For anyone keeping score at home, lissener and I watched this earlier today. I’d not seen it before; it had been at the top of my must-see list for several years but I somehow hadn’t managed to make the opportunity. In all honesty, I was perhaps a little intimidated by the prospect: Maybe I wouldn’t get it, you know, or maybe it would fall short of my expectations. Compare another all-time classic and hugely influential work, Eisenstein’s Potemkin, which is inarguably important and has aspects of enduring brilliance but is really now a film to be appreciated more than enjoyed. I certainly don’t feel the need to see it again any time soon.
Passion of Joan of Arc is something else entirely. It transcends cinema. It didn’t just surpass my high expectations; it redefined them. I can’t really say it’s the best film I’ve ever seen, because it didn’t feel to me like “just” a movie. It’s been about nine hours now since I’ve seen it, and I think it’s going to haunt me for a while. Not only did it work for me on every expected level, having emotional resonance and artistic clarity and thematic depth and startlingly modern sensibilities and so on, it operates on levels I didn’t predict. Oh, and I’d watch it again right this very minute if given the opportunity.
The capsule writeup, I’d say, is spot-on, but it’s missing a line at the end. To wit: “P.S., Luc Besson is a fucking hack.”
Rashomon teaches us that the lie is often in the eye of the beholder. In one of world cinema’s most admired and influential films, the camera records exactly what the director, the great Akira Kurasawa, wants it to, and nothing it records is true. The wonder of Rashomon is that nothing it shows us is a lie, either. Rashomon unfolds in beautifully folded layers of first person, third person, and channeled from the grave (fourth person?). Three men, sheltering in a temple, discuss a bewildering case: A samurai (Masayuki Mori) is dead. His wife (Machiko Kyo) has been raped. A bandit (Toshiro Mifune) stands accused. We see scenes from the bandit’s trial where each participant testifies. Each of them believes himself to be responsible for the death of the samurai, and in what is probably the first use of unreliable flashbacks (see The Usual Suspects, etc., for later examples), we learn that each account is true. This means of course that each account is also a lie. Kurasawa’s genius–helped not a little by the breathtaking black and white cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa–allows us to experience this insoluble mystery without any sense of frustration. Instead we come away with a greater understanding of the fluidity of truth, and thus a greater understanding of ourselves.
Rashomon teaches us that the lie is often in the eye of the beholder. In one of world cinema’s most admired and influential films, the camera records exactly what the director, the great Akira Kurasawa, wants it to, and nothing it records is true. The wonder of Rashomon is that nothing it shows us is a lie, either. Rashomon unfolds in beautifully folded layers of first person, third person, and channeled from the grave (fourth person?). Three men, sheltering in a temple, discuss a bewildering case: A samurai (Masayuki Mori) is dead. His wife (Machiko Kyo) has been raped. A bandit (Toshiro Mifune) stands accused. We see scenes from the bandit’s trial where each participant testifies. Each of them believes himself to be responsible for the death of the samurai, and in what is probably the first use of unreliable flashbacks (see The Usual Suspects, etc., for later examples), we learn that each account is true. This means of course that each account is also a lie. Kurasawa’s genius–helped not a little by the breathtaking black and white cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa–allows us to experience this insoluble mystery without any sense of frustration. Instead we come away with a greater understanding of the fluidity of truth, and thus a greater understanding of ourselves.
The time has come to reevaluate one of the most universally loathed films of the last decade. Showgirls is a wicked piece of satire that went over everyone’s head–including mine–on its first release in 1995. Being a committed Verhoeven fan, I went with higher expectations than the critical bandwagon had dictated. Nonetheless, I dutifully hated it. Cut to, five years later, and I come across a review in which the Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum refers in an article wherein noted French director Jacques Rivette “[defends] Showgirls as the best and most personal of Verhoeven’s American films.” Intrigued, I donned a fake mustache and rented it. I was stunned. Stunned I tell you. Five years’ perspective made this second viewing an entirely new experience. Yes, Elizabeth Berkeley is awful. But we don’t object when John Waters uses bad actors intentionally. Perhaps that’s because Waters is ultimately very affectionate toward his characters, while Verhoeven clearly hates just about everyone. It’s crucial to Verhoeven’s vision that Berkeley be unable to convince us of her character’s humanity, because Nomi (“no me”?) is inhuman. In a deeply subversive twist on the Hollywood cliche of the stagestruck ingenue’s rise to stardom, Nomi finally achieves her full potential when she stops pretending to be human and embraces her inner monster. At the end of Showgirls, I had a mental image of Nomi shedding her showgirl skin to reveal a hideous monster, and this was confirmed for me by the song that played over the closing credits: Siouxsie Sioux singing “I Need a New Skin.” Please, don’t wait for the French to point out our myopia once again: see and reevaluate Showgirls as film that perfectly fulfills its every intention, unpalatable as those intentions may ultimately be.
Good reviews–they’re insightful and well written. However, as an editor (I know you’re an editor as well, but one should never edit one’s own writing), I offer a few tips on the style:
Cut your adverbs. “Five years’ perspective made this second viewing an entirely new experience” could be changed to “a new experience” or “a novel experience.” “Entirely” weakens the impact of your sentence.
Use synonyms to avoid repetition. “Nomi finally achieves her full potential when she stops pretending to be human and embraces her inner monster. At the end of Showgirls, I had a mental image of Nomi shedding her showgirl skin to reveal a hideous monster.” Replacing the second use of “monster” in the second sentence with “demon” or “succubus” would delete the monotony of repeating a word in two consecutive sentences.
Check your spelling. It’s “Kurosawa,” not “Kurasawa”; “stanch a wound,” not “staunch a wound”.
Be consistent with your formatting. You italicize some movie titles, but not others. You apply circumflexes to indicate long vowels in Japanese names in the heading of your review of Rashomon, but not in the body.
BTW, your review of the Dreyer film inspired me to put it in my Greencine rental queue, so well done, Lissener.
Excellent points, gobear. The circumflexes came with the cut and paste, but I’ll c&p them throughout. And the italicizing is coded differently for my final submittals to the editor, so I just left it out this draft.
In Blowup, his first English-language feature, Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni starts with Hitchcock and ends up, brilliantly, nowhere. As the go-to fashion photographer of “swinging” London, Thomas (David Hemmings) has it all–wealth, professional fame, all the “birds” he can bed, a Rolls Royce convertible–and nothing at all: he moves through this life of riches with an automoton’s ennui. Until, courtesy of Hitchchock, he stumbles upon a mystery. Strolling in a park, he photographs a couple in the distance, and is pursued by the woman–Vanessa Redgrave–who entreats him to give her the film. He refuses, despite her subsequent (and then-scandalous) attempt to seduce him. Intrigued by her desperation to destroy whatever it is he’s captured on film, he develops and prints it to find what may be a murder: is that a gun in the shrubbery? is that a body on the ground? Thomas’s pursuit of this enigma cuts through his ennui and gives his life, for now, some direction. Though his investigations lead us ever more deeply into mystery rather than toward a pat solution, we accompany him gladly. Filmed with great attention to the poppy colors of ‘60’s London, today Blowup is almost as exotic a travelogue as Thomas’s excursion to a Yardbirds concert must have been to contemporary audiences (it’s an obvious source of Austin Powers’s pastiche), and its frank nudity lacks its original impact, but Blowup remains a vital meditation on the numbing excesses of modern life.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a hoot. The best part is, that’s ALL it is. Joel and Ethan Coen, in their most lighthearted romp since Raising Arizona, take one of the all-time great movie comedies–Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels–as a starting point for an exercise in sheer entertainment. In Sullivan’s Travels, John Sullivan is a rich movie producer who feels guilty that he’s not making significant films: films that treat the woes and miseries of real people. His dream is to film the novel O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a Grapes-of-Wrathy plunge into the depths of poverty and hopelessness. Accused of ivory-tower hypocrisy, Sully rubs some dirt on his face and sets out to be an undercover hobo, to learn about the other half from their side of the fence. What he learns, finally, is that the greatest gift he can give to people who live dreary lives is laughter: the laughter he’s given them through his “insubstantial” comedies. And now the Coen brothers have made the film of O Brother, Where Art Thou? that Sullivan might have made after his epiphany. O Brother has all the surface trappings of a highbrow Depression drama–its heros are escaped prisoners on the lam, and it jokes that it’s based on James Joyce’s Ulysses (you can’t get much higher brow than that)–but ultimately it’s a fast ride on a hilarious horse, with an absolutely fabulous bluegrassy soundtrack of wildly entertaining songs. Don’t make the mistake Sullivan would have made before his journey of self discovery and get lost in surface details; take this ride for the sheer fun of it.
