Beware of Maya: Illusion, Cary Grant, Wes Anderson and Owen in Paris

April 20, 2014 / jpbohannon / Leave a comment

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Towards the end of Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the elderly Moustafa (played by F. Murray Abrahams) says this about his mentor, the concierge M. Gustav H.:

“His world had vanished long before he entered it. But he sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.”

And this reminded me of Cary Grant.

I saw three movies this week. And oddly–and not purposefully– they dovetailed into a similar theme. I was sick as a dog in the beginning of the week and so, lazing around, I watched two films on television.

The first was To Catch a Thief. How gloriously campy it now seems. Cary Grant’s ascots alone are only outdone by the sweet innuendos that he and Grace Kelly ad-libbed with Hitchcock’s permission.

Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief

It is all pure fantasy. Pure illusion.

One time, when Cary Grant was told by an interviewer that countless men would love to be “like Cary Grant,” he replied that so would he. For he knew it was all illusion: the sophisticated banter, the artless seductions, the calm equanimity. It was his job, being Cary Grant. In the end, Grant ultimately left the movie business when the illusion gave way to reality. His type of character–as unreal as it was–was no longer in fashion in the gritty, realism of modern cinema.

A few days later I watched Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. The entire movie is built on illusion, one that we all suffer from. The plot deals with the idea that we all believe that an earlier time was more exciting, more inspiring, more fulfilling. The fallacy of the belief is wonderfully depicted, as Owen Wilson’s character–Gil Pender–returns to the 1920s and falls in love with a beautiful woman whose dream is to live in the 1890s. Even in the presence of his literary and artistic idols, Wilson’s character comes to realize that the past is painted with gold dust and that our image of that past is greatly unreal.

Owen Wilson with Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway and Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein.

And in the end, it is all illusion. Many of us believe that another time was better than the one we live in. And some believe that, if only, they had been born at a different time their lives would be so much different–and better. (At this point read, E. A. Robinson’s poem “Miniver Cheevy” which is referenced in the film as well.)

And so, I finally go out and go to the movies and I see Wes Anderson’s The Budapest Grand Hotel. It is a beautiful movie to look at and the performances of Ralph Fiennes and his young protege, Tony Revolori, are extraordinary. But it too is all illusion. The world it describes is long gone, if it ever existed at all. And the heroism of the film–if it can be called such–is that Fiennes’ character maintains the illusion that that world still exists, still matters. And we are even more removed from it than he.

And after all that is what movie making is about. Sixty years ago, Cary Grant left movie making because he believed the magic had left, that hard-nosed grittiness had blown the magic away.

But that is not the case. Most of the time, we still go to the movies for the magic. Whether it is the unreal pleasures of the moneyed classes in Monte Carlo or the time-tripping adventures of a sincere romantic in Paris, the movies still provide a good dollop of magic. And in The Grand Budapest Hotel all that magic comes full circle. For not only is the set and the landscape and the costumes and the cartoonish villainy not part of our real world, but even the characters themselves are clinging to an illusion, to a world that has longed passed, but which in our “Golden Age” memories is a thing of refinement, class and excitement…more civilized world than the one we know.

Movie Review: Frances Ha (dir. by Noah Baumbach) —-running in place and getting nowhere

July 22, 2013July 15, 2013 / jpbohannon / Leave a comment

Frances running through the streets of Brooklyn

Frances runs a lot during the course of Frances Ha. She leaves a restaurant and runs to the ATM, she runs to work, she runs to her parents in Sacramento, she runs back to New York, she runs to Paris, she runs from New York, she runs back to her old college, and she returns again to New York. And until the end, she doesn’t get anywhere. She’s just running in place. She is hapless and feckless and lonely and dangerously stuck in the past. And she is endearingly quirky.

Frances is played by Greta Gerwig who also co-wrote the screenplay with director Noah Baumbach. (There is a follow-up collaboration already in post-production, tentatively titled Untitled Public School Project). She–like countless others–have come to New York, because it’s the world’s biggest stage and she is a dancer. However, we are to infer, not a very good one.

So we follow her trajectory as she breaks up with her boyfriend, as her roommate leaves to move in with her mate, as she “crashes” in various friends’ apartments, and as she is “fired” from her job. What is a poor girl to do? Certainly, she makes some bad decisions–an impulsive trip to Paris on her credit card and a friendship shattering tantrum at a restaurant–but ultimately we know she is decent and hard-working, and we hope that things will pan out for her.

I had seen the trailer for Frances Ha a few months back, but hadn’t put it on my “must see” list. Then I saw an article in one of the free newspapers that ran with this headline:

“Woody Allen Call Your Lawyers…Someone has Stolen your Style.”

Greta Gerwig as Frances in Frances Ha

So of course that sent me to the theaters. (I didn’t even read the article, just the headline.) The “stolen style” is the cinematography. It is filmed in black-and-white, and there are scenes that very much have a “Woody Allen” feel: New York street scenes, a shot going down into the subway, a scene around a table in an up-scale apartment, a family Christmas dinner. These all very much LOOK like a Woody Allen film.

However, the similarity stops with the dialog. What, I assume, is meant to be witty and quirky and insightful is not. It simply does not come off.

Instead, we follow Frances (and her friend Sophie, played by Mickie Sumner) as she stumbles forward, sometimes awkwardly and sometimes ineptly. And we want to root for her except that we often lose interest in her. No doubt that her travails are all true to life, but more often than not it is simply that–true to life. And life is often not all that interesting to watch.

I realize that Gerwig and Baumbach both have solid credentials in films about life’s wry moments. Baumbach has successfully co-written with Wes Anderson and has written and directed such films as Margot and the Wedding and The Squid and the Whale; while Gerwig has been working–non-stop it seems–with directors as varied as Daryl Wein and, yes, Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris), while increasingly taking part in the screenwriting, as well. But Frances Ha left me wanting something more.

I want to like Gerwig and Baumbach’s work. I want to very much. I am excited about what they are trying. But so far, I am lukewarm with the results. I feel as if I know what they are trying to say, to do, but it is not coming across.

I feel as if they are running in place.

Movie Review: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie by Luis Buñuel

June 24, 2013June 24, 2013 / jpbohannon / Leave a comment

painting of Luis Bunuel
(artist unknown)

Towards the end of Midnight in Paris, the main character Gil (Owen Wilson) suggests a movie idea to a young man accompanying Salvador Dali. The man (played by Adrien de Van) was Luis Buñuel, the Spanish filmmaker and poet who caused a outrage with his first two films, Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L’Age d’Or (1930), both collaborations with the surrealist painter, Salvador Dali. The latter film was banned for nearly 50 years before it had its premier in the U.S. in 1979.

(By the way, the movie that the Owen Wilson character was suggesting was Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.)

Buñuel and his compatriot Dali were at the forefront of surrealism and, while their artistic vision was not embraced by everyone, both men practiced their art well into old age. And while the difficulty of surrealism coupled with Buñuel’s savage attacks on the bourgeoisie and on religion might have distanced himself from much of the mainstream audience, he was quickly seen as a seminal figure in film and one of its greatest directors. His films won or were nominated for major awards throughout the world.

Both his anti-religion and the anti-bourgeoisie attitudes are in full display in Buñuel’s 1972 film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. And of course, the entire film is surreal...and quiet funny.

While plot has never been the most stringent part of Buñuel’s films, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie focuses on three couples and a series of quirky events and odder dreams that continually prevent them from dining together. There is also a Catholic bishop who asks to moonlight as one couple’s gardener. (It is typical of Buñuel that the bishop performs the most brutal action in the film.)

There are gentle stabs at the military, the police, and the upper-middle-classes, but overall the film is relatively light–at times even farcical. Etiquette is important to the three couples–and propriety–despite the fact that the men are drug smugglers and their life style is founded on drug money. They talk about the proper way to drink a martini and bemoan the fact that the lower classes do not know how–this they see as evidence of the downfall of society. (They use their chauffeur as a test case.)

Throughout the film, dreams occur within dreams within dreams…and at times we forget that some of the situations the characters find themselves in dissolve upon waking. And the dreams themselves get increasingly brutal. There are various ghosts and visits to the underworld and dreamlike violence.

And all these well-to-do people want to do is eat a meal together–and they can’t…a rare event for people who are used to getting everything they want. Life–as surreal as it can be–gets in the way.

The six discreet bourgeoisie

By the way…

The original title for the movie was Down with Lenin, or The Virgin in the Manger (A bas Lénine, ou la Vierge à l’écurie) and was changed to The Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Adding the word Discreet was an afterthought.

Midnight on Revolutionary Road in Paris, County Cork

April 10, 2012June 18, 2012 / jpbohannon / 5 Comments

I am reading a book, The Night Swimmer by Matt Bondurant, where early in the novel, a young, successful couple have these yearnings to chuck it all and to move to Ireland. They are intelligent and aware of the commonness of this trope–they intentionally nickname their street “Revolutionary Road” after the Richard Yates’ novel. Earlier, before the dream of starting afresh in Ireland, the couple had wished to live in the time period when the novel Revolutionary Road takes place–a Cheever-esque world where pitchers of martinis and pyramids of cigarettes punctuated each evening. That glamorous “Mad-Men” world had not work out for them, but the dream of emigrating does: the husband wins a pub in County Cork, Ireland. Needless to say, the paradise/excitement/vigor of the new life they imagined in this other world does not pan out they way it had in their dreams. And like in Richard Yates’ novel, the marriage suffers more than greatly.

What is it about us that makes us often wish we were in some other place, some other time? In Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen wrestles with this question. The protagonist wishes he lived in 1920s Paris, but the 1920s woman he meets wishes she lived in the Paris of the 1890s? And in fact, the life he is already experiencing in 2011 turns out to be full of promise. Why is this nostalgia for a world other than our own, for an imagined place and an imagined time, so strong? Is it general among everyone? Or only with a certain type of person?

I walked out to get a coffee today and on my walk home I cut down an alley. Looking around me, I realized that I could have been walking in any foreign city with any foreign adventure around the corner. I could have been in Paris, in Cork, but I was merely a short stroll from my own house. I took a picture with my phone. The concept of a more exotic, romantic other place is just a whiff of smoke–it is always around us if we keep our eyes open.

Now it is often said that one doesn’t appreciated one’s home until one is separated from it. Joyce gave us a loving, photographic picture of Dublin, but only when he was writing in Switzerland and Paris. Beckett too gives us an unnamed but undoubtedly Irish landscape in his novels and several of his plays and he too was across the sea. But that is different than romanticizing a place one wishes for, a place that does not exist. What Joyce and Beckett do is understand what they had left, see it without the distortion of being so close within. This is not the same as dream-manufacturing, as imagining a better world through the kaleidoscope of nostalgia and generalities.

Nevertheless, there are still many days when I wish I was somewhere else, when I don’t appreciate the vitality of the world around me. But in these daydreams, it seems that I am never working, that there is no concern about putting food on the table or where the next dollar is coming from–who wouldn’t find that attractive. And that’s what makes it all somewhat of a sham.