Cast: Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth
Director: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
Runtime: 111 mins
Genre: Drama/Noir
Country: USA





Film noir, to quote James Brown, is "a man's man's man's world". Tough-nut men in trilby hats wisecracking hard-boiled dialogue, toting guns, fighting gangsters and sucking up cigarettes like there's no tomorrow. Women in this genre are either femme fatales or subjects of abuse. So it's surprising, then, that Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce designates a woman at the centre of this 1940s noir picture, which essentially mashes up film noir with women's weepie, a concoction that went on be lauded as the "definitive women's noir". This is a giant blunder. For all Mildred Pierce's dramatic tension and Hollywood sheen, it feels derivative and most of all, manipulative. Here is a tale of a titular mother's resilience and self-sacrifice told in flashback, as a fur-coated Joan Crawford tells her story in a police investigation after the murder of her wealthy second-husband. It turns out that the actual truth is an elaborate set-up of a mother's cover-up and her daughter's betrayal, a mother so engrossed in her own restaurant career that she fails to recognise her own daughter stealing her husband just right under her nose. Mildred Pierce has been a part of the 1940's feminist discourse, but if feminism means establishing a solid womanly professional career whilst sacrificing the moralities of your underlings, then Mrs. Pierce is completely deluded and self-possessed, her ineptness in raising children masquerading as devotion.

The biggest flaw here is the titular character, so wrongly drawn despite of the transformation Joan Crawford has to go through (not that she needs it - her Hollywood image is very linked to old-school glamour), from lowly, dowdy suburban wife to glamourpuss restauranteur. Okay, Mildred Pierce is a hardworking woman, a sacrificial mother who wanted to provide the best of her children, pursued her career by starting as a waitress who went on to open five restaurants, which all resulted to the downfall of her spoilt-rotten daughter Veda (a terrific 17-year old Ann Blyth, who almost eclipses Crawford in this with her ice-cold bitchiness) - but somehow in the end, you're thinking who to really blame. Is it the daughter, calculating, greedy and sordid? Or the mother, who feeds material conformities to her children, fails to discipline them and remains mindlessly oblivious to her daughter's affairs, until to the very last clinch?

The entire film, in film noir fashion, is framed with the final climax bookending both ends, with Mildred contemplating suicide on a harbour with a gun in her pocket. This feels like a plot contrivance, a deux ex machina to keep the final twist from audience's attention, and not because her character really means to commit suicide. Michael Curtiz, famed director for Casablanca, does a professional job for providing aesthetic finesse to the picture, all signature noir lighting and polished cinematography. It falls however in Max Steiner's choice in musical scoring, recycling every bit of the melodramatic orchestra in his Now,Voyager theme every time Mildred scores with a man. Nevertheless, let's wrap with the main woman of the show. In this performance, Crawford did not only win as much as clawed her way to her first Oscar, which she wanted very badly after a career comatose, preceding her transfer from MGM to Warner Bros. She may be Mildred Pierce, but Pierce looks and moves like Crawford, replete with a glamorised stiffness. It's a performance as overrated as this film. No wonder why Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck turned down this role.




What is touted to be a "definitive women's noir picture" turns out to be a faux pas, a faulty Hollywood representation of a resilient, self-sacrificing mother. Despite Curtiz's prestige direction, this is a manipulative, melodramatic blunder that barely goes skin-deep. Crawford is as overrated as the film, and compared to other sterling, more complex women-centric noir pictures Double Indemnity and The Letter, Mildred Pierce pales in comparison.



Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Mark Ruffalo
Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Runtime: 140 mins
Genre: Drama/Thriller/Horror/Noir
Country: USA





Say what you will about Martin Scorsese. There's a very few Hollywood filmmakers today that could wring out an impressive CV laminated with solid, credible auteurist works that treads the fine balance between popular cinema and contemporary film art, boasting a canon loaded with signature cinematic specimens of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Raging Bull. He may have won an Oscar for directing The Departed, but it wasn't his best film. Now, with a statuette under his belt, he could have gone and made a Hollywood crowd-pleaser and perhaps gather more gongs. But he didn't. Instead he made Shutter Island, and went all Powell and Pressburger on us - and there's barely any other film in recent memory that potentially divide audiences sharply in the middle. Either you like it, or you don't.

For the cinematically uninitiated, any fairweather moviegoer who practically knows little about film noir, Hitchcock, Powell and Pressburger are very likely to appreciate Shutter Island less, as Scorcese packs a chock-full of filmic references that in most frame compositions, it would send a film-fan with an OCD flying though film books for a fevered scrutiny. That Shutter Island, adapted from Dennis 'Mystic River' Lehane's novel, shares an identifiable DNA with Hitchcock's Vertigo - a noirish, sombre tale of a detective set to investigate a crime. In Vertigo, James Stewart's protagonists seeks to solve the identity of a woman, and in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio's Federal Marsall Teddy Daniels lands on the eponymous island to investigate a missing woman, a patient in an American correctional asylum where this film entirely takes place. It also happens that both narrative threads implode on its two central characters. Noir, meanwhile, is the underlying theme here, with DiCaprio and Ruffalo's sidekick Chuck donning 1950's noir trilby hats, Philip Marlowe cloaks and Humphrey Bogart cynicism. Crucial to the proceedings is also the genre's prototype, the unreliable narrator, which serves significant to the final twist.

Which leads us to the story. If it weren't too self-conscious, Shutter Island could have fully engorged on its audiences. This doesn't mean it's an inferior film. Teddy's odyssey into the dark depths of the asylum, encountering eccentric and intriguing mental-hospital doctors played to oily perfection by Sir Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow, is gripping stuff, working best as a mutual engagement between noir-thriller and loony-bin horror. We descend further into the labyrinthine mystery surrounding the island, walking through Gothic hospital corridors, dark underground prison cells, and sends us into the tall vertiginous cliffs towering over lashing waves below - scenes so marvellously framed and lit that could make Scorsese's idols Powell and Pressburger proud. Yet the steady narrative flow is occasionally broken by unsubtle flashbacks of Teddy's haunted WWII past and his dead wife (Michelle Williams), scenes so overly saturated and stilted, where the film's central problem lies. There is a final twist that isn't so much M. Night Shyamalan as Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, a denouement that both frustrates and sends minds reeling with incomprehension. This is not a critique to the 'twist', but rather the execution to the finale, which transports the narrative into flashback again that could have fared better with exposition. Nevertheless, minds are warped here, so who are we going to believe?




This might be far from a masterpiece, flawed and ridden with contrived flashbacks, Shutter Island's material is nonetheless a perfect fit for Scorcese - a tough-edged potboiler with a noir-thriller Hitchcockian undertow. Cinematically, it's impressively assembled it could make film gods proud.



Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Flavio Parenti, Diane Fleri
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenplay: Luca Guadagnino
Studio: Mikado Films
Runtime: 120 mins
Genre: Foreign/Drama
Country: Italy





At the heart of Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love are two things - a sterling central performance and an opulent, exquisite filmmaking. Tilda Swinton, arguably one of the most fascinating actors working in the film industry today, is the central beating core of this rich, nuanced, grand Italian melodrama and her matriarch Emma Recchi, Russian-born and married into a clan of über-wealthy Milanese bourgeois, is a character so magnificently well drawn that it makes one think Swinton might as well read the London Tube map and we're still in thrall to her talents. This is an actor that veers mightily and fearlessly from one superlative performance to the next. She was the only dignified thing in The Chronicles of Narnia as the glacial White Witch, nabbed an Oscar gong for her gig as corporate bitch in Michael Clayton whilst eclipsing co-star George Clooney, delivered an unhinged, tempestuous performance as a freewheeling prostitute at last year's kidnap-thriller Julia, and now this. An Italian arthouse, to which she produced herself.

This harks back to the nostalgia-tinted days of 50's Douglas Sirk melodrama via 70's Hitchcock byway of Antonioni and Visconti's Italian cinema, which might seem to be a gross pastiche at first, but Guadagnino's sublime directing elegantly swerves this film from an arthouse trainwreck. It's tale might be a tad familiar, the clash of the old and new, as the ancient heirloom of the Recchi family is being handed down to the younger generation, to run the age-old textile business, reminiscent of Coppola's The Godfather and Visconti's The Leopard, but the approach is supremely stylish. Its operatic tone means cameras smoothly glide around the Recchi household, from corridors, to halls, to staircases, and introduces us to the key family members by inter-cutting through a dinner scene. We get to know them straight away and their criss-crossing of relationships with barely any exposition, but through a visual style. A stronghold of family foundation that would soon crumble when a sweeping force of change leaks through the gaps in the clan's tapestry.

Through all this, Emma remains a lovely wallflower. Only until her daughter rushes off to be with a girl. There is an eloquent scene when she discovers her daughter's letter outside a shop shown in superfluous editing of Emma's urgent reactions, sharp breathing, unfocused eyes, wearing a face of both surprise and realisation. She reacts not like a mother, but a woman who suddenly questions not only her daughter, but also herself. Swinton doesn't act this out, she embodies Emma through and through. Also, she gets to show off her Russian and Italian language skills. And Swinton guides this journey to self-awakening, as she falls passionately and gloriously in love with young earthy chef Antonio (her son Eduardo's best pal). Guadagnino frames one literally ravishing scene in which Emma dissolves into Antonio's lush prawn cocktail, lit by a headlight while the rest of the restaurant and everything else orbiting Emma fades away. It's an evocative set-piece, and says there is all to say off-setting food with carnal, basic human passion.

Guadagnino mounts a superb sense of pacing, as Emma and Antonio's illicit affair become known to her son Eduardo, taking this film into a tragic, heart-wrenching crescendo, a full-blown orchestra of misunderstandings, alienation and subsequent liberation. Emma's soaring pursuit for her inner self comes to full tilt at a funeral, with Swinton in an impressive transformation from an impeccably dressed wife to an earthy, liberated woman. This refined piece of human artefact in the Recchi gallery of solid traditions, learns to free herself from repression, a Russian tempest that was laid dormant from marriage, responsibilities and subservience. This is gorgeously sublime, liberating stuff.




Here is the first great film of 2010. Luca Guadagnino's operatic Italian melodrama I Am Love possesses a supreme understanding of cinema as an artform, operating visuals, tone and story to spellbinding precision. Above all, this high-class, exceptional study of a mother's existential awakening has a narrative build-up that bursts into a shattering, breathtaking climax.



Review by The Moviejerk © Janz