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Reviews
Mifunes sidste sang (1999)
Individual more than social critique
With Mifunes sidste sang, Søren Kragh-Jakobsen continues the Danish Dogma group project (Idioterna, Festen) of providing us with original pictures from Denmark. We know the rules by now: camera on the shoulder, no added light, no added music, and all properties to be fond on location. This gets us as far as Wonderful Copenhagen -- The official slogan of the Danish capital city -- as one could come: Dogma stands for a dark realism, although the critique is more individual than social. And Mifume confirms the Dogma's ability to deal in an innovative way with as important matters as deviance, everyday's violence, or modern loneliness.
Un tè con Mussolini (1999)
Postcard from Tuscany at war
Zeffirelli's film is a romantic easy to watch catalogue of how to build a story on established contrasts: US vs. British, young vs. old, allied vs. Germans/Italians, smart democrats vs. stupid fascists aso. Fortunately enough, a good cast does rescue the film from being a caricature of War-can-be-fun-if-filmed-skillfully (see Begnini's La vita´è bella). You get a nice filmed postcard of Beautiful Toscany (at war, though, even if it does not show too much) and some fun if you are in a light mood. One thing only in this Italy for tourists: Were there no ore Italians in Firenza these years ?
La vita è bella (1997)
Just another love story
Making people laugh about Concentration camp is a courageous if dangerous endeavor, especially as a wave of neo-Nazism sweeps over Europe. Laughing is a serious matter, however, as Begnini seems to believe, and why could it not make us discover new aspect of the Nazi horror? Well it could but in the case of Begninis's film it does not. The film is less a film on concentration camps than another love story, of a man and a woman and of a father and his son. The Holocaust is turned into a banal jail the Jews project (I particularly resented the depicting nearly every prisoner as Italian speaking, in itself a highly unrealistic assumption) to serve a melodramatic story. Italy has produced with Primo Levi's self-biographical book If This is a Man one the strongest account of life in Nazi's concentration camp to date. Begnini's film is indeed an insult to Levi´s masterwork. Read Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale comic strip on the subject instead.
Buffalo '66 (1998)
Either ... or
The-problems-of-the-guy-that-just-comes-out-of-jail must be one of the most recurrent themes of US film, and it is hard to do something original on it. Yet, this is what Buffalo'66 trying to do, with some success and some failures. The film is indeed tighter that it appears I believe. I think it has an original way of working with close up, multiple frames. And I recommend in this respect the scene, at the very beginning, where Billy Brown (Vincent Gallo), waiting for the bus that will take him from the prison to town remembers his life inside. It is quite suggestive indeed. Too, mostly thanks to short flashbacks, the film give us effective hints as to the psychology of this enervating guy. We slowly start to understand him a bit better, and why not even feel sympathy for him. Personally, the meeting with his parents reminded me of Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause and even Kenneth Loach's Family Life. Now, the film would not be that interesting if Layla alias Wendy (Chistina Ricci) would not create such a contrapuntal effect, but I do not want to tell more. Christina Ricci IS the reward, and her performance is all the more admirable that her character was dangerously close from the stupid blonde that loves to be badly treated. But she makes something else out of it. So I believe that you should see the film if you liked Cohens' Largo or The Big Lebowski (they play bowling there too), or if you want to see slightly different pictures. On the other hand, I can understand you get tired of Vincent Gallo self complacent character and acting and think that Gallo should have let more people get into the making of the film as it is so difficult to do everything oneself. Well you will either leave after 20 minutes or be fond of it.
Karakter (1997)
Creating a character
Karakter embarks on the ambitious project of creating a universal character, in the sense given to that term by Don Quichotte, Pickwick Le père Goriot, or Madame Bovary. One may credit the book for that, it does not reduce the quality of Van Diem's pictures which do create a balance between psychological realism and classic literature narrative devices (love / hate, abandoned mothers; ambitious young men). Dreverhaven is an archetype aimed at functioning as a deforming mirror of human soul: this only makes the film highly memorable.
The Ice Storm (1997)
Of decomposition
I found The Ice Storm a remarkable treaty in social decomposition. The nearly ethnographic accuracy of everyday's life details (colours, shapes, fabrics, aso) added to the specific time location during the Watergate scandal turn the film into more than another fiction about how difficult it is to keep families together and being a parent. We are actually witnessing how social links desagragates: social decomposition may be the film's key word. The film does not have the ravaging humour of Todd Solonz's Happiness and just this coldness in tone makes it even more frightening: how far are we ready to go to keep the dream of the nuclear family alive ?