..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

May 24, 2004

A Bit Autobiographical

I've been perplexed by some reviews of Valentin - Alejandro Agresti's memorable slice of Buenos Aires boyhood - tarring, feathering, and raving against this quiet, subtle joy of a movie. Some seem to go out of their way to identify distributor Miramax, but the Agresti's film was acquired rather than produced by the Disney-owned concern. Others, like Time's Richard Schickel, see only sugar: "Agresti flat out denies the implicit - and, yes, existential - terrors of this child's desperately improvised life. Agresti's just out to give us a sentimental good time. Which some people, heaven help us, will have - while the rest of us choke on the cutesiness."

It's familiar ground for foreign language imports, the life of a boy who will grow up surely to become the author of the film we are watching, admittedly. From Truffaut's classic The 400 Blows to Giuseppe Tornatore's emotional Cinema Paradiso to Lasse Hallström's great classic My Life as a Dog, the boy-child has not been a neglected protagonist. (Agresti's understated movie has a voice-over, but it's filled with fancies and ambiguities, rather than coldly calculated reductions.)

Huge-eyed Rodrigo Noya seems already to be writing novels behind blank yet watchful expressions through enormous horn-rims. When he smiles at some discovery or frowns at some realization, he's a bright light.

Agresti plays his own father, an angry man, a womanizer, a distant character who is fearsomely demanding on the rare occasions he visits, usually with a new girlfriend, all of whom Valentin dearly wishes to mother him. Valentin's own mother has disappeared, almost an unspeakable myth in the family, and considering the era of the movie is the era of generals running the country, one fears for what may have happened to her, or what symbolism Agresti might inflict. (He withholds.) Valentin lives with his grandmother (Carmen Maura), who talks to the boy almost as if he were her late, beloved husband. Valentin worships rock-'n'-roll records, and in one goofball scene, which goes on just long enough, he parades around the house and the neighborhood in a self-constructed astronaut suit.

Agresti's flown straight from his Amsterdam home and he's already got a Scotch and a lit cigarette when I arrive at Chicago's Four Seasons Hotel's bar for our conversation. Nice: we could be in Argentina, I think, as he signals the bartender. Unlike his role in the film, he's got a sly smile. He was stuck with the role. "Since the film is a bit autobiographical - quite a lot -'You have to play your own father!'" the other actors told him.

He's lived in Holland for almost twenty years. He returns to Argentina specifically to make a movie, to remember. "I come back very often. Four, five months a year.

"Some of my films are political," he says of the eight or nine of his movies I haven't seen, "a vision about how things are and the past also. But yeah, I love to make films in Argentina when I can. I try to show as faithfully as I can how Argentineans are. I don't try to glamorize to be an Argentinean, no? Like all films can do. I made very different films when I [lived there]. Valentin is touching 1969, before everything changed for the country. It's also about the psychology of Argentina before the [1976 ascent of the] military dictatorship."

Agresti uses only a few locations. His choice of streets, cafes, trees, are all telling: you feel the life of the neighborhood in which this small observer thrives. He also works from a kid's perspective, from not explaining certain events Valentin eavesdrops on, down to the simple yet canny device of never letting the camera rise above a child's eyeline. "The child's point-of-view, so important. I spent a week sitting on a little box. Your parents are alive? Next time if you go to the house of your parents, try to eat-it is so stupid. But really you will be amazed, your heart wills tart to tell you things, suddenly you start to remember. Just take a little box and eat low. Eat with your head here? And your mother serves you food, and look at them from that perspective. Not one second, all the food, the mechanics, the knife, the fork, from here, and look at them here. You will feel, 'this is a joke, what I'm doing here.' After a couple of minutes, you will start to feel a lot of memories, the value of your parents, particularly the way they look now.

"I tried to reproduce the house [I grew up in] as much as I could, at least faithful to my memory. It was so important. When I decided the framing, sometimes I didn't want to move the camera, see the table, the doorway. I do an A-B shot, I will just be touching my memories. But there is such a warm feeling when you keep the [wide] shot. The surroundings are so important, the vision of everything. The memory, you don't remember close-ups in memory! You just have colors and textures. Me, particularly, when I have one of these memories, I have a feeling that I'm peeping through something, I am a bit separated, I am not so close. [It is] the point-of-view of memories."

An example of Agresti's understatement: When Valentin discovers that a young man, a musician he's befriended, is Jewish, he realizes that he may himself be Jewish. He's confused. He hides. He cries. We watch him. We do not hear his thoughts. "A thing happens to a child. He doesn't know really why these things are happening. So there's always space for doubt, for the observer not to judge. The child is not judgmental like we are as adults. A child is not full of justifications or bullshit, either. When we grow up, we justify ourselves. Since we turn 14 and we read Herman Hesse, we are fucked up. But a boy, he's growing, he learns about himself each day."

Ogre the River and Through the Trees

Puss-in-Boots rules. Among the frisky jokes bustling along in the likeable, jam-packed and sometimes acerbic Shrek 2, Antonio Banderas' vocal habitation of the wee mythical kitty is the kind of scene-stealing, show-stopping turn that made the Ice Age's Skrat character equally memorable. The main story is what you'd expect-the royal family of Far Far Away is unlikely to accept Princess Fiona's ogre husband, Shrek, and lessons in accepting oneself are soon to follow. Despite their reported multimillion dollar salaries, Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz add little the work of the writers or directors in their voice work, although Eddie Murphy's enormously annoying and funny Donkey is in fast competition with Puss -"The role of annoying talking animal sidekick is already taken," Donkey tells the shameless cat. It's funny. Reviewers will relish giving away all the best stuff, if the trailer hasn't already. Music supervisor Chris Douridas does his usual DreamWorks thing-bringing in songs by Tom Waits and Nick Cave, among the cover versions suitable for the tie-in CD.

Hummer Job

What does a self-serious French auteur do in the expanses of California desert with a couple hundred thousand dollars, a bright red Hummer, a couple who can't keep their clothes on, who don't know how to talk to each other, and try to make the world all right through explicit sex and cross-cultural near-babble? (He's American, she's Russian, neither really acts.) After The Life of Jesus and L'Humanité, Twentynine Palms (hopscotching larger cities now) is Bruno Dumont's third savage howl at a world without love, without spiritual elevation. His interviews are dense marvels, filled with utterances like, "Isn't every real work of art about the same things? Really, there's nothing but sex, love and evil." Twentynine Palms tempts boredom and follows it down the garden path, but the final ten minutes, well, the ending is terror itself. Dumont's the real thing. An uncompromising artist who makes very uncomfortable movies about how irrational the world, and our impulses, will always be. "My goal was to make a horror film," Dumont says, "To scare people." Even with resemblances to various westerns, Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, Psycho, and, yes, Deliverance, Dumont delivers a genuine wallop.

Based on a True Deal

Stephen Holden in the New York Times is probably closer to the mark than my first impressions of Stateside. He writes: "he early scenes of Stateside, the muddled drama of a young marine and his obsessive relationship with a schizophrenic pop singer, make you fear that you are about to be plunged into a fill-in-the-blanks Hollywood fantasy of cut-rate redemption… Maybe at two and a half hours the movie would have made more sense. At 97 minutes, it is an unsalvageable mess." It's so genuinely odd, however, I found it diverting for its vigorous taking on and trouncing of clichés, Stateside, Reverge Anselmo's third feature, takes on the poppy early 1980s, the rich-boy-gone-wrong plot, the redemption-through-service plot, and the musician-actress who loves a little too much while losing her mind plot. (Yes, the lead of Josie and the Pussycats may be playing a woman tumbling into schizophrenia, or at least, Girl, Interrupted.) With mournfulness reminiscent of Peter Bogdanovich's Last Picture Show, Anselmo, as writer-producer-director (and as one of the partners of distributor FirstLook), works with what he identifies as a "true story," and hums with emotion. (In a conversation with he and Cook, he insisted that the "true story" tag, drawing from his own life, gave him more leeway to make a narrative with odd details and erratic motivations.) Jonathan Tucker (The Deep End) is the privileged Connecticut kid who's sent to the Marines after a car accident that cripples a priest; Rachael Leigh Cook is the unlucky-in-life waif who he meets soon afterwards. Many things keep them apart, other things bring them together, but it's Anselmo's willingness to have the characters speak aphoristically that makes the movie stick in the mind. (Holden, pissed: "The dialogue is so quirky (and so in love with its own cuteness) that it's sometimes unintelligible.")

That and the insanely diverse cast-Val Kilmer as a central casting D.I., Joe Mantegna as a bleak father, Carrie Fisher as an angry mother, Ed Begley, Jr. as the priest. He even knows how to direct Cook's inflection: her voice weighted with a slightly nasal "awwww" that suggests words work faster than her character's tumbrel of a mind.

One fragrant snippet: on a misty day walk somewhere between the Williamsburg Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge, the fucked-up schizophrenic actor-out says, "This can be a remembrance. Something nice we remember in the time of pomegranates." And the fucked-up jarhead richie says, "And sweaters are cute." And she replies, "Which look good on me." It's one of many fluffs of nonsense they volley, but rather than coming off as pretentious or unsalvageably clotted, the language throughout comes across as earnest yet unrelentingly optimistic.

Europudding

People I know keep telling me that L'auberge Espagnole is coming to the top of their Netflix queue. And they like it. I'm into the second of six "chapters" of the Criterion edition of the original television version of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. It's shattering. I'm wondering where Sarabande has disappeared to, Bergman's most recent "final" feature that ought to have been in theaters by now.

 

- Email Ray Pride