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Archive for the ‘Tom Conti’ Category

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

05 Jul

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence – directed by Nagisa Ôshima. WWII prisoner Of War Story. 123 minutes Color 1983.
★★★★
The Story: The Commandant of a Japanese prison in Java falls in love with a British prisoner.
~
As in In The Realm Of The Senses, Ôshima deals with love’s wildest extremeties.

He is a director of simple means. He does not inflate; he does not relate. The story unfolds before one’s eyes in eminent visual narrative and in scenes in which all is present that needs to be and nothing else.

So much for his skill.

The camera captures performance like no body’s business, and everything seen convinces and holds.

Four main characters work out this material, and three of them are not actors, but hardworking, earnest, gifted amateurs. Each has a world of performance experienced in him. But of the three one becomes an actor, Takeshi Kitasno, the famed Japanese comic, who sets down in it naturally, as comedians often do when they are called upon to act – Jackie Gleason being the most renowned example of this I know of. Somehow or other Kitasno does so too.

Two world-famous rock stars play the main characters.

Tyuichi Sakamoto plays the slight, powerful, Shinto-devoté commandant who falls in love at first sight with a spiritually-freer-than-he handsome blond prisoner.

Sakamoto’s job is to repress everything. For an actor, repressing means trying to hold back going to the bathroom. You squeeze. And the credit you hand this first-time actor is that you side with him because he is in so much pain. You believe in the frozen rapture of his discipline, his ethos, his meditation, his sword-play. There is not a moment uncorsetted, until the moment of letting go happens to him, and we see him feel the greatest ecstasy he has ever felt combined with the greatest shame.

David Bowie is not an actor, but he buckles down and works his part. In other arts, we have seen David Bowie as a performer of his own fascination. And why not? He is magically beautiful and he is endowed with enough neurotic eccentricity to scrub an ocean. He is, like Robert Downey Junior, one of the angel/devil beings, born to entice and to bless and to know it. He is shameless – good. But his eyes are always in charge. So it does not matter what Bowie’s face reflects. The character is inert. The inner actor is missing. This prevents us from moving towards him as a human.

This is often the way with non-actors. The idea that non-actors are naturally free and spontaneous is delusional. What is needed from them – and many notable stars do not possess it – is the lit candle of the calling. Bowie can be the part, yes – but Bowie cannot play the part.

Such is certainly not the case with Tom Conti, an actor of choice. In interviews, he criticizes himself for too much “acting” in this film, and at times it is true, but he has the ability to respond to an imaginary situation imaginatively, situationally, not as a performer or star or personality, but as an individual meant to act in it.

We have many fine prisoner movies. I would not number this one among them. Burt Lancaster is a bad actor but he is an actor, and so The Birdman Of Alcatraz works. Acting is a high calling. David Bowie is a gifted performer, but forming and acting are not the same thing, and we all know the difference. David Bowie is beautiful. In acting, beauty does not cross the bridge. When we find the candle of the actor lit, no matter how many beautiful creatures stand near it, Edward G. Robinson is whom we will look at always.

This film is a fictional account of the war experiences of Laurents van der Pos. Accompanying this film is a biographical documentary of Laurents van der Post worth more that the film itself.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: ENGLISH REALISTIC, HISTORICAL DRAMA, PRISON DRAMA, Tom Conti, War Story, World War II

 

Beyond Therapy

01 Apr

 

Beyond Therapy –– directed by Robert Altman. Lampoon. A bisexual dish blinds dates a ninny in a French restaurant in New York. 93 minutes Color 1987.

I should only give it half a star because I only watched half of it. Altman claims it failed because AIDS emerged at that time, but AIDS emerged five years before, and he is deluding himself. It fails because he has no bone interest in the material.

Julie Hagerty is too vapid to alert our interest, much less that of  the improbable goof played by Jeff Goldblum. All the characters are in therapy including the therapists, I guess, but I didn’t stay around to find out. My hour was up.

The trouble with the film is that a fundamental strand of Altman’s nature was exactly like that of the big studio hirelings he made it his business not to become. That is to say, he is exactly like Michael Curtiz or Allan Dwan if in nothing else than that he would like nothing better than to end one production at 5 PM and start another at 6. There are people who like working in a productiont, and Altman was one of them. He says so himself. So he would take up any project that ripened before him. If one withered before it fruited, he would seize on the next one lying around. He wasn’t a studio hack; he was his own hack.

In his case, however, this crap shoot way of working popped up some fine and entertaining pictures. The Company, his next to last film, emerged like that, and, when he took on Gosford Park, he admits he never thought it would come to pass. One way he was a master-film-maker was simply that he was so productive. He liked to work on all sorts of different genres. I don’t know what genre he thought he was working in here.

At any rate, sometimes he executes a film and sometimes he executes a film. This one is crushed by slapdash improvisations by bit players, and not quite rescued by the entertainment value of supporting players: Tom Conti is spot on as a bored therapist, and Glenda Jackson really knows her stock in trade as a therapist more balmy than her clients.

The fallacy of improvisation is this: improvisation is supposed to generate natural honest behavior in actors, but when actors are let to improves, they tend to fall into their personal schtick, which is no more honest than the falsity they are supposed to evade. The actual matter is that actors often go into acting to cut through their own schtick, their personality, to delve a truth deeper than the strip mining of improvisation ever can reach.

Also the film was made in Paris, which is supposed to stand-in for New York, which is just silly. It also accounts for the casting of Conti and Jackson, jetting in from across the channel. to play parts requiring Alan Arkin and Lily Tomlin. Pierre Mignot filmed it, of course, beautifully.

If you find 52-Pick-Up a riveting card game you might be taken with this picture. Otherwise, graduate to Go-Fish. This is by comparison a Doctorate.

 

 
 
 
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