Film n. 15: Caravaggio

Derek, The Last of England

Non vorrei rischiare di diventare il blog di cinema che scrive più sui morti che sui vivi, ma ci sono anniversari che per Zazie non possono (e non devono!) passare inosservati.
Venti anni fa, il 19 Febbraio 1994, moriva di AIDS uno dei miei artisti preferiti di sempre, il regista inglese Derek Jarman.
Nato nel 1942, Jarman inizia giovanissimo a girare filmini in Super 8 (abitudine che in effetti non abbandonerà mai) e, dopo essere stato scenografo su I Diavoli di Ken Russell, passa alla regia nel 1976 con il film Sebastiane, sul martirio di San Sebastiano, un film dichiaratamente omosessuale e girato in latino (!). Non so quale delle due cose, all’epoca, abbia stupito di più. A seguire, Jarman gira due film leggermente iconoclastici: Jubilee e The Tempest, libero adattamento del lavoro di Shakespeare, da molti considerato il primo film punk inglese. Ma il suo capolavoro esce nel 1986: Caravaggio, un film visionario, visivamente sontuoso, ricco di idee geniali (poi la Coppola mette le scarpe da ginnastica nel film su Marie Antoinette, ma è Jarman il primo a far vedere in primo piano una macchina da scrivere nello studio di un pittore del 1500), e che segna la sua prima collaborazione con quella che diventerà la sua musa ispiratrice di sempre, Tilda Swinton. 

Frustrato dai tempi lunghi delle produzioni dell’epoca, incazzato a morte con la Tatcher, e stanco della classica narrativa cinematografica, Jarman si rimette a lavorare ai suoi Super 8, creando dei piccoli film del tutto inclassificabili ma che cercano di risvegliare la coscienza della gente su temi che gli stanno a cuore, come in The Last of England, in cui Jarman denuncia la grettezza e la distruzione portata dalla gente al potere (Maggie, we love you!).
Jarman ritornerà al cinema classico (si fa per dire) con le sue due ultime produzioni: Edward II, il suo film più politico e più militante per la causa omosessuale, e Wittgenstein, sulla vita del filosofo viennese Ludwig Wittgenstein (dove, ad interpretare la madre del protagonista, chiama la mamma vera di un altro figlio famoso: Jill Balcon, la madre di Daniel Day Lewis).
Ammalato di AIDS dal 1986, Jarman ha sempre dichiarato la sua malattia, così come ha sempre dichiarato le sue tendenze sessuali, facendo campagne contro la famosa Clause 28, con la quale si vietava di parlare di omosessualità nelle scuole inglesi.
Alla fine della sua vita, Jarman si trasferisce a vivere nel Kent, in un cottage a poca distanza dalla Centrale Nucleare di Dungeness, dove creerà un giardino dall’aria post-atomica sul quale sono stati scritti numerosi libri. 

Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, Kent

Il regista si congeda dal mondo con il toccante film Blue, dove lo schermo viene invaso da un colore blu intenso mentre la voce di Jarman racconta di se stesso, della sua vita e della sua malattia. 
Appassionato di musica, Jarman ha diretto numerosi video, per gente come i Sex Pistols, Marianne Faithfull, Marc Almond, Bryan Ferry, i Pet Shop Boys e, soprattutto, The Smiths: il suo mini-film per l’album The Queen is dead, che include le tre canzoni The Queen is Dead, Panic e There is a Ligh that never goes out, è un must assoluto per qualsiasi fan della band.

Ho sempre amato Jarman per le cose che diceva e come le diceva.
Era un uomo mite ma di grandissima forza interiore, un ribelle di quelli veri, che andava contro le convenzioni, contro le regole di una società che non amava, e che lottava per tutto quello in cui credeva. Mi piaceva la follia dei suoi film, quel rimescolamento di generi, di tipi di filmati, quei dialoghi folgoranti, declamati, quel farti vedere la bruttezza del mondo per dirti che però vale la pena di salvarlo, e il nudo dei corpi per farti capire che il desiderio è bello da qualsiasi parte provenga, senza dimenticare la sua ironia, so british indeed.
Ho sempre pensato che l’idea del suo cottage sullo sfondo della centrale nucleare lo definisse perfettamente: creare la bellezza dove il mondo pensa non ci sarà mai, fregandosene dello sconcerto degli altri.

 

In questi giorni ero a Londra e mi è capitato di andare al British Film Institute.
Con mia grande gioia, ho notato che le celebrazioni per l'anniversario della sua morte erano in pieno svolgimento: retrospettiva completa, incontri sulla sua opera, riedizioni in DVD di tutti i suoi film, libri scritti da lui e su di lui. 
There is a light that never goes out.
E quella di Jarman, di sicuro, brillerà sempre.

It's a Shame!

Everybody knows that the Oscars are the most important cinema awards in the world.
This doesn't mean, of course, that they are the best. 
Actually, they are not. 
Still, for people involved in cinema, to win an Oscar means a lot, and very often it means to have a career, if not a life, changed.
Everybody knows as well, or at least my loyal readers, how much I love Michael Fassbender. Stupidly enough, especially after his nomination to the Golden Globes, I thought he would have had an Oscar nomination for his incredible performance in Shame by Steve McQueen. He didn't, and I think it is a real shame! 

Sadly enough, it wasn't my only deception: I think it is a pity not to have nominated Tilda Swinton for her amazing role in We need to talk about Kevin by Lynne Ramsay, or Albert Brooks for his great role in Drive by Nicholas Winding Refn (I mean, why Drive is not present at all???) and I am also shocked to hear that Once upon a time in Anatolia by Nuri Bilge Ceylan is not among the 5 nominations for the Best Foreign Film. 
Let's cheer up, though, because there are reasons to be happy: the success of The Artist by Michel Hazanavicius, a movie I really loved, the two nominations for the Iranian masterpiece A separation by Asghar Farhadi and the unexpected nomination for Margin Call by J. C. Chandor in the category of Best Original Screenplay.
The missed nomination to Fassbender, reminded me of something that happened back in 1988. That year, the Academy forgot to nominate an actor who deserved that award more than anybody else: Jeremy Irons, for his double role in Dead Ringers by David Cronenberg.
A couple of years afterwards, Irons was nominated and won the Oscar for Reversal of Fortune by Barbet Schroeder. During his acceptance speech, he pronounced the following statement: "Thank you also, and some of you may understand why, David Cronenberg!" The audience started clapping. That Oscar, as a matter of fact, was more for the Cronenberg movie than for the one he was receiving the award for.
I am pretty sure that one day, in years to come, Michael Fassbender will make the same kind of speech, and he will pronounce the famous statement: "Thank you, Steve McQueen!"
We will all understand why.

The Limits of Jim Jarmusch

There’s nothing more disappointing in life than a bad movie by a film-maker you like, and this is absolutely the case with the last Jim Jarmusch work, The Limits of Control. Apparently, we have to put the blame on some film critics, who accused Jarmusch to have turned into an almost mainstream film-maker with his previous movie, Broken Flowers. Jarmusch, the king of independent American movie, hurt by the accusation, decided to write and direct a completely free and non-commercial movie.
And, well, no doubt he succeeded in doing so, but the problem is that, in the enthusiasm of re-establishing and re-confirming his complete freedom as an artist, he also completely forgot that there would have been an audience, looking at his movie. Judging from the number of people quitting the cinema yesterday afternoon, the audience tried to forget Jarmusch as well.
The plot: a lone man (good actor Isaach De Bankolé, a familiar presence in Jarmusch universe) leaves France to Spain to accomplish a mysterious mission. Arrived in Madrid, he starts to have “meetings” with different people, with whom he exchanges boxes of matches containing incomprehensible (at least for us) messages. Following the advice of one of them, the man moves to Sevilla and then to another unspecified place where there is the “target” he’s looking for. Once the job completed, the solitary man got back to his normal (?) life.

I’m usually not afraid of very slow movies. Movies where apparently nothing’s going on but in reality there’s much to follow and to understand. At the beginning of this film I thought: Ok, this is just the start, many things are going to happen, I’ll be taken by the story, or by the atmosphere, or… after 30 minutes, I understood that my great expectations would have been frustrated.
This movie is BORING; it is simply, unbearably, boring.
The parade of magnificent actors (among others Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Gael Garcia Bernal, Bill Murray) not only doesn’t help, but contributes to frustrate the public even more: do you have all these great actors and do you use them this way, Jim???
But the thing that really surprised me here is the total lack of irony, usually a very important element in Jarmusch works. The repetition of the same dialogue is very funny, yes, sure, for the first three times, the fourth time it just sucks. The lone man always ordering two espressos in different cups, yes, very funny indeed… but even in this case, the fourth time he is doing so, you just want him to order a bloody double espresso. And if there’s a secret meaning behind this gesture, well, who gives a damn.
In fact, this is a total “who gives a damn” movie.
I found the final dialogue by Bill Murray (representing, I guess, the movie’s core) very pretentious and ridiculous. Who’s talking about? Who are the people that have the “objective” vision of the world to be opposite to the people (and here again… who? The Artists?) having a subjective vision of things?
Please, Jim, give us a break.

Well, let’s say at least two things I really loved of this movie:
The first one is the photography, absolutely amazing, and I wasn’t surprised to read that the cinematographer of The Limits of Control is Mr. Christopher Doyle (the Australian genius behind In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar Wai and Paranoid Park by Gus Van Sant, for instance).
The other one, but it is very personal, is the scene where John Hurt, talking about bohèmiens, quotes La vie de Bohème by Aki Kaurismaki, simply saying: There was a great Finnish movie about this some years ago. Kaurismaki and Jarmusch are very good friends, and they have this habit of quoting each other in their movies. I know, I know, it’s very “cinéphile”, but it’s cute!

Anyway, I want to be clear on this point: I LOVE Jim Jarmusch, and this is why I’m so disappointed with him.
Film-makers can be exactly as lovers: you know they can do better than that, they just have to prove it.