Nosh 102: 'A Fantastic Woman,' 'Death Wish' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of A Fantastic Woman and Death Wish.

A Fantastic Woman

Opening with fantastic images of Iguazu Falls in Brazil, A Fantastic Woman takes us over emotional falls in Santiago, Chile, with the remarkably buoyant Marina Vidal. In transit to womanhood, Marina (once Daniel) has had hormonal treatment but not surgery. I have never seen an actor who uses, with such poised polarity, feminine and masculine qualities quite like trans artist Daniela Vega (born David). Three at least came close, yet more melodramatically: Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry, Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club and, way back, Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden.

Lovely in a box-faced way, with the gazing gravity of an Olmec statue, Marina is eagerly moving into a flat with Orlando (Francisco Reyes), 57. Deeply in love, the sensitive businessman has left his razor-edged wife and angry, grown kids (Marina also loves his dog, a key plot figure). I have to spill a spoiler, otherwise I’d be stuck on tiptoes of silence. As their new life begins, Orlando dies (aneurism), unleashing all the wasps of pent-up rage in his family. Grieving Marina must deal not only with the increasingly hostile widow (Aline Küppenheim) but Orlando’s rabidly homophobic son. Lonely in supporting her is Orlando’s brother (actor Luís Gnecco also played poet Pablo Neruda in Pablo Larrain’s Neruda).

Larrain was a producer here, and director Sebastián Lelio, co-scripting with Gonzalo Maza, is Larrain-like in his artful combinations. As with Larrain (Tony Manero, No, Jackie) there is a generous range of sympathy, surprise and invention, along with Benjamín Echazarreta’s sinuous, light-tranced photography. The use of Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman” seems a touch facile and dated. More revealing is Marina’s piping soprano voice. 

The motor for everything is, of course, Vega. At 28 the Chilean actor-singer uses face, body and voice brilliantly, without lathering soap or ducking into transvestite glam (just once, in a dream of emergence). Unforgettable are Marina’s encounter with a mirror in motion, her visit to a crematorium, her delight in the dog, her fierce escape into a dance club, her Hitchcock tensions at a Turkish bath, her striding almost horizontally against a hard wind, her proud passage past a copy of Rosa Bonheur’s painting “The Horse Fair” (a great female vision of male and equine power). Perhaps not since Barbet Schroeder’s Colombian gay drama Our Lady of the Assassins (2001) has a South American movie been so skillfully bold and creatively candid. At first an ode to love, it becomes a declaration of independence. 

Death Wish

Blood provides pump-action lubrication for the new version of  Death Wish. That’s “poetic” because revenge seeker Paul Kersey is no longer a New York architect (Charles Bronson) but a top Chicago surgeon (Bruce Willis). We see him practicing bloody surgery, which sets us up, in a not exactly Proustean way, for a later garage scene: Paul slicing open a screaming thug’s sciatic nerve and pouring in raw brake fluid. That really shoots a hypo into the old Hippocratic oath.

Kersey’s campaign is a more-sado echo of Harrison Ford’s justice-seeking Chicago doctor in The Fugitive. Mainly he must fill the stompin’ boots of Bronson, whose 1974 movie hit like a pulp asteroid (director: flashy hack Michael Winner). Director Eli Roth is another kind of winner, able to split-screen surgical wounds with porny shots of guns and ammo. But Roth is not, like Winner, stuck in the cement bunker of Bronson’s talent. Willis can do alpha-male nuances, registering some terse pathos even as he obtains weapons with stunning ease, masters their use, and unleashes his vigilante spree, egged on by radio talk shows. Now 62, Willis did no runs or stunts worthy of Burt Lancaster’s jolting vitality at 60 in Scorpio.

When his wife is killed by burglars (goodbye, lovely Elisabeth Shue), who put his teen daughter into a coma (complexion and hair remain marvelous), Paul smolders into payback. “Disguised” by a hoodie, he wipes out generic street trash as practice, then tracks down the vile creeps who savaged his family. Veteran homicide cops remain a puzzled step behind him. A bit of violence with a bowling ball belongs in a Roadrunner cartoon. After the slaughter catharsis, the toughest detective gives Paul an NRA-dude smile and commends him for “doing what any man would do.” While his hands perform more surgery, Dr. Kersey’s trigger finger will itch for sequels. Bronson scratched four bad ones.

SALAD (A List)

Fifteen Outstanding Revenge and Payback Movies:

Kind Hearts and Coronets with Dennis Price (1949), Seven Men From Now with Randolph Scott (1956), One-Eyed Jacks with Marlon Brando (1960), Cape Fear with Robert Mitchum (1962), Point Blank with Lee Marvin (1967), Straw Dogs with Dustin Hoffman (1971), Theater of Blood with Vincent Price (1973), Carrie with Sissy Spacek (1976), Deep in the Heart with Karen Young (1983), Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood (1992), The Fugitive with Harrison Ford (1993), The Shawshank Redemption with Tim Robbins (1994), On Guard with Daniel Auteuil (1997), The Limey with Terence Stamp (1999) and Kill Bill with Uma Thurman (2003).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Long before there was “American independent cinema” there was, in 1947, Orson Welles making Macbeth on virtual Scotch tape at mongrel Republic Pictures, after a try-out staging in Utah: “This was to be precisely the sort of experiment Orson had protested the money men were not willing to back. If they saw that an experiment like this could be profitable, they might change their minds … Within the strict limitations of time and budget he imposed on himself, he would make a Macbeth absolutely as expressive, and eccentric, as he wished.” Eccentricity proved fatal. OW ordained a Scottish brogue, later dubbed into standard English, and the film had a lousy release. (Quote from Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The Palmer dance party is one of the great set-pieces of Alice Adams: “Eager Alice keeps nervously smiling. As she arabesques among columns worthy of a state capitol, she is drubbingly snubbed. This is not winsome, like Natasha fretting her first Moscow ball in War and Peace. This is elite sadism. Maybe not since Jane Austen has the fate of a hopeful girl at a chancy dance felt so fraught with burrs and bristles. Hauteur swans glide by, smirking. Tuxed swells ignore her and, like a parody of agony, a sort of poached-egg-in-pants appears: Frank (Grady Sutton, a bulbous specialist in dim bulbs), soon yanked away by his mother.” (From the Katharine Hepburn/Alice Adams 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.

Vincent Price serves revenge with ham, in this promo painting of an image from Theater of Blood (United Artists, 1973; director Douglas Hickox).

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