Live each day like it’s your last – and, some day, you’ll be right ! ~ Rose Dorfman

This is a response to, more than a review of, Café Society (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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2 September

This is more of a response to, than a review of, Woody Allen's latest cinematic release, Café Society (2016)

There are, in Café Society (2016), quite a few familiar Allen(esque) themes (or concerns - a non-exhaustive list is assembling below), but is this a summation of them, and could it even (but one hopes that it does not !) serve as a swansong – in the way that, although Midnight in Paris (2011) was Woody Allen’s tribute to that city (and its past literary, artistic and social life), it was excessively lauded, and would hardly be a fit note to go out on… ?

For The Observer (in @guardian), Wendy Ide gives @cafesocietyfilm 3*, but is that mean ? :https://t.co/W3uT6elD24https://t.co/Ib2gVX0fXP

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 4, 2016

After all, Midnight in Paris is not a film that dreams this much, with Gil’s (Owen Wilson’s) entry into another world proving as easy as waiting for an old cab with T. S. Eliot in it¹, and its ending, which settles for finding love in the ‘here and now’, not with a former lover of – was it ? – Picasso’s, who herself hankers for an earlier time still. Rather, it is a direction that was perhaps indicated by Magic in the Moonlight (2014), an Allen film that was unnecessarily disesteemed, and wrongly criticized for what is also an element here – even though that is what happened in the films’ common era – i.e. a younger woman marrying a man at least twice her age².

(Though equally, in Blue Jasmine, both Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) and Ginger (Sally Hawkins) retreat into – whilst they last – blissful forms of dreaming impossibly for, respectively, what cannot be sustained, and what is too good to be true, or there are the brothers³ in Cassandra’s Dream (2007) (Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor), who realise a dream at the start, but one whose consequences almost inexorably take them further and further from it.)

However, reading a summation of a career in film into Café Society is based on what... - as if Allen were the fictional director Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), in Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth (La giovinezza) (2015), but envisaging, if not desiring leaving, his testament in making film-within-a-film Life’s Last Day ? Apart, of course, from the allusiveness⁴ of the line, quoted from Bobby's mother in the title to this posting, Live each day like it’s your last – and, some day, you’ll be right !, nothing more than the work itself, and its feel. (Yet, at the same time, Allen just cannot resist telling us – alongside the film’s ambiguous interpretations of the observation that Dreams are… dreams – about dreams as we know that he sees them, putting in a plug for those centred on NYC (East Coast ‘chic’) over ones about LA (a West Coast illusion, which Bobby, unimpressed by its film industry, describes as a ‘boring, nasty, dog-eat-dog’ existence).



Interlude - An alphabetical selection (some spoilery ?) of concerns (or themes) familiar from the Allen filmography :


* Affairs: many examples, from the hilarious parody of ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ in Love and Death (1975), to Husbands and Wives (1992) or Deconstructing Harry (1997)

* Central Park : Passim, but not least Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

* Confession being overheard by someone who should not know : Another Woman (1988), Everyone Says I Love You (1996)

* Dodgy relatives : Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989), Cassandra’s Dream (2007) [by no means the only point of contact between Cassandra and Crimes (sadly, via Match Point (2005))]

* Family : Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987)

* Financial advice, (possibly) untrustworthy : Celebrity (1998) [as well as the funniest scene ever with a banana !], Blue Jasmine (2013)

* Gangsters : Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

* Jewish gangsters : John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo (2013), in which Allen plays opposite Turturro - though, with Jewish gangsters, the primary reference must be Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

* Jewishness : Stardust Memories (1980) , Oedipus Wrecks (in New York Stories (1989), with Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola)

* Night-clubs : Stardust Memories (1980), Radio Days (1987)

* Religious conversion : Love and Death (1975), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Just as in Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and the tales told around the table about Danny (Allen himself) that frame it (or in Radio Days (1987), in which - as in other cases - Allen narrates, but does not appear), an infectious dream of life inhabits Café Society, i.e. the film itself and in its microcosm in the night-club that Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg) agrees to help [Ben] run as its manager (but is somehow guilelessly unaware of how it is run⁵ (NB possible spoiler in the end-note), until he comes to be able to change its name from Hangover to Les Tropiques).

Allen very deliberately gives us the fiction of the film itself, both how it is told to us visually (such that we know that it must all be there – all that information about the family, and who is who – for a reason, as yet unrevealed), and in the manner and style of his own narration, casual and urbane, and which even seems to make light of state or informal executions as if ‘one of those things’ that happen in life (the camera also does not dwell). (By contrast, Irrational Man (2015) had been in a different place altogether, and employed voice-overs by its interlocked principals, Emma Stone (Jill Pollard) and Joaquin Phoenix (Abe Lucas).)

Left to right : Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Dianne Wiest

One can instructively look back to the effect of Allen’s voice-overs as Mickey in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), partly when narrating his existential crisis (and how, by happenstance, The Marx Brothers came to resolve it) to Holly (Dianne Wiest) - with whom former relations, as one of Hannah’s said sisters, had been stormy and unpromising : because they had been, both of them (as here), where they were, and who they were, at the time. In Café Society, Allen uses the voice-over as our relation to a cinematic world that allows us to enter into the sheer dramatic contrivance that a man can choose to unburden himself to his younger relative about what, initially unbeknownst to either, also touches him the other – which feels awkward enough in itself, and yet it is only when, artlessly, the other passes on that story (although told in confidence) that the set-up fully unfolds, and, as a situation that it is to be repeated, we see a fight to maintain composure…

Ellen Page and Jesse Eisenberg in To Rome with Love

Quite apart from letting us see him use the cast as an ensemble (please see below), a more recent film, To Rome With Love (2012), is another that deserves more attention than it received, not just for being very good fun (and good natured, as Café Society is, and not Irrational Man (2015)), but also to be credited for being what it is – the work of a director who had the versatility, after Annie Hall (1977), to make Interiors (1978) (with all the brickbats that Allen got for it), and then make Manhattan, but also Stardust Memories (1980) (again, unjustly criticized). (To Rome with Love came before Blue Jasmine (2013) took people’s attention again (after Allen, for some reason, had it with Midnight in Paris).)

Alec Baldwin and Jesse Eisenberg in To Rome with Love

In To Rome with Love, Allen has Alec Baldwin maybe trying to help the younger man that he once was (again, Jesse Eisenberg) not make, amongst other mistakes, that of being seduced when he thought that he was seducing : it is one strand, amongst four, of wonder, which are presented with a tacitly agreed impossibility, but with none on its own asking us to credit it with the whole film. Nor exactly does Café Society, but not likewise, because it coheres around its elements in the way that Hannah and Her Sisters does (though with a different note on which to finish...).

As The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) did [which was claimed by Allen, at the time of the first edition of Woody Allen on Woody Allen, to be the film of his with which he was most pleased], Café Society revolves the question of the connectedness of image and substance – as well as the related one, both seen here and in others of his films (especially Blue Jasmine), of looking the other way as to where wealth comes from⁵ (NB possible spoiler in the end-note), or regarding the person from whom one wishes to acquire it.

Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin in Blue Jasmine

Perhaps the main sense, in Café Society, of a summation (if not of a conclusion) of a career inheres in a characteristic that it shares with that then-disliked film from 1980, Stardust Memories ? A strong sense of Allenesque couples who, though not exactly feeling regret, wonder What if... ?


And cause us to wonder deeply - when we might, instead, wonder about ourselves ?

Time passes… Life moves on… People change…

End-notes :

¹ Of course, on another level, dream is transmuted literally into wish-fulfilment for Gil, presenting as real the history that helped bring him to Paris – and overlook Inez’ own infidelity – until he realizes that he is chasing rainbows.

² It was there in Manhattan (1979) – which people usually forget was co-written with Marshall Brickman (as was Annie Hall (1977), not to omit the hilarity and foresight that is Sleeper (1973)) – and, from there (via Husbands and Wives (1992)), right up to Irrational Man (2015).

³ As it happens, Ginger and Jasmine are sisters by adoption, but not Cassandra's Terry (Farrell) and Ian (McGregor) - who, in Tom Wilkinson, have an Uncle Howard - with his line in calling in family favours...

⁴ Although, naturally one cannot go far in Allen's canon without hearing words that echo our mortality – even here, with Bobby's sister Evelyn's husband Leonard (Stephen Kunken), i.e. his brother-in-law, also talking - in the puzzled, but semi-humorous, way that his characters do - about Socrates and 'the life examined'…

⁵ Put another way, as in Cassandra’s Dream (2007) (or Match Point (2005)), getting what one wants - but at what cost ?

NB Possible spoiler : And one could ask – and will ask on a re-watching – why again, exactly, was it that Bobby went to see his uncle, Phil Stern, in LA (given that, back in NYC, Bobby is given a warning that Ben should consider disappear to Florida – which maybe Bobby 'forgot' to pass on ?)… Florida is also where Ben (Corey Stoll) was also heard urging Bobby's and his parents to go, just after Bobby has arrived in LA : as if form's sake, his mother, Rose Dorfman (Jeannie Berlin), superficially is concerned where Ben's money comes from, but then seems satisfied with some casual excuse ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Immense beauty ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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7 September


I believe that a viewer who approaches The Great Beauty (2013) as narration, not meditation, is missing its best qualities

Humbert Humbert

Or

Un bel homme au charme irrésistible malgré les premiers signes de la vieillesse

AlloCiné

Film-titles are problematic.

The title of The Way Way Back (2013) is meant to be provocative, so 'the problem' is systemically desirable from the point of view of the film-makers, their supporters, distributors, etc.

On my understanding, the original Italian title of La Grande Bellezza just means something like immense beauty*, or maybe, more loosely, very beautiful - and the film exquisitely, almost hyper-realistically, is beautifully composed, shot, edited.

Talking about the film in English under the name 'The Great Beauty' makes one think that someone of the kind of Claudia Cardinale is its unattainable star - if there is such an unattainable star, it is, as one will surely appreciate in and through the filming, Rome.

Yes, The Eternal City - and, yes, Una Grande Attrice, starring above all others in cinema from Roman Holiday (1953) to To Rome With Love (2012)**, with La Dolce Vita (1960) and others in between. But, most of all, Fellini’s Roma (1972) for an insight into Sorrentino’s vision for what this film could (or should) be / mean.


Who knows whether it is a riposte in any way to Allen’s opera-singing, showering undertaker, or his Cruz-realized cheery prostitute, but the worlds are worlds apart : they are, in fact, more the mainly well-heeled world of another Fellini, 8½ (1963), and Federico’s Guido Anselmi is a puzzler in the vein of Paolo’s Jep Gambardella. Whether he puzzles us is not the real issue, but how what he / life / Rome is puzzles him is his real – and our proper – concern.

Jep is not easily impressed, but we both see him cry, and reduce another to the need to escape the company in which he has just, so perfectly, so mercilessly, delivered humiliation. (For a moment, we think that she will outface him / them and stay. What does Jep expect, in this cruel attack on pretension and pompous self-inflation ?)

What he cries at, along with the daydreams, reveries, fantasies that he shares with Guido is at the heart of this film. Akin to Marcello Mastroianni’s mastery, Jep is brought to us to a tee by Toni Servillo as this man who is just as capable of demolishing as building up, a restless individual of talent, but little direction. He is not a Citizen Kane, but his roots do lie deep in what he cannot forget, and maybe few others know about - unlike Kane, Jep is alive, and he makes a confession to himself about how he lives – has chosen to live – at the conclusion of the film.


Comparisons with Warsaw Bridge (1990), screened in the Festival’s lovely Catalan strand in 2012, are also not inappropriate, would that overload had not stripped many memories of watching it – the nuances, the humour, the shallowness of society were all, I nevertheless know, all reminiscent. But Fellini informs so much more, and the man whom Jep has forced his novelette-authoring soul to embrace being is, although quite alien to him, all that he is left with when he cannot be other than he is (nothing to do with his age ?) :

He can hurt, but he can also heal. Perhaps we here see Jep attracted to what he is not able to be, and vice versa, because in some Jungian archetypical way they are complementary personalities, two sides of one coin…

The film is not an easy ride, but it is a phlegmatic one, not one that relies on linearity, literality, logic – just a shame that, as my Italian source confirms, the sub-titles are a poor reflection of the dialogue, on which, and not on whose rendering, I shall attempt to turn my attention next time around.


End-notes

* After writing that, I secured agreement from a convenient and friendly person with Italian credentials. (I have few.)

** I make no apologies for rating that film on a par with Midnight in Paris (2011), because the former is not that weak, nor the latter that strong, despite what is claimed about both.

*** Amazingly turned into Nine (2009) with the participation of the late Anthony Minghella.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Too good to be true ?

This is a review of Frances Ha (2012)

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1 August

This is a review of Frances Ha (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

I had heard such positive noises about Frances Ha (2012) that I feared that I would be disappointed - and would squirm. But my worry was groundless, and I have nothing but praise for the film and for Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote it, as well as starring.

The script had all the urbanity of, say, Dianne Wiest as Holly and her friend and business partner April (played by Carrie Fisher) in Hannah and her Sisters (1986), and one likewise felt that, just as Woody Allen produces very good parts for himself (apart from giving himself the lion's share of the jokes), so Gerwig gauged her own nuances perfectly in the writing. (Allen gave her the part of Sally in To Rome with Love (2012), which, of course, does not surprise.)

The film is shot in monochrome, and uses a montage to give us quickly the breadth of the relationship between Frances and her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner). Coincidentally, and in no ways as a detraction from this film's originality and expressive power, I found myself reminded of those long-lost stories of another inhabitant of New York and her sister, from the t.v. series Rhoda : not pressing the similarities, but the quirkiness, the humanity, and the sense of being an individual.

Frances is gorgeously composed and shot, edited with style and precision, and the music is as it should be, so unobtrusive that, when one sees the list of what has been used, one is boggled not to have noticed so much of it, even well-known classical pieces. To prove the rule, two deliberately prominent tracks are David Bowie's 'Modern Love' and 'Every 1's a Winner' by Hot Chocolate, which feel just right, both in their exact context, and their emotional contribution.

So who is Frances exactly ? I shall say nothing about the film's title other than that one is kept waiting right to the end*, where we feel again the healthily pragmatic and impulsive part of Frances' character to the fore. Throughout, she is her own woman, and those who struggled with the role of Poppy in Mike Leigh's Happy-go-Lucky (2008), an excellent piece of work by Sally Hawkins, might be reminded of it.

If one took seriously what IMDb's headline statement had to say about Frances, one would think that she is simply a dreamer, which she is not : I do not believe that Poppy or Frances is an incurable optimist, but that they have a not infallible sense of others' hurts and susceptibilities, and live their lives trying to take account of them. (Unlike me before this film, Frances approaches things, and people, with expectancy.)

Sumner and Gerwig have to be singled out since, just as Poppy has her trusted flatmate in Zoe (Alexis Zegerman) for their own bohemian world, they are at the heart of the film (though a heart that beats at a distance when Sophie goes to Tokyo), but everyone seems well cast, and to give of their very best as part of the ensemble.

The film covers a lot of ground, and feels a lot like a portrait of Frances done with honesty and compassion : quite naturally, I believe that one feels for her, whether it is being let down about the Christmas show, or finding that a conversation with new room-mates Lev and Benji that she relied on about rent has been forgotten.

A key scene is the rather awkward dinner-party with friends of another room-mate, this time reluctant, where we learn a lot about where Frances stands in relation to others who are not of her kind - with Benji, she was able to communicate naturally, whereas these people seem unable to understand even when, metatextually, she drunkenly tries to explain what makes her able to get on with people.

Perhaps a bit of a loner, an outsider, she is still valued, and she sticks to her convictions. (In this connection, whatever dancer Gerwig may be, the film wisely limits what we see of her on her feet, choosing instead to show her nimbleness as she runs and twirls with ease along the streets of New York and of Paris, so that the status as dancer is established, but does not distract.)

In Poppy, one might have felt that her vibrant persona in the world was a response to something deeper. What we get to know of Frances, with her spontaneity and with a problematic way with money, makes a similar hint, not to be much dwelt on**, but noticed. What I take away is a special person, loving and caring (even for someone whom she does not know who is sad), and a bit of an outsider. If this is what Miranda July had in mind in The Future, I believe that she is way off, whereas Gerwig and the film's co-writer and director, Noah Baumbach, are spot on.


End-notes

* But there is a joke from A. A. Milne...

** Unless one's bedtime reading is informed by such things as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and it guides trying to understand a whole person : one would quickly rule out high-functioning autism, but ponder a mild form of bi-polar disorder, or even traits of borderline personality disorder, on which more here...

Also, I'm not sure that it's just not having the money that means that Sophie has a mobile on which she can get e-mail and Frances hasn't, or that Frances has a computer that she doubts will enable her to communicate with a distant Sophie as suggested. Even if she could, I don't see Frances spending on those things, because her priorities, her notions of relations, are different : Sophie makes an up-beat blog in Tokyo so that her mother will not worry, whereas, tellingly, Frances envisages her mother seeing the truth on her own blog and coping with it. (I forget the quotation, but the word 'depressed' / 'depressing' is used.)


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A roaming view

This is a review of To Rome with Love (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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6 October

This is a review of To Rome with Love (2012)

Few people might expect so much dialogue in Italian with English sub-titles from To Rome with Love (2012), even after seeing Midnight in Paris (2011) - I hope that the fact will not put off members of a typical Allen audience who are maybe less used to following text and action together in this way, either by their telling friends to avoid the experience, or by having it as a mental reservation for his next release.

(I could speculate as to how the Italian dialogue was arrived at, because it does not quite seem as if Allen wrote the sub-titled speech and it was translated into Italian, but something more complicated than that, and maybe Woody's Italian is much better than mine and he worked on writing the Italian parts of the screenplay.)

A traffic-policeman, balletically directing the thronging vehicles high on a tub in their centre, first introduces us to two of the couples in the stories that we will see, and then thankfully, unlike the narrator in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), leaves us to our own devices. He, himself, is a device, because he purports to be able to see what he shows us from his vantage-point, and he is competing to be important to us.

Moreover, he is a symbol for Allen in exactly bringing the four stories before us beautifully in one timescale, all of them humorous, but all of them, despite the humour, nonetheless serious in some way. One story takes place in a single day, another in a week, and the remaining two in probably two or three weeks, but they begin and end together, and we are never worried that time is running more quickly for someone than for someone else, which is the film’s real triumph, that we can accept what we see so easily because the different lines are woven together, but are separate, happening in their own universe.

We first meet Hayley, an American woman spending the summer in Rome and falling in love with the first Roman whom she asks directions, Michaelangelo. (And, yes, in another strand, Allen gives us Leonardo.) Later, her parents (Judy Davis, being waspish as Phyllis, and Woody Allen being one of his typical creative roles as Jerry) meet his parents, and so begins the most bizarre story of Michaelangelo’s father Giancarlo giving an operatic performance under Allen's bizarre direction. This should not be spoilt, so do not imagine what will come better as a surprise - and even did fine the second time around. Allen calls his film to Rome, and he shows us himself going there, both as an actor (and hating the turbulence), and to bring us there with him.

Pure Italian is used to tell the tale of Milly and Antonio, newlyweds from Pordenone who came to Rome for a honeymoon and a new life with Antnonio’s relatives' company, if only he had something in common with his aunts and uncles! Enter a wish to impress them with a new haircut for Milly, Penélope Cruz as the fortuitous Anna, and chance encounters with the cast of a film, allowed by the running joke of directions to anywhere being endlessly complicated and losing Milly further and further, but somehow bringing her having lunch in the same restaurant with actor Luca Salta as Cruz hilariously stands in as Milly (but - fear not - all ends well!).

Cruz being who she is not, and performing the role so delightfully that she steals virtually every scene, is part of what the story, equally deliciously portrayed by Roberto Beningi, of Leopoldo Pisanello (another painter’s name) is about : suddenly, everyone wants to know all about Pisanello, a little as he had wished, and is whisked off to answer questions about what he had for breakfast. He does not get used to all the attention, all the desire to know his opinions, and comes to see it as a curse. When it has gone, this take on modern celebrity mixed with Warhol’s notorious pronouncement leaves Pisanello a little bereft by the change, and he has to satisfy himself that he once had a chauffeur and people knew who he was.

The last story has an on-screen American narrator in older architect John (Alec Baldwin), who is not ever visible to more than one person (more or less), trying most of the time to share his wisdom with the younger architect Tim, and thereby giving us a great deal of amusement in his ironic comments and predictions, and ultimately proving right when Tim has decided to follow his romantic feelings. Baldwin finds an on-screen equal in the acting presence of Ellen Page as the bewitching Monica, who draws Tim despite what he or John can say to the contrary.


The film is thoroughly charming, but my hesitation is whether two strands in Italian is taking things too far for some potential viewers. It ends with a competing claim, from a man who emerges from behind some shutters near The Spanish Steps, to see everything from where he is, and, a bit like Beckettt ('Oh the stories I could tell if I were easy', from Moran's part of Molloy), the offer to tell some of these stories some other time.


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