Y Tu Mama Tambien is inauspicious, but like many great films, it reaches for and touches the world and humanity in everyday actions and seemingly small gestures. Here, for instance, we have teen sexuality, laid out with all its romanticism and reality, filled with the kinds of empty-but-meaningful gestures that define humanity’s desires and their foibles. Director Alfonso Cuaron is a highly personal director, but he’s always most interested in defining his characters in relation to the world they inhabit. His two protagonists here are immature and petty yet deeply human, reflections of a society that won’t admit it has given birth to them and which they, initially, want no part in. He gives us a profoundly human story, built on the eternal humanness of sex as a marker of adulthood and childishness, and given life by Cuaron’s wonderfully and contrapuntally painterly version of sloppy, slovenly reality. Continue reading
Film Favorites: Y Tu Mama Tambien
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A little switch-up, if you will, because I couldn’t watch a 1961 Cannes film at pace, but will get to it soon enough. So 1961 and 1962 have been flipped, after which the order shall return to normal…
In my review of Nights of Cabiria, I noted that Federico Fellini grew more fantastical and whimsical with age, and he became forever less entombed in the limits of pure realism. True, and it might be assumed that with whimsy and fantasy come happiness and warmth. To some extent, they did; Nights of Cabiria ends on one of the most singularly uplifting notes in all of cinema. But whimsy does not automatically imply joy, nor a new leaf. Fellini was still an angry, tormented, complicated man; he had simply developed a new filmic vocabulary for exploring his emotions, whatever emotions they may be. New storytelling mechanisms dictated how he would explore emotions, and not what emotions he would explore. His application of Hollywood romance and Italian/ French romanticism was not always an uncomplicated acceptance, but more often a dare. Fellini would follow romanticism and melodrama to their limits and see if he could come out the other side a believer. With La Dolce Vita, melodrama is a slaughterhouse, and you unravel from the other side in shreds. 
Bluntly, Inside Out is not a good film because it explores the inner regions of a child’s mind, nor is this a particularly novel concept. The girders of the screenplay strip parts from many films that rest on the subject of literalizing human emotion.. Winnie the Pooh, in all its facets, including the seminal duo of feature films by Pixar’s parent company, Disney, is implicitly about childhood emotions let loose in the forest of the mind. Eeyore is melancholy, Tigger is a deranged enthusiast and childhood id, Pooh is the curiosity balancing them all on a pin head. The Hundred Acre Wood is Christopher Robin’s free-floating mental space, scratchily drawn with free-floating ambition and tapered-off regions where the harsh scrawl fades into watercolor lightness to symbolize Robin’s emotions eventually trailing off into the great unknown limbo of pure empty whiteness. 
If you are a cinephile, it is a fair guess that you have seen your share of war-time romances, one of the stodgiest of all film sub-genres. But that does not mean you have a Soviet war-time romance, nor have you seen a Mikhail Kalatozov war-time romance. Kalatozov is one of the masters of world cinema (his later Yo Soy Cuba is both a passionate ode to a lifestyle and a perplexing, dumbfoundingly beautiful exercise in pushing the heights of camerawork to impossible achievements). He is not nearly as well known today as he ought to be (but the same can be said of all post-Eisenstein Soviet cinema, excepting Tarkovsky), largely because political lines in the sand were well entrenched by the time Cranes was made. He was bound to the lingering death of existing in a world with more interest in denouncing art than expressing it. At least Cannes got it right, putting political qualms aside and awarding The Cranes are Flying the Palme d’Or for its luminous artistic achievement, transcendent performances and craft, and its stunning ode to love and loss in a world that no longer knew the meaning of the former term. 
Federico Fellini, the grand master of Italian cinema, began his life behind a camera as a young lad among the neo-realists, a protege of sorts to De Sica and Rossellini and their own habits of redefining cinema forever. Fellini, like those masters of the form, sought to reject Hollywood convention and lay down a thick layer of everyday humanity with non-actors and grungier camera techniques less galvanized in Hollywood glamour and melodrama. This shift itself was a towering upheaval to the cinematic tradition, a tangible stimulant to directors everywhere to shake the foundations of film land and brace for impact.
It is hard to imagine a better version of Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World, and that is a troubling fact. Lit with a fluorescent technicolor expressiveness, this non-narrative documentary of undersea images is like a peek through the looking glass of another world, exactly the magical, alien world of whimsy and majesty that Cousteau dedicated his life to and dared to see in his dreams. With the soon-to-be seminal Louis Malle (who would direct through the French New Wave and then hop on over to Hollywood) by his side, The Silent World is a visuals-first extravaganza of lush, hysterical colors and evocative silences. All these years later, it is also, perhaps unintentionally, a showpiece for the arrogance of mankind, and the terror of humanity at its egotistical worst. 
John Sturges, mostly famous for his two later rugged process-driven films, The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, drew out a mostly forgotten niche of manly not-quite-action films. They weren’t really violent, but they had the soul of action entertainment in their braggadocio and mechanics-first brand of raspy storytelling. His two most famous films are given at least the repute of minor-classics, but he is not particularly associated with them. He was a man who worked with groups of talented actors, and they often dwarfed him in the final analysis, not because he was appreciably under-skilled, but because he always subsumed his skill to the mechanics of the narrative, and we as a society tend to focus on actors and narrative at the expense of directors. He didn’t have a truly unique style, so to speak, but he was an ultra-competent director, and arguably the ultra-competent director. And his competence never tipped over into out-right genius quite like it did in Bad Day at Black Rock. 
Has the cinema ever known the pleasures of a greater humanist than Jacques Tati? Charlie Chaplin, who Tati is generally compared to, comes to mind, but Chaplin at his best could draw fangs. His post-silent productions are nasty-minded masterpieces, works of barely-hidden discontent more than whimsical discovery. Tati could poke fun with the best of them, but never ruefully, and anger may not have been a word he knew. Certainly, it wasn’t a word he wanted to room with, or even walk in the same neighborhood as. Chaplin could love his audience or laugh at them, and he sold both as well as any filmmaker ever did. Tati was never not laughing, but always with us, never at us, and his laughs were laughs of love.
The Long Take 