Dream House

In an era of computer animation wizardry it's nice to see older technologies like stop-motion animation being reinvigorated and put to use for intelligent visual storytelling. A few months ago we were pleasantly surprised by Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, and just last night we stumbled upon this little gem. Written by Enda Walsh, The House is made up of three narratives supervised by three different directors, with the common thread being the title building and how it embodies both the nightmarish aspects of home ownership and our insistent need for a place to hang our hats. (For reasons I won't go into, we found it uncannily appropriate to our circumstances.)

The first segment begins in folktale fashion with a poor couple who, after an encounter with a mysterious stranger, find themselves in free possession of a rambling mansion in the British countryside, the only requirement being that they surrender the smaller house that is their own. The focus of the segment is on the older of the couple's two young daughters, who, like Chihiro in Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, is more alert to the dangers of temptation then her parents are. Increasingly creepy as it progresses, it is the only part of the film that features human subjects, here represented by doll-like and delicate figures whose faces convey boundless melancholy.

By the second segment, the rural landscape has become urbanized and contemporary, and the house is in the possession of an ambitious developer (literally, a rat) who has furnished it with the latest mod cons in the hopes of making a killing in the real estate market. When the house is ready for showing everything possible goes wrong, and, what's worse, two sinister creatures — are they rodents, or something unimaginably worse? — take up residence uninvited and show no sign of leaving.

In the final segment, the house has become isolated by rising seas and is now owned by a long-suffering cat named Rosa, who struggles to maintain it and run it as an apartment building with little help from her two tenants, neither of whom pays cash rent. Gentler and more wistful than the other two parts, it ends in a way that is ultimately liberating.

Here and there I sensed affinities with, but rarely overt allusions to, everything from Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, and Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle to the scratchboard artist Thomas Ott and Terhi Ekebom's lovely graphic story Logbook. The trailer below gives a good idea of the film's visual styles, but, inevitably, exaggerates its pace. The film largely avoids the lamentable tendency of contemporary animation to fill every possible second of running time with frenetic activity. When the story is sound to begin with there's little need for all of that.

Macario

I enjoyed this seasonally appropriate 1960 Mexican film directed by Roberto Gavaldón, with cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa. Macario is based on a short story by B. Traven, which is in turn based on a folktale called (in one of its many versions) "Godfather Death." It tells of a poor woodcutter (Ignacio López Tarso) who can barely feed his family enough tortillas and beans to fill their stomachs. Since his one wish in life is to have an entire roast turkey for himself, his devoted wife (Pina Pellicer) finally steals one and cooks it for him. As he sits down to eat it he receives in succession three visitors, whom we realize are in turn the Devil, God (or Jesus), and Death. Each asks to share his meal, but on the basis of some quite logical reasoning he agrees to invite only the third, who, in return, gives Macario a magic liquid that will enable him to cure the dying. There is a catch, however; if Macario sees Death standing at the feet of the patient, he may perform his cure; if Death stands at the head of the bed, the patient is his and Macario must not intervene. Macario makes use of the potion and becomes, in time, a rich man, until the Inquisition gets wind of his activities.

One of the things I liked about the film is that it plays down the potentially garish visual aspect of the story. (That aspect is, in part, reserved for the opening credits, which feature a troupe of folkloric skeleton marionettes.) The Devil, for instance, is a bit of a snazzy dresser, but he doesn't have horns and a goatee, nor is Death a skeletal figure with a flail. Macario, in his unassuming way, recognizes them for who they are nevertheless, and he isn't excessively impressed with either, or with the Señor. López Tarso is particularly good at giving Death skeptical looks at the bedside of patients who are obvious goners but whom Death assures him can still be saved. Really, this one? (Shrug.)

Gavaldón made at least two other films based on Traven novels or stories, Rosa Blanca and Días de otoño. I haven't seen either one, although I've read the story the latter is based on and it could be interesting. Ignacio López Tarso, at this writing, is still alive at the age of 97, which suggests that he set aside a bit of that potion for himself. Sadly, Pina Pellicer, who starred in Días de otoño, died at age 30 of an overdose of sleeping pills.

I'm not sure about the current availability of Macario on DVD or from streaming services; I watched an older DVD release that has subtitle options in both English and Spanish. A version of the folktale can be found in the Lore Segal / Maurice Sendak edition of The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm, one of those perfect books that belong in every household.

Scalded to Death by the Steam

I think this is what is called character development. Newlywed Cesca (Ann Dvorak) romps through a disturbingly peppy rendition of the most gruesome lines of the railroad disaster ballad "The Wreck of the Old 97." Just off-screen is her husband, mobster Guino Rinaldo (George Raft), who is about to get his at the hand of her brother, Tony Camonte (Paul Muni), whose relationship with Cesca is itself more than a little creepy. From Scarface (1932).

The lyrics to the ballad are sung out of order, as the death of the engineer here occurs before the train crashes. Ann Dvorak was not related to the subject of the previous post.

Roma: Words Unspoken

I had been looking forward to seeing Alfonso Cuarón's Roma as soon as it made it to a local theatre, and it didn't disappoint. I'm not a movie critic and won't attempt a synopsis or analysis of the film*, but in a very quick summation it's about a few months in the lives of a well-to-do (but perhaps downwardly-mobile) Mexico City household around 1971. (Cuarón drew on his own family memories, and he has meticulously — even obsessively — recreated the texture of the world he grew up in.) At one crucial point the family's story intersects dramatically with the tumultuous course of the broader history of twentieth-century Mexico. The film is beautifully designed, acted, and shot (in black and white), and has the sweep and richness of a great novel. I'll be watching it again.

Pictured above is Cleodegaria (played by newcomer Yalitza Aparicio), one of the family's Oaxacan servants and the film's emotional center. One criticism that has been leveled at the film is that we don't really get to learn much about what she thinks and feels, but I think that apparent silence is itself the point. (As it happens, I think we can get a fair idea of what she thinks and feels, but to do so requires attention to more than words.) Roma isn't your typical Hollywood have-it-both-ways movie in which all conflicts are resolved and all the characters overcome the limits of their personal histories, their class or racial backgrounds, and are at last fully revealed as equal agents. Being constrained and unheard is part of the social reality of Cleo's life (as it is, in different ways and degrees, of the lives of the family she serves); for a director to pretend otherwise would be a betrayal.

* For a full and thoughtful review, Alma Guillermoprieto's NYRB review, "The Twisting Nature of Love" is a good place to start.

Thaw

A scene from Paweł Pawlikowski's Cold War, the follow-up to his Oscar-winning Ida from five years ago, which was one of my favorite movies of the last twenty years. I'd rate Cold War one notch below the earlier film, mostly for some choppiness in the latter half and an ending I didn't much care for, but it's still a very consequential movie (and with some of the same cast members, notably Joanna Kulig, who had a cameo in Ida but utterly dominates here). And of course it's in black and white, as all films worth watching should be. (I'm exaggerating, of course, a little.)

Cold War is about various things but the action principally concerns music makers making various kinds of music, and there's an almost programmatic sequence, from a bagpiper at the film's opening who's playing sounds that could be a thousand years old to more recent folk and classical music to jazz and kitsch and Bill Haley and the Comets (heard above). All of the music, as far as I could tell, is diagetic (that is, it's either being performed as part of the action or is listened to by the characters) except for the Goldberg Variations accompanying the credits.

Claire Messud has a thoughtful appraisal in the New York Review and Lisa Liebman at Vulture has a good article on the music in the film.

The world is inside of nothing

It's funny how the world is inside of nothing. I mean, you have your heart and your soul inside of you. Babies are inside of their mothers. Fish are out there in the water. But the world is inside nothing. I don't know if I like this or not but you better write it down.

I just watched Bertrand Tavernier's 1986 film Round Midnight again for the first time in nearly thirty years. This scene, in which saxophonist Dexter Gordon, playing a fictional jazz legend named Dale Turner, philosophizes while a friend's daughter plays on a French beach, is one of my favorite parts of the movie. It's a bit hokey, of course, but that's show business.

I can readily understand why a black filmmaker like Spike Lee had issues with a film like this, and there's much that could be said regarding its rehearsal of cultural clichés about black men who are in one way or another damaged being sympathetically "minded" by whites, as well as about the portrayal of jazz musicians as oracles rather than as disciplined, skilled professional musicians (see Cortázar's "The Pursuer," which may have been one of the inspirations for this film), but on the other hand this is one of the few fictional feature films from the second half of the twentieth century in which jazz musicians are actually played by jazz musicians rather than by professional actors. In addition to Gordon, who reportedly contributed to the development of the script, the cast includes Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and other luminaries. The music is splendid (and plentiful), Gordon and co-star François Cluzet are splendid, and you have this scene on the beach, all of which ought to count for something.

Rising Voices

Today, the New York Times has an astonishing series of photos from the nationwide worldwide women's marches of January 21, 2017.

The Orphan

Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida is my kind of film: spare, understated, sensitively directed, small in scope but firmly anchored in its time and place, which in this case means Poland in the early 1960s. Sumptuously shot in black-and-white in a narrow-screen format, it's very much a movie to be looked at, the way one looks at still photographs, supplying one's own active eye and interpretation, and not just something to be watched, the way one witnesses a spectacle that's been programmed to hit all the right emotional buttons at the predetermined moments.

The lead character — she's called Anna, a Catholic novice, but she learns that she's really Ida, the daughter of murdered Jews — actually has relatively little to say, usually no more than a few words per scene, and her face betrays little of what's going on inside her head, but she is, in the end, not only the ostensible protagonist of the movie but its audience as well, the one whose fate it is to experience the unfolding of a story that, even as it is about her, is fundamentally not of her own devising. Which is not to suggest that Ida is without a visceral punch. There's something in fact very Greek about it, not so much in the events as in the suddenness and starkness of its emotions, the way the characters — the young novice aside — respond in almost stylized fashion to the revelation of long-hidden secrets, as if purging the collective sins of an entire community.

The trailer below gives an idea of the storyline and the film's beautiful visual style, though inevitably it can't capture its graceful pacing. Stuart Klawans, at the Nation, has a comprehensive and thoughtful review that nicely encapsulates its virtues and ambiguities. I think this is a movie you should see.

Tales of a Sea Cow

I saw most of this "documentary" by Etienne de France this summer at the Listasafns Íslands (National Gallery of Iceland) in Reykjavík, where it was playing in a continuous loop. As far as I can tell only this trailer is available online.

The Stellar's sea cow is believed to have become extinct in the 1760s.