KINGS OF THE ROAD
(Wim Wenders, 1976).
Bruno (Rüdiger Vogler), a traveling movie projector repairman,
is shaving next to his parked van when he sees a Volkswagen zoom off
the road and into the Elbe River at top speed. If this is a suicide
attempt, it's a failure, because the car floats, and its driver, Robert
(Hanns Zischler) sheepishly wades to shore. Bruno offers to give him
a ride, but Robert ends up sticking around, and the two of them travel
around Germany, living in the huge van and meeting various characters
on their journey.
With this poetic road film, Wenders went from a minor figure in German
cinema to an internationally recognized director. Three hours long,
and shot in gorgeous black and white by Robby Müller and Martin
Schäfer, the film maintains a mood of wistful, outsider bonhomie
with precious little dialogue, relying on long takes and the body language
of the two leads to immerse the viewer in its world.
Robert, recently divorced, is a cryptic, angst-ridden figure - at one
point going off by himself to exorcize a ghost in the person of his
hated (and loved) father, the publisher of a small town newspaper. Long-time
Wenders cohort Vogler plays Bruno with an eccentric, roll-with-the-punches
charm, but with time we glimpse his fears and, in a sequence where he
meets up with a small town girl, his loneliness around women. None of
this is at all trite or formulaic - our knowledge of the two wanderers
comes as naturally as the unfolding of their awareness of each other.
The device of having Bruno repair movie projectors allows Wenders to
meditate with bemusement on the state of German film, and culture in
general, in relation to the lives of ordinary people. One marvelous
scene has the duo give up trying to fix a projector behind a screen,
substituting an impromptu bit of shadow slapstick for the benefit of
a delighted audience of children. Everything leads up to a drunken evening
in an old sentry house on the border between East and West Germany,
in which much is revealed.
The film, with its languorous pace and long silences, is not without
its moments of tedium, but if you let yourself relax into Wenders' rhythm,
there is a richness and a kind of wisdom to be experienced here. More
thoughtful and tender than the average road or "buddy" film, Kings
of the Road is a rough-hewn hymn to the virtues of taking one's
time.
THE PARALLAX VIEW
(Alan J. Pakula, 1974).
A Seattle reporter (Warren Beatty), who witnessed the assassination
of a Presidential candidate, investigates the mysterious deaths of other
witnesses to that event, uncovering a shadowy corporation called Parallax
that recruits and trains professional assassins.
Made at the time of the Watergate scandal, when a lot of unsavory facts
were coming to the surface, including an alliance of the CIA and the
Mob, The Parallax View is suffused with the dread surrounding
the Kennedy and King assassinations, and the malaise and sense of corruption
of the early 70s. It is a political film in a way that Hollywood no
longer dares to be political - depicting an American system founded
on crime, secrecy, and coverup. All the more pity that flaws in the
script (David Giler and Lorenzo Semple, Jr.) keep it from attaining
real greatness.
Pakula uses bold camera placement and staccato rhythms to create a
sense of fear and confusion. The opening assassination sequence is a
small masterpiece of shock. Another nice touch is the surreal, pop art
mind-control film that the reporter is shown when he is being indocrinated
into the Parallax training program. Gordon Willis' photography is impeccable,
and Beatty, who is too often a wooden presence on screen, turns in one
of his better, more expressive performances.
Perhaps this is old fashioned of me, but I prefer a thriller to make
more sense than this one does. For one thing, it is never clear why
the witnesses are being bumped off, since the investigation has already
been closed and forgotten. A long early sequence in a fishing town seems
like it comes from another movie, complete with a ridiculous bar fight
and car chase. And there are several loose ends left untied at the finale.
Of course, the idea is that the protagonist is in over his head and
perhaps will never know the full truth, but the impression here is that
the screenwriters were careless about motivation and detail.
It would seem that the great paranoid conspiracy thriller has yet to
be made. Still, The Parallax View's stylish creepiness has much
to recommend it, and it's worth seeing, if only as a reminder of what
a movie with a critical attitude towards power looks like.
GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933
(Mervyn LeRoy, 1933).
When 42nd
Street became a hit, Warners followed it up with this
film, which followed a similar formula and became very lucrative itself,
spawning a couple of "gold digger" sequels. This story isn't as engaging
as the earlier film, although to criticize an early Warners musical
for its plot may be missing the point, since it's merely a set-up for
the marvelous Busby Berkeley numbers.
If you must know, it's about three out-of-work showgirls (Joan Blondell,
Aline MacMahon, and Ruby Keeler) and a songwriter (Dick Powell) who
helps bankroll a new show. When the songwriter's rich, stuffed-shirt
brother (Warren William) arrives on the scene with his lawyer (Guy Kibbee)
to ruin everything by disowning Powell for being associated with the
sordid world of showbiz, Blondell and MacMahon take them down a peg
by seducing them, while Powell and Keeler get all lovey-dovey.
This might sound like fun, but the script doesn't have the wisecracking
zest of 42nd Street, and the insufferably sweet Powell/Keeler
duo is almost enough to make me lose my lunch. William isn't very funny
as an uptight prude - he needs to be in one of his philandering egomaniac
roles to really shine. Ginger Rogers adds some punch in her scenes,
but she's not on screen often enough. Overall, the non-musical scenes
tend to be a drag.
In contrast, the Berkeley song-and-dance numbers (to some great Harry
Warren tunes) are among the finest he ever did. The film opens with
"We're In the Money," with Ginger Rogers singing in pig Latin, and the
chorus dressed in gold coin costumes. "The Shadow Waltz" features girls
playing flourescent violins, shot from above to achieve the famous kaleidoscope
effect. The finale is "Remember My Forgotten Man," sung by Blondell,
with its World War I soldiers turning into unemployed men on the breadline
- the epitome of the Depression-era musical statement. It's a magnificent,
moving ending that dares to be downbeat.
The hackneyed script for Gold Diggers of 1933 puts it a notch
or two below the great 42nd Street, but the music makes it a
must anyway. Thank god for fast-forward.
DAISIES (Vera Chytilová, 1966).
The Czech New Wave was one of the most vibrant radical film movements
of the 60s, and this film is a daring example of experimental satire
that has, unfortunately, not been as widely seen or appreciated as the
works of Milos Forman or Ivan Passer. Two young women (Jitka Cerhová
and Ivana Karbonová) decide that, since the world is a spoiled,
rotten place, they might as well spoil themselves and do whatever they
feel like. The rest of the film follows them on their increasingly outrageous
sprees - flirting with older men and then dumping them, getting ejected
from a nightclub for making a drunken spectacle of themselves, cutting
food into little pieces, and so on. In a tour de force sequence, they
stumble into a dining hall that is set up for a huge banquet, and proceed
to eat everything they can, while smashing everything else.
The incredibly inventive photography (by the director's husband, Jaroslav
Kucera) features constant switches in color, or from color to black
& white, saturation of shots in one color, and trick effects such as
image fragmentation when the women pretend to cut each other up with
scissors. The performances of the leads are deliberately over-the-top,
filled with idiotic giggling and mock-stupid expressions - a grotesque
parody of the stereotype of vain and petty femininity.
Daisies avoids psychology or characterization. The women have
no interior lives; they seem like personifications of a voracious consumer
id. Chytilová and her co-screenwriter, Ester Krumbachová,
attack materialism through the exaggerated portrayal of its mindless
self-centeredness, while at the same time they offend patriarchal expectations
by not making the women cute or sexy in their transgression. Instead,
the whole idea of a sexual object is made to seem ridiculous and repellent.
The depth and range of the film's satiric thrust is somewhat limited
by its premise. This is most definitely a film of the psychedelic 60s,
with all the strengths and drawbacks of that era. Opening and closing
with scenes of bombs exploding, the picture was eventually banned by
the Czech government. One of the reasons given was that it depicted
the waste of a lot of a food. The real reasons were ideological - it
showed Czech society in an unflattering light. It later won critical
acclaim, but the subsequent denial of state funding to Chytilová
made her life difficult.
THE VALLEY OF ABRAHAM
(Manoel de Oliveira, 1993).
Ema (Leonor Silveira), the beautiful daughter of a rich Portuguese
businessman, is married off to a doctor whom she doesn't love. Although
she stays with him and has two daughters, she takes a succession of
lovers to fill the void inside her, but still feels essentially alone.
The veteran Oliveria's three-hour epic, with its overt references to
Flaubert's Madame Bovary, is an odd duck of a movie. It takes
place in the 20th century, with automobiles and references to the upheavals
in Portugal in the 1970s, but its style, tone, and thematic concerns
are decidedly 19th century. Most unusual is the use of voice-over -
this is perhaps the most extensive use of a narrator in a fiction film
to date. The urbane, omniscient voice is something of a character itself
- what we are shown enacts what we have been told, or sometimes subtly
comments on it - and this technique takes some getting used to. I can't
say that it's a complete success - at times it seems pretentious - but
the union of image with the old-fashioned literary style of the word
began to grow on me during the film's second half.
Oliveira treats the film like a novel. The main story is like a river
with many tributaries (the picture in fact takes place around a beautiful
river in the titular valley) that explore different characters and themes,
and include intellectual discussions on topics political and spiritual,
as well as amusing glimpses into the sexual mores and hypocrisies of
the Portuguese upper class.
The director's serene style, with its careful attention to the passage
of time, does create the full-bodied impression of a big novel. Silveira
is stunning in the lead role, while the rest of the cast is of variable
quality, with one standout being Luís Lima Barreto as one of
Ema's rich admirers.
On the whole, Abraham's Valley cannot fail to impress as a rich
expression of the director's personal vision. Its central theme is the
tragedy of women having their self-worth defined as being admired by
men. Ema internalizes what she is taught, so that she becomes trapped
by her own need to be considered desirable, no matter what the cost.
It's a huge, beautiful, flawed motion picture, alternately graceful
and awkward, composed with very few moving shots, yet taking great risks
with its narrative technique. Vanguard's recent DVD release, however,
apparently doesn't get the image ratio quite right, so until someone
takes the trouble to do it correctly, you'll just have to put up with
the annoyance, or hope the film pops up at a festival near you.
©2003 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
