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Thought I was supposed to be impressed with Jane Campion. I’ve liked her movies that I’ve seen – this, Sweetie and Holy Smoke – but I can’t say I love ’em to death. Very capably-made dramas with unique performances, nothing especially transcendent though. Maybe my expectations were too high… I’ve been hearing that this is a must-see classic important film for a decade and a half now.

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Local Georgia girl Holly Hunter, who I haven’t seen since O Brother Where Art Thou, is a mute pianist come to secluded New Zealand in the mid-1800’s with her daughter (10-year-old Anna Paquin) to marry landowner Sam Neill (the year before his finest hour: In the Mouth of Madness). Right away, Holly meets brutish tattooed native-wrangler Harvey Keitel (on a roll, in between Bad Lieutenant and Pulp Fiction). He takes ownership of her precious piano and invites her over to play, offering her it back in trade if she’ll let him touch her. Harvey is obsessed with her and a music lover, which is more than Sam Neill’s got going for him, being impatient with Holly’s muteness, her music and her daughter, so eventually Holly is sleeping with Harvey. Sam finds out and chops off her finger, then apologizes and lets her go away with Harvey to live happily as a piano teacher with a Harvey-made false finger.

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I didn’t mean to watch a bunch of oscar-nominated films from 1993 all in a row, it just worked out that way. So now I can look at the list of nominees and see how this stacked up to Orlando and The Age of Innocence, while cursing Schindler’s List and Philadelphia. At least it’s good to see that Dave and Farewell My Concubine each got a chance, and can’t argue with Nick Park winning for a Wallace & Gromit movie. Personally, in ’93 I was more psyched about Jurassic Park, In the Line of Fire, Groundhog Day, A Perfect World and Wayne’s World 2.

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So this movie, The Piano Teacher and The Pianist all contain scenes of horror and mutilation, and Shoot The Piano Player has a perfectly unhappy ending. I wonder what awful things lie in wait with The Page Turner, The Tuner and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes.

by ·Comments Off on The Round-Up (1965, Miklós Jancsó)

Emory played this for us on 35mm, introduced by poet and politician Gyula Kodolányi who watched it in Hungary during its opening run… and this is the night after I saw a perfect print of The Age of Innocence introduced by Salman Rushdie. If their film screenings are about to stop, as has been rumored, at least they’re going out on top.

Scary movie. First 90ish minutes I’m wondering “where are they going with this”, then it all comes together in the last five. Set in the 1860’s but meant to illustrate and refer to interrogation techniques of the 1960’s (surprised he got away with it). Stark black-and-white, artfully composed in widescreen, with long-ish shots (nothing over a couple minutes), set at a prison out on the plains and a few surrounding buildings.

A hundred or more prisoners are being held together, a few in solitary covered with hoods and the rest in a large courtyard, but the guards don’t know whether they’ve captured the rebel leader and which of the prisoners are his horsemen. Threat of execution turns one prisonder, a pointy-hatted murderer, into a not-so-covert inside agent for the jailers. Guards capture a local woman and torture her to death in view of the prisoners, provoking suicides. Ultimately the jailers succeed through some twisty psych tricks into getting two elder rebel soldiers to identify themselves. A competition is staged, and the winner gets to select a troop of men to leave prison and join him. It’s announced that the rebel leader has been granted amnesty, and the new troops all cheer. The guards, now having identified the rebels, descend upon them with hoods…

Bright Lights:

In the concise (20-minute) but revealing interview included by Second Run with The Round-Up, Jancsó pauses to explain the larger context intended by these films, that is, how they were meant to universalize human cruelty beyond apparent, coded references to the then recent 1956 Soviet action. Speaking carefully and succinctly, Jancsó offers two themes: “the humiliation by the powerful” and “the defenselessness of the people.”