Italics are mine

Review of "Cold War"

This could have been a masterpiece. Instead, the movie consists of a lot of disjoint scenes with plenty of gaps in-between so that we never relate to the main two protagonists and their so-called love story. First of all, let me say I really wanted to love this movie. I love black-and-white movies, and this one seemed to have all the ingredients for success in the foreign film genre. Second, I have to point out that perhaps the movie has been heavily edited to fit within one hour and thirty minutes, and so there is a possibility that the sorry state of the final product is not the filmmaker's fault. This being said, it should be clear by this point in my review that I'm flabbergasted by the positive reviews this movie has received and that I'm frankly going to pan it, so brace yourselves. (Warning: this review contains spoilers.)

The story is as follows. In 1949, a young blond-haired woman arrives for an audition at a new dance company in Poland, which is going to teach folk dance so that the students can go and dance on stage all over Poland and amaze their fellow citizens. The rehearsal pianist, who is about twenty years older than her and in a relationship with the school director (who is his age), decides that the young woman "has something", although we're told her female companion had the better voice. What she has, of course, is an attractive body, and he soon cheats on his partner with the young woman. We're never told of the school director's reaction at the betrayal. In fact, she never appears in the movie again, although she was a great character with principles (she didn't want her students to sing songs praising Communism and Stalin because she wants to stick to authentic folk art, but she is overruled). So this is the timeless story of a man and a woman of similar age are in a couple until the man hits a midlife crisis and cheats on the woman with a much younger woman. And in itself I'm not against that story line (I know plenty of women of the age of that school director who turn out to be bitter when they lose their looks and take out their anger and envy on younger women, including women only barely younger than them, so it's a little easy to pity her just because she's the wronged woman.) But we're never told what the man finds in the younger woman, really, or what she finds in him. What draws them together? He keeps telling others she's the woman of his life. She never says that about him. In fact he seems more like a case of raging hormones who is attracted by her freedom. It turns out he is drawn to freedom a lot more than she is.

So when the folk art troupe goes to Berlin, he tries to convince the young woman to follow him but he waits in vain by the checkpoint to West Berlin because she prefers to stay behind with the company manager, entertaining some Communist hotshots. The man becomes pianist in a jazz bar. Now I know enough about the defections of Bolshoi dancers to the West during the Cold War to be aware of the consequences of a defection for the people left behind. Do you think you will be shown such consequences in this movie? Think again. In fact you won't be shown anything that would cast Communism under a bad light. No shortage of food, no breadlines, just everything very rosy with the folk art troupe entertaining their countrymen. This also made it difficult to relate to the man's defection to the West. It wasn't clear what he was fleeing. He counted among the people who were doing rather well under the system because the troupe was being used for propaganda purposes. So what drives him to leave everything behind? Midlife crisis, I suppose.

Then one day he meets the woman again in Paris. Now, she's with someone. He too. They go their separate ways. Then the movie skips ahead to Yugoslavia, it seems, although it wasn't quite clear at first where the action was taking place. The young woman is still performing for the folk art troupe. The handsome pianist with his raging hormones goes and sees her. The company manager sees him. What do you know, two serious-looking men arrive at the theater during the performance and kidnap him. But thankfully things don't become any hard for him because they put him in a train that isn't going to send him back to Warsaw as the Poles wanted but instead will go to Zagreb and then Paris. Yes, it was quite obvious that the Poles would try to get him back after the humiliation of his defection, and he was just dumb to try to see the woman again. Thankfully he doesn't have to fight very hard to escape danger. There are so many "fade to black" transitions in that movie following by a new scene several months or years later that it was hard to care about the characters. 

Then the young blond woman shows up unannounced in Paris in the recording studio where the handsome pianist is working and they record an album together so that she can be famous. Now she's married (to an Italian, which allowed her to get out legally, although we also don't quite know why she would want to leave Poland, having missed her chance with the handsome rehearsal pianist), but we never see her husband. Clearly she doesn't have a lot of feelings for men. She gets into a relationship with the rehearsal pianist but they never seem to get along particularly well together. She even says at a party that she misses Poland. What does she miss about it, we never know. She stabbed her father with a knife because, in her words, he mistook her for her mother, and she doesn't seem to have any friends. But, lo and behold, she picks up her things and leaves Democratic France to return to Communist Poland. Frankly I didn't believe that turning point for a moment. Now, I'm aware of people who had escaped the Communist block and decided to return because they couldn't adjust to life in exile (the stories I'm thinking about are in East Germany), but my understanding is that people who did that had left families behind and they were clearly ill adjusted in their new country. The woman has a published record and artistic success. She comes across as dumb and spoiled when she throws the copy of the record that the handsome pianist offers her into a fountain in Paris. Even more nonsensical is that our pianist with raging hormones chooses to return to Poland to be with her, when they've never seemed to be in love but rather in lust the whole time. 

And what happens then? We see the young woman visit a labor camp and, surprise, the handsome pianist is in a camp for fifteen years. His hands have been injured so he can't play the piano anymore. Do you think we'd be given a hint about how he feels, whether he feels it was worth it to run after that woman? Think again. But the spoiled blond woman announces she's going to get him out. Fade to black. In the next scene, many years later, the blond woman sings some songs with a Hispanic theme, she's in a couple with the manager of the folk art troupe, they have a son together (about two years old), and yes our handsome pianist has been freed. How remains a mystery. It would have been good to show the woman struggle a little, have obstacles thrown in her way, something to make us care about her. But whatever these two decide, they achieve. The woman seems drunk and after her performance asks the handsome pianist to take her away from there. She shows absolutely no interest in her son. In the end the two of them return to the abandoned church near the folk art school, perform their own wedding ceremony with no witnesses, take sleeping pills and go and sit on a bench at the bus stop, presumably to wait for death. Do they regret not staying in Paris? Or are they just two selfish two-dimensional characters who do whatever they feel like and have everything miraculously happen in those many "fade to black" moments? Perhaps the ending could have involved them doing something for other people, but they're clearly too self-absorbed to care.  

The best part of the movie was Jeanne Balibar's cameo as Juliette. Twenty-five years ago back in Paris I adored the work of Jeanne Balibar and the rest of Arnaud Despleschin crew (Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos, etc). I particularly liked Balibar because she was pursuing brilliant literary studies at Normale Sup until she decided to go into theater, joined the Cours Florent and saw her career skyrocket. I've always felt sorry she decided to focus on singing more than acting after her first few movies. 

The movie did raise some questions for me, which is the sign of a not completely terrible movie. Those questions had to do with: what is home? Is it Poland or France for our protagonists? Perhaps I would have cared more about the story if the movie had been longer, with more scenes to fill in the blanks, and I'll be curious to learn if any scenes had been cut. As is, my advice is: don't bother.

Review of "The Naked City"

 I've been wanting to watch this movie ever since Jennifer Egan mentioned on the New York Times Book Review podcast that it provided her with inspiration when she researched the atmosphere of New York City for her book Manhattan Beach, because it was filmed on location in New York and shows the city in the 1940s like few movies ever did. (Also, it is a black-and-white movie, and I love those.) The premise is that a young woman is found murdered in her bathtub by her maid and the police must find who did it. The Naked City is a solid B movie with good acting and a tight plot, but for me it has really survived into the 21st century because of the views of New York. I haven't missed the city so much in a long time, although today's New York has little left in common with the New York of 1948. I also liked the narrator's voice-over, something movies today don't do, and was moved by the bit at the end (this might be half a spoiler, sorry) about the reputable doctor being taken advantage by the younger crooks. Now that I'm older it is easier for me to understand how people let that happen to them. So, it was a good "film noir" I would recommend to people who love New York. 

Lynn Nottage's Play "Sweat" at Dallas Theater Center

Some plays receive awards because the competition the year they were in the running turned out weak. Others receive awards because they are so good that they crushed any competition they might have had, dazzling with their plot turns and delivering sucker-punches that leave the viewer deeply moved long after seeing the play. Lynn Nottage's Sweat, in a solid Dallas Theater Center production at the Kalita Humphreys Theater, belongs to the second category. 

It is hard to know what to write about the play without giving away key plot points so I will start by staying the obvious: go and see it. The first scene didn't quite work for me (one of the actors was overacting), but the production quickly hit its stride and had me riveted on my seat, in spite of the narrative structure going back and forth between 2000 and 2008. Every conflict in that play was pitch-perfect. Some of the scenes that took my breath away include the one where the woman who joined the factory at age 18 talks about the dreams she had had of quitting after 6 months and going to visit the world with her boyfriend (but she chose to remain at her blue-collar union job instead and never left Berks County), the violence that is hinted at in the blurb of the play finally happens (it is not quite what you think) and the very last one that shows the aftermath at the bar. I was also moved by the depiction of the two drug addicts in the play, especially the one who doesn't start out as a drug addict. 

The play hit close to home because I spent 11 years in Lehigh Valley, PA (12 years if you don't count my sabbatical), which is mentioned once in the play, and Reading, PA was only one hour drive away. I met once someone at Air Products once who lived in Reading, I'm not sure if it was because his family was from there or if it was because he was able to afford a big house for very cheap, but I remember someone talking about the very high poverty rate already back then, and having seen the Lehigh Valley after the demise of Bethlehem Steel, I can believe Reading was named the city with the highest poverty rate in America back in 2011. (The poverty rate was about 40%. I am told things have been improving.)

For me those workers who gather at the bar after their shift could have been Bethlehem Steel workers in Bethlehem, PA back in the early 1990s. I've stopped viewing Bethlehem as home a long time ago (I love Dallas too much to be nostalgic about it), but I've lived the longest there of any place I've lived since I moved to the U.S., so it still means something to me to watch a play about people who could have been my neighbors back then. 

Because of the recent layoffs of 43 employees at the Dallas Morning News, including their culture critic Chris Vognar, the play, which features a strike and someone who crosses the picket line to do the job at much lower pay than what an union employee would require, also made me think in unexpected ways about today's economy. Undoubtedly this free review of a play I've seen on my own personal blog does not affect the long-term economic prospects of theater critics and other culture journalists, but what of free professional review sites that are financed through advertising? Yet, people have the right to do what they want - write for free to get their names out there, read for free to avoid paying for content they can find online easily.

Newspapers still haven't found a compelling way to define and sell a financially viable product. After reading about the re-organization, I felt that the Dallas Morning News wants to focus on local news and not on news about books or movies that readers can glean from the New York Times Review of Books or rottentomatoes.com. Yet there is value in hearing multiple experts on the same topic, particularly when they disagree with each other. Perhaps syndicated columns would work best, with multiple newspapers in different markets sharing the cost of paying an employee's salary and benefits. Or should journalists develop a fundraising or patronage model? It is time to try groundbreakingly innovative solutions to the problem of newspapers' financial viability in the digital age - something that goes beyond defining the specifics of a paywall. 

Quite obviously, unpaid reviewers do the job of paid reviewers for free. We like to think that a byline in the Dallas Morning News or the Dallas Observer is a sign of quality while some blogs would be better left unseen, but clearly that was not enough to keep the Dallas Morning News employees their jobs. Sweat only talks about unionized factory workers, but the increased precarity of just about every job in the United States is staggering. Tensions run high in the play between the union workers and management, the union workers and the young man who crosses the picket line, the white workers and the non-white workers. Tensions run high in the country too. The play offers no solution, except for the theme of education as a way out of this mess and a glimmer of decency in the last scene. But plays don't have to make policy. They have to move us, to shake us, to increase our understanding of our fellow countrymen, and to make us view the world in ways we hadn't imagined before. Sweat succeeds superbly.  

Homer's Odyssey as a Self-Help Book

Back in November 2017, Daniel Mendelsohn stopped by the Dallas Museum of Art while he was on book tour for his memoir An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and An Epic, which recounts his seminar on the Odyssey one year at Bard College, followed by a cruise down the Adriatic with his father, following on Ulysses's footsteps. I loved his talk so much I bought his book, and after devouring his book in one weekend I bought the actual Odyssey by Homer in the Robert Fagles translation.

I really love that translation, the poetry in the choice of words, the way the language flows,  and while I haven't read as much of it as I should (I'm a long way from finishing it), I was reminded to pick up the book at a reading of excerpts of The Odyssey I attended in Dallas a few weeks back. So now I am past the chapter where Ulysses convinces Calypso to let him sail home after spending seven years on her island, and because the quest for home has been a major theme for me for many years, I've been asking myself how much the story can shed any insight into my next steps in life. 

In Bethlehem things were easier in the sense that I knew I hadn't found my home. Dallas is more complicated, because Dallas as a city is phenomenal: symphony, opera, a Regional Tony-winning theater, indie movies, indie bookstores, the Met in HD, the Bolshoi at the movies, restaurants, ballet, theater, an Amazon fulfillment center nearby to give me same-day delivery if I feel like it, 2 airports, you name it, Dallas has it, and of the utmost quality to boot. Everything is very close: about 6 minutes max from where I live and 12 minutes from where I work. My quality of life is simply phenomenal. For me Dallas is a paradise, especially after the years in Bethlehem.

Yet recently I've been asking myself whether I've found my home or whether I've wandered onto Calypso's island, because work wise, the environment has its challenges, for reasons I won't get into. So while my broad environment has brought me much joy, my immediate environment has provided some serious headaches too, and it is only through my immediate environment that I will fully utilize my skills and contribute to the world. Plenty of people go to the symphony or the opera in Dallas, or more generally consume the available entertainment. Whether I participate in it or not will not change a thing. Where I can have an impact is through my work, and I'm not sure the conditions are there for me to pull it off. But maybe I can bring them about. Maybe I can make it work. Or am I kidding myself? Am I just listening to a siren's song? 

Sadly, The Odyssey doesn't provide much advice on living, except if you believe in praying to Hermes or Athena. (You may not mind praying to the shopping gods, but here Hermes is the god of trade, commerce and travelers.) Both Circe and Calypso ultimately help Ulysses leave them, so perhaps if you're lucky, the people who have been keeping you tied to a place will send you on your way after they realize your place isn't with them. But Ulysses always knew home was Ithaca where Penelope was waiting for him. Where is home for us wanderers? Where is the tradeoff between wanting an enjoyable environment with great quality of life and fully utilizing your skills by playing your edge? When do you know when you have found home? What do you compromise on and what do you refuse to give up? Or do you just wait until, like Ulysses, you decide you've had enough and it is time to continue on your path?

So, it's complicated, precisely because Dallas is an amazing city to live in. But at least I have The Odyssey to keep me company.

Musings on Maria (Callas)

Back in December I finally got to see the movie Maria on Callas, a documentary that recounts Maria Callas's life based on her own interviews and the interviews of people who knew her. It is heavy on the interview snippets and footage of the time and light on the big picture, but I still enjoyed it tremendously. As much as I love opera, I've never much listened to Callas, until I saw Norma in DC back in 2013 (time flies...), wanted to get a recording and ended up with this, where she sings her signature role at La Scala. I loved it so much I spent an inordinate amount of time listening to it again and again on my 3-hour road trips when I was driving down from B'lem to Bethesda and back, but it didn't make me want to hear Callas's singing in other roles.

I'm also fortunate to have this recording of her, offered by a student and his mother after he had graduated (long story as to why, which I can't get into in order to protect the student's privacy), and that book+CD combo I got at the Juilliard Book Shop a few weeks before I left the East Coast, thinking it'd be nice to know more about Callas and then finding other things to read. I never got around to listening to the CD from the book+CD combo until I saw Maria on Callas and then I was floored by how good she was and saddened by the way her life turned out. 

After seeing Maria on Callas I watched Tony Palmer's movie about her, a more traditional documentary that gives a better analysis of her life. In both movies Callas proves herself very shrewd in commenting on human nature, people who betrayed her or tried to bring her down, although she didn't give details, yet she allowed Aristotle Onassis's betrayal to completely destroy her. The Tony Palmer movie explains the constant battle between Maria the woman and Callas the artist: after she had scaled unheard-of heights as a soprano, she also wanted to know a sweep-her-off-her-feet love story. (She had married a much older man who served as her manager.) Onassis, Greek like her, was one of the richest men of the world, although the movie presents him as a womanizer and a shady character. Callas was particularly vulnerable because her voice started giving signs of strain so it became all-important for her to "go out with a bang". Marrying Onassis would have provided that bang. Instead, Onassis dumped her and married Jacqueline Kennedy - a woman far less talented than Callas, but evolving in powerful circles and more conventionally attractive.   

Now, if Onassis hadn't come about, would the end of Callas's life have been much different? It wouldn't have taken the turn of a Greek tragedy, but given the signs of strains on her voice, it is unlikely that she would have remained in the opera world much longer. What would she have done? She tried to reinvent herself, directing operas and conducting masterclasses, but her heart wasn't in it. What a terrifying prospect, to have been put on earth to mesmerize the world doing one thing, to have done it, and then, as someone quoted her as saying to him (I paraphrase), to spend the days waiting for death to come.

Reading Faulkner

Last month I finally read Faulkner - Faulkner's stories, that is, for a book club I took part in. Like Shakespeare, Faulkner is an icon of the English literature whom I heard about back in high school (in Belgium) twenty-five years ago but truly discovered rather late in life. While I adore Shakespeare's plays, I doubt I'll ever love Faulkner's works a third as much, but I was amazed by his insights into human nature and the originality of his plots.

Most of the stories we read have been collected in this book, although the one that stuck out most in my mind, The Unvanquished, is not. (But it makes a chapter of Faulkner's eponymous novel, which is easy enough to get.) I liked The Unvanquished because of the grandmother, a woman with great resilience, grit and outright "spunk" in spite of her old age. The characters are unique and clearly defined, and have strong motivations that make for spellbinding conflict.

(Warning: the following paragraphs contain spoilers.)

The first story of Faulkner's I ever read is the first one in the book, Barn Burning. In it, a young boy tries to warn a landowner that the boy's father is going to set fire to his barn, but the landowner arrives too late. I watched The Long, Hot Summer starring Paul Newman last summer (a very bad movie that even Paul Newman couldn't save) and interestingly enough, Barn Burning recounts the incident that kicks the young boy out of town, while Long, Hot Summer follows the boy, now grown-up, as he returns to town. Although I knew the story's ending because of the movie, Faulkner's prose still took my breath away. The story just gripped me and didn't let go.

Another story that I couldn't stop thinking about was Dry September, a story where a white thirty-something spinster, who had once been the life of the party and realized last that she wouldn't get married, accuses a black man of assaulting her. This results in the black man's murder by a posse of white men, in spite of the white barber's insistence that the black man didn't do it. The white woman's female friends give her fleeting attention, but soon everything will return to normal, except that the black man's death weighs on the white woman's conscience. She has a breakdown where she can't stop laughing hysterically.

When we discussed this story in the bookclub and the book club leader asked what the woman's problem was, an older woman with her hair dyed brown, maybe sixty-eight years old wanting to look fifty (in other words, not young but not the very elderly people the book club can attract), exclaimed gleefully "she didn't get picked up!" When you saw the sheer delight on her face, you could only imagine how life must have been for an unmarried woman in the South sixty or seventy years ago. What stayed with me in the story is that the woman hadn't been a particularly mean or vicious girl growing up, in fact it seemed that she had been quite popular and just as nice as the next person, and yet her life went off track (because of her parents, if I remember correctly). She committed that awful act, accusing an innocent black man, and in the end it only succeeded in pushing her further off the deep end.

Two other stories I recommend are A Rose for Emily and Centaur in Brass. I have to say, I didn't see the ending of A Rose for Emily coming. It is told for the point of view of the townspeople, who believe that Emily is an odd, harmless but determined elderly lady and who speak of her in a somewhat condescending tone, so I didn't think the smell outside the house that they get rid of without telling Emily was that of a corpse and I didn't think she had used the arsenic she had bought from the pharmacist to kill him. (I thought she might want to kill herself.) It's only at the end of the story that we find out that she keeps the corpse of her beau in a bedroom upstairs. He thought he could leave her? He should have thought again. Obviously she was unhinged, but she is such a great character.

If Barn Burning and The Unvanquished have Ab Snopes as the "bad" character (barn burner and horse thief), Centaur in Brass is about Ab Snopes's son Flem, who is supposed to come back so ethical and handsome in The Long, Hot Summer (under the name of Ben Quick) and, in Faulkner's story, is stealing brass from the factory he supervises but is ultimately defeated by his black employees. I always love a good story where both sides are very shrewd.  

That Evening Sun was also quite stunning in its description of a black woman's fear that her violent man has come back into town. It is not clear he did, the story is told from the point of view of the young children of the white man who employs the black woman and they clearly don't believe he's back, but all the signs point toward him being back nonetheless, and the woman being about to be killed.

I haven't written a story in many years, but reading Faulkner's stories made me remember how much I liked the genre, back in the days. 

"Antony and Cleopatra": RSC vs NTLive

 Not too long ago I got to see the NTLive (National Theater) broadcast of Antony and Cleopatra, with Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo in the title roles. This is the advantage of living in a wonderful city like Dallas, with so many the cultural opportunities, including theater broadcasts at the Angelika right next to SMU. I’ve always been fond of that play, because it is the first Shakespeare play I ever saw, back in 2009 at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, and it so happens that PSF will present a new production of the play this summer. After seeing the broadcast I watched the DVD of the 2017 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production directed by Iqbal Khan and starring Antony Byrne and Josette Simon. For this blog I want to compare the two, but for those of you who don’t have the time to read blog posts past their first paragraph, my one-line review is that the RSC version is superior in every way.

First, the setting. The RSC version wisely keeps the play in ancient times, while the NTLive production sets it in some vaguely modern setting where army officers, some of whom arrive in submarines, wear neat, clear-colored, freshly ironed military fatigues or crisp military uniforms that make them look like they are wearing Halloween costumes. It has become fashionable to set Shakespeare plays in modern times, and when the plays tell us something about mankind’s unbridled ambition or thirst for power, there certainly is a case for the transposition. Recent broadcast productions of Julius Caesar and Macbeth did so to great effect. But Antony & Cleopatra is about the love between two sovereigns, and there is little to be gained in reminding us that love for a woman can bring a man down, except to emphasize the fact that women rulers might have been more common in the Antiquity than today. In addition, designers in the NTLive production, in the pre-show features, made a big fuss about Cleopatra’s dresses, including the replica of a yellow dress that Beyonce is said to have worn but this made Cleopatra look like a bored housewife from the upper society circles who is more interested in looking sophisticated than ruling over a country. In fact Cleopatra looked like her husband was off to war and she didn’t really rule over anything except the heart of an old soldier from the enemy’s camp. The Cleopatra in the NTLive production looked like “the wife of”. She was so enamored of Antony it looked like a miracle Antony was the only one who had to worry about power intrigues and place coups. In contrast, the Cleopatra in the RSC production looked like a queen. It wasn’t about her clothes, usually fairly simple although elegant, but it was about the way she carried herself, and little details like the manner her hair was pulled up high over her head. That was a woman ruler I believed in. I do have to give NTLive’s Sophie Okonedo credit for an outstanding last scene at the monument (with a live snake!) She really nailed it there.

My favorite actor in the NTLive production was Tunji Kasim as Julius Caesar, who gave a solid performance as a poised and determined young leader, but there was a clearer theme of generation rift in the RSC production where all the young men seemed hotblooded and eager to fight.

I found myself quite bored by the NTLive production, which pretended to offer something fresh in giving Antony’s camp the look of an army of today and shed no new insight on the play, giving it instead a vague hybrid look. At times I was so bored I started imagining more thought-provoking productions, including a gender-bending one I dubbed Antonia and Cleopatro, in a world where women wage war and men rulers are oddities. (If you’re going to talk about female rulers today, you might as well emphasize the lack of them full out.) Other ones I thought about were set during the Vietnam War with a U.S. general in love with a Vietnamese woman, or something in Russia in the eighteenth century with Cleopatra looking like Catherine the Great.

Everything in the RSC production was superb, from the sets to the costumes to the lighting, and the change of expression in the actors’ faces, for instance when Cleopatra learns Antony married Octavia or Antony is told Cleopatra is dead, shows a dimension of theater acting that places both Antony Byrne and Josette Simon among the great actors of our time.