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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