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moremojo:
I did manage to see Eastern Promises Saturday evening with my sister Cathy. We both enjoyed it, and found it to be an accomplished and rewarding film of real artistic merit. Directed by noted Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg to a Steve Knight screenplay, the film has some of the flavor of Francis Ford Coppola's and Martin Scorsese's gangster pictures, but without the idealization/glamorization of the violent ethos and psychology of the worlds depicted in those works that I find so distasteful and hypocritical.
Set in the world of the Russian mob in contemporary London, the story is a timely window onto the high price that globalization and the advance of unrestrained capitalism has wrought upon so many people struggling for life and parity in today's world. Anna (played by Naomi Watts) is a midwife who delivers a stricken fourteen-year-old Russian girl named Tatiana of her baby, only to have the girl die, leaving her infant daughter alive but alone. Finding a diary in Russian among Tatiana's effects, and a card naming a Russian restaurant in London, Anna consults the restaurant's owner for help in establishing the girl's identity and story. Unbeknownst to her, the restaurant owner, Semyon (played by Armin Stueller-Mahl) is a leading member of the Russian mob, and has played a central role in Tatiana's demise. Semyon's chauffeur Nikolai (played by Viggo Mortensen), who is rising through the ranks of his adopted criminal family, comes to interact with the increasingly endangered Anna, and both prove helpful to one another in unexpected and surprising ways.
There is a distinct homoerotic undertone introduced to the story through the character of Semyon's son Kirill (played by Vincent Cassel), who is clearly (if subliminally) attracted to Nikolai, and whose affections Nikolai subtly encourages and exploits for a range of reasons. There is also more than a note of homoeroticism in the film's most celebrated set-piece, wherein Nikolai is attacked while completely naked by a couple of assassins in a public bathhouse. This is one of the most ferocious ballets of violence I have seen in cinema, and is electrifying to watch while the horror and pain being meted out by the characters is never diminished.
The complex humanity of all the characters is one of the film's strongest assets. While many are shown engaging in truly terrible acts, everyone is always depicted as fully human, with nuances of feeling and choice with which they are constantly grappling. This thematic sophistication mirrors the often intransigent complexities met in real life.
The film is distinguished by handsome, warm cinematography by the noted Peter Suschitzky, and a welcome supporting role by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski as Anna's uncle Stepan. This is one of the more noteworthy releases so far of 2007, and is one I would recommend.
Meryl:
Thanks for the wonderful, insightful review, Scott. You summarized it perfectly, too, without giving away essential plot twists. 8)
--- Quote from: moremojo on October 15, 2007, 12:33:22 pm ---This is one of the most ferocious ballets of violence I have seen in cinema, and is electrifying to watch while the horror and pain being meted out by the characters is never diminished.
--- End quote ---
Electrifying is right! Mikaela and I were in a state of shock for awhile after seeing this scene. It's an instant classic as far as film fights go, IMO. :P
Front-Ranger:
I'm looking forward to seeing "Black, White and Gray" at the Starz International Film Festival tomorrow. Its the story of NY photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Wagstaff.
Scott6373:
I went to see "American Gangster" this weekend (not my choice...I dislike RC intensely), but it was worth it to see the preview of "Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street". It's one of my favorite musical theater pieces. I did not know they were turning it into a film. I am hesitant about Johnny Depp, but still very anxious to see it.
http://www.sweeneytoddmovie.com/
moremojo:
I went to see The Passenger (aka Professione: reporter), the 1975 feature directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, last night at a free screening; this was my first experience of this important film. The film had been rereleased in late 2005, and was showing at the same theater I went to see Brokeback Mountain for the first time on Saturday, 18 February 2006--I remember seeing the poster while standing in line, and regretting that I would have to defer my chance to see it until later. (That ended up being much later...in the wake of Brokeback Mountain, I had no energy or desire for other movies for some time).
So this was a second opportunity (maybe once in a lifetime) to see this work, as it was made and meant to be seen...as a 35-millimeter print projected onto a movie screen. The screening was fairly well-attended, so perhaps others were of a like mind, though there seemed to be a significant amount of restlessness in some members, with a few walkouts noticeable.
Antonioni, though one of the supremely great filmmakers (he died earlier this year after more than two decades of poor health), is not for all tastes. His pacing is deliberately patient and observant, his mood overridingly one of alienation and dislocation. He presents a pessimistic view of late twentieth-century man, but filters this through a prism of visual and aural poetry, rendering the pessimism equivocal by virtue of the intelligence and artistry of which the human mind is capable.
The Passenger stars Jack Nicholson as British TV reporter David Locke who, while on location in an unnamed African country, is ambiguously motivated to switch identities with a stranger with whom he becomes casually acquainted and who dies suddenly at the hotel in which they are both lodged. So Locke officially becomes dead to the world, while Robertson lives on in a new body. What Locke doesn't realize is that Robertson was an illegal arms smuggler, and unwittingly inherits Robertson's connections and responsibilities with his new identity.
The story is set up to become a thriller, but Antonioni frustrates and redirects this trajectory in a number of ways. Narrative is less important here than the evocation of mood and the delineation of existential freedom and angst. During the course of his international travels (the film was shot in Algeria, Britain, West Germany, and Spain), Locke meets up with a young woman (played by Maria Schneider), who is no less mysteriously motivated to become this strange man's fellow traveller and lover. Both are running away from the certainties of their past existences into an uncharted and potentially perilous future. And running after them, locked into attitudes of certainty and social expectation, are Locke's wife (played by Jenny Runacre), who comes to realize what her husband has done, and Robertson's (now Locke's) twin nemeses, his illicit accomplices and the law.
There is a subdued quality to Nicholson's performance, and Schneider and Runacre are both strangely affectless in their respective personae. This woodenness may have been deliberate on Antonioni's part, to convey a sense of alienation, which seems to me to be Antonioni's major theme in his body of work. Inspired use is made of the many exotic locations in which the story is set, and the film's (anti-)climax is a stunningly bravura sequence of camerawork (obviously inspired by Michael Snow's 1967 experimental film Wavelength) that literally pushes Locke to the periphery of the action, becoming the dead center of the other characters' frenetic and bewildered attentions.
Antonioni was the supreme cinematic poet of urban alienation, and even in a film like The Passenger, where much of the narrative transpires in rural settings, the blighted reach of twentieth-century urban man is shown to be limitless. Though not as fine as Antonioni's earlier L'eclisse and Il deserto rosso, this film remains a resonant work of art, capable of coloring one's experiences of the world outside the film itself, which is perhaps the most salient qualification of artistic greatness I know.
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