By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of The
Cakemaker and Alpha
The
Cakemaker
That Colorado baker who got lucky with the U.S. Supreme
Court, after refusing to bake a gay wedding’s cake, should maybe avoid The Cakemaker. In possibly the best
Israeli-German movie ever, debut feature director and writer Ophir Raul Graizer
has baked in flavors of subtlety, grace and humanity – remarkable in a picture
about German-Jewish tensions, covert gay love, and sexual pressures in a
religiously contentious society.
The flour-white face of big German actor Tim Kahlkof resembles
the dough he so masterfully shapes as Thomas the Berlin baker. Thomas has the wary
self-sufficiency of a loner (parents long-gone, raised solo by a grandmother). Though
eloquent with his cakes and breads, he rarely speaks. Solitude crumbles when he
meets an assured, married, German-fluent Israeli businessman, Oren (Roy
Miller). The secretive, erotic joys of Oren’s visits end when he is killed by a
car in Jerusalem (no big spoiler: it happens early). Thomas (“I have my work,
and my apartment, and I have you”) might fold in a sag of sorrow, back into bearish
hibernation.
Instead, seeking the truth, Thomas leaves his cozy café
behind. In Jerusalem he meets Oren’s widow Anat, struggling with her own little
café. Not very religious, kosher but rather resentfully, Anat finds that her
new helper is a splendid baker. Communicating in English, they are both needy
kneaders. Attraction rises like a great loaf, despite her fretful suspicions of
his past (and the unspoken intuitions of her sage mother). Anat’s son, initially
loyal to the kosher strictures of his intrusive uncle, soon adores Thomas’s
Black Forest cake. Tenderness advances, bit always sweetly. Omri Aloni’s
photography, avoiding mere tourism, impeccably supports Graizer’s intimate
script and excellent cast.
The Cakemaker doesn’t
knead bread ($) in the sense noted by the great émigré Berliner Marlene Dietrich,
who snapped that “in Hollywood every church should be shaped as a box office.”
Nothing is rushed, pounded, prodded, overbaked.
Revelation must come, with some shock, but the story never loses it attentive
poise. It balances on the joining rails of Kalkhof and Adler (with her slightly
plain beauty, a Jewish-mama Charlotte Gainsbourg).The movie might abrade some
gay PC piety, as it suggests that gayness is not always life-determining. Graizer’s
layer cake uses few standard ingedients. For all the scenes of happy cooking,
tasting, eating – surely the most subtle culinary emotions since the delightful,
Italo-American Big Night – the movie
is about affection overcoming fear. Love is, when you bite deep, the most
complicated and surprising dish at the human banquet.
Alpha
Essentially a dog movie, mostly for boys aged to 16 –
do kids still read the old Jack London dog stories? – Alpha is also a cross-species Quest
for Fire set around 20,000 years ago. Keda (finely named Kodi Smit-McPhee)
is facing his Cro-Magnon coming-of-age. His dad, the tribal leader and master
hunter, fears that the beardless teen might be on the soft side. Mom reckons
that the lad “leads from his heart, not his spear.” In fact, he does both.
Having survived a cliff fall that has killed a herd of bison, Keda (left for
dead) overcomes wounds, makes fires, eat worms, faces hyenas and blizzards. And
(merit badge!) tames the first wolf pet of our acquisitive species. The animal
is curious, too – wolf star Alpha is actually Chuck, a Czech wolf-dog from
France.
Pumping primeval adrenaline and defying
implausibility, Alpha has more
digital skies and effects than I like in a tough survival story. But once Keda
meets and befriends the big canine for a bonding adventure, the film finds its
furry niche. The raw survivalist lineage of The
Naked Prey, A Boy and His Dog and The
Revenant has found a remarkably warm-spirited ancestor, with McPhee an
engaging young lead, and director Albert Hughes making a wondrous show of
locations in Canada, Iceland and California. There’s something here for the
owner of every Fifi and Fido, Butch and Pepper, Spot and Rover.
SALAD (List)
Ten Good
Movies That Vividly Feature Cooks
Tampopo (director Juzo Itami, 1985), Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987), Big Night (Campbell Scott, Stanley Tucci, 1996), Volver (Pedro Almodóvar, 2006), Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007), Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron, 2009), Jiro Dreams of Sushi (David Gelb, 2011),
Chef (Jon Favreau, 2014), City of Gold (Laura Gabbert, 2915) and The Cakemaker (Ophir Raul Graizer,
2018).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson
Welles said he included one of the surreal moments in Citizen Kane “just to wake the audience up” – was that ever a problem for the film? A scholar
elaborated: “When Raymond the butler describes Kane destroying Susan’s bedroom,
the scene opens with a startling shot of a screeching cockatoo. The bird –
which appears for less than two seconds – has no eye. The background of the
Florida coastline shows through where the eye should have been. The missing
eye, long a subject of speculation among film writers, was, Welles admitted,
only the result of a mistake in the special effects lab.” But Kane has very few glitches. (See photograph
below. Quote from Harlan Lebo’s Citizen
Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
The
rising Nicole Kidman had a key breakthrough in 1995: “Not since Jean Harlow’s Bombshell and Bette Davis’s Dangerous had a title fit so snugly as To Die For. Kidman’s vampy Suzanne
hustles TV fame in a small town, affirming the insight of Marshall McLuhan:
‘What’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody’s watching?’ Blind
ambition leads to a dumb crime, and teen Joaquin Phoenix is a snack for
Suzanne’s eroticized ego. Her dress clinging at night in the rain, haloed by
car beams, she shim-boogies to ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ in a splurge of soft-porn
wit. Kidman became an American star.” (From the Kidman/Fur 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.
The
eyeless cockatoo makes its loud, eye-catching appearance in Citizen Kane (RKO Pictures, 1941;
director Orson Welles; chief optical printer Linwood G. Dunn).
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