The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954)

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Luis Buñuel, 1954) This is another of those films that seems to be remade every few years (the attraction of the property being in the public domain is irresistible), but it would be tough from an overall perspective to improve on Bunuel's English language version (which was also made in the director's native Spanish) from 1954.

The story is familiar to everyone (it's been around since 1719)—of the British sailor who is stranded on an island after his ship is wrecked and must eke out an existence there without hope of rescue, despite his lack of experience taking care of himself.  Also, there is the man "Friday," who eventually becomes his companion on the island, leading to the "noble savage" mythology that is trucked around whenever somebody wants to point to relative "worth's" of races within the humanoid one.  

But, Buñuel, one of the peskiest of directors has nothing to do with all that, and the surrealist—and realist—in him, takes this Robinson Crusoe to some little-known parts of the island in this version of the adventure.  For example, Robinson Crusoe is on that ship as part of his work as a slave-trader, its wrecking serving as some kind of retribution for its business, and his exile a learning experience for what it is like for a man to have no choices in the world.  

Crusoe is able to swim back to the ship to get a good amount of supplies before it finally succumbs to the sea, and manages to rescue a cat, Sam, from the wreckage.  Once back on his island, with a raft so piled with supplies that it must have been in constant danger of sinking, he finds the Captain's dog, Rex, has also survived and made it to land.  With that troika of inhabitants comes the most interesting part of the film, where Crusoe explores the island, sets up fire-stations in case a ship should sail by, hunts game, starts to raise livestock from the wild goats that live on the island, builds a walled compound around a make-shift cave where he lives.  When he runs out of bread from the ship, he starts to raise his own wheat and grain and makes his own.  A rescued bible provides study, and he even takes up pottery.   He has a lot of time and quite a bit of resources.

Years go by.  Rex dies of natural causes, and Crusoe keeps to his daily routine, living well if eccentric in his ways, until one day he notices that his island has been invaded by cannibals.  Being so industrious, you'd expect him to maybe start a small business, given the new source of traffic, but, instead he manages to rescue one of the intended victims and names him "Friday"* (Jaime Fernández) after the day of the week on which they met (Crusoe has an elaborate calendar).

Not sure of Friday's eating habits, Crusoe returns to his old ways and puts the native under metal restraints that he carried over with him from the slave ship.  Before long, he learns to trust the man, and one begins to wonder what the hierarchy between them is.  The native is "Friday." Crusoe is, disquietingly, "Master."  When Friday is barbering Crusoe's hair and the voice-over says it was a sublime time on the island, one is about to protest, when he gets up, the two exchange places and the former slaver cuts Friday's hair in reciprocity.  Buñuel, you crafty old Marxist. "We found that two working together could do much more than working separately."  We won't spoil the part where Crusoe and Friday debate the Bible.

And as far as surrealism, the closest Buñuel comes to it is in a Crusoe fever-dream, where he is warned by his father (also played by O'Herlihy) never to stray from his native land (Buñuel, a Spaniard was living in Mexico City at the time, after spending a few years in the United States) with the sequence intercut with shots of the father (or is it an elderly Crusoe) drowning.

O'Herlihy is mostly known for his later career of playing ancient, menacing autocrats, but here he is a revelation, and it is, frankly, amazing that the film had enough attention that he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, the same year as Bogart for The Caine Mutiny, Bing Crosby for The Country Girl (an amazing performance, that), James Mason in A Star is Born, and the winner, Marlon Brando for On the Waterfront.  Tough year.

It's interesting to note that Robinson Crusoe on Mars has a release in the Criterion Collection (not to quibble, I regard RCOM fondly), but this adult-oriented family film by one of the great directors of the 20th century is not.

*But, not T.G.I. Friday, because that would be something of a sick joke that nobody'd get until they invented shopping malls.

The Impossible

Disaster Relief
or
The Tides That Bind

It truly is an amazing story, fully befitting the title The Impossible.  The heart-and earth-rending circumstances surrounding the 2004 tsunami are the stuff of nightmares.

The Bennett family* is spending Christmas 2004 in Thailand.  They're Australians living in Japan: she's a wife/mother/home-maker for now, a doctor by trade; he's a something or other, attached to his phone and worried about losing his job.  The kids are twelve, seven, and five, respectively with the oldest, Lucas, a bit of a pre-teen jerk to everybody—little brothers and parents—and has a bad case of the surlies with a lot of growing up to do.

Thailand at Christmastime 2004 is the perfect time to do it.  Their seaside resort is pristine, perfect.  They spend Christmas lightly bickering, worrying, and considering the future.  Man plans.  God laughs.

What they can't anticipate is the earthquake that rocks Southeast Asia, or the resulting wall of water that comes crashing through the resort, pushing everything out of its path, slamming everything up-shore, sucking it back to the ocean and then, hammering them again, turning the tidelands into a raging river in both directions, scattering everything in random paths.

That includes the Bennetts. When Mom Maria rises above the wall of water, battered and bleeding, she sees Lucas being carried away to the ocean.  The two desperately risk safety and stability to connect and stay within reach, despite being tossed about like so much silt.  When the waters subside they scrabble in bare feet amid the carnage of uprooted vegetation, rubble and broken bodies.  Maria's leg is torn apart, flesh ripped from bone.  A makeshift tourniquet keeps her together, and Lucas becomes parent, keeping her focused through her shock and finding high ground and supervising her trip to a triage center, a hospital drastically ill-equipped to deal with the wreckage of such a catastrophe.  What has become of the rest of the family is anybody's guess, but that is for another time, if they can spare it from just surviving.

Director Juan Antonio Bayona (in the credits, he's "J.A. Bayona") manages to keep the focus micro, while presenting a macro canvas.  That in itself is an amazing accomplishment, but he has an amazing talent for making things personal and visceral, the scenes of the struggle swept up in the ocean waves is tough to watch, and the inundation of the victims in the tsunami's path, as experienced by Maria is a surreal nightmare of images, that convey panic and horror simultaneously. The details of everything, especially the personal crises of the peripheral victims is in plain view, as much a part of the story as the Bennett's struggles.  Their crisis is central, but the individuals' own efforts in providing help to other survivors is reflected by the help they get back.  It's a story of one family, but the efforts of all the survivors, native and tourist, to help each other through the overwhelming havoc is knitted throughout the story in an overall arc that is inspiring, and something of a tonic in this movie season.

The Impossible is a Full-Price Ticket.

Watts, McGregor and The Impossible Belon family

* Much has been made of the fact that the Belon's (who are Latinos) are being played by Anglo actors,  something that is much pooh-poohed by Maria Belon.  But, one has to ask: why did a production, headed by Spanish-speaking artists, make such a decision, other than for "sellability?"  I only bring this up, as there is a pattern here, what with the similarly anglicized Argo.  Are Latinos not allowed to be featured in movies because it might hurt the box office (I say this while ruefully noting that a Latino actor and black actor are "inserted" into the all-white Gangster Squad—if one is to be accurate one way, shouldn't one the other—and yet I thought Mackie and Pena were a nice touch, and they're always welcome to see). Yes, as Maria Belon says, the story is "universal"—it has more to do with family than what race that family is.

Biutiful

"Cast-aways"
or
"Living on the Razor Blade"

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu has directed three features starting with the much-beloved Amores Perros that deal with interlocking stories and the tangential way that things interconnect—all butterflies and hurricanes.  Now, with Biutiful, he's abandoned that global gambit for a more focused film dealing with the ramifications of one life trying to do something decent in the underbelly of exploitation.  Rather than Iñárritu going to far-flung locations to show the skein of inter-connectedness, it all takes place in Barcelona, the diaspora of the world, rather than spreading out, coming to one place.  The world's economic crises—the current one and the on-going struggles of third-world countries, has created a surplus of one thing: refugees and immigrants, easily exploited by those trying to keep costs and prices down by keeping the labor lower.

The spider in the web is Uxbal (Javier Bardem, and he's amazing in this), part-time single father—his wife is a bi-polar, drinking, sluttish massage therapist and has lost custody of their two small children to him—and full-time black-marketer and employment agency for the disadvantaged.  That's being polite.  He works for a sweat-shop that ekes out its living by supplying warm bodies to various enterprises: the Senegalese sell crafts (and drugs) on the streets with increasingly ineffective bribes to the police in lieu of licenses, the Chinese make copies of movies and other cheap knock-offs, and...with Uxbal's brother's help...are farmed out for cheap labor on construction projects, which is the big score.  He's sort of an HR guy, without regard to humanity or resources.

He also has an ability—as in The Sixth Sense, he "can see dead people."  The recently departed are usually hanging around (sometimes literally) their bodies not knowing what to do or where to go, and Uxbal quiets their whispers, takes in their final words to help the grieving kin, and sends them on their way.  For this, he receives a small fee from desperate families.  Uxbal is teetering on the ledge of so many worlds, it is amazing that he is as  balanced as he is, sheltering his children from the encroaching corruption—that he is a gateway to—from all sides.

Oh.  One other thing: he has pancreatic cancer that has metastasized and he only has a couple months to live.  With so much blade-running, he's ignored his own health issues and condemned himself—but with so much responsibility, he won't just lay down and die.  What he needs is someone like himself to allow himself to move on.  He's a "dead man walking" on a tight rope.  The only question is...what will send him over the edge.

And this is the problem (if you want to call it that) with Iñárritu, the writer/director—he doesn't know when to stop.  For all the digging he does to bring his audience down into the mire of man's inhumanity and crimes against brothers, he can't help but take it to the realm of not just the fantastic...but the unbelievable.  We can believe the exploitation of workers and sweat-shops and slave-barracks because we've seen it, but to pile on a ghost story seems a desperate bid to make things mystical and "significant," when the story already has heft and worth.  By gilding the mass-produced imitation lily, he undercuts a searing look at human desperation that would have been fine on its own.

Maybe...just maybe...he wanted to cushion the impact of our race to the bottom by providing a happy landing for its protagonist.  But it seems a bit like hedging his bets to provide that, while reducing the importance of the very people he's trying to give a face to.  Which "big picture" is more important?

Biutiful is a Matinee

The Spirit of the Beehive

"The Spirit of the Beehive" (Victor Erice, 1973) Victor Erice is the Terrence Malick of Spain (though to be correct it should be the other way around). His films are precise and planned so carefully that he has made three films since 1972's "The Spirit of the Beehive." "Spirit" tells the story of two children; Father is a bee-keeper, Mother is a repressed housewife. The children go to see a matinee of James Whale's "Frankenstein," which deeply affects the youngest, Ana. She wonders why, in a pivotal scene, the monster kills a young child (in the film it's never seen) and if the monster is real. She's told by her older sister that the monster is a spirit who will come at her call--"Hello, I am Ana." This sets in motion a series of events that juxtaposes life and freedom, identity and society, death and repression. This film was made in the last echoes of the Franco regime and the people walk around in a form of zombie-state, their expressions impossible to read. That the Frankenstein monster is seen in this context as a symbol of life and freedom shows what a palpable symbol it remains, and how malleable.

Broken Embraces

"Raising Caine" or "Eyesight to the Blind"

Harry Caine (Lluís Homar) is a writer of screenplays in Madrid, semi-content to take on the occasional assignment his former production assistant Judit (Blanca Portillo) gives him and to pick up the occasional stranger who helps him across the street. Harry happens to be blind, and that he writes for a visual medium is just one of the ambiguities that inform "Broken Embraces" (or "Los Abrazos Rotos"), the latest film of Pedro Almodóvar that, like Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," is a valentine to the movies.

Maybe it's more like a box of dark chocolates. Multi-layered, with movies within movies and a story told mostly in flashbacks and first-person narration, it's a film noir in candy-colors (like the Andy Warhol prints of firearms in the heavy's house), and interlocking human triangles that make up the chain of the movie.* Running throughout are the Almodovar themes of dual identity, parental issues and role-playing (but no sexual ambiguity here, he keeps this story fairly hard-boiled), but it comes back to the art of seeing, and illusion, and seeing and creating illusion.

And Penelope Cruz. But, let's back-track.

On the day when a wealthy industrialist, Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) dies, Harry gets an appointment with a film-maker (he claims to have made a documentary fourteen years ago) named Ray X (Rubén Ochandiano), who wants Harry to collaborate on a screenplay. Given the scenario, Harry refuses and X is tossed out by Diego (Tamar Novas), Harry's assistant and typist (and Judit's son). An accident to Diego while his mother is away, puts the two men together in a mutually care-giving relationship, and Diego asks him about Mateo Blanco.

Mateo Blanco, you see, was another life. "Harry Caine" is a pseudonym that Blanco lives and writes under now. And over the course of the film, "Harry" tells Diego about the complicated story that led up to the day that Blanco lost his sight, his life and his love. It involves Magdalena Rivas (Penélope Cruz), secretary to Martel, and in a past life, a call-girl. A family crisis puts "Lena" in Martel's debt and she becomes his mistress, and he provides her anything money can buy...except freedom. Lena desires to be an actress, and one day she auditons for Mateo, who becomes enchanted with her.

There's a lot more to tell, but you can probably guess a lot of it, if you've seen a few movies out of the past. Almodovar isn't breaking any new ground this time, but he is tilling rich story-telling soil, the kind that binds screenwriters to Fate, for Good or Ill, and produced the films that made him fall in love with The Movies.

And movie-making. The film that the film's Mateo is fussing over is highly reminiscent of one of Almodovar's own films (right down to the...uh...cast), and his perverse humor knows there's not much difference between a controlling lover and a controlling director. Lena is a pawn in both men's game, and when being pulled in two directions something's gotta give...or be taken.

It's familiar stuff, but one more opportunity for Almodovar to have fun with the house of mirrors that is cinema. And one more opportunity to work and reflect a different aspect of his current Muse, Penelope Cruz. In his last film, "Volver," Cruz was an earthy Sophia Loren. Here, she's Audrey Hepburn...well, that's how Mateo molds her for the film (in a scene highly reminiscent of this blog-post by Almodovar about the film's prep). There's another more tragic icon that's touched on. One that the public embraced, and who loved the attention it brought her. And who learned too late that to be embraced also means to be held, constricted and restricted. Things cost.

Cruz and Almodovar show how it's done.

* At one point, Penelope Cruz is festooned with the most elaborate gold jewelry that almost looks like an elaborate horse harness. Makes one consider whether any jewelry is a form of "tack."

Volver

"Volver" (Pedro Almodovar, 2006) Almodovar film about the prevailing myth-making of Family, and the resiliency and strength of women. In the course of it, Raimunda (Penelope Cruz, far better and livelier than any of her Hollywood films) has her entire world--her ENTIRE world--turned upside down, as her family structure--maybe that should be stricture--crumbles around her, and she must turn her back on tending to the dead--except for that pesky secret in the freezer downstairs--and concentrate on the living by, ironically, embracing the past. Then, and only then, can she be prepared for a miracle of sorts, the "coming back" of the title. It's a film that celebrates independence and family and is far less controversial than a lot of Almodovar's past work, but full of great film-making choices, including some sequences of suspense that rival those of Hitchcock.

The Spirit of the Beehive

"The Spirit of the Beehive" (Victor Erice, 1973) Victor Erice is the Terrence Malick of Spain (though to be correct it should be the other way around). His films are precise and planned so carefully that he has made three films since 1972's "The Spirit of the Beehive." "Spirit" tells the story of two children; Father is a bee-keeper, Mother is a repressed housewife. The children go to see a matinee of James Whale's "Frankenstein," which deeply affects the youngest, Ana. She wonders why, in a pivotal scene, the monster kills a young child (in the film it's never seen) and if the monster is real. She's told by her older sister that the monster is a spirit who will come at her call--"Hello, I am Ana." This sets in motion a series of events that juxtaposes life and freedom, identity and society, death and repression. This film was made in the last echoes of the Franco regime and the people walk around in a form of zombie-state, their expressions impossible to read. That the Frankenstein monster is seen in this context as a symbol of life and freedom shows what a palpable symbol it remains, and how malleable.