Reviews

This idyllic Italian family, reunited for Christmas, conceals a very poisonous side: every one of the children (grown-up people, some with children of their own) is too fond of her/his life in its present state and is not available to change it in order to concretize the love they profess to have for their elderly parents. The trick of having the story told by the youngest grandchild enhances the dispassionate portraying of shallow people who are interested only in their petty grievances and bodily comforts. The visual background contrasts the great beauty of the ancient townlet with the vulgar showing-off of the humans who move in it.

So beautiful and so disturbing! The Yuletide end makes clear what it really is: a Christmas tale in the English tradition, such as Dickens's tale of the same name or Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher" about Burke and Hare. The reader feels all the thrill and horror of the little children's predicament and prays for a redeeming end until it eventually arrives. No realism here, but a visually deep blood-chilling story set in a southern State and along a river (anybody remember Huckleberry Finn? the importance of escaping on a boat?) by an extremely talented Englishman who had read both English and American classics. There are cases when the junction of different cultures works miracles, as it did with Nabokov's Lolita (which actually is a declaration of love for the English language). Differently, but also on a very high artistic level, Laughton focuses on very American themes. Maybe not the way the US would like to be depicted - ah, but then Lolita is just as cruel to a certain self-representation of American society as The night of the Hunter. Bless Shelley Winters for acting the victim both in this film and in Kubrick's Lolita! Although Lilian Gish's transformation from Stoneman's daughter (The Birth of a Nation) into the saviour of children is the most evident tribute by Laughton to US filmmaking.

Sokurov is in a very different line of business from Goethe. No ennobling Faust's motives here, no redemption thanks to beauty or God's grace. The spectator is cast down onto a greasy, grimy and smelly small-town world where a cynical Dr. Faust states at once that he has not found any soul when dissecting people's bodies. Material problems suffocate his thirst for knowledge, so the tempting devil is the town's moneylender (a character who does not believe in eternal good but believes in eternal evil). Faust lets himself be seduced with only formal protest and does not care a jot about signing his soul away, when the deal is at last offered; but, as he keeps saying, "for this, you must give me more". Margarethe is not enough, meeting the dead is not enough, understanding nature's work is not enough; Faust goes on, apparently to nowhere. It is a visually straining experience, but also enticing in retrospect.

This is a merciless exposure of ways of thinking and behaviors that plagued (and maybe plague still) provincial towns. It starts lightly as a comedy centered on the old "cuckhold" theme, but it makes clear from the first minutes that the "Ladies and Gentlemen" of the original title are a bunch of leering gossipers, held together only by affluence, sexual intrigues and pretensions. Then we are made to witness a dream of love and liberation shattered to pieces by social conventions and a lot of pressure (and this is where a character that started comically grows up to tragic size). The last novella is material for courtroom drama - but there are no heroes here and everybody is just as corrupt as everybody else, the victim excepted, so much that we may feel sick on hearing that "justice has triumphed". The director subtly extracts from us laughter, but a laughter that risks becoming a desperate howl.

It is a film you may watch on TV without feeling that you are completely wasting your time, although I would not visit a movie theatre just to see it (well maybe I could given a peculiar mood, such as the end of a relationship). The plot is a clandestine love affair between two not very young, not very beautiful people (in this sense you enjoy it far more than the usual Hollywood fare, because you feel the heroes' level of sex appeal is not far from the average viewer's). But the characters are rather human and on the whole sufficiently convincing, especially the main characters' husband and wife. Special mention for Leonid Yarmolnik: in a few minutes' appearance he manages to convey a full fledged character, whereas everybody else in the film needs some time to impose him/herself upon the viewer. A good film for fans of close-ups.

It started in an uncertain way, with too many obvious passages and with characters showing at once what we should expect of them. Yet a surprise was in the making. The first part seemed a déjà vu exercise and might have been shot about anything else - I feel I have seen exactly the same plot in some TV film on the Jewish Holocaust. Then the killing began and the whole world was changed. The realm of the obvious became the realm of terror. Villains and heroes change places. Some clues take a long time to unveil, and this is good. The realm of horror is the right background of an epic tale of suffering and resistance. Here, hallucinations and dreams are the food of the mind and of the empty body. Reality is cruel and crude and mind-torturing and in this pitch of darkness we are really surprised to witness a few really human beings. The epic resistance of Nonik and the unexpected accusation of Yussuf make for a great tale on a few remains of humanity.

A very good thriller indeed and very powerful in mixing Irena's present with her nightmarish past. Yet something was missing. Excellent actors (especially Alessandro Haber), a fully believable heroine, good plot, but a trifle too melodramatic, for instance in the hospital (or clinic) scene with the sick child. I cannot believe it is possible to find a dead body in a landfill (unless you are the police and use earth-moving equipment). A thumbs-up for the way the police is shown, calm and restrained. Yet it all just looked a bit too artificial. Irena's "teaching" Tea to fight for herself is didactic at best and somewhat sadistic - which fits in with Irena's past but is hardly going to really help Tea grow up, whereas the film wants us to believe just that and leads us to shed tears on the grown-up little angel in the last cadre. Small plot flaws, on the whole, which might have been redeemed by Tornatore's talent, but were not.

The film looks so simple, and maybe it is somewhat too simple in cinematographic terms, but the story is very carefully built (and faultlessly acted). Just remark how symmetric are the paths of Esma and Pelda in the film: war has left her with a difficult daughter, him with a psychically suffering mother. It is moving just because the heroine (almost) always manages to stay dignified and hide her real feelings from unsympathetic people, and the spectator is engrossed by her slow and difficult acceptance of the need for crying out. I found especially credible Sara and her boyfriend, who show a perfect blend of childishness and pseudo-adult behaviour (when they are alone in Esma's flat they drink wine AND play puzzle). The story is brought by the director to the brink of tragedy and Esma might well end badly at one point or two, but then the plot gently turns a bit and there is no more tragedy that what has already happened during the war and which we sense, rather than see, through Esma's own reactions at scenes recalling her of those times. And the spectator is led to feel with her.

I found it too long and very different from the shorter Ken Russel works I know. His theatrical films have a gift of visionary concision which is utterly incompatible with a 3 1/2 hrs TV production. Connie's dream says much more about her than her visit to Clifford with only her face covered. I kept feeling that Russel was conveying all that was significant in a few short scenes and that most of the remaining screen time was simply decorative, exemplified by Connie and Hilda's tango: pure exercise in style. Some moments can even be enjoyed, but a film lover smells too many rats. Then the ending is so "B-movie", I start to suppose Russell was sneering at his TV audience. There is a feeling of tiredness throughout the film and you are constantly reminded that the plot is so well known, there isn't much to expect in the way of surprises. So you start to make amends... which is what you happens when you are trying to make the best out of something not really satisfactory. This is pleasant but not outstanding TV fiction. A pity that I had been expecting a typical Ken Russel work.