Review: Don't Look Now (1973)

* * * *
Director: Nicholas Roeg
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie

Don't Look Now is one of the most dread-filled movies ever made. A shadow hangs over it from the first to the last, and every scene has a palpable sense that the other shoe is about to drop. A psychological horror thriller about the lingering effects of grief, this adaptation of a short story by Daphne du Maurier is a deeply creepy and deeply effective movie that has influenced filmmakers far and wide since its release in 1973. It's taken me a while to catch up this this film, which is now considered a modern classic, and what struck me about it (aside from the fact of how good it is) is how the elements that made it controversial in 1973 still stand out now. Often it's difficult, so many years later (in this case forty), to see why something would have once caused such heated debate, but the frankness of Nicholas Roeg's film remains somewhat out of the ordinary. Don't Look Now would still be a compelling film even if that frankness had become muted by time, but the fact that it remains so sharp helps give the film a greater sense of timelessness than it would otherwise have.

Oscarstravaganza: Doctor Zhivago

* * *

Winner: Best Cinematography, 1965
Director: David Lean
Starring: Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Rod Steiger

Big screens were made for David Lean's epics. I would imagine that even an IMAX screen could barely contain them. Doctor Zhivago is one of his biggest, most lavish productions, though it ultimately lacks the gravitas of his best films, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. Still, the strength of its production values makes up somewhat for the weaknesses of its script and much like with his previous films, Lean's ability to craft a story makes the time fly by.

Based on the novel by Boris Pasternak, the film tells the story of Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif), born just in time to be caught in the transition from Czarist Russia to the communist Soviet Union. He's a young boy when his mother dies, leaving him in the care of her friends Alexander (Ralph Richardson) and Anna (Siobhan McKenna) and he grows up with their daughter Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), whom he eventually marries. With the outbreak of World War I, Yuri is sent to the front where he officially meets Lara (Julie Christie) who is working as a nurse and trying to locate her husband Pasha (Tom Courtenay). Until this point Yuri and Lara's lives have brought them within each other's vicinities, but they've never actually been able to speak to each other. Now, spending a great deal of time together in an intense situation, they fall in love, though it remains unconsummated. When the war ends Yuri returns to Tonya and their son and Lara sets off on her own course.

Moscow has changed in the time that Yuri has been gone. The Russian Revolution has taken place and the communists are now in charge, turning the Zhivago house into a tenement where Zhivago, Tonya, their son, and Alexander are forced to share but a single room. Eventually the family moves to Varynko, in the Ural Mountains, where Alexander has a country estate and where Zhiavgo learns that Lara and her daughter have set up residence in the next town over. They begin their affair in earnest but the always shifting political forces tear them apart at every turn.

All of this really just scratches the surface of Doctor Zhivago's plot, which also includes a framing device involving Yuri's half-brother (Alec Guinness), a girl who may or may not be Yuri and Lara's illegitimate child, Pasha's transformation into the iron fisted Red leader Strelnikov, and Lara's relationship with Komorovsky (Rod Steiger), a one-time "advisor" to her mother whom she alternates between needing and despising. There is also, of course, a cursory history lesson about the political changes sweeping through Russia, though the film never delves too deeply into these issues. Doctor Zhivago is about the Russian Revolution and civil war in the same way that Gone With The Wind is about the American civil war and reconstruction. Both films treat these events not as history worth exploring but as romantic backdrops for the intense passions of their protagonists.

The problem with Doctor Zhivago is that it doesn't really feel that passionate. We're given several cues to make us think otherwise (my favourite comes from the beginning, when Yuri and Lara pass each other on a crowded tram and the film cuts to a shot of sparks flying from the cable), but the romance ultimately feels a bit watery. Lean is very good at telling stories about men and their relationships with each other, but he seems less sure how to convey the complexities of relationships between men and women and, indeed, the relationship between Yuri and Lara takes up a relatively small amount of the screen time. The most dynamic characters are the ones on the sidelines - Steiger's self-important and self-loathing Komorovsky, Courtenay's hard line Pasha/Strelnikov, the minor characters who show up for a scene or two and then disappear back into the tapestry of the story. In comparison Yuri and Lara are a bit boring, their concerns rather run of the mill.

What saves the film is the grand spectacle of it. Lean may misstep here and there in telling the story, but he remains a master at composing brilliant shots, some of them absolutely staggering in their beauty. The one that most immediately comes to mind is Yuri and Lara's entrance into the ice palace, so delicately, perfectly rendered that you can almost feel the chill. I'm also very fond of the shot of the shovel breaking the ice on the train to reveal the countryside, and the shot of a sunflower fading into a shot of Lara's face. Lean is such a masterful visual storyteller that you feel compelled to forgive him his flaws. If Doctor Zhivago never reaches the level of Bridge on the River Kwai or Lawrence of Arabia, it is still worth seeing for a variety of other reasons and it has aged fairly well.

Review: Shampoo (1975)

* *
Director: Hal Ashby
Starring: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn

Maybe I’m too young to really “get” Shampoo, or maybe it’s because as a woman I find very little compelling about a man whose life is thrown into chaos because he just can’t keep it in his pants, but I found this movie really lacking. There are some good moments in it, but on the whole I thought it was all surface and no depth.

Warren Beatty stars as George, the premier hairdresser in Los Angeles. He’s in a relationship of sorts with Jill (Goldie Hawn), an actress whose best friend is Jackie (Julie Christie), who used to date George herself. He’s also carrying on an affair with Felicia (Lee Grant), whose husband (Jack Warden) is a power player currently having an affair with the aforementioned Jackie. The story takes place over the course of about a day and a half, beginning the night before the 1968 election and ending after Richard Nixon has been declared the winner. By the time the results are in, George’s love life has effectively blown up in his face after all three of the women in his life end up in the same room together.

As I said before, I don’t find the character of George to be particularly compelling. He wants to open his own shop but can’t get financing for it, and it’s easy to understand why the bank doesn’t think he’s a good risk. Yes, he’s got a lot of clients but he only ever seems to be at work for five minutes at a time before he has to take off chasing after one woman or another, and even when he is at work his romantic entanglements tend to follow him there and disrupt his ability to do his job. He claims that he spends every day listening to women’s problems, but he doesn’t appear to actually hear anything anyone says to him given that Jill has to tell him three times in the space of as many minutes that she might be going to Cairo. He hops from bed to bed, but can’t seem to understand why the women in his life are always pissed off at him. He implies that both Jackie and Jill are whores, but doesn’t think twice about carrying on with Felicia so that she’ll talk her husband into lending him the money to start his business. George is a really weak character, played by Beatty like he’s an unwilling passenger to the whims of his own dick, who sleeps with women less because he wants to and more because they expect him to.

With the exception of Jill, the characters in this movie are difficult to like. We’re supposed to feel sympathy for George but honestly, all he has to do is stop acting like such a dumb ass and his life would be improved tenfold. The only person I felt any sympathy for was Jill, who gets screwed over by pretty much everyone and seems to be the only character capable of feeling anything genuine for anyone else. George says he loves Jackie, but does he really? When Jill finds him and Jackie together, George runs after Jill and then, having lost her, goes back to Jackie. The next morning he proposes to Jackie, but only after he’s been to see Jill, who gives him his walking papers in no uncertain terms.

There are things about the film that almost make it worth watching. The sequence where Jill finds George and Jackie together at a party and he first runs after Jill, then runs back to find Jackie, who has taken off, and runs after her – is well-done, and there’s a sense that the film wants to be about something, about how George’s empty promises to women reflect the empty promises Nixon makes when he’s elected, but ultimately it just doesn’t hold together.

Canadian Film Review: Away From Her (2007)

Director: Sarah Polley
Starring: Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis

This is quite simply a fantastic film, and one that treats its characters with a lot more respect than the vast majority of films. Consider how often characters in their sixties are allowed to be the focal point of films, and consider also that though those characters may be allowed to be in love, rarely is enough consideration given them that they’re allowed to feel lust. This is a story that knows that life carries on beyond the age of forty and that feelings don’t become fossilized and forgotten and die away in later age. That the film is guided by the hand of a 27-year-old director is astounding.

The film is adapted from a short story by Alice Munro called The Bear Came Over The Mountain and is true to the original without relying on viewer’s having read it to provide depth to the film. The movie is very carefully paced, allowing us to get to know the characters and get some sense of the history that exists between them. The film also makes excellent use of the surrounding landscape, using it to complement the development of the story and the characters. Most of the film takes place during the winter, literally taking place around Christmas time, and figuratively taking place during the winter of Fiona (Christie) and Grant’s (Pinsent) life together. There are moments when the landscape is so vast and blank with snow that we get a sense of the loneliness that these two people, torn apart from each other by nature, must be feeling.

This is a film without pretence. It doesn’t pretend that a marriage that has survived for some forty years has done so easily or without obstacles. It is established fairly early that Grant used to have a roving eye, that Fiona forgave him and they managed to make the marriage work afterwards – which, of course, doesn’t mean that the business was ever forgotten. After Fiona is checked into a care facility and develops an attachment to another patient, Grant wonders if perhaps she’s just playing a game with him, punishing him for the affairs that he had in the past. Later, in a conversation with a nurse who has become a confidante, he remarks that in spite of their problems, things were never that bad. She replies (in what is one of the best scenes in the film) that in her experience, it’s always the husbands who think things were never that bad, and wonders if the wives would agree.

The performances in the film are excellent across the board. Olympia Dukakis, as the wife of the patient Fiona develops a relationship with, brings a wonderful mixture of stability and fragility to her character. There’s a scene where she leaves a message on Grant's machine, asking him out on what is officially not a date, even though it kind of is a date, and then sits alone in her kitchen waiting for him to call her back. Her loneliness is tangible, and Dukakis plays it without vanity. She has no illusions about her life or the potential of a relationship with Grant. She’s informed by a lifetime of experience, and she’s entering on this new adventure with clear eyes. It’s a brave performance, playing as she does a character who could easily veer into being pathetic, but never does. Dukakis brings a solidity to her that helps ground the film.

Christie is wonderful as Fiona, and absolutely deserves all the praise she’s gotten. There are scenes where she doesn’t speak, but simply looks at her surroundings and we sense her grasping for understanding even as she disappears deeper and deeper into herself. The performance is never showy and never rings false. However, for me, it’s Pinsent who really carries the film. He spends much of the film in denial – convinced that she’s just forgetful, convinced that she’ll only be in the care facility for a short time, convinced that she’ll get better – and then slowly comes to accept things for being the way that they are. We know that he’s behaved badly in his marriage, but we also believe that he cares about Fiona’s happiness. When he first approaches the Dukakis character at the beginning of the film, we think maybe that he’s come to ask her to remove her husband from the facility. Later, we find that she’s already done that and Grant has come to request that she put him back in, because Fiona is depressed without his company. Grant is jealous of the relationship, but willing to encourage it if it will help keep Fiona from getting sicker. Like Christie, Pinsent never rings a false note and it’s a shame that he’s been largely ignored in favour of his co-star.

This really is a great character film, one in which people are allowed to speak and interact with each other in ways that feel utterly natural. The acting is great and the direction is solid and sure-footed. Polley will have a lot to live up to, should she decide to step behind the camera again. Here’s hoping that she does.