Nosh 188: Emma., And Then We Danced, Max von Sydow

David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.
NOTE: As theaters shutter during the viral storm, so must Flix Nosh go into hibernation. Hopefully we and all theaters will return this summer.  Stay tuned, and stay healthy! 

APPETIZER (Reviews of Emma. and And Then We Danced)

Emma.

What about that period at the end of Emma.? Maybe it means this is it, period, wrapped up forever. But no, Jane Austen movies will go on, forever remade for new generations of (mostly) women. My guess: it means that the story’s dear subject and prized object, Emma Woodhouse, finds the period-stop moment which closes her long, spoiled girlhood and begins her less conceited womanhood. You could make the period an exclamation, because Emma is a pristine starburst for Anya Taylor-Joy, 23. Born in Miami, raised in Argentina and Britain, the former juvenile (The Witch, Split) casts a sunrise beam over fond memory of Gwyneth Paltrow’s 1996 Emma (in Paltrovian terms, her Goop is more gilded). In Austenian terms Taylor-Joy is tailored for joy, with pert blonde ringlets, pink-peach skin and big eyes that cat-pounce with attention. Silly and silky, funny and tart-tongued, her Emma seems something new: taffy with edge.

Oh what a clean and crispy, tart and tricky lass she is, flitting round the  manor house 16 miles from London, lady-lording over her awed, plainer friend Harriet (sweet Mia Goth), whom she tries to marriage-shop upscale while denying any matrimonial interest herself (what man could possibly be worthy?). Emma flaunts her dauntless intuition (“I have not yet been proven wrong”), and cozies her spindly old dad (flawlessly cast Bill Nighy), who is terrified of drafts and seems made of desiccated doilies. Emma., as tightly joined as a glowing parquet floor, is funny in the very English Austen way. Stylized to an almost Wes Anderson degree, it is rich in counterpointed, often pastel colors (the local church is like a delicate candy box). Fabrics and paintings are caught pin-sure by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt’s lighting. Amid the sweeping manorial grass of the plot a dark snake slithers: class snobbery, cutting through all the busy bother and zippered dialog (“I only know what is generally known – that she is poor and of no consequence.” Harriet, blessedly, will rebound).

In a comedy of manners bad manners can be tragic, and Emma will find her heart beyond her wits, via social come-uppance. Prompted by rich, sneering Frank Churchill (Callum Turner), she stops a country outing cold with an insensitive snark to dull but endearingly daffy Miss Bates (Miranda Hart, doing a fresh variant on the fabled English dowager specialist Edna May Oliver). Emma falls into funk, abashed by her faux-pas, her hauteur broken. The story is about the synchronized humbling and self-recognition of Emma. Inevitably, Austen education ordains a reward, some caviar to go with hard cheese. As we suspected, this is Johnny Flynn as Emma’s previously critical and now smitten friend, the equally curly-blonde George Knightley. Suave but shy, his romantic emergence is like dough rising in the oven of Emma’s radiance (these two could mascot The Great British Baking Show).

The chef in charge, cooking her debut feature after many videos and shorts, is director Autumn de Wilde (using Elizabeth Catton’s adaptation of Austen). All gourmet ingredients come to full flavor: terrific acting including the delectably snippy-nice vicar played by Josh O’Connor, superb production design by Kave Quinn, costumes by Alexandra Byrne, and deft inserts of music from folk ballads to Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. I could go on, burbling like a snuff-stoned twit, but I’d rather watch the movie again. Period.   

    
 

And Then We Danced

Titled like a vintage studio musical, And Then We Danced might have gotten lost in the cliché grid of gay coming-of-age pictures, a factor even in the best recently, Call Me by Your Name. Context is crucial, and this time it’s Georgia, not the Atlanta one but the Tbilisi one – capital of the small Caucasian nation northeast of Turkey. Using foreign (French, Swedish) money and support, writer and director Levan Akin focuses (many close-ups) on an aspirant for the national dance troupe, the fiercely boyish Merab. He dances with Nureyevian fervor, but his bearish teacher is blood-loyal to ritual tradition. To him Merab, son of a former dancer, is gifted but rather “soft,” and too individual (meaning: not very macho, meaning … you know). “You should be like a nail,” barks the teacher, surely aware that the most famous of all Georgians was (and is) Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, whose Bolshevik name means “steel” in Russian. Georgia, fighting wars since Rome vs. Persia, is proudly masculine. Athletic ramrod males dominate dance, moving to drum music as icons of national virility. Nothing Swan Lake about it, and no room for Mark Morris.

The first half is best, tracing the pressure on Merab’s ambition as his sexual crisis emerges before being outed (not totally) by his virginal crush on an older, probably bi dancer. Intuitively upset is Merab’s partner and presumed girlfriend (she, like nearly all the young dancers, is hooked on smoking – evidently nobody expects a very long career). Melodrama jangles the story, building to family crisis and Merab’s audacious audition. In hilly, picturesque Tbilisi, the people often seem trip-wired for emotional and physical conflict (beware My Big Fat Georgian Wedding). The core of interest, all the way, is lean, intense Levan Gelbakhiani as Merab. With his foxy, vulnerably candid face pointing the way, we enter a culture that most of us have never known. Georgian traditionalists must find Merab’s James Dean moods and eloquently twisting body very post-Stalinist.    

SALAD: A List

The 12 Best Films of Max von Sydow
Max von Sydow, the supreme Nordic crag of film history, died at 90 on March 8, in Paris. Lifted to global icon status by director Ingmar Bergman, the long-faced Swede also did major work for Jan Troell, notably as indomitable farmer Karl Oskar in The Emigrants and The New Land and fascist writer Knut Hamsun in Hamsun. I leave off this list The Greatest Story Ever Told, with his touching but almost geologically rigid Jesus, and his devil-chasing priest in The Exorcist and its even more kitschy sequel. In my opinion, his best work was:

The Seventh Seal (1957), The Magician (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Hawaii (1966), Shame (1968), The Touch (1970), The Emigrants (1971, photo below), The New Land (1972), The Flight of the Eagle (1982), Never Say Never Again (1983), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Hamsun (1996).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In 1951 Orson Welles accepted Laurence Olivier’s invitation to stage and star in Othello in London. Some British critics disliked the cuts and changes he brought to the text. One viewer was unusually responsive: “Early in the run, Winston Churchill attended a performance and Orson heard some low murmuring from where Churchill was sitting. He thought the old man was either sleeping or talking to himself, unaware that Churchill often attended the theater and would mouth the words of the principal parts, even whole soliloquies he had in memory. Later Churchill went to Orson’s dressing room and began their visit with ‘Most potent, grave and reverent signiors, my most approved good masters …,’ then went on with a great deal of extra emphasis to give some of Othello’s speeches, always including the cuts that Orson had made.” (Richard Burton’s Hamlet was subject to the same treatment. Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

With all of its messy pulp, 1970s blaxploitation filming was a rude, overdue rebuke to the movie biz, in which “mainstream (white) Hollywood’s mind had not greatly changed since 1936, when John O’Hara, flush with studio pay, boasted to F. Scott Fitzgerald of his new ‘white house, Southern style,’ including ‘a brand new Picasso, a Packard phaeton, a couple of Negroes …’ Deeply talented Sidney Poitier enjoyed a long tenure as the industry’s official black star, but, observed Armand White, ‘Poitier’s march through ’50s and ’60s Hollywood didn’t stamp out the problem of stereotype.” (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)

Farmer Karl Oskar (Max von Sydow) with wife Kristina (Liv Ullman) and child in The Emigrants, one of the greatest films about migration to America (Warner Bros. 1971; director and d.p. Jan Troell).

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Nosh 187: Portrait of a Lady on Fire & More

David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (Review of Portrait of a Lady on Fire)

Inevitably sold in this country as a “lesbian romance,” Portrait of a Lady on Fire is so clearly a French art film of complex ambition that you wonder how much of it will be absorbed by prurient peepers. There is some informal and tender nudity, but the sexuality is in the pervasive, pensive sensuality that begins to build at the start. Maybe it was to deflect such shallow voyeurism that the English title female is a “lady” instead of a “young girl” (the French title is Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, a variant on the more familiar jeune fille en fleur, young girl flowering).Well, vive les nuances, because they are the essence, manner and method of one of the most elegant movies of recent years.

Céline Sciamma, the director and writer whose previous work centers on young, modern girls and women, has by all accounts found her finest platform, by going to the late 18^th century (not very late; no mention of the Revolution or Napoleon). She has re-imagined it as a stylized feminist idyll of discovery, though “feminist” doesn’t exist for these women. Héloise (Adele Haenel) is brought home to a seaside villa from a convent, to replace her recently dead (likely suicide) sister, who went over a nearby cliff before an arranged marriage. Her mother, the widowed Comtesse (Valeria Golino, a long way from her young work in Big Top Pee-wee), is the arranger. She wanted to marry the lass to a Milanese nobleman so that she, an Italian, can return home in high style.

Now Héloise returns home, ordered to marry the unseen foreigner who expects an oil portrait that will ratify his choice. The sister’s male painter departed in haste, leaving the portrait’s face as a smeary remnant of loss, rage or ineptitude. His replacement is Marianne (Noémie Merlant), daughter of a painter, herself a very talented artist and art teacher, but as a woman denied access by the art patriarchy to male nude models, crucial to major Salon themes. Héloise, who misses her convent so free of males (few appear in the story), fears marriage and refuses to pose. But shyly, slyly she opens to Marianne, who at first sketches her covertly. The home’s large, spare rooms (evidence of fading income?) are like canvases, with the story seemingly painted into place by the impeccable brush strokes of glances, moods and confidential talk. This is the most exquisite vision of the era since Eric Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke (2001), which created revolutionary Paris with wonderful painted and digital backdrops.

The deepening suspense is the testing intimacy between the women through shared intelligence and longing. Cinematographer Clair Mathon embraces them in a chiaroscuro from fireplaces and candles, in fine fabrics both actual and painted, all beautifully composed. Even with talk about the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, the liaison is never bloodless and seems to anticipate Romanticism. Merlant’s Marianne has an advantage. More arrestingly pretty with her dark, piercing eyes, she gets to paint, and thrill Héloise by playing Vivaldi on a spinet. Haenel, however, projects more mystery and yearning. Their visits to the sea seem to evoke the future beach vistas of Courbet, Corot and Monet. Sciamma doesn’t need to emphasize sex, because her movie is a pulsing tapestry of quietly erotic touches, clues and portents.

At times we notice the educated French urge to map out feelings as concepts. Some dialog emits a parfum analytique de Sorbonne, like “In solitude I feel the liberty you speak of, but I also feel your absence.” The silences feel loaded with thought. The sequence of the two women helping their charming little servant find an abortion, using the folk wisdom of peasant women, seems rather imported, to add a more modern social solidarity and feminist urgency to the story. Still, you can’t blame the French for being French, and the lesbian romantic theme is so deeply sensitive and exquisitely poignant that only a clod would not be moved. There is a wistful double coda, one at the official Salon in Paris, and one at an orchestral concert that pushes the emotional pedal. But who can complain about hearing Vivaldi again?     

SALAD: A List

 

12 Major Performances by French Women in French Films

Each is indisputably special (with director, year):

Marie Falconetti as Jeanne in Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Dreyer 1928), Jeanne Moreau as Catherine in Jules et Jim (Truffaut 1963), Juliette Binoche as Julie in Three Colors: Blue (Kieslowski 1993), Simone Signoret as Marie in Casque d’Or (Becker 1952), Anna Karina as Nana (photo above) in Vivre Sa Vie (Godard 1962), Isabelle Adjani as Adele Hugo in Histoire de Adele H. (Truffaut 1975), Catherine Deneuve as Severine in Belle de Jour (Buñuel 1967), Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose (Dahan 2007), Arletty as Garance in Les Enfants de Paradis (Carné 1945), Maria Schneider as Jeanne in Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci 1972), Dita Parlo as Odile in L’Atalante (Vigo 1934) and little Catherine Demongeot as Zazie, seen in the photo below from Zazie dans le Métro (Malle 1960).  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

For Orson Welles, the supreme French director was Jean Renoir (and he was right). Here is a taste of his 1979 obituary salute to Renoir in the Los Angeles Times: “It’s safe to say that the owners of Pierre Auguste Renoir’s paintings in Bel-Air and Beverly Hills are (mostly) connected with the movies. And it’s just as safe to say that not one of them has ever been connected with any movie comparable to the masterpieces of the painter’s son Jean. Some of these were commercial and even, in their time, critical failures. Some enjoyed success. None were blockbusters. Many were immortal.” (From This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Funny Face (1957) is not a great French movie – it isn’t even French – but it has the most joyous salute to tourist Paris. After arriving at Orly airport, Americans Jo (Audrey Hepburn), Dick (Fred Astaire) and Maggie (Kay Thompson) “separately invade 38 sites, their lyrics landing in giddy, overlapping rhythm at Les Invalides, Notre Dame, Sacré Couer, Versailles, St. Cloud, etc. Jo cheerfully informs the Left Bank that ‘I want to philosophize with all the guys, around Montmartre.” In musical sync each pilgrim intuits the obligatory finale, uniting at the Eiffel Tower: ‘We’re strictly tourists, you can chatter and jeer / All we want to say is Lafayette we are here – bonjour, Paris!” (From the Hepburn/Funny Face chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.) 

DESSERT (An Image)

As Zazie, Parisian scamp of Zazie dans le Métro, Catherine Demongeot became a vanguard mascot of the French New Wave and its impudent energies. Seen here with co-star Philippe Noiret (Pathé 1960; director Louis Malle, d.p. Henri Raichi).

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