Screenpicks

by Sam Adams

Once Upon a Time, Cinema

(Fri., Aug. 17, 10:30 p.m.; Wed., Aug. 22, 1:35 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 26, 1:30 p.m.; Thu., Aug. 30, 7 p.m., Sundance Channel)

During Sundance Channel’s "Taste of Iran" month, there are two ways to guide yourself through the history of Iranian cinema. One is via Jamsheed Akrami’s Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema After the Revolution (Thu., Aug. 16, 12:30 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 19, 10:30 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 26, 9:30 a.m.; Sun., Aug. 31, 11:30 a.m.), a documentary including interviews with Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry), Majid Majidi (The Children of Heaven), Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon), Dariush Mehrjui (Leila ) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. (All of those films except Majidi’s will play on the channel this month.) But for a more eccentric and personal recapitulation of Iranian history, turn to Makhmalbaf’s 1992 film Once Upon a Time, Cinema.

Those only familiar with Makhmalbaf from such conservatively styled recent films as Gabbeh may be shocked at Once Upon a Time’s experimental wit. A whimsical narrative essay, the film concerns a leading man (not incidentally a dead ringer for Charlie Chaplin) who’s dead-set on selling a decadent sultan on the virtues of cinematography. Really, though, it’s an excuse for Makhmalbaf, whose daughter Samira directed The Apple (also part of the Sundance series) and whose wife Marzieh Meshkini directed last year’s The Day I Became a Woman (which he wrote), to pay homage to the power (and the danger) of cinema. The better to integrate the golden-age stock footage which forms a good part of the film, Makhmalbaf limits himself to primitive camera techniques, but in doing so he rediscovers the magic of cinema’s earliest days — the magic of Méliès and the Lumière Brothers. Characters walk into and out of movie screens without the slightest hesitation, and they peer through the holes in the cinematographer’s peep-show contraption as if they’re gazing into another dimension.

With sly nods at the limitations imposed on both pre- and post-revolutionary filmmakers — the cinematographer not only has to help the sultan find the woman of his dreams, who’s escaped from one of his films, but he has to survive the scrutiny of an ad hoc censorship committee — Makhmalbaf takes cinema from its inception up to the present, incorporating a few sly genre parodies and climaxing in the film-historical equivalent of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s cosmic trip. The closing barrage of film clips may be lost on all but the most devoted Iranian film scholar — though the references to Mehrjui’s 1969 Cow are easy enough to spot — but Makhmalbaf’s abiding passion for his medium is not at all obscure.

Traffic/Traffik

($26.98 DVD/VHS priced for rental; $39.95 DVD/$49.95 VHS)

It’s become trendy in past months to use Traffik, the six-part 1989 BBC miniseries, as a club to beat the Oscar-winning Steven Soderbergh film which was inspired by it. To a certain extent, it’s an apples-and-oranges comparison; the BBC series runs more than twice the length of the American film, giving it far more time to flesh out its characters and peer into different aspects of the drug trade, while the American version focuses on carefully honed emotional punch. People who’ve only seen the American version, or who only remember the original from its PBS airing more than 10 years ago, may be struck by the similarities between the two — some of Traffic’s cleverest plot twists are lifted wholesale from Traffik’s script, written by Brit Simon Moore (who’s recently written such less-challenging fare as the NBC miniseries The 10th Kingdom ). There are differences, of course, most notably the fact that Benicio del Toro’s morally flexible Tijuana cop was, in the original, a Pakistani opium farmer who becomes a right-hand man to a notorious drug baron in order to provide for his family. Del Toro’s performance notwithstanding, it’s more interesting to trace the opium trade back to its source than it is to focus on south-of-the-border way stations.

That said, though, what really distinguishes Traffic and Traffik is presentation. Soderbergh and Stephen Gaghan’s version of the story is necessarily more brief, but it’s compensated for by Soderbergh’s magnificent narrative telescoping; he can say in a brief shot what the British series takes a monologue (and there are many) to explain. Traffik exercises more sophisticated restraint, but by the time Bill Paterson’s disgraced government minister is grimly banging on doors looking for his heroin-addicted daughter (Julia Ormond), you’re wishing he’d pull a Michael Douglas and crack that impassive façade. Not surprisingly, the American version amps up the emotion, but given that the nature of the story is to show the impact of the drug trade on individual people — be they teenage junkies or international drug smugglers —it makes sense to juice up the drama. It’s a mistake to think that narrative film, no matter how much time you take, can capture the complexity of the real world; what it can do is provide an emotional simulacrum, which is the imperative Traffic seizes.

Especially in the midst of Reagan/Thatcherite anti-drug hysteria, the original Traffik was a powerful antidote, praising counseling and social solutions over prohibition (a message somewhat blunted by the open-ended "We’re here to listen" ending of the American film). But as interesting as it is, Traffik simply isn’t as dazzling or as powerful as Soderbergh’s version; its message is more complicated, but it’s not put over with nearly as much force.

Sullivan’s Travels

($39.95 DVD)

Held in inestimably high regard by generations of comedy lovers — four of whom (Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Noah Baumbach and Kenneth Bowser) testify on the audio commentary track — Preston Sturges’ 1942 comedy assaults self-serious Hollywood liberalism with its portrait of a fatuous comedy director (Joel McCrea) who’s decided to take a turn for the socially significant. Accoutering himself en hobo and setting out to ride the rails, he quickly finds it impossible to simulate poverty so easily, but he does hook up with Veronica Lake, a down-on-her-luck would-be actress who teaches him a few life lessons before an unexpected twist buys him hardship more genuine than he could have imagined. Sturges has his fervent admirers, and the accompanying documentary (directed by Bowser and written by Variety’s Todd McCarthy, originally shown by PBS’ American Masters series) makes a good case for Sturges as a groundbreaker, the first writer to seize the directorial reigns, paving the way for such figures as Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder. But for my money, he doesn’t nearly have Wilder’s incisiveness or Hawks’ sense of pace. And Travels, which winds up in a rather forced (and, you can’t help but feel, self-serving) defense of comedy over drama, often seems too broad to support such a nuanced conclusion. (Sturges, who was raised on high culture by his mother, a close friend of Isadora Duncan, attacks lowbrow humor with the gusto of a college freshman getting his first taste of sugary cereals.) In The Lady Eve, Barbara Stanwyck glories in her character’s coarse, blue-collar forthrightness, but though Lake, best known as a film noir vamp, proves an able light comedienne, she doesn’t have the earthiness the role would seem to call for. Perhaps it’s just that Sturges has too much affection for his characters to satirize them properly, but it still feels like he’s pulling his punches. And the film violates its own precepts by descending into mawkishness. It’s hard to quarrel with the people Sturges has inspired — among them the Coen Brothers, who swiped the title of McCrea’s would-be message movie for O Brother, Where Art Thou? — but he’s a better inspiration than a self-contained artist.