30X30: Four relevant films from the past

Q’orianka Kilcher stars as Pocahontas in Terence Malick’s muli-layered 2005 love story The New World.
Q’orianka Kilcher stars as Pocahontas in Terence Malick’s muli-layered 2005 love story The New World.

This week, I embarked on a pair of longer filmic journeys, one involving the early European settlers of this country and the young woman who helped bridge the gap between the natives and the new immigrants; the other, an Italian yacht cruise gone mysteriously bad, and the peculiar reactions of those left in the aftermath.

From there, I delved into a different kind of Western, set during the Dust Bowl era of the late '30s; and ended up in Tehran, watching the aftermath of a perplexing impersonation fraud case as it goes to court. The quartet of films was helmed by serious auteurs, international and domestic -- Terrence Malick, Michelangelo Antonioni, John Ford and Abbas Kiarostami, respectively -- which only adds to the idea of the panoply of cinematic brilliance from all over the world, which gloriously enough seems to know no bounds. We're coming to the final third of films in this initial project, and I've never been more impressed by the genius and ingenuity of this particular art form.

To repeat: Just to keep things relative, I am awarding a score on a 10.0 scale at the end, along with what I'm calling a Relevancy score out of five stars. In other words, even if I wasn't wild about the picture, I still believe that it is an important film to have seen. Expect a lot of fives on that category.

1. The New World (2005): Terrence Malick is a director with singular vision and a keen intellect. Several of his films -- including Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Tree of Life -- I consider very strong, if not absolute masterworks. It is in his oeuvre post-Life, which came out in 2011, that his career has begun to wobble. I could not abide the indulgence of either Knight of Cups, or the even-worse To the Wonder.

This excellent film from 2005 however, finds many of Malick's pet themes and imageries at full play, and the crisscrossing inner/outer dialogue that helped make Life so profoundly effective as a means of presenting a character's inner world. Ostensibly, it is (one interpretation) of the tragic story of Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher), the young and favored daughter of the Algonquin chief Powhatan (August Schellenberg), who, according to this film, if not the historical record, fell in love with English explorer John Smith (Colin Farrell), ultimately causing to her to be excommunicated by her father and banished from her tribe. She then married prominent colonist John Rolfe (Christian Bale), and was taken to England to be shown off to the Royals.

In Malick's hands, her life becomes a layered love story between an earthy, grounded native, and a brooding, ambitious European, who sees their time spent together as a dream, and not so much reality. Stunningly shot by director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki and utilizing many of the innovative storytelling techniques Malick would perfect in Life, the director's cut, standing at a stout 172 minutes, presents a lush, exquisitely detailed evocation of the land and the era -- with textural acuteness ranging from the caked mud on the natives' skin, to the different hatchet marks on the tops of the fort posts the Jamestown colony erects to protect themselves from hostiles.

Post-Life Malick invokes many of the same hand-held, natural light techniques used here, but encases them in meandering narratives that spin out into improv-leaden inconsequence. Here, he stays mostly rooted in the story, and his investment in authenticity and reverence for the land connect deeply within his characters, giving them enough weight to support his various psychological conceits.

Score: 8.8/10

Relevancy: 5/5

2. L'Avventura (1960): My second Antonioni movie of this series (and, along with the Fellini films, continuing a thematic leaning toward the Italian masters) the film sets up as one sort of genre -- a beautiful young woman, Anna (Lea Massari), disappears from one of the Aeolian islands during a cruise off the Italian coast, leaving Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), her fiance; and Claudia (Monica Vitti), her best friend, confused and concerned -- before morphing into something else entirely.

Sandro and Anna spend the night on the island trying to find her, while the rest of the party on the yacht, including a disaffected princess (Esmeralda Ruspoli), her hateful lover (Lelio Luttazzi); and another mismatched married couple (Dominique Blanchar and James Addams), head off to alert authorities. After a scant couple of days, however, Sandro declares his adoration of Claudia, and after some initial hesitation, she dives into a relationship with him, even as they go through the motions of trying to find the still-missing Anna.

As with Blow-Up, Antonioni works his themes in a sort of melange, piling on small vignettes and mini-scenes with other characters and seemingly random passers-by to flesh out what he's driving at: A pharmacist and his young wife, who may have seen Anna before she vanished, are shown to be in complete disharmony after only being married for less than a month; one town the couple arrive in appears completely deserted; none of Anna's supposed friends seem to particularly care that their friend has vanished, and so forth.

The title can be translated to "adventure," but also, as "fling," which can of course be in the romantic sense -- as a brief love affair -- but also indicates throwing caution and sensibility to the wind in pursuit of something enticing. Working intimately with his leads, Antonioni culls fascinating performances out of Vitti and Ferzetti, who alternately come across as caring, callous, fatuous, creepy, and, finally, broken. In this way, Antonioni's obfuscating style perfectly serves his purpose: It's a study of grief, and 1960-style emotional detachment, with everyone left imprisoned in their own, severely contracted worlds, lost unto themselves.

Score: 8.7/10

Relevancy: 5/5

3. The Grapes of Wrath (1940): John Ford is known primarily as master of Westerns, such as the immortal The Searchers, so it makes a certain amount of sense that this Dust Bowl drama, based closely on the novel by John Steinbeck, is played like one, with a new group of hombres and their families coming out west to pursue the American Dream.

Only, in this case, the hombres are hardscrabble field hands and farmers tossed off their land by corporations already bleeding every last cent of profit from the wrecked agricultural industry, and in desperation heading out to where they hear work may still be found in California -- twin six shooters replaced with scythes and digging hoes. Lead by oldest son Tom (Henry Fonda, nominated for an Oscar), just paroled from prison for justifiable homicide, the Joads head out west in a beaten up jalopy, along with grandparents, extended family, kids, and a former preacher (John Carradine), trying to find answers to the world's grievances without the Lord's help, with their few belongings tossed in the back of the open truck along with everyone else.

On the way, they encounter unexpected kindnesses from random strangers they meet, along with disillusioning cruelty, generally coming from large, faceless companies, who see in the wave of dispossessed migrants coming west the opportunity to better exploit them for maximum profits. They also encounter increasing intolerance from the previous wave of immigrants, trying to keep all these newcomers out so as to maintain the already unsteady job situation in their favor.

In this way, the film, made as it was on the tail-end of the Depression, is disturbingly prescient: In the callous manner of law enforcement -- all too happy to protect the land barons' interests at the expense of the workers -- and the exploitive tang of big business turning everyone else's misery to their advantage, to the intolerance of fellow immigrants against the newest wave, the film speaks deeply to our current political climate.

As Tom finally is forced to break free of the family and go on the lam, he does so as a true Western hero, in silhouette and off into the uncertain sunrise. We can only hope his ghost is still out there, trying to speak up for the downtrodden and ignored underclass.

Score: 9.2/10

Relevancy: 5/5

4. Close-Up (1990): Admittedly, Abbas Kiarostami's film -- a narrative/documentary mashup with a director literally controlling the proceedings in an actual trial in the name of filmmaking -- is something of an odd hybrid, and therefore was a particularly difficult choice for my 12-year-old daughter to process, but her constant questions (sometimes as basic as "who is talking right now?") actually did help me break it down in my own head, even as I was trying to explain it to her.

The (true) story it covers is pretty easily met: An Iranian man in Tehran named Hossain Sabzian impersonates Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf in order to be taken into the confidence of a relatively wealthy family he meets by chance. When the patriarch, Abolfazi Ahankhah, begins to suspect something is amiss, he contacts a journalist (played by Hossain Farazmand), who brings a couple of cops along with him to arrest Sabzian, leading up to a trial in which the skinny, jobless unfortunate finally explains the reason for his deception.

The late Kiarostami, who died in 2016, was always taken with the idea of identity, assumed or otherwise -- see his celebrated 2010 film Certified Copy -- and the explicable mystery of Sabzian's deception absolutely resonated with his pet theme. We generally associate the idea of "fraud" as someone using deception to trick people out of money or property in some way, but, it's pretty clear Sabzian wasn't after material goods or cash.

His in-court disclosure, near the end of the film, is a moving and honest monologue of self-reflection from a man whose station in life denied him a chance at any sort of artistic endeavor, but whose spirit carried him in that direction anyway. Even if she didn't precisely follow the intricate structure of Kiarostami's film, my daughter was still moved by Sabzian's plight, a most human moment from a director dedicated to such.

Score: 8.8/10

Relevancy: 5/5

photo

The Joad family — including (from left) Rosasharn (Dorris Bowdon), Ma (Jane Darwell) and Tom (Henry Fonda) — quit Oklahoma for California in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940).

MovieStyle on 07/13/2018

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