WHAT FOREIGN FILMS HAVE YOU WATCHED LATELY?

[MikeBSG]

Today I saw a film I never expected to see in my life: "Liliom" (1934) the only movie Fritz Lang directed in France.

I was very impressed, in part because I've hardly read anything about this movie. The opening sequence, at the fairground where Liliom steals a drunken sailor away from a rival carnival barker, impresses the girl who will love him, and gets fired by the lady who owns the carousel, is rivetting. It is clearly the work of the guy who made "M." Charles Boyer plays Liliom, and he is a revelation as a rough-and-tumble lumpenproletariat.

"Liliom" is the movie "Carousel" is based on, and some of the scenes are a bit long. However, it ends with an interesting sequence set in the afterlife, which is half-"Metropolis" and half-comedy. (I love the scenes with the clerk who can't get his official stamp to work.) The musical score by Franz Waxman is terrific here. (Early use of theremin?) Anybody who says "Liliom" has an unhappy ending is crazy. Nobody sings "You'll Never Walk Alone," but it doesn't end with Liliom being sent back to Purgatory (as some people have said.)

The film is available as an extra on the DVD for "Carousel."

[JackFavell]

Mike -

I just loved Liliom. For me, it's prime Lang and I enjoy the darkly comic ending. Boyer is just great, especially in the ironic heavenly scenes at the end.

[MikeBSG]

I liked the ending. The use of the tears made me wonder if Powellandpressburger had seen this before "A Matter of Life and Death."

But then I think "Liliom" has only been subtitled for a couple of decades. Back in the 80s, the Cleveland Museum of Art showed it, but it had no subtitles then. (Interestingly, the DVD I saw the film on had an apology because the movie hadn't been dubbed into English.)

[charliechaplinfan]

I had to watch Liliom twice to fully appreciate it, it's a far cry from the American movies that Boyer made, his Liliom has nothing of the smooth continental lover about it, the first time I watched I kept thinking that he would change and appreciate Julie, of course he never does, he knows how hard she works for him but he won't change his behaviour unless it suits him. Lang's work harks back a little to Metropolis and shows the range and vision of the director, something wasn't always appreciated later on.

[JackFavell]

All I know is that reading the play in college made me appreciate the Lang version most.

it's so unsentimental, and works very well as an everyman tale... aren't we all a bit like Liliom? Maybe a bit nicer, or more loving, but we are all here on earth bumbling around, making the same mistakes over and over again, because that's the way we are made. Born to untimately fail, Our biggest human frailty is that we never know what we had till it's gone, and then we lose sight of it quickly again as life goes on.

[charliechaplinfan]

There is an everyman quality to Liliom but unlike Liliom most of us learn to adapt our behaviour to suit others too but he never does, that's what makes him hard to believe and that's what seperates Boyer's portrayal from Charles Farrell, I can't quite believe Farrell possessing these qualities in his portrayal, even though Borzage's direction and he sets are something else but I can believe Boyer's Liliom being uncaring to the core and understanding what he's doing to Julie even though he can't stop himself for behaving in that way.

[ChiO]

Friday night we saw KISSES TO THE CHILDREN (Vassilis Loules 2011) at the Greek Film Festival (Chicago edition). It is a documentary on the Greek Jewish experience during WWII, told by five survivors who were hidden as children. The interviews were overlaid with home movies from the time, photographs, pages from journals and letters -- most from those being interviewed -- and some stock footage. The soundtrack often included Sephardic folk songs sung during the interview. Three women -- two from Salonika, one from the Peloponese -- and two men -- one from Athens, one from Crete. Their stories differed in the details, but the overall arc was the same: not understanding how one day they are playing with friends in the street and the next in hiding with no friends, no parents, new name, fear. As one said, life went from games of tag and hide-and-seek to a life of tag and hide-and-seek (as stock footage of the bombing of Salonika was on the screen).

A motif was the train. For some, a train was a beloved toy that was abandoned when going into hiding; to others, it was how parents and neighbors were taken away to a place they hadn't heard of (Auschwitz); and, to one, it represented safety, an escape from Salonika (occupied by the Germans) to the relative benign security of Athens (occupied by the Italians at first). That theme was set up early when the camera slowly panned the pictures of the prisoners at Auschwitz, speeded up, then rolled to the side at breakneck speed so that the pictures looked like an upside down railroad track heading into nothingness. One of the most poignant stories was how the gentleman from Crete was taken to Athens by his Gentile wet nurse, who posed as his unwed mother. His parents did survive. When they met after the war, he was unable to accept that they were his parents.

Salonika, the center of Jewish culture in Greece, had 55,000 Jews at the start of the war, approximately 25% of the city's population. At the war's end, 70 had survived.

Director Loules flew in from Athens to attend the screening. He said that he not only wanted to tell the story of these five people, but the story of those who showed uncommon bravery in protecting them and the impact of war on children. He succeeded.

Last night we saw WELCOME TO ALL SAINTS (Sotiris Goritsas 2011), a black comedy about life at a public hospital (All Saints -- Irony alert! Nobody is!). Maybe it's just me, but comedy of the non-silent type in a language I don't understand often doesn't translate well. A line that reads as not particularly funny may be hilarious if I understood the inflections, possible puns, nuances, or innuendoes. It seemed to be stock characters from a poor imitation of Scrubs trying to reintroduce the themes of THE HOSPITAL and M.A.S.H. It fell flat. The reviews from the three people I saw it with and who all speak the language: one "It was funny. I liked it.", one "It was so-so", and one (Mrs. ChiO) "It wasn't funny at all." As Gus Portokalos would say, "There you go!"

[JackFavell]

Kisses to the Children sounds great, I don't know why, but I always feel compelled to watch anything about the concentration camps and those hiding from them during WWII. Just reading your review got me choked up a bit.

[charliechaplinfan]

I rewatched Raise The Red Lantern, a gripping story coupled with period sets and beautiful cinematography, how I adore Yhang Zimou especially with Gong Li. I think RTRL is my favourite of Zimou's films, it's unpredictable, Li's character is partly unreadable, unpredictable and for two characters, deadly. We don't properly get to see her husband, she is number 4 mistress and each night the mistresses wait to see who's lantern will be lit that night, it seems that mistress number 3 is out to cause trouble, whilst she has a friend in mistress number 2, whilst mistress number 1 has been around and seen everything and had to move up a position 3 times before, she never gets her lantern lit anymore. We don't get an awful lot of Li's backstory, enough to know that she has fallen on hard times due to her dad's death and she has to become a concubine to survive, a lot better than that of her maid who desires to be a concubine and not a maid and a master who thinks nothing of touching up the maid. Part of the fascination of this film is the set, the rooms of each mistress and the layout of the compound in which they live including the tower at the top of the building. The greyness of the compound making it feel like the prison it is and colours highligting the themes. A fascinating film.

[feaito]

Raise the Red Lantern is one of my very favourite films Alison. I could watch it over and over again. One of Yimou's best. Gong Li is a superb artist and one of the most beautiful women ever.

[MikeBSG]

Yesterday I saw "In Darkness" (2011), directed by Agneiszka Holland.

Based on a true incident about a Pole who ended up hiding Jews in the sewers of Lvov during the German occupation, this turned out to be a compelling movie, as strong as anything Wajda has made. The movie never lets the audience make easy assumptions about the characters and keeps you on edge throughout. I was lucky to see this on the big screen.

Holland has had an interesting career. "Europa, Europa," "The Secret Garden," "Washington Square" then cable work like "The Wire" and "The Killing." She moves between countries, languages and film and television. Truly remarkable.

[charliechaplinfan]

In Darkness sounds the kind of modern film that I would seek out. I'll keep my eye out Mike.

Raise the Red Lantern almost takes place in another world, it has a fairytale feel to it and has all the brightness and darkness that are in fairytales, only here the ending isn't happy. I agree with you about Gong Li, she's stunning. I picked up a book by a journalist called Xinran, about the lives of Chinese women, I don't know if she's an author you've come across Fernando but the storys she tells are true and page turners, here truth is far stranger and crueler that fiction. I know she's published in the US although she lives in London, her books have been well received. I'd recommend Voices of Chinese Women if you were going to start anywhere, it's about women who used to ring her phone in radio show and some of their heart wrenching stories. I'm reading another book at the moment in which she examines the Chinese girls who were either killed or given up for adoption and the lives of their mothers who were powerless to stop it.

[feaito]

I have never heard of Xinran Ali, thanks for the info and recommendation. I'll follow it. Well, it was due to your insightful post on Yasujiro Ozu that I finally got to see the unique "Tokyo Story" (1953)

[JackFavell]

Europa Europa is a great film. Very unexpected, showing the randomness of events and how one small decision can lead to life or death.