Shtisel

I started a TV series on Netflix called Shtisel, an Israeli show about a family in an ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community in Jerusalem. Shtisel is (mostly) a sweet show, showing the daily life and struggles of its characters. There is little to no mention of wider conflicts in Israel; the show keeps us fully immersed in the Haredi milieu, and doesn't bring up issues of how the Haredi are perceived by other Jews in Israel. We are charmed by Akiva, the youngest son of the patriarch Shumel. The warmth and strength of strong family ties are evident. Food is present in almost every episode. But we also see the toll taken on girls and women by pressure to marry early, to have many children, with men who don't support their families, and the bald and normative sexism of everyday life. Akiva is meeting prospective marriage partners, but scares one off by telling her that they'd have to live with his father. He then becomes attracted to a widow, who is described as a tough microwave dinner that has already been eaten by others. He impulsively agrees to marry a spoiled "princess" and causes an uproar when he tells her father he doesn't love her, resulting in a broken engagement. Now he is damaged goods as well. His sister Giti's husband ditches her and her five children with no notice, leaving her to struggle to support them all while concealing this family shame. She stubbornly refuses money from her father even as she conceals her husband's desertion. Her oldest child, daughter Ruchami, witnesses her mother's struggles and despises her father, writing letters to her brothers in his name to help conceal his callous cowardice as well. She's the character I find most compelling but all of the women on the show are well portrayed; we see how they navigate their narrow circumstances with strength and imagination. I'm half way through the first season and enjoying it so far. 

Update: finished all three seasons! Lots to think about as to how much stubbornness and fierce willpower seem to make people willing to persist with marriages that are undertaken after just a few meetings. I'm sure things are exaggerated for TV, but one side-story is about how Tovi, who is working as a teacher while taking care her young kids and her husband who is a scholar, has to overcome prejudice just to get a drivers license and a car that will make her life easier. Her husband gave up an opportunity to sing with a band, a dream he'd had and that his wife had encouraged, because he was afraid it would lead him to become dissatisfied with his life.

Several stories in the third season involved lying, whether it was to avoid criticism by the community, or lying to family members to manipulate them into a course of action. Ruchami lies to her doctor and her husband to get her IUD removed and gets pregnant in spite of the fact that surrogacy is an option (albeit involving more lying with a set of fake pregancy pillows) and that it will put her life at risk. Are we supposed to admire her because she so fiercely wants to get pregnant herself? Gitti and Libbe lie to their son about finding/not finding the woman he'd met by mistake at a marriage meeting so they can have him meet the one he was supposed to encounter, because the first woman's family is from North Africa; the son has also lied to the woman he was engaged to, while pursuing the first woman he met. Whoops!  Akiva hastily marries a woman he hardly knows so he can lie to the social welfare services who are (rightly!) concerned that his drinking had led him to rely on a feckless friend to pick up his infant daughter at daycare--only to have him bring the wrong child. Even though the mistake was quickly corrected, Akiva was out of control and needed to make changes. The marriage turns out to be to a woman with a major mental health issue that she did not tell him about. We feel sympathy for her, but her approach to conflict is to lie down and stop answering her phone. In the end we see them moving in together, despite the fact that they still barely know each other and knowing that her father-in-laws attitude toward her problems is viciously bigoted. The scoundrel uncle Nuchem lies to the woman he is supposed to marry so that he can try to finagle half of her money from his brother who has received it as a charitable donation for his school. We already knew he was a weasel--she should run the other way! I came away with the sense that a lot of what people do is try mightily to live within rigid precepts in ways that make dishonesty a constant resource, the way Shulem begins to smoke immediately after being told that he has a momentary reprieve from his angina. People connect to the characters' complexity.

Great interview with three of the actors:

Darling and Design for Living

Today was a double feature about infidelity and polyamory!

Darling (1965), directed by John Schlesinger and starring Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. Christie won the BAFTA and the Oscar for her performance, playing a model who moves from one affair to another as she pursues her career.  

In the end, she returns to an unhappy marriage to an wealthy Italian prince when she is rejected by a former lover  (Dirk Bogarde). Her lively exuberance and beauty give her great charisma, but she also suffers the consequences of selfish choices. The movie has a kind of edgy humor.

Design for Living (1933),  directed by Ernst Lubitsch, and starring Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper and Fredric March. The Noel Coward play was basically re-written by Ben Hecht, removing the more overtly gay subtext. Gilda is pursued by two starving artists and a wealthy businessman. She declines to choose between the two attractive artists and they agree to a platonic threesome. This doesn't last long, and she becomes the lover of first one, and then the other. Jealousy and accusations of betrayal ensue, and she leaves both of them to marry the stodgy boring businessman. She's miserable in the marriage, and when the two artists show up at her mansion she ends up leaving with both of them, presumably to enter into a threesome with them both. In contrast to Darling, where the woman's free sexuality is connected to infidelity and degrading orgies, in Design for Living, the  idea of witty polyamory is presented as preferable to a loveless bourgeois marriage.

Ninotchka

Viewed for a new cinema chat group I'm going to try out tomorrow: Ninotchka (1939) with Greta Garbo. Co-written by Billy Wilder, directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

What is the Lubitsch touch? in Ninotchka, it's a frothy comedy with serious undertones: the imminent war, Soviet repression. But revolutionary ideals are no match for a wacky hat and a little champagne. Paris is freedom.

Divesting from tech monopolies

 After listening to the Vox's Recode podcast series Land of the Giants, I reaffirmed my choices to delete my Facebook account and to never shop on Amazon again. I sent my daughter some kitchen stuff for her new apartment set-up and was able to shop online without succumbing to the behemoth. A few years ago I started to try to extricate myself from Google: I already use Firefox as my browser;  I have been very happy with the privacy-oriented Duck Duck Go as my search engine; I also switched most of my email to a free and ad-free zoho email account.  But I haven't given up on Google Maps yet (I didn't like Apple's map app), and I have yet to cut the cord on YouTube. I would like to get rid of gmail entirely, but I still have a twitter account linked to it that I use every day, and I'd need to back up the few things I have in Google Drive (at least I downloaded all the photos I had there). I think my primary Apple store account is also linked to that gmail, so I'd need to switch that as well. Ugh, so many ways the big G is entwined with our online lives.

Two more by Jia Zhangke

On Mubi, I was able to watch two more films by Jia Zhangke: the short comic film The Hedonists (2016) and the feature-length Mountains May Depart (2015).  Both of tells stories against the back drop of  the decline of coal mining: The Hedonists shows three men who've lost their jobs when the coal mine shuts down and who try to find work only to end up as actors in a cultural heritage show. Co-written by Zhao Tao.

Mountains May Depart has three parts in three different time periods: 1999, 2014 and 2025. Zhao Tao is a woman who has two suitors. One is the sympathetic friend who works at the coal mine, the other is an obnoxious  rich guy who owns a gas station, and then buys the failing coal mine so he can fire his rival. She chooses the rich guy and her friend leaves town. The second act shows the coal miner, now with a wife and son, stricken by disease and forced to return home where his wife seeks out Tao and begs for help. Tao is now divorced and has lost custody of her son who lives with this father in Shanghai. When her father dies, she calls her son back for the funeral, and it's clear that she's going to lose him because the father is going to take him to Australia. The last act takes place in 2025, where the son is now a college student who has forgotten his  Chinese and is lost and angry. He starts a relationship with his Chinese teacher, who encourages him to go back to China to try to find his mother. We don't know if he actually does it, but the last scene of the film shows Tao dancing alone in a snowy field with her dog, doing the same dance that opened the film on New Year's Eve 1999. As in his other films, the family drama plays out against the backdrop of major transformations of China--whole industries shutting down, landscapes disappearing as waves of building replace nature or villages with huge cityscapes. The three-act structure will be used again in Ash is the Purest White. Each section is filmed with a different aspect ratio, to communicate something about the feeling of how we viewed film at those times. Some have been critical of the third act (my main complaint is that the actor who plays the young man sometimes mumbles so it is hard to understand his lines) but it has something important to say about the experience of Chinese who have left and whose relationships to language and culture are truncated by dislocation.  Zhao Tao is tremendous as the woman who has to live with the consequences of a choice that deprives her of her child.

The Lady Eve

 The Lady Eve (1941) is second up in my Preston Sturges marathon. Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. So cruel, so funny! so many pratfalls! a romantic screwball comedy

Ash is Purest White

Jia Zhangke's film Ash is Purest White (2019) is  apparently a kind of summation of all his previous films. I found his first three films on Criterion, so I'll have to watch them. I'd seen it at the PFA, so seeing it again on the small screen I was so glad I'd seen it in a theater. My first viewing of it was very emotional: the first act is a gangster story with the most arresting and engaging performance by Tao Zhao; the second act shows what happens to her after she gets out of prison where she has spent five years taking the fall for her boyfriend Bin; the last act returns to their home turf and now he is recovering from a stroke and depends on her for survival. Over seventeen years their lives are played out on the backdrop of the enormous changes to China. Her father rails against the abandonment of the mine and the miners. She rids a boat through the Three Gorges where they are told that what they see will soon be under water because of a dam projects. The raggedy workers' housing blocs set in the middle of the fields give way to block after block of high-rises, an enormous train station, a huge arena. As was the case in Bi Gan's film that we just watched, we have the impression that people are like small creatures finding shelter and surviving in a massive coral reef, but here we don't have the close-ups on the corroding walls but a sweep from back-rooms to street plazas, to trains hurtling through the landscape, to a starry sky lit up by mysterious flash that could be a UFO or that could be the forces of change. 

Tao Zhao, the lead actress, is also Jia Zhangke's wife, and has appeared in nine of his films. She was working as a dance teacher when he cast her in the film Platform, and you can see her dancer's  expressivity in her acting. I'm eager to watch the his first three films, available on Criterion, and the two that are on Mubi. 

Preston Sturges binge

Commencing a mini-Preston Sturges festival on Criterion with The Palm Beach Story! Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrae are Tom and Gerry, the screwball comedy couple, but Rudy Vallée was most charming as the rich man who falls for Gerry on the train. There's some unpleasant humor at the expense of black characters. Sigh.

Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth

 Colossal Youth is the English title of Pedro Costa's film 2006 Juventude Em Marcha, which I watched today for tomorrow's Criterion Club discussion. It's almost three hours long, and I found myself dozing midway through it because it is resolutely monotonous: very long shots whose painterly composition is mostly dark on dark with small patches of light; characters whose relations to each other are obscure; repetition of settings, dialogue, tableaux; a slow, deliberate pace with characters wandering in and out of shots; no plot. There's an anchor character, Ventura, an immigrant from Cabo Verde, who circulates among others he calls his children although it doesn't seem that they actually are his children. The opening sequence is a window with furniture being thrown through it, and then a woman named Clotilde holds a knife and tells us (she's looking straight at the camera) how she used to swim as a form of escape. Ventura then goes to see Bete who rejects him the first time we see her; he tells her that his wife Clotilde has destroyed all his furniture and left him. This would seem to set up a story, but we don't revisit it for the rest of the film. Instead, we follow Ventura as he goes on a series of visits: to Vanda who narrates her childbirth story and her drug addiction while they loll on her bed watching a TV show we can't see; to his lunches with a man who, late in the film, is identified as Vanda's husband, and who listens to him in silence; to Lento, who plays cards and sleeps with him in a hovel, as well as asking for a letter that Ventura recites but never writes for him. Is Lento his younger self? In between these visits, which repeat themselves, we see Ventura meeting an agent who is showing him the new housing he can have, as the slum he lives in is going to be demolished, rooms as blindingly white as the rest of the film's decors are dark. Ventura insists he needs a bigger space with more rooms, for his children. ("How many children do you have?" "I don't know.") The effect of these circular movements is to focus on the acts of conversation rather than on any action. It is possible that some of these events are flashbacks but the film doesn't seem interested in making temporal relationships apparent. The effect is to confront the viewer with daily life and relationships in a strange kind of purgatory.

There are a few moments that connect the to a world outside this round of visits and these black-and-white spaces. With Lento, Ventura pulls out a record player and plays a song that seems to be about the July 5, 1975 independence of Cabo Verde and Amilcar Cabral (who led the struggle but was assassinated in 1973, in events that precipitated the coup in Portugal in 1974). And there's a scene of Ventura and Lento standing in a window talking about the political events (either independence struggles or the carnation revolt) and repression in the slums. And Ventura talks of working in the construction of the Gulbenkian Museum, various banks and buildings for the rich; there is a scene where he is in the museum but is escorted out. 

The effect of using Ventura as the focal point is to make him stand in for the African immigrant experience in Portugal, in its impoverished version. What does Costa want us to take away from this experience? While I was watching the film I didn't really like it that much but it's sticking with me. Now I want to watch Vitalina Varela, (also on Criterion) which came out in 2019, and centers a woman's experience.

Here's an interview with Costa from the New York Film Festival:

Sunday morning zoom

 Every Sunday morning, I set up a zoom meeting for my family. It has allowed us to talk to each other all together for the first time in years, since my brother's family lives in Maryland. One of his daughters has been joining us too, and I'm so glad to finally get to know her. My nephew and his family are usually having breakfast, so we get to see their 2-year-old daughter when she stops running around to eat. This morning she apparently tried the cat's food. Sometimes my daughter joins us from Brooklyn, but she didn't today.  Even though I try to give us a heads-up that the meeting is about to end, we inevitably get cut off in the middle of someone's sentence.

Jo Seung Woo

I'm only watching one Korean drama right now: Sisyphus: The Myth. It's a time-travel drama, with the usual plot incoherencies of the genre, but lots of great action set-pieces in which Park Shin-Hye kicks butt while the delightful Jo Seung Woo mcguyvers things. He's had success in film and tv, but is insanely popular in Korea as a musical theater star, in shows like Jekyll and Hyde, Hedwig and the Angry Itch.  This song from the movie The Throne (Sado) "Flower Bloom and Fall" is more to my taste than some of the songs floating around YouTube:

Long Day's Journey Into Night (Bi Gan)

I saw Long Day's Journey Into Night (directed by Bi Gan) in the California theater with the last hour in 3-D, when it came out. It was a dazzling, hypnotic experience, and I enjoyed it so much that I sought out his film Kaili Blues. There are reminiscences of Wong Kar-Wai, not least in the lighting and use of color. The first half of the film is a story of blue and green. The architecture is decaying, corroded, overgrown with vegetation, about to be torn down. Every surface has texture-- peeling paint, rust, water runs down walls and from the ceiling. We see through window grids, dirty windshields, meshes, fences. One of the only smooth surfaces is the shiny green dress of the Mystery Woman.

And folks say there are many shots that recall Tarkovsky's films as well-I haven't seen them.

The trailer doesn't at all convey the sense of dreaminess:

First dose

 My excursion to get the first dose of the vaccine went well. My brother-in-law was so kind, and came to get me. I could have taken BART but I was extremely nervous and agitated, so I'm glad I didn't have to do that. Once we got to the clinic location in downtown Oakland, there were lots of signs making it really easy to find the entrance. It was in a convention room at the Marriot next to a Kaiser facility. There were greeters to check Kaiser ID, then a check-in station where they booked my second appointment and gave me a card. Next we went through a long line with markings on the floor to keep us six feet apart. There was an allergy questionnaire,  then we were waved into a section where little injection stations were set up. The nurse was very sweet and I didn't feel a thing. I was given the Pfizer.  Last, we were supposed to sit for fifteen minutes to make sure we didn't go into shock or break out in hives. I was also given a visit with a doctor although no explanation was offered as to why some of us were  seen while most people weren't. It may have been because I was due for an annual visit, but I'll be having that with my regular doctor by video tomorrow. The whole thing took about an hour and a half. Amazing.

Now it's been a few hours, and I have no side-effects or reactions yet. There's a bump and a little bit of soreness at the site if I press on it, but I can't really feel anything unless I search for it. I get to see if I have any reactions tomorrow, but now I get to wait three weeks for the second dose, and then two more weeks after that for it to be fully effective. So, mid-April.

Vaccine appointment

I have an appointment to get the covid vaccine tomorrow at Kaiser in Oakland! My brother-in-law is going to drive me there so I don't have to take public transportation and be all out of my mind with anxiety about it. I'm so grateful. I got a letter from Kaiser saying that I am eligible according to their latest set of criteria, because of my disability. If they're going to offer me the chance to get it, I'm taking it. I'll get the second dose and be cleared by mid-April. How will I celebrate? Take BART to the Ferry Building and buy myself a treat. See the Frida Kahlo show at the DeYoung Museum. Hang out with my mom at her place.

It has been almost exactly a year since we all went into lockdown: a year since I abandoned taking the bus and BART, a year since I have been to my mother's house, a year of trudging up and down the streets around my house so that I get out to get some exercise almost every day. I did make that mad trip to Minnesota with Rosemary when we just hung out at the farm before Blas and Loren went off to Spain indefinitely. It was risky but I needed to see my family so badly. And other than that, no movies, no lectures at the PFA, no restaurants, no museums, no trips to SF, no window shopping on 4th Street, no browsing in bookstores, no travel to New York or to Paris or to Spain---I still have $1200 worth of airfare vouchers I need to check up on. I've been weathering the quarantine limitations fairly well, all things considering. I struggle with boredom, sadness, anxiety, irritation with the neighbors, fear for the future, just like everyone. But I've done my gratitude lists and I don't have to deal with kids at home, with work from home, with financial woes or insecurities. My biggest enemy is sloth. I was really on top of doing yoga every day for some months and then I just stopped. Sloth.

Gohatto (Taboo)

Just watched Gohatto (Taboo) directed in 1999 by Oshima Nagisa, his last film. It's about same-sex relations in the Shinsengumi, the Shogun's militia, in 1865.  Kano, the archetypal bishonen, is one of two new recruits. Everyone has the hots for him, deadly hijinks ensue. The two senior officers, Kondo and Hijikata, are based on historical figures. 

Andrew Grossman has some provacative things to say about Gohatto, which he reads as beautiful but not as radical as Oshima's earlier films. But he doesn't talk about the ending, in which it appears that Kano is murdered offscreen. Disruptive beauty must be punished.

The score is by Sakamoto Ryuichi.

Adolescence of Utena

 Adolescence of Utena is the movie version of Revolutionary Girl Utena manga and anime. I watched about half of the anime episodes, and found a dubbed version of the film for our next cinema club chat. I tried not to compare the movie to the anime too much. I need to rewatch the subbed version because I always find dubs so annoying. The film focuses on how Utena and Anthy come together to overcome and rise above their issues to be better and stronger people.

The dance sequence:

 

 

Utena turns into a car: 

Lido Pimienta

 Just watched Lido Pimienta perform on the Grammys, where her album "Miss Colombia" was nominated (Fito Paez won).  I know her song "Nada" from NPR's alt.latino podcast. Here she is doing a Tiny Desk Concert:

Tokyo Story

 Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) is widely beloved, and is often held up as one of the greatest films of all time. I've seen it but need to watch it again for tonight's cinema chat group. I'm going to pay attention to the way the film represents the post-war moment as well as family dynamics.

 

 

Here is a lovely explanation of key elements of Ozu's style:

Behind Her Eyes

 Did not see that coming!

Reading: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

 Now on deck is volume three of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. In this book Elena has finished her university studies and published a book. She has a fiance from a good family, and has managed to make her way out of her neighborhood. Lila is doing gruelling work in a sausage factory, living with her defender Enzo and her small son Rinu. The events of the students movements and poltical turmoil of 1968 are at the forefront of Elena's mind even as she deals with the transformations that marriage and motherhood bring to her.

Before I start readin, I'm listening to a podcast with her translator, Ann Goldstein. She started learning Italian while working at the New Yorker, so she could read Dante in Italian. Her private tutor was paid for by the magazine! Wow. She already knew French, Latin, and Greek. She has also written a book in Italian, about Primo Levi, whose works she has edited in English. She uses online dictionaries after her rapid first draft. The novels are not written in dialect; Ferrante tells you when a character is speaking in dialect, but then writes in Italian. She has also translated the screenplays for the RAI-HBO series. Those are written in dialect, and the actors are Neapolitan so they don't have to imitate the language. In Italy, they put subtitles on the dialect. 

Her translation relationship with Ferrante is through the publisher, and is fairly hands-off. I realized this when Rosemary's book was being translated; there isn't necessarily any collaboration, even when the writer speaks both languages. She did read the translation, and likes it, but there's not necessarily any feedback process.

Goldstein doesn't know who Ferrante is and is happy to turn away any inquiries. Ferrante's desire for anonymity predates her success and fame, and now is a statement about the market. Goldstein started as a proofreader at Esquire in the seventies, a job she got from an ad in the New York Times (those were the days!). Back then, there was more time to work on stories at the New Yorker. Writers chose to write on what they were interested in and Mr. Shawn approved or disapproved. A lot of freedom! Her work at the New Yorker today is as steward of copy. An editor, a fact-checker, legal, the editor-in-chief all read a story. Then it is put into type and reviewed by a copy-editor, to do line-editing. There's another pass by the editor to deal with queries, then it's reread by the copy-editor and a second reader as well.  This process has become more compressed, with computers to aid revising. And pieces that are being published directly online are not subject to the same process, although there is copy-editing and fact-checking.

Goldstein says that she wants the final copy to read as if it were written in English.

Land of the Giants

 Land of the Giants is a podcast about the big tech/media companies that have changed so much in the last 20 years: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (FAANG). The series on Amazon confirmed what I already knew and my decision never to shop on Amazon if I could help it. Now I'm halfway through the Netflix series. Their corporate culture is really hateful, but the way they've changed so many aspects our media landscape is fascinating. I remember when I got my DVDs from Intercontinental video and other independent video stores. I also went to the Blockbuster on Hennepin because it was on my way home and had a big parking lot. I didn't always stay on top of the late fees. Apparently, they were the biggest source of profit for the Blockbuster, and one of the reasons that Netflix became so attractive; you could keep the DVDs as long as you needed. I churned through series and watched the commentary tracks as well, another bonus. There were a lot of good indie movies in their library in those days, but I still used the independent video stores for their eclectic catalogues. For a time I had the DVD and streaming option, and eventually I slid into the all streaming tier because it was cheaper and easier. Now I have streaming subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu (bundled with Spotify), MUBI, Criterion, HBO Max and PBS. I can't keep up with all the stuff that's in my queue, but since I'm not able to go out and spend money anywhere else, it's affordable. I refuse to get Amazon Prime which means there are some good shows that I miss out on, but that's OK; FOMO is not strong enough for me to change my mind.

White Out, Black In

 I had my first negative experience watching a film for one of my cinema chat groups, watching a Brazilian film that was billed as a low-budget science-fiction documentary about race in Brazil: White Out, Black In. It is part of the Afro-Futurist collection on Criterion. Three characters are shown in parallel: two men who were been injured by police raiding a club, one in a wheelchair and the other with a prosthetic leg,and a guy who might be a time traveler, or maybe is just crazy. A lot  of the film seemed to be long scenes of the guy in the wheelchair going up and down his lifts and smoking. I kept wondering what would happen if the power went out. The only part I really liked was a rap he did in the first part of the film. The rest of it was too disjointed, without a rhythm that made me want to look. The pieces of the plot, such as it was, were inert. I did like the use of storyboards instead of CGI to imagine the revenge at the end, but I had to really force myself to continue watching. I don't usually get bored with slow or experimental films; this one just did not connect with me. It has been well-received by some, but I am in agreement with those who like the premise but not the execution.

Reading: The Story of a New Name

I just finished The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante, book two in the Neapolitan Novels series. I'm about to start watching the next season of the series on HBO. My mother says she wanted to shake all of them. I get it, but it's gripping even if you could sum it up as men are shit and bitches be crazy. Each book ends on a cliffhanger.

Martin Eden

Based on a novel by Jack London that I haven't read, the Italian film Martin Eden (on MUBI) won an award at Venice for its charismatic star, Luca Marinelli. He has the physique of the lusty sailor, and the feverish eyes of the autodidact who swears to become a successful writer, inspired by his love for a lovely bourgeoise. Set in working-class Naples in a somewhat indeterminate time period, rather than the Oakland of the 1909 novel, the movie is best when it shows Martin as an aspiring writer. The last sequence, in which he is a jaded, disappointed success who rails at his fans and screams at his former love, is too schematic. When he commits suicide by swimming out into the ocean, we believe it, but it feels like a disease of the ego. Espousing a radical individualism and rejecting socialism, Eden ends up isolated, pretentious, and vain. Maybe that was Jack London's point, but the film leaps too quickly from his days of struggle to his burn-out, so he just comes off as obnoxious rather than principled.

Shoplifters

This will be the third time I watch Shoplifters (Manbiki Kazoku) by director Kore-Eda Hirokazu. I am so fortunate that I saw several Kore-Eda films as part of a PFA series, and all of them were marvelous. Seeing these films on the movie screen was such a great experience, and watching them again on my laptop I'm aware of how much is lost. The Red Lantern cinema chat group is going to talk about Shoplifters tonight, do I'll watch it again.

 I would like to see his most recent film, The Truth, made with a French cast, but it is not available to stream, boo. His next feature will have a Korean cast.

Watching: My Brilliant Friend

I'm on episode five of My Brilliant Friend on HBO and it's an incredibly faithful adaptation of the book, so far.  The acting is uniformly terrific, and the materiality of the locations, the objects, the clothing, is all as important as the action and the communication of the characters.

I'm fascinated by the way the characters switch between Neapolitan dialect and standard Italian. One side of my mother's family was from Gesualdo, about 90 kilometers from Naples.I asked her why she doesn't like the books and she more or less refused to tell me until I've finished them. I have the second volume, The Story of a New Name, from the library.

Here's a great little interview with the costume designer, Antonella Cannarozzi, who was nominated for an Oscar for her work on I Am Love with Tilda Swinton.

Reading: Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante's first novel in her Neapolitan cycle, My Brilliant Friend, fell into my hands last week. I'm almost done with it. I quite like it, but my mother really disliked it, something about not liking any of the characters. She was unhappy that all her book clubs wanted to read Ferrante novels. I wonder if it hits too close to home.

 It has been made into a mini-series on HBO, which is adapting all of the novels in the series. Apparently Ferrante collaborated on the show, and it stays faithful to the book. I'll need to get the next book in the series before I watch the second season.

Trying to grind my way out of a pity party. Let me think of something good: oh, yeah, I'm successfully transferring auto-payments from one bank account to another! This feels like a big accomplishment in my uneventful life. I used to pay phone, PG&E, and rent from my old MN account while AmEx is paid from my Berkeley account. Since almost all of my autopay transactions for streaming services or charitable donations are on that AmEx card, and I've been doing almost all of my purchases there, I'm able to track my spending with my statement. My SSDI deposits have been going to the old account, and that was how I paid my rent. But all my retirement income is going to the new account, and it seemed silly to have these two things to keep track of. I hesitated to make these changes for so long because I was almost superstitiously afraid to try to change that SSDI deposit, in case something went wrong. 

It did take a few false starts because I started out using the wrong account number for the new account. Once I figured out what the correct number was (involving just a few hours of online research and phone calls) I was able to get the changes to work  properly. Today I saw that my rent was paid from the new account-yay! This means that I should have no more business transactions with the MN account by the end of March, and that my SSDI should also be moved by April. Once that is confirmed, I can close out the MN account and shift the balances over to CA. I'll still have a credit card there but I don't have to use it.

All of this was incredibly tedious to set up but it needed to be done. I'm grateful I can afford any of these things. I just listened to a podcast about what's going on in Texas after the freeze, and it's absolutely dire: folks with burst pipes that have ruined their homes, sleeping on a bus so they don't freeze,dealing with the aftermath of Covid, working three jobs to take care of their kids. I'm so fortunate.

I've been living in this place for five years now, and for the most part it has been good, up until it got sold to an absentee landlord and a management company that's an hour away by car. Yes, I have neighbors who screw up the garbage, don't clean up their dog crap, and make too much noise. But I looked at rental ads and was overcome by how dreary and expensive everything is. To get the kind of place I used to have in MN would cost me at least $4000 a month. To get a better one-bedroom would cost me at least $500 more a month and even that would not be for anything special.  I really hate the trend in layouts that have the kitchen in the living room, which is what so much new construction has.  I may have a shabby place, but at least the kitchen-dining area is separated from the living room by a wall. I may never close the door-screen, but it's there. If I ever want to get a better place, it would have to be a shared apartment, and I don't want to have to share. 

I wish my mom would talk about a back-up plan: if she isn't able to live alone any more, we could pool our resources and rent a two-bedroom apartment. She could sell her place. I could pay our shared expenses and do the cleaning; she could do the cooking. We'd each have to be able to close the door on a bedroom that had room for seating so we could have privacy and quiet while streaming or watching. It would be hard, but we could make it work. I think I would be able to tolerate a lot if we were in it together.

So, the noisy road work that has been going on for the last two weeks should be done this week, at least that is what I hope. They dug yet another trench this morning, and were out there yukking it up on their lunch break. Now we're back to grinding and whining machinery. It has made being stuck at home that much harder.

Funeral Parade of Roses

Watched Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) directed by Toshio Matsumoto for Monday's LGBTQ+ film group. I found a great discussion in this episode of The Magic Lantern podcast.

Mentioned in the podcast: 

-the film's first title card is a quote from Baudelaire;

-Kubrick cited this film as an influence on Clockwork Orange;

-Peter, the actor who plays Eddie, played the role of the Fool in Kurosawa's Ran;

-roses appear throughout. Bara means rose, but is also an epithet for a gay man that has been reclaimed, and is now a shorthand term for a type of gay manga.

-the eyelashes!

-the interviewees resist collapsing identity into the interviewer's narrow terms. We all wish there were more to the interviews;

-"gay bars have changed"  

-drugs, performance art, protests, riots, art, film-making, all in Shinjuku;

-street scenes, shot from rooftops and street-level, including some performance pieces, and Eddie and friends presenting as women and encountering harassment and fights with girl gangsters;

-a long flashback within a long flashback, the narrative circles back on itself a couple of times;

-Oedipus inverted;

-"All definitions of cinema are erased. All the doors are now open."

-gentle caricature of the group of artsy kids;

-Eddie putting on her make-up, such a great scene! but echoes the scene when she put on lipstick and was kissing the mirror, and was attacked by her mother;

-"dangerous deviant" or gay kid as killer is subsumed by the Oedipus plot--or is it?;

-Oedipus's crime was pride. What is Eddie's? Yes, she killed, but is she being punished for being gay?

-Leda's suicide, laying herself out as a bride;

-Gonda discovers the photo and kills himself;

-absurd cut to movie critic: "Sayonara, sayonara, sayonara!"

-it's a full-body film!

 

 

The White Tiger

Up for discussion tonight: The White Tiger (dir. Ramin Bahrani-2021). It's based on the 2008 novel by Aravind Adiga (which won the 40th Man Booker Prize), and the director, Iranian-American Ramin Bahrani, is a good friend of Adiga. It turns out that I have read his second novel, Last Man in Tower, recently--it is an equally gripping and dark (and darkly humorous) examination of Indian society through the story of real estate development.

The film's narrative is structured by the device of the protagonist, Balram (played by Adarsh Gourav), writing a letter to the visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, telling in voice-over how he came to be a successful entrepreneur despite his origins in an impoverished family from a small village. This works to explain things to the viewer as well, thus incorporating the outsider's view into the story. Balram says the future of India is with China instead of "the white man."

 Promised a scholarship as a boy when he showed his ability to read in English, he was forced out of school into work at a tea shop by his grandmother. Desperate to escape the fate of being controlled by his family, he convinces her to give him money to learn to drive so he can become the "second driver" for the village landlord, the Stork. We see how the landlord reinforces his extortionate collection of villagers' earnings with brutality and insults; his son the Mongoose is his thuggish strongman. His American-educated son is back in India with his NRI wife Pinky (Priyanka Chopra). Balram fast-talks his way into the job which entails cleaning the mansion as well as being on call for driving. But he has a uniform and sends money back to his family, as he'd promised. At first he sees loyalty and hustle as the path to getting ahead, but then he gets rid of the first driver by threatening to reveal that he's secretly a Muslim. His view of the social relations of Indian servants is that of the rooster coop: the rooster can see the fate of his fellows but doesn't rebel.   Once he realizes that he will never be able to break out of his servitude, he begins to cheat and skim, like everyone else. Balram is willing to use dirty means to make sure he is safe and can move up. Master and servant.

While Adosh and Pinky act as if they are willing to set aside some of the more brutish aspects of caste society, when Pinky hits a child while driving drunk, the family sets Balram up as the scapegoat, threatening his family if he doesn't go along and sign away his life. Even though they fix things so that Balram is not charged, they threaten him (and his family) if he were ever to talk. And when Balram's family send a child for him to take care of, and announce their plans to marry him off or else, he comes up with a plan. He kills Adosh and steals the money he had been toting around to bribe officials in a red bag, using it to move away with his nephew and to bribe his way to a monopoly for his chauffeur service. "What he does is monstrous, but you understand it" says Oliver Stone in an interview with the director.

The end of the film shows him taking care of a similar accident by paying off the family and giving work to their other son. The last shot is of his group of drivers staring back into the camera. What happens when tradition, caste, and a corrupt political class choke off dignity and ambition? The film shows the character's ruthlessness with cynicism.

Many reviews make the inevitable contrast with Slumdog Millionaire, and there are lots of comparisons to Parasite. 

Here's an interview with director Ramin Bahrani. I'd like to track down his other films.