Review: Alexander Nevsky (1938)

* * *
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Starring: Nikolai Cherkasov

Alexander Nevsky is an epic historical film from Russian master Sergei Eisenstein. Made in 1938 at a time when tensions between the Soviet Union and Germany were high, the film has heavy political overtones and suffered the misfortune of being completed only a few months before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, making the Soviets and Germans allies and necessitating that the film be pulled from screens. Fortunately for the film (and the world, I suppose), the Soviets and the Germans would be fighting again by 1941, giving the film a second life and making it seem disarmingly prescient.

The film takes place in the 13th century as Teutonic Knights attempt an invasion of Novgorod. Prince Alexander (Nikolai Cherkasov) is sent for to lead the troops because he’s well known for his bravery and intelligence and for his ability to rally the people. The knights have already taken the city of Pskov and brutally massacred its population (including a scene in which the knights casually drop children into a fire), which adds fuel to Nevsky’s cause. He devises a plan to lure the knights into a fight on the ice, reasoning that their heavy armor will eventually lead them to catastrophe.

Running parallel to Nevsky’s story is a subplot involving two soldiers, Vasili Buslai and Gavrilo Oleksich, two friends who have used the war as the pretence for a wager. Whichever shows the most courage and skill during the Battle on the Ice will win the right to marry Olga Danilovna, a Novgorod maiden they’ve both taken a liking to. She doesn’t seem to care, particularly, which of them she ends up with – I’m not sure whether that says more about her or them, but in the end the loser declares that he’ll settle for Vasilisa, a Pskov woman who joins in the fighting at Novgorod and has nothing at all to say when her hand is claimed in marriage. It’s a fairly silly plot, especially when contrasted with the rest of this very serious film.

The film is, unsurprisingly given the time and place it was made, an explicit propaganda piece. Eisenstein often films Alexander from below and frames him so that he’s busting out of the shot – the film simply cannot contain this great man as he stands in his Superman pose. The German knights are portrayed as decidedly vile creatures whose helmets are meant to evoke those of German soldiers. The helmets are a fairly dehumanizing element of their costume, as they obscure the entire face and leave only little slits for the eyes, making the German forces seem monolithic and almost robotic. The message of the film is loud and clear – invade the Soviet Union at your own peril – and very overt regarding who it’s really about, leaving no question as to why it had to be pulled from distribution.

Eisenstein doesn’t get terrifically experimental with this film – it’s pretty straight forward narratively, though there is a lot of visual symbolism. It can be a difficult story to engage with at times because the characters are so thin, but I can see how it would have worked as a rallying piece at the time it was made and especially at the time of its re-release in 1941. The Battle on the Ice is the film’s big set piece and is one of the best and most memorable large scale hand-to-hand combat sequences I’ve ever seen. The story can be a bit plodding as it wades through layers of political commentary, but this battle sequence makes the film worth watching.


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Friday's Top 5... Posters of the 1950s

#5: 12 Angry Men
The tagline is a bit on the melodramatic side, but the artwork itself is great, showing the jurors divided by the murder weapon and then the solitary shot of Henry Fonda at the bottom. It really manages to encapsulate the spirit of the film.


#4: Anatomy of a Murder
There's nothing fancy about this poster - no photos of stars, no ornate design, no tagline - it's mostly just blank space. However, its simplicity is intriguing and is the very thing that makes it so memorable.



#3: War of the Worlds
Generally speaking, '50s era science fiction films have great posters and this one is no exception. Its nightmarish vision of alien invasion perfectly sets the tone for a dark and intense story.



#2: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman
Has any poster ever more perfectly captured society's attraction/repulsion to female sexuality? Sure, she's scantily clad and straddling a highway, but she's also leaving a trail of destruction behind her. Exquisite.



#1: Vertigo
This is another instance where simplicity is the most effective way to go. Its spiralling design grabs you and draws you right in. It's a beautiful piece of work.
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Canadian Film Review: The Wrong Guy (1997)

* * *
Director: David Steinberg
Starring: Dave Foley, Jennifer Tilly, Colm Feore

An ordinary man, framed for a crime he didn't commit, on the run in a chase that will culminate at the top of an American monument - but, no, this is not North By Northwest, though in its own, goofy way, The Wrong Guy is also rather brilliant. It's the kind of a movie where a character can posit a totally crazy theory about the JFK assassination - "His head just did that. I call it the 'No Bullet Theory'" - and not only will it not seem out of place, but entirely sensible given everything else that's going on.

Dave Foley stars as Nelson Hibbert, an executive who believes he’s about to receive a big promotion thanks to the fact that he’s engaged to the daughter of his boss. He’s disappointed when he learns that the boss has a favorite daughter and that the promotion will be going to the guy who is engaged to her. In a rage, Nelson storms into his future father-in-law’s office and discovers him with a knife in his back – a knife which Nelson unthinkingly removes and then tries to reinsert when he realizes what he’s done. By this time he’s covered in blood (he’s also been screaming a lot, which gets the attention of other people in the office) and certain that everyone will think he’s the murderer. Pretending to be casual, he makes his way out of the building (again: covered in blood) and goes on the run. Little does he know that there was a security camera in the boss’ office which captured the murderer in the act, a fact which is doubly funny when you take into account the elaborate means the real killer (Colm Feore) employs to get out of the building undetected.

No one is actually looking for Nelson (his co-workers, in fact, are convinced that he’s still at the office and doing a better than usual job – think of it as the George Costanza effect) but he has a way of ending up at the exact same place as the real killer and, shortly thereafter, the cops always show up. The killer becomes convinced that Nelson is actually a cop himself and decides to get rid of him, but his plans are always somehow thwarted. Eventually Nelson winds up in a small town and is taken in by the Holdens – Fred (Joe Flaherty), a banker who is about to be run off his lot by wealthy farmers, and his daughter Lynn (Jennifer Tilly), a narcoleptic who doesn’t let her condition get in the way of her desire to get behind the wheel of a truck.

The film, written by Foley, David Anthony Higgens, and Jay Kogen is a parody of chase movies generally and North By Northwest specifically. It also parodies the convention of the evil banker running simple farm folks out of their livelihood by reversing the trope and having the farmer be the town’s big time tycoon. “Sure be nice to tear this bank down and plant me a fresh crop of corn,” Farmer Brown tells Fred gloatingly. This is all played completely straight and very dry, which is probably why it works so well. That the characters aren’t aware of how ridiculous they’re being in situations that are equally ridiculous, just makes it even funnier.

There’s a subplot involving the police detective (played by Higgens) who is investigating the murder and spearheading the hunt for the killer which finds him trying to shirk his responsibilities at every turn. All he wants to do is pass the case off to someone else so that he doesn’t have to do anything, but the people around him are doing such a good job that all the pieces fall in his favor and the investigation practically runs itself, dragging him along with it. His indifference creates a nice balance to Nelson’s nervous, clumsy energy and the killer’s single-minded determination.

Directed by David Steinberg, the film is a well paced and clever send up of chase movies. It invests itself fully in the surreal nature of its reality and has the confidence to let the film stay "in character" along with the actual characters. If you happen to see this one in the video store, don't hesitate to pick it up. You're in for a treat.




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Review: Coco Before Chanel (2009)

* *
Director: Anne Fontaine
Starring: Audrey Tautou

Oh, dear. Once upon a time, a woman named Coco Chanel nudged women’s fashion into the modern era with an aesthetic that emphasized comfort over shape without sacrificing elegance. One has to wonder how Chanel, who freed women from the confines of the corset and the petticoat, would feel about seeing herself placed in such a stodgy and airless biopic.

The film opens with sisters Gabrielle and Adrienne Chanel (played as children by Lisa Cohen and Ines Bassalem) being deposited at an orphanage by their father, whom they never see again. As adults they toil at manual labor by day (Gabrielle as a seamstress now played by Audrey Tautou) and at night they perform a double act in a music hall. Their career is derailed first by Gabrielle’s prickly comments to the hall owner, who unceremoniously fires them, and then by Adrienne’s “engagement” to a baron. Gabrielle is certain that the baron will never make good on his promise but Adrienne is confident in his love for her and leaves to set up house with him in Paris. Shortly thereafter Gabrielle sets off for Paris herself, inviting herself to live with wealthy Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde), who nicknames her Coco after one of the songs he saw her and Adrienne perform in the music hall.

Coco’s relationship with Etienne is not a happy one. He agrees to let her stay on at his estate but expects sex in return and asks that she keep herself hidden away when his friends visit, as he’s embarrassed by her lower class origins. Eventually she forces her way into his social circle and he makes the best of it by making her the entertainment, forcing her to reenact her old act for the benefit of his friends, one of whom is Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola). She and Boy fall in love and though their relationship is complicated by a number of factors, they do find some happiness together and he encourages her to leave Etienne and helps her to start the business which will, eventually, make her world famous.

Coco Before Chanel falls into the same trap that snares a lot of biopics, namely the assumption that the most interesting thing about an interesting person is their sexual partners, which is rarely the case. The film spends a lot of time focusing on Coco’s relationships with Etienne and Boy and, yet, both relationships end up feeling curiously underdeveloped. Her feelings for both men seem to change according to the whims of the plot, rather than according to any organic progression of emotion and intimacy. I believe that in real life Coco’s relationship with Etienne could have evolved from its ugly beginnings into something comfortable and friendly, but I don’t believe it the way that it plays out in the film. Nor do I believe in the half-hearted attempts to introduce conflict into Coco’s relationship with Boy. After discovering that he is to be married to someone whose family wealth can fund his business ventures, she informs him that nothing between them will ever be the same again and yet they seem to carry on afterwards just the same as before, except that now she knows they’ll never marry. Similarly, when she learns that the money she’s made through her shop is under his control because he secured the loan that got her the shop in the first place, she’s upset but things quickly revert to normal between them. Does she see the similarities between her relationships with Boy and Etienne and the way that each has found a means to “keep” her? The film seems only to care enough to suggest these issues, not to actually explore them.

Through it all Tautou delivers a solid, unwavering performance. Coco is a much colder character than she usually plays and Tautou brings a hardness to her that works well with the story. Coco has not had an easy life and has come to expect the world to be unfair and disappointing. Her eventual ambitions in the world of fashion are characterized not by optimism, but simply by grim determination. If only the film itself were so determined. Coco’s relationships with Etienne and Boy are a necessary part of her story, in that one introduced her to her clientele and one provided her with the capital to start her business, but they are not the story. If she didn’t have that very particular, revolutionary style, there never would have been the empire that still bears her name, so why not spend more time exploring how she developed and nurtured that style instead of lumbering through the paces of a love triangle?

Writer/director Anne Fontaine has a keen eye for framing shots (several are stunningly beautiful), but the pacing of this film is absolutely brutal. If it had unfolded at a more lively pace, I might not have minded its preoccupation with Coco’s romantic life so much, but the fact that it feels so damn long even though it’s only 105 minutes really killed it for me. It is not a film without merit, but there’s not nearly enough for me to recommend it.



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Review: Il Divo (2008)

* * * *
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Starring: Toni Servillo

If Tarantino ever makes a political biopic, it’ll probably look a lot like Il Divo, Paolo Sorrentino’s vibrant, sometimes confounding, look at the career of former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti (Toni Servillo). What Sorrentino accomplishes with this movie is kind of amazing when you consider it alongside other politically themed films which, regardless of how good they are, can often be a little dry. Il Divo, on the other hand, is a lot of fun.

The film begins with a montage reminiscent of The Godfather’s assassination of the enemies sequence, as various figures who pose a threat to Andreotti’s continued wielding of power are taken out. Most of them are gunned down or commit “suicide,” but the most memorable of the deaths involves a car falling in slow motion through the air and then exploding on impact with the ground. The film doesn’t explicitly state that Andreotti is behind these murders, just that people have reason to believe that he might have been. For years there have been rumors of mafia ties, rumors which will eventually see him brought to trial.

We’re introduced to Andreotti’s inner circle of political cohorts who, at different times, are made to remind us of the gang in Reservoir Dogs and the Apostles in a mock last supper scene. These men are, for the most part, much more flamboyant and flashy that Andreotti, who is something of an absent presence throughout the film. All the things that you might associate with the madness of power – excessive displays of wealth, booze, women – seem to be happening around him rather than to him. He is the calm centre of the storm, quiet (very quiet) and calculating. His only display of passion comes during a long monologue in which he explains and defends himself to the audience, arguing that good can only be achieved by bad actions. It’s a marvelous moment from Sevillo who, up until this point, has had to play the character very close to the vest. For this one moment he gets to unleash and then he pulls it all back in, becoming once again that inscrutable figure.

The film unfolds at a fast pace, whipping through the events of Andreotti’s career leading up to his trial. It is not constructed to give you a particularly clear vision of the workings of Italian politics or, indeed, of Andreotti's career as a whole. Much of the story deals with rumors and conjecture, of corruption that may be real but may just be imagined. That's not to say that the film takes no position with regards to Andreotti - it casts him as a guilty party, certainly, but it also admits that proving his guilt is a difficult proposition. In a way, I suppose, the film has a kind of grudging admiration for the man who keeps suceeding while everyone around him falls.

Servillo's performance is flawless - he manages to make Andreotti both a shadow and a massive, feared presence at the same time. Andreotti is not a big man but though he's frequently placed in cavernous rooms, he never really seems "small." You wouldn't think so just to look at him, but he's kind of cool and he owns every room no matter who else is there or what else is going on. Sorrentino's style as a director helps a great deal in terms of this, underscoring Servillo's performance by treating the character and those around him like rock stars, making for an odd but highly enjoyable contrast. I absolutely love the way that this film moves, how it swoops and glides and sneaks up on its characters. It buoys a complicated story up with its energy and holds you firmly in its grip from beginning to end.



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