list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Lady Chatterley on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Lady_Chatterley/313813/default.aspx Title: Lady Chatterley
Year: 2007
Director: Pascale Ferran
Plot: Winner of five major prizes, including Best Film and Best Actress at the 2007 César Awards, France's equivalent of the Oscars®, this frankly sensual yet never vulgar film is based on the second of three versions of D.H. Lawrence's tale about an earthy passion that is both innocent and subversive. A Kino International Release. ~tribecafilmfestival.org
Times Tagged: 5
Number of Lists: 3
Number of blog posts: 2
SpoutRating: 3
]]>Thu, 25 Oct 2007 03:02:13 GMTLady Chatterley2007Pascale FerranWinner of five major prizes, including Best Film and Best Actress at the 2007 César Awards, France's equivalent of the Oscars®, this frankly sensual yet never vulgar film is based on the second of three versions of D.H. Lawrence's tale about an earthy passion that is both innocent and subversive. A Kino International Release. ~tribecafilmfestival.org5Slightly Tagged (1-5)323http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s313813.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Lady_Chatterley/313813/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/pal/archive/2007/8/7/17538.aspx Post By: PaL
Post To: PaL Blog
Post Date: 8/7/2007 3:36:00 PM
Body: Okay, let's talk about sex. Ready, everyone? I'm trusting you to get back to me on this one... We went to see "Lady Chatterley" last night--the new French film based on the second version of D. H. Lawrence's novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover"--the one that's entitled "John Thomas and Lady Jane." John Thomas, for those unfamiliar with English idiom (that's English English) was in my young day--and perhaps still is--a common euphemism for the penis. Lady Jane...? Well, I never heard it used that way, but I'm sure Lawrence had a wry smile when he thought up the title. As I recall, he wrote the second and third versions because he was not wholly satisfied with the first: he wanted it to be less coy, more frank, more explicit than he had originally allowed himself. (Remember, he had been in trouble with the obscenity police already in the past.) This time, I'm guessing, he wanted to get it right, no matter what the morality brigade might say.The film? Delightful. Erotic. Sensual. It's slightly odd, I'll confess, to see this French take on the English landscape, the English social structure, English mores. The landscape is beautiful, and captured with loving attention to detail. Those who saw Andy Goldsworthy's "Rivers and Tides" might have some sense of the quality of "nature as art" that we get in the long shots of green landscapes with rolling hills and thick forests of trees, or the close-ups of ferns, wildflowers, grasses... It's breathtaking and all, somehow, so quintessentially English. I could smell the moldering leaves and the rotting wood along the pathways through the woods, and feel them underfoot. The simple close-up of a prickly sweet chestnut casing, fallen from its branch, was enough to awaken long dormant memories of childhood. Delicious.And the sex? No, I hadn't forgotten it. In fact, I think I've just been talking about it, because in this movie sex and nature are inseparable. The sex is earthy, a bit clumsy, real. The film--remarkably, considering its origin--captures something crucial about the English character, the surface reticence beneath which, often, despite stereotypes to the contrary, a real passion burns. Connie (Lady Chatterley) and Barkin share little in common but for these characteristics. Thanks to the reticence, their sexuality is slow to awaken, and when it does (a great scene, with a baby chick, passed from his hand to hers) it burns slow and awkward to begin with. Clothes, even, are not readily shed--and then not until well into the relationship; which does not mean that the scenes are not infectiously erotic. And once awakened, the sex runs deep and steamy on both sides, and it is shown as good, healthy, human and, let's say it, not a little animal. It is, notably, about both man and woman. It does not take sides.I'm not sure that the film fully captures the full depth of the social taboos that are violated by Lawrence's novel, though it certainly tries. This is, after all, early twentieth century England, with Victorianism at least very present in the rear view mirror. She is, after all, a "Lady," and he a gamekeeper, a man of the lower orders, a servant to her husband, rude in appearance and in manner (both captured in great performances, by the way.) Her mansion, with its sweeping stairways, its elegant furniture, its ancestral portraits, is amply contrasted with his humble cottage and the shack where they meet, its walls and shelves lined with common tools and utensils--all filmed with equal love of their sheer physicality. It might seem that the affair is somehow more, well, permissible than then current social mores would have allowed: there is little sense of the risk involved for both parties, of the enormity of their action. But that, perhaps, is Lawrence, because he insists on the rightness of it--the rightness of sex as well as the rightness of flouting those old, artificial social barriers that stoof between human beings.Okay, you may have gathered by now that I enjoyed this film. But what about the moral questions about obscenity that so riled critics--both literary and social--when the book appeared? In view of the pornography that is available at the tough of a few buttons on your home computer these days, the eroticism of "Lady Chatterley," while less explicit, seems to me in some ways more potent than the debased images of human flesh so liberally exposed to the voyeuristic eye. I think it's clear by now that the healthy, human sexuality for which Lawrence made his pitch is regarded by most thinking people as just that: human, and healthy. Would today's morals brigades work up a lather over "Lady Chatterley"? Not, perhaps, when they have so much juicier and more broadly available targets.Which brings us to the interesting question as to whether obscenity is harmful. Are there still boundaries that should not be crossed, or that are crossed at the cost of damage to the social fabric? Is it anybody's business what I choose to watch, or read? What I have learned about Buddhist teachings in this regard is that the practice of sex is reprehensible only by the standard of potential harm--harm to myself, or harm to other people. So then I have to wonder what is harmful. Rape, clearly, at one extreme, no question there. But how about, um, dare I raise the subject... masturbation? Harmful? I guess if you still believe that it causes acne--or blindness. Seriously, though, to whom? To anyone who indulges in the practice? To those who become addicted? Food for thought. I guess we must all make these intimate judgments for ourselves.And what about pornography? Is it harmful to those who produce the stuff? To those who watch it? On what basis do we condemn it, if we choose to do so?Anyway, interesting questions, no? I'd be happy to hear your thoughts...The Buddha Diaries
]]>Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:36:00 GMTPaLPaL Blog8/7/2007 3:36:00 PMOkay, let's talk about sex. Ready, everyone? I'm trusting you to get back to me on this one... We went to see "Lady Chatterley" last night--the new French film based on the second version of D. H. Lawrence's novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover"--the one that's entitled "John Thomas and Lady Jane." John Thomas, for those unfamiliar with English idiom (that's English English) was in my young day--and perhaps still is--a common euphemism for the penis. Lady Jane...? Well, I never heard it used that way, but I'm sure Lawrence had a wry smile when he thought up the title. As I recall, he wrote the second and third versions because he was not wholly satisfied with the first: he wanted it to be less coy, more frank, more explicit than he had originally allowed himself. (Remember, he had been in trouble with the obscenity police already in the past.) This time, I'm guessing, he wanted to get it right, no matter what the morality brigade might say.The film? Delightful. Erotic. Sensual. It's slightly odd, I'll confess, to see this French take on the English landscape, the English social structure, English mores. The landscape is beautiful, and captured with loving attention to detail. Those who saw Andy Goldsworthy's "Rivers and Tides" might have some sense of the quality of "nature as art" that we get in the long shots of green landscapes with rolling hills and thick forests of trees, or the close-ups of ferns, wildflowers, grasses... It's breathtaking and all, somehow, so quintessentially English. I could smell the moldering leaves and the rotting wood along the pathways through the woods, and feel them underfoot. The simple close-up of a prickly sweet chestnut casing, fallen from its branch, was enough to awaken long dormant memories of childhood. Delicious.And the sex? No, I hadn't forgotten it. In fact, I think I've just been talking about it, because in this movie sex and nature are inseparable. The sex is earthy, a bit clumsy, real. The film--remarkably, considering its origin--captures something crucial about the English character, the surface reticence beneath which, often, despite stereotypes to the contrary, a real passion burns. Connie (Lady Chatterley) and Barkin share little in common but for these characteristics. Thanks to the reticence, their sexuality is slow to awaken, and when it does (a great scene, with a baby chick, passed from his hand to hers) it burns slow and awkward to begin with. Clothes, even, are not readily shed--and then not until well into the relationship; which does not mean that the scenes are not infectiously erotic. And once awakened, the sex runs deep and steamy on both sides, and it is shown as good, healthy, human and, let's say it, not a little animal. It is, notably, about both man and woman. It does not take sides.I'm not sure that the film fully captures the full depth of the social taboos that are violated by Lawrence's novel, though it certainly tries. This is, after all, early twentieth century England, with Victorianism at least very present in the rear view mirror. She is, after all, a "Lady," and he a gamekeeper, a man of the lower orders, a servant to her husband, rude in appearance and in manner (both captured in great performances, by the way.) Her mansion, with its sweeping stairways, its elegant furniture, its ancestral portraits, is amply contrasted with his humble cottage and the shack where they meet, its walls and shelves lined with common tools and utensils--all filmed with equal love of their sheer physicality. It might seem that the affair is somehow more, well, permissible than then current social mores would have allowed: there is little sense of the risk involved for both parties, of the enormity of their action. But that, perhaps, is Lawrence, because he insists on the rightness of it--the rightness of sex as well as the rightness of flouting those old, artificial social barriers that stoof between human beings.Okay, you may have gathered by now that I enjoyed this film. But what about the moral questions about obscenity that so riled critics--both literary and social--when the book appeared? In view of the pornography that is available at the tough of a few buttons on your home computer these days, the eroticism of "Lady Chatterley," while less explicit, seems to me in some ways more potent than the debased images of human flesh so liberally exposed to the voyeuristic eye. I think it's clear by now that the healthy, human sexuality for which Lawrence made his pitch is regarded by most thinking people as just that: human, and healthy. Would today's morals brigades work up a lather over "Lady Chatterley"? Not, perhaps, when they have so much juicier and more broadly available targets.Which brings us to the interesting question as to whether obscenity is harmful. Are there still boundaries that should not be crossed, or that are crossed at the cost of damage to the social fabric? Is it anybody's business what I choose to watch, or read? What I have learned about Buddhist teachings in this regard is that the practice of sex is reprehensible only by the standard of potential harm--harm to myself, or harm to other people. So then I have to wonder what is harmful. Rape, clearly, at one extreme, no question there. But how about, um, dare I raise the subject... masturbation? Harmful? I guess if you still believe that it causes acne--or blindness. Seriously, though, to whom? To anyone who indulges in the practice? To those who become addicted? Food for thought. I guess we must all make these intimate judgments for ourselves.And what about pornography? Is it harmful to those who produce the stuff? To those who watch it? On what basis do we condemn it, if we choose to do so?Anyway, interesting questions, no? I'd be happy to hear your thoughts...The Buddha Diaries http://www.spout.com/blogs/thereeler/archive/2007/4/25/7614.aspx Post By: TheReeler
Post To: The Reeler on Spout
Post Date: 4/25/2007 1:01:03 AM
Body: A scene from Kirill Serebrenikov's Playing the Victim By Vadim Rizov "Russian cinema is in the ass," announces Valya (Yuri Chursin) at the beginning of Playing the Victim, Kirill Serebrenikov's third feature and second adaptation of a play by the Brothers Presnyakov. Then the film vigorously sets about disproving him. The first 20 minutes caused numerous walk-outs at the press screening, understandably so. The Brothers seems hellbent on being as shocking as a 13-year-old as his characters say "piss" and "shit" repeatedly, to generally unpleasant effect, and it's hard to tell whether they mean it or just want to put his viewers through an endurance test to kick things off and make us earn the good stuff. Somewhere along the line, things settle down into a compelling routine. Valya -- ostensibly an actor -- has the bizarre day job of re-enacting the role of the victim in murders. The killer is brought in to re-create the whole thing for the cameras while Valya does his best to play dead, leading to an increasing number of logical absurdities. These absurdist set-pieces provide the comic fuel necessary to get through some of the more pretentious bits, like Serebrenikov's black-and-white animated inserts whenever Valya undergoes a particularly intense emotion or bad David Fincher-lite CGI shots through tiny crevices. Like seemingly every contemporary Russian movie ever made, the main public service performed by Playing The Victim is demonstrating to the world once again what an awful place it is, with a particular emphasis on the country’s inescapable racism. The most quotable example is at a sushi restaurant, the police chief yells "Shit! This isn't food, this is some kind of weird mindfuck." There’s also a persistent loathing of the country at work: When told that a murderer is repenting and wants to be sent to Siberia, the chief explains that he won't necessarily be sent there: "We have lots of places like that in Russia." Fans of this kind of morbid humor should check it out; everyone else might find it too shrill and consistently abrasive to handle. Par for the Russian course, really, but a definite highlight of the narrative feature competition.Pascale Ferran's nearly three-hour D.H. Lawrence adaptation Lady Chatterley (cut down, frighteningly enough, from a 220-minute TV version) starts off impressively austere and, at some point in the duration, slumps into inconsequentiality. The story's no shocker -- the quiet, repressed title character (Marina Hands) discovers her sexuality and regains control of her life by fucking hubby's gamekeeper (Jean-Louis Coullo'ch) -- but Ferran avoids a lot of obvious traps. For example, the husband (Hippolyte Girardot) may be bourgeois, a repressive capitalist, and both symbolically and literally crippled, but he's not an abusive Restrainer of Sexuality, which prevents the movie from lapsing into rote Free Woman v. Society territory. Ferran gets a lot of mileage from her extremely understated sound design and nature photography, and she throws in a lot of sex scenes which manage to convey characterization via thrusting more successfully than 9 Songs could. Still, Ferran is unable to smother Lawrence, and the film eventually becomes both redundant and self-righteously hippie-esque. By the time Lady Chatterley and her animalistic lover are running free-spirited and naked in the rain, the spell has lifted. Still, for a good spell Lady Chatterley is a period piece that avoids the twin traps of fetishizing and/or reviling an era. If Ferran learns not to sprawl out and choose better source material, she might be brilliant. Imagine Rushmore as a drab Swiss crowdpleaser minus Bill Murray and you'll get the rough idea of Vitus. Instead of Max Fischer there's the titular boy (Fabrizio Borsani as a 6-year-old, Teo Gheorgiu as a 12-year old), who nurses a genius IQ and a boner for classical piano instead of theatrical schlock. Saddled with cookie-cutter parents -- castratingly caring and stifling mom (Julika Jenkins), loving but not particularly attentive, career-oriented dad (Urs Jucker) -- Vitus turns instead to the obligatory cuddly grandpa (Bruno Ganz) for attention. The parents want the boy to be a prodigy, pushing him away from normal childhood, and therein lies the rub: For about an hour, Vitus is pretty insufferable -- visually indifferent, prone to every dramatic cliche on tap -- but it eventually digs into the ways parents can convince themselves that pressuring a kid to "live up to their potential" (the most loathsome phrase on the planet) can make them oblivious to when the kid's totally miserable. It's undeniably kind of a sluggish crowdpleaser of the blandest sort, but it got to this reviewer, who spent 11 years slogging through classical piano and nearly as many through the ludicrous concept of being "gifted and talented." Better yet, Borsani and Gheorgiu can actually play the piano -- Gheorgiu's a real-life junior prodigy -- making this the rare film to show hands playing the correct keys rather than cutting around them or using a stunt double. Like The Namesake, the value of the film as a formal object (minimal) will be outweighed by feeling of recognition for anyone who's been there. Sony Pictures Classics will probably make a minor killing on release. The latest disappointment from once-promising director John Dahl, You Kill Me situates itself at the presumably edgy intersection of alcoholism, gang wars and ethnic rivalry; remarkably, it comes out as bland as a family comedy (maybe something called Are We Dry Yet?, with no disrespect intended to Ice Cube). Ben Kingsley is a hitman whose increasingly crippling drinking problem makes him of no use to his Polish employers; sent to dry out in San Francisco, he discovers strength through AA and love interest Tea Leoni. Kingsley is too dour to do deadpan without killing the joke, although in combination with either Leoni or AA sponsor Luke Wilson the cast has the ability to sound better than the script, even if the sole joke behind Wilson’s character seems to be how hilarious it is that this paragon of frat-boy straightness is playing someone gay. The crappy digital lensing fails to impart snowy noir gravitas (a la The Ice Harvest) to the Buffalo gangland of the poles or any kind of distinct texture at all to San Francisco. The results are zippy enough and forgettable even while you're watching. Perhaps it's time to start treating the increasing "treasure trove" of rediscovered Soviet films as camp classics instead of trying to pretend that formal accomplishment trumps the ludicrously didactic ideological content. Shot by Sergei Urusevsky -- most famous for his undeniably stunning work on I Am Cuba -- The Forty-First does about the best possible job of filming the desert in Academy ratio, despite the undeniable, after-the-fact proof provided by Lawrence of Arabia that CinemaScope is a must. Urusevsky plays with the desert by itself and in contrast with fire and water (Tarkovsky would've been thrilled). Still, Grigori Chukhrai's film is a mostly ludicrous attempt to graft USSR propaganda onto a fairly basic story about an army unit marooned in the desert. Hero Martyushka (Izolda Izvitskaya) is a Red Army sniper in the days of the revolution who's bagged 38 kills already as the film opens. Left to die by the White Army, her straggling unit picks up a high-ranking White officer (Oleg Strizhenov), who Martyushka guards and eventually falls in love with. Vistas can't obscure howlers like an officer yelling at his soldier (after the man crosses himself) "There is no God! How many times do I have to tell you?" See also: Martyushka rejecting the lovelorn officer's offer of life on his country estate with: "You want me to lie in bed and eat chocolates with you. Chocolates smeared with blood!" Play this at the Sunshine at midnight and watch the crowds roll in. The Tribeca catalogue talks up Gerard Blain's second feature The Pelican -- apparently never before screened in the U.S. -- as in the rigorous realm of Dreyer and Bresson. Aside from the simple fact that Blain cuts more often in the whole film than those masters might've in their entire bodies of work, he's not nearly as cogent a thinker. The simple story of a jazz pianist (Blain) who goes to jail for nine years while his son is only two years old and comes out trying to connect with him again is visually expanded to somehow include musings on obsession, voyeurism, economic jealousy and memory. Unfortunately, the impressive master shots only serve to bring out the film's latent shallowness rather than helping create depth. It doesn't help that the whole thing is redolent of '70s cheese (were the '70s or the '80s the most unfortunate decade to try to film in without succumbing to dated fashions?); it's hard to take a villain seriously when he's sporting a thick Burt Reynolds mustache and a gaudy bathrobe. The best sequences find the pianist peering over the fence into the yard of his wife's new family, complete with rich husband; the creepy P.O.V. shots observe the banal routines of bored rich people as they play cards and listen to their 8-track recorder (it's 1973, after all). Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout: Playing the Victim Lady Chatterley Vitus The Pelican You Kill Me The Forty-First Syndicated Feed From:The Reeler
]]>Wed, 25 Apr 2007 05:01:03 GMTTheReelerThe Reeler on Spout4/25/2007 1:01:03 AMA scene from Kirill Serebrenikov's Playing the Victim By Vadim Rizov "Russian cinema is in the ass," announces Valya (Yuri Chursin) at the beginning of Playing the Victim, Kirill Serebrenikov's third feature and second adaptation of a play by the Brothers Presnyakov. Then the film vigorously sets about disproving him. The first 20 minutes caused numerous walk-outs at the press screening, understandably so. The Brothers seems hellbent on being as shocking as a 13-year-old as his characters say "piss" and "shit" repeatedly, to generally unpleasant effect, and it's hard to tell whether they mean it or just want to put his viewers through an endurance test to kick things off and make us earn the good stuff. Somewhere along the line, things settle down into a compelling routine. Valya -- ostensibly an actor -- has the bizarre day job of re-enacting the role of the victim in murders. The killer is brought in to re-create the whole thing for the cameras while Valya does his best to play dead, leading to an increasing number of logical absurdities. These absurdist set-pieces provide the comic fuel necessary to get through some of the more pretentious bits, like Serebrenikov's black-and-white animated inserts whenever Valya undergoes a particularly intense emotion or bad David Fincher-lite CGI shots through tiny crevices. Like seemingly every contemporary Russian movie ever made, the main public service performed by Playing The Victim is demonstrating to the world once again what an awful place it is, with a particular emphasis on the country’s inescapable racism. The most quotable example is at a sushi restaurant, the police chief yells "Shit! This isn't food, this is some kind of weird mindfuck." There’s also a persistent loathing of the country at work: When told that a murderer is repenting and wants to be sent to Siberia, the chief explains that he won't necessarily be sent there: "We have lots of places like that in Russia." Fans of this kind of morbid humor should check it out; everyone else might find it too shrill and consistently abrasive to handle. Par for the Russian course, really, but a definite highlight of the narrative feature competition.Pascale Ferran's nearly three-hour D.H. Lawrence adaptation Lady Chatterley (cut down, frighteningly enough, from a 220-minute TV version) starts off impressively austere and, at some point in the duration, slumps into inconsequentiality. The story's no shocker -- the quiet, repressed title character (Marina Hands) discovers her sexuality and regains control of her life by fucking hubby's gamekeeper (Jean-Louis Coullo'ch) -- but Ferran avoids a lot of obvious traps. For example, the husband (Hippolyte Girardot) may be bourgeois, a repressive capitalist, and both symbolically and literally crippled, but he's not an abusive Restrainer of Sexuality, which prevents the movie from lapsing into rote Free Woman v. Society territory. Ferran gets a lot of mileage from her extremely understated sound design and nature photography, and she throws in a lot of sex scenes which manage to convey characterization via thrusting more successfully than 9 Songs could. Still, Ferran is unable to smother Lawrence, and the film eventually becomes both redundant and self-righteously hippie-esque. By the time Lady Chatterley and her animalistic lover are running free-spirited and naked in the rain, the spell has lifted. Still, for a good spell Lady Chatterley is a period piece that avoids the twin traps of fetishizing and/or reviling an era. If Ferran learns not to sprawl out and choose better source material, she might be brilliant. Imagine Rushmore as a drab Swiss crowdpleaser minus Bill Murray and you'll get the rough idea of Vitus. Instead of Max Fischer there's the titular boy (Fabrizio Borsani as a 6-year-old, Teo Gheorgiu as a 12-year old), who nurses a genius IQ and a boner for classical piano instead of theatrical schlock. Saddled with cookie-cutter parents -- castratingly caring and stifling mom (Julika Jenkins), loving but not particularly attentive, career-oriented dad (Urs Jucker) -- Vitus turns instead to the obligatory cuddly grandpa (Bruno Ganz) for attention. The parents want the boy to be a prodigy, pushing him away from normal childhood, and therein lies the rub: For about an hour, Vitus is pretty insufferable -- visually indifferent, prone to every dramatic cliche on tap -- but it eventually digs into the ways parents can convince themselves that pressuring a kid to "live up to their potential" (the most loathsome phrase on the planet) can make them oblivious to when the kid's totally miserable. It's undeniably kind of a sluggish crowdpleaser of the blandest sort, but it got to this reviewer, who spent 11 years slogging through classical piano and nearly as many through the ludicrous concept of being "gifted and talented." Better yet, Borsani and Gheorgiu can actually play the piano -- Gheorgiu's a real-life junior prodigy -- making this the rare film to show hands playing the correct keys rather than cutting around them or using a stunt double. Like The Namesake, the value of the film as a formal object (minimal) will be outweighed by feeling of recognition for anyone who's been there. Sony Pictures Classics will probably make a minor killing on release. The latest disappointment from once-promising director John Dahl, You Kill Me situates itself at the presumably edgy intersection of alcoholism, gang wars and ethnic rivalry; remarkably, it comes out as bland as a family comedy (maybe something called Are We Dry Yet?, with no disrespect intended to Ice Cube). Ben Kingsley is a hitman whose increasingly crippling drinking problem makes him of no use to his Polish employers; sent to dry out in San Francisco, he discovers strength through AA and love interest Tea Leoni. Kingsley is too dour to do deadpan without killing the joke, although in combination with either Leoni or AA sponsor Luke Wilson the cast has the ability to sound better than the script, even if the sole joke behind Wilson’s character seems to be how hilarious it is that this paragon of frat-boy straightness is playing someone gay. The crappy digital lensing fails to impart snowy noir gravitas (a la The Ice Harvest) to the Buffalo gangland of the poles or any kind of distinct texture at all to San Francisco. The results are zippy enough and forgettable even while you're watching. Perhaps it's time to start treating the increasing "treasure trove" of rediscovered Soviet films as camp classics instead of trying to pretend that formal accomplishment trumps the ludicrously didactic ideological content. Shot by Sergei Urusevsky -- most famous for his undeniably stunning work on I Am Cuba -- The Forty-First does about the best possible job of filming the desert in Academy ratio, despite the undeniable, after-the-fact proof provided by Lawrence of Arabia that CinemaScope is a must. Urusevsky plays with the desert by itself and in contrast with fire and water (Tarkovsky would've been thrilled). Still, Grigori Chukhrai's film is a mostly ludicrous attempt to graft USSR propaganda onto a fairly basic story about an army unit marooned in the desert. Hero Martyushka (Izolda Izvitskaya) is a Red Army sniper in the days of the revolution who's bagged 38 kills already as the film opens. Left to die by the White Army, her straggling unit picks up a high-ranking White officer (Oleg Strizhenov), who Martyushka guards and eventually falls in love with. Vistas can't obscure howlers like an officer yelling at his soldier (after the man crosses himself) "There is no God! How many times do I have to tell you?" See also: Martyushka rejecting the lovelorn officer's offer of life on his country estate with: "You want me to lie in bed and eat chocolates with you. Chocolates smeared with blood!" Play this at the Sunshine at midnight and watch the crowds roll in. The Tribeca catalogue talks up Gerard Blain's second feature The Pelican -- apparently never before screened in the U.S. -- as in the rigorous realm of Dreyer and Bresson. Aside from the simple fact that Blain cuts more often in the whole film than those masters might've in their entire bodies of work, he's not nearly as cogent a thinker. The simple story of a jazz pianist (Blain) who goes to jail for nine years while his son is only two years old and comes out trying to connect with him again is visually expanded to somehow include musings on obsession, voyeurism, economic jealousy and memory. Unfortunately, the impressive master shots only serve to bring out the film's latent shallowness rather than helping create depth. It doesn't help that the whole thing is redolent of '70s cheese (were the '70s or the '80s the most unfortunate decade to try to film in without succumbing to dated fashions?); it's hard to take a villain seriously when he's sporting a thick Burt Reynolds mustache and a gaudy bathrobe. The best sequences find the pianist peering over the fence into the yard of his wife's new family, complete with rich husband; the creepy P.O.V. shots observe the banal routines of bored rich people as they play cards and listen to their 8-track recorder (it's 1973, after all). Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout: Playing the Victim Lady Chatterley Vitus The Pelican You Kill Me The Forty-First Syndicated Feed From:The Reeler http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/affair/MemberTagFilms.aspxaffair
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Number of people who tagged: 1

Number of times used: 116

]]>Mon, 07 May 2007 13:42:31 GMT1161116Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/groundskeeper/MemberTagFilms.aspxgroundskeeper
Number of films tagged: 9

Number of people who tagged: 0

Number of times used: 0

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