The Spanish Prisoner

Before I went to see I Am Love, I heard someone on the radio refer to it as an “Italian potboiler”. That seems to me to be a fair description of the film. It tells the story of a Russian woman, Emma (Tilda Swinton), who has married into a family of Italian industrialists, the Recchys. She has a cold relationship with her husband, Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), who is out of town much of time. She throws fancy parties that she doesn’t attend. Her son, Edoardo (Flavio Parenti), runs the family business along with his father. He doesn’t like some of his father’s decisions, such as laying off workers. When his father, along with the rest of the family, decide to sell their textile business, Edoardo objects. He argues that the Recchys have always been about more than just making money.

Edoardo’s best friend is Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), a chef who makes exquisite dishes with skimpy portions. The two of them want to open up a restaurant. One day, Emma bumps into Antonio on the street. He invites her up to his cottage in the mountains, where he grows all the vegetables he uses in his dishes. (His garden looks small. No wonder his portions are skimpy.) There the two of them begin, without much dialogue, a torrid affair. During the love scenes there are lots of cutaway shots of flowers and insects. I take it that this is supposed to indicate that nature is following her course. From then on, Emma and Antonio keep their affair secret. However, Edoardo eventually finds out about it. As you might expect, he becomes deeply upset. During an argument with his mother, he accidently falls into a swimming pool. Since this is an Italian movie, he hits his head on the edge of the pool and dies. Edoardo’s death plunges Emma and the entire Recchy family into a profound crisis.

Emma’s eventual rejection of her family’s cynical venality in favor of Antonio’s bohemianism is clearly meant to be seen as a form of self-liberation. (The film links eating with sex in a way that reminded me of Like Water for Chocolate.) However, I didn’t like the fact that Edoardo is killed, since I found him the most sympathetic character in the film. I guess his death is supposed to be the shattering of Emma’s last remaining illusions about her life.

The main reason I went to see this film is because the musical score is by John Adams, a composer whose work I’ve always admired. Adams’s music is glorious, though the movie uses it in a way that is melodramatic.

I Am Love is not a bad movie. However, it didn’t strike me as being particularly good, either. I didn’t care that much about the characters, and there were moments that struck me as self-consciously artsy. However, it did keep me interested for two hours. That’s more than I can say for some films that have won Academy Awards.

At a time when computer animation has made it possible to make incredibly beautiful and detailed cartoons, there seems to have developed in opposition to this an aesthetic of crude animation. South Park is a good example of this. As a member of a generation that grew up on the cartoons of Hanna & Barbera, not to mention Rocky & Bullwinkle, I know how potent cheap animation can be. A Town Called Panic carries on this proud tradition of cartoon slumming.

The characters in this film all look like cheap plastic figurines (the kind you can purchase in a bag in a toy store); some even have little oval stands underneath their feet. (According to Wikipedia, 1500 plastic toys were used in the making of this film. Truly, a cast of hundreds!) They all move in awkward jerky motions, as if they were being moved around by children. The three main characters are Cowboy, Indian, and Horse. Their names describe them exactly. It would be impossible to summarize the story of this film. Suffice it to say, it involves some strange aquatic creatures that keep stealing the heroes’ house, as well as a giant robotic penguin that throws enormous snowballs. This film is 75 minutes of pure, unadulterated silliness with no redeeming social value whatsoever. Highly recommended.

The German film, North Face is a fictionalized account of a 1936 attempt to climb the north face of the Eiger Mountain in Switzerland. Two German climbers, Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann) and Andreas Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas) and two Austrians, Edi Rainer (Georg Friedrich) and Willy Angerer (Simon Schwarz) are determined to be the first to climb the dangerous north face. However they run into various difficulties. Their ascent is closely watched by a young reporter, Luise Fellner (Johanna Wokalek) – who is also Toni’s sometime girlfriend – and by her ambitious boss, Henry Arau (Ulrich Tukur).

Although I liked this film overall, there are a few problems with it. While the film frankly acknowledges that the climbers were tools of Nazi propaganda, I got the impression that the filmmakers weren’t sure what conclusions they should draw from this. Kurz and Hinterstoisser are portrayed as being politically indifferent, though I wonder whether that was true in real life. (Rainer and Angerer are portrayed as enthusiastic Nazis. They’re clearly meant to be less sympathetic than the other two.) Also, at the end Luise is inspired to move to New York and become a photographer. This reminded me uncomfortably of Titanic, in which Kate Winslet is inspired to become an aviatrix after seeing her boyfriend freeze to death in the North Atlantic. The idea here seems to be that a woman has to see her significant other come to a bad end before she can do something with her life.

What makes this film so powerful and disturbing are the climbing scenes. We see the climbers struggling in an absolutely unforgiving environment, where little mistakes can turn into huge disasters. At times I couldn’t help squirming in my seat. At the end we’re left wondering why some people undertake such dangerous pursuits as mountain climbing. The only explanation seems to be that they do it because they can.