By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Marie
Curie and Letters From Baghdad
Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge
You
don’t expect a film about a great female scientist to include a pistol duel in
the woods, but then you haven’t seen Marie
Curie: The Courage of Knowledge. Curie (b. Maria Sklodowska) was surely
Poland’s greatest export to France since pianist Frédéric Chopin (b. Fryderyk
Chopin). She married the brilliant French chemist Pierre Curie, co-shared (by
his insistence) the Nobel Prize, and after his tragic death became the first
person to win a second Nobel. She co-discovered radium and polonium, pioneered
the crucial theories of radioactivity (and cancer treatments), designed and
conducted experiments (which finally killed her), uplifted female scientists
and – touché!—was the Sorbonne’s first female prof, and the first woman buried
in the Panthéon.
Marie
Noelle’s bravura film makes us forget Greer Garson’s Madame Curie (1943), who hugged her nobility like a tragic fur from
Bonwit Teller. In this Franco-Polish production (German financing), Noelle and
photographer Michal Englert achieve French light of such Impressionist impact
that we can almost believe radium is the source. Noelle gives us the scientific
excitement, the work, the friendship with Einstein, the misogynist opposition including
imbecilic anti-Semitism (she wasn’t Jewish), and Marie’s love of Pierre and
their kids, notably Irene (who went on to her own Nobel). The couple stand before
luminous vials of radium. Pierre: “It is glowing from inside.” Marie: “Like
you.” OK, a touch corny, but great, radiant corn!
Noelle’s
first film was Obsession (1997), with
Daniel Craig, and Marie Curie goes
well beyond. There is high fixation in Marie’s science, her feminism, her love
of Pierre, her recovery from his death (street accident), her compensating love
for Pierre’s great assistant Paul Langevin, which caused scandal. Noell has expert
instinct for vividly cross-stitching the creative and personal, as Robert
Altman did in his Van Gogh film Vincent
and Theo. If Karolina Gruszka doesn’t quite have the Garbo intensity of
Poland’s great Maja Komorowska, she attains her own erotic power, salted and served
with innate dignity and intellect.
I
haven’t seen Daniel Olbrychski in many years (he seemed to be in half the
Polish films of the '70s), but here he is, excellent as a preening swine.
Also terrific: Charles Berling as Pierre, and Arieh Worthalter as Paul (who
fights the duel). Piotr Glowacki’s Einstein easily rivals the recent TV saga Genius. It is really Gruszka’s movie, by
way of Noelle. When Paul calls Marie “my beaming radium queen,” we can believe
it. Of course, there is also an old-school male to grunt, “Not bad for a woman,
eh?” That “eh” is from the periodic table of macho piggery.
Letters from Baghdad
The masters of war who took us
into the Iraq quagmire, in 2003, probably would have cared little for a British
film that is a feminist history lesson, poetically realized. Or cared more than
a dry, dusty fig for the movie’s subject: Gertrude Bell (1868-1926). In any
case, the beautiful and stirring documentary Letters from Baghdad was not made until 2015, a dozen years after
the start of our Bush-born misadventure.
Bell
came from a wealthy if declining Yorkshire family, and tore herself from her roots
(a lovely estate, a cherished father) after a youthful trip to Persia (Iran)
besotted her. One of the great Victorian travelers, Bell applied her Oxford-honed
brain to mastering Arabic (“I am so wildly interested in Arabic – and the fun of it!”). Alarming the
Ottoman Turks, she led her own camel troupe into the baking interior of Saudia
Arabia. Her enchantment with Brit-run Mesopotamia, once fabled Babylon, would
lead to her advising Winston Churchill (as did her friend T.E. Lawrence “of
Arabia”) into forging the kingdom of Iraq after WWI. The acerbic, tireless Bell
became a power, “one of the boys” in a blunt but feminine way. The man she
loved was killed in World War I and Gertrude became, in essence, betrothed to exotic
history. After Iraq was born, she founded and guided Baghdad’s museum of antiquities.
An
excellent tribute and time capsule, Letters
touches greatness with its form: an almost Arabian Nights streaming of old news
clips, travelogs, personal movies and Bell’s often wonderful photos, in a
shimmering cascade of times reborn. The film has a haunted fluency, Bell’s
strong face looming among sandy vistas. Her letters are read with High
Victorian grace by Tilda Swinton. Actors speak as other key figures,
studio-posed in period costume. The makers, including editor Sabine Krayenbuhl (who
co-directed with Zeva Oelbaum) and designer Erik Rehl, achieve perhaps the most
poetic use of vintage film since Peter Delpeut’s entrancing salute to
proto-cinema, Lyrical Nitrate.
SALAD (A List)
Memorable Women Starring in
Documentaries:
Pina
Bausch in Pina, 2011; Antonia Brico
in Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman,
1974; Louise Brooks in Louise Brooks:
Looking for Lulu, 1998; Marlene Dietrich in Marlene, 1984; Traudl Junge in Hitler’s
Secretary, 2002; Vivian Maier in Finding
Vivian Maier, 2013; Carmen Miranda in Carmen
Miranda: Bananas Is My Business, 1995; Ayn Rand in Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, 1996; Leni Riefenstahl in The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl,
1993; Eleanor Roosevelt in The Eleanor
Roosevelt Story, 1965; Nina Simone in What
Happened, Miss Simone?, 2015; Patti Smith in Patti Smith: Dream of Life, 2008; Susan Tom in My Flesh and Blood, 2003; Amy Winehouse in Amy, 2015; Gwen Welles in Angel
on My Shoulder, 1998.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Partly
for legal reasons, partly from pride-of-inspiration, Orson Welles always tried
to deflect the idea that Citizen Kane
is centrally about William Randolph Hearst. In 1941 he sought to elude that
notion in an article: “The easiest way to draw parallels between Kane and
other famous publishers is not to see the picture. It is the portrait of a
public man’s private life. I have met some publishers, but I know none of them
well enough to make them possible models. Constant references have been made to
the career of Hearst, drawing parallels to my film. That is unfair to Hearst and
to Kane.” His viewpoint has not prevailed. (Quote from Frank Brady’s fine biography Citizen Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Among
those thrilled in 1935 by Katharine Hepburn’s moving Alice Adams was young Pauline Kael: “Hepburn made her feel ‘as if you
were inside her skin.’ The Bay Area girl ‘was 16 when the film was first shown,
and during the slapstick dinner-party scene, when Alice was undergoing agonies
of comic humiliation, I started up the aisle to leave the theater, and was
almost out the door before I snapped back to my senses.’ Alice Adams still snaps our senses.”
(From
the Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter of my
book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in
Movies, obtainable from Amazon, Nook, Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
A
Pina Bausch dancer in Pina (IFC
Films, 2011; director Wim Wenders; cinematographers Helene Louvart, Jorg
Widmer).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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