mercoledì 31 maggio 2017

Nocedicocco - Il piccolo drago

Un film che si rivolge direttamente all'infanzia senza alcun ammiccamento agli adulti
* * * - - (mymonetro: 3,00)

Regia di Nina West.
Genere Animazione - Germania, 2016. Durata 83 minuti circa.

Nocedicocco è un draghetto sputafuoco che non ha ancora imparato a volare e che ha anche qualche problema nello sputare il fuoco. L'unico che ha davvero fiducia in lui è il nonno che lo vede come un se stesso giovane. Gli assegna così un compito di responsabilità: fare la guardia per una notte al luogo in cui ha collocato l'erba di fuoco che è rara ma garantisce ai draghi sputafuoco la giusta riserva di combustibile. Il sopraggiungere di un vitellino darà il via a una serie di avventure il cui obiettivo è tornare in possesso dell'erba.





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Una vita

Dall'omonimo romanzo di Guy de Maupassant
* * * 1/2 - (mymonetro: 3,92)

Regia di Stéphane Brizé. Con Judith Chemla, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Yolande Moreau, Swann Arlaud, Nina Meurisse, Olivier Perrier, Clotilde Hesme, Alain Beigel, Finnegan Oldfield, Lucette Beudin, Jérôme Lanne.
Genere Drammatico - Francia, Belgio, 2016. Durata 119 minuti circa.

Normandia, 1819. Jeanne è una giovane donna che sboccia alla vita. Figlia dei baroni Le Perthuis des Vauds, si innamora e sposa Julien de Lamare, un nobile locale decaduto che si rivela presto un adultero incorreggibile. Dopo aver sedotto e ingravidato Rosalie, la domestica al servizio dei baroni, Julien chiede perdono a Jeanne e lo ottiene, rientrando in seno alla famiglia e diventando padre di Paul. Ma all'orizzonte si prepara un'altra tempesta che travolgerà ogni bene, materiale e affettivo, affondando Jeanne nei ricordi di una vita.





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Transformers: Hailee Steinfeld nello spin-off dedicato a Bumblebee

La giovane star lanciata da Il Grinta sarà la protagonista del progetto targato Paramount

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Taipei Story: Modern Planning

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To appreciate just how bitter a pill Edward Yang was serving up with Taipei Story, it helps to understand the sarcastic fake-out embedded in the film’s Chinese title. Lifted from a poem by Tang dynasty master Li Bai, Qingmei zhuma translates literally as “Green plum, bamboo horse,” a phrase that, like many classical idioms in the language, distills human experience to a tableau of emblematic objects that can be savored by the mind’s eye. Here the experience being described is one of kismet—an eternal love that evolves out of the carefree games of childhood and preserves its innocence even as the companions age. Seeing these words on a marquee in 1985, the year the film was released, the average Taiwanese viewer would have been primed to expect the kind of escapist melodrama that commercial Chinese-language cinema had excelled at for decades, or at least something in tune with the treacly hit ballads of lead actress (and Yang’s first wife) Tsai Chin. But instead of the pastoral, ever-blooming romance evoked in Li Bai’s lines, what we get is the dry chill of urban malaise.

In the film’s opening scene, a couple walk through an apartment, sizing up its empty spaces, shruggingly deeming it “not bad” as a potential residence. The front door is wrapped in plastic; the bedroom window looks out onto another anonymous condominium building. The man, Lung (Yang’s fellow New Taiwan Cinema titan Hou Hsiao-hsien, who shares a writing credit with Yang and Chu Tien-wen), is casually dressed and emotionally distant, mimicking a baseball batter with his swinging arms. His yuppie-attired girlfriend, Chin (Tsai), eyes one corner of a room from behind her oversize shades and begins to list the middle-class fixtures that could fit in it: stereo, TV, VCR. Like the green plum and bamboo horse of the film’s title, her roll call of electronic appliances invokes the stability of a kind of dream life, an archetype ready to be inhabited. But Chin and Lung, reminiscent of the languorously embattled lovers in the famous apartment scene in Contempt, are already being boxed in and divided by the floor plan, their fates circumscribed by the threshold of each doorway.

Before studying engineering and gradually finding his way to cinema, Yang contemplated attending Harvard for architecture, a field that would have exercised some of the native gifts that became so evident in his films: his methodical approach to structure, his sensitivity to how people interact with (and within) built landscapes, his understanding of how place becomes a conduit for emotionally charged ideas about history and identity. The influence of this abandoned profession is nowhere more pronounced than in Taipei Story, his second feature, which reflects the worldly skepticism of a man who was born in Shanghai and raised in Taiwan, and had studied and worked in the U.S. for more than a decade.

Yang returned to Taiwan in 1981, and his film career, along with Hou’s, marked a major break from the dominant trends in Taiwanese cinema prior to the eighties. Together, they became the leading figures in a generation of directors who injected a thrilling sense of modernity into an industry whose most distinctive products up to that point had been martial-arts films, tear-jerking adaptations of the best-selling romance novels of Chiung Yao, and works of government-sanctioned “healthy realism” that promoted traditional values as a counterbalance to the nation’s rapid westernization. This artistic conservatism was partly the result of the Kuomintang government’s thirty-eight-year imposition of martial law, and while the New Taiwan Cinema did not become explicitly political until the late eighties, when the law was lifted, Yang’s and Hou’s early films were among the first to depict Taiwan as a place with a burgeoning sense of its own social and historical integrity, independent of a mainland China that had long considered it a mere repository.

For Yang, this implicit acknowledgment of cultural specificity is complicated by the encroaching forces of Western values and money, the angst-ridden awareness of which distinguishes his cinema from Hou’s contemporaneous chronicles of provincial family life (A Summer at Grandpa’s; A Time to Live, a Time to Die). With much of its action playing out in depersonalized bourgeois spaces—a bedroom furnished with little more than a mattress and a television, a cramped pub with Michael Jackson blaring from the speakers, a rooftop hangout in the shadow of a flickering neon sign—Taipei Story regards globalized architecture, in all its pervasiveness, not as a portal to the outside world but as an enclosure, something to be thrashed against.

Like the more widely appreciated masterpieces that Yang made later in his career, A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Yi Yi (2000), Taipei Story is charged with the urgency of a director attempting to map out a whole society through the interlocking oppositions of gender, class, generation, and cultural persuasion that threaten to pull it apart. But whereas those later works boast the intricate plotting and ensemble acting that have led to his reputation as a novelistic director (further differentiating him from the more impressionistically inclined Hou), Taipei Story is hollowed out and almost airless, qualities that make its portrait of two lives grinding to a halt feel that much more unforgiving. As in almost all of Yang’s work, the central tensions arise out of what lovers, friends, and family do not know—and do not care to know—about each other. And the more we see of Chin and Lung in their private moments together, the more bewildered and embarrassed they seem that, despite having known each other since their school days, they’ve spent so many years calling something a relationship that now barely merits the name.

As if to offset the forbidding solidity of its concrete-jungle environment, the film takes on an apparitional quality by pivoting on events that never materialize on-screen, or do so only at the margins. Soon after that opening scene in the empty apartment, Lung travels for the first time to Los Angeles, to meet with his big-honcho brother-in-law as a prelude to his and Chin’s planned emigration to the U.S., a part of the narrative that is completely elided after the title credits and only reluctantly discussed thereafter. In the wake of Lung’s return to Taipei, the film unfolds as the chronicle of a reunion that never really comes off. We observe Chin and Lung leading mostly separate lives, all signs pointing to a couple beset not just by the boredom and resentment that can creep into any long-term relationship but also by the widening chasm between their worldviews. Yang telegraphs their contrasting lifestyles without much fussy elaboration, situating Chin in the corporate milieu of a property-development firm, where she works as a ladder-climbing executive assistant before being unceremoniously demoted, and Lung in the male-dominated world of his old haunts, where he spent his long-lost glory days as a hotshot baseball player. In a rare moment when the pair’s personal and professional worlds do converge, Lung is forced to explain to Chin’s uppity colleagues that he works at an old-fashioned fabric shop, a piece of information that makes palpable the sheer awkwardness of their incompatibility.

Just as A Brighter Summer Day centers on a cipher of a protagonist whose inscrutability is thrown into relief by a cast of vibrant supporting characters, so does Taipei Story invest much of its mystery in a richly varied (albeit smaller and less intricate) network of bit players. There’s the colleague with whom Chin has been having a half-hearted affair, an architect who waxes philosophical about how tiny errors can prove fatal in his line of work. There’s the friend (New Taiwan Cinema writer, actor, and director Wu Nien-jen) who spots Lung in midday traffic, another baseball has-been whose life has taken a turn for the worse since serving in the military. And in Yang’s most explicit acknowledgment of the sinister patriarchal forces that Chin is up against, we’re introduced to her drinking, gambling deadbeat of a father, who continues to subjugate his daughter and determine her fate, as if to punish her for achieving a social status that overshadows both his and Lung’s. We meet him in a quietly brutal scene set in Chin’s spooky, shadow-drenched family house, where he and Lung bond over dinner while Chin silently assumes the role of servant and her mother busies herself with chores. This tyrant serves as the couple’s first real flash point when, out of reverence to some code of masculine honor, Lung sacrifices his savings to pull Chin’s father out of financial disgrace, leaving Chin incredulous that he would compromise their shot at making it in America together.

For all the alienation and cultural rootlessness found in Yang’s vision of modernity, this depiction of a society shackled to age-old habits of filial piety signals the director’s unwillingness to romanticize a Confucian past littered with its own skeletons. If the title Qingmei zhuma valorizes loyalties wrought in the crucible of time, the film itself dramatizes how such long-standing relationships turn toxic—and while China is hardly mentioned, Yang’s argument against the presumption of inherent value in old ties could be interpreted as a subliminal refutation of the mainland’s historical claims to sovereignty over Taiwan. At the same time, the newness of America offers no safe harbor. The allure of its culture is clear, particularly when it provides the film with its one burst of physical abandon, in the form of a club scene in which Chin’s free-spirited younger sister and her rebellious friends dance to “Footloose.” But the dream of American freedom reveals its untenability when Lung, previously tight-lipped about his trip to the States (and standing in front of a calendar portrait of Marilyn Monroe), describes a barbaric country where black people are barred from owning high-end real estate and violence is indiscriminately inflicted in the name of self-defense.

Though Yang was already approaching his forties when he made Taipei Story, the film registers as the muffled howl of an angry young man resigned neither to the reassurances of tradition nor to the enticements of modernity—a howl that would become full-throated with his next film, the ferociously postmodern The Terrorizers (1986). Echoing the defiant voices of the Hong Kong New Wave (particularly Patrick Tam and his groundbreaking 1982 teen drama Nomad), Yang’s cynical appraisal of a proudly cosmopolitan city must have been hard to stomach for many Taiwanese of the period, who imagined themselves inheriting an “economic miracle” that distinguished their geopolitically contested island from mainland China, which was still reeling from the Cultural Revolution. Yet it is this capacity for self-reproach that links Yang’s cinema to the prestigious lineage of European brooders like Antonioni and Bergman, ensuring its legibility for Western viewers. While it was not until the 2000 release of Yi Yi that a Yang film enjoyed a proper theatrical run in the U.S., Taipei Story did win a critics’ prize at Locarno, an early international victory for his homeland’s flourishing (though short-lived) art-film movement. Meanwhile, the film was a disaster domestically, dismissed as indulgent and yanked from screens after just three days—an experience that no doubt laid the foundation for Yang’s festering disillusionment with the local film culture.

While a preoccupation with what exactly defines contemporary Taiwanese identity certainly invigorated a national cinema that had been stifled for decades by political and industrial constraints, Yang was enough of an outsider to recognize the limits of such an essentializing project. Positioned within the educated middle class, and suffused with the unease of someone for whom home was a constantly shifting construct, Yang’s films are concerned with aspiration, often in the absence of any clear goal. Whereas some filmmakers are primarily interested in the textures of life as it reveals itself in the present moment, Yang, even at his most despairing, is always tempted to look elsewhere, as if to ask what more might be needed to live meaningfully. Fifteen years before the tender resignation of Yi Yi, Taipei Story, in all its unrelenting darkness, comes up short on answers. But it’s in Yang’s ability to face up to the big questions with neither self-consciousness nor self-delusion that the seeds of his later hard-won hopefulness can be found.

Andrew Chan is web editor at the Criterion Collection. His writing has appeared in Film Comment, Reverse Shot, Slant, and other publications.



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Limite: Memory in the Present Tense

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Paris, August 1929: a twenty-one-year-old aspiring poet from Brazil stands transfixed in front of a newsstand. That moment during his summer break from his studies in England wasn’t for any fait divers—not Babe Ruth’s five hundredth home run, not the parade of sixty thousand opening the fourth Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg—but for an image, more precisely the cover of issue 74 of the French pictorial weekly Vu. The photograph, by André Kertész, showed two male hands handcuffed around the neck of a woman gazing into the camera. The spellbound poet was Mário Peixoto, and the encounter produced what screenwriting manuals would come to call the “generative image,” a kernel for an entire movie script—though Saulo Pereira de Mello, head of the Mário Peixoto Archives and the individual most decisive to the survival, study, and recognition of Peixoto’s work, prefers the term “protean image,” alluding to the Greek god Proteus’s ability to morph into different forms and remain omnipresent.

Then came the title: Limite—literally “limit,” following no article, a word as polysemic in Portuguese as in English. The remaining “scenario”—more a collection of visual reminders to the director than an actual script—was finished in no time. Peixoto wanted to play the lead and pitched the project to two of Brazil’s best filmmakers, Humberto Mauro and Adhemar Gonzaga, but both thought it was too personal to be directed by anyone other than him. He reluctantly decided to direct the film and paid for the production with family funds, hosting a small crew throughout the following year on the coast of Mangaratiba, a village about fifty miles away from Rio de Janeiro where his cousin owned a farm.

The film had three public screenings in Rio between May 1931 and January 1932, and was met with cold indifference by the general public and distributors alike. Yet it made some important fans, who would host occasional private screenings over the coming years. Vinicius de Moraes—then a film critic, who would later cowrite “The Girl from Ipanema” with Antônio Carlos Jobim and become one of the most prominent poets and lyricists in Brazil—put together a special presentation for Orson Welles, when the director was in the country in 1942 to shoot one of the segments of It’s All True. Film critic Pedro Lima and intellectuals Otávio de Faria and Plínio Sussekind Rocha—founders of the early film society Chaplin Club and friends of Peixoto’s—promoted yearly screenings of the film at the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia (National School of Philosophy), where Rocha taught physics. Pereira de Mello, one of his students, saw the film for the first time there, where it played alongside Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother (1926) as an exemplary masterpiece of silent cinema. By 1959, the single nitrate print was severely deteriorated due to poor storage conditions—especially deadly when combined with the high salinity of Rio’s air—and Limite could no longer be screened. The print was stored at the school until 1966, when it, along with the two Soviet cinema classics, was confiscated by the police during the military dictatorship. Once Mello managed to retrieve the print, later that same year, a long process of restoration began—starting with photographic reproductions of every single frame of the film, which at that point was already missing the section it still misses now—making the movie wholly inaccessible until the process was finished, in 1978. Limite the commercial flop turned into a forbidden object of desire for the next few generations of cinephiles.

A number of factors contributed to making the film a sort of movie lover’s dream, besides its evident singularity. Peixoto wouldn’t finish another film for the rest of his life. He died in 1992, at the age of eighty-three, leaving a substantial body of literary work, unproduced screenplays and plays, and a stunning fragment of his second feature, Onde a terra acaba, never finished and mostly lost in a fire. Despite this discontinuity, the director actively contributed to Limite’s mythology in ways that often challenged historical reality. Even before the film premiered, Peixoto sent production stills to the press, identifying them as promotional material for a new Pudovkin film, in a strategy to generate buzz. He would later go out of his way to make his already precocious feature seem even more exceptional, saying he was as young as fifteen when he wrote the script (most researchers agree that he was actually twenty-one), and purposefully concealing such basic biographical information as his place of birth (it was likely Brussels). During the years the movie was inaccessible, his accounts of it would mention shots that were not featured in the original scenario and were likely never filmed; when the first restoration was finally released on VHS in the late eighties—with scarce distribution—he claimed that the transfer looked nothing like the original film, as can be seen in Reginaldo Gontijo’s great documentary O mar de Mário (2010).

In many ways, Limite benefited from its invisibility, as the myth was thickened by hearsay. In 1963, in his book Revisão crítica do cinema brasileiro, Brazilian Cinema Novo mastermind Glauber Rocha accused Peixoto of having made a movie that was “unable to comprehend the contradictions of bourgeois society”—even though, as he freely admitted, he hadn’t seen it by then. That same year, French film historian Georges Sadoul claimed, in the expanded edition of his Histoire du cinéma mondial, to have flown to Rio de Janeiro exclusively to watch Peixoto’s “unknown masterpiece,” only to find that the surviving print was in no condition to be screened. Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, Brazil’s most important film critic, wondered whether Limite existed at all or was only a collective dream. Both Gomes and Sadoul died before the first restoration was complete, yet the myth lived on.

In 1965, Peixoto publicized an article, allegedly written by Eisenstein, praising the film’s “luminous pain, which unfolds as rhythm, coordinated to images of rare precision and ingenuity.” When Mello asked him for the original article, Peixoto handed him a translation in his own handwriting, hiding the original source behind a cloud of contradictory information—at first, he said it had been published in Tatler, a British fashion magazine not known for articles on cinema; later, he said it was from an unidentified German magazine. Mello would later state that, due to the lack of primary sources and of historical evidence that Eisenstein could have attended a screening of the film, as well as stylistic particularities of the text, the article could’ve been written only by Peixoto himself—probably as much an attempt to keep the mythology of the film alive as a gesture of poetic justice on the part of an artist who knew that reality had failed to welcome the grandeur of his own work. When the magazine Filme cultura conducted a poll in 1968 on the best Brazilian films of all time, Limite ranked tenth, even though the film had been out of circulation for over thirty-five years and completely inaccessible for almost a decade. Limite was long consigned to a game of telephone, yet it was precisely that trajectory that granted it a fate most Brazilian silent films never had. Like Greed (1924), Citizen Kane (1941), A Brighter Summer Day (1991), or Hard to Be a God (2013), it is a rare cult film that lives up to its mythology, a singular work born out of peculiar insularity. When seen today, the film still seems to open doors to cinematic territories that remain vastly unexplored. This historical missing link can really be understood only through this prism, a legacy of decay, missed connections, and passionate reinvention.

Such peculiarity poses a methodological problem: where does the film end and its mythology begin? At the same time, how can one remain immune to the unique artistry displayed in this new restoration—completed with the support of the World Cinema Project in 2010, using materials preserved by Cinemateca Brasileira, VideoFilmes, and the Mário Peixoto Archives, and which Mello has diligently made sure is as close as can be to the film he has devoted his life to? The answer—or at least an attempt at one—is offered by the film itself, starting with its very first image. The title appears in big, bold letters that tremble and melt under the forthcoming sun, hinting at a feeling that is present in every aspect of the film: limits are both a hindrance and an invitation to transgression, a chance for expression.

The narrative is sparse: a man and two women are in a rowboat adrift in the Atlantic. The vessel is not wrecked, but none of the characters row, as if paralyzed by an invisible circumstance. The film then branches out into individual flashback narratives, clearly demarcated by music, that show us where each of them came from before they ended up here: one woman has escaped from prison; the other feels imprisoned by her failed marriage; and the man is in love with someone else’s wife. Yet the eyes in extreme close-up, facing the shimmering sea, tucked between dissolves after the protean shot of the handcuffs, open the possibility that the journey here is as internal as it is external. The film is neither here nor there but precisely in between, inhabiting the very limit, embracing the porosity of its position. From that vantage point, Limite incorporates its surroundings. And while this may seem like language one would use to discuss contemporary experimental cinema, this 1931 film embodies it with remarkable purpose.

Peixoto’s synthesis of the many different schools of silent cinema has been rightfully emphasized throughout the years. His unique style collides a sophisticated understanding of Griffith’s decoupage with Soviet montage, existential motifs sipped from the waters of French impressionism, and expressive camera work inspired by German cinema. The cinematography is taken to unforeseen extremes by the extraordinarily inventive work of director of photography Edgar Brasil—himself German-born—who built camera cranes and dollies to fulfill and expand the director’s vision, and stretched the film’s latitude to capture the tropical sun in its ravishing fury. Yet what could seem like a superficial stylistic collage is only the loose thread leading to the deep pattern of contrasts and heterogeneity that makes this such a singular film.

Limite is both poetry and prose; a metaphor about the inexorability of the human condition as much as it is an experience of tactile memories, salty wind and sunburnt skin. The film reveals depth by adhering to the surface, finding common ground for Robert Flaherty’s direct approach (the near absence of makeup, the fraying costumes, the merciless glow of the sun) and Man Ray’s exploration of film as a flat canvas (of fabric, of sand, of newspaper headlines). The shots alternate between perspectives, using the camera as a polyphonic narrator: it can “see” as a character, as the wind, as the wheel of a train, creating a rhythmic experience that aspires to transcend physicality yet is always pulled back to the physical world, much like the stranded boat.

This contradiction is expressed through an orchestration of long durations and staccato cuts that strobe in carefully placed interferences. In the stillness of a lifeboat adrift, the arrows of time are shot in different directions, reverberating the past as memory in the present tense, spread out in multiple locations and personal stories that refuse conclusion but capture an emotional state in their open-endedness. The film’s structure is both narrative and digressive, linear and circular.

At the end of the first act, after the flashback narrative returns us to the boat from the opening, a close-up of a fish out of water, struggling to breathe, feels like a metaphorical coda before the inevitable fade-out. Yet the second act begins and that figurative boat gives way to a real fishing boat, and the dying fish reacquires its literal meaning and is folded back into the narrative, as the unhappy wife takes a fish home in her grocery basket . . . until she sees her drunken husband on the stairs of her house, and the suffocating fish regains symbolic weight. In Limite, no shot seems to mean only one thing, and no event is completely detached from the others.

That multiple nature is emphasized in the visual construction of the film, out of clashing straight lines and circular shapes that allude to the curious form of the narrative itself: a journey toward its place of departure, given the vultures that bookend the film. The same contrast of shapes builds up the tension between masculine and feminine, as Limite is rich in both phallic imagery (the scissors, the crosses, the cigarettes, the branches and logs) and allusive intervals (the windows, the doors, the ocean, as well as the ellipses in the narrative structure itself). This fundamental tension that drives the film is literalized in its archetypal approach to the characters, identified in the credits exclusively by gender and number. Edgar Brasil’s impossible camera explores the expansive landscape to describe the interior complexity of unnamed characters and the objects that surround them, breaking the limits between inside and outside to sustain a drama that is both personal and universal: the tension between the impermanence of faces and the resistant Brazilian colonial architecture, the fluidity of the ocean and the splinters of the damned boat.

At a time when filmmakers like Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Jean Epstein attempted to distill cinema to its own specificity, affirming its independence from other art forms, Mário Peixoto embraced a surprising level of impurity and a liberating disregard for cinema’s apparent limits. No wonder the only moment of relief takes place in a movie theater, expressively with an escape scene from a Chaplin film. The fundamental questions resound: Is cinema’s vocation poetry or prose? Character pieces or existential allegories? Narrative or visual abstraction? Limite makes every “or” an anachronistic conjunction. The combination of the rigorous sensibility of the artist with an unrestricted and eclectic creativity is what makes the film such a precious object for today, revealing a cinema that could have been and that still is yet to come.

Fábio Andrade is a film critic, filmmaker, and musician. He is editor in chief of the bilingual Brazilian online film magazine Cinética and holds an MFA in filmmaking from Columbia University.



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On the Music of Ghost World

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My own likes and dislikes, musically speaking, are so out of touch with the rest of the world’s that it was problematic choosing tunes to use in Ghost World that would connote the same message to the audience as to myself. I suppose that to have done it in a very broad way wouldn’t have been too terribly difficult, but I wanted to sustain a more nuanced and subtle deadpan tone throughout the film.

For the world at large in the film, I wanted horribly contrived commercial slop—which usually translates, in my opinion, to the most popular music of the day. I wanted this music to heighten the alienation and the general feeling of paranoia and cynicism I was attempting to create. I temped in “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” during the fifties diner scene (“Who can forget this great hit from the fifties?”), and it was very funny (and passé enough for even the most mainstream audience member to get the joke), but way out of our price range. Ditto with some Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. (I still cannot tell them apart for the life of me—call me retarded if you must.) This modern pop music is almost impossible to parody—it’s a parody of itself. (C’mon, how’re you gonna parody Björk?) You want the audience to get the fact that the music is supposed to be bad, but that can just make it hard to sit through the scene. It also fights how the audience has been conditioned to react by most other film music. They’re used to films where the director clearly endorses the source music chosen for a scene—and the viewer is also supposed to love it. (In many films, the lyrics often comment on the scene as well.) I first became aware of this while watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969 and enduring “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” during that insipid bicycle-riding interlude.

Seymour’s music was somewhat easier for me because his musical taste was based on my own, and I had my vast collection of 78s to draw upon. (I have about 1,500 78s—I try to keep my collection down to the essentials.) However, I was stymied sometimes by records I wanted to use being construed as “Woody Allen music,” as Mr. Allen has virtually cornered the market on using old jazz in modern films. (From now on, any director using a Django Reinhardt or Louis Armstrong 78 in a film will seem derivative of Woody Allen.) I tried a lot of my favorite 78s with different scenes, and it was very satisfying when they worked. There’s something very mysterious at times about what works and what doesn’t. It’s not always what you expect will work. Skip James I knew would work, and it was a great privilege to be able to use his music as part of this film. “Devil Got My Woman” was the first old 78 I ever heard that stopped me dead in my tracks. I have been in awe of James’s music ever since and believe him to be the greatest blues musician ever to record. Later, I learned more about him from the excellent liner notes of a Yazoo LP reissue of his complete 1931 recordings. Stephen Calt, who befriended James in the sixties, wrote: “He was a solitary, secretive person who never had his own family, regarded women with contempt, and was seemingly wary of the entire human race, several members of which he had coolly eliminated in shoot-outs. He was mistrustful of merriment: Once he passed a caravan of cars departing from a wedding. When he heard the honking, he said, with no attempt at humor: ‘Bet you won’t hear that when they get divorced.’ His bleak outlook made blues songs a natural outlet for him. He had no concept of blues as entertainment, or crowd-pleasing music. It was his goal to startle with his musicianship.” In many ways, his music seemed perfect for the Seymour character and the film.

One further note about Skip James: His “I’m So Glad” was part of a huge hit rock LP by Cream during the sixties. When I was in college, it was impossible to escape that damn LP—it was playing in every house, apartment, and coffeehouse, or so it seemed. Although aided by the blasting volume of electric guitar, bass, and drums, Cream’s version was vastly inferior in every way to James’s intense, frenzied masterpiece, which was fueled, no doubt, by the immense inner anger he clearly possessed. Although Cream’s version sold over a million copies and James’s probably sold less than one hundred, it is James’s version that will be remembered (while Björk and Cream records are rotting in some New Jersey landfill). If you’re interested in hearing more of him, buy the CD (Yazoo 2009) that reissues his entire 1931 recordings. Avoid the inferior recordings he made after being rediscovered by blues enthusiasts in the sixties.

I’ve been wanting to use the King Oliver and Tiny Parham records in a film for years now. I used one for the original opening title sequence to Crumb but had to replace it when it proved too expensive to license. Our music budget was so small on Ghost World that, again, I couldn’t afford it. I turned to Vince Giordano, who leads a New York band that plays old jazz better than anyone else still living, and had him recreate some of the jazz tunes we couldn’t afford. He did a remarkable job duplicating not only the notes but the bittersweet emotion of this music.

Mostly what worked in Seymour’s room was something quite unexpected—the 1920s recordings of Lionel Belasco, a West Indian bandleader-pianist. Belasco’s mother was a Trinidadian Creole who taught classical music on the piano; his father was a Sephardic Jew who played the violin and sang baritone. Although classically trained at home, Lionel would sneak off into the countryside to hear the “jungle music” (calypso) that he loved. His own music reflects all these influences and somehow also works for Seymour, with its charming yet poignant quality. The Belasco tunes chosen for the film, “Miranda” (1933), “Venezuela” (1929), and “The Palms of Maracaibo” (1930), were taken from extremely rare original 78 rpm recordings that are among the few copies known to exist.

The last big hurdle musically was finding a composer who could write a score that would lend a thread of cohesiveness to the film. When I started meeting with prospective composers, I kept telling them I wanted something classical (to stand apart and ground the film), something haunting, something distant yet moving. A tall order. All I could offer in the way of guidance was to watch and listen to Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut, as those films came the closest emotionally in my memory. Of course, it couldn’t sound too dated—something more timeless was needed.

Most of the composers wanted to try something hipper and trendier, with zany, oddball instruments, but I steered clear of them. I wanted violins, cellos, violas, and basses. I met with David Kitay, whose résumé, though quite accomplished, led me to fear he’d be incapable of anything like what I was requesting. Even he, at the end of our initial discussion, admitted he thought I was crazy and what I was asking for would probably never work. Two days later, he called me and said he’d had an inspiration while driving his car. He came over and played me a bit of it, and he was hired.

This 2001 piece appeared as liner notes for the Ghost World soundtrack. The author updated it slightly for our release of the film. And we put together this playlist, which gathers all the songs on the soundtrack currently available on Spotify.



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Il domani tra di noi: primo trailer italiano del film Kate Winslet e Idris Elba

Diretto dal regista nominato agli Oscar Hany Abu-Asad, in uscita il 19 ottobre 2017.

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Sette minuti dopo la mezzanotte

Di indubbio impatto visivo ed emotivo, Sette minuti dopo la mezzanotte (titolo italiano un po' fuorviante rispetto all'internazionale A monster call), l'ultimo film di Juan Antonio Bayona (regista di The orphanage e The impossibile) esce anche in Italia dopo aver conquistato ben 9 premi Goya in Spagna.
Conor O'Malley è un ragazzino pieno di inventiva e creatività. Ama disegnare e immaginare storie, nelle quali trova rifugio dinnanzi alle difficoltà: prima tra tutte la malattia della madre, che si aggrava ogni giorno di più. Una notte, un mostro-albero invade la sua stanza. Malgrado l'aspetto pauroso e imponente , non è malvagio, anzi è un racconta-storie. Vuole narrarne tre a Conor, dopo le quali il ragazzo sarà obbligato a sua volta a raccontare la propria, confessando le verità che si celano dietro i suoi incubi…
Fantasia e disagio; immaginazione e sofferenza, sono due binomi quasi onnipresenti nel cinema fantastico, proprio per la valenza catartica, insita nell'immaginare altri mondi, realtà nuove e sconosciute in cui trovare riparo dalle difficoltà, metafore spesso necessarie per elaborare ed esprimere le complesse emozioni che scavano all'interno del proprio animo.
Il film di Bayona (tratto dall'omonimo romanzo di Patrick Ness), al contrario di altri, non si nasconde dietro l'ambiguità tra verità e finzione. Non gioca con lo spettatore mischiando e confondendo i due piani (come ad esempio nel Labirinto del Fauno di Del Toro). Fin da subito li tiene distinti. Il mostro è chiaramente una creatura fantastica, partorita dalla mente di Conor, che lo evoca per far fronte alle avversità. È un padre-albero che gli fornisce forza e conforto; dà espressione alla sua rabbia e al suo desiderio distruttivo, ma al contempo tempera le sue reazioni più istintive. Lo rassicura, ma è anche fonte di profondo turbamento, perché lo provoca con le sue strane storie, che in verità appaiono subito atipiche e contraddittorie. Ogni fiaba è destabilizzante e reca in se un suo insegnamento, primo tra tutti la duplicità insita nella vita reale, che è sempre complessa, multi sfaccettata, spesso difficile da definire univocamente come bene o male. Con i suoi racconti l'albero fa “scontrare” il ragazzo con la dura realtà, “scoperchia” le sue paure più recondite, come fa con le case e gli edifici. Nessuno spazio, che sia esteriore o interiore, gli è precluso, così come nessuna emozione, rabbia, dolore o senso di colpa. E' nell'immaginazione veicolata dal mostro che paradossalmente Conor “forgia” se stesso per affrontare e accettare il doloroso futuro che lo attende.
Forte, commuovente (a tratti struggente), ma per nulla banale, la parte finale del film, in cui il protagonista, incalzato dal “demone” albero, confessa e ammette la sua paura più grande, quella vissuta nei suoi peggiori incubi, che provoca in lui un distruttivo e annichilente senso di colpa: il desiderio che tutto finisca il prima possibile, nonostante le inaccettabili conseguenze che ciò inevitabilmente comporta.
Bayona scommette sulle emozioni, ma lo fa senza mai deviare dalla strada intrapresa fin dall'inizio del film. L'emozione è autentica, verosimile e sentita. Non come in The Orphanage, dello stesso regista, in cui sul finire assumeva toni forzati e melensi, superflui nell'ottica della pellicola.
Sette minuti dopo la mezzanotte non è un banale cancer movie. Il dolore e le problematiche legate alla malattia sono analizzate con cognizione di causa, forti probabilmente del romanzo bestseller da cui è tratta l'opera, al livello di sceneggiatura. La metafora non è mistificata, ma chiara e questo non è un limite, ma un vantaggio, perché permette al regista di concentrarsi sull'interiorità di Conor, piuttosto che sulle suggestioni del suo mondo fantastico.
Convincenti anche gli interpreti a partire dal ragazzo, Lewis Mcdougall, la madre (una “scavata” Felicity Jones) e la nonna (la sempre intensa Sigourney Weaver).
Le stupende animazioni in acquerello, integrate con la computer grafica, che immortalano i personaggi misteriosi e senza volto dei racconti onirici narrati dall'albero, su sfondi incantati a tinte rosse e dorate, sono senz'altro originali e rappresentano un altro punto forte del film: gli conferiscono un' identità visiva propria, cosa difficile visti i precedenti, tra cui Il Labirinto del Fauno.
Convincenti anche le animazioni dell'albero che entra con vigore e forza negli spazi, li distrugge, li avvolge con i suoi rami. Al livello scenico molto bella la scena dell'incubo, in cui la “catastrofe” interiore che avviene dentro Conor, viene rappresentata sottoforma di un terremoto che priva gli oggetti, anche le costruzioni più stabili, di sostegno e radici, risucchiando tutto verso un baratro oscuro e profondo.
Altro tema fondamentale della pellicola è l'arte. I racconti, i disegni, lo stesso uomo albero rappresentano, infatti, il legame inscindibile che unisce il protagonista alla madre. In tal senso viene in mente il confronto con Neverland di Marc Forster, che racconta la genesi della piece teatrale “Peter Pan” ad opera dello scrittore James Barrie. Anche lì vi è un bambino creativo e arrabbiato per la malattia della madre. Lo scrittore (Johnny Depp) funge un po' da albero cantastorie. Con i suoi giochi e le sue favole fa evadere i ragazzi dalla realtà, ma infine li aiuta anche ad affrontarla. Idealizzato da Peter, si scoprirà essere pieno di contraddizioni, infantile, fallibile, in quanto uomo e non un personaggio fantastico come quelli da lui stesso creati. Come in “Sette minuti dopo mezzanotte” l'arte diventa il non-luogo (l'isola che non c'è), in cui esorcizzare il dolore, la paura, la rabbia, la morte. Uno scudo per difendersi, un'armatura per essere più forti, per entrare in contatto con la verità delle proprie emozioni e accettarle nel loro essere inevitabilmente contraddittorie e, a volte, distruttive.

(Un monstruo viene a verme); Regia: Juan Antonio Bayona; sceneggiatura: Patrick Ness; fotografia: Óscar Faura; musica: Fernando Velázquez; interpreti: Sigourney Weaver, Liam Neeson, Felicity Jones, Toby Kebbell, Geraldine Chaplin, Lewis MacDougall, James Melville; produzione: Apaches Entertainment, Participant Media [US], River Road Entertainment [US]; origine: Spagna, Stati Uniti, 2017; durata: 108'



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Baywatch, Pirati dei Caraibi, Rotten Tomatoes, gli incassi e la critica che è cattiva

Negli Stati Uniti è scoppiata una polemica interessante, e abbiamo buttato giù qualche riflessione al riguardo.

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[The Daily] Goings On: Varda, Kiarostami, and More

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New York. The BAMcinématek series Varda in California opens today and runs through June 13. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody recommends Lions Love (...and Lies) (1969): “Filming this docu-fiction in Los Angeles in June, 1968, the week of California’s Democratic primary, the French director Agnès Varda catches the era’s epochal violence and cultural exuberance, high hopes and bitter outcomes. . . . Her film is more than a time capsule of events and moods—it’s a living aesthetic model for revolutionary times.”

At Screen Slate, Caroline Golum writes that, with Model Shop (1969), screening as part of the series from Friday through June 11, Jacques Demy’s “elevates what could have been a lesser New Hollywood sad-dude drama into a plaintive and intimate film about the ennui of merely existing in L.A.”

Back to Richard Brody: “The director Frank Perry, working with his first wife, Eleanor Perry, and other screenwriters, is distinguished mainly by his skill at eliciting enticingly florid yet intimately vulnerable performances from actors. It’s no surprise that he made one of the best films about a Hollywood star that the industry has yet produced: Mommie Dearest, from 1981.” And it screens Sunday and Monday as part of Desperate Characters: The Cinema of Frank & Eleanor Perry at the Quad.

Tonight at the Quad, though, Tavi Gevinson will be seen Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) for the first time. The screening is part of the First Encounters series that Andrew Chan writes about here in the Current.

Maximilian Schell’s Marlene (1984) “is a shrewd summa of stardom and late-life legend-burnishing, wearily but no less admiringly acknowledging its irascible subject’s perverse genius,” writes Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice. “By sticking to the shadows in Schell’s documentary, the senescent Dietrich ensures that viewers will crave images of her from the past that much more. It’s a diva move, one that, like most displays of hauteur, cannot completely mask its author’s vulnerabilities.” Screens Friday as part of the Metrograph’s series, Marlene, on through July 8.

Back to Screen Slate:

A New Golden Age: Contemporary Philippine Cinema opens tomorrow and runs through June 25. “The 18 movies screening at MoMA show renewed commitment to a range of genres, from documentary to thrillers to historical fiction,” writes Elisa Wouk Almino at Hyperallergic.

Indelible Portraits: Polish Hybrid Nonfiction, a series curated by Ela Bittencourt, runs at the Museum of the Moving Image from Friday through Sunday.

For Tony Pipolo, writing for Artforum, “at least half of this year’s selections in the Open Roads series of New Italian cinema would make any film festival worth attending.” Edoardo De Angelis’s Indivisible “is a flashy opening feature,” and he also writes about Federica Di Giacomo’s “mesmerizing documentary” Deliver Us, Roberto Ando’s The Confessions, “a moral allegory about global capitalism and corporate greed,” Claudio Giovannesi’s Fiore, Gianni Amelio’s Tenderness, Marco Bellocchio’s Sweet Dreams, and Daniele Vicari’s Sun, Heart, Love, “a sober, touching, ultimately tragic tale.”

Los Angeles. Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow (1973) screens at the New Beverly on Sunday and Monday. “I’ve never seen Al Pacino so endearing and young as he is here,” writes Kim Morgan. As for Gene Hackman, “he moves from brash to outbursts of laughter to rage to tremulous caring exquisitely.”

And Marc Edward Heuck sets up a triple feature happening at the New Beverly on Tuesday: Michael Winner’s Scream for Help (1984), Joseph Ruben’s The Stepfather (1987), and Gary Sherman’s Lisa (1989).

The Cinefamily series Fairy Tales for Adults runs from Saturday through June 25.

San Francisco. From tomorrow through Sunday, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents Harold Lloyd in The Freshman (1925), Douglas Fairbanks in The Three Musketeers (1921), and more “cinematic treasures brought to life by some of the world’s foremost practitioners of live silent film musical accompaniment,” as Justin DeFreitas puts it in his overview of the highlights in the SF Weekly.

Chicago. The 24th edition of the Chicago Underground Film Festival opens today and runs through Sunday. “We don’t have any quota, but we’re in a really good period for Chicago filmmaking,” co-founder, artistic director and programmer Bryan Wendorf tells Ray Pride in Newcity Film. About a quarter of this year’s lineup comes from local filmmakers. The Reader has capsule previews of several shorts and features, including:

  • J. R. Jones on Deborah Stratman's “head-spinning” Xenoi.
  • Andrea Gronvall on Michael Galinsky’s All the Rage, a documentary about “the acclaimed but controversial physician” Dr. John Sarno.
  • Ben Sachs on Laura Stewart’s “pleasant, occasionally lyrical travelogue,” Drifting Towards the Crescent.
  • Leah Pickett on Tujiko Noriko and Joji Koyama’s “creepy experiment in nonlinear storytelling,” Kuro.

Back in Newcity Film, Ray Pride previews Jean-Pierre Melville: Criminal Codes, a series running at the Gene Siskel Film Center from Saturday through July 6, noting that “the exquisitely measured, distillate beauty of movies like Le Cercle Rouge, Army of Shadows, Le Silence de la Mer, and Le Doulos are must-sees on a larger screen.”

Washington, DC. A Pictorial Dream — Directed by Straub and Huillet, a series at the National Gallery of Art, opens Saturday and runs through June 25.

Austin. "When the Earth quakes," writes Richard Whittaker in the Chronicle, “and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake, Kurt Russell just looks that big ole storm right square in the eye and he says, ‘Give me your best shot, pal. I can take it.’ That's why the king of the Western and killer of shapeshifters gets his second Tough Guy Cinema marathon with Russellmania II.

London. From Monday through June 19, the Close-Up Film Centre presents Abbas Kiarostami: Early Works, a program that “shows the filmmaker reframing the world and the relationships between individuals through his creative involvement with actors—often amateurs and children—producing philosophical works that reinvigorated the genres of documentary and narrative fiction, frequently blurring the lines between the two.”

Berlin. Porous Boundaries: New Paths Through Mexican Film, a series curated by James Lattimer opening Friday at the Arsenal and running through June 30, features “15 feature-length, medium-length, and short films across 12 programs that have received considerable acclaim and attention on the international festival circuit. The series is screening many of these works in Germany for the very first time and includes established names such as Nicolás Pereda, Natalia Almada, Tatiana Huezo and Pedro González Rubio together with prize-winning emerging talents such as Ricardo Silva, Pablo Chavarría Gutiérrez, and Pablo Escoto.”

Paris. 7 jours avec Vincent Lindon is on at the Cinémathèque française from today through June 7.

Brussels. From Monday through July 2, the Goethe Institute and Cinematek present a series of films by Iranian filmmaker Sohrab Shahid Saless (1944–1998) who, from 1974 through 1991, worked in Germany.

Vienna. “Class of 1978: With Canadian Alexandre Larose and Japanese Makino Takashi, the Film Museum presents two young greats of international avant-garde cinema for the first time in Austria, with a program devoted to each in the framework of VIS Vienna Shorts.” Friday and Sunday.

And on Saturday: “At the invitation of Michael Haneke and the Film Academy Vienna on the occasion of its 65th anniversary, great European actor Jean-Louis Trintignant will also honor the Austrian Film Museum with a visit.”

For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.



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Nasce a Roma il Laboratorio di Arti Sceniche di Massimiliano Bruno

La prima tappa dei casting della scuola di recitazione e regia è prevista per il 10 e l'11 giugno.

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Quello che so di lei: arriva al cinema il film con Catherine Deneuve e Catherine Frot

La trama, il trailer e la recensione del film scritto e diretto da Martin Provost.

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Per Wonder Woman, un bel DC Comics quiz sui supereroi al cinema!

Tra Superman, Batman ed eventuali nemici, vi mettiamo alla prova con dieci domande non troppo difficili.

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Il trailer de La traviata con la regia di Sofia Coppola


Concerti 2017 in Italia da non perdere

Tutte le informazioni sui concerti dei Rolling Stones, Guns N Roses, Eddie Vedder, U2, Aerosmith, Radiohead, Ennio Morricone, Coldplay, Depeche Mode, Lady Gaga e tanti altri.



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Milla Jovovich perplessa per il reboot di Resident Evil

Produce James Wan, ma l'ex-eroina della saga avvisa: "Occhio, i fan non sono stupidi."

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Crazy Night - Festa col morto: il nuovo trailer della commedia con Scarlett Johnasson

Metti un sera a Miami cinque amiche che festeggiano un addio al nubilato.

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Quello che so di lei

Rivelare antichi segreti
* * * - - (mymonetro: 3,00)

Regia di Martin Provost. Con Catherine Frot, Catherine Deneuve, Olivier Gourmet, Quentin Dolmaire, Mylène Demongeot, Pauline Etienne, Audrey Dana, Marie Paquim, Pauline Parigot, Marie Gili-Pierre, Jeanne Rosa, Élise Oppong.
Genere Drammatico - Francia, 2017. Durata 117 minuti circa.

Claire è un'ostetrica che nel corso della sua vita professionale ha fatto nascere innumerevoli bambini amando la propria professione. Proprio in un momento difficile per il suo lavoro (si sta per chiudere il reparto maternità) ricompare dal passato una donna che l'aveva fatta soffrire quando era giovane. Si tratta di Béatrice, colei per cui suo padre aveva lasciato la famiglia. Béatrice è malata e ha bisogno di aiuto anche se non ha perso del tutto la vitalità di un tempo. Claire, che ha anche un figlio ormai grande e anche lui in una fase di svolta della propria vita, deve decidere cosa fare.





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LA CLASSE: Come trasformare il testo narrativo in una drammaturgia e in uno spettacolo sorprendenti.

Uno degli spettacoli che più ha parlato di attualità e giovani, tematiche molto delicate nel panorama europeo, è La classe andato in scena al Teatro Marconi di Roma e in altre tappe della tournée.
La storia era già stata portato al grande pubblico attraverso il film omonimo, diretto da Laurent Cantet, che vedeva protagonista un intenso François Bégadeau; lo stesso ruolo, del professore alle prese con una classe di periferia piuttosto difficile, è stato qui affidato ad Andrea Paolotti, attore trentaseinne, già impegnato in importanti ruoli nella Compagnia del teatro stabile del Friuli-Venezia Giulia, diretta da Alessandro Gassman.
È una sfida non indifferente interpretare con coerenza scenica un personaggio come quello del professore/Albert, che deve mantenere una tensione piuttosto elevata per tutta la durata dello spettacolo. Alberto si ritrova così ad insegnare in una scuola superiore piuttosto disagiata, in cui gli studenti presentano tutti delle problematiche personali di natura psicologica, dovute a delle vite difficili e a delle famiglie disfunzionali.
La bellezza del testo è coinvolgente e trascina lo spettatore in una cittadina europea in forte crisi economica, trenta chilometri dal centro il mare - ci viene subito in mente Marsiglia, o una delle città francesi più multiculturali e post industriali - cresciuta a dismisura e poi al collasso.
Disagio sociale, crimini e conflitti di classe emergono in tutti i racconti dei protagonisti che vivono un decadimento generalizzato che sembra coinvolgerli involontariamente
La presenza dello Zoo, un centro di raccolta degli stranieri ha estremizzato le criticità di un tessuto sociale già sull'orlo del collasso, e al contempo ha portato anche occupazione, attraverso servizi, logistica e controlli.
Sembrerebbe la descrizione perfetta di molte situazioni speculari che interessano anche i nostri attuali centri di raccolta per clandestini e rifugiati.
Albert si ritrova dopo aver atteso una lunga graduatoria ad insegnare in un istituto, in cui non dovrà pianificare nulla di particolare come programma, ai fini della didattica, tranne far recuperare crediti agli studenti, che devono diplomarsi in fretta.
Il giovane professore riesce comunque a personalizzare l'insegnamento, anzi veicola la rabbia dei ragazzi in una maniera costruttiva e educativa, rispetto alla realtà sociale che li circonda. Propone infatti di partecipare ad un bando europeo, in cui si parla di giovani ed Oleocausto: i parallelismi con la loro società spietata e piena di sperequazioni sono perfetti per poter analizzare nel profondo ciò che hanno sempre visto con distacco e forse paura. Albert gli procura molto materiale, attraverso il contatto con un uomo che prima della guerra nel proprio paese si occupava di catalogare le vittime del regime.
I temi difficili e angosciosi affrontati, sono drammaturgicamente ben sviluppati, rendendo questo spettacolo godibile anche da parte delle fasce d'età più giovani, i quali sono evidentemente attratti da vicende in cui possano essere i protagonisti senza una rappresentazione di se stessi che sia troppo lirica rispetto alla realtà immanente. Giuseppe Marini riesce con maestra ad amalgamare violenza, amore, riscatto sociale, voglia di sopravvivere e volontà di distruzione, rendendoci un vero gioiello di teatro contemporaneo.
L'aspetto centrale del testo e del messaggio della Classe è il diritto dei giovani di poter sognare e dimostrare che insieme si può aspirare ad un vero cambiamento: non a caso si parla di una classe, un luogo dal quale, in una società evoluta tutti dovrebbero poter costruire il proprio futuro, interagendo con il mondo e l'altro da sé.

Titolo:La Classe
drammaturgia: Vincenzo Manna
Attori: (in ordine di apparizione) Andrea Paolotti, Cecilia D'Amico, Tito Vittori, Carmine Fabbricatore, Edoardo Frullini, Valentina Carli, Giulia Paoletti, Haroun Fall
e con la partecipazione straordinaria di Ludovica Modugno
regia: Giuseppe Marini
scene: Alessandro Chiti
costumi: Laura Fantuzzo
musiche: Paolo Coletta
light designer: Javier Delle Monache



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Aurora Deiana: intervista di una giovane attrice italiana a Cannes.

Come hai iniziato a fare questo lavoro?

Mi sono avvicinata alla recitazione grazie all'inserimento, da bambina, in un gruppo di tradizioni popolari calabresi. Ballavo, cantavo e recitavo. La primissima volta che son salita sul palco, da quel che ricordo, è stato all'età di 7 anni. Mi sentivo a mio agio e amavo il rapporto con il pubblico, ma di certo ancora non immaginavo che recitare sarebbe diventato il mio lavoro. La consapevolizzazione della mia passione e del volerla trasformare in professione è arrivata a 17 anni, vincendo un premio come miglior attrice protagonista in un Festival di Teatro per le scuole.

Quanti anni hai studiato?

Ho studiato per oltre dieci anni e continuo ancora oggi a formarmi, appena la disponibilità economica e il tempo me lo permettono. Direi che ho iniziato con il Teatro Scuola a 14 anni e poi mi son spostata a Roma dove mi sono diplomata all'Accademia Teatrale Sofia Amendolea con il massimo dei voti. Perdona la precisione ma ne vado fiera! Soprattutto dal momento che ho scoperto, da poco, di detenere ancora il primato, dopo ben 9 anni! Che fatica e che soddisfazione! Dopo il diploma naturalmente ho continuato a perfezionarmi frequentando diversi workshop e laboratori, più e meno lunghi, con professionisti quali Sorrentino, Lucchetti, Veronesi, Rossella Izzo, Fioretta Mari, il maestro Albertazzi, i cui insegnamenti porterò sempre nel cuore e tanti altri.

Anche all'estero?

Si! Gli studi mi hanno portato anche all'estero, in particolare a Londra dove ho studiato tecniche di musical e di uso della voce e a Los Angeles in cui ho affinato una recitazione di tipo più cinematografico con un acting coach americano, Bernard Hiller e con la casting director californiana April Webster.

Cosa ne pensi di questa tua avventura a Cannes?

Cannes è meravigliosa! I francesi molto ospitali. L'esperienza all'interno del Emerging Filmmaker Showcase nel Padiglione Americano diretto da Monika Skerbelis è stata indimenticabile. Tante occasioni di crescita e arricchimento culturale e umano, grazie al programma e a tutto lo Staff. Naturalmente ho passato molto tempo anche nel Padiglione Italiano, che a dirla tutta era meraviglioso con la suggestiva installazione del collettivo artistico NONE, attraverso cui potevi passare in mezzo e godere di proiezioni di grandi momenti del Cinema Italiano e all'opulenta atmosfera del Majestic Hotel. Peccato non aver avuto il tempo di organizzare una proiezione anche lì, che consideravo un po' casa mia, vista la mia nazionalità, ma sono sicura che ne avremo l'opportunità ben presto e con altri progetti.

Lo trovi un posto profondamente artistico o di tendenza?

Credo che il Cinema sia anche Glamour! Dove c'è il Glamour c'è la moda, l'arte, la musica, i giornalisti e il pubblico e il Festival di Cannes, metaforicamente è un po' come un grande Teatro, grazie cui l'arte può diventare tendenza e perché no?! Business! Del resto il sogno di ogni artista è arrivare al pubblico emozionalmente e lo può fare, a mio parere, solo se ci arriva anche fisicamente. Per me è il giusto equilibrio tra creatività e lavoro di produzione che ci regala i grandi momenti di Cinema e trovo che a Cannes si respirino entrambi gli elementi.

Parlaci del tuo ruolo e del corto che è stato selezionato a Cannes.

Spaghetti Romanze è un cortometraggio co-prodotto da CinemadaMare e dal Santa Monica College di Los Angeles, diretto dalla film-maker e produttrice californiana Carrie Finklea.
Una commedia romantica che tratta il tema dell'omosessualità e lo contestualizza nella Sicilia di oggi. Le riprese sono state fatte nel borgo medioevale di Erice (TP), grazie anche al supporto di Fondazione Erice Arte. Il mio personaggio, Margherita, porta per la prima volta a casa la sua fidanzata Abby, a far conoscere la madre conservatrice. Interpretare un personaggio siciliano è stato molto stimolante, specialmente cimentarsi nel recitare con la cadenza dialettale, anche se ci sono parti recitate in inglese in quanto Margherita, da copione, ha vissuto per molti anni in America. Mi è piaciuto lavorare a questo personaggio che rappresenta una ragazza dolce e forte, come molte ragazze italiane, e che non ha paura di rimanere se stessa e combattere per i propri diritti, contro i pregiudizi e le convezioni sociali e culturali. Inoltre raccontare la vittoria dell'Amore su tutto, per me, che sono un'inguaribile romantica, è sempre un piacere.

Con chi vorresti lavorare?

Il mio sogno è di lavorare con Quentin Tarantino e Wes Anderson, i cui stili cinematografici apprezzo particolarmente. Daniele Lucchetti, Sorrentino, Salvatores, Mainetti, Rovere, Almodòvar. Mi piace molto Massimiliano Bruno, Paolo Genovese, Alessandro Genovesi, Ferzen Opzetek, Francesca Archibugi, Sergio Rubini, Peter Greenaway, Tornatore, Polansky e veramente potrei andare avanti ancora per molto. In Teatro con Giampiero Rappa, Luca de Bei, Castellucci, Nekrosius, Binasco, Sepe e tanti altri.

Cosa ne pensi del teatro? Tu sei un attrice formatasi lì.

Il teatro è un po' come una mamma. Ti insegna a camminare, a gestire l'ansia, a comunicare con il pubblico, a sentire il pubblico, a sentire te stesso, a non perderti e/o meglio, a perderti in maniera cosciente e lucida. Il teatro ti insegna a conoscere il tuo strumento, te stesso e a farlo suonare in maniera giusta e con i buoni maestri anche interessante. Il teatro è il luogo da cui tutto nasce e in cui tutto può nascere ed essere vissuto, almeno per una volta.



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Wonder Woman

Un film-prologo che introduce Diana Prince e la sua mitologia, ma per vedere Wonder Woman occorrerà aspettare
* * 1/2 - - (mymonetro: 2,50)

Regia di Patty Jenkins. Con Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Robin Wright, David Thewlis, Elena Anaya, Danny Huston, Lucy Davis, Saïd Taghmaoui, Ewen Bremner, Dino Fazzani, Kaveh Khatiri, Connie Nielsen, Doutzen Kroes, Samantha Jo, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Florence Kasumba.
Genere Azione - USA, 2017. Durata 141 minuti circa.

Diana è l'unica figlia della regina delle Amazzoni, Ippolita. Cresciuta nell'isola paradisiaca offerta al suo popolo da Zeus, sogna di diventare una grande guerriera e si fa addestrare dalla più forte delle Amazzoni, la zia Antiope. Ma la forza di Diana, e il suo potere, superano di gran lunga quelli delle compagne. Il giorno in cui un aereo militare precipita nel loro mare e la giovane, ormai adulta, salva dall'annegamento il maggiore Steve Trevor, nulla e nessuno riuscirà ad impedirle di partire con lui per il fronte, dov'è determinata a sconfiggere Ares e a porre così fine per sempre alla guerra.





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martedì 30 maggio 2017

I figli della notte

Piccoli (e spietati) dirigenti crescono
* * * - - (mymonetro: 3,00)

Regia di Andrea De Sica. Con Vincenzo Crea, Ludovico Succio, Fabrizio Rongione, Yuliia Sobol, Luigi Bignone, Pietro Monfreda, Michael Bernhard Plattner, Dario Cantarelli.
Genere Drammatico - Italia, Belgio, 2016. Durata 85 minuti circa.

Con poca voglia ma parecchia obbedienza alla madre, Giulio entra in un collegio prestigioso per rampolli benestanti. Dalle sembianze asburgiche, la struttura è una nota palestra per la futura classe dirigente, rigida e spietata. Il ragazzo è immediatamente attratto da Edo, dalla personalità a lui opposta, anticonformista e incline alla ribellione. In complicità si oppongono al bullismo imperante e in totale segretezza, iniziano a trascorrere nottate in un locale di prostitute. Gli effetti attesi non tarderanno a presentarsi.





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Baywatch

L'adattamento cinematografico della famosa serie degli Anni Novanta

Regia di Seth Gordon. Con Dwayne Johnson, Zac Efron, Priyanka Chopra, Alexandra Daddario, Jon Bass, Kelly Rohrbach, Ilfenesh Hadera, David Hasselhoff, Hannibal Buress, Jack Kesy, Pamela Anderson.
Genere Commedia - USA, 2017. Durata 116 minuti circa.

L'adattamento cinematografico dell'omonima serie televisiva degli anni novanta interpretata da David Hasselhoff e Pamela Anderson.





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Zachary Quinto raggiunge Jodie Foster nel thriller Hotel Artemis

Il film segna l'esordio alla regia di Drew Pearce, sceneggiatore di Iron Man 3

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Mysterious Object at Noon: Stories That Haunt One Another

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Right off the bat, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon induces in the unsuspecting viewer a sensation that has become a hallmark of this singular artist’s work: the mild delirium of being agreeably lost and unmoored. Rarely has a first feature been more aptly titled; critics greeted its arrival on the festival circuit in 2000 as they might have a UFO sighting. Mysterious Object was disorienting equally for its out-of-nowhere inventiveness and for being rooted in a very specific—and for many, fairly alien—place and culture. Thailand had been largely off the radar of even the most seasoned festivalgoers. But coming from anywhere, this thoroughly unpredictable shape-shifter would have qualified as sui generis: part road movie, part folk storytelling exercise, part surrealist parlor game.

In the years since, Apichatpong—or Joe, to use a nickname that dates from his student days at the Art Institute of Chicago—has come to occupy a central place in cinephile culture, as influential as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami were for a previous generation. His subsequent features Blissfully Yours (2002), Tropical Malady (2004), and Syndromes and a Century (2006) featured prominently on best-of-decade lists; in 2010, he received world cinema’s highest honor, the Cannes Palme d’Or, for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Throughout, Apichatpong’s films have continued to confound even his longtime admirers, which attests to their open-endedness and to the multiple contexts in which they exist. While the Thai genre movies of his youth made a mark, so did the avant-garde virtuosos (Bruce Baillie, Andy Warhol) he discovered in Chicago. Apichatpong, who studied architecture before pursuing an MFA in filmmaking, is acutely aware of film as a spatial practice. (Of late, he has moved with increasing fluidity between the cinema and the gallery.) His movies are sensory immersions, primal plays of darkness and light. But they are also pointed and specific engagements with local beliefs, customs, and history, and his most recent feature, Cemetery of Splendor (2015), foregrounds the political instincts that have long simmered beneath the serene surfaces of his work.

Little seen at the time outside festivals, Mysterious Object is generally considered the most modest of Joe’s features, a beguiling oddity that grew out of the freewheeling experimentation of his short films, or even a prologue of sorts before the ground zero of Blissfully Yours, with its obvious compendium of Apichatpongian motifs (bifurcated structure, jungle reverie). While his other films, with their drifts into trance and daydream, have been reductively labeled “slow cinema,” there is nothing remotely leisurely about Mysterious Object, which springs narrative twists and discombobulations at practically breakneck speed. All that said, the movie is less an anomaly than a secret skeleton key. Revisiting this precocious debut with the benefit of hindsight, one is struck by its intricacy and purpose, and by the degree to which it anticipates many of the themes and methods that would define his body of work.

The film borrows its structure, and its principles of collaboration and chance, from the surrealist game of the exquisite corpse, in which each participant adds a word, or an image, to an ever-mutating whole. Apichatpong’s version draws as well on local oral tradition: he traveled the length of Thailand, inviting various people to contribute episodes to an evolving story. Shot with a small crew on black-and-white 16 mm film, Mysterious Object is both a chronicle of that process and a depiction of the collectively told tale, which grows more fanciful with each new participant, its plot bending to accommodate magical doublings and impossible reversals, and its cast swelling to include extraterrestrial star-boys and witch tigers.

Mysterious Object at Noon is an especially vivid example of the hybrid tendency that has galvanized so much of contemporary world cinema. As with the work of many of today’s most adventurous filmmakers—Pedro Costa, Carlos Reygadas, and Miguel Gomes, to name a few—Apichatpong’s films rewire the relationship between fiction and documentary. More precisely, they perform a kind of alchemy by which contact with reality turns their narratives that much richer and stranger. A documentary about the creation of a story, Mysterious Object celebrates equally the possibilities of fact and fiction.

After a fablelike opening intertitle—“Once upon a time . . .”—the film plunges into documentary mode, a windshield framing unknown terrain as we pass through it (such traveling shots are a recurring motif in Apichatpong’s later work). These first few minutes, moving along a Bangkok highway and down narrowing streets, foster considerable uncertainty about where we are headed and what we are hearing. On the soundtrack, a Thai ballad competes with a sales pitch for incense and fish and the melodramatic strains of what may be a radio soap opera. “The more he tried, the more complicated the story,” a male voice declares, foreshadowing the imminent convolutions. Eventually, we realize that we are in a fishmonger’s truck, and the focus shifts to a vendor in the back, who tells of being sold by her father to her uncle for bus fare. No sooner has her tearful confession ended than the director, offscreen, pipes up, seeming to cast doubt on its veracity. “Do you have any other stories to tell us?” he asks, helpfully adding that “it can be real or fiction.”

So prompted, the woman launches into the tale of a paraplegic boy and his teacher, Dogfahr, his primary caretaker and connection to the outside world. The narrator’s attention soon drifts away from the homebound setting—Dogfahr accompanies her irritable, hard-of-hearing father to a doctor, whom she also consults about her own skin problems, possibly caused by a protective necklace. Later, back at the house, the boy finds Dogfahr unconscious, an unidentified object rolling out of her skirt . . . The next person to take up the storytelling baton is an elderly woman who inquires about the rules of this game. “Can it turn into a kid?” she asks, referring to the object. The response—“Anything you want”—establishes the anarchic tone that will prevail for the rest of the film.

Mysterious Object at Noon revels in the myriad ways a story can be transmitted. A performance troupe acts out its segment in a traditional song-and-dance routine. A pair of deaf girls use sign language. Sometimes we watch and listen to the narrators as they concoct new installments; sometimes we see their fabulations dramatized, occasionally with voice-over or intertitles to move things along. The scenario grows at once darker and more absurd as it progresses, its lurid developments living up to the film’s pulpy Thai title, Dogfahr in the Devil’s Hand. The object from the teacher’s skirt turns out to be a star from the sky, which transforms into a mischief-making boy with apparent superpowers that allow him to appear as Dogfahr.

Far from smoothing out the crazy-quilt chaos of a story with multiple authors, Apichatpong adds subtle derangements of his own, sustaining a willful confusion in the telling. The film often declines to signal whether we are in the nested drama or the framing documentary; in fact, with sound and dialogue from one plane repeatedly bleeding into the other, the border between the two remains conspicuously porous. At one point, the actors in the story-within-the-story break character, and the director himself wanders into the frame. Narrative fragments unconnected to the Dogfahr story register as phantom limbs of other intersecting tales, perhaps the radio melodrama of the opening or a residual invention of one of the raconteurs. One narrator calls for a flashback, accounting for the boy’s injury with a wartime plane crash; the film cuts to a television news piece about the event and even inserts archival footage from the 1940s. This chronological tampering triggers a time warp of sorts: back in the ostensible present, we hear a radio broadcast announcing the end of the Pacific War.

The structural playfulness that would become one of Apichatpong’s signatures is evident in Mysterious Object—the daisy-chain narrative gives way to a surprise epilogue, titled “At noon”—as is the distinctive tone, a wryly amused deadpan in the face of both the wondrous and the ridiculous. The visit to a clinic—Apichatpong’s parents were doctors—portends the medical environments in Blissfully Yours and Syndromes and a Century. The various instances of transmogrification in the Dogfahr story foretell the creaturely metamorphoses in Tropical Malady and Uncle Boonmee. Apichatpong forgoes a directing credit in Mysterious Object, opting instead for “conceived and edited by.” More overtly than his other films, his debut embodies the spirit of openness that has always been central to his process. In ways big and small, his films are shaped by the input of others: they find source material not just in his own personal histories and memories but in those of his collaborators.

In Apichatpong’s endlessly regenerating corpus—which now encompasses an intertwined suite of shorts, installations, and performances in addition to feature films—stories are retold, characters reborn, and situations and locations transmigrated within and among movies. Everything seems to belong to a larger whole; each tale has a past and an afterlife. But the overall effect is less of a puzzle to be solved than of a space to be freely inhabited and explored—much like the overgrown park that the characters wander around in Cemetery of Splendor, discerning traces of the places and people that once were there. With its simultaneous impressions of abundance and incompletion—its profusion of abandoned and regenerated stories, stories that haunt one another, that have a life beyond the frame, that invite us to complete them—Mysterious Object at Noon is as close as Apichatpong has come to a statement of intent. His work is often described in terms of its mystifications, but as this humble yet capacious film reminds us, Apichatpong’s vision is a fundamentally generous one, and his magnanimity extends above all to the viewer.

Dennis Lim is director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the author of David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (New Harvest, 2015). He has written for various publications, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Artforum, and Cinema Scope.



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Il Cinema Ritrovato al cinema

Lunedì 29 e martedì 30, fuori programma, due capolavori restaurati dell'ultima stagione del Cinema Ritrovato al cinema: Gli amori di una bionda e I cancelli del cielo.

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Viva i musicarelli: 'Nessuno ci può giudicare'

Mercoledì 31 il documentario di Steve della Casa e Chiara Ronchini sulla gloriosa stagione dei musicarelli. Precede Nessuno mi può giudicare con 'casco d'oro' Caterina Caselli.


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Insiang: Slum Goddess

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The ever-haunting Insiang (1976) introduced its director, Lino Brocka, to the world stage when it showed at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival. Brocka had begun his career in 1970 making commercial genre films—domestic melodramas about marital infidelity as well as action pictures and comedies. But wanting to create independent movies that addressed more problematic aspects of Philippine reality, he shifted direction in 1975, with Manila in the Claws of Light, a powerful, dark, and sprawling film about country youth who come to the city, only to be ground down by urban poverty. (It was this movie that inspired Lav Diaz, today’s most prominent Filipino director—and one also given to telling expansive stories—to become a filmmaker.) The next year, Brocka made the equally provocative Insiang, which succeeded more fully than its predecessor by narrowing its focus and concentrating on one protagonist and one city neighborhood.

With these two films, Brocka joined a generation of filmmakers (including Ishmael Bernal, Mike De Leon, Kidlat Tahimik, and Mario O’Hara) whose aim was to wrench Philippine cinema from the slick commercial and soft-porn product it had come to be known for, and to move it in a more personal, socially progressive, and artistically challenging direction. Of these New Wave–like innovators, who brought about what came to be known as the “Second Golden Age”—the first was right after World War II—Brocka was the most internationally visible. He went on to make some sixty-odd features, many dealing with taboo subjects such as injustice and torture under martial law, government corruption, murderous militias, and prejudice against gay people. Brocka, who also helped run an experimental theater troupe and directed for television, became a cultural hero of the protest movement against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. It must be said that the artistic quality of his films varies widely, and that may explain why film preservationists and festival curators keep coming back to Insiang as Brocka’s one unassailably compelling masterwork. (Tragically, he died young in a car accident, which may or may not have been self-induced.)

Why Insiang? It came from a novel by Mario O’Hara, who also, with Lamberto E. Antonio, wrote the screenplay. A small film in some respects, it is also an uncanny, resonant blend of neorealism and melodrama. It opens documentary-fashion at a slaughterhouse, where pigs are being gutted, their blood gushing into water tanks, then surveys the jerry-built shacks of a slum abutting a river, with children playing in the dirt. Eventually, we pick out in the distance the heroine, Insiang, crossing a bridge. She (played by the Filipina screen goddess Hilda Koronel) is extraordinarily lovely, her beauty a counterweight to the shabbiness around her. She is also good and chaste; we see her vainly trying to keep peace in her squabbling household—her mother, Tonya, who sells fish in the market, is constantly haranguing the parasitic unemployed relatives camped out in her house. These bickering ensemble scenes have a remarkable vitality, the camera framing shots of dense overlapping figures crossing and colliding. Tonya, played indelibly by the veteran actor Mona Lisa, is a shrewish, bitter woman whose husband, Insiang’s father, deserted her for a mistress. In short order, she kicks out her husband’s relatives so that she can install a much younger male, the hunky, macho slaughterhouse worker Dado. She is relentlessly cruel to Insiang, associating the girl with her straying husband, and envious of the younger woman’s beauty. As Insiang says in a matter-of-fact understatement, “I feel no affection from her anymore.” Dado, no surprise, is more drawn to Insiang than to her aging mother. Thus a triangle is set up that can lead only to disaster.

The cinematic style is rough and ready: the film was shot in seven days, and usually only one take sufficed. The talented cameraman, Conrado Baltazar, employed frequent zooms and pans to keep up with the jittery action. You come to know well the interior of that shack: the kitchen, the dining table, the toilet, everything out in the open. (In one shot, Insiang is cooking on the stove while her mother squats nearby, taking a piss.) Brocka often commandeered actors from his theatrical troupe, the PETA Kalinangan Ensemble, to be in his films, and one senses that he was more concerned with staging the action as a theater director might, and getting the best possible performances out of the cast, than with devising an elaborate mise-en-scène for the camera. Indeed, Pierre Rissient, the extraordinary scout who first brought Insiang to Cannes and helped produce several of the filmmaker’s later films, has confirmed that Brocka knew nothing about lenses, leaving those decisions to the cameraman. In certain respects, Brocka resembled Rainer Werner Fassbinder: both had theater troupes; both worked quickly and were inordinately prolific; both were gay and put forward a harsh vision of the strong preying on the weak.

In Insiang, the laws of physical attraction trump any ethical considerations. The two men who take sexual advantage of Insiang conveniently excuse their rapacity by saying that they are only men—in effect, animals—and can’t help themselves. Insiang’s muscular, feckless mechanic boyfriend Bebot (Rez Cortez) is shown shirtless throughout, while Dado (Ruel Vernal) recalls Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski, pouncing on every female in the household. It does not take much to imagine a gay storyteller like Brocka projecting his own fascination with the handsome, cruelly exploitative Dado. Tall, mustachioed, with a tattoo on his chest, Dado dominates the smaller Bebot, taunting the other man by fingering his earring and questioning his masculinity. Dado may be a lout, but by the end it does seem that he genuinely loves Insiang. It is Insiang, initially pure and virtuous, who turns out to be the monster, bent as she is on revenge.

Much of the film’s lure derives from the way the main character keeps revealing unexpected aspects of herself. Insiang surprises us initially when she declares her hope of getting married to the boyish, immature Bebot (she deserves so much better!), and then she startles us with the boldness of her declaration that she hates her mother. If in the first half she seems an innocent, wanting only to be rescued from a sordid situation, in the second half she becomes more calculating, having learned to use her sensual power over men. This change corresponds to an alteration in the film’s pace and tone, as it slows down to savor the moment. There is the prolonged, awkward scene where Bebot starts to pay for a room in a hot-sheet hotel and then turns to Insiang for the money when he comes up short. There are slow night scenes where we glimpse Insiang behind a mosquito net, dimly lit, suggesting the awakening of her sexuality, side by side with her disgust. These scenes plunge us into a dreamlike mood, almost surreal, reminiscent of the way Luis Buñuel incorporated dreams into his neorealistic portrait of slum dwellers in Los olvidados (1950). There is also an undercutting of realism in the many scenes that end with a zoom onto Insiang’s expressive but inscrutable face, like the close-ups in a cheesy television soap opera, while the same limited musical refrain churns in the background and then is abruptly chopped off. It is hard to say what part of this is crude filmmaking and what part a conscious stylistic device, meant to draw us further into an oneiric, meditative space.

In the background is a third suitor for Insiang’s hand, Nanding, a serious, studious boy—and, of course, she barely notices him. He is the one who keeps telling her she must “leave this place,” as he has every expectation of doing. This idea of escaping the shantytown is articulated repeatedly by different speakers, but the film casts a claustrophobic net over the barrio, and will not permit them or us to exit the premises. The ending (without giving it away) is very strong, and forces us to reinterpret all that has gone before: now we are invited to see it as a thwarted mother-daughter love story. Each is encaged separately in her own pride and anger.

The film’s psychology is intricate and subtle. Still, it is the tactility of desire and matter that leaves the deepest impression. The press of flesh on flesh, the tropical heat and sweat, the water dripping from the faucet to drown out the sounds of sex, the smell of fish that Tonya tries to get rid of before her pig-butcher lover comes home . . . Most of all, there is the physicality of the barrio in all its gritty concreteness. Insiang may not be as explicitly political as many of Brocka’s later movies, but it insinuates a clear politics about the urban poor, merely by depicting their living conditions. This Philippine reality was one Marcos would have definitely not wanted the world to see. At the same time, these slum dwellers are never presented as mere victims; they possess agency and enormous, if spiteful, vitality and a willingness to engage with each other, inflicting pain or tenderness as the situation arises. “Just put up with it,” Insiang advises a recipient of her mother’s tongue-lashing early on, but stoicism is finally not an option. Rarely has fate been more convincingly orchestrated.

Phillip Lopate’s latest book is A Mother’s Tale. He has written extensively on the movies for Criterion, Film Comment, Cineaste, and the New York Times and is a professor at Columbia University.



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