Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese’s slick, big-budget documentary-slash-concert film on the Rolling Stones, is entertaining in an in-your-face sort of way, sticks around too long, and doesn’t have that many ideas.  In other words, it’s a lot like the Rolling Stones themselves.

All the spit and polish is applied – a glut of expensive, moving, tracking, gliding, sliding cameras; a marquee director past his prime; unexpected cameo appearances from politicians and pop stars.  If you’re a fan of the Rolling Stones (in the true, fainting-from-dehydration sense of the word) then the energetic, electric performance these four gods of rock and roll turn in will make you almost as high as Keith Richards on a slow day.  If, like me, you’re merely a guy or gal who knows that Mick, Keith, Ronnie and Charlie are rock deities and wants to understand the halo, then Shine a Light is, well, less than illuminating.

Scorsese does sprinkle in some well-chosen bits of archival footage – feature pieces on a smooth-skinned Richards, newsreel clips of arrests and releases, choice questions from old interviews with young reporters (to a 1964 Jagger: “Do you see yourself doing what you do at the age of 60?”).  It’s fun to laugh at the predictable naivete of youth; in 1964, having performed with the Stones for two years, Jagger tells a reporter he thinks the band might last another year or so.  In another excerpt, this time from a Japanese interview, the pretty reporter sitting across from Jagger is so overcome by his careless handsomeness she dissolves into uncontrollable giggles when he reveals they are both 29.

Forty years later, it is awesome to see the ravages of time on the quartet, especially the frontman and lead guitarist, and equally awesome to watch them defy age, gravity and every other immutable law of nature on the New York City Beacon Theatre stage.  And occasionally, the music is more than a slap on the best-hits jukebox – “Far Away Eyes” and “Sympathy for the Devil” are both meaningful, masterful performances.

But it was the rock-version of the Temptations staple “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)” that led my own imagination away from the film I was watching.  We all bow before the Rolling Stones.  I wonder, though, how many members of the audience for Shine a Light realize that Keith and co. rose to fame at the same time as the many Motown groups that equally defined a generation – the Temptations, yes, but also the Drifters, the Impressions, the Four Tops, the Delfonics, the Spinners and the Chi-Lites.  That almost no one under forty knows by name the members of any of these groups is tantamount to musical treason, and speaks to the racial inequality (yes, I said it) that still plagues America.  White America gobbled up the Motown music and then spat out the bands, relegating former superstars like Otis Williams (Temptations founder) to the B-circuit of metropolitan nightclubs and Vegas casinos – healthy paychecks, but a far cry from a Scorsese film (although Scorsese does have a thing for casinos in his other films).

So Shine a Light is a bittersweet experience: the African-American backup singers from Queens and Brooklyn, glimpsed here and there throughout the film, only serve as painful reminders of a niggling problem.  With few exceptions (Ray Charles and James Brown come to mind), extraordinary black musicians continue to find their way into the Hall of Fame but not Mount Olympus.  I guess I just can’t get no satisfaction from Shine a Light.

Harry Allen is married.  Happily married.  To his wife, Pat Allen.  They live together, in the way married couples do – Harry goes to work in a suit and tie; Pat stays home and does the laundry; he has a drink in the evenings while she makes dinner.  Harry is bored with work.  Pat is bored with the house.  Their life is full of boring routine.  So eventually they get bored with each other.  Then Harry meets Kay.

Thus begins Married Life, a 90-minute romp through 1940s suburbia, before suburbia became known as suburbia.  If it all sounds a bit romantic and patriarchal, don’t worry: it’s all in good fun, and the writer and director, Ira Sachs, knows what he’s doing.  Before long, the house that Harry built gets a knock from a big bad wolf – Harry’s best friend, Richard Langley.

The film explores the relationships before, during and after marriage between Harry (played by the unfailingly flawless Chris Cooper), Pat (Patricia Clarkson with a twinkle in her eye), Richard (Pierce Brosnan, more on him later) and Kay (Rachel McAdams, duly gorgeous).  Unable to stomach the idea of Pat’s loneliness if he left her for Kay, Harry soon realizes there’s only one way to happiness: he must kill his wife.  Meanwhile Richard, dog that he is, decides to chase Harry’s lover, Kay.  The boys aren’t the only sneaky ones.  Pat has secrets of her own and Kay, the most luscious young widow since Anna Nicole Smith (oh, wait, that won’t happen for another 60 years), can’t decide what she wants.

Somewhere between Kay’s initial entrance – with her coiffed blonde curls and emerald green satin dress – and Harry’s decision to poison Pat’s indigestion medicine – courtesy of darkroom chemicals from the friendly neighbourhood pharmacy – it becomes clear that Married Life is a feature-length love note to the screwball comedies of its period.

All throughout the forties, Hollywood experienced a comedic renaissance as it realized its potential as a jointly visual and auditory medium.  Writers, imported en masse from Broadway in the thirties, settled into their new playground, and the silent antics of Chaplin and Keaton were superceded by the frenetic witticisms delivered by Cary Grant and James Stewart and Katherine Hepburn.  Many of the best films of the period were comedies of remarriage – an unhappy couple divorce, flirt with outsiders and then remarry – because the Production Code in effect at the time banned the depiction of extramarital affairs.  Married Life is the Screwball Comedy That Never Was; unbound by a pesky Production Code, affairs come out of the woodwork of Harry and Pat’s weekend cottage.

Patricia Clarkson and Rachel McAdams split Hepburn’s prodigious talents – Clarkson possesses the same exquisite comic timing and effortless grace while McAdams inherits Hepburn’s angular beauty and haute couture imperiousness.  One of the film’s many tongue-in-cheek jokes is that McAdams’s Kay, with her Barbie-doll proportions and mischievous mouth, lives alone and chaste in a suburban house (her favourite leisure activity is reading, for chrissakes).

Chris Cooper plays the sort of upper-middle-class everyman that James Stewart became famous portraying in films like Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life.  Cooper plays Harry as a man who is both meticulous and nervous, both long-suffering and short-sighted.  He’s a wonderful naïf.

And if ever a man was meant to slip into Cary Grant’s loafers, it’s Pierce Brosnan.  As the suave, debonair Richard Langley, he simply runs away with the picture.  I’ve had a schoolboy crush on Brosnan ever since I saw him in 1995’s Goldeneye as suave, debonair James Bond.  As his boyish good looks matured – gray hairs creeping around his temples, his cheeks and chest filling out – my infatuation matured correspondingly into a leisurely long-lasting love.  I enjoyed him as the suave, debonair Thomas Crown in The Thomas Crown Affair, and as the suave, debonair (and unstable) Julian Noble in The Matador.  Sure, he hasn’t displayed the greatest range in his career.  Neither did Grant.  But when these guys don a fedora, no one, on screen or off, can resist.

The film’s opening credit sequence is a joy in and of itself, as oil paintings of high heels and floral bedsheets come to life while Doris Day scats through “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”.  It establishes the deadly serious frivolity embodied in the actors’ performances and in the sets and costumes seemingly pulled intact from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer vault.  Gwendolyn Margetson’s art direction is a playful mix of Art Deco extravagance and suburban utilitarianism.  Michael Dennison’s costumes are classic studio-era, and like the classics, he distinguishes his characters with clever separation of style and colour – Brosnan’s jackets and vests are cut closer than Cooper’s; McAdams gets the Technicolor brights and Clarkson the pastel housepaint tones.

Yes, it’s a Hollywood movie made by a guy who loves old Hollywood movies, so of course it ends well.  The boys get the girls.  Which boy, which girl?  I can keep a secret as well as the next guy.

What can you buy with a hundred dollars? Today, a Broadway ticket. In 1977, a barrel of crude oil. In 1954, an ounce of gold. And in 1936, in Germany, for Jewish forger Salomon Sorowitsch, incarcerated in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, a hundred American dollars bought the lives of five men.

At least, that’s how the story goes according to writer/director Stefan Ruzowitsky in his bleak film Die Fälscher, or The Counterfeiters. Sorowitsch, played by a gaunt Karl Marcovics with machined precision, is tasked by his Nazi captors to do the impossible: forge the British pound, and then the American dollar, with such perfection so as to fool the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a mission which tears Sorowitsch in half – his politics, condition and compatriots say no, but as the most notorious counterfeiter in all Germany (and arguably all Europe), capable of false identity papers, forged passports and fake Reichsmark, his profession and pride say yes.

The first section of Counterfeiters depicts Sorowitsch’s previous life – the gambling, the women, the general debauched habits of a man who literally makes his money. He invites an attractive woman back to his apartment and workshop, which is where and how the Gestapo find him the following morning. His Grimm fairy-tale existence quickly becomes the much grimmer reality of the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen.

The rest of Counterfeiters depicts the day-to-day survival of Sorowitsch and his friends inside the camp (think Saving Private Ryan without any salvation or privacy). It is a miserable, degrading existence where ordinary men, traumatized beyond repair by having their wives and children ripped from their hands, try to kill themselves faster than the concentration camp itself. Men who fall ill are shot by the SS to prevent other prisoners from becoming infected – in this place, the common cold is a deadly disease. Supplies are short everywhere; the medic has no medicine. As the film trickles along, we realize the scarcity is not merely Nazi savagery. The Germans are bankrupt.

Hence Sorowitsch’s predicament. He can do the right thing by his country and conscience, pass up the chance of a lifetime and be summarily executed, or he can have his crowning achievement, save himself and his friends, and directly fund the Nazi war machine. He chooses to stay alive, which is easier said than done. The Germans are on shrinking deadlines as the Allies make headway on both fronts. Sorowitsch tries to neither have his cake nor eat it: he tolerates mistakes and mischief to delay the counterfeiting effort, doing his best not to help the Germans while being forced to help them. This only provokes their wrath, and Counterfeiters pulls no punches – we have the benefit of history and hindsight; we see and hear everything.

It is powerful moviemaking. The Jewish prisoners, drained of the will to enjoy life, to wake up each morning, to live, seem to have their energy echoed in the desaturated footage – the film is all blues and grays, as if the very celluloid has bled in commiseration with its subjects. The camera is stable when outside the camp and when focused on the Germans; shaky when with the Jews. Sergio Leone was noted for creating landscapes not only out of the Italian countryside, but of his actors; through his lens, a man’s face became pockmarked knolls of muscle stretched over bone. Ruzowitsky, or at least his cinematographer Benedict Neuenfels, creates a similar effect with Marcovics – his cheeks sunken, tiny valleys between zygomatic and mandible, his eye sockets small dark pools, his nose a misshapen mesa.

At the same time, I’m not sure what The Counterfeiters seeks to add to the long, decorated list of Nazi-exposé films. The Holocaust motion picture is by now its own war movie subgenre, with over 100 narrative films (and over 100 documentaries) stretching from Stalag 17 (1953) and the Czech classic The Shop on Main Street (1965) to Sophie’s Choice (1982) and Steven Spielberg’s pet project and magnus opus, Schindler’s List (1993). I will never erase the image of Ralph Fiennes as Amon Göth using labouring Jews as target practice from his balcony. At some point, through one film or another, or even through a different medium, the horror of the Holocaust has hit home for most of us alive today. We know the Nazi genocidal project was one of the great modern tragedies – Aristotle, father of drama, would be shaken to his core.

Tragedy, according to the great Greek, is the imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude. But we’ve been there time and time again with World War II Germany. Aristotle failed to weigh in on an imitation of the imitations of an action, which is ultimately what The Counterfeiters is. It’s a very close forgery of the Nazi movie we’ve all seen before, so well-designed a forgery that we’re fooled into selling ourselves short.

Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters)
Written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitsky.
With Karl Marcovics, Devid Striesow, August Diehl and Marie Bäumer.
98 minutes. Drama/War.

As a man, I don’t get invited to many bridal showers, baby showers or restaurant restrooms (although I have a fair idea what the last looks like). The secrets of these provinces are guarded by their occupants, instinctively and collectively, as subversive intervention into a world built, shaped and dominated by men. Naturally, we power-hungry men are a little curious. How can a bridal shower last five hours? At a baby shower, do you talk about the father? What are you doing when you say you’re powdering your nose?

So watching Sukkar Banat, the filmic debut of Lebanese writer, director and star Nadine Labaki, at least for male viewers, is a lot like peeking through the crack in the wall of the girls’ bathroom in high school, except the girls are older, sexier, more complicated, and you don’t have to worry about getting caught. The film is set in a Beirut hairdressing salon, revolving around the intertwined lives of four women: Layale (Labaki), in love with a married man; Nisrine (Yasmine Elmasri), soon-to-be-married; Rima (Joanna Moukarzel), rebel with a coif; and Jamale (Giséle Aouad), struggling actress.

The salon, Sibelle, is workplace and home away from home for the women. For Layale, manicures and pedicures sometimes take a backseat in favour of meeting her illicit paramour (whose face we never see) in the front seat of her not-so-dependable sedan. Rima washes hair in the back room, and the privacy (often unintentionally heightened by sudden blackouts) leads to a more intimate transaction with a beautiful customer. As anyone who has been in a salon knows, professional stylists can elicit confessionals and apply conditioner at the same time; drying chairs become hot-headed personal shrinks.

The pace is at once hurried and relaxed – appointments and traffic interrupt gossip and grooming; the real world, with all its attendant annoyances, insists on intruding into the quiet warmth of the parlour (the real Beirut also has a chronic noise pollution problem). At one point, Layale throws her lover’s wallet into a drawer, as if she can tuck her whole messy, imperfect love life away with it. The girls spontaneously celebrate Nisrine’s upcoming wedding with dancing and singing and an aluminum-foil wreath Rima throws on Nisrine’s head.

The first half of Caramel is a traditional comedy, although a playful and sophisticated one – the sticky-sweet confection of the title is an epilation tool suitable for Hezbollah; more than once, Layale finds catharsis as her customers flinch. The supporting cast (Sihame Haddad as an old seamstress, Adel Karam as a policeman enamored with Layale) is talented and hilarious, the highlight being Aziza Semaan’s priceless portrayal of an elderly, senile bag lady still looking for love. It is only in the second half of this 95-minute picture that Labaki pulls out the bobby pins, allowing the dramatic events to cascade. As the four women see their dreams fading, they each try – and fail – to invent individual solutions. After a depressed Layale calls from a cheap motel room, the women finally share, laugh and cry together. It’s impossible to resist laughing and crying with them.

Caramel premiered almost a year ago at the Cannes Film Festival, won international acclaim, and has been slowly making its way around the world (next stop: Britain on May 16). Most of the praise lavished on the film has focused on the absence of any political content, a Lebanese film not about war and conflict. I think that such kudos miss the point. Right after the final shot cuts to black, Labaki prints: “To my Beirut.” This film, sugary on the surface, is deeply political. The problems the women face stem directly and inexorably from the constrained, confined social and economic space they are forced to inhabit in a highly patriarchal and militarized society (fair warning: PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD).

Layale is a lady leper – no longer a virgin, she is considered damaged goods by bachelors. Her subsequent pursuit of a married man therefore denies easy dismissal as reprehensible or naïve or selfish; from a practical perspective, it is her best shot at happiness. Nisrine faces a similar problem with more catastrophic potential. Also sexually experienced, she must find a way to deceive her husband on her honeymoon or risk losing a life partner, shaming her family and becoming Layale. The lesser of two evils is to become a virgin again, a cosmetic surgical procedure blessedly but gut-wrenchingly depicted with the film’s match cut to the seamstress’s sowing machine.

Rami’s nascent lesbianism is possibly more dangerous to the carefully constructed social fabric of heterosexual union – she must settle for soothing scalps in the back of a salon, in the process sacrificing personal happiness, the joy of intimate and open relationships, and the self-confidence that comes with displaying to the world who you are. Jamale also sacrifices her womanly confidence in the hyper-sexualized, unapologetically discriminating world of commercial television. In one arresting audition scene, as the camera jerks ever closer, Jamale recites banal ad copy for a toothpaste, almost breaking down as the casting agent imperiously issues instructions and destructive criticism.

What Labaki has accomplished is not a Lebanese film without conflict or politics. It is a film laced with politics, damning at its core the covert gender-based oppression of its protagonists while still retaining a magnificent and magnanimous humanity. It is a rare filmmaker who can rebuke without condescension, who can provoke without pity. Caramel is that most delicious of cinematic treats: a devotion picture.

Sukkar Banat (Caramel)
Directed by Nadine Labaki.
With Nadine Labaki, Yasmine Elmasri, Joanna Moukarzel and Giséle Aouad.
95 minutes. Comedy/Drama.

When I saw Fernando Meirelles’s Cidade de Deus in 2002, I was affected by the unvarnished and honest depiction of the Brazilian favelas – shanty towns, crowded onto Rio de Janiero’s hillsides, filled with poverty and perishable dreams. Although I had never been to Brazil, the violence and vitriol reminded me of the Jamaican inner city communities I had grown up watching on the news and whose gunshots echoed faintly in my guarded suburb. Meirelles’s relentlessly kinetic camera captured the vitality and futility of life in the favela, two sides of a tarnished centavo.

So I entered the theatre to see Paulo Morelli’s Cidade dos Homens, “from the producers of City of God,” with unhealthy skepticism (especially for a critic). I was prepared, at the first copycat edit or borrowed line of dialogue, to dismiss the film as a failed attempt to cash in on the runaway success of the 2002 original. Two hours later, I was still waiting. City of Men is as powerful, and more touching, than its filmic predecessor.

In a way, City of Men actually predates City of God. Or perhaps a better way to say it is that the two films are blood brothers, much like City of Men’s dual protagonists. Writer Paulo Lins, who grew up in Cidade de Deus, published an eponymous 1997 novel chronicling four decades of death and decadence and tracing the divergent path of two childhood friends. Fernando Meirelles then turned one of the novel’s vignettes into the short film Palace II (2000), with 12-year-olds Darlan Cunha as Acerola and Douglas Silva as Laranjinha.

Two years later, Meirelles made Cidade de Deus and the film’s success led to the Brazilian television series Cidade dos Homens, starring Cunha and Silva in switched roles. The show became a hit in its own right, its twenty episodes playing to 35 million viewers, and went off the air in 2005. Cidade dos Homens – the film – picks up three years after the end of the television series. It’s a history as complicated as those of the favelas.

In the film, Acerola (Silva) and Laranjinha (Cunha), are grappling with the uncomfortable transition from boys to men as they turn 18 – Acerola has a wife and a young child; Laranjinha wants to find the father he never knew. They live on Dead End Hill, under the armed protection of Madrugadao and his number two, Nefasto. The film opens on a blistering summer day. Madrugadao descends the hill for the first time in three years to go for an ocean swim. It is the pebble that catalyzes a landslide of gang warfare, defections, mistaken alliances, ambushes and dead bodies.

While the quicksilver atmosphere of living in Dead End Hill is terrifying, both for the occupants and the audience – in one sequence where Acerola flees for his life through the arteries of the hill, I wanted to scream at him to shed his backpack and ten pounds – the heart of the film is the relationship between Acerola and Laranjinha. Theirs is a truly familial bond – each understands the other better than he understands himself. When Laranjinha refuses to enter a building that may house his father, Acerola goes by himself. Laranjinha kisses Acerola’s child as if it is his own.

Cunha and Silva play the inseparable friends so naturalistically, so easily, that a willing suspension of disbelief isn’t necessary, only a belief in suspense – What will they do now? Where will they sleep? Will Laranjinha find Acerola? Will Acerola become like all the other boys? The relationship is enhanced through flashbacks stripped from the television series – we get to see Cunha and Silva as their muscles emerge, as their smiles get less toothy, as they grow up. The effect is not unlike watching home movie footage, an effect enhanced by the contrast between the TV show’s grainier 16mm and the film’s more polished 35mm images. Morelli desaturates the flashback clips, but the rich, colourful performances are undiminished by aesthetic tricks. The director knows that his actors have embodied their characters for years; he moves the camera so close to their faces that a tightening of the jaw or a relaxing of the eyes says more than a monologue. At the film’s climax, as Laranjinha pleads with Acerola, we are focused not on the words but on their faces.

The handheld camerawork is mostly out of necessity – you try laying camera track on narrow, winding, broken concrete steps between zinc fences – but Morelli and his cinematographer, Adriano Goldman, resist swinging the camera around. The chases and fights feel claustrophobic and desperate even with a Steadicam. In fact, you wonder how long James Bond and Jason Bourne would last in Morelli’s world without editing to save them.

As visceral and cathartic as the film was for this Third World critic, I can’t escape a sense of closure, not just for Acerola and Laranjinha, but for the cinematic depiction of poor, gun-ravaged urban Rio. One novel, two feature films and a television series are not nearly enough to tell all the stories that need to be told, but new stylistic and narrative exploration is necessary if Morelli et al want us to return to the theatre. The next one-sheet I see for a Brazilian film should say “Not from the producers of City of Men, but just as compelling.” But that’s no way to win hearts, minds and the box office. Cidade dos Angels, anyone?

Cidade dos Homens (City of Men)
Directed by Paulo Morelli.
With Douglas Silva, Darlan Cunha.
110 minutes. Drama.

Godard famously said cinema is truth at 24 frames per second; Michael Haneke (director of the wickedly playful Funny Games in theatres now) says a feature film is 24 lies per second; Eran Kolirin, the Israeli writer and director of The Band’s Visit, hasn’t put forth his own version of Godard, but I’ll do it for him – motion pictures are emotion, 24 frames per second. Insofar as cinema can encapsulate and embody emotion – extracting it from actors, distilling it through cinematography, preserving it through editing, and serving it up on a flickering, fleeting tray – then The Band’s Visit does not just hint at longing, suggest longing, or effuse longing: it is longing.

Eight Egyptian policemen, the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, arrive in Israel to perform at the inauguration of an Arab culture center. Miscommunication between the young trumpet player, Haled (Saleh Bakri), and a cute airport information desk attendant lands the band in the wrong town, a town small enough to have one bus stop and one bus trip per day. It also has Ronit Elkabetz as Dina, the owner of a small restaurant. The band leader, Lieutenant-Colonel Tawfiq Zacharya (Sasson Gabai), is thus compelled to accept Dina’s offer to put the band up for the night.

If this were an American film, a freight train of unstoppable hilarity would ensue involving rabbis, mistaken identities, a camel and the business end of a tuba. Instead, Kolirin takes us deeply, sharply, painfully close to his characters – reckless Haled, trapped Dina, repressed Tawfiq, and his lonely second-in-command Simon (Khalifa Natour) – and stays there for 89 minutes. It doesn’t feel short. And it doesn’t sell us short, either; part of the joy of watching The Band’s Visit is acknowledging Kolirin’s implicit trust that we will go for a ride without popcorn moments or expensive thrills.

Shai Goldman’s cinematography tells the story, wordlessly, in plaintive, static shots of the dusty half-desert, half-deserted landscape. Through his lens, we see the uneasy truce between the elements and man-made encroachments; two-pronged streetlamps are cacti on the road, the empty streets like so many dry riverbeds. This is a town timeless in its stagnation, where one young man waits by a pay phone every night for his girlfriend to call, where a wrought-iron bench on the sidewalk constitutes a park, where everyone is friends, enemies or lovers with everyone else – the characters do not so much happen upon this place as move inexorably towards it. Call it Loneliness, Israel.

Paired with Doron Ashkenazi’s costumes, the film becomes a series of tableaux, eight uniformed men clad head-to-toe in the unblemished azure of a clear sky set against a bleached palette of beige and brown, the canvas of dust, desert and dereliction. The brilliant light blue uniforms lift right off the screen, even when the men stand still, as they often are, waiting for Tawfiq’s next instruction.

Sasson Gabai plays Tawfiq as a tragic hero, worlds of sadness behind his bristle moustache and watery eyes. Aristotle said a man doesn’t become a hero until he can see the root of his own downfall; Tawfiq has seen the root of his downfall for years, and when it is revealed at the nadir of the film, the camera holds on Gabai, and we feel the man’s barricades collapsing one by one.
Ronit Elkabetz (you may remember her from the 2001 Israeli dramedy Late Marriage) is at her pulchritudinous best playing Dina, a woman hurt, a woman all the more desperate for human connection and happiness the farther they slip into the distance. She lives, day in, day out, in this spit-stop of a town and she needs the band, and Tawfiq, as much as he, and the band, need her. If Betty Grable was America’s bombshell during World War II – blonde, bold, beautiful – then Ronit Elkabetz is the pin-up girl of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – dark, complicated, cryptic.

Saleh Bakri shows less range as Haled, but demonstrates his keen comic timing in a touching, and touch-heavy, seduction scene halfway through the film. His brash, boyish good looks should lead him to leading man parts in short order. Khalifa Natour, a fine actor, is given little to work with here except a character sketch – “unhappy musician” (and isn’t that redundant?) – so his scenes lack the emotional punch of the rest of the movie.

Longing requires absence, and Kolirin knows how to wield wordlessness; minutes pass without dialogue as characters grapple with their individual demons. In these scenes, Arik Leibovitch’s editing does the heavy lifting, whether assembling a series of point-of-view shots to externalize a character’s thoughts or, conversely, staying with a shot of the actor beyond the first impulse to cut away. Kolirin is aware of the versatility and universality of body language; a kiss is a kiss no matter how hopelessly lost you are in a foreign country; a late-night glass of wine with a beautiful woman is an invitation in Egypt, Israel, and around the world.

As The Band’s Visit approaches its denouement, when in Hollywood films the boy gets the girl, the villain dies, the hero finds the treasure, and plotlines neatly dovetail into a bowtie, it becomes clear that Kolirin is not susceptible to tidy solutions or romance. You may even wonder, for a moment, why you bothered to watch the film at all, why Kolirin bothered to make it. Where’s the arc? The progress? The point? And then the lights come on, and with an exhilarting rush you are grateful to be around people, to be lifted from the public solitude of the darkened theatre, to not be lonely anymore, at 24 frames per second.

The Band’s Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret)
Written and directed by Eran Kolirin.
With Sasson Gabai, Ronit Elkabetz, Saleh Bakri and Khalifa Natour.
89 minutes. Comedy/Drama.

Making art about art, a vaguely incestuous and yet high-minded endeavour, can result in the cultural equivalent of English royalty: an overburdened and pretentious product coated with grandeur but ultimately quite dull. That Starting Out in the Evening, a film which references Faulkner, Hemingway and Narayan, escapes such dreary elitism is due equally to Frank Langella’s exquisite performance and the writing of Fred Parnes and Andrew Wagner (who also directed).

Langella plays Leonard Schiller, an esteemed but forgotten American novelist (all four of his books are long out of print) desperate to eke out one final opus. He spends his days ensconced in his Upper West Side apartment, pecking fruitlessly at his manual typewriter. His dutiful daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor) is his cook, companion and only visitor. That is, until change arrives as Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), a bright and bright-eyed graduate student who wants to write her thesis on Schiller, cementing him in the pantheon of Great American Writers and introducing him to a new generation. Resigned to being a recluse and dogmatic about his routine, Leonard declines the offer. After facing rejection from publishers, however, he reconsiders, and the two embark on a painful path of introspection, loss and the possibility of a May/December romance.

Langella embodies the enigmatic, elegiac Schiller with such conviction and compassion that Wagner is often reduced to a technician, required only to point the camera in his direction. The actor shapes his silences with as much care as his lines, evoking stubbornness, empathy, desire and affront with the subtlest shading of his eyes. Etched in his lined face and pale skin are the years of interminable loneliness brought on by the death of his wife. A muted intensity seeps through the crusty façade he presents to Heather, an intensity which deepens her attraction to him, academically and otherwise. Langella utilizes a reduced palette of acting tropes, which, far from limiting the portrayal, seem to liberate him in a manner similar to the exuberant minimalist paintings of Gerhard Richter and Frank Stella.

Lauren Ambrose (a Six Feet Under alum) as Heather fails to impress, capturing the drive and naivete of a postgraduate but never digging deep enough to find the connection between her ingénue and Langella’s genius. Extra credit to Wagner and the casting director for embracing a romantic lead with a healthy figure and unconventional beauty. Lili Taylor is phenomenal as Schiller’s daughter, a woman perennially adrift, steaming towards forty without a partner or a child and in desperate need of both. Her lithe physicality and angular face toy with shadow and light; she has that indefinable quality, like Diane Lane and Maria Bello, that compels us to watch her whenever she is onscreen and to search for her when she is not. Also of note is Adrian Lester (of AMC’s Hu$tle) as Ariel’s on-again, off-again, on-again love interest. Their tender, complicated relationship is one of the best parts of this well-written film (more extra credit for presenting an interracial couple as normalized and part of the reality of present-day America).

Despite the acting and directorial talent, this film, explicitly about writing, would have failed without the smart, self-aware, simply charming script by Parnes and Wagner. Given the inherently uncinematic nature of the craft, very little writing takes place in front of the camera, even though two of the four main characters spend most of their time doing it. To compensate, Parnes imbues the entire script with a lingering, meditative quality, where conflicts are more often postponed than resolved, characters are more likely to bear the brunt of their sins than blame others, and dialogue interrupts silence rather than the other way around.

Wagner does his part by setting up static shots, or else slow, languorous tracking shots, or else handheld shots refreshingly calm and measured (and none of the trendy frenzy of Paul Greengrass et al). Shot entirely on location in New York City, the film feels decidedly urban and sophisticated, yet its four-person microcosm of raw human emotion grounds the film in universal reality. The relentless drumbeat of traditional Hollywood dramas, inexorably pushing the story forward and escalating the conflict, would have sliced this film to about half its 111 minutes, effectively preventing it from being made at all. The added breathing room of an indie film is here vitally utilized, extending scenes past their traditional breakpoints to provide poignant and honest moments.

The film ends where it began: with Leonard at his typewriter, staring into the middle distance. And, as with all good art about art, the theme is not a trumpet note blared across the house speakers but a soft melody that may exist only inside your head. Standing Out in the Evening does not insist that art is easy, or that it is devilishly difficult, or that it is the province of a gifted few, although it does say these things. It suggests that the true essence of art is lived experience, that in our triumphs and tragedies, our most private suffering and personal ecstasies, we are each great artists, with some good work already behind us and with a nagging desire to eke out just one more opus – a novel, an improbable romance, a commitment, a child. Art is not great because New York critics lauded it fifty years ago; it is great because the artist knows that it is honest, it is true, and it is grounded in reality. Standing Out in the Evening is honest, true and grounded in reality, and therefore it is art.

Starting Out in the Evening
Directed by Andrew Wagner.
With Frank Langella, Lauren Ambrose, Lili Taylor, Adrian Lester.
111 minutes. Drama.

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Daniel Plainview is a Southern oilman whose insatiable greed and unyielding disdain for his peers leave him wealthy beyond his dreams and alone with his demons. His journey is set in the dirty, barren plains of New Mexico at the turn of the last century, when there was money to be made for the reckless and the adventurous. Plainview is both. The film is a meditation on the allure of success, the twisted ethics required to attain it and the moral poverty required to keep it, delivered through a complex character study.

The film opens with Daniel (played with Method-rich relish by Daniel Day-Lewis) toiling with a pick in a hole. He finds a small deposit of silver ore, and in the effort to remove it, falls and breaks his ankle. He then drags himself across the desert, with a sample tucked under his vest, back to the prospector’s office. This superhuman determination is both Daniel’s greatest strength and weakness. He swindles a farming family out of their oil-soaked land and is tormented for the remainder of the film by the family’s son, Eli Sunday, (Paul Dano of Little Miss Sunshine fame) and the fiery flavor of Christianity he represents. Oil and religion fight for supremacy throughout the film’s plodding two hours and 38 minutes.

Day-Lewis delivers a performance full of tics–his tongue massaging his ruddy cheeks, the veins in his forehead pulsing–but it comes off as angling too hard for a Best Actor nod (which he got). A few more failed epics and Day-Lewis could find himself in the discount bin of overextended Great Thespians with Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro: once great, now grating. Dano finds the fun in his fundamentalist Eli, and although his menace falls flat, he and Day-Lewis share a terrific baptism scene halfway through the film. Rounding out the competent cast are Dillon Freasier as 7-year-old HW Plainview and Sydney McAllister as his best friend, young Mary Sunday.

Jonny Greenwood provides dissonant strings on the soundtrack with mixed results. At times, the bass and cello combination hints at Daniel’s dark, tormented loneliness, but elsewhere it feels out of place. Anderson’s script (he wrote and directed) could have used more of what the industry gently calls polish, but amounts to the studio getting another scribe to toss out the bad parts. Subplots appear for the sake of getting the audience through the second act, and Daniel’s deterioration into a paranoid hermit is neither adequately explained nor explored. One wonders if the good people at Miramax picked up the project because of its eerie parallels to America’s current foreign fixation on oil and the domestic disturbance of fundamentalist Christianity.

All told, There Will Be Blood feels like one of Daniel’s oil derricks: lots of potential under the surface, but ultimately a great, big, sloppy mess.

There Will Be Blood
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
With Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano.
158 minutes. Drama.