Once (2006) - Directed by John Carney

 Note: This review is posted as part of the 101 Greatest Romance Films of All Time countdown occurring at Wonders in the Dark, coming in at #93.

Once is one of the defining romantic films of the new millennium, and the most touching elements are the chemistry and song writing skills of the two leads in the film. Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova had known each other for years, performing together as a folk duo prior to any involvement with this film. Hansard, as lead singer of The Frames, met Irglova back in 2001 in the Czech Republic when her father had organized a music festival, inviting The Frames to play there. Hansard, a veteran of the Irish music scene for years, began supporting Irglova and her piano career. Hansard and Irglova soon decided to join forces as a duo to write and record and play live as The Swell Season, releasing their self-titled debut album in 2006. On the album appears the seeds of Once, with the tracks Lies and Falling Slowly seeing their initial release. It would be on the backs of these and other songs, a real-life relationship unfolding, and the chemistry of hope and promise that would spur on this film that is touching, romantic and bittersweet and one of the best musicals of the modern era. It’s also a film that positions romance not necessarily defined by sex or declaration, but by inspiration, openness and friendship.

Irglova and Hansard were consulted by John Carney (former bassist for The Frames) for a film about street musicians in Dublin. Originally, Cillian Murphy was cast opposite Irglova, but pulled away from the project, unable to commit to singing Hansard’s songs. Hansard was then pulled in, creating an intimate opportunity for life, music, and film to overlap with astounding honesty and commitment. It’s about a Guy (Hansard) who’s Irish and a Girl who’s Czech (Irglova) who meet on the street when the Guy is playing songs on the sidewalk. They start off a tentative relationship, where she learns he repairs vacuums and she needs a vacuum fixed. The Girl and Guy begin to flirt and end up meeting again because of the vacuum, and then walk into her favorite music shop where she is allowed to play piano. He has his guitar and they both decide to play a song together that he has written. “Falling Slowly” unfolds before the camera as collaboration, mutual affection, and inspiration mesh in the lyrics and the eyes of the musicians. He is healing from a past relationship and she is living with her mother and daughter, while her husband is back home in the Czech Republic. This new relationship is a cautious but earnest dance of romantic yearning and companionship as they begin to play music together and share ideas. The Guy has several songs he wants to record and recruits The Girl and some other local musicians to rent out a studio for a day, where songs are recorded in one long session, creating a document of relationships, past and present. As the film ends, The Guy and The Girl part ways, he heading off to London to retrieve his old flame, and she, equipped with a new piano he buys her, is living again with her whole family, husband included. It is a delicately played finale, using hope and reflection as romantic climax.

There is no kissing or real romance on display whatsoever in this film, unless you count delicate eye contact, honesty, and friendship as romantic. Surely there are countless “romances” that never fully materialize for one reason or another in the fashion that most movies equate with the definition. It could be argued that some of the most touching and devastating romances in cinematic history, though, are defined by lovers not consummating the relationship or who don’t stay together at the end. Once is in this vein, but is even more restrained in its approach, almost to the point of emphasizing these are “just friends”. Yes, friends who are attracted to each other, but friends just the same. If the film achieves anything, it is all because of the utterly real chemistry of the two leads as they portray this friendship. Around the time of the making of the film, Irglova and Hansard became romantically linked and then on for a period of a few years. Thus, the film contains real, unforced, onscreen chemistry, like Bogie and Bacall or Hepburn and Tracy. But it is not filtered through professional acting and instead reflects a kind of ragamuffin, honesty. Due to their unfamiliarity with being filmed, Hansard and Irglova were often filmed from afar as it made them more comfortable not being so close to the camera. One can see examples of their lack of polished acting, yet it almost works to the advantage in this cinema verite style of filmmaking, where imperfections in acting are leveraged by the filmmaker for greater effect.

Maybe the best way to convey what works about this film, is from a segment of an interview that Irglova did with The Huffington Post back in 2011:

Huffington Post: Along with Glen Hansard, you received an Academy Award for Best Song for the movie Once. Marketa, your on screen chemistry was amazing. Though your music was beautiful and the plot was special, I honestly think what drew people into that movie the most was the beautiful depiction of your relationship.

Irglova: Oh, thank you. Once is a perfect example of synchronicity and serendipity in life that happens when you're open. There are so many parallels between the film and real life and the lives of John Carney--the director and the screenwriter--and Glen and mine. The script was written and my character was developed before John Carney even met me, and there were so many similarities in terms of my life and the life of this woman and how the two characters in the movie meet and how Glen and I met, so it was this beautiful thing of the lines blurring in terms of what is real and what is fiction. I think that's, in a way, the perfect way to it to be because sometimes art imitates life and other times, life imitates art. It really walks this full circle, in a way. Working with the director on the film was most inspiring in a way that it was very much open. He recognized the friendship between Glen and I, and that was a big reason why he cast us in the first place--because he saw us play together in Dublin, and whatever chemistry we had together onstage was the one he was looking for in his film. So, once he cast us, he kind of allowed us to express the friendship that we naturally had and allowed for that to be felt throughout the movie within the context of the characters that he had written. So, I absolutely agree that there's something very authentic and sincere about the love between the characters and the love that Glen and I have for one another.”

Through collaboration and honesty, both The Guy and The Girl end up better people through the relationship. It is a film that defines romantic epiphany not through sex, but through inspiration, with the lasting document of this inspiration being the music they created together. Though they don’t consummate this love, they “birth” music and achieve a different kind of family unit together.

Touch of Evil (1958) - Directed by Orson Welles

I’m not sure if it’s the saddest tale in all of Hollywood, but Orson Welles’ fall from grace within the studio system surely left quite a large stain upon cinematic history. As I’ve grown older, I've become more attuned to the passing of time as both a marker of progress and of what was left unaccomplished. In the case of Orson Welles, we should actually count our lucky stars that we have what we have. There of course is Citizen Kane, made at the outset of a career where he was a wunderkind who quickly fell into a situation from which he never recovered, having film after film taken from his controls. Most consider the lost passages of The Magnificent Ambersons to have contained elements that may have made it even greater than Kane. Then there’s all the messiness of the rest of his career, loaded with unfinished films, bizarrely financed ones, the Shakespearean adaptations, the “documentaries”, and of course Touch of Evil. There is something just so gloriously cathartic and sad about an aging and paunchy cop in the throes of his own demise, made terrifically humanistic by Welles’ portrayal in this film. What makes it resonate even further, are the struggles that Welles had to even get the film released as he envisioned, something he never saw happen in his lifetime.

Welles’ Touch of Evil is one of the last examples of film noir from the classic period. It stars Charlton Heston as Mike Vargas, a drug enforcement official for the Mexican government,  who has just been married to Susie (Janet Leigh). They witness a car bomb explosion on the U.S. – Mexico border and quickly, several investigators join the scene, including police Captain Hank Quinlan (Welles). The investigation leads to a suspect named Sanchez, who is interrogated in his apartment. 2 Sticks of dynamite are found in Sanchez’s apartment, but Vargas suspects that Quinlan planted the dynamite there to frame Sanchez. Vargas decides to look into Quinlan’s police records and determines many of his cases involved evidence that the accused was not aware of. Meanwhile, Susie ends up in some trouble of her own after she begins staying at a small, rather vacant motel (Psycho anyone?), where she is kidnapped and then used by Quinlan to try and ruin the name of Mike Vargas by framing her for the murder of a thug named Grandi and with drug involvement. Vargas is at the end of his wits when Quinlan’s assistant detective Pete Menzies (Joseph Calleia) notifies Vargas that he found Quinlan’s cane at the scene of the crime, thereby convincing Vargas that he was right all along, leading to the fantastic conclusion where Vargas and Menzies attempt to bug Quinlan’s conversation to incriminate himself in order to bring Quinlan to justice.

For all the convoluted-ness of the plot, it’s actually remarkable how well the film holds together despite the raggedness and disjointed qualities. Many key sequences of continuity were lost once Welles lost control of the editing of the film for its theatrical release. His 58 page memo to Universal Pictures detailed his wishes of what should be fixed in order to make the film complete. It was reduced to 93 minutes from his original 112 minute cut for original release. In 1998, the film was restored, to the best approximation possible to Welles’ information found in his memo to the studio. However one looks at all the different versions and incarnations of the film, what is so staggering is the look and feel of the film. There is so much kinetic camerawork that was filmed by Russell Metty with a few key tracking shots and shaky-cam shots giving a vibrant sense of discombobulation. Also, Welles’s prototypical Dutch angle shots and low angle shots predominate, along with low-lit scenes with deep amounts of shadows pervading throughout. Welles’s vision of creating a world where wrong outweighs right seems to reflect the bizarre and garish lighting and angles, along with Mancini’s pulsing and often atonal score. There is an uneasy kind of squeamishness to the whole film that is hard to look away from and is one of the reasons why I love the film so much.

What I love best though, is the performance by Welles himself, who here gives his greatest on screen performance. Welles was so often a vocal actor in his earlier career. His voice inflections carry so much weight that it’s hard to sometimes focus on the physical quality of his acting. Not so in Touch of Evil, where the sheer physical size of his presence and his bulbous and swollen face seem to be larger than life. The camera likes to over-emphasize this at key moments, positioning Welles’ face in grotesque close-up at sometimes odd angles. In fact, Welles seems to be relishing the opportunity to undermine his own sense of stardom, tossing off the trappings of youth and ambition and laying it all bare for the world to see, nearly deliberately making himself repulsive. Welles captures and embodies a kind of sad-sack persona in Hank Quinlan, a pathetic and previously confident man who is quickly seeing the end of a long run at the top of the heap. How Welles makes Quinlan such a compelling figure is a great feat of acting. Quinlan is such a sleaze-ball, yet I’m torn between wanting him to see justice and also feeling pity for the guy. Perhaps it’s because Welles toned down his vocal ticks and aggressive confidence in this film, which forced him to stretch for effect and emotion in other areas, like quietness and pensiveness and sadness and regret. It’s a terrific performance and not something to be ignored. I don’t think Touch of Evil is Welles's best film. That would be a hard argument to put forth. It’s just my own personal favorite of his. 

Persona (1966) - Directed by Ingmar Bergman

I’ve deliberately avoided reading much analysis about one of my favorite films of all time. Persona stands as one of the canonical art house films of its time, and you'll find (from what little I’ve read), that the film is usually considered a kind of visceral and tonal response to the avant garde cinema of the time…..Bergman’s “anything you can do I can do better” response to the Antonionis, Godards, and Fellinis of European cinema. Of any reading I’ve done, perhaps it was Roger Ebert’s Great Movies review that spoke to me best where he comments that “Persona is a film we return to over the years, for the beauty of its images and because we hope to understand its mysteries.” In my own life, I tend to return to this film every couple years just for these reasons. But, in a way, I’m not sure I ever truly hope to understand the film, even if it was possible to do so. Maybe it’s why I don’t read much analysis of the film. I want it to remain a thought process for me, a bafflement but an emotionally grounded bafflement at that. It is the constant hoping for understanding but the comfort of not truly understanding that makes me return to it…. that and the overwhelming beauty (and sometimes terror) of the images and the acting.

Bergman’s plot to Persona, on a literal level, is about a nurse named Alma (Bibi Andersson) who is charged to care for a patient named Elisabet (Liv Ullmann). Elisabet, a famous actress, has suddenly and without warning, decided to become completely silent, refraining from all forms of verbal communication. All indications are that she has a husband and a young child. Alma, based upon the recommendations of the lead doctor, takes Elisabet to a secluded home near the coast where healing and rest can take place. Over time, the two women seem to bond, as Alma bears her soul to the silent Elisabet, conveying past sins and regrets and a whole host of expressions. However, one day when Alma is taking some mail to be delivered into town, she reads a letter that Elisabet is writing to her husband, whereby Elisabet admits that Alma is an interesting person to study. Alma becomes bitter and feels used by Elisabet. They begin to clash, with confrontations becoming increasingly violent and vitriolic. One day, the two women seem to have some kind of epiphany, where they seem to become one individual. From then on, it's open to interpretation on what it all means. 

The number of films that I would consider to be visually overwhelming, such that the frame is filled with a kind of immersive attempt to convey an obsession of intimacy to thus achieve a heightened emotional response. Only The Passion of Joan of Arc and The Double Life of Veronique come to mind, in addition to Persona. No more prevalent was this feeling than when I watched it last night on the new Blu-Ray Criterion release. I was struck by just how much of the film is shot in close-up, even extreme close-up. These large and detailed images of the faces of the actresses, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman, strike an intense awareness of intimacy for us, with a power appropriated to the images by us as we are not used to being this close and intimate with anyone in our lives….. except lovers or family members. If you are close enough to see every pore on someone’s face for an extended period of time, it is likely you are in some kind of close and intimate relationship. Indeed, Bergman and master cinematographer Sven Nykvist achieve a kind of orgiastic and sensual obsession with the human face. At the same time, there is a duality of nature to these beautiful images, though, in that they appear almost otherworldly, ghostly, horrific or even abstract. Thus, we are simultaneously drawn to and taken aback by the same images. One example of this occurs as both women’s faces look into the camera as they embrace during the dream sequence at night (ghostly), and then later in the film where their faces merge into 2 halves of a whole (horrific). I suppose the early sequence where the boy is face to face with a large and blurry screen with alternating faces of the actresses may also qualify here (abstract). He reaches out to touch the image in a queasy, sickening kind of love caress. I’m not sure if I’m able to articulate the intensity of feeling that the images of the faces convey, but there is something so shocking and intense about being so close to these images. You can show me a close-up of an animal or an object and I may respond mildly….but show me a close-up of a face and there is suddenly an intimacy, or even a voyeuristic projection from the audience into the images, especially if the images are only viewed in one direction, with the audience being in the position of anonymity.

I don’t come to surmise exactly how the film ends or what it all means, but there are moments where I believe I’ve got it all figured out. Moments of mistaken identity, and duality of nature seem to lead to conclusions whereby the women are two halves of the same self. I suppose this reading is enhanced if you view the end of the film when Alma leaves the house all cleaned up and boards the bus by herself, with no trace of Elisabet. I’ve felt on more than one occasion that Alma is perhaps the physical and Elisabet the psychological side of the same person and this would be my preferred interpretation.  I suppose it’s also possible that they are two separate individuals, but that Alma is developing some kind of schizophrenic personality, or that they merge into one being, hence they arrive as two, but leave as one.  But does it really matter? Part of the allure for me, as I mentioned before, is not understanding it, but experiencing it. Even if someone were to explain the film in totality, it would not add to the appeal for me. Bergman's masterpiece stands the test of time because of the imagery and the performances, not the structure per se. Liv Ullman’s near wordless performance in her first film strikes notes of openness and compassion despite her silence. Bibi Andersson gives the performance of her career here, and is likely one of the greatest of turns by any actress. Her voice, her facial expressions and her changes in tone from loving to hateful run the full gamut. Nykvist’s camera is the other star. Probing and framing with impossible perfection, the natural light and curvatures of the women’s faces in Persona is one of cinema’s greatest expressions of beauty. And maybe that’s what the appeal of the film boils down to. Nykvist is able to capture the beauty and texture of the faces while Bergman is able to command and utilize the inherent intimacy of such imagery for deep dramatic and emotional effect. That’s why the film is so powerful for me.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) - Directed by Michel Gondry

As I sit down to write this essay, I realize that I haven’t written a thing in nearly 2 months. It is due to both a combination of not really being enthused about any films I’ve seen in the last couple months and also from the sheer burden of keeping up with life in all its vast responsibilities and possibilities. On any given day, it’s amazing how many choices we can make and how many different directions we can go in. It’s a wonder that most of us end up each night in roughly the same place as the night before, probably sleeping in the same bed, under the same roof. When you stop and think of the complexities of life, it’s amazing how our brains have a vast ability to keep us, for the most part, grounded. Some of us are faced with more challenges than others. Some of us thrive on change and pressure more than others. But, for the most part, there are routines that each of us follow, day in and day out. Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is many things, but at it's core, it somehow captures a certain quality about how our brains work, and the choices we make (both consciously and unconsciously), while also remarkably capturing a vast humanist element at the same time. This coupling of a structural analysis and a humanistic decomposition of our mind’s process yields one of cinema’s most memorable attempts at capturing our existence. It’s also one of the most beautiful and poignant attempts to show the duality of love relationships….the beauty and tragedy of a life spent trying to preserve ourselves yet also at times risking everything for love and acceptance.

Gondry’s masterful film concerns the current mindstate of Joel, played with a relaxed and almost morose quality by Jim Carrey. At the beginning of the film, we see what looks like the beginning of a relationship between he and a woman named Clementine (Kate Winslet) who happen to meet in Montauk, NY on a day when Joel has decided to ditch work on a random whim…..or maybe not so random. This initial sequence sets up a poignancy after we realize later that this isn’t the first time Joel and Clementine have met. It only FEELS like it to them. In the weeks and months prior, they were both in a relationship together that was filled with lots of beautiful moments and many ugly moments. It got to a point where both of them determined they wanted to erase each other from their memories. Thus, they each hired a firm called Lacuna to conduct such a procedure. Clementine has the erasing done first. When Joel learns of it, he decides to join her in the process. This premise sets up the beautiful second half whereby the Lacuna crew (played by Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Tom Wilkinson, and Kirsten Dunst), attempt to erase each memory of the relationship from Joel’s mind. Meanwhile in Joel’s subconscious, non-waking state, he attempts to preserve and salvage some memory of Clementine as he realizes it would be far better to retain some of the good memories along with the bad memories, rather than remove all memory of their relationship altogether.

The recently deceased Alain Resnais surely must have seen commonalities between his works and Gondry’s film. Being that the screenplay was written by Charlie Kaufman, the film's look and feel is also as much his as Gondry’s, with Kaufman’s unique perspectives of reality on display, which are in turn leveraging processes and techniques that Resnais built back in the 1950’s and 60’s. Resnais was able to blend past and present into a commonality. He didn’t allow for a separation of past and present. As he once stated, “The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn’t be in flashback.” It could be argued that Resnais’s singular, distilled essence was to emphasize this point. Gondry and Kaufman build upon this foundation, essentially turning the present and past into a common experience, inseparable from each other, with present and past intermingling to such a degree that there is no distinction. So often during the film, we witness Jim Carrey’s current perspective embedded in a past memory, such that he and Clementine exist in two states at the same time, or more simply put.....just a single state of being. In what might be the best sequence in the film, Joel attempts to find a place in his mind where he can hide the memory of Clementine so far deep in his brain that the Lacuna company can’t find it. He places himself and Clementine into a memory when he was 4 years old, hiding under the kitchen table and witnessing the interaction of Clementine and his mother, with Clementine taking the place of his mom’s friend. Clementine and Joel are privy to the fact that they are attempting to hide from Lacuna at the present time, while concurrently existing in an experience from 30 years prior. Thus, the past and present become one experience for them.

What makes the film so desperately romantic, is in fact the idea of a relationship which has gone off track and the duality of wanting to remember and wanting to forget at the same time. For Joel, what starts out as a desire to forget everything, ends up as a fight to preserve at least some of the good along with the bad. We can all recall relationships that either never got off the ground or crashed and burned over time. This film asks, "would we rather maintain the memories, both the good with the bad, or remove them entirely?" The poignancy of this question is posed in such a way that the film emphasizes the sensitive beauty and tragedy of our memories. Memories can stir such different reactions depending on what they are. But to erase them is a scary proposition, not just because of the loss of recollection, but for the loss of experience and learning. What happens at the end of the film, as Joel and Clementine realize the mistakes they made in the past, they learn to overlook the pursuit of the safe approach and choose the messiness of existence over sanitized love. They choose passion over perfection. This is such a relatable and poignant conclusion, it can’t help but conjure a hopeful, humanistic conveyance. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet provide a grounded presence throughout the film with their beautiful and varied performances. Winslet in particular conveys alternate approaches, particularly as she exists post memory loss, ending up in a temporary relationship with the Elijah Wood character, who is attempting to duplicate Joel’s courtship of Clementine. She has this way of appearing lost in a certain spatial plane that is neither here nor there. Gondry’s willingness to lose the audience for periods of time is brazen in his confidence in that he knows he will recover us later as things come together. I must admit it was 10 years between viewings and it’s amazing how beautifully the film comes together upon repeated viewing. Although there is already a dated, low-tech vibe to the film (no cell phones, primitive computer systems), the film hardly suffers from them, with the warmth of human contact taking center stage. Charlie Kaufman’s script is as loose and free as it is deliciously pragmatic. Once you watch the film, it’s amazing how intricately designed it is. No wonder he won the best Screenplay Oscar that year. What stands out for me, are the beautiful sequences as Joel and Clementine race to hide in Joel’s mind, attempting to preserve small semblances of their love and experience together, learning from these experiences on how to be better people and building a greater love and appreciation for each other. It is one of cinema’s most truly lovely expressions of romantic love.

My Favorite films of 2013

There's no way I've seen all the films I need to in order to do full justice to this list. I still haven't seen Like Someone in Love and am still waiting for Beyond the Hills to get some kind of distribution. But at some point, you just need to put 2013 to bed. I think 2013 was a tremendous year for film. Probably the best year in the last decade. Last year I had a hard time filling out a top 10. This year, my 10 favorite films (actually 11) are all top notch, and there were a several others that I had a hard time leaving off my top 10, including (ahem), Frozen. Anyway, now that we're already 1/4 of the way through 2014, these are my favorite films of 2013. And now I can move on. (ratings are out of 4 stars)

1. 12 Years a Slave (2013) - McQueen ****
- There was no more powerful film last year than this one. It even gained in stature for me after I read Northup's incredible memoir. I will not soon forget this one. McQueen's greatest feat was bringing the stone-cold emotional honesty of the memoir, whilst not selling out to sentiment.

2. Before Midnight (2013) - Linklater ****
- Perhaps the best film of the trilogy, Linklater's labor of love with his stars Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke is another superb entry in what is turning into more of a lifelong relationship examined on film. As Celine and Jesse age, the entire trilogy continues to morph and shift as our perceptions of past and present perceptions of this couple changes.

3. Gravity (2013) - Cuaron ****
- The funnest and most breathtaking experience I've had in a theater in about 8 years. And when I say breathtaking, I really mean it. I felt out of breath at the end of the film. It's a memorable leap forward for technological effects and the advance of cinema as experience. It's also a deeply felt humanistic tale and well acted by Bullock.

4. The Act of Killing (2012) - Oppenheimer ****
- It's hard to completely fathom how this film got made. But Joshua Oppenheimer has made a documentary for the ages. Scorching, brazen, appalling, and unforgettable.

5. Laurence Anyways (2012) - Dolan ****
- Mostly went unnoticed, this Canadian release from 2012 that played in the US last year is an unabashed love story with tinges of Kubrick and Fassbinder. It's loaded with style and although it has a long running time, it also has an epic and tragic leaning that I couldn't get enough of.

6. Prisoners (2013) - Villaneuve ****
- My favorite procedural since Silence of the Lambs (and without sensationalizing the crime). Villaneuve's film is utterly creepy and gets under your skin. I had this film on the brain for weeks. Jackman and Gyllenhaal have never been better.

7. Blue Jasmine (2013) - Allen ****
- Allen's best film since Match Point, nearly a decade a go. True, though the film is a tremendous vehicle for Cate Blanchett, it also contains a great deal of Shakespearean elements and class dynamics. Superbly acted by the ensemble and really an engaging film.

8. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) - Scorsese *** 1/2
- This was the most talked about film for awhile there, but when you boil it down to pure cinema and bravado, nothing could top it. Hard to believe that Scorsese still has this much energy, but his film made American Hustle look boring by comparison. Scorsese is remarkably successful portraying comedy as grand circus, with DiCaprio an excellent ring leader.

9. To the Wonder (2013) - Malick ****
- Malick's darkest and most doubt-laden film was his most poorly received film yet, mainly due to the public's and critic's misreading of it. If The Tree of Life displays spiritual birth, then To the Wonder examines spiritual doubt. Once all is said and done, the film will likely settle nicely into Malick's canon. It just might take awhile. I found it to be gorgeous, romantic, and unsettling.

10. Short Term 12 (2013) - Cretton ****
- At times the film begins to veer into tv movie territory, but reality and honesty are constantly setting things straight. Brie Larson as a social worker taking care of troubled teens is just amazing. It's as moving and honest as any film from last year.

11. Fill the Void (2012) - Burshtein *** 1/2
- I'm making room for this one on my list. This is the one film that took me somewhere I felt I'd never seen before. Rama Burshtein brought me into the Hassidic Jewish world of arranged marriages and makes it feel simultaneously unique and common, building upon the kinds of societal and relational pressures common to the works of Jane Austen, but transporting them to a world rarely filmed.



Honorable Mention:
Afternoon Delight (2013) - Soloway ***
The Attack (2012) - Doueiri *** 1/2
Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) - Kechiche ***
Captain Phillips (2013) - Greengrass ***
Frances Ha (2012) - Baumbach ***
Frozen (2013) - Buck, Lee *** 1/2
The Kings of Summer (2013) - Vogt-Roberts ***
Cutie and the Boxer (2013) - Heinzerling ***
Mud (2013) - Nichols ***


The rest of 2013: In alphabetical order....

Ain't Them Bodies Saints (2013) - Lowrey **
All is Lost (2013) - Chandor ** 1/2
American Hustle (2013) - Russell **
August: Osage County (2013) - Wells ***
A Band Called Death (2012) - Covino ***
Behind the Candelabra (2013) - Soderbergh **
Blackfish (2013) - Cowperwaithe ***
The Bling Ring (2013) - Coppola **
Blue Caprice (2013) - Moors ***
The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012) - Van Groeningen * 1/2
The Butler (2013) - Daniels ***
Computer Chess (2013) - Bujalski **
The Conjuring (2013) - Wan **
Dallas Buyer's Club (2013) - Vallee **
Fruitvale Station (2013) - Coogler ***
The Gatekeepers (2013) - Moreh ** 1/2
Gatsby (2013) - Luhrman **
Gimme the Loot (2012) - Leon ** 1/2
Goodbye First Love (2012) - Hansen-Love **
The Great Beauty (2013) - Sorrentino ***
Hannah Arendt (2012) - Von Trotta ***
Her (2013) - Jonze ***
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) - Lawrence ** 1/2
The Hunt (2013) - Vinterberg **
I'm So Excited (2013) - Almodovar * 1/2
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) - Coen **
Leviathan (2012) - Castaing-Taylor * 1/2
Mama (2013) - Muschietti ***
Nebraska (2013) - Payne ***
Night Across the Street (2012) - Ruiz ** 1/2
No (2013) - Larrain ** 1/2
Only God Forgives (2013) - Refn * 1/2
Oz: The Great and Powerful (2013) - Raimi ***
Pain and Gain (2013) - Bay **
The Place Beyond the Pines (2013) - Cianfrance ***
Post Tenabras Lux (2012) - Reygadas ** 1/2
Prince Avalanche (2013) - Green **
Renoir (2012) - Bourdos ** 1/2
Rush (2013) - Howard * 1/2
Saving Mr. Banks (2013) - Hancock ** 1/2
Side Effects (2013) - Soderberg ** 1/2
Something in the Air (2012) - Assayas **
The Spectacular Now (2013) - Ponsoldt **
Spring Breakers (2013) - Korine ***
Stoker (2013) - Park **
Stories We Tell (2013) - Polley ** 1/2
Therese (2012) - Miller ** 1/2
Touchy Feely (2013) - Shelton **
Trance (2013) - Boyle **
Upstream Color (2013) - Carruth ** 1/2
The Way Way Back (2013) - Faxon/Rash ** 1/2
The We and the I (2013) - Gondry ** 1/2
What Maisie Knew (2013) - McGehee **
The World's End (2013) - Wright ** 1/2
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (2013) - ** 1/2

Waterloo Bridge (1931) - Directed by James Whale

Though remade a couple of times since, the original film adaptation of the play by the same name remains a definitive romantic film from the 1930’s. Made at about the same time as many of Maurice Chevalier’s little escapist romances and musicals, Waterloo Bridge plays as a sort of romantic pre-coder with a more pessimistic core. It captures the same sorts of time-pressured romantic entanglements that have been one of cinema’s greatest romantic interests: That of two lovers or would-be lovers who do not have time on their side. There’s also a fascinating emotional transparency on display and a rather inquisitive nature to observe interaction and dialogue without intent to over-dramatize or over-sensationalize the scenario, especially when considering the era in which it was made. Let’s face it.... falling in love with a prostitute isn’t exactly something we’ve never seen before. But it was never approached with the degree of subtlety and lack of sentimentality than it was here in Waterloo Bridge.

Waterloo Bridge stars Mae Clarke as an American showgirl named Myra, living in London, who is down on her luck and selling herself to soldiers to make ends meet.  One evening, she has a meet-cute with a WWI American Soldier named Roy (Kent Douglass) on Waterloo Bridge during an air raid. She portrays herself to him as a showgirl and not a prostitute. They both return to her apartment where they spend the evening talking and getting to know each other, whereupon Roy decides he wants to help her out by paying her rent. She is insulted and nearly throws him out, but is already smitten and attached to him so she apologizes. They begin a hot and cold relationship that is threatened by Roy’s future return to the battle lines, and by Myra’s refusal to tell him about her past, which keeps her from opening herself up to his marriage proposals. At one point, he goads her into spending some time with his family at their large home where she feels threatened by her own conscience as she still hasn’t confided to Roy. Myra continues to run and Roy continues to pursue despite the challenges, bringing them to a tear-filled departure on Waterloo Bridge as Roy must head to the battle lines. Unbeknownst to them, this moment will be the last time they ever see each other.

James Whale, he of Frankenstein fame, directs this pre-coder with a large degree of restraint. There’s actually very little of the ubiquitous cleavage and lingerie of the era and potential scenes of prostitution are few and far between, with precious few minutes actually devoted to her professional endeavors. So although the film is about a woman who is a prostitute, this never becomes a preachy film about prostitution. Instead, most of the focus is on the face to face interaction between Myra and Roy as they flirt and retreat, plead and yearn, laugh and cry. Both Mae Clark and Kent Douglas give unaffected and emotionally fragile performances. These are both two relatively inexperienced, young actors whose insecurity onscreen translates into fragile portrayals of individuals who are yearning for a connection but afraid of being hurt and of hurting others, relegating their emotional states into something resembling a paralyzed love, a yearning and an intention that lacks the blunt truth to survive. Both Clark and Douglas have terrific chemistry together and both look great onscreen. Each has this way of naturally hanging out and feeling comfortable. They don't have to be speaking to be communicating. There is a strange, beautiful, and poetic infusion of un-rushed sincerity to their scenes.

What on paper feels very much like cliché is realized in such a way that the emphasis is on character development and emotional context.  Pressures of war and hunger drives each to believe they are making decisions that are in the best interest of the other. As the audience understands slightly more than the characters do, there is a hushed and tragic suspense to this romance that really never seems to get off the ground in proper fashion. Denial though, is often more romantic than coupling itself, as examples from Casablanca to Brief Encounter remind us of that old question...... “Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?” Are the brief memories of beauty that are coupled with deep pain to be preferred over nothingness and numbness? This is a central question common to many a love story both in real life and in the movies. As far as the romantic movies go, Waterloo Bridge is one of the best. 

The Blogging Doldrums

Maybe it's just me, but blogging this winter has become, oddly, a bit of a chore. I'm not sure whether it's been this horrendously long, cold, and snowy winter, a lack of quality film viewings, or some other random combination of things, but I've seemingly run out of films that I've been interested in writing about. I've still been watching tons of movies, but nothing has really caught my fancy in the last couple of months since most of the new films that I really liked, such as Wolf of Wall Street or 12 Years a Slave are now far in the rearview mirror. 

Don't get me wrong; I still enjoy writing and blogging, but unless there is something I'm passionate about, it's hard to find time to write. I am looking forward to the upcoming Romance countdown at WiTD, and expect to submit several essays to that effort, but in the meantime, I will continue to only write about films that really drive a passion.