Aye, There's the Rub
by Chris Dashiell

THE BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB is a rich, satisfying film by Wim Wenders about the group of elderly Cuban musicians drawn together by Ry Cooder to make a CD and do a tour. One-time legends like singer Ibrahim Ferrer (70), and pianist Ruben Gonzalez (80) had fallen into obscurity until, thankfully, they were rediscovered. Much of the film focuses on performance - and the music is beautiful, romantic and passionate indeed. The photography (Jorg Widmer, Robby Muller and Lisa Rinzler) makes this more than just a musical documentary. The images of Havana are especially gorgeous - although poverty has clearly left its mark, the film's precise use of color brings the city vividly alive. Each band member is introduced in a different setting, often spacious and deserted, and we hear reminiscences, fleeting glimpses of his or her life story. Always we return to the music, with footage of a concert in Amsterdam, later at Carnegie Hall. The sequences in New York, with the musicians achieving a life-long dream, are bittersweet. We often hear about "feel good" movies. This picture earns its good feelings with its patient attention to detail, letting the musicians' exuberance and love of music tell the story.

I don't believe in the survival of individuality after death. It seems to me that death is by definition, the end of the person. Therefore I always have trouble with movies that fictionalize the "afterlife." I can't stand Here Comes Mister Jordan. I even resist Michael Powell's A Matter of Life and Death. So naturally I came to Hirokazu Kore-eda's AFTER LIFE with my guard up. I wasn't completely won over, but this is certainly the least pretentious, most unassuming work I have seen in this genre. The premise is that there is a sort of way-station between life and eternity where people go to be processed. It is a very ordinary looking building. The dead souls stay there for a week, where they are interviewed by a team of afterlife functionaries. They have three days to pick one memory of their life that they would like to take with them. After they have chosen, the staff reconstruct the memory as best they can, making a film of it that the dead person then takes with him or her into eternity. There is much humor, not broad at all but very quiet, in the contrast between the mundane office conditions and procedures and their supposed cosmic significance. Not only is the set-up not credible - the film actually plays off the holes in its own logic for laughs. Beyond that, though, After Life is actually not so much about death as it is about the nature of memory and the curiously diverse views people have of their own lives - what they see as significant, and what they sadly ignore. I enjoyed this film's freedom of conception, its underplaying and its simple tone and texture. I only got restless when it introduced a plot element having to do with one of the celestial workers, another worker who has a crush on him, and the resolution of his own feelings about his past life. It seemed like the filmmaker felt the need to impose a plot. I'm not so sure it was needed. But overall, this is one-of-a-kind, and against the grain of most afterlife films because the sense in the end is not of joy but of thoughtfulness and even melancholy.

I recently read Hamlet again, that work of marvelous excess which can't help but leave an imprint on you, if you're open to it. Hamlet himself is so bold a character, a man whose contradictions make him more rather than less believable, that the temptation is to go around talking like him after you've read the play. No wonder he's considered the actor's great challenge.

My renewed excitement prompted me to watch Laurence Olivier's version (1948) again. I had seen it four or five times before, but the last time over twenty years ago. I always admired it, so it was with some amazement that I found myself experiencing disappointment this time. Some of this, I'm sure has to do with having just read the play. Hamlet in performance could never equal the performance in one's head! Still, my judgment now is that Olivier's film is a good introduction to the play for someone relatively new to Shakespeare, as I was then, but for someone more seasoned its faults show more readily.

The production design, with its eerie stone castle of endless steps, dark, dreamlike, suspended in clouds - is a marvel. It is a stark vision, but also a bit abstract where Hamlet begs for some sense of human warmth in the midst of tragic doings. The William Walton music is perfect. Olivier himself is very bright and intense, with a haunted look. Sometimes he soars. But this time he seemed too studied to me, and too cold to draw one into him as fully as Hamlet should. Hamlet's humor is largely missing - Olivier's clipped diction, his bitterness, doesn't give his scenes where he spars with Polonius enough verve. I would not underrate this performance, only say that I like Olivier better in more imperious roles such as Richard III or Henry V.

The problem is always where to cut - for unless you want a four-hour film (or if you're Kenneth Branagh, a three-hour film where everyone speaks the lines too fast) you must cut. Olivier's solution is to cut Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and I respect this decision, althought I miss the wonderful gibes and wordplay in their scenes. On the other hand he also cuts the First Player's "Hecuba" speech, consequently he cuts the "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I" soliloquy, and this, I think, is a mistake. He also follows the tradition, which I disagree with, of making Hamlet aware that he is being watched during the "nunnery" scene. In this way we are supposed to think that his cruelty to Ophelia is mere show, so as not to lose sympathy with him, I suppose - but in this we sacrifice some complexity in his character, and as far as I'm concerned that's a loss. Olivier's rearrangement of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy so that it takes place after the nunnery scene only makes sense in this context. The artifice of this sequence, done in voice-over, otherwise used well in the film, here deflates the soliloquy's power. There are other changes, too numerous to mention - some more successful than others. I am one of those who thinks that the conversation between Hamlet and Horatio in Act 5, right before the entrance of Osric, when Hamlet relates his sense of providence in discovering Claudius' plot against him, and then his question "And is't not to be damned to let this canker of our nature come in further evil?" - is central to the understanding of the play. Here it has been cut - probably because of its connection to the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern element - but surely it could have been retained with only slight incisions. Olivier also introduces what I believe is an innovation at the end -the implication that Gertrude (the marvelous Eileen Herlie) realizes the wine is poisoned and purposely drinks it to rescue Hamlet. Ingenious but flawed - why not just knock the cup over? It seems to me that part of the devastating impact of the ending is the accidental nature of her death, the feeling that a horrible mistake has occurred.

I only state here the reasons for disappointment. There is still much that is remarkable. I love the way the camera pulls away into a long shot and then back into close-up as Claudius and Laertes plot their treachery. (Basil Sidney's Claudius is so good that he is my image of him.) The death of Ophelia (Jean Simmons) is visualized, and this gives the Queen's account an added poignance. The scene where the play catches the king's conscience is quite striking (although we only get to the dumb show). The picture's look and feel is like no other - it's hard to shake the imagery from your mind. If you are not familiar with the play it may inspire you to become so. It is a young man's film, I think, which would explain why I liked it better twenty years ago. I think the play has yet to receive the mature cinematic treatment it deserves.