“Farinelli has surprised me so much that I feel as though I had hitherto heard only a small part of the human voice, and now have heard it all.” Paolo Rolli, librettist, c. 1735

     Carlo Maria Broschi, aka “Farinelli”, was one of opera’s most celebrated castrati. Castrati were the first musical superstars, complete with exorbitant salaries, diva-like behavior, and young women throwing themselves at them.. Their voices were said to be ethereal and almost otherworldly, combining a young boy’s soprano with an adult’s lung capacity and skill. They played leading roles in many 17^th and 18th century operas, the childlike quality of their voices becoming a representation of the hero’s purity and virtue. From the Renaissance onward, young boys who possessed truly extraordinary voices would be prevented from going through puberty by having their testicles removed. This would either be done on purpose, with the boy’s full knowledge and approval, or “by accident”.

In the film, Carlo (Stefano Dionisi; The Truce, Children of the Century) had such an “accident”, according to his older brother Riccardo (Enrico Lo Verso). Riccardo tells him that as a youngster he was stricken with a fever that made him delirious, and in his altered mental state took the family’s “demon horse” on a ride that ended in a catastrophe involving a wire fence. In order to save young Carlo’s life, amputation was required.

Carlo goes on to become “Farinelli”, a stage name likely derived from his probable patrons, the Farina brothers. We see him giving performances that make women swoon, making love to opera groupies, traveling all over Europe, and being sought after by famous composers, even Handel (Jeroen Krabbe). But Farinelli’s bond to his brother, a mediocre composer, prevents him from working with anyone else. They both remember their father telling them to stick together, and this admonition seems to be the basis for their entire relationship. Farinelli sings only his brother’s songs, they go everywhere together, and are even united through sex; Farinelli will bring the woman to climax, and then Riccardo will come in to “plant the seed”. This is at first shocking, but the point of showing this arrangement is not simply to depict kinky sex, but to show the two brothers sharing the most intimate of acts is symbolic of their willing dependence on each other.

As Farinelli matures, his paternal instincts begin to grow. He bonds with the young son of a countess (Marianne Basler), to the point that he actually asks the woman to marry him, just so he can be a father. When she refuses, he shatters a wine goblet in his hand, not because he’s been rejected, but because he thinks that he’s lost his only chance to be a father. This rising desire to have children obviously leads him to resent his physical state and the fame that it brings him.

Not surprisingly, the most powerful scenes in this movie center on the resolution of these conflicts. Desperate for music, Riccardo steals one of Handel’s compositions and Handel, aware of the theft and interested to see what Farinelli will do with it, attends the performance. He has told Farinelli before that “his kind” fail to move him musically. Farinelli looks directly at Handel during the performance, and at the climax of “Lascia ch’io pianga” sings with such passion and intensity that it causes Handel to faint.(Farinelli’s voice was created by digitally fusing the voices of countertenor Derek Lee Ragin and soprano Ewa Mallas-Godlewska. The soundtrack is supposed to be phenomenal.) But Handel retaliates, as Riccardo has told him, in a moment of weakness, his darkest secret. Handel urges Farinelli to talk to his brother, and Farinelli finds that there was no accident, and Riccardo himself castrated him. This information leads to a massive fight, with Riccardo begging for forgiveness to no avail. Farinelli splits from his brother, marries his longtime love Alexandra, (Elsa Zylberstein) ,and heads to Spain to become the king’s official singer. Several years later, Riccardo comes riding into the courtyard, shouting to his brother that the “masterwork”, an opera based on Oedipus, is finally complete. The idea behind this opera, which Riccardo has been working on for years, is that it will be the pinnacle of the brothers’ partnership. After days of letting Riccardo languish outside, Farinelli lets him in. The brothers reconcile, and become a team as they once were, which leads to the realization of Farinelli’s most desperate wish. Later, Riccardo writes to Farinelli to say that he has burned the opera, as the real “masterwork” is now growing inside Alexandra.

Reviewers have noted that Corbiau takes substantial liberties with history, which is certainly correct. The Farinelli character is not so much the real Farinelli as he is an amalgam of several famous castrati, legendary for their colorful personalities and sexual exploits. Also, Farinelli never married or raised any children, and this is simply some dramatic license to further explore the relationship between the two brothers. But most off-putting to many (male) American reviewers seems to be the androgyny of the character and the fact that many women apparently found that androgyny immensely attractive. A man that’s in any way like a woman is supposed to be a joke, not a sex symbol. This film is to some an uncomfortable reminder that gender constructs are not set in stone but can vary widely from age to age and culture to culture.

Posted by LizL | DVD Boutique | WebbleYou Blog Network | © 2008 | Permalink | Comments

      This film is what Natural Born Killers desperately wanted to be, but couldn’t; this kind of dark and vicious satire is not possible when Hollywood studios and big names are involved.

     Man Bites Dog centers on Benoit, (Benoit Poelvoorde), a serial murderer who kills for money, fun, and occasionally social commentary. He’s being followed around by a documentary film crew, (Remy Belvaux and Andre Bonzel), eager to capture his every joke, opinion, and victim. Benoit, while sometimes funny and charming, and always intriguing, is not particularly likable. He has no hard-luck story about a bad childhood, as his loving mother features prominently in the film, and no revelations of any past trauma to explain his bahavior. He appears to come from a normal upper middle class family, he’s been formally educated, and has no evident problem forming relationships with women. He will kill anyone, including children and old people. In short, there is nothing to make us feel any sympathy or empathy for this character, which is a bold move on the part of the filmmakers; they drive the point home by making sure we see his victims die, quickly and brutally. No violence-as-visual-poetry to lessen the effects. Benoit is simply a near-sociopath, and the viewer has no excuse for being glued to the screen, other than morbid fascination.

      It is this fascination that is the biggest target of the satire, as this film is really about the darker parts of human nature and the media’s almost pathological need to exploit this. The vicarious thrill that nearly everyone gets from watching violence becomes very real for the filmmakers as they are pulled into Benoit’s world, and production continues even after crew members are killed. In a particularly good scene, a supposedly grieving Remy is revealed to be almost as soulless as Benoit.

      Benoit only becomes human at the very end of the film, when two people close to him are killed by the brother of one of his victims, (another killer who ran into Benoit and company with his own documentary film crew in another wonderful scene). But this lasts only a few minutes, and our lasting impression of him is largely unsympathetic, as is our impression of the filmmakers themselves. It’s refreshingly unusual, at least to an American, to see people in the media being so critical of themselves and their role in society. This film is dark and silly, funny and sobering, and all the contradictions one expects from a good art film.

Posted by LizL | DVD Boutique | WebbleYou Blog Network | © 2008 | Permalink | Comments

Alongside David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, Denys Arcand is Canada’s best-known film director, a small club for sure but all of them creative forces to be reckoned with in the global film world. Arcand’s post-modern and referential cinema, often sprinkled with wry, savvy sense of humour, which his usually memorable film titles demonstrate (The Decline of the American Empire (1986), the Barbarian Invasions (2003)) is the most political of the three as well as more accessible.

Jesus of Montreal (1989) is one of his best films and ranks alongside Pier Paolo Pasolini The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) as one of the most original revisitations of the Passion of Christ. Winner of the Grand Prix of the Jury atthe 1989 Cannes festival and nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1990, it focuses on a leftist reading of the gospel to comment on contemporary issues such as commercialism and artistic integrity. The most remarkable aspect of Jesus of Montreal was how Arcand managed to extract relevance from such played-out narrative, one which seemed to have been rendered almost irredeemably kitsch by the likes of Franco Zefirelli.

Lothaire Bluteau plays Marcel, a Nick Cave look-alike avant-garde actor who is a hired by a priest at a Catholic university (Father Leclerc) where the Passion play is annually staged on the grounds of a hillside shrine overlooking the city. Using data from the latest archaeological finds and new translations of the Talmud, he reworks the traditional Stations of the Cross and injects a new lease of life into the staid production. He casts himself as Jesus and finds four other actors to join him — Constance (Johanne-Marie Tremblay), a single mother who was in the previous production and is Leclerc’s mistress; Mireille (Catherine Wilkening), a glamourous TV advert who sees the opportunity as challenge to prove herself; Martin (Remy Girard), who earns a living dubbing voices for a porno film and Rene (Robert Lepage), a rather arrogant actor who at first refuses to join in.

Critics and the public love the modernised play, but Father Leclerc becomes worried that the liberties taken with the story of Jesus may land him in trouble. Meanwhile, Mireille, after having abandoned her boyfriend for the contempt he showed her, is shacking up with Constance and Daniel, with whom she starts an affair. Their romance provides Arcand with the opportunity to show how Daniel literally got under the skin of his character. When Mirelle is humiliated by the producer and director during an audition for a beer commercial, he does a Jesus-in-the-temple routine and, in a fit of rage, smashes all the recording equipment in the room and chases the advertising big hats out of the auditorium. As a consequence, in the middle of the next performance of the Passion play, Daniel is arrested by the police on charges of aggravated assault and vandalism, a real visual coup on the part of Arcand. Released from custody after a hearing, Daniel is propositioned by Richard Cardinal (Yves Jacques), a show business lawyer who offers to make him a superstar. The 1980s yuppie vista of Montreal’s cityscape is offered to him as the prize of a Faustian pact with the devil.

Tension starts to mount and the situation of the actors increasingly mirrors that of Jesus and his disciples, culminating in a heart-breaking finale - Arcand is a sharp emotion stirrer as he proved with The Barbarian Invasions. Of course, he is not saying anything new with this film – it is after all, an update of an old story. However, his elegance and idionsyncrasy save the film from any hint of staleness. His minimalism and straightforward dialogues are always surprising and add new layers of meaning to familiar utterings. Besides, his criticism of institutionalised religion and the emptiness of modern life (celebrity, consumerism, the media, the latter a recurring motif in his films via TV imagery) is always accurate and incisive.

Posted by antoniop | DVD Boutique | WebbleYou Blog Network | © 2008 | Permalink | Comments

Films about the Holocaust don’t come much closer to capturing the horror of Auschwitz and the concentration camps than Andrzej Munk’s 1961-1963 The Passenger. Munk died in a car crash at the age of 39 in the middle of producing his film. His friend and colleague Witold Lesiewicz decided to complete the project to what he believed were Munk’s intentions and assembled it using the existing footage, still protographs and a voice over.

This method, used as a necessity, turned out to be very beneficial to the form of the film, with its mixture of documentary and representation. Its economic, pared-down narrative captures with sober poignancy the awful void and sadness of this monstrous episode, concentrating on details rather than the big picture. In this sense, it’ s more of a humanist film than a historic piece, focusing on the banality of the everyday routine of the camps while showing in the background the gruesome signs of the carnage - children marching down to the gas chambers, the smoke billowing out of the chimneys, inmates playing music as new interns arrive. The place is hell but one with recognisable, realist features.

The film focuses on two main characters, a former SS officer called Liza and a Marta, a Polish prisoner of war who had been under Liza’s vigilance in the camp. The two women’s paths cross again on a cruise liner bound for South America a decade later. Worried that Marta will expose her past to her husband, Liza decides to tell her husband her real story, first giving him a version of facts whereby she tried to save Marta, but she retracts and tells him a more truthful account, which is that she was actually ambitious and loyal to the Nazi program.

There’s no better description of the film than the one provided by Ewa Mazierska in her essay that accompanies this first-ever DVD release and it’s worth quoting: “Not so much a film about the reality of the concentration camps, as about the power of memory to immortalise and distort what happened there, which, according to Claude Lanzmann, author of Shoah, should be the proper subject of any film about Holocaust.” Dealing with the Holocaust on filmic terms is an enormous challenge, but The Passenger points to the appropriate route. A very important film.

Posted by antoniop | DVD Boutique | WebbleYou Blog Network | © 2008 | Permalink | Comments

Like many art film pioneers, the work and legacy of Maya Deren (1917-1961) is often more talked about than actually seen. Fortunately, as rare films are increasingly available on DVD, a gem like Meshes of the Afternoon is more widely available and should help bring more visibility to Deren’s outstanding legacy.

The daughter of an educated Jewish émigré family from Kiev who arrived in the USA in the early 1920s, Deren has become an emblem of independent American cinema and a feminist icon. She is the woman behind the black and white window glass pane, looking out enigmatically from within a pattern of reflected trees, emanating an air of daydreaming madness, which is what Meshes of the Afternoon is about. Although its aesthetic roots are in Europe on account of its Surrealist form and Deren’s interest in Eisensteinian montage, her film is distinctly American: it is pregnant with a sense of otherness; the voodoo, trance-inducing soundtrack alludes to a black culture that doesn’t exist in Europe; the spiralling narrative flow that evokes a sense of shifting identities. It’s no coincidence that America’s most famous film surrealist, David Lynch, was inspired by Meshes when he made Lost Highway (1996), arguably one of his best films.

The film was Deren’s first, and marked the beginning of her collaboration with Alexander Hammid, the Czech cameraman who she married. Laden with symbolism, it stars Deren herself as she often did in her films. Deren started her career as a dancer with choreographer Katherine Dunham’s company, with whom she toured the USA. She met Hammid in Los Angeles in 1941 and it was this encounter that ignited her change of focus from dance to film, although her physicality and beautiful, dance-trained expressiveness is an integral part of her work.

Meshes of the Afternoon is an atmospheric, paranoid reverie where the main character repeats actions (walking up the street, looking out of the window) while a mysterious, hooded finger with a mirror for a face provides a black, nightmarish touch in a sun-lit Los Angeles street. It became the most famous experimental short film of the 1940s, and the thousands of music video clips that adopt similar strategies to disrupt conventional narrative are testimonies to Deren’s influence, if not necessarily acknowledged by younger generations.

But, as in the case of a lot of good art, Meshes of the Afternoon, is best enjoyed if we avoid reading too much into it. The symbolisms are clear and allude to ideas of sexual angst, fear, death etc. But like poetry, the images are not there to ‘educate’. Instead they serve a more lyrical function. Sometimes it’s best to succumb to our intuition, like Deren seems to have done when she conceived it.The real meaning in this film is in the editing, in the beautiful synchronisation between image and sound which constitutes a perfectly formed organic whole. If Deren’s intention was to cast a spell on the viewer and lead us into a state of trance like a celluloid priestess, she was completely successful.

Posted by antoniop | DVD Boutique | WebbleYou Blog Network | © 2008 | Permalink | Comments

When L’Armée des ombres (Army in the Shadows) opens, we are immediately struck by Jean-Pierre Melville’s style: the blue-grey colours that also dominate the Alain Delon-starred Le Samouraï (1967), the minimalist, elegant and unmistakably Gallic mise-en-scene and the references to the American gangster movie genre. For Melville, like his New Wave successors, loved 1940s American film and Army of Shadows, as a film about a resistance group during WWII, certainly pays homage to American cinema as a symbol of liberation (how times have changed!). Traditionally the French have shown a knack for appropriating American genre conventions, then slow down the pace of the narrative and elevate it to something approaching highbrow status.Based on Joseph Kessel’s war-time novel, but also drawing on Melville’s own memories of the Underground, the film starts with a one-minute sequence showing the Wehrmacht marching down the Champs Elysées. The screen projects a sombre spectre and draws us into this cold, semi-monochromatic world of wartime espionage and resistance. Despite the bleakness, Melville made it incredibly attractive to look at.

However, the success of this long, slow film is mainly due to the cast: Lino Ventura tops the bill with his laconic and swift Philippe Gerbier, the leader of an Underground network. Simone Signoret’s Mathilde, the only feminine presence in this otherwise purposefully masculine film (like most of Melville’s films, where women exist on the periphery), is the most memorable presence, though, perhaps due to her ‘lonely female’ standing in the narrative, but also due to her charisma, the intellectual aura of her acting skills and her left-wing star persona that infuses her resistance character with extra pathos and morality.

Originally released in September 1969 around the time of the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Paris, this melancholy, downbeat story is less about heroism and more about the relationships within the group, their liaisons and the moral decisions that they have to make. Their bravery and cold-bloodedness is quite something to watch. In line with Melville’s controlled style, this is a film that requires great attention to detail, but the effort is continuously rewarded. Also, the fact that it is a film hinged on a historic moment freed the director from having to build up a narrative towards a resolution since that is provided by life. We know from the beginning, from the terrifying marching scene, that the world is damned and that things will not turn out well.

The film is pervaded by a fatalistic sentiment, even during the ‘action’ sequences such as the heist segment when the resistance disguise as German Red Cross to get into German quarters for a rescue operation that turns out to be futile, the airplane/parachute scenes and Gerbier’s rescue from prison. The expressionist look of the film serves a story that is less concerned about historic details than it is with the banality of the war and the tragedy that befalls all the characters. Stylization leads to abstraction and the effect is altogether more moving and hard-hitting. Melville’s originality of vision combined with controlled performances and dense atmosphere form a film which is highly coherent aesthetically, making for a devastatingly moving experience.

Posted by antoniop | DVD Boutique | WebbleYou Blog Network | © 2008 | Permalink | Comments

Here’s another example of how the documentary format currently often offers more than fiction as far as drama and humanism are concerned. Veteran German director Werner Herzog has always been fascinated by individuals with an obstinate sense of mission in the middle of nature and Grizzly Man fits right in Herzog’s vast oeuvre, which includes classics like Fitzcarraldo and Aguire: The Wrath of God. But what is most impressive is that he managed to make a film completely his own despite the fact that Grizzly Man was assembled out of video footage shot by the man who is the subject of the film, except for a few segments shot by Herzog himself. He showed with this film what a good director with a sense of integrity can achieve with even an amateur source.

Grizzly Man is Timothy Treadwell, on the surface quite a typical American blonde dude who, after a failed attempt at acting - he used to say he lost the part in the sitcom Cheers that went to Woody Harrelson - proclaimed himself the guardian of the grizzly bears of the Katami National Park in Alaska. For eleven years, up to his death in October 2003, Treadwell would camp out in the park to ‘protect’ and study the bears that became his reason to live. He become a minor celebrity in the process, the subject of a Discovery Channel series and even appeared in the David Letterman show as a guest. During those years he shot over 100 hours of footage.

Because of the unpredicted outcome of Treadwell’s ursine saga, what we see is a very uncensored presentation of himself, often ranting, babbling and indulging in his puerile, Disneyfied vision of nature. Herzog constructed the film in such a way to create a compassionate portrait of a man. The film inspires sympathy and Treadwell’s seeming lunacy comes across as a synthesis of modern misanthropy and discontent with the world as it is. The Western world is full of Timothy Treadwells and this is what makes this film so compelling as well as poignant.

Clearly, Herzog was not interested in exploiting the memory of a man who met a gruesome death in the hands of one of the animals he sought to protect; he was more interested in this man’s symbolic search for communion with nature, which achieves a disastrously ironic culmination when gets devoured by a bear desperate for food before hibernation.

Extremely humane and impartial, Herzog comes across as a compassionate director with a philosophical clarity about the relationship between nature and man. It’s a very eloquent film, full of unforgettable imagery and meditations on our place on this planet. In two words: utterly relevant.

Posted by antoniop | DVD Boutique | WebbleYou Blog Network | © 2008 | Permalink | Comments

This is a must-see cult classic from Tod Browing, who also gave the world the truly wonderful Freaks (quoted by Robert Altman in The Player). Made in 1936 and starring Lionel Barrymore, Frank Lawton and Maureen O’Sullivan, The Devil Doll is a camp cacophony of mad scientists, mind control, shrinking people and Lionel Barrymore in drag. Paul Lavond (Barrymore) decides to take revenge on his three business partners after being framed and imprisoned on Devil’s Island for 17 years. He hooks up with Marcel, an elderly deranged scientist, whose master plan is to save the planet by shrinking all men and beasts. Lavond simply wants retribution on his crooked bankers and when Marcel unexpectedly dies of a heart attack, he becomes the proprietress of a doll shop, the murderous Madame Mandelip – ready to take on her victims. Delicious!

Posted by antoniop | DVD Boutique | WebbleYou Blog Network | © 2008 | Permalink | Comments

The Franco-Brazilian production Black Orpheus is a splash of color that paints on the screen some of the most postcard-y images that Rio de Janeiro ever got. It was also the film that introduced to the world the Bossa Nova and won the 1959 Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Oscar for best foreign language film in 1960.

Directed by Marcel Camus, the film is set on the heights of a rock mountain in Rio where the dwellers of a ‘favela’ (slum) are getting ready for the carnival celebration. The cast is led by the handsome Breno Mello (Orpheus) who falls in love with Marpessa Dawn’s Eurydice against the backdrop of romanticized shacks and broad-smiled noble savages.

The Cinema Novo (Brazil’s neo-realist film movement) people hated this film because of its foreign, romanticised view of the poor as naive Olympian gods living in the firmament (the film is set on top of a mountain and the sky is often the background). They were right about this as Camus did cast a very stylised and stereotypical look at that universe that looks like a Pierre et Gilles photograph. However, the film did take samba outside the ghetto at a time when it was still taboo to enjoy the music, which the white middle-classes perceived as a subversive, low-brow expression. It had been banned from the Rio Carnival until the 1930s.

The film has not survived the test of time without looking like a kitsch relic of Rio de Janeiro memorabilia, but it does look stunning. The scenario by Vinicius ‘Girl from Ipanema’ Morais is messy and the re-contextualisation of the Greek story in a modern setting is often contrived. But the music justifies watching this film, which is very evocative of a more naive world that died at the dawn of the 1960s.

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A very young girl arrives in a coffin at a same-sex school enclosed by woods. The place has a timeless feel about it, although the dress code bespeaks of the 1960s or even the 1950s. The girls have the posture of ballet dancers and immaculate manners as a result of careful and strict grooming. This is the universe depicted by the uncanny, haunting film Innocence, a combination of dark fairy tale fare and drama that plumbs into the realms of female pre-pubescence with nods to magic realism and surrealism.

Directed by one of the rising stars of French cinema, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Innocence is based on an 1888 short story by symbolist German writer Frank Wedekind. Hadzihalilovic shows here a tremendous gift for creating symbolic imagery and atmosphere, not to mention a very developed cinematic vision.

After Iris, the girl from the coffin, is welcomed into the institution, she becomes the protégé of the oldest in the group, Bianca. As it happens, every evening Bianca has to go to an undisclosed place, much to Iris’s distress, who has to be left behind. The only two adult presences in the place are Mademoiselle Edith (Hélene de Fougerolles) and Mademoiselle Eva (Marion Cotillard, seen previously in A Very Long Engagement and last year in La Vie En Rose). Most of the girls seem happy enough, mainly because they know nothing else or perhaps any memories from their prior lives elsewhere seem to have been erased. One of them (Alice) rebels and climbs the wall that separates the place from the rest of the world, disappearing into the forest. The mise-en-scene is immaculately elegant, understatedly sumptuous with lots of dark furniture, white linen and the breathtaking location of the film.

Innocence is like a dream that hypnotizes the viewer with its strange yet recognizable imagery. It is one of those texts into which many interpretations can be read. The most external layer shows a feminine sensitivity dealing with the female soul as it prepares for a world dominated by men. It’s strange in that enclosed universe that is constructed like a Freudian metaphor of female biology and sexuality, but it’s also cosy and protected. Hadzihalilovic never really explains much, which also gives the film a certain tension.

Despite the fact that nothing much happens, the film generates a feeling of compelling curiosity. Like the girls in it, the viewer is seduced into forgetting what the outside world is like and becomes as surprised by the panorama of a sunny city square as the characters that get outside of the school at the end are.

Hadzihalilovic managed to create a meticulous balance between fantasy/surrealism and reality in a film that moves like a dream but which is, all the same, naturalistic. Innocence is a beautifully woven fable tailored to the contemporary imagination populated by accumulated references. It is a very idiosyncratic work with one of the most striking opening credits scenes I’ve ever seen.

Posted by antoniop | DVD Boutique | WebbleYou Blog Network | © 2008 | Permalink | Comments