Fairy tale goes fashionably retro-formalist

Spanish writer/director Pablo Berger’s second feature transports the titular Brothers Grimm fairy tale—Blancanieves is a literal translation of Snow White—to a mythical 1920s Andalucia brimming with flamenco dancers, bullfighters and other such regional kitsch. In keeping with the period setting, Berger relays his vaguely feminist revision as a monochromatic silent film, replete with title cards and antiquated effects. I attended a number of film festivals over the course of the last year where the film was screening and noticed a consistently divided response: viewers seemed either charmed or irritated. I fell more into the latter camp—in part because of the film’s incessant camp.

To give credit to the complexity of both Berger’s motives and the film’s layered qualities, Blancanieves is a peculiar beast, at once an obvious labour of love—the film could hardly have been easy to finance—and a work shrewdly calibrated to adhere to current cinephile fashion, such as retro formalism—à la Tabu, The Artist and Guy Maddin’s entire career—and fairy tale re-visitation, evident in various other recent versions of Snow White. It is an ostensible love letter to some Spanish past but is shamelessly pitched to an international market, sticking closely as it does to the broadest possible cultural stereotypes. It felt to me both pandering and academic, which is a rare enough combination, I suppose. Perhaps it is too much the supposedly critic friendly film—the sort that brings out the unfriendly side of this critic.

Our heroine is one Carmen (Macarena García), daughter of a beloved toreador (Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho) and a flamenco dancer (Inma Cuesta). Mom dies in childbirth, dad gets paralyzed by a bull named Lucifer, and so along comes Encarna (Maribel Verdú, Y Tu Mamá También). Like Phyllis Nirdlinger in Double Indemnity, Encarna worms her way into the family via her role as a kindly nurse, but once she assumes the role of stepmother she proves plenty wicked. The most appealing, iconoclastic spin on the familiar renditions of Snow White is the way Berger imbues Carmen with more agency and grit. Gender restrictions be damned, this Snow White is following Dad’s slippered footsteps into the ring. She becomes a great bullfighter. What else? Oh, the dwarves. There are seven of them. I guess they’re kind of funny.

I frequently felt frustrated by Blancanieves’ simplistic emotional landscape and its insistence on slavishly appropriating silent era tics without bringing anything very fresh to the exercise (this is what I meant when I called it academic). My favourite scene by far was the final, somber one, tinged with tragedy and genuine mystery. Yet when I saw the film for the first time in Toronto, Berger immediately took the stage afterwards for a Q&A and rather smugly confessed that he deliberately chose an ambiguous finale because he figured that would make the film seem smarter. So if it seems like I’m picking on the film, let me say that it’s kind of asking to be picked on. If you’re willing to simply take pleasure in its handsomely photographed surfaces, you probably won’t feel as ornery. 

                      

The Red and the Black: Two Powell-Pressburger Technicolor classics return on DVD

The last time I heard an audience collectively gasp during a movie wasn’t very long ago, it’s just that the movie they were watching was over 60 years old. Of course, it looked like new. The restoration of The Red Shoes (1948) by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation has been making the rounds since its 2009 Cannes premiere. I saw it with a full house at the Cinematheque Ontario last summer. It’s difficult to describe the sort of rapture it aroused, not only for older patrons clearly familiar with the work, nor for younger ones who may or may not have seen The Red Shoes before—I hadn’t—but also for several kids who probably weren’t especially concerned with the arduous work involved in correcting the shrinkage, dirt, and mold damage that had compromised the original negative—Technicolor being a three-strip process means you basically restore the same movie three times. Nah, I think those kids sat mesmerized before this deeply sinister, 134-minute fairy tale-turned-backstage ballet melodrama about the costs of artistic devotion because it was fascinating and otherworldly, beautiful and fluid, because whether they know it or not The Red Shoes fulfills the promise of the movies like very few movies do.

Criterion’s DVD and Blu-ray reissue of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s masterpiece delivers the fruits of this restoration, with all its depth, warmth and detail, its velvet shadows, startling hues and creamy hair, right to your home. The story is so carefully structured that home video rewards viewing it chapter-by-chapter, though you may find it hard to hit pause. As the charismatic and nefarious impresario Boris Lermontov—deliciously played by Anton Walbrook—says while synopsizing his Red Shoes ballet: “Time rushes by. Love rushes by. Life rushes by…” The rush of The Red Shoes emerges from its stylized condensation of a life in art, of rowdy youth quickly slipping away in favour of discipline, of the happy busyness of collaboration, of the ephemeral triumphs of theatre, captured through the use of real dancers, most notably our heroine, Vicky—played by the utterly natural Moira Shearer—gliding through deliriously artificial, subjectively-rendered choreography—Jack Cardiff’s camerawork is itself balletic—and colours so vivid as to resemble dream more than reality.

Watching the restored Red Shoes you begin to sense how Cardiff’s achievements with Technicolor—there really was no one better—signaled a fork in the road for how movies might look. We took the other route, I think, striving for fidelity rather than expression. At least that’s how it seems these days, when most large-scale filmmakers reluctantly embrace digital cinematography only as it approaches greater precision and crisper resolution. But things change. Time rushes by. At least the red shoes keep dancing.

Powell-Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (47) has also been lovingly re-issued by Criterion. Cardiff’s Technicolor imagery echoes Vermeer and Caravaggio to evoke yet another tale of troubled devotion, not to art but to god. Deborah Kerr’s Sister Clodagh is sent up a mountain to build a convent on top of a brothel, but the Himalayan winds that endlessly sweep through the sisters’ habits seem to carry whispers of the past. Ceiling fans and birdcages create strange geometries within the drafty convent walls. Repressed memories of youth, innocence, and lust seep in the cracks. There’s a sense of vertigo running through the movie, not only in the images of steep cliffs and looming towers but in the emotional dynamics incited by the precarious attempt of eclipsing one world with another.

This colonialist strategy doesn’t finally fare very well for the church in Black Narcissus, but it works wonders for Powell and his crack production team, who filmed this achingly gorgeous and exotic tale not in the Himalayas but entirely at London’s Pinewood Studios. Powell would often utilize locations to stunning effect—see bombed-out Canterbury in A Canterbury Tale (44) or Chesil Beach in The Small Back Room (49)—but he and Pressburger seemed to understand that the struggle of spirit and flesh they sought to depict would need to be realized in a heightened and highly controlled setting.

The only aspect of Black Narcissus that leaves me cold has something to do with its somewhat airy idea of India. I suspect this has something to do with Rumer Godden’s source novel, since Jean Renoir’s The River (51), also based on a Godden, has the same effect on me while being in virtually every sense a completely different sort of work—one shot on location in India. Nonetheless, each of the major characters, most of whom are British, are more complex than their archetypes would have it, and are played to the hilt, not only by Kerr but also Kathleen Byron, as Sister Ruth, and David Farrar, as Mr. Dean, who becomes the object of Ruth and perhaps Clodagh’s desire. Bryon and Farrar would be able to consummate their love in The Small Back Room, but in the meantime the peculiar tension they develop here remains deeply satisfying. Powell called this his most erotic film and he may he right. It’s certainly his most neurotic film—Peeping Tom (60) excepted—and deserves to be seen and re-seen for the arresting ways it conjures the unconscious at the very top of the world.

Twisted sisters: Bluebeard on DVD

Does Catherine Breillat instinctively think in pairs? There was something dizzyingly baroque to the catalogue of sexual encounters in her internationally scandalous breakout Romance (1999), while her brilliant follow-up, Fat Girl (01), felt pleasingly chamber-like by comparison. Fat Girl itself became part of a pairing, since that film was soon followed by Sex is Comedy (02), which functioned as a fascinating fictionalized meta-study of the making of a particularly arduous sex scene in its predecessor. Now comes Bluebeard (09) and, while also a period piece, it feels as lean and efficient at 80 minutes as its predecessor The Last Mistress (07) unfurled luxuriously at 115. Breillat’s films possess an unusual balance of incendiary subject matter and elegantly cool and controlled mise en scène. It’s intriguing that the sequencing of her output seems equally calculated for maximum effect. That being said, this effect only functions if people can actually see Breillat’s films. Bluebeard, which is itself another diptych, balancing one narrative within a framing device that proves to be a parallel narrative, arrives on DVD via Strand Home Video without having ever enjoyed a theatrical release in Canada. (It will actually have its Canadian premiere at this week as part of the Cinematheque Ontario's Breillat retrospective.)

The source material for Breillat’s latest is of course the familiar fairy tale first rendered into literature in the 17th century by Charles Perrault, who also delivered the beloved woman-in-peril fables Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood into posterity. Unlike those other stories Bluebeard has failed to find itself repeatedly adapted into movies. The titular serial wife-killer can be found lurking in the DNA of a handful of nasty adult thrillers, but it doesn’t seem very malleable to the tirelessly sanitizing forces of Disney. Yet as an allegory of sexual curiosity and feminine oppression rich in enduringly strange detail it seems tailor-made for Breillat, whose work has brought continual rigour to such themes, sometimes employing scenes of explicit sex, sometimes not. If Breillat’s films are shocking it has more to do with what they imply about the crosscurrents of sex, power and gender than how they push the envelope on anatomical depictions. If you think you’ve got Breillat pegged as a feminist, you should be equally aware of the fact that she’s also labeled herself, quite accurately I think, as a Puritan. Bluebeard suggests that mortal punishment may indeed await young ladies who choose to penetrate the forbidden territories of eros. In fact, the movie makes this suggestion twice!

The dominant half of Bluebeard, set in what appears to be 17th century France, concerns a pair of sisters, the elder Anne (Daphné Baiwir) and the younger Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton), forced to leave their convent when their father’s death leaves their mother financially unable to continue their schooling. They return home, where the furniture is being carted away by debt collectors, mom boils their wardrobes in black, and the dinner menu consists of such humble fare as grass soup—there’s an inspired black comedian behind these scenes, though humour is an aspect of Breillat’s cinema that’s often forgotten. Salvation of a most dreadful kind arrives in the form of a handsome young messenger inviting the bereaved family to a garden party held on the grounds of the wealthy and colossally corpulent Lord Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas). It’s commonly whispered about throughout the county that Bluebeard has murdered each of his wives. The sisters go anyway. Marie-Catherine is fascinated by the seemingly gentle giant, who schools her on the local flora and recalls Cocteau’s Beast more than, say, Joseph Cotton in Shadow of a Doubt. Bluebeard is equally drawn to the wide-eyed, optimistic and barely pubescent Marie-Catherine. She accepts his proposal of marriage. Among the most memorable images in Bluebeard are those of Bluebeard’s immense paw hovering over Marie-Catherine’s tiny hand, and of Marie-Catherine nestled like the tinniest sparrow in the crook of Bluebeard’s elephantine arm. Other memorable images include a trio of paper doll-like corpses suspended from a ceiling, and the arguably gratuitous close-up of a decapitated duck, a phallic spinal stump wriggling from its neck.

The other half of Bluebeard features another pair of sisters, the elder Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti) and the younger Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites), their costumes placing the period sometime in the middle of the 20th century, making their belated appearance something of a flash-forward. They sneak into the family’s off-limits attic where Catherine finds a book and, much to her sister’s repulsion—though, crucially, not her direct refusal—she begins to read the sordid story of Bluebeard aloud. Between passages they discuss somewhat related matters, including their humorously imaginative notions of what the term “homosexual” means. What’s most interesting in these short, often sinisterly playful scenes isn’t necessarily how they reflect a reading, both literal and analytical, of the movie’s primary text, but how they contribute to a particular idea of sisterhood as a potentially volatile testing ground for the push and pull of adolescent transgression. And it is no surprise that in each case the younger, braver, potentially doomed sister is named after Bluebeard’s writer/director. The original French title of Fat Girl, incidentally, was À ma soeur! You’ve got to wonder just what it would be like to be Catherine Breillat’s sister. The final minutes of Bluebeard make you glad you don’t have first-hand experience.