Spring in a Small Town (1948)

Saw Spring in a Small Town, a quiet but intense melodrama about a woman who is married to a sickly man.  You can see trouble brewing as soon as a visitor comes to their small household: a good friend of the husband and the childhood sweetheart of the wife.  The wife and the visitor care for the sickly husband and begin the long slow process of circling around each other, unwilling to hurt each other, but both still longing for the other.  It's forbidden love, 1940s style!

The film is somewhat mannered.  No more than contemporary American films, but differently.  There's scenes where the characters dramatically pose before launching into some dramatic act.  Curiously, there's not a lot of monologues.  The central woman does a lot of acting by way of little pauses, her downturned gaze bespeaking an intense inner struggle.  There's a lot of pregnant pauses and unspoken feelings.  The result is that the feelings can be as intense as we understand them to be.  Well done.

The film is somewhat pokey however.  I admit I wasn't in the mood for a family melodrama, so this film didn't really hit the spot, but I could tell even so that this is a well-made film.  It seems to celebrate self-sacrifice which feels troublesome and uncomfortable.  You shouldn't be too self-centered of course, but staying in what seems to be a loveless marriage, just out of a sense of duty?  It feels like it's asking too much.  The past was a different time.

The film is good.  It's a little old, but brief for all that.  It's an interesting, small, quietly big film.

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

Saw The Boy and the Heron, a typically masterful film from Studio Ghibli.  This one reminded me a lot of Howl's Moving Castle, another film that hearkens back to arcadian idylls, full of vast monuments, intricate passages, and malevolent danger. The film doesn't directly steal from anything, but echoes MC Escher, the grotesques of Felix Colgrave and Jan Švankmajer.  The film is so touching and grand.

The opening of the film gives Pixar's Up a run for the fastest a film can break your heart: we open on the main character's memories of his mother dying in a fire.  This haunts him and he becomes a stern, serious little boy who is always ready to do the right thing, ready to pull the next victim from a fire.  The film is set against the backdrop of a burgeoning WW2, when the whole world was bracing itself, steeling itself; preparing itself to make the great self-sacrifice.  This rigidity is the boy's strength and his weakness.  He is ready to do battle with magical forces, but he cannot bring himself to face his classmates.

The film is packed with wonderful whimsey.  There's a gang of seven old women who look like wrinkled little frogs and who gleefully cackle over potted meat.  In addition to the titular heron, there are lots of birds, some sinister, some pathetic.  There are many set-pieces with the gorgeous intricacy of the bathhouse from Spirited Away or the club house from From Up on Poppy Hill. This is a world I would love to live in, even as the characters shout cryptic warnings about waking the dead.

I loved this film.  It opened with an almost palpable sense of doom: the little boy, newly traumatized by the death of his mother seems to be thrust in a new situation and engaged in self-destruction.  Indeed, about a fourth of the way through, I thought I was going to write that this is the closest Miyazaki has come to a horror movie.  But soon after that, the film deepens, and opens, and lifts, and it gets slowly better.  Just a lovely film.

Winter Light (1963)

Saw Winter Light, an Ingmar Bergman film about a priest who is having a crisis of faith.  We open on a celebration of the mass in front of a nearly empty church.  The organist yawns as he starts the music.  The priest has no emotion in his voice and has the flu.  The film is subtle and ambiguous.  Famously, Ingmar's wife said of this film "Yes, Ingmar, it's a masterpiece. But it's a dreary masterpiece."

The nature of the priest's crisis of faith is the central point of the film.  I felt that the only way to satisfyingly end the film was for the priest to recover his faith (happy ending!) or to reject it in some way (stupid ending!) The film leaves it nicely ambiguous right up to the end though.  The priest's plight is likened to Jesus in the garden of gethsemane, praying while his apostles slept and ignored him.  As opposed to that image, this priest is merely letting himself down: he has a faithful woman who loves him, his advice is sought by the congregation, he does not seem to be being abandoned.

Despite this lack of abandonment however, the priest finds it hard to have faith in his God, his mission, and himself.  This doubt leads to guilt leads to self-loathing which prevents him from being of use and prevents him from receiving help.  We sort of leave him there - still acting out the lingering fumes of an exhausted faith.  The ending is deliciously ambiguous though: is this the dying gasp or the reclamation I hoped for (the happy ending?) It's a nice little study of a film, a stark yet ambiguous look at a man in crisis.

Consuming Spirits (2012)

Saw Consuming Spirits, a somewhat grim animated film about three people living in some dreary Appalachian town.  It features the usual elements of a cramped, small-town drama: addiction, mental health issues, divorce and infidelity.  Everyone in the film is ugly and advertisements play on the radio for "institution-grade" meat products.  Yes, this is one of those universes where things kind of comically suck.  Despite the grim and confusion start however, the film coheres into a touching, almost comforting story.

The film is very sad.  The characters are hopeless, stuck in this town in jobs which they are failing at and in romances that are continuing more out of inertia and faith than out of any affection.  The title of the film does a lot of nice work laying the thematic background: "Consuming Spirits" can be read as either ghosts which devour or just plain old drinking beer.  These two interpretations are tied together by the legacy of alcoholism that haunts the characters.

The film has the rough, unfinished look of a work print.  Some scenes are animated in Southpark-style paper puppets, some are stop-motion miniatures, some are traditional drawings.  Adding to this loose, raw feeling is the narration which is provided by the host of a radio gardening show who waxes poetical about vegetables and pests, weeds and deer.  At one point he says of deer "A rutting deer may lose the fear of man altogether when unsated.  Beware these cloven messengers of the hybrid knowledge.  They are the keepers of my crypt!"  Believe it or not, this statement makes more sense after you know the full story.  It's not just wild set-dressing (I mean it is that, but not just that.)

The film is interesting.  It's fairly dismal, reminding me of Phil Mulloy's Cowboys shorts.  The animation is off-putting and the subject matter is challenging.  The film feels long and it drags a bit here and there, but it wraps together nicely and is much more coherent and cohesive than you'd expect.

The Wild Child (1970)

Saw The Wild Child, a film about a feral boy who is slowly brought into the machinery of normal society.  It was interesting.  It was based on the nonfiction case report of the doctor who was treating the feral boy.  It's interesting seeing this kid slowly adopt clothing, learn to ask for things, slowly crawl out of the hole they were left in as a child living in the wild, exposed to the elements.

I don't have any particular thoughts about this movie.  It's pleasant, admittedly in a sort of severe, dry, French kind of way, but it is pleasant and uplifting to see the boy's progress.  I suppose there's a parallel to be drawn here between our own innate desires vs society: how people are willing to be indulgent, but only for so far and for so long.  Eventually, you will have to behave.  Rather than this being a dower story of innate nature crushed, this is an uplifting story about reaching potential.

I enjoyed the movie but don't have a lot to say about it.

The Death of Stalin (2017)

Saw The Death of Stalin, a film which is a comedy, in spite of its title and subject matter.  Indeed, the plot follows the pant-shitting panic of the heads of the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death.  I enjoyed it a lot.

The film contains a strange mix of tragedy and comedy.  There's an element of whimsy in the fact that an insurgent's note wishing death upon Stalin is the actual cause of his death, but there's an element of realism in that Stalin, reading the note, chuckles to himself and later on that it's stuffed into the pocket of one of the other bureaucrats with an indifferent grunt.  These men are realists pretending to be idealists, their power magnifying their smallness.

The film is pretty funny though.  In the spirit of In The Loop and other political dramas, it mostly centers around petty squabbles, men in suits jockeying for power, overreacting, stuttering, dithering, frantically browbeating each other into going along with their plans which lead nowhere.  There's a lot of humor to be had from these dower grey men just standing in sumptuous halls of power and being catty bitches to each other.

From what I've heard, the film was fairly accurate to life as well.  Of course liberties were taken for the sake of comedy, but Lavrentiy Beriya apparently really was like that.  Likewise Khrushchev.  Michael Palin plays a hilariously intense Molotov and Jeffrey Tambor plays a wonderfully limp stand-in Stalin.  There's an element of grimness, but a fair amount of silliness too.  It's as though The Lives of Others was made as a comedy.

Antonio das Mortes (1969)

Saw Antonio das Mortes, the sequel to Black God, White Devil.  This film follows a bounty hunter,  Antonio, who comes out of retirement to kill his last bandit, the legendary Lampião (a real person in Brazilian history.)  In the opening text crawl we are told that Antonio is similar to St George who slew a dragon.  We are told up-front that Antonio is going to kill the dragon of evil.  Lampião then would seem to be this dragon, but when Antonio confronts Lampião, Lampião reminds him that he is merely the lap-dog of the landlords and the bourgeoise.  It is they who are the dragon and Antonio is their servant.

The film indulges in a lot of 1960s art-house stuff.  We get slow pans and grimy film-stock.  Scenes of crowds chanting or men fighting seem to stretch on forever, reels of film unspooling while nothing happens.  We are given plenty of time to sit and meditate over the film, but I could have done with something a little punchier (such is my weakness.)

There's an interesting use of seeming anachronism.  When we first see Lampião, he seems to be surrounded by a mob of medieval peasants.  We see men in button-up shirts wandering around however and realize that this is some kind of performance or festival or something.  The effect is sort of like watching a parade: somehow both tawdry and grand at the same time.  Our St George stand-in, Antonio, looks somewhat medieval as well, standing in his thick wool cloak, his machete sheathed by his hip.  You can imagine him as a knight, conversing with the bar maid.

I remember seeing an interview with Terry Gilliam where he described how much he admired Antonio Fellini until he went to Italy himself.  He had thought that Fellini had such a wonderful imagination until he discovered that no, Italy is just like that.  This film reminds me of the work of Jodorowsky: strange and obscure, but I also got the feeling that, like Italy, Brazil is just like that in some way.  A strange film.