What happens on the screen? Actually, very little. Husband, a liberal newspaper publisher, neglects pretty young wife. Wife is attracted to husband’s young cousin, a dashing derelict. He nobly departs just in time, and the couple begin again—yes, older and wiser. That’s it. It takes nearly two hours. As do all Ray films, it moves like a majestic snail.
As usual, Mr. Ray has composed the picture in the most literal sense of the word—and exquisitely. He has made the most of beautiful young Madhabi Mukherjee, who gives a lustrously affecting and almost mind-readable performance as the yearning heroine.
In a sense, the very opening shot—Miss Mukherjee’s hands darting a needle into an embroidery hoop—keys all that follows. Arranging every single camera frame to convey nuance, mood or tension, Mr. Ray has photographically embroidered a steady flow of quiet images with precise, striking acuity. One montage—when the day-dreaming wife, in a garden swing, rocks to and fro like a pendulum—is unforgettable. And the final shot in the film—a stop-motion close-up of two hands—is a memorable period to Mr. Ray’s structure. –Howard Thompson, The New York Times
Charulata is an exquisitely shot, sublimely haunting, and emotionally complex film on the nature of human relationships. At the heart of the conflict are three well-intentioned, sympathetic protagonists – Bhupati, Charulata, and Amal – who clearly love and respect each other, but realize that their individual actions have led to an unforeseeable, yet inevitable emotional betrayal. Satyajit Ray does not dilute the gravity of the situation with an act of adultery or violence, but with the subtle gaze of crushing realization and the heartbreaking weight of consequence: Charulata’s concealed apprehension at Amal’s arranged marriage proposal; Amal’s guilt-ridden, sideways glance to Charulata as Bhupati reveals his business problems involving a relative; Bhupati’s lone carriage ride. In the remarkable final shot (inspired by Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows) of Bhupati and Charulata’s hands frozen in mid grasp, the words “The Ruined Nest†appear: the title of Rabindranath Tagore’s short novel on which the film was based. It is a poignant reminder that life cannot continue as before – that something has been irretrievably lost from the relationship – and all that can be salvaged are the fragments of human decency that remain… the polite gesture. –strictly film school
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JAMES PENFIELD, the journalist who glowers at the center of the fine new English film â€The Ploughman’s Lunch,†is a fascinating variation on all of the angry, low-born young men who populated British novels and plays in the late 1950′s and 60′s. Although he denies it, he is angry. At one point he says: â€You do everything right and you feel nothing. Either way.†His problem is that he feels everything all too acutely, but it doesn’t make him a better person, only more devious.
James Penfield is Jimmy Porter of â€Look Back in Anger†updated to the 1980′s, specifically to London during the 1982 Falkland war and the Tory leadership of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. â€The Ploughman’s Lunch,†the first theatrical film to be written by Ian McEwan and directed by Richard Eyre, is a witty, bitter tale of duplicity and opportunism in both private and public life. –Vincent Canby, The New York Times
Funded in part by Channel Four and released in 1983, The Ploughman’s Lunch is an ‘issues’ film, commenting on the state of affairs in Britain in the early 1980s. It uses a very contemporary setting to criticise the policies of the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher, particularly the promotion of self-interest, of ruthless dedication to obtain a desired goal. Each of the film’s main characters embraces these ideas, but in a negative way, using each other to get ahead. Journalist James uses Susan to get to her historian mother, then sleeps with the mother so she will continue to help him with his research. Embarrassed by his working-class parents, he tells people they are dead.
The subtext of the film is the way countries and people re-write their own history to suit the needs of the present. James’ book is about the 1956 Suez Crisis, which was a disaster for Britain and then Prime Minister Anthony Eden. But in the light of the 1982 Falklands War, which for many presented a new image of Britain as a strong and brave country, James re-writes the story of Suez to make it look like a victory. James also writes the news for the radio, so as he re-writes past events to fit a new British image, he also shapes the news as it happens. He also shapes himself, moulding his opinions to fit whoever he is talking to, in order to make the right impression.
The film presents a bleak Britain with little hope for the future. There are almost no sympathetic characters and at the end James learns no lesson. He improves his image, but loses his soul. He gets what he wants, at a price he is prepared to pay. –Simon Brown, screenonline
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I vividly remember the experience of sitting in a large, state-of-the-art theater in 1978, encountering this work, which seemed like the shotgun marriage of a Hollywood epic (in 70 mm!) with an avant-garde poem. Wordless (but never soundless) scenes flared up and were snatched away before the mind could fully grasp their plot import; what we could see did not always seem matched to what we could hear. Yes, there was another “couple on the runâ€â€”Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as the lovers Bill and Abby, he fleeing a murder he inadvertently committed working in a Chicago steel mill, she pretending to be his sister during the wheat harvest season in the Texas panhandle near the turn of the twentieth century—but this time, the filmmaker’s gaze upon them was not simply distant or ironic but positively cosmic. And there was so much more going on around these two characters, beyond even the dramatic triangle they formed with the melancholic figure of the dying farmer (Sam Shepard)—now the landscape truly moved from background to foreground, and the work that went on in it, the changes that the seasons wreaked upon it, the daily miracles of shifting natural light or the punctual catastrophes of fire or locust plague that took place . . . all this mattered as much, if not more, than the strictly human element of the film. –Adrian Martin, The Current
At the beginning, it is as though this is going to be a film about European immigrants in the early days of President Wilson’s presidency. Then it switches to the Texas Panhandle, where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope still play. Migrant workers, fleeing the big cities, help reap the wheat harvest of a young, wealthy farmer. There are all kinds of special effects, including a plague of locusts and a prairie fire. There is a romance, in which the girlfriend of a young worker, who poses as his sister, marries the farmer. What results is jealousy and murder.
But Days of Heaven never really makes up its mind what it wants to be. It ends up something between a Texas pastoral and Cavalleria Rusticana. Back of what basically is a conventional plot is all kinds of fancy, self-conscious cineaste techniques. The film proceeds in short takes: people seldom say more than two or three connected sentences. It might be described as the mosaic school of filmmaking as the camera and the action hop around, concentrating on a bit here, a bit there.
A young girl named Linda Manz—and a talented young lady she is—has a prominent part of the action. The voice-over that constantly runs through the film is hers; she comments on the action, something in the manner of a Greek chorus. The photography, beautiful as some of it is, is as self-conscious as the rest of the film. People are carefully arranged, frames are carefully composed; there are more silhouettes than in an old nickelodeon.
Anyway, the old cars, and the biplane and triplane in an airplane sequence are fun. –Harold C. Schonberg, The New York Times
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The Mother and the Whore is a raw, unsentimental, and incisive slice-of-life exposition into the demoralization, deflated euphoria, and pervasive rootlessness of the May 68 generation (a period marked by widespread student protests and worker strikes throughout France) in the wake of the failed counterculture revolution. Jean Eustache employs high contrast black and white, medium framing and close-ups, spare (almost squalid) interiors, and natural milieu to create an atmosphere of visually distilled, organic hyperreality that reflect the profound desolation, ambivalent direction, and meaningless rituals that define the unresolved emotional and psychological states of Alexandre, Veronika, and Marie. However, in contrast to the figuratively transcendent images of manual labor in Bresson’s minimalist and dedramatized cinema, Eustache’s illustration of physical activity is inherently inert, self-destructive, and escapist: experimental drug use, intimations of suicide (that sadly presages the filmmaker’s own cause of death in 1981), and Veronika and Marie’s passive, almost autonomic response to Alexandre’s initiations of sex serve as transitory surrogates to the actual process of human existence and true intimacy. Moreover, interpersonal communication is reduced to vacuous, distended conversations (or more appropriately, monologues by the self-consumed Alexandre) that similarly devalue human connection to impressive, but ultimately meaningless words. In the end, it is this underlying emptiness that the filmmaker exposes through Alexandre’s moribund, pleasure-seeking, existential limbo: the trauma of a generation struggling to come to terms with profound change, cultural alienation, and the collapse of a once seemingly attainable ideal. –strictly film school
Time-traveling can be demoralizing — when you’re going in reverse. Watching “The Mother and the Whore,†you find that you’re back in the movie-sludge of the nineteen-fifties, when a number of mediocre French films focused on sub-Sagan characters: numb, semi-paralyzed creatures who hardly had the calories to drag themselves through the day. Then, boredom was a hip disease—and it all comes rushing down the spout of memory when Jean-Pierre Léaud explains that he lives “in a world where people are old at 17.†Jean Eustache’s picture, which was shown last night at the New York Film Festival, is so reminiscent of those mossy productions that you start wondering if nothing has been learned about movies, about acting, about men and women. The discoveries of the last decade have been erased. Or else the sixties never happened: you were just hallucinating.
All in all, it’s tempting to mail the director a list of complaints as long as his movie. What possessed him to use slow dissolves when we yearn for quick cuts? Or to give us a tour of the inside of a refrigerator or lessons in putting records on turntables or how to make a call? And occasionally, when Eustache builds toward a scene that might be almost interesting—in which these weary people might have to cope with one another — he leaves it out. The program notes report that he “now hates most films.†So this picture may be his vengeance on the apes who like them. But perhaps he was paying homage to Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, who had “a radical theory†that “boredom in the arts can be, under the right circumstances, dull.†–Nora Sayre, The New York Times
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ИюльÑкий дождь (July Rain) // МарлеÌн ХуциÌев (Marlen Khutsiyev) // 1967
November 4, 2009
After the first 15 minutes of Marlen Khutsiyev’s â€July Rain†you may be tempted to pack a suitcase and catch a plane to Moscow, 1966. Like Godard and Truffaut’s black-and-white Paris, it’s where the cool kids seem to be — talking, arguing, dancing to jazzy records and trying to construct modern lives.
Showing in the invaluable â€Envisioning Russia†series at the Walter Reade Theater, â€July Rain†has a loose, improvisatory style, influenced by the Nouvelle Vague and punctuated with lyrical passages in which the camera restlessly probes city streets. About a group of young intellectuals, in particular Lena (an expressive Yevgeniya Uralova, above, with a Julie Christie bob) and her boyfriend, Volodya (Aleksandr Belyavsky), the film has more parties and picnics than plot. But like many Russian movies from the 1960s, it tries to paint an honest picture of daily life and real people. You can feel its internal tug of war between optimism and melancholy: the filmmaking may be exciting — there’s always something interesting to look at — but melancholy wins hands down. (Not surprisingly, it was criticized for being too dark. Mr. Khutsiyev’s previous film, the brilliant â€I Am Twenty,†had to be reshot and edited after Khrushchev attacked it.) –Rachel Saltz, The New York Times
When Lena decides that her fiancé is not the man she thought he was, the breakup causes her to reflect on her life and to wonder about the kind ofworld she and other members of her generation are set to inherit. Then, during a cooling rain, she meets Zhenya…An invaluable record of its moment, July Rain is an engaging portrait of ’60s Moscow youth—the first generation to have grown up far from the shadows of war and Stalinist repression. The well-loved soundtrack features the work of several Soviet pop superstars of the ’60s. —Dryden Theater, Rochester, NY
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