If you rake through the National Film events which are in a log jam here right now, you can spot an odd phenomenon, a run of movies made in second language English in their home countries.
I saw Paris Song in the first Kazakh movie event in Paris which I'll discuss elsewhere but it turned up again here (inexplicably) in the Jewish Film Festival.
The film is in English with sub-titled Kazakh passages and puts the cause of the subject people oppressed during the period of Soviet domination, a current movie preoccupation. Bernd Böhlich’s German Und der Zukunft zugewandt/Sealed Lips covers similar material in the GDR.
Paris Song follows Sanjar Madi as Amre Kashaubayev the rural Kazakh folk singer the Russians packed off to the 1925 Paris Song Contest, with nervous party man minder (here Miha Rodman), sure of a propaganda triumph when he’d get blown away by their own entry.
However, apologising to the appointed pianist and stepping off stage to reappear with his two string mandolin, Madi wows the elimination round audience that includes Ben Aldridge as George Gershwin and Toms Liepajnieks as Irving Berlin.
Though warned about the “dangerous” Kazakh leader in exile there, our hero gets the address of the Boeuf Sur la Toit club from him and finds Berlin and Gershwin jamming with the house band to an enthusiastic audience that includes Jean Cocteau, Jean Weiner, Man Ray, Kiki de Montmartre and Josephine Baker (another name drop film in the line of Dilili à Paris and Midnight in Paris). After some hesitation, Madi fits right in.
Nervous Rodman cautions him “If you aren’t worried about your own neck, think about mine” but when he gets inside, a sexy blonde, Abbie Cornish no less, getting second billing as a character spun off photographer Lee Miller, is doing “Fascinating Rhythm” with her own voice and stopping the show. Rodman is blown away, as are we all. I can’t get the lyrics out of my head a month later. Rodman tells Madi to ignore his caution. The singer has found his people.
Romance for Madi with Cornish who photographs him in the park where he feels at ease - “the only place not made out of stone.”
The Russkie heavies take a dim view of all this, along with the possible damage if Madi defeats their own candidate and have the Kazakh beaten and thrown in a cell to prevent him competing but the Russian candidate announces “If Amre does not sing, I will not sing” (rousing moment) so they have to clean Madi up and get him to the theater where he breaks out the national costume in his trunk and looks like carrying off the competition.
Finally Madi tells Abie that Kazakhstan needs him and he goes back. We see his Amre again in the rural setting of the film’s opening before a title tells us he won honors in another international Sing-Off before vanishing in a Stalinist purge.
Mainly the film making has been assured if a little old-fashioned. The most adventurous sequence being an outfitting in western clothes montage that could have come out of any movie since the 1920s. However Paris Song delivers a knockout punch in a final non-verbal sequence where Aldridge‘s Gershwin plays “An American in Paris” against a black limbo background panned to Madi as Amre doing his own material which suggests the American derived passages from that.
This one would be a treat from any source but it is particularly welcome as a manifestation of the current assertion of Kazakh film making.
The style is established with Topolanszky’s stylish 35mm projector machinery background titles and a Citizen Kane rip-off with executives smoking in the theatrette as the “day that will live in infamy” Pearl Harbor news footage plays. There's a close up of Ferenc Lengyel looking like a studio portrait of Curtiz - which he doesn’t during the rest of the film - lining up a shot.
The most interesting element is their idea of relationship between Lengyel & Evelin Dobos as Curtiz and separated daughter Kitty, played in sub-titled Hungarian, unlike the body of the film which is in English. The growing together with Kitty seems forced, though his bafflement when she first speaks to him in Hungarian and his unaware attempt to pick her up, like the waitress he gets to grope, register. The makers do manage to equate the father daughter relationship with the uncertain interaction between the Bogart and Bergman characters in Casablanca then filming.
Curtiz fails to integrate bits of authentic Curtiz history- humiliating the show off extra, ordering poodles when he wanted puddles - with Lengyel’s sensitive, anguished character. Their moody scope B&W (with red shooting light sequences) attempt at film noir lighting only runs to one Curtiz signature shadow - the dwarf on the stairs. The music belongs to a different decade.
Otherwise departures from fact keep on irritating - Curtiz giving the studio Errol Flynn and Bette Davis and a bitchy fashion plate (brunette) Bess Meredith. Particularly grating is the invention of a Soviet style Cultural Commissar as villain rapist who Mike punches out.
Another misfire is bringing out the Nazi in Christopher Krieg's Conrad Veidt. The legendary actor’s intriguing real character they totally fail to catch. There was certainly enough material to draw on there. Scott Alexander Young does Hal Wallis as just an on screen narrator, though the scene with Andrew Hefler/Jack Warner getting a massage during his confrontation with Legnyel does ring when he tells his director that it will be Warner’s name that people will remember and not his. The fact that the studio didn’t boost Curtiz, the way his employers did Hitchcock or Paramount did De Mille, could have been used to give resonance here. I always suspected that Warners didn’t want their lifetime employee to improve his bargaining position.
The film’s key failure is in its attempt to make central the WW2 setting where Lengyel is asked “Do you love your country” countering “Which one?”
Admirers of Iron Mike Curtiz are not going to learn anything about him here though it's intriguing to see someone trying turn the facts of his life into a fiction feature. By and large their representation is a lot more respectful than the John Huston in Clint Eastwood's White Hunter Black Heart or Robert Flaherty in Charles Massot's Kabloonak/Nanook. Maybe we should be grateful.
Current Russian Resurection Film Festival is pushing Journey to China: Mysteries of the Dragon’s Seal, director Oleg Stepchenko’s sequel to his Yij, the big Russian earner of 2014 despite going straight to video in most markets. The new film brings back Seventeenth Century English Cartographer Jason Flemyng, a rather middle aged hero with his (Slavonic looking) aristocratic love interest Anna Churina and shoe horns them into a new plot with Jackie Chan and Arnold Arnold Schwarzenegger about Peter the Great as a man in an iron mask and a Chinese sorceress who has taken over the industry of harvesting the eye lashes of the great dragon as tea exports.
Fleming’s father in law Lord Charles Dance takes a dim view of him but comes to accept the grandchild the liaison has produced and Fleming is sent off on a mission to Moscow to offer his pioneer world maps, detouring through Transylvania where he collects a rather winning hobgoblin. Fleming spots the impostor Czar Peter so he’s packed off on to the East. The Chinese prisoner he rescues as his side kick is not what he seems.
 |
| Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan on set |
However, the big set piece and the reason the name stars participate, is the face-off between Arnie and Jackie - with the very Chan gag of Jackie inverting the treasured helmet of Genghis Khan from the governor’s military museum to reveal it as a common Chinese cooking pot.
Suspecting her husband is up to something on the silk road, Churina in drag smuggles herself onto a Cossack ship captained by drunken redheaded midget Martin Klebba.
The material in the digital Tower of London, the chase across a digital London Bridge (much better than Perfume) and the voyage with monstrous seas is pretty good but at this length interest wilts when we get to the China of dungeons and dragons we recognise from the Tsui Hark movies and face changing sorceress Yington Yau (Chinese Zodiac) in a gold one piece attempting to acquire the seal that will give her power over the sleeping dragon which she is simulating with a Siegfried style contrivance until the good guys arrive on umbrella gliders devised by Fleming whose science is pitted against the old magic.
If this synopsis sounds incoherent you’re getting the idea.
Introducing the film in Sydney, amiable, bearded visiting director Stepchenko was visibly delighted to be offering his forty million dollar, two years in the making, 140 day shoot, large scale kiddie (nine years and up he suggest) adventure to an overseas public. It has its moments but it needs to be shorn of a lot of flab designed to give the host countries equal time and lose the lip-flap dubbing if it’s going to conquer the international market.
At this distance it’s hard to tell whether this English speaking foreign product is a coincidence or a bid to cash in on the new streaming market or an international phenomenon like the Spaghetti Western and the Kung Fu movie. We’ll know soon enough.
Editor's Note: Barrie Pattison is a lifelong Sydney-based scholar, critic, collector and film-maker. He has written extensively for many decades and his current writing can be found throughout the Film Alert 101 blog and at his own blog Sprocketed Sources. Barrie's most recent book, written with John Howard Reid is a study of Michael Curtiz. To purchase copies email mozjoukine@yahoo.com.au
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.