'Teeth' (Melbourne Film Festival)

High school student, Dawn (played by Jess Weixler, resembling the love-child of Reese Witherspoon and Kate Winslet), is a goody-two-shoes promoter of waiting-til-you're married before having sex, and gives seminars to fellow students to that effect.
Unfortunately, she is also afflicted with a rare condition well-known to feminist theorists as 'vagina dentata' in which the organs denoting gender have the capacity to 'de-flower' males with whom she copulates.
This ponderous difficulty makes for a delightfully playful film, rather as if 'Election' was crossed with 'Girl's School Screamers'. A clever hybrid, rather in the way that 'Hot Fuzz' cross-fertilises 'Bad Boys 2' with 'Midsomer Murders', 'Teeth' has the droll fortitude of 'Groundhog Day' too, as the unfortunate lead drily endures their horrible position.
Dawn makes the most of her predicament, taking revenge on her brother from Hell, releasing a howl of delight from the audience, but the chief pleasure of the film is in the perfect casting of Weixler as the prim, squeaky clean girl who was happy to wait, but can't quite resist the temptation to find out what happens when...
Of course there will be those po-faced killjoys who point out that the film's underlying moral could be construed as conservative (and did so with recent frolics '40 Year Old Virgin' and 'Knocked Up'): give in to lust outside marriage and you will commit a sin tantamount to grievous bodily harm, if not manslaughter.
Amazingly, there were two walkouts at the screening I went to. Some people, as we know from observing the Mormons, are defiantly committed to not enjoying themselves.
The film had the same mordantly self-satisfied tone as comic short 'Happiest Day Of My Life', also shown at the Melbourne Film Festival, an LA wedding skit, in which roles are reversed and the women adopt the parts played by men in formal marriage rites, another satirical exercise that worked through all of the enjoyable consequences of its own inversions.
The film-maker introduced the short, which we would never have otherwise seen were it not for the Festival, though Film Festivals are rarely events to be celebrated so much as endured, the enforced viewings brought about by scheduling together with the concern that many films will never be seen again, or released at all, drives you to attend screenings you would otherwise avoid and brings on that peculiar sensation, 'film festival psychosis', in which the sufferer feels tormented by the conviction that he is constantly missing something, only to give in to the blurb-writers' puff and find out that he's missing nothing at all. Also that awful sensation of sitting through films with no merit, appeal or real value at all, interminable longuers, patched together out of various exercises in pretension, searching for but failing to find the way to rouse the emotion they long to evoke, while several hundred of us wait in the dark for something to happen which never comes about, experiencing that kind of headcrushing boredom only film festivals know how to bring on, then filing out and hearing that particular kind of sniggering among the relieved audience which can only mean, 'That was awful, why did we all put up with it?' Anyone who complains is told that they don't understand 'the Asian sense of Time'. But of course we put up with it because every now and then something like 'Teeth' comes along and provides an evening of pure delight.

Woman In The Dunes (1964)

Let us pretend that this story does not happen in Japan, that it happens instead on the moon, and were it not for the occasional visitations by men who lower supplies by rope into the giant pit, we could be anywhere... Mauritania, the Gobi desert, Antarctica.
But there are certain concrete details: the village nearby has run out of water, the woman in the pit is charged with digging for water, her house will be engulfed if she does not keep digging. If her house is engulfed the village will be lost as well. If she stops digging the villagers come and shout at her to carry on. The villagers bring the entomologist to the hole into which he descends by rope ladder and then remove the ladder, ignoring his cries for help.
But what is it about this oddly surreal fable that makes it all the more believable, because it is set in Japan? What is it about our perceptions of Japan, and Japan's perceptions of itself that make this pared-down drama of a dual between a man and a woman seem all the more realistic than it would if were set in Europe or America?
It is a version of Robinson Crusoe, and Happy Days, but it is also a reverse of John Fowles' The Collector, in which a young man takes captive a young woman. The sexual passion which flares up between the two is a peculiar product of the imprisonment which in turn produces a child that in turn convinces the man remain in the pit with the woman, a spin on the old problem of getting stuck in a rut.

Valery Gergiev in Rehearsal (1997)

Gergiev is not only a great conductor and a good Russian citizen for putting his local orchestra back at the top of the international league, but a fascinating, inspiring and charismatic figure. In 2002, he guided three young conductors in Rotterdam through a series of masterclasses ('The Master and His Pupil'). This is one of the great documentaries about mentoring, teaching, instruction, direction and guidance, and has something about it both of the 'Karate Kid' and 50s Westerns 'Tin Star' or 'Rio Bravo', the irascible older man teasing and tormenting, disciplining and shaping young, gifted but occasionally silly talent.

Unfortunately, 'The Master and His Pupil' is still not available on disk, but there is this fascinating consolation-prize from 1997, when Gergiev led the Rotterdam orchestra through rehearsals for the Prokofiev 'Scythian Suites'.

The pairing is doubly, trebly interesting, for Gergiev himself comes from the southern states of Russia, Ossetia in the Caucasas, a district known historically as 'Scythia', and the 'bright wildness' of these ancient peoples scared invaders off, centuries ago. That spirit Prokofiev attempted to capture with his bright, jagged music in this orchestral suite which ends with the astonishing 'rising of the sun' sequence, when the sound reaches a brilliant sustained crescendo which in Gergiev's hands becomes a moment of blinding zenith and riveting drama.

Prokofiev's son, Oleg, stands by and gives some intriguing comments to the camera. Archive footage of the premiere, photos from the period, and interviews with Gergiev make this a remarkable disk in its own right. As well as a concert version of the Scythian Suites, the Rotterdam Philharmonic performs Stravinsky's Fireworks and Piano Concerto with Alexandre Toradze as soloist, Debussy's Le Martyre De Saint Sebastien.

The Tin Star (1951)

Henry Fonda is Morg Hickman, a cynical ex-sheriff turned bounty hunter who helps young, recently appointed acting Sheriff Ben Owens (Antony Perkins) with his craggy advice, his cynicism hardwon by experience, and his gun.
Immensely likeable Henry Fonda does not particularly want to help Anthony Perkins, but if he wants to get paid for his most recent bodybag-delivery as bounty-hunter, then he has to hang around in town and he might as well help the stsruggling young sheriff.
Perkins has exactly the right quality of edgy determination and haplessness to let you know he can't do his job but that he will press on regardless. Like Gary Cooper in High Noon, he has a struggle on his hands and the town aren't going to support him against the bad guy, in this case, Bart Bogardus (Neville Brand). Like Sheriff Chance in Rio Bravo facing off the bullying Burdette brothers who don't have respect for his authority of the law, Perkins doesn't seem to have much chance, but now he has put on the tin star he can't take it off.

Ace In The Hole (1951)

Kirk Douglas played the villain in another key noir, Out Of The Past (1947), but his baddie here is altogether more chilling and compelling. Chuck Tatum is a hard-boiled reporter down on his luck who washes up in Alberquerque riding in his brokendown car hauled by a pick-up truck like a chariot.
After insulting the editor of the local rag, Jacob Q Boot (Porter Hall), he gets a job that he doesn't want, but having no money to pay for his car repairs, he has to stay anyway.. for two years.
By now, he's ropeable, so the editor sends him out of the office to a rattlesnake festival two hours away. En route, he stops at a tiny place called Escuando, and hears that local miner has got stuck underground, hunting for Indian pottery.
Sniffing a story, Chuck blags his way into the mineshaft and finds Leo, his leg trapped under a rockfall. But Leo Minosa (Richard Benjamin) seems more concerned that his violating Indian ghosts has brought about the collapse.
But to Chuck, this is his story, and he calls it in, creating what we now call 'a media frenzy'. Back then they called it a circus. Soon a vast carnival has assembled under the New Mexico sky. Chuck is in cahoots with the local sheriff (Ray Teal) who is seeking re-election and both decide to build the story. They persuade a reluctant Smollet, the mining engineer, (Frank Jacquet) to take the long way in to rescue the marooned Leo, and his fate is sealed. Seven days later they have a nationwide headline story, and a dead miner on their hands.
Chuck gets his comeuppance when he tries to start acting morally. His attempt to remonstrate with Leo's disenchanted wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling) end in disaster.
Billy Wilder's film is a noir under a clear sky, a thriller that becomes a satire, a satire without any laughs, and a more bitter indictment of the modern media than Citizen Kane or Network. Long neglected, the film is at last available on Criterion in a deluxe edition with a long interview with Wilder on the second disk. Halfway through the movie, I had a flashback to the last time I saw the film, in a Welsh kitchen in 1986 as a first year student, and the film seems more disturbing now than it did then, for the cynical coercive mediua stuntmen, the spin-meisters have done much worse since.

Good Fairy, The (1935)

Preston Sturges wrote this script and it is his hand which lies on this comic wish-fulfilment fantasy rather than director William Wyler's, or author of the play, Ferenc Molnar. Maureen Sullavan is Lu Ginglebusher, rescured from an 'orphan asylum' by to work as an usherette in a picture palace, but rapidly finds herself taken out of that world and placed under the wing of hotel waiter, Detlaff (Reginald Owen) who can do nothing to save her from the admiring attention of bored, ageing millionaire, Konrad, beef king of Latin America, played with chattery gusto like a youthful Wiener King (Palm Beach Story) by Frank Morgan.
'Good fairy' Maureen Sullavan tries to keep up her vow of doing one good deed a day and she sees an opportunity when the millionaire offers to make her rich, a gift she realises he would make to anyone she cares to nominate. Here is her opportunity to bring 'Christmas in July', but who to? Not the orphanage, anyway. That never seems to occur to her, and at a loss she turns to the phone-book and selects the 'poor-looking' name of lawyer, Dr Max Sporum (Herbert Marshall). He is soon the recipient of 120,000 a yaer (kroner). But has she done the right thing?

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce (1975)

Chantal Akerman's three-hour study of three days in the life of a Belgian housewife - or is she a wife? There is no sign of a Mr Dielman, though Jeanne Dielman has a son, the vaguely moronic grown up boy whose sofa-bed she makes and puts away each morning. That is one of the rituals, customs, habits that she must repeat every day. Cleaning, cooking, bathing herself, shopping, taking lunch in a cafe, banking her income, and of course earning her income, which she does by entertaining gentlemen in the afternoons.
That we could then call her 'a prostitute' is perhaps made more complicated by the aesthetic decision taken by the film-maker to give equal weighting to the other activities in her day. By contrast, in other filmed portraits of 'women on the game' (Vivre Sa Vie, Belle De Jour, Working Girls) the women's other routines are glossed over and the performance of their duties is given most film-time, making the description of them as 'working girls', and nothing else, seem appropriate. Catherine Deneuve is a housewife who, bored of her eventless life, goes on the game; she then becomes a prostitute. Jeanne Dielman may not even be a housewife; she is a mother who cleans house, prepares food, washes herself, goes shopping, and earns income by welcoming men into her bedroom during one hour of the afternoon. What does this make her? It makes her 'Jeanne Dielman, 23Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles'. Quite simply, she is her address.
We see three of her clients, a white-haired old man, a youth, and a middle-aged Belgiques with a handlebar moustache. He is the unluckiest of the three, but we don't find that out until the 183rd minute of this careful, methodical study. this sequence of 'perpendicular' shots. Like the Dardennes brothers whose documentaries maintain an almost painfully steady eye on their subjects, Chantal Akerman likes to look from a certain distance, for long periods of time with an almost childlike unblinkingness. That quality may not be peculiarly Belgian, but for a small country an awful lot of people seem to get killed here, if all of the victims of the Poirot and Maigret novels are included. In this tiny notoriously neutral nation trapped between larger neighbours it has been their history to sit back and watch.
Chantal Akerman creates feminist films whose political concept matches their aesthetic form. On the same disk set, her films Rendez-vous of Anna, Je Tu Il Elle, Hotel Monterey, News From Home, and a documentary on Chantal Akerman, together with interviews with those who know her. and two early short films.

Big Steal, The (1949)

Mitchum was let out of jail to film this Don Siegel road movie, on probation after being charged with possession of dope, and looks the part. The only other film he made with Jane Greer, 'Out Of The Past', made it clear the pair had chemistry, and in this film they squabble pretty much until the final big smile for the camera shot.
It's a neat much ado about nothing caper, Mitchum and Greer pursuing a flim-flam man, Fiske (Patric Knowles) and his suitcase of cash, while being pursued in turn by Captain Blake (William Bendix), enraged that Mitchum has been impersonating him and stolen his passport. A Mexican police caption almost outwits them but in the big showdown the pair, unlike their counterparts in 'Gun Crazy' (aka. 'Deadly Is The Female', 1950), get away with their big steal.
The DVD includes a colourised version (faces and backgrounds tinted pastel shades) which is of interest only to illustrate how the movie's classy look derives in large part, not merely from its era but from its form: in black and white it has great style, colourised that style is harder to see and the film looks more like the cheapish production that it probably was.
The pace at which the scenes are played, the beauty of the two leads, the thrill of a road movie going down deep into Mexico (The Getaway, Three Burials, Y Tu Mama Tambien) and the easy nonchalance, the controlled recklessness that Mitchum brought to any part, together with the beauty of Jane Greer, the whole thing has something of the charisma of 'To Have and To Hold'.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)

A beautiful woman on a hot evening in the remote port of Esperanza somewhere on the Spanish main. Ava Gardner, possibly the most beautiful woman ever created, plays Pandora, a woman with the power to make men drop dead from futile devotion, the ultimate femme fatale, in fact, arriving at the very turning point of film noir in cinema history.
Ava Gardner is Pandora, but she is also a kind of Ingrid Bergman in Rick's, waiting and waiting for a man to arrive so she can get out of there, languorous, bored, worldweary. No man has ever managed to make her fall in love. She wonders if they ever will and is vaguely intrigued by the men who fall for her, and trails them along, perhaps to see if they will 'turn' her. But none do, until Captain Hendrik van der Zee's boat sails into the harbour.
James Mason is Captain van der Zee. He is also, it turns out, the Flying Dutchman, mythic Hollander cursed to sail the seas interminably until he can find a woman who will love him and that means die for him. An unlikely match: but we know it's going to happen, the two will pair up, because this is a movie and it's in Technicolor, and in the opening 'flash-forward' scene we watched as fishermen dragged up in their nets the bodies of a drowned couple...
In the first scenes of the film proper, Pandora's latest devotee, Reggie Demerast, almost dead from drinking, proposes to her and is rejected. He pops tablets into his own drink and swallows: it's poison! While she lazily pretends to play the piano, he pirouettes and drops like a stone.
As friends gather round, Sheila Sims accuses Pandora of heartlessness to which she responds with cool cynicism: she cannot be blamed for what men do to themselves in pursuit of her.
The film's literariness is unusual: it not only lards the story with mythic overtones but the script is written with ornate theatricality and some depth, which for the absurdity of the surface antics has Powell and Pressburger tendencies: superficially preposterous, but uncannily deep.
Shot in Technicolor by Jack Cardiff (Black Narcissus, Red Shoes, Black Rose), faces alter subtly from orange to yellow to green and back again: Technicolor introduces another preposterous tendency, but one which magicalises the image and makes it spellbinding. For religious reasons I try to avoid films that are not in black and white, but Technicolor is another form of black and white - the religious reasons that the film is spellbinding. Technicolor, like black and white, mythologises, though a film like Pandora with its generous helpings of mythologies (Carmen, Wagner, Pandora) hardly needs any help. But it is important to say that this fanciful, wispy looking film actually achieves that very difficult synthesis of realism and mythologism, much as the great Technicolor films of the era also managed to do: the Wizard of Oz, The Red Shoes, Reap The Wild Wind. The colour scheme heightens, amplifies, intensifies and deepens the illusion, resembling not reality - which we want to escape - but the dreams we would like to have. This romanticism is somehow missing from modern mythologies, say, the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter series where the blend of realism and artifice somehow leads to pomposity, earnestness, heavyhandedness and silliness, all of the things you would expect of films like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman but are somehow lead away from by the seriousness and depth of the thought and reading that has gone into the script.
Godard said we look up at cinema-screen while we look down at television.

Passenger (1961)

PASSENGER, Andrzej Munk, 1961-3 Poland

The final film of young Polish director of 'Bad Luck' (1960), a black comedy in which the little grey man of East European literature blunders through a series of misfortunes, in which he is mistaken for a Jew because of the shape of his nose, only to end up working as a camp for the German occupiers. In 'Passenger' (Pasazerka, 1963)) the Jews have been mistaken for people who deserve to die, and the camp guard is a woman, icily Aryan and Jodie Fosterish, called Liza.
The film contains at least one of the great sequences in post-war European cinema: the children descending the steps into the sealed chamber, accompanied by fat white-wimpled matrons and watched by Aleksandra Slaska (playing Liza, a minor SS supervisor). She stands on the far side of the wire 'unable to do anything' to prevent the massacre. Meanwhile a fellow guard pours white powder into the ventilation-shaft on the roof, rather ineptly, rather clumsily, haplessly doing his job...
In Auschwitz we are told, it is the sound of the wires singing at night which created perpetual terror in the inmates. We hear that sound in the accompanying documentary 'Last Pictures' (also on this admirable disk set from Second Run DVD, the UK releasing house now in the front rank of world distributors). What is Liza thinking as she stands there watching the queue of children descending into the charnel-house? What might she be thinking as she watches this? More importantly (for Liza is of course Slaska, an actor) is what the image prompts the viewer to be thinking, to experience, to imagine. Are we tempted by the questionable pleasures of watching such a film to empathise with the most unsympathetic people in the modern history, those who administered the death-camps of eastern Poland in the early 1940's, but did so with a kind of - dare we say? - conscience. The camera holds, and holds, until Liza is called away. She of course does nothing to stop the holocaust. The plot includes a segment (the film is unfinished and made up of surviving sections and portmanteau of stills put together by Munk's collaborator Witold Lesiewicz) wherein she does something to save Marta (a woman who fascinates her) from certain death, and to save a baby found in a pram after dozens of other babies had been incinerated. Then Liza is transferred and collects her bicycle, washes her hands of the whole fiasco, and walks away. Because she can.

Utterly chilling, and a marvellous artefact both from its period, the early sixties Polish new wave (evoked in interviews with Polanski in the accompanying doco) and from the 'holocaust era', a relatively early attempt to create art after Auschwitz.

Like Vigo, who left two films and two shorts, but an enduring reputation, Munk did so little (by comparison with the prolific and brilliant Polanski - five full-length features), but left a considerable mark as the best film-author of the Polish new wave. This kind of film-art it is tempting to put in the top drawer of all genres and styles for the effect it has on the viewer's mind is supremely elevating and humbling at once, while the helpless gallows-humour seems likely to be more appropriate in the end than melodrama or horror for treating this terrible subject.