Each week, Richard Brody picks a classic film, a modern film, an
independent film, a foreign film, and a documentary for online viewing.
“Daisy Miller”
Photograph from Everett
Peter Bogdanovich films Henry James’s novella “Daisy Miller” with an
acerbic humor that matches the horror of manners on which the drama
runs. The 1974 movie stars Cybill Shepherd as the young American in
Europe, whose free-spiritedness adapts easily to the romantic strains of
European society and whose relationship with the expatriate American
Frederick Winterbourne (Barry Brown) is spoiled by her uninhibited ways.
It’s a singular display of directorial style. Bogdanovich replicates the
sinuous psychological intricacies of James’s sentences in the filigreed
opulence of the décor and the graceful and florid long takes that track
Shepherd through a performance of exquisitely capricious and spontaneous
choreography—the link between Katharine Hepburn and Greta Gerwig. The
light and the settings are reminiscent of paintings by Renoir, even when
the narrow refinement of behavior and the rigidity of morals lead to
comedic absurdities that have no place in Impressionism but seem right
at home in the American nineteen-seventies. Brown (who committed suicide
in 1978, at the age of twenty-seven) gives a performance of a deft,
coruscating irony; his style is the closest forerunner to that of Jason
Schwartzman.
Stream “Daisy Miller” on Amazon, Google Play, and other services.
“Faust”
Photograph from Everett
It’s a singular act of directorial chutzpah to adapt Goethe’s teeming
page drama “Faust” into a movie—a silent movie, no less—but the German
director F. W. Murnau, the most technically adept and grandly visionary
filmmaker of the silent era, pulls it off on a colossal scale in this
1926 tour de force. (This was his last German film; he immigrated to
Hollywood later that year.) Like Goethe’s poem, Murnau’s film embraces
the great beyond, opening with a wager between God and the Devil. The
debonair Swedish actor Gösta Ekman plays the tormented old scholar who
trades his soul to Mephisto (the torrentially expressive yet subtle Emil
Jannings) for the restoration of his youth. Murnau captures the
supernatural effects—the bat-like Devil casting his cape over a village
and smoking it with the plague, the science-fiction-like light rings of
Faust’s imprecations, his fiery rejuvenation, the Wagnerian flight over
mountains—with a simple yet spectacular power. He looks at Faust’s
romance with Gretchen (Camilla Horn) with an agonized tenderness, and at
Mephisto’s courtship of the concupiscent Marthe (Yvette Guilbert) with
rib-shaking ribaldry. The dramatic power Gretchen’s cruel punishment
reaches a tragic pitch that’s among the most exalted in the history of
cinema—then and now.
Stream “Faust” on Amazon and Kanopy.
“Effi Briest”
Photograph from Everett
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 drama “Effi Briest” is an adaptation of
the 1895 novel by Theodor Fontane, which is more or less the German
“Madame Bovary.” It’s the story of a young woman of a romantic
temperament (played by Hanna Schygulla) who, at age seventeen, marries a
prosperous but soberly earnest government official (Wolfgang Schenck)
and soon begins an affair with a flashy, dashing officer (Ulli Lommel),
resulting in a wide spectrum of intimate tragedies. But Fassbinder’s
bold intentions are suggested in the movie’s actual German title,
“Fontane Effi Briest”: though the movie is a straightforward
dramatization of scenes from the novel, complete with meticulous
costumes and elaborate period settings, he puts the chilled and precise
performances in a virtual cinematic proscenium, filled with reflections
and scrims, that have the effect of turning the dramatization into a
series of quotations and transforming the immediate emotional affect
into a mode of analysis. True to Fassbinder’s career-long theme, it’s a
study of power—in particular, the oppressive and insidiously destructive
power of norms and mores on the soul and life of an intelligent,
capable, independent-minded woman who’s deprived of any practical
independence.
Stream “Effi Briest” on the Criterion Channel at FilmStruck and Kanopy.
“Hermia & Helena”
Photograph by Atlaspix / Alamy
The young Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro has begun a career of
transforming or refracting Shakespeare’s plays into the lives of young,
current-day artists. In his 2016 comedic drama, “Hermia & Helena,” the
play in question is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and the settings are
both Buenos Aires and New York. The center of the action is a so-called
institute in an apartment in Chinatown, where two young Argentinian
women trade places. Carmen (María Villar), a writer, is heading back to
Buenos Aires—and separating from the institute’s manager, Lukas (Keith
Poulson), who is romantically interested in her. The institute’s new
fellow is Carmen’s friend Camila (Agustina Muñoz), who is there to
translate “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into Spanish and also hopes to
reconnect with a former lover, a filmmaker (played by the filmmaker
Dustin Guy Defa—there’s a film-within-a-film that’s a work of tender
comedic ingenuity). There’s also the prospect of a reunion with a
long-lost family member (played by the filmmaker Dan Sallitt, in a
character turn that’s among the most justly celebrated in recent
independent cinema); there are bold leaps back and forth in time, clever
pivots on peculiar totem objects, and, above all, the sense of
discoveries and abandonments, mysteries and wonders, that evoke the
exquisitely tender exaltation of Shakespearean whimsy.
Stream “Hermia & Helena” on Amazon, iTunes, and other services.
“Tongues”
Photograph from Everett
A plain filming of a play onstage is, in effect, a literary documentary,
but Shirley Clarke’s twenty-minute video “Tongues,” from 1982, is that
and more. She videotapes the actor Joseph Chaikin performing a text by
Sam Shepard that was expressly written for their collaboration, and
includes the live percussion accompaniment by Skip LaPlante that Shepard
planned. But Clarke, who expanded the notion of performance
documentaries with her dance-centered films of the nineteen-fifties and
the 1967 feature “Portrait of Jason,” here relies on the pliability of
the video image to transform Chaikin’s performance by means of simple
but highly expressive effects. The text is a polyphony of seemingly
overheard voices, running from the trivial to the cosmic, the domestic
to the momentous, which Shepard endows with incantatory repetitions and
Chaikin distinguishes with a variety of tones and accents. Clarke
inflects the text with rhythmic variations on the recorded image:
stretchings and flattenings on the beat of Chaiken’s delivery,
striations, superimpositions, multiplications, tints, and other
manipulations that create a kind of visual counterpoint to the
recitation and the percussion accompaniment, turning a basic one-man
show into an intimate extravaganza.
Stream “Tongues” on FilmStruck.
Sourse: newyorker.com
