Plague Times Diary (9) - Peter Hourigan, and David Hare are taking advantage of self-isolation.

Peter Hourigan writes:

Week 2

Hurrah for the back door!  It was how several of my highlights for the week came to me. One was Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy. Through the back door you have to take what you can – I saw the Italian version. Mostly, it wasn’t distracting, only when an occasionally single word – pronto, grazie, arriverderci – was so easily picked up. Anyway, I was just too engrossed in the film. Fabulous!

It’s not a film about Dreyfus as a man suffering injustice, but a film about the political affair, the official incompetence, prejudice, cover-ups, bureaucratic manipulations and powerful string-pulling. The sense of period is impeccable – I never felt the presence of CGI. And Louis Garrel as Dreyfus was, to me, unrecognisable.  Perhaps because I just felt he was Dreyfus.

The back door also let in Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor (Il traditore). Hard to believe that it’s so long ago that he had his Fists in the Pocket.  This is really an epic work, steadily focused on Tommaso Buscetta, a Sicilian mafia boss who broke the code of silence, leading to some of the enormous trials of Mafia bosses and members. Like Scorsese’s The Irishman it is suffused with the sense of a gangster facing up to what his life in big crime has cost him, emotionally, family. But the tone and mood is quite different,

Bellocchio’s film seems to move at a stately pace, quiet and more contemplative. It has its share of action and violence, for sure. But the tone feels more restrained, more elegiac. Perhaps there is something in the mood of films from filmmakers of a certain age, sensing any film could be the final testament.  A beautiful score by Nicola Piovani (he wrote some wonderful scores for the Taviani Brothers) is supplemented by powerful use of existing music – especially Verdil

 Now over to the streams.  On Netflix, Happy Old Year from Thai director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit.   A complete change of mood here, with our main character setting out to adapt her cluttered family home into a minimalist office space.  A quiet film, with a charming story and set of characters, stirred by the way that memories can be attached to particular items – and why it can be so difficult (or even fraught) to get rid of some things.

And Synonyms (Nadav Lapid) came from my DVD pile. This has had some Festival screenings around Australia, but I’d missed it. I can see why it didn’t work for some people, but I was completely drawn in.  It wasn’t didactic or overtly philosophical, but seemed to be addressing so many thoughts and ideas, from questions of nationality and personal identity, to the impact and power of a word.  I’d love to have a coat like the one Yoav wears when he tries to flee his Israeli identity by escaping to Paris.

City of Photographers (Sebastian Moreno) was an interesting Chilean film (on Kanopy) about some of the photographers documenting what was going on in Santiago during the Pinochet years. 

I’d also watched a Netflix documentary on Nietszche (from the Genius of the Modern World series). Spurred by this, I picked Lou Andres-Salome (Cordula Kablitz) a German bio-pic of a pioneer German psychoanalyst who had an affair with the philosopher. Interesting to a degree, but hardly rising about the Heritage Traditional mould.

David Hare Writes:

Diary for the Plague: Week 2

Movie watching for this period started up last week after an alert from movie fashion and wardrobe guru David Noh, who was praising Irene Dunne and her great Walter Plunkett wardrobe in the 1933 precode Fallen Woman epic, Ann Vickers for RKO. Watched on an older Warner Archive DVD-R. Director John Cromwell struggles to handle an over-long, over written screenplay which, coming to the end of a such a well-worn cycle, I felt simply overloads the goods. Dunne also doesn’t feel quite near her peak yet. I shelved it into the minor Cromwell shelf. 

This happily led me straight to Criterion’s stunning new Blu of Whale’s Show Boat sourced from a superb 4K Warner/MPI restoration. Dunne holds her own against original cast members including Helen Morgan. The movie needs to wait for a full review from me. 

Staying with strong, powerful women Jean Peters as Anne of the Indies, from 1951. The Blu-ray is on Spanish Resen, taken from an Eastman recomb source, there being no tech three strip negs in existence. In many ways a perfect adventure genre Tourneur, just as Wichita is perhaps Tourneur’s perfect western. Suffice to say briefly, Peters is a knockout, and one understands fully why Tourneur lamented not convincing Fox and Zanuck to give him Peters for his great Way of a Gaucho the next year (1952) instead stiffing him with the more “prestigious” Gene Tierney. I actually like Tierney in Gaucho a lot, not least for the way she reacts to a much more physical costar like Rory Calhoun. But Peters is a major under appreciated actor.

And thus to the new 4k restorations of two early Fellinis, Lo Sceicco Bianco from 1952 and perhaps his masterpiece for many, Le Notti di Cabiria from 1957. It’s nice to relish Fellini again after long breaks in attention. I hope Geoff Gardner’s Cinema Reborn event is back in 2021, so that Cabiria at least can finally get a screening in Sydney. The new discs were on German Arthaus label, from Canal who has authored them for German, French and English release. The German discs are the first off the block.

Two effectively banned films, at least in the Anglosphere, the 1946 Disney live action and animation feature Song of the South, and Polanski’s very personal, even allegorical film about the Dreyfus affair, and exile and cancel culture, J’Accuse. I like both movies very much, and I despair at the politics that inhibit their open availability. Needless to say these two titles were sourced from backchannels.

Finally, watching in a superb quality UHD 4K disc from Fox of Taika Waititi’s JoJo Rabbit. I have very mixed reactions to the film. Sometimes it works very well, sometimes I feel Taika is just trying to do too much. But the disc is a beauty. 

And for completely mindless fun, junk viewing the two Flicker Alley 3D Rarities discs curated so beautifully by Bob Furmanek and Jack Theakston. You need a fairly high tolerance for stuff like g rated stripper loops in 3D and other “novelty “ routines, but some of the high points amongst the dross include a long 3 minute trailer for Miss Sadie Thompson which looks terrific and uses the enclosed spaces of the pacific shack to great advantage. Rita also looks terrific in 3D. I am only sorry the industry decided to kill off 3D with the home video debut of 4K.

Who says quarantining can’t be fun!