film

Rip It Up, Issue 168, 1 July 1991, Page 38

film

Bill Gosdin, president of the New Zealand Federation of Film Societies, has done his customarily impressive job and this year's International Film Festival finds the main centres inundated with some of the best films around — in the case of Auckland, 75 of them in a mere two weeks. There are obscurities from Iran and Thailand as well as off-beat titles from America and Britain and the usual selection of music features, gay-orientated movies, and documentaries which we've come to look forward to. A new touch in 1991 is the showcasing of three featured woman film artists. Three titles by Russian director Kira Muralove include the long (153 minutes) but gripping The Aesthetic Syndrome. The highly politicized American Su Friedrich is represented by a number of features, the most controversial being Damned If You Don't which mixes an ironic deconstruction of Michael Powell's 1946 Black Narcissus with the tale of a nun coming to terms with lesbianism. The New Zealand Film Archives have come up with a number of films featuring the Danish actor Asta Nielsen, including her 1920 Hamlet and Pabsts beautiful The Joyless Street

of 1925, which also features a young Greta Garbo. All the Nielsen movies will feature live music provided by the Archive's resident composer Dorothy Buchanan. Stephen Frears' snappy adaptation of Jim Thompson's novel The Grifters should have been on the circuit months ago, when Angelica Huston was up for her second Academy award. The tone veers a little for the grim film noir Grifters seems to be aiming at, but Huston is viciously watchable in a tight little blonde wig that might have been tailor-made for Barbara Stanwyck in Walk On The Wild Side. The admirable

Susan Sarandon does wonders with the unlikely material of White Palace — watch out for the scene of blow job rivarly at the dinner table. I'd give the precious Mobil Masterpiece Theatre tastefulness of Jame's Ivory's Mr and Mrs Bridge a miss and spend my $8.50 ($5 if you can get there before 5) on Charles Burnett's 7b Sleep With Anger, a stunning first feature from the young man who got his break as Spike Lee's editor.

I'll be giving Eric Rohmer's new Conte de Printemps a miss — Rohmer's fey little 'moral tales' are wearing a

little thin in the nineties, but Luc Besson's modish thriller Nikita is worth a visit — if only for the chance to see Jeanne Moreau. Maurizio Nichetti's The /cycle Thief is the film that Cinema Paradiso should have been, with its affectionate take on De Sica's classic Bicycle Thieves and the combination of Julian Sands, Nastassia Kinski and Tolstoy in the Tavani Brothers' Night Sun sounds intriguing. On the music front there is Greta Schiller's documentary on Maxine Sullivan, and Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones, an irritatingly fragmented documentary which has such delirious silliness as Steven Spielberg likening Jones to 'a spray gun of love'. For those in the spell of the goddess of vogue, there is Truth or Dare, which sets out to prove that "sexuality is at the core of everyone's being. Everybody's in a different state of envying it". The best musical rewards come in Allan Moyle's Pump Up The Volume, a hilarious tale of an introverted teenager, who pumps his private radio station, with everything from MCS, Leonard Cohen and Sonic Youth to teenage masturbatory fantasies, into the suburbs of Arizona. Barry Barclay's Te Rua is the single New Zealand feature and if the delays in following up the festival premiere of Mereta Mita's Mauri with a cinema release are anything to go by, I'd catch Barclay's new thriller during the festival.

Madonna recently slated Longtime Companion as an arthouse movie, but it's far from it. Companion is the latest in a succession of noble film reactions to Al Ds — including An Early Frost,

Parting Glances and Peter Well's A Death In The Family— a brave venture, with a glowing performance from Bruce Davison. Jennie Livingstone's Paris Is Burning, a documentary on black drag queens and Harlem Drag Balls, won the LA Critics award as best documentary of 1990. Todd Hayne's Poison is the director's first feature after his extraordinary Barbie doll extravaganza The Karen Carpenter Story which was a feature in the 1989 festival. Poison is a powerful and complex movie, imbued with the spirit of Genet, and providing, in its 'Horror' segment, as effective an AIDs parable as one could wish for. WILLIAM DART ALICE Director: Woody Allen Mia Farrow is Alice, a privileged and bored New York woman, whose life has been reduced to a series of dietary obsessions from free-range chickens to high fibre papayas. Woody Allen offers a solution to her stultifying vacuum of a life by borrowing a framework from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. A visit to a mysterious old doctor in Chinatown offers Farrow access to a series of herbs which enable her to come to terms with the break-up of her marriage to William Hurt, a passing infatuation with a

saxophonist (Joe Mantegna) and the death of an old boyfriend (Alex Baldwin), and finally discover

happiness as a solo mother and social worker.

Much of Alice is Allen at his most fey — the Chinese herbs can make one invisible, fly over the streets of New

York, or become the centre of everyone's infatutaion — a vein Allen has already explored in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and, most recently, in New York Stories. The film is at its strongest when it has its feet firmly on the ground, in the touching scenes between Farrow and Mantegna (including a delicately erotic banter about saxophones) or confrontations with her more earthy sister (Blythe Danner). By contrast, Cybil Shepherd's cameo as a television producer who snidely rejects Farrow's scriptwriting ambitions is shallow and exteriorized. Tricks like having a confession box plopped on Danner's front lawn or a cinema verite style interview with Farrow's mother (Gwen Verdon) are self-conscious and just don't gel with the film around them. Alice is at its most convincing when Allen relaxes and lets his characters make their own point, with the humanity and believability that made last year's Crimes and Misdemeanours so memorable. WILLIAM DART IN BED WITH MADONNA The more famous the person the more fascinating the trivia, so when Madonna gives a director access all areas to film backstage, in hotel rooms and on the road (via plane and limousine) on her blonde Ambition tour, the punter sits up and takes notice. Interspersed with colour

concert footage in Paris, Japan and America, we see Madonna and her "family" of dancers in various states of undress — psychological and physical. Lots of pre-concert prayer huddles led by Miss M, scenes of her getting her makeup and hair applied (by our own Joanne Gair, daughter of the Rt Hon North Shore MP), prowling around her sumptuous hotel suites, slurping cereal on the phone while she asks her dad how many tickets he wants for that night's Detroit show, indulging in raucous girl-talk with best buddy

Sandra Bernhard. "I'm bored," wails Madonna, "I want to have some fun!" "Who would you like to meet honey, who would really rock your world?" enquires Sandra. "I don't know," wails Madonna, "I think I've already met everybody." Directed by twenty-six year old video director Alek Keshishian, executive producer Madonna, you can bet you're not going to see anything she doesn't intend for you to see but this is a livewire glimpse behind the scenes in the life of one for whom all the world is a stage. DONNA YUZWALK POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE Director: Mike Nichol . Hollywood on Hollywood is a genre with considerable lineage, from Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful to Russell Rouse's The Oscar, one of the most preposterously trashy films ever made. Carrie Fisher's barbed-and-bitchin' script for Postcards makes it a particularly classy specimen of the genre, and the style is kept up by the directorial skill of Mike Nichols and ace performances from Shirley Maclaine and Meryl Streep as the sparring mother and daughter. One of the strongest points of Working Gid was the neat ensemble playing between Melanie Griffiths, Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver, and Nichols manages the same magic with Maclaine and Streep. Other Tinseltown luminaries lend a few lines here and there (Gene Hackman, Rob Reiner, Richard Dreyfuss) but they pale beside Maclaine's portrait of a matriarchal monster, upstaging Meryl's return from rehab by belting out Stephen Sondheim's 'l'm Still Here' to a clutch of sycophantic friends. By the end of the film, Meryl has got her life into order and celebrates it by throwing herself into a country ballad by Shel Silverstein. The resolution is a pat one, as one might expect in such a brittle comedy of manners as this but, as MacLaine beamed proudly from the sidelines, one couldn't help but wonder if she might have had another Sondheim show-stopper lined up.

WILLIAM DART