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Postwar Drama
Two new videos tackle similar themes
By Noel Murray, Rob Nelson, and Jim Ridley
NOVEMBER 30, 1998:
On the wall--recommended new releases
Capitaine Conan/The Long Way Home--In many ways, Bertrand
Tavernier's World War I drama Capitaine Conan and the Academy
Award-winning documentary The Long Way Home couldn't be more
different, but they are alike in their surveillance of the postwar
landscape. War doesn't stop on a dime, both films explain. There are
occupying forces, refugees, and scars that don't heal overnight.
Tavernier's film follows (loosely and sometimes confusingly) a pack of
ruthless French soldiers, who after Nov. 11, 1918, are reassigned to keep
the peace in a small Romanian village. However, the men find it hard to
adjust to state dinners and guard duty, and it's not long before their
pent-up aggression explodes in a series of petty (and not-so-petty) crimes.
The plot revolves around court-martial proceedings, but the debate is not
one of law but one of appropriateness--how can you expect a war hero to
become a paper pusher? How are you going to keep 'em down on the farm after
they've razed Paris?
Similarly, The Long Way Home deals with displaced persons, as it
meticulously details the years between the liberation of the German
concentration camps (1944) and the foundation of the state of Israel
(1948). "The Jewish Problem," as it had been called for centuries,
threatened to choke a rebuilding Europe, as a decimated people wandered
between villages and military installations, looking for the remnants of
homes and family.
The Long Way Home begs for a sequel, to show how the Jews went
from overcoming adversity and building a new homeland to degrading the
Palestinians almost as shabbily as they themselves were degraded after the
war; but even the incomplete story is fascinating and loaded with context.
What lingers is the single-minded vision of a people determined to survive,
if only to show their children that the world can be just. --Noel Murray
Clockwatchers--Set in Anywhere, U.S.A., this keenly observed and
darkly comic indie is named for a quartet of office temps who toil at
Global Credit while receiving no credit of their own. Each of the four has
her own ironic way of coping: Paula (Lisa Kudrow) believes she'll soon make
it as an actress, but in the meantime she makes it with various
junior-executive jerks; Jane (Alanna Ubach) is an obsessive-compulsive,
counting the days until her wedding to a guy who's probably cheating on
her; Margaret (Parker Posey) yearns for a permanent job while relishing
every minor opportunity for sarcasm or insurrection; and Iris (Toni
Collette) is a sensitive shoegazer who longs for conversation but rarely
speaks, instead reserving her most intimate thoughts for the safe space of
her diary. As director Jill Sprecher keeps her camera in the cubicled
trenches, and as her sharp eye fixes on the most minute details in this
company of men, Clockwatchers begins to notice that the master's
tools might be used to tear down his office--or at least to pry open the
door a little wider.--Rob Nelson
Man With a Movie Camera--As part of its Soviet avant-garde series
of treasures from the silent Russian cinema, Kino International has
released a new version of Dziga Vertov's 1929 classic, a record of
dusk-to-dawn life in Moscow intended to demonstrate a new principle of
cinematic realism called Kino-Eye. The Soviet film theoretician conceived
of the camera as a disconnected eye, free to record events from superhuman
perspectives.
If that sounds dry, brace yourself for a shock: At less than an hour,
the film is a whirling delight, a kinetic overload of motion, elation, and
unrestrained optimism. Accompanied by a bustling new Alloy Orchestra score
that owes more to Carl Stalling than to Prokofiev, Vertov's plucky
cameraman (who appears throughout) dodges trains, prowls factories, leans
out of moving cars, and attempts to represent sound visually with pumping
pistons and whirring wheels. Lest we forget this is cinema, Vertov films
the audience responding to the film. Some of his wiggiest effects would
seem to violate the idea of verit. But that's the intoxicating power of
making movies--you start out trying to record realism, and you end up
animating a plate full of prawns.--Jim Ridley
Six O'Clock News--Documentarian Ross McElwee continues to
chronicle his life in this latest piece, which played on PBS two years ago.
Unlike Time Indefinite and the masterpiece Sherman's March,
Six O'Clock News finds the filmmaker turning his camera away from
himself and toward the media. McElwee develops a fascination with the way
reporters cover natural disasters, so he becomes a "storm chaser,"
following tornadoes and hurricanes across the country and interviewing the
people who have survived both the storm and the press. Six O'Clock
News is rather freeform, which gives McElwee a chance to talk to a
neighbor with a wall of TVs, to document an interview of himself done by a
local news crew, and to check on his old friend Charlene, who is recovering
from storms of her own.--Noel Murray
Off the wall--alternatives to The Big Lebowski
The Big Fix--The Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski (one of
the best and funniest films of the year, no matter what other critics say)
is not the first film to cross a rickety counterculture with the work of a
gumshoe. For example, there's this surprisingly deep California crime film
from 1978. Richard Dreyfus stars as a cynical private dick who gets hired
to track down a refugee revolutionary (F. Murray Abraham). The search for
an icon ends up becoming a search for something that has been lost by many;
and, as befits late-'70s malaise, what gets found is a betrayal of
everything a generation once stood for. It's pretty heavy, man, but it's
also pretty interesting both from a historical and from a cinematic
perspective.--Noel Murray
Cutter's Way--On a par with the two above-mentioned Big films is
Ivan Passer's low-key 1981 thriller, a darker but strikingly similar take
on the fate of '60s idealism. Here Jeff Bridges ("The Dude" in the Coens'
film) plays Bone, a laid-back, amoral hustler whose closest pal is Cutter
(John Heard, in a devastating performance), a maimed, embittered Vietnam
vet who rages against the country's power structure. When Bone witnesses a
tycoon's heinous crime, Cutter presses him to take action--a decision that
leads to revenge and redemption. In many ways this is Lebowski's
mirror image--a ragged group of '60s outcasts renewing its struggle against
forces of commerce and corruption--but Passer's hazy atmosphere of regret
and decay is unique and haunting. And the last shot's a killer. --Jim Ridley
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