Arizona Dream

ARIZONA DREAM   ***

Emir Kusturica

1993

IDEA:  After coming to Arizona on the behest of his Cadillac dealer uncle, a New York fish-counter falls in love with an eccentric woman who dreams of building her own flying machine.

BLURB:  Arizona Dream presents a porous universe in which reality, dream, and cinema produce and reciprocate each other in an irresolvable feedback loop. In this möbius strip of a cosmos, you can see a man mime the crop-duster scene from North by Northwest at a talent show before finding himself stalked by a real aircraft in an impromptu reproduction of the same scene. It’s a place where Chekhov’s gun is invoked and, of course, used. Where the combination of Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway, Jerry Lewis, Vincent Gallo, Lili Taylor, sea turtles, Cadillacs, and Sirkian domestic psychodrama improbably exists. If this all makes Arizona Dream sound preciously self-reflexive or just downright arbitrary, that wouldn’t be inaccurate. Kusturica’s raucous direction fosters a tonal stew that vacillates between astringent, often slapstick black comedy and existential drama. The filmmaker has negotiated this balance better in other films; here, the manic tenor tends to cross the line into the ungainly and strident, clouding a narrative that often seems divorced from any kind of perceivable calculus. That being said, illogic also appears to be somewhat of the point. Arizona Dream deserves recognition for being a rare (semi)-mainstream film committed to the philosophy and aesthetics of surrealism. Similar to works by Buñuel or Jodorowsky, it creates a deliquescent, uncanny dream logic of free-floating symbols that speak in some indirect way to our deepest fears and desires. Kusturica and screenwriter David Atkins throw up signifiers both opaque and obvious (all the allusions to flight), inviting us to intuit connections more than interpret meaning. And if one can’t see the connection between Faye Dunaway ebulliently piloting a Wright brothers-style flyer and Jerry Lewis speaking Inukitut, well, some things just may never make sense.

Play

PLAY   **

Ruben Östlund

2011

IDEA:  A group of black immigrant kids in Sweden carry out an elaborate scheme in which they gain the trust of middle-class white kids to rob them of their cellphones and other belongings.

BLURB:  The children are definitely watching us, but who’s watching them? That’s a question posed heavy-handedly and pleonastically by Play, a self-serious Euro-arthouse provocation masquerading as profound sociological study. The film comes unashamedly from the Michael Haneke playbook of clinically-observed cruelty, its gaze trained coldly on the complacency and moral apathy of capitalist bourgeois society. Like his pitiless Austrian idol, Östlund favors long, often static master-shots that echo the impassive indifference of his characters to the violence and inequity occurring around them. Sometimes, the camera’s creeping pans and zooms suggest the automatism of mass surveillance, signifying a state apparatus void of human compassion. In Östlund’s dourly cynical formulation, we become aligned with that acedia and inaction; moreover, we’re asked to confront our racial and class biases as we witness lower-class black immigrant children systematically deceive and rob middle-class white kids. But what, exactly, does this seemingly tendentious narrative want us to understand? That immigrants can be criminals, and that liberal piety conceals this truth? Östlund’s aim is dubious at best; it doesn’t help that his characters feel more like pawns in an experiment than actual people, inhabiting a world that operates according to its imperious creator’s disingenuously manipulative rules. Formally impressive though it is, Play is a smug, overlong slog, displaying precious little of the dramatic tautness or biting dark comedy Östlund would master just three years later.

Love on the Run

LOVE ON THE RUN   ***1/2

François Truffaut

1979

IDEA:  While awaiting his divorce from Christine, Antoine Doinel has struck up a relationship with record shop employee Sabine. Escaping his troubles with both women, he runs into his former flame Colette at a railway station.

BLURB:  After all his aimless peregrinations and relationship woes, Antoine Doinel at last finds some measure of surcease in Love on the Run, the disarming final chapter of Truffaut’s 20-year saga about the imprudent, perpetually stifled young man. Per the title, however, he’s still chasing romantic satiety for most of the film. Proceeding from a hallucinatory opening sequence that blurs the distinction between passionate intimacy and hostility, Truffaut interweaves Doinel’s latest flight from responsibility with a spate of flashbacks to his tribulations from the preceding installments in the series. The uneasy sense that this is all a glorified, redundant clip show eventually recedes as the flashbacks accrue a psychic, spectral power, the traces of the past resurfacing for Doinel in what amounts to a delayed reckoning. Our protagonist isn’t the only one reflecting on the effects of his actions, as Love on the Run devotes just as much time to the subjectivities of the women who have crossed his desiring path. In the most surprising and welcome development of the whole Doinel series, it is Colette, heretofore the most narratively diminutive of Doinel’s love interests, who emerges as something of the film’s stealth hero. Often shot in adoring closeup, actress Marie-France Pisier imbues the character with equal parts moxie and melancholy, giving her a fully-fleshed life apart from the man to whom she is otherwise inextricably tied. Her happy ending is just as cathartic as Doinel’s, who, no longer on the run, is nevertheless gifted with Truffaut’s most ecstatically kinetic gesture, answering the concluding freeze frame of The 400 Blows with a radiantly romantic whip-panning sendoff.

The Harvey Girls

THE HARVEY GIRLS   ***1/2

George Sidney

1946

IDEA:  En route to Arizona to marry a man she's never met, a young woman falls in with a group of waitresses working for the famed Harvey House hospitality chain.

BLURB:  Despite its low profile in the canon of MGM musicals, The Harvey Girls is among the heartiest and most satisfying of the films created for the studio by the Arthur Freed unit. On a cinematographic level alone, Sidney’s tuneful Western is several cuts above the standard 1940s crop. From the rousing, geography-trotting company performance of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” to the sinuous craning shots that ascend a balcony or zigzag across a ballroom floor, The Harvey Girls feels like a genuine work of film art, its musical strengths supported and elevated by its considerable formal panache. It helps, too, that the film features a dynamite ensemble cast working as both a fluid, evenly showcased collective and as an elegantly delineated community of idiosyncratic individuals, each with their time to shine. Within its milieu, The Harvey Girls ennobles its titular waitresses and, in its way, the showgirls with whom they compete for business, offering a generous celebration of the historical importance of women in the service industry. It might be a bit of a stretch to identify in this anything more than the germs of a proto-feminist ideology, but the attention to politics is itself a welcome dimension, making a grand Hollywood entertainment that has so many other plates spinning effortlessly - Comedy! Romance! Action! Melodrama! - all the richer.