We were in Edmonton over Christmas, and we
planned to go to a movie on Christmas Day with my mother in law as usual, but
we couldn’t agree on anything. We nixed Les
Miserables on our behalf; we nixed Django
Unchained on her behalf; she
surprised us a little by expressing no interest in seeing Barbra Streisand; and
since hell wasn’t actually freezing over, there was no need to see The Hobbit. In the end we all agreed on A Late Quartet, but it meant we had to
wait until Boxing Day, because it was in an old downtown theatre that did the
civilized thing and took a day off. My nephew came with us, and because of
weather conditions (I guess I lied about hell not freezing over), it looked for
a while like we were going to miss the start of the movie. So I asked him what
he’d think of a Plan B by which we went to see Hitchcock in the same theatre, which started a bit later, and he
surprised me by saying he’d already seen it; when I asked what he thought of
it, he said the first half was much better than the second. On further
questioning, it transpired he was thinking of the old Will Smith movie Hitch. I like my nephew very much, but
this story tells you something about why I’m glad I belong to my generation
rather than his.
A Late Quartet
Anyway, in the end we made it to A Late Quartet (which is just about
playing its final notes on the Toronto circuit) with a few seconds to spare,
and I think my nephew might have ended up enjoying it more than I did, although
this might be in large part because it’s the kind of thing he’d never usually
see, whereas in broad terms it’s the kind of thing I always seem to be seeing. Directed by Yaron Zilberman, it depicts a
long-standing and esteemed string quartet, suddenly in jeopardy when its cellist
(Christopher Walken) is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease; this opens up other
tensions within group members, some of them long-simmering, others new. In
broad terms, I suppose the notion is that the human equilibrium that keeps the
four together is as intricate, and potentially fallible, as the technical
demands of the music, but whereas they nurture the latter through painstaking
rehearsal and attention to detail (possibly to the extent of stifling the sense
of risk and excitement), the former develops much more haphazardly and
incompletely.
At one point, Walken’s character talks of the “transcendent moments” that
push through a performance’s faults and imperfections, but A Late Quartet is disappointingly short on such moments – if there
are any at all, they’re provided by Walken himself. The film is intriguing when
it studies the contours of the professional musician’s existence, but it’s
contrived, overwritten and/or melodramatic in dealing with most else. And while
the inherently resonant Walken might be striking some unique notes, Philip
Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener might as well have been directed to give
their canonical “standard” performances. If I’d seen the movie in November when
it came out in Toronto, I’d have been quite disappointed. But these are the
three things I know you need to do at Christmas: (1) put your normal
expectations aside; (2) focus on the glass half full, and (3) keep in mind that
as long as you avoided having to sit through The Hobbit, you’re ahead.
Barbara
The following weekend, back
in the city of choice, we returned to the cinematic life to which we’re
accustomed, and went to the Lightbox to see Christian Petzold’s Barbara. Barbara is a doctor in 1980’s
East Germany, compelled to work in a small town for reasons that aren’t fully
explained; she’s subject to constant surveillance and frequent searches, and
maintains a self-protective distance from her surroundings and colleagues.
Despite the difficulties, she occasionally manages to meet up with a lover from
the west, who devises a plan for her to defect. At the same time, she gradually
makes connections, in particular with her immediate supervisor, and with a
troubled patient.
With superb, almost
subliminal precision, Petzold makes Barbara
a compelling study of lives lived under perverse constraints. The film shows
little of the State at work, and spends no time on the merits of the governing
ideology, but it conveys a constant sense of inner siege, all the more powerful
for withholding its details. Near the beginning, her supervisor talks about
Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson
of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, casting it as a study in perception and composition,
and thus alerting us to the film’s strategy. Right afterwards, he acknowledges
his monologue might have been unwelcome: in this environment, every utterance
is potentially suspect for one reason or another, every act of apparent kindness
potentially duplicitous.
At Last I Am Free
However, Petzold doesn’t
overdo the greyness of things – there’s still some beauty in this world, both
natural and manmade. And he doesn’t present the west as a perfect alternative –
when her lover tells Barbara she won’t need to work over there, because he
makes enough money, we sense her choice as one between competing pressures and
strictures, not merely between confinement and freedom. In one of the film’s
best scenes, she meets a younger woman, also the lover of someone from the
west, a man who gives her gifts and says he’ll marry her; the exchange only
lasts a few minutes, but is remarkable in conveying a tangle of excitement,
fear, capitulation and awareness. And what about Petzold’s decision to run the
closing credits over Chic’s At Last I am
Free – a very witty evocation of the relative texture of Western culture at
the time!
It’s unclear what degree of
freedom Barbara actually attains at the end. The decision she makes, if less
subtly handled, might be regarded as one of those “triumph of the human spirit”
machinations in which the emotional and moral payoff transcends the possible
physical toll. But Petzold leaves the final accounting ambiguous, as it
presumably must always be in such an environment. Overall, Barbara is one of the year’s most satisfying pictures, and I hope
my nephew gets to see it some time. It sounds like his favourite foreign film
might currently be the recent Little
White Lies, but that movie seems to me almost as contrived and calculated
as any Hollywood “product,” with its Frenchness providing only the most trivial
layer of difference. Oddly, he thought Little
White Lies might have been directed by Jean-Luc Godard, which for an art
movie aficionado ranks with that Seinfeld
episode where someone thinks Dustin Hoffman was in Star Wars. But it’s endearing that he even cares, and (Christmas
wish coming up) I truly hope he manages soon to identify and love the immense
difference between the two.
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