MVFF

MY DONKEY, MY LOVER & I: it had me at the title

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Laure Calamy in MY DONKEY, MY LOVER AND I

In the intriguingly titled French comedy My Donkey, My Lover & I, Antoinette (Laure Calamy) is a vivacious and goofy schoolteacher in a French provincial town.  She’s single, but she’s head over heels into a fling with a married man.  She’s excited that’s he’s taking her away to a resort at the upcoming school holiday, but – at the very last minute – he instead submits to a mountain hiking trip with his family.

Antoinette’s distraught and angry disappointment soon transforms into determination and lunacy – she decides to go to the same network of mountain trails, rent a donkey and encounter him in the mountains.

Here’s what I didn’t know before I stumbled on this film at the Mill Valley Film Festival.  In 1879, a lovelorn Robert Louis Stevenson, with only a donkey companion, took a solitary hike in Southern France and penned his travel memoir Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. It’s common for today’s French to spend a week of their vacations re-creating Stevenson’s experience.  It’s a thing, and it’s spawned a cottage industry of donkey rentals and mountain hostels.

Antoinette can be an over-sharer, and when she blurts her mission to another hiker, it goes viral, and soon everyone else in the mountains knows.  Having prepared for a lie-by-the-pool vacation, she is ill-equipped, especially in the footwear department, to trudge over mountains,.  And, of course, she gets the very most uncooperative donkey.  How is she going to find her lover – and, if she does,  what is she going to do with him?

Laure Calamy is a brilliant comic actress (and one of the highlights of last summer’s Sibyl). She knows that the key to comedy is for an actor to be absolutely committed (with no hint of winking at the audience) to an absurd course of action.  This is why Buster Keaton, Lucille Ball and Gene Wilder were performance geniuses.  And it is why Will Ferrell isn’t as funny as Bill Hader or Kristen Wiig.

In My Lover, My Donkey & I, Calamy is all in on Antoinette, a woman who can be both alarmingly unself-conscious and cringingly self-conscious, and both pathetic and empowered.  Antoinette endures indignity after indignity, but Calamy’s radiance shines through.

The premise of this film seems utterly unbelievable, but the story is based on actual events which are well-known in France, hence the French title Antoinette dans les Cévennes.

My Lover, My Donkey & I may not be Annie Hall or even There’s Something About Mary, but there are worse ways to spend 97 minutes than with the delightful Laure Calamy. It’s opening July 22, including in the Bay Area at the Opera Plaza and the Rafael.

THE HEIST OF THE CENTURY: improbable, ingenious and all too human

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Guillermo Francella and Diego Peretti in THE HEIST OF THE CENTURY. Photo courtesy of Mill Valley Film Festival.

The Heist of the Century, a delightful crime tale from Argentina, tells a story that would be unbelievable – except it all really happened.

Most improbably, one of the masterminds is Fernando (Diego Peretti), a dope-smoking, new agey martial arts instructor. He has an idea for One Big Score – a bank robbery that will take hours, during daylight, in the middle of the city, and is certain to mobilize the entire police force. Fernando enlists a highly disciplined, professional criminal Luis Mario (Guillermo Francella); initially skeptical of and resistant to both Fernando and the job, Luis Mario joins Fernando in planning and assembling a team.

The planning is meticulous, including unexpected elements like studying the SWAT Team manual on hostage negotiations and attending acting class. Three of their solutions to defeating the bank’s security demonstrate undeniable genius.

The heist itself, with the seconds ticking and the bank surrounded by an army of police, is thrilling. The thieves have a formidable opponent in the police negotiator Sileo (an excellent Luis Luque); he is a wise and solid pro surrounded by lesser minds – and he doesn’t appreciate being made to look like Wiley Coyote.

However, what looks like a triumph might come to ruin – because of the most human of foibles. The ending is amazing.  

The Heist of the Century is the true story of the 2006 Banco Rio robbery in Acassuso, Argentina, a seaside suburb of Buenos Aires. Fernando Araujo, the original mastermind, is credited as one of the screenwriters.

The Heist of the Century is directed by Ariel Winograd, who emphasizes the contrasting personalities of Fernando and Luis Mario and creates a perfect balance between the humor and the thrills. Winograd spices the soundtrack with music ranging from The Kinks, spaghetti westerns to Motown and opens with a cheesy James Bondesque tune.

Guillermo Francella, who plays Luis Mario, played Ricardo Darin’s drunk assistant in The Secrets of Their Eyes. In this movie, Francella’s real life daughter Ana plays Mario Luis’ daughter Lu.

I screened The Heist of the Century for the Mill Valley Film Festival in October 2020. Now you can stream it from HBO Max, Amazon, Vudu and YouTube.

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL: see ’em here first

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Photo caption: Simon Rex in Sean Baker’s RED ROCKET, paying at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Photo courtesy of A24.

The Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF) is always the best opportunity for Bay Area film goers to catch an early look at the Big Movies – the prestige films that will be released during Award Season. This year’s fest runs from October 7 through October 17.

The biggest movies playing at this year’s MVFF:

  • Red Rocket: a Cannes hit from Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine).
  • Dune: Denis Villeneuve’s take on Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel.
  • Parallel Mothers: Pedro Almodovar’s latest, with Penelope Cruz.
  • Spencer: Kristin Stewart as Princess Di.
  • Belfast: Kenneth Branagh’s period coming of age film set amidst Northern Ireland’s Troubles. Branagh will appear in person at the MVFF.
  • C’mon C’mon : Joaquin Phoenix’s performance has been described as “endearing” (huh?). Also wih Gaby Hoffmann.
  • The French Dispatch: If you can bear to sit through another of Wes Anderson’s star-studded, overly precious self-indulgences, here it is.
  • A Hero: The latest from Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, The Salesman).

The slate of documentaries includes:

  • The Velvet Underground: Todd Haynes (Carol, Far from Heaven) looks at the seminal band.
  • Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres: About the pioneering rock journalist.
  • Becoming Costeau: About the iconic Jacques Costeau, popularizing the worlds under the surfaces of our oceans.

Last year, MVFF brought us the year’s two most honored films: Nomadland and The Father. In 2019, MVFF showcased five films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: the winner Parasite, along with Marriage Story, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit and Ford vs. Ferrari. The 2018 festival featured Roma, Green Book, Shoplifters, If Beale Street Could Talk and Cold War; those five films combined for 28 Oscar nominations and 7 Oscars. You get the idea.

Take a look at the Mill Valley Film Festival program. Here’s the trailer for Parallel Mothers.

UNDINE: a slow burn, barely flickering

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Paula Beer in UNDINE. Courtesy of MVFF.

In Christian Petzold’s German tragic romance Undine, Paula Beer plays the title character, a young woman of passion and unproven emotional stability. One morning, she experiences a heartbreaking breakup and rebounds into a profound love story. The course of that love affair becomes operatic and supernatural, and very tragic.

In mythology, Undine was a water nymph, and Petzold maintains the story framework of the original legend, but sets it in contemporary times.  Undine meets Christoph (Franz Rogowski). I often roll my eyes at a “meet cute”, and I sure didn’t expect one from Euro art film director Petzold, but this one really works.  Christoph is capitated by Undine and persists in courting her.  He becomes obsessed, she less so, and a tragic romance ensues.

Undine strives for the operatic but is too much of a slow burn (as in barely flickering at times).

I was thrilled by Petzold’s Barbara and then his Phoenix.  I was much less satisfied by his Transit (also with Rogowski and Beer). I’m becoming less of a Petzold enthusiast after these last two disappointments.

Beer, as she was in Transit, is exceptionally expressive and captivating. Rogowski (whose supporting character in Victoria was the most memorable turn in that film) excels when he plays a haunted man – as he does here and in Transit.

I saw Undine at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October, and it opens in Bay Area theaters this weekend.

THE FATHER: as reality shifts

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Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in THE FATHER

Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman deliver heartbreaking performances in The Father, an unsettling exploration of memory loss.

As we meet the elderly Anthony (Hopkins), he is insisting on independence that he can no longer sustain. That makes it hard on his daughter Anne (Colman), who is trying to keep him safe and healthy, despite his resistance. But Anthony is losing his memory and becoming ever more suspicious. Soon, all the characters are experiencing disorentation, even fantasies and hallucinations.

The Father is the directing debut for Florian Zeller, who wrote the original play. Along with the superb acting, the key to The Father is Zeller’s ever shifting of reality as understood by the characters and by the audience. As we think we understand what is going on and then have it unraveled, we, like Anthony, lose confidence in our orientation.

Anthony Hopkins has an Oscar and a long list of great performances (The Silence of the Lambs, The Remains of the Day, Nixon, The Human Stain, The Two Popes), but none is better than this one. His Anthony is a man whose characteristic wilfulness is finally self-defeating; he is a man ever confident of his opinions, but the factual basis for those opinions is eroding. He is a man who firmly believes he is always right, facing a new reality in which he demonstrably is not.

Colman is also superb as the able and devoted daughter who is hurt by her father’s perception that she is betraying him. The rest of cast – Rufus Sewell, Imogen Poots, Mark Gattis and Olivia Williams – is impeccable.

The Father, which I saw while covering the virtual Mill Valley Film Festival in October, will be widely available to stream on Friday. It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2020. It has earned six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and acting recognition for Hopkins and Colman.

THE FATHER: as reality shifts

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Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in THE FATHER

Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman deliver heartbreaking performances in The Father, an unsettling exploration of memory loss.

As we meet the elderly Anthony (Hopkins), he is insisting on independence that he can no longer sustain. That makes it hard on his daughter Anne (Colman), who is trying to keep him safe and healthy, despite his resistance. But Anthony is losing his memory and becoming ever more suspicious. Soon, all the characters are experiencing disorentation, even fantasies and hallucinations.

The Father is the directing debut for Florian Zeller, who wrote the original play. Along with the superb acting, the key to The Father is Zeller’s ever shifting of reality as understood by the characters and by the audience. As we think we understand what is going on and then have it unraveled, we, like Anthony, lose confidence in our orientation.

Anthony Hopkins has an Oscar and a long list of great performances (The Silence of the Lambs, The Remains of the Day, Nixon, The Human Stain, The Two Popes), but none is better than this one. His Anthony is a man whose characteristic wilfulness is finally self-defeating; he is a man ever confident of his opinions, but the factual basis for those opinions is eroding. He is a man who firmly believes he is always right, facing a new reality in which he demonstrably is not.

Colman is also superb as the able and devoted daughter who is hurt by her father’s perception that she is betraying him. The rest of cast – Rufus Sewell, Imogen Poots, Mark Gattis and Olivia Williams – is impeccable.

The Father, which I saw while covering the virtual Mill Valley Film Festival in October, had been set for a December release, but Sony Pictures Classics has now scheduled a February 26 release. Nevertheless, it’s on my list of Best Movies of 2020.

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL: see ’em here first (and see ’em at home)

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Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in THE FATHER. Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute

The Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF) is always the best opportunity for Bay Area film goers to catch an early look at the Big Movies – the prestige films that will be released during Award Season. This year is the same – except we don’t even have to visit Marin County in person.

The MVFF has gone virtual and is streaming most of its program. A few of the biggest movies can be seen on a big screen – at Marin County drive-in theaters. Browse the program and buy tickets here.

THREE of the movies I am expecting to be the year’s best are playing at this year’s MVFF:

  • Nomadland: Frances McDormand stars in the latest from filmmaker Chloe Zhao (The Rider).
  • The Father: some say this is Anthony Hopkins’ greatest performance. Olivia Colman co-stars.
  • One Night in Miami: highly acclaimed directorial debut of actress Regina King.

This 2020 MVFF has an especially rich slate of documentaries, including:

  • Banksy Most Wanted (will it reveal his identity?)
  • The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (opens the fest at a drive-in)
  • The Boys Who Said No (Vietnam War resisters)
  • Trust Me (explores misinformation on social media)
  • Coded Bias (there’s an Algorithmic Justice League searching out racial bias in AI and facial recognition software)
Chritian Petzold’s UNDINE

The Heist of the Century from Argentine plays on opening night and looks pretty funny. Other international cinema includes:

  • I Carry You With Me (double Sundance winner)
  • Jumbo (popular at Sundance and the Berlinale)
  • My Donkey My Lover and I (with the hilarious actress Laure Calamy)
  • Undine (the latest from German auteur Christian Petzold)

Other promising films including Alexandre Rockwell’s much buzzed-about indie Sweet Thing and the romp The Comeback Trail (with Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones). Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit with Judi Dench opens the fest at a drive-in.

Last year’s MVFF showcased five films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: the winner Parasite, along with Marriage Story, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit and Ford vs. Ferrari. The 2018 festival featured Roma, Green Book, Shoplifters, If Beale Street Could Talk and Cold War; those five films combined for 28 Oscar nominations and 7 Oscars. You get the idea.

This year, I’m not going to have to find a parking space in downtown Mill Valley nor race from Mill Valley’s Sequoia to San Rafael’s Rafael during Marin’s rush hour. But I’ve already got my tickets to nine of the offerings. Pick out your tickets here.

Movies to See Right Now (at home)

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Regina King’s ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI opening at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Amazon.

This week: The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE. And this weekend, I’ll be previewing a great film festival that we can all attend (virtually).

Don’t miss this beautifully-written essay on Five Easy Pieces by Steven Gaydos in Variety. Gaydos gets the impact on the 1970 audience just right and shines overdue credit on its female screenwriter Carole Eastman. There’s also a tidbit on Helena Kallianiotes, the funniest hitch hiker in movie history.

Karen Black, Helena Kallianiotes, Toni Basil and Jack Nicholson in FIVE EASY PIECES

REMEMBRANCE

RAGING BULL: cinematography by Michael Chapman

Cinematographer Michael Chapman shot the most stunning boxing scenes ever in Raging Bull. Before that, Chapman had an amazing run of work in indelible films from 1973 through 1979: The Last Detail, Taxi Driver, The Last Waltz, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wanderers.

RAGING BULL: cinematography by Michael Chapman

ON VIDEO

I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore: This wonderfully dark comedy is a showcase for Melanie Lynskey as a schlub who goes postal. Streaming on Netflix.

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

ON TV

Edih Chatterton and Walter Huston in DODSWORTH. Photo by Goldwyn/Kobal/Shutterstock (5880310c) Goldwyn USA Scene Still

On October 1, Turner Classic Movies airs the compelling Dodsworth, William Wyler’s 1936 film version of the Sinclair Lewis novel. The title character is a guy who has worked hard to get rich enough to step away from the rat race and take his wife on an extended European holiday. He thinks that he finally has it all – until he discovers that his wife has conflicting needs.

In one of his greatest performances, Walter Huston plays Sam Dodsworth as a guy supremely confident in his own skin, until he is devastated in learning who his wife really is. Unlike many stars from the Classic Era, Huston’s naturalistic acting would work in today’s cinema. Ruth Chatterton, who was a big Broadway star just ending a ten-year movie career, is equally good as Sam’s unashamedly selfish wife Fran (you’ve just to let me have my fling!).

The third great performance is Mary Astor’s most sympathetic, as Edith, the straight-shooting anti-Ftan. Astor shot Dodsworth during the daytime and then suffered through a humiliating child custody trial, held at night (with Chatterton at her side for support). Astor won over the court on the stand by channeling the character of Edith.

“Love has to stop somewhere short of suicide.” I just discovered Dodsworth this year, thanks to TCM guru Sandy Wolf.

63 UP: a generation faces mortality

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63 Up is the latest chapter in the greatest documentary series in cinema history (and on my list of Greatest Movies of All Time). Starting with Seven Up! in 1964, director Michael Apted has followed the same fourteen British children, filming snapshots of their lives at ages 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49. and 56 – and now at age 63. Choosing kids from different backgrounds, the series started as a critique of the British class system, but has since evolved into a broader exploration of what factors can lead to success and happiness at different stages of human life. (Apted was the hands-on researcher, not the director on Seven Up! and then directed the next nine films in the series.)

We have seen these characters live roller coaster lives.  The surprise in 56 Up was how contented they seemed to be, having independently reached a stage in their lives where they live with acceptance and satisfaction; the subjects had already weathered their broken marriages and other dramas and seemed to have settled into themselves.  The same is true of 63 Up, but there is more reflection in light of mortality.  There’s a death and a life-threatening illness, but all the characters understand that they’re longer at the beginning of their lives.

Because Apted includes clips from earlier films to set the stage for each character, you don’t need to watch all nine movies.  Because there is so little conflict in 63 Up, it would be ideal to first screen an edgier film like 35 Up or 42: Forty Two Up.  The earlier films are difficult, perhaps impossible, to find streaming, but the entire series (Seven Up!, Seven Plus Seven, 21 Up, 28 Up, 35 Up, 42 Up, 49 Up, 56 Up) is available on Netflix DVDs. 56 Up is streamable on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Kanopy.

The theme of the series at the outset was “Give me a boy of seven and I will give you the man“. This time, Apted asks this question directly of the subjects, with varying results.

As usual, the voluble Tony and the utterly unpredictable Neil are the stars, but I got more out of the stories of Symon and Paul than I had ever before.  The biggest surprise for me was the earnest do-gooder teacher Bruce, who I hadn’t ever envisaged as a jovial family patriarch.

63 UP

Michael Apted is a big time director (Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist).  It is remarkable that he has returned so faithfully to his subjects in the Up series. 

I saw 63 Up at the Mill Valley Film Festival, with Apted in attendance. Apted is now 78, and hopes to direct 70 Up if he still has mental acuity. Apted acknowledges that his biggest mistake was not including enough girls at the outset (four girls out of fourteen kids); he’s tried to address it by expanding the roles of several of the male subjects’ female partners.

The Up series is significant and unique cinema – see 63 Up if you can.

MARRIAGE STORY: the comedy helps us watch the tragedy

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MARRIAGE STORY

Noah Baumbach’s family dramedy Marriage Story, one of the very best films of 2019, traces two good people who care for each other at the end of their marriage.  It’s a heartfelt film about a personal tragedy that has some of the funniest moments on screen this year.

Charlie (Adam Driver) is a theater director and Nicole (Scarlett Johannson) is an actress.   They are married with an eight-year-old son Henry.  Nicole’s career is taking her to California, while Charlie’s is anchored to his beloved New York.  Adults might be able to manage a bicoastal relationship, but the kid needs to have his school and his friends in one place or the other. 

The two try to complete an amicable divorce, but their disagreement over the kid’s primary home unintentionally plunges them into a litigation nightmare, with a cascade of stress added by the lawyers and the courts.  It’s been written elsewhere, but I need to add that Nicole and Charlie are horrified by a system that is working as designed.  There’s a wonderful shot of Charlie and Nicole sitting apart on an near-empty subway car, exhausted, bereft and unable to support each other.

In a masterstroke, Baumbach introduces his lead characters with each spouse’s assessment of what is so lovable about the other.  Then we sober up when we learn what prompted the essays.

We relate to both Charlie and Nicole, and Driver and Johansson perfectly inhabit these good folks, slipping into a deeper nightmare with each step in the process.  Near the end, the two have the raw argument that they had each been too nice to have before.

I think that the reason Marriage Story works is that Johansson and Driver can go through their characters’ pain with complete authenticity while amidst all the funny supporting characters.  

Laura Dern and Ray Liotta play top echelon Divorce Lawyers to the Stars. Alan Alda plays a sage older attorney who has lost something off his fastball.  Dern’s riotously funny performance is a lock for an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.  Dern, Liotta, Alda, Julie Haggerty, Merritt Wever and Wallace Shawn are each hilarious.  Azhy Robertson (Juliet, Naked) is very good as the kid.

At one point, the court appoints a child evaluator to visit Charlie and judge his relationship with his child.  Having any stranger parachute into your home, with your parenting rights at stake, would be stressful.   Martha Kelly is superb as an especially humorless evaluator, an oddball impervious to Charlie’s charms and oblivious to any of his positive attributes.  As things start going wrong, Charlie gets more and more desperate and the scene gets funnier.

Scarlett Johannson and Adam Driver in MARRIAGE STORY

Director Noah Baumbach’s screenplay is informed by the end of his own marriage to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. He acknowledges “a connection to the material”, but that it’s not only about his divorce. He is generous enough to write the character of Charlie with self-absorbed cluelessness about his impact to Nicole’s career aspirations.

I liked Baumbach’s first movie The Squid and the Whale, about his own parents’ divorce. But my reaction to all his subsequent work until now has ranged from to indifference to antipathy; “detest” is the adjective that springs to mind. Despite my bias, I gotta admit that Marriage Story is so, so good that it solidifies Baumbach’s place as an American auteur. Baumbach should head into awards season as the favorite for the screenplay Oscar.

A superb screenplay, superbly acted, Marriage Story balances tragedy and comedy with uncommon success. It’s a masterpiece, and among the very best cinema of 2019. It’s a Must See. I saw Marriage Story in early October at the Mill Valley Film Festival.  You can find it theaters now, and it will stream on Netflix beginning on Friday, December 6.