24
Amsterdam Weekly_18-24 December 2008
AGENDA: FILM
pletely gripping. Harvey Keitel is the young mobster on the rise; Robert De Niro is his brutish, irresponsible nemesis, whom he’s determined to love. With Amy Robinson, Cesare Danova, and George Memmoli. (DK) 110 min. Kriterion
Special screenings Auf
der anderen Seite Two coffins pass through the Istanbul airport; for the people left behind, life takes unexpected turns. Fatih Akin’s new film tells the story of six people in Germany and Turkey whose lives are connected by two deaths: the widower Ali and his son Nejat; a woman named Yeter, her daughter Ayten, who meets a girl called Lotte; and Lotte’s mother (Hanna Schygulla). After a sad film about love, Gegen die Wand, Akin has made an optimistic film about mortality, families and forgiveness. The film seems heavily edited—it’s clear the director had a lot more material—but the episodic character of the film saves it from appearing pieced-together. Akin’s screenplay won top honours at Cannes. In German with Dutch subtitles. (SG) 122 min. De Uitkijk Blithe Spririt Passably good, but it should have been better, what with Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings, and Margaret Rutherford reading the Noel Coward lines. Though the play was all of four years old in 1945, director David Lean gave it the ‘classic’ treatment—he didn’t stage it, he stuffed and mounted it. Photographed in brilliant British Technicolor by Ronald Neame, who also collaborated on the screenplay. With Kay Hammond, Hugh Wakefield, and Joyce Carey. (DK) 96 min. Filmmuseum
Brief Encounter This is the film that established
David Lean’s reputation, before he went on to such bombastic exercises as Lawrence of Arabia and Ryan’s Daughter and shifted from being—as Lindsay Anderson well put it—England’s white hope to England’s white elephant. Though based on a short play (and screenplay) by Noel Coward that rarely rises above the level of the old women’s magazines, this 1945 tale of the chance meeting and almost affair of a bored suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) and a married doctor (Trevor Howard) in a provincial railway buffet does manage to zero in on some of the more depressing aspects of English middle-class life. The film thus survives more as a social document than a genuinely compelling drama. With Cyril Raymond and Stanley Holloway. See review on p.23. (DD) 85 min. Filmmuseum Crazy Love This jaw-dropping true crime video documentary by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens neatly balances tabloid headlines and unfathomable intimacy. Burt Pugach and Linda Riss met in the Bronx in the late ’50s, when he was a high-rolling ambulance chaser and she a stunning 20-year-old; their love affair soured when he welshed on his promise to divorce his wife, and from there the story descends into a thicket of lies, cruelty, and passion run amok. Klores and Stevens don’t have much to work with visually besides talking heads, old photos, news clippings, and stock footage, but with a narrative this insane, that’s more than enough. (JJ) 92 min. De Nieuwe Anita
The Nightmare Before Christmas Tim Burton’s 1993 stop-motion animated film is a tale about the havoc that ensues when Jack Skellington, the pipecleaner hero of Halloween Town, decides to take over the duties of Santa Claus. The result is at worst a macabre Muppet movie, at best an inspired jaunt. The songs (music and lyrics by Danny Elfman) are fairly good and the set designs are ingenious. (JR) 75 min. Kriterion
Must see:
The Nightmare Before Christmas Kriterion, Monday 21 December
Il Deserto Rosso Michelangelo Antonioni’s first color feature (1964) uses colours expressionistically, and to get the precise hues he wanted, he had entire fields painted. The film came at the end of his most fertile period, just after L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse, and it isn’t as good as the first and last of these, but the ecological concerns look a lot more prescient today. Monica Vitti plays a neurotic married woman briefly attracted to industrialist Richard Harris, and Antonioni does eerie, memorable work with the industrial shapes and colours that surround her; she walks through a science fiction landscape dotted with structures that are both disorienting and full of possibilities. In Italian with English subtitles. (JR) 118 min. OT301 Doctor Zhivago David Lean’s 1965 adaptation of Pasternak’s romance of the Russian Revolution is intelligent and handsomely mounted, though it doesn’t use its length to build to a particularly complex emotional effect. It’s a thin, snaky epic with more breadth than body, rather like watching an entire Masterpiece Theatre chapter play in a single sitting. Omar Sharif doesn’t have the dimensionality an epic lead requires, but Julie Christie shines brightly in support. (DK) 197 min. Filmmuseum Glass Lips Polish surrealist Lech Majewski is a real problem, a film-maker of extraordinary visual talent whose thematic material seems confined to the sort of Catholic sexual hang-ups Martin Scorsese worked through in his student films. This wordless 2006 feature, adapted from Majewksi’s installations at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and originally titled after Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, centers on a young man in a mental institution and his awful reveries of childhood and his parents’ perverse mar-
A Lemming didn’t jump off a cliff. Walt Disney kicked it.
riage. Stigmata, breast milk, pig carcasses, and forced meals of canned dog food are the dominant motifs, rendered with such compositional flair that you may actually forget how trite they are. (JJ) 99 min. SMART Cinema
Hiroshima Mon Amour Alain Resnais’ truly revo-
lutionary 1959 film about the ‘impossible love’ between a French actress and a Japanese architect. Integrating past and present, poetic images and documentary footage, music and Marguerite Duras’ dialogue, the film achieved a structural balance of such emotional and intellectual power that audiences were stunned. Its rearrangement of temporal and emotional impressions is now old stuff for filmmakers (and even directors of television commercials), but Resnais’ contributions to the New Wave are virtually incalculable. In French with English subtitles. (DD) 91 min. OT301 Lemming A bizarre psychological drama likely to catch the eyes of David Lynch fans, Lemming by French film director Dominik Moll. The story focuses on the troubled relationships brewing between two couples—engineer Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas), Bénédicte Getty (Charlotte Gainsbourg), his boss Richard Pollock (André Dussollier) and his wife (Charlotte Rampling). Weird behavior initially erupts between the four of them at a dinner party. In French with Dutch subtitles. (SM) 129 min. Rialto Mean Streets Martin Scorsese’s intrusive insistence on his abstract, metaphysical theme—the possibility of modern sainthood—marks this 1973 film, his first to attract critical notice, as still somewhat immature, yet the acting and editing have such an original, tumultuous force that the picture is com-
A Passage to India David Lean’s overanalytic direction manages to kill most of the meaning in EM Forster’s haunting novel of cultural collision in colonial India, reducing Forster’s complexities of point of view to a pat tale of an uptight British virgin (Judy Davis) who freaks out in the face of some dimly perceived native ‘sensuality’. Still, Lean’s method affords its small pleasures: he approaches every project as a strategic challenge, and his way of maneuvering characters in and out of the action has the elegance of a sophisticated battle plan. Though Lean apparently spent a good deal of time on location, the film’s most successful evocations of exotic landscape arrive through lovely, blatantly false matte paintings. (DK) 163 min. Filmmuseum The Passionate Friends HG Wells wrote the source novel for this 1949 British drama about love and betrayal among the upper crust. If you could not get enough of Brief Encounter, this is definitely the film for you. David Lean was not orignally attached to direct it, and entered the production when the previous director Ronald Neame left. Still, he did a pretty fine job. With Ann Todd, Trevor Howard, and Claude Rains. (MB) 95 min. Filmmuseum The Shop Around the Corner There are no art deco nightclubs, shimmering silk gowns, or slamming bedroom doors to be seen, but this 1940 film is one of Ernst Lubitsch’s finest and most enduring works, a romantic comedy of dazzling range that takes place almost entirely within the four walls of a leathergoods store in prewar Budapest. James Stewart is the earnest, slightly awkward young manager; Margaret Sullavan is the new sales clerk who gets on his nerves—and neither realises that they are partners in a passionate romance being carried out through the mails. (It’s the original of the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan vehicle You’ve Got Mail.) Interwoven with subplots centred on the other members of the shop’s little family, the romance proceeds through Lubitsch’s brilliant deployment of point of view, allowing the audience to enter the perceptions of each individual character at exactly the right moment to develop maximum sympathy and suspense. (DK) 98 min. Pathé Tuschinski Silent Night, Deadly Night Dressed as Santa Claus, a serial killer gives the gift of gore. Nuff said. 85 min. Cavia