A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON - #805

One of cinema’s most observant documentarians meets the ramshackle world of rock ’n’ roll in the 1974 film A Poem is a Naked Person. Part concert movie, part journalistic portrait, part travelogue, Les Blank trains his camera on singer-songwriter Leon Russell, an Oklahoma native, piano player, and revered session musician who, in the early 1970s, transitioned into solo work, performing swampy rock jams and writing a few classics along the way, perhaps most notably “A Song for You.”

Blank joins up with Russell’s camp at the apex of the performer’s career, when success has allowed him an opportunity to build a recording studio in his home state. Blank’s team follows Russell throughout the construction, though they don’t always stay around to watch the hammers swing. Interspersed with these scenes are snapshots from the road, including full performances and dalliances backstage. For much of A Poem is a Naked Person, these are our only real glimpses of Russell. Probably unsurprising to anyone who knows Blank’s work, the director spends much of the movie looking at the world around his subject, getting reactions from the locals regarding their famous new neighbor or watching as Jim Franklin, the man painting a mural on the bottom of Russell’s pool, catches scorpions before putting brush to concrete. Or stepping away from people altogether to look at the natural environs.

This impulse to cast his glance sideways keeps A Poem is a Naked Person from being a great music documentary, but Blank makes up for it by basically inventing something that is its own beast. Throughout his work, he has been fascinated by Americana and folk art, and there are subtle touches here, like the Hank Williams façade on the front of a building, or the accidental visual echo of the man with the butterfly tattoo hearkening back to the butterfly imagery in that painting on Russell’s pool.  Even the rootsy music that Russell covers in his concerts remind us of a musical tradition that stretches back to the earliest days of our nation. Not to mention added performances by George Jones and Willie Nelson, themselves legends in the country music field.

The downside is that if you’re looking to learn more about Leon Russell, you’re probably going to be better off reading his Wikipedia entry alongside the film. He doesn’t step out from behind the piano and start to emerge as a character until about halfway through the movie. And even then, since Blank never interviews him directly, he remains an enigma, almost entirely in control of what he shows the camera lens. One is quickly reminded of Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back [review], especially so in a scene where Russell sarcastically dresses down a musician using his studio who steps to him in the wrong way. The way the elder statesman verbally bats around the young newbie (Eric Andersen) and puts him on the defensive is up there with Dylan’s humiliation of Donovan, right down to the lesser’s naïve sincerity.

But then maybe the code to this thing is right there in the title: A Poem is a Naked Person. Blank is creating something evocative of the man and his art, and through these captured impressions exposing something about both. He doesn’t exactly strip Leon Russell bare and show him off to the world, but perhaps he exposes more of the personage by suggesting the image dominates all that may be underneath.

For more local color, Maureen Gosling’s, Poem’s sound recordist and assistant editor has put together a montage of some of her own footage taken during the shoot, adding commentary using excerpts from letters she wrote to her parents. (Gosling is one of the director’s of the recent This Ain’t No Mouse Music [review], which shows Blank’s influence quite heavily.)

There are also supplements looking back at the making of the film, including a more recent conversation between Russell and Les Blank’s son Harrod, in which Russell discusses why he initially disliked the film and kept it out of circulation for years. Turns out, he didn’t think it was about him enough either! So is the naked person being put on display really Les Blank after all? Leon seems to think so.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY - #804

Just when a guy thinks he’s had enough of coming-of-age dramas about troubled adolescents, along comes a movie like A Brighter Summer Day to remind him of why he liked the genre in the first place.

Released in 1991, Edwin Yang’s true-to-life tale has a lot going for it: an interesting setting (Taiwan) during an interesting time period (the start of the 1960s), and historical roots that give it elements of a docudrama. The climactic incident that happens to our main character, Si’r (Chen Chang), actually occurred, and the fallout had a tremendous impact on Taiwanese culture and politics. Or so we are told in a textual coda, Yang’s movie is the build-up to the moment. The denouement is for others to explore.

Taking into account all those things mentioned above, to call A Brighter Summer Day merely a coming-of-age story is to understate it. Yang’s narrative is all encompassing, novelistic in length and approach (the film is nearly 4 hours long), looking not just at the teenaged boy’s troubles, but the struggles of those around him and the reality that informed his downfall. Following the Communist takeover of China, many citizens left the mainland for the small island country of Taiwan to escape persecution. At the outset of the 1960s, the people there are feeling the influence of America (mostly by choice) and Japan (not so much) even as they endeavor to establish their own identity. As Si’r will find out the hard way, there is also an influx of the same oppressive politics his parents tried to outrun.

The Commies and the government are no match for rock ’n’ roll, though. It’s the biggest influence on Si’r and his friends, who form street gangs and adopt ludicrous American nicknames like Honey, Airplane, Tiger, and Deuce. Si’r’s best friend, Cat (Chi-tsan Wang), sings with his brother in a band that covers the latest hits, transcribed for them by Si’r’s older sister. The babyfaced, angel-voiced Cat doesn’t know the meaning of the lyrics, but he gets the emotion and sees how the girl’s react to even a middle-aged Asian man singing Elvis. The title of the movie is a misheard lyric from “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” and as Cat’s subplot wraps up, we’ll see that music has come to mean for him what it has meant for so many kids since Bill Haley first rocked around the clock: escape from the everyday. Cat and Si’r likewise indulge in escapism by spying on the productions at a movie studio neighboring their school.

Ironically, Si’r is the one perhaps the least in need of escape. Though the budding juvenile delinquent’s behavior might remind one of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows [review], Si’r comes from a nice family who take an interest in his studies and, much to their eventual chagrin, trust him enough to think he’s sticking with it, even when bad behavior and poor performance gets him busted down to night school with other students who act out and underperform. Si’r’s older brother (Han Chang) has gone down a similar path. He’s a hustler with a penchant for pool. So far, though, Si’r has mostly observed rather than participated in anything truly bad. A little vandalism, a minor theft, that’s about it. The kid acts tough, and doesn’t back down when challenged, but he’s not got the mettle to carry through with real violence, especially when his opponent is at a disadvantage.

Deep down, Si’r has romantic tendencies. He fantasizes about a knife that Cat has, believing it was used in a lovers’ suicide pact, staring longingly at a photo of the woman who allegedly owned the blade. He also falls for Ming (Lisa Yang), the girlfriend of the leader of the Little Park Gang, currently on the lam from the law. His absence has left a power vacuum that other boys are trying to fill. This includes making claims on Ming. As many a sensitive adolescent before him, Si’r fancies himself a bit of a white knight, though his intentions and the girls he tries to impose them on never quite line up. Not one, but two young ladies dress him down for trying to change them. These fumblings ultimately lead to tragedy, and of a manner that has haunting parallels to other such tragedies of today.

It’s kind of fascinating how Edward Yang (Yi Yi [review]) constructs such a broad story, and yet manages to pull the strings closed to make it all seem like it’s been about Si’r and Ming. A Brighter Summer Day is so long because Yang’s eye roves from person to person. We see Si’r’s brother get tangled up with a rival gang he’s hustled at pool, we see Si’r’s dad burdened by work woes and government suspicion, and we see Ming’s mother and her declining health. Even the most minor characters get their own arcs. The owner of a café where the Little Park boys like to hang out is only in a few scenes, but from one to the next, she has suffered and grown. It’s not arbitrary, either: in the last scene in the café, Si’r is witness to an alternate option should he choose to step away from gang life. Likewise, his brother’s skill at billiards has an effect on Si’r’s trajectory, it’s not just there to add color.

Yang’s style here is steady, both in visual presentation and scripting (he’s one of four credited writers). The pace and construction is a little bit Godfather-era Coppola, a little TV miniseries. There isn’t a lot of fat, nor a lot of lingering or expository scenes. The dramatic staging is realistic, and the natural settings feel lived in, but A Brighter Summer Day is still big moviemaking at its most fundamental. Yang’s story is large enough to take up as many reels as required. To be honest, before I realized that A Brighter Summer Day was a true story, I thought it might be autobio and Si’r was going to end up working at the movie studio. No dice. Instead, Si’r will eventually decide filmmakers really don’t know anything about life. It’s an ironically meta comment for a movie that itself seems to know so much.

The bonus disc in the A Brighter Summer Day package features a 2002 documentary called Our Time, Our Story, chronicling the rise of independent cinema in Taiwan and the eventual loosening of government control of the motion picture business. The full-length doc does a good job of shedding light on the cinema scene that Edward Yang came out of, even if Yang himself is not interviewed. His contemporaries, like director Hou Hsiao-hsien (Flight of the Red Balloon [review], Three Times [review]) do a good job of explaining what a fertile, creative period the mid-1980s was and how they shifted the focus of mainstream movies from kung-fu and romance to reflect life at that time.

Also included is a videotaped performance from 1992 of Yang’s stage play Likely Consequence. Shot on a bare set with the audience flanking both sides, and featuring timed sound effects, the production is ambitious and engaging, even if the presentation here is lo-fi. The drama focuses on a couple debating what to do with a dead body that the wife may or may not have killed on purpose. The more they argue, the more that is revealed about both their past and their current situation.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

SECONDS - #667

“I’ve been assigned to go over the circumstances of your death with you.”

So goes the sales pitch that kicks Seconds into high gear. After watching middle-aged, upper-middle-class businessman Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) navigate mysterious instructions from long-lost friends, meat packers, and dry cleaners, we finally get to the heart of the matter, the thing that he is being lured toward. The program isn’t something you choose, they choose you, whether you’re looking for it or not. You ready to take that mid-life crisis of yours by the horns? Look no further. You can wake up tomorrow with a new face, a new vocation, and a new identity. The only price is...well, everything.

A predecessor to Fincher’s The Game [review], a close cousin to Orson Welles’ The Trial, John Frankenheimer’s 1966 paranoid freak-out is an enigmatic, intriguing hallucination. It hits the ground with both feet and runs like hell, never worrying too much to stop and explain itself, confident the audience will get on board, banking on our wanting to understand what it all means, putting us in our anti-hero’s shoes by never letting us know more than he does. It’s fascinating and weird and strangely prescient. It wouldn’t shock me at all to find out this was Charlie Kaufman’s favorite film as a child.

After plastic surgery and rehab, and a complete overhaul of his most telling physical features (new teeth, removed fingerprints, etc.), Arthur wakes up as Antiochus Wilson (Rock Hudson, Magnificent Obsession [review]), a painter with a beach house in California. It’s a fresh start where the husband and father is now a single swinging bachelor, primed to pursue his art, no matter how impractical; he just has to go along and get along. Which naturally, he can’t. The new Mr. Wilson can’t quite wrap his head around what happened to him, and he starts trying to scratch at the veneer.

“Rebirth is painful...Is it easier to go forward than go back?”

Released at the center of a cultural revolution, Seconds pursues a question of the times: can the past be assimilated into the future? (The present need not apply.) If Arthur Hamilton has bought into the dream of the establishment, living a life of quiet desperation in the suburbs, then he is part of the old guard, one ill prepared for changes to come. Yet, he’s also one with the means to buy his way out. As Wilson, he is set up with a new bohemian lifestyle, free of responsibility, disconnected from cultural change, even if in some ways he is embracing counter culture. The drunken bacchanal that baptizes him as a member of his new community is at once a throwback to the orgies of Rome and a reflection of the Free Love 1960s. Yet it’s false, the whole experience is, which is what Wilson can’t accept. His partying is a bit like Roger Sterling’s experiments with LSD on Mad Men: he has stepped beyond the point where he could maybe pull it off.

The conundrum here is in which direction Frankenheimer’s critique flows. Is his disdain for the squares or for the hippies? The fact that Seconds exists almost within a void, with little hint as to the time it was actually made, it could be viewed as relevant regardless of where you are standing on the continuum. Wilson could just as easily be any struggling white man trying to outrun obsolescence in 2016. The problem is that once Arthur/Wilson has woken up, as it were, he cannot go back to sleep. You can’t roll back history--even if many today try to pretend them can. To not accept change is to end up back in limbo. In this case, an office job within the program, only escapable by selling someone out to your same fate. To once again invoke Mad Men, Wilson is a little like Don Draper at the end of that series, becoming aware that he must relinquish material things, but in this case, too late to bend this enlightenment to his will or exploit it.

Hudson is perfect for the role of the man lost in the construct of himself, perhaps because he knows the pain of living a false identity all to well, having done it for so long in his real life. The restlessness and self-loathing of Wilson grappling with his fraudulent existence is agonizing. Something was lost in the endeavor to have everything. Hudson lends a heaviness to the performance, and when Wilson begins to self-medicate, the actor makes for a very convincing drunk. It’s one of the funniest scenes in a movie full of black humor, and one of the creepiest when the crowd all turn against him. That drunkenness gives way to a tangible despair, and the self-medication turns to literal medication when Wilson returns to the company. They give him pharmaceuticals to keep him pacified. It’s yet another turn that is all too current and relevant, 50 years later.

Seconds is nothing if not immediate. Even how it was shot was intended to make it seem as if it were happening at the exact moment each viewer witnesses it. Director of photography James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success) uses a stark photographic style, one with a more realistic, unenhanced look we might expect from more contemporary pictures shot on video or digital. He favors extreme close-ups and even over-the-shoulder moves to put us in the thick of it. In the various party scenes, the camera practically gets buried in the revels. And when things get weird, reality warps under fish-eye lenses and tricky perspectives, pushing us away at one moment and pulling us in the next, like we are dangling on a spring. There is an intimacy to our participating in the unraveling that keeps us firmly in Wilson’s shoes. We are trapped in the same horror movie as he is, but with the added enhancement of gothic organ music.

“Just who the hell do you think you are?”

For Wilson, that is an unanswerable question in the end. He is either/or, neither/nor. He surrendered the identity he spent a lifetime building in exchange for an altogether different, artificial construct, and when he fails to maintain it, that is stripped from him, too. It’s a fairly chilling ouroboros: you have to assimilate in order to be different. It’s the illusion of freedom, and there’s nothing really to be done, the more you push against it, the more it dissipates. So it goes, same as it ever was. THE END.

Special thanks to Francis Rizzo III, from whose DVDTalk.com review of the movie I snagged the majority of the above images.

SOLO CON TU PAREJA - #353

I’ve been circling various artful ways in which to enter this review, but they all make me more irritated and bored than I already am, so I’ll just give it to you straight: Sólo con tu pareja is not a very good movie.

I’ll even go so far as to say that it is one of the more baffling selections in the Criterion Collection. It’s fairly common for Criterion nerds to debate what movies do and do no deserve to be in the Collection, and I tend to be more forgiving than most, preferring to default to the label’s original mission statement and figure out what the film represents that makes it important to this version of cinematic history. When it comes to Sólo con tu pareja, however, I come up with nothing, except that it’s the full-length debut of Alfonso Cuarón, made in Mexico a decade before Y tu mamá también [review]. Well, I guess it’s true, everyone has to start somewhere. The cover copy calls Sólo con tu pareja a “ribald and lightning-quick social satire,” to which I can only reply, “I guess...?”

Sólo con tu pareja, which translates as “Only With Your Partner,” and has also been referred to as “Love in the Time of Hysteria,” is a sex comedy released in 1991. Written by Carlos Cuarón, it tells the story of Tomás Tomás (Daniel Giménez Cacho, BadEducation), a ladies man who we are lead to believe has game inside the bedroom, but who otherwise appears to be a buffoon outside of it. As a schemer, Tomás seems to have picked up most of his moves from Three’sCompany reruns. We’re talking a guy who calls in sick to work while holding the thermometer against a light bulb to prove he has a fever. Over the phone.

Tomás not only refuses to settle down, but he’s irresponsible about it. You see, Tomás is one of those immature lovers who refuses to wear condoms. If the girl is on the pill, that’s enough, he doesn’t think about other consequences (but more on that later). Things change for Tomás on a night he tries to balance two women--his best friend’s assistant, Silvia (Dobrina Liubomirova), and his own boss (Isabel Benet)--keeping one in his apartment and one two apartments down. It’s when moving between the two via the building’s outer ledge, going in and out through the bathroom windows, that Tomás spots the new neighbor that has moved into the middle apartment. Clarisa (Claudia Ramírez) is a pretty flight attendant who captures Tomás’ imagination. So much so, he declares he’s in love and will change his ways to impress her.

Only, as such things go, Tomás has to actually learn his lesson first. Tomás’ best friend, Mateo (Luis De Icaza), also happens to be his doctor, and this puts Silvia in the position to intercept Tomás’ lab reports and mark him down as having tested positive for HIV. Fearing his life now ruined, while everyone else is out celebrating for New Year’s, Tomás is concocting ways to kill himself (like sticking his head in the microwave!). As luck would have it, when Clarisa comes home early and catches her own boyfriend, a pilot with silver-fox Elvis hair, having sex with another woman on her bed, she joins Tomás’ suicide mission. You think they’ll find love with one another rather than go through with it? Well, do ya’?

Oh, and did I mention that earlier Tomás accidentally gave Silvia his stool samples when seeing her off to work, and he took her lunch to the hospital for lab analysis. Is that a “meet cute” or a “meet poop”?

In many ways, Sólo con tu pareja is very much of its time, particularly in style and presentation. One could see it fitting in with the early 1990s Sundance circuit, where many middling efforts were applauded for their quirky energy and stepping outside the mainstream. Indeed, Sólo con tu pareja sort of comes off like Pedro Almodovar decided to make an Adam Sandler movie, but ended up meeting Sandler more than halfway in his attempt to adapt to the comedian’s style. Even for 1991, the comedy is politically tone deaf, making light of people’s ignorance about a very serious subject, with occasional pit stops for racist comments about some Japanese doctors visiting Mateo. Really, that Sólo con tu pareja holds any kind of critical regard at all is down to that strange reverence some cinephiles have for movies in any language other than English. Were this a Hollywood release, it would already be forgotten, and it should be held up as evidence that cinema from other shores is not automatically better or devoid of schlock. We are just normally spared anyone importing the worst of it. Hell, I’d probably sit through The Cobbler again before reaching for this disc.

As a young filmmaker, Alfonso Cuarón already shows an attention to detail and an early interest in tricky shots and extreme angles. Likewise, his relationship with his regular cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, is  starting to form. The storytelling here is clear, as are the pair’s command over a locale. What Cuarón shows little facility for, however, is comedy, which might explain why his career has gone in other directions since this debut. His instincts for what is funny and for how to frame a gag prove woefully inadequate. Despite the preponderance of pratfalls and slapstick, Cuarón is no Charlie Chaplin, and his leading man is no Buster Keaton. Cacho gives an off-putting performance full of mugging and banal mimicry. Worst of all, he fucks like he’s being bitten by bugs and is trying desperately to shake them off his body, meaning this sex comedy isn’t just unfunny, it’s unsexy, making it hard not to root for Tomás to get everything he deserves.

Though vastly different in tone and quality, Criterion also includes two short films from the Cuarón brothers on Sólo con tu pareja: Alfonso’s 1983 student film Quartet for the End of Time and Carlos’ 2002 comedic short Wedding Night. Of the two, Carlos is the winner, with a quick vignette that features a solid gag. The trick here is not overselling it or overstaying his welcome: set-up and punchline.

Quartet is more ponderous, as perhaps befitting a college project. Angst, boy, angst!

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN - #723

There is an ephemeral grace to Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también that makes it easy to reduce to something simple and small, but that when chased after, reveals deeper meaning and an artful construction of a movie that at times feels like it has no construction at  all.

At it’s most basic, Y tu mamá también is a road trip and a coming-of-age story, both fairly standard and oft predictable genres. At its most grandiose, Y tu mamá también explores erotic identity, political engagement, and the biggest, darkest theme of all: death. It does most of this with a light touch, never once pushing any of these elements so far forward that they dominate. The underlying themes of the eroticism never overtake the erotica itself. More than anything, this is a sexy movie, but like, say, Bernardo Bertollucci’s The Dreamers, a sexy movie with meaning.

The Dreamers is a good comparison for another reason. That movie is a tribute to the French New Wave, and Bertollucci channels the techniques of 1960s cinema through a youthful story of sexual and political awakening. So too does Cuarón adopt the style and the spirit of those influential filmmakers to create something that is free and spontaneous and at its most virtuoso moments, a celebration of moviemaking itself. Released in 2001, and hinting very little at the director’s smart sci-fi blockbusters to come (namely, Children of Men [review] and Gravity [review]) in terms of scope, Cuarón already exhibits the casual mastery of technique that would be so impressive in those later films. Working with frequent collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki (The Tree of Life [review]), he orchestrates long, unbroken scenes that rarely call attention to themselves. They aren’t used to deliver action, but rather are mostly used to probe the environment, to expose the details of the characters’ world by moving away from them and looking around. The one exception is the unforgettable dance sequence between actress Maribel Verdú (Pan’s Labyrinth [review], Tetro [review]) and, almost literally, the camera lens. Her eyes locked dead center, she dances like someone is watching, locking in the audience, seduction through control. Though much is made of her young co-stars, this scene alone explains why the actress got top billing: she’s the star.

Oh, but of those younger men. Y tu mamá también introduced the world at large to Diego Luna and Gael Garciá Bernal; these talented performers would go from Y tu mamá también to separately work with directors as renowned as Spielberg, Gondry, Korine, Jarmusch, Van Sant, and Almodovar. Here they play recent high-school graduates and best friends in Mexico, with Luna taking the role of Tenoch, the son of a rich politician, and Bernal playing Julio, the average son of a middle-class family. The boys are restless during their final summer before college, and spend most of it getting stoned and trying to get laid. It’s at a wedding that they meet Luissa (Verdú), the Spanish wife of one of Tenoch’s cousins. The horny pair invites her to go to the beach with them, promising to show her a beautiful cove so idyllic it’s been nicknamed Heaven’s Mouth. The locale is pure invention, but they haven’t a hope of luring the older woman to go its shores, so that really doesn’t matter.

Except, circumstances change for Luissa, and when she finds out her husband has been cheating on her, she decides to go with them after all. Their naïveté amuses her, and she takes advantage of their eagerness to please by probing them about their sexual adventures (such as they are) while they drive toward the coast in search of paradise. As they reveal more about what they do or do not know--and as she shares with them in equal measure--a sexual tension builds up, one that will eventually find a release.

This in itself would be enough for most filmmakers, but not for Cuarón. Co-written with his brother Carlos, Cuarón’s script for Y tu mamá también never forgets that there is more going on all around the three travelers. There are regular references to political unrest throughout Mexico, and even glimpses off it along the roadway. The travelers pass police checkpoints and people getting arrested, but remain mostly oblivious to the lives being altered within their view, carrying on with their sex talk as if somehow separate from the changing world. This in itself mimics most existences, we all drive on more concerned with our own situation than that of our fellow man. Yet, Cuarón mixes these macro details with the micro. The vacationers also drive by various rites of passage: a car full of newlyweds, a girl having her quinceañera, and a funeral procession. No matter how isolated the transitional experience of two teenage boys and an older woman may feel, the world carries on.

Which also fits the Nouvelle Vague ethos, particularly that of Jean-Luc Godard, who in movies like Masculin Feminin and La chinoise [review] would use the experiences of young people as a springboard to explore other things, to detail the political climate of his era, and expound on his own radical ideas. You could also say similar things of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude [review], another film about a young man having an affair with a (much) older woman set against political turmoil. Cuarón goes so far as to give Ashby’s movie a shout out. Y tu mamá también opens with Tenoch having sex with his girlfriend under a Harold and Maude poster.

Not that the reported protests and massacres ever interrupt or invade the getaway; rather, they are representative of the things that these three voyagers are putting off, the seriousness they will ignore and avoid as long as they can in much the same way they--and all of us--put off death. Cuarón regularly reminds us of this unavoidable fate, as well, with the narrator breaking in to tell us about different traffic accidents that happened in spots along the highway when the car passes. This voiceover interrupts regularly to inform us of things we would not otherwise know, filling in details from the past and present and even the future about all the characters. Rather than being overcompensating narration, however, it adds a poetic quality to Y tu mamá también, evoking the style of South American literature. In terms of presentation, it also calls to mind Godard again, the way Cuarón tweaks the sound, turning the volume down on the main audio to give his off-screen speaker the dominance. (It’s probably no coincidence that Luissa’s cheating husband is a writer, and his encouragement of Tenoch’s own literary aspirations gives us cause to wonder if maybe it’s this boy eventually turning their excursion into something more.)

In the end, though, these things all dissipate. Like sea foam, as Luissa might put it. It’s the connection she makes with the boys, and the things they share, that we will remember. Even if--or perhaps because of--their coming together also eventually drives them apart, we can assume it’s also something they can never forget, and perhaps the finality it engenders is because it’s a time of life that can never be replicated. They will always be remembering, always looking back, even as the next road opens up before them.

Included in this set alongside Y tu mamá también is a 2002 short film by co-writer Carlos Cuarón. Though far lighter in tone, You Owe Me One is a fine companion to the main feature, and perhaps should be watched as a lead-in for a full night of programming. The lark features an oversexed family going about their clandestine business on what we can assume is an average night in their home. The laughs are genuine and unforced, with Cuarón lacing together his scenarios with smart cues derived from the story itself. Double the pace, and this would be a screwball comedy, but as it is, it’s genial and fun.

THE PALM BEACH STORY - #742

There is nothing sillier in love than trying to treat romance as a practical thing, yet that is exactly what the young married couple at the center of Preston Sturges’ 1942 screwball rom-com The Palm Beach Story attempt to do. Or more precisely, what Gerry (Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night [review]) attempts to do when her marriage to Tom (Joel McCrea, Foreign Correspondent [review]) hits rocky times. It’s from such complications that  Sturges prefers to draw his laughs. He is not concerned about the paradise most other love stories promise. On the contrary, he opens where those films usually end, a title card declaring that the newlyweds lived happily ever after...followed by a second that asks, “Or did they?”

It’s not that Gerry doesn’t love her husband, she does; it’s that Tom is a dreamer with a $99K scheme to build airports suspended over major cities like tennis rackets, where planes would land on metal strips. Tom and Gerry (hey, wait a minute!) have faith in the plan, but no one else does, and Tom’s pursuit of the dream has left them broke, to the point that their landlord is renting their apartment out from under them. The potential tenant, a near-deaf sausage tycoon (Robert Dudley), takes pity and gives Gerry the money she needs to pay the bills. His gesture also gives her an idea: leave Tom and find a millionaire willing to tie the knot. She can tell him Tom won’t grant a divorce until he gets his $99 thousand, thus getting her husband everything he wants. It’s a twisted O. Henry variation.

For much of The Palm Beach Story, this cockamamie plan takes a backseat to other comedic business, the best of which is Gerry’s long train ride to Palm Beach. She is adopted by a group of besotted rich men on their way to hunt. Calling themselves the Ale and Quail Club, these fellows kill more bottles of booze than they do birds, and wreak havoc by shooting up the train. Sturges-regular William Demarest (a.k.a. Uncle Charlie from the 1960s television show “My Three Sons”) stands out as the most vocal hunter, his emphatic declarations of “Bang-bang!” providing the 1940s equivalent of an SNL catchphrase.

It’s actually when Gerry is running from these drunk gunman that she meets her would-be second husband, the mega-wealthy J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee, also in Sturges’ darker marriage comedy, Unfaithfully Yours [review]). Hackensacker is endlessly patient and eternally pleasant, and he becomes smitten with what looks to him like a lost little girl, buying her a new wardrobe and taking her the rest of the way to her destination on his private yacht. Things get complicated once they return to dry land. Tom is waiting for them, having never signed on to Gerry’s plot, and they also run into Hackensacker’s hot-to-trot sister, the Princess Centimillia (Mary Astor, The Maltese Falcon [review]). Once Gerry insists Tom is her brother, things only get screwier from there.

Sturges has always had a light touch, but it’s also very precise. Famous for directing his movies by acting out all the dialogue for his actors, there is not a word in The Palm Beach Story out of place, nor a scenario that falls flat. The dialogue comes fast, but it’s also smooth, so the witticisms and turns of phrase ring clear. His command of language is only equaled by his command of his performers. Time and again, Sturges was able to make the most of Joel McCrea’s whitebread mannerisms, making him both the everyman and a parody of the same; Vallee is likewise uptight and strange, an early depiction of the eccentric millionaire. (Between him and the alcoholic hunters, and factoring in Tom’s aspirational endeavors, there is much we can hash out here about class and the American Dream, were we so inclined. Maybe another day....)

It’s the ladies whom the writer/director lets cut loose, which is kind of his signature (see Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve [review], or Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels [review]). Mary Astor is a hoot as the five-time divorcee on the prowl for her next husband. She is a gossip and a troublemaker, and though she knows she is overbearing, the Princess has absolute faith in her own charm. “I grow on people,” she tells Tom. “Like moss.”

The star of the show, though, really belongs to Colbert, who is genuinely charming and winning in all the right ways. Her earnestness often turns to devilishness, but that can also give way to genuine sympathy and concern for the man she loves. You can believe in her belief she is doing the right thing, and forgive her for being so blind.

Gerry’s misguided mission does, after all, gives us all the zany plot turns and clever gags that lead to Sturges’ preposterous ending. The conclusion of The Palm Beach Story is amusingly self-aware, and just plain funny--and once again, a kick in the crotch to all those other fairy tales. Sturges doubles the love, gives us the second happy ending, but then wonders again, “or did they?” I guess it’s up to how romantic you are whether or not you shoot back, “They did?!”

On a side note, in Criterion’s great tradition of reaching out to current artists and illustrators to design their covers, The Palm Beach Story’s cover and interior drawings are by famed Canadian cartoonist Maurice Vellekoop. Check out more of his work at his website.

BITTER RICE - #792

NeoRealism meets noir in Giuseppe De Santis’ 1949 crime drama Bitter Rice.

The bulk of the story is set in the rice fields of Vercelli, a place nomadic workers travel to for 40 days at a time to harvest the current crop and plant the next one. It’s at the train yard the day the workers are supposed to ship off  where two thieves hope to mix in with the crowd and get away with stolen jewels. Except one of the pair, Walter (Vittorio Gassman, Big Deal on Madonna Street), has been made and the cops are on scene to nab him. He makes a run for it, leaving Francesca (Doris Dowling) with the loot. With the help of Silvana (Silvana Mangano, The Decameron [review]), Francesca gets a job with the rice crew--albeit an illegal one, since official contracts have all been handed out already. Silvana is experienced with the system, and is also experienced manipulating people. We are introduced to this spitfire when she is dancing in the train yard to a jazz tune playing on her portable record player. All attention turns to her. Like many a femme fatale before her, Silvana knows she is desired and takes the power that comes with it.

Only, the femme isn’t all that fatale. Or nearly as experienced as she thinks. Though she quickly susses out the truth about Francesca and why she is running away, Silvana is not prepared for the consequences of getting tangled up with dangerous people. When Walter comes looking for Francesca, he sets his eyes on the new girl. Silvana immediately forgets the cautionary tale that Francesca spun for her, about how Walter got his hooks in her and she can’t escape. He is a manipulator himself, and an abusive one at that. By the end of Bitter Rice, the women will have switched places. Francesca will learn the value of hard work, while Silvana will learn the downside of chasing a quick score.

There are many twists and reversals to be found as Bitter Rice progresses. The jewels change hands, Silvana tries to get Francesca kicked out of the camp, they make up and become friends--it’s both melodrama and pulpy crime. A handsome soldier, Marco (Raf Vallone), proves to be equal parts conscience and romantic distraction. And there is another heist yet to be planned.

Giuseppe De Santis creates a seductive amalgam of post-War Italian cinema and contemporary Hollywood Bs. His premise is rooted in reality, even if his plot is thoroughly hardboiled. Bitter Rice opens with a radio correspondent addressing the film-going audience and laying out all the details about Italy’s rice production and why the industry relies on women to do the picking (small, fast hands). The director could have easily made a film about the conditions of the migrant workers and the politics of the system, but rather than make a polemic, he uses the unique setting as his foundation. Rather than let the romantic quartet of criminals and their opposition be the sole focus, he lets the film breathe, moving away from their machinations to show us other characters. Bitter Rice has a large cast, and its narrative is brimming with life. We first see this early on, with the first of many beautiful tracking shots executed by De Santis and cinematographer Otello Martelli (a regular collaborator of Rossellini and Fellini, he shot both Paisan [review] and La dolce vita [review], among others). While seeking out the source of Francesca’s music, the camera pans across the train cars, and in every window, we catch glimpses of an individual existence. Each passenger is given action and purpose.

So, too, are the ladies that form the workforce at the rice fields. Several emerge as key players and return again and again. We see a lot of them in another elaborate, uncut take, as men come to the work site to catcall, and the ladies answer back, generally giving as good as they get (though, amusingly, Francesca is noticeably annoyed, as separate as ever). Again and again, De Santis will choreograph this kind of sequence to show us the full crowd, and to create a very real backdrop for the rest of his plot to play out.

Infused in all that are little nuggets about workers’ rights, fair treatment, class structure, and just general proper community behavior. Francesca initially takes to the work out of opportunity, but she bonds with the other women and comes to appreciate what it means to stick her hands in the soil and make something grow. Thus, when Walter starts to focus on the rice itself for his next crime, she can’t go along. She offers the age-old justification: when they stole from people who could afford it, it was okay, but stealing from people who toiled over something and leaving them nothing to show for it is despicable. (Never mind that several tons of rice doesn’t seem like the easiest thing to go fence. Walter doesn’t strike me as the type of guy who thinks things through.) While Mangano gets the showier performance--and with it, a different kind of attention from the camera--Dowling makes a more subtle transformation. With her perfect posture and dark eyes, she could be misconstrued as overly arch, but it fits Francesca, who begins the picture completely on guard, but ends it in a more empathetic place, yet without surrendering any of her strength.

The final half hour of Bitter Rice is an exceptional orchestration. As the workers plan to celebrate their last day with a wedding, Walter and his new gang put their scheme into motion. De Santis jumps around, taking in all the action, building tension, and then releasing all of his players to their fate. It’s quite riveting, and ultimately satisfying. Crime, as per usual, doesn’t pay, and virtue is rewarded, but that reward is hard earned. The final image of the film encapsulates all these things, with ultimate respect being paid to the more sustainable values, the things that Silvana once knew but has rebuked, and that Francesca has come to anew.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.