Spanish Film Festival (4) - Barrie Pattison is underwhelmed by the domestic hit CHAMPIONS (Javier Fesser)

Javier Fesser’s Campeones/ Champions is a massive hit in Spain. It opened the Spanish Film Festival here and the audience I saw it with gave it spontaneous applause - how often does that happen? Took me a while to understand why I was uncomfortable with it.

The plot has the admirable Javier Gutiérrez (La Isla minima, Plan de fuga) second coach to a Spanish ACB's champion basketball team. During the match he gets into a shoving match with chief coach Daniel Freire (Sex and Lucía) and is sent off. His marriage to the winning Athenea Mata is on the rocks and his mother is impatient about him occupying her spare bed so Gutiérrez empties the bottle in a bar and, when pulled over, he rear ends the police car. In the cells, a lawyer he’s never seen shows up, not to to have him released but to handle his appearance before the lady judge he doesn’t know how to address. He’s given a driving ban and three months either in the slammer or community service. 

Gutiérrez thinks he’s hard done by but the lawyer tells him to shut up and accept his court appointed punishment which turns out to be coaching “Los Amigos,” a mentally impaired basketball team from a rundown Cultural Service operated by elderly Juan Margallo, whose career goes back to Spirit of the Beehive. He turns out to be the nephew of the judge.

Confronting the result of child birth accidents taps into Gutiérrez’ own fears about becoming a father but a visit to the judge lets him know he’s getting off lightly. Comic scenes of them not getting the idea that they have to wear team colours or run in a line. This is increasingly the way as with the bus that they are thrown off after complaints by the other passengers. The audience was falling about while I became uncomfortable with the use of genuine cases being put up as ridiculous if heartwarming.

The formulaic body of the film has the players (his mum slaps Gutiérrez for saying “retards”) turn out to be winning and funny and he somewhat implausibly shapes them into a unit he takes to the Paralympic national league's competition finals. The cast actually do basketball stunts.

Of course Gutiérrez’ marital and personality problems are solved by his contact with the team. The finale does ring. He hasn’t realised that he achieved his aim until he sees the evidence all around him among slow mo of falling paper guns. However even structurally I find the piece flawed. Roberto Chinchilla, the player from the Paralympics who lost his medal in a cheating scandal has a more interesting story than our hero. Maybe that’s why his part is so fragmentary. The film is otherwise generally technically accomplished.

Projects like this need careful judgement. Think the Stanley Kramer/John Cassavetes’ A Child is Waiting. Playing it for cheap shot comedy is suspect to say the least. Can’t blame the cast who seem to have enjoyed themselves in their first contact with the movies.

CINEMA REBORN - Short notes and links (7) - WANDA (Barbara Loden, USA, 1970)

Barbara Loden’s (left) only feature-length directorial achievement is a stark portrait of a working-class woman (played by Loden herself) who breaks free of a miserable marriage, only to find herself on the lam with an abusive bank robber.

“Wanda was a revelation. Nothing had prepared me for her performance—or for the film itself. Here was an American depiction of outlaws that refused to glamorize. Here was an American movie that picked up where Italian neorealism had left off.” Amy Taubin, critic

“I believe there’s a miracle in Wanda,” Marguerite Duras

Click on this link to the Ritz website to Book tickets to this remarkable film

To read Adrian Martin and Cristina Alvarez Lopez’s specially written program notes Click on this link

Spanish Film Festival (3) - Barrie Pattison highly recommends LA QUIETUD (Pablo Trapero, Argentina)

Pablo Trapero is one of those people that the festival circuit picked up in his early days and then dropped. Think Italians like Gabriele Salvatores or Luigi Zampa. It comes as a surprise to find these talents went on working. Trapero (Mondo Grua/Crane World, Famiglia rodante/Rolling Family) has continued to do some of Argentina’s most ambitious movies and his new La Quietud (the name sign over the gate of the low slung red buildings of the family rancho they use for the stylish opening title) is remarkable.

Trapero’s wife Martina Gusman and Bérénice Bejo are a pair of sisters who meet again when their aged father Isidoro Tolcachir has a stroke and is confined comatose in the I.C.U. The film stops being ordinary when we get the scene of the two sisters rolling about in the bed masturbating together in their scanties as they recall the black plumber they lusted after in their chidhood - bare intertwined limbs and giggling. The Medem Habitación en Roma is left in this one’s dust. The scene and a later make-out are more explicit that we are used to seeing in mainstream cinema or for that matter porn.

The family matriarch is played by the legendary Graciela Borges whose work runs from the fifties and is pretty much inaccessible in the Anglosphere. She soon manages to dominate her scenes. Just lighting a cigarette is spell binding. Borges comes into ferocious conflict with Gusman. Her “the first child is special” line gets to have greater meaning as the film progresses.

Diego Dussuel’s 'Scope images are mobile and exceptionally sharp and the film’s characterisation is quite merciless. We get to know these people intensely without my really wanting to spend time with them - but hold on. Latino melodrama is metamorphosing into Greek tragedy.

The girls share Bejo’s husband and Gusman’s lover with events complicated by Bejo’s new pregnancy. “Don’t meddle mother!” Borges is warned. Meanwhile the father Gusman adores has been wheeled on a respirator into the main bedroom with a view of the grounds where the numbered horses graze, to be attended by a relay of medics. They keep on reminding us this family is rich - cut to the thick steak being sliced on the dinner table.

The servile housekeeper insists Borges come back to sign a police witness statement and we start hearing about Powers of Attorney. There’s a mysterious ledger (another one) in the briefcase given Gusman.  The family argue over The Dictatorship. 

The sexual tensions reach a head at the family funeral, done Hill Street Blues style in a complex traveling when the camera switches from one character’s plot to another without an edit. The leads emerge from that scarred in more ways than one.

Borges’ big scene drags the film out of its exploitation format and into something more politically correct but also more challenging. This is not a film that will leave audiences impartial. The sonogram ending shifts the production even further away from what we expect.

Bejo is the performer we know and her travels, which have taken her from France to Iran and now South America, make her someone who has made use of her star status to build this impressive international filmography. She looks great and gives an exceptional performance to set against the film's men who are made uniformly spineless.

So far Spanish Film Festival is delivering big time.

Pablo Trapero, Martina Gusman, Berenice Bejo

CINEMA REBORN - Short notes and links (6) - SONS OF MATTHEW (Charles Chauvel, Australia, 1949)

A tale of rugged pioneer days, Sons of Matthew Charles Chauvel gave the lead role to the young Michael Pate and, as with the earlier Chauvel discovery, Errol Flynn, the film’s success hurtled the actor towards a long career in Hollywood. Controversial in its day for its famous nude bathing scene which the censor, remarkably, let through.

“This film is quintessentially Chauvel, combining the strongest factors in his personality. His reverence for the soil and the pioneer spirit is clear in the story of a young couple settling down on a “lost world” plateau in Queensland and raising a family despite drought, fire and natural obstacles. The setting, the rain forests of the border between Queensland and New South Wales, gave him the broad natural background he needed, and the script, with its bushfires and cyclones, an opportunity for spectacle. He could hardly have had a more congenial vehicle.” John Baxter, The Australian Cinema.

Digital 2K restoration by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia as part of NFSA Restores.

Click on this link to the Ritz website to Book tickets to this Australian classic

To read a detailed program note mostly drawn from Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper's Australian Film 1900-1977  Click on this link

Adam Bowen's TALKIE TALK #56 - New Movies, Bernard Hermann's Movie Music and classics on TV by Reed, Huston, Kubrick, Hitchcock and more

NEW IN CINEMAS THIS WEEK

Celeste (2018) Aussie movie, directed by Ben Hackworth. Rhada Mitchell is Celeste, an opera diva, who retired early – for the love of her husband, who has since died. Living on a decaying estate in a Queensland rainforest, Celeste plans her final stage performance. 

Watch the trailer here

Gloria Bell (2018) - Julianne Moore is a woman in her 50s, searching for love in LA dance clubs. Chilean director, Sebastián Lelio’s American version of the movie, Gloria, which he co-wrote and directed in Chile, in 2013.

1985 (2018) – Fort Worth, Texas, 1985. A gay young man who resides in NYC, visits his evangelical Christian parents, and pretends to be straight – for a while.

The Chaperone (2018) Teenaged Louise Brooks (Haley Lou Richardson) – before she was a movie star – is chaperoned from Wichita, Kansas to NYC by a teetotal family friend (Elizabeth McGovern). Written by Julian (Downton Abbey) Fellowes.

The Hummingbird Project (2018) Jesse Eisenberg, Salma Hayek and Alexander Skarsgård star in a thriller about high-stakes traders who plan to make millions by to building a fibre-optic cable between Kansas and New Jersey…let’s hope it’s not fibre to the node.

Watch the trailer here

Thunder Road (2018) Police officer Jim Cummings goes all doo-lally when he fails to cope with divorce and the death of his mother. At least he has time to Vote Tony Out. 

Yellow is Forbidden (2018) –The struggles of a Chinese couturier.

The Spanish Film Festival is screening now! Click on its website

  

MOVIE MUSIC on 102.5 fm …or stream it by clicking here 

Wednesday 9am:Psycho*(1960); The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) – all scores by Bernard Herrmann (left)

ON THE TELLY

Monday 8.30pm & Tuesday Noon, Fox Classics: Bullitt (1968) – Steve McQueen is a very cool San Francisco detective; Robert Vaughan is a smoothly sleazy politician. The plot is familiar, but there’s lots of atmosphere, a brilliant car chase and music by Lalo Schifrin.

Wednesday Noon 9Gem: The Third Man (1948) - Mystery thriller, set in the shadowy streets of bombed-out, post-WW2 Vienna.  All concerned are at the top of their form: script (Graham Greene), direction (Carol Reed), photography (Australian, Robert Krasker); stars Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Valli and Trevor Howard; supporting cast, Wilfred Hyde-White, Bernard Lee and Ernst Deutsch. The score was composed and performed (entirely on the zither) by Viennese-born Anton Karas. 

Watch the Restoration trailer

For additional preparation you can watch the production history of THE THIRD MAN, written by Charles Drazin and narrated by V.O. actor Robb Webb. From the Criterion Collection DVD release.Just click here

Wednesday 10.35pm & Thursday 2.10pm, Fox Classics: The African Queen (1951) During WW1, a prim missionary, Katharine Hepburn, persuades drunken river trader, Humphrey Bogart, to attack a German gunboat. Excellent characters having a grand, old-fashioned adventure, directed by John Huston and photographed by Jack Cardiff.

Watch a trailer here

Thursday Noon 9Gem: Ice Cold in Alex (1958) - a British ambulance crosses the Libyan desert, despite land mines, a spy and Nazis. A WW2 nail-biter, expertly directed by J. Lee Thompson, and photographed by Gilbert Taylor. Starring John Mills and Sylvia Syms.

Thursday 8.35pm & Friday Noon, Fox Classics: Paths of Glory (1957) Anti-war story set in 1916. French infantrymen refuse an order to undertake a suicidal attack, and are court-martialed for cowardice. Stark, graphic and bitter story of horror in the trenches and corruption amongst the top brass. Makes Saving Private Ryan look like a bloated cartoon. Directed by Stanley Kubrick; photographed by Georg Krause; starring Kirk Douglas and Adolphe Menjou.

Friday 10.50pm & Saturday 210pm, Fox Classics: Director Alfred Hitchcock made Psycho*(1960) with a TV crew. When it was completed, he was certain it would flop, and planned to cut it down to a one-hour TV movie. Composer Bernard Herrmann said: “wait ‘til you hear my score” – composed entirely for strings, high and low. The amalgamation makes electrifying viewing. Psycho stars Janet Leigh, as a woman who embezzles some money from her real estate boss. She makes the bad decision to stay at a run-down motel, run by the loopy Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins, above). I won’t spoil the rest of the story, but Norman has a problem with his mother, and with knives. 

Saturday 10am 9Gem Mandy (1952), a beautifully made and acted film about a girl (Mandy Miller) who’s born deaf. She and her parents’ struggle to find Mandy a place in a world full of talk. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick and photographed by Douglas Slocombe.

Watch a French-subtitled trailer of the restored copy

Streaming on Netflix - Rod Bishop admires WILD WILD COUNTRY (Chapman Way, Maclain Way, USA, 2018) ...and extra added response from David Hare

Editor's Note: Following online posting David Hare commented about his memories of the Rajneesh in Sydney.  I've now included this further contribution at the foot of Rod's review.

When the religious commune known as the Rajneesh imploded in rural Oregon in the mid-1980s, they had already carried out the largest biological terrorist attack in US history; they were armed to the back teeth; they had committed widespread electoral fraud and had planned assassinations including killing their own kind. They were led by an Indian guru who believed in free love, disco dancing and collecting Rolls Royces – 93 of them - the world’s largest collection. 

But when their downfall eventually - and inevitably - came in a welter of prosecutions, no-one had died. Not like Jonestown or Waco, where the loss of life ensured those deranged religious cultists made pop culture infamy. Without any lurid deaths as their commune fell apart, the Rajneesh sort of faded away and have largely been forgotten.

I’m just as guilty as anyone of forgetting the Rajneeshees. At the time, I merely relegated their guru and his Rolls Royces to the Monty Python part of my brain. I even gobbled up the Waco TV series last year as soon as it was available (five hours of my life I won’t get back) while avoiding Wild Wild Country, no matter how many glowing reviews it was getting.

The Way Brothers were pitched the idea for Wild Wild Country by an archivist at the Oregon Historical Society who had access to nearly 300 hours of archival footage collated from television stations and material filmed by Rajneeshee film crews.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later known as ‘Osho’) established an ashram in Pune, India in 1974 and preached an odd combination of meditation, self-actualization, sexual freedom and a celebration of wealth. Unsurprisingly, Westerners flocked to the ashram, but when Indian authorities decided to clamp down in 1981, the Bhagwan’s loyal ‘secretary’ moved the commune to the rural town of Antelope, Oregon, population 40 (mostly retirees).

Thousands of Rajneeshees, clothed in their trademark red-and-orange, descended on the tiny community, bought the 64,000-acre Big Muddy Ranch and set about building the city of “Rajneeshpuram’’ - homes, vast assembly halls, dams, a pizza parlour, clothes shops (all orange or red), a Medical Research Laboratory and a private airstrip for their planes.

Exploiting US laws, they set-up a hugely sophisticated electoral fraud scheme, took over Antelope and renamed it Rajneesh with their own Rajneeshee police force. When their hotel in Portland was bombed, they went to war against the locals, the nearby towns and State officials. 

Their inventory was 17,400 rounds of rifle ammunition, 20 semi-automatic Uzi rifles, 96 AK-47s and a million rounds of AK-47 ammo - “more semi-automatic weapons than all of the police forces in Oregon combined” muses one old-timer. At one point, they shipped in the homeless from surrounding states and put them up in the commune to add to their electoral roll.

The commune’s biological warfare attack on the town of The Dalles poisoned 751 residents with salmonella in an attempt to stop them voting on election day.

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Oddly, but possibility due to a lack of footage, the Bhagwan is the least successful of the characters in this series. After all, he stopped speaking for three-and-a-half years following the move to Oregon. The viewer spends as much time wondering where all their money came from as wondering how he managed to exert such influence and control over his happy-flappy followers (left). Even by strange guru standards, he appears as anything but charismatic.

The sex, money and the much vaunted ‘freedom’ are clearly attractions, but their devotion to this man was so intense that even after a handful of Rajneeshees were sent to jail, the commune collapsed and the Bhagwan was deported, many still followed him back to India. There are remarkable scenes at his funeral in 1990, where the wide-eyed devotion of the followers to their guru is palpable.

Bhagwan’s ‘secretary’ Ma Anand Sheela (formally known as Sheela Silverman, right) is the commanding presence and the main focus of attention. Her controlling, antagonistic commands and her ruthless strategies have not diminished in the least, judging by her recent interviews for this series. 

Not so, Australian Jane Stork (formally known as Ma Shanti B) who was charged with plotting the murder of another Rajneeshee, but who now denounces the cult. She is the exception and the eloquent lawyer Swami Prem Niren (formally known as Philip J Toelkes), who once represented Linda Ronstadt, sees nothing at all wrong with anything that happened in Oregon, except for the persecution of a religion by a xenophobic country eternally afraid of “the other”. He wonders whether all this calamity would have been foisted on a community of Christians moving to Antelope.

There are six episodes running nearly seven hours and there’s not a wasted minute. The Americans have been the world’s best documentary filmmakers for some time now and you can add the Way Brothers to their great tradition.

David Hare responds I have extremely fond memories of the Rajneesh folks who were still current in Sydney right up to the mid eighties. They seemed to have “happened” at some weirdly distorted point in middle class western history when AIDS had broken out, and the sexual revolution was grinding to a halt. And for that moment in time their followers in Sydney were all ex “smart” middle class people who had embraced the movement after becoming repulsed by the Greed is Good religion that was following on the coattails of neo liberal capitalism which was even beginning to poison the ALP government in Australia. I had more than a few personal, sexual and social connections with a remaining stalwart group, who wre communally living in Surrey Street Darlo, near Phil Noyce’s house, and around the corner from a tiny but wonderful 20s apartment down the hill a bit which I had bought and where I was then living. There is so much to tell but I was, as a lifelong sceptic and anti theistic anti spiritual arsehole to simply find awe in their achievements, not least their totally sublime Vego restaurant at Taylor Square in the old Chez Ivy joint - a font not only for superb food and wine, but home to my second favorite dealer in Sydney who sold the best and cleanest coke it was ever my privilege to snort. I wish we had them all back in our lives!

CINEMA REBORN - Short notes and links to the selection (5) - LUCKY TO BE A WOMAN (Alessandro Blasetti, Italy, 1954)

Long before they became internationally famous, Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni starred in a series of piquant, cheeky comedies that set the domestic box-office alight.

This one has Marcello as a paparazzi photographer who snaps a picture of the gorgeous Sophia showing more of her legs than appropriate for the day. Her noisy and very wily campaign to get some retribution ends inevitably but not before there’s much on display about Italian women and men and the roles the play. Funny, charming but also very spiky in its attitudes. Veteran director Blasettti (left) handles the material adroitly.

 “…ninety-six minutes of unrestrained bantering and quarreling and teasing on the part of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni…” Geoffrey O’Brien, the New York Review of Books

Digital Restoration by the Cineteca di Bologna, 2018.

Click on this link to the Ritz website to Book tickets to this cheeky Italian comedy

For detailed program notes Click on this link