Friday October 19
Beautiful and tragic, this story of the effects of economic dislocation on a working-class Argentinean family manages to avoid the problems (didacticism, dullness, cheerleading) that plague most social-problem films. If anything, the director (Tristan Bauer, whose first feature film this is) succumbs a bit too much to unmotivated aestheticism (lingering shots whose picturesque composition is their chief virtue, for example). The story–which centers on the self-questioning forced upon 45-year-old Ramon as his factory shuts down, the family moves to a shantytown, and his son is hauled off to jail–is simply told, beautifully photographed, and affectingly acted. Most of us are probably only peripherally conscious of the mounting hardship and chaos afflicting much of the third world over the past few years–the product of debt crisis and U.S.-backed austerity programs. This film can serve as an educator in that respect, but it can also be appreciated as good filmmaking. (JS) (Fine Arts, 4:30)
Men of Respect
Rain has been made and remade since the silent days, a vehicle for both Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford. This time Rita Hayworth plays the prostitute stranded in Pago Pago who is “redeemed” and then raped by a minister. The Reverend Davidson becomes Mr. Davidson, a missionary official rather than a man of the cloth, thereby offending no one but the intelligent. Curtis Bernhardt’s direction does nothing to make Harry Kleiner’s script seem less pedestrian–which leaves Hayworth the only reason to see the film. Her Sadie Thompson is breezy and fun, but one counts the minutes between musical numbers. Her singing is dubbed as usual, and the songs are second-rate (though “Blue Pacific Blues” was nominated for an Oscar for some unknown reason), but Hayworth delivers nonetheless. Her body is obviously “mature,” but when she dances it’s still a miracle of movement: “The Heat Is On” is steamy and erotic. Jose Ferrer plays the missionary as if he were Jose Ferrer; Aldo Ray plays the marine as if he were butch. The film’s 3-D neither helps nor hinders (1953). (DO) (Music Box, 9:30)
Man in the Dark
Joel L. Freedman’s To Protect Mother Earth, Brian Beker’s Lines of Fire, Arthur Dong’s Forbidden City, and Elise Fried’s Do You Take This Man: Pakistani Arranged Marriages. (Fine Arts, noon)
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There’s nothing particularly subtle about the visual symbolism in this French-language drama, written and directed by Marie-France Pisier; virtually the first thing the audience sees is a slow tracking shot up a phallic white lighthouse–a vain flourish of French male authority over women, children, and the natives of New Caledonia, where this story of sexual and political awakening is set. The time is 1957, the eve of the tropical land’s “upgrading” from colony to territory; that change of status, more illusory than real, parallels the tenuous distinction between childhood and adulthood in Pisier’s story of a pretty young woman and her adolescent daughter. Each woman is caught in an emotional tempest over her secret infatuation with a forbidden beloved. The mother, wife of the lieutenant governor, hungers after a handsome, rebellious young doctor; the daughter pines for her slightly more mature female schoolmate. Scandal and heartbreak are in the offing; so is a labor strike, a warm-up for the political and racial unrest soon to break the back of French colonialism. It all comes to a head, naturally, at the rite-of-passage celebration that gives the film its title. Adding warmth to this ironic study, adapted by Pisier from her own novel, is a collection of emotionally expressive female performances (not surprising, given Pisier’s work as an actress in such films as Cousin, Cousine and Celine and Julie Go Boating) by beautiful Kristin Scott-Thomas as the mother, Vanessa Wagner as the daughter, and Edwige Navarro as the daughter’s beloved. (AW) (Fine Arts, 4:00)
