Some Came Running

NYFF 2012: "Frances Ha"

I know what you might be thinking: "What, ANOTHER movie about the travails of young white women seeking fulfillment in challenging urban America, someone kill me now." That feeling will not necessarily go away for the first ten minutes of Frances Ha, wherein Frances (Greta Gerwig) and her best friend Sophie address each other in arguably offensive faux-Ebonics, share a bed, get drunk, go to a PARTY IN BROOKLYN, WILLIAMFUCKINGSBURG TO BE PRECISE, exchange confidences about the Men In Their Lives And How Lame They Are, and do a few other things that you might be under the impression that you've seen in a movie or on a television show something like ten or fifteen thousand times before in the last eight months. I can't lie to you about that, even if I wanted to. 

But Frances Ha starts to take shape in a somewhat more possibly amiable way after this introduction. As a somewhat slightly qualified admirer of the HBO series Girls I can report that the agenda of Frances Ha is not, like that of the series, to contrive a sort of "look from the inside" at the situations of particular young women in the circumstance of seeking fulfillment in challenging urban America and from therein to perform some sort of inversion of traditional audience expectation. No, Frances Ha is a somewhat more conventional contrivance, a specific sort-of adult coming-of-age comedy. Directed by Noah Baumbach from a script by Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, who also plays the title character, Frances Ha brings a reasonably fresh perspective to material that people who go to a lot of film festivals and follow a lot of non-audience-connecting film-festival-dubbed "movements" or genres might consider overexposed to the point of losing-the-will-to-live over.

I'll try not to be so trite as to assert that what Baumbach brings to the table is a kind of artistic detachment. But, first, and most strikingly obvious, thing first, he does put this material through his own particular sensibility, shooting it in black-and-white and scoring it with a bunch of old Georges Delerue music, and hence attaching his own wistful notion of how this particular material (which I'm going to assume at least originated with Gerwig, as she is, or was, an authentic representative of the class portrayed herein) should be cinematically rendered. And he and Gerwig go through the trouble of constructing something of an actual narrative. The movie begins with Frances declining to move in with her boyfriend on account of having promised aforementioned best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) that they'd stick to cohabitating until at least their lease ran out, and OF COURSE Sophie's the one who then turns around and bails into a new roommate situation. Leaving Frances to "crash" at the big apartment of a guy with whom she MIGHT have been able to at least hook up (the movie's structured around a series of addresses Frances roosts in, which come up in nice white-on-black title cards). Again, I cannot tell a lie: this guy is played by Adam Driver, the big white lug of Girls, and here his character is actually rather charming and goofy in a mild 20-something-semi-cad sort of way. Frances Ha is pretty kind to its male characters, and it's not particularly harsh on Frances herself, although the movie doesn't stint on depicting her as something of a fuck up. But as it is in fact a pure comedy—Baumbach never overreaches here in the ways that made parts of Margot At The Wedding the wrong kind of uncomfortable—the viewer is pretty sure things will pick up before Frances has to go rooting around dumpsters. On the way we are treated to some very awkward and funny and engaging scenes that often ring quite true. I was particularly taken with a dinner party sequence in which Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips are cast against type as aging snooty one-time yuppies who turn out to be not entirely unsympathetic to Frances; it's just that, with pretty much very nearly a generation separating them, they do in fact turn out to speak entirely different languages. The dialogue is fresh and sharp throughout: little offhand quirked-out observations like "Transportation's his thing" get some of the movie's biggest laughs. 

Unlike Joe Swanberg's opportunistic and quasi-voyeuristic Hannah Takes The Stairs—a similarly-themed picture starring Gerwig for which its director tacked a new name on the actress and then sat her in front of, say, Kent Osborne, who's apparently Swanberg's idea of Brice Parain, and then switched the camera on—Frances Ha gives Gerwig the performer some tasks, in the form of a character who eventually repairs herself, somewhat, off-screen. I'm a Baumbach fan, but it's been some time since he's made a film this...I think the word is "winning." But there you have it. Nevertheless, if I read one more piece about the movie referring to it as a "valentine" or "love letter" to its star, with whom Baumbach reportedly has some kind of personal involvement, I may barf even more prodigiously than Mickey Sumner's character does at a crucial point in the film. 

NYFF 2012: "Passion"

Rachel McAdams going about as far as she's going to for her director.

My initial attempted aperçu about this romp was: "Passion purports to be a Brian De Palma remake of Love Crime but is in fact a Radley Metzger remake of demonlover." As we all know Twitter isn't so great with nuance and while the above is thereby wracked with small but not entirely insignificant innaccuracies I'll still stand by it. In any event Passion is, by De Palma standards, as compellingly watchable as his 2007 Redacted was aesthetically and by extension morally repellent. The problems with Redacted were many, but the main—formal—one casts a useful light on what helps makes Passion work. That is, the various visual platforms from which De Palma told Redacted's story were so haphazardly contrived/executed as to very nearly scotch De Palma's rep as a visual "master." The "surveillance video" didn't look like surveillance video, the computer screen chats didn't look like computer screen chats, etc. "Brechtian" or not, this created the wrong kind of alienation effect. Someone or something must have made DePalma understand this since that time, because Passion shows he's done some homework. While I daresay a very sharp dissector could point out ways in which total accuracy eludes him, the phone-camera advertising spot and hotel sex file look convincingly and compellingly authentic, as does all the multi-screen Skypeing in the picture, and more. That these screens all appear in frames put on real celluloid film by longtime Almodóvar cinematographer José Luis Alcaine. Long a top player in the realm of split-screen and multi-bifurcated compositions, De Palma really makes his frames within frames within frames work for him here. 

And this, some will intuit, is in the service of saying something about The Way We Live Now. In a way the real world has caught up with a vision that De Palma has always been putting forward, one that he and his fellow movie brats intuited from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom perhaps: that we are always looking, and we are always looking not at what is, or more to the point, ought to be, in front of us, but at something we're putting in front of us, some screen containing some contrivance of what we would like to think is our desire. This vision has become, for DePalma, so distilled (some would say rarified) that his best work of the past twenty years or maybe even more (hey, I really LIKE Femme Fatale!) has almost everything to do with that idea and nothing to do with the way actual human beings behave or speak. So the ridiculously flat dialogue and almost pantomime performance styles on display in Passion will not come as any surprise to a longtime De Palma watcher, although they are likely to elicit some sort of "That was stupid" reflex in non-adepts. No matter—does this thing even have a U.S. distributor yet? In any event, in adapting the tonally straightforward but full-of-myriad-plot-twists 2010 Alain Corneau thriller Love Crime (a far more conventional picture than his still brain-melting 1979 Serie Noire, the seediest of Jim Thompson adaptations, and that's really saying something), De Palma insists of course on reconfiguring it into a movie not about the duplicity of cinematic subjectivity and then cranking the volume of that subjectivity up to eleven once a strong prescription sleep aid enters the scenario of ruthless corporate one-upswomanship. 

it's a hoot, all right, but it isn't quite Radley Metzger, which is to say in a sense that it isn't quite Brian De Palma either. It doesn't have enough sex, is the thing. At 72 hardly an enfant terrible any longer, De Palma is nonetheless palpably constrained. American female stars of the bankability caliber necessary to obtain foreign funding (if I read my credits correctly there's not one American dollar in this movie, so to speak) simply won't do the kind of thngs De Palma leading ladies of the '80s had little if any trouble with. Hence, the ostensible sapphic tensions between the characters played by Rachel McAdams (American Canadian [see comments], appears in her underwear) and Noomi Rapace (European, appears topless) don't really get all that much traction and the most explicit stuff here is in the reveal of sex toys. Being an old master doesn't cut certain kinds of ice these days, I guess. I almost feel sorry for the guy. 

The irresistible inconsequentiality of Blake Edwards' "High Time"

First things first: I appropriated the above image from a review of the Blu-ray of the 1960 motion picture High Time from a review of that disc from the site DVD Talk. Sorry fellas. I'm still having issues with getting Blu-ray captures for my blog posts. And truth to tell, had I my druthers, I probably wouldn't have, myself, used the above image, an arresting process shot of Bing Crosby, "three-foot Chippendale" under his arm, climbing to the top of a large pile of wood, the better to boost the Freshman Bonfire past regulation height. I likely would have gone for one of the many innovative overhead (and occasionally in-camera) wipes that punctuate the film—a bed of golden and orrange leaves sweeping across the screen, skaters scattering loose snow to reveal an ice-rink scene underneath, and so on. But still. The above image is hardly un-apropos, as it depicts one of the dramatic highlights of the film. Yes, you read it right. Bing Crosby getting a freshman bonfire woodpile up to code is one of the dramatic highlights of the movie. 

It would be pretty pretentious, and worse, inaccurate, to say that High Time is some sort of structuralist film avant le la lettre. But to me one of its main attractions is that nothing actually happens in it. Here is the storyline: a chain restaurant tycoon named Harvey Howard, now in his early fifties (Crosby himself was about 57 at the time of shooting), above the objections of his snooty adult kids (the fellow's a widower) decides he wants to get a proper education, and to do it the proper way: by actually going to college. Living in a dorm. Participating in activities. Joining a frat. Some eyebrows are raised at this. Then he graduates. That's pretty much it. 

Oh, other things "happen," sure. Harvey brings the bonfire up to code. He expresses bemusement at the flirty ways of Tuesday Weld, who cuts an amorous swath through Harvey's dorm mates term by term. He falls for a French teacher (Nicole Maurey), there's a minor scandal, it's nipped in the bud. He dresses in drag as part of a fraternity hazing. And so on. A sufficient amount of incident to keep an hour-and-forty-five-minute-or-so narrative feature bouncing. And bounce it does. But there's absolutely nothing fraught about it, nothing to catch at the viewer and request a level of involvement above an ostensibly simple matrix of enjoyment. The self-made man Crosby plays is a ultra-relaxed version of a particular kind of can-do American pragmatist. In one scene he stages the opening-of-the-semester ritual toast he shares with his dormmates (a light-division Jeffrey-Hunter-esque Richard Beymer, amusingly pompadoured Fabian, non-sterotypical South Asian Patrick Adiarte, and lovely Weld) at one of his own eponymous "Smoke Houses," and not only is the know-nothing head waiter a snoot, but the burgers are inedible. Harvey just throws an apron on, gets behind the grill, and cooks up a batch just right, and he doesn't even fire the head waiter, merely instructs him, "You just cook 'em the way I did and they'll turn out that way every time." Every other conflict or potential conflict is dispatched with a similar lack of fuss. At the end of the film, after Crosby's character delivers the valedectorian's speech at commencement, we aren't even certain that things have "turned out" for Harvey and the aforementioned French teacher. We might as well assume they did, or that the movie is indifferent to the matter. 

Writing in the liner notes of the Mosaic Records collection The Complete Bing Crosby CBS Radio Recordings 1954-56, Crosby biographer Gary Giddins (whose long-awaited second volume of the Crosby biography—the first is the superb A Pocketful Of Dreams—is supposed to be due this fall, and will cover the period in which High Time was shot and released) runs down Crosby's accomplishments in the period prior to the making of this picture: "[Crosby] was [...] a prominent television star and producer (Ben Casey and Hogan's Heroes were the most successful of several shows launched by his company), whose annual one-hour specials were highlights of broadcasting seasons in the late 1950s and early 1960s, succeeded by his record-breaking stint as the most frequent host of the Hollywood Palace and his annual Christmas shows, carried over from radio and a tradition in millions of American homes. In addition, there were his 'extracurricular' activities, including his tireless work in supporting the troops during the Second World War, for which returning servicemen voted him the individual who had done the most to boost G.I. morale; as well as his role in creating the first and longest running celebrity pro-am golf championship, playing host for 35 years and raising millions in charity; his leadershipin developing the Del Mar racetrack; and his co-ownership of the Pittsburgh Pirates. For a man whose carefully nurtured persona was that of a lazy scamp, he was just about the busiest man in Hollywood."

There's nothing of the scamp in Bing in High Time. Sure, he goes along with a frat prank, but it's only bacause it's what the frat requires of him; he's actually pursuing the normative in doing so. When he objects to the rules, it's because the rules are unfair, as when French instructor Mme. Gauthier's position is threatened on account of their involvement, which at this point in the picture is entirely on the up-and-up anyway. And it is perhaps no accident that one of the picture's most lyrical scenes is, yep, a Christmas one, with Bing leading a chorus of "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear." In terms of pop iconography, the movie represents a shift in the Crosby persona; the whole scenario of the film is tailor-made for the older fella who's young at heart. It is once again probably ridiculously overstating the case to say that Crosby was here positioning himself as the can-do uncle for the young pioneers of the New Frontier, but the actively anti-fraught optimism of the picture is a real thing. 

And it isn't as if Blake Edwards couldn't do fraught. His next film, Breakfast at Tiffany's, has a light frosting that only slightly camouflages the emotional push-pull that resolves in the galvanizing rainstorm of its final scene. Soon to come were Experiment In Terror and The Days Of Wine And Roses. In High Time we find him indulging his love of comedians—for Crosby was a comedian, and a great one—and perhaps an envy for a free-floating state of being in which a take-it-as-it-comes attitude was ninety percent of success. That's what Crosby's embodying here, and as such, High Time falls on the performer-as-auteur side of the theory. The Blu-ray from Screen Archives Entertainment/Twilight Time is not rated enormously highly be the DVD Talk experts I stole the image from, but I found it exceptionally pleasing, clean and bright, like the song says, and a good representation of its lively color palette. 

Image of the day 9/1/12

Ugestu Monogatari, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953.

There has been an awful lot of...stuff written pertaining to the "Greatest Films Poll" sponsored by the British Film Institute and Sight & Sound magazine (which I was fortunate enough to have been invited to vote in); I am not inclined to contribute to any of the polemecizing per se but would like to note that the top picks in both the final poll result itself and the individual ballots is giving me an incentive to revisit some pictures I haven't seen in some time or perhaps maybe not at all. Mizoguchi's haunting ghost story, which I myself threw under the bus in favor of Sansho Dayu, and then threw Sansho Dayu under the bus and PUT NO JAPANESE FILMS AT ALL ON MY BALLOT (like many have said, in more polite ways, doing these ballots is completely fucking impossible), is now available, like Sansho, in a wonderful high-def edition from Eureka!/Masters of Cinema if you are fortunate enough to own an all-region Blu-ray player. On my coffee table right now: Arrow Cinema's U.K. Blu-ray of Wajda's Ashes And Diamonds (Martin Scorsese's ballot; also Francis Ford Coppola's ballot; it would be lovely to think they maybe hashed it out in a phone conversation but probably not, and in a sense it's sweeter to think of this affinity as having long gone un-reiterated); Tartan DVD's U.K. standard-def edition of Ingmar Bergman's 1949 Prison (Abel Ferrara's ballot; a reading of the synopsis for the film suggests an inspiration for Ferrara's own very underrated Snake Eyes/Dangerous Game); and Kino Video's Avant Garde: Experimental Cinema Of The 1920s And '30s, which features Joris Ivens' 1929 Regen, which is on Apichatpong Weerasethukal's ballot. 

The wrong man: Billy Wilder, "The Seven Year Itch," and Frank Tashlin (Updated)

I'm not really one for speculative film criticism, or concocting alternative histories of cinema, but I have to own up to a thought that hit me while checking out the new Blu-ray disc of The Seven Year Itch, the 1955 comedy directed by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell. Which was that the film really would have been better off having been directed by Frank Tashlin than Billy Wilder. 

Wilder, who'd later direct Monroe much more effectively (albeit under much tougher circumstances for the star) in Some Like It Hot, allowed to Cameron Crowe that he did not number Itch among his favorites. He didn't go into much detail, but admitted that he was under loan to Fox at the time. And Fox was Daryl Zanuck's house, and Zanuck was, among other things, all about the Cinemascope. As much as I admire Rudy Behlmer's essential book Memo From David O. Selznick, I rather wish that he had been able to do an equally exhaustive job with his similar book on Zanuck, then maybe I'd able to formulate a more supportable theory pertaining to the executive's ideas concerning comedy and Cinemascope. But it seems to me that just as early non-comedic Cinemascope pictures were all about Biblical pageants and historical drama (a cursory look at the largely abysmal 1954 Desiree, with Marlon Brando a Napoleon, reveals that, aside from snakes and trains and funerals, Cinemascope was a natural for coronation sequences), even to the extent that Zanuck himself got sick of it (writing to Elia Kazan with respect to some pitches the director had been obliged to send Fox, Zanuck passed on Oedipus Rex and allowed that he was "personally" "fed up with material of this sort"), Cinemascope comedy (and to a lesser extent, musicals) for Zanuck spelled S-E-X. Which of course seemed a natural fit for Wilder, except, let's say, for those capital letters. 

Reviewing the Monroe Blu-ray set for the New York Times recently, Dave Kehr, never what you'd call a Wilder man, calls The Seven Year Itch "ugly and shallow" and notes disdainfully that Wilder "doesn't even bother to give her a name." This is not quite fair to Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay with George Axelrod, adapting Axelrod's hit play. Itch came after two problematic pictures, Stalag 17 and Sabrina, and doesn't seem like a comfortable next step when looking at Wilder's filmography from an auteurist bent. Wilder told Crowe: "I was angry there." One wants to read a little more into that, but it turns out he was angry for a specific reason: he wanted a young actor named Walter Matthau for the part of the would-be errant husband, and Fox made him go with Tom Ewell, who, by Wilder's lights, "wasn't a bad actor[...][h]e was Tom Ewell." Wilder also wanted a scene that would make clear that the infidelity flirted with was actually committed. But no.

But there's also the matter of the broad allusiveness of Axelrod's farce, which, cinematically, Wilder approaches from a huge remove. The picture opens with a mock history of Manhattan which posits the "hunting season" for Native Americans once inhabiting the island was taken up by, um, squaw-hunting. The treatment of the "joke" is studio-flat:

Similarly, as Ewell is later reflecting on his own imagined magnetism, a reminiscence of a beachside tryst is rendered as a spoof of the then-infamous legs-together passion-in-the sand scene in 1953's From Here To Eternity; the most amusing visual signifier here is Ewell's Mack-Sennett-era swimsuit.

Wilder never made any bones of the fact that he became a director so that he could protect the integrity of his own scripts, and the visual interest of his films is inextricably tied to whatever cinematographer he was working with at the time. Some might argue that John Seitz deserved a co-director credit for Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, and Five Graves To Cairo, films he lensed for Wilder that happen to be among the director's most visually arresting. The Seven Year Itch was shot by Milton Krasner, hardly a slouch, but also someone who seemed to take his cues from the director, doing his best work with guys who were generally strong visually (Minnelli, Ray, Preminger). In any event, it's telling that the one pastiche scene that takes off is more of an overt character transformation than a pop-culture spoof. When Ewell's character imagines the effect that Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto will have on his potential conquest (it is an interesting sociological note that the petit bourgeois middlebrow of '50s NYC is painted as being conversant with classical music to the extent that it's a lingua franca, and that mainstream audiences are expected not to be alienated by this) the room darkens and Ewell turns into a gray-templed longhair while Monroe becomes a vamp whose vampiness is hammered into helplessness by the swoony notes. 

Later, when Ewell's character is confronted, in his paranoid fantasy world by gun-brandishing wife Evelyn Keyes (rather cruelly frumped up a mere four years after driving Van Heflin crazy with lust-rage in Losey's The Prowler), it seems as even the idea of giving the sequence some noir styling never even occured to Wilder and company. That sort of thing was just not his kind of comedy. Even the nudges togangster-picture genre conventions in Some Like It Hot were incorporated in an almost anti-pomo way. And when Wilder deploys some Vidor-quoting quasi-expressionism in the opening scenes of the widescreen black-and-white The Apartment, it's in the service of a pretty specific idea.

Which is not to say that Frank Tashlin's stylistic flourishes are empty. They are absolutely not, and in fact in a lot of cases they eventually serve the function of fleshing out the caricatures contained in his deliberately cartoonish movies. Kehr complains that Monroe is a "barely humanized set of body parts" in Itch, but then again, she's not a dislikable one. In any event, the one-dimensionality of Monroe's part can't be laid entirely at Axelrod's feet. Wilder told Crowe "the picture was good for the invention of that girl, The Girl who is always hot." In both The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? the oversized Jayne Mansfield is first made to serve that function in an exaggerated-beyond-credulity mode, AND revealed to be rather different from what he appearance suggests. It is no accident that both of those films represent the apex of the Fox Cinemascope-Technicolor comedies, which make it all the more frustrating that they don't figure in Behlmer's collection of Zanuck memos (Tashlin doesn't get a mention either.)  Where Wilder, as a default mode, kept character and dialogue at the forefront of his filmmaking, Tashlin's vision incorporated character and color and geometry in the same ball of energetically creative wax. The screen grabs from The Girl Can't Help It, in which an in-his-cups Ewell imagines ex-girlfriend (and client; he plays a music agent in the film) Julie London chastizing him with "Cry Me A River" will hint at the fluidity and vitality of what Wilder brought to his assignments. I certainly hope this film gets a Blu-ray treatment. (Speaking of which, the Itch screen caps are also from the standard-definition disc of the film; the new Blu-ray it quite an upgrade, and highly recommended). 

UPDATE: I was hoping these musings would kick up a good discussion, so I'm gratified that they have. I agree on the transcendent powers of Marilyn Monroe, and much else. I'm also glad to hear from my old friend Joseph Failla, who offers these thoughts:

For a better idea of how Tashlin might have tackled SEVEN YEAR ITCH,  why not take another look at SUSAN SLEPT HERE? Made a year before ITCH, SUSAN also incorporates the idea of an older man (Dick Powell) sharing his apartment with (in this case) a sexy teen (Debbie Reynolds), causing him endless frustration and turning his life upside down during her overnight stay. Although he's not married, he does have a sultry Anne Francis as his interfering girlfriend, adding even more pressure to his plight, rather than a non-present wife away on summer vacation as in Wilder's movie. 

I'm not unhappy with the way Wilder handled ITCH, although it may be a film that's better remembered than how it actually plays and the censors would have come down hard on anyone trying to make a film version of the original show. What I do like about it is how it clearly details what was really on most folk's minds regarding sex in the oppressive '50s. Everything seems to simmer in the summer heat, from the fans in motion, to the underwear placed in open ice boxes, until it spills over with Marilyn's more than suggestive bubble bath scene and the ever famous shot of her white dress billowing over the subway grating.

Incidentally, I did manage to see Walter Matthau's screen test for ITCH years ago on a television program promoting the film. As I remember, he was much more lively than Ewell, not sad or downhearted at all, if anything, he's overly giddy and self satisfied. Running up and down a staircase while managing a fair balancing act with a tray of items he's bringing to the girl waiting for him upstairs. He also worked that crick in his neck bit quite a lot, never missing a chance to bring attention to it. That said, this is one of those rare instances where Matthau can actually appear youthful in comparison to Ewell's droopy, wannabe rebel. 

Five frames from "Targets," Peter Bogdanovich, 1968, interpolating one frame from "The Terror," Roger Corman et alia, 1963

With Boris Karloff and Tim O'Kelly. See also here. 

Palate cleanser

Jack Lemmon, Virna Lisi, and Claire Trevor in How To Murder Your Wife, Richard Quine, 1965.

Three films by Dan Sallitt

I hope I'll be indulged if I hew to a journalistic convention that, for reasons that remain obscure to me, has fallen into disfavor in recent years, and begin by making a disclosure. The writer and filmmaker Dan Sallitt and I are friendly acquaintances. We run in a couple of the same social circles and hence see each other at parties as well as at some screenings. We have "done" karaoke together, once. 

That said, we're not "close." There's quite a bit I don't know about him. Until recently, for instance, I was unaware that he's also a musician, and plays in a band, which information I found moderately irritating, as I had been hoping to "corner" the "market" in film-critic-types-who-also-have-bands. While I admire Sallitt's writing on film, we differ in taste more than a bit, and I frankly find myself exasperated by certain of his critical enthusiasms. 

Sallitt has made three feature films since the late '90s; his latest, The Unspeakable Act, plays in New York as part of BAM's CinemaFest on Sunday, June 24. I think it's an absolutely remarkable film, one of the best of the year so far, and if you're around, you should definitely see it. I'm hoping it gets wider distribution, because, not to be crass or anything, I think it more than establishes Dan's bonafides in terms of deseving a wider audience, funding for more films, and all that sort of thing. If you're already familiar with Dan's films, or even if you aren't, this lengthy "conversation" at MUBI is worth reading; and below are some of my observations on Dan's work so far. 

Made in 1998, Sallitt's first feature, Honeymoon, is clearly the work of a real film artist, albeit one who is testing his fully-formed voice against his technical facility. Let me talk about its strengths first. The movie tells an unusual New York story; Michael and Mimi (Dylan McCormack and Edith Meeks, seen above) longtime friends who toil in mid-level positions in publishing, are best friends who impulsively decide to marry without, not to be crude or anything, having established whether they can get it up for each other. One of Sallitt's immediately visible strengths as a writer and director of actors is his ability to comprehensively portray an actual social type (one that was more plentiful in 1998 New York than it is in 2012, admittedly): what I used to refer to as the Too-Brilliant-Copy-Editor, e.g., the genuinely gifted and genuinely sensitive and aesthetically attuned soul that never breaks through what you might want to call a glass ceiling for reasons that are entirely their own and are not unrelated to a certain social awkwardness. This social sect is the only one, I believe that could contain non-religiously committed individuals who would marry without even getting a sense of what their sex life could be.

The resultant spectacle of two painfully smart people tormenting themselves and each other in the most civilized way possible has its farcical aspects, naturally, but Sallitt doesn't caricature his characters, and many of the scenes operate on a low-frequency but definitely palpable level of emotional pain and physical mortification that's incredibly absorbing even while largely cringe-inducing. There’s a knife-edge on which the performances teeter between naturalistic and weirdly clumsy, and at times this actually messes with the suspension of disbelief you might need to fully invest in the action. That said, the two leads are remarkable, particularly Meeks, a woman who's not necessarily conventionally attractive and yet is able to exude, in performance, a demanding, even querulous sexuality that's seemingly at odds with her intellect and politesse and preferred mode of living. 

Sallitt's shooting and editing style here is surface-plain but, as with one of his cinematic heroes Eric Rohmer, deceptively canny, but total control occasionally eludes him; now and again in a shot you get the feeling of the performers having a too-acute awareness of the camera, holding themselves back so as not to get too close to it, and so on. None of this finally compromises the film's cumulative power, which it accrues by continuously threatening to send one of its characters into a Pialat-style rage blowout but...well, I don't want to spoil it for you. You can acquire the movie for viewing in various formats/platforms at Dan's home page. 

Dan's second film, All The Ships At Sea, made in 2004, displays more directorial assurance from its very first, still shot. It also displays Sallitt's admirable powers of compression perhaps to a fault, as 64 minutes is a pretty unusual length for a feature film. This is a fully-realized work though, once again featuring the extraordinary Meeks in a lead role. She plays a woman recently escaped, or expelled, from a religious cult, and the attempt of her Catholic theologian sister (Strawn Bovee, in the still above), to reconnect with her, and help her put her life back together. 

In a sense this picture harks back to Rohmer's 1969 My Night At Maud's, a feature-length chat about religious philosophy disguised as a sex comedy. Although Ships has neither the sex nor (for the most part) the comedy (there is a fair amount of mordant humor, as when a character you don't expect this kind of language from says "Ohio, Iowa, what the fuck's the difference?"). "We believe that a lot of the spiritual turmoil in the world is happening for a reason," Meeks' Virginia tries to explain to her sister Evelyn. Eventually we come to understand that at issue here is not belief or difference of belief or lack thereof of any of the above but plain and horrific disconnection, exemplified in the simple-as-death confidence Virginia confides to Evelyn about a childhood treehouse: "No one knew about it. I built it myself." Nevertheless, Sallitt gets a lot of implied spookiness out of the shadow of the cult that hovers over Virginia. I believe it is a testimony to Dan's equanimity as a person that he has not even considered, as far as I know, taking a polo mallet to the kneecaps of the makers of Martha Marcy May Marlene.

 Still courtesy of BAMcinemaFest/Static Prods.

The Unspeakable Act is a fully realized—sure, I'll say it—masterwork, an emotionally wrenching character study that puts its uncomfortable truths forward without recourse to conventional psychology. That is, the powerful attraction super-precocious teen Jackie (Tallie Medel) feels for her older brother, the equally brilliant but possibly more well-adjusted and socially accomplished Matthew, doesn't "make sense," yet makes total sense in the context Sallitt creates for it. And once again, that context has its roots in an actual (or is it "probably actual"?) social milieu, the shabby-genteel bohemian Brooklyn that's been priced out of the Heights and whose diaspora, such as it is, extends to the likes of Ditmas Park, where the film was shot. 

Using a variety of dislocation techniques (some of which are discussed at length in Sallitt's talk with Keller), the movie brings us uncomfortably into Jackie's world, and her bedrock obsession, to the point that, fifteen minutes in, when Jackie admits "I've never slept with anyone," the sigh of relief from the viewer is apt to be seismically palpable. Once what's at stake is laid on the table, Sallitt deploys his characters in what I can only describe as alchemical chess moves. Particularly upside-the-head-smacking is how we're shown the way that the amiable and ostensibly sane Matthew actually gets off on the attentions of Jackie. When a therapist enters the picture (she is played, beautifully, by Caroline Luft, who, I should disclose, is a friend of myself and my wife's, albeit one we don't see as often as we would like; in fact, I did not recognize her on my first viewing of the film), that character gets to play not-quite-irresistable force to Jackie's seemingly immovable object. Rarely does cinema treat us to the spectacle of a person inflicting what can only be called metaphysical damage to him or her self (despite its topic, the last thing Sallitt is making here is a "social problem" picture). One of the wonders of Tallie Medel's performance, besides the way she uses her slightly-sexually-ambiguous physicality, is how she documents that damage as vividly as if she were actually physically cutting into herself, even as Jackie the character believes she's giving nothing away that she doesn't want to. 

The movie is dedicated to Rohmer, but it is entirely a Dan Sallitt work. I hope his next film comes sooner than six to eight years from now.

Schnook

Ray Liotta, Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese, 1990

Henry Hill

When I was a kid, I was watching a television talk show on which the recently paroled Depresion-era criminal Alvin Karpis, or maybe just someone who was associated with him, was a guest. And this guest was asked to describe his confederate Clyde Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde and Bonnie and Clyde fame, and this fellow said—and I seem to remember this part exactly—he said, "Well I'll tell you one thing for sure, he weren't no Clyde Beatty." He meant Warren Beatty, of course, but the confusion with the (by-now-not-quite-so) famous circus dude was kind of touching. In any event, the point was and remains well-taken.

When Beatty made Bonnie and Clyde, the real Clyde Barrow was long dead, and hence could not reappear in some medium or other to break the spell cast by the movie and Beatty's work in it. This was not the case with Henry Hill, the source of Nick Pileggi's non-fiction book Wiseguys and its subsequent film adaptation, Martin Scorsese's 1990 GoodFellas.

GoodFellas is frequently cited as a harrowing deglamourization of the gangster life/lifestyle, although it certainly owns up to the perks that criminality can ofttimes furnish; still in all, it shoots down various romantic notions concerning honor among thieves and depicts with great conviction a milieu that's not just entirely morally bankrupt but essentially tawdry, vulgar, squalid, and all that. 

Still. In their essay "The Power And The Gory," Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson take Scorsese's 1976 Taxi Driver to task, among other ways, thusly: "The intense [Robert] DeNiro is sold as a misfit psychotic and, at the same time, a charismatic star who centers every shot and is given a prismatic detailing." They hold Scorsese specifically responsible for this. But is the fault (if it is in fact a "fault" in the first place) Scorsese's, or is it narrative fictional cinema's itself?

The question could not help but come up in one's mind every time Henry Hill himself deigned to come out of protective custody hiding and appear on some news-based or reality-type television show or other. He seemed a recognizable type, of sorts; a real mook, if you will. Bit of an attention whore as well, which I imagine was part of the pathology that helped get him into the life, and trouble, in the first place. One thing he definitively was not was Ray Liotta. 

As protean as Liotta's performance in the film is, as eager and unhesitating as he is as a performer to plumb the sweaty, powdered-nose depths of his character's eventual depravity, as much of his actorly vanity as he is able to shed, he still remains...a performer, and a performer with an innate sense of charisma. Which is, ultimately, necessary in some way to audience engagement in even the most brutally honest but nevertheless conventionally conceived/structured narrative fictional film. If Henry Hill, who died Tuesday at the age of 69, had himself been able to summon the ability to be nothing but himself and harnessed that ability into performance as himself, and then took the role of himself in GoodFellas—I know I'm dealing in a lot of rank implausibilities here, but bear with me, and also that's the whole point—the movie would have been a stone drag to sit through. Because, from all available appearance, Henry Hill really WAS a schnook, albeit one who hit and shot people a fair amount more than schnooks such as you and I. 

Image of the day (with subtitle), 5/24/12

Enrique Irazoqui as Christ in Il vangelo secondo Matteo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964

Screen capture from the standard-def disc of the invaluable Eureka!/Masters of Cinema dual-format edition of the film. 

For The Anchoress, with a hearty "Up yours, whatever in hell 'yours' actually is." Hat tip to Roy Edroso and his also invaluable albeit infuriating alicublog.