Films and Plays
Jun. 25th, 2003 07:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakBefore I pack my suitcase and say goodbye to London, a last bunch of reviews:
In "Ripley's Game", John Malkovich joins Alain Delon, Dennis Potter and Matt Damon in playing Patricia Highsmith's favourite killer, Tom Ripley. "Ripley's Game" was the third of the Ripley novels, has already been filmed once by Wim Wenders, starring Potter, and is arguably the best of the sequels anyway. The new movie is arguably the first one which renders Highsmith's cool amorality on screen without making concessions as all the others do. (Doesn't mean it's the best film.) The major change - instead of being located in France and Germany, it's located in Italy and Germany - does not affect the plot or the characterisation. Malkovich is good, but somewhat affected my suspension of disbelief - his acting persona in most of his films is so similar to his Ripley that I had trouble seeing Tom Ripley instead of seeing John Malkovich. Nonetheless, it's a movie well worth seeing, and it's deceptively simple plot - Tom Ripley manipulating an innocent man into becoming a murderer partly because the guy snobbed him but mostly because he can, and an odd bond developing between the two en route to Jonathan's road to hell - is never less than gripping.
A couple of months ago I first heard about "Max", and the inevitable debate whether one can or should depict Hitler as anything else than a complete monster. George Tabori, whose mother died at Auschwitz, used a somewhat similar premise to "Max" in "Mein Kampf", his play in which a young suicidal Adolf Hitler is befriended by a kind old Jew (who tells him to get into politics instead of art to boot). But "Mein Kampf" is written as a farce, and "Max" plays it straight. It's set in Munich directly after the first World War and has its fictional Hero, art dealer Max Rothman (John Cusack) befriend an embittered fellow veteran who sees himself as an artist, one Adolf Hitler. Which means "Max" the movie faces the task of on the one hand having to make the relationship plausible and on the other hand avoiding to depict Hitler as harmless or only misunderstood. It's a high wire act, but the film actually manages to pull it off.
No, we never hear Hitler wondering aloud what it would be like to committ genocide. But we do see him pass by a man lying wounded and beaten in a street without hesitation or even the flicker of an inclination to help the guy. (This early scene has a thematic connection to the end of the movie, btw.) The antisemitism of the time, both in general and in Hitler in particular, is rendered in its full ugliness. And yet one does understand why a cultured, humane person like Max would bother to try and befriend somone like this movie's Adolf H. in the first place. Though he denies it, there is the guilt factor; the child of privilege and wealth, complete with loving family, beautiful wife and beautiful mistress, driven to help the help the poor loner without anything at all. WW I and its effect on both Max and Hitler - as something which both unites as an experience and divides in the way they deal with it - is a theme throughout the movie, and for a film which obviosuly was shot on a tight budget, the depiction of the overall poverty and devastation post-War is brilliant.
The idea of abstract and expressionist art as something to express the horrors of the dawning century with, or the idea Hitler couldn't go there and hated it for this very reason, isn't new, nor is the suggestion that fascism in its Hitlerian version was, as far as the aesthetics were concerned, simultanously futuristic and retro, but I don't think this has been as efficiently combined before. The last drawings Hitler shows Max, of his future world, look like something out of the sketchbooks of Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl both, with a dash of Fritz Lang, and it also disturbingly reminds you that quite a lot of Sci-Fi aesthetics (notably the original Star Wars, A New Hope) were heavily influenced by the lot of them. (There is a Sci-Fi novel-within-a-novel which satirically uses the premise of Hitler having emigrated to the US after WW I and having written Sci-Fi instead of killing millions instead.)
One nitpick: I don't know why the actor wo played Hitler was the only one talking with a pseudo-Germanic accent. When I watch a movie set in Germany shot in the English language, I'm assuming everyone talks German (just as when watching, say, "Gladiator", I take it the characters talk in Latin and Greek), so why the odd pronounciation? Or is this supposed to be Hitler's AUSTRIAN accent? (Which does sound somewhat different from the Bavarian German people in Munich talk in.) If so, the voice coach failed.
Going to the Globe and watching an Elizabethan play performed Elizabethan-style is something I've enjoyed doing when in London ever since the Globe (build not far from where the original stood) was finished. This time, I brought Kathy along who hadn't been there before. (That's locals for you - and I know what it's like. There are theatres in Munich I haven't visited yet, too.) The play in question was "Richard II", and it amused me that the motto of the season in the Globe was "Season of Regime Change". (The other plays they perform are Edward II and Richard III.) Not my favourite of the King plays; I do remember a crushingly dull BBC production. However, this one actually made me wish to reread "Richard II", which I haven't done for ages. The acting was excellent all around (though at times I thought Mark Rylance overdid with the hankerchief), and for the first time, I realized that some of the York scenes can actually be seen as funny (and consequently got laughs). Without, mind you, taking away from the emotional seriousness when York decides to join nephew Henry. During the break, Kathy & self discovered the actor who played John of Gaunt and who was going to play the gardener in the second half was actually none other than Mercutio in Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet". Tempus fugit!
Rounding off my London week was the play "Hitchcock Blonde" at the Lyric, written and directed by Terry Johnson. Its basic plot does remind one somewhat of A.S. Byatt's "Possession" - a present-day storyline in which a university don and an undergraduate find some remains of a film Hitchcock shot but never finished, and another storyline set in the past actually involving Hitchcock. It's a very post-modern, very clever play on Hitchcock's obsession with blondes and the way he presents them in his movies, with a twist as the Blonde starts to change the plot on Hitchcock. Simultanously, the point both storylines make about male desire for the untouchable and unattainable, which can't survive metaphor becoming reality, is presented somewhat ruefully, with a resigned if acerbic affection.
In "Ripley's Game", John Malkovich joins Alain Delon, Dennis Potter and Matt Damon in playing Patricia Highsmith's favourite killer, Tom Ripley. "Ripley's Game" was the third of the Ripley novels, has already been filmed once by Wim Wenders, starring Potter, and is arguably the best of the sequels anyway. The new movie is arguably the first one which renders Highsmith's cool amorality on screen without making concessions as all the others do. (Doesn't mean it's the best film.) The major change - instead of being located in France and Germany, it's located in Italy and Germany - does not affect the plot or the characterisation. Malkovich is good, but somewhat affected my suspension of disbelief - his acting persona in most of his films is so similar to his Ripley that I had trouble seeing Tom Ripley instead of seeing John Malkovich. Nonetheless, it's a movie well worth seeing, and it's deceptively simple plot - Tom Ripley manipulating an innocent man into becoming a murderer partly because the guy snobbed him but mostly because he can, and an odd bond developing between the two en route to Jonathan's road to hell - is never less than gripping.
A couple of months ago I first heard about "Max", and the inevitable debate whether one can or should depict Hitler as anything else than a complete monster. George Tabori, whose mother died at Auschwitz, used a somewhat similar premise to "Max" in "Mein Kampf", his play in which a young suicidal Adolf Hitler is befriended by a kind old Jew (who tells him to get into politics instead of art to boot). But "Mein Kampf" is written as a farce, and "Max" plays it straight. It's set in Munich directly after the first World War and has its fictional Hero, art dealer Max Rothman (John Cusack) befriend an embittered fellow veteran who sees himself as an artist, one Adolf Hitler. Which means "Max" the movie faces the task of on the one hand having to make the relationship plausible and on the other hand avoiding to depict Hitler as harmless or only misunderstood. It's a high wire act, but the film actually manages to pull it off.
No, we never hear Hitler wondering aloud what it would be like to committ genocide. But we do see him pass by a man lying wounded and beaten in a street without hesitation or even the flicker of an inclination to help the guy. (This early scene has a thematic connection to the end of the movie, btw.) The antisemitism of the time, both in general and in Hitler in particular, is rendered in its full ugliness. And yet one does understand why a cultured, humane person like Max would bother to try and befriend somone like this movie's Adolf H. in the first place. Though he denies it, there is the guilt factor; the child of privilege and wealth, complete with loving family, beautiful wife and beautiful mistress, driven to help the help the poor loner without anything at all. WW I and its effect on both Max and Hitler - as something which both unites as an experience and divides in the way they deal with it - is a theme throughout the movie, and for a film which obviosuly was shot on a tight budget, the depiction of the overall poverty and devastation post-War is brilliant.
The idea of abstract and expressionist art as something to express the horrors of the dawning century with, or the idea Hitler couldn't go there and hated it for this very reason, isn't new, nor is the suggestion that fascism in its Hitlerian version was, as far as the aesthetics were concerned, simultanously futuristic and retro, but I don't think this has been as efficiently combined before. The last drawings Hitler shows Max, of his future world, look like something out of the sketchbooks of Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl both, with a dash of Fritz Lang, and it also disturbingly reminds you that quite a lot of Sci-Fi aesthetics (notably the original Star Wars, A New Hope) were heavily influenced by the lot of them. (There is a Sci-Fi novel-within-a-novel which satirically uses the premise of Hitler having emigrated to the US after WW I and having written Sci-Fi instead of killing millions instead.)
One nitpick: I don't know why the actor wo played Hitler was the only one talking with a pseudo-Germanic accent. When I watch a movie set in Germany shot in the English language, I'm assuming everyone talks German (just as when watching, say, "Gladiator", I take it the characters talk in Latin and Greek), so why the odd pronounciation? Or is this supposed to be Hitler's AUSTRIAN accent? (Which does sound somewhat different from the Bavarian German people in Munich talk in.) If so, the voice coach failed.
Going to the Globe and watching an Elizabethan play performed Elizabethan-style is something I've enjoyed doing when in London ever since the Globe (build not far from where the original stood) was finished. This time, I brought Kathy along who hadn't been there before. (That's locals for you - and I know what it's like. There are theatres in Munich I haven't visited yet, too.) The play in question was "Richard II", and it amused me that the motto of the season in the Globe was "Season of Regime Change". (The other plays they perform are Edward II and Richard III.) Not my favourite of the King plays; I do remember a crushingly dull BBC production. However, this one actually made me wish to reread "Richard II", which I haven't done for ages. The acting was excellent all around (though at times I thought Mark Rylance overdid with the hankerchief), and for the first time, I realized that some of the York scenes can actually be seen as funny (and consequently got laughs). Without, mind you, taking away from the emotional seriousness when York decides to join nephew Henry. During the break, Kathy & self discovered the actor who played John of Gaunt and who was going to play the gardener in the second half was actually none other than Mercutio in Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet". Tempus fugit!
Rounding off my London week was the play "Hitchcock Blonde" at the Lyric, written and directed by Terry Johnson. Its basic plot does remind one somewhat of A.S. Byatt's "Possession" - a present-day storyline in which a university don and an undergraduate find some remains of a film Hitchcock shot but never finished, and another storyline set in the past actually involving Hitchcock. It's a very post-modern, very clever play on Hitchcock's obsession with blondes and the way he presents them in his movies, with a twist as the Blonde starts to change the plot on Hitchcock. Simultanously, the point both storylines make about male desire for the untouchable and unattainable, which can't survive metaphor becoming reality, is presented somewhat ruefully, with a resigned if acerbic affection.
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Date: 2003-06-24 11:41 pm (UTC)Would you say the production was significantly affected by the contemporary (to the period the play was written in, I mean) rather than modern stage design? I've never been to the Globe (I always seem to end up in the UK in the winter) and I'm curious as to how (or if) it changes things.
So, was 'Max' actually shot in Munich or some other city dressed up as Munich? I'm told that Prague is the Vancouver of Europe, constantly appearing in films but almost always in disguise as some other city.
Let's see:
Date: 2003-06-25 12:20 am (UTC)No, "Max" wasn't shot in Munich but in Prague. Since the cities aren't much alike they got around this by showing mostly universal old European streets, city parks, and the like. Most importantly, they got the cold damp feeling of November 1918, whic in a city of Eastern Europe is actually easier than in our real Munich these days where it's hard to find spots without any late 20th century additions.
And yes, Prague is the Vancouver of Europe. You can see it as Vienna in "Amadeus", for example. And it will be London in the dreaded film version of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen".