Iron Curtain Dramas

CORPUS CHRISTI (A-minus) - Bartosz Bielenia is hypnotic as an ex-con drifter, fleeing a detention facility, who deceives a small village in Poland into thinking that he is a priest arriving just in time to take over duties at a parish grieving over the recent deaths of a car-full of young residents in a suspected drunk-driving accident. Much of young Daniel's appeal comes through Bielenia's large, captivating green eyes.

A sense of doom hangs over Daniel, and it's a tribute to director Jan Komasa and young screenwriter Mateusz Pacewicz that they can maintain intrigue as they build toward Daniel's inevitable comeuppance. This is never less than gripping during its nearly two-hour running time, all shot in a blue-tinged gloom. It is fascinating to watch Daniel smoke, carouse and seduce while at the same time developing a spiritual connection with the mourning villagers that had eluded his elderly predecessor.  In fact, it's hard to look away.

BEANPOLE (A-minus) - Another visually stunning character study -- this one from a 20-something Russian writer-director Kantemir Balagov -- "Beanpole" follows two damaged women as they try to survive in the aftermath of World War II in a devastated Leningrad.

Working as nurses, Ilya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), also known as Beanpole after her stringbean frame, and Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina) each have their unique battlefield traumas to work through -- Ilya/Beanpole has a concussive disorder that renders her catatonic at random times, and Masha sexually serviced the servicemen, producing a son who, at the start of the movie, is being mothered by Ilya, who, suffice it to say, is unfit to be a parent.

Balagov subverts expectations by shooting in lively Godardian primary colors, contrasting this palette with the grim existence of recovering soldiers and put-upon doctors and nurses in a land of deep deprivation. When Masha's son dies (in a truly horrifying scene that you'll never be able to unsee) she insists that the still-fertile Ilya conceive a replacement. 

This can be a challenge at two and a quarter hours of human misery, but Miroshnichenko, a pale doppelganger of Tilda Swinton, and the doe-eyed Perelygina providing truly alluring leading women, burrowing into the broken souls of their characters, who are fused by their complementary needs to fill the holes inside themselves and each other. Alternatively challenging and beguiling.

BONUS TRACKS
The trailers:




 

That '70s Drift: Adrift

STROSZEK (1977) (A) - A marvel from Werner Herzog, using a mostly amateur cast of actors to tell the story of a damaged Berlin man seeking comfort in the heartland of America, where he finds a harsh capitalist reality instead.

Bruno Stroszek (musician Bruno S) rescues battered prostitute Eva (Eva Mattes) and takes her with as he follows an old neighbor to rural Wisconsin, where he works as a truck mechanic and she as a truck-stop waitress. But her old ways return, and they struggle to keep up with payments on their mobile home and console television.

Herzog ("Cave of Forgotten Dreams," "Fitzcarraldo" and the execrable "Grizzly Man") betrays his documentary leanings and crafts a classic mid-'70s road feature, complete with wistful shots through windshields. Bruno S and Mattes are heartbreaking, and the characters surrounding them (leftovers from a "Green Acres" era of America) add depth as well as comedic relief. The ending features a compelling 10-minute sequence that may be unparalleled in film history -- stunning on a par with the ending of "Five Easy Pieces" or any other film I can think of.

THE SCAR (1976) (B-minus) - The first full-length narrative big-screen feature from Krzysztof Kieslowski is a minor effort that has some of the elements that would make him a master.  However this tale of a bureaucratic functionary trying to bring heart to the task of building a chemical factory in a small town (his hometown) never quite gels as a compelling drama.

The narrative inches along slowly. Like Herzog above, Kieslowski had extensive experience in the documentary world, and it seems here like he's trying to shake off that training and switch gears. Franciszek Pieczka brings a soulfulness to Stefan, the apparatchik who balances the needs of the residents of the rundown town with his duties as a cog in Poland's machine. Some lingering scenes of life behind the curtain can be moving. But it would be another decade before Kieslowski found his groove as a master storyteller who would go on to bring us "Blind Chance," "The Double Life of Veronique," "The Dekalog" and the three-colors trilogy "Blue," "White" and "Red."
 

Best of Ever, Vol. I: Cursed Men

A SERIOUS MAN (2009) (A) - The Coen brothers, at the height of their powers, find the perfect mix of black comedy and pathos in this story of an everyday mensch struggling in the evolving cultural landscape of the pscychedelic '60s to keep family and career on track. Michael Stuhlbarg is sublime as the perpetually flustered Larry Gopnik, whose wife is leaving him for their friend, whose son is a useless stoner, and whose exchange student is trying to bribe him.

Even by Coen standards, this cast of characters is quirky yet oddly compelling. The humor is as dark and devastating as you can get without crossing over to mawkish or macabre. Larry, for much of the film, awaits a doctor's diagnosis. Meantime, he must share a hotel room with his disgusting brother Arthur (Richard Kind) while trying to shake from his mind the image of his hippie-chick neighbor Mrs. Samsky (a scene-stealing Amy Landecker).

You get the feeling that the Coens are vetting their own childhoods through adolescent Danny Gopnik (Aaron Wolff), who dodges a bully on his way from school every day, talks trash with his buddies, gets high at his bar mitzvah, and shudders in the presence of the ancient, mysterious rabbi who confiscates his transistor radio (Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" plays a pivotal role on the soundtrack).

There's just too much to unpack here in a capsule review. But Stuhlbarg's hectored schmuck is so riddled with layer upon layer of guilt and longing and displacement that even Larry Gopnik would not know whether to laugh or cry at the trivialized travails of Job he is put through. This is easily on of the Coens' best films (see our 2016 ranking at the end of this link) that only grows more touching with each viewing.

FIVE EASY PIECES (1970) (A) - Devastating doesn't get any more smart and cool than this landmark 1970 film from Bob Rafelson and starring Jack Nicholson at the height of his powers. This eviscerating family drama centers around Nicholson's Bobby Dupea, a former piano prodigy slumming it as an oil-rig worker, wasting his life going on drunk romps with a buddy and shacking up with a floozy waitress girlfriend, Rayette (Karen Black), who has a fondness for Tammy Wynette weepers on the record player.

When he learns that his father is dying, Bobby is convinced by his sister, Partita (Lois Smith), to return to the family's country estate in Washington State. Bobby plies his charms on his affable brother Carl's fiancee, Catherine Van Oost (a deliriously attractive Susan Anspach), who toys with the psychologically screwed-up Bobby with the skills of a feral cat -- all while Rayette cools her heels in a rundown motel outside of town. The final scene might rip your heart out if you're not prepared for a demonstration of the cruelty of the human contition.

Brutal doesn't begin to describe the emotional depths that Nicholson explores in this ultimate character study of the American male. Rafelson co-wrote this with Carole Eastman (credited as Adrien Joyce).

This film is inexorably of its time -- the early years of the American New Wave when the boomers were replacing the postwar generations. If you don't get weak in the legs upon seeing Karen Black (curled up in a bathroom sink like a kitten to apply her makeup) or Susan Anspach, well, then, you went through adolescence at a different time than I did, and I hope you've got others to fill that gap. Look also for Fannie Flagg, Tony Basil and Sally Struthers in cameos.

BONUS TRACKS
You haven't lived until you've seen a 90-year-old riff on the opening lyrics of a Jefferson Airplane song: "When the truth is found ... to be lies ... and all hope ... within you dies ... then vhut?!"



Nicholson's Bobby bangs out a raggedy version of Chopin's Fantasie in F minor on a piano perched on the back of a pickup truck sitting in traffic:

Chamber Pieces

WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY (B) - Molly Shannon, as Emily Dickinson, is a delight, as always, especially with Susan Ziegler by her side as Susan, Dickinson's sister-in-law and lover. Writer-director Madeleinie Olnek seeks to subvert history by dragging the famously reclusive poet out of her boudoir and into the world as a lustful, talented poet who actually sought acclaim as much as solitude.

Olnek starts out rickety, with some confusing time jumps. But she finally settles on Dickinson approaching middle age and trysting with her longtime friend and now brother's wife, Susan. Olnek's technique, mixing dry humor with touching visual scripting of Dickinson's poetry, is sneaky here. She frames the narrative through the eyes of Mabel Todd (a delightful Amy Seimetz from "Upstream Color"), a local Amherst busybody who is the first to sketch the biography of Dickinson, an apparently misguided perception of the poet as a humorless hermit who hid her poetry from the world (even though Dickinson managed to get published in newspapers here and there).

By the movie's second half, it is clear that Olnek is puncturing what she considers to be a myth. It matters not which biographer is more accurate. What matters is the fun Olnek has with her characters (including Emily's loopy siblings) and with her rewriting of history, whether serious or not. And, of course, the poetry is as moving as ever.

Points off for some cheap production. I'm used to characters on TV and in movies sipping from empty cups, but here you get an over-the-shoulder shot that reveals a teacup clearly dry as a bone. That's unforgivable, even on a skinflint budget.

THE SISTERS (A-minus) (2006) - A strong cast bangs home a sterling screenplay about feuding sisters and family secrets, all based on Anton Chekhov's play "The Three Sisters." Maria Bello gives perhaps the performance of her career as Marcia, the alpha female among the Prior sisters, born and raised by a brutish father in academic aristocracy in the snooty northeast. She sets the bar for Mary Stuart Masterson as Olga, a prim, uptight academic with a secret she keeps, and Erika Christens

on as Irene, the baby of the family with problems of her own.

Most scenes in this stagy production by journeyman director Arthur Allan Seidelman take place in the tony faculty lounge of the unnamed college, where, conveniently, only the main characters hang out. They include Irene's drab fiance David (Chris O'Donnell); his rival for Irene's affections; Gary (a hammy Eric McCormack; the wise and witty Dr. Chebrin (a voracious Rip Torn), who loves nothing more than to read the daily newspaper's true-crime dispatches; and the Prior brother, Andrew (a sharp Allessandro Nivola), who brings in his floozy fiancee, Nancy, played with gum-snapping verve by Elizabeth Banks.

Throw them together and let simmer. The poison in this mix is the dashing Vincent (Tony Goldwyn), a former colleague of Prior pater who knew the women as girls and can't hide his desire for Bello's Marcia, even though they both are married. This chamber drama (not without its share of dark, cutting comedy) would not work at all if not for the seething screenplay by Richard Alfieri (who has since written only one other film, also with Seidelman).

Alfieri originally wrote this for the stage, and Seidelman and his cast don't bother making many concessions to the transitions to the screen, and that staginess is actually a plus here. "The Sisters" has a classic feel, but with modern snippets of putdowns and recriminations. And Bello -- sexy and brooding and vicious -- takes it the the next level.

BONUS TRACKS
The trailers:




 

New to the Queue

Crisis? What crisis? ...

A documentary about a summer getaway for disabled kids from the 1950s to 1970s, "Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution."

Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots star as a couple trapped in a suburban tract-home hell in "Vivarium."

A teen comedy about two young women who bond over (despite?) the lug they dated in succession, "Banana Split."

An oddball tale of a man obsessed with his backside and trying to walk the straight and narrow, "Butt Boy."
 

R.I.P., Bill Withers

My go-to song at karaoke (everyone has one) is "Ain't No Sunshine." It was Bill Withers' first hit, back in 1971. Barely two minutes of perfection. When he sang it, anyway. Withers died this week at age 81.  Here is the AP obituary.

Of course, his mega-hit "Lean on Me" inspired a film staring Morgan Freeman as a whip-cracking high school principal. The trailer makes it look cheesy (and it is at times) but damn if it doesn't get to you at times.



Withers was a lunch-bucket guy whose debut album clicked and brought him wide acclaim. He butted heads with record company executives and seems to have had a frustrating time playing the fame game. He gave it all up at a relatively young age and let the kids take over, as he faded into retirement, his legacy undiminished.

Imagine the emotional energy required to write (let alone perform) a song like "Use Me," which has one of the grooviest grooves ever constructed. (And, in this version, one of the happiest drummers.)



The essence of his early work is captured on his 1972 album "Live at Carnegie Hall." Back to ground zero. "I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know ..."