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Tag: Italian

  • Pasolini’s Accatone

    **Update: Accatone is a pain in the ass to see, but it’s on youtube right now. Great quality in one full video. Watch it before it vanishes (make sure to turn on CC)**

    Ballila the Fat Thief to Accatone the Starving Pimp:

    Did you sell your car? Is all the gold gone? You really look like a beggar. What a bad end!

    Hai venduto la macchina? E finito l’oro? Ma tu mi pari proprio un dizgrazato. Che brutta fine!

    Che brutta fine! Che brutta fine!

    I watched Accatone for the first time eight years ago, and for eight years now I’ve recited those words “Che brutta fine!” with regular regularity. I say them out loud, not to myself, and I do this the most as I walk from one place to another. These days I walk two miles to the coffee shop and two miles back. This allows me thirty three minutes twice a day to call upon “Che brutta fine.” It is a compulsive and calming habit, like chewing a piece of hair, or fondling the edge of t-shirt. Eva D’Andrea my oldest friend, will attest to this routine. She is an Italian just back from Italy and I especially enjoy saying the sentence around her. It is more authentic with an Italian around. Che brutta fine! The rolling R thrills my tongue.

    But behind the seduction of certain phonetics, lies the other reason. The larger, less cheerful explanation behind my attraction to these words and why my mind returns to Accatone repeatedly: My soul, or a portion of it I have yet to resolve, is Accatone’s posture embodied. Shoulders hunched, head down, he stands heavy with the weight of his own immorality.

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  • Certified Copy


    *I am traveling right now, and am uneasy and anxious. Interestingly, in the past few days I’ve found myself yearning for the comfort of Juliette Binoche’s breasts in Certified Copy, and so I am reposting*

    I watched Certified Copy on a plane. I watched it on my laptop sitting between an older man and an older woman, and so the three of us watched the film together. They in secret glances here and there, and I, aware of their curiosity, in varying states of self consciousness. This is the inevitable consequence of personal movie viewing in public spaces, but as we three watched, these lines appeared and to my horror, I began to cry.

    “Look at your wife, who has made herself pretty for you.”

    Bearing witness to a stranger’s unexpected emotional vulnerability results in an uncomfortable domino effect of exposure. And so, because my sniffles betrayed me, our whole row became connected in a strange and awkward way. Apart from violence, nothing changes the air more instantaneously than tears shed amongst strangers.

    All is ripe for speculation.

    And as I did small things to feign non-crying casualness, like coughing and rustling in my bag, I was reminded of a story. Many years ago a friend of my parents needed to phone them following an emotionally upsetting fight with her husband. This was in the age of pay phones and she could not call from home. Dreading being spotted sobbing in a phone booth, she decided to make the call the only place her tears would be perceived as appropriate: The hospital. This story was relayed to me and I have always regarded it as a brilliantly heroic manipulation of perception. This is the same subjectivity of reality that Certified Copy explores.

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  • I Am Love vs. Somewhere

    **Watch my “Ebert Presents” segment on “I Am Love” here**

    In Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love Tilda Swinton plays Emma Recchi, a Russian woman who marries into a wealthy Italian family and finds herself moving (somewhat unwillingly) into the role of matriarch. Dissatisfied with a soulless life of planning dinner parties, Emma finds love with a younger man, one with the earthiness she needs to remedy her stale aristocratic life. Now this is a movie about many things: family, legacy, death, birth, incest, and definitions of love and loneliness among them, but what I like most about the film is its size. I Am Love isn’t a movie that minimizes itself. Though we associate this kind of grandeur with melodramas of old, mainly pre-1970‘s, given the current popular styles of filmmaking, which often cast the theatrical and poetic as false, Guadagnino’s decision to make a grand, operatic film is actually a radical one.

    I recently read a review of the film by one of my favorite film critics, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody. Even when I disagree with Brody’s thoughts on a movie, I am always intrigued by his reasons. Brody was not especially fond of Guadagnino’s film. He tore it a new one. But what fascinated me this time was that the reasons he gave were the exact reasons I hated Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, a movie he loved. And Brody loved Somewhere for the reasons I loved I Am Love. They are two films with relatively similar stories (dissatisfied elite person finds happiness in the unexpected), done in completely opposing styles. Their titles even represent this contradiction: I AM LOVE vs. somewhere.

    And as I thought more about I Am Love I thought more about what it represented to me and how my love for it is very much related to my dislike of Somewhere.

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  • Race in Film: L’eclisse

    In Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1962 film L’eclisse (Eclipse), time is the enemy. For this reason the chronically depressed will understand it implicitly. They will know that a fan turning left to right makes all the more stagnant the air in a room. They will understand that no part of that room, no corner or cushion, can provide relief from the realization that every approaching minute is opportunity for life to prove itself meaningless.

    Do you not hear the constant victory,
    in the human footrace
    of time, slow as fire,
    sure, and thick and Herculean
    accumulating its volume and adding its sad fiber?

    – Pablo Neruda (Cold Work)

    Faced with this pointless existence, the only thing to do is roam listlessly about, picking things up and putting things down.

    This is what Vittoria does.

    Played by Monica Vitti, Vittoria falls out of love with lover Riccardo and into an affair with stock broker Piero, another relationship doomed to dissatisfy. In between (and during) she wanders about the urban landscape of Rome.

    L’eclisse is a modern movie. Its allegiance to an early sixties modernism and aesthetic is declared in its opening titles. It is a movie of hard lines and clean surfaces. A movie about those who have climbed up, out of nature to build lives high above its savagery. As Katharine Hepburn says in the African Queen:

    “Nature, Mr. Allnut is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

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  • Who’s That Knocking at My Door

    **In the video I refer to “Il Bidone” when I meant to say “I Vitelloni.” Please excuse me.**

    There exist in this sometimes sad world, moments that remind you that you are alive.

    You know these moments well. Blood rushes from your toes to your cheeks. Or from your cheeks to your toes. Either way you are made aware of its movement.

    A great energy is felt in your jaw and in the ends of each strand of hair. Your fingers curl. Your hands turn into fists or claws. Everything is hot. You shudder violently (the energy must be flung off or you will be eaten alive). This all happens in two seconds. It is stunning.

    There is a scene in Martin Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking At My Door that gives me this delicious sensation every-single-time-I-see-it. For four minutes and thirty seconds I am paralyzed with pleasure. A curious kind of paralysis. A mixture of sexual desire, odd violent inclinations, jealousy and tenderness. If you have ever cuddled a baby animal and wanted to literally crush it with affection, you will know what I mean.

    Though Scorsese films populate the favorite movie section of the bro dude’s Facebook page, the man remains a genius. One of the few commercially successful directors whose films always have a true visual dynamism. Maybe you have forgotten. It’s easy to forget the actual artistry of popular directors (Spielberg uses the background TV like nobody’s business), but return to their early works especially and you’ll be reminded.

    1967’s Who’s That Knocking At My Door is a movie about young aimless men, very much in the tradition of I Vitelloni. One of these men is J.R. (Harvey Keitel). J.R. wants to marry a girl (Zina Bethune). Sadly this girl has been raped. This causes J.R. much grief. After struggling with intense Catholic guilt, he decides he’s man enough to marry her. Unfortunately she is unimpressed with his attitude and turns him down.

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  • Bread & Chocolate: Memoirs of a Suspicious Foreigner

    This is Mirror’s first guest post! Every now and then select persons will bless us with their most personal musings on film.

    James has been a dear friend of mine for years and years. I recall one particularly wonderful afternoon spent getting very drunk on a stone bench in Boston’s Little Italy whilst sharing our delight over Jean Cocteau’s “The Art of Cinema.” We are creative soul mates and must live at least 500 miles apart or else die in the heat of each other’s suns. This is the only reason why James lives in Beunos Aires, Argentina. Together we would cause far too much trouble.

    ***

    For the past few years I have been living in Buenos Aires, enjoying a little bit of paradise. This far south, it is easy to remain blissfully unaware of the world outside my adopted city, with news and familial nagging lost somewhere over the equator. I’ve walked the long road of assimilation, navigating the pitfalls of sloppy conjugation and verbal embarrassment. I’ve offended locals and invited muggings with outrageous foreign fashions and for a long time led the life of an outsider. But over time, I have learned the rules while gradually gaining the respect of my Argentine friends. Slowly being accepted as not just another clueless, carpetbagging foreigner means being granted the gift of reluctant relaxation. Gone are the ghastly stares of yesterday, which means I can now go an entire meal without addressing the waitress as pig-fucker and enjoy far cheaper cab fare. But, with the return of of the World Cup, there has been a familiar feeling afoot here in Arcadia.

    As a stranger to football culture, it seemed the entire country has been throwing an epic party for a few weeks now, one to which–forgive the cliche–I was not invited. On game days, streets are abandoned. Shops and schools are closed. A makeshift sign on a hospital reads, “emergencies only.” Impromptu parades and fireworks randomly materialize upon the city, in what I assume are signs of victory. These bizarre celebrations leave people jubilant, overwhelmed with a pride that comes from simply being Argentine.

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  • Le Notti Bianche (White Nights)

    Count Luchino Visconti di Modrone is my beloved. Grand and operatic. Never fearing the theatrical or taboo (but never vulgar for vulgarities sake).

    You see, we are exactly alike.

    The Count was an interesting man. A member of the Italian aristocracy and the Italian Communist Party. He was open with his homosexuality, and photographs men in a way unlike any other directors I’ve seen.

    He showcases their beauty.

    Le Notti (based on the Dostoevsky short story) has an unusual cast, all actors I associate with different directors simply because I saw them in other movies first. Marcello Mastroianni (Fellini’s man), Maria Schell (Rene Clement’s girl), and Jean Marais (Cocteau).

    Schell (with the most expressive eyes) plays Natalia, an innocent girl in a small city who pines away after Jean Marais, a lover who has left, but she insists will return to her. Natalia meets Mario (Mastroianni), a lonely wanderer who falls in love with her. Mastroianni tries desperately to convince Natalia to forget Marais and begin a new life with him. Will she or won’t she? I shall never tell. You must watch it yourself.

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  • Race in Film: Paisá (Paisan)

    Paisá directed in 1946 by Roberto Rossellini is, in my most humble opinion, one of the greatest films ever made. After watching neo realist films I often wonder how different American movies would have been then and now, had WWII been fought on US soil. I’m not saying Best Years of Our Lives (released the same year) isn’t good, but it’s certainly no Paisá.

    Paisá is the second film in Rossellini’s “War trilogy”, films made during and after the war (preceded by Open City, followed by Germany Year Zero). Though Open City is generally more critically acclaimed, I find Paisá to be more moving.

    The film consists of six episodes set during the liberation of Italy at the end of WWII.Though all the episodes are powerfully moving, I shall focus on the second, for it is in this episode that I saw something I had never seen before in a European movie from the 40s-50s. Something I had rarely seen in any Hollywood movies of the same era.

    It was a black man. An American black man.

    A soldier. Not a butler or janitor.

    I was startled, I was amazed, I was impressed.

    I was filled with a greater love for Rossellini that I suspect is similar to seeing your baby walk for the first time.

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