23Oct06
Twenty-one years after Orson Welles sprang on the world a current-events picture called Citizen Kane—original title, American—a worthy successor burst forth in Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano. A real-life story of the recent murder of a Sicilian bandit—or, rather, an inquiry into the bloody confluence of business interests, the political establishment, and the Mafia—Salvatore Giuliano may be compared to Citizen Kane in that it tore its subject matter from the newspaper, then dramatized it in a style of brooding razzle-dazzle, using a fractured narrative structure and a protagonist who was huge and yet strangely absent. It was the third feature to be directed and co-written by the thirty-nine-year-old Rosi, following his long apprenticeship in theater and radio, and as an assistant to Luchino Visconti and other filmmakers; but Salvatore Giuliano was, by his own account, the first movie in which he "mastered the delicate balance between reality itself and an interpretation of reality." Its presentation at the 1962 Berlin Film Festival was one of the moments that made the 1960s so rare and exciting, putting Rosi into that select international group of artists who seemed likely to remake the world by remaking the cinema.
From that moment through the release, in 1976, of his Illustrious Corpses, Rosi created a series of political dramas that were at once provocations, exposés, thrillers, puzzles, and acts of virtuosity. The fond hope that these films might eventually change society was encouraged, early on, by the ruckus that Salvatore Giuliano set off, leading to the formation of a parliamentary commission in Sicily to investigate the influence of the Mafia. The people would know, and the people at last would act! Meanwhile, fortunately, the films also provided an instantaneous benefit of being vital and innovative. Rosi had taken the immediacy of neorealism—its quasidocumentary presentation of real people, in real locations, acting out real social problems—and merged it with a Wellesian love of showmanship, melancholy, baroque contrivance, and enigma. Nowhere is this combination more outlandishly theatrical, yet absolutely authentic, than in Hands over the City, where actual members of the Naples City Council, playing themselves, in their own chamber, lift up their arms in protest to cry, "Our hands are clean!"—a bit of acting that they must have performed twice, so that Rosi could film it in long shot from the front, and then cut to a closer, more emphatic view from behind.
23Oct06
As it has evolved, Jane Campion's body of work has come increasingly to exhibit a powerful unity, centered on a commitment to depicting the psychosexual realities of women's lives. In her feature films, she homes in on the subjectivity of one woman, chronicling how, for better or worse, she finds her life irrevocably changed by a strong (but ultimately sensitive) man. Most famous is The Piano (1993), with its Gothic narrative of a woman trapped in an empty marriage who is given new direction in life through an intense, erotic encounter. But all of Campion's features offer versions of this story, as if each were a piece in an overall experiment in which Campion was testing how women wend their way through the thorny terrain of heterosexual desire and dread.
Elements of this story line even appear in Campion's earliest film-school shorts, although these works—An Exercise in Discipline: Peel (1982), Passionless Moments (1983), and A Girl's Own Story (1983)—are also unique experiments, and not just in their form and youthfulness. Made while she was a student at the prestigious Australian Film Television and Radio School, they are marked by a distinctive, oftentimes wacky visual style, one that her first feature, Sweetie (1989), shares. Sweetie, in fact, can be seen as a bridge between Campion's tentative, probing film-school works and her subsequent features, anticipating the later films' intense focus on single female characters in emotional crisis while retaining the visual inventiveness, and some of the narrative fragmentation, of the shorts.
16Oct06
Fans of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 international hit Y tu mamá también will recognize the opening shot of his 1990 debut feature, Sólo con tu pareja, which shows a couple having noisy sex in the morning. The films, indeed, have much in common, in form and content, but they could hardly be more different in terms of production. Cuarón’s first film—a sex farce that pokes fun at Mexican culture, including a public-service AIDS campaign—emerged from Mexico’s beleaguered state funding system for cinema, and was initially shelved by the government, whereas Y tu mamá también was essentially privately financed and, of course, widely distributed internationally. Despite the delays with Sólo con tu pareja, however, it did go on to be a popular and critical success when it was finally released in Mexico, in 1991. Although its U.S. release would have to wait until the fall of 2006, it made a splash at the Toronto Film Festival in 1991. That North American success helped lead the director to Hollywood, where he made A Little Princess (1995) with Warner Brothers and Great Expectations (1998) with Twentieth Century Fox, before returning triumphantly to Mexican screens, ten years after Sólo con tu pareja, with the even more risqué and socially critical Y tu mamá también.
The decade that separated Cuarón’s two Mexican films witnessed a fundamental transition in Mexican cinema. In the 1970s and early ’80s, quality Mexican films were most likely produced or coproduced by the state. By the time Cuarón procured funding from the state-sponsored production company IMCINE (Mexican Institute of Cinematography), however, the Mexican government’s involvement in film production had diminished considerably from its heyday under the administration of President Luis Echeverría Álvarez, which fostered an auteur cinema during the first half of the 1970s that helped develop the careers of such noted Mexican directors as Arturo Ripstein, Felipe Cazals, and Paul Leduc. This was a result of the failure of the national-popular economic model, which had sustained Mexico’s economy throughout the 1970s, and coincided with the country’s turn toward a privatized market economy. Public funding for film and other cultural production dried up, and, as a result, practically all that remained on the screens—with a few notable exceptions, such as Leduc’s Frida: Naturaleza viva (1984) and Ripstein’s El imperio de la fortuna (1986)—were privately funded, formulaic genre pieces, like narco-films and sexycomedias.
16Oct06
This character profile was written by Sólo con tu pareja screenwriter Carlos Cuarón, in 1990, as a way to help actor Luis De Icaza get to know his character. It was translated for this release by Mariana Carreño King.
MATEO MATEOS WAS BORN THE DAY THE SINGER JORGE NEGRETE DIED, so his mother, Mrs. Josefa José de Mateos, feeling responsible, promised the Saint Virgin of Atocha that her son would be a great singer and an idol among idols. Giving birth was like selecting a piece—possibly M2—from a giant jukebox: he was one among many. Mateo was the sixth product of a husband and wife who, years before, after seeing a bad print of Cheaper by the Dozen in a rat-infested movie theater in Tlaxcala, had promised themselves to conceive twelve children. Perhaps it was the moment of giving birth, or the anesthesia-induced delirium, but Mrs. Josefa swears to have heard during labor “three different versions of the song ‘Amanecer Ranchero.’ With such a clear prophesy on such a tragic day, how was I not to offer my child to the Virgin, asking to make him the consummate head of the great totem that is the entertainment industry?” she told Paco Malgesto over the phone during his live radio program on the W [a popular radio station].
16Oct06
This character profile was written by Sólo con tu pareja screenwriter Carlos Cuarón, in 1990, as a way to help actor Claudia Ramírez get to know her character. It was translated for this release by Mariana Carreño King.
THE DAY AURORA ALBOR DE NEGRETE GAVE BIRTH to her oldest child, Clarisa, the city raised its curtains to allow the sun to come out, the volcanoes to be seen wearing their vests of snow, and Mount Ajusco to proudly display its mane of pine trees, prior to adopting the premature baldness of a decrepit young man. The rare sight of a clear day in the city provoked much comment among the population, accustomed as they were to melting into the pavement.
“Mexico, the belly button of the world,” the renowned Conchero [Aztec dancer] Nezahualpilli Teototzin Hernández called his native soil, covered in the milky shine of selenite sand. “Look carefully, brother. What you see in between the volcanoes Popo and Iztla is Cuahutétoc burning Cortés’s feet,” Pancreas told his friend Anxiety, while sipping pulque from a plastic bag outside the bar If Life’s Bad, Mescal. If It’s Good, Mescal Too. The greatest thinker in national history couldn’t resist the temptation of deceiving future generations, declaring publicly that the Anahuac Valley was “where the air is clear."
16Oct06
This character profile was written by Sólo con tu pareja screenwriter Carlos Cuarón, in 1990, as a way to help actor Astrid Hadad get to know her character. It was translated for this release by Mariana Carreño King.
“PLEASE, DEAR GOD, MAKE HER LOOK LIKE ROSITA QUINTANA,” begged Mrs. Fortuna Fortúñez de Teresa on her way to the hospital to give birth to Teresa, her only child. Mr. Terso de Teresa, nicknamed by his friends “the Murnau Creature,” agreed with his wife and held her hand: “Don’t worry, Fortu. You’ll have the most shining baby.” And he wasn’t wrong. Teresa was certainly born as most babies are: looking like a prune. But even the nurses from the maternity ward noticed a light very few infants who enter this world carry. The child was born with her eyes wide open, and she seemed to be aware of everything around her, admiring right from the start all life had to offer. She possessed such a particular vitality that when a nurse looked into her eyes, she asked her colleague, “Would you carry her now, please, Beti? I think she’s hypnotizing me.” And when Beti held her in her arms, she was startled: “This is odd. She weighs the same as the other babies but she feels lighter.”
Mrs. Fortuna, who once won the Miss Woot-Woo Beauty Pageant, was so happy to see the baby that she ruined with tears the Pampers she had packed for her. “I’m sorry, Terso, but it’s been so hard for us,” she said to her husband, crying, boogers running from her nose. Touched, he replied, “Don’t worry, love of my life. If you want, I’ll bring the disposable ones that I left in the car.” Teresa’s grandfather, a professional joker who specialized in dark humor, couldn’t utter a word when he saw Teresita’s eyes. When he recovered his speech, he stuttered, “That girl has the sun and the moon in her eyes."
16Oct06
Lodge Kerrigan's movies are so often termed "uncompromising" and "unrelenting" that it's worth pondering what exactly lies behind their steadfast refusal to let up. The salient quality of these spare, intense films is that they deny the viewer the comfort of distance. Kerrigan demolishes the notion that movies are not suited to expressing inner life. He forces you to share skull space with characters most films would never think to look at, let alone so intimately. Getting close, often upsettingly so, to his lost souls and margin dwellers, he is undaunted by their opacity and failing grip on sanity, not to mention unencumbered by social judgments of any sort. In the course of three features, all as steel nerved in execution as they are rigorous in conception, this singular American independent has developed what might be the most literal and harrowing form of empathy in modern movies. At the center of each of Kerrigan's films—two of which are titled after their protagonists—is a lone, severely troubled person. More than focused, these portraits are defined foremost by the director's relationship with his subject—a moral and aesthetic stance that informs everything from camera placement to character psychology and dictates the terms of engagement for the spectator.
Keane (2004), Kerrigan's most recent feature, maintains a suffocating, obsessive proximity, via handheld stalker-cam, with a desperate young father, sick with grief over the recent disappearance of his little girl and helplessly drawn to the site of his unthinkable loss, replaying the traumatic event as if hoping to alter its outcome. Claire Dolan (1998), about a New York City prostitute's stoic struggle for financial and spiritual independence, holds its benumbed protagonist in the steadiest and most implacable of gaze—one under which all preconceptions can only wither.
