joaodelauraaurora Reviews

Love in the Afternoon (1972)

Another good Rohmer about the intricacies of love

[8/10 · 15 January 2002]

No other director has exposed, analyzed and interpreted love relations as profoundly and as maturely as Eric Rohmer. His cycles `Six Moral Tales' and `Comedies and Proverbs', based on his own screenplays, are the best examples of how cinema can be at the same time `talkative', philosophic and incredibly effective. Rohmer's movies prove that cinema can fully explore love without being melodramatic, naive or predictable. `Chloe in the Afternoon' (`L'amour l'après midi') is the sixth and the last of his moral tales and tells the story of Frédéric, a married lawyer who loves his wife but feels tempted to have an affair with seductive Chloe, a friend of old times who reenters his now bourgeois life. As in the case of many of his other films, Rohmer's screenplay is in itself worth-reading, with intelligent dialogues and interesting ups and downs in the love triangle, but his directing of the three actors, emphasizing their ambiguities (Frédéric's principles and impulses; Hélène's apparent self-assurance and hidden anguish; Chloe's solitude and tricks), is also very impressive. `Chloe in the Afternoon' is a good reflection on the dilemmas of monogamy and the traps of possessiveness. One more to the admirable list of Rohmer's movies about love (8/10).

Yi Yi (2000)

A delicate and genuine portrait of life

[8/10 · 13 January 2002]

There are two scenes in `Yi Yi' that could express this movie's essence. The first is a dialogue between two teenagers: when Fatty says that cinema is about happiness and sadness, Ting-Ting asks why then we go to the movies, if life itself is like that. In another scene, the 8 year-old Yang-Yang says he wants to show other people what they can't see, so he take pictures of their backs. The truth of `Yi Yi' is in both messages: on the one hand, it is a movie about life as life itself, about ordinary existence in a urbanized, middle-class, modern family in Taiwan (as much universal as any other family can be today); on the other hand, it is about different perspectives of day-to-day experience, and how people manage to interact despite their often irreconcilable personal interests, half-truths and dilemmas. Against the backdrop of today's mainstream cinema, intoxicated by spectacular plots, effects and characters, director Edward Yang's movie is a quiet blessing, with its deliberately slow though never boring pace, its Ozu-like use of the camera (as a neutral, fixed and often detached eye capturing daily life), and its delicate use of silence and glass reflections to better immerse us in the characters' doubts and choices. Few movies portrayed ordinary family life in such an authentic and convincing way (8/10).

The Road Home (1999)

Beautiful images for a conventional and predictable love story

[6/10 · 13 January 2002]

Zhang Yimou is a great director; his `Jou Dou' and `Raise the Red Lantern' are masterpieces. For no other reason, ‘The Road Home', with its naive love story and use of easy cinematographic formulas, is a bit of a disappointment. No doubt some of Yimou's qualities are here, such as his capacity to give life to characters with admirable dignity and tenacity (as Zhao Di), and his acute eye for exquisite landscapes and for color. But `The Road Home' does not go beyond this combination of nice cinematography (of a hilly Chinese village during springtime and winter) and a simple romantic plot (the young woman who takes care of her blind mother falls in love with the village teacher). The clichés and predictable formulas are frequent: the grandiose and melodramatic musical score emphasizing emotion; the slow-motion camera for ecstatic moments; the repetitive close-up of Ziyi Zhang's beautiful and inebriated face; the artificial plot obstacles adjourning the promised love. Though beautiful in its images, `The Road Home' lacks vigor and originality: it is too much style for little content (6/10).

No Man's Land (I) (2001)

A noble cause for a flawed movie

[6/10 · 9 January 2002]

One can never overstate the absurdity of war, especially of a fratricidal ethnic conflict as the one that ravaged Bosnia. This is the merit of `No Man's Land', a movie about a group of Bosnians and Serbs stuck in a no man's land trench under the fire of both armies, a parable of the deadly stalemate that marked this war. But this underlying noble intention is in a way better than the movie itself, if we are to distinguish end and means. There are two main flaws in Danis Tanovic's film. The first is the fact that the movie's main conflict, between the Bosnian Chiki and the Serb Nino, is not entirely convincing (it is even childish sometimes) and therefore is not up to the hatred and grievances that oppose the two nations. That's why the tragic way this conflict finally unfolds seems a bit out of proportion with the story, as if artificially conceived in order to neutralize some satirical and farcical aspects of the movie that are at odds with the gravity of the war itself. The second flaw is, ironically, the movie's only attempt at analyzing the war. As a rule, there is no effort to explain the causes of the conflict (good, it's a movie, not a dissertation), but Tanovic's screenplay attributes to the United Nations peacekeeping mission a good deal of responsibility for the absurd continuation of the war, which is nonsense. The UN bureaucracy, as well as the international press, is portrayed as the movie's villain, as if the war had more to do with personal and institutional incompetence than with historical and complex disputes between nations (6/10).

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

Bjork's impressive drama and Von Trier's parody of musicals

[8/10 · 8 January 2002]

Czech Selma works in a factory in the US during the 60s. She is going blind, but what obsesses her is the fact that her son has the same disease. She is saving money for his medical surgery, though she will have to pay a high price for her obstinacy to heal the boy. Notwithstanding this simple, soap opera like plot, `Dancer in the Dark' is a great movie. Why? Because it is both effective as drama and original as a reflection on cinema itself. Despite its implausibility and melodramatic quality, the story moves us intensely because pop singer Bjork is impressive as Selma, with her dreamy, naive, fragile, next to retarded expression, captured by a digital camera that intensifies intimacy and gives a documentary aspect to the movie. But director Lars Von Trier does not seem to make drama for the sake of drama; he makes a parody of musicals, by inserting musical-like scenes as arising from Selma's dreamy mind. The effect is intriguing: Trier stretches to the limit the artificiality of musical numbers, their "deus ex machina" unreality, ironically combining and contrasting them with the tragic aspects of the story, as in the torturing final scene. A good provocative movie (8/10).

Barry Lyndon (1975)

Kubrick's perfect portrait of Lyndon's rise and fall

[9/10 · 8 January 2002]

`Barry Lyndon' is a delight for the eyes and the ears: the XVIII century landscapes are exquisite in their colors and light; the indoor sets, with perfect decoration and costume design, are marvelous to the minutest nuances; and the music, from Bach to Schubert, is sublime. But what is most impressive in Kubrick's movie is his capacity to convey melancholy and inexorability to portray the tragic story of Thackeray's anti-hero Barry Lyndon, a gifted but poor Irishman who will impersonate different roles, crossing several countries and facing continuous disenchantment, only to meet his gloomy fate in the end. The deliberate subdued acting, the narrator's subtle irony and detachment, Ryan O'Neal's sad eyes and impassive face and, most of all, the slow–pacing of both editing and acting, all converge to provide a sense of grief and doom that mark this masterpiece. Kubrick's genius can be better observed by the way he conceives of and stages the three duels that are the turning points of the story. `Barry Lyndon' is the ultimate example of how a movie with a conventional, linear narrative can be brilliant in its own way (9/10).

The Million Dollar Hotel (2000)

Wenders' ineffective incursion into comedy and parody

[6/10 · 7 January 2002]

Far from being a luxury hotel, the `Million Dollar' shelters a collection of insane people who would prefer to be in a mental facility (`three nice meals a day, people in white clothes caring for you', says Dixie). One of them falls from the building and dies. It happens to be Izzy (Tim Roth), the unconventional son of a media magnate, and to discover who murdered him comes FBI agent Skinner (Mel Gibson). Based on this whodunit plot, director Wim Wenders weaves a net of references and ironies: some caricatures (the truculent cop, the manipulative media baron, the crazy hippie, the unscrupulous art-dealer) as well as parodies of other movies (the thriller genre, Robocop/Terminator, and even Wenders' `Wings of Desire'). The result is unbalanced: though there are some good moments (the conspiratorial meetings among the insane and the unorthodox romance between two of them - Tom Tom and Eloise), the story seems loose, some characters are unconvincing, like Skinner, and the underlying messages (like `TV fakes reality') are far from original. As in other Wenders' movies there are some intriguing images and excellent music, but ‘The Million Dollar Hotel' lacks what is so impressive in his works: either a kind of philosophical nature and meaning (`State of Things', `Lisbon Story', `End of Violence') or a strong humanistic appeal (`Paris Texas', `Wings of Desire', `Alice in the Cities'). A minor Wenders (6/10).

Intimacy (2001)

Sex as catharsis

[8/10 · 5 January 2002]

Despite all the controversy about its explicit sex scenes, `Intimacy' is a movie about loneliness, about the precarious encounter of shattered lives. Jay and Claire meet every Wednesday and have sex without exchanging a single word. She is married; he is a divorcé. They need those anonymous meetings not as a source of physical pleasure, but as an expression of distress and frustration. That's why the sex scenes are the more powerful the less erotic they are: for Jay and Claire, it's about catharsis, not about flesh. We could expect them to cry after making love; never to smile. Director Chéreau does an impressive job to convey solitude and desperation out of Hanif Kureishi's stories: a sordid set, a gloomy atmosphere, an intimate camera. But the movie's strength comes mostly from the extraordinary acting by Rylance and Fox, subtle in their sadness, brilliant with or without clothes. Confronted with their angst and their secret ritual, all other characters, all other subplots are in a way superfluous. A great movie (8/10).

Divided We Fall (2000)

Comedy out of tragedy

[7/10 · 4 January 2002]

Not an easy task: how to make a comedy about the Nazi occupation and the Jewish persecution without disdaining the intrinsic tragedy of it? One possible solution: to create some characters complex enough to avoid the pitfalls of a movie indulging exclusively in laughable caricatures. That's the merit of Hrebejk's `Divided We Fall', a finely acted comedy about a moving Czech couple (Josef and Marie) who manage, against all odds, to secretly shelter a Jew (David) during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. The screenplay has many ingredients for vaudeville situations: the presence of an inconvenient friend (Horst); the logistics of hiding someone in a house; Josef and Marie's difficulty to have a baby, but director Hrebejk tries to explore them with a light hand, never abandoning the dramatic aspects of the story. A bit heavy-handed are only the music and the frequent use of a peculiar slow motion camera, which artificially exaggerate tension and emotion, but the leading couple of actors (Cizek and Ciskova) more than compensate for it (7/10).

Bread and Roses (2000)

capital x labor

[7/10 · 2 January 2002]

Like Costa Gavras, director Ken Loach thinks that cinema is a powerful instrument for noble causes - political as well as social - rather than pure entertainment. "Bread and Roses" is a story about a group of L.A. janitors trying to unionize, while two of them, the Mexican sisters Maya and Rosa, end up following completely different paths. Loach's conflict between capital and labor may seem a bit schematic or didactic, but reality is not much more complex. In fact, "Bread and Roses" avoids two easy and simplistic solutions: to divert the labor-oriented plot to a love story between Maya and Sam (the witty union organizer), and to give us an unlikely but comforting happy end. The bittersweet finale fits perfectly. Also good is Rosa's monologue on how she managed to survive in the U.S., though the most magnetic character is Maya's, with her humorous energy, her smart but well intentioned tricks, her very personal but undeniably warmhearted ethics. Not a brilliant movie, but a good one (7/10).