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Friday, May 12, 2006

May DVD Roundup: A Brazilian Masterpiece, A De Sica Special, ReNoir and Munch?s Music

Vidas Secas (Barren Lives) (1963)
Directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos
(New Yorker)

The Children Are Watching Us (1944)
Directed by Vittorio De Sica
(Criterion)

La B?te humaine (1938)
Directed by Jean Renoir
(Criterion)

Edvard Munch (1976)
Directed by Peter Watkins
(New Yorker)

Reviewed by Michael Joshua Rowin, Nick Pinkerton, Jared Rapfogel and Nicolas Rapold

*****

Vidas Secas (Barren Lives) (1963)
Directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos
(New Yorker)

Reviewed by Michael Joshua Rowin

Long considered the inaugurating masterpiece of Brazil?s Cinema Novo movement and one of the crown jewels of Latin American cinema, Nelson Pereira dos Santos? Vidas Secas finally gets its release on DVD in the U.S. and will no doubt stun viewers unfamiliar with the 1963 film?s remarkable blending of neorealist aesthetics and expressionistic technique. Dos Santos built Vidas on the foundation of postwar Italian neorealism ? proletariat subject matter, non-professional actors, low-budget shooting ? while transcending its parameters to create subjective and poetic correlatives to the Faulknerian novel of Graciliano Ramos from which the film was adapted.

The story concerns a poor migrant family traveling across rural Brazil in the early ?40s. Fabiano (?tila I?rio) provides for his wife and two children by taking on a job as a ranch hand, but falls prey to gambling and the corruption of the police force, which destroys the brief happiness and relative prosperity his family has earned. Dos Santos?s innovations are still startling forty years later: overlapping dialogue; sound/image disjunctions; lens flares; stylized natural lighting; and, most effective of all, shots representing the point of view of each family member, including their dog. The most radical sequence involves one of the children, having just learned about hell, repeating the word to himself as dos Santos abandons narrative entirely and matches the mantra to subjective images of the child?s desolate surroundings.

New Yorker has made a fine transfer of the film onto DVD except for minor flaws on the soundtrack ? digital glitches and hiccups of complete silence intermittently disrupt the symphonic use of sound that dos Santos created out of purely environmental noise and music. The disc contains supplements, including a twenty-minute introduction by NYU Film Studies professor Robert Stam explaining the director?s formal strategies in adapting Ramos?s novel and the film?s importance in the history of Brazilian cinema. There?s also a short film written and directed by Luelane Loiola Corr?a called How One Dies in the Movies about Baleia, the beloved dog of Vidas Secas that became a star in her own right as well as the center of a controversy begun by over-concerned animal-cruelty activists (the dog, the film demonstrates, was completely unharmed). The whole thing ? as narrated by a talking parrot ? is as cute as it is necessary (which is to say, not very).

*****

The Children Are Watching Us (1944)
Directed by Vittorio De Sica
(Criterion)

Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton

I can say, without fawning, that The Children Are Watching Us is the most crushingly emotional movie I have seen in some time ? if you are inclined to cry during films, it will make you cry. If you watch it with a similarly sensitive group, you?ll all cry on cue (quoth Ms. Kael on another De Sica work: ??if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel??). Which may be part of what has put De Sica?s films somewhat out of vogue in contemporary film culture: his films can be too moving, too immaculately engineered in their emotional effect, to seem entirely trustworthy. Can I or anyone be blamed for being cynical? It?s so much easier to miss out on some transcendence than to deal with the morning-after feeling that comes from giving in to emotional rape from wet-eyed waifs and plaintive violins?

Melodrama this is, then, but melodrama admirably compacted in scale ? a kid, Pric? (untrained actor Luciano De Ambrosis, who has a contemporary interview on Criterion?s ? surprise! ? gorgeously restored disc), maybe ten years old, wakes up to find that his mother (Isa Pola) has abandoned the family to join her lover, leaving him to his somewhat emotionally inept, cuckolded father (a fine Emilio Cigoli who, underlining this film?s straddle of the dapper telefono bianco ?30s films and the frayed-shirtsleeves Forties, resembles a dyspeptic William Powell). She comes back soon enough, but thereafter the film is a delicate domestic cliffhanger, as momma wavers between duty and desire.

Ignoring its tidal power of feeling ? which, frankly, frightens me ? I liked best the film?s accomplishments in miniature, like Pric?, in the period after his abandonment, becoming conscious of an elevated aroma of that not-quite-understood, hidden thing that happens between grown men and women, which is somehow responsible for his pain. As our little martyr (an actual alternate title for the film?s American release) is carted between guardians we get an aunt?s lingerie shop populated by a fleshy, stripped-down customer and cackling seamstresses; then his grandmother?s lithe housekeeper making goo-goo eyes at a village pharmacist who can sure make a mortar-and-pestle seem suggestive. It may just brush past the matter, but the movie?s sensitivity to how kids start to process sex may be its most understated, gutsy aspect ? it?s the early echo of Antoine Doinel exploring his mother?s vanity table.

*****

La B?te humaine (1938)
Directed by Jean Renoir
(Criterion)

Reviewed by Jared Rapfogel

The film that put the ?noir? in Jean Renoir, La B?te humaine is a strikingly atypical work for a filmmaker known for such humanistic masterpieces as La Grande illusion, The Rules of the Game and The Golden Coach. A story of self-destructive desire and moral corruption, La B?te humaine is a not altogether comfortable fit for Renoir, dark and deterministic where he is usually generous and open-ended. But the tension between the material and Renoir?s sensibility is fascinating, producing a strange hybrid whose narrative and themes anticipate 1940s Hollywood noir while the stunningly accomplished naturalism of the location shooting, especially the tour-de-force passages shot with a camera affixed to a speeding train, calls to mind the British documentary movement of the ?30s, as well as the approach of neorealism.

An adaptation from Zola, La B?te humaine focuses on Lantier (Jean Gabin), a locomotive operator prone to sudden violent attacks, who becomes involved with the stationmaster?s wife, Madame Roubaud (Simone Simon), after discovering that she is implicated in murder. Though every character here is morally tainted, Renoir humanizes them by identifying their various motivations, none entirely unsympathetic. Even Madame Roubaud, a familiar and destructive figure, becomes relatively complicated by Renoir and Simon?s stubborn refusal to make her true nature apparent. And this ambiguity extends even to the inevitably violent conclusion. We wait the whole movie for Lantier to have his final attack, but when it comes, it?s without warning or apparent motivation ? unlike his first attack, he seems fully aware of what he?s doing, overcome not by psychosis but by a sudden clarity that?s all the more powerful and shocking for being entirely implicit.

The Criterion release comes laden with typically excellent extras, including a charming introduction by Renoir in which he observes that La B?te humaine is essentially a love triangle between a man, a woman, and a locomotive, as well as excerpts from a TV program showcasing an amazingly substantive discussion between Zola scholar Henri Mitterand, screenwriter Pierre Bost and critic Jean Collet. And to think the best we can do is Charlie Rose.

*****

Edvard Munch (1976)
Directed by Peter Watkins
(New Yorker)

Reviewed by Nicolas Rapold

Rare is the biographical film that?s truly technically worthy of its subject, and rarer still the laudatory review of such a film that doesn?t make a similar case for the work?s sui generis status. But what can you do: Peter Watkins?s 170-minute Edvard Munch is its own masterwork ? a wrenching iterative portrait of the artist as, to borrow a title from one of his works, a ?blossom of pain.?

Presenting a revolutionary alternative to the usual sentimental fables and celebrity necrophilia of the ?biopic,? the shifting techniques of Edvard Munch embody the anxious porousness of emotion that fueled the artist?s expressionist innovations. It?s amazing that the movie doesn?t fly apart at any given moment: avoiding straight-up plotting (or standard scenes), Watkins accumulates and alternates moments of Munch stabbing at the canvas, promenading on the main drag, hanging out in taverns with fellow upstarts. The movie returns obsessively, almost musically, to his TB-ravaged family and his doomed love affair with a married woman, experiences that both inspired and tormented him. An exacting, dry-wry voiceover, familiar from Watkins?s more agitprop work, places everything in precise historical context (with not a little class analysis), finding devastating words from Munch?s diaries, and his contemporaries. (?I think your paintings are shit,? went one response to an exhibition.)

The effect is an absorbing chain of associations that?s as immediate as being in Munch?s own head (with an encyclopedically informed guide). Many shots seem to replicate memory and the lateral drift of lived experience, intermingling the visuals of one moment with the sound from another. Munch will nuzzle with his lover in a sun-dappled glade while on the soundtrack holds over on his mother?s last words from her deathbed. It all comes across as utterly organic and direct.

Edvard Munch underlines Watkins?s muscular talent as a filmmaker, which won?t surprise anyone who has watched his other films, something that happily is getting easier to do thanks to a series of New Yorker releases. If you need more than the hook typically given to his work as ?censored critique,? then watch this film ? and meditate on the director?s calling it ?the most personal film I have ever made.? You won?t find a more captivating, heartbreaking love/art story than the one that he delicately pieces together around Vampire, Munch?s notorious painting of a woman kissing a man?s neck, bent over him as if consuming him.