Movies: August – December 2017

Tags

“Der Rosenkavalier”, “Final portrait”, “I am not your negro”, “Namatjira”, “The eagle huntress”, Mountain”

It’s a while since I’ve been to Narooma Kinema, and in that time it’s had a major facelift. I’m not too sure about the external colour scheme, but the 30-seater theatre where I’ve spent so many pleasurable hours is unchanged, and on my first visit I manage to snaffle my favourite front-row seat with plenty of leg-room, and a shelf for the interval chai latte.

I launch myself back into movie going with nearly five hours of opera. “Der Rosenkavalier” was the first opera I ever saw, some fifty years ago, and it was so sparsely staged and so long – my mental picture is of people standing in front of a mantelpiece and singing interminably – that it turned me off opera till recently.

The opulent staging by the New York Metropolitan Opera is a very different kettle of fish. Yet again I’m awed by the double skills needed by opera stars: they have to be able to both sing and act. And this lot can. Opening scene – young lover and older woman – dissolves into the older woman’s sense of time passing: the poignancy of her confession that sometimes in the middle of the night she stops all the clocks; and her conviction about the end of the affair “if not today, tomorrow”. And so it proves. Octavian falls for the young bride he carries the silver rose for and has to navigate around the boorish Baron Ochs, who shows the fading arisocracy (Strauss wrote this is 1911) in all it’s ghastliness: entitlement, sexual predation, and total gracelessness. The nouveau arrived don’t fare much better: ostentation and a determination to be accepted by the aristocracy no matter how, in this case father virtually selling his daughter for a title. When the Marshallin vacates the stage in favour of the younger woman her lover is in love with she shows what grace and dignity look like.

What I particularly enjoy about the Met live on screen are the bonus offerings in the interval – in this case two intervals. An interviewer waylays the singers as they leave the stage, often dripping with sweat, to interrogate them about their roles and how they perceive and developed them. Or talks to the stage designer for a future production of “Tosca” about using 3D printing for the armature of a statue. Or discusses the intricacies of the music with the conductor. Or talks to the director about the ideas that drive his production. Or talks to the wigmaker (40 hours per wig, an average of 70 wigs per production) who plays a cameo role as hairdresser in this production. I’m introduced to a new concept: retiring from role. Two of the leads are about to do just that. For Renée Fleming , the Marschallin has been a signature role: she’s played it many many times and says she’s added as many layers to it as she can.  Elina Garanca who played Octavian so stunningly, is also moving on from this role to more mature ones. I’m intrigued by this definition of retirement.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/savor-renee-fleming-in-der-rosenkavalier-at-the-met

It’s not often I sit through a movie with a smile on my face. I loved the gentleness of this one, set in Mongolia, despite the slaughter of sheep, rabbits and fox. The relationship between Aisholpan and her father, her mother’s acceptance of her daughter’s ambition, the teenage giggling of her friends in the dormitory at school are all natural in a way you don’t often see on screen. So is the montage of disapproving elders when they hear about the eagle festival ambitions of a girl. So many sequences adhere to my mind: Aisholpan’s capture of her eaglet after a perilous descent down a rocky cliff, her father holding the blue rope; Aisholpan clumsily painting her fingernails and then her sister’s in preparation for the festival; her strength when she catches the eagle on her arm; the horses sinking into snow on the fox hunt in the icy vastness of winter; the disappointment on her face when her eaglet fails to catch the fox.

Reviewers castigate the movie for not being a “true documentary”, whatever that is. They point out that girls have been eagle huntresses before; that other girls were competing in the eagle festival Aisholpan won. Does this matter? I’ve given up seeing documentaries as absolute truth long ago. I’m more than happy to see it as the story of a strong girl fulfilling her dreams without high drama and over-dramatic setbacks. The few moments of tension come from extreme landscape. One reviewer calls it a “documentary fairy tale” and that seems to me to be a perfectly satisfactory categorisation. A spectacular vast natural landscape: ordinary loving people and relationships; a simple story of achievement. These are rare in the world of movies and gave me great pleasure.

For the trailer click here

Albert Namatjira is an Australian artist, the first Aboriginal to paint his country in the white man’s way. He became famous and his paintings sold well. This documentary is shaped around the Namatjira project, an attempt to recover copyright of his work for his family. A play is one centrepiece, performed around Australia and then in London, where his descendants have an audience with the uncomprehending queen, hoping that she’ll give them back their land. The other centrepiece is documentary footage from the 1940s – 1950s and the present in Namatjira’s community. It damns Australia’s ongoing attitude to its Indigenous people. The commentary from the past is condescending and paternalistic, and current attitudes are no better.
The landscape of the red heart, the subject of Namatjira’s art, is stunning, glowing red soil the background to startling white gums. His relationship with white artist Rex Batterbee is the only redeeming aspect of race relations, although the white producer of the play is respectful, seeking family approval before proceeding and using an all-Aboriginal cast.

If you want to watch a trailer for the documentary, click here

If you want to see his paintings, click here for a google images collection.

If you want to know more about the copyright issue, read these news items

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-07/fight-for-copyright-continues-from-namatjiras-family/8881474

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-09/albert-namatjira-copyright-sale-a-mistake/8335624

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/film-festivals/miff-2017-premiere-charts-familys-battle-to-reclaim-albert-namatjiras-legacy-20170724-gxha3o.html

What an experience! If you are edgy about heights, expect to be clammy-palmed for the duration, as people hug sheer cliffs, make their way along a knife-edge of snow, hang suspended over emptiness in their dangling tents, pause in the middle of a vast vista of mountain peaks and fog, mutter “I want to be at home” when the cold and the height and the danger finally makes them recognise the risks they are taking. Robert Macfarlane’s script reflects on the insanity of mountaineering (if you’re not a mountaineer) and comments that now climbing Everest isn’t an adventure, it’s standing in a queue. But oh the beauty of the mountains from the comfort of my Kinema seat: the pleats and folds of snow, the icicles bordering a cavern, the sharp rockiness outlined in white, the sublime night skies. And the smallness of human beings against this majestic background.

This documentary is visually magnificent. The script is sometimes banal and trite, maybe the fault of the voice which intones rather than speaks. The music is played by the Australian Chamber Orchestra under Richard Tognetti: much that is familiar from the classics, some specially composed. The music is only occasionally domineering: just once in the early stages when the suspense of the climber’s search for handholds didn’t really need reinforcement with dramatic music.

The film traces attitudes to the mountains over time. We see in a Sherpa elder bowing and burning incense the old feeling of awe: the mountains as a place for gods and monsters, not humans. Slowly puny men begin to desire conquest and by the end of the documentary thrill-seekers are going to increasingly absurd ends for their adrenaline fix, leaping off pinnacles with pushbike and parachute, jumping out of planes on snowboards, skiing impossibly vertical runs, and joining endless crowds in pursuit of conquest.

For the trailer, click here

Just as well you don’t have to like the lead character in a movie. Giacometti channeled by Geoffrey Rush is obnoxious and selfish and self-obsessed. And often very amusing, as he virtually kidnaps an American to be his subject for “a few hours” that turns into three weeks. He chases after his prostitute-muse, insists on an absolute position for his subject, agonises over his lack of talent, stashes banknotes indiscriminately all over the studio. And still there are pleasures: the contrast between him and his wryly acquiescent sitter, who could be an American abroad from a Henry James novel; the reconstruction of the studio that is visually beautiful in its chaos and untidiness; the imitation sculptures all over the place, which had to be exact replicas and then had to be destroyed so they wouldn’t find their way onto the market as originals.

Watch the trailer here

I am alone in the Kinema to watch this. It’s a savage indictment of the treatment of negroes in America (and Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people), scripted by James Baldwin, whose words are interspersed with footage from the worst times. It’s framed around the lives of three assassinated men – Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King – who were all Baldwin’s friends. Baldwin’s passionate words reshape the concept of racism:

You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves – and furthermore you give me a terrifying advantage – you never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me. Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

This documentary is confronting and challenging in its starkness. Maybe now Australia finally has a law allowing gay marriage, it’s time to really tackle justice for Aboriginal people.

To watch the trailer, click here

Four months of movies

Tags

diverse movies, Narooma Kinema

While I was in Warsaw, one of the things I missed was the Narooma Kinema, and John’s satisfying programming. Since I returned I’ve been indulging myself in an ongoing private festival, often sharing the small theatre with only one or two other people. It seems from this collection that I don’t have much of an urge towards comedy, that in fact my taste is for the sombre and movies that reflect reality, that are based on true stories. That is when I’m not revisiting the classics of theatre and opera.

Circumstances are against the characters in the first four movies, which portray different kinds of oppression and different ways of dealing with it.

In “Hedda Gabler” the set is sparse, marking the disappointed hopes of Hedda when her husband looks like missing out on the job they pin their hopes on. Hedda behaves like a spoilt child: throwing flowers, making hurtful comments about Aunt Julie’s hat, a wilful adolescent woman, dissatisfied with her life and eager to upend everyone else’s. She betrays two friends, one of them three times: by encouraging him to drink, by destroying his manuscript, and by offering him the gun that kills him, expecting him to die a grand and noble death. The staging is overdramatic in places where it needs gravitas: when Judge demonstrates his power over Hedda by dribbling red liquid over her the effect is disconcertingly comical; and Hedda’s death throes when she shoots herself are far too twitchy in silhouette. For my money, Terence Rattigan’s “The deep blue sea” is a far more satisfying portrayal of a woman trapped in an unsatisfactory life. 

I’m far more pleased with the low key acting in “I Daniel Blake”. Life’s given him a far harder hand to play than Hedda’s: he loses his wife and then his job, and has to deal with Kafkaesque bureaucracy to be given a pension. His occasional outburst are controlled and measured and none the less powerful: in the employment office waiting room he sees a young mother’s dilemma with compassion and takes what action he can to support her. When he’s knocked back after suffering the indignity of applying for jobs his health won’t let him take, he takes a stand with spray paint to make his demands before he’s lugged off to gaol. When poverty really takes hold, he retreats into isolation, emerging only to die on the way to his hearing. Through all this he remains dignified.

“Loving” presents a seemingly insoluble problem: a mixed-race couple is driven out of their home state by the race laws, under ban of returning for 25 years. Joel Edgerton plays the husband who just wants to be allowed to love his wife and his children:   his submissiveness to the intransigence of the law rings very true. His wife is more proactive and finally their case goes to the Supreme Court and changes the American constitution. Beautiful, low-key acting again.

This true story of displacement, begins when 5 year old Saroo is separated from his brother and finds himself on a train that takes him alone across India to Kolkata. There he doesn’t speak the language and he has to fend for himself until he’s adopted by an Australian couple. The fairy tale life collapses when he’s at university, and he longs for home as he knew it in his childhood and for his beloved mother: he sets off on another journey to find his obscure village. The young Saroo is a delight, and India is beautifully portrayed, without drawing back from poverty and other sinister aspects. I’m glad I didn’t let my almost pathological dislike of Nicole Kidman keep me away from this movie.

A movie that is absolutely beautiful to look at, although the story is far from “beautiful”. Yet another attempt to deal with the aftermath of war: the loss of fiancé and son up against the horrors committed in the name of duty; and another doomed love affair.

I desperately want to see this opera, which I have never heard of – because of the costumes. A previous MetOpera Live took me behind the scenes into the wardrobe room. I wasn’t disappointed, and the opera itself satisfied me in a way that many operas don’t, with their ridiculous overwrought stories. Here, the plot worked as parable rather than melodrama. A nymph wants to be human so badly she is prepared to take the consequences if her lover discards her. The storyline keeps me interested; the singing is superb; and the stage sets (palace and woodland) are beautifully contrasted. The quirky thing about this opera is that muteness is the price the nymph pays for becoming human, a strange state for the main character in an opera.

I’m an addict of National Theatre Live filmed performances. I can sit in the small theatre in Narooma Kinema, twenty kilometres from home, and for $25 I can watch superlative Shakespeare. And this production of “Twelfth night” is superlative, Shakespeare very much alive. The staging is triangular and clever – it manages to be a ship foundering at sea; a grand staircase for Malvolia’s appearance in yellow stockings, cross-gaitered; a room for Sir Toby and Sir Andrew to perpetrate their drunkenness; and a dark cell for the imprisonment of “mad” Malvolia. There are plenty of laughs, but there is also the darkness of the bullying Malvolia is subject to. Tamsin Greig makes me feel outraged at her treatment and to break into applause for her performance, something I never do at the movies.

“The innocents” is based on a true story from Poland. As the Russians move through they take the spoils of war. Breaking into a convent, they rape the nuns and leave a number of them pregnant. The mother superior is determined to keep the shame secret, but one of the nuns enlists the help of a French Red Cross nurse. The story traverses difficult terrain: the black and white of the winter landscape and the nun’s habits belies the complexity of the consequences that have to be faced as the nuns give birth, and as babies are left to die in the snow at the foot of a cross.

On a rainy June Tuesday, I create my own mini-film-festival. A morning viewing of  the Australian movie “Don’t tell”; and in the afternoon “Denial”.

“Don’t tell” is the harrowing true story of a young girl sexually abused by a teacher at Toowoomba Anglican school. Years later she dares to accuse the school and take it to court: the outcome is recognition that her story is true and the resignation of Australia’s Governor General, Peter Hollingworth, who was Anglican archbishop at the time of her abuse. It’s not an easy movie to watch: while it focuses on the court case, Lyndal is subject to disturbing flashbacks, especially when the court moves to the school. It is confronting not only for Lyndal but for her parents who ignored her pleas not to be sent back to the school: for other abused students who have submerged their abuse; and for the school nurse who finally dares to name something disturbing she saw as the girls were showering. The closing scene is moving: Lyndal and her younger self sit companionably on haybales in the paddock as long-awaited rain begins to fall.

“Denial” is based on the true story of holocaust denier David Irving’s court case against Penguin books. It raises many pertinent questions in this age of alternative facts, as Penguin’s formidable legal team set out to prove that Irving knowingly perverted documents in his attempts to rehabilitate Hitler. The dilemma the team faces is demolishing Irving’s credibility without giving him airspace to pursue his cause. A visit to Auschwitz on a snowy winter’s day is the centrepiece of the movie.

Brett Whiteley is an Australian artist. The documentary begins with a Sotheby auction where one of his painting sells for $1.2million, a record for an Australian painting at the time. In the course of the documentary you hear his voice, see the splendid diversity of his art, watch recreations from childhood, and stand by with his wife as he destroys himself with drugs. His boyhood epiphany that he is an artist comes in church in Bathurst, when he finds a book of Van Gogh paintings someone has left on the floor. This moment is dramatically represented as his image and everything around him swirls into Van Gogh brush strokes and spirals. He is very quotable: “My libido is as present in my paintings as ultramarine”: “Artists are not nice people, but they make honey.” His art is immensely varied: the huge sequences of “Alchemy” and ” The American dream”; the serial killer series; the voluptuous bath room nudes; the Sydney harbour scenes; birds; and Nobel Prizewinner Patrick White as a headland. His wife hits the nail on the head when she says his attraction is his “blazing energy”.

For once the trailer is well worth watching.

My fourth visit to the movies in one week. Maybe I take my sleeping bag and camp out! This time it’s Opera from the Met in New York. I’m familiar with the voice-free music: I played my “La traviata” LP over and over as a girl, and everything is familiar except the story which I’d never even wondered about. The music no longer sounds quite so beautiful when I know it’s the accompaniment to a long dying. A large clock and a motionless man onstage all the time remind us of Violetta’s mortality. This production is stunning to look at in its starkness and curves: black, white, grey and red except in the carefree Act 2 when Violetta and don Alberto are deeply and playfully in love. Violetta is played by Sonya Yoncheva whose voice is superlative. Alberto is no actor, which spoils things a bit. His declarations of love are accompanied by a robotic stare into space. 

I’m pleased with my viewing: not one movie I’m sorry I saw. Australian, French, French-Polish, English productions. No Hollywood. Thank you, John.

How to be treated badly 60 years ago

Tags

"Hidden figures", "Jasper Jones", prejudice

There are a number of ways you can do this. Be born Aboriginal in a country town. Be Vietnamese in Australia during the Vietnam war. Be a woman in the workplace. And if you want to double the chances, be an African-American woman in the workplace. Sadly, even if you wait sixty years you’ll still probably be treated badly.

“Jasper Jones” is an Australian movie, set in a small town in Western Australia. Seeing it was part of my reclaim-Australia push. There was a personal incentive too: it was holiday reading for the mob at my place over Christmas; and my granddaughter, to her delight, met author Craig Silvey and director Rachel Perkins in her first week of media studies at university.

One night there’s a tap on Charlie’s window: it’s Jasper Jones, an Aboriginal lad he hardly knows, asking for help. They go off into the bush to find a girl hanging from a tree. They release her and weight her body before they bury her in the lagoon. Why? Because Jasper knows he’ll be blamed. As the story unfolds, Charlie finds himself more deeply involved, and committed to silence, causing problems with his irascible mother and preternaturally calm father.

Then there’s Charlie’s best mate Jeffrey La, a Vietnamese boy obsessed by cricket, and very good at it. But it’s the time of the Vietnam war and the small town doesn’t take kindly to the enemy living amongst them. Jeffrey’s mother has a cup of tea thrown in her face at a town gathering to plan the search for a missing girl, and two men root up his father’s prized garden after Jeffrey’s triumph at a town cricket match.

Things become darker as the missing girl’s story unfolds: not killed by the local madman, not by Jasper, not by a stray murderer, but suicide after long abuse by her father, who happens to be the town mayor. The movie ends with a fire which destroys the house of abuse, but leaves many things unpurified.

There! I’ve spilled the beans about the story. But there was more than story. The night scenes in the town and the bush are beautifully shot; Jasper is superbly acted by Aaron L McGrath as a young man who has no illusions about his place in the town where he grew up; Levi Miller captures a teenager in over his head and juggling an overprotective mother, family breakup, first love, and an understanding of the darker side of his world. The only jarring note is Toni Collette’s caricaturish portrayal of the borderline hysterical mother. The adolescent exchanges between Jeffrey and Charlie debating superheroes are hilarious, a light note riding above the darkness.

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“Hidden figures” tells the story of a mathematician, an engineer, and a computer whizz who all work at NASA when America is trying to catch up with Russia in the space race. They are women, no mean feat at that time in a field colonised by men. They are also all African Americans, Coloured. The mathematician whose skills got John Glenn safely back to earth after three circuits has to run across campus to use the coloured bathroom; deal with the assumption that she is the cleaner; and use an ostentatiously marked kettle to make her coffee in the office. Even when the IBM computer moves in her capacities are essential, and she still does many calculations on a chalkboard. By then her boss has crowbarred down the sign on the coloured washroom, and taken her to high level meetings despite forbidding protocol.

These are three feisty women. The movie opens on a deserted road with a broken down car and one of them sprawled underneath it to get it going. The engineer goes to court to gain the right to attend a white school. The computer whizz has her staff ready for the arrival of computers, even though she is refused the designation “supervisor”.

The feel of the period is beautifully captured in the muted colours and of course the clothes, the cars, and the attitudes. The twins would love the footage of rockets launching.

 It’s a triumphant, energetic movie. I felt like applauding at the end.