Luca

LUCA   ***1/2

Enrico Casarosa

2021

IDEA:  Two sea monster friends, who take human form when on land, set out to win a Vespa in the Italian port town of Portorosso.

BLURB:  Luca is perhaps one of Pixar’s least ambitious original works, but this proves to not be such a bad thing. Following a string of unnecessary sequels and unwieldy, spottily examined high concepts, Casarosa’s spry, unfussy tale of summer friendship feels as refreshing as the Mediterranean breeze. Eschewing elaborate fantasy world-building, heady internal logics, and a sprawling cast, the film capers along with a light stroke not seen in the studio’s recent, more existentially heavy films. Luca knows and respects its relatively modest scope and scale, and, happily, feels no need to burden itself with overwrought plot developments or thematic aspirations toward profundity. Despite this sense of dialing down, the film is far from a trifle. Drawing efficiently on coming-of-age and monster fiction tropes, it tells a moving story of alterity and outsider alliances, with parallels to the LGBTQ experience that feel more than subtextual. The script is lucid in its understanding of the anxieties of difference, and the relationship between Luca and the roguish Alberto is a beautifully multifaceted depiction of intense, obsessive childhood friendship and potentially nascent same-sex desire. Luca also distinguishes itself by adopting an animation style closer to cartoon than the customary Pixar photorealism, giving it a vibrant, at times expressionistic visual fluidity perfectly suited to both Vespa rides among the fish and close embraces with cherished partners.

The Grand Olympics

THE GRAND OLYMPICS   ***

Romolo Marcellini

1961

IDEA: An account of the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, Italy.

BLURB:  Scenic, ebullient, and often surprising in its formal choices, The Grand Olympics anticipates the greater innovations of Kon Ichikawa’s magisterial Tokyo Olympiad, while adding its own unique colors to the Olympic film palette. A relatively more linear account than Ichikawa’s, the film nevertheless is invigorated by sprightly pacing, a lively soundtrack, and shrewd edits, from the rhythmic montage of the gymnastics competitions to the superb action match cut that turns a diver’s aerial flip into the flight of a pole vaulter. Meanwhile, the frequently snarky, editorializing narration injects a certain jocularity into the proceedings, despite its occasional lapses into sexist and racist colonial commentary. More appreciated is the brief expository information that fills in the backgrounds of the athletes, providing us with details of vocations and relationships. The Grand Olympics overall does a good job of relating to the athletes as humans, and not just bodies; gesturing toward heteroglossia, it even includes some of their diaristic first-person accounts, particularly of German 100-meter champion Armin Hary, who for an extended portion of the film becomes its winsome star. Marcellini concludes the documentary with the marathon, in which Abebe Bikila’s legendary victory is rendered as a mythic twilight feat under the watchful gazes of Roman statues. It’s an expected although entirely fitting ending to a celebration of outsize athletic achievement in the Eternal City.

Unfaithfully Yours

UNFAITHFULLY YOURS   ***1/2

Preston Sturges

1948

IDEA:  Believing his wife has been unfaithful to him while he was away in England, a supercilious conductor fantasizes about his revenge.

BLURB:  As clever, gut-busting, and formally sophisticated as anything else Preston Sturges did, Unfaithfully Yours is also the writer-director’s most scaldingly dark film, a murder comedy that throws acid on the “Great Man” narrative of creative genius. Sturges’ subject is Sir Alfred de Carter, a vaunted orchestra conductor played with brilliantly insufferable haughtiness and irascibility by Rex Harrison. Unfaithfully Yours wastes little time undercutting the illusion of his alleged greatness; suspecting his wife of infidelity on nothing more than a secondhand account from a reviled brother-in-law, the urbane Carter is launched into an emotional tailspin, his doubts compounding into a full-fledged mania of insecure masculinity. It is not his love for putative wife-muse Daphne de Carter that feeds his work, but his misguided hatred for her. Sturges stages the psychic effects of his imagined grievances in an ingeniously structured series of revenge fantasies, all scored to classical music pieces, as Carter’s ideé fixe becomes more pathetically insane. The payoff is a protracted sequence of astonishingly choreographed and timed physical comedy, in which a houseful of domestic objects systematically and hysterically rebel against Carter’s progress, deflating him to a sniveling child on the floor. One wishes Unfaithfully Yours did more for its female characters, who mostly sit on the sidelines as their husbands make fools of themselves. Yet the film’s steel-trap construction and sheer hilarity are often overwhelming, and proof that seeing pompous men fail will always carry a charge of satisfaction.

The Damned

THE DAMNED   **1/2

Luchino Visconti

1969

IDEA:  A prominent industrialist family in Weimar Germany is torn asunder when the Nazis rise to power on the patriarch's birthday. 

BLURB:  The Damned is a cousin of such deliriously nasty familial melodramas as The Little Foxes and Written on the Wind; like those texts, it proceeds from the idea that social ills are bred within the structure of the dynastic patriarchal family, and perpetuated via nepotisms that, when combined with the naked greed of capitalism, seek to derange the world at large. The primary difference in Visconti’s lurid, frequently strident soap opera is that it deals with the ascent of the most abhorrent of all modern evils: Nazism. However, The Damned proves less interested in delineating the movement’s fruition than in dramatizing the toxic complicity, psychopathology, and political opportunism that fuels any malevolent regime. The microcosm is the Essenbeck clan, a wealthy industrialist family ensconced in the aristocratic privileges of Weimar Germany. A viper’s nest of animosity, sexual perversion, and moral sloth, their hasty self-destruction, accelerated by the influence of a Nazi relative, is the allegorical descent of Germany itself into the bowels of insanity. Visconti plays up the Oedipal drama that ultimately grants scion Martin, and by extension the SS, control of the family’s manufacturing power; juxtaposed with the massacre of gay SA members in the film’s most memorable sequence, it’s easy to interpret in the queer Visconti’s vision an indictment of state power’s connection to heterosexual, hereditary capital. While little about The Damned is subtle or even refined - whether it’s the overuse of zooms or a narrative structure that builds in fits and starts - the film still has an intermittently chilling power, especially when it reins in the shrillness to stare silently aghast into the abyss.

My Little Chickadee

MY LITTLE CHICKADEE   ***1/2

Edward F. Cline

1940

IDEA:  After being driven out of town for not being "respectable" enough, a woman works toward her redemption by marrying a braggadocios conman.

BLURB:  It may not be as naughty as her pre-Code work, but My Little Chickadee is pound-for-pound one of the funniest films in the Mae West catalogue. Taking elements of the Western milieux from Goin’ to Town and Klondike Annie, Edward F. Cline’s film sets the actress’s famous wanton loucheness against the moral hypocrisy of 19th-century settlers, whose far graver dissolution makes West’s Flower Belle Lee seem a saint in comparison. Of all the unscrupulous characters, nobody is more proudly so than W. C. Fields’ Cuthbert J. Twillie, a blowzy, drunken grifter who lumbers through the film boasting of his murderous exploits, abusing his Indigenous assistant, and scamming anyone in sight. That such a loathsome galoot is almost instantly appointed sheriff says all one needs to know about the ostensible civility of white colonial society. Despite the casual racism that still slips through - this is a 1940 Hollywood Western, after all - My Little Chickadee is quite pointed in its lampooning of phony “law and order” morality, as well as the intended role of marriage to chasten and control women. West and Fields wield their signature outsize personas like comedic steamrollers, memorably clashing as they issue bon mots with reliable, hilarious dexterity. The final line - a reversal of Fields’ patronizing terms of endearment followed by West’s defiantly sashaying hips - is the perfectly sassy capper.

The Phantom of Liberty

THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY   ****

Luis Buñuel

1974

IDEA:  From the Napoleonic occupation of Spain in 1808 to contemporary France, an array of characters enter and exit through tenuously related vignettes.

BLURB:  Much of the power of Buñuel’s films lie in how they create the impression of a crumbling Symbolic order through signs that are not only legible, but deceptively mundane; it’s only in the steady accumulation of audiovisual juxtapositions and narrative displacements that one really perceives the extent of the erosion. This is especially true of the films the director co-wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière, and particularly The Phantom of Liberty. Structured like a serial string of anacoluthons, the film proceeds with a dream logic that defies the grammar of linear narrative progress. Characters’ present activities and goals are consistently interrupted or dropped, only for the focus to be redirected toward other unrelated episodes and pursuits, in a sidewinding stream of deferrals, disavowals, and substitutions. The effect not only mimics the scrambled nature of dreams, but sardonically conveys the desultoriness and apathy of the film’s bourgeois characters, who can neither seem to get anything meaningful done nor find good reason for their behavior. Buñuel’s juxtapositions - monks mortified by S&M, the (failed) law and order of a police academy giving way to the connotations of abjection suggested by the image of guests dining on toilets - sharply set into relief the porousness and contradictions of our social mores and structures, whether it’s religious dogma or the very organization of space. The fissures that emerge from his mischievous inversions and subversions don’t so much explode reality as subtly destabilize it, diffusing our naturalized rules and rituals into a still somehow operating disarray. Even in the disruption of revolution, however, The Phantom of Liberty queasily reminds us how power still finds a way to pervert.

Blonde Venus

BLONDE VENUS   ***1/2

Josef von Sternberg

1932

IDEA:  A former entertainer from Germany returns to show business after immigrating to the US, in order to raise money to send her ailing husband abroad for medical treatment.

BLURB:  Across the robust portfolio of characters she authored in the films of Josef von Sternberg - all arguably among the most variegated, fascinating, subversive female roles in early Hollywood cinema - Helen Faraday stands out as perhaps Dietrich’s most complex. This nominal Venus is less a vamp or a romantic lover than an iridescent, nearly cubist embodiment of a myriad conceptions of femininity, ones that both stem from and upend patriarchal gender dualisms. She first appears swimming nude in a wooded watering hole, a shimmering earthly sign of the eternal feminine. Then, Sternberg makes an ingeniously disorienting transition to another nude bathing body, this time of her young son in the near future, establishing the primal bond that will define Helen as Mother - the only in the Dietrich/Sternberg catalog. One consequently expects Blonde Venus to settle into a familiar mold of women’s melodrama, to reinscribe the role of the sacrificial mother in the schema of the heterosexual nuclear family. But Sternberg is not one to play by the books. Instead, Helen jinks in tandem with the mercurial, sometimes haphazard-feeling, and proudly unbelievable script, pin-balling between maternal domesticity and promiscuous showbiz spectacle, vanquishing the distance between devoted mother/wife and fallen woman. Maybe the most radical aspect of Blonde Venus is the odd, shifting psychosexual triangle made of Helen and her husband and child, which mixes obviously Oedipal dynamics with a rejection of same, resulting in an anti-phallic structure that almost entirely removes Herbert Marshall’s passive father from the picture. The power, after all, resides in Helen, in Dietrich’s enigmatic and inexhaustible mutability, in a woman who defies the expectations and categories of a male-authored world.