The Academy of Muses (La academia de las musas)

THE ACADEMY OF MUSES (La academia de las musas)             B-                   

Spain  (92 mi)  2015  d:  José Luis Guerin         Official site [Japan]

While Guerin is viewed as an experimental filmmaker, often creating images that appear to be a collage from different sources, producing painterly, impressionistic glimpses of life as seen through a fractured prism of light, his unorthodox approach has always been viewed as meditative and intellectually probing.  While that may be true here as well, this film, while its intent may be satiric, smacks of sexism, where it’s hard to get past the blatant moral transgressions being depicted.  Ostensibly an academic lecture of ideas, where Barcelona University philology professor Raffaele Pinto stands before a class of interested students and poses ideas on the origin of love in art, suggesting artists since the dawn of time have always relied upon female muses as a source of inspiration.  His ideas are actually engaging, as he breaks down complicated works of literature like Dante’s Inferno into easily understandable conversation pieces, described as men having a relationship with women, even with their dead spirits, a notion that has been around since the Greek mythology of Orpheus, where poets have carried around “the idea of love.”  What immediately stands out is that only attractive female students ask questions and articulate their positions in class, though the heightened level of classroom discussion is engaging.  What happens afterwards, however, may leave many viewers at a loss, as these attractive women are seen with the professor outside of class as well, often getting into their personal lives, where he’s seen as a father figure and confidante, perhaps even their private confessor, taking on a priestly role.  When we realize he’s having sex with these women, where relationships escalate to his personal lovers, all bets are off, as this is something else altogether.  While Guerín’s films regularly explore the boundaries between documentary and fiction, yet real or not, this is a decidedly troublesome aspect of the film as it clearly crosses into morally forbidden or taboo behavior.  One of the most damning scenes in the film is a prolonged argument between the professor and his Spanish wife Rosa (Rosa Delor Muns), which begins in an animated fury but soon unfolds into utter silence, with Rosa staring blankly out the window, neither one able to acknowledge the other. 

Described at the outset as “An educational experience with Professor Raffaele Pinto, filmed by José Luis Guerín,” where you’d think initially that you’re walking into a classroom, like Wiseman’s uncommonly uplifting At Berkeley (2013), but as the word “experience” starts mulling around in your head, the meaning of the word expands into an imaginary concept where we hear the expression, “To teach is to seduce.”  Throughout the centuries poets and writers have felt emboldened in describing fiery love affairs, carnal pleasures, and intense longed-for desires, where this film seems interested in merging academia with the imagination, where there are no boundaries or prohibitions, allowing passions to exist in private dialogues and ordinary moments.  While it’s one thing to theorize, this film takes the lecture out of the classroom and allows it to live and breathe in the real world.  While Pinto is a balding man in his early 60’s, the women in his class are considerably younger and more attractive, yet sharp as a tack, where their intelligence rivals their beauty.  Emanuela (Emanuela Forgetta) is a voluptuous and fiery Italian student who seems as knowledgeable as the professor, while the others are Spanish students, where Mireia (Mireia Iniesta) is seen confiding in her, revealing she is pursuing an online love affair, apparently wondering if words alone can sustain love, where you don’t even have to meet the object of your desires in person.  Carolina (Carolina Llacher) is a short-haired student who seems more interested in challenging the professor’s theories, using more contemporary, free-form verse, for instance, instead of the preferred classical language.  Except for the professor, none of the women are referred to by their names, remaining anonymous throughout, although at least once Carolina is referred to by name from one of the other students.  This tends to minimize any associated reality and instead they are more mythical creatures, existing in the stream of thought, necessary in the pursuit of ideas.  As far as Pinto is concerned the women are real, where his justification to his wife is, “I fall in love within a teaching relationship,” a rationalization that she simply refuses to accept.

In private discussions, student papers are critiqued and evaluated, where he retains his professorial relationship, but especially concerning Carolina, he’s not very open minded to new ideas or concepts.  Who’s to say what she expounds is any less exemplary than his own philosophy, but he excoriates the very notion that she would communicate “outside” the boundaries of “his” guidelines, which at the very least appears to be hypocritical and sexist.  Poetry of any kind remains within the stream of thought and can be used to communicate and express a myriad of ideas, perhaps even more than the professor is willing to consider.  When she is soundly rejected, she again confides with Emanuela, the student/professor among them, who reminds her she knew this would happen, so what did she expect?  Mireia actually travels with the professor to Naples as his mistress, and is the only one seen naked in bed, where they visit various museum artifacts afterwards, reminiscent of Rossellini’s love in the ruins film, Journey to Italy (1954).  Afterwards she meets in a coffee shop with Rosa, hiding nothing, actually defending her right to be the object of the professor’s desires, yet Rosa has a larger overall view, noting that at some point, it is inevitable that the man will tire of her, and in her diminished state, what will she represent then?  Rosa is the only one in the film who seems rational and human, angered by her husband’s actions, bothered by this young girl’s insolence, yet retaining every shred of dignity even in such a compromising situation.  From her position, her husband’s experiment is nothing more than selfish male indulgence, where he’s using his position to manipulate the behavior of younger more attractive girls, where he can claim the ones he wants and reject the ones he’s not interested in, where it’s actually surprising he hasn’t gotten fired.  Despite all the flowery academia, one wonders if any of that actually comes into play when a man finds a woman he’s attracted to.  As the professor and his wife agree to share their extensive wall-sized bookshelf rather than break it in half, there is something to be said for enduring love, the kind that exists beyond all the artifice and youthful bluster, where perhaps this is all a diversionary smokescreen, as ultimately, sexual attraction can never really be explained in a classroom, as it rarely happens the way the poets see it.  Instead we are a smaller microcosm with a much shorter attention span, but we do have the capacity to dream.   

Inside Job

Henry Paulson, former Treasury Secretary, Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman, and Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary (left to right)

Larry Summers

Richard Fuld, Lehman Brothers former chairman and CEO

Glenn Hubbard

Raghuram Rajan

Bill Ackman, Hedge Fund Manager

Andrew Sheng, Chief Advisor to the China Banking Regulatory Commission

John Campbell, Department chair of Harvard University’s Department of Economics

Daniel Alpert, Founding Managing Director of Westwood Capital

Sigridur Benediktsdottir, Yale economics lecturer

Jonathan Alpert, Manhattan psychotherapist

Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, Massachusetts Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee

Martin Feldstein, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Reagan Administration

Jerome Fons, Managing Director of Credit Policy at Moody’s Investor Services

Eric Halperin, Special Counsel for Fair Lending at the U.S. Department of Justice

Robert Gnaizda, General Counsel, Policy Director, and former President of the Greenlining Institute in Berkeley

Christine Lagarde, French Minister of Finance, Economic Affairs, Industry and Employment

Samuel Hayes, Investment Banking Emeritus at the Harvard Business School

Simon Johnson, Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management

Charles Morris, author and one of the people who predicted the crisis before it happened

Eliot Spitzer, former Democratic Governor of New York who resigned from a sex scandal

INSIDE JOB              B+                  

USA  (109 mi)  2010  d:  Charles Ferguson 

You have three more minutes. Give it your best shot!             —Glenn Hubbard, Columbia University Business School Dean and Bush Chief Economic Advisor

Inside Job is otherwise known as:  Who’s left holding the bag for the economic meltdown of 2008?  Ferguson is a bright investigative photo journalist who does his research, a guy with a Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T. who made a fortune designing computer technology, including the invention of the FrontPage which he sold to Microsoft for $133 million dollars over a decade ago.  Since then, he made perhaps the most comprehensive documentary film analysis of the Bush administration’s mishandling of the postwar occupation of Iraq in NO END IN SIGHT (2007).  Ferguson is a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, one of the more influential and independent-minded non-for-profit think tanks in America.  Here he sets his sights on helping the audience understand just what caused the economic crisis which ran amok in a sweeping euphoria of bank deregulation, an industry that offers surprisingly little oversight or caution in the name of quick profits and handsome corporate bonuses, where Ferguson identifies the names and influential positions of the people who implemented the decisions that led to the crisis, an interesting mix of those who would and wouldn’t speak before the cameras. 

Occasionally there were advanced signs of potential distress, such as a research paper entitled “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?” warning of a “catastrophic meltdown” from the accumulation of too much debt, which was presented at a celebration honoring retiring Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in 2005 by Raghuram Rajan, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund who presented his analysis of a potential systematic breakdown in front of an international group of G-7 economic elite, but was summarily mocked and dismissed by Larry Summers, the President of Harvard, the Chief economist at the World Bank, and the Secretary of the Treasury, calling him “misguided” and a “Luddite.”  Despite the meticulous care to make this subject understandable to the common man, much of this economic analysis will clearly sail over the heads of most, making this difficult, at best, to have the impact it should, which is likely what the persons named as most responsible for this crisis must hope for, as Ferguson points them out, one by one, like that deck of cards that listed all of Saddam Hussein’s most influential men in Iraq.  Most all of these men retain their prestigious positions of authority within the walls of government, hand-chosen by the current Presidents, be it Clinton, Bush, or Obama, Republican or Democrat, to hand guide them through each administration’s economic vision for the future. 

What’s unique about this particular group of economists and Ivy League academics is the degree of their insularity, protected from any accountability to the outside world as if they live in a protected refuge of an ivory tower sanctuary.  It’s clear most of these individuals have never mixed with anyone other than their own exclusive, ultra-rich economic strata, continually designing economic laws that favor protection and exclusivity for the rich to such a degree that only the top 1% of the nation’s wealthiest actually benefit with multi-million dollar rewards while the rest of the population ends up paying for it, as their jobs are sent overseas, their pension funds dry up from neglect or mismanagement, where too many people have lost their homes and anything resembling a secure way of life.  Investment firms like Goldman Sachs were actually consolidating bad debt loans into securities that received smooth sailing Triple A credit ratings by firms paid by the banks to list them as safe investments for their customers, but then bet against them, presenting a house of cards designed to fall, then making a handsome profit on their own customer’s misfortunes.  The chief financial officers from these huge investment houses that subsequently went bankrupt from their dizzyingly amoral short-sightedness ended up sitting in Cabinet positions in the White House, advising the President on all economic policies.  As part of the conditions set to bail out Wall Street investment firms, strings were attached where no one would be prosecuted for criminal malfeasance, even in instances where the executives of these companies were hiring strippers, prostitutes, and rampant cocaine use, then writing them off as business expenses, all supposedly part of the culture of executive privilege. 

As the viewer becomes more familiar with the problems, some of the major players are seen being grilled before Congress, which includes Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, who received a $484 million dollar bonus for leading his company into bankruptcy, a man who refused to even share an elevator with the public, or Daniel Sparks, head of the Goldman Sachs mortgages department, who was forced to explain why investments his own traders describe as “shitty” were aggressively being sold to their own unsuspecting customers.  Ferguson himself from behind the camera begins to interrupt or ask more pointed questions, many of which are never answered, as the person sitting in the hot seat in front of the camera begins to stammer unintelligently or grows more angrily indignant, as these men are not used to someone questioning their judgment or business acumen.  By the end, however, when it’s clear the same men who implemented the crisis remain firmly entrenched within the current government, there is something of a hollow plea for the audience to do something about it, which is a clear case of feebly throwing one’s hands-in-the-air with disgust.  Surely the filmmaker hopes to load the audience with knowledge and information, thinking this must lead to a better solution, perhaps hoping democracy will take its course, but like Supreme Court justices who retain their position for life, these targeted individuals enjoy such a life of privilege that no one ever votes for them, so you can’t vote them out of office, as they are selected at the discretion of the President and are considered “the chosen people.”  These individuals with their millions tucked away in their pockets remain untouchable.  One thing this film makes perfectly clear is how widespread and systemic the problem is regardless of which party controls the White House or the Congress, and how serious the need is to revise the current practices in the financial world.  Until then, whoever is in the White House will be considered a Wall Street President.