At
Film Space: on Saturdays at 7 pm
Film Space in December
has been presenting “A Month of Krzysztof Kieslowski”
featuring the Three Colors Trilogy, films of which I am very
fond, plus, as the final offering, his The Double Life of
Veronique. In January they present simply a series of films by
some directors they like.
Film Space is to the
right and in the back of the CMU Art Museum, in the Media Arts and
Design building across from the ballet school. Now that the weather
is cool, they are resuming their rooftop showings, weather
permitting. You might want to bring something to sit on or lie on. A
contribution is requested in the donation box at the entrance. Well
worth supporting.
Saturday,
December 27: La
Double vie de Véronique / The Double Life of Veronique
(1991)
by Krzysztof Kieslowski –
98 mins – France/ Poland, Drama/ Fantasy/ Romance. In French
and Polish, with English subtitles. Generally favorable reviews: 77
out of 100.
With
Irène Jacob, Wladyslaw Kowalski, Sandrine Dumas, Guillaume de
Tonquedec, Aleksander Bardini.
I
truly and deeply appreciate the mastery of its filmmaking, and I am
endlessly fascinated by it, but I think this film is a mess – a
very flawed masterpiece. Nevertheless, it was Krzysztof Kieslowski’s
international breakthrough, and it remains one of his most beloved
films, and is to be sure a ravishing, mysterious rumination on
identity, love, and human intuition. Irène Jacob is
incandescent as both Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her
double, Véronique, a French music teacher. Though unknown to
each other, the two women share an enigmatic, purely emotional bond,
which Kieslowski details in gorgeous reflections, colors, and
movements, aided by Slawomir Idziak’s shimmering cinematography
and Zbigniew Preisner’s haunting, operatic score.
More
than in most of his films, Kieslowski didn’t seem to know what
he wanted to do in this film, and constantly fiddled with it. It
started out to be 50% about Weronika in Poland, and 50% about
Vèronique in France, but it ended up being one-third for
Weronika and the rest for Vèronique. Originally, according to
the star Irène Jacob, he wanted to intertwine the two stories,
but he ended up keeping them separate except for the brief encounter
at the tour bus. Irène Jacob said that he made fifteen
different versions of the film. “It was tough, because each one
told a different story.” She goes on to say, “He had
versions where the movie seemed even more open-ended, and others
where he explained things more. . . . I was amazed when I saw the
finished film – when I saw how many scenes were missing, I was
very surprised. He’d cut so many scenes that I was a bit lost!”
Irène
Jacob also said that Kieslowski contemplated several different
endings. His cinematographer Slawomir Idziak says that they
eventually worked on three different endings which they were hoping
to distribute in a random way so that some audiences in Paris would
see one ending, and others one of the others. This idea was abandoned
due to the cost involved, but the cinematographer states that the
present ending incorporates elements of all three endings. And to my
mind the result is more of a muddle than it should be.
Despite
all this, the result is a fascinating film.
Reel.com:
Just before he began work on his stunning film trilogy Blue,
Red, and White, Polish writer/director Krzysztof Kieslowski made
a film that could easily have been part of the same series, and
probably should have been called Yellow, but was titled The Double
Life of Veronique instead. Like the three color films, Veronique
is a meditation on the interconnectedness of people, told in poetic
style with a visual language that repeats itself with the comforting
cadence of a nursery rhyme. It's a film experience, in other words,
in which the sensuous nature of the medium takes over, and the plot
matters less and less as the film goes on.
The
Double Life of Veronique is propelled by an idea, and by the
excellent performance of Irène Jacob in dual lead roles—as
Weronika, a young woman in Poland, and Vèronique, her
identical counterpart in France. Weronika receives the shocking news
first: She learns about her double when she spies Vèronique in
a busload of picture-snapping French tourists on a plaza in Krakow.
Vèronique finds out later, when she develops her snapshots
from the trip, and is equally devastated. A doppelganger, in this
case, is not a pal who knows what you're going to say before you say
it; it means that feelings of loneliness and isolation are passed
back and forth between the characters, doubling their despair.
Saturday,
January 3: Where
in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? (2008)
by Morgan Spurlock –
93 mins – France/ US Documentary. In English. Mixed or average
reviews: 45 out of 100.
A
Nutshell Review: Of course it will be silly to presume that
this film can find the answers to the multi-million dollar question,
or even come close to it, so just what was the intention?
Director
Morgan Spurlock isn't new to controversy, having burst onto the
documentary scene with his real life gorging on MacDonald's for every
meal in order to drive home the point that junk food really does junk
your well being. So for this new film of his, it stems from his
desire to seek out the world's #1 wanted man, and ask him just what
floats his boat. He may be putting on his jester cap with his
somewhat hilarious introduction, but looking at the preparation with
vaccination and even attending some terrorism survival course, he's
quite dead set in his mission to find that elusive man.
Until
of course you realize that he's hitting all the relative safe havens
for the most part, before venturing into the more likely places in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. But what he seeks to unearth is the Middle
East's attitudes towards Americans, and it seems that the common
consensus is that while they have nothing against the people, almost
everyone that Spurlock chose to showcase, has issues with the foreign
policies. And from interviews with the average Joes, they sure have
issues with politics at home more than those that are from abroad.
Spurlock also takes opportunity to slam the US foreign policy, and
does so through a hilarious animated sequence involving Uncle Sam and
the Statue of Liberty herself, in what would be a realistic case of
sleeping with the wrong bedfellows.
Bringing
the camera from Morocco to Saudi Arabia, and interview people from
the state of Palestine and Israel, what he had presented were
compelling arguments for and against, as well as plenty of moderate
views that seek to debunk the bulk of western media who find delight
in demonizing those in the Middle East. Through the looking glass
peering at their everyday lives, the film comes to present the basic
need for survival and providing for one's family, no matter one's
geography, country, religion, and culture. Naturally there were some
feathers ruffled, especially when dealing with closed cultures who
clam up, or intolerant folks who have no qualms in using violence,
but in general, this documentary serves to be rather tame.
Yes
it's gimmicky in its title, and half the time you're not sure whether
Spurlock will take that plunge and really head to where he will
likely find some inkling of positive leads, but what it has presented
instead is something more powerful: that this world really needs to
reach out and have everyone take a more tolerant attitude, and to
understand one another a lot more, to avoid conflict. This should be
a world without strangers, and this documentary manages to show just
a glimmer of that hope.
Saturday,
January 10: Sayonara
Color (2005)
by Naoto Takenaka –
119 mins – Japan Romance. In Japanese, English subtitles.
Sayonara
Color is the fifth film by Takenaka Naoto, one of Japan’s
most respected character actors and the director of Muno no Hlto -
Nowhere Man and Tokyo Bivori. Shohei (Takenaka Naoto)
works as a doctor in a sea-side hospital. One day a new patient is
admitted to the hospital with ovarian cancer. Shohei is surprised to
recognize Michiko, his first love from high school. Shohei has been
leading a dissolute bachelor life, paying for the company of high
school girls and dating an older woman who works in a local bar, but
in reality for the last twenty years he has not forgotten Michiko.
Unfortunately, though Michiko doesn’t remember him at all.
Shohei
becomes more and more and more persistent in his attempts to get her
to recall their past. At first she is annoyed by his overtures, but
gradually warms to the doctor. Under Shohei’s kind and patient
care Michiko’s condition improves and her cancer becomes
operable. The operation is a success, but now Shohei himself learns
that he has terminal cancer.
Both
starring and directing, Takenaka Naoto gives a characteristically
eccentric performance as a quirky doctor in love with his patient in
this moving drama that affects with both offbeat humor and terminal
disease pathos.
