Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Megan Fox Allure Magazine Photoshoot
They’re the trendsetters of tomorrow. She’s the actress of the moment. Eight edgy new designers pin their clothes on mega beauty Megan Fox. This flawless photo shoot was featured in beauty magazine Allure in 2008.
Monday, April 26, 2010
I Vitelloni (1953)
****
Country: Italy
Director: Federico Fellini
What a joy it was to rediscover this early masterpiece of Fellini. When I first saw it years ago while in college, I was familiar only with the more flamboyant works of the 1960s, and I didn't quite know what to make of this one. Now I can see it as Fellini's first full-blown masterpiece, a film that bridges the gap between the postwar neorealism of Roberto Rossellini—with whom Fellini cowrote several movies including Open City and Paisan, working as assistant director on those films as well—and the later works made in Fellini's increasingly personal and fanciful style.
The movie deals with the adventures and misadventures of five buddies in a postwar seaside town, unnamed but generally assumed to be Fellini's own hometown of Rimini. These men are referred to in contemporary Italian slang as vitelloni, translated as "the guys" or "the layabouts." In modern American slang they would probably be called slackers. Nearly thirty years old and obviously well-educated, they dress stylishly and talk of life in the big city while putting down the hidebound attitudes of their provincial town. Yet they are unmarried, live at home with their families, and don't work (although some have unachieved career aspirations)—clear examples of arrested development. Like the three main characters in Fellini's next film, La Strada (which was actually written before I Vitelloni but not considered commercial enough to be made right away), each of the five represents a character type: a beret-wearing, bespectacled intellectual who wants to be a playwright; a handsome Don Juan; a chubby, talented musician; a goofball (played in his inimitable hysterico-comic way by Alberto Sordi); and an introspective, observant young man named Moraldo who is clearly a stand-in for the young Fellini. At the end of the movie, only Moraldo has actually left to pursue his dreams in Rome, leaving the others behind to continue their avoidance of adulthood in the sticks.
I Vitelloni contains many images that would recur in later Fellini movies. A scene of the pals on the pier in mid-winter gazing wistfully out to sea presages the scene of Marcello on the beach near the end of La Dolce Vita; an episode at the theater, Cabiria's visit to the variety show in The Nights of Cabiria; a priest high up in a tree, the mad uncle in the tree in Amarcord; the Lent carnival, the wild parties of La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits, and Satyricon; Moraldo's friendship with a little boy who works at the train station (which makes him see how much he has to lose by staying in his hometown) presages Marcello's friendship with the girl on the beach in La Dolce Vita (which makes him see how much he has lost in his quest for success in the big city).
With I Vitelloni Fellini begins the process of taking events from his own life, transforming them, and incorporating them into the events in his movies, a subject he dealt with directly in 8½. Taken together, four of his movies form a sort of cinematic autobiography that pinpoints Fellini's state of mind at various stages of his life. I Vitelloni is Fellini's portrait of the artist as a young man, leaving behind the comfortable strictures of the past for an unknown future. La Dolce Vita (1960) shows its main character on the verge of fame but still torn between the simplistic morality of his provincial origins and the disturbing decadence he sees all around him. 8½ (1963) portrays a middle-aged film director now famous but still haunted by images of the past, fearful of commitment (except to his art), and plagued by an entirely new set of problems, both personal and professional. Finally, in Amarcord (1973) Fellini returns to his more innocent and hopeful boyhood in search of lost time. It's no wonder these films resonate powerfully with audiences, so authentically does Fellini encapsulate the universal in the personal.
But even outside the context of Fellini's oeuvre, I Vitelloni stands as a brilliant film in its own right. Fellini enlivens his realistically observed story with the kind of near-surreal images and episodes that came to be associated with his style: the Miss Mermaid 1953 beauty contest that opens the film, a group of priests walking single-file on the beach, the bizarre shop of religious notions that one of the group is forced by his father to work in, the gilded angel statue he steals from the shop, the simple-minded Giudizio who helps him try (unsuccessfully) to peddle the angel to a nunnery and a monastery then installs the statue on a mound at the beach and adores its otherworldly beauty.
Fellini is masterful at interweaving the stories of the five different main characters, deftly juggling and mingling individual plot lines. And although each of the five vitelloni is an identifiable type, Fellini invests each with a distinct personality. He already shows his brilliance at matching the actor to the part and gets superb performances from all five of his leading men, including his brother Riccardo, who plays the musician. The most famous member of the cast was Alberto Sordi, and in fact Fellini organized the long shooting schedule around Sordi, who was touring Italy with a vaudeville company at the time. Sordi turns in a broad but at times quite touching comic performance as Alberto, the joker of the group. When he attends the carnival costume ball in drag—wearing a short blonde wig and one of his mother's hats and flapper dresses from the 1920s, with overdone makeup including a beauty spot and a comically vampish, pouty, heavy-lidded expression, doing an exaggerated tango with a male partner—just try not to think of Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot.
Interestingly, the only one of the main actors who never worked more than once with Fellini is Franco Interlenghi, who plays Fellini's alter ego, Moraldo. Is the fact that Interlenghi is easily the best-looking of the vitelloni—just as Marcello Mastroianni and Bruno Zanin, who performed the same function in later films, were clearly more attractive than Fellini himself—an indication that Fellini was just a bit vain? At any rate, Interlenghi does a first-rate job of portraying a person who is more an observer of events than a participant. The character never openly discusses the subject with any of his pals, but Interlenghi subtly conveys Moraldo's growing discomfort with his buddies and the dawning realization that if he doesn't take the plunge and leave them behind, he will be trapped in the same kind of dead-end life they are destined for.
One of the last shots of the film leaves a lasting impression—a shot of Moraldo looking sadly from the early morning train that is taking him away, clearly fighting the urge to stay, waving tentatively at his friend the station boy, who is walking away from him, balancing on one rail as though walking on a tightrope. Moraldo almost seems to be saying goodbye to his past and to his youthful self. At the same time, images of each of the other vitelloni still asleep in their beds flash by in his mind and he knows that life in the little town will go on without him the same as always, while he is borne away to a new life somewhere else.
Country: Italy
Director: Federico Fellini
What a joy it was to rediscover this early masterpiece of Fellini. When I first saw it years ago while in college, I was familiar only with the more flamboyant works of the 1960s, and I didn't quite know what to make of this one. Now I can see it as Fellini's first full-blown masterpiece, a film that bridges the gap between the postwar neorealism of Roberto Rossellini—with whom Fellini cowrote several movies including Open City and Paisan, working as assistant director on those films as well—and the later works made in Fellini's increasingly personal and fanciful style.
The movie deals with the adventures and misadventures of five buddies in a postwar seaside town, unnamed but generally assumed to be Fellini's own hometown of Rimini. These men are referred to in contemporary Italian slang as vitelloni, translated as "the guys" or "the layabouts." In modern American slang they would probably be called slackers. Nearly thirty years old and obviously well-educated, they dress stylishly and talk of life in the big city while putting down the hidebound attitudes of their provincial town. Yet they are unmarried, live at home with their families, and don't work (although some have unachieved career aspirations)—clear examples of arrested development. Like the three main characters in Fellini's next film, La Strada (which was actually written before I Vitelloni but not considered commercial enough to be made right away), each of the five represents a character type: a beret-wearing, bespectacled intellectual who wants to be a playwright; a handsome Don Juan; a chubby, talented musician; a goofball (played in his inimitable hysterico-comic way by Alberto Sordi); and an introspective, observant young man named Moraldo who is clearly a stand-in for the young Fellini. At the end of the movie, only Moraldo has actually left to pursue his dreams in Rome, leaving the others behind to continue their avoidance of adulthood in the sticks.I Vitelloni contains many images that would recur in later Fellini movies. A scene of the pals on the pier in mid-winter gazing wistfully out to sea presages the scene of Marcello on the beach near the end of La Dolce Vita; an episode at the theater, Cabiria's visit to the variety show in The Nights of Cabiria; a priest high up in a tree, the mad uncle in the tree in Amarcord; the Lent carnival, the wild parties of La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits, and Satyricon; Moraldo's friendship with a little boy who works at the train station (which makes him see how much he has to lose by staying in his hometown) presages Marcello's friendship with the girl on the beach in La Dolce Vita (which makes him see how much he has lost in his quest for success in the big city).
With I Vitelloni Fellini begins the process of taking events from his own life, transforming them, and incorporating them into the events in his movies, a subject he dealt with directly in 8½. Taken together, four of his movies form a sort of cinematic autobiography that pinpoints Fellini's state of mind at various stages of his life. I Vitelloni is Fellini's portrait of the artist as a young man, leaving behind the comfortable strictures of the past for an unknown future. La Dolce Vita (1960) shows its main character on the verge of fame but still torn between the simplistic morality of his provincial origins and the disturbing decadence he sees all around him. 8½ (1963) portrays a middle-aged film director now famous but still haunted by images of the past, fearful of commitment (except to his art), and plagued by an entirely new set of problems, both personal and professional. Finally, in Amarcord (1973) Fellini returns to his more innocent and hopeful boyhood in search of lost time. It's no wonder these films resonate powerfully with audiences, so authentically does Fellini encapsulate the universal in the personal.
But even outside the context of Fellini's oeuvre, I Vitelloni stands as a brilliant film in its own right. Fellini enlivens his realistically observed story with the kind of near-surreal images and episodes that came to be associated with his style: the Miss Mermaid 1953 beauty contest that opens the film, a group of priests walking single-file on the beach, the bizarre shop of religious notions that one of the group is forced by his father to work in, the gilded angel statue he steals from the shop, the simple-minded Giudizio who helps him try (unsuccessfully) to peddle the angel to a nunnery and a monastery then installs the statue on a mound at the beach and adores its otherworldly beauty.
Fellini is masterful at interweaving the stories of the five different main characters, deftly juggling and mingling individual plot lines. And although each of the five vitelloni is an identifiable type, Fellini invests each with a distinct personality. He already shows his brilliance at matching the actor to the part and gets superb performances from all five of his leading men, including his brother Riccardo, who plays the musician. The most famous member of the cast was Alberto Sordi, and in fact Fellini organized the long shooting schedule around Sordi, who was touring Italy with a vaudeville company at the time. Sordi turns in a broad but at times quite touching comic performance as Alberto, the joker of the group. When he attends the carnival costume ball in drag—wearing a short blonde wig and one of his mother's hats and flapper dresses from the 1920s, with overdone makeup including a beauty spot and a comically vampish, pouty, heavy-lidded expression, doing an exaggerated tango with a male partner—just try not to think of Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot.
Interestingly, the only one of the main actors who never worked more than once with Fellini is Franco Interlenghi, who plays Fellini's alter ego, Moraldo. Is the fact that Interlenghi is easily the best-looking of the vitelloni—just as Marcello Mastroianni and Bruno Zanin, who performed the same function in later films, were clearly more attractive than Fellini himself—an indication that Fellini was just a bit vain? At any rate, Interlenghi does a first-rate job of portraying a person who is more an observer of events than a participant. The character never openly discusses the subject with any of his pals, but Interlenghi subtly conveys Moraldo's growing discomfort with his buddies and the dawning realization that if he doesn't take the plunge and leave them behind, he will be trapped in the same kind of dead-end life they are destined for.One of the last shots of the film leaves a lasting impression—a shot of Moraldo looking sadly from the early morning train that is taking him away, clearly fighting the urge to stay, waving tentatively at his friend the station boy, who is walking away from him, balancing on one rail as though walking on a tightrope. Moraldo almost seems to be saying goodbye to his past and to his youthful self. At the same time, images of each of the other vitelloni still asleep in their beds flash by in his mind and he knows that life in the little town will go on without him the same as always, while he is borne away to a new life somewhere else.
Monday, April 19, 2010
No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)
***½
Country: Japan
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Seeing this early film of Kurosawa recently was for me a revelation. I was immediately struck by how dissimilar it is to most of the later films I'm familiar with. Those later works are almost exclusively male-centered. The women in those movies not only are few in number, but also tend to have secondary roles and to lack the complexity of the male characters. Like his idol John Ford, the subjects that interested Kurosawa—honor, loyalty, betrayal and revenge, shrewdness of thought and strategy, physical prowess and the use of force to ensure that personal might and moral right prevail—are male preoccupations explored through problems faced and resolved by male characters. Yet according to David Thomson, this is not typical of classic Japanese cinema: "Despite the flourish and fame of Kurosawa, the core of Japanese cinema is to be found in family stories, wistful romances, and in attention paid to women as much as to men." What is so surprising about No Regrets for Our Youth is how closely it corresponds to Thomson's description of mainstream Japanese cinema, unlike the bulk of Kurosawa's work.
Like many of the films coming out of China in the last twenty years, No Regrets not only places its story in the context of recent historical events, but actually links its plot to those events, in itself unusual in a Kurosawa movie. The main character is a young woman, Yukie (Sestuko Hara), the daughter of a professor of law at Kyoto University when the movie opens in 1933. Professors and students at the university are embroiled in agitation against the suppression of academic freedom by the minister of education, specifically the suppression of their protests against the war-mongering of the government in the run-up to the invasion of Manchuria—a situation strongly reminiscent of the controversial protest movements at universities in this country in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, such as the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Yukie is torn between two suitors, Itokawa and Noge. Both of these young men begin as student rebels but later follow different paths. Noge drops out of school just before graduating, spends five years in jail because of his political dissent, and after his release becomes an anti-war writer, publisher, and activist. In contrast, Itokawa abandons his rebellion, remains in school, and after graduation becomes a government prosecutor and member of the establishment.
Yukie, raised in a very Westernized household, rejects the traditional, subservient role of Japanese women and spends her life searching for meaning. In a house filled with books and Western furniture, she wears Western clothing, eats with a knife and fork, and plays Russian piano music, expressing her inner turmoil by intense sessions at the piano playing "The Great Gate of Kiev" from Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. At one point she shocks the other young women in her flower arranging class by telling them she hates the arrangement of hers they are admiring because she despises having to follow the rigid rules they are taught, preferring to follow her own inspiration. She then impulsively destroys her arrangement by tearing it from its vase, ripping the flowers off their stalks, and dropping three flowers into a large bowl of water, where they float in beautiful isolation (an unconscious representation of Itokawa, Noge, and herself adrift?) in an image that would not seem out of place in a film by Ozu.
This is just the beginning of Yukie's journey of self-discovery. She rejects Itokawa's marriage proposal, leaves home and supports herself working at a series of menial secretarial jobs in Tokyo, reconnects with Noge, marries him, sees him arrested as a traitor literally on the eve of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, is herself interrogated as a subversive (the arrogant interrogator is played by Takashi Shimura, who worked in at least twenty of Kurosawa's films, becoming one of his main male actors, second only to Toshiro Mifune, and in Kurosawa's 1952 masterpiece Ikiru gave one of the great screen performances of all time), jailed, widowed, estranged from her family, and finally ends up spending the duration of World War II as a permanent uninvited guest of Noge's resentful peasant mother and father.
This is certainly the closest thing Kurosawa ever made to a "women's picture," and the amazing thing is how well he does it. No Regrets was only his sixth movie as director, yet already he seems in full command of both the Western techniques of cinematic storytelling and the brilliant way he had of pursuing theme through character. No Regrets may be about a young woman, but its sensibility is in no way feminine. By concentrating on Yukie's quest for meaning in her life—even the romantic complications of her life are an offshoot of this—Kurosawa avoids the sentimentality that traditionally devalues the genre, elevating the film to a sort of female bildungsroman—the chronicles of the ethical, emotional, and spiritual development of a young woman who defies her culture's veneration of conformity over self-expression.
The picture is beautifully framed by two scenes: an idyllic picnic at the beginning of the movie and a scene near the end where Yukie revisits the site of the picnic and sees a new generation of students doing the same things she and her friends did all those years ago, a poignant reminder of how much her life has changed and how much she has grown in the intervening years. Like Shimura's dying civil servant in Ikiru, Yukie ultimately comes to the realization that the key to finding meaning in her life is to free herself from her own self-concern.
Kurosawa is aided immensely by the casting of Setsuko Hara as Yukie. The intelligence and spirit she brings to the role—what Thomson calls "her outward modesty and inner strength"—make the character come alive. She was only in her mid-twenties when the film was made, yet she was already an expert movie actress. (She had been acting in films for ten years.) The expressiveness of her voice, the subtlety of her facial expressions and body language, the independence of thought and strength of character she projects are tremendously affecting, reminiscent of the controlled intensity of the young Katharine Hepburn but without the exaggerated mannerisms. The way she holds her head perfectly still, looking slightly down and straight ahead as another character speaks to her, and then at just the exactly judged moment lifts her head, turns it, and gazes wistfully at the speaker with those soulful eyes is just hypnotic. She carries the entire movie, and her amazing work here prefigures the great performances for Ozu in Late Spring, Tokyo Story, and Late Autumn.
In No Regrets for Our Youth, as in only a few of his films like the great Ikiru, Kurosawa uncharacteristically downplays his trademark visual grandeur and stylization to concentrate instead on the inner life of a character. The result is a sensitivity and depth of feeling not typically associated with Kurosawa.
Country: Japan
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Seeing this early film of Kurosawa recently was for me a revelation. I was immediately struck by how dissimilar it is to most of the later films I'm familiar with. Those later works are almost exclusively male-centered. The women in those movies not only are few in number, but also tend to have secondary roles and to lack the complexity of the male characters. Like his idol John Ford, the subjects that interested Kurosawa—honor, loyalty, betrayal and revenge, shrewdness of thought and strategy, physical prowess and the use of force to ensure that personal might and moral right prevail—are male preoccupations explored through problems faced and resolved by male characters. Yet according to David Thomson, this is not typical of classic Japanese cinema: "Despite the flourish and fame of Kurosawa, the core of Japanese cinema is to be found in family stories, wistful romances, and in attention paid to women as much as to men." What is so surprising about No Regrets for Our Youth is how closely it corresponds to Thomson's description of mainstream Japanese cinema, unlike the bulk of Kurosawa's work.
Like many of the films coming out of China in the last twenty years, No Regrets not only places its story in the context of recent historical events, but actually links its plot to those events, in itself unusual in a Kurosawa movie. The main character is a young woman, Yukie (Sestuko Hara), the daughter of a professor of law at Kyoto University when the movie opens in 1933. Professors and students at the university are embroiled in agitation against the suppression of academic freedom by the minister of education, specifically the suppression of their protests against the war-mongering of the government in the run-up to the invasion of Manchuria—a situation strongly reminiscent of the controversial protest movements at universities in this country in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, such as the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Yukie is torn between two suitors, Itokawa and Noge. Both of these young men begin as student rebels but later follow different paths. Noge drops out of school just before graduating, spends five years in jail because of his political dissent, and after his release becomes an anti-war writer, publisher, and activist. In contrast, Itokawa abandons his rebellion, remains in school, and after graduation becomes a government prosecutor and member of the establishment.Yukie, raised in a very Westernized household, rejects the traditional, subservient role of Japanese women and spends her life searching for meaning. In a house filled with books and Western furniture, she wears Western clothing, eats with a knife and fork, and plays Russian piano music, expressing her inner turmoil by intense sessions at the piano playing "The Great Gate of Kiev" from Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. At one point she shocks the other young women in her flower arranging class by telling them she hates the arrangement of hers they are admiring because she despises having to follow the rigid rules they are taught, preferring to follow her own inspiration. She then impulsively destroys her arrangement by tearing it from its vase, ripping the flowers off their stalks, and dropping three flowers into a large bowl of water, where they float in beautiful isolation (an unconscious representation of Itokawa, Noge, and herself adrift?) in an image that would not seem out of place in a film by Ozu.
This is just the beginning of Yukie's journey of self-discovery. She rejects Itokawa's marriage proposal, leaves home and supports herself working at a series of menial secretarial jobs in Tokyo, reconnects with Noge, marries him, sees him arrested as a traitor literally on the eve of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, is herself interrogated as a subversive (the arrogant interrogator is played by Takashi Shimura, who worked in at least twenty of Kurosawa's films, becoming one of his main male actors, second only to Toshiro Mifune, and in Kurosawa's 1952 masterpiece Ikiru gave one of the great screen performances of all time), jailed, widowed, estranged from her family, and finally ends up spending the duration of World War II as a permanent uninvited guest of Noge's resentful peasant mother and father.
This is certainly the closest thing Kurosawa ever made to a "women's picture," and the amazing thing is how well he does it. No Regrets was only his sixth movie as director, yet already he seems in full command of both the Western techniques of cinematic storytelling and the brilliant way he had of pursuing theme through character. No Regrets may be about a young woman, but its sensibility is in no way feminine. By concentrating on Yukie's quest for meaning in her life—even the romantic complications of her life are an offshoot of this—Kurosawa avoids the sentimentality that traditionally devalues the genre, elevating the film to a sort of female bildungsroman—the chronicles of the ethical, emotional, and spiritual development of a young woman who defies her culture's veneration of conformity over self-expression.
The picture is beautifully framed by two scenes: an idyllic picnic at the beginning of the movie and a scene near the end where Yukie revisits the site of the picnic and sees a new generation of students doing the same things she and her friends did all those years ago, a poignant reminder of how much her life has changed and how much she has grown in the intervening years. Like Shimura's dying civil servant in Ikiru, Yukie ultimately comes to the realization that the key to finding meaning in her life is to free herself from her own self-concern.
Kurosawa is aided immensely by the casting of Setsuko Hara as Yukie. The intelligence and spirit she brings to the role—what Thomson calls "her outward modesty and inner strength"—make the character come alive. She was only in her mid-twenties when the film was made, yet she was already an expert movie actress. (She had been acting in films for ten years.) The expressiveness of her voice, the subtlety of her facial expressions and body language, the independence of thought and strength of character she projects are tremendously affecting, reminiscent of the controlled intensity of the young Katharine Hepburn but without the exaggerated mannerisms. The way she holds her head perfectly still, looking slightly down and straight ahead as another character speaks to her, and then at just the exactly judged moment lifts her head, turns it, and gazes wistfully at the speaker with those soulful eyes is just hypnotic. She carries the entire movie, and her amazing work here prefigures the great performances for Ozu in Late Spring, Tokyo Story, and Late Autumn.
In No Regrets for Our Youth, as in only a few of his films like the great Ikiru, Kurosawa uncharacteristically downplays his trademark visual grandeur and stylization to concentrate instead on the inner life of a character. The result is a sensitivity and depth of feeling not typically associated with Kurosawa.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Monday, April 12, 2010
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
***½
Country: US
Director: Max Ophüls
David Thomson calls Letter from an Unknown Woman "a perfect film." I wouldn't go that far myself, but it is a very good one, not quite of the same caliber as La Ronde, Lola Montès, or the sublime Madame de, but in quality still close to those masterpieces. The film follows the lifelong infatuation of a woman, Lisa Berndle (Joan Fontaine), with a concert pianist, Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan). She first encounters him as a teenager when he moves into the apartment building in 19th-century Vienna where she lives with her widowed mother. She is separated from Stefan, on whom she has developed a girlish crush, when her mother remarries and the family moves to Linz. As a young woman, Lisa cannot free herself from her romantic obsession with Stefan and refusing offers of marriage, moves back to Vienna to become a salon model. She sets about stalking Stefan and after he finally notices her following him one night, he seduces her and has a brief affair with her before abandoning her and leaving Vienna. Lisa, pregnant by Stefan, has her baby and decides to keep him. Several years later she marries a wealthy older man and lives a comfortable but passionless life with him until one night she encounters Stefan at the opera. Seeing him again revives her feelings for him, and she arranges a rendezvous at the very apartment house where as a girl she first met him (a detail that gives the movie a wonderful circularity, in a way a foretaste of La Ronde). When she arrives, she realizes that he doesn't even remember her from any of their past encounters, that the passion she has nursed all those years has been completely on her part, and abruptly leaves.
As this brief synopsis makes clear, Letter from an Unknown Woman has much in common with the later work of Ophüls. It deals with sexual liaisons, marital infidelity, and the emotional damage that can result from fervent romantic passion. It is as fatalistic—its tragic outcome as inescapable—as Madame de and even ends the same way, in a duel that Stefan, like Vittorio de Sica's Baron in that film, is fated to lose but refuses to evade. It uses the device of a letter from Lisa to Stefan (the letter of the title) to provide the framework for the film's episodic narrative structure in the same way as Peter Ustinov's ringmaster's spiel in Lola Montès or Anton Walbrook's direct-to-camera narration as the storyteller in La Ronde or even the diamond earrings as they pass from one person to the next in Madame de.
Letter from an Unknown Woman has none of the detached irony and wit of those later films, though, going instead for the straight-ahead romantic approach of the Hollywood "women's picture." Even though it contains many elements of the conventional Hollywood soap opera—unrequited love, self-destructive romantic passion, illegitimate child, separated lovers, tragic ends for practically everyone involved—the movie seems far above the sentimental tearjerkers that were a staple of the studio years. For one thing, the emotions seem wholly genuine, not the synthetic passion of the standard tearjerker. The reason for this is the way Ophüls treats the story. The subject and the plot may be super-romantic, but the way he tells the story is realistic—restrained where most movies of this type are exaggerated, matter-of-fact where they bludgeon the audience with contrived and highly manipulative sentimentality.
The real impact of the movie comes not from ersatz sentiment, but from the authenticity of the emotional situation it depicts. Lisa has completely invested herself in an almost religious devotion to her intense feelings for Stefan. At the end of the movie, just when she believes that her most cherished desire is about to be realized, she suddenly sees that her entire emotional life has been based on a vain and pathetic self-delusion. The person she has made the center of her world literally doesn't even know she exists; her feelings for him not only have never been returned, but haven't even been recognized. The result of this epiphany is nothing less than emotional devastation. Anyone who has experienced anything resembling Lisa's situation will understand the power of her response and will also recognize that the authenticity of Ophüls's vision comes not from genre conventions, but from acute observation and personal memory.
The greatest practical obstacle Ophüls must overcome to get the viewer to accept the movie's premise is to make plausible Fontaine's portrayal of Lisa at three distinct periods of her life: as a teenager, a young woman in her mid-twenties, and a mature woman in her mid-thirties. Admittedly, making Fontaine, who was in her early thirties when the film was made, believable as Lisa requires a huge stretch of credibility, but he and Fontaine just manage to bring this off. Together, they convey these three different ages of the character through subtle adjustments in her appearance, through changes in her hair and costume that reflect her advancing age and social station: the lank, shoulder-length hair and the shapeless clothing that emphasizes her slender, undeveloped figure as a teenager; the middle-class shopgirl attire and pinned-up hair of her twenties; and finally the elegant, low-cut formal gowns, brilliant jewelry, and stylish coiffure as a chic socialite in her thirties. Ophüls also has Fontaine subtly modulate the timbre of her voice and the increasing self-assurance conveyed by her physical bearing as she matures. We see the continuity of the person over the years, but these subtle outer changes make it just believable that a compulsive Lothario like Stefan, who looks upon women more as objects than as individuals, might not. The lovely Fontaine was hardly a great actress, but with the help of Ophüls she gives one of her most accomplished performances, one that ranks right up there with those she gave for Hitchcock in Rebecca and Suspicion, in a part similar to those two but more demanding.
Viewers who prize directorial prowess will find much to admire. There are, of course, the customary extended takes and elegant, gliding camera moves of Ophüls. Then there is the vivid way that, confined to the studio and working on what was clearly a limited budget, he captures the look and atmosphere—and at the same time suggests the pervasive class divisions—of late 19th-century Austria. (The cinematography, by Franz Planer, is especially gorgeous in the pristine print recently premiered on TCM.) The cobbled streets, bourgeois beer gardens and exclusive restaurants, opera houses, modest apartments with their shared courtyards and opulent townhouses, and the clothing the people wear, from everyday street clothes to elaborate military uniforms and the formal evening wear of the rich—all these details relay the movie's setting as graphically as in the later films. We are always aware that the events in the movie occur in a distinct place and time, a place and time quite different from our own and forever locked in the past. The film is as much an elegy for a vanished way of life as it is a tragic love story, and it is this melancholy mood of the transience and the often illusory nature of both love and life that, as in much of Ophüls's work, lingers after the movie has ended.
Country: US
Director: Max Ophüls
David Thomson calls Letter from an Unknown Woman "a perfect film." I wouldn't go that far myself, but it is a very good one, not quite of the same caliber as La Ronde, Lola Montès, or the sublime Madame de, but in quality still close to those masterpieces. The film follows the lifelong infatuation of a woman, Lisa Berndle (Joan Fontaine), with a concert pianist, Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan). She first encounters him as a teenager when he moves into the apartment building in 19th-century Vienna where she lives with her widowed mother. She is separated from Stefan, on whom she has developed a girlish crush, when her mother remarries and the family moves to Linz. As a young woman, Lisa cannot free herself from her romantic obsession with Stefan and refusing offers of marriage, moves back to Vienna to become a salon model. She sets about stalking Stefan and after he finally notices her following him one night, he seduces her and has a brief affair with her before abandoning her and leaving Vienna. Lisa, pregnant by Stefan, has her baby and decides to keep him. Several years later she marries a wealthy older man and lives a comfortable but passionless life with him until one night she encounters Stefan at the opera. Seeing him again revives her feelings for him, and she arranges a rendezvous at the very apartment house where as a girl she first met him (a detail that gives the movie a wonderful circularity, in a way a foretaste of La Ronde). When she arrives, she realizes that he doesn't even remember her from any of their past encounters, that the passion she has nursed all those years has been completely on her part, and abruptly leaves.
As this brief synopsis makes clear, Letter from an Unknown Woman has much in common with the later work of Ophüls. It deals with sexual liaisons, marital infidelity, and the emotional damage that can result from fervent romantic passion. It is as fatalistic—its tragic outcome as inescapable—as Madame de and even ends the same way, in a duel that Stefan, like Vittorio de Sica's Baron in that film, is fated to lose but refuses to evade. It uses the device of a letter from Lisa to Stefan (the letter of the title) to provide the framework for the film's episodic narrative structure in the same way as Peter Ustinov's ringmaster's spiel in Lola Montès or Anton Walbrook's direct-to-camera narration as the storyteller in La Ronde or even the diamond earrings as they pass from one person to the next in Madame de.Letter from an Unknown Woman has none of the detached irony and wit of those later films, though, going instead for the straight-ahead romantic approach of the Hollywood "women's picture." Even though it contains many elements of the conventional Hollywood soap opera—unrequited love, self-destructive romantic passion, illegitimate child, separated lovers, tragic ends for practically everyone involved—the movie seems far above the sentimental tearjerkers that were a staple of the studio years. For one thing, the emotions seem wholly genuine, not the synthetic passion of the standard tearjerker. The reason for this is the way Ophüls treats the story. The subject and the plot may be super-romantic, but the way he tells the story is realistic—restrained where most movies of this type are exaggerated, matter-of-fact where they bludgeon the audience with contrived and highly manipulative sentimentality.
The real impact of the movie comes not from ersatz sentiment, but from the authenticity of the emotional situation it depicts. Lisa has completely invested herself in an almost religious devotion to her intense feelings for Stefan. At the end of the movie, just when she believes that her most cherished desire is about to be realized, she suddenly sees that her entire emotional life has been based on a vain and pathetic self-delusion. The person she has made the center of her world literally doesn't even know she exists; her feelings for him not only have never been returned, but haven't even been recognized. The result of this epiphany is nothing less than emotional devastation. Anyone who has experienced anything resembling Lisa's situation will understand the power of her response and will also recognize that the authenticity of Ophüls's vision comes not from genre conventions, but from acute observation and personal memory.
The greatest practical obstacle Ophüls must overcome to get the viewer to accept the movie's premise is to make plausible Fontaine's portrayal of Lisa at three distinct periods of her life: as a teenager, a young woman in her mid-twenties, and a mature woman in her mid-thirties. Admittedly, making Fontaine, who was in her early thirties when the film was made, believable as Lisa requires a huge stretch of credibility, but he and Fontaine just manage to bring this off. Together, they convey these three different ages of the character through subtle adjustments in her appearance, through changes in her hair and costume that reflect her advancing age and social station: the lank, shoulder-length hair and the shapeless clothing that emphasizes her slender, undeveloped figure as a teenager; the middle-class shopgirl attire and pinned-up hair of her twenties; and finally the elegant, low-cut formal gowns, brilliant jewelry, and stylish coiffure as a chic socialite in her thirties. Ophüls also has Fontaine subtly modulate the timbre of her voice and the increasing self-assurance conveyed by her physical bearing as she matures. We see the continuity of the person over the years, but these subtle outer changes make it just believable that a compulsive Lothario like Stefan, who looks upon women more as objects than as individuals, might not. The lovely Fontaine was hardly a great actress, but with the help of Ophüls she gives one of her most accomplished performances, one that ranks right up there with those she gave for Hitchcock in Rebecca and Suspicion, in a part similar to those two but more demanding.
Viewers who prize directorial prowess will find much to admire. There are, of course, the customary extended takes and elegant, gliding camera moves of Ophüls. Then there is the vivid way that, confined to the studio and working on what was clearly a limited budget, he captures the look and atmosphere—and at the same time suggests the pervasive class divisions—of late 19th-century Austria. (The cinematography, by Franz Planer, is especially gorgeous in the pristine print recently premiered on TCM.) The cobbled streets, bourgeois beer gardens and exclusive restaurants, opera houses, modest apartments with their shared courtyards and opulent townhouses, and the clothing the people wear, from everyday street clothes to elaborate military uniforms and the formal evening wear of the rich—all these details relay the movie's setting as graphically as in the later films. We are always aware that the events in the movie occur in a distinct place and time, a place and time quite different from our own and forever locked in the past. The film is as much an elegy for a vanished way of life as it is a tragic love story, and it is this melancholy mood of the transience and the often illusory nature of both love and life that, as in much of Ophüls's work, lingers after the movie has ended.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
.jpg "Kim Kardashian 2010 Calendar Photoshoot")
Monday, April 5, 2010
Dangerous Liaisons (1988) / Valmont (1989)
Dangerous Liaisons
****
Country: US-UK
Director: Stephen Frears
Valmont
***
Country: France-US
Director: Milos Forman
Released less than one year apart, these two movies were based on the same source, the French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos, published in 1782. Dangerous Liaisons was adapted from the stage play by Christoper Hampton produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1985. Hampton is a prolific British playwright, translator of plays by Chekhov, Ibsen, and Molière among others, and screenwriter who won an Oscar for his adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons. Valmont was adapted by Jean-Claude Carrière, a multiple award-nominee and winner whose credentials are also impressive. He has done screen adaptations of works by esteemed writers like Flaubert, Proust, Milan Kundera, and Günter Grass. As well as Milos Forman, he has worked with such noted directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Andrzej Wajda, and in the 1960s and 1970s on no less than six films of Luis Buñuel.
When these two versions of the same novel were released, Dangerous Liaisons got a great deal more attention—better reviews, more award nominations (seven Oscar nominations and three wins to one nomination for Valmont), and considerably better business. Dangerous Liaisons cost about $14 million to make and had a domestic gross of more than $35 million, while Valmont's budget was $33 million with a domestic gross of only a little more than $1 million. Yet Valmont has its admirers. David Thomson states flatly that "Valmont is the better film." So after I saw Valmont recently for the first time, I decided to go back and rewatch Dangerous Liaisons, which I hadn't seen since its release and which I recalled as being outstanding. My conclusion, based on watching the two movies about one week apart: I'll go along with the majority view and say that Dangerous Liaisons is clearly the better of the two.
Both movies contain the same basic plot elements. In late 18-century Paris two aristocrats, the widowed Marquise de Verteuil and the Don Juan-like Vicomte de Valmont, wager on the seduction by Valmont of two young women—Cécile, the virginal teenaged daughter, just out of a convent school, of a close friend of the Marquise and Madame de Tourvel, a young married woman whom Valmont has determined to seduce. Valmont's prize if he succeeds: a night with the Marquise. The rest of the movie deals with the machinations of the two in their conspiracy and with the repercussions, both expected and unexpected, of their efforts.
Yet despite the similarity of plot, the two movies are quite distinct in tone. Forman, who has a tendency to trivialize his plots and characters, does just that in Valmont. He makes the movie an amusing but superficial comedy of sexual manners and hypocrisy. Frears, on the other hand, takes an altogether darker approach, making his version a trenchant commentary on the sociopolitical climate of prerevolutionary France and a probing examination of the psychology of two warped individuals.
Forman's Marquise (Annette Bening) is motivated by personal revenge: Her lover has suddenly broken off with her after becoming engaged to young Cécile. Whereas the Marquise is perfectly acceptable as a mistress, he insists on a virgin for his wife, and the humiliated Marquise is determined to use Valmont to play a dirty trick on her former lover. Frears's Marquise (Glenn Close) is a far more complex and dangerous person. For her the wager with Valmont is not about personal revenge but, as she explains to him in a speech with a clear feminist slant, about exercising power in the only way open to her sex, a sort of revenge both on social conventions which leave no other outlet for her ambitions and on the males who create and perpetuate those mores that disenfranchise her sex.
Bening's Marquise is an idle, self-absorbed woman who sees the manipulation of others as an amusing game to ease her boredom, oblivious of the harm she might be causing to her human playthings. Close's icy Marquise is altogether scarier, a malevolent puppeteer who looks upon others not as playthings but as victims, who sees the control of others as a means to effect their psychological devastation and social ruin. Her pastimes are not mere frivolities, but all-out warfare, and the bedroom is her battlefield, where harm done to those caught up in her intrigues is not collateral damage but the main objective.
Similarly, Forman's Valmont (Colin Firth) seems far less malicious than Frears's (John Malkovich). The very casting of these two actors in the role—the essentially likable Firth versus the smarmy, saurian Malkovich—indicates how differently the two directors view this character. Firth's Valmont, like Bening's Marquise, is a narcissistic sensualist driven by the compulsion for self-gratification. Malkovich's Valmont, like Close's Marquise, is obsessed with power and control. For him the fulfillment of his libidinous impulses is less an end in itself than the felicitous by-product of the need to dominate others.
At one point in each film Valmont concocts a charade to win the sympathies of Mme de Tourvel, who has become aware of his scandalous reputation as a serial seducer. The way this is presented in each film makes a good comparison of the very different ambiances the two directors are aiming for. In Valmont the scene takes place when the Vicomte is out rowing on a lake. He leaves his manservant on the shore and rows to the opposite bank, where Mme de Tourvel (Meg Tilly) is sitting. Telling her he cannot swim, he threatens to drown himself if she will not have him. When she calls his bluff, he throws himself into the water and stays under for an alarming amount of time. Just when she is about to panic and call for help, he pops to the surface and confesses his deception. In the meantime the servant has jumped into the lake to save him and begins to flounder, and Valmont, now standing up in what is clearly about three feet of water, ends up rescuing the servant. It's an amusing sequence, but fairly predictable and not far removed from the farcical sort of scheme Bertie Wooster might have devised to get the attention of an attractive girl in a story by P. G. Wodehouse.
In Dangerous Liaisons, Valmont does something very different. He stages a theatrical scene intended to improve his image to Mme de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer). Knowing that the footman she has sent to spy on him will be nearby to witness the scene, he contrives to be out walking with his servant when they pass the hovel of peasants being evicted for being unable to pay their taxes. Offering to pay the taxes, he saves them from eviction and succeeds in convincing Mme de Tourvel of his humanity and charity. The entire scene is a cynical fabrication intended to deceive, while the equivalent sequence in Valmont is a fairly transparent ruse intended—and played—more to amuse than to mislead.
And because class conflict exacerbated by excessive taxation to support the extravagant lives of the nobility and to pay off the huge debts of the Seven Years' War was one of the main causes of the French Revolution, Frears and Hampton give the episode a caustic historical-political undertone. (Earlier the Marquise remarks to Valmont that the "century is drawing to a close." The French Revolution occurred in 1789, seven years after Les Liaisons Dangereuses was published.) They even manage to make an implicit criticism of the ethos of greed, arrant materialism, and the widening gulf between rich and poor of the Reagan-Thatcher era, at the height of which the movie was made. Touches like this give Dangerous Liaisons real bite in comparison to Valmont.
Dangerous Liaisons bests Valmont in other ways too. The dialogue is snappier and more witty, peppered with irony and double-entendre. The pacing of the movie is brisker, using ellipsis and narrative jumps to avoid the lulls and sometimes laborious elaboration of action in Valmont, with its more leisurely rhythms and nearly 40 minutes' longer runtime. Frears's film is also better structured and edited than Forman's. For a large portion of the first half of Valmont, Firth disappears completely while Forman concentrates on Bening, something Frears avoids by cross-cutting more frequently among the various plot strains. But probably the biggest advantage Dangerous Liaisons has over Valmont is its cast. It's true that the more forceful conception of the characters by Hampton is in large part responsible for this. Close, Malkovich, and Pfeiffer are simply given more to work with, but even so they make much stronger impressions than do their counterparts in Valmont. Glenn Close in particular dominates the movie with her predatory Marquise de Verteuil and received an Oscar nomination for best actress (with Pfeiffer receiving a nomination for best supporting actress).
****
Country: US-UK
Director: Stephen Frears
Valmont
***
Country: France-US
Director: Milos Forman
Released less than one year apart, these two movies were based on the same source, the French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos, published in 1782. Dangerous Liaisons was adapted from the stage play by Christoper Hampton produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1985. Hampton is a prolific British playwright, translator of plays by Chekhov, Ibsen, and Molière among others, and screenwriter who won an Oscar for his adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons. Valmont was adapted by Jean-Claude Carrière, a multiple award-nominee and winner whose credentials are also impressive. He has done screen adaptations of works by esteemed writers like Flaubert, Proust, Milan Kundera, and Günter Grass. As well as Milos Forman, he has worked with such noted directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Andrzej Wajda, and in the 1960s and 1970s on no less than six films of Luis Buñuel.
When these two versions of the same novel were released, Dangerous Liaisons got a great deal more attention—better reviews, more award nominations (seven Oscar nominations and three wins to one nomination for Valmont), and considerably better business. Dangerous Liaisons cost about $14 million to make and had a domestic gross of more than $35 million, while Valmont's budget was $33 million with a domestic gross of only a little more than $1 million. Yet Valmont has its admirers. David Thomson states flatly that "Valmont is the better film." So after I saw Valmont recently for the first time, I decided to go back and rewatch Dangerous Liaisons, which I hadn't seen since its release and which I recalled as being outstanding. My conclusion, based on watching the two movies about one week apart: I'll go along with the majority view and say that Dangerous Liaisons is clearly the better of the two.
Glenn Close, John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons
Both movies contain the same basic plot elements. In late 18-century Paris two aristocrats, the widowed Marquise de Verteuil and the Don Juan-like Vicomte de Valmont, wager on the seduction by Valmont of two young women—Cécile, the virginal teenaged daughter, just out of a convent school, of a close friend of the Marquise and Madame de Tourvel, a young married woman whom Valmont has determined to seduce. Valmont's prize if he succeeds: a night with the Marquise. The rest of the movie deals with the machinations of the two in their conspiracy and with the repercussions, both expected and unexpected, of their efforts.
Annette Bening, Colin Firth in Valmont
Yet despite the similarity of plot, the two movies are quite distinct in tone. Forman, who has a tendency to trivialize his plots and characters, does just that in Valmont. He makes the movie an amusing but superficial comedy of sexual manners and hypocrisy. Frears, on the other hand, takes an altogether darker approach, making his version a trenchant commentary on the sociopolitical climate of prerevolutionary France and a probing examination of the psychology of two warped individuals.
Forman's Marquise (Annette Bening) is motivated by personal revenge: Her lover has suddenly broken off with her after becoming engaged to young Cécile. Whereas the Marquise is perfectly acceptable as a mistress, he insists on a virgin for his wife, and the humiliated Marquise is determined to use Valmont to play a dirty trick on her former lover. Frears's Marquise (Glenn Close) is a far more complex and dangerous person. For her the wager with Valmont is not about personal revenge but, as she explains to him in a speech with a clear feminist slant, about exercising power in the only way open to her sex, a sort of revenge both on social conventions which leave no other outlet for her ambitions and on the males who create and perpetuate those mores that disenfranchise her sex.
Bening's Marquise is an idle, self-absorbed woman who sees the manipulation of others as an amusing game to ease her boredom, oblivious of the harm she might be causing to her human playthings. Close's icy Marquise is altogether scarier, a malevolent puppeteer who looks upon others not as playthings but as victims, who sees the control of others as a means to effect their psychological devastation and social ruin. Her pastimes are not mere frivolities, but all-out warfare, and the bedroom is her battlefield, where harm done to those caught up in her intrigues is not collateral damage but the main objective.
Similarly, Forman's Valmont (Colin Firth) seems far less malicious than Frears's (John Malkovich). The very casting of these two actors in the role—the essentially likable Firth versus the smarmy, saurian Malkovich—indicates how differently the two directors view this character. Firth's Valmont, like Bening's Marquise, is a narcissistic sensualist driven by the compulsion for self-gratification. Malkovich's Valmont, like Close's Marquise, is obsessed with power and control. For him the fulfillment of his libidinous impulses is less an end in itself than the felicitous by-product of the need to dominate others.
At one point in each film Valmont concocts a charade to win the sympathies of Mme de Tourvel, who has become aware of his scandalous reputation as a serial seducer. The way this is presented in each film makes a good comparison of the very different ambiances the two directors are aiming for. In Valmont the scene takes place when the Vicomte is out rowing on a lake. He leaves his manservant on the shore and rows to the opposite bank, where Mme de Tourvel (Meg Tilly) is sitting. Telling her he cannot swim, he threatens to drown himself if she will not have him. When she calls his bluff, he throws himself into the water and stays under for an alarming amount of time. Just when she is about to panic and call for help, he pops to the surface and confesses his deception. In the meantime the servant has jumped into the lake to save him and begins to flounder, and Valmont, now standing up in what is clearly about three feet of water, ends up rescuing the servant. It's an amusing sequence, but fairly predictable and not far removed from the farcical sort of scheme Bertie Wooster might have devised to get the attention of an attractive girl in a story by P. G. Wodehouse.
In Dangerous Liaisons, Valmont does something very different. He stages a theatrical scene intended to improve his image to Mme de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer). Knowing that the footman she has sent to spy on him will be nearby to witness the scene, he contrives to be out walking with his servant when they pass the hovel of peasants being evicted for being unable to pay their taxes. Offering to pay the taxes, he saves them from eviction and succeeds in convincing Mme de Tourvel of his humanity and charity. The entire scene is a cynical fabrication intended to deceive, while the equivalent sequence in Valmont is a fairly transparent ruse intended—and played—more to amuse than to mislead.
And because class conflict exacerbated by excessive taxation to support the extravagant lives of the nobility and to pay off the huge debts of the Seven Years' War was one of the main causes of the French Revolution, Frears and Hampton give the episode a caustic historical-political undertone. (Earlier the Marquise remarks to Valmont that the "century is drawing to a close." The French Revolution occurred in 1789, seven years after Les Liaisons Dangereuses was published.) They even manage to make an implicit criticism of the ethos of greed, arrant materialism, and the widening gulf between rich and poor of the Reagan-Thatcher era, at the height of which the movie was made. Touches like this give Dangerous Liaisons real bite in comparison to Valmont.
Dangerous Liaisons bests Valmont in other ways too. The dialogue is snappier and more witty, peppered with irony and double-entendre. The pacing of the movie is brisker, using ellipsis and narrative jumps to avoid the lulls and sometimes laborious elaboration of action in Valmont, with its more leisurely rhythms and nearly 40 minutes' longer runtime. Frears's film is also better structured and edited than Forman's. For a large portion of the first half of Valmont, Firth disappears completely while Forman concentrates on Bening, something Frears avoids by cross-cutting more frequently among the various plot strains. But probably the biggest advantage Dangerous Liaisons has over Valmont is its cast. It's true that the more forceful conception of the characters by Hampton is in large part responsible for this. Close, Malkovich, and Pfeiffer are simply given more to work with, but even so they make much stronger impressions than do their counterparts in Valmont. Glenn Close in particular dominates the movie with her predatory Marquise de Verteuil and received an Oscar nomination for best actress (with Pfeiffer receiving a nomination for best supporting actress).
Friday, April 2, 2010
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