Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

This is my first trip into the oeuvre of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with his powerful Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Taking place in Munich, it tells the story of the scandalous relationship between Emmi (Brigitte Mira) and Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). The relationship is scandalous for a couple of reasons, mainly because she is in her 60's, he is about 40. She's German, he's Moroccan. But they share in common that they're nice people. They're also very lonely people. She is long widowed, with kids whose lives she's not an active part of. He's an immigrant mechanic who doesn't speak the best German, and spends his time either working or drinking away his loneliness at the local Arab friendly bar. They find each other by accident almost, as she ducks into the bar to get out of the rain, and he's taunted by some of his fellow Arabs to dance with "the old woman". They do, and immediately connect with each other.

Soon, they're being confronted with all the post-WWII racism that still exists, with many people considering any dark skinned foreigners "filthy swine" and any woman who takes up with them a "whore". These reactions aren't totally unexpected to Emmi and Ali, but they just want to be together because they make each other happy. But society does its best to spit on them and their relationship, even to the point that her 3 children disown her when they find out about it. Emmi says she wishes they were alone in the world just the two of them and didn't have to deal with that behavior. But we see subtly how as their relationship settles a bit, and people start to accept them more, she unconsciously takes on some of the same qualities of others, even at one point showing off Ali's muscles to her friends like he's just an object. And when Ali complains that he'd like Emmi to make him couscous sometimes, she says irritably that she doesn't like couscous and he needs to assimilate into being a German now.

Not knowing anything about Fassbinder's sensibilities, I had no idea where this relationship would go. Is he a romantic? A cynic or fatalist? From what I've now read a bit about him, he seemed to almost consider love a weakness, or at best a distraction. But here, he made a movie about two people coming together out of shared kindness and loneliness, ceding into truly being in love, falling a bit into complacency, and eventually, hopefully, dedication and more love. It's an astounding movie, powerful and striking right to the core. Simply and realistically acted by our two leads who I was really rooting for by the end of it.

This movie definitely makes me want to check out more from Fassbinder, who made something like 40 movies despite dying from a drug overdose at the age of 37, in 1982. Despite being only 29 when he made this movie, it's a remarkably mature and deep work that I'm sure I'll return to many times over the years.

Night Train

Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Night Train is a very low key movie. It's mostly about a man Jerzy (Leon Niemczyk, making his third appearance on my world cinema quest, after The Saragossa Manuscript and Knife in the Water) and a woman, Marta (Lucyna Winnicka) as they share a room on a long, overnight, train ride to the Baltic Sea. We meet them as well as some of the other passengers, like a flirty neighbor and Marta's love sick ex-boyfriend (Zbigniew Cybulski, also from The Saragossa Manuscript). A murder has taken place somewhere in the city before the train departs, and as the journey goes along we wonder if the murderer has taken up passage on the train, or if he might even be one of our main characters.

It's a good movie, but I'm not sure why exactly it was included in Martin Scorsese's Masterpieces of Polish Cinema series alongside The Saragossa Manuscript, Ashes and Diamonds, and The Hourglass Sanatorium, all of which are masterpieces of varying degrees. Granted, Jerzy Kawalerowicz's reputation was that of making politically charged movies, so maybe the seeming low-key blank slate-ness of this movie is actually a kind of allegory for post war Poland. If it is, I'm unaware of it, obviously. That said, this is still an engaging movie, even if it feel slight outside of the context of the time.

The Conformist

The Conformist was a frustrating movie. Director Bernardo Bertolucci has such impressive command of the camera, and along with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro created one of the most visually stunning movies ever made. There are scenes here that make you ache from their beauty. But I personally found the story lacking. The story is set in 1930's Fascist Italy and concerns Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a cowardly man letting others control and influence his behavior in a lifelong effort to fit in. But having a lead character who doesn't question himself, is kind of a blank slate, and having a backdrop of such extreme behavior of the times, I felt it didn't quite work as well as a total piece of drama as I wanted it to.

I understand the metaphorical way that Bertolucci, as the writer (adapting from Alberto Moravia's 1951 novel), constructs the film as showing what could lead to someone becoming a Fascist and leading to the rise of Fascism as a whole, but Clerici, as our protagonist, is not a compelling character. But actually, now that I think about it, he's not really a blank slate either. That could've worked better. We get senses of Marcello, sketches of him and his past. But in the Wikipedia page entry for the novel it says:

"Marcello spends the entire novel in a search for what he perceives to be a normal life - normal activities, a normal appearance, normal emotions, and so on. However, he confuses normality with conformity, and in his quest to conform, subjugates his already-repressed emotions. When the natural course of his life presents him with ethical dilemmas - the assignment to betray Professor Quadri, his attraction to women other than his wife - he is ill-prepared to deal with them."

That sounds like a fascinating character, and we get all of that in the movie as well. So why didn't I find this movie very interesting to watch? Certainly I was tired when I watched it, but that hasn't stopped movies from enthralling me before. I often found myself overwhelmed at this movie's beauty, but bored by our main character. And I'm not really sure why.

Certainly, the visuals of this astonishingly high level kept my interest. You can see a lot of influence here on Coppola's work in the Godfather movies. From the clothes and sets, to some of the camera placements and movements. Bertolucci's camera seemed to be ever moving, ever expanding and always fascinating.

Perhaps this movie needs a revisit some day. I feel like I gave it a fair shake, but as I'm writing this I feel like maybe this was deeper than my mind is giving it credit for and I just wasn't seeing it during viewing. Only time will tell.

Chunking Express

Wong Kar-wai's 1994 film Chunking Express is an odd movie to look at 21 years later. Obviously influenced heavily by the French New Wave films of the 50's and 60's, it feels now very much a product of the 90's. Kar-wai's use of a kind of stop motion action photography that is something you'd see in a cheap Lifetime movie as a flashback tool or something, makes the movie feels painfully dated. It's a relief when we're brought back to our normal 24 frames per second. The movie is split into two parts, both about a local Hong Kong cop dealing with the breakup of a relationship, trying to move forward, or maybe being pushed forward. I like the second more than the first, but both are engaging and interesting.

The first story shows Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) feeling heartbroken over his girlfriend leaving him on April Fool's Day. He gives her 30 days to come back, until May 1st, his birthday. He eventually meets a drug smuggler (Brigitte Lin) who helps him, perhaps unintentionally, move on. The second story stars a cop only known by his badge number, 663 (Tony Leung), and his moving on from a breakup with the (unknown to him) help from Faye (Faye Wong). Faye tries to give him a letter from his previous girlfriend, presumably detailing why she left, but more importantly, returning her set of keys to his apartment. Faye takes the keys and begins breaking into his apartment to help clean up, get away from her work by saying she's out paying bills, and generally just kinda let loose to sometimes touching and often hilarious results.

Chunking Express was a huge hit upon its release, and has a reputation now as one of the best movies of the 90's. In 2002, Sight and Sound magazine named it the 8th best movie of the previous 25 years. Although I liked it, I wouldn't say it was that good. It was sweet, always engaging, stylishly filmed, but ultimately I don't know that it made much of an impact on me. Perhaps that's seeing it removed from the time it came out, perhaps not. I'm very glad I saw it, I particularly like the ending. It was my first movie from Wong Kar-wai, as it's a good movie. I have his possibly even more acclaimed 2000 film In the Mood for Love up soon, so it'll be interesting to see if that one connects to me more, less, the same. I love exploring the catalogs of new (to me) filmmakers.

The Spirit of the Beehive

Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive is an interesting movie, but not one that fully connected with me. It's about two young sisters, Ana (Ana Torrent) and Isabel (Isabel Telleria), and their parents, in the post civil war Spanish countryside, somewhere around 1940. The whole town goes to see a traveling exhibition of the classic Frankenstein with Boris Karloff. The younger Ana is unable to sleep much that night, but it's more because she's curious about this creature than she is frightened. She also takes as gospel her sister insisting that Frankenstein doesn't really kill the little girl by the river, everything in movies is fake, and that was just a body Frankenstein took for a bit, he's actually a spirit that you can talk to if you close your eyes and say "It's me, Ana."

It's an interesting look into sibling relationships, as even though there's not but a couple of years between the sisters, Ana looks to Isabel as though she knows all the answers. It doesn't help that Isabel is a mischievous, slightly malicious, young girl. Ana is innocent and open to the spiritual possibilities of seeing and feeling spirits. She wants to talk to Frankenstein, with no hesitation or trepidation. Young Ana Torrent's dark brown eyes lend her a certain earnestness and seriousness that makes her feel like the more mature, deeper, person, even as she's taken in by her sister's flights of fancy.

It's a gorgeous movie to look at, full of open countryside, sun bathed fields, honey colored interiors, and beautifully shot contrasts of light and shadow. But I also felt a certain distance from everything, which may or may not have been intentional. The family is never shown together, even when they're all around the dinner table, each is only shown in single shots, visually showing us their isolation from one another. And there's a distracted, passionless, almost hypnotized quality to the performances. I can't imagine the distance I felt was unintentional, but I didn't like it. The movie has a dream like quality I enjoyed up to a point, but ultimately I felt like I was chasing smoke, I could never get my hands around anything.

But the movie is often called the greatest Spanish movie ever made, so I'm sure I'll give it another go some day.

Yi Yi

Taiwan's Edward Yang was one of the most respected filmmakers of world cinema, and most often cited as his masterpiece is his 2000 drama Yi Yi (sometimes translated as A One and a Two). A nearly 3 hour human epic focusing on the Jian family living in Taipei. It starts with a wedding, and a visibly pregnant bride, and ends with a funeral, in between containing everything life could contain: joy, pain, anger, regret, love, and the constant search for the whole truth of it all. It's a truly great movie.

We mostly follow NJ (Nien-Jen Wu), the father of the family, as he struggles with money, disagreements with his partners in the failing business he runs, and a chance meeting with his first love, 30 years after he'd run away from her, making him contemplate his choices and direction in life. We also see Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), NJ's teenaged daughter, struggle through the mess of being a teenager. Making friends, hanging out, discovering boys (and boys discovering her), her relationship with her elders, and more. We see a bit of the mom in the family, Min-Min (Elaine Jin), but mostly the other person we follow is Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang), the 8-year-old son as he navigates being a kid, a curious, sensitive kid. Writer/director Yang manages all of this and more with an author's sense of detail and character building. Like John Sayles's Lone Star or Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, this is one of the few movies I'd describe as novelic. It is so richly made, and with such care. I've rarely felt closer or more curious about the fates and futures of movie characters than this family.

Yang was a member of the Taiwanese New Wave, alongside one of my favorite filmmakers Hou Hsiao-Hsien. He even cast Hou in his third movie, Taipei Story, in 1985. Nien-Jen Wu, the father NJ, is a celebrated writer/director himself (his 1994 movie A Borrowed Life was named by Martin Scorsese as the 3rd best movie of the 90's), and worked as an actor and writer for both Hou and Yang throughout his career. And he's tremendous in the lead role here, playing a thoroughly good man who contemplates his life while trying to be a good dad, and a good and ethical business man. The kids, neither of whom had ever acted before or much since, are both tremendous. Especially little Jonathan Chang as the son searching for truth in the world. It's a beautiful trio of performances in a beautiful movie.

Sadly, Yi Yi was Yang's last movie, as he contracted colon cancer around the time of its release and fought it for years before finally succumbing in 2007. Though his movies tended to be long, his other most famous movie A Brighter Summer Day is 4 hours long, this movie is so filled with depth and attention and soul that I will definitely be checking out more from yet another towering figure in world cinema that I have found in this wonderful quest I'm on.

Stroszek

Werner Herzog is unlike any other filmmaker. His movies couldn't have been made by anyone else, so singular of an artist is he. 1977's Stroszek is one of the odder movies of his I've seen. Roger Ebert described it as "one of the oddest films ever made", but it's not THAT weird. He goes on to use the word I'd use to describe the movie, which is peculiar. It's not "quirky", it may be eccentric, but peculiar feels right. Much of that credit goes to the movie's star, Bruno S, a former mental patient with whom Herzog made 2 movies, this and 1974's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, which I haven't seen. Bruno gives an extraordinary performance of great focus and intensity, playing a man for whom the world may be a little overwhelming.

Herzog, not from the movie

We start off in Berlin, with Bruno getting out of a kind of mental institution (there's a lot of autobiography to his character), promising the warden he'll not touch a drop of alcohol again, and while carrying all of his possessions before he even gets home, stopping at a bar for a beer. Bruno isn't an alcoholic, and that's not what this movie is about. It's just kind of a funny little thing. He hooks up with prostitute Eva (Eva Mattes), who after evading her abusive pimps and along with friend and neighbor Mr. Sheitz (Clemens Sheitz) moves away from the troubled world of Berlin and to Sheitz's nephew's place in Wisconsin. The movie follows them as they come up against the expected language issues present to immigrants (though helped by Eva's English speaking ability) and also against the facts that maybe America isn't any easier of a place to live than Berlin was. "In Berlin they physically kick you down. Here, they do it to your spirit, and that's worse" Bruno says to Eva.

There are a lot of metaphors and themes and issues you could look at if you wanted to, Herzog's movies never hurt for their ability to be read into. There were the usual Herzog striking images, whether the rising buildings above Bruno as he plays his accordion in the streets, Bruno standing watching the empty lot where his mobile home used to be, or a doctor cradling a prematurely born baby as Bruno looks on with a look of intense and impenetrable depth.

Herzog has said that despite Bruno's past (being in mental asylum's from 3-26) Bruno wasn't mentally ill, and he certainly doesn't appear to be here. He seems peculiar, but not "weird". He seems particular. There was only one of this guy made, and he's infinitely fascinating to watch. There's a laser like focus to his every movement and look, he's completely magnetic to look at. I really liked this movie a lot, mostly because of Bruno and Herzog's particular brand of Herzog-ness. I feel like The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser must be added to the list of this foreign film quest because I want to see what else these two did together.

Andrei Rublev

Legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's biopic of legendary Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev is a most unusual movie. Epic, but intimate. Lengthy, but not overlong. Insightful, but enigmatic. Tarkovsky set up the movie as an 8 sectioned look at the monk's life at different stages. There are 2 versions of the movie, the original 205 minute version (which is what I watched) and the 186 minute version Tarkovsky was forced to cut down due to studio pressure, and which ultimately Tarkovsky said he preferred. But either way, Andrei Rublev is a fascinating movie that is often cited as one of the best ever made.

I won't bother with a plot synopsis, since the movie isn't exactly plot driven. But Tarkovsky explores a lot of things here through Andrei's journey. Andrei ponders the place of the artist in society a lot. What is the point of painting religious icons when there's so much violence, death, chaos, and sin around us? Andrei has that crisis of faith, even taking a years long vow of silence at one point in his life. But Tarkovsky also views things through the lens of some of the other people in Andrei's life, including the monks that are his mentors in his early years, as well as a Greek painter who served as a later mentor, and eventually a young man taking on the huge task of casting a bell for the Prince. This movie is populated with fascinating characters more than just our title protagonist.

It's also, like Tarkovsky's other work, visually wonderful. Tarkovsky just had a special way with framing, camera movement, and meditative narrative. This movie is long, there are extended periods of silence, and often episodic movies lost their steam as inevitably some episodes are more interesting than others. But not here. Because Tarkovsky gives us snapshots of these times, most of the sections are in the 20-30 minute range, none outstay their welcome, and something about the way Tarkovsky shoots it, I was always interested by what was happening on screen.

Weirdly though, I don't think it's an out and out great movie. I liked it a lot, but I didn't love it. I was interested in each section, but I wasn't fascinated. I don't find anything about it bad in any way, but it's not exceptional either. I suppose it is exceptional that Tarkovsky made a 3 1/2 hour movie that I don't think was too long, but I also don't wish it was longer. An odd reaction, but we'll see how this one grows in my mind.

The Killer

John Woo's The Killer is like the epitome of the 80's action movie while also being the father of many a 90's action movie. The story concerns Ah Jong (Chow Yun-Fat), an assassin who accidentally blinds lounge singer Jennie (Sally Yeh) during a shootout at one of his hits. He tries to help her with surgeries to get her failing sight back, and agrees to take on one last hit to pay for her surgery. He's double crossed by the people that are supposed to pay him, while also crossing paths with Detective Li Ying (Danny Lee) who's on the case of the contract killings. It's a textbook late 80's thriller, with all the ridiculous cliche that accompanies such action fare. And it's also completely awesome.

And when I say cliche, I mean the super believable kind like how the hero never has to reload his pistol because it magically has a clip capacity of a thousand. It's sometimes comical to see Chow Yun-Fat unload on a bad guy with 8 or 10 shots, only to keep going with innumerable more shots afterwards. The body count on the movie is supposedly 120, and the movie is less than 2 hours long. But there's also the 80's music, freeze frames, slow-motion, guys wielding double pistols, cheap sound effects, a screaming woman who won't just stay down and hide, quick flashbacks to things we haven't had time to forget yet. Seriously, the first flashback is like 8 minutes into the movie, flashing back to something that literally happened 3 minutes ago. It almost feels like a parody of these kinds of movies because it's done so well and has so many of the cliches in it, but that just lets you know where a lot of these came from.

Still, even with all that seemingly negative stuff (which aren't negatives here), this movie is awesome. The church finale is particularly over-the-top, bloody, unbelievable, ridiculous, amazing, and one of the high points of action cinema. And heading the whole thing is Chow Yun-Fat at his coolest. Even as cheesy 80's-ness is happening all around him, the dude is just badass and magnetic. What a wonderful ride this movie is.

Katyn

 "It's not over till it's over" is a famous saying, but a movie like Katyn shows that it's not even over at that point. During WWII, the Soviets massacred thousands of Polish citizens, both soldiers and civilians, in the Katyn forest in April and May of 1940. The estimates on how many were murdered is between 12,000 and 22,000 people. The Nazis, as the relationship with the Soviets turned south, exposed the genocide and used it as propaganda against them. When the Soviets took control of Poland after the war, however, they turned and claimed the Nazis were the culprits, committing the crimes in 1941. In post-war Poland, to even suggest that your brother died in Katyn in 1940 was considered treason, as the Soviet backed government propagated the lie covering up their actions in Katyn.

Among those murdered was Jakub Wajda, the father of 14-year-old Andrzej, who would go on to be the most important filmmaker in Polish history. Andrzej has said he knew he needed to make a movie about the Katyn massacre, but he wasn't able to tackle it until 2007, at the age of 81. What he gave us is one of the most powerful war movies I've ever seen because, although the movie takes fictionalized characters to tell the story, it sees the reality of how war spreads over people like a plague. Once the war is over, it's not really over because now we have to live with the consequences of war. And that's how we see this story, often playing out through the women: wives, mothers, sisters, daughters of those killed. Some holding out hope, some trying to move on, some just wanting the closure that truth brings. Katyn is a powerful movie that plays on us like no other WWII movies have.

The movie is gorgeously made, Wajda is obviously a master filmmaker of the highest order. But what I keep coming back to as this movie grows in my mind is the complexity of everything. Wajda has said he wasn't sure how to approach the subject, whether to make it about the massacre (his fathers story) or the aftermath and the lie continued afterwards (his mothers story), ultimately settling on both, which I think was his own story.

But he also doesn't shy away from showing the massacre itself, in fact ending the movie with it. Roger Ebert said it was "a scene of relentless horror, showing the assembly line of execution." Because these people weren't murdered in mass, but one at a time. Wajda leaves us with the senseless brutality of bodies falling and being thrown into mass graves, the sickening dull thud as they hit either the dirt or bodies already down there. It's not a numbing downer of an ending as much as it sounds. It's emotionally powerful and driven because we know that death didn't give any of these people peace, and all sides used them over and over again (the graves were dug up multiple times) as propaganda pieces. Their families weren't given any peace, they couldn't even talk openly about the truth of what happened until Poland's independence was gained in 1989.

Katyn serves as a powerful emotional experience, and a fascinating study on how the horrors of war don't go away once one side "wins". The war is over halfway through the 121 minute runtime, but I hope some peace was gained through the making of this movie. At least the truth, both factual and emotional, is able to be out there now.