Schindler's List and In Darkness

I have a lot of respect for Roger Ebert and often like his take on films so I was disappointed by his bad review of "In Darkness". He used "Schindler's List" as a club to beat "In Darkness", arguing that the greatness of Spielberg's film made it unnecessary to make any more films about gentiles saving Jews from the Nazis. I realized that as bureau chief I had to again overcome my reluctance to watch a film on the Holocaust and finally take a look at "Schindler's List".  I'm very happy that I did. It is an great film and undoubtedly Spielberg's masterpiece.

He used his superb skills to direct a huge cast in a true story graced with wonderful performances by Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler and Ralph Fiennes as SS officer Amon Goeth. However being Spielberg he also followed his tendency towards over-the -top sentimentality and almost destroyed his master work in a scene near the end where Schindler breaks down and berates himself for not saving more Jews. We've been watching Oskar Schindler for three hours and regardless of whether this scene is based on a real incident, it seems invented and tacked on. Yes Schindler has changed but this is just out of character. Luckily, the film survives that.

Ebert seems to be saying in his review that since Spielberg has made a great symphony, Agnieszka Holland isn't allowed to make a chamber piece on the same subject. This is amazingly wrong. Schindler is a businessman with a factory. He uses the tools available to a businessman to save over a thousand Jews, Leopold Socha, the lead character of "In Darkness", is a sewer worker and a thief and he uses the tools available to a working class person to save a handful of Jews. When the war is finally over, the group of 1100 Jews gathers in the the dining hall of the factory to thank Schindler and his wife who have to flee the victorious Russians. The people shower Schindler with their gratitude.

When Leopold Socha leads the small group of Jews out of the sewer through a manhole, they stand blinking in the May sunlight while passersby gawk at this strange apparition. Socha's wife hurries up with a cake she has baked and distributes it to the survivors and Socha says to the onlookers, "These are my Jews, this is my work", not meaning to be patronizing but because finally he really has done something very good.

Ebert ends his review with this:

"The movie (In Darkness) has been no­minated for an Oscar in the foreign film category. It's a completely safe nomination for a film that's very long, very dark, against Nazis, and of course "based on a true story." Why anyone would feel the need to make it after seeing "Schindler's List," I cannot say."

Agnieszka Holland's father is a  Polish Jew whose own parents died in the Holocaust and her mother is a Polish Catholic who fought in the Resistance. Maybe she has as much right as an American guy from Arizona to make a film about the Holocaust.

Winter Light Part 3

Montparnasse Cemetery exists in the shadow of the Montparnasse Tower, the only skyscraper in central Paris. After the tower was built, they realized that it was a terrible idea and changed the rules so it would never happen again. This is the cemetery from the top of the tower (in summer light 2008).

This is the tower from the cemetery on a very chilly day in 2005. The top of the tower is lost in the fog.

Jean Seberg was a cinematic icon just on the basis of "Breathless".

The intelligentsia.

This is Contantin Brancusi's statue "The Kiss" on a grave in the cemetery.

Winter Light Part 2

The bureau chief neglected to mention that the winter photos in the last post were from our 2005 trip, giving some of our faithful readers the impression they were recent. Unfortunately, recently completed renovations to the bureau precluded traveling to France last year and will preclude it this year (I know I'll get no sympathy). On the other hand our excellent contractor is paying for his daughter's wedding.

Since the blogging machine is already fired up, I thought I'd post some pictures of Montmartre cemetery. Since it's on a hill it has a certain double-decker aspect.

There are lots of famous people buried there but Nijinsky's tomb caught my eye.

As did La Goulue's.

I don't know if she was the sole creator of the "French Cancan" but she was certainly an icon of it.

Winter Light

Madame Le Chef and I have made it to Paris five times in this century. Four trips were in the summer and one was at Christmas time. Paris was fascinating, as always, but the one thing we weren't totally prepared for is that the city is further north than one tends to think. It's further north than Thunder Bay Ontario. This means that when you arrive close to the shortest day of the year, the sun is not fully up until 8:30 AM and starts descending around 4 PM. That's not a lot of daylight. On the other hand, the light is very beautiful.

This was taken around 9 AM.

The Louvre.

Louvre roof.

19th century apartment blocks near the Louvre.

It's claimed that it rarely snows in Paris but it did while we were there. This is outside the Pantheon.

In Darkness

Let's be honest, it's hard to decide to watch a Holocaust film. Your hand reaches for the DVD of "Shindler's List" but lands on "The Hangover". But after reading Mick LaSalle's glowing review of Polish director Agnieszka Holland's "In Darkness", the bureau chief and Madame Le Chef decided to watch this new film. I don't always agree with M. LaSalle's reviews but in this case I did. This is an excellent film. And unlike M. LaSalle, I'm going to tell you the ending because I want you to see it. The small group of Jews who are being helped to hide in the sewers of Lvov, by the lead character Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz ), survives because of his actions. The way the human mind works, or at least the bureau chief's does, is that even if a few people survive, in the face of the overwhelming horror, we can actually extract emotional uplift from it. Art battles against depression.

Since there's no reason to repeat what LaSalle said, I'll mention a detail or two that he didn't. The actors dialogue is in five different languages (Polish, German, Yiddish, Ukrainian and a dialect formerly spoken in Lvov, which has now disappeared). The name Lvov has also disappeared. Today the city is called Lviv and is in Ukraine instead of Poland. All the acting is good but Robert Wieckiewicz's performance is great. Highly recommended

Zaz

In the lengthening history of this blog the bureau chief has never recommended any music until now. Zaz is a young French singer with an amazing strong, rough voice that conjures up memories of Edith Piaf. Madame Le Chef noticed her singing over the tail credits of "Hugo" and tracked down a video of her on YouTube. We have the album and it's really good. It doesn't matter if you don't understand a word of French. This is lively, delightful music.

Hugo and The Artist

Faithful readers, as chief of The Bureau of Odd Shaped Objects please accept my apologies for not having posted for so long. I kept hoping I would see a great film, worth talking about, but alas, did not. Instead I'm talking about two films that are good, and well worth seeing, but not as good as their nominations for Best Film Oscars or their glowing reviews would indicate.

Michel Hazanavicius, the director of "The Artist", is a very skillful French filmmaker. Back in 2009, I recommended his spy spoof "OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies", which also starred the leads of "The Artist", Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo. The coup de maître of "The Artist" is that it's a silent film about an actor who can't or won't make the transition from silent films to talkies. As the actor is disintegrating, later in the film, sound effects start to creep into the track, which (of course) was only music up till then. It's very cleverly done. Bejo, Dujardin and Uggy the Jack Russell are terrific, as are the supporting actors. The director and his crew perfectly captured the look of a silent film from the 1920s.

The reason the film is not great is that the script is rather static. The hero falls into despair and then falls deeper until he's finally rescued by the heroine. It's enough of a comedy that it limits the amount of emotional interest the viewer can put in it but it's not a really funny comedy. Still it's a very interesting and odd object and well worth a look.

Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" starts out not working at all and then rallies and begins to make connections with the audience. It took a while but I eventually got caught up in the plight of the orphan boy who hides in the enormous clock of a grand Parisian train station, stealing food to survive and stealing mechanical parts so that he can repair an automaton given to him by his father. He gathers friends and also an enemy and in the end finds a new family. Bravo! And then we have even more about the film career of Georges Méliès which we've had a hell of a lot of already. Méliès is one of the great pioneers of film and his image of the moon as a face with a rocketship stuck in its eye has escaped from his film "A Trip to the Moon" and become an iconic image. It's totally admirable that Scorsese is so enthusiastic about film history and preservation but the end of the movie is functionally a "This is Your Life" for Georges Méliès. Still it's another nice looking odd shaped object.

Below is a metal fence on West 21st Street in NYC. I took the picture in 2008. It's interesting that they've reversed the image.