A Windmill Too Far

Film: Soldaat van Oranje (Soldier of Orange)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

If you look at my archive, you may notice that I haven’t specifically avoided any part of the list or any film in the specific. I realized recently, though, that I have somehow missed all of the films by Paul Verhoeven. This is surprising and completely unintentional. Now, close to 60% done, Verhoeven is a measurable part of The List, which is the main reason I watched Soldaat van Oranje (Soldier of Orange) today.

There’s a particular type of World War II film that I watched a lot of as a kid, frequently in the company of my older brother. My guess is that my own personal interest in World War II comes in no small part from these films and their specific way of looking at the war. There is a moral clarity in these films, a sense of good and evil, right and wrong. There’s also a good bit of adventure and danger, which is what kept me in my seat while I watched. I’m thinking of films like The Great Escape or A Bridge Too Far specifically, with its cast of thousands and stories of both the military and The Resistance. Such a film is Soldaat van Oranje.

A group of relatively wealthy college students in Holland acts like, well, college students. They play pranks on each other that sometimes backfire, play a lot of tennis, and suddenly, their lives change completely as the war starts. It is their belief and hope that, as with the previous war, Holland will remain neutral, a hope that quickly becomes shattered when Germany invades. The film follows the fates of these young men as the war goes from bad to worse, to unbelievable and then to final victory.

Erik (Rutger Hauer) and Guus (Jeroen Krabbe) are the main focus of the film, or are at least the characters with whom we spend the most time. When Holland is invaded, both attempt to join up, but are pushed aside by the recruiter, who seems unable to focus on anything. Instead, the pair joins the Resistance, eventually attempting to make their way over to England. Meanwhile, their friend Jan (Huib Rooymans), a boxer, defends a pair of Jews, and must escape. Erik offers him the chance to make it to England, but Jan is caught, imprisoned, and tortured.

On the other side of the fence, we have Robby (Eddy Habbema), who runs a small wireless set in communication with the Allies. Eventually, the invading Germans find him out, and convert him to work for them, mainly because Robby’s fiancée Esther (Belinda Meuldijk) looks (and likely is) at least partly Jewish. His compliance with sending false information and helping round up the Resistance is what keeps her out of a Polish labor camp and a mass grave. The final member of the group is Alex (Derek de Lint), who joins the Dutch Army, and with the capitulation, signs up with the Germans and fights in an SS unit on the Russian Front.

Throughout the film, we move back and forth between the stories, seeing in many cases the results of particular actions as well as the personal and private failures and successes of the characters. Jan, for instance, never talks and never reveals any information to the Germans, and eventually pays for it, ending up buried in an unmarked grave in the sand dunes near the coast. Guus and Erik eventually make it to England where they work for the Resistance, both eventually crossing back into Holland with the goal of bringing out important people for post-war Holland as well as tasked with the idea of spreading rumors about the imminent Allied invasion of the continent, hoping to mislead the enemy into thinking the invasion might occur on the Dutch coast. As one British officer comments, it’s not important whether or not they return or die as long as they help further the cause of misinformation regarding the invasion.

And so, while the machinery of war marches on heartlessly, using up and discarding the people caught up in the struggle, those people continue to live and survive as best they can—as dupes, as collaborators, as fighters against oppression. The plot, such as it is, is one of survival through the war and the struggle to reclaim Holland and eventually the European continent, all told through the lives, actions, and thoughts of these characters.

Soldaat van Oranje is not a character-driven movie. We see, for instance, Erik graduate from college with a law degree, but that degree never really enters into the film otherwise. He could have just as easily had any other degree for all of the impact this makes on the narrative. In fact, based on circumstances, many of these characters could be swapped out for each other. While it might be a stretch to see, for example, Erik donning an SS uniform as Alex does, it’s not a difficult think to envision him trapped in the same sort of conflict as Robby and thus acting as Robby does.

That, certainly, is a part of the point of this film, but this is not a film with a deep or important message. The story is what’s important here, the story of the struggle and of survival against these terrible conditions and odds. Throughout, there is less a sense of duty and urgency and more a sense of fate in the proceedings. Esther, at the end of the film, her hair cut short to mark her as a collaborator, holds no grudge and shrugs about her treatment. She and Robby did what they did to survive, just as everyone else who survived did.

There’s plenty of action and intrigue in this film, which is probably why it seems shorter on character and longer on events. It’s also another reason why it feels so familiar to me, like those films I mentioned back at the start. What people do here is far more important than who is doing them. The actions are critical, and in many ways independent of the characters.

If I have a complaint, it’s that everything wraps up too quickly—not an easy thing to say for a film that runs about 2 ½ hours. Erik, though, desperate to fly for the RAF, only gets into a cockpit with about 15 minutes left. It’s almost as if Verhoeven ran out of film or was told to keep the film under a certain length, so he cut half an hour from near the end and shoehorned a year of war into 15 minutes. In many ways, I’d have loved to have seen this as a mini-series of 4-6 hours in length where the full scope of the story and the characters could be given room to breathe and stretch, but I’ll take it and enjoy it for the ripping yarn it is.

Why to watch Soldaat van Oranje: A classic tale of World War II.
Why not to watch: After a sweeping story, it all wraps up far too fast.

Billy Budd

Film: Beau Travail
Format: Internet video on laptop.

I’m continuing with the all-internet video all the time program for the moment, although I have to assume that I’ll continue to bust through NetFlix DVDs as they show up—otherwise, I’m just wasting money. Still, I’m finding this an interesting process at the moment. I’m watching things that most people don’t based simply on availability at the moment, and in some ways, it feels like I’m blazing a sort of trail. Beau Travail is a film that is currently unavailable on NetFlix, and not available in my various library systems, meaning it’s yet another that leaves me at the whims of internet availability.

This is an odd duck of a film, a modern military film that doesn’t touch on a war. Instead, we see troops training and patrolling, practicing, doing mock drills, and fighting. There is a sense of military school in this film, although the soldiers are not of school age. Oddly, the film that I am most put in mind of in scenes like this is Shaolin Master Killer with the endless training and drilling.

The story here is a very simple one. We are told the tale in flashback through the eyes of a man named Galoup (Denis Lavant). Galoup recalls his time in the French Foreign Legion, working and drilling his men in the heat and dust of Djibouti under the tutelage of Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor). It’s evident that Galoup desperately wants the approval of his superior, and that while he is well thought of, he’s not thought of that often.

The trouble starts with the arrival of a soldier named Sentain (Gregoire Colin). Galoup’s world changes in significant ways with the arrival of this new soldier. Sentain good looking, dedicated, and well-liked among the men. He also proves himself to be exceptionally brave when he saves victims from a helicopter crash nearby the legionnaires’ camp. All of this would seem to be a good thing, but in the mind of Galoup, it is not. It quickly becomes evident that there is a great deal at work here. Galoup is threatened by the young man, threatened for very specific reasons. First, Sentain is an excellent soldier. More significantly, it’s equally evident that Galoup is attracted to the young man, and this sends a jolt through the man’s world.

Certainly there is a great deal of homoeroticism in the film. This is due in no small part to the frequent shots of lines of men exercising with their shirts off, grappling, embracing and otherwise training. Many of the most masculine activities have this touch to them, whether intentional or not, and it’s most certainly intentional here. There is no other purpose for the relative close-ups of half-naked men stretching for minutes at a clip.

Because Sentain is such a threat to him, Galoup reacts out of his own fear and pain, sabotaging the man at every opportunity. He channels his attraction to the younger man into a sort of burning hatred, convinced that Sentain is set to destroy him and dedicated to the idea of destroying him first. So, when Sentain falls afoul of military discipline, Galoup has his chance to act, sending him off into the desert with a broken compass in the hopes that he will die of exposure, thus freeing Galoup from his presence.

That’s really the whole film. As you might expect, this is a slow movie. Anything like an action sequence is really nothing more than a training montage. Additionally, the drama here is entirely internal and never fully expressed outwardly. We’re left to divine everything for ourselves, even the basic attraction that drives the slim narrative to its conclusion.

Beau Travail is tragic in the traditional sense in that it tells the story of a man destroyed by his own inner character defect. Galoup’s actions are beyond his own control, and while he is not forced to act by any traditional measure, he is also powerless to prevent his own acting.

This is not an easy film. The narrative is sparse, as is the dialogue. Instead, the story is told through glances and camera angles, through the looks given by one character to another and through anything that we can gain by what we infer. It is filmed beautifully, and fans of cinematography will not even need the story to find this film worth watching. For the rest of us, the simple story simply told and the rather surprising and bizarre ending make for an unforgettable film experience.

If you're of a literary bent, Beau Travail owes a great deal to Herman Melville's Billy Budd. I don't remember as much homoeroticism in that work, but it certainly wouldn't be out of place on board a military ship out to sea for months at a time.

Why to watch Beau Travail: A visual feast.
Why not to watch: Not much happens.

Malaise

Film: Astenichenskiy Sindrom (The Asthenic Syndrome)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

I started looking through my bookmarks today to check out some of the films I’ve found on the internet. As it happens, Sunday tends to be a good day for me to watch something on the laptop because I’m not teaching and have been pretty good about getting my work graded quickly. Unfortunately for me, I discovered today that a number of films that I had found and bookmarked have since been removed—all within the last couple of weeks. So it looks like I’ll be burning through as many that remain as possible in the weeks ahead, just to avoid having to search for them again. Of these, I selected Astenichenskiy Sindrom (The Asthenic Syndrom) for today for one particular reason.

That reason is simple, and perhaps does not speak particularly well of my desire to watch this film. I can’t claim this is a film I’ve been wanting to watch. But when I first started looking for some of the more unusual films on The List, this was the one that seemed in many ways the most difficult to find and the most exotic. That’s not true, obviously; there are several dozen I have yet to locate, but mentally and emotionally, finding and watching this film feels like achieving the impossible, or at least the highly unlikely.

Kira Muratova’s film is…well, it’s unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s also almost impossible to talk about without getting into spoiler territory, so you can expect a spoiler tag very soon. Our film begins in black-and-white. A man is being buried, and his widow, a woman named Natasha (Olga Antonova) reacts to this in an extreme way. She becomes alternately aggressive and completely passive to the point of catatonia. Her life, essentially, ceases to have any meaning or purpose. She attacks anyone who comes near her, resigns from her hospital job and burns that bridge by overtly insulting everyone she worked with including her boss. At one point, she grabs a drunk off the street for sex, then kicks him out of her apartment. In one of the more disturbing scenes, she stands in her kitchen, slowly pushing wine glasses off the table and listening to them shatter, an act aggressive in nature but passive in the way she does it. And then…

*** GO TO SLEEP ***

We discover suddenly that all of this has been a movie. The first forty minutes of this film are actually a film within this film. The actress walks out on stage to take questions from the audience only to discover that the audience is leaving en masse and that no one cares to ask her anything. We’ve been scammed for forty minutes, sort of—everything that we’ve invested in so far is a fiction within the fiction. It was all to set the stage and the theme for our main story.

*** WAKE UP ***

The rest of the film concerns Nikolai (Sergei Popov), a teacher who suddenly discovers himself unable to stay awake. He falls asleep in almost any situation. We see him first asleep in a crowded theater, then asleep in the middle of a busy concourse of a Moscow subway. Eventually, someone drags him out of the main path for foot traffic, propping him against a wall, only to leave him sleeping peacefully in a sort of extended narcolepsy. And in what will come to be a theme for the film as it continues, many who encounter Nikolai begin yawning, as if his sudden narcolepsy is contagious.

This contagion of sleepiness becomes the central theme of the film, which takes place in Glasnost-era Russia. Nikolai’s students don’t care about the English lessons he gives them, and it’s evident that he doesn’t care much about them (the lessons or the students), either. There is an overall feeling of listlessness and ennui over virtually everyone in the film. There is a grayness that permeates the proceedings—even the part of the film in color might as well be in the pseudo-sepia of the opening forty minutes. The title evidently refers to a sort of hypochondria, but really, it seems much more like a general malaise, and it’s universal. We see the kids in Nikolai’s class not paying attention, chatting with each other. Later, we see the teachers in a meeting doing the same thing.

So what is Muratova trying to say here? Is this an indictment on Glasnost? Probably, but it seems like it’s more general than that, as if there is an inherent laziness and indifference in the entirety of modern life, as if we are all seeing the world through a dirty filter. I do not know if this is a film that I can honestly say that I enjoyed; it might well be impossible to truly enjoy this film. It is an impressive film, though, one that works on multiple levels. There are sudden bursts of violent action throughout the film that are strange and shocking, made all the more terrible by witnesses simply observing and doing nothing to prevent it. There is a pervasive sickness at work here, a contagious insanity that infects everything it touches in this film world.

It’s worth noting that this film was the only Russian-made film banned in Glasnost-era Russia. It’s a film that should be seen by more people despite its daunting length and subject matter. However, I imagine it’s also a film that many people will find too trying or too slow to fully consume. That’s not a film snob comment, by the way. There have been plenty of films on this list that flew straight over my head. I think in this case, I’m simply more attuned to the message Muratova wanted to get across.

As a final note, there are some scenes near the end that are extremely upsetting, particularly if you are an animal lover.

If this is one you need, go here: The Asthenic Syndrome.

Why to watch Astenichenskiy Sindrom: It expresses something almost impossible to express.
Why not to watch: The start is there just to mess with you.

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

Film: Dodsworth
Format: Internet video on laptop.

It occurs to me that in poor economic times, movies often reflect both the economic realities of the day as well as the fantasy. It seems that when I think of movies made during the Great Depression, for instance, most of them seem to feature the uber-wealthy. It’s almost as if these films offered a sort of money porn for the downtrodden. It also seems often as if the problems that occur in this films are the sort that plague only the wealthy and not the rank and file rest of us. And then, suddenly and out of nowhere for me in this collection of films about rich people being rich, comes a film like Dodsworth.

Our hero, Sam Dodsworth (Walter Huston) is the owner of a large automobile company, and as the film starts, he has sold it off to another company, effectively retiring. He’s decided, as many wealthy retirees might, to take this opportunity to travel to Europe with his wife Fran (Ruth Chatterton) for a sort of second honeymoon. But the ship over presents us with a few hitches in the Dodsworths’ plans. Fran, it soon becomes evident, is younger than her husband, and is desperately afraid of being old before her time. We get inklings of this in her encounters with Captain Clyde Lockert (David Niven), who romances Mrs. Dodsworth rather unsuccessfully, and forces the couple to France instead of England thanks to her potential embarrassment.

And things don’t change in Paris. Here, she encounters Arnold Iselin (Paul Lukas), a wealthy financier, who picks up where Lockert left off. This time, Fran is swept off her feet and she decides that she likes it in Paris, in no small part because of the presence of Iselin. Sam decides that he’s had enough, and returns home while his wife is left in the company of the man trying to steal her away. Once home, Sam becomes lost in his life without his wife around and confused by her lack of communication with him. Her returns to Europe to confront her and essentially offers her the chance to save their marriage by leaving with him for another part of Europe immediately. Again, she goes with him. The mood changes when he reveals that their recently-married daughter is pregnant, and Fran is overwhelmed with excitement until that moment when he says the word she dreads—grandparent.

The night of the child’s birth, when Sam and Fran are in Vienna, she forces him to hide the news from Baron Kurt von Obersdorf (Gregory Gaye) and Sam complies. He also spends the night in, allowing the baron to escort his wife out for the evening. Three is a charm, of course, so when Kurt confesses his love for her, Fran decides that this time it’s the real deal. She tells Sam that she will divorce him and marry the baron, living on in Europe as a part of the minor nobility and setting Sam spiritually adrift once again.

And so he travels, but never discovers precisely how he wants to live. In Italy he runs into Mrs. Edith Cortright (Mary Astor), a young divorcee living in Italy because it is cheap. He remembers her from his first crossing to Italy, and it’s evident that he is immediately smitten with her. Lacking direction and now on the verge of divorce, he moves into her house, deciding not to care what her neighbors think. Then Fran’s impending marriage to the baron falls through, leaving Sam with a quandary. Does he return to the life he had and the wife he loves despite her evident penchant for infidelity? Or does he remain with the woman who has discovered a better way to live, a woman truly alive and in the moment rather than simply running after her own faded youth?

Dodsworth is a film that could have quickly become melodramatic and maudlin, but it resists this temptation throughout. It does so in the best way possible—by presenting real characters with real emotions and who truly experience the passions and joys and problems expressed in the film. Sam Dodsworth may well be a wealthy industrialist at the start of the film, and there’s no loss of opulence as he travels around Europe or strides through his home library, which is roughly the size of my entire house. Regardless of this, he is at heart a real and simple man attempting to discover a meaning for his existence in his world post-career. Sam is not pathetic by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, he’s decent and caring. But he’s also vulnerable and fallible as a person, and easily wounded.

This more than anything is what surprised me about this film. Rather than fall victim to the standard Hollywood tropes, Dodsworth attempts to depict real people going through real emotional struggles, dealing with the pain and frustration of the couple growing apart and their marriage splintering as they realize that they both need and want different things from life, and that each one is incapable of giving the other what he or she needs. It’s poignant and painful, and very, very human.

I can’t say that I’m gobsmacked by this film, but five minutes in, I thought I was in for the standard “It’s good by old Hollywood standards” trope fest. By 15 minutes, I was hooked and buying into it completely. It’s as good and as true as story as you’ll find in any film, and it plays straight with the viewer as well as its characters. A higher compliment, I cannot give.

Why to watch Dodsworth: A story that aims for painful reality rather than Hollywood feel-good.
Why not to watch: Sometimes it seems like old Hollywood thought that only the wealthy could manage to have non-monetary problems.

One Hell of a Poker Hand

Film: Three Kings; Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens)
Format: DVD from personal collection (Three Kings) and from Rockford Public Library (Nueve Reinas) on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I sort of remember when Three Kings was released. I remember it got pretty good reviews overall, but I never really had any strong desire to watch it. Then it turned up on The List, and when I encountered a copy for sale for a couple of dollars, and knowing I’d have to watch it eventually, I picked it up. Eventually finally turned up today.

The film takes place during the waning days of the first Iraqi war. We encounter (despite the sort of misleading name of the film) a quartet of American soldiers getting ready to rotate back home. Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) is a new father who just wants to get back to his new baby. Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze, far better known as a director) is a guy who never graduated from high school, and idolizes Barlow and everything he does. We also have Chief Elgin (Ice Cube), who is officious and just wants to get himself out of the war in one piece. Finally, there is Archie Gates (George Clooney), who has rank and good looks, is tasked with leading around a press correspondent named Adriana Cruz (Nora Dunn), but who is leaking her stories and having sex with other reporters on the side.

The plot takes off when Barlow discovers a map stuck into the rectum of a surrendering Iraqi soldier. The map evidently shows the location of several compounds controlled by Saddam Hussein and reported to be loaded with the various treasures he removed from Kuwait during his invasion. Naturally, this sets Barlow, his constant companion Vig, and Chief Elgin to thinking. But when Cruz gets wind of the map (and thus Gates finds out about it), everything kicks into high.

Basically, Gates shows up and takes over. His plan isn’t to liberate a couple of televisions and cell phones, but to locate the millions of dollars worth of gold bullion that Hussein was alleged to have stolen with the idea of liberating it for himself. He works out a plan with the other three, engages another soldier (Jamie Kennedy) to get his press contact off his back, and the four proceed to head off in a Hum-Vee to see what they can see. And, not too long after they start looking, they find the gold. They also find quite a bit more. They find refugees, who will be killed by Hussein’s troops as soon as they leave. And so a deal is struck—the refugees help them carry the millions in heavy gold bullion, and they get the refugees to the Iranian border and safety.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple, especially in the demilitarized area of a warzone in a movie, and there are plenty of complications, live fire, deaths, and a little bit of torture. Despite all of this, the film is relatively straightforward from start to finish. The twists and turns here come not from double crosses, but from attacks of conscience and from people making the decision between doing what they want and ultimately doing what is right. All of our main characters make this choice at least once, deciding essentially what the lives of these Iraqi refugees is worth in a very literal sense.

I liked Three Kings, but I’m not sure it belongs on the 1001 Movies list. It’s a good film, and one that makes an interesting point about the war in which it takes place. It’s difficult these days to make a war film that doesn’t make some sort of political point, and Three Kings is no different in that respect. The troops, eventually, feel responsible for the suffering and the survival of the Iraqi people because the joint military forces stopped short of the removal of Hussein from power, leaving those people to his not-so-tender mercies in the aftermath. In other words, these troops defy orders to do precisely what the American military failed to do in the war. There’s no question that this was the intended message here.

Russell frequently plays with the way the film plays out, reducing one action sequence to slow motion and momentary still frames. It’s an interesting effect. Rather than showing a melee, he shows one man shooting, then the results of that shot, then the next and the next until the shooting stops. It’s a fascinating scene, but the use of this technique is too infrequent in the film to be more than a simple trick. At several times, he takes us inside the human body to show us what is happening, and here he depicts the human organs in a variety of bright colors that offer the suggestion of biology with all of the reality of an expensive plastic museum display. It’s odd and mildly off-putting, as if he wanted to be edgy without offering offense.

Three Kings isn’t a bad movie, but it’s also not really a great one.

Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens) is a film I knew nothing about going in, and that I selected only for the royal similarity in the name. As it turns out, though, there is a distinct similarity between these two films despite having nothing in common on the surface. This film is far more akin to a modern Argentinean version of The Sting than anything else, and had I known that, I might have saved it for a conman/crime spree double feature. However, I didn’t and went with a pairing based on titles alone. I just happened to get lucky in that both films involve a plot that is at least marginally about acquiring and moving merchandise of great value.

Juan (Gaston Pauls) is a small-time conman scamming convenience stores for a few bucks at a time. He’s caught by who he thinks is a cop, but who actually turns out to be Marcos (Ricardo Darin), another conman who is more sophisticated and experienced. Marcos, used to working with a partner, decides to take Juan under his wing, and the two pull off a couple of scams around Buenos Aries. We discover that Juan needs the money to bribe a judge for his father, which is why he is scamming everyone and everything he can. And then a massive scam falls into their laps.

A former associate of Marcos, a man named Sandler (Oscar Nunez) has a scam set up that is perfect. A man named Gandolfo (Ignasi Abadal) is being deported. As it happens, Gandolfo is fabulously wealthy and is an inveterate stamp collector. Sandler has access to a set of rare stamps from the Weimar Republic. These stamps, called the Nine Queens, are worth a fortune, and while he can’t actually get his hands on the real thing, he’s been able to create a near perfect forgery. With Gandolfo leaving the country the next day, he’s got to sell him the forgery now, but his health won’t let him. Enter Marcos and Juan to pull off the deal.

Of course, there are a lot of hurdles in the way here. The first and biggest is that Gandolfo is staying at the hotel where Marcos’s sister Valeria (Leticia Bredice) works. The two are at odds with each other because Marcos has cheated her and their younger brother out of their inheritance. The appraiser who verifies the Nine Queens wants his cut for passing off the forgery as the real thing. Gandolfo decides that he’d rather have sex with Valeria as part of the deal. And Marcos attempts to screw Juan on the deal at every opportunity, naturally enough.

This film is very much like The Sting, although its sense of humor comes from a very different place. This film is grittier and a lot more sardonic, mainly. It becomes difficult to take anything at face value, which naturally makes those things that happen at face value that much more effective.

This is a clever film, and a film that is carefully plotted to within an inch of its life. Throughout, we get only enough information to keep us invested in the plot. Everything makes sense during the entire running time, and each of the various plot twists continue to make sense all the way along. And yet despite this, the ending is impossible to guess. Every time something happens, there’s no way to know if it’s really happening or just another machination from Marcos or Juan.

Worth watching? Absolutely yes. The performances are well done all the way through, and the film is a real pleasure to watch. Director Fabian Bielinsky doesn’t do anything particularly noteworthy here, but he’s also smart enough to stay out of the way of the film and the actors and let the plot play out. Nueve Reinas is all about the plot—the actors and characters are almost secondary, and only Marcos (and perhaps Valeria) are really memorable here. But that doesn’t matter at all because the plot is good enough that it’s all we really want anyway.

Why to watch Three Kings: A war story with actual heart.
Why not to watch: Day-Glo innards.

Why to watch Nueve Reinas: A con game of the highest quality.
Why not to watch: How enticing do you typically find stamp collecting?

A Cheerful Touch of Misogyny

Film: Gigi
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I have a friend named Lori who loves musicals. Loves them to death. She gets mad at me when I complain about musicals. Then again, she’s more cinematically limited than I am, in that there are a good dozen genres she won’t watch. Anyway, every now and again I talk to her about the stuff that I’m watching. When musicals on The List came up, she flat out told me I shouldn’t watch Gigi. It wasn’t because she didn’t think I’d like it. It’s because she absolutely hates it. Lori was right.

Hate isn’t a word that I bandy about loosely, either when writing about film or talking about anything else, and it’s probably too strong a word for my feelings about this film. It’s safe to say, though, that I really didn’t like it, and I had a difficulties paying attention to it at times. It’s a film that features the sort of joyful misogyny that only a musical from the ‘40s or ‘50s can. That, more than anything, is my biggest problem with the film.

She is Risen!

Film: Volver
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television.

A few days ago, I tried to get a little ahead on my movie watching, so I plugged in Volver. I managed to get about 20 minutes in before I turned it off. I just couldn’t get into it. I tried again today, and I’m happy to say that my inability to watch this film the other night rests entirely on my shoulders, and is not the problem of the film. I enjoyed it far more than my initial foray would have had me guess.

This is not to say that the film is without its problems. It has a major one that’s difficult to talk about without spoiling the entire film. I’m going to try, but you can assume there will be a spoiler tag coming up in the near future. Anyway, regardless of the problems of this film, it has one major plus going for it: Penelope Cruz. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to call her a favorite of mine; in addition to being very easy to look at, she’s also extremely talented, and Volver is plenty of evidence of that.

Raimunda (Cruz) returns to the village of her birth to take care of the gravestone of her parents, who died in a fire. She is with her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) and her sister Soledad (Lola Duenas). While in town, they visit their friend Augustine (Blanca Portillo) and their aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave). Tia Paula is old, becoming infirm, and not sure what decade she is living in any more. She seems to be hallucinating, claiming that Raimunda’s and Sole’s mother Irene (Carmen Maura) has returned from the dead and lives with her, helping around the house.

They return to Madrid, and the film takes a strange left turn. Raimunda’s husband Paco (Antonio de la Torre) claims that Paula is not his daughter and tries to molest her, and Paula reacts by killing him. Raimunda works to clean up the mess only to find that Tia Paula has died, and that she has been charged with selling off the restaurant of an old boss. While she disposes of Paco’s body by placing him in a freezer in the restaurant, Sole returns for Paula’s funeral and discovers that her mother’s spirit now appears to her and follows her to Madrid.

And, to add more fun to the mix, we learn that Augustine has cancer and is terminal. All she wants is to discover what has happened to her mother, who disappeared on the same day that Raimunda’s parents died in the fire. There’s enough here to figure out exactly what happened, but to talk about it, we need that spoiler tag I mentioned earlier.

*** DO NOT REVEAL THE SECRET ENDING! ***

Okay, so Raimunda’s mother isn’t dead. She was never dead. It turns out that Augustine’s mother was having an affair with Raimunda’s father. Worse, he also molested Raimunda, and young Paula is both her daughter and her sister (following Chinatown and followed by Precious). When she discovered this, Irene burned the house down, then vanished, and has appeared as a “spirit” ever since. All she really wants is to reconcile with her children, particularly Raimunda, who was so badly wronged.

As much as this was supposed to be a big reveal, though, I didn’t buy it for a second. As soon as Irene showed up, I knew who she was, and I knew she wasn’t dead. I didn’t put all of the pieces together, but I did figure out that she was alive from the first moment. She didn’t look like a phantom, for instance, and she had far too many physical characteristics. She was solid. She was capable of working for Soledad, for instance, and when she travelled to Madrid, she did so inside Sole’s trunk. In short, she didn’t act like a ghost at all.

It leaves me in a strange position. See, I rather liked this movie for the simple fact that I got that the spirit thing was an act. I don’t know how much it was supposed to work as something I didn’t get, because I wasn’t really fooled by it. The problem with that is that it immediately calls into question the essential intelligence of everyone in the film with the exception of Raimunda, who sees through the ruse immediately.

*** OKAY. WE’RE DONE HERE ***

The major problem with Volver is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be. There’s a whole subplot, for instance, about the restaurant that Raimunda tries to sell for her former boss. A movie crew working in the area decides that evidently it’s the only restaurant in all of Madrid that they can eat at, so Raimunda opens it up specifically for them. Why? While this offered us a few plot points, and gave us a temporary place for the body of Paco, it felt in many ways like padding.

Regardless, it’s well acted and surprisingly entertaining. I do love me some Penelope Cruz, and Blanca Portillo is an absolute find, and is my favorite non-Penelope character in the film. It’s worth seeing for the depth of the relationships of the characters, but I can’t help but think I’d have liked it more if it could have decided what exactly it wanted to be and simply focused on that rather than trying for so much real life that didn’t intercept with the plot.

Why to watch Volver: Because it stars Penelope Cruz.
Why not to watch: It’s not sure what it wants to be.