’s mother, of course, and I’ve known about it for twenty years, but having been exposed to many other Disney films over the years – The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and The Lion King, all of which had villains that really scared me, not to mention the film made of Pinocchio - I decided to wait it out. The wait turned into more than a decade and now that I have finally seen the film, I am a little conflicted about my response.

It is a film of its time, coming shortly after the groundbreaking work initiated by Walt Disney in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and continued, in spectacular fashion, in Fantasia (1940). Its animation rather resembles a moving picture book and very often the animals are the only elements of the frame that are in movement. As the deer play among the tall grass, the grass barely moves, and even though the treetops seem to sway, the grass remains firmly rigid. But these are not my primary objections to the film.

The film starts with the birth of Bambi, a young stag, deep in the forest. He is lying next to his mother, but his father is absent. And his father’s absence is never explained or justified. The father is alive and well, named the Great Prince of the Forest, but he is distant – regal and silent – and only makes an appearance when his wisdom or experience is called for. Bambi’s mother isn’t very actively involved in her son’s upbringing either, and he spends most of his time – including an outdoor trip, when he says his first words! – with his friend Thumper the rabbit, whose father is mentioned repeatedly but never seen, unlike his mother. Bambi spends very little time with his mother: the most significant incident takes place at the meadow, when she warns him that danger lies beyond the forest, and that he should take care.

The meadow would be the place where his mother is killed by the humans (whom we never see), but this central event of the narrative occurs off-screen and since we hadn’t seen Bambi in his mother’s company very often, her subsequent absence in his life wasn’t going to upset our idea of his world all that much.

The most noteworthy scene in the film has to be the big forest fire that breaks out and forces  many different animals to flee. The role of humans in this desperate situation is unmistakable and it is this scene, much more than the death of Bambi’s mother, that would inspire sympathy in the viewers and make us aware of the point of view of the animals.

Without giving away too much, I must say here that the final scene, though meant to be a joyous occasion, has a very eery feel to it, since it can easily be interpreted as another beginning, similar in kind to the beginning of the film, and therefore it plants the idea that the future will be a repetition of the past.

The film has a very appropriate soundtrack, which also tells us when danger is approaching, since we don’t see the humans, and I particularly enjoyed the rhythmic effect of the simultaneous appearance of rain drops on screen and “April Shower” on the audio track. However, this film is too short, and it skips over important moments (the death of Bambi’s mother; his grief; his subsequent growing up) while it focuses a long time on relatively insignificant details (playing with Thumper on the frozen lake; his strange relationship with Flower, a young male skunk who clearly fancies him).

The death of a mother is sad, but in this case, the film cares little about her, or her relationship with her son, and therefore it is difficult for the viewer to care much more, beyond a general desire for innocent mothers not to get killed.

Sullivan’s Travels (1941)

USA

3*
Director: Preston Sturges
Screenwriter: Preston Sturges
Director of Photography: John Seitz
Running time: 90 minutes

This is my first Sturges film, and I like the Capra quality of the thing. There is something very warm and fuzzy about the story, even though it deals, albeit obliquely, with the idea of poverty. I also like films that deal with the film industry and Sullivan’s Travels is a comedy about the commercial infeasibility of making films that deal with socially relevant topics, rather than straightforward comedies, which almost inevitably do better at the box office. However, whereas Capra had a comedic way of presenting dramatic and important messages (Mr Smith Goes to Washington: ”Stand up for what is right!”; It’s a Wonderful Life: ”Don’t ever think that you haven’t made a difference!”; It Happened One Night: ”Down with the walls of Jericho! We are in love!”), this film by Preston Sturges doesn’t quite rise above its comedic simplicity.

The film was made at the beginning of the Second World War and was released at the end of 1941, around the time of the Pearl Harbor attack that escalated the American military’s participation. Social issues, such as unemployment and low income, are raised in the film – this was at a time when US unemployment figures, of a population still rattled by the Great Depression of the 1930s, were around 15% – but the central character regards everything from a comfortable distance. Sure, he mingles with the hoi polloi and even shares a table with them, but there is very little – if not a complete lack of – interaction between him and those he wants to represent on the big screen.

In fact, one can easily forget that Sullivan is actually a director. He doesn’t seem very awkward in his scenes with the homeless, and such moments of uneasiness as there are – at the communal dinner table, for example – have very little screen time and do not communicate much except a little comedy. Chaplin dealt comically with the life of a tramp, but even his films have emotions and insight into the life of someone who is homeless to a much deeper degree than anything in Sullivan’s Travels.

The film opens with a marvellous scene: two men, accompanied by very loud, very enthusiastically bombastic music, are fighting on top of a train advancing at full speed through the dark night. The scene turns out to be final scene of another film, screened for some producers. Such metatextuality is refreshing, considering the banal nature of most of the rest of the film.

The film contains at least one very bad scene. In prison, where there is a lot of hardship (although the only hardship we ever see inflicted on anybody is on John Sullivan), the prisoners go to watch a movie one night: cartoons by Walt Disney. The moment the picture starts, the prisoners burst out laughing, to such a degree you might think they are having seizures. It is an absolutely ludicrous way to communicate the message (comedy works, even in hard times) and I found it thoroughly simpleminded.

Based on my experience of Sullivan’s Travels, a film that is supposed to be Preston Sturges’s masterpiece, it is very easy to come to the conclusion that he was no Frank Capra and while there is some amusing banter between Joel McCree and Veronica Lake, in the spirit of screwball comedies, the film never seriously investigates the social milieu its main character wishes to study.

The Witness (1969)

Hungary

3*
Director: Péter Bacsó
Screenwriters: Péter Bacsó, János Újhegyić
Director of Photography: János Zsombolyai
Running time: 103 minutes

Original title: A tanú

József Pelikán, by his own admission, is “ideologically ill-defined”, in spite of his affiliation with the Communist Party; he is a continuous victim of circumstance. All he really cares about is the dyke next to his house, where he does his best to keep the gophers from burrowing and destroying this wall that protects him and his family against the slowly rising level of water. And rise it does, in the end providing the inevitable tragedy in this tragicomedy.

In one of the film’s opening scenes – incidentally, one of the only instances when Pelikán deliberately defies the law of the land – he slaughters a pig in the basement while his children, standing on the trapdoor above, sing at the top of their lungs. Such an activity (the killing, not the singing) is illegal under law and soon enough, by way of more misunderstandings, Pelikán is arrested and thrown in jail.

Very quickly, the film’s structure becomes a chain of predictable causality – he is thrown in jail, let out almost immediately, given a job by a Party senior, he fails to respect someone high up and is thrown in jail again – but the situations themselves are comedic gems. Pelikán is appointed as director of a swimming pool, director of an amusement park and director of an orange research institute, but fails to impress.

But the Orange Research Institute does provide one of the funniest banners in the film, visible during a ceremony supposed to celebrate the success of the Hungarian Orange: “Forward with the Hungarian Orange!”

This film is one of those Communist-era comedies that clearly poke fun at the regime and still astound by virtue of having been made in such a political climate in the first place. In particular, I’m thinking of a Polish film called Miś, by Stanisław Bareja. The Witness is less overtly laughable, but there is a lot to laugh at, and this laughter is often derived from the hilarious absurdity of the main character’s ignorance of and disregard for the power structures.

A Witness is a grand farce and the one character’s recurring reminder that “life is not a whipped-cream cake” might not be as poetic or optimistic as Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, but it makes clear what the characters should not be expecting.

The use of communist slogans in the film is striking and comical, and can still be easily comprehended by a contemporary audience. Also, there is no difficulty in understanding the subtext of the episode about the Hungarian Oranges. The last part of the story is handled well and contains one or two interesting surprises, which the episodic nature of the film up to that point had sought to conceal.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

USA

3*
Director: Woody Allen
Screenwriter: Woody Allen
Director of Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Running time: 98 minutes

Another year, another film from the neurotic New Yorker. The extraordinarily prolific Woody Allen is back in London, after the enjoyable but forgettable interlude that was Whatever Works. “Enjoyable but forgettable” seems to be a very appropriate way to qualify his recent films. In fact, the narrator of his most recent film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, admits that the story is all “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. And indeed it is.

As usual, the cast is a veritable smorgasbord of talent: Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas and Gemma Jones are all delightful to watch. And Lucy Punch, representing a cross-section of the cheaper side of East London, is as fantastic as her character is grating.

Having recently separated, Alfie and Helena (Hopkins and Jones) go their own ways: Alfie ends up marrying a prostitute (Punch), while Helena blindly follows the advice of a clairvoyant who can’t see beyond Helena’s own desires and her pocketbook. Meanwhile, Sally (Watts), the daughter of Alfie and Helena, starts to work at an art gallery and gradually falls in love with her boss (Banderas), while her husband Roy (Brolin) is struggling to finish his latest novel and regularly sneaks a peek through the rear window at a young woman on the other side of the courtyard.

There are misunderstandings, no lack of lust, and a risky measure of self-delusion on the part of many of the characters, and it is good fun to watch the stew come to a boil. But the stories branch out in every direction and I’ve grown tired of Allen’s jazz soundtrack, which attracts too much attention. Also, it is perhaps a sign of Allen’s auteur sensibility that his films all look the same in spite of having different DoPs on every production, but with a cameraman like Vilmos Zsigmond at the helm, I would have expected a look that is a little more risky. No such luck.

The film is lukewarm at best and while it is a nice temperature for this relaxing 100 minute distraction, it is hardly worth remembering and will be all but forgotten by the time his next film rolls round – which should be any day now.