More Slant reviews! One documentary and one transgressive film that I liked quite a bit.
As a proud Powell and Pressburger completist, my chief complaint regarding Craig McCall’s 12-years-in-the-making documentary Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff is that we’ve seen the best material here before. Essentially an expanded version of McCall’s featurette “Painting with Light,” available on the Criterion Collection’s Black Narcissus DVD and Blu-ray, Cameraman covers the entirety of Cardiff’s career as an operator, technician, 2nd unit director, cinematographer, and finally film director through copious clips and interviews with collaborators, notable fans, and the man himself. It should be said that “Painting with Light” is arguably one of the best Criterion supplements; Cardiff explicates, with down-to-earth sardonicism, the inner workings of a Technicolor camera, and passionately discusses the painters that influenced the light schemes of the Himalayan nunnery. But after Cameraman runs dry on this material, and Cardiff’s relationship with the Archers ends, the film offers precious little in the way of biographical piquancy to compensate for its subject’s myriad of uninteresting projects.
The rare piece of transgressive art that’s more grimly meditative than satirical or allegorical, A Serbian Film’s most daring aspect may be the muddle of soul-searching it demands from its audience. With sickeningly smooth digital cinematography and a terminally rusted conscience, the film pummels an assembly line of taboos beyond the point of recognition—indeed, nearly beyond perversion. The filial kink and corporeal grittiness set out not to offend our rubric of taste, but to dismantle it, and thereby reveal the pensively anthropological nuance of their grotesqueness.
Pasolini’s similarly disturbing Salò bemoaned the manner in which fascism cultivates a world with two classes and no exploitative limits; one suspects from the title that A Serbian Film’s raucousness is meant to be taken as an analogous socio-political salvo. But aside from a sputtering monologue comparing Serbia’s masses to raped, dithering orphans, writer-director Srdjan Spasojevic’s content flowers with mostly psychological resonance; his film is better than the nationalist lividness that may have been its impetus.
…Few directors, however, have tackled social and personal shape-shifting as concretely or as intuitively as Jonathan Demme. Throughout his diverse yet unified oeuvre, characters are uncannily aware of what makes them tick, to the point that exposition is occasionally bypassed altogether. Something Wild, one of his best films, stylizes this strength of personality a step further with people who are addicted to reinvention, both as a means of expression and as a method of exposing absurdity. When Lulu (Melanie Griffith) catches go-getter businessman Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels) skipping out on a lunch check in a Manhattan diner, she’s wearing a straight, black wig and faux-voodoo accoutrements around her neck and wrists; before the movie hits the halfway mark, she’s exchanged this for a cozy, floral sundress and cropped, bleach-blond hair. By the time the film ends, she’s dragged Driggs through at least four iterations of herself, and done it all with a sarcastic smile not for the thrill of the moment, but the depth of possibility at her fingertips.
The aforementioned Loren Bouchard created and developed Bob’s Burgers with King of the Hill alumnus Jim Dauterive; for both writers, environments and relationships preclude premise and storytelling. So unsurprisingly, I’ve encountered—and sympathized with—fans of FOX’s Sunday-night lineup who’ve been reluctant to embrace Bob’s Burgers’s admittedly weak exposition. For starters, the pressures of a family-owned fast-food joint feel like fodder for a high-concept studio film that can squeak a few winking innuendos past a PG rating. Furthermore, the show’s pale, crayon-like color palette and five-o’-clock-shadow fetish seem to lazily amalgamate King of the Hill’s doodly aesthetic with Arrested Development’s instantly recognizable orange-on-white branding strategy. (The theme to Bob’s Burgers even prominently features a ukulele.) Despite all this sputtering, however, the half a season thus far aired has been a welcome attempt on Bouchard’s part especially to fuse Home Movies’s interpersonal orientation with more traditional situation comedy.
…It’s this, and the striking modernity of the gags, that have preserved The Mikado‘s glory in spite of its now-esoteric satirical content. (The easy laughs are often the deepest and most familiar: When the jilted betrothed Katisha attempts to expose the protagonist’s secret royal heritage, the crowd continually interrupts her with Monty Python-like nonsense.) And so the disappointment of the 1939 film adaptation of the opera by director Victor Schertzinger and producer/composer Geoffrey Toye, now out on Blu-ray, rests less on the clumsy hacking received by the already convoluted libretto and more on the awkwardness with which the play’s usually sharp comedy is rendered. To be sure, the fusillade of exposition provided by the introductory title cards makes David Lynch’s Dune appear narratively competent. But one feels as though he isn’t supposed to follow the story too doggedly here anyhow. What we truly miss is the half-smirking pomposity of Gilbert and Sullivan’s élan; the simplicity of the camera angles and by-the-book editing pace can’t quite keep up with the deftness of the music or lyrics.
WHAT HAPPENED WAS (1994, Tom Noonan). Like his very occasional collaborator Wallace Shawn, Noonan writes characters that reveal their hidden ferocity to one another by tedious degrees. But Noonan’s got a sense of cultural despondency that eludes Shawn, even at his most fervidly futile (The Fever) — in What Happened Was, Noonan’s directorial debut, television becomes a kind of oracle whose prophecies of comfort and illumination refuse to yield anything humanly useful. The movie was adapted by the director/writer himself, from his stageplay; the camera is perhaps predictably a bit too aware of itself throughout. (The lens flits between the windows of a dollhouse and Noonan’s own sunken, horrified eyes at the climax.) But Noonan and Karen Sillas, portraying work acquaintances on a hesitant dinner date at the latter’s apartment, rise to the occasion with explicitly cinematic performances–the former especially, offering an above-average manifestation of his middle-aged creeper shtick, emotes with minuscule gestures that evince his inner anxiety. (When his date serves a microwaved scallop dish, he lifts a piece on his fork, sniffs daintily, and bites down, his eyebrows rising.) When the script turns to the couple’s hobbies the drama derails almost like a Sherwood Anderson short story and spirals off, albeit with mesmerizing patience, into Greek grotesquerie. Still, my girlfriend Rachel couldn’t get through the first 20 minutes: “The characters are talking like they’re in a shitty play,” she commented. I imagine, however, that this is part of Noonan’s point. We’re all playing parts in shitty plays, and only by luck or confidence do we get to write our own dialog. (Next stop: Noonan’s The Wife.)
Picking up roughly a decade after the bleak if preposterous Pacific War milieu of 
If Feo Aladag’s shrill, soapy When We Leave is able to repeat its festival-circuit success with the U.S. theatrical press and AMPAS (it’s Germany’s official Oscar submission), it’ll likely be due to the feisty, termitic performance at its center. Sibel Kekilli, playing the scrawny, battered, Turkish-German mother Umay, deserves attention primarily for resisting the plodding stateliness of Aladag’s neophyte directing. Even in the wordless opening, which blinks us from a vague flash forward of violence to a cool gray hospital room where Umay lies in anticipation, the film apes the anticlimactic mood fetishism of Blue while seemingly forgetting Krzysztof Kieslowski’s subtle emotional cues. What follows isn’t much more encouraging; the new director admirably avoids mirroring the storyline’s physical turbulence with the churning grit of handheld photography, but the meditative camera angles and vibrantly burnt colors palettes make When We Leave one of the few eastern European woman’s issues films to be shot like a designer catalogue.
