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October 18-24, 2012 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 29
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Studio green-lights secret ops by David Lamble
exotic Middle Eastern vibe. Women gather, offering ecstatic libations to the sky gods – Argo, a science-fantasy adventure.” “It’s in turnaround. Can we get the option?” “Why do we need the option?” “You’re worried about the Ayatollah? Try the WGA [Writers Guild of America, the screenwriters’ union].” One of Argo’s many jokes is that the US is rescued by Canadians, from a country used by Hollywood in recent times mainly as a taxdodge stand-in for “real places” like New York. Affleck’s Mendez hectors the six into remembering their fake Canadian identities. “Where’s your passport issued?” “Vancouver.” “Where were you born?” “Toronto.” “Canadians don’t pronounce the t.” “Some revolutionary guard is ac-
tually going to know that?” “If you’re detained for questioning, they’ll bring somebody in who knows that. What’s your middle name?” “You really believe your little story is going to make a difference when there’s a gun to our heads?” “I think my story is the only thing between you and a gun to your head.” Adapting from the real Tony Mendez’s book The Master of Disguise and a Wired magazine article by Joshuah Bearman, “The Great Escape,” screenwriter Chris Terrio concocts a parallel-universe farcical thriller where the myth of the American Century gets a makeover by the boys who lie for a living. The filmmakers carefully tiptoe around getting too specific about anybody’s crimes – America’s, the Shah’s, the Ayatollah’s – there is only a short animated prologue for the terminally uninformed. Oil is never mentioned, Reagan stays off-screen. If you’re desperate for the real skinny on the great Anglo-American struggle to “democratize” the Middle East, go rent Lawrence of Arabia. Argo’s virtues are in its very lack of a messianic vision. Even Affleck damps down his hero’s charisma so as to appear little more than a bearded, overgrown Eagle Scout. The 70s threads and hairstyles are risibly authentic, and the actors playing the six give off a Nick at Night sitcom vibe. In the end it’s left to the comedy boys Goodman and Arkin to reinforce the spirit of those old John Sturges platitudes from his “a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” blood-and-guts 60s thrillers like The Dirty Dozen. Questioned about the wisdom of Hollywood getting in the spy business instead of just cranking out bad movies about heroes too cool for school, Arkin snaps, “Argo fuck yourself.”▼
nism in a way that inspired ordinary people to make great sacrifices for the sake of a more hopeful future. Swan Lake was turned from a tragedy into a struggle with a happy ending. In the last 20 years, especially since the rise of Putin, the Soviet outlook has been re-valorized, and the version of Swan Lake we saw is the Stalin-approved version [by Konstantin Sergeyev] from 1950. From the beginning, Sergeyev points us to a happy ending. He adds a jester to the story who is constantly mocking the prince’s tutor; the jester gets much quirky virtuoso dancing to perform and gets to win every contest with the tutor, who looks less the voice of reason than an old schoolmarm. Sergeyev trivializes the evil sorcerer Rotbart so that at the end, Siegfried can fight and destroy him. First of all, he pulls Rotbart off his power spot and makes him dance – indeed, both Rotbarts I saw (Konstantin Zverov in the first cast, Andrey Solovyov on Thursday) were brilliant dancers who made the prince look a little weak. Sergeyev did a brilliant job of creating a consistent “cheered up” Swan Lake. He has trivialized the tragic last act, made the dances almost perky, by cleverly omitting the more melancholy music for the choral dances, and by making the sorcerer a lurid charlatan in the third act. While in the original, Rotbart has outmaneuvered Odette with a brilliant intrigue, and cast a spell over his own daughter Odile to make her resemble our heroine, and brought her to court to trap Siegfried into proposing in front of the whole court to the falseseeming swan, and the rash promise cannot be undone, in Sergeyev’s version the Prince can just fight the sorcerer, break his wing, and that will
break the spell. Problem is, the music requires a Gotterdaemmerung-scale disaster, a complete destruction and drowning of everything. This is why Matthew Bourne’s all-male-swan version is the most powerful, since the stage picture matches the catastrophe we hear in the music. Ekaterina Kondaurova was thrilling as both the white swan and as her diabolical parody, the black swan. In all technical matters she reigned supreme: the white swan’s gestures unfurled magnificently, and her evil simulacrum bore a glamor so potent, so sexy, so commanding, and so thrilling in her actual dancing, she drove me crazy – so of course, she fooled the prince. The prince in the second cast, Vladimir Shklyaurov, outshone his swan queen. He was heart-breakingly beautiful. Oksana Skoryk, his very young ballerina, has imagination, musicality, a gloriously unfurling line, but her fear of the technical difficulties of Act III shone through, distorted her shoulders and neck, made her very difficult to partner – at one point, it looked like both the Prince and von Rotbart were going to have to hold her up on pointe, which scared us, though nothing disastrous happened, and she finished the act and the ballet in excellent form. The corps danced with wonderful discipline and good temper throughout. Thursday night’s first-act pas de trois deserve naming: Ekaterina Ivannikova, Nadezda Gonchar, Alexander Perish; both Rotbarts were wonderful, Konstantin Zverev and Andrey Solovyov. And the little swans were superb: Anastasya Mikheyevna, Svetlana Ivanova, Elena Chmil, Marisa Shirinkina. Again, it was the orchestra who carried them. They were out of this world.▼
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hate to admit just how much I’ve learned about life on this perilous planet at the movies or from the boob tube. From the time JFK was shot in Dallas to Jimmy Carter’s unraveling over the storming of our embassy in Iran, Hollywood and the folks at “Black Rock” (a Tinseltowninspired metaphor for corporate CBS) paraded more and more of our dirty linen out there, and at times it did indeed seem that “the whole world was watching.” The trick of convincing movie consumers to invest in a story “based on true events” is to so quicken the pace of your storytelling that fact and fiction fly past at dizzying speed, producing a complete suspension of disbelief. And most importantly: keep them laughing. Argo, director Ben Affleck’s entertaining, wildly improbable, but at times moving tale, begins like an information-age tsunami. The time is November 4, 1979, a year before the Carter-Reagan election, and the staff at the US embassy in Tehran trembles as a howling mob gathers outside the gates. President Carter has just admitted the hated ex-Shah of Iran into the US for cancer treatment, and the mob demands he be returned to stand trial for the crimes perpetrated by his secret police. Affleck and his talented crew give us a peek inside a human tornado as the protesters leap over the gates, overwhelming the Marine guards under orders not to fire into the crowd. Meanwhile embassy workers burn and shred the files – it appears we have things to hide. The digital pastiche of chaos created for the movie is weaved in with TV archival footage, fact and fiction joined seamlessly together: the end of a world as we knew it. 52 men and women were seized
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John Goodman, Alan Arkin and Ben Affleck share a toast to their mission in Affleck’s Argo.
and held for 444 days, but in the chaos five embassy employees escape out a side door and, with a sixth person, make it undetected to the home of the Canadian ambassador. The big brass at the State Department fear that the secret six will suffer a far worse fate if detected. Throughout the movie, Iranian intelligence agents are shown attempting to reassemble shredded embassy photos. It’s here that Hollywood itself enters the story, and things get really weird. Affleck gives himself the pivotal role of CIA operative Tony Mendez, an agent expert at concocting far-fetched secret ops, with cover stories and disguises to match. Rejecting the State Departmenthatched scheme that the six take a 300-mile bike trip to the Turkish border, Mendez suggests that he can hide the six, in plain sight of
the revolutionary guards, disguised as a crew scouting locations for a preposterous B-movie. Enter Argo’s court jesters John Goodman and Alan Arkin – the guy who designed costumes for Planet of the Apes, and a cynical trash-movie producer. In a smart, funny set-piece, Goodman and Arkin sort through a slush pile of wretched screenplays to find one so risibly bad that the Iranians will buy into the caper. “How about The Horses of Achilles?” “No good, nobody does Westerns anymore.” “It’s ancient Troy.” “If it’s got horses in it, it’s a Western.” “It doesn’t matter, it’s a fake movie.” “If I’m doing a fake movie, it’s going to be a fake hit.” They read camera directions: “Fade in on a starship landing, an
Swan Lake
From page 17
picture with only the power of personal beauty, scenic effects, sincerity of gesture, and music to take your heart and wring you out. The orchestra (conductor Mikhail Agrest) played Tchaikovsky’s haunting score beautifully. From the oboe’s first halting melody, carried down into the clarinet and into the strings, the sound was glorious. Tchaikovsky sets up an oscillation of ominous and hopeful melodies which drives the story and breathes life into a pair of delicate creatures: Prince Siegfried, who’s unready to take on the duties of kingship; and his soulmate Odette, a princess who’s been enthralled by a sorcerer and subjected to a spell which turns her into a swan. This is a philosophic fable masquerading as a fairy tale, and just when it seems least plausible, it sucks you in. The Prince, whose 21st birthday is celebrated in a first-act party, realizes he’s about to have to cross a line he’s not ready to cross, and restless, goes out hunting by night. Beside a lake he sees a beautiful swan, aims his bow, and finds his arm paralyzed – he cannot shoot. Siegfried recognizes in Odette the only one he could ever love even as she changes from a swan into a woman. The situation requires all the absurdities of ballet technique and style – Odette steps out onto the tip of her toe, subsides into a lunge, and shakes out her wings, which turn into arms even as she lengthens her neck. All the CGI arts that made Gollum believable pale against the powers of a ballerina to make you believe she’s a swan. At this, both Ekaterina Kondaurova and Oksana Skoryk, the ballerinas for the first two performances, were
Courtesy of Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra
Members of the Mariinsky Ballet perform in Swan Lake.
astonishingly apt. The corps de ballet similarly stylized their postures and their dance-moves so artfully, the illusion cast its spell. The audience must make a willing suspension of disbelief, but can only do so when the dancers use their imagination and project their images with complete conviction in a uniform style. In Swan Lake’s Act II both nights, the Russian dancers were flawless. The problems came in the outlying acts. Once you’re inside the story, and accept the idea of magic, what’s the
magician going to be like? Do we want a medieval magician? Do we want a restless spirit of evil, or a terrifying figure who creates despair? And what is the overall arc of feeling? Forgive me if I have to fill in some back-story. During the Soviet era, ballet survived by making the classics relevant to the proletariat – the heroic artists of the ballet presented classical technique in a clarified form, leaving behind the daintiness of the old style, and making the fairy tales into fables that presented the ideals of commu-