The cinetrix withdraws to her remote and undesireable villa this week, after a 9-week urban movie binge. Her habit has gotten so bad as the departure date approaches that now there's an appalling backlog of films to discuss.
Seeing two to three indie films in one day and trying to see at least one matinee each weekday will do that, I guess. So, without further ado, let's start with last Friday's slate.
First up, Junebug, a lovely if uneven little film set in North Carolina that wowed 'em at Sundance this year. Madeleine is a dealer in outsider art in Chicago who speaks in the clipped cadences of the well-traveled diplomatic corps brat she was. Six months ago she impulsively married George, and only now is she meeting his family in North Carolina, as part of a trip to woo an artist who lives nearby to sign with her gallery.
Lambent details shine and flicker. Homesick North Carolinians in particular should gird themselves for glimpses of Cheerwine and red clay earth, and the ever-present eggplant- or tan-colored plastic pitcher of sweet tea on the table. The filmmakers linger lovingly on empty rooms and landscapes, waiting for people to appear while watching the wind rustle the leaves. This patience is reflected in the gentle rhythms of the film, in which quite a bit and not a lot happens, depending on when and whether you pay attention.
Cheek-kissing Madeleine unknowingly alienates George's brusque bleached-blonde mother immediately, calling her Pat [her name is Peg]. Peg, a force of nature in clip-on earrings, rules her wood-paneled, ceramic figurine-bedaubed roost, bullying her retiring husband Eugene, clashing with her surly younger son Johnny, and chivvying Johnny's sunny, enormously pregnant and naive wife Ashley.
Ashley will break your heart. She's godfearing and flighty, just a little girl, really, who wishes Johnny still loved her the way he did before they dropped out of high school to marry. Vowing to hate Madeleine before she arrives, Ashley instead immediately falls for the glamorous urbanite, hard, trailing behind her and chattering away.
Amy Adams' performance as Ashley is a marvel of optimism and pluck; her game smile, unsure of its welcome, can't quite be repressed even when her eyes well with tears. It is matched only by that of Embeth Davitz, her crush-object Madeleine. Davitz plays the role with a keen sense of Madeleine's own innate outsiderness as a woman who's lived many places without ever quite belonging anywhere. The tensile strength of her long neck and slim, toned body further underscore what an alien she is. Celia Weston's Peg delivers the withering back-handed compliments that are the hallmark of Southern women with aplomb, but the character, like that of Benjamin McKenzie's Johnny, lacks three-dimensionality.
Sadly, the easy-on-the eyes Alessandro Nivola is given nothing to do and no backstory. In a scene that's been singled out by many critics, he sings a beautiful hymn at a church function with the refrain "Come home." But we're never given a sense of who he is or where home is for him now, the wide world of his new wife or the claustrophobic insularity of his family.
The second film I saw with Tony Takitani, which is adapted from the short story by Haruki Murakami. I can honestly say that I've never seen a film quite like it. I've only read Murakami's stories when they've appeared in the New Yorker, but the chilly loneliness and alienation I remembered as the hallmarks of his style have been translated to the screen intact.
The titular character is a technical illustrator, the son of Shozaburo, a jazz trombonist whose wife died three days after giving birth to the boy with the anglo name. Shozaburo is not very good at being a father, and Tony is not much better kitted out to be a son. Brought up by a housekeeper, he still spends his time mostly alone, working.
We know all this because of the near-constant voice-over, which provides exposition and insight into this strange, lonely figure who haunts stark white rooms he never quite inhabits. Is this even cinematic? Certainly not in any traditional sense, but its images are beautiful to regard. [The closest I can come to describing the effect of this stream of counterintuitive tell-not-show narration is by invoking Chris Marker's Sans Soleil.] Every so often Tony, who we watch as he goes about his solitary life underneath the narration, speaks up long enough to finish the narrator's sentence before lapsing into silence again.
One day Tony meets Eiko, a woman 15 years his junior who wears her designer clothing so beautifully that Tony asks her to marry him on their fifth date. They are surprisingly happy together until Eiko's uncontrollable compulsion to buy ever more couture creates an unmendable rift in their relationship.
From that point onward, the film takes a turn into Vertigo territory. [Yes, Vertigo, in a minor key. Stay with me.] This shift is perhaps signaled by Eiko's own voice-over narration, which unlike Tony's is delivered in the third person. The same actress plays Eiko the fashionable wife as well as a more dowdy young woman, while Issey Ogata lends his beautifully creased mien to both Tony and his father. Ryuichi Sakamoto's score traces a ceaselessly circular piano theme, which swirls under the action in a way that suggests Bernard Hermann's famous spiraling theme. And, as in the Hitchcock, the action, such as it is, slowly begins to suffocate under the weight of Tony's senses of isolation and loss.
It is said that most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but the austere silence at the heart of Tony Takitani is particularly devastating. A harrowing portrait of loneliness in words and pictures, it knocks the wind out of you and leaves you breathless.
As for the third film, well... it goes a little something like this:
A family walks into a talent agency to pitch its act.
@#!&%!!$&@##*!
?@&#%%(.)(.)@&$!!!@#!
&%!!$&@##*!?@&#%%
(.)(.)
@&$!@&#%%(.)(.)@&$!!!@#!&
%@&#%%(.)(.)@&$!@&#%%(.)(.)@&$!!!
The agent says, "That's quite an act. What do you call yourselves?"
The Aristocrats.
The Fesser and I enjoyed this smart-mouthed film to an unseemly degree, and now while away the hours debating which comedian's version of the titular joke [heh: titular] was the filthiest. Highly recommended, but good luck trying to tell the joke yourself. It's harder than it looks.
