Gemma Bovery Review: A Feminized Flaubert And Objectified Male In The Buff

A sort of satirically laced literary pseudo-biopic, French writer/director Anne Fontaine's Gemma Bovery may very well be posing the question, what if Madame Bovary had been written from a woman's point of view instead. Though this somewhat lunatic provincial romp playing out in the present seems to have more to do with an idealized sense of existence lived within the unbridled male imagination that literary obsession might lead to, as opposed to being anchored in the real world.

In a tall tale romance with possibly no less than four infatuated males crowded into a single love triangle, Fabrice Luchini is Joubert, a despondent countryside baker in a region where wine is apparently deemed the local anti-depressant. Having bolted from Paris with his wife and son to rustic Normandy after ditching a vocation for a publishing house annotating university papers 'that nobody will ever read,' Joubert doesn't exactly discover a sought after serenity in taking over his father's town bakery.

On the other hand, his new relationship making bread and exploring a novel sensuous connection between flour and flesh, and exacerbated by his hopeless fixation on Madame Bovary, bodes ill when a new and fetching British neighbor (Gemma Arterton) turns up with the uncanny name Gemma Bovery. Not to mention Flaubert having written the novel right there in the 19th century.

Which eventually evolves into the silently smitten Joubert leading an alternate double life between baker and lurker. And stalking his often imaginary object of literary desire, while eluding her clueless artisan spouse (Jason Flemyng) and a seductive law school matriculated boy toy (Niels Schneider) holed up in a local castle. And ultimately in a sense, an intertwining of this fanciful fable with the radically revised novel running all around inside this Flaubert impersonator's borderline hallucinatory head.

This is Arterton's second venture into graphic novel screen stardom, following Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe in 2010, and with Gemme Bovery adapted from the likewise female perspective penned by Posy Simmonds in both works. And the concoction however pensive, is a delightful blend of magic and buffoonery. Not to mention a film finally where in sex scenes the woman gets to keep some clothes on, while the male is consigned to prancing around in the objectified buff.

Prairie Miller

The Lesson Review: Bulgaria/Greece Dramatic Co-Production A Class Act On Toxic Neo-Colonialism

Economic crisis cinema in these unrelenting hard times, even when simply subtextual to larger themes, has mushroomed as we've observed, into somewhat of a genre in its own right in this country. But European cinema may be catching up these days with their own end stage capitalism mass misery. And the Bulgarian combo domestic drama/moral thriller The Lesson [Urok] as revelation raises those bitter stakes with its post-Soviet, been there done that reverse requiem of despair under the domination of the dollar, kicking in as well.

And with much more than just classroom lessons to be learned, or maybe not, in the solemn and disturbing The Lesson. And like many other post-USSR films preceding this one edging back down memory lane, and possibly playing out as a kind of second thoughts cinema evolving across Eastern Europe ever since then.

That is, seemingly spontaneously precipitated as sobering reflection since the overthrow of the Soviet Union twenty-five years ago - and Eastern Europe turned into a vast, occupied US/Nato military parking lot. And that The Lesson is a Bulgarian co-production with a Greece currently in mass uprising, may in a more immediate economic and sociopolitical hindsight sense, be no mere coincidence.

Nade [Margita Gosheva] is a middle class mother and teacher of preteens, and reluctant family breadwinner married to a slacker spouse. Silently resigned to her fate and struggling to make ends meet translating documents into English for a company that keeps making excuses not to pay her, Nade is likewise an English language teacher - and in a telling narrative thread under the increasing Americanization under the basically unannounced occupation of that country.

While concurrent US values seem to have seeped into the culture as well, epitomized in the new predatory money lust and ruthless greed under the establishment of capitalism. And epitomized in a classroom incident that infuriates the normally passive Nade, when one student steal another's wallet and refuses to confess. Nor does anyone in the class seem to care, or offer witness testimony.

And as a woman who appears to still be imbued with the ethical sense of collective unity under socialism, a frustrated Nade insists that everyone among these indifferent students contribute a portion of their own money to the victim, to compensate for what was stolen. But even this mandatory gesture fails to comfort the teacher, who remains distraught and fixated on this troubling lack of humanity evidently afflicting the next generation.

But Nade is soon caught up in her own personal victimhood, when threatened with eviction and the auctioning of her home within a day for lack of payments to the bank in question. Thus begins a terrifying race against the clock alternately sorrowful and suspenseful quest. And at one point leading Nade in desperation to beg strangers on the street for money, and then reluctantly rolling up her sleeves and scooping coins out of a park fountain so she might run to the bank and avert the eviction within minutes of closing time. Though her troubles are apparently just beginning, as Nade herself is dragged down the rabbit hole of debasement and demoralization.

The Lesson is as potent and gripping in its own way, as the iconic, trailblazing race against the clock 1950 noir D.O.A., as visited upon Edmond O'Brien's Frank Bigelow. But while D.O.A. involved an actual toxin that is frantically confronted, this bleak film's poison is more metaphorical as a component of perplexing survival, though no less penetrating and potentially irreversible - capitalism and socioeconomic corruption of the soul, despite one's best intentions.

The Sundance 2015 Wrap-Up Report: Taking On Scientology At Sundance

**Going Clear At Sundance: The Real Deal On What's Going Down Behind Scientology's Secretive Doors. In his Sundance 2015 Wrap-Up Report, Indiewire chief critic Eric Kohn phones in to Arts Express on location in Utah at the Film Festival. With a look at the most controversial entry there, Alex Gibney's Going Clear: Scientology And The Prison Of Belief. And how the Scientology cult has been intimidating film critics including Kohn, who dare to report on the documentary's exposure of member manipulation, physical abuse, and torture connected to a space deep within their fortresses - notoriously known as The Hole. While HBO has lawyered up with 160 attorneys in anticipation of doing legal battle with Scientology when they air the film. And, other Festival highlights ranging from white supremacy to the Black Lives Matter movement; the influence of Hollywood at Sundance when it comes to creative impulses versus creative control; and what audiences can look forward to  - or shouldn't -  from these Festival debuts during the coming year at the movies.

Listen To The Show Here

**The Devil's Violinist: Musician and solo performer David Garrett is on the line from LA to talk about his role as 19th century daring innovative rebel musician Niccolo Paganini in this biopic. A celebrity violinist himself, Garrett discusses becoming Paganini in every sense, emotionally and musically; marrying in his own crossover compositions classical and contemporary music; and who exactly is that violinist's devil and does he exist as well today.

**The Working Actor Studio: Jack Shalom in a conversation with Working Actor Studio director, Betsy Daly, about meeting the economic and artistic challenges facing struggling, aspiring actors today. And developing the necessary dramatic skills and tools there, including workshops in improv, scene study and musical theater. And, something rather intriguing known as stage combat.

Arts Express, airing on WBAI Radio in NY archived at wbai.org, and on the Pacifica National Radio Network.

Queen And Country: National Belief System Without A Soul

The second recent movie about making war on Korea and the only one that gets it right without being ridiculous or repugnant - though not without its own satirically sharp observations - is John Boorman's simultaneously bold, bittersweet and elegant Korean War era British screen memoir. Or in other words when it comes to Korea, The Interview, you're no Queen And Country.

The film is adapted from a period in Boorman's own life back in the 1950's, when primarily perplexed young men were begrudgingly conscripted into the army. And to not only unfathomably fight other people's battles in an essentially anti-communist American war in Asia intent on cornering both North Korea and their Red Chinese ally - but to prop up the crumbling British Empire as well, in the distant colonialist realms of Africa and Southeast Asia.

Callum Turner stars as Bill in Queen And Country, a rebellious recruit in league with a rowdy posse on an army base, biding their time with pranks and awkwardly propositioning local women, until such unclear moment when they will be sent into inexplicable battle. Boorman grasps this opportunity to actually mount an incidental battle of his own domestically, ridiculing a military hierarchy ranging from nasty to nonsensical. And pulled off with malevolent glee by the likes of David Thewlis and Richard E. Grant.

And in the midst of the Cold War, Bill's cynical when not irreverent outspoken joint aversion to both 'war and the class system' sends him on a collision course with the military brass, and interrogation by a visiting team from the UK version of the CIA, known as MI5. Which only reinforces his distaste for a national belief system increasingly without a soul.

Boorman, with his incisive analysis of human violence in movies like Deliverance, also brilliantly conjures in a metaphorical narrative thread running through the film, petty, punitive squabbling by the military officers over a stolen clock on the base. Which encapsulates succinctly and rather sadly, the terrible, destructive rationale nations engage in, to perpetuate murderous wars on the planet.

And though Queen And Country never actually proceeds to Korean battlegrounds, there is no need to. As the story evokes the after-effects of the horrors of war right at home - and youth scarred and destroyed psychologically and physically in the process.

And with the title itself reflecting a sorrowful mood of endless and groundless war into the present time. And a confounding lack of confident leadership, conviction or direction, epitomized in the film with the sudden the death of George VI who never actually wanted to be king - and became so unexpectedly following the abdication of his brother King Edward VIII, in 1936. And, ensuing replacement with his daughter Queen Elizabeth, essentially by default.

Along with, in hindsight as a pall cast upon this narrative, that the United States imposed an economic blockade against North Korea these many decades, attempting to starve the country into submission. And perhaps as a vendetta as well, for the US not winning the Korean War. In which the US and its British allies killed one tenth of the population there - 290,000 North Korean soldiers and nearly three million civilians - for perhaps nothing more substantial than possession of a purloined clock.

The Humbling Review: Better Than Birdman, In Al Pacino's Introspectively Stunning Screen Soliloquoy

While economic crisis cinema has been the prevailing political theme in candidly conceived movies, whether subtextually or not since end stage capitalism has set in, The Humbling explores the twin angst connected to the irreversible fateful loss of one's craft through aging. And who better to ignite the screen with that resonant despair, than one of the film world's greatest thespian treasures possibly in joint contemplation of his own advancing decline, Al Pacino.

Adapted from the Philip Roth novel and directed by Barry Levinson, The Humbling shines with  a literary, existentially rich glow derived from the cinematic fusion of these three master craftsmen. As the film delves into the physical, psychological, and emotional freakout of celebrity Broadway stage and screen actor Simon Axler (Pacino), pushing seventy and increasingly aware of the fadeout of his faculties, of both the body and mind.

Failing to get a grip on his doomed diminishing capacities, or in some cases imagined disintegration, Axler retreats to a hermetic existence at his remote Connecticut estate. Or so he incorrectly thinks, as Axler is pursued there by an assortment of primarily annoying female kooks who progressively lead him to doubt his own sanity.

And including thirtysomething comparative youngster and ambivalent lesbian daughter of a theatrical colleague who has admired Axler since childhood - and is beyond eager intent on seducing him -  Pegeen (Greta Gerwig). Along with his increasing inability to separate the characters he plays from his real life, creating a hallucinatory cross-pollination in his mind which doesn't in the least help matters - not even with regular session kicking in courtesy of his Internet shrink (Dylan Baker), alternately via Skype and smartphone.

The Humbling's drama within a drama is deliciously weird when not toxic wicked fun. And actually better than Birdman, with its more poignant, less pretentious introspective grasp of the raw and revealing truths connected to the ironic and elusive notions of art, existence, identity, self-worth, fame - and the inevitable transience of life negating everything else.

Henry Fool: Hal Hartley Interview

Henry Fool: Interview with Hal Hartley You might say that the perverse Gothic comedy Henry Fool may signify a weird case of life imitating art. Director Hal Hartley, who just walked off with the "Best Screenplay" Award at Cannes for Henry Fool, is not far off from his main character and possible alter ego, a not-so-simple Simon Grim. The mostly mute Queens, NY garbageman is graced with the Nobel Prize for literature soon after drifting nearly by accident into the creative life. Shy, soft spoken and as spare in self-expression as the stark but stirring settings of his movies, Hartley, an introvert who tends to go for the radically extroverted in Henry Fool, met for a candid conversation about life, art, and a filmmaker's ultimate burning need to be understood, just like his characters.

PM: Henry Fool is a great film about writing, the way it revels in words.

HAL HARTLEY: Yeah...Verbosity! It's got a lot of verbose characters. PM: Congratulations on your "Best Screenplay" Award at Cannes. HH: Thank you. PM: That's really something. HH: I guess so. That's what they tell me! We'll see what happens...

PM: You've got to confide something more than that. Like, how did it feel when you won?

HH: Umm...You know, they tell you you're going to get something. They tell you that day around noon. They call your distributor and say, "Hal should be at the theater. He should not leave town." And you say, "Oh great." So then you've got to get the tuxedo out again. And, you know, clean off the stains and stuff. So you get yourself ready, and about an hour prior to the ceremony, my French distributor Michel told me "Yeah, I think it's the screenwriting award," which they don't give every year. But this year they made a point of announcing that they will give it every year. So that felt great. I knew at least what I had to say. I was just afraid of like stumbling and stuttering and stuff like that. And then to realize that the group of people up there, Martin Scorsese, Winona Ryder, and Sigourney Weaver, that these are the people who spent the week arguing with each other about the relative merits of all these, you know, films. That is really exciting. And it kind of justified everything. Yeah, I appreciate getting an award. But there is something just dumb and embarrassing about getting awards too, which I always feel -- because you never really know what it means, you know?

PM: Well you know, that's exactly what you talk about in the movie.

HH: Yeah...What is recognition? Yeah.

PM: But do you think that Simon Grim winning his big award was a strange premonition of your big moment at Cannes?

HH: [He laughs] No, no! I was just reaching for the biggest, biggest thing...It was funny, somebody said to me at Cannes, "Are you concerned that people at the Nobel Prize will be insulted by the film?"...Why? Simon's poem might be great. I don't know, I haven't read it.

PM: Is there anything deeply, darkly autobiographical in Henry Fool that I should know about?

HH: No. I mean, almost everything I do gets sparked by experiences in my personal life. I was surprised to realize at a certain point that Henry Fool was going to be about, you know, a creative person. I was reaching at the beginning for a history, like a great, big wonderful biography toward romances and all this stuff. You know, of a kind of character, a Simon character, going out into the world and struggling. It was going to be the sort of quintessential story of an individual trying to achieve something simple, a career, and against tremendous odds. But he gets really large, and that kind of led to this idea of Henry, this influencing kind of character, and somewhere it just all melted down.

PM: Do all those artistic issues between the characters reflect something about you as a creative guy?

HH: Oh, it certainly reflects everything. There's nothing directly lifted from my life. But yeah, conversations like what Simon has with the publisher...If I had to take every conversation I've ever had with a movie distributor and boil it down to its essence, that's the conversation he has. And it's a conversation I respect, that I don't shy away from. I enjoy the dynamics between the ivory tower and the selling floor. I like being in the middle, but I don't like to be too close to either one.

PM: And how exactly have you managed to hold on to your independence as a filmmaker?

HH: Well, that's it. Sometimes you have to be up in the ivory tower, and sometimes you've got to roll up your sleeves and you've got to go down there in the marketplace and sell it.

PM: But do you think about that when you're creating?

HH: No. When I'm creating, I'm trying to do what I want. It's the most selfish thing imaginable. But I want to communicate, and I don't want to sell out. You have to know who you are and what you want. The struggle is sometimes that I don't always know who I am. You have to know when you have to take the time to go somewhere, and find out who you are.

PM: You have an extreme creative fondness for your lead actress Parker Posey. And she just told me a few minutes ago that you're "a tornado of humor in the great abyss." How did you guys meet?

HH: Parker and I...She went to the same school as I did.

PM: Which one?

 HH: The State University of New York at Purchase. And the summer she graduated, the teachers at the school called me, because I stay pretty close with my teachers. And they said, "You know, there's this girl whose like hell on wheels and just graduating. The school has not been able to do anything with her," she said. "She's rambunctious and trouble, so she's clearly a super talent. Are you doing anything?" And I said, "Well yeah." But actually, she started dating my friend Bob, who was hanging out in the hallway during all these auditions, hitting on all the ingenues coming in. So they lived together for like five years, and I became very close with her. I have to admit, I was a little nervous about her. She was clearly very talented, but she was out of control. I was making this small movie for American Playhouse, and I had two weeks to shoot it. And that producer side of me was saying, this is going to take a lot of time. I mean, the rewards could be terrific, but if she's as really unmanageable as she seems to be, it could be a mess. I think she felt that about herself too. She's an extremely disciplined person, but eight years ago it was different.

PM: You're a pretty hot property right now. How have you managed to steer clear of Hollywood?

HH: Easily! They've managed to avoid me too. So...

PM: To put the question another way, would you take on a big studio project where you'd have less control over your work?

HH: No. The control is essential. Though more money, that would be great. I'm always looking for more money. But some of the big American movies in history, good movies, I like them, and I like the way they're made. However, at its worst, you feel the multiplicity of voices. I think good work comes from a singleness of voice. I'm thinking of classic American movies. I mean, I don't know how they did it, but I know that Ford was making movies, and he had to answer to a boardroom full of guys in suits. But somehow he managed to keep a singleness of voice. And what I see happening too often in America cinema now, it's a soup. You look at the movie, and you just know that whoever designed the clothes resented the person who designed the decors. And then they both resented the director, and the director resented the producer. And nobody could really agree on who should make the music, so they opted for the big guy on campus that year, because he won an Academy Award last year, and all the movies look alike, they all sound alike, and they're all pretty much about the same thing. Because difference has been conscientiously extracted from these movies, in case they offend somebody or don't fit into the marketing scheme of a whole other group of people down in marketing and advertising who have their own ideas. So I have more affection these days for an anarchistic approach, perhaps radically different. I don't know, I hope in the future difference will be more tolerated. I'll wait and see.

PM: Is Henry Fool going to be your most successful movie?

HH: I think so.

PM: What makes you feel that way?

HH: It's just a great big story. And it's got more obvious emotion in it, which it should. I don't feel like I've betrayed myself or anything, but it felt like it needed that. And hmm...you could just tell from the buzz. I mean, even the people who hate it, hate it vociferously, so that's always a good sign.

The ANTI-OSCARS 2014: THE JAMES AGEE CINEMA CIRCLE AWARDS

*THE TRUMBO: The Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE PICTURE is named after Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten, who was imprisoned for his beliefs and refusing to inform. Trumbo helped break the Blacklist when he received screen credit for "Spartacus" and "Exodus" in 1960.

*KILL THE MESSENGER: One of the only biopics this year not twisting truths through either falsification or omission, this Michael Cuesta directed docudrama heralds the courageous, defiant, lonely and tragic struggle of journalist Gary Webb, who stood up to both the US government and corporate media in collusion. As he exposed the CIA scheme to flood the inner cities with cocaine back in the 1990s to covertly finance the illegal US-backed Contra war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.

With their citing of late iconic film critic Pauline Kael that 'Criticism is the only thing that stands between the audience and advertising,' the Critics Chapter of JACC is described as an association of national and international critics, historians and film scholars who came together to form the first progressive critics organization, in the belief that idealistic perspectives, voices and diverse ideological visions in film criticism that speak with social conviction and consciousness, are sorely lacking as a public platform. And we recognize films embodying those humanistic ideals with our annual awards.


For the complete list of JACC Awards 2014, visit the James Agee Cinema Circle HERE