Viewing Log #40: On earth as it is [4/5/10 - 4/11/10]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—How it falls, plays, waves

• Alamar [Pedro González-Rubio, 2009] This one's playing SFIFF53, and I watched it on a screener with headphones. That seemed okay to me. It's a quiet, small thing. But it's also impressive photography of a world I'll likely never know but through this magic medium. It further impresses me that González-Rubio is his own cinematographer and that he barely gets in the way of these three generations and their time with water, and an egret. More in my festival preview, I promise, which should probably hit the webs this week.
  
• Read My Lips [Jacques Audiard, 2001] Supremely entertaining and ingratiating quasi-thriller. I think it's more interesting than Beat That My Heart Skipped, too, though its aural effects are only employed when it suits the filmmaker, not the story; or, though it's clearly Devos' movie (and what a joy that is!), the forced perspective registered by the soundtrack is inconsistent. Which is to say that Audiard has a lot of ideas, no doubt, but he's not exactly rigorous and he's not exactly free-wheeling. Will be interesting to see how this flux plays in Un Prophète, which I expect to like, as I've liked the other two I've seen. In all honesty, it'd be great to make something this accomplished, sturdy and engrossing. There's even a few jokes.
  
  
• Dodsworth [William Wyler, 1936] Nice to see something with a happy ending after the bittersweet, brush-the-edge finale of the McCarey. Walter Huston is a little loud, but still nuanced, and Mary Astor's calm makes me somersault with hope that, yes, life is long and I'll be presented plenty of opportunities to find a real help meet some day down the line. Also, Wyler's got some chops, duh, and a penchant for playing with focus in key moments. Brian already tweeted about the pivotal phone, but I'd also like to point to the mirrors, specifically the one in Vienna that keeps fantasies "outside" or "off" the real world.
  
• Make Way For Tomorrow [Leo McCarey, 1937] Lived up to the hype, and the precedent set by the other McCarey films I love. But I don't have anything to add to what Danny wrote here, or what Tag Gallagher wrote for the new Criterion disc, which I'd urge anybody to enjoy with or without a lover. Also, I'd urge you watch The Awful Truth directly afterwards. And then I'd urge you to keep your job.
  
  
• Greenberg [Noah Baumbach, 2010] As Dan Sallitt said to me last week, I don't get why Baumbach has to make everybody so nasty. But I laughed a lot, and loudly, in that almost-empty theatre. Hiring Harris Savides was a wise choice, as was casting Greta Gerwig, whose seemingly natural élan turns preternatural next to Ben Stiller. I don't know how she sold that attraction so well, but it's got a lot more to do with lust and loneliness than with true chemistry. And the movie seems to get that, too. But I don't think Ben Stiller can play that as well as Gerwig can, and everything she does masks that in the ways we all mask those impulses. A curious picture that's almost something; if it weren't hilarious, it'd be nothing.
  
• Micmacs [Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009] As far as festival openers go, this is fine. Will probably make everybody exiting the Castro on the 22nd smile a lot, and desire company. That is, its capricious (arch?) proclivity for goofy gears at work is amiable enough and the filmmaking is Jeunet's least expository, to say swiftest, if forever ostentatious/ornate. Great final shot, though.
  
  
• The Sopranos "Made In America" [S6E21, David Chase, 2007] # Nearly every single line makes me laugh, but it's dry and dire, too; nothing's as outlandish as it could be. Some of that's the performances, too, but a lot is the writing and the directing. It's the best kind of surrealism that matches "the world" to dreams' fluid, deft, associational tilt on actions—or that possibility in formal arrangements—be they sounds, like the ring of a door opening, or accidents, like a car in neutral rolling over a dead head, or anything else, like the aphasia one faces in a sea of others or like the absurdity of a cat staring at a dead man's cheesy portrait.
  
  
• Plastic Bag [Ramin Bahrani, 2009] Finally got around to watching this because a good friend said he liked it. Doesn't "side firmly with things" in the end, as Ignatiy wrote here, and it's only the quality of Herzog's voice (and what kind of intentionality that brings) that gives the little ditty anything. It's pretty, I guess, but it's still about human desires, not a bag's. (Similar problems as with that Pixar paean to bathos and trash.)

—I should look for leaves?

Susana: Buñuel at Play

by Steven Boone

Luis Buñuel's Susana (1951) might be his worst, most entertaining film. After shooting his low-budget masterpiece, Los Olvidados in 1950, Buñuel was on rocky terms with Mexican audiences. That film represented Mexico as a nightmare in which failed social services and a hostile or indifferent economy resulted in children tossed aside like trash. Bunuel's producer, Oscar Dancigers, had agreed to let the aging surrealist make one personal film for every two commercial ones. Buñuel had delivered, with two crowd-pleasers, the musical Gran Casino (1946) and the screwball comedy The Great Madcap (1949). But the hostility toward Los Olvidados ended Danciger's and Buñuel's scheme just when it really got going. The director made Susana for another producer, Sergio Kogan. (The ironic postscript is that Los Olvidados went on to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes before its release to worldwide acclaim in 1952.)

With Susana, Buñuel honed an elegant "invisible" storytelling style that would reach perfection in Viridiana. This might account for the overacting and bombastic musical score: Maybe Buñuel was so caught up with camera choreography (on a tight 20-day schedule) that he let the performances run amok. Seen today, the bombast works as camp. It kind of fits this (literally) stormy melodrama about a female juvenile delinquent (Rosita Quintana) who single-handedly wrecks a wealthy Mexican rancher's home by seducing him, his son and his most trusted ranchero. Fernando Soler (who brings the most subtlety of the entire cast) plays the rancher as a tough-minded middle aged jefe who Susana reduces to a fool in love.

Buñuel uses the horny premise to indulge his leg fetish and favorite sacreligious themes. Buxom, hot-blooded Susana prays to the "God of prisons" to bust her out of juvie-- and He does. She escapes to don Guadalupe's ranch and proceeds to eat every man in sight. If you watch Susana without sound, it's as feverish and irrational as something like L'age d'Or. Buñuel's camera gets away with sensuality and eroticism less visually adroit directors wouldn't know how to manage.

Here's a sample of that craftiness, set to David Axelrod's song A Divine Image:

[Editor's Note: This is a belated submission to the Luis Buñuel blog-a-thon (hosted by Flickhead) that ran last week. I was planning on seeing Los Olvidados to contribute a tandem piece with Steve's delightful little appreciation, here, but life got in the way. So, if you want more on Buñuel from me, you'll have to wait. Luckily, thanks to a special gift from Senor Boone, I will be able to watch a lot of the Mexican films sooner than later. So stay tuned. -- RWK]

CINCO DE VINYL: Buñuel's Travelling Illusions

by Steven Boone

At the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, Luis Buñuel and family fled their newly fascist homeland for the United States. The rising 39-year-old filmmaker suddenly found himself in a marginal position in world cinema — as a dubber for Hollywood films and New York's Museum of Modern Art. Mexico provided the unlikely stage for his return to directing when the Russian-born producer Oscar Dancigers offered him the Mexican "political musical" Gran Casino (1946). Buñuel would spend the next 13 years churning out Mexican comedies and melodramas aimed at a mass audience. Accordingly, his triumphs and failures in this period were judged primarily by box office receipts.

Buñuel's third film for Dancigers, the devastating Los Olvidados (1950), forced world attention back onto the former surrealist upstart, whose Un chien andalou (1929) and L'age d'or (1930) were now distant pinpoints in the rearview mirror. Los Olvidados, a story of ghetto kids in Mexico City, won Best Director and the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1951. This established Buñuel's pattern of alternating between commercial films and riskier artistic projects that were his reward for the former. For example, the international success of his Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1952) provided for Wuthering Heights and Buñuel's most personal film, the obsessive masterpiece El (both from 1953). (Ironically, the poor box office performance of Los Olvidados temporarily halted Buñuel's partnership with Dancigers; the low-budget Buñuel quickies that immediately followed it were produced by others.)

Mexico has often been described as the place where man-without-a-country Buñuel "made do" — making art on slim budgets in between more crass, popular projects. Along with El, Wuthering Heights and Los Olvidados, counted among the "art" are Nazarin, El Bruto (1952), The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955), and the Mexican evil twin of his Spanish Viridiana (1961), The Exterminating Angel (1962). Bill Krohn's assessment in the book Luis Buñuel: The Complete Films (Taschen) typifies this attitude: "Shipwrecked in Mexico, Buñuel had found a way to keep working and had become, like Crusoe, 'Governor of the Isle'."

But what about the dozen Mexican films — potboilers, capers, screwball comedies, soapy tragedies — that get such short shrift from critics and historians? Do the box office receipts really tell the whole story? Were Buñuel's heart and mind truly elsewhere when he was hammering out these, the cinematic equivalent of page-turners?

I propose that, high and low, Buñuel's Mexican films are his most personal and enduring. In Mexico, he learned to tell stories in the "invisible" visual style perfected in Viridiana (and often either overindulged or neglected in his subsequent European classics). Though the plots in his Mexican programmers typically followed proven formulas, Buñuel's class politics, his surreal, fetishistic imagery, his private fears, and, above all, the abiding humanism that his atheistic cynicism tends to obscure, are bursting out of these films — but only if you're watching.
Here are some images from one of his forgotten Mexican cheapies, the lighthearted Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1953). In the film, two drunk, frustrated streetcar mechanics take one of the vehicles on a nighttime joyride but get mistaken for an on-duty car. They have no choice but to continue the charade into the work day, giving free rides to working stiffs all over Mexico City. The caper unfolds like a lucid dream.