By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu,
served fresh each Friday.
APPETIZER (reviews of Francofonia and The Family Fang)
When you see a film as remarkable as Aleksandr Sokurov’s Francofonia, you realize that most of our current movies just barely have a brain stem. Not drama, not documentary, this is a packed, juicy meditation on art, museums, France, war, history, waste and illusion. Achieving visual beauties which only he seems capable of, the Russian director wanders through the Louvre, but mostly the restaged Louvre of 1940, with most of its treasures (except statuary) having found refuge south of Paris. The stripped frames are like hollowed, hallowed ghosts, past which walk unusual tourists: German soldiers on leave. The remnants are guarded not only by the resident administrator Jaujard (played by wonderfully named Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) but a German culture official, the cultivated Count Graff Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath).
The
two men achieved a tense, formal friendship. Both would protect France’s
heritage, and each won the Legion of Honor. With Sokurov narrating and
commenting in his ruminative, melancholy Russian, we also visit a castle where
Gericault’s grand Raft of the Medusa
stands alone, safe but unvisited. With musically timed skill, Sokurov inserts vintage footage of Paris under Nazi rule (including the Hitler shots used
in Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, but Sokurov impishly has the Fuhrer asking:
Where’s the Louvre?). This is not quite such a choreographed poem as his Russian Ark, a tribute to St.
Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum shot as one long, flowing take, but his wit
continues. He tries to gently wake an Egyptian mummy, and depicts France’s
symbolic Lady Liberty, Marianne (played by a German actress!) admiring, along
with a grumpy, possessive Napoleon, the Mona Lisa.
In a
recurring gambit, Sokurov shows an art-laden cargo ship foundering at sea; it’s
a rather waterlogged metaphor for Europe afflicted by post-Nazi terrorism. More
moving are his images of Soviet Leningrad under siege, treated by the brutal Germans
with none of the “Aryan courtesy” they affected in Paris. Francofonia pulls you into its wandering and wondering, and
its inventive fertility rivals Orson Welles’s F for Fake and Alain Resnais’s Mon
Oncle d’Amerique. Sokurov has made two of the supreme modern films, Mother and Son (1997) and Russian Ark (2002), and Francofonia is very close to that
status, an international treasure.
Held
together by conceptual hooks, The Family
Fang will either zipper your attention as a curious family drama or leave
you contemplating rips in the fabric. Fully engaged are Jason Bateman and
Nicole Kidman, grown offspring of two “inspired” obsessives (Christopher Walken
and Maryann Plunkett). As kids, the offspring were praised and pressured into being
players and audience bait in transgressive “performance art” hoaxes. Pushed fervently
by their Dada daddy, the Fangs are minor art stars. But now the matured
siblings, as actor (Kidman) and novelist (Bateman), feel like spent troupers. When
father Fang unleashes a crowning hoax, there is a sick sense of both
abandonment and assault.
Kidman, always a gutsy star, is quite fine as the daughter who realizes that her modest stardom has faded twice (as a child, now as an adult). She opens up some angry, startling pain. Bateman’s work as her brother has a reflective naturalness, possibly because his energy also went into directing. Walken and Plunkett chew ham. Most of the elaborate Fang stunts are in the goof-gag lineage of Alan (Candid Camera) Funt and the Jackass boys. This odd movie, from Kevin Wilson’s novel, is over-determined by its ideas. There was more wit in Phyllis Diller’s silly jokes about her husband, “Fang.”
SALAD (A List)
With
a nod to Sokurov, my Ten Favorite Films
by Russian Directors: Oblomov (Mikhalkov, 1980);
Crime and Punishment (Kulidzhanov, 1970); I Am Cuba (Kalatozov, 1964); Russian
Ark (Sokurov, 2002); Ménilmontant (Kirsanov,
1926); Hamlet (Kozintsev, 1964); October (Eisenstein, 1928); Mother and Son (Sokurov, 1997); The Cranes Are Flying (Kalatozov, 1957) and The Overcoat (Batalov, 1959).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Always
bravura in his opinions, Orson Welles disliked safe, consensual taste: “I would
personally die for Bach and Mozart, Bartok, Beethoven. I’m sure I’m right about
them – and about Velázquez, too – but what troubles me is when people accept
the whole edifice, the movies, the books, the paintings, what’s in, what’s out,
just because it has already been accepted. That arouses my suspicion, even when
it’s right.” (From My Lunches With Orson,
by Henry Jaglom.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
The
bold virtuosity of Samuel L. Jackson: “Instantly cultish was his recital in Pulp Fiction of Ezekiel 25:17: ‘And you will know my name is the Lord when
I lay my vengeance upon you.’ Jackson syncopates and counterpoints
hard-nail consonants, pontifical vowels, withering pauses. He’s the Glenn Gould
of juju mojo. ‘Sam talked so fast,’ complained Pam Grier fondly, ‘that he could
exhaust you just keeping up.” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of
my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in
Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll
below.
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