A Bit of This, A Bit of That

Yet another week where the more recent films available on satellite and terrestrial TV were so dire that I won't even bother with capsule reviews. This leaves me to mull over some recent 'silent' viewing and one re-watched 60s' classic.

I'm sure I've written before that there was a time when there was at least a sprinkling of silent movies available on British television. For a start there was Brownlow and Gills' Thames Silents series which re-introduced golden oldies to a new generation, often with new Carl Davis scores. However those days seem gone forever. Nowadays I rely on the wonderful selection available on YouTube and the occasional seasons on the German/French satellite channel Arte. The latter can go months without showing any new silent films and then schedule a weekly cornucopia of flicks new to television -- for which I for one am most thankful. Their selections are often obscurities and are not always terribly memorable but that doesn't stop my watching them and hoping for the best.

The past three Monday nights have offered the following: "L'Inhumaine" (1923) which I kind of hated when I saw it at the National Film Theatre a while back (http://prettypinkpattyspictures.blogspot.co.uk/2006/04/l-1924.html), but it was worth another watch for its splendid Art Deco design.  The second (much more) rarity was "Pest in Florenz" (1919); this obviously translates as 'The Plague in Florence' and was a delightful telling of how licentious aristos and clergy received their comeuppance for their loose living by 'The Pest' embodied in a dead-eyed walking female. It reminded me in many ways of Corman's "The Masque of the Red Death" but without its glorious colour and Vincent Price. Most recently there was "Die Stadt der Millonen" (1923), a documentary love-letter to Berlin, with some interesting cinematography, but not a patch on Walter Ruttman's 1927 "Berlin, Symphony of a Great City". Next Monday's offering is "Chronicle of the Grey House" (1925) which I await with bated breath... sort of! 

The 1965 re-watch was Vittorio De Sica's "Marriage Italian Style" of which I seem to have two copies for some reason. This is not the joke-fest of the earlier "Divorce Italian Style" but a semi-serious look at a non-marriage. The movie was Oscar-nominated for best foreign film and for best actress for Sophia Loren in the lead. I have never counted how many movies she made with Marcello Mastroianni but they are numerous and memorable for their effortless chemistry. This one traces their relationship over twenty-two years from their first meeting in a brothel during World War II where she plays a wide-eyed and terrified seventeen-year old through their on-off relationship over the years. Mastroianni plays moneyed Lothario Domenico who always returns to Loren's Filumena for a bit of 'how's your father'. He moves her out of the brothel and into a sumptuous flat where she is expected to tender to his senesccent mother; he also employs her to run several of his bakery businesses. When she learns that he is due to marry the latest of his popsies, she feigns a fatal illness forcing him to compassionately marry her on her would-be deathbed (from which she rises triumphant).

And so it goes over the years with Domenico ever in the background between his many liaisons until lawyers annul their marriage on the grounds of her deceit. No worry she retorts, your money has helped me to raise my three sons -- 'only one of which is yours'! This sends him into a flap to discover which is his son and heir, only for the movie to move forward to the totally expected happy ending. Loren gives a virtuoso performance as she moves between naïve innocent, strutting tart, and devoted earth mother, embodying the many sides of womankind. As for Mastroianni, well Marcello is always the cheeky, twinkling Marcello that we know and love. After his early masterpieces, this may be one of De Sica's finest late offerings, along with "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" (1970). 

Disappointments

I'll tell you! You wait for years to view a movie and then find that it is so much worse than you hoped. This is the case for the famous Italian film "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" (1963), directed by De Sica, and pairing Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in three separate stories. For years it was only available to view dubbed, but I held off for a subtitled version now available. The film won the Oscar for best foreign film, beating the far superior Japanese movie "Woman in the Dunes", so I was hoping for a great experience, especially with all those credentials. It was frankly just a wee bit short of embarrassing in part. The first tale concerns Loren having to get pregnant annually to avoid being sent to jail for illegal cigarette trafficing, and her disgust when Mastroianni can no longer perform after seven kids. The second and shortest casts her as a rich and indulged wife who starts an affair with him until he manages to crash her Rolls Royce. The last has her as a high-class prostitute flirting with the student priest in the next apartment while Mastroianni plays a long-standing client, a harrassed businessman who just wants to have sex; this segment contains the "famous" (and quite innocent) striptease which some people recall fondly and which was replayed as a joke in "Pret a Porter".

Both players could be fine dramatic and comic actors in their day, especially Mastroianni, but there is little left here to show them to best advantage. There is a lot of screaming dialogue and sadly little to make the viewer even smile -- unless of course a semi-clothed Loren rings your bell.

My next disappointment was a preview showing of "Synecdoche, New York" (2008) which has not yet been released here, but about which I have been reading raves. It's the first film to be both written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, who was responsible for scripting a series of brilliant movies starting with "Being John Malkovich". This film like his earlier ones is crowded with quirky ideas and characters, but I felt that he did not have the directing skills to bring it all together.

Philip Semour Hoffman plays a minor theatre director, a latent hypochondriac overly aware of his own mortality, who has been awarded a generous Arts Grant and who wants to create something important. He therefore manufactures a growing collection of mini-worlds in large warehouses to re-create different aspects of his life and the lives of others, played by an endless stream of actors including Tom Noonan playing him; after some 19 years, an audience has yet to view the performances! The meaning of the title is the philosophic concept that the whole can equal a part or vice versa; get your head around that.

Various critics have remarked that this is a film that needs to be viewed more than once and I am inclined to agree with that assessment. There is too much going on to take it all in at the first viewing which is what created my own disappointment with this movie; I think a second view would make it a far more worthwhile experience, especially considering the splendid female cast which includes Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Emily Watson, Diane Wiest, and Jennifer Jason Leigh (who appears to have grown an enormous bosom!). So maybe this will not be quite a disappointment in the long run.