Barbican introduction (screening as part of the Cinema Restored series): Directed by Bachtiar Siagian, this
neorealist gem captures the turbulence and resilience of a community
caught in the fight for independence. The story follows Rusli, a wounded
freedom fighter who finds sanctuary in a remote, Dutch-occupied
village. As he heals under the care of Tipi and her father, the village
chief, bonds of loyalty, love, and courage emerge amidst the unrest. A powerful reflection on solidarity and survival, Turang offers
a rare cinematic insight into the spirit of a nation striving for
liberation. Don't miss this beautifully restored classic, a vital part
of Indonesia's film heritage.
Here's
one of the great films of recent times and an opportunity to see
Stanley Kubrick's much-underrated final movie in an original 35mm print. The movie is also screened on May 10th.
Chicago Reader review: Initial
viewings of Stanley Kubrick's movies can be deceptive because his films
all tend to be emotionally convoluted in some way; one has to follow
them as if through a maze. A character that Kubrick might seem to treat
cruelly the first time around (e.g., Elisha Cook Jr.'s fall guy in The
Killing) can appear the object of tender compassion on a subsequent
viewing. The director's desire to avoid sentimentality at all costs
doesn't preclude feeling, as some critics have claimed, but it does
create ambiguity and a distanced relationship to the central characters.
Kubrick's final feature very skillfully portrays the dark side of
desire in a successful marriage; since the 60s he'd been thinking about
filming Arthur Schnitzler's brilliant novella "Traumnovelle," and
working with Frederic Raphael, he's adapted it faithfully--at least if
one allows for all the differences between Viennese Jews in the 20s and
New York WASPs in the 90s. Schnitzler's tale, about a young doctor
contemplating various forms of adultery and debauchery after discovering
that his wife has entertained comparable fantasies, has a somewhat
Kafkaesque ambiguity, wavering between dream and waking fantasy (hence
Kubrick's title), and all the actors do a fine job of traversing this
delicate territory. Yet the story has been altered to make the
successful doctor (Tom Cruise) more of a hypocrite and his wife
(powerfully played by Nicole Kidman) a little feistier; Kubrick's also
added a Zeus-like tycoon (played to perfection by Sydney Pollack) who
pretends to explain the plot shortly before the end but in fact only
summarizes the various mysteries, his cynicism and chilly access to
power revealing that Kubrick is more of a moralist than Schnitzler. To
accept the premises and experiences of this movie, you have to be open
to an expressionist version of New York with scant relation to the 90s
(apart from cellular phones and AIDS) and a complex reading of a
marriage that assumes the relations between men and women haven't
essentially changed in the past 70-odd years. This is a remarkably
gripping, suggestive, and inventive piece of storytelling that, like
Kubrick's other work, is likely to grow in mystery and intensity over
time. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening is part of a Reiner Werner Fassbinder season at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Time Out review: Fear and loathing in the mean streets of suburban Munich, where all
behaviour obeys the basest and most basic of drives, and fleeting
allegiances form and re-form in almost mathematically abstract
permutations until disrupted by the advent of an immigrant Greek
worker (played by Fassbinder himself; the title is a Bavarian slang
term for a gastarbeiter, implying tomcatting sexual proclivities) who
becomes the target for xenophobic violence. Fassbinder's
sub-Godardian gangster film début, Love is Colder than Death,
was dismissed as derivative and dilettanté-ish; this second feature,
based on his own anti-teaterplay, won immediate acclaim. It
still seems remarkable, mainly for Fassbinder's distinctive, highly
stylised dialogue and minimalist mise-en-scène that
transfigures a cinema of poverty into bleakly triumphant rites of
despair.Sheila Johnston
This late John Huston film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man
is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of
Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course
in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new
season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The
men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady,
Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to
engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards
race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences
who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a
world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some
railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s
phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo;
others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a
transformed society.
Everyone
will be doing Huston's film a favour if they try hard not to compare it
with the now classic Malcolm Lowry novel. In fact it captures the
doomed spirit of the original, while - rightly - in no way apeing its
dense, poetic style. Huston opts for straightforward narrative, telling
the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic English ex-diplomat who
embraces his own destruction in Mexico shortly before the outbreak of
World War II. As the limp-wristed observers of this manic process,
Anthony Andrews and Jacqueline Bisset are at best merely decorative, at worst an
embarrassment, and the film's success rests largely on an (often
literally) staggering performance from Albert Finney as the dipso diplo.
Slurring sentences, sweating like a pig, wobbling on his pins, he
conveys a character who is still, somehow, holding on to his sense of
love and dignity. Not for the purists, maybe, but the last half-hour, as
Firmin plunges ever deeper into his self-created hell, leaves one
shell-shocked. Richard Rayner
This
great, late Billy Wilder film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man
is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of
Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course
in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new
season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The
men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady,
Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to
engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards
race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences
who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a
world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some
railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s
phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo;
others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a
transformed society.
Chicago Reader review: This 1972 release is the most underrated of all Billy Wilder comedies
and arguably the one that comes closest to the sweet mastery and lilting
grace of his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch. Jack Lemmon arrives at a small
resort in Italy to claim the body of his late father, who’s perished in a
car accident; there he meets Juliet Mills, whose mother has died in the
same accident and, as it turns out, had been having an affair with the
father. The development of Mills and Lemmon’s own romance over various
bureaucratic complications is gradual and leisurely paced; at 144
minutes, this is an experience to roll around on your tongue. Wilder and
I.A.L. Diamond adapted a relatively obscure play by Samuel A. Taylor,
and the lovely music is by Carlo Rustichelli; with Clive Revill and
Edward Andrews. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This
rarely screened George Cukor film is part of the 'You Must Remember
This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many
great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s,
radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme
that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This
and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a
Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho,
attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in
technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new
generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical
that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning
down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new
‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with
beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make
films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.
Tonight’s film (on 35mm) will be introduced by season curator Karina Longworth.
Chicago Reader review: Feelings of great depth and poignancy surface unpredictably in this film
by George Cukor, though they have little to do with the ostensible
subject: the director seems to be responding to the material in private,
wholly personal ways completely divorced from the concerns of his
collaborators. The screenplay, an old rewrite of Old Acquaintance by Gerald Ayers (Foxes),
is one of the worst Cukor has had to work with in his long career,
redolent of strained staircase wit and false sophistication. The lead
performances, by Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen as two college
friends who become competing novelists in later life, have the Cukor
audacity without the Cukor grace, and his visual expressiveness is in
evidence only sporadically. Yet the film stays in the mind for its dark
asides on aging, loneliness, and the troubling survival of sexual needs.
Dave Kehr
This
rarely screened Vincente Minnelli film is part of the 'You Must Remember
This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many
great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s,
radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme
that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This
and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a
Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho,
attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in
technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new
generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical
that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning
down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new
‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with
beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make
films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.
Tonight’s film (on 35mm) will be introduced by season curator Karina Longworth.
Chicago Reader review: Considering how stupid the whole idea was—to remake a Rudolph Valentino
silent with Glenn Ford—this 1962 feature picture is surprisingly
passable, particularly when you turn off the sound track and concentrate
on the sumptuous visuals provided by Vincente Minnelli. It’s no
classic, but there’s more integrity here than anyone would have a right
to expect. With Ingrid Thulin, Charles Boyer, Lee J. Cobb, and the two
horsemen of 40s melodrama, Paul Henreid and Paul Lukas. Dave Kehr
