February 14–21, 2002

movies

Screenpicks

by Sam Adams

The Vagina Monologues

(Thu., Feb. 14, 9:30 p.m.; Mon., Feb. 18, 11:15 p.m., HBO)

Eve Ensler’s gynocentric play has become such a snowballing phenomenon that it’s almost disconcerting to see it returned to its original form. What with the nationally coordinated, star-studded performances (see Mixpick on p. 76) that the Monologues have sparked, it’s a little underwhelming to be presented, in HBO’s film, with the sight of Ensler alone on a nearly bare stage. She’s not a particularly gifted performer; attempts at humor come off like bad stand-up, and drama threatens to shade into the maudlin. The film’s most interesting moments come between the monologues themselves, in documentary segments where Ensler asks women apparently pulled off the street the questions that helped her form the project in the first place (the most famous being, "If your vagina could talk, what would it say?"). The flood of responses, from revelations of sexual assault to elderly women who claim never to have even peeked at their own coochies, more than illustrates the need for dialogue, even if Ensler’s "I am pussy, hear me roar" approach is ultimately a lot less groundbreaking than the self-proclaimed "radical" seems to think it is. There’s no arguing that sending the play’s audiences home talking about female sexuality — or violence against women, which Thursday’s "V-Day" performances raise money to fight — is a significant act, which maybe just goes to show that it doesn’t take radical theater to provoke an important response.

Un Chien Andalou/That Obscure Object of Desire

(Fri., Feb. 15, 8 p.m., $5, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215- 895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org )

International House’s one-night tribute to Luis Buñuel spans 50 years in just over two hours, encompassing the career of one of cinema’s most malleable and beguiling talents. Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), which Buñuel co-directed with his compatriot Salvador Dali in 1928 (with a hefty uncredited contribution from Carlos Saura), is a mesmerizing collage of imagery that all but defies description. From a straight razor slicing through a (dead) cow’s eye to ants crawling out of a hole in a human hand, the film is as much a surrealist act as a work of art, designed to provoke, attack and sometimes bamboozle its audience, all of which it still manages nicely. Object, Buñuel’s final film, dates from 1977, and in some ways it’s the earlier work’s polar opposite. Adapted from Pierre Louÿs’ Le Femme et le Pantin (also the source for Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman ), the film stars Buñuel regular Fernando Rey (his voice dubbed by Michel Piccoli) as a Parisian businessman who becomes consumed with desire for his housemaid Conchita. Despite that Conchita is played by two different actresses — seductive, deceitful Carole Bouquet and fiery, dangerous Ángela Molina — Buñuel’s camera plays it straight, as if nothing at all out of the ordinary were taking place. The film’s apparent straight face makes Buñuel’s narrative games all the more disturbing, as threatening to the natural order as the bursts of terrorist activity that punctuate Buñuel’s otherwise faithful adaptation of the novel.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

($39.95 DVD)

That Obscure Object of Desire

($29.98 DVD)

Diary of a Chambermaid

($29.98 DVD)

Belle de Jour

($34.98)

Once again, I-House’s programming provides the perfect impetus to brush up on some recent releases. Criterion’s Discreet Charm double disc pairs Buñuel’s commonly acknowledged 1972 masterpiece with a comprehensive feature-length documentary on his life and work, as well as a fond reminiscence by cohorts Arturo Ripstein and Rafael Castanedo which shows Buñuel preparing martinis as solicitously as his food-obsessed characters. Discreet Charm plays out as a series of elliptically comic sketches linked by the main characters’ constant quest to have a peaceful dinner for six — a desire that is only realized, and disastrously so, in the final reel. That rare breed of satire that transcends its initial context, the film survives as an attack on bourgeois appetites and short-sightedness. Though it’s structured like a dream and the characters are constantly confronted with dream narratives and occurrences, they never swerve from their focus on material satisfaction, and they pay the price.

Diary (1964) and Belle de Jour (1967) are an odd pair, faithful literary adaptations that feel like Buñuel is playing someone else’s game. In the former, Jeanne Moreau plays a domestic servant whose exposure to the aristocracy results in a crash course in sexual perversion, cruelty, murder and incipient fascism (with a closing swipe at the police chief who banned Buñuel’s L’Âge d’Or in 1930). Belle de Jour (brought to disc in an indifferent transfer) features Catherine Deneuve as a bored housewife who can’t seem to drum up any sexual enthusiasm for her husband and becomes convinced that the solution to her problem lies in her becoming a high-priced prostitute. Both films adopt a tone of psychological realism (with occasional lapses into dreamlike imagery) that doesn’t square with Buñuel’s strengths, and their reliance on female protagonists points up the fact that Buñuel was far better at understanding men’s attractions to, and frustrations with, women than he was at getting inside the female psyche. (Object’s dual casting seems like a wink at his own Madonna-Whore Complex.) Belle de Jour includes several memorable fantasy sequences, and, of course, watching Deneuve at this stage in her career is several orders of magnitude better than a sharp stick in the eye. But neither film represents Buñuel at his best. (Object’s DVD includes excerpts from Jacques de Baroncelli’s 1929 silent adaptation of the same source novel, while Criterion’s editions of both Object and Diary include video interviews with Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière. Belle de Jour includes a pedantic scholarly commentary.)

Blue Wild Angel

(Sat., Feb, 16, Sun., Feb. 17, Wed., Feb. 21, 7:30 p.m.)

Wattstax

(Fri., Feb. 15, 7:30 p.m.; Sat., Feb. 16, 10 p.m.; Thu., Feb. 21, 9:30 p.m., Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org )

The best concert films document not just a performance, but a moment in history — a bill filled amply by both of this weekend’s Prince offerings. Culled from footage shot for his own Message to Love, Murray Lerner’s Blue Wild Angel documents Jimi Hendrix’s entire performance from the 1970 Isle of Wight festival. While the set isn’t uniformly stimulating (Mitch Mitchell’s flat-footed drum solos are your cue to step out for a smoke), the warts-and-all approach provides a genuine feeling of being there, minus the mud and smelly hippies. The film has its frustrations, like the fact that Hendrix’s right and left hands are rarely in the frame at the same time (a major consideration given his guitar-god status), but the moments when it clicks, as on a scorching "Red House," make it all worthwhile. Lerner will be present at the Saturday night screening.

Despite its great performances, Wattstax is most fascinating as a cultural document (and fashion scrapbook). The 1972 Los Angeles concert was intended to both commemorate the 1965 Watts riots and the newly Afrocentric direction of the soul powerhouse Stax label (which resulted in the unfortunate disenfranchisement of founder Jim Stewart, who never recovered). From Jesse Jackson’s "I Am Somebody" convocation to Richard Pryor’s between-acts riffs to Isaac Hayes in all his Black Moses finery, Wattstax (which, though released in 1973, has never made it to video) captures Black Power at its height — and seriously, some of those outfits have to be seen to be believed. The communal ethos of the ’60s was all but sputtered out, and within a few years, Stax would collapse in an avalanche of debt, but, at least for that moment, you can believe everything came together.

Slavery: A Global Investigation

(Tue., Feb. 19, 8 p.m. and midnight, DUTV-54)

This documentary by Brits Kate Blewitt and Brian Woods falls back a little too heavily on dramatic string whooshes and tear-jerking narration, but, for the most part, it’s a clear-eyed look at a drastically overlooked crisis. With all the attention (deservedly) drawn to sweatshop and subsistence labor, the fact that people all over the world are still compelled by force or intimidation to work for nothing at all nearly escapes notice. Blewitt and Woods focus most specifically on India and the Ivory Coast: In the former, children are kidnapped and forced to weave rugs sold mainly in Britain and the U.S.; in the latter, one official estimates that as much as 90 percent of the country’s critical cocoa crop (or about 40 percent of the world’s total) is produced by slave labor. That’s not to say Westerners get off scot-free, though: Blewitt and Woods also interview several women who have been compelled to work as domestics without wages in London and Washington, D.C., mainly by officials employed by the World Bank (whose purported goal is curing global poverty). The film offers no easy answers — boycotting chocolate, we’re told, would only worsen the situation, though the U.N.-affiliated Rugmark program helps identify rugs made without slave labor — but it still serves as a vital eye-opener.