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Home Cinema
by
Leonard Heldreth
Ireland, France are settings for interesting films
Our films this month are set in Paris; Ireland’s County Galway; and the south-central French countryside. They concern literary nostalgia, Irish policemen and prehistoric cave painting.
Midnight in Paris
How does time travel work? Let’s say you’re a young American named Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), and one night you’re in Paris, a little woozy and a little lost, sitting on the steps of an old church when the clock strikes midnight. A gleaming Peugeot limousine made in the 1920s comes around the corner, up the hill, and stops in the street in front of you. The window opens and out leans Zelda Fitzgerald (Alison Pill), a cocktail glass in hand, and says, “We’re going to a party! Come on! Get in!” and, after gawking in amazement for a moment at this beautiful creature, you get in the car with her and greet F. Scott (Tom Hiddleston) and off you go to the bar where Cole Porter is playing and then to where Hemingway is drinking and then to where Gertrude Stein is holding forth. At least, that’s how time travel works in Woody Allen’s absolutely charming new movie, Midnight in Paris.
Allen’s forty-first film continues his exploration of Europe after England (Match Point) and Spain (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), and it also continues his long-term interest in nostalgia, lost love, and other romantic inclinations, although in this film he balances the romanticism and his trademark cynicism better than he has in some previous films.
The plot is simple. Gil Pender and Inez (Rachel McAdams) are engaged, and when her wealthy parents, John (Kurt Fuller) and Helen (Mimi Kennedy), go to Paris to close a business deal, the children tag along. Gil is a successful Hollywood screen writer but really wants to write a serious novel that will qualify as “literature,” like those written by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. In Paris, Gil wants to wander around, preferably in the rain, and imagine himself in the Bohemian Paris of his idols. Inez prefers to go shopping with her mother or dancing with her snobbish friends, and as any astute member of the audience will soon realize, there are problems in this potential marriage. Inez runs into some friends from the States, including Paul (Michael Sheen), an insufferable pedant who is guest lecturing at the Sorbonne and who begins most comments with, “I may be wrong, but...” He is a variation on the self-important Columbia professor who held forth about Marshall McLuhan and Federico Fellini in Annie Hall.
To avoid going to a party with Paul and his wife, Gil claims he is working on his novel but instead goes for a walk in Paris at night. There he is picked up by the Fitzgeralds and ends up in a room filled with literary and artistic icons. He meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who has been the mistress of Braque and Modigliani, and is now the lover of Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo), who is, of course, painting her. Gil is smitten immediately, but the Fitzgeralds drag him away and leave him in a bar with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), who is drinking alone, and who lectures him about facing death and writing true. At some point they go to the bar of Carrot Top (Josephine Baker), where the singer’s stand-in does a cooled-down version of her famous shimmy. And then it’s on to the home of Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) where they are met at the door by Alice B. Toklas (Therese Bourou-Rubinsztein) and find Gertrude critiquing Picasso’s latest painting. And so it goes.
Stunned and satiated with celebrities, Gil wakes up the next morning and works on his novel all day, since Stein has agreed to read it and advise him. The next few days are spent rewriting during the day and hobnobbing with the ’20s literary and artistic elite: Salvadore Dali (Adrien Brody), filmmaker Bunuel (to whom he suggests a film about people unable to leave a room after dinner), and others. He is falling deeper in love with Adriana each night, and during the day he meets Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), who sells old records of Cole Porter. He also finds in a used bookstore a tattered copy of Adriana’s memoirs in which she recounts how she found Gil’s innocence fascinating and that they became lovers after he gave her some earrings. The passage is translated from French in the film by a tour guide at the Musée Rodin (Carla Bruni, a.k.a. Mme. Sarkozy, First Lady of France). This leads to a string of comic complications, a further trip into the past to the Belle Époque, and an excursion to Maxim’s where they meet Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Vincent Menjou Cortes) and Paul Gauguin (Olivier Rabourdin).
Allen manages to make all of this work, more or less, in a positive fashion, and to make his point (he insists on making the point) that each person has his or her own era to be nostalgic about, but nostalgia leads only to disregard of the present, where life really occurs. And don’t look too hard at the time-travel paradoxes, because if they don’t go back to her apartment, how could she have written the book that he bought in the bookstall? Is this a parallel universe movie? Is string theory involved? Let’s not go there–let’s not even ask. Rather, as T.S. Eliot says (and Eliot is in the pick-up limo one night), “Oh do not ask what is it, / let us go and make our visit.” Be sure to visit this lovely cinematic confection about young love and lust and art and literature and “the city of lights.” See you in Paris. At midnight.
The Guard
The title for The Guard comes from the Gaelic “garda” or “guard,” i. e., a policeman, and that is the official position of Sgt. Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson). Boyle is a series of apparent contradictions, seemingly soft and pudgy but actually tough as nails; he swears like the f-word is about to become extinct and he wants to preserve its future, but he uses racist slurs with equal ease. He does his police work with unconventional and sometimes brutal efficiency but takes loving care of his dying mother. He also picks the pockets of accident and murder victims and brings in prostitutes from Dublin for a romp on his day off.
The plot turns on a rumor that a large drug shipment is about to be landed in Ireland for distribution through Europe (half a billion euros worth? Half a million? As Boyle says, they all lie about its street value). Boyle and the other policemen up and down the Irish coast are called to a meeting to work with agents from the F.B.I., represented by Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle, who coproduced the film). Boyle and Everett have to work together, but Boyle not only constantly makes racial slurs (“which ghetto did you grow up in?”) but also insults Everett’s meticulous police procedure habits by constantly violating standard protocol.
Everett keeps telling Boyle he doesn’t want to know about his women and drugs, but, with a grin on his face, Boyle insists on telling him anyway. As with most such “odd couple” films, the two gradually develop a grudging admiration for each other but only actually cooperate in the final shoot-out. One sub-plot involves Boyle’s relationship with Aidan McBride (Rory Keenan), a young policeman transferred in from Dublin and assigned to work with the older cop at the beginning of the film. Boyle later demonstrates another side of his character as he becomes involved in McBride’s wife’s problems and chooses carefully what to say and what not to say.
The film was written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, a first-time director, whose brother is the playwright and filmmaker, Martin McDonagh. Martin directed Gleeson in the thriller In Bruges, which had language, characters, and some situations similar to The Guard. Like his brother, John Michael McDonagh creates quirky characters with distinctive habits. For example, the three major drug runners in The Guard (Mark Strong, Liam Cunningham and David Wilmot) challenge each other with quotations from the Bible, argue about the nationality of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and gripe about how boring life is as an international drug runner. One of the thugs doesn’t know whether he is a psychopath or a sociopath because he can’t remember the difference between the two.
A young boy on a bicycle with a dog on a leash keeps wandering into and out of the scenes, sometimes providing tips to Boyle, at other times wheedling money and contraband from him. The roles of McBride and his wife are developed more than most minor film characters are, as is the part of Boyle’s mother Eileen (Fionnula Flanagan). One of the more effective scenes occurs with Gerry and Eileen sitting on a lawn bench at the nursing home where she has gone to die, his large bulk beside her tiny one. He pulls out a hip flask and they take turns on it, and she then says, “Ah, that’s better.” She asks to go hear some live music, and a later scene shows them at a pub (he has sneaked her out) having a few last drinks together. The dialogue throughout is sharp and distinctive–for example, as one of the drug runners is dying, he says to Boyle, “But there were other things I wanted to do before I died!” Gleeson and Cheadle are excellent in their parts, taking what could have been stock characters and turning them into human beings that engage the audience’s sympathy.
The Irish countryside and people are important aspects of the film. F.B.I. agent Everett spends an afternoon trying to investigate a disappearance but can’t find anyone who will speak to him in English, not Gaelic. The visuals by former Kubrick photographer Larry Smith are lovely, and the sets and clothing unusually colorful.
The ending has some ambiguity, depending upon whether Boyle was lying about his past accomplishments or not, but that’s consistent with the rest of the film. Most of the people and events in The Guard are not quite what they appear to be initially, but the film is consistently entertaining and engaging.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
On December 18, 1994, three Frenchmen—Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, and Jean-Marie Chauvet–discovered a limestone cave in the cliff face above the Ardeche River, in the mountainous Ardèche region of south-central France. Some 32,000 years before, humans, working with charcoal and red ochre, had created drawings of animals on the cave walls, and sometime after that, perhaps 20,000 years ago, a rock slide sealed the original entrance, protecting the art work from moisture, air and other contaminants.
The paintings in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave represent the oldest known human art work, and after the discovery, the French government sealed the cave with a massive steel door and limited access to only a few scholars and specialists to protect the paintings.
Inspired by Judith Thurman’s 2008 New Yorker article, German filmmaker Werner Herzog petitioned the French government to film the cave paintings as an additional way of preserving them as well as making them accessible to a large number of people.
In the spring of 2010, Herzog was given permission to take a four-man crew, including himself, into the cave for six days, four hours per day, to film the paintings. They were limited to four battery-powered cold-panel lights and a custom-built 3-D camera. They were required to step only on previously installed two-foot wide aluminum walkways that extended along the cave’s 1,300 foot length. Cave of Forgotten Dreams documents what they found there, perhaps the closest view most people will ever have of the world’s earliest known works of art.
On the cave walls are more than 400 complex drawings, in excellent condition, of some thirteen different animal species from the Paleolithic period, including depictions of mammoths, lions, rhinoceroses, bison, horses, bears and other animals, some of which are now extinct. A “wall of lions” shows the lions of that period in Europe did not have manes like the lions of Africa today. Charging rhinos with enormous horns and galloping horses sweep across the limestone walls, as fresh as if painted yesterday.
These sketches are not stick figures but beautifully realized portraits of the creatures of the period, although no one is sure if the paintings were made for ritualistic purposes or simply for the pleasure of creating them. Some of the drawings repeat horns and legs in an obvious attempt to depict movement, or what Herzog calls “proto-cinema.” Carbon dating indicates that some of the figures were created over two thousand years after the others but in the same style.
Other items found in the cave include animal bones and skulls of the extinct cave bear, but humans apparently did not live in the cave. Just inside the original entrance is a series of handprints in red ochre, perhaps the artists acknowledging their work, and one of these handprints has a crooked little finger, while deeper in the cave is a similar handprint—the mark of a unique individual still intact after thirty millennia.
In the dust on the floor is a child’s footprint and near it the footprint of a wolf, a combination that leads Herzog to ask: Was the wolf stalking the boy? Was it his pet? Or were the tracks made thousands of years apart?
Herzog chose to film in 3-D because that process captures the curvature of the walls on which the paintings were done and permits the viewer to experience the paintings more completely (Not having a 3-D TV, I watched the film in 2-D and still found it thoroughly absorbing.)
Throughout the film, Herzog interviews experts about the cave and the paintings, sometimes in the cave, sometimes in their laboratories, and adds his own eccentric and often insightful comments. For example, he interviews the former president of a national organization of perfumers, who travels about the region where caves are, sniffing the air, hoping to find where other caves are venting and perhaps hiding additional treasures from the past. He films an anthropologist demonstrating how an ancient artist might have thrown a spear.
Herzog’s comments, questions and inquiries sometimes become eccentric, but great artists should be permitted to be eccentric. Above all, Herzog is fascinated by the artwork, that preservation of fleeting human life and thought. His basic questions are, What makes us human and when did it begin?
The desire to capture reality with a framework of art and to comment upon it apparently goes back as far as we can see into the dim recesses of our history. Art is not a luxury for societies where the basic necessities have been met, but a fundamental impulse for all human beings that helps define who we are and what we do.
People should see the Herzog documentary because it’s probably the only chance they will ever have to see this amazing artwork. Then, when the school boards want to cut the art budget to preserve a couple of additional football games, remember these ancestors, with their torches and charcoal bits, bringing to life in difficult circumstances, what they saw in their heads. That impulse, inherent in all of us, still needs to be nurtured.
––Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available as DVDs from local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited can be found at mmnow.com
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