Quarterly Cinema Scan - Volume XVII

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done;

It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

Those words, among the most famous in all of English literature, are spoken by Sydney Carton in Charles Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities, my favorite novel of all time.  The story depicts life in Paris at the beginning of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century.  The national motto of France, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," is said to have its origins from the Revolution.

In the mid-1990's Polish film maker Krzysztof Kieslowski decided to create a trilogy of stories loosely based on the three words comprising the aforementioned French motto.  Appropriately enough, the film titles, in their shortened form, are simply called Blue, White and Red.  (The on-screen titles are each preceded by the word "Tri-color.")  It is no accident that the three colors precisely correspond to the vertical bars of the French flag, seen left-to-right as blue, white and red.

When these movies came out in the United States, I intended to see them, mostly out of a combination of my admiration of the Dickens book and a curiosity over how the famous Kieslowski worked the colors into his themes.  Alas, I never made it to the theater in 1993 in time to see Blue before it disappeared from the Twin Cities, and I was reluctant to view the remaining two films when they were released a year later because I thought -- it turns out mistakenly -- that I needed the background of the first.  (PSA: Although you do not need to see the three films in order, the ending of Red makes more sense if you watch that movie last.)  About ten years ago I almost bought the boxed set of the trilogy, but due to my basic nature of being frugal -- okay, cheap -- I decided against it.  I finally had an opportunity to watch all three films four months ago when they were featured on Turner Classic Movies television.  It was worth the wait.

I also remember that after Red was released in 1994, the local critics declared it to be the best of the trilogy.  On the other hand, national film critic Leonard Maltin, who published his forty-fifth and final annual film guide this year, bestows that distinction on White. Initially, my personal preference was to give the nod to Blue.  Of course, I must confess that I could watch a two hour movie of Juliette Binoche picking flowers in a garden or shopping for floor tile in Menard's, and I would still be inclined to give it two enthusiastic thumbs up (to borrow a phrase from the late Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel).  But after a few doses of honest deliberation, I am forced to declare White the superior film, with Blue coming in second.

In Blue, Binoche stars as Julie, the widow of a world famous music composer who had been commissioned by the European Council to write a major concerto titled Concert For The Unification Of Europe.  The piece was to be played only once, simultaneously by orchestras in twelve European cities.  As the story develops we learn more about the influence Julie had on the composition, working behind the scenes while her husband was hailed as the master.

When she loses her family in a tragic accident, Julie decides to rid herself of almost all of her possessions, including the unfinished concerto score.  She instructs her attorney to sell her villa, and heads for the city with only a small box.  Her ambition is to start a new life by living anonymously and alone.

Will she be able to find liberty from the life she has left behind?  It may not be as easy to do so as one might originally believe.

In White, Zbigniew Zamachowski plays Karol, a Polish hair dresser who marries Dominique (Julie Delpy of the Before Sunrise trilogy), a Parisian who owns a small shop.  The story opens with a short courtroom scene, in which Dominique is telling a French judge that she wants a divorce because Karol can't perform in the boudoir.  Karol still loves Dominique, but due to the language barrier caused by his inability to converse in French, he has little grasp of what the testimony is, and is unable to assert his own position coherently to the judge.  He asks the judge if he is not entitled to a fair trial because he speaks only Polish.  In his mind, the principle of equality of legal rights should not be compromised just because one of the parties does not speak the language of the court, viz., French.

When Karol gets back to Poland, he concocts an ingenious scheme to get back at his ex.  Will it work, or should he have left well enough alone?  By far, this film has the most humor in the trilogy, and has the most "going on" as the story takes place.  Add to the mix that Zamachowski is a brilliant actor, and that explains why I place White as the signature piece of the trio.

In Red, Valentine (Irene Jacob) is a young Swiss fashion model whose picture is splashed on billboards all over Geneva.  She accidentally injures a dog with her car, and meets the mysterious retired judge Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who is identified on the dog's collar as its owner.  Inside Kern's house, Valentine discovers that he has set up an intricate eavesdropping apparatus which enables him to listen in on his neighbors' telephone conversations.  Despite Kern's position, explained at length, that his practice has merit, Valentine shows her disgust and leaves to take the dog to the veterinarian.  Kern seems disinterested.

Their paths cross again when the dog runs away from Valentine and ends up back at Kern's house.  The two lead characters, who originally could not seem any more disparate, have more conversations.  In a strange way, a fraternity is established, and despite their age differences, what they have to say to each other has an impact on their lives.

Kieslowski co-wrote all three of the scripts.  As a result there are certain common threads throughout, the most obvious being the use of the respective film titles' colors in each picture.  For example, in Blue Julie keeps a blue chandelier after getting rid of all the other items in her villa.  That chandelier appears in several subsequent scenes.  Many of the filmed scenes appear to be shot through a blue filter.  In White, Karol hangs on to a white porcelain bust of a woman's head, which he repairs (and even kisses!).  That bust stays with him, whether in France or Poland.  There are several outdoor scenes with snow, and a few flashbacks to Karol and Dominique's wedding day, obviously having white as the predominant color.  In Red, that color is pervasive throughout; even the dog, Rita, is red.

Each of the three movies contains a "throwaway shot" involving a very old, hunched-over person attempting to insert a bottle into a tall recycling bin.  There are varying degrees to which the main character in each story interacts with the senior citizen.  There is also one scene in each movie where one or more characters from the other two movies make an extremely brief appearance.  Watching the three films in a short span of time will assist you in spotting those moments.

***

I am approximately a month late in posting this Cinema Scan of the movies I've seen on the tube during the third quarter of 2014.  Hopefully my editor won't fire me.

1. And God Created Woman (1956 drama; Bridgette Bardot is a sexy teen foster child, who marries Jean-Louis Trintignant to avoid being sent back to the orphanage, even though she is more smitten with his older brother Christian Marquand.)  B

2. Blue (1993 drama; see the above mini-review.) B+

3. Breakfast Club (1985 dramedy; Emilio Estevez and Molly Ringwald are among five high school students from five different cliques who serve a Saturday morning detention in their school's library.) B+

4. Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969 western; Paul Newman and Robert Redford are humorous train and bank robbers who, with occasional assistance from Katharine Ross, stay on the run to evade capture by the lawmen.) A

5. A Farewell To Arms (1932 war romance; Gary Cooper is an American army lieutenant who secretly marries nurse Helen Hayes in Italy, but World War I doesn't make things easy on them.) C

6. The Fault In Our Stars (2014 romance; Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort are teenage cancer patients who meet in a support group, fall in love and travel to Amsterdam to meet a favorite author.) B+

7. Gallipoli (1981 war drama; Mel Gibson and Mark Lee are young track stars who volunteer to fight for Australia against the Ottoman Turks in World War I.) B+

8. Harper (1966 detective drama; Paul Newman is a slick LA private dick, hired by super rich Lauren Bacall to track down her alcoholic philandering husband.) C

9. Her (2013 drama; Joaquin Phoenix is a nerdy loner who develops a relationship with the woman "inside" his future (?) word operating system.) B-

10. The Lovers (1958 romance; Jeanne Moreau is married to French business owner Alain Cuny, and dallies with handsome polo player Jose Luis de Vilallonga, but when her car breaks down she turns her attention to the motorist who gave her a ride, Jean-Marc Bory.) C

11. Our Man In Havana (1959 comedy; Alec Guiness is a British vacuum cleaner salesman who gets talked into becoming a spy in Havana, where cigar chomping Ernie Kovacs is the chief of police.)  B+

12. Random Harvest (1942 romance; show girl Greer Garson helps Ronald Coleman avoid the authorities as he escapes from an asylum where he was an amnesia patient, but their budding romance is cut short when he's struck by a car and suddenly is able to recall his former life.) B+

13. Red (1994 drama; see the above mini-review.) B

14. Shine A Light (2008 documentary; Martin Scorsese filmed the Rolling Stones performance at New York City's Beacon Theater in the fall of 2006, with Mick Jagger doing almost all the singing, while Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts let the great backup singers fill in the accompanying vocals.)  B+

15. Spencer's Mountain (1963 drama; Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara raise nine kids on the Grand Tetons, and don't mind being poor until their oldest, James MacArthur, needs money for college.) C

16. Three Days Of The Condor (1975 drama; Robert Redford is an analyst for the CIA who unwittingly uncovers a top secret scheme, then relies on photographer Faye Dunaway to assist him in keeping alive while he gets to the bottom of it.) A-

17. White (1994 dramedy; see the above mini-review.) A-

The MHT 8, Part IV: The Aisle Cloggers

The Ugly stands alone.

We first spotted them in the Tel Aviv terminal late Sunday night, about an hour before we weary travelers were to board our 12:30 a.m. Delta flight to JFK in New York.  Groups of boys, obviously Hasidic Jews, running all over the place, like kids being turned loose at Disneyland.  The main attraction was sprinting the wrong way on the people movers, with occasional spurts into and out of the stores.  They ranged in age from young teens to college age.  Their apparel consisted of knee length bottoned black coats, black top hats, and braids coming way down from their ears where sideburns ought to be.  "I'll bet they are bound for Russia," said Tom Hart, one of the MHT 8.  If only he were right.

Our final day had started early, of course, with the walk down the Via Dolorosa and the visit to the Church Of The Holy Sepulchre, as described in my September 30th second installment of The MHT 8.  We concluded the morning with a thirty minute stop at the Western (aka Wailing) Wall inside the Jewish Quarter of The Old City.  Then, that Sunday afternoon was free, the first mid-day period we had without an organized activity since arriving in the Holy Lands nine days before.  Between our return to the Inbal Hotel and our final group dinner at 6:30, we had a leisurely outdoor lunch at a nearby cafe, visited the famous King David Hotel -- I enjoyed the celebrity signatures on the floor tiles of the main hallway -- packed our bags, and (in Momma Cuan's case) swam in the Inbal pool.

Following dinner, we bade farewell to the ten Magi group members (including Father Joe) who were "extending" to Istanbul the next day, and then boarded the bus for one final ride.   Tel Aviv was a little over an hour away, and by the time we arrived at the airport, all we wanted to do was fall asleep on the plane and wake up twelve hours later at JFK.  To put it mildly, however, things did not go without a hitch.  First there was the fatiguing wait to pass through not only the regular security check point, but also the energy-sapping formality of customs.  Following that ordeal, we still had plenty of time, so most of us gathered near our gate to drain an Israeli beer or two -- Goldstar amber was quite tasty -- and hang out, waiting for the midnight boarding.

It wasn't long after we were seated on the jumbo jet that we realized the Hasidic Jews we'd seen running around the terminal were not going to Russia after all; they were getting on our plane.  A simultaneous surprise was that they were in the company of dozens of male adults of all ages, including sixties and seventies, whom we hadn't spotted in the terminal.  Where were these older folks when the teens were frolicking in the terminal?  On a plane which held close to four hundred passengers, the Hasidic delegation comprised at least two-thirds of it.

What followed was one of the strangest, most surrealistic sights I have ever experienced.  The ultra-orthodox Jews refused to take their seats, and were blocking the aisles.  Small groups would proceed toward the rear of the plane, only to return back up the aisle, against the flow.  Then they would stand there aimlessly.  They placed very large suitcases in the overhead compartments, some of which were too big to allow the shutting of the compartment door.  Then they'd return to the overhead compartment, and open it for purposes of retrieving articles from their carry-ons, or re-adjusting the contents of the compartment.  Whenever they did this, which was often, they would have to lean into whoever the poor soul was sitting in the aisle seat underneath the overhead.  One of them was our fellow pilgrim, Chuck Neerland, who I thought was going to clobber the guy who went to the overhead above Chuck for the fifth or sixth time.  Luckily Chuck thought the better of it, or he may have been escorted off the plane, but I would not have blamed him if he had acted on his impulses.

This mockery of decorum, civility, safety and airline protocol went uninterrupted for over an hour.  There were more people standing than sitting.  The Delta flight attendants were ineffective, flabbergasted and incompetent.  About forty-five minutes into this ridiculousness, the pilot (or copilot) got on the intercom, and asked people to take their assigned seat.  This announcement, which sounded more like a plea than a command, fell on deaf ears.  A few minutes later, two of the officers came out of the cockpit and convened with a small group of Jews halfway down the starboard aisle.  Again, this conference had no effect.  The aisles remained clogged.  Several minutes after that, someone (a flight attendant?) asked over the P.A. if there were people who were willing to trade their seats to accommodate the passengers who did not like the seat to which they were assigned.  (At this point, we had no idea what their beef was.)  I only saw one passenger, who did not appear to be Hasidic, get up to trade seats, and as he was doing so, there was an unfriendly verbal exchange between him and another passenger whom I could not see.

What I could see were many Hasidic "elders" who did absolutely nothing to help resolve the situation, but chose instead to bury their collective noses in their prayer books, oblivious to what was obviously going on all around them and refusing to take any responsibility.  I momentarily thought back to my teaching days, when my eighth graders simply would not have dared to misbehave on any of our several public outings.  They might not have been angels on school premises, but never failed to toe the mark in public.  Yes, it is a different culture now, and we live in a much different era.

Along with the total ineptitude of the Delta flight crew, the biggest surprise to me was that this airplane insubordination would be occurring in Israel, of all places.  If there is one country on the globe known for its tight travel security and enforcement of the rules, it is Israel.  Yet, if the same thing happened on a domestic flight in almost any other country, the perpetrators would have been taken off the plane by a marshall and charged with a crime.  On Flight 469, no police or security officer ever came on the plane.  We did not push off from the gate until 1:10 a.m., an hour and ten minutes after we boarded, and forty minutes after we were scheduled to take off.

So, what was the cause for the ruckus? The MHT 8 found out later that disruption caused by Hasidic Jews failing to take their seats is not an uncommon occurrence.  Their unhappiness stems from their refusal to sit next to a woman, and of course there were many women on the plane.  When I first heard this I was incredulous, but after some research I've learned it's true.  It's hard to believe that a religion teaches that awful practice, but apparently that was one reason why the elders did not admonish their young proteges.  I still wonder why Delta puts up with such foolishness, or if it's even within the rules of accepted international travel regulations.  I still find it hard to believe that airport security never made an appearance.

When all the commotion was going on, I wanted so badly to take a picture to memorialize the sad event.  I did not for two reasons.  First, I was in a window seat, so I would have had to raise my camera quite high to capture a picture over fellow passengers' heads.  Second, the last thing I wanted was to start another brouhaha in the event someone saw me taking pictures and wanted to "make something of it."  In any event, if you care to see pictures of a similar happening which occurred on an El Al flight going from New York to Isreal, check out the following article which appeared last month in the Gothamist: http://gothamist.com/2014/09/26/ultra-orthodox_jews_flight.php.  Finally, I am happy to report that the Hasidics did not accompany us on the final leg to the Twin Cities.  Once they deplaned at JFK, we never saw them again.        

The MHT 8, Part III: Beleaguered In Bethlehem

In the final paragraph of my September 30th second installment of The MHT 8, I promised to share a small sampling of "the bad" and "the ugly" regarding our recent pilgrimage to the Holy Lands.  The good far outnumbered the bad, and accordingly, I have chosen merely three items to describe in that category.  The first two can be classified as annoying; the third was disheartening.  I've decided to save "the ugly" for a subsequent, fourth post.

The Layover. The first irritant of our adventure was the layover in Charles De Gaulle Airport outside of Paris.  After taking off on Friday from MSP at 5:28 p.m. CDT, we had arrived at De Gaulle at 8:06 Saturday morning, Paris time, which was 1:06 a.m. body (Minneapolis) time.  We had been in the air seven hours and thirty-eight minutes.  How would we kill the six hour interval until taking off for Amman later that afternoon?  If the layover was, say, eight or ten hours, we could have taken a train into the city for a couple of hours before returning to the airport.  But six hours?  Too short a time to take a chance on leaving the confines of De Gaulle.  Then, to our collective dismay, the layover was extended from six hours, which was bad enough, to seven and a-half hours.  Sigh.

The pre-trip buzz was that De Gaulle was a good airport for travelers with long layovers, similar to MSP.  I'm not sure who gave us that false hope, but they were dead wrong.  We were stuck in terminal 2E, which seemed to be isolated from the rest of the airport.  This being Saturday morning, the place was almost deserted.  If what you were looking for was perfume, cosmetics or cigarettes, no problem.  There must have been eight stores and kiosks selling those products.  But what we really craved was a comfortable place to sit, preferably inside a bar or restaurant.  We eventually found an area, hidden behind an almost unmarked wall, which functioned as a makeshift bar, selling wrapped day-old sandwiches and bottles of Heineken out of a deli case.  As we sat on hard plastic chairs sipping our brew around tiny tables, we were too tired to go exploring on foot in an effort to discover a passageway to a different, more welcoming section of De Gaulle (if, indeed, there was one to be found).  We also wondered why Magi Travel routed us this way.  Did we save a few bucks by putting up with this interminable layover?  Those were dollars we gladly would have paid for better routing.  We were not happy campers when we eventually boarded the Air France flight to Amman.

The Inbal.  Magi Travel has a reputation for booking its clients in first class hotels. The Crowne Plaza in Amman, during our short single overnight stay, seemed nice enough, and as I wrote in my September 30th post, the Scots Hotel in Tiberius was phenomenal.  Then we spent the final four nights -- five if you count our getaway night -- at the Inbal Hotel in Jerusalem.  While not as posh as the Scots, the Inbal  upheld Magi's reputation, but with one major exception.  The service in and near the bar and commons areas was, for all intents and purposes, non-existent.

Picture a group of twenty-nine people who have been up since dawn and have spent most of their day either on a bus or on foot visiting designated points of interest.  It is now the hour before (or after) dinner, and their fondest desire is to sit down, relax, enjoy each other's company and recount the splendid things they've witnessed while they quaff an adult beverage.  It all sounds good, but soon after the large group congregates a few feet from the hotel bar, they realize that no one is going to take drink orders.  So a few unlucky ones go up to the bar, where they are ignored by the staff.  Finally, when it dawns on the staff that their guests would like to order drinks, they act as if they have never taken a drink order before.  And these are the hotel bartenders!  Then they can't find the correct bottle or a clean glass.  Finally when they attempt to "ring up the order," they can't find the right button on their register's keypad, so they wait for their colleague to finish what she's doing and then ask that person for instruction.  They rarely have change in the cash drawer.  If you didn't really need a drink before you arrived, you certainly did by the time you were eventually handed your glass.

This routine repeated itself every night we were there.  When we congregated in the lounge or on the nearby patio, moving chairs and heavy tables around so we could sit together, no staff member ever came to assist or to serve us.  We were invisible to them, notwithstanding our numbers.  Almost every time we wanted to order something, we had to belly up to the bar and go through the aggravating routine all over again.

When I returned home I did some research regarding the Inbal, and was shocked to find that, on some sites, it is rated a five star hotel.  Apparently those reviewers are teetotalers!

Astonishing Poverty.  I remember reading a Twin Cities Reader (predecessor to City Pages) review of the former restaurant, Aquavit, located years ago on the ground floor of the IDS Building in downtown Minneapolis.  The critic's comment that stayed with me was something like this:  "It is very hard to enjoy your nine dollar dessert at Aquavit when you happen to glance out the window next to your table and see someone shivering in the cold begging for bus money."  More than once on our trip, that recollection came to me.

Our first tour guide was Sammy, a very personable fellow who greeted us at the Amman airport Saturday night, got us to our hotel in time for a late dinner, and then accompanied us on the bus the next morning and afternoon while we visited Mount Nebo and Bethany Beyond The Jordan, where John The Baptist baptized Jesus.  Sammy, a Jordanian, was very proud of his country, and emphasized to us that it's not just Israel (which he often referred to as "the other side") which comprises the Holy Lands.  This was important information, and the more he talked about Jordan's connection to the Bible, the better we could understand why we didn't start the tour in Israel.

Sammy talked almost non-stop, from the time we boarded the bus at the Amman hotel until we re-boarded following the baptism sight.  But then, during the seventy-five minutes or so it took us to drive north to the heavily secured border crossing, he barely said a word.  The reason was evident by observing the crumbling towns we passed through.  What was there to say?  Buildings falling apart, people sitting idly on the edge of the curbless roads, broken and boarded-up windows, stray dogs and cats meandering across the rubble.  The thought occurred to me that Jordan is one of our most important allies in the Middle East, and yet it is clearly a third world country.  One explanation offered by Sammy for the depressing conditions is that, unfortunately, there are no oil deposits under the sands of his country.

Although things did immediately change for the better once we crossed from Jordan into Israel, scenes of abject poverty once again were before us three days later when we entered the occupied West Bank.  I am tempted to use the word "god-forsaken" to describe a large portion of that area.  Miles and miles of endless arid desert, distopian towns where it was hard to find a smiling face, barbed wire fences, guard towers at the corners of long impenetrable walls, garbage in the streets and in the yards, crumbling buildings, falling roofs.  I have been on a number of American Indian reservations, but this was far worse.  Most of all I felt sorry for the kids.  Kicking a soccer ball around on a dirt pitch was the closest thing I saw to happiness.

It is one thing to witness the gloom of the occupied territories through the tour bus window.  It is quite another to encounter it on a personal basis.  This happened a handful of times throughout the week.  We pilgrims would be led into a shop or a restaurant which would be run by Christian friends of our Israeli tour guide, Wally, where we were encouraged to spend our money.  Although there was no real pressure to buy, the atmosphere was such that one felt almost compelled to purchase something, anything, even if for the mere sake of helping the proprietors out.

The most disappointing experience of the entire pilgrimage was witnessing what has become of Bethlehem.  Before our trip, my image of that place conformed to the lyrics of the well-known Christmas carol, O Little Town Of Bethlehem.  The present day city of Bethlehem could not be more opposite.

Forget about pictures of a young couple entering a small village with their donkey, and hoping to find lodging where their child might be born.  Bethlehem today is a large, grimy, bustling city, almost adjacent to Jerusalem.  There is no countryside separating the two cities, no sense of pastoral cleanliness, quaintness or enchanting stargazing.  Those concepts are quickly dispelled when you must pass by a security checkpoint to enter; unlike Jerusalem, Bethlehem is in the West Bank.

Of course the only reason to come to Bethlehem is to visit the Church Of The Blessed Nativity, built over the stable where it's believed Jesus was born.  But our first stop in Bethlehem, once we got past the security gates, was a large gift shop owned and operated by Wally's friends.  All of the men in our group collectively moaned when Wally told us he'd give us an hour -- an hour -- in the store.  That was about fifty minutes longer than any of us needed or wanted.  Upon entering the store, we were immediately handed a medium size basket into which we were supposed to place our selections of statues, crucifixes, jewelry, scarfs, paintings, trinkets, toys, clothing and other assorted items which, had we been in a US shopping mall, we would have ignored without giving it a second thought.  There seemed to be a sales clerk on hand for each one of the twenty-nine of us.  I commented to a friend that it reminded me of my one trip to Nate's Clothing Store in the Minneapolis Warehouse District back in the '80's.  In both instances, the clerks descended upon you as soon as you set foot in the shop, and would not let go of you until you were out the door.  In the Bethlehem store, I ditched my basket as quickly as practically possible, and waited near the door with my other three male counterparts from the MHT 8 while our wives explored the aisles.

Momma Cuandito did end up buying a few items, but the worst was yet to come.  A pack of Palestinian men had gathered outside the store's door, blocking the path to our bus.  They were shoving beads, wood carvings and other religious artifacts in our faces, beseeching us to buy with stories about their families' desperate circumstances.  Our three-word reply, "No thank you," did not work.  A couple of them became belligerent, and I had to wrap my arm around Momma Cuan and get her into the bus.  I used to think the panhandlers on the streets of San Francisco were the most aggressive I'd encountered.  The Palestinians in Bethlehem made those beggars by the bay look meek.  Accosting us on the sidewalk was bad enough.  I don't know what would have happened if they'd climbed aboard the bus.