Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Nosh 142: 'Cold War,' 'The World Before Your Feet' & More


David Elliott
         
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER (Reviews of Cold War and The World Before Your Feet)
Cold War
My big Polish movie experience was at the Chicago International Film Festival during the early 1970s. In chill November, in an under-heated screening room, well-wrapped pundits dutifully previewed many Polish (often wintry) movies. The saving warmth was the discovery of emerging talents like directors Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof  Zanussi, stars like tense, electric Daniel Olbrychski and soul-baring actress Maja Komarowska. They would all continue, but I would leave the Chicago fest behind. For me Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War evokes that strangely rich time, but in a rather freeze-dried way.

There is an aura of importance: festival honors, the Golden Reel as best Polish film of 2018, now Oscar nominations (for foreign film, director, and ace cinematographer Lukasz Zal). But what’s missing is the urgent, arresting energy of those ’70s films I recall, cracking through the iced cement of an increasingly dead Communist system. Cold War, shown in classic 4:3 screen ratio, filmed in velvety black and white, traces the long-term affair of fated lovers: gifted pianist and musicologist Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and the singer-dancer Zula (Joanna Kulig), a sparky blonde with a rugged, ragged past.

They meet in 1949. Stalinism is killing tragic Poland’s last hopes for democracy. Wiktor is a virile, stern, brooding intellectual, with facial stubble decades before it became fashionable. He is the classic older, frustrated guy hooked on a younger woman who is not only sexy but more emotionally free. This is all culturally packaged. Wiktor’s zeal to preserve Polish folk dance and music is soon Stalinized by officials who want patriotic hymns of happiness, like a Marxist Tabernacle Choir. The time is pre-Wall (Germany’s, not Trump’s), and on tour in East Berlin Wiktor peels away to freedom. Zula holds back, but will later meet him in Paris for brisk surges of lust and Left Bank attitude (sadly no bongos or Juliette Greco imitators). Music shifts from folk chants and Chopin to bop, cabaret crooning and (raw decadence!) “Rock Around the Clock.” The lovers, whose hearts can reach across the Iron Curtain when they’re apart, are often riven by angst when they’re together.

Pawlikowski’s lesson-plan script and earnest direction merely dangle the heavy politics (even labor camps). Each theme is slotted into tidy vignettes with terse, biting dialog, yet the romance is never explored in depth. It mopes and moans. This begins to feel like David Lean’s Brief Encounter oddly grafted to a Tony Judt essay on postwar Europe, yet without the rewards of either. The Vatican will appreciate the solemn, topping lurch into Catholic piety. More secular viewers may cherish an unforgettable line: “Love you to bits, but I need to throw up.”  



The World Before Your Feet
For those of us to whom “seeing New York” means zipping around Midtown Manhattan, with a few jaunts north or south, the rambles of Matt Green are almost as exotic as Marlow tracking down Kurtz in the Congo of Heart of Darkness. For over six years Green has visited by foot  every New York City street and block, in every borough, including parks, beaches, cemeteries and industrial pockets. The World Before Your Feet, video-filmed from a few paces behind by Matt’s shadow Jeremy Workman (son of Chuck Workman, maker of rapid-fire Oscars clips), presents without any travelog bluster many delights of Green’s tireless journey. Now in his 30s, the ex-engineer lives on $15 a day, crashes friendly couches, is a devoted cat-sitter, and as of 2018 still had a thousand or more Whitmanesque miles to add to his pedestrian odometer of 6,000-plus. Each walk, though planned and notated, is also an exercise in serendipity.

Low-key Green is entirely amiable. Challenged by a paranoid home-owner, he soon makes the guy a friend. Fearlessly curious, he fled a comfy office grind (also a couple of disappointed girlfriends) for ambulatory freedom and serial interests including street art, obscure graves, quirky barber shops, 9/11 memorials and “churchagogues” (synagogues turned into churches when Jews left the nabe). He researches every find and feeds his richly informative blog (imjustwalkin.com). Green visits the Queens Museum’s glorious panoramic model of NYC, and also finds a grand, hidden tree with roots in the American Revolution. As he meets many people, we can feel again the hopeful, communal spirit of On the Town. This is like a more prosaic (but never dull) cousin of The Cruise (1998), the poetic, layered docu-gem about the totally original street stroller and tour guide Tim Levitch, who made a rapt visit to the old WTC plaza. Matt is Tim’s post-9/11 heir, in an entirely engaging and satisfying movie.

SALAD (A List)
Since the 2018 Oscars will be given this Sunday, I offer my Hope These Will Win list from the nominees, while knowing that many worthies were not nominated. These are not predictions!

Picture: Roma. Director: Alfonso Cuarón, Roma. Actress: Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Actor: Christian Bale, Vice. Supporting Actress: Amy Adams, Vice. Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali, Green Book. Original Screenplay: Alfonso Cuarón, Roma. Adapted Screenplay: Spike Lee etc., BlacKkKlansman. Cinematography: Alfonso Cuarón, Roma.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson has taken this week off to deeply ponder my review last week (scroll below) of The Other Side of the Wind.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Rambling street guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch “had gone some years without personal living space, but kept clean and practiced ‘couch surfing’ (he praises actress Natasha Lyonne and her ‘great couch’). Tim paid in verbal coin, minted with hyperbolic alloys. As writer, artist and raconteur Alexander King said of his Village pal DeHirsch Margules, ‘The outstanding characteristics of my friend’s personality are affirmation, emphasis and over-emphasis.’ ” (From the Timothy Levitch/The Cruise chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)   

DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.



Always fastidious, the doomsday doctor (Peter Sellers) inspects his leather hand in Dr. Strangelove (Columbia Pictures 1964; director Stanley Kubrick, photography by Kubrick and Gilbert Taylor).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

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