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Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (1971)
Una Cuba Libre Por Favor
Fassbinder ends this film with a quote from Thomas Mann that expresses his tiredness in representing the human species, without being part of it. This could well be the key to interpreting not only this film, but almost all of Fassbinder's work.
In a world divided between capitalist tyranny and socialist hypocrisy, there is no real place for Fassbinder and his troupe, representative of a generation that wants to be above bourgeois values, but finds no alternatives, falling into nihilism and depression.
In retrospect, we can believe that Fassbinder's discomfort stemmed, in large part, from the rejection of homosexuality, whether by fascist moralism or socialist progressivism. The sexual freedom of the sixties did not yet include homosexuality, and Fassbinder, using shock therapy in his films, was one of the staunchest critics of this hypocritical sexual revolution.
The film tells the story of a film production, which takes place in a haphazard manner, in a Sorrento painted in Francoist Spain, as a metaphor for a society and a revolution of mentalities, which is also slow to happen.
Meanwhile, Cuba Libres are drunk, in honor of the revolution.
Les créatures (1966)
Between Luck and Destiny
A hermetic work, where fantasy and reality mix, in a surreal universe of a writer, locked in a strange beach house, almost a fortress, with his pregnant wife, while writing a literary work.
Both suffer injuries from a road accident. He has a deep feeling of guilt, marked by a scar on his forehead, which symbolizes a healthy madness, which he channels into literary creation. She, a loving muteness, the reverse of her husband's guilt, which she only overcomes at the end, with the birth of her son.
Meanwhile, like a demiurge of the small world that surrounds him, he plays the luck and destiny of his characters and of his own life and family.
Of course, with all the hermetic surrealism that dominates the film, everything could mean something completely different to other viewers.
It is certainly not Varda's most representative cinematographic language, nor is it her most inspired or influential film.
Ruusujen aika (1969)
Democratic Roses and Thorns
A surprising Finnish film from the end of the 60s, which proposes, in a science fiction environment that could have inspired Woody Allen's Sleeper, a reflection on the concept of democracy and the utopias it gave rise to, which kept the world divided and suspended at the time of the Cold War, which nevertheless caused episodes of enormous violence, permanently threatening the world with the total destruction of humanity.
The conclusion seems to be that totalitarian democracy annihilates the individual, and that only the imperfection of the democratic social struggle guarantees individual freedom, even if it generates violence and social confrontation.
However, totalitarianism inevitably imposes itself on the annihilation of the individual in the face of the collective interest.
An interesting reflection that well reflects the ambiguity of political thought at the time, which is still relevant, even in current times, when the Cold War has become history.
What is democracy after all? Are these regimes, in which we currently live, truly democratic?
Doesn't the ghost of totalitarianism remain suspended, waiting for the bankruptcy of social democracies, victors of the cold war?
La nona (1979)
She eats everything
Like José Afonso's vampires, this grandmother who eats everything, exhausting her family to death, would perhaps be, in 1979, when written and directed by Hector Oliveira, a metaphor for American capitalism and the Argentine ruling class, which, insatiable, consumed the country's resources to exhaustion, literally pushing its inhabitants to a miserable death.
There is always a grandmother in every political regime, in every country, in every family, so the metaphor remains timeless, capable of pleasing successive generations and different cultures.
A classic that, despite the years, remains lively and relevant.
Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
Chaplin Noir
Curiously based on an idea by Orson Welles, although written, directed and performed by Charles Chaplin, this Monsieur Verdoux adapts a true story, that of the infamous Bluebeard, Monsieur Henri Désiré Landru, a french serial killer, executed in 1922, specialized in seducing and killing widows and then make the corpses disappear, to construct a metaphor for the society of the time, still dominated by the terrible effects of the 1929 financial crisis and the Second World War.
When America emerged victorious from the conflict and reborn from its own ashes, as a global economic and military power, the public and some critics did not like seeing Chaplin playing the villain (although as tragicomic as always) nor the capitalist model criticized at a time when the Cold War began and the Soviet Union emerged as the new enemy to be defeated by the North American empire.
Chaplin, who was already persecuted and criticized by the FBI as a communist sympathizer, saw his destiny in exile determined after this film.
Monsieur Verdoux is a delicious black comedy where Chaplin plays a character as poetic and human as the others. He just has the peculiarity of having a business of killing wealthy widows, after being fired from a bank. But he does it to support a handicapped wife and a young son, so he has a clear conscience.
He ends up defeated by the economy and war, after years of deceiving the police.
Irony at the best level. It was a timing error. It emerged in a moralistic era that was unreceptive to the humanist theories of Chaplin, critical of war and savage capitalism.
Limelight (1952)
The False Farewell
Limelight is the film that marks the beginning of Chaplin's exile, after several years of persecution by American authorities, who accused him of communist sympathies.
Far from being a bitter and adversarial film, this cinematic response from Chaplin is a farewell of an old glory, full of panache, sweetness and poetry.
Chaplin says goodbye to Hollywood with a smile and a white glove slap, with the enormous elegance and critical sense with which he always acted throughout his career.
Interestingly, this film would give him the only competitive Oscar of his life, for the soundtrack (he would receive another, an honorary award, in 1972, for his entire career).
It wouldn't be Chaplin's last film, as he might have thought when he made it, but it is certainly among the best that has been done in cinematographic art, to this day.
A Night in Casablanca (1946)
Madness in Casablanca
One of the last films by the Marx brothers where, despite adding nothing relevant to their cinematic routine, they also don't clash, building a coherent work and where there is space for each of them to express their enormous humorous talent.
The theme of the hotel managed by the chaotic brothers is recurrent in their work (the four coconuts, a day at the races (here a sanatorium hotel), room service), and when it is not a hotel it is an opera or a circus company, a university or even an imaginary country called Sylvania. The important thing is to create chaos, where the healthy madness of the Marx brothers prevails, to the undeniable pleasure of the viewer.
This film is also a nice parody of the classic Casablanca, at the time at the peak of popularity.
A film that no Marx Brothers fan will want to miss.
A King in New York (1957)
A Bath of Humility
Charlie Chaplin, exiled in Switzerland to avoid answering to the infamous Commission on Un-American Activities, prevented from working in the United States and at the age of sixty-eight, returns to New York, in his metaphorical condition as king of comedy, in exile, to expose to North Americans the absurdity of McCarthysm and literally give a shower of humility to the members of the Commission on Un-American Activities.
It is certainly not one of the best films by the genius Chaplin, but he, as usual, is not afraid to put his finger on the wound (as he does with the hose in the elevator) to expose his democratic and inclusive ideals, which earned him exile, for alleged pro-communist sympathies, and refusal to testify before the McCarthy commission.
A respectable and courageous work by someone who never knew how to remain silent when time demanded to denounce injustice.
Topper (1937)
Screwball Comedy
Topper is a 1930s screwball comedy in the full sense of the term. The very fragility of the argument elevates it to the healthy madness that characterizes this type of comedy.
Nothing in this story makes much sense, but the truth is that the whole works as exceptional entertainment, with some of the most fun and charismatic actors of the time.
It's no wonder why it was a tremendous success and even led to two sequels, although without Cary Grant, who only appears in the first film and Constance Bennett who plays the first two but does not appear in the third film. The duo Roland Young and Billie Burke, however, complete the trilogy.
A film with the density of a sheet of paper, but still downright fun.
Det sjunde inseglet (1957)
Between life and death
Rarely have the human condition, the permanent struggle between life and death and the search for knowledge, for a meaning to existence, been presented in such an eloquent and poetic way as in Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal.
This is certainly why it is seen by many not only as the Swedish director's masterpiece, but as a pillar of 20th century cinema and culture.
The Seventh Seal is much more than a film, it is a work of art. A bold visual poem, beautiful but frightening at the same time, where each viewer is deeply confronted with their own mortality and the search for meaning in life.
It's not worth asking many questions when the answer is just one, and inevitably painted in black.
Banditi a Orgosolo (1961)
Omerta
A portrait of misery and ignorance, in a Sardinia lost in its ancient traditions of isolation and distrust.
A shepherd finds himself unjustly involved in an escape of bandits, which resulted in the death of a police officer. His survival instinct pushes him to flee. He fears continental justice, the loss of his sheep, the prison that would prevent him from supporting his old mother and brother.
But it's a dead end. He manages to escape the police, but not the poverty and violence, which push him into a life as a fugitive, a criminal, condemned and persecuted by everyone.
A harsh and merciless vision of the isolation and ignorance, imposed by the law of silence, in the pastoral communities of Sardinia, filmed in the mountains in the center of the island, using only amateur actors, belonging to the local communities.
An excellent example of new cinema from the 1960s, at its best.
Retour à Séoul (2022)
Reencounter
A story about the search for identity that can equally be seen as a metaphor for a country divided by a suspended but omnipresent war.
Freddie also lives suspended, not only between her biological and adoptive parents, but between East and West, between the present and the past, between war and peace.
She is the product of war and misery, despite having lived far from it all. Confronting the pain, shame and suffering associated with her birth and adoption imposes on her a need for reconciliation with her origins, with her identity lost and never found again.
But it is an impossible task. Life doesn't stop, the past cannot be redone. Freddie is condemned to live on the border, an outcast, lonely without integrating anywhere.
Ansiktet (1958)
The Great Illusion
The Face (The Magician) is a curious incursion by Ingmar Bergman into the territory of the occult, fear, illusions and superstitions that still mark, in an indelible way, the human condition.
Despite the evidence, the tricks, the manifest mystification of occultism, there is always a doubt that hovers, an atavistic, or perhaps mystical, desire to believe that life is not just this, that reality is too absurd to be simply accepted and that It takes faith in something superior and supernatural to be able to survive, to overcome the banality of life.
In the absence of love, even the cheap tricks of some charlatan seem to be enough.
Bachelor Mother (1939)
Once upon a time
Bachelor Mother is one of those romantic comedies, written in the good tradition of farce, that delighted audiences in the 30s and 40s of the last century, and still do.
It may not be the most dynamic, the most hilarious, the most wildly romantic of the thirties' screwball comedies, but it is well written, well directed by screenwriter/director Garston Kanin and well acted by the always charismatic Ginger Rogers, the friendly heartthrob David Niven and the unavoidable Charles Coburn, a habitual and almost essential presence in these works that fill the collective imagination of successive generations of cinephiles.
Highly recommended.
La sombra del Caudillo (1960)
Political Portrait
A very curious film because, based on the 1929 work of Martin Luís Gusmán, it denounces the dirty struggle for power within the revolutionary army and in the intricacies of supposedly democratic politics in Mexico in the 1920s.
With fictional characters, Gusmán and Bracho put their finger on the wound of the struggle for power, not just in Mexico but in general. Even in current representative democracies, the ruling generals are replaced by other caudillos, but the principles and ethics are the same, an indignant struggle for power and wealth, where everything goes and the ends always justify the means.
Mexican political power was so well portrayed in the film that banned it for 30 years, with it only being released, abroad, in 1990.
A picture that shows politics in its true grotesque face.
Identificazione di una donna (1982)
Between reality and fiction
The story of an artist, film director, divorced, who seeks, in a new woman, to rebuild a meaning for his life and work. A muse that inspires a new film at the same time that fills the obvious gap in his life.
Antonioni thus mixes reality and fiction in the protagonist's journey, in a challenge equally launched to the viewer, who slowly separates the waters between the work and its creative process.
It is an intelligent film in which the master returns to his favorite theme, the relationship between man and woman, although it is hardly comparable, in form and content, to the classics that elevated him to the status of star of the new Italian wave.
Il traditore (2019)
Their Things
Marco Bellocchio directs a biographical film about a key character in the history of the fight against the Sicilian mafia during the 80s and 90s, Tommaso Buscetta, the so-called boss of two worlds who became the first repentant member of Cosa Nostra, whose collaboration with justice led to the arrest of hundreds of mafiosi and triggered a wave of repentants that practically dismantled the organization and the main Italian political parties at the time.
Far from being a hero, this Buscetta, who the film's title bluntly calls "the traitor", was a murderer, drug trafficker and member of a criminal organization who, when he found himself cornered by the justice system and abandoned by his supporters, decided to repent, tell everything and put himself in the service and under the protection of justice, living the rest of his life, approximately 16 years, at the expense of the State and under the North American witness protection program. All of this leads us to consider this status of repentance and the extent to which the ends justify the means in the fight against organized crime.
This is not about humanizing a sinister figure, because criminals are as human as other people. They are the result of the accumulation of circumstances that make human beings ambiguous, always oscillating between good and evil, between virtue and vice. Buscetta is not and does not consider himself a hero, just a survivor, who would like to die peacefully in his bed instead of being shot in the street, or in jail, despite all the mistakes he made in life.
If there is anything that this film adds to a theme as recurrent as that of the Sicilian Mafia, it is, in my opinion, the idea, rejected outright by Judge Falcone, but which Buscetta seems to believe until the last moment, that Cosa Nostra was an organization of honor and mutual aid, at some point in its history, which was perverted by the struggle for power and wealth. It is in this sense that, when faced with Riina, the capo dei capi, Buscetta accuses him of having been the one to kill the Mafia, with his ambition and thirst for power and revenge.
The truth is that, with or without the Mafia, organized crime continues to exist and proliferate, with close links to all forms of power in the world. There is no true power without organized crime to sustain it, it seems to be an inevitable conclusion.
L'avventura (1960)
The Absurdity of Life
In The Adventure Antonioni demonstrates how easy it is for people to disappear from our lives. It is not just death, or even death, that takes them, but oblivion.
Passions are like drunkenness for alcoholics, one can be cured by the next one. And life continues its daily adventure, made of an eternal becoming, where everything is ephemeral, empty, absurd.
In this film, which marks, like Fellini's La Dolce Vita, the beginning of the new Italian wave, a profound existentialism also emerges which, unlike Bergman's cinema, which paints the existential drama in black, fills it with futile and ephemeral vanity, the absurd comedy of life.
L'eclisse (1962)
The Cult of the Absurd
The Eclipse, from 1962, closes a golden trilogy begun by Antonioni with The Adventure, in 1960 and continued with The Night, in 1961.
These three films, without wanting to devalue the others, where there are works of undeniable value, are the epicenter of the new cinematic language, led by Antonioni, who so influenced the new wave, Italian and elsewhere, and catapulted the director to stardom.
It is a language that strives for restraint, based on the maxim that says, sometimes less is more. Silence is explored as a vehicle of communication. See the opening scene of this Eclipse, in which Monica Vitti and Francisco Rabal spend several minutes in silence, symbolizing the end of a relationship in which they had nothing more to say to each other.
At the center of the plot are always complex relationships, men and women who aspire to something, without knowing exactly what, but find themselves permanently drawn into the emptiness of everyday life. The absurd existentialism of a generation that, devoid of the fight for survival, which so marked the previous generation, that of war, now vegetates in the opulence of an Italy in full economic boom, without a true meaning to life. Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which in Antonioni's cinema is much more bitter than sweet, precisely because it is empty, it lacks values, objectives, designs. It's an absurd life for someone who doesn't know what they want in life and experiments, forever, without ever being satisfied with the result.
The beautiful black and white cinematography, in large format, and the minimal, abstract soundtrack, also contribute greatly to framing this beautiful but deserted universe, of an Italy rebuilt by the rules of a ferocious capitalism and a new idle bourgeoisie. Morally absent.
Fumer fait tousser (2022)
Never mind!
Quentin Dupieux is one of the most irreverent and original directors working today.
Said like that, it seems like a virtue and very occasionally it can be, but on most occasions his unquestionable irreverence and originality only leads to total and complete absurdity.
Note that I speak from the experience of someone who has seen four feature films and even a short film by Dupieux, each one more ridiculous than the last.
In Runner there is a killer tire that travels the North American roads in search of victims. In 100% Suede, a fur coat transforms a middle-aged man into a serial killer. In Mandibules, there are a pair of friends who find a giant fly and decide to train it, for inevitably disastrous ends. Finally, in this Smoking Makes You Cough, we have a group of Power Rangers, led by a giant, womanizing rat, like the head of the ninja turtles, fighting against insects and giant turtles, while telling gore stories to each other, in a spiritual retreat, with a talking barracuda participating in the gathering.
All of this is served using some of the most important French actors and actresses today.
If the objective is to scare the viewer with such nonsense, I recognize that it is fully achieved.
But if there should be some surreal message behind such incongruity, I confess that it has escaped me, almost completely.
Never mind!
Holy Spider (2022)
The Iranian Spider
Holy Spider is an intelligent criticism of the Iranian theocratic regime which, although it maintains an apparent legality, instills religious fanaticism in its population, to the point of provoking violence, especially against women.
It is a film that could never have been made in Iran, due to its clearly critical political message of theocratic power and the boldness of its scenes.
However, it is directed by an Iranian, who lives in Sweden, and with Iranian actors or Iranian descendants, exiled in Europe.
It was filmed in Jordan, which passes for Iran and the holy city of Mashhad, where the events that inspire the film took place.
While Iran does not change, Iranians change, especially abroad, but also, more slowly, in the mentality that supports their fundamentalist regime.
Chhello Show (2021)
The Magic of Light
The Indian Cinema Paradise is called Galaxy, it is located in a small town in Gujarat and its hero is a young Brahmin sorcerer's apprentice named Samay, which literally means time. The time that passes and makes projectors and old films obsolete, the time needed to grow up and learn English and above all to leave his small village of Chalala and embark on the great adventure of discovering light and the stories it has to tell.
A beautiful parable from a director who is also a self-taught artist, passionate about cinema, and who gained prominence on the world stage with the success of his debut film, Samsara, in 2001.
Nazarín (1959)
The Nazarene's Crisis of Faith
Dostoevsky made his character Ivan Karamazov create a poem, the Grand Inquisitor, in which he orders the arrest of Christ, returned to earth, condemning him to death at the stake.
Bunuel takes up the theme again in this Nazarín. It is not Christ, but a Catholic priest, determined to follow Jesus' example, to the last consequences. It is not the inquisition that persecutes and condemns him, but rather the contemporary Church and society, led by rich property owners, who persist in using the name of Christ to manipulate the faith of the ignorant people, for their benefit.
This essential idea has been repeated over the centuries, under the most varied heresies and ideologies. The Christian message is one of peace, solidarity, love, detachment from material goods, sharing and helping those most in need. Instead, the Church and temporal power have transformed Christianity into a straitjacket, which protects their interests and perpetuates the shameless exploitation of the weakest. And does it in the name of God and Christ.
The film's final message, however, is one of hope: there are still charitable souls who do good selflessly.
This is how the Nazarene's faith in man is renewed.
Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond - Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton (2017)
Scary
After watching several shows by Andy Kaufman on YouTube, I felt curious to watch the film Man on the Moon, and after seeing Man on the Moon I had to watch this documentary, about the making of the film and much more.
I had already written, in the commentary about the film, that Carrey seemed the obvious choice for the main role, because, like Kaufman, he too is much more than an actor, he is someone who lives somewhere between genius and madness.
This documentary proves how true this is, how far Carrey's madness goes in assuming the personality of Kaufman or Clifton, on and off stage, in the studio but also on the street, at home, in the car.
Jim Carrey, like Kaufman, is a separate being, someone who doesn't fit into any pattern of this world. He lives in an existential limbo where he could be Kaufman today, Clifton tomorrow and any other character the day after. He is a chameleon who not only changes his color but also his identity in each film, a zelig, using the Woody Allen metaphor, to the point that, sometimes, he no longer even knows what his identity is.
A frightening experience.
Man on the Moon (1999)
Between Genius and Madness
Andy Kaufman was a controversial figure in the few years he enjoyed notoriety, because he was probably as much a genius as he was a madman.
His boldness had no limits and at times it was scathing, at others it was shocking, because Andy (and Bob Zmuda and several other accomplices in his mystifications) loved to provoke the public, to the limit, pushing that limit further and further.
Even his premature death, at the age of 35, from a rare lung cancer, served as a pretext to provoke the public, leading many to believe that it was a hoax and that Kaufman was still alive, with posthumous appearances by his character Tony Clifton.
This film, produced by a team led by Danny de Vito, Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher (and which included Kaufman's eternal accomplice, Bob Zmuda) is a fitting tribute to this genius and madman, who shocked and amused America for less than a decade, but which was enough to elevate him to the restricted group of visionaries, of myths, that endure over time, for the originality and boldness with which they faced life and spectacle.
Well directed by Milos Forman, a multi-academy award-winning veteran, the film features many of Kaufman's real partners in his artistic life, the cast of Taxi, Budd Friedman, Richard Belzer, Lorne Michaels, fighter Jerry Lawler, Bob Zmuda in a secondary role (his character is played by Paul Giamatti), David Letterman, among others, as well as recreates many of the key moments of Kaufmann's career, with the real actors, recreating for the film, the programs and shows shared with Kaufman.
All that remains is to talk about the protagonist, Jim Carrey, himself a phenomenon that often oscillates between genius and madness, therefore an apparently perfect choice to bring Kaufmann's myth to life.
There is no doubt that Carrey does a remarkable job, especially with restraint, being a hyperactive actor, as he is known. The only drawback is that Carrey is too iconic to pass off as someone else. It's like having Elvis imitate Johnny Cash. No matter how good the imitation is, the public can never forget that it is Jim Carrey, just as they would never be convinced that Elvis was Cash. Magnificent as Carrey, but without ever truly convincing that he is Kaufman.
Tony Clifton, full of attitude and makeup, is however, always perfect, whether played by Carrey, Giamatti, or a possible and unknown third party, in the posthumous show.