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Home Edition and War Stories
The Stop Smiling DVD Roundup
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Wings (1966)
The Ascent (1977)
Directed by Larisa Shepitko
(Criterion Eclipse)
Spaced (1999-2001)
Directed by Edgar Wright
Written by Jessica Hynes and Simon Pegg
(BBC Warner)
The Small Back Room (1949)
Directed by Michael Powell
(Criterion)
Reviewed by Eric Hynes, Sarah Silver and José Teodoro
*****
Wings (1966)
The Ascent (1977)
Directed by Larisa Shepitko
(Criterion Eclipse)
Reviewed by Eric Hynes
Though destined to infiltrate and complicate Tarkovsky and Parajanov-centered conversations about Russian and Soviet postwar film, Criterion’s DVD restoration and release of two well-regarded but under-seen features by Larisa Shepitko — Wings (1966) and The Ascent (1977) — is more revelation than mere corrective. Two of only four films that Shepitko would live to complete — she died in a car accident in 1979, just 40 years old and mere days before beginning her fifth feature — they are as singular and confidently self-contained as they are evocative of a prevailing auteurist vision, and suggestive of seemingly infinite range. Furthermore, for as much as they speak to notions of historical and cultural import, they are standout stand-alone exemplars of the art. Make room, boys: The canon just got a little more crowded.
Not quite feminist, not adequately uplifting in the eyes of the Soviet state, not quite melodrama or even drama, Wings is frankly unlike most films made anywhere at any time. Seemingly a modest character study about a war veteran negotiating civilian life, middle age and single womanhood, the film paints a portrait of a woman in full while also somehow sketching the portrait in negative. We see the world through the eyes of our protagonist, Nadezhda Petrukhina, but also see how peers, students and family respond to her, verbally and otherwise. The closest analogue would be Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7, another quietly radical Sixties film unhurried by plot machinations and attentive to both its lead character’s fascinating ambiguity and the collective ambivalence with which she’s viewed by her lovers and acquaintances.
Like Cleo before her, Nadezhda (the engaging, formidably handsome Maya Bulgakova) would seem to well represent the height of achievement for a woman in a proudly open and equal society: she’s a war hero, a celebrity in her town, and school headmistress. But it’s lonely at the top. Shepitko isn’t concerned with glass ceilings or misogynist double-talk, but rather the subtle sacrifices and daily indignities that high-achieving women endure for not taking a back seat. When she ultimately concedes to settle and marry her long-suffering suitor, she’s stunned when he suddenly isn’t willing; though she wears the pants, it’s apparently still his domain to do the asking. Yet rather than her melodramatic ruin, Shepitko lets Nadezhda depart with dignity in place, and even allows her to fly high again, solo but ever so alive.
A gorgeously grim WWII-set drama, The Ascent finds Shepitko on comparatively familiar, international art film footing (it won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival). Sent to fetch supplies for a beleaguered army stretched thin by advancing Nazi forces, Belorussian soldiers Sotnikov and Rybak (Boris Plotnikov and Vladimir Gostyukhin) cling together to stay warm, stay alive, and elude capture. What begins as an against-all-odds tale of survival turns, after the men are captured, into a surprisingly schematic Christian/nationalist allegory. The surprise is not the turn to spirituality — by 1977, spiritual imagery as well as practice had grown permissively, if not officially, in the avowed atheistic Soviet state — but the harsh duality that the fair Sotnikov and earthy Rybak come to represent. The former comes to accept his pending death, refuses to collaborate with the Nazis, and in defiance finds inner strength, his inner Christ, and nationalist pride. Rybak, on the other hand, though brave, strong and loyal to Sotnikov, wrongly believes that he’s better alive — if morally compromised — than dead.
The duality effectively simplifies muddy historical reality, as the impossible conditions that Soviet soldiers and citizens were forced to confront during the Great War could never be morally addressed in black and white, no matter how pristinely cinematographed. What makes The Ascent impossible to shake is Shepitko’s bracing attention to sonic and visual detail, grounding the transcendental in crackling brambles and deadly drifts of snow. Death may offer some characters a divine release, but its physical advance — in boots shuffling outside the door, or the yawn of a leather noose hung from a cramped latrine — is a haunting reminder. It’s morality vs. mortality in man’s endless winter war. Tragic that Shepitko never had the chance to elaborate or go further, but really, who could ask for anything more?
*****
Spaced (1999-2001)
Directed by Edgar Wright
Written by Jessica Hynes and Simon Pegg
(BBC Warner)
Reviewed by Sarah Silver
Spaced, a Britcom which aired from 1999-2001 in the UK, has just had its first US release on DVD, much to the delight of American fans of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, the creative team behind genre-mashups Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Based on the DVD cover of Spaced (Pegg and co-star/writer Jessica Hynes’s disembodied heads floating in an inky black universe dappled with stars), I feared a sci-fi spoof à la Red Dwarf, but was pleasantly surprised to discover that Spaced veers more towards Seinfeld than Deep Space 9.
“They say the family of the 21st century is made up of friends, not relatives,” says Tim Bisley (Pegg), in the series finale. Like Seinfeld and Friends, Spaced revolves around an apartment building where a motley group of strangers become the staples of one another’s lives. Self-deprecating, down-and-out comic artist Tim meets self-sabotaging, down-and-out journalist Daisy Steiner (Hynes) in a café, and the two, both homeless at the time, find an apartment together by posing as a couple in order to meet the landlady’s requirements. They soon fall in step with their wacky neighbors forming a memorable ensemble cast of what really feel like lived-in characters.
As the series moves along, plotlines become more intricate as pop culture references are thrown harder and faster. Season Two opens with Daisy delivering a Manhattan-inspired monologue to the tune of “Rhapsody in Blue.” This is intercut with Tim’s Goodfellas speech (“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a graphic artist…”) and, in the very next scene, they go in for a shot-by-shot spoof of a sequence from Pulp Fiction. As described, this technique might sound grating, but as writers Pegg and Hynes never let the stream of consciousness riffing go on too long without interjecting some scene of genuine human emotion, and Pegg and Hynes the actors bring so much heart and soul to the material that it would be pointless to begrudge them their fun.
As one of the DVD bonus features, superfan Quentin Tarantino finds himself commenting over the aforementioned homage. It doesn’t get more meta than QT stepping back to comment upon Pegg and Hynes’s comment upon QT’s ultimate pop culture reference-laden movie; I nearly felt my mind was going to implode. But amidst all this confusion, Tarantino sums it up succinctly: “I love the spoofs, but my favorite moments are you guys just hanging out.”
*****
The Small Back Room (1949)
Directed by Michael Powell
(Criterion)
Reviewed by José Teodoro
At the heart of this WWII drama, set entirely on British soil, is demolitions expert Sammy Rice (David Farrar), who is maimed, pained, embittered and torn between the redemptive love of a good woman and the siren song of the bottle. Like the movie’s primary authors, Sammy is one of these stoic “men who know their jobs,” the always flawed but never less than engaging heroes that frequently inhabit the foreground of Powell and Pressburger’s many collaborations. Over the course of The Small Back Room (1949), Sammy will be put through the ringer, forced to confront a series of precarious new German explosives, smiling industrialists ready to rush new weaponry into the war for the lure of lucre, and his own bruised pride. It’s the latter that’s the biggest obstacle standing between him and what should be romantic bliss with Susan (Kathleen Byron), his co-worker and, it’s shrewdly implied, cohabitant.
Among the many pleasures of The Small Back Room is witnessing how deftly all these balls are kept in the air. Powell manages the task by alternating between classical clarity and deliberate disorientation, particularly during the fast-paced set-up full of jarring cuts, a babble of different languages, a strange vertical pan along an office directory sign, and the delayed entrance of the protagonist. Sammy appears only after we’ve seen his empty apartment and the many objects within, items that accumulate in significance as the story moves forward. It’s this playful attention to spaces, places, objects and crowds — a major set-piece occurs on the expansive, graded Chesil Beach, another, somewhat implausibly, at Stonehenge — that lend The Small Back Room its rich formal texture, a reminder that this seemingly humble little black and white character study is the work of the men behind The Red Shoes (1948), this film’s immediate predecessor.
None of the visual craftsmanship on display distracts however from what’s finally an enduring story of men and women negotiating a shared life during the tumult of war and the ache of its residual damage. Farrar’s performance is smart and brave, at times downright ugly as his Sammy seems almost hell-bent on sabotaging his love life, while Byron brings a complicated dignity to Susan, evoking an astonishing variety of subtext with something as simple as the pursing of lips. But the supporting players are terrific too, especially the lovely Renée Asherton, who somehow manages to make something surprisingly heartbreaking out of her bit part as a woman reading back a record of a bomb dismantling.
