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| gromit |
 Posted: Wed Feb 05, 2014 5:40 pm |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9010
Location: Shanghai
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The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972).
Pretty unmistakably Fassbinder.
Power relationships. Maltreatment of others, followed by apologies. Emotional flip-flops.
And being early Fassbinder it has a definite artificial stagey quality.
Petra is a well-off Bremen fashion designer. There's another woman in her household who is somewhere along the assistant-servant-slave continuum. This woman seems to do most of the work, all the chores and never speaks. She does provide some extremely good glaring. This relationship is interrupted by a young model (Hanna Schygulla) who Petra invites to live with her, falls in love with, and gets mildly mistreated by. It's rather easy to associate Fassbinder with Petra -- the successful artist with power over others, bi-sexual and a little cruelly manipulative.
It's an all woman cast, with the three other minor characters all relatives of Petra's. This all-female drama takes place almost entirely in front of a wall mural of naked men, a copy of some classical painting on Petra's bedroom wall. There are some background males we never see -- the model's husband and "a big black man with a big black dick" that the model says she spent the night with -- rather reminiscent of one of Fassbinder's long-term affairs. Making me wonder just how many -- all? -- of these characters are aspects of Fassbinder.
Petra changes wigs frequently, going from brunette to blonde to redhead as fits her mood/personality at the time. For good measure there also are naked mannequins scattered throughout the apartment. The theme being the layers of disguise and emotion and need we cloak ourselves in.
A kind of odd, talkative film, and perhaps a bit overlong. I did like most of the compositions, where people were placed in the frame, or revealed to be in the apartment. I was kind of kept on edge by the masochistic assistant/servant/slave who seems to be trying out for the part of Jeanne Dielman. In that regard the end is a bit of an anti-climax, so I'll just have to pretend the forwarding address she leaves is 23 Quai du Commerce, Brussels. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Wed Feb 05, 2014 6:01 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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bartist wrote: IIRC, Fanny & Alexander also featured a castmember igniting his own fart. That was CGI, too, I'm sure.
Actually he blew the candles out. |
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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2014 10:11 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9010
Location: Shanghai
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I knew I had some Paolo Sorrentino films lying around.
On the fringes of my to-watch piles.
So I gave Consequences of Love a whirl.
It's stylish but fairly inert.
That's part of the point as the main character looks like Chance the Gardener and maintains a Buster Keaton deadpan throughout. His life is mostly a dull routine living in a hotel under a sort of house arrest by the mafia, only broken up by taking money to bank to be laundered and a weekly heroin dose.
So a fairly artificial situation, and then it gets hard to care about Mr. No Emotion when he falls for a girl working in the hotel bar/cafe.
I found it a little dull, overlong and pretentious, but I don't really like slow films that appear slick and stylish. I'd say it's fairly well made and maintains a style, but not really to my taste.
I think I have another of his film(s) here somewhere.
Though maybe I bought just one (or two).
Divo sounds interesting, but might be more slickerdoodle. |
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Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2014 11:30 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
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| The search function is useless on "Closed Circuit," so I ask: anyone see this 2013 spy thriller? Critical reception seems to have been tepid/mixed. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2014 11:51 am |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2014 9:20 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
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| Sorry, I meant the search function for Third Eye - trying to see if anyone had mentioned it here. I did see the movie database page, thanks. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2014 10:35 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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| Never saw Closed Circuit. Or Short Circuit, for that matter. |
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You've got a great brain. You should keep it in your head.
-Topher |
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| jeremy |
| Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2014 6:45 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
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| Bart, the search function is a bit clunky, but sort of works. You've got to remember to click on the options to search 'posts' and, if appropriate, search 'all terms'. |
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I am angry, I am ill, and I'm as ugly as sin.
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking.
I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit.
I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2014 7:43 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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Put in Closed Circuit and tell it to look for all terms and select 'post.' You get 9 listings.
Edit: If Jeremy and I agree, it must be true. |
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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2014 11:19 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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That is precisely the search I performed, and I got 9 listings. I should clarify: my problem was that those 9 listings (minus the recent ones on how to search for that title), yielded posts like this, from Gromit, last year....
Quote: thought it alternated between some powerful moments and some auto-pilot cliches. The hand-held cam got a bit overdone, and I thought the one main dance sequence was spoiled by its usage. I didn't find Arnold's concerns with music videos, cameras and other media interesting. It's in keeping with Red Road which ground us down with closed circuit monitors. It all seemed rather Atom Egoyan to me, without much message or insight into media-saturation, or its relation to film.
IOW, the searches are not case-sensitive. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| Befade |
| Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2014 1:55 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 3784
Location: AZ
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I had a delightful experience watching Heartburn again. Back in the days before Meryl Streep did that giddy laugh and before Jack Nicholson arched his eyebrow and grinned. Those were simple times. Meryl was still captivating as a bruised housewife and writer. Nicholson was more of a nice guy doing something he shouldn't have been doing.
This may have been the era when DIVORCE was a new social issue devastating our culture. I guess from here I need to go to Kramer vs. Kramer. |
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Lost in my own private I dunno. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 4:45 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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Fanny and Alexander in the three hour theatrical version. The title is odd in that Fanny's name isn't even mentioned for the first hour of the movie, and she's a minor character compared with Alexander. It took me a while to figure out which girl she was.
I had a problem watching it because I hated the Lutheran bishop who became their stepfather from almost his first appearance and I was skeptical that Alexander's mother would marry him in the first place, especially when he set the condition that she cut off all her former contacts, and her kids do the same. The actor's effective in creating one of the slimier villains in movies, but it's hard to watch him, and it was always a relief when the movie left his austere home to Alexander's grandmother's house or the Jewish shop where the kids take refuge. These places are full of life and color and I loved the people who inhabited them.
One thing that alarmed me: The grandmother's house is lit with a mixture of incandescent lights, lamps and candles. (The movie is set in 1907-8 when electric lighting was coming in.) The first hour is set on Christmas, and all the lights on Christmas trees are candles, and at one point one of the trees is moved with the candles lit. This is after someone walks down a set of stairs carrying a flaming bowl. Times have changed.
It's also a little alarming when the maid Maj gets pregnant, because the actress also played Darth Vader's mother.
This is a beautiful piece of filmmaking that won four Oscars, for Foreign Language Film, Cinematography, Art/Set Direction and Costume Design and richly deserved all four. It seems slightly long at three hours, and the TV version is five hours. I'm docking it a bit for that my difficulty getting through the scenes with the bishop, so 8 of 10 seems about right. |
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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 11:39 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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| At least you made it through the movie. I found it meandering and pointless and stopped watching probably not long after the half hour mark. No offense, but I find your obsession with the candles and flames odd. What were people supposed to do? Live in the dark until electricity was invented/perfected? People lived as they do in Fanny and Alexander for a greater bulk of recorded history than people live today. |
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You've got a great brain. You should keep it in your head.
-Topher |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 11:57 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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Joe Vitus wrote: At least you made it through the movie. I found it meandering and pointless and stopped watching probably not long after the half hour mark.
I think Bergman can be a great filmmaker, but he sometimes loses me, and this is a movie I knew (Gary-style) that I would dislike just from the description, so I've never ventured into it. Don't plan to, either. |
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| knox |
| Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 12:07 pm |
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Joined: 18 Mar 2010
Posts: 1246
Location: St. Louis
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Quote: It's also a little alarming when the maid Maj gets pregnant, because the actress also played Darth Vader's mother...
First: spit-take.
second: the fact that you concocted a "meta" joke could indicate that your attention wandered a bit during this film.
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