Monthly Archives: August 2016

  • Wiener-Dog

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Todd Solondz (2016)

    Wiener-Dog is a portmanteau film, its episodes linked by a dachshund bitch and by themes of futility and mortality.  The movie starts with the title character being deposited at a dogs’ home.  From there, she begins her odyssey through a series of four, increasingly old owners – a child, a thirty-something, an elderly man, an octogenarian woman.  The first owner – a nine-year-old boy called Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke) – is recovering from cancer.   The last owner (Ellen Burstyn) calls the dog Cancer; when her puzzled granddaughter Zoe (Zosia Mamet) asks why, Nana replies, ‘It seemed right’.  Visiting her grandmother for the first time in a long time, Zoe also questions Nana spending her twilight years in a house set at the side of a noisy major road.  The dog’s life ends there, when she wanders out into the road and gets run over by a truck.   Zoe’s rare visit to Nana is prompted by a need for funds – for herself and for her artist boyfriend Fantasy (Michael Shaw).  Three months later, a stuffed animatronic dachshund is a main exhibit at Fantasy’s latest show.

    There are funny lines, comic-sketch pleasures and arresting images in Wiener-Dog but Todd Solondz’s pessimism feels automatic and the story’s construction is negligent.  It’s messy that Solondz explains how the first change of ownership happens but not the subsequent ones.  When Remi’s bullying, bullhorn-voiced father Danny (a one-note Tracy Letts) has had enough of the dog throwing up and crapping, he takes her to the vet to be euthanised.  The vet’s assistant Dawn (Greta Gerwig, who’s affecting as usual) smuggles the animal out and takes possession of her.  It’s right enough that the dog’s reprieve is described; the rationale for not explaining her later transfers may be that the animal’s life is meant to be a proxy for haplessly fortuitous human existence.  But the dachshund’s cheerful inscrutability makes her too different from Todd Solondz people to function as an illustration of the human condition – and the writer-director’s approach comes across as more generally casual.

    The film’s third episode climaxes with her depressed owner strapping explosives to the dog.  Although he shows a sinister bomb disposal man inching towards the (unperturbed) animal, Solondz is otherwise indifferent to this cliffhanger.  It would make sense for the dachshund’s name to change each time her ownership changed – and there’s no doubt that Solondz attaches importance to names.  While she’s Remi’s pet, wiener dog is called Wiener Dog.  Dawn renames her Doody, which nicely combines her new owner’s sweet sentimentality and the excretory problems that, in effect, brought the dachshund into Dawn’s life.  Dawn’s own surname is Wiener:  this young woman is the adolescent protagonist of Welcome to the Dollhouse, Solondz’s first success, twenty years on.  The sad, superannuated film studies professor who turns the animal into an explosive device has the fine name of Dave Schmerz (and Danny DeVito is impressively unhappy in the role) but Solondz doesn’t bother to rename the dog during her time with Schmerz.  He then does so very emphatically when she moves to the moribund Nana.

    The death theme in Wiener-Dog would have more bite if there were more people in the world of Todd Solondz who deserved better.  These are in short supply since he’s deeply pessimistic partly because he’s strongly misanthropic.  The relatively likeable human beings – Remi, Dawn, Zoe – tend to be appealing in a similar register – they’re wan yet emotionally knotted up.  Solondz gives Dawn – perhaps for old times’ sake – a low-key happy ending.  Buying dog food for Doody, she bumps into Brandon (Kieran Culkin), whom Dawn knew at school, and agrees to go with him to Ohio.  When she asks him what’s in Ohio, he replies ‘crystal meth’; in fact, his younger brother Tommy (Connor Long) and Tommy’s wife April (Bridget Brown) are there too.  They adore Doody and Dawn leaves her with them.  (There’s no further narrative involving Tommy and Dawn – they don’t really count among the dog’s owners in the main scheme of the movie.)   As they drive away, Dawn and Brandon tentatively touch each other’s hand.  In contrast, Solondz makes things as miserable as possible for Remi.  After Danny has taken Wiener Dog to the vet, Remi’s mother Dina (Julie Delpy) doesn’t euphemise the dog’s disappearance by telling her son that she’s gone to a better place.  Returning her to the dogs’ home, with good new owners as a possibility, seems a more likely scenario then asking a vet to euthanise a basically healthy dog but Solondz ignores this.  In spite of the fact that Remi has already survived serious illness, Solondz prefers to show the child, through the loss of Wiener Dog, being confronted with mortality.

    Nana’s apprehension of death, at close quarters, feels less predetermined.   At first, her cynical, foul-mouthed wisecracking suggests a geriatric movie type.  Once she removes the dark glasses she wears indoors, however, Ellen Burstyn achieves shades of a different kind – her face starts to achieve a real weight of fear and regret.  Sitting in her garden after Zoe and Fantasy have taken their leave, Nana has a dream in which she’s visited by a succession of identical young girls (incarnated by Melo Ludwig), each of whom represents what Nana might have been.  This sequence – as well as being visually striking – is funny in things like the anti-climax of the selection of if-onlys incanted by the clone girls (‘if only you’d liked other people more, if only you’d liked yourself more, if only you’d left bigger tips …’)   The most simply enjoyable comedy comes in the Dave Schmerz episode, when he sits on a panel interviewing a prospective student for admission to film school.  This young man (excellent Charlie Tahan) is full of enthusiasm but bereft of cinema knowledge to such an extent that the panel ends up imploring him just to ‘name a movie you’ve seen – any movie’.  Funny as the scene is, it’s pretty obvious – and that goes for most of Solondz’s satire of the pretensions and frustrations of those who want to make it creatively:  Dave Schmerz’s doomed attempts, via one emptily encouraging agent after another, to sell a screenplay; aspiring actress Zoe’s desperate insistence to Nana that the bit part she’s landed is a big deal; the uncompromising, temperamental artist Fantasy (‘which is, actually, his real name’).

    Todd Solondz is working in this film for the second time with Edward Lachman (he also shot Life During Wartime).  Lachman’s cinematography adds lustrous substance to proceedings, whether or not the object of attention is conventionally beautiful.  The most remarkable example of this occurs when Remi’s parents go out, leaving him and Wiener Dog alone in the house together.  Solondz shows boy and dog rolling, in blissful slow motion, in a snowstorm of feathers produced from the insides of a pillow.   This is followed, after Remi has disastrously decided to feed Wiener Dog granola bars (‘I thought they were healthy’), by the camera moving, with fascinated languor, along the products of canine insides:  a seemingly unending stream of diarrhoea.  These juxtaposed sequences are both scored to Debussy’s ‘Clair de lune’.  Solondz’s rapt attention to the physically extraordinary is more discomfiting when he’s looking at people.  It’s discomfiting for this viewer because it makes me worry I have issues with these people’s appearance – until I realise that Solondz is deliberately encouraging this reaction, that it’s he who’s decided that Tommy and April should be a Down’s syndrome couple and to emphasise the extremely slow-moving bulk of Yvette (Marcella Lowery), Nana’s African-American carer.

    Halfway through, Solondz inserts a faux intermission, which introduces a song written for the film by Marc Shaiman. The dachshund travels a good deal in the course of the movie – Ohio, New York (for the Dave Schmerz part) and so on – and the intermission shows the dog superimposed on various American landscapes.  The shots are accompanied by Shaiman’s gutsy folk ballad (‘Wiener dog, wiener dog/Just looking for some shelter and a place to rest her head’).  This serves as a taster for the full song, which is played over the closing credits.  Its comic vibrancy sends you out of the theatre on a high – which is amazing, all things considered.  It will prove there’s no justice in the world – not that Todd Solondz needs proof – if  ‘The Ballad of Wiener Dog’ isn’t nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song.

    16 August 2016

  • Blancanieves

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Snow White

    Pablo Berger (2012)

    According to Mar Diestro-Dópido in Sight & Sound (August 2013), the writer-director Pablo Berger’s aim in Blancanieves is clear.  Berger relocates the Brothers Grimm’s Snow White story to Andalucía in the 1920s and intends:

    ‘… to examine the more populist elements of Spanish film history from the perspective of the present; and to reflect, in a personal and refreshingly nostalgia-free manner, on the country [of Spain], its history and its traditions through the prism of international film history.’

    Blancanieves may give pleasure to audiences who enjoy watching bullfighting, as well as to film scholars or, at least, to spot-the-auteur-reference moviegoers.  Diestro-Dópido again:

    ‘There’s German expressionism in the angular shapes of the long, shadowy corridors in the family’s lusciously gothic home; Eisenstein in the extreme close-ups on the contorted expressions of secondary characters; von Stroheim in the passion and determination of the female protagonist.  Throw in the names of Lang, Tournier, Duvivier and L’Herbier too, and Blancanieves feels like a film revelling brilliantly in the heterogeneity of its multiple influences.’

    This black-and-white silent-movie take on Snow White appeared in 2012 and was therefore also a timely arthouse stick with which to beat the more popular The Artist and that year’s brace of Hollywood Snow Whites (Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman).

    These factors combined to ensure that Blancanieves really got on my nerves – and the bullfighting did worse than that.  I’d been attracted to the idea of a primeval form of cinema narrative being used to tell a correspondingly original story (by original, I mean a story that goes back a long way, to one’s childhood world).   But the silent-cinema qualities of Blancanieves are no more than artfully cosmetic and the acting seems, for the most part, not so much stylised as monotonously overdone.  The film comes across as fancy melodrama with the sound turned off and intertitles in its place.  Those intertitles – the English ones anyway – sometimes appear in capital letters, for emphasis, and always refer to the heroine as ‘Snowhite’, making her sound like a cleaning product.  I found both these things irritating and kept wanting to shout at the screen IT’S SNOW WHITE!

    The story of Blancanieves is more or less as follows.  Antonio Villalta (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a renowned bullfighter.   When he’s gored (and serves him right), his traumatised pregnant wife goes into premature labour.  Antonio survives but his wife dies and he shuns the baby girl to whom she gave birth.  Carmencita (Sofía Oria), as she’s known, is brought up by her grandmother (Ángela Molina) – then the old woman dies and the girl is sent to live with Antonio and Encarna (Maríbel Verdú), the nasty nurse who looked after Antonio in hospital and, as soon as his wife died, determined to snare him in marriage.   Antonio, wheelchair-bound as a result of his serious injuries, wasn’t well placed to argue.  The socially ambitious Encarna rules the domestic roost and Carmencita becomes a Cinderella-esque drudge in the household; her father, who’s now forgiven his daughter, reads Red Riding Hood with her, as Blancanieves revels brilliantly in the heterogeneity of its fairytale references.  When Antonio dies, Encarna gets a foolish acolyte to finish off Carmencita (now grown up into Macarena García).  He fails and she’s taken in by a troupe of bullfighting dwarves:  they pit themselves, as a comedy warm-up to the main event, against a calf (bloodlessly – for them and it).   During the time she spent with her father, Carmencita learned from Antonio the matador’s art.  She now becomes the main attraction in the dwarves’ troupe and a serious fighter in her own right.

    The dwarves give Carmencita the name of Blancanieves – ‘like the girl in the story’.   So how come, in spite of this explicit awareness of their source material, the heroine’s team falls for the old poisoned apple trick?   Encarna, whose social climbing and scheming becomes exceedingly tiresome, gets a lifestyle magazine to take photographs of her swanky home.  She expects to see these on the front cover of the magazine and is horrified to find instead that Carmencita, now a bullfighting star, is the cover girl.  Vengeful Encarna turns up at the corrida brandishing a piece of fruit – just what you’d expect of a would-be socialite in the 1920s.  Her first attempt to get her stepdaughter to eat it fails but a second attempt succeeds:  the apple passes into the hands of one of the dwarves and Carmencita bites into it.  You’d think all concerned would know to steer clear of apples at important moments.  Although Pablo Berger can’t be bothered to update the Wicked Queen’s lethal weapon, his modernisation of the story means that the heroine not only dies but can’t be magically revived.

    One of the seven dwarves is jealous of Carmencita; another is female (or wears a dress anyway); four of the others are disappointingly undifferentiated personalities.  The remaining dwarf, Rafita (Sergio Dorado), is facially different from, and conventionally good-looking compared with, the other six; and he is in love with Carmencita.   He naturally brings to mind Hans, the lovelorn midget ringmaster in Tod Browning’s Freaks (albeit that Hans’ adored, statuesque Cleopatra is – unlike Carmencita – unworthy of devoted love).  In the absence of a handsome prince of normal dimensions, can Rafita somehow fit the bill?  The answer involves the only interesting element of Blancanieves, although it’s queasy too.   Blancanieves becomes part of a freak show posthumously.  Punters are invited to kiss her cold lips in an attempt to revive her; a mechanical device is used every so often to create the momentary, scary illusion that the corpse has come back to life.  When the freak show has closed for the night, Rafita sleeps beside the dead body of his beloved.  We see him kiss her and a mystifying teardrop falls from her eye (which Rafita doesn’t see).  The image feels like a pinch from The Innocents but the effect of this closing scene – literally a tearjerker, of a quasi-necrophiliac kind – is strongly uncomfortable, as nothing else in the film is.

    The lively, agreeable score by Alfonso de Villalonga is Nino Rota-inspired, to put it mildly.  (The martial music played at the bullfights is strongly reminiscent of the ‘Marcia stilo italiano’ in The Godfather: Part II; other phrases echo Rota’s compositions for Fellini movies.)   I can’t think of much to say about the cast, except that Sofía Oria, as the child Carmencita, is more distinctive and appealing than Macarena García’s adult version, and that Sergio Dorado is touching as Rafita.  One of Encarna’s early victims is Carmencita’s pet cockerel.  This bird gives a performance that’s arguably more nuanced than most of the human ones, although, when its image is superimposed on the screen in Carmencita’s memory, it inevitably brings to mind the Pathé News cockerel.  Maybe it doesn’t, though, if you’re not British – and I should confess that some of the Spanish cultural references mentioned in Mar Diestro-Dópido’s S&S review passed over my head with most of the movie ones.  Blancanieves was showing at BFI as part of a programme supplementary to this month’s Pedro Almodóvar retrospective – the adjunct group of movies is a diverse collection chosen by Almodóvar himself.  I’d forgotten, until one of the friends I saw Blancanieves with reminded me as we came out of BFI, that Talk to Her included not just a lifeless heroine but also a black-and-white silent movie sequence.  My friend also remarked – not unreasonably – that Pablo Berger’s film made you wonder if Almodóvar had chosen as his particular favourites movies that included nods to his own.

    5 August 2016

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