The Great Pottery Throwdown

 I just finished watching season one of The Great Pottery Throw down, another one of the British makers' reality competition shows. Like the Great British Bake Off, the show highlights the contestants' struggles with the material rather than with each other, and that's why we love it. That, and judge Keith Brymer Jones' tears of joy when one of the potters does something really pleasing. "It's brilliant! absolutely brilliant!"

Nomadland

Tonight's movie for discussion is Nomadland. I watched it last month but I may watch it again this afternoon. 

When I became ill some years ago and was losing my job and career in slow motion I thought I would no longer have an income, so I started thinking about how I'd survive. My disability benefits kept getting cut off by the insurance company my employer used to get rid of disabled employees, and the struggle to get them reinstated each month made me sicker. Drastic action seemed necessary.

I seriously considered relocating to Mexico. I didn't think I'd be able to handle life in Mexico City. The last time I was there, for a conference, it felt grim and foreboding.  I read some blogs by "expats" only to realize that I would not have the mental stamina to wrestle with the logistics of such a change, even if I spoke fluent Spanish and had enough money to live relatively well. Even though one of my dreams was to spend time in Oaxaca in a house with bougainvillia, I felt overwhelmed by the logistics of relocating. I was still very sick.

I also thought of becoming a digital nomad abroad. After all, travel was one of my dreams. But I couldn't afford to live short-term in the places I was most interested in visiting and I didn't think I could manage as an older woman alone in some of the places I could afford. I'm too old to backpack.

I also gave real consideration to getting a camper and hitting the road but quickly recognized that I was too daunted by the idea of keeping the vehicle repaired and dealing with the bathroom and bathing issues. This was before the book (and movie) Nomadland revealed how many older people in my situation were turning to van living as a way to survive while working exhausting temp jobs. I also had little interest in exploring the U.S. backroads--I felt too alienated.

One issue I wasn't thinking about as I weighed my options was how isolated and lonely life on the road would be; I was only looking at the budget. That was years before the pandemic gave us all the chance to deal with radical isolation and loneliness from the comfort of our own homes. Another issue is how to get my meds while traveling.

My situation changed and I didn't have to make those choices. I now have sufficient income to live close to family, modestly but well enough. Who knows, maybe travel will become safe again one day.

Here's a really interesting take on the movie by a woman who was an extra in the film, who is herself an RV nomad  

Yes, the movie is a story of grief, not just that of Fern (Frances McDormand), but also a collective experience of grief over an American dream, and especially the experiences of older women. Carolyn used to live in the SFBay Area and says she saw the writing on the wall and made a conscious choice to change her life after the crash of 2008. Maybe if I hadn't had this health crisis (how to manage refilling a Rx on the road is a whole chapter) and were twenty years younger, I would have had the guts to give it a shot.

Neighboring Sounds

Kleber Mendonça Filho, co-director of Bacurau, made his first feature-length film Neighboring Sounds in 2012. It takes place in the neighborhood where he lives in Recife, a middle-class neighborhood where apartment towers are replacing single-family homes and where every entrance has a locked gate and every family has servants. The class and racial divides are shown through the ensemble cast's interactions on a single block, on which a new private security detail is setting up operations. The first chapter is called guard dogs, but the guard dog is just a noisy nuisance to the neighbors. The second chapter is called night watchman, but the building's residents are trying to figure out how to fire their night watchman who has been filmed sleeping on the job. The third chapter features the street patrol that promises peace of mind from all the car break-ins and crime in the neighborhood, but it turns out that the thief is actually the grandson of local landowner Seu Francisco who warns the patrol to leave his grandson alone. In fact, we see that this wealthy man is still the local boss--he owns a sugar plantation while his other grandson works as a real estate agent in his condos: the old power structures extend to the newly reconfigured economy.

 "The sound goes beyond what you are looking at" said Mendonça Filho in this Q and A. The mood of paranoia and fear beneath the surface of everyday life is heightened by the sound design: the barking dogs, the intrusions of music, power tools, voices--the feeling that nobody is ever really alone but also that the noise is not part of a sheltering communal life is reinforced by the way characters move from locked gate to barred door in narrow alleys and guarded domestic spaces. In one sequence, the camera looks down from an apartment window as men are jumping over the gate into the garden, and we hear the slap of their feet as they land, one after another after another. The girl in the apartment wakes up and sees them. As they keep coming, the threat seems to increase from a small group of burglars to a full-scale invasion. The sequence is revealed to be a nightmare the girl is having, but the dread contaminates waking life on the block. In another surreal sequence, the real estate agent grandson is visiting his grandfather's sugar plantation house with his girl friend. They visit a waterfall where they all stand under the cascade for a long time. Suddenly the water changes to blood and we see a flash of the grandson bathed in blood like Carrie at the prom, but he is looking straight at the camera.  His bloody family heritage returns at the very end of the film when it is revealed that the street patrol leader and his brother have a family feud with the grandfather. Seu Francisco calls them to his house for something and they tell him that they are the children of men he wronged--murdered?-- on his plantation back in 1984. The very last sequence has the family that has been tormented by the barking dog setting off firecrackers to frighten it, but the last bang is probably a gunshot from the confrontation with Seu Francisco. 

  All the watchmen are supposed to use surveillance to keep the owners safe but the owners use surveillance to spy on the night watchman's naps. Throughout the film the various maids and guardians have been present in domestic interiors, supposedly in service of their employers, but with their own agendas: the maid brings her grandchildren along, and a relative who sleeps on the couch; the security patrol leader and a different maid use an absent neighbor's home for sex, and it turns out that the house is not empty as they thought; the building watchman spies on people kissing in the elevator; another maid accidentally fries the device that has been used to torment the barking dog (the "dog buster") and is berated by her employer; the street patrol knows who is having an affair, which building the lost party-goer needs to find when he returns from a beer run. There's no privacy, only the illusion of security, and it's the heir of the sugar plantation boss who is stealing car stereos and threatening the security guards if they dare to call him on it. The last shot shows the ineffectual violence of the fiercrackers covering the gunshot off-screen; we know what it means because we have observed the ways that fears of violence permeate the neighborhood.

second dose reaction

I had my second vaccine dose on Friday. This time, I felt pain with the injection and my arm got sore by the evening. The next day I felt achy and feverish, and ended up crashed out on the couch, watching episodes of a kdrama and The Great Pottery Throwdown. I was too tired to read or take a walk. I woke up in the night with aching teeth and jaws--I must have been grinding my teeth. But this morning I feel fine--no more soreness or flu-like feelings. I'm glad it didn't last too long. I'm grateful that in two weeks I'll be fully protected from the virus, at least for a while. 

Meanwhile, this is the funniest thing I've seen in a while:

Senso

Luchino Visconti's 1954 film Senso is the next film for our discussion group: splendid technicolor and high melodrama with so many floating veils, sweeping skirts, white uniforms with white capes, La Fenice and Venice by night, the beautiful veneto countryside.  Do we feel sorry for the Countess who betrays her family, and the cause of Venetian independence from Austria, for a man who turns out to be a loathsome snake? She has her revenge in the end when she rats him out as a deserter and gets him shot. 

 Visconti uses Anton Bruckner's Seventh Symphony as its score, but maybe the best part of the film is the opening sequence, set during a performance of Il Trovatore in La Fenice. We get to hear the duet between Manrico and Leonora, and then"Di quella pira" as the film uses the opera to present its themes of doomed passion and patriotic fervor.

trip to New York!

I am about to go get my second dose of the vaccine! Yesterday I bought a ticket to New York to visit my daughter in Brooklyn. I had bought a ticket to visit her in March of 2020, so I'm thrilled to finally get to see her new apartment, her studio, and her neighborhood. There are so many things we want to do together; even with pandemic restrictions, we'll be busy. We each are making a wish list. Here are ten things I want to do that I haven't been able to do on all my previous trips to New York:

1. Ride the Staten Island ferry and maybe visit the Botanical Gardens at Snug Harbor

2. Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.

3. See the Yayoi Kusama show at the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx.

4. Do a walking tour of the Bushwick street art.

5. See the formal Conservatory Garden at the North End of Central Park and walk the length of the park.

6. Check out chef José Andrés' Little Spain market, in the Hudson Yards under the High Line.

7.  check out tacos from Los Hermanos and try out some of the Mexican food here or here in Bushwick.

8. maybe we could try this bakery crawl (although we might keel over) or we could try a different one every day.

9. view the Statue of Liberty from the gardens in Battery Park.

10. traipse around the Green-Wood Cemetary. 

Little Free Library north loop

Today I took the north loop for my walk. There are five Little Free Library boxes on this routes. At the first one, I found a book that is on the reading list of the Berkeley Public Library's book club, The Library Book by Susan Orlean.

At the third box I found  Judith Butler's Senses of the Subject, a collection of essays on our "embodied existence."

I decided not to take any of the books I found in the other boxes on my route. As it is, I only dropped off one and picked up two, so the pile is increasing.

 

The Mission (Johnny To)

Caught up with Johnny To's 1999 film The Mission (the title in Chinese is Gunfire). I had already seen this but I can't remember whether it was part of a Maggie Cheung marathon (she has a bit part) or what. It's another Hong Kong action film for our Thursday night cinema club, but more cool and stylish than City on Fire. Five bodyguards are hired to protect a Triad boss. Much of the film has no dialogue but relationships are communicated efficiently. The shoot-out in the shopping mall is excellently choreographed. 

The twist at the end is a surprise. The score is a total synthy earworm (BA buh buh BA buh buh NA na na Na!). Triad professionalism, honor among gunmen, blam blam blam blam blam!

Little Free Library book crawl

 I have been trying to take a walk every day during the past year. I had originally started  because I was so out of shape from being ill for so long. As I got stronger, I continued because I wanted to be in better shape for the times I traveled: I had been brutally surprised the first time I went to Japan with Rosemary when I got wiped out and had circulation problems due to walking on pavement for so many hours. The second time we traveled there, I wore compression socks and was in better shape but still had to rest frequently. My trips to LA and Seattle were done when I was able to walk several miles without being completely worn out, so I when I had to cancel all my travel plans in 2020, I decided that I would treat my walks like running laps on a track. Just do it every day and stop worrying about whether or not I had a destination now that all the destinations were closed or off limits. 

I have ended up with three primary walks, each oriented around the Little Free Library book boxes that my neighbors have made. The first is just a straight shot down Channing toward San Pablo and back, which is about 2.5 mile. The end point is a Little Free Library box. It doesn't often have new stock but I've found some good books there so I always check. If I go up a block for the return loop, there are three more boxes: two on Spaulding and one by the school near Milvia. Not a lot of turnover there either but still some good finds.

The second walk is a north loop up to Virginia and back down Milvia. There are four Little Free Library boxes on this loop, which is just a little shorter than the first walk. These tend to have more literary offerings, and often there are uncorrected proof books, so someone must either be a bookseller or know somebody who is. The third walk is the one I take when I'm feeling tired or crabby or the weather is not great, aka my short walk. It's the southern loop, down Milvia to a Little Free Library box that is just a few blocks from the Berkeley Bowl. This is the original destination box that I found when I went grocery shopping years ago. 

There are a couple of other book boxes that I haven't visited for a while now because I'm no longer walking in that direction for a weekly appointment, but I have too many books so I don't need to add more to the huge pile of books I've found over the last several months. I return each book as I read it, but I have not respected the one-in/one-out rule and have accumulated quite a few. My last three acquisitions are: Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, a book I used to own but never read; John Baxter's The Perfect Meal, by an author I'd read when I was anticipating my trip to Paris; and Leif Enger's Virgil Wander, set in Minnesota so I must read it.

Beau Travail

For cinema club, I forced myself to watch Beau Travail directed by Claire Denis. I will never forgive her for the loathsome ending to Les salauds, so my viewing experience was colored by my mistrust. I did enjoy the gorgeous landscapes of Djibouti, the choreography of military training, the sensuous images of women dancing, all the laundry and the ironing. There's almost no dialogue. In some scenes there's a kind of vibrating sound that creates a tension, and in some of the scenes of balletic exercises, music from Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd is used. 

I did not find the story, as such, compelling. There was a disconnect between what the narrator tells us and what we see. Maybe it's because the ritualized cruelty and senselessness of the everyday training doesn't look much different from the targeted brutality of his plot. Maybe that's the point. My chat club friends had some interesting things to say about the colonial context in which the French Foreign Legion is circling the drain.

Agnes Godard's cinematography is wonderful and her soft voice in this interview is captivating.

A Reckoning

 I just finished A Reckoning by May Sarton, the first book of hers I've read. It's about a woman who finds out she is dying of lung cancer and who resolves to meet death her way, on her own terms. As she grows weaker and more ill and as her friends and family find out, she contends with their presence as she sorts through her memories and reckons with what each relationship means to her now: her mother, her three children, the doctor, her dearest friend. The account of her decline is persuasive, although at the end I would imagine she would have been in more pain than the novel contemplates. Having witnessed a death from lung cancer of someone who ended up in the hospital, probably against his will and because his wife wanted him to fight, I know it is a painful, undignified end. At least in this novel, we see someone who is able to die at home surrounded by her loved ones. 

City on Fire

 For my Red Lantern cinema chat group, we watched Ringo Lam's City on Fire, a 1987 Hong Kong gangster-cop action film, complete with '80s wailing sax soundtrack. 

This film served as inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (either a rip-off or homage, depending on your degree of QT fanboying) and is part of a sub-genre of Hong Kong films called "heroic bloodshed," films where guns replaced martial arts. The seed film for this genre was John Woo's A Better Tomorrow, and Chow Yun Fat was the star whose signature trenchcoat and sunglasses look would inspire Hong Kong youth. There would be feedback loops between the Hong Kong and Hollywood films over the next decade.

In our discussion we talked about the cartoonish tonal shifts between comedy and cynical cop-gangster action, the unfortunately shrill girlfriend subplot, the amount of smoking, and genre favorites of those who had seen these films before. It was suggested that Infernal Affairs might be a good film to see next, and for next week we will watch Johnny To's The Mission. I'm not the target audience for this film but I enjoyed it's propulsive action.

taxes

I qualify for free tax return filing using an online tool, and was able to finish preparing and submitting my taxes in about an hour. The tool loads the forms that have been submitted to the IRS, and after a few false starts I was able to complete the return, even though some aspects of it were confusing. As has been the case since I started taking retirement payments from my IRAs, my total withholding means I owe the Fed but get a refund from the state in twice that amount, so I end up with a net refund. Now I have to wait to see if the submitted returns are accepted, which may take a few days. Last year I got a mysterious message that made me believe that my Federal payment had not gone through on the credit card, so I ended up sending them a check. Then I learned that it had, in fact, gone through so I had to call up the IRS and get the over-payment refunded. This time, I'll check my credit card statement instead of the tool's website for confirmation because they confused the goose.

Jury duty

      My first experience with jury duty was when I was a graduate student, preparing for my oral exams for the PhD. I was called to appear in court in Berkeley, and was very anxious about whether the case would interfere with my exam date, which had been very hard to schedule. When I showed up, there were about fifty of us in a very large room, and each juror was asked if they had any relationship to the University of California. When each person answered yes, the lawyers finally turned to the room and asked if there was anyone who didn't--almost everyone did. What a company town. This turned out to be relevant because the case involved a trespassing charge made by the UC police against a man--an elderly person with a bag of papers who we called a street person then-- who had been sitting in an inner courtyard in the math building on a Sunday, have his lunch, not bothering anyone. The rookie UC cops arrested him when he argued with them about leaving. He insisted on defending himself, in spite of the judge's advice against it, so the case went to trial. He wanted to argue that UC was funded by the taxpayers and therefore was a public place and should be open to the public. The judge instructed us that according to the law, the Regents of UC had to be considered as persons, and as the property owners. Most of us were resentful that the charges had even been brought at all, and we didn't want to find him guilty, but according to the evidence and the instructions, we had to. It was an educational experience about how one ends up going with the system in spite of one's beliefs. He got off with a warning by the judge.

      This week's experience with jury duty is being conducted over zoom because of covid; a hundred of us are sitting around in a zoom room while the lawyers question the smaller jury pool of sixteen (twelve jurors plus four alternates). We have to look at the screen and act as if we are attentive, although, in fact, I have discovered that it is easy to browse or type without detection (we are all muted) because it just looks as if you are sitting there looking at the camera when in fact you are scrolling for BTS news on Twitter.

     The case is a civil case involving a lawsuit against a corporation. On the questionnaire we filled out before the voir dire, we were asked how we felt about corporations, and I answered "Not a fan." This could be one reason why I was not included in the pool for questioning, but I bet it's because I'm a "little old lady" (and therefore more likely to be sympathetic to the plaintiff) and a retired university professor (and thus "less amenable to persuasion") according to some of the rule-of-thumb ideas I found when I looked up voir dire guidelines. Since they are supposed to finish up very soon and have almost made their numbers, I am not going to have to serve. I still have to show up again for one more session, but it looks as if they will seat a jury and four alternates with the pool they have. Fingers crossed.

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