Amour (***1/2)

Woody Allen once made a comedy called Love and Death. Michael Haneke has made a film called Love that is about death, and is superficially a tragedy, but only superficially. Beginning with the end, the body of a woman alone in a luxurious Paris apartment, Haneke then takes us through the stages of her decline following a stroke. The woman is played by Emmanuel Riva, the 85-year-old whose earliest starring role was in the similarly titled Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), her husband by the slightly younger Jean-Louis Trintignant, of ...And God Created Woman, The Conformist, and other European classics. Isabelle Huppert, who plays the couple’s daughter in a few scenes, has starred in two Haneke films, Time of the Wolf and The Piano Teacher. (Here, Riva’s character was once a piano teacher.) We never see these characters at a younger age, but French viewers may feel that they have known them well via earlier roles.

 

Haneke has strongly resisted the conventions of Hollywood (though he remade his own film Funny Games in English) and mainstream cinema, such as tidy endings. In doing so he has made movies that can seem chilly and detached. Films like Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, and The White Ribbon take a nearly clinical look into dark aspects of human behavior. I’m not sure whether he’s doing anything different here. It may be that simply placing his camera in front of these two characters, one witnessing her own decline, the other transitioning from husband to caretaker, is responsible for the deep empathy we feel for both. His approach is at once minimalist and rich in detail. The camera lingers, sometimes to the point where the viewer may become impatient, but allows us to see the evidence of this couple’s life together, including their well-appointed residence, full of books, art, and old furniture.

 

The tragedy embodied in the movie is that with all the ways modernity has made life easier, it has done little to improve the experiences of death and loss. The way in which it is not a tragedy, is hopeful even, is in its depiction of the tenderness shown by the husband. He does not speak the film’s title. No protestations of ardor, no dramatic medical interventions, no grand gestures (well, not more than one), as in a Nicholas Sparks novel, no mad dashes to the airport attest to his feelings. All that does is his willingness to do for his wife, day after day, what she cannot do and would want done. (In contrast is his daughter, who cannot see the situation through the eyes of her parents.) You don’t expect to see that in one of Haneke’s movies, and that makes it all the more moving.

 

IMDb link

 

viewed 1/27/13 4:00 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 1/18/13 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (***)

“For the elderly and beautiful” reads the legend on the sign of the namesake hotel in this comedy-drama, whose cast amounts to an employment program for some British actors of a certain age. Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton are the married couple. Judi Dench is the recent widow. Celia Imrie is the man hunter, and the aptly named Ronald Pickup her male counterpart. Maggie Smith…is the bigot. Tom Wilkinson is the just-retired businessman returning to his long-ago home, which is Jaipur, India. Which is the home of the once-majestic, still exotic Marigold. And which is where all of these characters have come, even the bigot, because the living (and the medical care) is cheaper in England.

In hardly ten minutes of screen time — I didn’t quite get how it was arranged — they all manage to arrive into the same previously unoccupied hotel at the very same time. Whereupon the young proprietor (Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel, playing a similarly optimistic character) adds “Now with guests!” to the hotel’s sign sign. A bunch of English folk learning life lessons in a poor country is a plot ripe for cliché. These are not completely avoided—most obviously simplistic is the story of the proprietor, whose mother disapproves of his girlfriend, scoffs at his plans to revive the hotel, would prefer an arranged marriage to a Delhi girl, etc. However, the key to this kind of film is to be able to establish the several characters efficiently without making them into clichés, and this is done. Even Wilton’s character, the least likeable and most resistant to India’s charms, is sympathetic, at times, in her despair.

The script (from Deborah Maggoch’s novel) by Ol Parker (Imagine Me & You) is sometimes witty. The direction by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) highlights the colors of the Pink City and avoids making the old folks “cute.” (In this respect, I would contrast it with some of Richard Curtis’s work, like Love, Actually, which I found to be faux “adorable.”) The English seem to specialize in ensemble-cast dramedies, and this one is fairly good, if occasionally meandering.

IMDB link

viewed 5/2/12 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/3/12

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (***)

More than ever, the modern media, along with human nature, turns celebrities into clichés. Elizabeth Taylor and Larry King may now be best known for being oft-married, Lindsay Lohan for being a drunk. Millions know their names without ever having seen their work. Documentaries like this, or Tyson, remind us that in real life, no one is simply a cliché. Joan Rivers, who would prefer to be thought of as an actress, not a comedian, doesn’t regret her well-publicized plastic surgeries, only that, for many people, they overshadow whatever else she may accomplish. And, aged 75 in the year this was filmed, there is more she intends to accomplish.

The approach of filmmakers Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg was simply to follow Rivers around with a camera so for a “year in the life of a semi-legend.” This was a year that included a new book, an autobiographical play, a successful stint (along with her daughter Melissa) on Celebrity Apprentice, a celebrity roast aired on Comedy Central, and the usual television commercials, hawking of her jewelry line, and numerous shows in small clubs and large auditoriums. For reasons both temperamental and financial, this a woman who’s rarely idle. Although Stern and Sunderg include enough old clips, from Johnny Carson’s tonight show in particular, to give a capsule version of Rivers’s history, but their approach is more of a profile than biography. A few other celebrities appear, but only to the extent that their paths cross hers, as does Don Rickles when they co-headline, or similarly caustic Kathy Griffin when she does the roast.

Unlike Mike Tyson, Rivers’s life doesn’t play out as tragedy, although she has suffered, as after the suicide of her husband of over 20 years in 1987, or during a bout with bulimia detailed in one of her books, but not here. The documentary doesn’t have much of a story arc, as movie folks say. Her story remains the persistence that allows her a place in a youth-obsessed culture, even if it doesn’t come with all of the respect she believes she deserves. She is the conflation of insecurity (about how others view her) and confidence (in her own skills) that is the hallmark of so many successful entertainers. And, as the clips of her act show, she’s still funny. In a bit shown during the credits, she notes that her dying before the movie’s release would a marketing coup. If that had happened, her biggest regret would have been not to be around for the career boost.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 6/23/10 and reviewed 6/23–24/10

Mid-August Lunch (**1/4)

The title suggests a nice, relaxed meal in pleasant company, and moreover a pleasant, light drama or comedy with no heavy themes, and that is what this aspires to be. Very Italian, with lots of casual wine sipping and a sprinkling of parmesan, it takes place when much of Rome seems to be on vacation. Meanwhile, middle-aged Gianni, who lives with his elderly mother, winds up being overnight host to multiple elderly women. They are all nice enough, though collectively a mild handful with their dietary restrictions, medications, and need for beds. Gianni is played by the director, Gianni Di Gregorio, who looks a lot like the late Jerry Orbach. Di Gregorio wrote the recent crime drama Gomorrah, among others, but apparently was looking for something less challenging for his directing debut.

I have no problem enjoying this sort of lightly plotted trifle, and this is certainly not unpleasant. But it’s so mild that it fails to make much of an impression. If this were actually something that happened to someone, it would make an amusing yarn, but a feature film seems a bit too much. Even if that movie takes merely the length of a leisurely lunch (75 minutes), viewers may be thinking that they’d prefer to spend that time eating the meal than watching it.

IMDB link

viewed 4/21/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/22/10

Boynton Beach Club (***)

? A group of Florida sixtysomethings unite around a bereavement group and find new partners. The gentle comedy by director Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) — whose own mom gets a story credit — provides a trio of famous 1970s actresses (Dyan Cannon, Sally Kellerman, Brenda Vaccaro) with good roles, and the male leads (Joseph Bologna, Len Cariou, Michael Nouri) are also semi-familiar faces.

+ Happily, the script not only avoids making the characters into drooling corpses but also avoids making them into teenagers with wrinkles. Nobody listens to hip hop (or even rock), nobody has a pierced tongue, and nobody has a potty mouth that’s supposed to be cute. The characters each felt real. Being essentially a romantic comedy, the movie de-emphasizes the negative aspects of aging (such as health issues), but it does examine the insecurity that can come with being intimate with a new person after so many years.

- The humor is benign, and the character arcs have the usual predictability. The “crises” that develop in the new romances are mild indeed. Some people will probably object that the group portrayed is a rather homogenous group of upper-middle-class types, but that’s true of so many Hollywood romantic comedies that it’s hard to single this out.

= *** There’s nothing new except that everyone’s old, but that alone is enough of a novelty. And remember, the movie’s cheaper if you catch the early-bird special.

IMDb link