Paranoid Park

PARANOID PARK               A-                   

USA   France  (85 mi)  2007  d:  Gus van Sant

An impressionistic portrait of a moody, self-absorbed teenage male who remains disinterested and aloof from just about every connecting social fabric of society, not the least of which includes girls and sex, absent parents who are separated and heading for divorce, a school that offers little incentive, and a mall in town where kids meet that’s pretty much just like any other mall, so instead he immerses himself in skateboard culture, filled with other outsider kids who are as bored as he is with nothing better to do.  The sense of alienation in this film is palpable and artistically expressed, from slowing down the speed of the film as a character walks in slow motion through school hallways, but even more through an inventive sound design that includes odd electronic sounds, like an updated Antonioni RED DESERT (1964), and the unmistakable sounds of Fellini’s musical nonpareil Nino Rota.  Abstract to the core, van Sant adapted Blake Nelson’s novel, reducing it to mere fragments in a reconstructed kaleidoscope mosaic, while also directing and editing the film.  Shot in Portland, Oregon by Wong Kar-wai stalwart Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li, the opening shot of a bridge at dusk is held steady as car lights zoom past like colorful laser beams of light before providing a collage of grainy video imagery of skateboarders moving in and out of view, like a darkened blur of moving shadows.  The voice of Gabe Nevins as Alex reads a voiceover letter in halting fashion, something he’s written in his notebook to try to make sense of a situation he can’t comprehend. 

Much of the film revolves around Alex’s face, youthful, innocent, open like a book but completely unreadable, remaining detached throughout, while the camera follows him wherever he goes, occasionally accompanied by his internal thoughts from his notebook, but more often from a unique sound design configured by Leslie Shatz, who has worked with van Sant since GOOD WILL HUNTING (1997).  Told out of sequence, Alex is called out of class and questioned by a police detective who is investigating a rail yard death near Paranoid Park, an undulating design of rolling curves and rising walls underneath a highway overpass where adolescent boys congregate with skateboards, a kind of free form improvisational expression created in a grungy part of town by the kids themselves, described by Alex as:  “They’d built the Park illegally, all by themselves.  Train hoppers, guitar punks, skate drunks, throwaway kids.  No matter how bad your family life was, these guys had it much worse.”  Alex recalls his whereabouts on a certain Saturday night to the detective with a natural high school specificity, what food he ate, how it was prepared, how much it cost, but due to his fractured state of mind, one suspects he is leaving something out.  We meet his high strung girl friend Jennifer, Taylor Momsen, through a phone call where he’d rather hang out with his buddy Jared (Jake Miller) than be with her, where even this partial glimpse reveals plenty about the tangential state of their affairs.  Later in the company of his buddies he can be overheard calling her a drama queen.  Little if any emotion is ever expressed by the boys who all but dominate this film, as Jennifer is a discardable part in his life while Macy, Lauren McKinney, who he meets at Paranoid Park, is more of a tomboy who fits in as one of the guys. 

What happened that Saturday night is the key to the film, alluded to frequently though not necessarily in any coherent order throughout the film, as Alex gets separated from Jared and meets Macy and a few other guys at Paranoid Park, including an older boy named Scratch (Scott Patrick Green) who offers him a beer and a ride on a freight train.  The idea of hopping a freight appeals to him and despite what the filmmaker decides to show us, an accidental death bordering on the surreal, it’s all ambiguously unclear what actually happened due to the hazy state of Alex’s mind.  Following right on the heels of this sequence is another of Jennifer losing her virginity to Alex at a party, where Alex couldn’t be less interested, but of course she’s thrilled to run off and tell her girl friends.  Later, depicted like a scene from the silent film era as mouths move but no words are heard, Alex breaks up with her in front of her cheerleader girl friends dressed in uniform after school, seen standing out of focus in the background, all told with the zany music of Nino Rota running through his mind.  This second scene suggests more happened at the first, but is being repressed due to the blunt emotional trauma, which is a lot for one kid to endure alone.  Both were likely sexual encounters gone wrong.  There’s a fascinating way to bring all this together, as all the skateboarders in school are called in to see the detective, where in a slow motion shot in the hallway, more keep being added to the frame in a humorous montage of their scruffy, free spirited approach to life.  It becomes emblematic, like a poster shot for the movie, as there’s something alluring yet completely under the surface about the appeal Paranoid Park has on these disconnected young boys.  All captured in a poetic reconfiguration, using sound, music, lightness and dark, van Sant keeps devising new strategies to fascinate his audience with cinematic ideas and thoughts whose narrative surface is barely there, yet whose haunting power and influence lies within.              

Rocco and His Brothers

ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS        A  
Italy  France  (175 mi)  1960  d:  Luchino Visconti

Luchino Visconti was heir to one of Milan’s richest families, as his mother inherited the Erba Pharmaceuticals fortune, where young Visconti grew up training and breeding racehorses before fashion designer Coco Chanel introduced him to French filmmaker Jean Renoir, where he began his career as Renoir’s assistant director.  Despite living in great luxury in a palace on the Italian island of Ischia, where today there is a museum dedicated to his work, possessing original works by Picasso and Gustav Klimt, he was also an avidly outspoken Communist after the war and openly gay, where throughout his film career he also worked as a theater and opera director.  This apparent contradiction in class consciousness lies at the heart of his films, as along with Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Vittorio de Sica, and others, they forged an Italian neorealist movement in the late 1940’s, much of which was forced upon them as they had no money, featuring non-professional actors, or poorly paid stars, often shooting on the street as many film studios were destroyed by the war, mostly in the rundown sections of urban areas, featuring the plight of the poor and the lower working class, focusing on their everyday struggles to survive the economic disaster that was postwar Italy.  Despite his connection with neorealism, Visconti also revealed an operatic flair for artificiality, beautifully expressed in White Nights (La Niotti Bianche) (1957) which was shot entirely within the artificially constructed world inside the Cinecittà studios.  Visconti is acknowledged to be one of the greatest directors of women, including Clara Calamai in OBSESSIONE (1943), Anna Magnani in BELLISSIMA (1951), Alida Valli in SENSO (1954), Maria Schell in White Nights (La Niotti Bianche) (1957), and Annie Girardot in this film, where the latter two, Austrian and French-speaking, were both dubbed in Italian.  Manipulating men for sport, in each case these women are representative of dominating forces men can neither resist nor overcome.  Released the same year as Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA (1960), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes, and Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA (1960), which won the Palme D’Or, the film was up against stiff competition, winning the FIPRESCI and Special Jury Prize at Venice. 

Often viewed as a flawed masterpiece, there remains an unreconciled tension between the realist, near documentary-style vision of a Marxist society and several over-the-top melodramatic moments where characters exhibit an operatic flair for excessive theatricality.  While not ruining the film, the exaggerations stand out as obvious contradictions to the otherwise low-key and brutally realistic style.  Adapted from the Giovanni Testor novel The Bridge of Ghisolfa, the story has an historical but also epic sweep about it, spanning more than a decade, following the continuing hardships of the Parondi family as they leave behind their traditional rural home in Southern Italy for a major city in the industrial north, apparently one the first films to portray a North/South migration, where the nation’s so-called economic miracle occurs almost entirely in the North.  The film captures the essence of postwar Italy and the politics of class, set in the housing projects and working class sections of Milan, the city of Visconti’s birth, becoming a historically relevant time capsule portrait of a vanishing era.  As the title points out, there are five brothers, each represented by a different chapter in the film, including the oldest, Vincenzo (Spiros Focás), who is already living in Milan, in the midst of an engagement party with the family of his fiancé, Ginetta (Claudia Cardinale), when the rest of his family arrives in mass out of the blue, carrying all their belongings as they pay him a surprise visit.  It’s a surprise, all right, when the perspective bride’s family realizes they haven’t come to congratulate the happy couple, but to migrate permanently to Milan, where they certainly pose an immediate logistics problem of where they can stay.  As quickly as they are welcomed with glasses of wine, the proud mother, Rosaria (Katina Paxinou, whose stereotypical long-suffering matriarch routine is almost cringe-worthy), realizes they’re seen as a financial burden and angrily grabs her sons, vowing never to return. Thus the family conflict begins. 

Given the ingenious advice by a relative to move into the cheap housing projects by paying first month’s rent, but after awhile, if you stop paying, they won’t throw you out on the street, suggesting this was quite common in Milan, as they’re already living in the city’s cheapest housing.  Simone, Renato Salvatori’s best role, is the next oldest, becoming completely smitten by the sexual exploits of a willfully manipulative local prostitute Nadia (Annie Girardot), whose family lives upstairs but continually kicks her out, so she takes refuge prancing around this house of brothers where Simone can’t take his eyes off her, much to his mother’s regret.  Jobs are scarce, but Simone picks up a few bucks in the boxing ring, but his first few wins go to his head, as he spends all his winnings on Nadia, filled with the deluded notion that his future is lined with victories.  But he drinks, smokes, and womanizes, refusing to train hard, which eventually catches up to him.  Enter the next brother, Rocco (Alain Delon, also dubbed), the quiet one with the pretty face, who initially works in a dry cleaners run exclusively by women who are all enthralled by his presence.  When Simone steals some clothing to impress Nadia, Rocco can’t go back to work there, so he follows his brother into the ring.  This habit of forgiving his brother and bailing him out of jams that he continually gets himself into is the central theme of the film, as Simone’s troubles only escalate, contrasting the traditional macho sexuality of animalistic men who think they own women as their exclusive property with those who feel genuine love and respect for them.  Envisioned by Visconti as the saintly Prince Myshkin from Dostoyevski’s The Idiot, “a representative of illustrious goodness as an end in itself,” Rocco is seen as the only saving grace holding the family together, even persuading Nadia to give up prostitution after spending a year in prison. 

But the story only grows bleaker, as Simone’s trajectory spirals further out of control, becoming a drunken brute that turns on his brother when he takes an interest in Nadia, enraged that Rocco is stealing “his” girl, as if he still owns her, even though he hasn’t seen her in years, leading to a horribly violent rape of Nadia in front of Rocco, followed by a vicious beating when his younger brother won’t apologize for what he’s done.  In a strangely baffling and utterly appalling moment framed atop the Milan cathedral, Rocco changes course and urges Nadia to return to Simone, knowing he’s a toxic entity, thinking this is somehow good for the family.  This is perhaps the key moment in the film, as Rocco’s saintly concern is not for Nadia, who’s been brutally raped, but for his brother’s fragile lack of self esteem.  The result is pathetic, of course, becoming a devastating critique of masculinity as seen through the lives of both Rocco and Simone, the two most developed characters of the film, especially when Simone and Nadia move under his mother’s roof, bringing nothing but endless shame to the family.  This is underlined further through a homosexual subtext, where a wealthy boxing promoter is attracted to Simone’s descent, where the promoter’s ultimate satisfaction is sexually taking advantage of fallen fighters that are so desperately in debt they’re willing to submit to anything.  This corrupt promoter ends up blackmailing the family afterwards, where Rocco signs away his future boxing earnings to pay off his brother’s enormously inflated debt.  In doing so, he becomes another wage slave while also abandoning his dream of returning to the South and reclaiming their lost land. 

The highly mobile, black and white cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno veers between ultra realism and heavily stylized film noir effects, with heavily darkened scenes during particularly murky moments, while Nino Rota’s musical score continually finds the right emotional counterpoint.  The film is clearly an influence of Martin Scorsese’s RAGING BULL (1980), where in each the fight sequences are beautifully handled, and also Francis Ford Coppola who chose Nino Rota to score his epic GODFATHER (1972, 1974) films.  At nearly 3-hours, allowing thorough exploration of the characters, the true scope of the film is an apocalyptic Greek tragedy played out within the context of larger historical forces, where perhaps the key to understanding the family’s psychological descent are the social circumstances they have to deal with, where the horrors of urban existence are all too common as jobs remain scarce.  But as Pauline Kael noted, it’s sexual passion that destroys the family, where the performances by Salvatori and Girardot are nothing less than stunning, culminating with a scene right out of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, a bleak, working class nightmare where in a crazed, jealous rage the protagonist kills the woman he loves, refusing to allow anyone else to have her, where it’s suggested this is due to the accumulated effects of poverty and economic exploitation, continually being beaten down by a society that allows him to have nothing.  The surreal nature of the act defies all moral boundaries and may be an irredeemable sin.  Simone’s crime destroys the unity of the family and their hopes of ever returning home, beautifully expressed in the bleak emptiness of the elegiac final shot, suggesting freedom, as represented by Rocco’s idealized hopes and dreams of being able to save Simone and/or his family, exists only in the abstract, while working class people must walk to the beat of the factory whistle where being a wage slave, exactly what they left the South to avoid becoming, is the only reality.

White Nights (La Niotti Bianche)

WHITE NIGHTS (La Niotti Bianche)     A-                 

Italy  France  (97 mi)  1957  d:  Luchino Visconti

1957 is a significant year in world cinema, as it is uniquely connected to historical events, coming one year after the spirited idealism of the Hungarian student uprising of 1956 was crushed by an invasion of Soviet tanks mowing down dissidents in the streets of Budapest, also one year after the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party where Premier Nikita Khrushchev made a speech denouncing Stalin and the Stalinist purges as well as the gulag labor systems, leading to the Russian release of THE CRANES ARE FLYING (1957), the first film after the death of Stalin to put a human face in Russian films, which went on to win the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 1958.  What’s unique about this era is a political thaw, an opening of doors previously closed, where art could once again flourish and express itself freely and openly without having to follow the dictates of a heavy handed, State-controlled social realist agenda.  This also led to a changing style in Italian cinema, where the post-war Neo-Realist movement softened its grip, allowing greater freedoms onscreen than ever before, which led to Fellini’s NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957), featuring the incomparable Giuletta Masina, which arguably stands up to anything Fellini ever created in his lifetime, and also this film by Luchino Visconti, which couldn’t be more unlike his earlier works, moving from naturalistic, on-site locations into a completely artificially constructed world inside the Cinecittà studios, much of it set in a dreamlike layer of fog, beautifully illuminated by street lamps.  The set design of this film is hugely imaginative, transporting Dostoevsky’s short story White Nights from the closely observed detail of St. Petersburg to an Italian city of bridges and canals, loosely based on the city of Livorno.  Bresson remade this film in Paris as Four Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d'un rêveur... (1971), and what the two versions have in common is a beautifully idealized construction of a utopian vision, something rarely seen in cinema. 

Opening pensively with the enchanting Nino Rota theme heard here Nino Rota - Le Notti Bianche (1957) on YouTube (2:48), Marcello Mastroianni as Mario finds himself alone on the city streets at night after spending a pleasant but uneventful afternoon in the country with his boss and extended family.  A recent transplant to the city, he knows no one, so he takes in the rhythm and atmosphere of the streets around him, where a realist element continues to exist in the way the walls are crumbling and the paint peeling, with piles of garbage swept off to the side of the street where he unsuccessfully attempts to make friends with a stray dog.  What catches his eye is a woman standing alone on a bridge trying to hide her tears, German-Austrian actress Maria Schell, who he immediately befriends.  But despite his polite manner, she quickly runs away, evading his every advance, but eventually relents and agrees to meet him on the bridge the next night.  While it should be noted that there was always an unreconciled tension between the socialist agenda of neorealism and the operatic theatricality of Visconti, who after all, filmed three versions of Verdi’s La Traviata in his lifetime, it is also often said he is one of the greatest directors of women, including Clara Calamai in OBSESSIONE (1943), Anna Magnani in BELLISSIMA (1951), Alida Valli in SENSO (1954), Annie Girardot in ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (1960), but also Ms. Schell as Natalia in this film.  In each case, these females use men for sport and wreak their havoc with a psychic force men can neither resist nor overcome.  Natalia is a perfect example, though some might find her performance overly simple and childish, living at home, never leaving the side of her blind grandmother, she is the picture of innocence and naïveté, yet when the floodgates of emotions are released, she is a force of nature, revealing a hidden dimension of love held in reserve for a lodger (Jean Marais) in her grandmother’s house that she met and fell in love with a year ago, briefly seen through flashbacks, but he had to abruptly leave, agreeing to meet her on the bridge in exactly one year.  Finding this story fairy tale-like and delusional, Mario can’t help but suspend his disbelief if only to comfort her, as she is in considerable pain at the thought he won’t show up.

Over the course of four nights, they meet on the bridge, where by the last night, Mario is tired of being sucked into her continuing melodrama.  Despite all evidence to the contrary, Natalia lives in constant hope, believing with the purity of a child, where to dispel her notion is simply cruel and unethical, leaving Mario no choice but to play along.  What’s especially interesting is to see how Dostoevsky’s story of a hopelessly adrift male dreamer attaches himself to an even more innocent girl, whose own dreamlife simply overwhelms his, where Visconti shows Mario grounded by the poverty of his economcis, as he’s so regrettably poor, awakening in his pitiful room every morning to the gossip and chatter of his intrusive landlady, who has a way of getting into everybody’s business, where there is nothing remotely evident of a private thought.  With Natalia, however, hearing her hold fast to her illusions has an almost calming and tranquil effect, as it takes the dreariness out of his own miserable life.  By the final night, however, Mario is convinced their own love can work, little by little building up his courage in admitting how he feels, which is perfectly expressed in a dance sequence where he starts out confessing his shyness, knowing nothing about dance, remaining coy until another man shows an interest in his girl, where he suddenly lights up the room in an outrageously intoxicating sequence set to the music of “Thirteen Women” by Bill Haley and the Comets seen here:  Le Notti Bianche on YouTube (6:08).  This sets into play a deliciously romantic set of sequences where Mario confesses his love, where his heart literally opens up in such a delightfully natural fashion, where Mastroianni is nothing less than divine in the role.  As the snow begins to fall, so beautifully captured by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, it’s as if their storybook lives have an enchanted touch of grace after all, adding a poetic layer of innocence to their lives, which is suddenly bright and new, reversing courses suddenly, evolving into sheer ecstasy and exaltation on the part of Natalia, who rushes off at the sight of her lost love waiting for her on the bridge, leaving Mario heartsick and utterly devastated, all but crushing his spirit, as if the air suddenly rushes out of his lungs, finding himself once again alone in the world, even more isolated than before.