Moonstruck

Annually, as the Late Films Blogathon approaches, I contemplate watching Fellini’s final feature, VOICE OF THE MOON, along with Kurosawa’s MADADAYO, and annually I fail to do so. I think I’ve been anxious lest I dislike the valedictory films of two favourite auteurs. I have actually started watching both movies and then ducked out, not quite feeling up to the challenge.

So when David Wingrove got in touch to say he was seeing the FF film as part of the Fellini 100 season at Edinburgh Filmhouse (and elsewhere — check listings for details), I seized the chance to commit myself, if you’ll pardon the expression. At the prices Filmhouse is compelled to charge, I wasn’t likely to walk out on it, so, come hell or high water, both of which admittedly seem likelier by the hour, I was going to see this film. Get it watched. When I watch a film, it stays watched. I hope.

It unfolds like a dream. I was convinced at first that it was just going to be a series of interwoven dream narratives, that Fellini would one-up Kurosawa by not TELLING us that it’s dreams…

Roberto Benigni, pleasingly muted by his standards, plays Ivo Salvini, both a Fellini surrogate (droopy scarf, flashbacks to childhood) and a care-in-the-community village lunatic, wandering around a small town for a night, a day and a night. Paolo Villaggio plays an equally deranged former politician, and seems another stand-in for the director with his broad face and coat slung over his shoulders.

Everybody our wandering lunatic meets seems to be a fellow madman. That must be what it’s like: nobody makes sense, everybody is pursuing incomprehensible obsessions. Not coincidentally, that’s also what it’s like when you are a child. “Damned are those who understand,” says the moon.

There’s a workman who dreams of dragging the moon down to Earth with a special crane and an unlucky-in-love character (another former inmate?) who wants to dance on it. Ivo just talks to it, which leads to him climbing into wells, to the danger of his life. He’s a relatively mild case, by the standards of this town.

In the tiny Filmhouse 3 there was a woman behind me laughing very heartily at jokes that might otherwise have passed me by. Her full-throated appreciation really lifted the movie. Maybe she’s mad too? Maybe we all are. Sample laugh-getter:

A local man has started his own village TV station.

“It’s called CIP. C is for Constanza, my wife, I is for Irena my eldest daughter, P is for Patrizia my dear sister.”

“And what about you, ma’am, are you proud of your husband?”

“NO! The idiot could have bought a zoo with that money!”

Maybe you had to be there, or dream that you were. But the maestro had not lost his knack of producing really good jokes out of surprising settings.

Some credit the source novel, by Ermanno Cavazzoni, who also collaborated on the script with FF and regular scribe Tullio Pinelli, with pushing Fellini out of his comfort zone so the movie isn’t a rehash of old imagery, as arguably GINGER AND FRED and INTERVISTA are (and Fellini was accused of simply warming over the same old stuff as far back as JULIETTE OF THE SPIRITS, an accusation I don’t agree with). On the other hand, to me a lot of the pleasure was that it WAS archetypal Fellini. The more it felt like Fellini, the better I liked it. Can’t understand anyone NOT liking it.

Fellini’s difficulty is that, after NIGHTS OF CABIRIA I guess I’d date it to, Fellini moved away from “regular” structured stories with “conventional” emotional catharses — having gotten really, really good at them. LA DOLCE VITA takes the title of CABIRIA literally — it’s a series of nights, it could be called NIGHTS OF MARCELLO. EIGHT AND A HALF has a story and a form but they’re not quite revealed while you’re watching. And then it gets more and more abstract. Without a structure you can set your watch by (a big reason three-act things are so common is simply that they’re so common, so you can tell after feeling you’ve been in your seat half an hour [not counting ads and trailers] that the first act just happened), without a clearly stated narrative goal, Fellini has to keep us engaged IN THE MOMENT, without using pressing questions about What will happen next? Will our hero succeed? Whodunnit? So if his invention flags for an instant, if what we’re watching right now isn’t wondrous strange, we can disengage and it’s going to take a big fish washed up or a Papal fashion show to get us back in.

VOICE OF THE MOON didn’t quite hold me throughout, even with a vague hero’s quest narrative shuffled into the mix, but I stayed focussed because the good bits were so good I didn’t want to miss any, even with my insomnia meds making me drowsy…

With Tonino Della Colli shooting and Dante Ferretti designing, VOTM has sequences that recapture the feel of classic Fellini, though sadly without Nino Rota. As last films go, better than POCKETFUL OF MIRACLES. I’m glad I returned to the well with the Maestro.

“You do not understand?” says the Moon. “Even better! Woe to him who understands!”

Mixed Emotions

I wanted to like Brian DePalma’s DOMINO, like a lot of people I think (some DID like it), but I couldn’t. It is NOT a good movie, imho. And I don’t even know why I wanted to like it, since I don’t think of BDP as a particularly nice character who deserves more success. But, since I’d bought a cheap secondhand copy and was watching it, I would have liked it to be entertaining. And he’s made some good movies — we can all disagree about which ones, which in a way is even better — so one would like to see a modern film with the vibe of (for me) SISTERS, OBSESSION, THE UNTOUCHABLES or even one of the really unpleasant ones, just for a change.

This Euro-pudding, which BDP did not write, may occupy the sort of place in the DePalma oeuvre that BURKE & HARE does for John Landis. “Want to come to some drab country and film this crappy script?” “Sure, I’m free this week!”

I exaggerate. Denmark is probably much nicer than Scotland, where I live. And they made REPTILICUS, which Scotland SHOULD have made.

What you get is the mannerisms of the director without any of the pleasure. BURKE & HARE has director cameos by Costa-Gavras and Michael Winner, and virtually no laughs (Paul Whitehouse squeezed a reluctant guffaw from us by main force). DOMINO has would-be Hitchcockian set-pieces and Pino Donaggio aping Bernard Herrmann on the soundtrack and a creepy interest in hi-tech voyeurism (ISIS execution videos, this time).

Fiona: “Thanks a lot, Brian, I’ve spent the last few years AVOIDING that kind of imagery.”

I point out that it’s an incredibly lame reenactment since the movie doesn’t show the head coming off. The whole point of snuff movies is presumably the “frenzy of the visible,” showing the moment of death in horrible close-up. Everything to do with tech in the film is unconvincing, including the heroine’s phone photos of her holidays with boyfriend “Lars Hansen”:

The movie ends with YouTube exploding. Extremely poor.

Someone on Twitter did point out that the subplot, in which a vengeful Arab character is recruited by Guy Pearce’s dastardly CIA man to bring down a terror cell, and he kills his way through the organisation, driven by rage, would make a much better movie than the main plot. Possibly, but not the way it’s done here. What’s certain is that the two storylines don’t help each other, they just diffuse focus.

Oh, and it begins with two cops, and one of them is older and has a nice, disabled wife. He’s going to get killed, I thought. And then I thought, a reasonably good twist would be to kill the young leading-man type guy, the guy whose girl sleeps in a modesty pouch for some reason. It might not make up for the crushing sense of predictability being experienced in the first place, but it would be a good surprise.

Also, the hero goes on duty and forgets his gun. And then his partner is killed and the bad guy escapes for reasons that actually have nothing to do with the forgotten gun.

Mostly this looks like a TV cop show. But they make some better TV cop shows in Europe.

I’ll say this, it’s a movie that’s ineffective and bad at least in surprising, incomprehensible ways. Why is it called DOMINO when there was a movie of that title fourteen years ago which did not do well and is usually remembered unfavourably? (I genuinely don’t know why this one is called DOMINO, in the sense of, what does it have to do with dominoes? It would only resemble dominoes if you had to knock over each piece with lethal force and they never, ever set off a chain reaction.)

 

Madame foX

A new Forgotten by Fox column over at The Notebook brings us into the pre-code era — GALLANT LADY is helmed by La Cava and stars Ann Harding and Clive Brook, both in excellent form, liberated by their director’s pixillated improv approach. Also, did Brook always have to play drunk to be fun?

Here, with clip to prove all I say.