173. US director Damien Chazelle’s second feature film “Whiplash” (2014): The ultimate Svengali levelled

“I saw a drive in him” —Terence Fletcher in Whiplash, referring to his former student Sean Casey 

“The next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged” —Terence Fletcher in Whiplash

A quick assessment of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash would be that the film is about a music student carving out a drumming career in a jazz band. Another would be classifying the film as a tale of a musician’s long and winding journey to acquire recognition by the critics who matter.  Others would only remember the film as one that forces the viewer to hate and cringe at the actions of an inhuman mentor, a perfectionist, who wrecks the lives of young creative diligent minds by physical and verbal abuse, all for his own goal in life. While all these are justifiable perceptions of the film, young Damien Chazelle’s script and film offers more than the obvious.

The film’s opening sequence is of the camera (the viewer’s point of view) entering a darkened corridor at the end of which the student Andrew Neimann (Miles Teller) is religiously practicing on a drum and cymbal set.  Concentrating on his music, he is oblivious of all else around him.  The lighting and camera movement innocuously provide the prologue for what is to follow without a word spoken. Chazelle’s poster of the film too captures that very mood. The spotlight is on the drummer.  And that is what could mislead the viewer. The film is equally about what is not under the spotlight, the shadowy part of the space, surrounding the drummer.The film is as much about the various characters (the teacher, the father and the lover) in the film who directly and indirectly shapes Andrew to what he becomes ultimately.

Fletcher (Simmons) (right) exacting what he wants from the drummer

The prologue over, from the darkened closed doors emerge a man in black Terence Fletcher (J K Simmons) like a cat’s stealthy entrance, followed  by a defining staccato conversation and the removal of his jacket (denoting that he is at work), and an equally dramatic exit slamming the doors only to reappear again apologetically to retrieve his jacket. Most viewers will be transfixed by the overpowering presence of the man in black (Simmons), but a keen viewer will note the effect is totally orchestrated by the scriptwriter and director Chazelle. It is not Simmons who has grabbed your attention; it is Chazelle who is really shaking up the viewer, with the lighting, Fletcher’s clothes, the quiet entry and the loud exit. Chazelle by getting Fletcher to remove his jacket for such a short time has told the viewer that the man takes his job very, very seriously.

Whiplash is more than a movie about music; it is a lovely work exploring the ultimate Svengali bringing out the best of drumming in a wannabe using insults, intimidation, skulduggery and psychological manipulation. While Andrew takes the spotlight, Fletcher is the less assessed ogre lurking in the shadows.

Developing the Charlie Parker in a first year student with  'a drive"

The viewer is manipulated by Chazelle to hate Terence Fletcher, who does everything to ensure his jazz ensemble is the best of the best. He spots the “drive” in a former trumpet player Sean Casey when the rest of the Schaefer School of Music faculty was telling him “Maybe this isn’t for you “ (who the viewer never gets to see on screen), picks him for his ensemble just as he does Andrew the drummer, to push them to the limits psychologically and physically to bring out the best. Sean Casey ultimately becomes the first trumpet at Lincoln Center.  Only Casey dies shortly after “in a car accident” according to Fletcher.  Casey’s Svengali—Terrence Fletcher (Simmons)—is sorry and provides a eulogy for the departed in a touching manner by making his entire ensemble listen to a CD of Casey, with the name Sean scribbled on it, playing. Evidently, Fletcher had recorded Casey’s musical output and kept the recording with him. There is a human side to the beast, who spits out venom at his students, and yet spots the real potential talent, shapes that, and makes them famous. Much later in the film, we learn that Sean Casey did not die in a car accident but hanged himself. Fletcher can lie as well. The spacing and timing of the two differing bits of information about Casey's death provided to the viewer is clever. The original details that Chezelle provides work as an antidote to the evil sketch of Fletcher elsewhere in the film.  The revised information on Casey’s death makes the viewer to reappraise Fletcher and his tactics. So are the innocuous yet brilliant lines written by Chezelle and mouthed by Fletcher “I never really had a Charlie Parker.  But I tried. I actually fucking tried. And that’s more than most people ever do.” The man in black is not all black. He too has a talent to spot the Charlie Parkers of the future and chisel them into a live Charlie Parker. And he does transform Andrew into a Charlie Parker, Andrew’s ideal musician.

Who is this Charlie Parker mentioned again and again in this movie? Charlie Parker is a legendary jazz saxophonist who often combined jazz with blues, Latin and Classical music. The recurring references to Parker in Whiplash relate to a real incident involving Parker, the jazz saxophonist. Apparently a real drummer colleague of the teenage Charlie Parker named Jo Jones threw a cymbal at the floor near Parker’s feet because Parker didn’t change key with the rest of the band (according to Wikipedia) , just as Fletcher threw a cymbal close to Andrew’s head in Whiplash. In real life that incident apparently inspired Charlie Parker to practice inordinately until he became a legend in music. In Whiplash, Charlie Parker is first mentioned over dinner by Andrew. Then you hear Fletcher wishing he had a Charlie Parker to mentor. And finally you see Andrew transform into a Charlie Parker not with a saxophone, bit with the drums. Again, if one looks at the film closely it is the brilliant screenplay that comes out trumps.

Light and shadows effectively used by Chezelle

There are aspects of the Svengali’s manipulation that one has to conjecture from what is not shown in screen.  One of them relates to the mysterious disappearance of the musical notes folder of the drummer Fletcher decides is better than Andrew. Fletcher tells the band never to lose the notes.  Then director/scriptwriter shows Fletcher noticing Andrew sitting by the drummer turning pages for the drummer. This is followed by the mysterious disappearance of the folder. One can only surmise that it was Fletcher who ensured the disappearance so that Andrew could play without the notes.  If the viewer takes the incident to be happenstance, one is missing out on the brilliance of the screenplay (Chezelle) and editing (Tom Cross) in Whiplash.

It would be short-sighted to view Whiplash as a duel of egos between the mentor and the mentored. Whiplash is more about levelling of the egos between the two. A keen viewer will note the camera perspective that allowed Fletcher to tower over ensemble players throughout the film  making a defining change in the  point of view  at the end when drummer  seems to be looking down at the conductor Fletcher, and finally having both Fletcher and Andrew  appear at the same visual level, each appreciating the other. So much is said in the film without the spoken word—in a movie where spoken word seems to be overarching at key moments. Are the words of Fletcher, “Not my tempo” more memorable in the film or the door opening precisely when second hand of the clock moves to 9 o’clock? There are invisible aspects of Fletcher the Terrible not so subtly brought on screen by the scriptwriter/director. The reconciliation between the tormentor and the tormented, the mutual admiration of each others talent and the manner in which the unusual ending shows the gains of the lies, torture, and manipulation that helps another Charlie Parker arrive on the music scene are laudable.

The Svengali in black merges with the shadows

Ironically Whiplashis competing with one another film at the Oscars that deals with another obsession of another character, that of the real life Alan Turing the mathematician turned inventor of the world’s first computer in The Imitation Game. In both films, a flat tyre delays two different characters to make the films interesting. In both films, the love interests are peripheral to the tale but add considerably to the character development. In both films, the protagonists are loners in school with no friends. Only Whiplash does it all with subtlety, an aspect bereft in the competing film. But then most audiences do not appreciate subtlety.

The shadows/lack of lighting gains importance in the final drum sequence as in the prologue as lights seems to go off before Andrews drum solo takes centre stage.  Fletcher is shadowed out, the ensemble is not lit, and slowly the drums are lit by the spotlight.  Then follows the amazing solo by Andrew which at times are not heard (by the human ear but heard by the mind’s ear) but only seen (a brilliant exhibition of sound mixing in the history of cinema and deserving of the Oscar nomination). First, Chezelle shows us the sweat drops on the cymbals and later a few drops of blood.  Fletcher is shown lending a helping hand to set Andrew's cymbals right. Fletcher takes off his jacket during the solo as in the first scene of Fletcher in Whiplash.  Fletcher is in business again, he has spotted the real Charlie Parker.  Such importance to details make Chezelle’s work truly amazing. The final body language between Fletcher and Andrew is one of mutual appreciation. A Svengali is sometimes needed. Somewhere in the shadows, Andrew’s dad’s visage changes from concern for his son’s physical agony to one of celebration. What a film! It is one of the finest films from USA in a long while with incredible attention to scriptwriting, editing, sound mixing (that includes patches of near silence) and cinematography.  The contribution of Simmons as Fletcher is overarching in this lovely film. Chezelle deserved a nomination for direction as well, despite the Oscar snub.  One wishes the 30 year old Chezelle, with just two feature films behind him, proves to be a Charlie Parker of cinema.

P.S. Whiplash is one of the author's best ten movies of 2014 and the only one from USA.  The film won 3 Oscars-- Best Editing, Best Supporting Actor (for J K Simmons) and Best Sound Mixing. It has won the Golden Globe award and the BAFTA award for Best Supporting Actor for J.K.Simmons who plays Fletcher. At BAFTA, it picked up awards also for editing and sound. At Sundance Film Festival it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience award. 

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151. Italian maestro Federico Fellini’s “La Strada” (The Road) (1954): Re-evaluating a neo-realist classic by reflecting on the movie’s screenplay

A  half century after La Strada was made and widely accepted as a world classic, the film needs to be evaluated by its content as much as by its often touted “neo-realist” style.  Interestingly, Pope Francis considers La Strada to be the film that he loves the most. Director Frederico Fellini considered this work  to be his most “representative film”, most autobiographical, and one which he had the greatest trouble “realizing” and finding a producer (p. 85 in Edward Murrays’s Ten Film Classics). Fellini also felt close to all the three principal characters in the film (p. 115 in Gilbert Salachas’ Federico Fellini).

First, it is interesting to study the three lead characters--three distinct types of idiots/fools—that Federico Fellini and his co-scriptwriters, Tulio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano, presented us. These are characters  that provide the basic, pivotal elements of the film. What made them create the three major characters? Were these characters fools or intelligent folks playing the fools? Who survives and who does not? Aren’t the three a reflection of the fool in each of us?

The fool Gelsomina--childlike innocence devoid of evil

The first fool in the film the viewer encounters is a woman, Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), who is childlike and innocent, fatherless and a burden on her single mother, who in turn is struggling to feed her many children. And Gelsomina, the fool, is most eloquent when she is silent. To top it all, she is not a sexually or a physically attractive person.  She is described in the film by another thus “What a funny face! Are you a woman, really? Or an artichoke?” She is the epitome of the innocent fool, unattractive, and yet without a trace of evil. Even the nun who befriends her sees parallels between Gelsomina and herself.

The fool Zampano--all brawn and no brains

The second fool is Zampano (Anthony Quinn), the strongman, who is a brute who uses his brawn more than his brains. Zampano does use his limited intellect to earn his daily bread (he fools his audiences that he is able to breaks chains strapped around his chest  with a physical effort  that could make his eyes pop out) but is not smart enough to be able to recognize true love or thank his benefactors who provide him shelter. He can never consider the consequences of his actions. In the film he is compared with a dog “He is like a dog.  A dog looks at you, wants to talk and only barks.” One could assume that Rosa, Gelsomina’s sister, either fled Zampano’s company or died while working for him. He believes his women can be bought either for sex or for work. He does not realize that he needs long-term companionship until it is too late. When Gelsomina suggests marriage he does not even consider it as an option. The first scene of Zampano in the film La Strada suggests a wicked, street-smart and physically overpowering man “buying” a woman. The final scene of Zampano in the film suggests just the opposite, a vulnerable and sensitive man, lonely and remorseful for his past actions, a King Lear who bemoans the loss of a loved one. Zampano’s eloquence is not verbal, his physical expressions, as Fellini captured them, in the final sequence of the film says more than all the spoken words in the film just as director Arthur Penn captured the essence of his film Night Moves (1975), visually and non-verbally with the brilliant end sequence.

The professional fool Il Matto--well-read but ignorant of his limits of foolery

The third fool is “Il matto” (The fool/The clown), a professional fool, played by Richard Baseheart . The clown is the smartest of the trio and a philosopher. He considers himself to be ignorant but he reads books. He is able to spot the latent capability of Gelsomina . But he is not smart enough to know when he has to stop playing the fool. He is the proverbial jester of a king’s court, intelligent enough to spot talent and grasp universal truths. In the most philosophically important line in the film he states “Everything is useful... This pebble for instance.” When queried as why the pebble is useful, he replies even more interestingly “If I knew, I would be the Almighty who knew all. When you are born, and when you die... Who knows? I don’t know for what this pebble is useful but it must be useful. For if it is useless, everything is useless. So are the stars.”   “Il matto,” the clown, when dying, is philosophically worried that his watch is broken, when it is his skull that is actually broken by Zampano.

Gelsomina is initially not able to play the trumpet but the filmmakers without showing her practising to play the instrument suggests, as the film progresses, that she had become close to the musical instrument (Zampano leaves that trumpet with her as she sleeps blissfully unaware that Zampano  is leaving her). What is more, we also learn later in the film that she has mastered the very musical notes that Il Matto the clown had always played on his miniature violin to make the audience laugh and cry.

Thus La Stradapresents the viewer with three kinds of fools: the simpleton, the boor, and the professional clown, who pokes fun at others and at himself, sometimes to earn money, sometimes by habit. Each one of us plays the fool some time in our lives—but we need to identify for ourselves which kind and when we played each role.

Gelsomina playing on her trumpet Nino Rota's touching notes

It is interesting to study how Fellini and his two co-scriptwriters developed the story of La Strada. It is well known that Fellini loved the circus and much of the ideas of La Strada was a result of this fascination. Fellini modeled Zampano’s character partly on a real-life pig castrator, who was also a womanizer.  He had wanted to make a film on a travelling circus. But the concept of Gelsomina was the contribution of Tulio Pinelli, who had seen a tiny woman pushing a cart just as Gelsomina pushed the motorcycle driven van with a tarpaulin cover when it would need a push to start. But it was Fellini who made Gelsomina the dim-witted woman in the tale.  The melancholic irony of La Strada was possibly the contribution of Ennio Flaiano, whose literary works represent that very bent of mind. Thus, the film distills a tale picked up from real situations by three writers to forge an unforgettable story of three unusual characters on the fringes of society, a story delicately  woven to entertain  a wider audience over time, not just the Jury members at Venice Film Festival or the voting Oscar Academy members but even the current Pope.

Zampano and Gelsomina on the road

Is there religion in La Strada? The only obvious religious reference is provided by the nuns who provide Gelsomina and Zampano a place to stay overnight and Zampano rebukes their generosity by stealing from his benefactors. The nun who befriends Gelsomina comments that she views Gelsomina’s purpose in life to be much like her own life with the nuns.  “Il matto”, the clown, sees  Gelsomina’s life having a purpose just as each pebble has a purpose. These are vignettes of philosophy and theology that possibly appealed to Pope Francis who took his papal name after St Francis of Assisi. And at the end of the film, a reflective viewer realizes that the “pebble” of the film did have a purpose, which might not be so obvious to some other viewers.

Nino Rota’s contribution of music to La Strada might not stand out but the theme music first played by “Il matto” (the fool/clown) on a kit violin is the same music/notes that Zampano hears a stranger, a lady drying her laundry reproducing towards the end of the movie.  The strength of Nino Rota’s music is not just the cadence of the philosophical theme “Travelling down the lonely road” but the ability of Rota to capture the mood of the film in those few notes and Fellini’s ability to use the music sparingly and yet so strategically at the right moments in the film to underscore its vitality.

Director Ermanno Olmi, a neo-realist filmmaker of eminence, has questioned has questioned the concept of neo-realism in cinema that utilized professional actors in neo-realist cinema. In that context, where does Fellini’s La Strada stand? For this critic, actor Anthony Quinn has never been as impressive as he was in La Strada and perhaps in a little known Biblical film of director Richard Fleischer called Barrabas (1961). Richard Basehart, too,  has been an outstanding thespian in most films that he appeared in and his role in La Strada is not one that can easily be forgotten. But the real winner is Giulietta Masina, who is able to bring shades of burlesque when presenting tragic realism and slip so effortlessly into a role quite different from her real life. (It is not surprising that she chose to study for a degree in philosophy just as her husband Fellini, who graduated with a degree in philosophy and literature.} Thus, if we subscribe to Olmi’s purist definition of neo-realism Fellini’s favourite work does not fit into a neo-realist mode as La Strada is often considered to represent. Yes, the film did capture the poorer sections of Italy with some honesty, but the recreation of that reality was done by great accomplished actors.

Cineastes today might find it interesting to compare and contrast La Strada with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkish film Three Monkeys (2008). Both films deal with three fools, two males and a woman. Both films have a touch of melancholic irony.  The films are separated by half a century and two religious perspectives but the end result is starkly similar. In both films, the three idiots are the losers at the end of the tale more as a result of their inherent personalities that they cannot control. They are parallel tales with totally divergent contexts. Yet both films offer much for a reflective viewer.

Fellini assesses his wife's transformation into Gelsomina

There is more to the film if we extrapolate the film to the lives of Fellini and his wife Masina. They were in love but their love life was tragic—their only child died as an infant. This apparently affected them unconsciously in their later work and lives. One can definitely assume Masina, a close associate of Fellini and his wife, would have contributed to the screenplay even though she is not officially credited with it. The two musical instruments (apart from the drum introduced briefly) shown in La Strada, were unconsciously linked to them. Masina was a daughter of a violinist mother, though she was brought up by her aunt.  It is therefore not surprising that violin should be one of the two chosen instruments.  And Fellini before his death requested that a famous trumpeter play the notes of Nino Rota from the film La Strada over his grave at his funeral. Masina died soon after the death of her husband and both are buried next to each other and their infant son. It is interesting to note how the unconscious references to one’s life or those close to one’s life creep into screenplays and to study how what the screenplay writer had developed in a screenplays affects him/her in later life. Thus, both the violin and trumpet were not just important facets of La Strada's screenplay but of the filmmakers' lives as well.

La Strada won of Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1957 and the Silver Lion at Venice Film Festival for Federico Fellini.

P.S. La Strada is one of the author’s top 100 films of all time.  Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957) with Giullietta Masina, and Pier Paolo Pasolini as its co-scriptwriter, has been reviewed on this blog earlier. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys (2008) has also been reviewed on this blog earlier.

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148. Argentine director Juan José Campanella’s “El secreto de sus Ojos” (The Secret in Their Eyes) (2009): Closing of open doors and revealing tales through the eyes, underscoring a visual element one often takes for granted

Viewers of this Oscar-winning Argentinean film are likely to enjoy the experience for varied reasons. It is definitely an engaging thriller with loads of subtle humor.  It is therefore not surprising that the film was a commercial and critical success in the country of its origin, Argentina. The best foreign film Oscar, the second for Argentina over the years, bestowed on the film would have boosted its popularity at home even further. However, the film can be enjoyed by non-Argentinean audiences as well for several additional elements beyond the obvious thrilling tale the film unfolds.

The film is at a basic level a detective story of tracking down a rapist and killer and ensuring that he gets a fitting punishment for the crime. At a more complex level, it is a tale of love of two sets of couples and a strong camaraderie of two detective colleagues. And finally, the screenplay captures the mood of Argentina’s “dirty war” period from 1976 to 1983 (during which tale is set) when criminals held sway and at least 15000 social activists ‘disappeared’ and often social status provided a sense of security for a privileged few (such as the Cornell-educated Hastings in the movie) when compared to lesser mortals (such as the investigating officer Benjamin Esposito in the movie). The indirect connection to the "dirty war" is established briefly with the TV news item watched by three pivotal characters in the movie that shows Isabel Peron morphed with the rapist/killer as her bodyguard/security staff.

The remarkable screenplay of the film, an adaptation of a book written by Eduardo Sacheri, is by both the author Sacheri and the film’s Argentinean director Juan José Campanella. The screenplay uses the power of cinema to elevate the tale of the book to an even more sophisticated level.

Campanella, for those unfamiliar with his work, is an engaging and creative screenplay writer. For instance, Campanella’s 2001 film The Son of the Bride, another delightful Argentinean film that made the final nominee list for the best foreign film Oscar that year, had the lead character muttering away that he is “no Albert Einstein, a Bill Gates or a Dick Watson” making all viewers wonder who on earth was this Dick Watson. At the end of the film, when the end-credits are rolling, the movie humorously reveals that this mysterious Dick Watson is a character from a pornographic film. Campanella carries forward his unusual penchant for juggling non-chronologically images and incidents in The Secret in Their Eyes that add to a diligent viewer’s entertainment. For instance, the movie begins with shots of Judge Hasting’s and Investigator Esposito’s eyes and shots of the railway station in Buenos Aires which are only fleshed out much later halfway into the movie. Campanella is apparently reinforcing two important strands that continue throughout the duration of The Secret in Their Eyes: the importance of eyes so pivotal in the film and the development of the plot; and the importance of railway stations as a key location for both the two parallel love stories and the detective story in the film. And both deal with memories, something the script reminds us is “all that we end up with.”

Campanella and Sacheri had devised a cute devise to capture the mood of Argentina to be weaved into the film. Judge Hastings (Soledad Villamil) hands Investigator Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) a typewriter which cannot type the alphabet “A”. Much later in the film the retired investigator Esposito, while writing a book on the case is shown waking up from a disturbed sleep and scribbling the word  TEMO(‘I fear’). He knows and is afraid that he could be knocked off by the killer-cum-rapist who is out on the loose and is seeking revenge for being briefly arrested by him.  Towards the end of the film, Esposito adds the alphabet “A” to TEMOto transform the scribble to TEAMO (‘I love you’). Campanella and Sacheri again prove the importance of a script that appears initially disconnected but  is all tied up eventually.

Temo to Teamo: From 'Fear' to 'Love', with an alphabet added

Similarly, throughout the film Judge Hastings wonders if she ought to close the door of her office.  The viewer would assume that it had something to do with the latent love affair between Hastings and Esposito that Hastings did not want her office staff to hear. But is it only that? It was a time when everybody seemed to be snooping on each other and the closing of doors became imperative for all important discussions. Take the sequence when Esposito and his dear colleague go snooping into a house of the suspect’s mother. The streets are empty. Yet there were people taking note of the car,its registration number, and what they were up to. The tale is set in a period when everyone was snooping on each other in Argentina.

And later on, Esposito’s rival colleague berates Esposito in front of Hastings that he is a nobody on the social ladder, minutes before the spine chilling encounter in the lift with the rapist-cum-killer loading his gun to send a message to both Esposito and Hastings. It is a sign of the terror most Argentinians had encountered, irrespective of their social status, during the 'dirty war' years.

The message of terror in Argentina during the Dirty War years

Campanella is a delightful scriptwriter. He has proved it time and again with two marvelous films: The Son of the Bride and The Secret in Their Eyes. In both films, he was aided by the marvelous thespian Ricardo Darin, who exudes magnetic charm in each role, film after film. And Campanella  has a magical touch with his actors Darin and Ms. Villamil not just in The Secret in Their Eyes but in an earlier work Same Love, Same Rain (1999). In all the three films, Campanella shows that he can elicit great performances from all his actors and he has a magic touch with script-writing. The viewers are not likely to forget the line “the gates of heaven have opened’’muttered by the males time and again as they encounter any beautiful woman in The Secret in Their Eyes.

However, Sacheri and Campanella, through this film, have raised the issue of crime and punishment of rapist-killers worldwide. The punishment suggested by the filmmakers is thought-provoking. The contents of the film will make the viewer think about corruption and the consequences of lenient punishments accorded to such criminals.

But is Campanella the director, the best filmmaker to come out of Argentina in recent years? This critic considers the late Fabián Bielinsky, who made just two feature films The Aura (2005) and Nine Queens (2000) (both with Ricardo Darin in the lead roles), before he passed away prematurely in 2006 to be head and shoulders above Campanella as a director. The two Bielinsky films had a maturity that should make Argentinean cinema proud of raising the bar of quality though it is Campanella, who eventually brought home the Oscar statuette.

P.S. The late Fabián Bielinsky’s The Aura was reviewed earlier on this blog.

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138. Austrian director Michael Haneke’s French film “Amour” (Love) (2012): Well-crafted, comprehensive cinema that will touch both the heart and the mind of the viewer equally

Amour is the best film that this critic viewed in 2012. There are two ways to appreciate this film. One way is to appreciate its subject and the second is to appreciate the artistic manner the contents of the movie are presented to the viewer.  The following review attempts to appreciate both aspects separately.

The subject of the film would win the hearts of the larger segment of its viewers.  Amour is French for “love.”  However, the subject of the film deals also with inevitable appointment with death for all of us. Both subjects intertwine in this movie.  Love depicted in the film is the rare kind of love not often elaborated on screen; it is the love between couples in the evening of their lives. The only types of viewers who might not like the subject are those who themselves are already beginning to experience situations similar to those depicted in the film. Amour has already won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, the top four awards at the European Film Awards (Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress), the two BAFTA awards (Best Actress and Best Film not in the English Language), and the Best Foreign Film Awards at the Oscars and Golden Globes. Predictably, it has also swept the top French Cesars (the French national film awards)--best film, best director, best actor, best actress, and best screenplay.

Amour, the film, brings many modern day social issues to the fore. The film’s point of view is that of the elderly person, not of a young man or a young woman. The filmmakers have indirectly achieved two remarkable feats.  One, the filmmakers are able to reinforce the importance for young people to understand, and thereby empathize with, the agony of elderly sick persons in hospitals and old age homes cut away from their immediate family and familiar surroundings. Two, the film underscores the importance of younger people to apportion quality time with the elders in the family when they most need their presence. It is also a film on the dignity of the old and the dying. It also presents a subtle plea for euthanasia for such unfortunate elders as an alternative to increasing levels of pain and degradation; when their offspring are not near to alleviate their suffering.

Anne and Georges

Most viewers will find Amourto be a film that is both endearing and thought-provoking. You love and empathize with the main characters in the film, Georges and Anne. Yet it is also a film about the darkest reality all of us have to accept eventually. It is about the evening of our lives when death seems strangely more attractive than life.

The film does not state whether the duo is married or not, what is clear is the communication and understanding between the two, spoken and unspoken, are alive and well. The film is primarily about the duo and when peripheral characters come on screen they are there to substantiate the love between the elderly spouses.  A key character in the film is their only offspring, a daughter, who herself has a family and associated problems, that leave her with little time to attend to her parents’ needs.  She prefers that her parents move to an old age home and be looked after by paid staff as most youngsters in the western world would like. The introduction of this character reveals that the primary couple, Georges and Anne, the parents of this woman, Eva, have been together for at least 30-odd years, if not more. This movies’ tale is not of a fleeting love of spouses who have been together for a short while but of a couple who have loved each other for a long, long while.  The film presents the outcome of a long relationship with music as their common interest and a factor closely related to their individual careers.  Two other individuals shown briefly in the movie are the concierge and his wife who bring the elderly couple their provisions including the heavy bottles of Evian (drinking water). These individuals are also old but less advanced in age compared to the main duo and the film records the honest appreciation of the younger couple for the elder couple.  The film also briefly brings into focus two youngsters interacting with the elderly duo. One is a pianist student of Anne who drops by to thank the couple for attending his concert and promises to bring a CD of his concert. The second is a nurse who is rough with Anne while taking care of her, and is subsequently fired by Georges.  The actions of the youngsters are of secondary importance, the reactions of the elderly couple to each youngster are of primary importance. The two youngsters provide differing responses of the younger generation to the elders. And finally, there is the pigeon, which enters the apartment and is trapped by Georges and eventually set free. Each interloper’s entry into the elder’s life and time provides additional psychological details of the elders’ mind. All this makes Amour a great tale to recall after one has watched the film in a movie hall or on a television screen. The viewer begins to empathize with the elderly duo’s condition, not with the peripheral characters.

Such contrasts are what Michael Haneke is so adept at presenting in his cinema. He loves to make the viewer enjoy viewing uncomfortable truths that he presents in his films. Haneke’s cinema often excels in adding a documentary-like touch that he provides to his fictional characters.

Now that brings us to the second way to appreciate Amour—the way the tale is presented.

The strength of Amour is not merely the subject of love but the cumulative creative strength of the team both in front of the camera and behind the camera that will enrapture audiences of all ages and mindsets and satiate the mind of an attentive and patient viewer.

Michael Haneke, the director, had earlier made a film called Caché (Hidden) in 2005 which had won him the best Director Prize at Cannes that year. Haneke is the sole author and scriptwriter of the tales of both Caché and Amour. Interestingly both movies/tales have a Georges and an Anne as the main protagonists. A coincidence? This critic doesn’t believe it is. Both films are studies of intelligent cinema in getting the viewer to participate in the film’s tale beyond what is presented on screen. Caché opened and closed with the static camera capturing the external part of a middle class Parisian apartment with hardly any changes in the visuals. The viewer was pulled into the role of the camera psychologically. Amour does something quite similar early in the film. After having revealed the dead body of Anne (Emmanuel Riva), a similar static camera takes in an audience waiting for a piano recital to begin in an auditorium. The camera is not interested in capturing the images on stage but that of the audience. The viewer has to spot the face of Anne just by the brief recollection of the dead face of Anne shown a wee bit earlier in the movie with no additional help from the director or the cinematographer. Mind you, this is not cinematographer Darius Khondji at work—this is the trademark of Haneke and Haneke’s regular cinematographer Christian Berger, perfected in previous Haneke films.

For Haneke watchers, the concept of demarcating the ’outside’ and the ‘inside’ living spaces of our lives is important. Much of Amour is built around the modest apartment of Georges and Anne representing the inside, and only the brief shots of the piano recital auditorium and the trip back home from the recital represent the outside.  The scriptwriter and director Haneke is clear about his intentions:  the subject is mainly confined in space and psychologically to the living spaces that limit the elders physically as they age. The few occasions in Amourthat transgress the boundaries are when Anne returns after a brief hospitalization, the open windows that allow the pigeon to enter, and the final decision to go for a walk “outside.”  The one brief segment of the film that stood out for this critic was ability of Haneke and Khondji to metamorphose the ‘inside’ with the ‘outside’ by showing and focusing on the ‘outdoor’ paintings in the apartment walls—that imbued both the pathos of the time with the dark waves of the sea and the recall of the youthful years with the image of a girl/young woman captured in the light of the exterior rays of the sun. This brief interlude of images not only took the viewer outside the apartment, but provides the viewer another opportunity to relate with the tale as an independent observer and make judgments of what would transpire next.

Haneke has another trade mark for his kind of cinema:  surprise the viewer with an action when the viewer least expects it. Both Caché and Amour has such sequences that jolt the viewer.

Haneke, the scriptwriter, has written the tale following an identical situation he is privy to in his own family. One begins to wonder if the Georges and Annes will continue to surface in Haneke’s cinema in the future as in Caché and Amour even though common links between the two sets of Georges and Annes are limited to the fact both are supposedly married and both have the same names. In   Caché, the events in the movie lead to a fracture in the marriage; in Amour, the events only affirm the relationship. Haneke is exploring the strengths of such relationships under trying circumstances in the two films. Haneke goes one step further in both films, he explores the possible effects on the offspring and interestingly both films offer distinctly different outcomes, in one the offspring is indifferent, in the other there seems to be a new awakening of real affection and understanding.

Space in the apartment is optimized to meet functional requirements

The strength of Haneke’s subjects and his ability to maximize the potential of his chosen cinematographers is surpassed by Haneke’s incredible ability to work with his lead actors: Jean-Louis Trintignant (81) and Emmanuelle Riva (85).  (Ms Riva is the oldest actress ever to be nominated for the Best Actress Oscar.) Now Trintignant is a master thespian who has enriched cinema with his unforgettable roles as the brave magistrate in Costa Gavras’ Z and a retired judge in Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Red, two cinematic works that standout among a remarkable list of great performances. Riva, too, is an accomplished thespian who considerably contributed to masterpieces such as Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour, Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Blue, and Gilo Pontecorvo’s Kapo.  Haneke coaxed Trintignant, who had retired from acting, to return to play another amazing role. In many ways, this critic feels Trintignant was no less than Riva in acting prowess in Amour. Both actors prove that subtlety is more important in conveying feelings than shouting and raving. Even in Caché, the performances that Haneke elicited from Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche stood out over all else. Haneke is to be admired for this ability to bring out the best in his chosen actors.

When eye cannot meet eye

 

The art direction of the film is very well thought out as well. Apparently the apartment used in the film is a set and even trained viewers will miss out on this fact—it is so well done. While the electronic equipment in the house is modern, the furniture is as old as its occupants including a baby grand piano that takes up costly space in an apartment where even the extra bed (shown at the final sequence) is tucked against the wall. The “crowded apartment” looks empty in the final sequence after the elders have left and the daughter takes their pace in the apartment.  The spatial difference is striking.

Amour proves a point or two to mainstream cinema today. One is the importance of sound (not of music) that is a crucial element in good cinema. The water gushing from a tap for washing dishes is used twice in the film eloquently in a manner that words and visuals rarely achieve in cinema. Then a CD playing the music of Anne’s protégé is switched off. Again Haneke underscores the loaded importance of silence. Most of all, Amourcontinues Haneke’s constant effort to empower the viewer to get involved in interpreting what is shown on the screen. If we compare Caché with Amour, the latter film requires less of the viewer, and is therefore able to please a larger potential viewership.  Haneke is able to throw the euthanasia question at the viewer without making it obvious. He is able to discuss the lack of love and care among modern-day youth for the elders by appearing to discuss “love” of two individuals who exhibit the epitome of love by caring for the other—even the concierge and wife split their labors (bring up the water) according to their physical condition. Haneke loves to shake up the viewer without appearing to do so.

While Amour is the finest work of comprehensive cinema this critic has viewed in 2012, Haneke has not treaded new paths with this work. The late Maurice Pialat’s French film La gueule ouverte/The Mouth Agape (1974) had dealt with a parallel tale and a similar treatment. That important work of cinema from the late Pialat also dealt with death of an elderly wife, reactions of the young offspring towards a dying parent, the sparse use of music, and ‘deafening’ silence with aplomb. While Amour’s strength lies in the performances and the film’s marvelous end-sequence, Pialat’s work, on the other hand, exhibited both the directorial skills of Pialat and the camerawork of the legendary Nestor Almendros at their very best. Pialat’s movie, with its own fascinating ending, will remain as one of this critic’s top 100 films of all time.  Amour, without doubt, offers a complete cinema experience and the finest movie of the past year with an interesting ending but it is not a movie that opens new pathways in the world of cinema.

P.S. Michael Haneke’s Caché was reviewed earlier on this blog. Though Amour is no.1 on the author's list of best films of 2012, Post Tenebras Lux, no.2 on the list is the only movie made in 2012 to be included on the list of the top 100 films of all time. This is a deliberate decision. This critic considers the Mexican film to be path-breaking cinema, which Amour is not. While Amourhas virtues of being a movie strong in departments of acting, scriptwriting and art direction as well, and has the awesome capability of universal appeal, Post Tenebras Lux loses out on those specific aspects. However, if this critic were to choose the better director of the two films, Carlos Reygadas scores over Haneke. The Cannes jury got it dead right while sitting in judgement over the two outstanding works of 2012 by bestowing Amour with the Golden Palm for the best film and Post Tenebras Lux with the Best Director award.

P.P.S. Two friends have pointed out that Amour has two critical sequences that are almost identical to the Icelandic film Volcano (2011) directed by Runar Runarsson, made a year earlier. This new information dilutes my fervent appreciation of Amour.

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136. Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s film in English “Life of Pi” (2012): Visually spellbinding cinema made standing on the shoulders of a marvelous novelist

Ang Lee needs to be congratulated for making an engaging movie Life of Pi.  Few other directors would have dared to even attempt the feat. As a Taiwanese director, the odds were stacked against him—filming an award-winning book populated with Indians talking in authentic Indian English accents about their quilt of culture, religion and even politics. Add to these problems, the technical difficulties of creating credible scenes of various animals and then editing all the visuals to match the tale is truly daunting.

Ang Lee had earlier proven his incredible skill of incorporating computer graphics (CG) and special effects in his Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000--a movie  that went on to win a bagful of Oscars and worldwide popular acceptance).  Some will point out that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon never won a major award at any major film festival of repute. So also, a keen cineaste will note, that Life of Pi, which can boast of the finest CG in cinema to date in 3D, was not picked up by the three major international film festivals--Cannes, Venice and Berlin--in their competition line-ups. But at the same time, Life of Pi is a sure shot contender in the 2013 Oscar race just as many Ang Lee films have turned up trumps in the past.  And quite appropriately, Ang Lee and the studio’s publicity mandarins have ensured that Life of Pi will open lesser film festivals: New York, Goa’s Indian International Film Festival and Dubai. Ang Lee knows where his film belongs. Ang Lee has consciously made the film to grab a particular slice of the global audience that would make the box office jingle. And that he will.

Life of Pi is a CG dreamboat. The team behind Life of Pi needs to be congratulated on recreating a Royal Bengal Tiger with muscles rippling under its fur and a face that is more expressive than many living actors today. The film even has shots of an emaciated tiger climbing out of the boat after months without sufficient food and water, floating in the Pacific, and then stepping out on terra firma on the Mexican coast, testing the ground if it was indeed real.  The visuals are so real that it is difficult to persuade an ignorant viewer that the animals are fake and that the actor playing Pi never had a live tiger’s head on his lap or even saw one while in front of the camera. One would be surprised if Life of Pi does not sweep a bagful of Oscars in 2013. But what did Ang Lee truly achieve in this movie beyond the 3D CG magic?

Without any doubt, Ang Lee has been able to convey the spirit of Yann Martel’s novel--faith in God, well-researched animal behavior, fantasy, and an intriguing end that tosses the question of illusion and reality in the viewer’s lap. Ang Lee has been successful in presenting the ecumenical Pi, who is a practising Hindu, Christian and Muslim, even though Pi’s conversion to Islam is barely shown in the film (not so in the novel).

An honest evaluation of Ang Lee’s Life of Pi is not possible without having read Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, winner of the Man Booker Prize. Any viewer who has read the book will see Ang Lee’s touch as he and his scriptwriter David Magee have intentionally chosen not to film certain parts of the book but instead added sequences to the film that never appeared in Martel’s book. These differences provide the viewer with insight into judging the true merits of Ang Lee’s film Life of Pi.

It is very evident to an observant viewer--even without reading the book--that Ang Lee has one aim. That one aim is to make the film bereft of blood and violent scenes.  Ang Lee has very intelligently shown a tiger killing a hyena and a hyena eating a live zebra, just to mention two of many sequences that strangely do not put off the viewer. There is no blood (or almost no blood) and no reason why a caring parent will cover the eyes of their children from seeing a carnivore kill another animal to survive.  Ang Lee and the studios that made Life of Pihave made a film that cleverly suggests various animal actions that never end up repulsing the viewer.  It almost brings to mind the sanitized Walt Disney films of yore.  Imagine the lifeboat in the tale, several days in the sea with all the animal remains.  When Ang Lee does show the boat’s floor briefly, it is only water that you see on an unscratched surface.  That is just one of the departures the filmmakers have intentionally made.  They have made a film that is agreeable to the largest number of viewers possible.

The director and scriptwriter made three or four fascinating additions to the Yann Martel tale. The sequence where the tiger named Richard Parker jumps out of the boat and then finds that it is able to swim but unable to climb back on board and is helped back on the boat by an innovative Pi is truly a lovely addition.  This sequence strengthens the bond between man and animal under trying unnatural situations, affirming that man is possibly more considerate than an animal. I congratulate the filmmakers for their artistic license they took to make this addition. The second addition is the creation of Pi’s sweetheart Anandi, the dance student, who never graced the novel.  This addition reveals Ang Lee’s commercial instincts to add a female character to a film dominated by males. Did it add value?  This critic is not convinced that it did. A third addition to the book is the shot of the young Pi trying to feed a live tiger in the zoo and being stopped at the eleventh hour by his father. (In the book, Pi claims he never did any such thing and is puzzled why his father should show him and his brother, how dangerous the animal could be by sacrificing a live goat in front of his sons' eyes to the horror of his wife as well.) This is an addition that improves on the book and makes the incident more credible. The fourth addition that an inattentive viewer could miss is the brief long shot of the mysterious floating island built on algae that resembles a sleeping human form as Pi’s boat drifts away, after the visit to "the island." That was indeed a clever addition by the filmmakers but it lacked its virtual symbolic punch because of the director’s and scriptwriter’s deliberate decisions not to show the bizarre and the terrifying bits of the book, which made the book what it is.

To some it is unfortunate that Ang Lee and his team decided to verbalize the alternate story of Pi narrated towards the end of the film to the Japanese representatives of the sunken ship instead of visualizing it on screen.  One could easily understand that an Ang Lee who was obviously flinching from showing details of raw animal meat or even raw fish earlier in the film would never include a gruesome beheading that the alternate tale entailed. So, too, is the surrealistic encounter of Pi with another boat carrying a man with a French accent that the tiger kills and subsequently driving Pi to cannibalism, which was a key bit to the story described in the novel that Ang Lee decided to discard again for the sake of popular taste.  Assume for an instant that Ang Lee had decided to have Gerard Depardieu (who plays the French cook on the sunken ship) reappear in that scene from the book. Life of Pi would then have been catapulted into an intellectual plane and made the Cannes/Venice competition class—but then Ang Lee was making a Disney film and not making a realistic film with blood and gore. The simple vegetarian meal prepared by Pi, in the movie, would then have suggested something more profound for the viewer.

Life of Pi, the movie, provides sanitized entertainment. It presents Indian characters that appear more Indian than David Lean, a perfectionist in his time, accomplished in his A Passage to India (1984). The only scene that was compromising in CG quality was perhaps the one which has Pi’s uncle swimming in Piscine Molitor in Paris where Pi's uncle looked unreal. Even with what the filmmakers chose ultimately to show on screen, Ang Lee’s Life of Piis a treat to watch in 3D with its limited intellectual query made to the viewer to mull over about which of the two tales narrated by Pi is the real one.  However, before one sings praises of Ang Lee and his talented team, one ought to demarcate what needs to be credited to Martel (who in turn, borrowed the basic idea from a 1981 Brazilian novel  Max and the Cats). Martel’s book offers much more than the film for the reader/viewer to figure out but Ang Lee and his team has brought the beauty of the tiger and the ocean’s fauna closer to the average viewer’s minds in a manner words can never accomplish.

P.S. Life of Pi is no.7 on the list of Best 10 films of 2012, ranked by the author of this blog. The movie won the Golden Globe for Best Original Score and the BAFTA awards for Best Cinematography and Best Special Visual Effects.The film has subsequently won the Best Direction Oscar and three other Oscars for Music, Cinematography and Visual Effects.

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134. US film director Mike Nichols’ debut film “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966): Nichols’ finest work to date

It is nearly half a century since Mike Nichols made his first feature film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  Richard Burton, the lead actor, is dead. Elizabeth Taylor, the lead actress, is dead. Its screenplay writer Ernest Lehman is dead. The film’s music composer, famous for his “sparse instrumentation,” Alex North, too, is dead.  He, too, had won an Oscar nomination for this film. No longer alive are the film’s editor Sam O’Steen, who won an Oscar nomination for the film, art director Richard Sylbert, and costume designer Irene Sharaff  the last two of whom  won separate Oscars  for this film.

Yet the movie, all 23 reels of it, (this critic recalls the exasperated look, decades ago, on the projectionist’s face opening the pile of film cans to feed the spools into the projector, at a time when most movies came in lots of 6 to 12 reels at the most) made in black and white, is colorfully alive in the minds of those who can appreciate the celebration of marriage of the finest in drama and in cinema.

If this critic finds this cinematic work memorable, thanks are primarily due to Edward Albee, the playwright. The play is a clinical look at modern social and psychological conditions, then and now. Forget the yelling and screaming and visceral abuse flung between a husband and a wife, both well educated professors in a US university. Forget the constant reference to sex and sexual terms and the open attempts to cuckold and to humiliate the spouse in front of strangers. And ironically the movie is not about sex. It is a mind game at an elevated plane. The play/film is essentially about how two spouses in spite of all their differences and agonies find comfort in each other. Incredible as it seems both the play and the film ends as a toast to love, which seemed to be absent throughout the lengthy play and film. At a time when the western world was enjoying quick divorces, here was Albee searching for and finding the ephemeral strand of love that binds couples together in spite of appearances that indicate otherwise. (An unforgettable quote loaded with meaning and bitterness from the play/film is this one spoken by Martha:  “I swear to God, George, that even if you existed I’d divorce you”. And there is no divorce in the film, only rapprochement and self realization.)

Albee, for this critic, in this play allowed catharsis at its brutal best to sink into the minds of the viewers. An orphan adopted by rich foster parents, Albee never truly felt loved and by many reports never reciprocated any feeling of love towards his foster family in later years. Albee wanted to be a writer while his foster parents were grooming him to be a successful tycoon. And Albee was gay. The lack of love permeates through the pages of Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But what Albee missed in real life and yearned for is revealed at the end of the play–love and appreciation, often not apparent in the play in a cursory view, idiomatically apparent in the movie though when the night ends and the sun’s rays enter through the windows.

Albee, in this play, had brought the finest traditions of Greek theater to America serving catharsis in large dollops. One gets the feeling that couples who watched the play being performed would be persuaded not to  spar with each other afterwards but only mentally re-examine their differences to come closer to each other. Albee, the playwright, must have been truly satisfied that he was able to put on the table a slice of his own life—not about children, but more about the lack of them and the inability of adults to communicate with them and the resulting ire towards the parents formed by the kids. Second, this is by Albee’s own admission, a magnificent play structured around a formidable thought “who is afraid of living life without false illusions?” Third, the play and the film are both a toast to the thin line separating dreams/fiction and reality. The admission of Martha (played by Elizabeth Taylor) to George’s (played by Richard Burton) loaded question Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is “I am, George, I am.”  Any intelligent viewer will realize that this answer is not merely applicable to Martha but to many of us. And it takes an extraordinary gay male writer to transpose those universal shattered feelings/words for a female character to speak, a female character who prior to uttering those words seemed to dominate her husband George for considerable length in the play.

Add to Albee, the contribution of Hollywood’s scriptwriter Ernest Lehman.  It appears Lehman was smart enough to tamper very little with Albee’s play except tone down the expletives for acceptance by the censors and the studio. He also added two minor characters: a roadside restaurant owner (who speaks a few lines) and his wife (who serves the drinks without saying a word). It is often difficult to demarcate who made such decisions while making a film, whether these decisions need to be attributed to the scriptwriter or to a director (in this case Lehman vs the debutant director Mike Nichols). The opening scene in the film of the church bells ringing for instance could merely be an indicator of time, 2 a.m. to establish time frame of the action (late night /early morning to first rays of sunlight in the final scene). But the church bells could take a different meaning (if extended in a Virginia Woolf type of stream of consciousness methodology) if one links up the bells with  the “Libera me, Domine, de morte aetima, in die illa treminda”—Sung in the Office of the Dead and at the Absolution of the Dead, after requiem mass before burial, asking God to have mercy upon the deceased person at the Last Judgement, “Deliver me, O Lord, from death eternal, on that fearful day...” brilliantly chanted by Richard Burton in Latin, as no one else can, later in the film. Now Albee and students of Albee know that Virginia Woolf had little to do with the play, and that Albee had merely spotted the title scrawled by someone on a rest room mirror and used it. The rest is history. But one suspects Nichols/Lehman/Burton played up the “Libera me, Domine..”chant sequence in the film knowing well that Burton could eloquently speak those Latin lines with aplomb and thus suggestively creating the “death,”  “request for heavenly mercy” and final “absolution” of Martha in an otherwise agnostic film. This idea, though latent in Albee’s play (recall Albee used to run away from compulsory chapel attendance in college), must have been burnished by the film’s creative team.

Mike Nichols (he is actually an American, German born, of Russian lineage, with an original name Michael Igor Peschkowsky) was making his first feature film. And directors are often at their creative best while making their debut. Nichols' decision to cast the Burtons as George and Martha was a masterstroke—the studios were initially considering James Mason and Bette Davis to play the parts. Nichols’ idea to get Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to add weight and look a lot older than what they were in real life was another brilliant move. Today actors play elderly roles if the characters transform in screen time, but not if they have to appear unattractive throughout the screen time. Nichols knew he had a winner with the script and his gifted team, which included cinematographer Haskell Wexler (who also picked up an Oscar for the film).

Now one wonders who actually made the decision to film the movie in black and white instead of color  at a time when Hollywood was quite comfortable with color movies. It is now well known cinematographer Harry Stradling, who had won plaudits and an Oscar for his work with color film on My Fair Lady just two years before, had done considerable preparatory work to shoot the Nichols film in color as well. But Nichols chose young Wexler instead of Stradling to shoot the film on black and white film stock to bring out the dark shades of the psychological tale better. (It is interesting to note that John Huston took a similar decision for making another fascinating film with Richard Burton—The Night of the Iguana (1964)—adapting a superb play by Tennessee Williams for another black and white film.)  Wexler was not able to recapture a similar psychological perspective in his camerawork until he made John Sayles’ Limbo (1999).

Now Nichols subsequently has made so many successful films including Closer (2004), again based on a play, this time a play by Patrick Marber.  The color film with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts was again nominated for multiple Oscars and quaintly resembled the basic structure of the Albee tale involving four persons, one pair considerably older than the other. Closer was all about real sexual encounters and foul mouthed mind games between characters. But there is a cardinal difference between the two Nichols films separated by some 35 years—the Albee film despite its constant allusions to sex was not about sex, which is not so in the case of Closer.  An evaluation of Closer elevates Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to a far superior level of entertainment  in varied aspects of cinema.  Nevertheless, it is amusing to see Nichols being drawn towards similar plots and structures of entertainment that resemble his debut film decades later.

It is obvious even today that the success of Nichols' debut film was largely due to the casting of the Burtons at the zenith of their acting careers. Here is an unusual film where the lead actors mesmerize the viewer without the usual physical allure often associated with actors. Here is a film that attracts us because the characters are not larger than life but plain, ordinary and even downright dowdy. It is the diction and enunciation of the spoken word and the Burtons' body language that carry the film though its unusual length of screen time. When Burton switches to Greek, it does not matter if the viewer does not know that “Kyrie, eleison” means “Lord have mercy” --the viewer remains enthralled nevertheless. It is sad that Burton was deprived of an Oscar seven times, especially for this adorable effort but the Academy instead recognized the efforts of Taylor, Wexler, Sandy Dennis, the art directors, and the costume designer by giving five Oscars for the film. 

But the real winner is the ending of the film with sunlight visible through the windows as George consoles Martha with his hand on her shoulder—an amazing antidote to what has preceded in the film. There is no divorce, no break-up, only reconciliation and closer understanding between man and wife. It is indeed a formidable play about living life "without false illusions." Albee was serving an ancient Greek theater recipe to American audiences and they loved it.

P.S. This film is one of the author's top 100 films. 

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