One Day You'll Understand

First of all, who would/could resist a movie starring Jeanne Moreau? All our lives, those eyes have enchanted us (Les Amants, Liaisons Dangereuses, Quatre Cent Coups, La Notte, Jules et Jim, Diary of a Chambermaid, M. Klein, La Femme Nikita) and here she is, now 81 and 134 movies later, still alive and kicking. One Day You'll Understand, a cinematic adaptation of French author, Jérôme Clément’s autobiographical homage to his mother, deals with the near impossibility of children ever recuperating the irrecoverable past of their parents, let along coming to terms with it. In this movie (just called Plus Tard in France), Jérôme Clément’s maternal grandparents, Vichy France, Klaus Barbie and the Holocaust are the irrecuperable past. Clément’s paternal family were French Catholics; his mother's were Russian Jews.

Situated at the centre of this intelligent meditation, Jeanne Moreau, knowing what fate visited upon her, knowing what barbarities were visited upon her parents, has composed a fiction of her past, having never shared past truths with either her children (and now her grandchildren). The trial of Klaus Barbie, butcher of Lyon, provokes her change. None has an escape from their past. On Yom Kippur, she takes her grandchildren to synagogue. Later, you'll understand, she reassures her son.

Because I'm in the process of reading The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its Ashes, by Israeli Avraham Burg, j'accuse Holocaust representations have been much on my mind. After screening Shoah in 1985, Claude Lanzman's eight-plus hours of interviewee memory (which ran 8 h 20 min.) I felt then as I feel now: I understand everything I will ever understand about cinematic representation of the Holocaust. And yet Holocaust indictment entertainment keeps spewing forth. Last holiday season, we got a spate of them, : I Served the King of England, Waltz With Bashir, Defiance, Adam Resurrected, Valkyrie, The Reader (I'm supposed to feel for an Auschwitz guard?), Counterfeiters. They provoke in me such guilt, sentimentality, sorrow, anger. They also strike me critic-immune, the most unctuous, claiming moral high ground and the mantle of all that is good and righteous to fend off cinematic mediocrity. Some (La Vita e Bella) are egregiously mawkish. Many pile it on with gratuitous violence.

Among critics, (Jewish, for the most part), there's a lot of Holocaust crankiness out there. Enough already. One wrote:the more bad Holocaust films you make, the more Holocaust clichés you employ, the more the Holocaust itself becomes a cliché. One Catskills wit cracked: There's No Business Like Shoah Business. IMDB lists 461 titles in the holocaust subset. There are even unseemly Top Ten Holocaust/Nazi movies lists. Here's my problem: exploiting unfathomable mass horror in the hopes of either making a buck or earning some gravitas recognition seems mighty unseemly.

In One Day You'll Understand, Israeli Director Amos Gitai seeks a dialog between past and future, between unknowable collective memory (Moreau) and uncomprehending present-day France, haunted by its past (Hippolyte Girardot). With the imminent disappearance off the stage of the last direct witnesses to the horrors (gone, as though they never existed). Buried secrets, Amos Gitai argues, must be entrusted to the artists: filmmakers, novelists, painters. His observations are astute, restrained, interior, contained.

Cherry Blossoms

Life is such a disappointment.
Yes.

Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story

Cherry Blossoms, scheduled to open here March 6th, was pushed for the last couple of months for reasons I have never learned. No matter. I was in no hurry. Finally it's arrived, a movie I have not seen and yet feel I know, as a distant cousin. Urbane children of an elderly rural couple find little time in their harried lives for parents they no longer relate to: quest for children's personal fulfillment blowing the parents apart. I've seen this movie before.

I've always been fascinated by movie provenance - be they remakes, sequels, prequels, spinoffs or plagiarisms. On March 18th, I blogged an item on Hollywood begats (read it here: http://peterspovblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/redux-begats.html). With The Soloist, I wrote last week on the series of L.A.Times newspaper columns which spawned a book, several documentary items and then the movie. Each dealing, in its own medium with the awesome mystery that is schizophrenia.

We all enjoyed comparing the themes, approaches, and performances of 12, the Russian movie remake of Sidney Lumet's 1957 Twelve Angry Men. Cherry Blossoms has yet another Hansel unt Gretl trail of provenance behind it: in 1937, in the heart of the depression, Leo McCarey directed Make Way for Tomorrow, a little known Hollywood gem many consider the greatest ever made about the plight of the elderly: when an elderly couple lose their home, their five ungrateful children, now grown-up and married, are far too self-absorbed to care for their parents.

Talk about provenance: Make Way for Tomorrow came from a play, which in turn was adapted from a novel. Here's the lead from the NYT movie review of 1937 : Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow has three qualities rarely encountered in the cinema: humanity, honesty, and warmth. These precious attributes, nurtured and developed by the best script Vina Delmar has written, by Mr. McCarey's brilliant direction, and by the superb performances of Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi, and the rest, have produced an extraordinarily fine motion picture, one that may be counted upon to bid for a place among the "ten best" of 1937.
Orson Welles reportedly said that it would make a stone cry. Documentairan Errol Morris quipped: the most depressing movie ever made, providing reassurance that everything will definitely end badly.

I remember vaguely seeing Make Way for Tomorrow on television decades ago and thinking it very old fashioned. Now, I'd give my eye teeth to rescreen it with fresh eyes. I've searched without success for a dvd or vhs. As far as I can see, Make Way for Tomorrow has been dropped down the oubliette of technological memory. Prints exist but we have no access to them, discarded much the way the elderly occasionally are when they're no longer of much use to their kids. Not surprisingly, while it flopped at the box office then, Make Way for Tomorrow lives on in cinemaniac memory. Nevertheless, you can bet Hollywood isn't actively optionning a remake today. When he won the Oscar that year, for a Cary Grant/Irene Dunne divorce comedy The Awful Truth, McCarey quipped: "Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture."

But somebody else, Swiss director Doris Dörrie has. She calls it Cherry Blossoms.

Which brings us to Yasujiro Ozu's 1951 Tokyo Story, modeled on McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (which Ozu claimed he never saw.) Ozu sets his wretched offspring story in post-WW II Japanese reconstruction. An old couple living in the port city of Onomichi take their first trip to Tokyo, visit their married (ungrateful) children: a doctor and a beautician—both somewhat put out by their parents' visit. Endless critics and filmmakers speak of Tokyo Story in complete awe and admiration. It's available both at Boîte Noire and the Fort Movieland.

Doris Dörrie's Cherry Blossoms (just over 2 hours long), then takes two classics, an homage to both McCarey and Ozu masterpieces while making her own movie. I have not yet seen Cherry Blossoms, nor feel any urgent need to do so. While this film and social mores are different (American becomes Japanese becomes Swiss), I anticipate yet another touching portrait of awkward love and understanding for ghastly offspring that leaving me both elated and devastated..

Movies get us looking at our world through different optics: when when the same movie gets translated into three separate decades: the 1930s Hollywood movie becomes the 1950s Japan story 21st century becomes the 2009 Switzerland production, we pick up cultural themes and variations that can't help but be evocative.

May 1st Cinebulletin

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• The Cannes Film Festival starts next week (May 13-24). They have a smart (in English) website, so bookmark this page: http://www.festival-cannes.com/en.html. Movies we know nothing about today, we'll be screening in the next year.

• Book Review - The Soloist - Finding fascinating the various iterations of the same story (movie, newspaper columns, TV documentaries), yesterday I bought, and consumed at one sitting the Steve Lopez book, The Soloist, the underpinning of the movie and a reworking in narrative form of his LA Times columns. It's a quick easy read, and while argumentative, very persuasive.

  I'm ashamed that in a region of unprecedented wealth, the destitute and the sick have been shoved into this human corral. I'm frustrated by my inability to do more for Nathaniel. If I can't help him, how can I help the others. ...and .....He lives in two distant constellations, this man who fends off rats on skid row and holds forth at Disney Hall, mingling easily with members of the orchestra...From paranoia to poetry, sirens to violins, madness to genius, Nathaniel's life is opera.

  ($13.86 @ Chapters; $3.96 @ Amazon).

• Cinephiles should visit our website (http://www.my-pov.ca/), screen the newly posted The Soloist trailer Scott has posted, and then screen, on YouTube(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7ovt3vSFi8), a 4:00 memorable documentary clip of a birthday party journalist Steve Lopez organized for Nathaniel Anthony Ayers in the basement of his newspaper.

• Farla, having seen The Soloist, reminds me of the healing-force-of-music parallels between this week's film and Shine, the elegant 1996 Australian movie about pianist, David Helfgott. Both deal with the conundrum posed by creativity: gifted, scarred musicians, whose lives can go so awry. Steve Lopez makes the same point in his book:

  Nathaniel's sound is the baring of his soul, and when he closes his eyes, it's as if he's come to a clearing in a forest and found relief under an open sky.

  In Shine, Rachmaninoff costars with Geoffrey Rush. In The Soloist, it's Beethoven.

• Nicole went to see Ghost of Girlfriends Past (100 min) for us. Here's what she found:

  Connor Mead, (Mathew McConaughey) ,more philandering bachelor than glamour photographer, heads from New York City to his childhood home in Newport, Rhode Island to serve as best man at his younger brother’s wedding.“Not the best man to pick for your best man” The publicity reads: And they were right! Uncle Wayne, (Michael Douglas) the Hugh Heffner ghost, with matching depth, is out to show his shallow nephew that he has lost his way “…like the Tin Man, born without a heart.” What wisdom!Uncle Wayne calls upon the ghost of many past girlfriends to lend a hand in teaching his shallow nephew a lesson about life and love.
  

• Beautiful childhood friend Jenny Perotti (Jennifer Garner), still vulnerable to Connor’s charm, is on a mission. She has the incredible task of making the weekend long festivities work smoothly.. Well educated, self confident, friend of the bride and groom. Of course, what wedding would be complete without a wicked tongued divorced mother-of-the bride, a drill sergeant Marine Corps father of the bride? Throw in a wedding rehearsal dinner party that goes awry, some predictable slapstick, bridesmaids disillusioned by socially inept ushers and eager to be out there on the make and you have the general ingredients of: Ghost of Girlfriends Past. This film is for young romantic comedy lovers. I am not one of them!

• Our thanks to J. Paul Higgins, who provided notes on Tyson, after attending the press screening on our behalf:

  Strangely compelling movie, “strangely” because I’m not a boxing fan and for the most part the movie consists of close cut scenes of Mike Tyson speaking interspersed with archival fight footage. There is no narration. And yet the time passed quickly and I was fully engaged.This is not a technical boxing film; focuses more on the mental framework of a fighter than the physical training or techniques. The boxing footage is taken from broadcasts of his fights but in generally seems dispassionate and not excessively brutal given the subject matter. Mike Tyson is not a very sympathetic character; he started life as a pre-teen mugger, became famous as an alleged wife abuser, was convicted and imprisoned for rape, was famous as a brutal and aggressive boxer and most famous for biting an opponent on the ear twice during a fight. Tyson does not shrink from any of the controversy, addressing all the low points. Some mistakes he admits to, others he denies, others are blamed on his young age or drug taking. The film effectively cuts between archival interviews of a young, brash Tyson and film of today’s battered and brutal looking man with a facial tattoo. He is an uneducated but an intelligent and thoughtful speaker and the director catches him in a range of emotions, from tears to angry defiance. Overall the film presents a middle aged man trying to come to terms with his past and self-consciously working to become his version of a better man.

• I'm proposing some major improvements to the future operations of my-pov.ca, finishing off a document I'll circulate next week

The Soloist - Monday, May 4th - 5:15 p.m.