Wendigo Meets THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN, PART 1 (2011)

Regular readers should know the drill by now, but for the uninitiated, my friend Wendigo is a fan of the Twilight books and rejects the contention that Stephenie Meyer's use of vampires is "wrong" in any significant way. The folklore of the vampire has evolved over time and keeps evolving, and if it evolves to the point that they become often-benign fantasy creatures -- elves in our world, I say -- so be it. That being said, Wendigo's attitude toward the Twilight movies is more tempered. He feels that the series started strong, slipped in the second installment -- the story required more emotional range than Kristen Stewart had at the time, -- and recovered in the third part. He waited for the fourth film with trepidation, knowing that Summit Entertainment had cynically decided to divide the final book into two films, Harry Potter style. We saw Deathly Hollows Part 2 a few days before Breaking Dawn Part 1 and thus were well aware of the pitfalls of splitting a long novel -- the Potter series sadly staggered to its conclusion, we felt. While Wendigo thought that the novel Breaking Dawn did have a convenient dividing point, he wasn't certain that writer Melissa Rosenberg and new director Bill Condon would pick the right spot. He feared that, like Deathly Hollows Part 1, the first Breaking Dawn would feel unpleasantly incomplete.

Part 1 actually takes us about two-thirds through the novel, but Wendigo says that's where it should break if you have to break it. The final third and second film will bring a lot of new characters into the spotlight, some of whom are introduced fleetingly in Part 1 -- most notably a group of Cullen-inspired Alaskan vampires who show up for the long-awaited nuptials of Edward (you know who) and Bella Swan (ditto). In simplest terms, the first film leads up to the climactic moment of the book if not the entire series, the violent birth of Bella's hybrid baby, while the second film addresses the consequences, hinted at in a mid-credits visit to the Volturii, those nasty foreign vampires who've been spoiling for a fight with the kindly Cullen clan.  Part 1 itself divides neatly into halves, the first building up to the wedding and Brazilian honeymoon, the second playing out Bella's unexpected and increasingly nightmarish pregnancy.

Even Wendigo feels that the wedding preparation, the ceremony and the celebration dragged a bit. So if you're not all in for Twilight, the first 45 minutes or so of the picture may be unendurable. Everything is nicely shot by Condon, a proven talent, but the content, especially to the uninitiated, is on the level not even of a Lifetime but a Hallmark TV movie -- less menace than benign numbness. Wendigo stresses that the tone in the novel is less treacly; the wedding in print is a more bittersweet event, more starkly a farewell to the life and the people Bella has known, than the movie's celebratory tone suggests. For moviegoers, the wedding is a payoff, a victory lap, the audience's reward for three film's worth of patience. Few shadows are cast, the most prominent by the sulking Jacob (you know who, too), and Condon leavens the happy tone with Ed's flashback confession to his Depression-era career as a vigilante vampire and Bella's horrorshow dream of her family slaughtered by her bloodstained intended.

 

Above: Depression Edward eyes some action while Bride of Frankenstein plays in an homage by the director of Gods and Monsters to himself. Below...Are you entertained? Is this what you came to see?

Wendigo's big complaint about the first half is less with the wedding than with the silly reception speeches. It's meant to be funny, but he found it generic and tedious -- though I felt that Pattinson was at his most relaxed to date during Ed's slightly tipsy speech. Wendigo felt that time would have been better spent recreating the exotic mystery of the new couple's journey to their Brazilian honeymoon island. Condon pays too much attention to the swanky furnishings of the Cullen vacation house -- including their all-too fragile bed -- to evoke the location the way Meyer does. The landscapes back in Forks may be familiar by now, but that doesn't relieve Condon of an artistic obligation to make it look impressive. Part 1 was the most claustrophobic of the Twilight films so far as far as Wendigo was concerned. That said, Condon pulled off some nice visuals, even if he's more comfortable with interior than with outdoor space, and the action sequences with the superspeedy vampires and the CGI wolves were mostly well done. Condon may be the most prestigious director to take on Twilight, but in Wendigo's opinion Catherine Hardwicke still sets the standard for handling the material right.

Above, the voice of Taylor Lautner stands out from the pack.

Below, the live Lautner bows before the Cullen baby, his "imprinted" mistress.

Bella and Edward's honeymoon is cut short when the new Mrs. C. finds herself visibly pregnant after only two weks of marriage. This catches all the Cullens flatfooted -- in patriarch Carlisle's centuries of medical practice he's never heard of a vampire impregnating a human -- while it infuriates the Forks wolfpack, who regard the impending offspring as an abomination. It's not so good for Bella, either, since the baby is like a parasite, draining her vitality from within. This leads to differences of opinion -- Jacob defies his pack to protect Bella (for a film focusing on the main pair's wedding, Wendigo felt that Taylor Lautner stole it with a forceful performance), and more importantly, the Cullens are split over whether the baby should be aborted -- if possible -- or carried to term. Ultimately it's Bella's decision, and despite being well-aware of the mortal risk to her, she insists on keeping the baby and -- still more horribly -- naming it "Ejay" if it's a boy and "Renesme" if a girl. Don't ask. A political message might be inferred here, but the movie doesn't really try to make a political issue of it. Both sides of the debate have good arguments, but it probably makes sense in the overall context of Twilight for Bella to carry the baby to term.

Since we started watching the movies Wendigo and I have pondered what metaphoric meaning vampirism might have for Stephenie Meyer. By now we're fairly convinced that it stands simply for coming of age, for the rites of passage that culminate, for females, in childbirth. It seems archetypically right that Bella should finally be turned upon giving birth, on an understanding that vampirism represents the mystery of adulthood, its pains and responsibilities, from the anxious yet ardent perspective of Meyer's target readership of teenage girls. Wendigo would add that the target audience really could extend to anyone capable of empathy with those adolescent feelings. It's a pretty good overarching metaphor -- but we haven't quite figured out where the shapeshifting Indians fit into the symbolic plan.

Cullens must fight for a very good reason,

Punching out wolves like Liam Neeson. Y'heard?

Breaking Dawn Part 1 disappoints Wendigo slightly for being less explicit and graphic, in order to keep the PG-13 rating, than the book. That means we don't get to see Bella nude and we don't see the baby's birth in all its splatterpunk splendor -- Edward discreetly bites through Bella's belly and placenta offscreen, obscured by mommy's belly. It's the main moment when the book lives up to the expectation horror fans bring, rightly or not, to anything dealing with vampires. While I felt the pregnancy and birth were the strongest drama of the movie series so far, Wendigo stresses that the film's birth scene falls far, far short of the horror that might finally have reconciled gorehounds and genre buffs to these much-hated films. Readers actually feared for Bella's survival, but the film's toned-down presentation, and the obvious fact that a sequel's on the way, diminish any anxiety viewers might fear. The cliffhanger becomes not whether Bella will survive, but what kind of vampire she'll be as she wakes up red-eyed in the final shot of Part 1.

Wendigo isn't worried over whether there'll be enough material left in Breaking Dawn for one more feature film. He can't really explain without spoiling Part 2, but suffice it to say that "all sorts of stuff" happens. He's also satisfied with Part 1 as it is, though he admits to a bias in favor of the material that makes him potentially more forgiving than he was with the last two Harry Potter films. But he thinks he could say objectively that Breaking Dawn Part 1 is better than either half of Deathly Hallows. It's still well short of the standard set for him by the first film -- though his wish that Hardwicke had stayed on was dampened after seeing Red Riding Hood -- and he doesn't think it's quite as good as Eclipse was. But at least it didn't make him dread seeing the final film in the series. Despite his reservations and criticisms, he's looking forward to seeing Condon close things out.

On the Big Screen: THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER (2010)

Taking advantage of a day off, I took a trip to downtown Schenectady to see Bertrand Tavernier's latest film at the GE Theater in the Proctor's Theater complex. Rather than dividing the original 1928 auditorium to get an extra screen, the Proctor's people built an IMAX-ready theater in the space next door, where the Tavernier was projected onto a huge screen for the amusement of a matinee crowd of perhaps a dozen people. That's too bad, because at least pictorially speaking, La Princesse du Montpensier was worthy of the big screen. It's Tavernier's adaptation of a story by the Princesse de Lafayette, a 17th century author, about the wars of religion and aristocratic intrigues of 16th century France. In those days the nation was torn between the Catholic establishment and the Protestant Huguenots, and the film opens with a skirmish from one of the religious wars, one of the episodes of violence that'll punctuate the actual romantic plot. The battle scenes are unromantic; Tavernier does without the pagentry of massive armies, making every encounter look pretty much like a skirmish, albeit a brutal one. In this opening fight, the Count of Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), a Huguenot warrior, takes the fight into a farmhouse, where he ends up reflexively running through a pregnant peasant woman who'd just hit him with a log. Horrified, he resolves to study war no more. He ends up back among the Catholics, returning to the household of the Montpensiers, where the young Prince (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet) had been tutored by him years before. Despite some small suspicion of his motives and loyalties, Chabannes is welcomed back by an admiring Prince, who eventually assigns this Renaissance man to train his new bride, Marie de Mezieres (Melanie Thierry), in the sociocultural niceties and the responsibilities of a lady of the manor -- everything from reading Latin to butchering game.

Marie, our title character, is a reluctant bride in an arranged marriage. It's virtually a commercial transaction that leaves her with little sense of privacy or dignity, at least by modern standards, as spectators settle in after seeing her stripped to listen in on the consummation and claim the bloodied besheet as a kind of trophy. Marie's heart belongs, if anywhere, to the dashingly battle-scarred Duke of Guise (Gaspard Ulliel). Montpensier is well aware of her mixed feelings and is jealously insecure about his own place in her affections. He worries when he learns that Chabannes, at Marie's request, has taught her to write; to whom would she want to write? The troubled young couple have at least one good night in the sack, but Montpensier is always too eager to return to war, as if to prove his superiority to Guise in that sector. He seems to realize, however, that Guise will always be the better fighter, and that increases his anxiety about the Duke as a romantic rival with whom he's all too ready to fight. Meanwhile, one of the royal family, the Duke of Anjou, (Raphael Personnaz), sticks his nose into Montpensier's affairs, in part because of his own attraction to Marie and in part to make mischief for Guise. As for Chabannes, his question is to whom he owes his first loyalty -- his former protege who is now his master, or his new protege, the princess. In the end, he perpetrates an almost Cyrano-like imposture, taking the blame for another man's amorous visit to Marie that costs him his place in the Montpensier household. He ends up in Paris just as the St. Bartholomew's Massacre breaks out, and rather than see helpless innocents slaughtered he finally takes up the sword again, just as he's come to terms with his feelings for the Princess of Montpensier....

Tavernier has a tricky balancing act to perform here. Despite the title, the opening scene creates an expectation that Chabannes will be our main character, and in a sense he is, though he recedes into the background for awhile as Marie's romantic entanglements claim the spotlight. At the same time, the story leaves you wondering about authorial priorities. Marie's amours seem trivial compared to even the limited scope of the religious wars we're exposed to. Moreover, Lambert Wilson (last seen here in the outstanding Of Gods and Men) easily outshines the callow youngsters in the romantic plot, including the indisputably attractive Thierry. Why should we care whom Marie loves? The answer seems to be that it matters to Chabannes -- indeed, it seems as if the truest love of all in the film is that which Chabannes ultimately expresses for her in a letter, and that Marie finally understands will be the one meaningful love in her life. But I'm not sure if I actually buy this. The moral seems to be that Chabannes had finally found someone worthy of self-sacrificing loyalty -- or had created someone in semi-Pygmalion fashion. Maybe I have a less generous heart, but I question Marie's worthiness, mainly because her obsession with Guise is lost on me. I guess that's why I don't usually watch so-called women's pictures. This one is still worth watching, though obviously more so for those more sympathetic with the genre generally, because Tavernier is his usual versatile self as a director, infusing every frame with atmosphere, and Wilson holds the thing together with a charismatic moral authority that transcends the trivialities in which he's enmeshed. If you're like me, however, The Princess of Montpensier will probably leave you looking for a good book on French history to get more of the story that matters.

This English-subtitled trailer for the U.S. release was uploaded to YouTube by VISOTrailers.

MAP OF THE SOUNDS OF TOKYO (Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio, 2009)

Isabel Coixet's erotic thriller never manages to top the outrageousness of its opening scene. It's a business banquet thrown by a Japanese firm for visiting American businessmen to help seal a deal. The men eat sushi -- warm sushi, we're told -- off the bodies of naked women. Wikipedia tells me that the scene created controversy in Japan because audiences there thought that Coixet was perpetuating stereotypes of national decadence. In the film I saw, however, on an IFC DVD, the corporate executive complains about having to go through such a demeaning event because the Americans expect it from them. That is, the scene is a comment on American stereotypes of Japan and the Japanese willingness to cater to them. Was that line added after the premiere or did the critics miss it?

The social comment could easily get lost in what follows, as the executive, Nagara, receives whispered news and promptly transforms the scene into a White Heat homage, slapping the sushi off the poor frightened women's bodies as he launches into a tantrum of grief. His daughter Midori has killed herself. She's left a suicide note written in blood on her bathroom mirror: "Why didn't you love me as I loved you?"

Understandably, Nagara blames his daughter's death on her boyfriend David (Sergi Lopez), a Spanish wine dealer. He wants David's blood and orders his chief flunky to make arrangements. How exactly the arrangements are made is unclear, but we're shortly introduced to Ryu (Rinko Kikuchi), a seafood butcher by trade with an odd habit of visiting cemeteries and compulsively cleaning certain graves. We see her through the eyes of our narrator, a sound-recording technician who admires the way Ryu slurps ramen noodles. Objectively, we infer that the graves belong to people whom Ryu, who moonlights as an assassin, has killed. David is her next target.

Ryu is lonely, David is grieving and Nagara is impatient. Guess what happens?

Ryu: I didn't know there were sensual wines.
David: Why not? Everything can be sensual.

Coixet tries to keep it interesting by showing how the lovers struggle with competing alienations, how their love may be less a matter of connecting with each other than a matter of each working out purely personal issues. This is especially true of David, who struggles admirably to fit into Japanese society by learning the language. As it turns out, most of the Japanese he encounters, from his employees to Ryu, are more comfortable speaking with him in English. The fact that the lovers address each other in a third language makes the alienation theme more obvious; this is a Spanish film in which the Spanish language goes almost entirely unspoken. There's a further point to be made about the ultimate inability to comprehend fully another person's issues; that point is made the most as we learn more (though never much) about Midori. It's driven home hardest in a speech by David's employee -- delivered in the most fluent English in the picture -- in which he explains that the girl was unworthy of either Nagara or David's grief. The "you" in her suicide note could have been either of them, or both, but we're assured through this convenient intervention that neither man is really to blame for her death. It seems that people's narcissism inevitably hurts those close to them; the more Ryu realizes that David is on some level using her to work out his grief issues, the more she suffers, and the more likely she may be to take back her decision to renounce the contract on David, if the employers don't act first....

But while Coixet has something interesting to say about the trouble with love, her film ends up being little more than eye candy, all too easily indulging in exotic eccentricity for its own sake. It's handsomely shot, but in a generic way, with the predictable godlike views of Tokyo at night. It burdens itself with pointless quirkiness, showing us not once but twice a person dressed as a shrubbery in a subway station and a group of young people who meet periodically to commemorate different emotions on orders from a meagphone-wielding master. First it's Kiss Day, and later it's Anger Day, and both times Ryu wanders through the absurd scene to illustrate her loneliness and alienation. The point was made the first time. Even the eroticism and the display of two would-be international stars in the nude must compete for your eye with the gimmick of a hotel room in the shape of a Paris Metro car, complete with standing-room accessories. Coixet is too self-conscious about creating pretty pictures or odd images. That and a very predictable tragic finish make Mapa de los sonidos an essentially superficial film. Whether you like it or not will depend on how you like the imagery, but this is a case where style may have undermined the substance of a potentially better movie.

In Brief: BRIGHT STAR (2009)

It was a negative review that I didn't get around to reading until after Jane Campion's film had left the local art house that finally interested me in seeing her tale of the romance of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. The review appeared in The New York Review of Books, and was written by Christopher Ricks, a critic and Keats scholar. The full review is only available for subscribers, but the excerpt available for free will give you idea enough of Ricks's beef with Campion. To sum up, Campion's offense, in Ricks's view, was to wander into the old debate between the critics and the biographers. It's kind of a one-sided war. The biographers do their thing, which is to inquire into the influence of life on art, and certain critics attack them. These critics accuse the biographers of going overboard, as if they meant to prove that every word written by an author could be traced to an episode from his life. That approach, to the extent that anyone employs it, supposedly denigrates the author's power of creation and, more importantly, imagination. Ricks feels that Bright Star compounds the biographic fallacy by illustrating Keats' inspirations in so literal-minded a fashion that the movie might undermine the poetry's potential to evoke sympathetic imagery in another reader's mind.

Ricks's diatribe got me interested in seeing Bright Star because it left me wondering whether Campion intended anything like what Ricks accused her of doing. I can't say I'm a Campion fan; her only films that I'd seen before this were The Piano and Holy Smoke! That selection should tell you that I approached those films as a Harvey Keitel fan first. I did like both of them, though, and I don't mind the occasional 19th century period piece or biopic, so once a copy of the new film turned up on the New Arrivals shelf at the library, and especially after some bloggers have touted it as among the best films of last year and the decade, I grabbed it.

I was quickly satisfied that Campion had attempted neither literary criticism nor biography. Bright Star is not about Keats's career; it opens with him having already published, albeit without popular success. Nor does it attempt to explain the composition of specific poems in the manner of the old Hollywood biopics. The film is a romance set in the Romantic era, in a milieu pervaded with art. Keats writes his poems, brainstorms plays with his crony Charles Brown, and sings (or vocalizes) in an informal male chorus. Fanny Brawne is an artist (or craftsman) in her own right, a creator rather than follower of fashion, and someone who can be moved by poetry while struggling to understand how it works. For a while I thought the lovers would serve as symbols of craft and genius as separate aspects of art, but Campion isn't up to anything that pretentious. But there is a payoff to the interplay of art and emotion. Keats is moved to poetry by his romance as his earlier poetry had moved Brawne toward romance, but the romance shapes her craft as well. During one of the poet's absences, she gives up her sewing and tells her little sister that she doesn't care a damn for stitches. But at the end, her love for Keats inspires a work of art from her: a new mourning dress she wears for a walk through the wintry woods and a recitation of the title poem.

You don't need to know anything about John Keats beforehand or want to read his poems later to appreciate Bright Star. It's quite self-sufficient as a persuasive evocation of the Romantic age. The actors talk and move like people from another time; Campion's ear and eye for the soulful formality of old-time manners are impressive. Films like this remind us that manners can just as easily encompass emotions as suppress them, especially when enacted by actors of the caliber of Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw as our romantic leads. Paul Schneider as Charles Brown overdoes it a bid in a more comical role that overstates a rivalry between him and Brawne for Keats's attention if not affection, and the film did seem to run out of things to say or do before the inevitable end and a moving finale. But the overall experience is a positive one, enhanced by Greig Fraser's cinematography and an original score by Mark Bradshaw that reaches beyond the period for dramatic effect rather than aping the stereotype sounds of 1820.

Bright Star is also one of those films where you'll want to stay through the closing credits. That's because you'll hear Whishaw reading some nice lines from Keats as the credits roll. These lyrics aren't illustrated in any way that could offend Christopher Ricks or any other critic, nor does the film as a whole brainwash you into any interpretation of Keats's work. Ricks's concern over how the movie would influence future readers of Keats made him overlook the obvious. Bright Star isn't a work of criticism or interpretation; it's a work of art in its own right.

BLISS (Mutluluk, 2007)

Here's a romantic drama from Turkey about rape and honor killing. Abdullah Oguz's film opens with shepherds discovering an unconscious girl on a beach. They wrap her in a rug and bring her to town, where it soon emerges, or it's assumed, that Meryem has been raped. That's a scandal that could hurt the prestige of the clan presided over by the Agha and local factory owner, Ali Riza. He summons Meryem's father and orders him to do the right thing for the extended family, which is to put Meryem to death to expunge the collective shame. But you can tell right off that Dad's a softy who won't have the heart to do it. Meryem's stepmom is probably a different story. She tosses Meryem a rope and suggests that the girl hang herself; God might be more forgiving that way. Meryem almost does it, but finally refuses, if only to spite the wicked stepmom. Fortunately for the Agha, there's a likely man for the job arriving in town: his own son Cemal, back from military service as a commando battling "terrorists," -- Kurds, presumably. Ali Riza tells his boy to take Meryem to Istanbul to do the deed away from local prying eyes. When Cemal balks briefly, the Agha reminds him that, as his dad, he's his commanding officer now. So it's off to the big city for a gravely mismatched couple.

When Meryem (Ozgu Namal) can't bump herself off, Cemal (Murat Han) is ordered to take her for a ride, but he sometimes isn't sure whom to bump off.

It'd be a short movie if Cemal could do the deed. When he can't goad her to jump to her death, he breaks down before he can pull the trigger on her. He clearly has issues of his own, at least with his dad (who we'll see has driven at least one other son away from him) if not with his wartime experiences. In any event, neither he nor Meryem can go back now, so they begin a picturesque picaresque adventure that takes them to a fishery and its adjoining shack, then to work as mate and cook on a college professor's sailboat. Cemal doesn't want Irfan the professor (Talat Bulut) to know their real identities and relationship, and he grows jealous as Irfan, who we see served with divorce papers in one scene, gives Meryem presents and tries to teach the backward girl about the wider world. Meanwhile, Ali Riza assumes the worst -- that Meryem hasn't been killed -- when Cemal doesn't come home, so he hits the trail to track them both down. Will Cemal's jealousy make the Agha's effort redundant?

Mutluluk is based on a novel, but cinematically it reminded me of some semi-waterborne tough-love stories like Sunrise and L'Atalante. It's distinguished by lovely land and seascape cinematography by Mirsad Herovic, who crafts pastoral images of almost archaic quality. The story may be a tough sell as a romance, in America at least, because of Cemal's occasional thuggishness. He's a man who, when provoked, will call Meryem a "whore" and sometimes slap her, but he's our hero, and as Irfan sees it, Cemal is only lashing out because he won't admit that he's in love with Meryem. Irfan is almost too good to be true in his disinterested benevolence, despite the director's attempt to incite suspicion with the divorce subplot. Nearly strangled by Cemal at one point, he drinks and has a heart-to-heart with him shortly afterward. I suppose it's part of the romantic tradition to have a benevolent eccentric around to steer the leads into each other's arms.

It's not until more than halfway through the film that we realize that there's a mystery to be solved. Meryem has constantly refused to name whoever raped her, and she sometimes insists that nothing actually happened. She may be keeping silent on purpose, but it seems more likely that she'd repressed the memory. In any event, the identity of the culprit seems irrelevant to the story for some time, since the rape dooms Meryem no matter whodunit. On the boat, however, Irfan throws her some rope, intending to teach her to tie a special knot, but it sparks a flashback to her near-hanging, and that leads to the first of several fragmentary scenes from her rape. Once we notice that the rapist's identity is being withheld, we know a big revelation is in store that is actually pretty predictable. And once that anticipation sinks in, you notice how a certain unconscious cultural prejudice may have kept you from anticipating it earlier, if you're a western viewer. Watching a film by and about a Muslim country, you may assume that honor killing is just what's done, especially in a backwater like Meryem's town. Scandalized by the concept, the issue of who raped Meryem may become irrelevant for you until Oguz gradually brings it back to the forefront. There may be a lesson in this film. When we see deplorable things in the Muslim world, we're tempted to blame them on Islam or Islamic culture in a way that makes the whole culture collectively guilty, but Bliss refutes that assumption by showing how religion or tradition can be exploited for pure self-interest. The best thing about the lesson is that Oguz doesn't make a lesson of it. It isn't a point that anyone has to make explicitly, but it's one that makes this sometimes-melodramatic story worthwhile.

Here's a trailer with English subtitles uploaded by the American DVD distributor, firstrunfeaturesnyc: