selenak

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Jane Fonda in Five Acts: directed by Susan Lacy, a documentary on guess who. using old and new footage well. Jane Fonda's constant reinventing of herself sometimes eerily goes with the decades in question - 60s: girl next door turns sex symbol, 70s: political activist, 80s: wife of billionaire - and has the kind of happy ending uniting all the previous incarnations (Jane in her eighties having a hit show, Grace and Frankie, while also being back on the barricades against the Orange Menace) which Hollywood loves. This is an affectionate take on its subject, meaning that while there are plenty of anti-Fonda voices heard as well growling "Hanoi Jane" in her general direction (including, hilariously, Richard Nixon's at the very start of the movie, with his own variation of "why must my sex symbol talk politics!"), the Jane-positive voices far outweigh them. The Richard Nixon "whatever happened to Jane Fonda?" outburst caught on tape ends with "I feel sorry for Henry Fonda". Susan Lacy decidedly does not. Having read Peter Fonda's memoirs, I was familiar with the truly Gothic family backstory; Jane's and Peter's mother cut her throat with a razor after repeated stints in an institution, no one ever told the kids who had to find out years later via the media, and Henry in general was great at expression of emotion only with a script and utterly incapable of doing so without one, so Jane in the end literally scripts her venting and their reconciliation via On Golden Pond, and of course he plays it very well. Lacy's film keeps coming back to the family damage, complete with Jane acknwledging she screwed up with her daughter Vanessa as well (who is notably the sole child not interviewed; Jane's son, step-daughter and adopted daughter all are) and hopes Vanessa will forgive her; and yet, there's a lot of humor in it, not least in Jane Fonda's summaries, with a great sense of comic timing in the verbal delivery, of the various men in her life. (Where she makes fun of herself, not them.) Same goes for the filming anecdotes (making the zero g scene for Barbarrella with ample drinking, then, because it had to reshot, the next day with a thundering hangover), and the tale of her slow political awakening (the first time Vadim tells her in the mid-60s that the US will never win in Vietnam, all-American girl Jane thinks "just because you French couldn't..." and does not believe him in the slightest, until her friendship with Simone Signoret starts to clue her in) and her son Troy's description of his trying-to-save-the-world-all-the-freaking-time parents at the height of their activism.

All in all, a charming character portrait also reflecting on the various eras its subject lived through. I doubt it will sway anyone disliking her, but if you like her or know nothing about her and have no emotions one way or the other, it's very enjoyable and occasionally touching.

Razzia, directed by Nabil Ayouch, produced in Morocco and France. This one was an anthology film mostly set in Casablanca, and anthology films - i.e. movies telling the stories of a hunge ensemble of people who are either losely connected or not at all - sometimes work for me and sometimes not so much. This one, trailing five different characters - has some powerful segments - the very first story, for example, the only one not set in Casablanca, about a teacher in a village who in the 80s gets the order to teach solely in Arabic (as opposed to Berber, which is what the children actually speak), which changes his lessons from something the kids participate joyfully in into numb repetition of something they don't comprehend, and it breaks him. Later, in Casablanca, there's also the tale of a Jewish restaurant owner whose joie de vivre always has a touch of sadness in it as well and comes with the awarenes that there aren't many Jews left in the city (his old father fears there won't be enough for a proper burial rite once it's his turn) and he's living on a powder keg, and the musician who so desperately wants to be Freddy Mercury. Frustratingly, the two female characters - a wife feeling trapped and frustrated in her marriage, and a teenager with a teenage identity crisis - are also the two most passive ones, and I often wished we'd have seen more of Yto, the old woman who used to be the teacher's landlady and in love with him in the village and later went to Casablanca with her son, where we reencoutner her in her old age in the trapped wife's plot thread, because every time she did show up, she struck me as far more interesting, plus the actress has great charisma.

There's a boiling rich-poor tension in the city throughout the movie which explodes in the final sequence, but that story felt oddly unfinished to me, as did most of the characters. The movie is richly atmospheric, and has great cinematography, and I don't regret having watched it, but I doubt I'll watch it again.

Ammore e Malavita ("Love and Bullets"), directed by Antonio and Marco Manetti, produced in Italy. This one was a hilarious farce expertedly parodying all the Mafia (well, Camorra, since the whole thing is set in Naples) story clichés and mixing them with (also very funny) songs, the first of which is delivered by the corpse in the opening funeral scene, so that gives you a taste of what the movie is like. I was in stitches throughout. Reccommended if you want to have a blast for two hours.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Location: Munich

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sovay

Henry in general was great at expression of emotion only with a script and utterly incapable of doing so without one, so Jane in the end literally scripts her venting and their reconciliation via On Golden Pond, and of course he plays it very well.

That is an especially bittersweet variant of Who Am I This Time?

Edited Date: 2018-07-03 09:33 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Having read your description now: true. Though the inability to communicate other than through acting out other people's inventions is of course of a different flavour in parent-child relationships than in a story about two same age lovers. Jane and Peter F. both come across as immensely proud of their father's talent and the America he came to symbolize, but also permanently scarred by the coldness (save for a very few moments) and non-presence. ("I was never upset with Dad for being Henry Fonda, I was upset with him for not being Dad", wrote Peter in his memoirs.)

The Jane documentary also had her talking about the way being an actor means you're always self-conscious, citing as an example when she found out Vadim was cheating on her, she was simultanously hurt and thinking "so this is what I look like, what I feel when I'm hurt, I'll have to replicate that", which she said was awful but that there was no off-switch. Which strikes me as maybe the reverse of of Henry Fonda apparantly having been one of the actors allowing himself to feel only through acting.

(All of which reminds me that I still haven't seen Once upon a time in the West, possibly one of the most famous anti-type castings of all time.)

From:

sovay

when she found out Vadim was cheating on her, she was simultanously hurt and thinking "so this is what I look like, what I feel when I'm hurt, I'll have to replicate that", which she said was awful but that there was no off-switch.

That accords with other things I've read or heard from actors, including

spatch. It reminds me of Grahame Greene's famous line about the splinter of ice:

"There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer. I watched and listened. There was something which one day I might need: the woman speaking, uttering the banalities she must have remembered from some woman’s magazine, a genuine grief that could communicate only in clichés."

(I agree with his feeling of double vision; I disagree with his metaphor. I don't think it's cold or inhuman any more than I think it was awful of Fonda not to have an off switch for filing away future emotional reference material. People observe their own behavior and others'. That's how you figure out how to be human.)

(All of which reminds me that I still haven't seen Once upon a time in the West, possibly one of the most famous anti-type castings of all time.)

Let me be very far from the first person to say it's great and Fonda's great in it!

From:

selenak

Did you know, going in, that he plays a villain? Because I'm slightly envious re: the contemporary audience getting that surprise unspoiled. As I heard, Fonda first thought he'd wear a mustache and brown contact lenses, which Sergio Leone immediately nixed - he wanted the famous blue eyes and Henry Fonda's unmasked face for this character.

Splinter of ice: yes, I know that Greene quote. Of course, Kai when gtting his from the Snow Queen thereafter wasn't able to recall anything, or even replicate feeling something.

Of course, sometimes it happens in reverse for actors, first the acting, then the actual experience. On the lighter side, Laurence Olivier in his memoirs writers how he went to Ernest Jones of Freudian fame to figure out Iago's motives etc. for his first performance in the role (when he played it with Ralph Richardson on a rotating basis - they switched between Iago and Othello), and then, years later when serving in WWII, he couldn't stand his superior officer, and found himself thinking "hm, he has an attractive wife..." until he realized what that meant, ever after concluding Jago should be taken at his word when stating it's for being passed over for promotion. :)

On the sader side, Corin Redgrave in his book on father Michael movingly describes Michael coming out to him, and how that sentence "I am, to say the very least, bisexual" (to which C.R. said "I know", because he and his sisters had figured it out in their adolescence without being told by either of their parents) was followed, after hearing the reply, with a shockwave of emotion, outburst of tears. And that he only much later realised he'd seen it before, whem Michael Redgrave played Arthur Crocker-Harris in "The Browning Variation" - the reaction when he gets the Browning with the "to a kind master" dedication was this exactly. But the film had come first, and only years later the reveal.

From:

sovay

Did you know, going in, that he plays a villain?

I did, but knew almost nothing else about the movie, which meant that the particulars of his entrance were a surprise—as intended—and an effective one.

and then, years later when serving in WWII, he couldn't stand his superior officer, and found himself thinking "hm, he has an attractive wife..." until he realized what that meant, ever after concluding Jago should be taken at his word when stating it's for being passed over for promotion.

Nice! (And I have seen a production that ran with that motivation and its Iago remains one of my favorites to this day.)

And that he only much later realised he'd seen it before, whem Michael Redgrave played Arthur Crocker-Harris in "The Browning Variation" - the reaction when he gets the Browning with the "to a kind master" dedication was this exactly. But the film had come first, and only years later the reveal.

The Browning Version is the movie which first made me notice Michael Redgrave (I don't have a real review of it, only notes) and I had heard the story of the conversation with his son and "I am, to say the least of it, bisexual," but I had not heard a version that drew the link between the two. Thanks for that.

From:

selenak

First the coming out passage, which happens after Corin Redgrave's son Luke is born.

"I cannot remember how he introduced the subject when, after an interminably long pause during which each of us, it seemed, had become absorbed in his own thoughts, he spoke again. Perhaps there was no introduction. I remember that his breathing seemed strained and difficult.
'I think I ought to tell you', he said, 'that I am, to say the least of it, bisexual.'
I recall every syllable of that sentence, with its strange qualification 'to say the least of it', because it took him an age to say it and the pauses, which were more or less as I have punctuated them, were painful. In each pause he breathed more deeply, to the bottom of his lungs, letting the air out with a punctured sigh, his shoulders sagging forward. When he had finished he stared at me, angrily, as if I had forced him to speak, as if I had taken advantage of his too trusting nature, and then came three huge, heaving sobs, 'Aaagh...aagh...aaagh', and then the dam burst and his grief and rage came out in a great, terrible, heaving cascade.
I had often see my father cry. He cried freely, without any attempt at restraint, and I was always grateful to have learned from him that there is nothing wrong with crying; quite the contrary. But I had never seen him cry like this. It was beyond anything I had experienced, a grief so awful that it seemed to undo him.
I sat on the arm of his armchair, folded my arms around his neck, and when eventually he quietened a little I said, 'I know.' He said, 'Do you?' and that was all. The end of the conversation."

Now the passage re: The Browning Version:

For the first few moments my father's high, dry, nasal voice, slowly, wearily, as if for the thousandth time, construing a piece of Greek verse, strikes me as absurd, impossible. I want to call out, 'Don't You can't possibly sustain it!' I remember having much the same response to another great screen actor, Marlon Brando, when he boards the Bounty as Fletcher Christian and turns to speak to Bligh in the accents of a Regency fob.
Everything about my father's performance in those first few frames gives me anguish: the tips of his fingers placed together under his chin; his stooping walk; the flick of his eyes to a remote corner of the classroom in case he might detect some inattention, some laughter. It seems such a high-wire performance, demanding that the audience accept it entirely on its own terms. And it has no safety net.
Yet I do accept it, entirely, after the first few moments. And I realise that in this instance too the process is one of losing and finding. (...) At the climax of the story one of the boys gives Crocker Harris, as a present, a copy of Browning's translation of Aeschylus' Agamemnon. ON the flyleaf he has written an inscription: 'God looks kindly on a gentle master.' The effect on Crocker Harris is one of terrifying catharsis. His body starts to shake, he turns away from the boy and he sends him out of the room before giving way to uncontrollable grief.
It is impossible for me to witness that scene now without recalling the evening I spent with Michael in 1967 after Luke was born. I am not suggesting that any such parallel would have occured to Michael. The scene from Rattigan was filmed many years before the scene we played together in real life. (...) Even so, I have come to realise, painfully, that all drama, even Shakespeare's, is a form of autobiography.

From:

sovay

Thank you for transcribing the quotes; I appreciate it.

Corin writes well about his father as an actor, too. That's a very precise, physical description of Crocker-Harris and a pleasure to read. I recognize it.