Moskva-Kassiopeya

Communications have been discovered emanating from the star of Cassiopeia.  The spaceship “Dawn” is launched, but because the journey will take 27 years each way… it’s manned with 14-year-olds!  Wacky outer space adventures ensue.

This is pretty silly stuff… and there’s some terrible comedy… and the special effects are often laughable.  But there is something fun about it.  You get several of the familiar space travel tropes: the selection of the crew, the universal translator, the giddy weightless hi-jinx.  There’s also a precursor to the holodeck, some 13 years before “Star Trek: The Next Generation” aired.  And of course, a problem arises, things go terribly wrong, and the mettle of the team is put to the test.

The film combines two fantasies of adolescent boys: spaceships and being alone with cute girls and no adult supervision (no, nothing happens… it’s a family-friendly movie).  In addition to the aerospace obstacles that must be overcome, there’s a running problem throughout the entire film of determining which of the girls wrote a mash note for the lead boy!  The answer will shock and amaze you! (Not really.) 

The movie has a lot of warts and the construction is pretty messy.  Still, it’s enjoyable as a goofy oddity if you give in to the spirit of it.  Rating: Fair (66)

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Un homme qui dort

A young man (Jacques Spiesser) detaches from the world, wandering aimlessly through Paris and holing up in his tiny apartment.  That’s all the plot summary I can provide.  The ultimate existentialist statement, Bernard Queysanne’s adaptation of Georges Perec’s novel has no dialogue, no named characters, no dramatic conflict.  Only images of Spiesser and his environs, with second-person narrative (“You wake up…”) by Ludmila Mikaël.

And it’s completely gripping.  I can think of few films that provide a purer depiction of depression and alienation.  Mikaël lists items in the world, but they are words that have lost all symbolic reference.  The narration describes the feeling of having ceased to find meaning in anything.  “You wait until there is nothing left to wait for.”  Spiesser goes through empty, mechanical motions that merely resemble a normal existence.  He gets dressed, he sees movies, he eats, but it is all just robotic action.  Six black socks sit soaking in a bowl, waiting to be cleaned, but what is the point?  It is an endless spiral of nothingness, of pointless games of solitaire (how many of those have I played? how much time have I spent playing “Bejeweled” with no goal, no purpose?) and repetitive meals.  All information is equally unenlightening.  Though once in a while the narration gets a bit too ponderous for its own good (shades of Resnais), for the most part it’s surprisingly effective.

The camerawork is exquisite, the carefully measured movements reflecting the mechanical, empty emotional state of the protagonist/you.  The black and white washes the world in drab, lifeless grays.  Often a scene or movement will be repeated, the bland repetition of daily existence.  Sometimes the narration contradicts the activity onscreen, the detachment from the world.  And once in a while, the film is overexposed, obliterating all detail until it becomes shapeless white nothingness… at one point, even the Eiffel Tower is swallowed up by it.  The soundtrack hums with strange, unsettling ambient music and noise, a nagging and eerie hum.

But all is not hopeless, and towards the end the voiceover takes on tones of anger and anxiety, a personality waking up to the futility of his/her/your futility, the way depression comes in a wave and will often recede if left to stew in its own juices long enough.  Whether or not he/you will sink again in existential crisis is uncertain, but some fight is still left.   Rating: Great (92)

There is apparently a version of this with the narration done by Shelley Duvall that I’d very much like to hear/see.

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La prima Angélica

Luis (José Luis López Vázquez) takes his mother’s remains from Barcelona to Begovia to be buried in the family tomb.  He stays with his aunt, whose daughter Angelica was his childhood crush.  Angelica is now married, with a daughter (also named Angelica) of her own.  Luis reflects on a visit he made many years earlier, in 1936, and his experiences with Angelica and her family at the start of the Spanish Civil War.

As he would do with Geraldine Chaplin in his next film, the more widely-known Cría Cuervos, Saura plays with casting to merge/blur the identities of the past and present.  María Clara Fernández de Loaysa plays young Angelica in both scenarios.  Fernando Delgado is Angelica’s husband in the current timeline, and her father in past… both antagonistic characters in Luis’ life.  And most idiosyncratically, Vázquez portrays both his older and younger selves.  It’s a marvellous performance, he never overdoes the childish gestures, merely adopting a more shy persona and a kind of tight-lipped smile for the younger version.

The timelines slip into each other seamlessly, transitioning mid-scene linking a current event to a childhood memory… some pleasant, some painful.  The Civil War looms large over everything, with Luis’s Nationalist uncle denigrating his Republican father to his face (when the uncle gets hit by shrapnel, his arm is amusingly cast into a Fascist salute).  The cruelty of the Nationalists and the consequences of their victory is commented on most eloquently in the film’s final moments, as “young” Luis receives a vicious beating.  Luis also suffers nightmares about a mortified nun, with Catholicism weighing upon him as a priest upbraids him for his sinful feelings towards his cousin.

It’s not entirely bitter and there are lovely moments between Luis and Angelica.  But ultimately it is a film about a country driven apart, and families divided.  The elasticity of the timeline suggests these problems reach through to the present.  Though Vázquez stands out the most, the supporting performances are quite fine as well, many of them difficult dual roles.  With strong similarities to Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem from a few years earlier, this is a very intriguing film that operates on multiple levels.  Rating: Very Good (83)

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Obsession

A successful real estate developer (Cliff Robertson) makes a crucial error in judgment when his wife (Genevieve Bujold) and daughter are kidnapped, resulting in their deaths.  But 16 years later, in the Italian cathedral where he met his wife, he sees her doppelganger… and a chance to set history right again.

It’s fitting that this movie’s original title was “Déjà Vu,” because it definitely evokes the feeling of having seen it before.  Once again, De Palma is borrowing — very heavily — from Vertigo, with additional nods to Marnie and Rebecca.  And he even enlisted Bernard Herrmann to do the score (as Truffaut did in his Hitchcock homage The Bride Wore Black).  But this is my favorite of De Palma’s Hitchcockian films, perhaps precisely because it’s so much in the Hitchcock vein.  De Palma is really going all out to evoke the master, and for the most part, he succeeds very nicely.

The film is pretty predictable in a general sense (though I won’t spoil anything) but still manages to be suspenseful in the details.  It’s difficult to talk about the darker edge of it without revealing anything, but that darker edge is there.  The hazy, dreamlike atmosphere of the gauzy visuals masks a twisted underbelly.  There are some fantastic shots throughout, including a series of matching zooms cutting between Bujold’s face and her face in a portrait.  And Herrmann’s score is evocative and majestic as always.  I’m not crazy about Robertson but he’s okay… Bujold is far more interesting, though, and of course Lithgow, whose mere presence in the film should tell you where it’s headed.  All in all, despite the blatant derivativeness of the film, I really quite enjoyed it.  This was the fourth and final movie in my De Palma mini-binge, I’m glad it ended on a high note.  Rating: Very Good (84)

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Parade

From the clips I’d seen, I expected this to be a one-man show.  But as in M. Hulot’s Holiday, it’s a very democratic movie, with Tati only a small part of an entire circus.  Besides Tati’s pantomimes, we see magic, acrobatics, juggling, animal acts and music… often at the same time, and all of it spiced with comedy.  Often the cast is preparing the set as the show goes on around them, we get peeks at the backstage antics, and even the audience gets in on the act.  Many of them are obviously plants — in fact, they might all be plants — but everyone seems to be having a grand old time.

It’s a tribute not just to circuses (essentially an extinct species, unless you count Cirque du Soleil… who I happen to enjoy) but to the old music hall/vaudeville tradition.  Tati is quite an old-timer by this point, and still reeling from the financial disaster of his masterful Playtime.  But his physicality is as limber as ever.  Maybe there’s something a bit too hokey about watching him do pantomime versions of boxers and tennis players and show horses on a stage, but you gotta admit he’s pretty damn good at it.

There are some negatives.  A number of the gags fell quite flat with me, both the mule routine and the orchestra portion eventually wear out their welcomes, and the rock band is not only painfully dated but completely incongruous with the rest of the film.   Nonetheless, it’s a very charming experience, especially after the rather disappointing Trafic.  It’s playful and funny and sometimes downright bizarre.  The set design and costumes are really funky.  The photography (with the great Gunnar Fischer on hand) is primarily functional, capturing the action without much flair, but for a performance film that’s pretty much what you want.  I would have preferred something approaching the greatness of Playtime as Tati’s swan song, but this will do.  Rating: Good (71)

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