The Sheila Variations

Great scene.

One of the all-time great sequences in cinema, I'm thinking.

Anyone?

Burn After Reading:

The new Coen brothers film, coming out this September.

After seeing the release of the poster and the trailer (domestic and international - two totally different trailers) I can now say I am officially excited. The poster calls up all of Saul Bass' iconic images - what a brilliant idea - no posters look like that anymore, and so it is completely eye-catching. And I love Brad Pitt when he's allowed to be a goofball. I guess my first impression of him - in first Thelma and Louise, and then True Romance - is the one that has really stuck - good-looking, sure, but doesn't take himself all that seriously. It's very endearing (when he's allowed to do it). I'm not gaga over his looks, he never really did it for me in that capacity - and I don't think he has all that much range - but range is over-rated. If you have too much range, you run the risk of being thought of as facile. Ooh, look at me with my different accents and haircuts and walks and gestures, aren't I clever? Pitt is just getting more interesting as he gets older. The parts he's getting are more interesting, too. I love it when he is allowed to be goofy and silly. It makes me so happy. I mean, his cameo as the pot-smoking loser roommate in True Romance is comedy gold as far as I'm concerned ("And get some .... cleaning products ... " "Dont' condissnd meeee .....". So funny!!) In the trailer, Brad Pitt gets punched in the face by John Malkovich and I've seen it 4 times now and it makes me laugh every time. And look at this still from the film:

I mean, I have no idea what's going on there, but it's hilarious.

So yeah. Sheila is STOKED. I actually am so excited I feel vaguely uncomfortable about it.

Poster, Saul Bass comparison - just for fun, and both trailers below. Can't WAIT!

Doesn't it remind you of ...

International teaser trailer:

Domestic trailer:

The shallow part of "shallow elitism"

So after two elitist posts (if by "elitist" you mean "talking about books" and making declarations that some things are better than others. If that is your criteria, I am one HELL of an elitist and proud of it!) - I figured I'd throw a bone to the shallow crowd, of which I am also a proud member.

(New readers, a word of explanation: A couple years ago, in one week alone, I got two bitchy emails - one from some jagoff ranting about how "elitist" I was because - well, basically because I wrote about things that HE didn't care about ... and the second email was from some snot ranting about how "shallow" I was because I was obsessed with Project Runway. There was something so FREEING in that one week of emails because I realized, head on, that I cannot please everyone. How on earth can one be a shallow elitist?? I don't know - but I know that I am!! The Sheila Variations: Bringing you Shallow Elitist content since 2002).

Here are some observations I have made of late:

-- Sometimes I listen to songs by "My Chemical Romance" (and I like a lot of them), and my overriding feeling is: "Boys. Please. Calm the hell down. Take a deep breath, and CHILLAX."

-- I have a huge crush on Padma Lakshmi. Oh, and come to think of it, I have a crush on Tom Colicchio too. But Padma actually makes me nervous.

-- I am pretty bummed that Pacifica French Lilac Body Butter is so hard to find. My Whole Foods has their whole line of products - but not that one particular lotion. I am resisting buying it online because they charge 15 dollars shipping and handling or something like that.

-- I love Angelina Jolie and I wonder if we could be friends. I really hope so. I'm psyched to see Wanted. I love her as an actress but I am particularly in love with her in action films. Mr. and Mrs. Smith was a BLAST. She's one of the only actresses out there where I can pretty much believe that it is her doing all that crap - not a stunt woman. She's a lot of fun.

-- I want Kathy Griffin's Life on the D-List show to go on forever. If she ever becomes an A-list actress, I will be devastated because there goes that series, and I love every second of it.

-- I beg of you: follow the link and click through. What???

-- I will always, and I mean always, look back fondly on the first season of Rock of Love. Television just doesn't get any better than that. I mean, seriously. What I love best about the image below is that there is no irony in it. It is earnest. And deeply crazy. And I wish more people on the planet were deeply openly crazy, so I wouldn't feel so left out.

Gorgeous.

-- Recently re-watched Eyes of Laura Mars and reveled in the sight of Tommy Lee Jones in bell bottom jeans, a black turtleneck and long hair.

-- The Real Housewives of New York City cannot hold a candle to the GLORY of Real Housewives of Orange County. It just doesn't have the botox and fake boobs that made the Orange County version so awesome.

-- Speaking of Real Housewives of Orange County, I wonder how Lauri and George are doing. I actually have moments where the couple pops into my mind, and I think, "I hope they're happy together."

-- You know what movie I saw recently and loved? Dan In Real Life. I think that might have to go on my Under-rated Movies List because (along with the incorrect marketing theme today) it was marketed wrong - it was marketed like a wacky 40 Year Old Virgin sequel - which made me not want to see it (as much as I loved 40 Year Old Virgin) - but what a pleasant surprise: it's a sweet well-written funny and poignant family drama - and I LOVED it. I'll do a review of it when I get out from underneath the pile of the project I am working on. Dane Cook was great, too - he belongs in an ensemble piece at this point in his career - he's not confident enough (as an actor, I mean) to carry a movie (yet), but he was terrific here. Everyone was.

Trains in cinema

Another breathtaking montage (it's part of a series). I get really excited when he posts a new installment. Just beautifully put together, I think.

I love the train sequence in Penny Serenade - right after Cary Grant and Irene Dunne get married he has to take a train to the West Coast to go on to his assignment in Japan - leaving her behind until he is ready to send for her - so there is no time for a honeymoon. She gets on the train with him just to say goodbye, and they sit in his cabin, not knowing how to speak to each other, sad that they must part. They embrace. Slowly, the train starts moving. She starts in alarm, "Roger! The train is moving!" He reaches out to close his cabin door, taking her in his arms, and he says what is perhaps the hottest line in the history of cinema, "We'll get you off."

It's a snowy night, and the next thing we see is the train slowly pulling into another station - we can see out the window how much snow has accumulated, and I think the sign says something like: New York: 150 Miles ... so as audience members we put it together. They got on the train in New York, they are now 150 miles away ... time enough to, uhm, "get her off", shall we say. I'm not dwelling on this to be prurient - it also becomes important later, because it is during that 150 mile journey on a train that she gets pregnant. So it's an important plot point as well. The platform is empty, snowy, it must be 2 or 3 in the morning. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne step off the train - she's going to wait to pick up another train back to New York - and he is going on on his journey. They don't speak. They are now man and wife for real, and all of that silent stuff coursing between them is palpable. SUCH a moving scene. They stand on the platform and embrace.

Look at their shadow on the side of the train.

There are no lines in this scene, but it's killer. Then, slowly, the train starts to pull away, and Cary Grant jumps back on - looking back at her ... She stands there, waving, and a snowflake alights on her eyelashes - it looks like an accident, but what a happy accident - because it gives such a sense of reality to the scene. She's devastated to watch that train pull away ... but now, after months of dating this guy, of trying to play it cool, of not trying to put the pressure on ... now she has him. He is her husband ... and he's on that train ... pulling away from her ... and who knows when she will see him again.

Lovely sequence - one of my favorite in cinema. Simple, effective, emotional.

In closeup: La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc

Here is Roger Ebert's review of La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928; dir. Carl Dreyer) which is one of the most startling and wrenching films I have ever seen in my life:

You cannot know the history of silent film unless you know the face of Renee Maria Falconetti. In a medium without words, where the filmmakers believed that the camera captured the essence of characters through their faces, to see Falconetti in Dreyer's ``The Passion of Joan of Arc'' (1928) is to look into eyes that will never leave you...

Dreyer had been given a large budget and a screenplay by his French producers, but he threw out the screenplay and turned instead to the transcripts of Joan's trial. They told the story that has become a legend: of how a simple country maid from Orleans, dressed as a boy, led the French troops in their defeat of the British occupation forces. How she was captured by French loyal to the British and brought before a church court, where her belief that she had been inspired by heavenly visions led to charges of heresy. There were 29 cross-examinations, combined with torture, before Joan was burned at the stake in 1431. Dreyer combined them into one inquisition, in which the judges, their faces twisted with their fear of her courage, loomed over her with shouts and accusations.

If you go to the Danish Film Museum in Copenhagen you can see Dreyer's model for the extraordinary set he built for the film. He wanted it all in one piece (with movable walls for the cameras), and he began with towers at four corners, linked with concrete walls so thick they could support the actors and equipment. Inside the enclosure were chapels, houses and the ecclesiastical court, built according to a weird geometry that put windows and doors out of plumb with one another and created discordant visual harmonies (the film was made at the height of German Expressionism and the French avant-garde movement in art).

It is helpful to see the model in Copenhagen, because you will never see the whole set in the movie. There is not one single establishing shot in all of ``The Passion of Joan of Arc,'' which is filmed entirely in closeups and medium shots, creating fearful intimacy between Joan and her tormentors. Nor are there easily read visual links between shots. In his brilliant shot-by-shot analysis of the film, David Bordwell of the University of Wisconsin concludes: ``Of the film's over 1,500 cuts, fewer than 30 carry a figure or object over from one shot to another; and fewer than 15 constitute genuine matches on action.''

What does this mean to the viewer? There is a language of shooting and editing that we subconsciously expect at the movies. We assume that if two people are talking, the cuts will make it seem that they are looking at one another. We assume that if a judge is questioning a defendant, the camera placement and editing will make it clear where they stand in relation to one another. If we see three people in a room, we expect to be able to say how they are arranged and which is closest to the camera. Almost all such visual cues are missing from ``The Passion of Joan of Arc.''

Instead Dreyer cuts the film into a series of startling images. The prison guards and the ecclesiastics on the court are seen in high contrast, often from a low angle, and although there are often sharp architectural angles behind them, we are not sure exactly what the scale is (are the windows and walls near or far?). Bordwell's book reproduces a shot of three priests, presumably lined up from front to back, but shot in such a way that their heads seem stacked on top of one another. All of the faces of the inquisitors are shot in bright light, without makeup, so that the crevices and flaws of the skin seem to reflect a diseased inner life.

Falconetti, by contrast, is shot in softer grays, rather than blacks and whites. Also without makeup, she seems solemn and consumed by inner conviction. Consider an exchange where a judge asks her whether St. Michael actually spoke to her. Her impassive face seems to suggest that whatever happened between Michael and herself was so far beyond the scope of the question that no answer is conceivable.

Why did Dreyer fragment his space, disorient the visual sense and shoot in closeup? I think he wanted to avoid the picturesque temptations of a historical drama. There is no scenery here, aside from walls and arches. Nothing was put in to look pretty. You do not leave discussing the costumes (although they are all authentic). The emphasis on the faces insists that these very people did what they did. Dreyer strips the church court of its ritual and righteousness and betrays its members as fleshy hypocrites in the pay of the British; their narrow eyes and mean mouths assault Joan's sanctity.

For Falconetti, the performance was an ordeal. Legends from the set tell of Dreyer forcing her to kneel painfully on stone and then wipe all expression from her face--so that the viewer would read suppressed or inner pain. He filmed the same shots again and again, hoping that in the editing room he could find exactly the right nuance in her facial expression. There is an echo in the famous methods of the French director Robert Bresson, who in his own 1962 ``The Trial of Joan of Arc'' put actors through the same shots again and again, until all apparent emotion was stripped from their performances. In his book on Dreyer, Tom Milne quotes the director: ``When a child suddenly sees an onrushing train in front of him, the expression on his face is spontaneous. By this I don't mean the feeling in it (which in this case is sudden fear), but the fact that the face is completely uninhibited.'' That is the impression he wanted from Falconetti.

That he got it is generally agreed. Perhaps it helps that Falconetti never made another movie (she died in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1946). We do not have her face in other roles to compare with her face here, and the movie seems to exist outside time (the French director Jean Cocteau famously said it played like ``an historical document from an era in which the cinema didn't exist'').

To modern audiences, raised on films where emotion is conveyed by dialogue and action more than by faces, a film like ``The Passion of Joan of Arc'' is an unsettling experience--so intimate we fear we will discover more secrets than we desire. Our sympathy is engaged so powerfully with Joan that Dreyer's visual methods--his angles, his cutting, his closeups--don't play like stylistic choices, but like the fragments of Joan's experience. Exhausted, starving, cold, in constant fear, only 19 when she died, she lives in a nightmare where the faces of her tormentors rise up like spectral demons.

Perhaps the secret of Dreyer's success is that he asked himself, ``What is this story really about?'' And after he answered that question he made a movie about absolutely nothing else.

It is Dreyer's use of close-ups, and, as Ebert points out, the lack of any establishing shots that make the film so terrifying and emotional to watch. There are times when you literally do not know where you are. And this reflects the unbelievable intensity of Joan of Arc's experience as she is interrogated. The faces of the actors are flawed, there appears to be no pancake makeup on anyone. There is one scene where Joan sits, tormented by the questions, listening to who knows what in her own head, and a fly buzzes around her face, sometimes landing on her neck, her forehead. It is unbelievably real. A lesser director would have chosen other shots, where there is no fly. But Dreyer was up to something else here.

The heads LOOM at you, throughout the film. It is captivating - in the best and worst sense of the word, meaning: you cannot look away, but you also feel trapped. You yearn to escape, to flee from that dungeon space ... but because Dreyer does not set up the scene so that you know where the exits are, you have no idea where you would go. He makes you lose yourself in the faces.

I watched the film with no sound (there is no sound anyway) - but there is a version of the film with music as well. Both versions are amazing - but I highly recommend watching it with no sound first. There is a ton of dialogue, of course - since it's an interrogation scene - but there are very little subtitles. You get the whole story from the expressions on the faces, and the behavioral tics captured by the camera. I must borrow a thought from Cocteau (lifted from Pauline Kael's review) because it is completely accurate, and reflects my own experience: Without any background sound, the film takes on a comfortless blasted-open atmosphere - you cannot hide from it - and you begin to get the sense (and this is where it gets mystical, unlike any other film I have ever seen) that you are actually looking at a historical event, you feel like you are watching a film that was made before film was invented. It's that real, that unfettered. The modern world (despite the fact that we are watching a film - filmed by cameras) does not seem to exist. Without sound, The Passion of Joan of Arc ranks as the most powerful film ever made.

And Falconetti's performance cannot, in any way shape or form, be over-stated. It is one for the ages. It takes on a mythic proportion that has rarely been seen in film, before or since.

Pauline Kael writes:

One of the greatest of all movies. The director, Carl Dreyer, based the script on the trial records, and the testimony appears to be given for the first time. (Cocteau wrote that this film "seems like an historical document from an era in which the cinema didn't exist.") As the five gruelling cross-examinations follow each other, Dreyer turns the camera on the faces of Joan and the judges, and in giant close-ups he reveals his interpretation of their emotions. In this enlargement Joan and her persecutors are shockingly fleshly - isolated with their sweat, warts, spittle, and tears, and (as no one used makeup) with startlingly individual contours, features, and skin. No other film has so subtly linked eroticism with religious persecution. Maria Falconetti's Joan may be the finest performance ever recorded on film. With Silvain as Cauchon, Michel Simon, Andre Berley, Maurice Schutz, and the young Antonin Artaud - as Massieu he's the image of passionate idealism. The staging, and the cinematography by Rudolph Mate, are in a style that suggests the Stations of the Cross. The film is silent but as you often see the (French) words forming you may have the illusion that you've heard them.

In the early years of film, many directors, who came from the theatre and vaudeville, filmed the movies from a theatrical perspective - long shots, lots of action, where you can see everyone at the same time, identical to what you see on the stage. D.W. Griffith understood the power of the new medium, though, and moved the camera in on his actor's faces - he knew that film, unlike theatre, had the potential to be a purely psychological experience (not that there is not psychology in the theatre - it's just that the form demands something larger, something that can be seen all the way in the cheap seats). But a closeup is psychological. It is internal. It is the equivalent of a Shakespearean soliloquy. Whatever is going on there is a one-on-one exchange between the character and the audience. We are privileged to get that close. It was THE breakthrough in early films. It changed everything.

Carl Dreyer, while not the first to move his camera in that close, took it to a level which can be called almost psychologically disorienting ... and you begin to wish he would pull back, so that you could get a break. But if Joan of Arc doesn't get a break, then neither should you in the audience. Close-ups have never been used to such a shattering effect.

That's the only way to describe the film. Shattering.

Screenshots below from this extraordinary film.

Movies watching movies:

A beautiful montage of people watching movies in movies ...

Funny - I had a similar idea for a post, so it's cool to see someone put together a montage like that. I love scenes in movies where the characters go to the movies. It's the world within the world aspect, partly ... but it's also the fact that movies inform our lives - not only that, but we mark memories through the movies we were seeing at the time. I know I remember "the summer of Star Wars" ... it was a movie, sure, but it was also part of life, the landscape, the culture. Or you know, we say stuff like, "Hey, member that night we went to see Sex Lies & Videotape and we ended up having a big fight about our relationship?" (or, er, maybe that was just me and my boyfriend ... ) ... But I love it when movies include that part of our relationship to the movies within their story. Like Alabama meeting Clarence at the kung fu movie.

There are countless examples. I recently watched Stranger Than Fiction again and there is a wonderful scene where he goes to the movie during the day and watches Monty Python's Meaning of Life and just sits and laughs like a little kid. Heartcracking.

Then there's also the big shootout at the end of Manhattan Murder Mystery - in the old movie palace - during a matinee of Lady From Shanghai. (Clip here.)

I wrote a brief post called "movies within movies" - focusing on the moment in Leila when Leila and her husband watch Dr. Zhivago ... they sit on the floor in their living room and you can see Omar Sharif glimmering bluely in the reflection of the glass table. A marvelous movie-within-movie moment, I thought.

Anyway, go check out the montage - lovely stuff

The Great Debaters; dir. Denzel Washington

The Great Debaters first came onto my radar because of this important site's multiple posts on it. I am not sure of that blogger's name, but she was determined that people would get out and see and support this film - a film about a debating team from a small black college in the 1930s that ended up defeating the national champions at Harvard in an historic debate. She writes:

Which came first the chicken or the egg? Is it that Black folks and White folks don't want to see something different out of Hollywood, or is it that Hollywood only seems to want to promote the same old narrow range of African American stories? If we don't go see this in droves, it might not be because we don't want to see it, it might be because a whole lot of folks don't know this movie is even out there. People can say what they want about Tyler Perry, but that man knows how to market a movie. The folks responsible for marketing "The Great Debaters" need to call Tyler and stop dialing it in. Get with it people! Time's a wastin'!

That's a site I read with some regularity, and she was nearly evangelical in her fervor to get people to go see this film - a film about the power of the intellect, a film about how to fight with words, and, all in all, a truly inspirational story. I didn't end up going to see The Great Debaters in the theatre, but I saw it last night, and just have to add my voice to the chorus: Wonderful movie!!

I think I've written before of my deep adoration for the "formula" of the sports movie. It just works for me (I mean, if it's done well). I love the whole struggling against adversity theme. I love how a group of disparate individuals has to come together to form a team. I love how there's a hard-ass coach who is determined to make his kids rise to the occasion. I also love it when there's a social or economic aspect added ... as in: kids who may be downtrodden or who don't have a leg up ... are shown the "way out" of their potential miserable futures - through this one big event, whatever it may be. This formula is annoying to some people, and it feels predictable to them. But to me, it is one of the most deeply satisfying story formulae in existence. I can settle in. I can relax. I know how it's going to go, because that's what a formula is, but it resonates with me. The movie can be shallow or deep, I don't care - it's the formula I love. Remember the Titans, Blue Crush, The Rookie, hell Searching for Bobby Fischer qualifies ... Bring It On qualifies ...
-- Hoosiers
-- All the Right Moves
-- Breaking Away
-- Miracle
-- Bend it like Beckham
-- 61*
-- Vision Quest
-- Rocky
-- Karate Kid
-- Stand and Deliver - with the sport being calculus ...

You get the point. Love the formula.

So here we have The Great Debaters which is, in essence, a sports movie - only the sport is debating. SO SATISFYING. Denzel Washington directed, his second foray, after 2002's Antwone Fisher. He doesn't try to be too clever here, his directing is gentle, specific, and very well crafted. He understands the formula and he pours this individual story into it, and it totally works. We have the tough coach of the debating team (played by Washington) - who is determined that these kids will have a shot, and the way they will have a shot - is through using their minds. He is fierce about that. He trains them in rhetoric, and improvisational responses, he makes them do mounds of research - gathering contextual quotes ... so that no matter the situation in a debate, they will be prepared.

It's the 1930s South, so there is almost complete segregation. It is only when their small debate team starts to go undefeated that white colleges start to say, 'Okay, let's debate these Negroes ..." The first inter-racial debate takes place in a tent in a field, because the university in question is so segregated that the black kids would not be allowed in the auditorium where debates normally would take place. It's a stressful situation, you can feel it in the audience and in the debating kids. It's all well and good to debate other black kids, over issues they all already agree on ... but to debate white kids? In front of a white audience? How will THAT go over? Watching these kids rise to the occasion (and because it's a sports movie, you get to know each one of them a little bit, and you love them ... you just love them) is intensely moving. I was a mess.

Denzel is great, too - but for me, the performance of the film is Forest Whitaker's. There's something about Forest Whitaker's intensity that, in and of itself, makes me want to cry. But here, seeing him in the role of a husband and father, a learned man who speaks 7 languages, a theology professor at the college - who holds his children to high standards in all things - academic, spiritual, moral - He's just marvelous. He's dignified, stately, a little bit scary ... but with an underbelly of warmth and kindness. There's a moment when his son, played by Denzel Whitaker (and that kid absolutely killed me) has suffered a serious defeat ... It was his big chance at a debate, and he choked ... he's the youngest kid on the team, only 14 years old, and he also struggles with the fact that his father is so illustrious, teaches at the college where he is a student (he's obviously a prodigy, small wonder with a dad like that) ... and he knows his father is so stern about accomplishment and doing the family proud ... The kid runs into the house and starts looking through the rooms for his mother - calling out, "Mom? Mom?" He is devastated. He knows he will be a disappointment to his parents ... but in that moment, he needs a mother's love. A little coddling. He's only 14 years old. But Forest Whitaker is home, and hears him calling out - so he appears in the door, holding a book in one hand, looking concerned and serious. His son looks at him for just one second, just one second of hesitation - and then races towards him and throws himself into his father's arms. Please just watch how Forest Whitaker reacts, and responds to this unexpected embrace ... He doesn't know what has happened with his son, and normally he takes a very strict tone with him ... but in that moment, he's a little boy, and so ... Forest Whitaker adjusts, in that moment, to what his son needs from him. Tremendously moving moment, and the kind of acting I love best. Silent, eloquent, powerful.

The film builds in suspense and tension, through victories, defeats, and side-line plots involving the local sherriff and the sharecroppers trying to organize into a union ... culminating in the debate team's journey to Cambridge to debate Harvard. They are little country kids, from a small town in Texas, totally segregated ... so to see them emerge into the palatial train station in Boston, being met by one of the members of the Harvard debate team, who is going to show them around and escort them back to their rooms, etc. ... and then to show them the debate hall where they will be debating - an absolutely intimidating gorgeous room that looks kind of like the House of Lords or something. The kids stroll about on the stage, gobsmacked, awestruck, excited, and scared to death.

I love Denzel, although I find him a bit too unendingly humorless for my taste - and so it's really really cool to see him here, playing things a bit lighter (when it's called for) - to see him in the classroom, pointing at this student to rebut, this one ... demanding that they strive for excellence. The 1930s setting adds to this man's obvious sense of mission: These kids must be strong to face the outside world. These kids must know how to respond ... and not just respond, but respond with their brains, their intellects ... Sure, it's an education. They're getting a great education, too. But there's more going on here than just that. Denzel plays both sides of that beautifully.

If you rent the film, make sure - MAKE SURE - you watch the Special Features. There are two documentaries:

-- The story of the original debate team at Wiley College - where they track down some of the original members, who are now in their 80s ... to talk about their memories of that time, the college, the debate coach, everything. Denzel sits and interviews them.

-- A short film about Denzel as a director

Both of these special features made me see Denzel in another light. NOT the "actor" light - but the collaborator, the director, the intelligent head of the entire project. Watching him kindly and sweetly ask the octogenarian debate team questions was so moving for me - He has things he wants to know, he is so thrilled that they have all showed up for the interviews - but he also had to make his voice very loud and very clear because most of them are obviously a little bit deaf - There's just such a kindness in him here. You can just see his mind at work, clicking away ... "Oh, I can use this ... Oh, this is good stuff ... I can use that ..." But at the same time, just having a nice conversation with these people who were there at that important moment in American history. Amazing. These people are AMAZING. You just love them!! Talking about what it was they "got" from the debate team, what the college was like - all that. It was incredibly moving, and there are a couple of times when you can see Washington reacting, just listening to one of them talk - and he's got a sheaf of papers in his hands, notes, and either a huge smile is on his face ... or a contemplative look ... It's a wonderful documentary about Wiley College, the 1930s, segregation, education - all that.

And then the second special feature, which is basically a "making of The Great Debaters" - focusing primarily on Denzel Washington as a director. You know, there are interviews with all the cast members, producers, all that - but there's one moment in particular that was so moving to me that I rewound to watch it 4 or 5 times. There's a scene where a debate is being broadcast on the radio - and the entire Wiley College student body has gathered in the auditorium to listen. It is a crucial moment for the team. When it is announced that Wiley College has won the debate, the auditorium erupts into chaos. Hugging, screaming, hats in air, etc. Great scene - a crucial part of any sports movie, an essential piece of the formula. So in the special features, you see Denzel Washington, glasses on a string around his neck, coaching the crowd of extras what he wants from them. "This is the biggest thing that has ever happened in this school - so you all can just go nuts, okay?" Then he counts down - "One ..... two ........" When he calls out "three" it is time to roll, and the place goes APESHIT. Hugging, screaming, jumping, absolute bedlam. It's a joy to watch. The camera pans back a bit to see Denzel on the sidelines, watching it all happen - and he's laughing, but also astonished at how into it everyone is - he can't believe the decibel level - and he kind of stands there, almost shy (like: "I did this??") - his hand on his head, kind of massaging it, an amazed expression on his face. I just wanted to hug him. He was so pleased, but even he was shocked at how far the crowd of extras took it! You then see him thanking the whole crowd - all of them who must have been like, "Holy shit, that is Denzel freakin' Washington standing RIGHT THERE ..." but he gave a gracious speech, thanking them for their time, expressing understanding of what a hard day it had been, long and tedious - and he was very grateful.

There are a bunch of moments showing Denzel at work - which were truly illuminating for me, in terms of his process, and also his enthusiasm. Director is different from actor. You're in charge. Every second you are called upon to make decisions. Everyone comes at you from every side: "how do these shoes look for the wife?" "There's a little problem with the location scouting ..." "We have 20 minutes before the sun goes down ... should we go on?" Etc. Big and little - the buck stops with the director. It was truly a joy to watch Denzel in that role.

But most of all, I loved watching him sitting on the sidelines, either looking at the monitor, or looking directly at the action. And he always sat there with a big happy smile on his face. He says at one point in an interview, "I like being a director. It makes me happy when other people do well."

You can totally see that in how he reacts to the work of other people, smiling at the monitor, or clutching at his own head during the bedlam in the auditorium, thinking, "Holy crap ... these people are into it ... How AWESOME!"

Yes. It is awesome. I loved the film.

Baby Face: pre-Code female

In early May I wrote about 1933's Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck in a highly charged pre-Code melodrama about a woman's dubious rise to the top. My thoughts about Baby Face here.

And a couple of days ago House of Mirth and Movies wrote an essay about Baby Face, with some very thought-provoking observations about it (it's still a difficult film - you realize just how much the ugliness of life was squelched by the Code when you see something like Baby Face).

I’ve seen several films of this type from the era, from Harlow’s The Red Headed Woman to the comedy-driven Gold Diggers of 1933. This one somehow feels far more immediate and dangerous. I’m finally undecided what to think of Powers, and can’t help putting myself in her place. It’s more difficult than I could imagine, especially considering her upbringing. How reckless is her behaviour? Should she have just been satisfied to live her life in abject poverty and abuse? Very early the film the point is made that honesty and kindness are not going to get people anywhere (especially not women it seems), so how wrong is she to abuse the loop holes of a system that only works to oppress and destroy people like her (people without money, and women in general)? I can’t help coming back to the fact that her own father prostituted her to men as young as fourteen…

I don’t think it’s a matter of condemning her, but rather understanding the circumstances of her actions. Putting myself in her shoes, it becomes a question of life and death. She stays behind, she is killing herself, and that isn’t an option for her.

Wonderful essay - go read the whole thing - and certainly, if you haven't already, check out Baby Face. The version I saw had both the pre-release version and the version that was deemed okay to go into the theatres. There's an interesting shot-by-shot analysis here of what was cut - which was mainly the explicit images of money passing hands at the saloon, making clear that Lily's father is her pimp, selling her to the highest bidder. The line about how "it's been nothing but dirty stinking men since I was fourteen years old" was cut. But you can see it in the pre-release version, and it still shocks. Her pain, and rage. But more than that - Lily's defense of herself when one of the guys gets rough, smashing a bottle over his head ... stuff like that. Not to mention the kind of egalitarian relationship between Lily and Chico, the black woman who works in her father's saloon. It's a class and gender issue that binds them together (not to mention friendship) - but they're women. They both know they're low chick on the totem pole. They're on equal footing. It's well worth watching both versions, for any movie buff - it gives you a tiny glimpse into how the Hays Code operated. Baby Face was one of the reasons the Hays Code was instituted (Public Enemy with Cagney was another) - and the film is still breathlessly subversive today. Amazing.

And come on. Let's give Stanwyck the props. She's my favorite. I love her hardness - which never seems like a put-on - but a true defining characteristic - think of how she was able to really fly with that in Double Indemnity where she played the bad dame to end all bad dames.

Anyway. Back to the link: Go read the whole thing.

Half Moon; dir: Bahman Ghobadi

Half Moon, an absolutely wonderful film directed by Bahman Ghobadi, and with a cameo appearance by Hedye Tehrani, is a story about borders. Borders between countries and borders between life and death. The entire film takes place on the borderlands (or, perhaps, no-man's-lands) between Turkey, Iraq and Iran. There are times when the border is nothing but a ditch with great mountainous plains stretching out on either side. Terribly dangerous, but there's not a border patrol in sight. The feeling of how artificial it is is palpable, borders superimposed by the powers-that-be, leaving the Kurds homeless and stuck in the middle. What is a border? Isn't it sometimes silly? That is one of the overriding feelings I got watching Half Moon, watching Mamo, a famous Kurdish singer who has been living in exile in Iran, and his multitude of sons, try to get back into Iraqi Kurdistan for a concert. It is as though being Kurdish is a deadly secret. Border guards in Iran, who have been speaking Farsi all along, pull Mamo aside and whisper in Kurdish, "I'm Kurdish, Mamo ..." Mamo is a hero to them. His return to Kurdistan is a huge deal, a political event. The Kurds don't belong anywhere, but their sense of identity and nationhood is actually stronger than many who belong to actual recognized nations. Isn't that always the way. Nothing like a little oppression to solidify a people's identity.

Half Moon is modeled after Mozart's "Requiem", and while much of the symbolism is a bit heavy-handed (coffins, death, open graves), I think it works. Because again, we're in a borderland. It is not a realistic film. We are in the borderland between dreaming and waking states. There are times when we're not sure that what we're looking at is actually real. Is this really happening, or is it in Mamo's head? Or was it a dream? None of it ends up mattering, because as Mamo approaches death (he is an old old man, he has sons who are in their 50s and 60s), his consciousness begins to turn towards the afterworld. He knows it is coming. He can feel it. He can almost hear it. There are moments, in the middle of busy crowd scenes, when you can tell that Mamo is hearing something. An approach. Someone, or something, coming to "get" him.

Half Moon takes place in the wake of the fall of Saddam. Saddam's genocidal campaigns against the Kurds are well-known, and so Mamo (played heartbreakingly by Ismail Ghaffari) has lived away from his homeland for almost 40 years. He was (and still is) a famous musician, but the wars against Kurdish culture were just as devastating as the actual wars. Kurdish music banned, singers fled to the four corners of the earth, or imprisoned, or exiled. Saddam Hussein is now gone, and although the war still rages (as someone shouts across the border, "The Americans are shooting at everything that moves!"), Mamo and his sons, all musicians as well, are called back to "Iraqi Kurdistan" to give a concert of traditional Kurdish music. It will be a joyous celebration, a rebirth of cultural confidence, a keening cry of freedom.

Mamo is old. Such a journey (in a beat-up school bus) will be dangerous and arduous. But if he does one last thing in his life, it will be this concert. He has waited so long. Even though one of his sons pulls him aside and tells him that the village wiseman has warned Mamo not to go, Mamo will not turn back. He shouts at the jagged mountains, "Who wants to stop me?" Ismail Ghaffari has no other credits to his name. I would imagine he is probably a musician - but his acting here is breathtaking. He is a determined old man, sometimes bossy, and sometimes haunted. He is afraid of death (aren't we all?), and he is afraid that it will come before he reaches Kurdistan. His emotional isolation is total. We all die alone. But it is his job to keep the group together, to keep them focused on the task at hand. His face is cracked with wrinkles, his eyes glitter - sometimes with deep love and gentleness, other times with rage, or fear. It's a marvelous performance and there were a couple of moments when he brought me to tears.

Bahman Ghobadi, the director, has said that if he didn't get into film, he would have been a musician. This is one of the most produced of Iranian films I have seen ... in terms of the sound design. The music is omnipresent (oh, for a soundtrack!), and there are beautiful scenes of the bus traveling through the mountains, with Mamo and his sons playing their traditional instruments, as the fearsome landscape whizzes by outside. Just beautiful.

I began to think, as I watched this film, My God, it is art that holds us together. As Camille Paglia wrote once, (and I'm paraphrasing, sorry): "If we ever meet beings from another planet and want to show them who we are, it is by our art that we will want to be known." There is no official "Kurdistan", and even though Saddam is gone, the future of the Kurds is in flux. But the music survives, and it survives in the musicians. They have not been allowed to perform their traditional music in 40 years, but cultural memory is a long long thing. The body does not forget its origins. There is a reason why Mamo is so revered, and along the way, in villages and hillsides, whoever they meet, runs up to Mamo to kiss him, or get his autograph. It is because he contains the cultural memory of Kurdistan. Not just "contains" it, but embodies it. He is the embodiment of their hopes, dreams, wishes, and memories.

As they travel along, they pick up all of his different sons along the way.

There are a couple of stand-out scenes where - like in The Day I Became A Woman (my review here) - the landscape itself seems to turn into something mystical. I saw things in Half Moon that I never saw before. Like I mentioned in my review for The Day I Became A Woman, you become used to seeing the same old things in movies, even good movies. Streets, apartments, closeups, beautiful trees and ocean, but then you come across a scene that is totally and completely original, and you realize: Wow, there really IS something new under the sun. I love film-making like that. Needless to say, I am not talking about CGI. I am talking about the apartment on the white beach in The Day I Became A Woman, with the bed and the refrigerator standing on the white sand. I am talking about the traveling band of hippie mimes in Blow Up, playing tennis with an imaginary ball. Amazing scene. Mysterious, beautiful, unexplainable. I watch and I can struggle with what it "means", I can think about it, ponder it ... but in the end, what is so amazing about these moments is how they look. A movie becomes a painting. A movie becomes a dream-space. It's not a realistic medium anyway, it is necessarily subjective. I love it when a filmmaker has the confidence to not just realize that, but to utilize it. It takes guts and a personal visiom.

At one point, Mamo stops off to pick up his daughter who is going to be his female singer in the concert. Because she is a relative, traveling with the men will be allowed. (Don't get me started. Or, all right, get me started. Half Moon takes a delicate stance here - but there are moments in the film, poetic moments, which have as much anger as a feminist manifesto. But it is all in context of the story - which is tremendously important. Remember that Iranian filmmakers work under strict censorship, so they have to be very tricky in how they get their point across. But the situation not just of women in Iran, but of performers, is one of the themes of Half Moon. It is the female voice that can raise the male from the dead - this is Mamo's view, and his experience. He cannot perform without the "celestial voice" of the female. But obstacles pile up in his way - stupid bureaucrats, rigid mullahs, cultural bullshit - that says women are not supposed to perform on stage. Or with men who aren't relatives. Or ... basically do anything besides be a submissive wife and bear lots of sons. But the females in Half Moon are not just "celestial voices", but - at the end - transcendent angels of mercy - tapped into some chord in the earth that men can never hear.

But men need them. A woman can help the man hear that chord. She is necessary to him. Bahman Ghobadi is amazing in how he puts this into the film, and lets it just sit there. The censors were probably too dumb and too literal to pick up on it.)

Mamo's daughter is a schoolteacher, and her village was submerged in a flood. Everyone lost their homes, and the school was destroyed. So she has now set up a school, with desks and all, on the side of a hill, and that is where Mamo finds her, when he comes to pick her up to take her to Kurdistan. This is what I am talking about: it is a brief scene. Mamo's daughter cannot leave to go to the concert, she knows she is leaving her father in the lurch, but the schoolchildren need her. They all seem to be girls, in vibrant different colored chadors, sitting quietly at desks ranged across the hillside, with snow-capped mountains in the background. It's an incredible image. It stops the heart to some degree. There is no "meaning", it is just beauty and poetry. I loved it. Mamo's daughter senses, she just senses, that she will not see her father again. They embrace, and she weeps. But Mamo must go on.

And now he has an idea. He needs a woman. He needs a singer. A famous Kurdish singer named Hesho has been imprisoned with 1334 other "woman singers" in a village carved into a mountainside. They have been exiled there. Who knows why. For performing with men other than a relative, for performing at all, for performing Kurdish music which was not allowed ... who knows. Hesho has a "celestial voice" and is, in her way, as famous as Mamo. All of Mamo's sons try to talk Mamo out of going to 'get" Hesho. It is illegal, first of all. She has no permit. She is not allowed to travel with them. They all could be arrested. Mamo doesn't care. It is her voice he wants, he needs. Perhaps, on some level, he hopes that her voice will raise him from the spectre of death.

Watching the approach to the "village of exiled singers" is one of the most amazing pieces of film-making I've ever seen. Mamo approaches from afar, and it's almost difficult to see the village, since it's built into the rock. And in the distance, you can hear the singing voices, echoing through the mountains. All female. A celestial sound indeed. Mamo's son asks, "Who is that singing?" Mamo answers, "It is all 1334 singers. They might as well just be one singer." A truly potent evocation of cultural warfare and the results thereof. It took my breath away. Reminds me of Stella Adler's great instruction to actors and artists: "It is not that important to know who you are. It is important to know what you do, and then do it like Hercules." What happens when what you do is illegal? What happens when you are not allowed to do it like Hercules? Not just not allowed, but imprisoned? To hear the celestial voices of the women floating out of the mountainside village is to ache for everyone oppressed everywhere. But Ghobadi, again, does not hammer you over the head with it. He remains in the context of his story, which is tremendously important. All you need to do is to see the village and hear the women singers, and know that they have been imprisoned there ... and that's all you need. You don't need to add anything. As Mamo enters the village, to go get Hesho, all of the women who have heard of his approach - stand on ceremony. They stand on rooftops, on walls, they do not move or speak. They each hold huge drums, but they do not play. Not yet. It is a ceremonious return. He is a hero to them. He has become their voice. My God. It's such a moving and amazing scene. And, at some unseen cue, all of the women, as one, start to beat on their drums, and sing. It's a sound to make the hair on the back of your neck rise up. It makes sense, if you think like a mullah, that these women would be banished from society. Because if they were allowed to play like that all the time, it would be cause for revolt. In and of themselves, the sounds those women make have one underlying scream: FREEDOM. Dangerous. Mamo strolls through, and then walks back out - with Hesho at his side, a beautiful sad-faced woman with long grey braids. The exiled women crowd around them, making a corridor for them to walk through, banging on their drums, and singing. They cannot leave, they are still imprisoned - but Hesho will represent. Hesho will sing for them.

Hesho is a small part played by the exquisite Hedye Tehrani. More thoughts on her here and here. I strongly urge you to look up this woman's work and experience it. She's a giant star in Iran, and her films very often make it to the international film circuit - she's as big as they come in Iran - but you know, her cache as an actress is definitely not that she is a household name to us in the "West" (which always makes me laugh because if you look at the earth, east and west are all just a matter of perspective - depends on where you are standing, I mean seriously). But she should be known to all of us. She's doing wonderful deep-felt work.

The journey takes many twists and turns, some tragic, some comedic, and Mamo begins to lose faith that they will ever get there. Larger forces appear to be at work, nation-states, languages (you must speak Farsi, not Kurdish, etc.), warfare ... all gathering together to stop the concert from going on. It seems insurmountable. Not to mention the fact that every time they are stopped by a policeman or a border guard, Hesho must climb into the crawlspace beneath the floorboards, hiding from detection. A direct reference to Mamo's death-dreams, and his haunting image of himself looking up out of a coffin. Ghobadi makes that connection explicit. Mamo, an old man, trapped by his own approaching death. Hesho, a woman, and that is her only crime.

The film strikes a lovely balance between comedy and serious drama. The guy who drives the bus, who is filming the entire journey in the hopes that he can sell the tape to Kurdish television, is hysterical. Kind of a buffoon but with a heart so big you want to tell him to protect it a little bit more. I also love the one son who breaks out his laptop throughout the journey, to email so-and-so, or to look up a better way to get there on the Iraqi version of Mapquest. They all have Yahoo email accounts and they chat about them. "I'm at Mamokurdistan@yahoo.com ..." Messing with our preconceived notions. I always love that.

The last 20 minutes of the film were shattering for me to watch. Maybe because of where I am at right now in my life. But I was mopping the tears off of my face.

Bravo, Ismail Ghaffari, Mister actor with no credits ... You absolutely killed me. My desire to see that concert, to have everyone arrive safely, to have it "all work out", was so intense I could barely watch the end of the film. As death comes closer, breathing on the back of Mamo's neck, he begins to hear the music. The celestial chords of his own requiem.

Some of the more spectacular imagery from the film below:

The movie Billy Wilder wanted to make

In line with what happened Today In History, here's something else. I love this story.

Billy Wilder and Charles Lindbergh were good friends despite many political, social differences - and here is one of Wilder's stories of filming (who directed The Spirit of St. Louis, a movie I'm not really wacky about) - and it fills me with regret that I don't get to see Wilder's version (in his own mind, I mean):

I got this excerpt from Cameron Crowe's wonderful book Conversations with Wilder:

Billy Wilder: "Spirit of St. Louis". I got into that. I suggested it. But I could not get in a little deeper, into Lindbergh's character. There was a wall there. We were friends, but there were many things I could not talk to him about. It was understood -- the picture had to follow the book. The book was immaculate. It had to be about the flight only. Not about his family, about the daughter, the Hauptmann thing, what happened after the flight ... just the flight itself.

I heard a story from newspapermen who were there in Long Island waiting for him to take off. And the newspapermen told me a little episode that happened there, and that would have been enough to make this a real picture.

The episode was that Lindbergh was waiting for the clouds to disappear -- the rain and the weather had to be perfect before he took off. There was a waitress in a little restaurant there. She was young, and she was very pretty. And they came to her and said, "Look, this young guy there, Lindbergh, sweet, you know, handsome. He is going to--" "Yes, I know, he is going to fly over the water." And they said, "It's going to be a flying coffin, full of gas, and he's not going to make it. But we come to you for the following reason. The guy has never been laid. Would you do us a favor, please. Just knock on the door, because the guy cannot sleep..."

So she does it.

And then, at the very end of the picture, when there's the parade down Fifth Avenue, millions of people, and there is that girl standing there in the crowd. She's waving at him. And he doesn't see her. She waves her hand at him, during the ticker-tape parade, the confetti raining down. He never sees her. He's God now.

This would be, this alone would be, enough to make the picture. Would have been a good scene. That's right -- would have been a good scene. But I could not even suggest it to him.

Cameron Crowe: Couldn't you have had your producer bring it up?

Billy Wilder: No. Absolutely not. They would have withdrawn the book or something, "There you go, Hollywood, out of here!" I don't know -- very tough guy, very tough guy...

Cameron Crowe: Did you ever think about using that character in another picture? The waitress from the early days?

Billy Wilder: Sure, that can be used, yeah, but it fit there. And just that girl, who we'd see again at the very end. And you fade out on that. That would have made the whole picture.

I am inclined to agree. Love it. Billy Wilder had lots of movies fully filmed in his own head ... I love to hear about them almost as much as the ones that actually got made.

A Woman's Face; dir. George Cukor

Combining the impeccable aesthetic of MGM, the meticulous lighting and atmosphere George Cukor is known for, and some kick-ass performances by all the leads (Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas, Conrad Veidt, Osa Massen), A Woman's Face is a psychological melodrama with aspects of a crime thriller, a noir, and a five-hankie weepie. It tells the story of Anna Holm (played brilliantly by Joan Crawford), a woman who was horribly disfigured in her youth, leaving her scarred on one side of her face. Being ugly is not just skin-deep. Anna Holm has been repeatedly rejected by the human race, who stare at her scar in horror and fascination, recoiling from her, and so she rejects the world in turn, succumbing to a life of crime. It's not that she's bad all the way through - Joan Crawford manages to suggest the pain at the heart of being that rejected, and what it means to the development of a personality. Joan Crawford naturally was a babe from the moment she was born, and seriously: this woman was a babe to end all babes. If you've seen photographs of her in her late teens and early twenties you know what a stunner she was. I mean, she was always beautiful - but in her youth she was spectacular. To see how she inhabits the neurotic cringing personality of Anna Holm, how compassionately she suggests what it is like to be ugly (and she does so with no condescension or self-importance, like: "Look at me! Joan Crawford! Bein' all ugly!"), and how she shows this woman's dawning realization of her own softness, her own desires ... is a revelation.

I am determined that I will see a Joan Crawford Renaissance in my lifetime. I am determined that her reputation be rehabilitated! It's insane that a vicious autobiography with a giant CHIP on its shoulder should so destroy an actress' entire reputation ... that book was a watershed, not just in Hollywood memoirs, but in the publishing industry itself. But that's neither here nor there. And frankly, I am SICK of having to talk about Christina Crawford every time I talk about her mother Joan. I am SICK of having Christina Crawford set the tone of the conversation, and insinuate herself into the action. We've heard what you had to say, Christina, now get out of my life. Whatever did or did not happen in that household is, as far as I am concerned, immaterial. I don't care if Joan Crawford made her children scrub the china with toothbrushes, I don't care if she made them dance a jig in the moonlight until they collapsed from exhaustion, I don't care if she made them drain the pool with teaspoons. I'm over it. Can we talk about her WORK, please? Honest to God. If she abused her kids, that's awful. Whatevs. I'm not interested in Joan Crawford because she's an upstanding citizen (although I think Christina's damning book leaves much to be desired in the way of, oh, TRUTH). I'm interested in Joan Crawford because she is a fine actress. So. NO MORE, CHRISTINA. You've dominated the Crawford landscape long enough.

Ah, that felt good.

A Woman's Face is told in flashbacks. We start in a Swedish court of law, where Anna Holm is on trial for murder. We never see Joan Crawford's face. She wears a black hat tilted over one eye, and her head is bowed. There is a group of people who are the 'witnesses' and they are all held in a small room with express instructions to not discuss the case amongst themselves. Wonderful character actors, all of them. One by one, they are led out into the courtroom to tell their version of the story, and we flash back to the past.

Conrad Veidt (who was just about to play Major Strasser in Casablanca) plays Torsten Barring, a slick conniving conman, who meets Anna Holm in the back of a tavern (leave it to MGM to make that tavern like something out of a fairy tale. The group of revelers sit outside on the patio, surrounded by a Hansel and Gretl forest, absolutely gorgeous) when he is trying to get out of paying his check, and when he sees her scar he does not recoil in disgust. He takes it in, certainly, but his manner is that of a gentleman, kind and considerate. He sees in her something that he can use (because he's that kind of guy) and eventually they go into "business" together. Their business is blackmailing the rich.

One of Conrad Veidt's party is the sleazy luscious Vera Segert, played beautifully by Osa Massen.

She is married to a prominent plastic surgeon in Stockholm, but she is obviously having an affair. Probably multiple affairs. She's a slut. Conrad Veidt steals a packet of her love letters out of the jacket of her lover, in order to blackmail her later.

Anna Holm goes to visit Mrs. Segert, and there is a thrilling vicious scene of confrontation between the two women. Mrs. Segert begs for mercy, she loves her husband, please let me have my letters! At one point, Joan Crawford has her on the couch, and she slaps her on the face 3, 4 times. Watch Joan Crawford in that violent moment. It's melodramatic, sure, but Joan Crawford was at home in melodrama. She could fill it, she could justify it, she could make it look real. I'm convinced she could make anything look real. She's that good. Her slapping of Mrs. Segert is not movie-violence, it's real violence, and you clench up, watching it, because it's the real world inserting itself into what is, of course, just a movie. Anna Holm loses control in that moment. And Anna Holm, twisted inside, bitter, hard, never loses control. So to see her slapping Mrs. Segert, Mrs. Segert crying out and sobbing, trying to get away, is thrilling movie-making. Crawford's eyes. Just take a look at Crawford's eyes in that scene. Scary. It's real.

Mr. Segert (played by the marvelous, God I love him, dear God help me, Melvyn Douglas) comes home unexpectedly and interrupts Anna Holm in the act of trying to escape out the window. Mrs. Segert, slut that she is, is terrified that Anna Holm will reveal the REAL reason that she is in their house. Mrs. Segert continuously insists that she "lufs" her husband, she "lufs" Gustav so much ... but you know she's only in it for the money and the prestige. She has a vested interest in being "Mrs. Gustav Segert" and if Anna Holm breaks out the packet of love letters, all will be lost. However: Gustav Segert just happens to be ("just happens"! Ha - that's one hell of a coincidence) the number one plastic surgeon in Stockholm, and he gets a look at the scar on Anna Holm's face, and tells her he can help her. He pulls out a book of before and after photographs, people who have been terribly burned or scarred - and what he has been able to do for them, the reconstructions he is known for.

Anna Holm is a tough case. She's not just a softie waiting to emerge with the right circumstances ... she is tough. She's had to be. But Joan Crawford flips through the before and after photographs with a dawning sense of hope on her face, hope and amazement ... and it's even more startling because hope, for Anna Holm, is necessarily combined with sadness. Hope cannot stand on its own, because she has been disappointed and hurt so many times. And that does something to a human being. It warps what was once straight. (I'm thinking about Tess of the D'Urbervilles right now, as I seem to do whenever such a question of the warping of personality by life comes up ... Can such things be undone? Is there such a thing as "too late"? Hardy thinks yes, but then he was a great pessimist. Tess was made, MADE, for a happy and fulfilled life. She was made to be a vibrant loving and loved woman. But life had something different in store for her, and by the time she actually emerges from the nightmare, and finds love again - it is too late. The damage has been done.) Joan Crawford is able to modulate that kind of delicate imbalance with meticulous accuracy. A million things are going on on her face (and for half of the film, she only has half of her face at her disposal as an actress!), she cannot believe that he is able to work such miracles, and she also cannot believe that he could ever "fix" her. "You couldn't fix this!" she says. But there's something deeper going on in the scene, and you just need to keep your eyes fixed on Crawford's face to discern it. The thought that someday she might NOT have a scar has never occurred to Anna Holm. But now, suddenly ... it does. Instead of leaping for joy, she is almost devastated by it. Because what will it mean? Her whole life is about having that scar. Who will she be without a scar? There's a certain sense of loss there as well ... it is as though she feels her whole identity is her scar.

Anna Holm submits to 12 grueling operations, and Gustav Segert (I love Melvyn Douglas ... have I mentioned that?) reminds her that all of this may come to naught. He makes no promises. But he's a genius, and after the 12th operation, Anna Holm is revealed as, well, the Joan Crawford we all know and love.

But life isn't as simple or as clear as it seems. We see that immediately in a scene where the newly un-scarred Joan Crawford strolls through a park. She still has the cringing posture and odd mannerisms of someone trying to hide herself from the world. A little boy chasing after a ball bumps into her, and glances up. Anna, so used to the cringing response from people to her scar, recoils, hiding the right side of her face, waiting for the inevitable "Ewwww" look to appear. But the little boy grins up at her, openly, and makes some cheese-ball 1941 comment like, "Gee, lady, you're awful pretty!" One must accept a bit of cheese with your pointed psychological melodrama. And I was moved to tears watching Joan Crawford's face in response to that comment. She realized how she had anticipated rejection, and then to NOT have it come ... it was like you could actually SEE her start to open her heart up to the world. You can actually SEE her become a little bit softer.

But the path will not be that easy for Anna Holm, due to her sordid past and her association with Conrad Veidt. Not to mention the fact that living for so many years in a state of bitterness, removing herself from the human race (as it were, and as she says in the last line of the film), accepting the world's worst opinion of her, and living up to it ... it won't be that easy for her to 'change her spots'. Thank God the film didn't go in that direction, ie: If you're ugly you're bad! But all you need to do is be changed into something beautiful, and all will be well! A Woman's Face is more complex than that. People internalize the world. It happens all the time. Our outer appearances are judged a million times a day, and people make decisions about us based on our appearances. This is just a part of life. For the majority of her time on this earth, Anna Holm got the message: You are ugly and it makes us frightened to look at you. And so she internalized that until it became her entire identity.

Joan Crawford is marvelous at this. Watch how she always, even after the operation, protects the right side of her face. She still seems to feel that the scar is there. And Crawford plays it so well that there were times when I could still see the scar, even though her skin was smooth and clear. The scar was inside. She still felt it, and therefore, so did I.

A Woman's Face is a terrific film with some minor silly elements, one being a "Swedish" folk dance scene - which The Siren, in her brilliant way, breaks down:

By far the worst is the dance at the castle, when Crawford shows up in the aforementioned dirndl. The guests are doing a traditional Swedish dance (or so we're told, possibly MGM made the whole thing up) and the old man who owns the castle says to Crawford, "come and try it! it isn't hard!" No, not hard at all. You just have to jump in the air, swing your partner, join hands and galop down a row of similarly attired partygoers, twirl in a foursome, join hands again and do a "London Bridge" formation and then start all over again with Conrad Veidt as your partner. For the duration of the dance poor Joan's performance goes stone-dead. Anyone who's ever seen her Charlestoning up a storm in one of her Jazz Baby roles realizes right away that Joan is really, really hating this "Lonely Goatherd" shit.

HA!!! Totally.

And I'm sorry to bring up Christina again but I cannot help it:

To watch Joan Crawford's intelligent heartfelt nuanced performance in A Woman's Face is to realize, for the 100th time, what a grave disservice has been done to this American icon. And I admit, I'm pissed about it. Joan Crawford is a fantastic actress, and there are many folks out there who might just know her from late-night viewings of Baby Jane, OR (worse yet) only know her from Faye Dunaway's chew-the-scenery performance in Mommie Dearest. I have nothing against Dunaway's performance, and I actually think it was scary brilliant ... but to have Joan Crawford, her huge and long body of work, to be remembered in the minds of millions as that? It's enough to make me want to cry. Joan Crawford was a huge movie star. There are plenty of huge movie stars. But watch her acting, watch how smart it is - and also, gotta say it - watch how she creates a character here. Joan Crawford obviously had a persona, she came up in the time of great personae ... but in her best roles, she submerges that into the experience of the character. Like in Daisy Kenyon (my review here) - a simple and compassionate portrayal of a magazine illustrator, living a simple yet independent life, torn between two loves and also her desire to have her own life. Then there's Mildred Pierce, her tour de force, and seriously: please watch her in the scenes where she's waiting tables on a busy night in the restaurant, barking to the cooks, "Hold slaw ..." before swooping off with a tray of food over her head. Her work is detailed. I think a lot of times that is forgotten about Crawford, in the sometimes over-the-top portrayals in her later career, not to mention the shrieking-eel afterimage left by Faye Dunaway. There's also Sudden Fear (my review here) which has quickly become not only my favorite Crawford performance, but one of my favorite performances of an actress ever. Marvelous. Marvelous. To put all of that up against her performance as the bitter pissed-off cynical Anna Holm in A Woman's Face is to see a giant talent at work, an actress who knew what she was good at, knew what she was capable of, and had the ambition and guts to mess with her own persona when called upon to do so. Here she is in A Woman's Face, denied, for the most part, of what was probably seen as her main asset: her beauty. And watch how Crawford doesn't just show off the makeup job of the scar, it's not at all a superficial performance. That scar goes to her core, and Joan Crawford plays it that way.

She was an actress. Check out this terrific interview with Crawford about how she worked on parts, and you can really get a sense of her dedication and her understanding of what her actual job is. I love her comment: "It's wonderful to be a perfectionist." I think many actors are in it to be famous. And I don't scorn that. Fame is a great motivator. But if fame distracts you to such a degree that you are then unable to do your work (I'm looking at YOU, Lindsay Lohan ... I love you, girl! But remember what you got into this thing for ... get back to THAT, mkay? I got your back!) ... you are no longer an actress. You are an "object". You are in a two-way conversation with the tabloids. It is no longer about your work, it is about your personal life, your persona, your vajayjay, and your offscreen shenanigans. Now if you're Paris Hilton, that's fine. I mean, what else is she going to do? She had BETTER be in the tabloids at all times, because other than her fortune she hasn't got much else going for her. But Lohan's got talent. I love her. She's actually an actress, so I hope that her derailment does not ... well, derail her completely. Because her job, her actual job, is to be an actress. And she's good! Joan Crawford had both elements in her life. She was a massive star. A "personality". But she also knew what her actual job was ... and that was NOT to be a star, but to be a good actress. To get in projects she was right for (and she had to lobby HARD for some of her most indelible parts), and then to commit totally to the demands of the script.

See A Woman's Face. Crawford is wonderful, and have I mentioned how much I love Melvyn Douglas? Also, it's a total hoot to watch Crawford in a dirndl skirt doing some bullshit MGM version of a folk dance. Seriously.

Other things to watch out for in the film:

-- The thrilling sleigh chase. It was filmed in Idaho, apparently - and however they did it - I have no idea, and I don't care ... it's a thrilling piece of filmmaking. Two sleighs gallop at top speed through the icy woods, dodging sudden avalanches, skidding perilously around corners ... Fantastic. Terrifying.

-- Conrad Veidt is great. I will always think of him as Major Strasser but he's great here, and he has much more to do. The character is despicable, and yet you can see totally why Crawford's character would find herself under his spell. When he saw her scar, he did not recoil! He accepted her!

-- Every character actor filling out the picture gives a slam-dunk performance. God, I love that old studio system mainly for its stable of brilliant reliable character actors.

-- Melvyn Douglas has a relatively thankless role, but what a wonderful performance he gives. I am particularly attached to the first moment he sees Anna's scar, and the soft kind look that comes into his eyes - mixed with professional interest. I also love the "chase" scene with the cable cars over the freezing white-water river.

-- But mainly it is the nuances of Crawford's performance that makes this picture a must-see. Her bitterness in the early flashbacks is not a put-on, or an actress self-consciously "behaving" like the character would behave. It feels like I am looking at who this woman actually is. It doesn't feel "acted" at all.

Brava.

Culture snapshots and emotional snapshots

-- I'm reading A Widow for One Year by John Irving and also The Fortune of War by Patrick O'Brian. Awesome counterpoint. Both superb writers in their own way.

-- Thank you, dear Siobhan, for introducing me to the amazing pleasures of L.E.O. - I cannot get enough of them right now. (Website here) Mike Viola and the Candybutchers are pretty much a required course if you are an O'Malley - kinda like the Foo Fighters - you at least have to give them a chance ... otherwise we won't take you seriously. It's kind of non-negotiable. Sorry. Anyway, L.E.O. is sheer liquid joy floating through the atmosphere. The song "Make Me" is my current fave. (Explanation of what L.E.O. is here)

-- Thinking a lot about Jeff Bridges these days. More later.

-- Went to a screening last week of Mongol, the sweeping Russian epic about Genghis Khan. Big plush press screening room on 57th Street, it was great. Everyone (myself included) blackberrying throughout the film, stepping outside to take a phone call, whatever ... and also scribbling on notepads throughout ... totally different atmosphere from seeing a movie out in the real world, but fun and interesting. My review will be on House Next Door eventually - I'll point you that way when it launches.

-- Totally consumed by something I'm working on now. It's causing me a lot of stress, there are not enough hours in the day, but I find a deadline ultimately very freeing.

-- Oh, guess who I heard from randomly (God bless Facebook) ... the guy I gave a photograph of my eyeball to for Valentine's Day 'lo those many years ago. Hysterical. It was good to catch up. I didn't bring up the eyeball. It's still too embarrassing.

-- I miss all of my friends right now.

-- Cashel wears a fedora to school now. He calls it his "trademark".

-- Allison's going to Italy for 10 days with her aunt to take a vacation in Tuscany on a horse farm. She's going to be riding horses the entire time. I'm so happy for her, although I will miss her.

-- Thank you, Hitachi. From the bottom of my heart: THANK. YOU.

-- Oh, and I'm also reading Patricia Neal's autobiography (thank you, cousin Mike!) and damn it's making me fucking SAD. She had one love. Gary Cooper. And she never recovered from the loss. Never. And Roald Dahl was a son of a bitch. But what a life, what a career, what strength ... but she ends the book with thoughts of Gary. She never got over it.

-- I crossed 2 or 3 pretty major things off my To Do list which have been haunting me. I actually cried when I crossed the last one off. It had been tormenting my mind, and giving me stress dreams.

-- Watched Stranger Than Fiction last night for, oh, the 10th time, and had to mop the tears off my face at the end. Slowly it's becoming one of my all-time favorite movies. ("You're never too old for space camp, dude.")

-- Last week I said the following sentence to Patrick, "My fallopian tubes are unfurling." Patrick still has not recovered.

-- My entire consciousness is now consumed by the bridesmaid dress I will wear in September.

-- I find office supplies immensely relaxing.

Hemlock; directed by Behrouz Afkhami

In my continuing tour of contemporary Iranian cinema, I watched Hemlock last night. Directed by Behrouz Afkhami, and starring the wonderful Hedye Tehrani, it tells the story of a mid-level manager (played by Fariborz Arabnia) at a factory in Tehran - who is being bribed to sell the company to a bunch of exiled Iranians from Los Angeles - he will be made CEO if he accepts the bribe, and there's a shadiness to the entire thing. His partner gets in a horrible car accident (there is some speculation that it was NOT an accident) and is hospitalized. Now all of this is basically just prologue and context for the real guts of the story: Mahmoud (Arabnia) has a wife and kids, and lives in comfort in a middle-class suburb of Tehran. He begins to drive into Tehran every day to visit his injured partner in the hospital. While there, he meets and becomes captivated by a nurse in the hospital - played by Hedye Tehrani. Although Tehrani is a giant star in Iran, I only first became aware of her last year when I saw the lovely film Fireworks Wednesday (my review here). I sing the praises of Tehrani in that review, and I'll continue it here.

Hemlock is a melodrama, with serious issues being brought up - but in a kind of ham-fisted soap opera-ish style. If I had to come up with a word, I'd say it was "overwrought". It's basically the story of a man who has an extramarital affair - only in Iran they have a special name for it: "temporary marriage" (or sigheh). It's extremely controversial - and people on both sides of the argument feel very strongly about it. It's one of those weird issues where Iranian feminists line up with the conservative mullahs on the same side. Some feel that "temporary marriage" is akin to prostitution ... others feel that sex is a normal impulse, and people need SOME release, even if they are not married yet - due to whatever reason. "Temporary marriage" is a way to keep all sex within the bounds of legality. Elaine Sciolino wrote an article about temporary marriage which presents the issue pretty clearly. The pros, the cons ... and not just intellectual pros and cons, because, after all, this is not just an intellectual debate. It's an issue that actually affects real people's lives, for realz. I like Sciolino a lot - she wrote the wonderful bookPersian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (excerpt here) - she can be a bit soft on the regime, I'm not wacky about that - but her book is not primarily a political book (and neither are her columns - although you realize that any issue involving people's personal lives becomes political in Iran - down to the clothes people wear, and issues involving sex, birth control, masturbation ... Whatever. It's political.) I think Sciolino's gift resides (and I highly recommend her books) in presenting the people, in their context ... and yes, drawing conclusions ... but also being able to admit, "You know what? There are things going on here that I can't quite understand.") Temporary marriage is the real topic of Hemlock, but that kind of gets lost in the top-heavy plot, and some scenes which push beyond drama and go into something I would call over-the-top. But don't let that put you off. It's an interesting little film, a domestic drama, really - which confronts the issue of temporary marriage head-on, and how silly it is. It's an affair, plain and simple. His wife back home has no idea that he has a whole other life in Tehran.

Hedye Tehrani plays a modern woman, very unlike the more traditional wife, who is draped in the full black chador. Tehrani wears light flowered scarves around her head, Ray Banz, and long light-colored trench coats. She is independent (although we come to realize that she has a lot more complexity than is first revealed - her father is an opium addict, and she buys him opium on the black market ... she's basically his supplier. So there are these scenes of her careening around in a car with her drug dealer, a nice guy actually - she's smoking, and putting the drugs into her handbag ... It's a whole side of her that her "temporary husband", blown away by her beauty, never sees. Until the end, when it is too late). Mahmoud, who also seems like a modern man, reveals himself as traditional - when he suggests to her that they get a "temporary marriage" - basically licensing their sexual encounter - and she laughs in his face. "You believe in all that stuff?" she says.

A couple words about Tehrani. She is an actress. Many Iranian films use non-actors, and that has its uses - but when you see a script in the hands of an actress, who knows how to create a character, and make a scene happen - and have a subtext ... you can see the difference. Tehrani, like I mentioned in my review of Fireworks Wednesday, seems uninterested in being liked. And that's so rare in actors - especially gorgeous ones, and she's one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. So far, she has revealed herself, as an actress, as willing to go where the character goes, do what the character does, and not protect herself. She is not particularly sympathetic in Hemlock, although eventually your heart does ache for her. She's a liar. She has not told Mahmoud the truth about who she is, and what her life is like. She makes up a story about being abandoned by her first husband, you know - to "up" the sympathy factor. She sneaks around, meeting her buddy who is a drug dealer. And as the film goes on, the "temporary marriage" she is in begins to grate. And then, not just grate - but drive her out of her mind. She wants to be validated, she wants to be accepted into his life. His wife doesn't even know. Tehrani shows up at their house one day, when he is not there, and sits chatting with the wife, making up a story about how Mahmoud was going to help her get a visa. Mahmoud begins to realize that, by letting her into his life, he has perhaps sown the seeds of his own destruction. He tries to cut it off. She threatens suicide. He pays her a settlement (which is part of the whole "temporary marriage" deal) and she stands in her kitchen, alone, looking at the coins on the counter, weeping. Tehrani is wonderful. The material is not worthy of her - it's all pretty conventional, the way it is filmed ... but I just love watching her act. She's unpredictable. She appears to be alive, rather than acting.

In one scene, she and Mahmoud sit and have a picnic in a park. She teases him about being a good Muslim. He says that yes, he does pray 5 times a day. She seems surprised. The thing about temporary marriage is that - as it is presented - it is little better than a sneaky affair. And she eventually, with the coins on the counter, realizes she is in the role of a whore. But she loves him. In the picnic scene, she asks him if he could teach her how to do the daily prayers. You get the sense that she is not interested in it for religious reasons, but as a way to being close to him. Tehrani is never playing just one thing. There's always a deep coursing river going on beneath her external actions ... she's fascinating to watch.

They have a date that night. She is going to cook him dinner at her house. We see her shopping beforehand, buying produce, and fish ... and then she goes to an upscale clothing store. The first floor has "modern" clothes - you can see that there are colors in the clothes on the racks. But she goes downstairs ... to where the traditional chadors are sold.

To me, this was the most subversive scene in the film (which, like I mentioned, is pretty conventional - and even with the "temporary marriage" thing is basically a Lifetime Movie - Iranian style - about infidelity). Tehrani tries on a black chador, staring at herself in the mirror. We watch the transformation occur - her shape obliterated - but because of the context in which she tries it on it becomes almost unbelievably provocative. She's not trying on the chador because she wants to become more devout, and show her devout feelings. Tehrani plays the scene so that we know she's doing it as a joke. A sexy joke. Mahmoud will arrive at her place, and see a black-clad woman waiting for him, and he will laugh, because it is so unlike her. It's not an expression of religious feeling - it's a costume. It's akin to buying a little sexy Frederick's of Hollywood number and answering the door in that get-up when your lover arrives. THAT is what Tehrani is playing in the scene.

Tehrani slowly drapes the folds over her face, her eyes mesmerized by her own reflection ... At one point, she starts to laugh to herself, laugh at what she looks like, and then, with mischievous glimmering eyes, she pulls the black veil up over the bottom half of her face, so only her eyes are visible. The typical image we have of Islamic women. But look at what is going on in her eyes. She is laughing. She is eager to show off her costume to Mahmoud, because he will think it funny, too.

A pretty ballsy scene, I'm thinking.

The film is drenched in pathos and tears, but once I succumbed to the fact that it was a Lifetime movie - I enjoyed it.

But mostly I enjoyed watching Tehrani at work. She's something else.

The Day I Became A Woman; director: Marziyeh Meshkini

Iranian film The Day I Became A Woman (2000), directed by Marziyeh Meshkini (it was her first film, although she had worked as an assistant director before that on husband Mohsen Makhmalbaf's films) won awards around the world, it was a ringing success.

The film is broken up into three stories, seemingly unconnected, but on a closer look, there is a thread tying them all together. The theme is pretty clearly stated in the title of the film, but there is nothing rote or predictable about this film ... I'm a huge fan of Meshkini now, and eager to see whatever she does next. It's stunning. And the last story earns the right to be called Fellini-esque - there are images there that are so arresting that they verge on poetry. It's a dream-space, and there are moments where I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Beautiful!! And the final image of the film ... I won't give it away - you'll just have to rent it. I watched it with dropped jaw. Fantastic. A fantastic debut.

I've been watching quite a few Iranian films recently with strictly Tehrani settings, like Offside (review here), or The Circle (review here). The Day I Became A Woman is set on Kish Island, off the coast of Iran in the Persian Gulf, a spectacular place of white beaches and crashing surf. It's apparently a resort island, a vacation spot for the Iranian wealthy - and a place where it's a bit more relaxed for women to hang out. But the world of The Day I Became A Woman does not show that side of Kish Island. You would never know it was a resort spot from what we see in the film.

The first story is about a little girl on her 9th birthday, the day she is slated to "become a woman". Meaning, she will have to put on the chador, not play with (or talk to) boys anymore, and basically begin her training to become a woman. Hava (the little girl) is a wild urchin whose best friend is a little boy named Hassan. But on this day, her birthday, she has to say goodbye to him as a friend. Her mother and grandmother give her a break, and tell her she can go off and see Hassan, but they put a stick in the sand and tell her she has to be home when the shadow of the stick disappears. Hava races off to find Hassan. Throughout their interaction (they share a lollipop, smacking their lips because of the sour-ness), Hava keeps racing back to check the shadow of the stick. She gets kind of frantic. She doesn't question her "plight", she just knows it's unfair, because she loves Hassan. But you know, she's a kid. She does what the grown-ups tell her to do. Like most Iranian film-makers Meshkini uses a light touch with filming children. She does not overburden them with metaphor and meaning. They are uninhibited, and seem like the most child-like of children in film. Hava does not see herself as a victim of a patriarchal theocratic society. She sees herself as living in an unfair world because she can't play with her best friend. It's no different from other children wailing about how "unfair" it is that they can't sleep over a friend's house on a school night. I'm not saying the two things are equal, of course I'm not - but it's equal in the way it is portrayed. Children are innocent. They may be mischievous, and capable of the full range of human emotions, but they are not aware of the larger societal issues that make life the way it is. And so Hava is pissed at the unfairness of life. She is too young to rebel in any meaningful way, and the whole thing is unFAIR because she wants to go outside and play. She doesn't see purdah itself as unfair. She's too little for that. It's why the first segment of The Day I Became A Woman is so devastating, because Hava is too young to understand. But she will submit, because ... that's what you do when you're a kid. Little Hassan, sucking on a sourpop with his friend, is also an innocent ... he doesn't understand why things have to change so drastically. Yesterday you were my friend and now you can't walk on the beach with me? Why? The use of strictly non-actors gives the first section an almost documentary feel to it. The kids are 100% unselfconscious in front of the camera. They aren't saying lines, they aren't acting at all.

The third story in The Day I Became A Woman (I'll come back to the second one momentarily) shows an old infirm woman going on a shopping spree. She is a widow, she has a little money, and has decided to buy all the things she wanted to buy during her life but never did. Her own things. She is so frail that a small boy pushes her wheelchair around a glittery mall (not her grandson - he is black - and from a couple of comments she says to him, it becomes clear that once upon a time she was in love with a black man, but was not allowed to marry him ... so she feels like the little black boy could be her dream-son). She buys so much stuff that an army of small boys are gathered to roll her purchases down the street on carts. The little woman has pieces of cloth tied around her fingers, to remind her of what she wants to buy. I kept expecting the little boys with the carts to bring them to a house or an apartment complex ... but no ... they take them to the beach. And set all of the stuff up on the white sand. A huge bed. A refrigerator. A clothesline, with pots and pans hanging from it. A free-standing tub. A couch and a couple of armchairs. With the blue gulf beyond. I'm still thinking about the scene, and the amazing images of it. It was stunning. There were moments when I thought of Fitzcarraldo, with the boat going over the mountain. What I was looking at was real, and was obviously really happening. But it had such a surreal edge, and ... I guess I'm used to seeing the same images, just in different movies. Even very good movies. You know, you see apartments, and close-ups of faces, and shots of sunsets. I'm simplifying, but still. In The Day I Became A Woman, I saw new things. A clothesline suspended on two poles that were offscreen, with pots hanging from the line, and empty glass bottles ... the blue sea in the background. The grandmother and two women sitting on the couch and armchair, chatting, surrounded by white beach. Then, odd scenes: the little boy putting on makeup in the mirror. Smearing lipstick over his lips. Another little boy trying on what was obviously the grandmother's wedding