A politically correct Shakespeare in retirement

Kenneth Branagh’s fascination with William Shakespeare has been well depicted in his films, both directed and acted in, over the past 30 years (Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Othello, Henry V, As You Like It, Twelfth Night). And now he has released All Is True (at The Maple Theater and coming in July to WIFF's year-round series), which he both directed and acts in, a kind of summing up of the best-known of all bards, in his years of retirement 1613-1616. The film opens with still, pastoral and lushly photographed images of the countryside around Stratford-upon-Avon. They’re perhaps a bit too static, leading one to think we’re in for a tedious low-key rendition of some story about Will Shakespeare. But prior to that there is a dramatic scene, when we’re told an almost goofy theatrical accident (as often happened in the day) ignited the venerable (and vulnerable) Globe Theater in London and burned it to the ground. Shakespeare was effectively out of work and opted for retirement. The movie continues in a plodding but interesting enough way as Will moves back to his birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, and to his rather disconsolate family, who harbors resentment that he abandoned them all those years for a very successful playwright and theatrical career. In reality, we know very little about Shakespeare’s life but we do know – and the film is accurate on these points - that he had three children, one who died at age 11, Hamnet (not Hamlet), and twin Judith and older daughter Susanna. His wife was Anne Hathaway. How much of the rest of the story is accurate is open to question and perhaps there’s a lot of conjecture in this film, written by Ben Elton. Shakespeare (Branagh) is depicted as a soft spoken, diffident man, the opposite of his roaring intellectual genius. As soon as he arrives in Stratford he is put upon by his family. His wife (Judi Dench) won’t sleep with him and his children are sullen at their neglectful father. Shakespeare retreats to his garden and tries to come to terms with the accusations as well as handle tumultuous affairs over his estate. Meanwhile, there are family scandals – Susannah (Lydia Wilson) is accused of adultery against her puritan husband (Hadley Fraser). And Judith (Kathryn Wilder) marries the town carouser (Jack Colgrave Hirst) who has impregnated another woman. But two themes emerge and both have resonance to our modern world. One is feminism - daughter Judith is really the author of poems attributed to the dead Hamnet. And the second is gay politics - Shakespeare apparently had a romantic relationship with the Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen) who pays him a visit. Add this to the patriarchal neglect of The Bard’s long-suffering wife and family and it all leads one to think that Branagh, in his summing up of Shakespeare’s life, has created a politically correct story for our oh-so-identity-politics-times.

Doris Day, and actresses then and now

There have been few actor’s deaths that have affected me as much as that of Doris Day’s. Written off, especially since the advent of 1960s countercultural-influenced film criticism, as a superficial all-American girl, enmeshed in the post-WWII consumer and suburban materialistic culture, her death sparked some revisionist thinking. For example, the headline for A. O. Scott’s “An Appraisal” in The New York Times was “Doris Day: A Hip Sex Goddess Disguised as the Girl Next Door.” Sex goddess? Whoever would have thought. For me, Day embodied a sunny but smart disposition; only fools would think her superficial. But foolish they were just like the often male characters in her films. A woman, in other words, who was to be reckoned with was at first underestimated, like by James Gannon (Clark Gable) in Teacher’s Pet (George Seaton 1958), or by Brad Allen (Rock Hudson) in Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon 1959). In Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann 1961) Day again plays an upstanding character, an advertising executive (and therefore a woman well ahead of her time), appalled by a competitor (Rock Hudson)’s underhanded tactics. In fact, I can’t think of a role where Day played someone unethical or dastardly. She is the shining light from which all goodness and justness emanates. And, for decades, she carried off her characters’ principles with a smile and shrewdness that eluded so-called sophisticated film critics, who could only see a cheerleading Miss America.  Yes, Day was perky, and emitted acres of sunshine, but she always was hip to her opponents’ sneaky tricks. Day of course also played serious roles, as in Hitchcock’s 1956 The Man Who Knew Too Much. And she was versatile - far more versatile than the vast majority of today’s actresses. She sang, danced, recorded scores of albums. 

It was hard not to think of someone like Doris Day after watching the much-hyped new Netflix movie Wine Country, directed by Amy Poehler and starring her and Saturday Night Live alumnae like Tina Fey, Ana Gusteyer, Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph and Paula Pell. All I knew about Wine Country was the hype and the fact I like wine and I like California’s wine country. And a bunch of broads hitting the road through Napa and Sonoma looked like a blast. Was I wrong. Admittedly I only watched the first hour - it was enough; I could only manage one smile and one LOL. This wasn’t funny, I thought, and left the room. What we have here, folks, is a depiction of a certain kind of contemporary womanhood – women trying to be funny but who are desultory, lacking in style and often vulgar. And there are the tropes – cell phone addiction, prescription drug-taking, middle aged identity crises. And, in the plot line, efforts at dancing and singing that seemed feigned and forced. I thought how Doris Day and a group of her “gals” – Janis Paige, Eve Arden, Audrey Meadows, Polly Bergen - from an earlier time would have performed in similar roles. There obviously would have been an innocence absent from today’s world-weary characters yet that virtue would belie a knowingness that would put any adversaries in their places, all with a sense of style and with smiles, some – very funny – jokes, and delightful sight gags. Ah, but that was then and this is now.

An art house theatre in your computer

I encourage anyone who really loves film to sign up for The Criterion Channel. The Criterion Channel is an offshoot of the esteemed Criterion Collection, the archive of arguably the most important genre, auteur and foreign films of the past century. The Criterion Channel was born from the ashes of FilmStruck which was, excuse me, struck from the internet after a corporate rearrangement by parent WarnerMedia late last year. It was only available in the US anyway. The Criterion Channel, which launched last month, is available in Canada. I joined as a charter member (having been a subscriber to FilmStruck) and pay only $89.99 US annually. For first time subscribers I believe the price is $10.99 US monthly but an annual sub is discounted at 25% or $99.99. But even if the price is a little more this service is a bargain. This, folks, is the ideal art film lovers’ website, or shall we say, paradise. Where else can you have a library of more than 1000 films – assuming more will increasingly be added -

with some of the most famous names in independent and auteur filmmaking? There is Godard, Fellini, Hitchcock, Truffaut, Haneke, Chaplin, Bergman, Bier, Rossellini, Eisenstein, Wenders, Fassbinder, Lynch, Antonioni, Soderbergh, Malle, Campion, von Trier, Bresson, Kurosawa, Rohmer – well, you get the picture. Personally, I haven’t had it this good since the late lamented Canadian DVD film service zip.ca folded in 2014. But while zip.ca dug deep into auteur and foreign films – much more so than the comparatively bland Netflix - it was a general movie subscription service. The Criterion Channel by contrast is exclusively art house…..This past weekend, for example, I watched Adua and Her Friends (1960) by Antonio Pietrangeli, an Italian director I’d never heard of before. The film was a wonderful story of a group of four prostitutes trying to make a clean break from the trade and starring the inimitable Simone Signoret and Marcello Mastroianni. I also finally watched Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), perhaps Varda’s – who just died in March at age 90 – most famous film. And I revisited the Claude Chabrol thriller from 1995 La cérémonie starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert and Jacqueline Bisset…..The Criterion Channel is a feast, available in Canada and the US, and truly a bargain given that you now have an art house theater in your computer.

The unwitting creator of Mutually Assured Destruction?

Red Joan, directed by Trevor Nunn and opening this weekend at the Birmingham Theatre 8 and Main Art Theatre, is based on the true story of a woman, in old age, unmasked as a British spy during the Second World War. Judi Dench plays the elderly Joan Stanley (based on the real Melita Norwood through the novel of Jennie Rooney). It’s an interesting story, and one I’d never heard of, and yet, for me, still raises philosophical or moral issues, though the film’s conclusion makes it seem all is settled. Joan was a research scientist in physics during WW II and seconded to a top-secret lab developing a British nuclear bomb. While there she befriends a campus agitator, Leo (Tom Hughes) who asks her to transfer information to the Russians, who also seek the bomb. Young Joan (Sophie Cookson) is appalled by the request. But after she sees the results of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki decides, using a miniature camera, to convey diagrams and other information to the Soviets. She maintains her patriotism but thought that giving another country such information would create a worldwide power balance, which in fact became popularly known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). “I was fighting for the living,” she maintains. And upon arrest 40 years later she tells a news conference that ensuring an enemy had the bomb was principled, “because only that way could the horror of another world war be averted.” That is farsighted thinking indeed and how at the time could she have been so sure her actions would result in no future nuclear war? But her intuition proved correct, incredibly so.  MAD became the overriding policy as the West and Communist East Bloc maintained a standoff for 50 years. In that sense Joan Stanley or Melita Norwood should be credited. But it is also extremely ironic that the film and the book and presumably much British popular opinion would applaud this would-be heroine while the philosophy of MAD, writ large by the top echelons of government and Realpolitik, be mocked for decades by, among others, the peace movement. And what if her spying had resulted in a new nuclear war? It just turned out she was kind of lucky. In the film, Dench as the older Joan has a smaller part, the weight of the character is carried by Cookson as the younger Joan, and she is strikingly good. From performing in close-up and in intimate settings with Leo and her then boss, Professor Max Davis (Stephen Campbell Moore), to the kind of nervous quirkiness as she attempts to deceive authorities while carrying out her spying. And unlike many other films with a young and older character version, both Dench and Cookson’s characters have similar looks and facial features. Also, the sets and costumes are well done. In many period movies there’s usually something about wardrobe that’s off, but here authenticity prevails quite well.

Windsor Jewish Film Festival set for 17th year

This is my piece for the Detroit Jewish News on the 17th edition of the Windsor Jewish Film Festival, which gets underway tonight.

The 17th edition of the Ruth and Bernard Friedman Windsor Jewish Film Festival features 10 films over four days from April 29 to May 2, including the acclaimed new documentary Who Will Write Our History.

The film is about a group of writers who kept a secret trove of documents chronicling their conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto. It will be screened opening night.

The festival, Windsor’s oldest movie fest, typically features films that celebrate or depict Jewish culture, including those about the Holocaust.

This year the lineup includes the comedy Humor Me starring Elliot Gould, the documentary Back to Berlin, about a group of Israeli motorcyclists who travel to Berlin for the Maccabi Games, retracing the ride of their forefathers before World War II. There’s also the film 93 Queen, about a group of Hasidic women in Brooklyn who create the first all-female ambulance corps. And the Israeli film Shoelaces is a funny but poignant story of the relationship between a father and his autistic son.

The festival has long had a dedicated group of programmers who choose from dozens of films for the event, held at the Devonshire Mall’s Cineplex Odeon theatre. They select movies based on what has been screened at other festivals and obtain screeners from film distributors.

“We have a committee that typically looks at 60 to 90 films a year to pick the 10 for our festival,” said spokesman and Windsor Jewish Community Centre executive director Jay Katz.

Katz said the fact the festival screens only 10 films means it’s showing pretty much the cream of the crop. “With 10 we’re pretty much getting award winners,” he said.

Katz said the programmers try to create a diverse program.

“They try to make sure there’s some light-hearted ones because in the genre of Jewish-themed films there’s a lot about the Holocaust,” he said. But he added it’s “important to include” the message of the Holocaust because of its centrality to Jewish history.

The festival was originally connected with the Lenore Marwil Detroit Jewish Film Festival, which takes place this May. But it went its separate way many years ago because of a different film distribution system in Canada.

The festival was started by Ruth and Bernard Friedman, philanthropists who were known for organizing a popular community picnic.

“But, you know, tastes change and communities change and they realized 17 years ago that it would evolve to having the film festival because the whole community would and does come together for this,” Katz said.

The festival has almost two dozen sponsors and with ticket sales it turns a profit, which goes to support Jewish community programs.

New this year is an educational component for high school students.

Drawing on funding from the Windsor-based Morris and Beverly Baker Foundation the festival opened its film vault of more than 100 titles from almost two decades, and school boards picked films to teach about the Holocaust.

“We gave them a list of all the films, they went through them and they took some to screen for their students,” Katz said.

One of them is Defiant Requiem, about the Czech concentration camp Theresienstadt and a young composer’s efforts to build morale through the performance of Verdi’s Requiem. Another is Sarah’s Key, the story of a 10-year-old girl during the round-up of Jews in Paris in 1942. A third is Le Voyage de Fanny, about the daring escape of school children to Switzerland.

Back to TCM on a dreary weekend

When the movie theatres just aren’t offering much to see, and the weather is dreary and you don’t feel like going outside, there’s always Turner Classic Movies (TCM).  Last Friday and Saturday, lying on the couch, I ended up watching a lot of films…

Let’s start with Orson Welles’s 1962 take on Franz Kafka’s The Trial. I’d caught glimpses of this before but never the entire thing. The Trial opens with the dramatic Adagio in G Minor by Tomaso Albinoni, a piece that resonates throughout. Anthony Perkins plays Joseph K., the bureaucrat who is arrested without knowing his charges. The entire film is made as an extended dream sequence, and that’s its brilliant aspect. Dreams are absurd with no apparent rational endings. The film is set in the then abandoned Gare D’Orsay railway station in Paris (though we don’t know that), now a fabulous art museum. Welles loved the building’s long passageways, cramped corridors and endless rooms opening on to others. The film also stars Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider and Welles himself as The Advocate or Joseph K’s would be lawyer. Part of it was filmed in Yugoslavia, where an exhibition hall was converted into a vast office with hundreds of office workers pounding away on their typewriters, faceless mass organization style. The film is draggy in parts and overly long but its recreation of a dream, the shadowy and dark cinematography by Edmond Richard, and Perkins’s acting, are what makes this a classic. 

Let’s now go to 1961’s The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (directed by famed New York theatre director José Quintero, his only film), based on the novel by Tennessee Williams and starring Vivien Leigh. Leigh has never seemed more elegant and that's saying something. As Karen Stone, a middle-aged recent widower, and theatrical star, she embarks on a reprieve from the mania of the New York theatre world - an indefinite spring vacation in Rome. With her riches she acquires a luxury apartment, which happens to be at the top of the Spanish Steps. Living a quiet life, she occasionally rendezvous with old friends. At one point she is set up by a high class madame (Lotte Lenya) who runs an escort service for the wealthy. The escort is Paolo (Warren Beatty, effecting a convincing enough Italian accent though you still might smile). However, Leigh as Stone is the entire story, and she, and it, are magnificent. It’s not that a whole lot takes place in the plot but that’s what also makes the film excellent. Leigh’s Stone is glamorous, smart, withdrawn, icy and ambiguous, all expressed through the most subtle facial looks and gestures. This is a film that is wonderfully slow and studied and the viewer accordingly hangs on to every slight moment. 

Other fil
ms I watched were The Secret Garden (Fred M. Wilcox, 1949) starring child actor Margaret O’Brien as Mary, Herbert Marshall as her strange and estranged uncle, and a very young Dean Stockwell as Mary’s sickly and tempestuous cousin. The story, based on the 1911 novel, is a children’s fable for the ages. In it, in essence, the children take over a stuffy old mansion with stuffy old people and, yes, an overgrown garden, and transform it and them……Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) is among the first of a genre of Australian films that captivated the art house cinema world through the 1970s and 80s. Based on what might have been a true story, a girls'  school class circa 1900 goes on an afternoon picnic to Hanging Rock, a remote geological formation. As the afternoon transpires some of the girls go missing. The remaining two-thirds of the film focusses on how the survivors deal with this trauma. The plot is circular and inconclusive and while elements like costumes are excellent and Russell Boyd’s cinematography creates a dreamy languor, the film is overall unsatisfying……For sheer early-1960s madcap comedy 1963’s Palm Springs Weekend is another prime example of the genre. Directed by Norman Taurog (who made a number of Elvis films) and starring Jerry Van Dyke, Jack Weston, Connie Stevens and Stefanie Powers, the “kids” are on a weekend break from college and you can imagine the antics……Finally, William Wyler’s 1939 Wuthering Heights with Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier and David Niven, recreates pivotal moments of  Emily Brontë’s romantic triangle of Heathcliff (Olivier), Cathy (Oberon) and Edgar (Niven), in almost “it was a dark and stormy night” mode courtesy camera work by the famed Gregg Toland. But you don’t recognize Niven without the moustache!

For some, the ennui of everyday life

For some people, life is never quite fulfilling enough. You try and you try and you try but heartache seems to be around every bend, a metaphor in the movie Diane, directed by Kent Jones, opening Friday at the Main Art Theatre. Diane, a woman in her early 70s, is forever driving from one place to another, and the film uses scenes from the front window of her car as she rounds bends in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. Most of the time the sky is gray and the scenes of what are normally a beautiful region are dreary in the early winter gloom countryside and downtrodden working-class streets of towns like Pittsfield. Diane is played by Mary Kay Place, whom we normally think of as an offbeat comedian dating back to her role as Mary Hartman’s best friend in the hit 1970s classic Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Thought she’s had a varied and continuing career since then I must confess the last roles I well remember her in was as Meg in Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 The Big Chill and as Rona in Brett Haley’s 2015 I’ll See You in My Dreams. In Diane the focus is squarely on her, as she portrays a lower-class single mother, with a drug addicted adult son, Brian (Jake Lacy), and a circle of friends who are nearing the age of no return. In fact, three of them die during the short period, around Christmas, when the story is set. Diane’s life is ho hum and no different from numerous nondescript lower to middle class women just trying to get by in a world where there is often little to cheer about. She constantly fights with Brian, even when he converts to Evangelical Christianity. Her dying best friend Donna (Deirdre O’Connell), still accuses her of betrayal for stealing her boyfriend that long-ago summer on Cape Cod. Meanwhile, Diane tries to do what she can. She brings food to friends and volunteers at a soup kitchen. But a kind of depressing ennui nags her - ”I’ve done some damage in my life” - and she eventually seeks solace in what may or may not be a personal salvation. Place is up to the task in this character study, where the camera is on her in almost every scene. The film is an ensemble of mostly women including Andrea Martin as Bobbie and Estelle Parsons as Mary. This is not an uplifting film, and there is seemingly no redemption for any of the characters. This is just about life as it sometimes is, and that’s all.