De-Lovely and Salvador Allende

More Munich Film Festival impressions. Yesterday I saw De-Lovely and Salvador Allende.

De-Lovely, a biopic about Cole Porter, had the great advantage of Kevin Kline in the main role, Porter's clever, clever songs and Ashley Judd being radiant. However. It still left me with mixed feelings. And not because the film makers decided to tell Porter's life as a love-and-marriage story (that's the emotional core of Frida and works very well), and not because of the central premise, which is that while Porter is homosexual, Linda Lee is the great love (and muse) of his life. That too can work - see also Carrington. Or rather, don't, because Carrington is a better movie, and the presence of Jonathan Pryce in De-Lovely reminded me of it.

What I'm trying to get at: both Carrington and De-Lovely tell an unconventional love story, between a homosexual man and a woman. (Both are based on actual lives - I know next to nothing about Porter's and somewhat more about Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington - but that's irrevelevant here, let's just look at them as films.) (Just that there are no misunderstandings, the sexuality of the man in question remains unchanged throughout in both cases.) I think the reason why Carrington works for me better is that not only do we get to see how and why the odd couple gets together, what they see in each other, but that Emma Thompson as Carrington is allowed to have flaws and to be less than perfect. It starts with her physical awkwardness and goes on to her tendency to avoid being honest about emotions for people other than Lytton. The script allows her to be genuinenly hurt when Ralph Partrige tells her Lytton told him he finds sex with women repellent, instead of being Understanding! Sophisticated! Woman. Most of all, it's a matter of show, not tell; instead of hearing contantly that the two leads are in love (which happens so often in De-Lovely I wanted to strangle the scriptwriter), we get to see things like the moment when Carrington doesn't cut Lytton Strachey's beard of in revenge for a prank but falls for him, and it's all conveyed in Thompson's eyes. And Lytton never uses the word "love" at all, but oh, the facial work of Jonathan Pryce when he's watching Carrington/Thompson shortly before his death.

Back to De-Lovely. Ashley Judd is best when she's allowed to be other than beautiful, radiant and loving, i.e. when Linda starts to feel that Cole's affairs do bother her, after all, and most poignantly when she has had a miscarriage and looks into the mirror before having to go to yet another opening night. That's when the film has an emotional reality about its central relationship that I find otherwise lacking. Kevin Kline is good throughout (when isn't he?), best, imo, as old Cole Porter commenting on his life in amused, bitter and moved one liners. Unfortunately, he hasn't got any chemistry either with the various young men who show up as Porter's lovers (never long enough to gain a personality) or with Ashley Judd. (Though I suppose chemistry is in the eyes of the beholder.)

Then again, maybe going to the film is worth it for hearing those songs again alone...

Salvador Allende is a new documentary by Patricio Guzman about, duh, Allende. Unabashedly emotional, subjective and in love with its subject and film-wise not nearly as sophisticated as Errol Morris' The Fog of War. Definitely worth watching, though. For Chileans, September 11 isn't evoking images of the WTC towers falling but of another date altogether, September 11, 1973, when a military coup, supported by the US, brought Pinochet to power and started 18 years of dictatorship, persecution and bloodshed. One of the most chilling scenes in the film is when the former American ambassador to Chile comments that well, Salvador Allende was one of the most civilized men he met, but really, with his determination of achieving socialism through peaceful means, what did he expect?

(Never mind Allende was democratically elected, repeatedly - the Nixon administration supported a first, failed coup as early as 1970, when Allende wasn't even in power yet and was still President-elect, and went as far as letting the CIA organize the murder of General Schneider, the pro-Allende head of the army at the time.)

Of course, any charismatic politician who dies a violent and tragic death is bound to become idealized later. The film's image of Salvador Allende is rather like the perception of Kennedy in the public consciousness which artaxastra mentioned in her comment yesterday - the lost leader who would have changed everything if only he had been allowed to live. Save for the American Ambassador, you don't hear criticism of the man. (And since his amounts basically to "never mind the 'socialist' tag, he was a communist at heart and so it was our duty to stop him, no matter how nice a guy he was", it's not exactly validated.) You don't get a real sense of his personality beyond the "hero of the people and martyr for the cause" iconage. Sometimes during the movie, I was reminded of the BTVS episode The Body and the definition of space through absences. One of the most powerful elements of the film is the way you get the sense of Allende still haunting Chile because even now, with Pinochet out of power, he's not spoken off officially. When Guzman wants to interview people who witnessed the destruction of Allende's house, they say they can't talk about it, and the image of doors being shut intercut with black and white photos of the wreckage back in the day is stunning.

This was the last film I hd tickets for; now I'm free to check out the xmmficathon which I hear has many good stories!

That Angel/Sandman thing...

Since honorh encouraged me to throw caution in the wind and pursue that Angel/Sandman plot bunny I mentioned a few days ago, and andrastewhite said I should try Sandman fanfic again anyway, I stopped practicing my lecture on Feuchtwanger and wrote the beginning of what will probably take a while to finish. Have a look. Spoilers for all seasons of Angel and the part of Neil Gaiman's Sandman saga that deals with Lyta Hall, as well as for Mike Carey's solo on Lyta, The Furies, which is set post-Wake.

( There should be a play... )

In other news, I found out this:


You are Maureen Dowd! You like to give people silly
nicknames and write in really short, non
sequitur paragraphs. You're the most playful of
the columnists and a rock-ribbed liberal, but
are often
accused of being too flamboyant and
frivolous. You tend to focus on style over
substance, personality over politics. But your
heart is in the right place. Plus, you are a
total fox.


Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla