CLAUDINE JONES in SAN FRANCISCO
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Don Bridges Australia
Claudine Jones San Francisco
Michael Bettencourt Boston
Ren Powell Norway
Ned Bobkoff Buffalo
Lucille&Steve Esquerré New Orleans

      

April movies proved to be the usual mixed bag, but for the first time this year more prizes than dogs showed up--though possibly the best of the month, AMORES PERROS, was full of dogs, dog-fights and blood.  This complex film from Mexico contains such realistic dog mayhem that the distributors moved the usual Humane Society disclaimer from the end to the very start before an image or title appears on the screen.  Viewers may feel assured that shootings and stabbings of humans are faked but have to be re-assured that the same is true for animals.  Here the intensity of the snarling dogs driving toward each other is both totally convincing and a metaphor for the human interactions. AMORES is a dark vision of human behavior but not a simplistic one.  The three interlocking stories move toward a resolution that withholds as much as it gives, hiding love inside creepy or threatening behavior, producing a film that must be approached with caution but should be seen. 

In a similar manner, the fine second film by Christopher Nolan, MEMENTO, circles back time and again over the same events until the full story is revealed—or is it?  We are left with ambiguity piled on ambiguity since the main character, played by Guy Pearce, “can’t make new memories,” so that nothing he recalls can be trusted. Even the polaroids he makes to record events as they happen or the messages to himself that he tattoos on his body turn out to have multiple possible explanations, none of which can be entirely trusted. This is the kind of film that leaves the audience standing around afterwards talking about it.  The performances of Pearce, Joe Pantoliano and Carrie-Ann Moss make all this layering work.  (Nolan’s first film, FOLLOWING, had hardly any play in the US and is well worth tracking down)

The other gems of the month were the French  Academy Award nominee, THE TASTE OF OTHERS, again interlocking narratives that keep the viewer wondering about who is going to end up with who and how the various interactions will be resolved, this one, however,  done with a light and delight filled touch; Doris Dorre’s latest, ENLIGHTMENT GUARANTEED, follows two German brothers on a trip to Japan to spend weeks in a Buddhist monastery sharing the disciplined life of the monks  (what kind of enlightenment each achieves is another kind of ambiguity--the film ends with the two of them sleeping in a stolen tent in a park in Tokyo); and a documentary by Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow, THE SECRETS OF SILICON VALLEY, showing the less positive effects of the high tech industry on the workers who spend their lives assembling the pricey computers and peripherals that keep the internet, etc. flourishing. Filmed over a period of more than a year, SECRETS uncovers the rather sordid under-belly of the “Silicon Valley Success Story.”

Among the less satisfying but pleasant enough releases were BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY, THE DISH and KEEP THE RIVER ON YOUR RIGHT.  BRIDGET has many clever moments and some nice performances by Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, the men in Bridget’s (Renee Zellweger’s) life.  But in the end, it is pretty standard romance fare with the inevitable trio of friends/boosters (always these days made up of one simpatico female, one bitchy female and one gay male), which has become a kind of de rigeur Greek Chorus in romantic film comedies. Even less satisfying, THE DISH recounts the telecast of the first moon landing which had to be relayed through an installation in Australia, the largest Dish in the southern hemisphere. At times the comedy moves well, with that Aussie touch of irony, but overall it treats the moonwalk with such sappy awe that the aftertaste is quite cloying.

KEEP THE RIVER ON YOUR RIGHT is a documentary about painter and anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum, now 78, who spent much of his time 30 years ago living among tribes of headhunters and cannibals in New Guinea and Peru.  While the film does take Schneebaum back to both places, where he finds people he has not seen for 25 years or more, it is far less about those cultures than about this man who only one time tasted human flesh yet remains a gentle, beloved and humane, though haunted.  As can be clearly seen in the clips from various TV shows in the ‘70s and ‘80s, that sensationalist bit of Schneebaum’s history is what grabs people.  I, for one, wanted to know a lot more about the tribes he lived among and a lot less about Tobias himself. 

Lesser films of the month included the highly praised but not very gripping Brazilian ME YOU THEM; another Australian production, the clunky and rhetorical STRANGE FITS OF PASSION; and the latest in the stream of super-metaphorical, sleep-inducing Iranian films, THE DAY I BECAME A WOMAN.

Stage also produced a series of unsatisfying evenings. Berkeley Rep’s BIG LOVE takes on issues of love, sex, freedom of choice, male power and female rebellion with zest and, at times, great humor. The plastic covered, rubber matted stage becomes the scene of tumbling and bouncing, wedding cake food fights, tomato smashing, naked bathing, and assorted bloody mayhem. Mostly engaging as well as producing what could be the messiest aftermath in theater history.  On the other hand, the action kept grinding to a halt while character after character got to do endless-seeming monologues expounding their political positions on the subjects at hand. The result: fits of wild action interspersed with soporific interludes, perhaps designed to allow the audience time to rest up for the next manic bit.  Charles L. Mee’s script, however, cried out for some heavy-duty cutting of verbiage to let the physical action shine more brightly.

Thick Description’s production of Eugenie Chan’s RANCHO GRANDE, also did the best it could with a flawed script. The story of a Chinese family on a ranch in the Southwest tries to make sense of the cultural conflicts faced by children whose lives are filled with differing mythologies. In this instance, Chinese notions of family and duty, Mexican romantic ballads and the Cowboy ethos of the male roaming away from wife and kids to pursue masculinity through freedom and adventure. A semi-annual return to the homestead to check on the kids and spend a night of love with the wife fits Pa’s life just dandy but leaves Ma and the children unable to figure out who they are. The overriding tale of Moon Lady and her lover, Ox-boy, attempts to splice the three mythologies together with unfortunately rather limited success.  All the strengths of the acting and staging in this production simply could not overcome the script problems. 

ACT NOW!’s production of SHOW AND TELL showed people in a small town trying to deal with the aftermath of an explosion in a local classroom that killed all the children and left the teacher who had stepped out of the room at a critical moment alive and filled with survivor guilt.  A team of disaster experts has been sent in by Federal authority to find out the cause of the explosion. The conflict between the locals and Feds is intense--people demanding to take home the remains of their children vs investigators reluctant to tell them the truth--that the explosion was so severe there are no remains as such, only a jumble of body parts and bits of clothing that cannot be adequately sorted out. The passion and drama here is mixed with a great deal of technical detail and explanation of the process the forensics experts must go through, material the cast at times simply was not up to making real.  Many cast members got to play both members of the investigative team and local citizens.  Across the board they did much better with the locals than with the experts.  Whether that was inherent in the script or not was difficult to tell. Still the impression remains that of the three plays SHOW AND TELL has the greatest potential for being turned into a  powerful evening of theater.

 © 2001 Claudine Jones

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