COPYING BEETHOVEN

COPYING BEETHOVEN (2006, USA/Germany/Hungary, Agnieszka Holland, Stephen J. Rivele / Christopher Wilkinson screenplay)
This new symphony, it's my farewell. My farewell to music as I've always known it, as I've always written it. I'm starting a new chapter in my life. New forms, a new language. And now this woman is sent to me at this very moment. What if she was sent… by Him? Suppose it's a sign. That it's time. Time for me to join with him.

A promising enough beginning – even if the writing clanks a little, strains for weight and authenticity by mere repetition and padding. Part of that promise is fulfilled – the God talk continues – but so too are our misgivings, as the writers continue to strain for notes they don’t quite manage to hit.

It’s not a bad movie – just like Antonio Salieri wasn’t a bad composer. It’s just that they both suffer badly by comparison. A comparison which they invite. To a certain AMADEUS, blessed above all others and beloved of God.

I don’t want to be hard on this film, which has its own appeal. It asks questions about creativity and divinity, speculates about the wildness of God. It features a committed Ed Harris in the title role and a fetching Diane Kruger as Anna, the copyist he retains to write out manuscript for the Ninth Symphony premiere. There’s clever riffing on “copying” Beethoven, and a dynamite eleven minutes in which the almost completely deaf composer defies his critics (and, I’m afraid, both history and credibility) when he conducts his glorious Ninth Symphony by copying Anna, who – unseen by the audience – beats time and cues the orchestra. Mr Harris conducts like a house afire, and when that choir kicks in with the “Ode To Joy”.... Wowzer. Turn it up and sing along.

Still, things too often feel dutiful, derivative. Ed Harris gives it his best effort, but consider the effortlessness of his portrayal of that other tormented genius (Jackson Pollock, not Wolfie Mozart) and you’ll realize how actorish this performance is. Recall other films by spiritually-oriented director Agnieszka Holland – THE THIRD MIRACLE, EUROPA EUROPA, TO KILL A PRIEST – and you may find the religiosity here unconvincing. Most damning, compare scenes – the deathbed composition-dictation sequence, or Anna’s “You gave me the gift, so why are you telling me not to use it” speech – with the celebrated Mozart flick and realize how unoriginal and inelegant much of this writing is. It may be that the writers of COPYING BEETHOVEN were mostly just copying AMADEUS.

But comparisons with the Mozart flick are odious. Make a point not to watch it before (or think about it during) BEETHOVEN and you’ll be fine – the film looks great and sounds greater. If Holland’s film is Salieri to Forman’s Mozart, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth watching: people still buy CDs by Antonio and Wolfgang both. But next time you’re in Vienna, just try finding chocolate with Salieri’s picture on it.

There are reasons.

THE GAMBLER

AMADEUS

AMADEUS (1984, USA, Milos Forman, Peter Shaffer play and screenplay)
Whilst my father prayed earnestly to God to protect commerce, I would offer up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of. “Lord, make me a great composer! Let me celebrate your glory through music - and be celebrated myself! Make me famous through the world, dear God! Make me immortal! After I die let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote! In return I vow I will give you my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility every hour of my life. And I will help my fellow man all I can. Amen and amen!”

What extraordinary writing! Economy, irony, implication – volumes are spoken in this one brief speech, themes sounded that will be repeated and inverted in subtle variations throughout the film. Salieri, speaking at the end of his life, recounts the childhood prayer that set the course of his life. He critiques the self-serving prayers of his father, a merchant, yet his own prayer is every bit as mercenary: he isn’t confiding in a loving Father, he’s unilaterally setting the terms of a quid pro quo contract, and presuming that makes it binding on both parties. When he calls the prayer “proud” he means it was noble, but we hear the irony as he names the cardinal sin that will come to define him. He pledges a chastity he will readily cast aside when he decides God isn’t keeping His end of the bargain, he promises a humility that will only ever be evident in recognizing – and coveting, and seeking to destroy – another man’s greater gift. The musical gift of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

These vows amuse us at the same time as they trouble us. They are childish, speaking a conventional piety as naïve as a Boy Scout promise – “and do a good turn to somebody every day.” But the fact the man who recounts them has never outgrown them, that he repeats them without recognizing their vanity, is chilling. What we smile at in the child, we recoil from in the man. By the time Salieri whines “all I ever wanted was to sing to God,” we know better.

Salieri believes he yearns only for eternity: we recognize a thoroughly earthly-minded man lusting for a merely earthbound immortality. Cruel justice lies in the fact that his prayer will in fact be answered. The now-aged man’s final speech picks up this opening theme and plays it back in an ironic inversion, and we realize that he is in fact remembered centuries after his death. People are writing plays and making movies about him. How pathetic.

When the young Salieri’s father chokes to death on a piece of fish and the self-consumed lad is sent away to study music, he takes it as a miracle – “I knew God had arranged it all; that was obvious” – and it is all clear: this God will do Salieri’s bidding, and even murder is an acceptable means to that end. How tragic.

Indeed, for all its energy and brilliantly entertaining wit, this film is a classic tragedy: not the story of Mozart at all, except indirectly, but the story of a man who could have been noble, or at least godly, but whose tragic flaw brings not only his own ruin, but the ruin of those around him. And this is a singularly theological tragedy: Salieri's tragic flaw is "the eldest sin of all, that struck down the morning star from heaven." The deadliest of the deadly sins.

“Amadeus” means “beloved of God.” Celebrated playwright Anthony Shaffer – preoccupied (like his playwriting twin brother, Peter) with twinning, and with the clash between conventional religiosity and a wilder, more dangerous communion with the divine – imagines in this not-quite-historical story something of a Cain and Abel tale, a Jacob and Esau rivalry. He considers what it may have been like to labour as a moderately skilled composer in the shadow of one of the sublime musical geniuses of all time. To believe oneself cursed because of another’s greater measure of blessing.

One smart friend is convinced the film is anti-religious, and certainly the image of God the film conveys is thoroughly unappealing. But perhaps the film is not so much anti-religious as it is the study of an anti-religious man. Bear in mind that this is Salieri's story, his version of event. We see everything through his jaundiced eye – including God. If his deity seems cruel, withholding, manipulative, capricious, punishing, are we seeing a true image of the Father, or only one that Salieri makes in his own image (or that of his own father?).

Or perhaps it is even closer to the truth to say that the film is not anti-religious, but rather anti-religion - if by religion we mean the things we do to please God. Biblical scholar Robert Jewett reads immense theological insight in the film, arguing that it conveys “a distinctive and little-understood aspect of the theology of Romans”: that sin, properly understood, has little to do with the conventional sense of sin as indecency – Mozart’s arrogance and crudity, his irresponsibility and unwillingness to conform to social niceties – and everything to do with the self-deception of the self-righteous man who would set himself against God. Who would set himself up as God.

The film doesn’t gloss over the sins of Amadeus – as winsome as he can be, he also acts out his own high-flying arrogance, lives in deadly thrall to his own vices. “There is none righteous, not one.” But he possesses a humanity, ultimately a vulnerability, that leaves room for the glories of grace Salieri can hear in “The Marriage Of Figaro” but not live. That can find the humility to ask forgiveness from one who is all the more in need of it.

EQUUS, WICKER MAN, COPYING BEETHOVEN

Available at Videomatica

name that show

Remind anyone of anything?

"I am broadcasting on all AM frequencies. If you are out there... If anyone is out there... Please."

Or how about this?


Will's new movie opens Dec 14.

Hmm. Wonder if he'll run into Tom Cruise in those empty New York streets?

THE STAND

THE STAND (1994, USA, Mick Garris, Stephen King teleplay from his own novel)
Are you the same Tom that Nick met in Oklahoma?
Yes. No. I'm God's Tom.

Stephen King calls this “a long, dark tale of Christianity,” and it’s loaded with things for Christians to chew on: indeed, some reviewers who don't believe any of this stuff are quite put off by it all. It's one of those post-apocalyptic survival yarns where the stark setting and life-and-death situations force characters to make impossible moral choices with their survival on the line. In THE STAND, those revealing decisions are clearly shown to have spiritual consequences, as people gradually align themselves with 108-year-old Mother Abigail or the demonic Randall Flagg. Hardcore King fans claim the big fat novel is a much better bet than the sometimes fascinating, sometimes tacky 1994 mini-series, but it's got its draws: watch for cameos by people like Ed Harris, Kathy Bates and even Sam "Evil Dead" Raimi.

CHILDREN OF MEN

Available at Videomatica

THE GREEN MILE

THE GREEN MILE (1999, USA, Frank Darabont, from Stephen King novel)
On the day of my judgment, when I stand before God and he asks me why did I kill one of his true miracles, what am I going to say? That it was my job?

Have you ever pitied God? All-compassionate, all-seeing, the whole panorama of human cruelty and suffering – “people being ugly to each other” – spread out before His unblinking gaze? Or does the thought make you angry: if He sees it, why not stop it? Stephen King has spent a lifetime contemplating the world’s evil – horrifying, pervasive, ineradicable – and his story about two good men who meet on death row goes to the heart of those questions.

Tom Hanks is the perfect Paul Edgecomb, a decent man trying to do an indecent job decently. These are the 1930s, jobs are scarce, and he makes ends meet supervising executions and managing the prison block where condemned men live out their last months. He sees “the green mile” as an intensive care ward for souls in extremis, a humane place where men can prepare to face their death.

I avoided this film for years. Partly its reputation for horrific prison violence, and partly the impression that it treats its gruesome subject with the glossy style and smack-you-in-the-face manipulation of the director’s subsequent film THE MAJESTIC.

I judged wrong: the film falls much closer to its predecessor, the wonderful SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, and is even more explicitly spiritual, even specifically Christian. And while there’s no denying that the simple-minded innocent John Coffey is clearly a Christ figure – you see it right from the start, check those initials – several elements confound a simple one-to-one symbolic correspondence between the godly inmate and God incarnate.

Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship praises the film for offering “a powerful picture of the dignity and worth of men on death row. It shows us that God’s reach extends even to the least of these, the ones the world would only too happily forget.” There are grisly depictions of electric chair executions – the film challenges the morality of capital punishment, though not simplistically – but there is great humanity as well. We see characters wholly and convincingly given over to evil, others striving to hold on to, or in the inescapable grip of, a Good overwhelming enough to inspire a certain kind of fear. A good that’s powerful enough to make a difference, but at a price.

There is a consideration of mortatlity and inquiry into the nature of God, there is the Problem of Evil, but mostly there are finely drawn, memorable characters and – trust Stephen King for this – the appeal of good old-fashioned story-telling. Look away from the screen when you must, but don’t miss seeing this compelling portrayal of a compassion, empathy and self-sacrifice that may be divine.

IN YOUR HANDS, COOL HAND LUKE, DEAD MAN WALKING, SLING BLADE, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION


Available at Videomatica

dry season / new crowned hope

Doug Cummings points us to DRY SEASON, another international film that sounds like it will follow in the footsteps of other DC reccs that have found their place in the Soul Food pantheon; f’rinstance THE SON, L’ENFANT, HAWAII OSLO, and everything in black and white by Robert Bresson. It’s part of the New Crowned Hope series commissioned as part of Vienna’s celebration of Mozart’s 250th birthday: here’s Doug’s entry from filmjourney.com, followed by gleanings from the July issue of Sight & Sound... (Since I can't seem to make that link work, here's the address of Doug's review, so you can cut and paste it into your browser; http://filmjourney.weblogger.com/2007/07/02)

filmjourney.com
Doug Cummings, July 2
Continuing my exploration of the excellent New Crowned Hope series, I caught up with Mahamat Saleh Haroun's entry from Chad, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last year. The filmmaker builds off the themes of vengeance and forgiveness in Mozart's La clemenza di Tito by setting his story during the period following the Chadian civil war, when universal amnesty was officially declared. Rejecting that policy, an elderly man whose son was murdered during the conflict asks his grandson to avenge his father, and the teenager travels to a nearby village determined to assassinate the murderer. As the boy is devising his plan, however, the murderer--now a scarred and hardened sixty-year-old baker--offers him a job.
I don't want to say more than that, because this is a highly nuanced story that focuses on the antagonistic, yet strangely positive relationship that forms between master and apprentice-assassin. It quietly emphasizes the physical and emotional tensions that emerge in ways that are reminiscent of the Dardennes' superb THE SON. Like the Belgian masters, Haroun has an especially strong sense of visual rhythm and knows how to frame figures in loose yet provocative counterpoint. Haroun has claimed he was also inspired by the minimalist power of Mozart's violin concertos, and has crafted a deep meditation on justice through his highly observant camera, strong sense of place, and the film's terrifically underplayed, simmering performances. It's a fine, powerful achievement.

from IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER
James Bell, July ’07 Sight & Sound, pg 37
DRY SEASON is set in the present and deals with a personal tragedy resulting from Chad’s ongoing civil war. It follows a teenager named Atim who is commanded by his grandfather to track down Nassara, the man who murdered the boy’s father before he was born. Atim travels to the country’s capital N’Jamena and soon finds Nassara, who employs him in his bakery. Atim continues to plot Nassara’s murder but experiences conflicting feelings when the older man shows him a paternal kindness.
James Bell, Sight & Sound: How did you become involved in New Crowned Hope?
Director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun: I prepared a ten-page treatment for DRY SEASON and Simon Field (executive producer of the New Crowned Hope series) thought it reflected the themes of forgiveness and reconciliation in Mozart’s opera “La clemenza di Tito.” So he invited me to join the project. I thought the best way to make DRY SEASON was to be very spare and pure: Mozart’s sonatas are simpler but also eternal and I wanted to see the film like that.
The first films I saw weren’t African: I was inspired by ROME, OPEN CITY, Charlie Chaplin, and now Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-hsien.
S&S: DRY SEASON has been compared to the Dardennes’ THE SON, which has a similar story. Was it an influence?
Haroun: No. When I wrote the script, THE SON hadn’t been made. But the editor on DRY SEASON also worked on THE SON. I like the Dardenne brothers, but their approach is more factual whereas I tried to give to my story something mythological.

from CINEMA’S TAP IN THE DESERT
Geoffrey Macnab, July ’07 Sight & Sound, pg 38
What connects the world of Mozart to film-makers such as Mahamat-Saleh Haroun? By the time Mozart, racked with ill health and poverty, made his last public conducting appearance at the New Crowned Hope Masonic lodge in Vienna, the composer had become a highly politicized figure. Peter Sellars, Artistic Director, New Crowned Hope series: “Mozart created superbly refined works of art in “The Marriage of Figaro” or “Don Giovanni,” which are statements of the equality of all human beings. In the last year of his life, however, his work was no longer political in the same way but rather strangely illuminated, not holding grudges and instead offering alternatives.” What Sellars wanted from the New Crowned Hope film-makers was “a high level of self-searching” in pieces that dealt with the themes of transformation, truth, reconciliation and redemption that run through the composer’s final works.

BEYOND THE HORIZON
Mark Cousins, July Sight & Sound, pp 35-36
Back in 1790 new ideas were sweeping Europe. The French revolution was out of the starting blocks and marching to the tune of the Enlightenment, while in Vienna it was the freemasons who carried the torch of liberal fervour. When the secret police closed down their lodges there was an outcry, so the emperor – anxious to pacify his opponents – allowed one to reopen. To celebrate the event, a 35-year-old modernizer called Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart conducted a cantata that was to be one of his last compositions. The lodge went by the exquisite name of New Crowned Hope.
Two hundred and fifty years after the composer’s birth, Austria is going Mozart mad. Amid the Amadeus keyrings and schnitzel, theatre impresario Peter Sellars has devised the New Crowned Hope arts festival, which took over Vienna at the end of last year and will play at the Barbican in London in July and August. This tribute to Mozart includes not a single note of his music. Instead Sellars has commissioned new works of music, theatre, dance, film, visual arts and architecture that respond to the themes of magic and transformation, truth and reconciliation, and ceremonies for the dead that inform Mozart’s last three great works: “The Marriage of Figaro,” “La clemenza di Tito” and the “Requiem.”
While the festival’s music, opera and dance are largely Euro-American, the six feature films and one short are from Kurdish Iran and Iraq, Indonesia, Paraguay, Chad, Thailand, Malaysia and South Africa. Tsai Ming-Liang’s I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE is a work of rare tenderness in which the director’s regular Lee Kang-Sheng plays two men, one in a coma, one a migrant Chinese worker in Kuala Lumpur who has been mugged. The film is about how each is nursed – and their bodies washed – by a young woman and a Bangladeshi man respectively. in each case the nursing is both a Magdalene act and an erotic one. The film ends with a real coup, a cinematic equivalent to the hidden track on a music CD. More than 30 seconds after the movie seems to have ended, with black on the screen and no sound, the top edge of the frame begins to glow blue. Nearly two minutes later there is a revelation.
In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY, magical or subconscious material erupts into the everyday to render its events mythic. Like Tsai’s film, SYNDROMES has two stories and a style that’s visually detached and radically spare: the people in his second story seem reincarnations of those from the first section. The last conversation in the first story is about reincarnation.
DRY SEASON is a version of the Dardenne brothers’ THE SON in which a young man whose father has been murdered is sent by his grandfather to kill the murderer, who turns out to be a taciturn, community-minded baker of physical nobility. The son becomes his apprentice and the baker asks to adopt him. As with the Dardennes, it feels as if Haroun has been watching Robert Bresson: most of DRY SEASON is confined to the bakery, where the suspense simmers as the men circle each other, and in the absence of words we read their body language.
New Crowned Hope shows how good world cinema is.

silent light

I've not been so excited about a forthcoming film since DOGVILLE played Cannes a few years back. Optimistic it will play the VIFF, as both JAPON and BATTLE IN HEAVEN were here in previous years. Here are excerpts from Jonathan Romney's piece in the July Sight & Sound.

Carlos Reygadas: SILENT LIGHT
review by Jonathan Romney

I felt deeply antipathetic to Reygada’s first film JAPON but was bowled over by his follow-up BATTLE IN HEAVEN, a success de scandale when it played in Cannes two years ago. In SILENT LIGHT he abandons his first two films’ sometimes calculated outrage quotient and goes for something deeper and more delicate. After the hothouse Catholic iconography of BATTLE IN HEAVEN he’ss still on a religious tack: his third feature is set within an austere Mennonite community in Chihuahua, northern Mexico. The community sepaks Plautdietsch, a German dialect related to medieval Dutch, and this, along with a smattering of Spanish, is the language of the film.

The protagonist is Mennonite farmer Johan (Cornelio Wall), a husband and father who, contrary to the laws of his community, falls for another woman. He views this new attachment not with shame but with joy and eagerness: he truly believes that his passion for ice-cream seller Mariane (Maria Pankratz) is part of the fate determined for him by God. Johan vows to give her up... (SPOILERS EDITED)

In its severe, contemplative way, SILENT LIGHT challenges you to take seriously certain highly unfashionable propositions about grace and divine intervention: in that sense it’s not dissimilar to BREAKING THE WAVES, by that other Dreyer acolyte Lars von Trier, but in a much more serious register. ...

The film opens with what is arguably the single most remarkable shot in Cannes this year. ...

Much of SILENT LIGHT consists of scenes of Mennonite life that lend it an ethnographic documentary feel: Johan’s family praying at breakfast, his solemn children bathing in a pool, tender rituals such as the assaging of feet or the combing of... (his wife) Esther’s hair. ...

SILENT LIGHT is one of the more mature and thoughtful recent films about adultery... The film also makes clear the intensity of the sexual passion involved: here is a rare work that treats middle-aged sex between ordinary-looking people seriously, and photographs it beautifully. The camera plays subtly on the facial likeness between Esther and Marianne and on the facial likeness between Johan and his father, who are father and son in real life and both members, like many of the cast, of Chihuahua’s Mennonite community.

You can’t help wondering what it means for a Mennonite man to play a character caught in the throes of an extra-marital romance and what understanding Reygadas had with the community and with individual participants. But you no longer get the impression – deeply troubling in both JAPON and BATTLE IN HEAVEN – that the director is exploiting his non-professional actors, In this film there’s a contemplative sensitivity in the way he studies their faces and bodies that makes for a sensuous and compassionate experience. The ending could be as much a bone of contention as the notorious final shot (pious or ironic?) of BREAKING THE WAVES, but even if you can’t buy into the religious dimension of SILENT LIGHT, it’s hard to remain unmoved – not least by the exalting spectacle of a promising director making the transition to true mastery.

Sight & Sound, July 2007

And here's a link to Peter Chattaway's blog, where he posts an article about Canadian Mennonite novelist Miriam Toews and her casting as Esther in the film!

eve & the fire horse

Recent enthusings from the folks at IMAGE Journal about a Vancouver-lensed picture with east-meets-west, Buddha-meets-Jesus themes

Eve and the Fire Horse
An audience favorite at the Sundance Festival, Eve and the Fire Horse is a lovely debut film by Canadian Julia Kwan. The protagonist is a child caught between cultures and faiths in the Chinese immigrant community in Vancouver during the 1970s. Her parents and grandmother are still immersed in the old Chinese culture where remnants of Buddhism consort with a general emphasis on “luck” (something one can find with difficulty and easily lose). After her grandmother dies, Eve and her older sister Karena encounter Christianity in the form of the Catholic Church. Karena assumes the role of stern moralist, bent on a mission of evangelism and self-mortification. Eve, who is gifted with a hyper-active imagination and much less certainty than her sister, feels caught between the two cultures. That imagination of hers allows for some “magical realism” in the film, which comes off well, with the sort of seamlessness that good magical realism should possess. Karena is a divider of sheep and goats, but Eve is driven to be a reconciler. In one delightful scene Eve imagines Jesus dancing with Buddha in her living room at night. This sounds cuter and more precious than it actually is in the film. One of the refreshing things about Eve and the Fire Horse is that it refuses to engage in caricature, even in its portrayal of religion. The Christianity in the film can be moralistic and abstract, but it also impels its adherents to acts of love and generosity. The ensemble cast, including actors brought in from Hong Kong and Los Angeles, is terrific. And the soundtrack is pitch perfect. Eve and the Fire Horse is currently playing in a few art houses, but it will be available on DVD starting July 24.

Originally appeared in IMAGE Update, July 15 2007

Christianity Today Movies editor Mark Moring adds his own strong recommendation:

"What in the world is a Fire Horse? I didn't know either, till I watched a wonderful off-the-beaten path film recently called Eve and the Fire Horse, now available on DVD. One of the perks of my job is hearing about films that, as a "regular" movie fan, I probably would never know existed. Eve and the Fire Horse is one such hidden gem.

The movie had a limited 2006 release in Canada and has been on the festival circuit for the last couple of years, winning over audiences and critics alike. At Sundance, where it won the Special Jury Prize for World Cinema, Roger Ebert crowed, "Luminous! One of the most beloved films at Sundance this year. … Intelligent, delicate, and touching."

I couldn't agree more.

The film, something of a "spiritual-coming-of-age" story, centers on Eve, a precocious 9-year-old girl with a vivid imagination. Seems that she was born in the Year of the Fire Horse, which, according to ancient Chinese legend, means some serious bad luck. And indeed, after misfortune and tragedy strike her Chinese-Canadian family, young Eve begins to wonder about the Meaning of Life and other Big Questions.

Meanwhile, her older sister Karena has started looking into Christianity, and soon, statues of Jesus pop up in the family home—right next to the porcelain Buddha and several Chinese goddesses. As the young sisters—who dub themselves The Girls of Perpetual Sorrow—continue their quest for spiritual truth, we see it all unfold through Eve's wide-eyed, soul-searching wonder. Various religious figures "appear" to Eve here and there, the imaginative musings of a child that are reminiscent of another of my favorite films, 2005's Millions. And no, director Julia Kwan didn't steal any ideas from Danny Boyle's fine film; she wrote this script almost a decade ago, based in part on her upbringing as a Chinese-Canadian who grew up in a Buddhist family but also went to a Christian school.

It's a fascinating—and utterly delightful—study of what spiritual searching might look like through the eyes of the child, lest we've all forgotten. And if you're concerned about the spiritual mishmash of Christianity and Buddhism and ancient Chinese beliefs, don't be. There's a whole lot of truth, Real Truth, that shines through in the end—and I don't want to give away any more than that, other than to say this: Eve and the Fire Horse, though made a couple years ago, is one of the most enjoyable films I've seen in 2007. And the young actresses who play the sisters—Phoebe Jo Jo Kut as Eve and Hollie Lo as Karena—will steal your heart with their terrific performances."

Available at Videomatica

Soul Food Bargains at HMV

Okay, the only place in town to rent your Soul Food flicks is Videomatica. That's a given. But if you want to pick up a few to own, for not too many bucks...

I was at the mall the other day, jotted down a whole batch of Soul Food DVDs they've got on sale. (And you can mix and match your deals: buy one DVD priced 2/$20 and a second priced 2/$10, you'd pay $15 for the pair. Make sense?)

Here's what I saw...

$6
AMISTAD

2/$20
COOL HAND LUKE
THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL
THE ELEPHANT MAN
FORREST GUMP
GROUNDHOG DAY
HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
THE SIXTH SENSE
SUPERMAN RETURNS

2/$25
BRUCE ALMIGHTY
THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE
THE EXORCIST
GODSPELL
JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR
LIFE OF BRIAN
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST
THE STRAIGHT STORY
THE UNFORGIVEN

$20
BECKET
LORD OF THE RINGS: FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (SPECIAL EXTENDED EDITION)
LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (SPECIAL EXTENDED EDITION)
LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING (SPECIAL EXTENDED EDITION)
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

PERSONAL VELOCITY

PERSONAL VELOCITY: THREE PORTRAITS (2002, USA, Rebecca Miller)
I don't know what all of this means, but it's got to mean something. Don't you see that? It makes sense. It's got to be a sign.

Rebecca Miller transfers three of her stories to the screen with all the instincts of a true film maker. There is a literary quality here – effective use of voice over, the below-the-surface-ness of a fine short story – but that doesn't stop this deeply moving film from being equally cinematic, as strongly visual as it is verbal.

As a director, Miller clearly knows how to work with actors, drawing extraordinary performances from Kyra Sedgwick as a woman who takes her children and flees an abusive husband, Parker Posey as an up-and-coming literary editor, and Fairuza Balk as a young woman who picks up her first hitch-hiker: "She had known it was a sign...."

All three portraits are rich with human detail, capturing women who make unexpected, even inscrutable, decisions at those hinge moments when lives undergo tumultuous change. A certain unity is achieved by the distinctive look of the film – a wonderfully successful use of digital video – and the fact that parts of each of these New York stories occur on the same day, as signalled by the news report of a freakish traffic accident which plays into each.

The final 26 minute episode is a marvel of narrative understatement and compaction: the opening sequence at the donut shop uses extremely deft and understated editing to suggest important themes and raise doubts about characters and chronology, presenting subtle details which may reflect the character's thoughts and fears, or may be foreshadowing or memory. To say more about how this culminating story unfolds would be to rob it of its power, but it is highly recommended not only for its artistry, subtlety and humanity, but also for a deep sense that there may be more at work in our lives than our own ambitions and strategies for survival. Highly recommended.


Available at Videomatica

SHANE

SHANE (1953, USA, George Stevens)
Ma, I just love Shane. He's so good.

According to movie books, this is the classic western; a mysterious stranger hangs up his guns, but when the bad guys go too far, he's got to decide between his old ways and the new. And to judge by all that's been written in Christian movie books, the title character is practically Jesus on a white horse riding.

So you may be fuddled just a bit when you rent this one and it doesn't look like westerns are supposed to look – that Shane fella sure as shootin' don't look like no cowboy hero to me, ma'am. And unless you're a Christ Figure Hunter ready to find a Jesus symbol in every cross-shaped tree or window frame, I'm not sure Alan Ladd is going to become your image of Jesus any time soon. He may be called on to save the day – most heroes are – but that's a fair sight different than saving the world. I wonder: if director George Stevens hadn't gone on to make The Greatest Story Ever Told a dozen years later, would it have occurred to anybody that this particular buckskinned good guy was actually a stand-in for The Good Guy?

Still, if you find inspiration in stories of good, simple people resisting ruthless and powerful evil – and if you can get past genre expectations of cowboy hats and noisy saloons – this surprisingly low-key film is the touchstone.

PALE RIDER

Available at Videomatica

PALE RIDER

PALE RIDER (1985, USA, Clint Eastwood, Michael Butler / Dennis Shryack screenplay)
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. Revelation 6:8

It's a revved-up Shane, with all the religion brought right to the surface. Mining company bad guys terrorize the settlers and shoot young Megan Wheeler's dog. At the graveside of her pet, the impossibly gorgeous 14-year-old breaks off from reciting the 23rd Psalm to plead with God, "We need more than comfort. We need a miracle." Apparently the prayer of a righteous babe availeth much, because next thing you know, guess who rides into town? "The Preacher," reluctant vengeance incarnate, High Plains Drifter in a clerical collar. Any biblical references viewers may read into the classic Shane – whose blueprint this film consciously follows – are explicit here. But the thin line between archetype and stereotype gets overstepped here, and I think director Clint wanted to be more spiritual and substantial than he achieved here. Seven years later in Unforgiven he was able to go much deeper into the tensions between justice and vengeance in a film less explicitly religious but far more spiritually significant. Still, it's fun to play "spot the references" – I'll leave it to you to decide if the movie's contradictions between spirit and flesh are complexities or just confusions. If you enjoy a good shoot 'em up with aspirations to be something more, this one can be a lot of fun.

SHANE, UNFORGIVEN

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NOT OF THIS WORLD

NOT OF THIS WORLD ("Fuoiri Dal Mondo" 1999, Italy, Giuseppe Piccioni, screenplay with Gualtiero Rosella & Lucia Zei)
Sometimes I think at night, "Give me another chance, I'll be better. With my friends, at work, with the woman I love." These are my prayers, but they are never granted.

"A nun and a dry-cleaner find this baby..." It sounds like the set-up for a bad joke: it's not. Sure there's a light touch, and Silvio Orlandos in particular delivers scenes of warm comic genius. But the opening minutes of this undiscovered gem serve notice that there's much more going on here.

Novitiate voices recite the Hail Mary ("Blessed is the fruit of your womb") as the camera explores... What? Extreme close-up of heavy texture, deep blue, there's a button... And the moment we recognize it as a sweater, we cut to the Mother Superior speaking of the call to be a nun: "Your habit will be the sign of your choice, and of your nearness to God... You shouldn't please with clothes but with your behaviour, who you truly are." Then a man's voice takes up the narration, matching hers, tone for tone; "The linen must be dry, not damp... Be careful with shirts with cuffs. With silk, use a cool iron, dampen and steam... You have to take care of things if you want to work here." We're no longer in the convent but in a laundry: our initiation is into the vocation of cleansing clothes, not souls.

It's all there from the outset. The droll humour of juxtaposition. A way of story-telling that doesn't spell things out, but trusts us to make the connections, figure out contexts. Images of clothing and fabric that can hide or reveal your true nature. Motherhood, divinity, purity. Questions of work, divine calling, human choice. Being in the world, or separate from it.

And soon we meet that sweater again. It is thrust into Sister Catarina's arms by a jogger in the park. Inside, a newborn baby. Typical of the film's gentle quirkiness, the man who found it can't take the baby to the authorities – he's supposed to be under house arrest. He jogs away, smoking a cigarette. And for all her assertions to the contrary, the ever-so-small questions begin for Catarina, with less than a year before she takes her perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience: what if she were to choose another life?

This is a layered, understated film, infinitely likeable and filled with quiet, telling ironies. Highly recommended, particularly for fans of movies like The Man Without A Past or Italian For Beginners.


Available at Videomatica

MOST

MOST (2003, USA, Bobby Garabedian, screenplay with William Zabka)

Most of us never get the chance to see some of the most compelling films around, simply because they're too darn short. You can tell a lot of story in twenty or forty minutes, but unless you pad it out to an hour and a half or two, nobody's going to show your movie. Or rent it at the video store. Or even hear about it.

Often, that's a pity. In the case of Most, it's a terrible loss. People who have seen this film count it among the best and most powerful movies they have ever seen: some say it's been life-changing. An audience favorite when it debuted at the prestigious Sundance Festival, it went on to win top honors at the Heartland Film Festival, Maui, Palm Springs and other international competitions before receiving an Oscar nomination as Best Live Action Short Film in 2004.

"Most" is Czech for "The Bridge," and this story revolves around a railway drawbridge somewhere in Eastern Europe, and the man whose responsibility it is to raise the bridge to allow ships to pass through. We glimpse the lives of passengers who find their way onto the train one autumn afternoon, as we get to know this man and the son he is raising on his own. Some sadness seems to cast a shadow on the man, and it seems almost as an act of caring for his father that the boy insists on accompanying him to work this particular day. To reveal much at all of a story this concise and beautifully constructed would be to rob the viewer of some of the film's greatest power, but there's no doubt the source of its true impact lies in the tangible realness of the lives we encounter.

The acting is glorious: what a privilege to see such astonishingly accomplished actors, their faces completely unrecognizeable to a North American audience. None of the distractions of celebrity to compete with the reality of the world that opens up onscreen.

And what a tangible, engrossing, closely observed world it is. The seed of the screenplay may be something of a Christian "urban legend," familiar from sermons, tracts and fireside talks at summer camp, but the film's exquisite attention to sensual detail and deeper character development makes it so much more. The events at the core of this story may have happened once, may not have, but over the years its telling and re-telling have stripped away the particularities and reduced it to its "message": but here the film-makers fill out the narrative with rich detail, not only of life in a European city viewed through the eyes of a small boy, but also by extending the stories of the central characters beyond the bounds of the didactic, boiled-down allegory. Elements of this story resonate with larger stories at the heart of the Christian faith, but the film-makers have introduced so much human detail back into the tale that it confounds the sort of one-to-one symbolic interpretation the "parable version" invites. It moves from an evocative, almost dreamlike opening to a stunning climax with tremendous artistry, then finds a perfectly conceived denoument that not only shifts the story away from a flatly allegorical interpretation but provides even greater emotional resonance for the events that have gone before.

The eastern European tone and setting combined with the moral/relational conundrum at the heart of the story are reminiscent of Kieslowski, particularly the short films in his acclaimed Decalogue project, though there's an unabashed soulfulness here (however understated) that contrasts with the muted emotions of the Polish director's work, and probably renders Most just that much more accessible to a North American audience. It's remarkable to learn that the film originates with a pair of young Los Angeles film-makers, Bobby Garabedian and William Zabka (though those last names may help explain something of the film's European flavor). It will be just that much more remarkable – at least for people more cynical about "Christian film-making" – that the film's creators are both committed Christians. "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Oh yes.

This film won't show up at your local movie theatre, or probably even your neighbourhood video store, so I strongly urge you to take the risk and order the DVD through the film's official website. Not only is it likely to be an extraordinary viewing experience for you and your family, but it is a film you will want to lend to others, probably even show at your church or to your movie-group. The film premiered with a score mostly borrowed from the soundtrack of Amelie (!), but the DVD release features an all new score by John Debney, whose quiet music for this film is as evocative as his heart-pounding Passion Of The Christ score was thundrous and overwhelming.

Garabedian and Zabka have taken a well-worn story that's probably not true but is definitely True, and elaborated that mythic kernel into a multi-layered and evocative story that visits tragedy and suggests transcendence without ever descending to didacticism. For my money, an absolute exemplar of what a short film can be, and of what Christians can accomplish with film: real art, real life, real hope. Take the trouble to seek it out.

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (2004, USA/UK, Michael Radford, play by William Shakespeare)
Therefore, Jew, though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

Director Michael Radford's MERCHANT OF VENICE is a gift. Since the Holocaust, to present this brilliant, challenging play about Jew-hating Christians and hateful Jewish caricatures is to invoke controversy, inviting accusations of aiding and abetting gross anti-Semitism. Just ask the artistic director of your local Shakespeare festival.

But to avoid the play simply because it makes us uncomfortable is unthinkable. That's what art is for. MERCHANT offers a complex and confounding window not only into our proclivity to mix racism and religion, but also into love and greed, mercy and justice, the contradictions of the human heart. Radford and his cast have created a MERCHANT for our day, grounded in the sensibilities of Shakespeare's.

The first image we see, centre-screen, is a cross, mounted at the stern of a boat that carries a Jew-hating cleric, haranguing listeners with Old Testament scriptures calling for death to usurers. In 1594, intolerance of Jews was a fact of life, and money-lending (at interest) violated the "Christian" law. While sophisticated Venetians turned a blind eye, "religious fanatics" used these laws to oppress Jews who, confined to ghettos by night and forbidden property ownership, resorted to money-lending as a means of survival.

One Jew, marked by a red cap as inescapably as his great-grandchildren would be by yellow stars, is taunted by a mob and thrown from a bridge. Another, Shylock, calls out to a passerby in what seems a plea for compassion. Antonio turns and spits on him. Clearly this production won't be soft-pedalling the anti-Semitism of its characters.

We're five minutes into the film before hearing the first line of Shakespeare's text. By the time Antonio finally utters the intriguing, portentous, inexplicable (and ultimately unexplained) words, "In sooth I know not why I am so sad," I couldn't help but wonder if his sorrow might be that of a soul divided, if his hatred toward Shylock might not have begun to leaven the whole loaf.

The puzzle of Antonio is the play's great conundrum and challenge. Loathing the gross racism of Saliano and Salarino, we comfort ourselves that we are not like them. But Antonio isn't like them either. He's greatly respected for his wealth and success (he is the merchant of the title), but he is also a man of honour and reputation, who would sacrifice himself for a friend – quite literally, should occasion demand. We would say he is a man of integrity, but for the terrible flaw we cannot integrate. Jeremy Irons' nuanced, insightful and carefully balanced characterization goes further, subtly suggesting that Antonio's grief may also have roots in a "love that dare not speak it's name": a man of status and conscience, he can give no expression to an affection he feels for Bassanio beyond mere comradeship.

It's a good thing Irons' Antonio is so strong, so fascinating: there's always the risk that Shylock will steal the show, and here Al Pacino offers what may be the performance of a lifetime (with all due respect to Michael Corleone).

For folks whose memories don't go back enough decades, who think of Al Pacino as a good but limited actor that mostly sticks to a pretty decent Al Pacino imitation – crooks and the occasional cop – this film ought to be a revelation. Pacino reminds us that he is not just good but great, a performer of true genius who can dominate the screen, or an entire film. Forgetting his Looking For Richard, we don't expect American screen actors to fulfill the demands of Shakespearean text, yet every image and metaphor is alive, every intention both precise and visceral. He is up to every demand of the script: one line he breaks your heart, the next he turns your stomach.

Pacino shapes the role masterfully, completely establishing our empathy for an isolated man of feeling and principle (Antonio's mirror image) before launching himself headlong into the character's sickening descent into hatred, avarice and revenge. The actor not only rises to the role's extremes of villainous melodrama, he fills them, rendering them both theatrical and believable. Libby Appel once said there's no such thing as over-acting: there's true acting and there's false acting, that's all, however large or small. This acting is true, and you won't see better.

Joseph Fiennes creates an exceptional Bassanio, a lover both forceful and flawed, heroic but human. Lynn Collins' Portia is stunning, not only gloriously beautiful but brilliant and self-possessed – ultimately, the play's driving force. How else is our interest kept once the duelling merchants leave the stage? She has all the appeal of Shrew's Kate, without the hard-to-swallow capitulation at the end. The agonizingly protracted trial is as taut, tense and dangerous as any courtroom scene anywhere, and Portia's centrepiece appeal for mercy stopped me from breathing. As conflicted as we may be about the play's unnerving – and perhaps unknowing – anti-Semitism, as galled as we may be by its questionable conversions, the core of it all is the core of the gospel, untainted: the exaltation of mercy over justice. This film flinches from neither the shameful nor the transcendent. They coexist in dazzling, confusing juxtaposition, the confounding tensions and contradictions lending the story both its controversy and its artistry.

This Merchant's Venice is exotic but real, mired in dirty, bloody specifics that contrast wondrously with its fairy-tale vision of Belmont. There's dreadful power in setting the "pound of flesh" negotiations at a Jewish meat-market: a goat is bled into the canal presaging the bargain's ultimate resolution, bringing the deeper realization that bloody meat just isn't kosher. Red wax drains onto the contract like blood to seal the deal.

The film is rich with interconnections and juxtapositions. Jessica's father gives her keys to lock herself away from her suitors: we cut directly to the keys Portia's father decreed should divine her true husband. And how about the beautifully foregrounded detail about Jessica's ring – on whose evidence do we believe that monkey story, after all? I marveled at the way it humanized Shylock all the more, connecting his history with the young lovers' courtship, finally resonating in those haunting and cryptic closing images.

Critics and audiences will agonize and argue over this potent rendering of a play so problematic to 21st century eyes. Some will question whether the film should have been made. Perhaps the anti-Semitism isn't simply a character flaw, but a failure of both play and playwright. And it's not just Jews who will feel shamed, threatened and misunderstood by this story: Christians too may feel like targets, wondering if we really need another movieful of bigoted, self-righteous "true believer" caricatures. The fact is, nobody comes off looking good here: all fall short of the glory of God. Maybe even the Bard himself.

I'm glad to see these battles rejoined, glad these questions will again be talked about, felt about, fought about. The long and terrible history of enmity between Christians and Jews leaves a legacy of guilt and unforgiveness and judgement. Perhaps this time, in at least a few of those arguments, Portia's plea will win out: our insistence on law and just recompense will give way, and Jesus' great prayer will at last teach us to render the deeds of mercy.


Available at Videomatica

Originally published at Christianity Today Movies

IKIRU

IKIRU (1951, Japan, Akira Kurosawa)
Doesn’t it make you furious when they walk all over you this way?
No. I can’t afford to hate people. I haven’t got that kind of time.

Akira Kurosawa's epic Samurai films are among the greatest movies ever made. But it is a quiet, intimate story about a very different sort of hero, a mid-level bureaucrat confronted with the futility of his own life, that may be the director's masterpiece. Certainly it is one of his most spiritual films.

IKIRU is the story of Mr Watanabe, the paper-shifting Section Chief of the municipal Public Affairs Department. For decades he has hoarded his money, his time and his affections until, with only months left to live, he discovers he no longer knows how to spend them. Played with wrenching vulnerability by Takashi Shimura, this may be the definitive portrait of a man who, examining his life, discovers that it may not be worth living.

The film opens with a stark X-ray image and the unemotional declaration that "This stomach belongs to the protagonist of our story. At this point, our protagonist has no idea he has this cancer." He shifts papers from one pile to another. He cleans his rubber stamp (using the cover page of a efficiency manual he created decades ago, when his job still mattered). He peers over his glasses at a young woman who dares interrupt the decorum of the office by laughing and telling stories. She will not last much longer in this sour, cramped place. But then, neither will Mr Watanabe.

In a gorgeously choreographed sequence unbroken by a single edit, the frame crowded with people moving around a doctor's waiting room, "our protagonist" moves closer and closer to the camera as if to escape a fellow patient and his news that Watanabe's litany of symptoms amounts to a death warrant. Suddenly we cut to a distant perspective: we see this shrunken, frightened man sitting framed in a doorway, hunched and alone as the doctor calls his name. The contrast is stark, breath-taking, heart-breaking.

Henry David Thoreau remarked famously that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things," and the rest of this film is taken up with Mr Watanabe's getting of wisdom, with his efforts to escape the mummified life he has settled for.

Kurosawa did not call himself a Christian, and much of the spirituality of the film is distinctly Asian, with its themes of honour and shame, its emphasis on family and community over the individual, and its celebration of the enobling power of "real work" (I couldn't help thinking of the wonderfully strange SPIRITED AWAY). Still, there is also something about IKIRU that is deeply Christian. Kurosawa was steeped in the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, having just completed his screen adaptation of The Idiot – the story of a man who experiences the joy of being alive only when he faces a firing squad. Indeed, the direct inspiration for IKIRU is likely The Death Of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy – the other great Christian novelist of nineteenth-century Russia.

Once he learns of his condition, Mr Watanabe spends a night in the company of his "good Mephistopheles," a conscience-stricken novelist who shows him the pleasures of the city. As Watanabe knocks back expensive saki, his guide (looking like a Japanese Tom Waits) proclaims to a skeptical bartender, "Ecce homo – behold this man. This man bears a cross called cancer. He's Christ. If you were diagnosed with cancer, you'd die on the spot. But not this fellow. That's the moment he started living. Right?" It's a sadly ironic moment: this pathetic Christ figure is a lost and desperate little man, drinking his way to an even earlier death.

Still, there is something prophetic in these words. Before the film is over we will see the frail figure of this prematurely aged man, bent in pain, resolutely making his way along a bureaucratic via dolorosa, a suffering civil servant whose passion leads him through the halls of Tokyo as resolutely as Mel Gibson's Jesus makes his way through the streets of Jerusalem.

"Ikiru" means "to live," and this is in every way a resurrection story: a simple man is desperate to find new life he faces his own death. Silver screens have seen an abundance of carpe diem films; quirky stories like HAROLD & MAUDE and JOE VS. THE VOLCANO, Peter Weir projects like DEAD POETS' SOCIETY and FEARLESS, and a spate of more recent films like PLEASANTVILLE, AMERICAN BEAUTY and even ABOUT SCHMIDT. Christians are often drawn to these movies and their secular conversions: we find parallels to our own experiences of rebirth, the sense that "all things are become new." But as Frederic Buechner said, "The world speaks of the holy in the only language it knows, which is a worldly language" – it's hard to get away from the fact that these parables of rebirth often end up looking like little more than apologetics for self-indulgence.

Like the protagonists of so many films, Mr Watanabe yearns to "seize the day," to come forth like Lazarus from his tomb and reclaim his life. But this soft-spoken film is profoundly different from the rest when it shows what a man might do with his day once he seizes it, and in the rigorously unsentimental way it observes the effect of his decision on the people around him.

Mr Watanabe discovers a hard road to a kind of redemption. It may be that he walks in the footsteps of Christ.


Originally published at Christianity Today Movies
The Criterion DVD is available at Videomatica

GATES OF HEAVEN

GATES OF HEAVEN (1980, USA, Errol Morris)
After all, there's your dog, your dog's dead. But where's the thing that made it move? It had to be something, didn't it? There's your spirit. There it is.

This film can make you cynical. Or it can break your heart. For many viewers, it does both. Memorably.

Errol Morris's first film is a markedly odd piece about pet cemeteries and the people who run them. In what became a distinctive of his documentary style, characters are not named, no interviewer steers the conversations, and there are no voice-overs to guide our response to what we are seeing. You're on your own, to make what you will of these quirky, tacky, idealistic, and possibly misguided people.

Roger Ebert famously named this eccentric little nonfiction film to his list of the Ten Greatest Films Ever Made, and writes eloquently about it in his indispensible volume of film appreciation, The Great Movies, describing it as "an underground legend, a litmus test for audiences who cannot decide if it is serious or satirical, funny or sad, sympathetic or mocking." At times an uncomfortably close observation of lower-middle class bad taste, at others a moving portrait of lost souls or failed idealism, the film ultimately evokes (but never enunciates) life and death questions that some may find troubling, others reassuring. "Do all dogs really go to heaven?" readily slips over into "Does anybody go to heaven, or is it all just something we've made up to comfort ourselves?" Ultimately, though, there's clearly something unconvincing and even self-interested in the very made-up-ness of Cal Harberts' religion, and you wonder if that's playing itself out in the lives of his two lost sons.

At the same time, for all his apparent detatchment, Morris conveys a genuine affection for the people in front of his camera: who can forget the immense, bemused compassion of Floyd McClure, whose fury at visions of family pets in garbage dumps led to the founding of the ill-fated Foothill Pet Cemetery. Whatever conclusions are drawn about the next life, I suspect GATES OF HEAVEN leaves many viewers considerably awakened to this one, and much more tender. Perhaps the kingdom of heaven is among us, after all?

AFTER LIFE

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THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE

THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE (USA, 2000, Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato)
I think gay people like Tammy because Tammy likes gay people, and she's one of the only Christians in the world who seems to these days. (Mel White)

One of the things art does is makes us bigger. And one of the main ways it does that is by shaking up our perceptions, taking a piece of the world and holding it up at an angle that makes us see it differently. That reversal of expectations is the real accomplishment of this unpredictable documentary about "the First Lady of Religious Broadcasting" created – who would have predicted? – by two gay film-makers and narrated by infamous drag queen RuPaul.

You can see the appeal. All the camp is there, from the infamous mascara, big hair and even bigger personality to the tackiest trappings of TV religion. But even at the outset, the tone isn't mockery so much as a certain ironic celebration. And by the time we've realized the radical truth that "Jim and Tammy's gospel of fun was for one and all," we've been moved from skeptical mockery through a kind of pitying compassion into something remarkably like respect. When Jim J. Bullock, an openly gay man who co-hosted a later TV show with Tammy, says "She has been judged by other people and she knows what that's like," the words resonate deeply, and we are very close to the heart of the gospel.

To get a sense of the way this film succeeds at reversing audience perceptions, compare the IMDb user comments on this film to those posted for Fall From Grace, the 1990 made-for-TV biopic about the Bakkers that starred (unbelievably) Kevin Spacey and Bernadette Peters. Maybe what looked so tacky and artificial all those years was a remarkable, unashamed authenticity – authentically tacky, yes, but also authentic in ways that matter. Viewed from this bracing, queer perspective, maybe Tammy's biggest appeal was her wildly unapologetic "outness" as much as it was her radical inclusivity.

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THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS

THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS (France, 1998, Erick Zonka, w/ Roger Bohbot, Virginie Wagon & Pierre Chosson)
I felt completely with the others. At one with them. I was Lau, I was Marc, I was Remi. Maybe it was the strong wind on the beach which mixed us...

You may love Paris in the springtime: Lille in January is quite another matter. The transient Isa hits this northern French town with only the rucksack on her back, but soon her winsome directness wins her a place to stay and, inevitably, a friend or two. We know at the outset, this girl is streetwise: that she is also truly wise is the relevation of this unsentimental, beautifully acted little film.

The exact meaning of the title is elusive, but it suggests transcendence in what is otherwise a gritty and sometimes disspiriting human story. What are those images she rips from magazines to paste into cards to hawk on the street? Does the biker really call after her, "Walk in the light"? What are we to make of the yearnings in Sandrine's diary, the sense of Mystery, the imagery of wind? The same subtle nod to spiritual realities is evident late in the film, when Isa's story has become interwoven with the fate of a comatose girl whose survival is at risk – a sequence reminiscent of the pivotal moment in BARCELONA, handled here with even greater understatement.

Elodie Bouchez shared Cannes Actress honours with Natacha Régnier, and truly this is as much Marie's story as it is her friend's. The events of this story are less about external plot developments than they are small revelations and transformations of the soul, and to see these changes in the faces and bodies of these actors is extraordinary. At the outset, Marie seems the prettier of the two, but whatever life has done to her – the film is blessedly free of psychological explanations – we only glimpse her beauty in passing moments. In repose, her face is lovely: on the rare occasion when she smiles (for all the wrong reasons), Marie is stunning. Usually, though, her guarded heart makes her face severe and plain, pulling at the muscles around her mouth, regarding us from under a brow or the corner of an eye, turned away as if expecting a blow. She despises her mother, dismissing her as a victim: "she won't look you in the eye." Like mother, like daughter. Marie's relationships usually end up transactions: money changes hands, sex is bought with a leather jacket. She uses people, and she gets used – and, ultimately, used up.

Isa's progression is a very different one. When we meet this opportunistic and self-interested street kid, she is worn and rough-looking, hardened by experiences we are left to guess at: the scar above her eye is never explained. Her hair is chopped short, her lips chapped and face reddened by the cold. But there is an indomitability there that is about more than just survival, and as compassion and insight grow in her, an extraordinary beauty is revealed. Her eyes are magnificent. Consider what is shown in bodies and faces when the two friends audition for the Hollywood restaurant: Isa is as open and unguarded as Marie is shut-down and resentful. Writer/director Erich Zonca based his film on a friend who exuded "serenity, grace and absolute confidence in life" – Bouchez embodies that to perfection.

Essentially this is the story of a friendship, of two young women blown together by the strong winds of circumstance. Their situations are alike, but their choices – and the inner character each reveals – are very different indeed. This film knows the comparative value of self-interest and self-respect – and, ultimately, of self-transcendence.

ROSETTA, MOUCHETTE

COTTON PATCH GOSPEL

COTTON PATCH GOSPEL (1988, USA, Michael Meece / Russell Treyz, script with Tom Key)
Now, you all think about this story and behave toward everybody on this planet as you would like everybody on this planet to behave toward you. In a nutshell, that's everything I've got to say.

In the early eighties, stage actor Tom Key was touring America with a one-man performance of excerpts from Clarence Jordan's "Cotton Patch" versions of the gospels. Jordan was an early civil rights activist whose controversial inter-racial Koinonia Farm in rural Georgia predated the explosive upheavals of the 1960s. A scholar of Biblical languages, he transposed the gospels into the Southern idioms of his day – a witty, subversive application of scripture to modern cultural situations that resulted in a series of Cotton Patch gospels and epistles that were very popular in the sixties and seventies.

As the story goes, Key was approached at a performance one night by a man clutching a stack of hand-written pages. He'd been captivated by the show on a previous night, and had begun writing songs that might fit with Key's performance. Fortunately, this wasn't just another instance of "The Lord gave me these songs" (presumably because He didn't want them): the man with the music was Harry Chapin, and the songs were superb.

For my money, these tunes are by far the best things Chapin wrote. In his recorded output I find a tendency toward a certain dreary sentimentality: that's counteracted here not only by the lively bluegrass and country arrangements (exquisitely played by The Cotton Pickers), but also by a wonderfully acerbic irreverence that energizes the entire script.
It isn't easy growing up to be Jesus, With no steady job and no steady girl.
You ain't got time to worry 'bout the little things in life
When you're s'posed to be out saving the world.

This video is nothing more – and nothing less – than the filmed version of the original cast production of the stage play, appreciative audience and all. Key is a winsome and flexible performer, and if occasional moments might strike viewers accustomed to screen naturalism as somewhat "stagey," other moments – such as the tender, matter-of-fact healing of the governor's daughter, or the lynching of Jesus – bring chills.

Key has performed the show in an extended Off-Broadway run and at major theatres across the states. It may be the most-produced version of the gospels on professional and community stages in the past twenty years. If you hear about a chance to experience the show live, "get movin'!" – as the archangel spake unto Joseph. But few companies of any calibre can match the artistry and musicality of the original cast.

BONNIE & CLYDE

COOL & CRAZY

COOL & CRAZY ("Heftig Og Begeistret" 2001, Norway/Sweden, Knut Erik Jensen)
You search for the rainbow believing you're wise,
But perhaps what you seek is in front of your eyes.

Early in this nordically understated documentary about a Norwegian men's choir in a remote fishing village, we're given glimpses of what we take to be sea-smoothed boulders, obscured by snow, somewhere near the impossibly cold northern sea. As the film progresses we get other impressions – this rounded grey shape shows up in the corner of a frame here, as part of a backdrop there, underfoot in another scene. They are unremarked by the film maker or the people of the town, but our curiosity begins to be engaged. How big are those things, anyway? And they can't be stone, the shape is too regular, they must be man-made.... The glimpses begin to add up, we start to get a sense for the odd shape of these things – and the size, they must be ten feet high. And just as we begin to realize we've noticed these strangely symmetrical four-legged Stonehenges, the camera steps back and lets us see. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of these things, heaped along the sea's edge like a giant child's building set, Stonehenge sized, swept aside in a jumble whose scale dwarfs the people we've begun to be familiar with. It's at that point we hear all that's going to be said about these wondrous, strange creations; " If not for the breakwater and the choir, we could not live here."

Like so many of the best documentaries – one thinks of the work of Erroll Morris, for example – and like the taciturn Finnmark people it introduces us to, this film doesn't spell itself out for us. God is in the details, and we are invited to observe closely, to make the inter-connections ourselves, to draw our own conclusions. There is no narration and little narrative structure, so the film gathers its weight and effect by the gradual accumulation of specificities, juxtapositions, ironies. One man prides himself in his walk, "firm and decisive." The church pastor speaks matter of factly about losing a childhood friend in a Nazi bombing attack on the village. We watch car tail lights drive to rehearsal along the village's one main street: later, they drive back home in the deeper darkness. In a series of brief conversations we come to know a recovering drug addict who, after years of homelessness in the city, takes fierce pride in owning his first home: "I am staying in Berlevag. Have to convince myself that I have grown up. That's important, to go with that feeling." (Quick – name another movie set in Berlevag...)

"The Strand Boys" – two brothers, 87 and 95 years old – zip their winter coats in unison, and the quick efficiency of the gesture speaks of long habit, brotherhood, and the unarguable realities of snow and cold. They sing "Children Of The Heavenly Father" in shaking, randomly-pitched voices, then comment that it would sound a lot better with all four parts. We are taken aback, later, when the whole choir assembles to sing the piece – outside, at night, punctuated with the laughter of children sledding – and the sound is glorious, rich, resonant with meaning.

Another man, who has sung with the choir since 1935, shows us a handful of coloured lights and – inexplicably – a single crab shell, hanging in a doorway in his otherwise neatly-ordered home: "Last year's Christmas decor," he explains. We intuit that he is a widower. "I especially enjoy the rehearsals now that I'm alone." A huge, bearded man reclines in his bubble bath, aged pictures of Marx and Lenin framed on his brightly painted wall: "I was a satyr in my youth. I was a singer in several dance bands. So I had plenty of opportunities.... Often it was just pure lust. One would regret it afterwards."

The humour – and there is plenty of it – is so droll and understated we're not sure we're meant to be laughing. But we do. Immediately after the man with the drawn and haggard face calls himself a carefree optimist, we cut to the choir neatly posed on the curving steps of a white painted oil tank, singing "Trolljazz" as they gamely bob back and forth, more or less in sync with the music, in what must pass for choreography in Norwegian fishing villages. A delightfully extroverted organist mangles the Wedding March, the camera cuts to the pristine Lutheran altar as he curses in frustration, and then remark "I used to call myself an atheist. Don't know what to call it now... I'm more liberated in my relationship with the church – now that I am the organist."

Of course, music is at the heart of this film. Unfortunately, this seems at first like a serious problem. You realize that these boys don't rock. They don't even swing. You make a mental note not to rush out and buy the soundtrack CD. The opening number in praise of Finnmark, "wondrous ever to behold, wintry nights so calm and cold" gives way to an ode to the women at the fish plant:
The filleting lasses are packing,
Their knives they go flashing
And fingers are swift
They cut and they fillet and work through the shift
"Keep up there, we won't have no slacking!"
The lasses at the pack house like ladies proudly prance,
The lasses at the pack house, how they deserve a dance!
Maybe it comes across better in Norwegian.

Curiously, though, this music grows on you, as do these people. There is a winnig directness about it, a lack of guile that is ultimately refreshing, even bracing. And in a sense the undeniable banality of some of these pieces provides a curiously effective set-up for those moments of real beauty when the choir sounds really good, when the music evokes something glorious, reassuring and deeply spiritual. Note the moment when the camera begins its pan of the choir with a shot of the recovering addict: "I know well that God's inviting all the peoples of this earth, Therefore happily I follow, come and join me in rebirth!" Deeply affecting – forced rhyme schemes notwithstanding.

The hard realities of these lives are never far removed from the comfort of the music, or from the almost Zen-like sense of humour reflected in the film. At one point the agnostic church organist delivers a monologue while playing the organ that veers from droll comedy routine to the yearning of a true artist, in what amounts to "found" poetry: "I am a multi-instrumentalist, but not very good at any of them. Compared to Paul McCartney, for example. I simply have to play. That is my strongest urge. Some have to steal, or burn down houses, others have to play. I can't explain it. It is just something that musicians feel. An irresistable urge. You have to hear those chords. ... I'm supposed to know this!"

Whenever the filmmaker seems to invite us to laugh at these people, it is never condescending: the irony is infused with affection, and exactly mirrors the character of his subjects. (Director Knut Erik Jensen himself grew up in the extreme north of Norway, before studying at the London International Film School and returning to Scandinavia to work in film and television.) The "politically dead Communist" and the drug addict work together to fry up some sort of breaded meat at the town's cafe: "Trygg and I are ruling world-champion chefs." To which his comrade adds, "Fish tongue can only be fried in Melange margarine." A certain easy-going, self-deprecating humour is essentially Norwegian, and one senses that its understatement and resolute unsentimentality come by way of extreme isolation and the communal battle against the elements.

The predominant impression you're left with is of the immensity and hostility of this desperately cold environment, and of the warmth of its people, especially when they gather to sing. The extended opening sequence gives an impression that we won't shake for the duration of the film: the sound and sight of the open ocean, snow on a rocky shore. A male choir, sonorous and deep, is occasionally audible through the wind and waves. Then we see the men: they are standing in a blizzard, singing. The wind begins to whip up the snow, carrying away snatches of their song, and soon they are lost to sight.

This film doesn't go out of its way to entertain. It doesn't pander. Instead, we are welcomed without fuss into these quiet, stoic, ordinary lives. And if we pay attention, we may come to see not only their humanity, but also a certain matter-of-fact glory.

BABETTE'S FEAST, THE CHORUS

Available at Videomatica

A sequel was made during the choir's tour to America which happened to coincide with the destruction of the twin towers: COOL & CRAZY ON THE ROAD

POSSIBLE FILMS: SHORT WORKS BY HAL HARTLEY 1994-2004

POSSIBLE FILMS: SHORT WORKS BY HAL HARTLEY 1994-2004 (2004, USA, Hal Hartley)
They didn’t know if they were doing the right thing or not. They hoped they were. They were living second by second, with signs. They’re religious: they kind of think the world is miraculous.

If you thought AMATEUR, HENRY FOOL or BOOK OF LIFE were off the beaten movie track, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Hartley’s idiosyncratic aesthetic may in fact be most effective in these short experimental pieces, three of which also continue his exploration of spiritual themes.

The writer-director’s preoccupation with things apocalyptic led him to an investigation not only of the Branch Davidians but back to the origins of American millennial Christianity. The results found their way into SOON, an oddly fascinating contemporary opera commissioned for Austria’s Salzburg Festival, a speculative recreation of the last days of an End Times group not unlike the famous Waco cult. We see only a teasing fifteen-minute excerpt of the work’s second staging in Pasadena, the emphasis on physical movement and exceptionally strong performances.

Parker Posey has never been so gorgeous or quirky nor Hal Hartley’s eccentricity so effective as in the even odder OPERA NO. 1, an 8-minute (Wenders/Shakespeare-inspired?) mini-opera about a pair of inept angels in wedding dresses and roller skates who play matchmaker to a tormented writer and a bicycle courier who sings “I work too much / I want a boyfriend,” all staged in an abandoned theatre for an invisible audience.

Less effective – or less accessible – is THE OTHER ALSO, in which two digitally distorted human forms move in front of a window as voices speak Jesus words (in English and, apparently, in Japanese?) “But I say unto you, do not resist, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

Viewers new to “personal vision” film may find these experiments intolerably strange, while hardcore gallery-goers could judge them light-weight and precious: for me, they hit the spot exactly.

SOON programme notes


Available at Videomatica