"Hail, Caesar!": The Coen brothers' faith in movies

My two cents on the Coen brothers' Hail, Caesar!, even though so many smart things have been written about it since its release in early February. It is not only a witty picture that will help film professors make history come alive beyond lectures and power points, but also a sharp comedy on 1950s Hollywood politics, that minces no words about genre staples, the behind-the-scenes of a studio, the private lives of stars, and communists cells.  Like so many other films about Hollywood – A Star Is Born, Singin’ in the Rain, The Player - the pleasure of this one is to get the references, as they play out for laughs in the plot, and work ironically or reflexively in 2016.

Unexpectedly, the film opens with a close-up of a crucifix in a Catholic Church and then cuts to a confessional, where a troubled studio executive is confessing his sin of the last 24 hours: lying to his wife about smoking.  In the next 27 hours, borrowing the name and function from the real MGM producer and ‘fixer’, Eddie Mannix will play puppeteer to oddballs and misfits so that Capitol studio (an explicit counterpoint to the communist study group that pores over Das Kapital) can weave the gossamer the public craves - “people don't want the facts, they want to believe”, asserts Mannix.  (The rest of the studio hierarchy does not exist in the film, only Mr. Schenck managing the business from New York.)

Among the most enjoyable sequences of Hail, Caesar! are the loving recreations of classic Hollywood genres: musicals, as if choreographed by Busby Berkeley and Gene Kelly; westerns with singing cowboys and horse stunts; sophisticated drawing room comedies directed by effete European filmmakers (a fun three-part sequence to teach mise-en-scène and editing); and wide-screen biblical epic like The Robe and Quo Vadis?  All these sharply crafted parodies work the same way: they embellish established genre conventions but deflate them with a final touch of excess, irony or referentiality that defuse any sentimentality.  (Incidentally, in the press conference after the film opened the Berlin Film festival on February 11, Joel Coen noted that he and his brother were not in the nostalgia business; not only because they did not live in 1950s Hollywood, but also because they would not have been able to work there if they had.) 

The ultimate deflating moment takes place during the overlapping climax of the film and the film-within-the film, the impassioned speech of George Clooney as the Roman military undergoing a spiritual conversion at the foot of the cross.  Together with the rousing sacred music of the soundtrack, his performance affects the characters in the crucifixion scene but also the crew filming it.  The emotional crescendo is comically destroyed when Clooney gropes for the key word of his conversion speech. Unable to recall it, the emotional spell is absurdly broken.

As it turns out, the missing noun in Clooney’s speech is ‘faith’.  The choice of word is not by chance, since it should be connected to the crucifix and the confessional of the opening sequence. But the twist here is that faith – a strong unshakeable belief – is not attached to Catholicism, and religion in general, in a denotative manner, as its primary meaning. In Hail, Caesar! faith has been made a connotation of Christianity, a second meaning, acquired by analogy. What faith  - a suspension of disbelief - really connects to is … movies.  It explains our thirst for films, the power of moving pictures to pull us out of the ordinary, to make us forget the here and now of this material and messy world. In the film, faith ends up trumping even the ‘futures’, that promise of liberation the communist screenwriters believe in but fail to deliver.

 At the end of Hail, Caesar! we are back at the confessional. Mannix acknowledges that he is still smoking; but most importantly he asks the priest how to distinguish right from wrong. In a piece of solid moral advice, he tells Mannix to follow the voice of his conscience, through which God speaks to him.

We are really back where we began– in a dark place, with a man who knows he’s running a circus instead of a business, but who understands the magic of movies and the good they can do. By other means, Hail, Caesar! is a Sullivan’s Travels for our times.  A very serious movie indeed.

The Berlinale throws a curveball: "A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery", by Lav Diaz

This stunning film from Filipino auteur Lav Diaz has been the most unforgettable event of this 66^th Berlinale for me.  Not because it lasted 482 minutes  (yes, eight hours of screening time, plus a one-hour break) and required unusual physical and spiritual stamina to watch, riveted to the seat in the darkness of the Berlinale Palast last Thursday, February 18.

 It was that intense esthetic experience – seeing what the film medium can do that no other art form can in the same way – that made me grasp once more that cinema is a form of revelation, an act of literally piercing the veil of physical reality to push it into a non-material dimension. This filmmaker belongs in the same company as Bresson, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Bela Tarr, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, Terrence Malick, and sometimes Lars von Trier, who practice what Paul Schrader described as the transcendental style in cinema.  I came out of that screening thinking, “I have seen a modern day version of the Divine Comedy ”. It’s an intuition that may be wrong but helped me understand what this black-and-white work made up of very long takes, meant when it made explicit its theme in the last line: “I’m searching for the soul of the Philippines”.

A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery describes a seminal period in the history of the Philippines, the beginnings of the rebellion against Spain in the 1890s after three hundred years of colonial presence.  It does so by linking a series of sequences – some exquisite tableaux shot in a studio; others, leisurely paced action scenes set in the jungle or by the sea – centered on the question “What is the Philippines?”.  The plot responds to it by proposing the answers from differing perspectives: the indigenous Tagalog, the Spaniards, the Catholic Church in her beauty and failings. Weaving through them runs a mythological demon, an ancient evil monster, half horse half man, which is also seen split in three characters.  (In a scene showing the first cinématographe arriving in the Philippines, the demon takes over the machine, looking like the monsters of German Expressionism.)

As I understood it, the film functions as a myth of origin. To those familiar with the history of the Philippines, the real characters, the literary works and folk songs interwoven in the story will be easy to recognize, like the national hero José Rizal (with whom the film begins), and his book El filibusterismo.  As the director explained in the lively press conference after the screening, “I wanted to show the minds, the pains and the questions of the thinking Filipino”. In that sense, the experience of colonialism – and how to assess the culture, the language and the religion of the occupier - can be transposed from the Philippines to elsewhere where a similar situation has unfolded.  It occurred to me that a good analogy would be an eight-hour film about the meaning and direction of the US, combining in the same storyline a rational and pragmatic British perspective with an indigenous and mythical mindset, in the coastal Virginia of the 1600s - a mythological variation of Terrence Malick’s New World.

During those eight hours of screen time, we see parallel and intersecting stories of journeys undertaken by suffering men and women, immersed in turmoil.  The jungle where they trample is a place of danger but also enchantment, and the sea they reach at the end is perhaps the only locus left for a new beginning to happen. These journeys are geographical but become metaphorical, and ultimately, open ended. They culminate with the final shot of the survivors: a resilient woman, a writer and a priest.

“The film is not eight hours. It’s just cinema”, answered Lav Diaz to a question about the viability of the picture in the real world of movie-going. He also spoke fondly of the influence of Italian Neorealism on this film and his other work, especially the moral perspective the Italians brought to the style.  Asked about other references, Diaz talked about German Expressionism and comic books, and, overall, the chiaroscuro of classic cinema.  The director warmly recalled André Bazin and his celebration of the long take. (Loved it).

A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery was the Berlinale’s special gift to moviegoers this year. I would love to see how the international jury will assess its unusual qualities, in a few hours, when the prizes are awarded.  Meryl Streep is the president this year, and I saw her several times, carefully guarded by polite minders.  I snapped this photo right before a film, since I was sitting behind her.

"Death in Sarajevo" and "Fire on the Sea": two sides of the European coin

Two films in the Competition section of this year’s Berlinale offer an interesting exploration, explicit and tacit, about the state of Europe today.  This may sound grandiloquent, even farfetched, but viewing them back to back made for an intriguing comparison.

 Director Danis Tannic

Death in Sarajevo, a Bosnian French production directed by Danis Tanovic, whose Neorealist-style drama An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker won the jury and actor prize at the 2013 Berlinale, is a breezily laid out exploration of the political fate of the Balkans since the summer of 1914, when the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire plunged Europe into a brutal war, until the equally bloody breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The film posits the Balkans as a synecdoche for Europe, and a summery of its current state of affairs. Building on a play by the French philosopher and media celebrity Bernard-Henri Lévy, the symbolically titled Hotel Europe, Tanovic wrote a screenplay developing the external events and characters orbiting around the central event of the play – an actor rehearsing a monologue in a Sarajevo hotel.  

Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy

This Bosnian French production follows the three rules of classic theater: unity of action, location and time. It’s a tour de force, like Victoria, a Berlinale entry last year, made up of one long take unfolding in real time.  In Death in Sarajevo, long takes prevail, with the camera trailing in and out of corridors, offices, kitchen and dining rooms behind the key players, in a show of Birdman’s dexterity (This is the new international film style).  Several crises unfold in the labyrinth of the hotel (a piece of Socialist architecture in downtown Sarajevo), two of which frame the politics of the film. One is the making of a news show in the terrace where a sharp Bosnian reporter is talking to historians about the events of 1914 on a location right below them, and the radicalized Gavrilo Princip  – a hero or a terrorist? – whose two pistol shots triggered WWI.  The second is the original play by Lévy, in which a French actor rehearsing his monologue, an argument about 20^th century Europe beginning and ending in Sarajevo. 

These and other story strands – the calling of a strike by the employees, who have not been paid for a while, since the hotel is on the brink of bankruptcy; a mother-daughter relationship; the thugs running a strip club in the basement; a wife pestering a coke-snorting policeman to buy a couch  - come together in the climax sequence outside of an elevator.  It is a key moment that simultaneously replicates and turns upside down the 1914 assassination and its meanings. It makes the audience ponder the fateful chain of events deriving from the two bullets, and what would have happened if chance had played its cards differently: the open car driving the heir and his wife made a wrong turn after having escaped a failed assassination attempt earlier.

Tightly edited, with strong performances and nimble camera work, Death in Sarajevo is a thought-provoking film that shows the Europe of 1914 not so different from that of today, torn by conflicts where politics and religion are interwoven . (I think a viable literary analogy is Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Soumission).  There might be no single event today capable of triggering its collapse, like the bullets of the Bosnian Serb Princip. But the parallels and questions – as laid out in the Lévy play and born out by the events of the film – are worth examining in light of Europe’s current state of affairs.

An intriguing counterpoint to Death in Sarajevo is Fuocoammare/Fire on the Sea, an Italian documentary directed by Gianfranco Rosi.  Eschewing narrator and exposition, except for a brief written preface, the film shows how migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Africa, at immense peril, reach the island of Lampedusa (population 6,000) in Southern Italy.  This is the first of two stories and has the looks of a procedural documentary – à la Frederick Wiseman – with the camera following the Italian authorities dealing with the crisis at sea, the migrants themselves traveling in harrowing conditions, and the administrative processing of the survivors.  The second strand, along the lines of La terra trema’s Neorealism, quietly follows the lives of the folks of Lampedusa: a DJ taking calls on radio, two elderly couples cooking, cleaning and eating, and a lively ten-year old kid, Emmanuele, who roams the island with slingshots, b.b. guns, learning to become a fisherman, the centuries-old occupation of the islanders.

The young protagonist

The two story lines run on parallel tracks, and do not connect, except for the symbolism we can read in the patch the kid is prescribed to stimulate his lazy eye. (It was a fortuitous metaphor, the director noted in the press conference).  The only other link is the island’s doctor, whom we see tending to a migrant pregnant woman, and also the little boy, suffering from anxiety.  The physician describes the lethal dangers of crossing the sea– oil burns, dehydration, drowning – in a heart-wrenching monologue to the camera (“no matter how many times you see dead children, you still feel the hole in your stomach”).  As an expository narrator at that point, he carries the moral conscience of the film.  The doctor came to Berlin and in the press conference pointed out the solidarity of Lampedusa with the waves of migrants.  He must have sensed the objection of many journalists, disturbed by the two-track story, where it is possible to read the Lampedusans as indifferent to this ongoing tragedy.

Gianfranco Rosi

An Italian colleague pointed out that a recent documentary on the subject, Lampedusa in Winter (2015), shown at Locarno last summer, succeeds in rendering a clearer picture of this catastrophe.  The first official visit of Pope Francis was to Lampedusa in July 2013, a cri-de-coeur that had a profound media impact.

Death in Sarajevo and Fire on the Sea reminded me in different ways about the soul of Europe today.  On my way to the Berlinale from the hotel these past days, I walk by a building on Stressemann Strasse that has been reconditioned to host Syrian refugees.  The words of Chancellor Merkel resonate in Berlin: ‘We can do it’.

"El rey del Once", la décima película de Daniel Burman, se vio en la Berlinale

Daniel Burman, director y productor que ocupa una posición sólida en la cinematrografía argentina, a caballo entre el cine de entretenimiento y películas con ideas, vino a la 66 edición del Festival de Berlin para presentar en la sección Panorama El rey del Once.  El título en castellano, enraizado en la geografía de Buenos Aires, se transformó en The Tenth Men para su circulación internacional (alusión a la ley judía de congregar diez varones para funciones religiosas).  Junto con los actores protagonistas, Alan Sabbagh, Julieta Zylberberg y el verdadero “rey del Once”, Usher Barilka, Burman ofreció una cálidad conferencia de prensa luego de la función para el periodismo, el viernes 12 de febrero.

Recordó con afecto la invitación de la Berlinale para mostrar su opera prima Un crisantemo estalla en Cincoesquinas, en 1998, una suerte de Western gauchesco que llamó la atención por su frescura y originalidad. “Fue mi primer viaje a Europa y allí aprendí por primera vez a mirar mis películas a través de las pupilas del público. Ahora es la quinta vez que vengo …”

Usher Barilla, Julieta Zylberberg y Daniel Burman
Berlinale 2016

“En El rey del Once recreo el barrio de mi infancia, donde viví hasta los veinte años. Uno reconstruye el territorio donde se desarrolla la infancia”.  En este caso, el Once de Pasteur y Corrientes, filmado cámara en mano y en un radio de 500 metros, ya que  “quería volver al cine de manos y pies, sin trabas de equipo y camiones de apoyo”.  Es el escenario de una nueva historia de padre e hijo, que describe como una  “construcción de la paternidad”.  Como en El abrazo partido, se ve la complicada relación que un hijo tiene con su padre ausente. Esta vez, el progenitor figura, pero su generosidad con la comunidad judía del barrio – de allí el título –ha sido a expensas de su único hijo, Ariel.  Este emigró a Nueva York, con éxito pero sin afectos profundos, según se deduce en el breve prólogo.  La vuelta a Buenos Aires, lo sume en un caos de recuerdos, afectos y estridencias, astutamente reflejados en el estilo visual de la película (la cámara movediza sobre tanto primer plano marea por momentos).  Si bien la historia se centra en Ariel, de un lunes a domingo, la referencia es el padre, al que sólo se lo oye  en llamados insistentes de celular. 

El verdadero Usher Barilka inspiró la historia; preside una fundación de bajo perfil que palia las  necesidades concretas de gente al borde de la pobreza.  “Sí – contestó Burman a una pregunta de la prensa – muestro a judío pobres, muy diferentes del estereotipo.  Son ellos mismos quienes actúan en la película.  Tenía el dilema moral de cómo presentarlos en su humanidad concreta, respetando su dignidad, y también su individualidad.  Muchas son anécdotas que viví yo, como las zapatillas con Velcro, numero 46, que Usher me pidió estando yo en Estados Unidos. Eran para un muchacho que no podia atarse los cordones. Pero como le traje zapatos de cuero y con cordones, me las rechazó, aunque después le vinieron bien a su hermano. Cuándo éste murió, Usher me mandó un zapato de recuerdo. Todavía lo tengo”.

El protagonista deambula por el Once, física y espiritualmente, 

buscando su lugar.

 “El punto de partida de la película fue observar como Usher y sus voluntarios dan sin esperar nada a cambio; es el misterio del bien, pero visto por un hijo que ha huido del padre, al que percibía ausente. Eso me intrigaba”.

La película da a conocer un universo de porteños judíos - tenderos, carniceros, viejitos jubilados, apegados a su barrio – mostrando sus costumbres religiosas y gastronómicas traídas de Europa y practicadas con alegría, como la fiesta de Purim, que celebra la estrategia de Esther para salvar a su pueblo del exterminio, y que en la película es su clímax.

El cambio emocional del protagonista, que desemboca en una conversión religiosa , lo desencadena una muchacha creyente (Julieta Zylberberg).  Que el proceso se haya producido en una semana resulta un poco forzado, tanto como el reemplazo del Mercedes que manejaba en Nueva York por un Citroen desvencijado rodando por  el Once, que no genera la más mínima protesta. Esa transformacion de observador de una cultura a nuevo “rey del barrio” no es del todo creíble, pero el retrato cálido de un universo humano en el corazón de Buenos Aires tiene mucho encanto.