Sunday, March 31, 2024

Grand Jeté


GRAND JETÉ   **1/2

Isabelle Stever
2022

























IDEA:  A former ballerina, now working as a dance instructor, engages in an affair with her estranged adult son.



BLURB:  In Grand Jeté, motherhood is a sadomasochistic ritual as precious as it is perverse. When we’re first introduced to Nadja (Sarah Grether), however, it’s not in the context of maternity but the vocation she long ago substituted for her role as a mother. Instead of rearing a child, Nadja received her licks as a ballerina, pushing the limits of her body through an art at once graceful and unforgivingly grueling until her body could take it no more. Constantin Campean’s camera cleaves to Nadja’s undulating bones and scarred skin in closeups so tight they become synecdochic of a woman’s crumbling midlife prospects. This sense of loss drives her to engage in an emphatically Oedipal relationship with her estranged son, through which she finds a figurative and literal second chance at motherhood. It’s not exactly clear, in this largely withholding film, what’s driving the son (besides an evident shared affinity for bodily punishment and drinking from the sink faucet), but then this isn’t really the story of his desire. While it often plays like a leaden Piano Teacher-like erotic provocation, Grand Jeté becomes, in its final moments, the dementedly poignant fable of a mother’s (re)birth.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

The Boy Friend


THE BOY FRIEND   ***

Ken Russell
1971























IDEA:  In 1920s London, an assistant stagehand reluctantly steps into the lead role of a musical called "The Boy Friend" after the leading lady breaks her ankle.



BLURB:  The musical has often been noted as the one classical Hollywood genre in which narrative concerns can be subordinated to spectacle. Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend takes this logic to its extreme, tipping the scales so emphatically in favor of the spectacle that the narrative is close to a non-entity. Like the last act of a Busby Berkeley musical or the dream ballet sequence of a Freed-era MGM musical engorged to (long) feature length, The Boy Friend proceeds as a series of lavish production numbers, each one more decadently realized than the last. There’s a mythological Grecian bacchanal in a verdant wood; dancing figures atop supersized turntables; people dressed as glittery playing card suits climbing a golden lattice; and, in a number that must have resonated in an era of psychedelia, a frolicsome/feverish jaunt through a mushroom village. The implication in the Berkeley musicals - that these allegedly stage-bound spectacles could only ever be executed, and appreciated, through the medium of film - is made explicit by Russell through the meta-textual device of a Hollywood director viewing the stage show within the movie, intending to adapt it for the screen. Whether or not Russell’s film faithfully depicts (is adapt even the right word?) Sandy Wilson’s "The Boy Friend" is beside the point in this deeply irreverent pastiche, which seems to want nothing more than to fill our eyes and ears with only the borrowed, sugary excesses of movie-musical tropes until we're stuffed silly. One’s viewing ratio of pleasure-to-pain will vary, but the chutzpah of the endeavor is undeniable.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Dune: Part Two


DUNE: PART TWO   ***

Denis Villeneuve
2024























IDEA:  Paul grapples with his burgeoning role as the prophesied messiah of the Fremen amid an increasingly chaotic galactic battle for control of Arrakis.



BLURB:  Dune: Part Two largely exhibits the same qualities that made Part One such an unexpectedly vigorous, astute work of large-scale blockbuster filmmaking. These are primarily formal ones: cinematography, sound, and production design, especially, and the ways in which Villeneuve orchestrates these elements to immerse the viewer in a spectacle that has a tactilely epic scope. There’s perhaps no better single example of this in Part Two than Paul’s sandworm initiation, a sequence that combines suspenseful buildup, visual and sonic contrasts, lithe camera movement, and a strategic, culminating POV shot to thrilling sensory effect. To be sure, the film continues to display this audiovisual prowess over the remaining two hours, and with a lucidity and apparent ease that is truly impressive, if not quite as awe-inspiring as it seemed in Part One. If the craft of the film is mostly unimpeachable, however, the same cannot be said for the writing and acting. Part Two tangibly strains as the story builds toward revolutionary ferment and the radicalization of Paul into a power-hungry tyrant, an operatic Lawrence of Arabia-esque arc neither the script nor a sluggish Chalamet are quite able to pull off. The relative blandness of the characters as performed - already a deficiency in Part One - becomes a greater liability in this chapter as they’re tasked with wrangling ever-more dramatic emotional and psychological developments. It’s a testament to the film’s sheer formal virtuosity that, despite the sense that the Spice has lost some of its cinematic potency, Dune: Part Two still proves a grandly exciting time.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore


ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE   ***1/2

Martin Scorsese
1974

























IDEA:  Following the sudden death of her husband, a woman sets off with her 11-year-old son through the American Southwest to start a new life.



BLURB:  In the context of Scorsese’s recent output of stately three-hour-plus historical epics, it is truly jolting to revisit an early work such as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which thrums with a vibrantly offbeat and freewheeling energy that feels mostly foreign to the director’s work in the 21st century. One laments the film’s widespread dismissal as merely his anomalous “women’s picture.” Of course, the film is Scorsese’s version of a women’s picture, and brilliantly so, taking the tropes of a classical Hollywood melodrama and spiking them with a bracingly New Hollywood audiovisual language. Through writing, acting, cinematography, editing, and sound, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is constantly defying expectations of what kind of shape and tone this story should have. This playfully protean approach results in some of Scorsese’s brightest and most inventively rangy filmmaking, from the teasing Technicolor artifice of the prologue to the tiny comedic masterpieces of the road trip scenes, which use sonic repetition and smash cuts to convey Alice’s growing irritation with her antsy passenger. Sometimes within the same scene, Scorsese toggles between registers of madcap farce and documentary verisimilitude, a combination that, if not always seamless, is never less than invigorating in the affects it generates. It’s all anchored by the nonpareil chemistry between Ellen Burstyn’s Alice and Alfred Lutter’s Tommy, one of cinema’s most winsomely unconventional mother-son duos. By turns antagonistic, chummy, and Oedipal, it’s a mercurial relationship that emblematizes the film’s dynamic, slippery portrait of a woman who exists beyond archetype.