Flirtations with Italian cinema history

As we've made our first real exploration of Italy -- I'd been here in 1994, but only in the far north to go skiing, and this is my wife's first time setting foot in the country -- we've expected to become reacquainted with our impression of Italy from the movies. 

In Venice, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now was invoked multiple times. As I'm writing this, we have not yet been to Rome, but we're already talking about a visit to the Trevi Fountain, because that's where Anita Ekberg frolicked in La Dolce Vita. (I had been saying it was Brigitte Bardot. Oops.) Perhaps more relevant to me personally, I will be on the lookout for scenes from Roman Holiday.  

What we were not expecting was what we found in the town of Arezzo in Tuscany, where we spent Tuesday night, chosen only for its relative equidistance between Venice and Rome. 

The town has the old buildings and piazzas to make it sort of the platonic ideal of a "small" Italian town. Small by the standards of Venice and Rome, anyway.

That must have been just what the producers of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful thought, which is why they chose to shoot the opening section of the film here.

Throughout the town you see little plaques like the one I've included above. I should say, we saw three of them. I assume there are only as many plaques as there are Arezzo locations that are recognizeable from the film. I recognized these specific locations only in the vaguest sense, having rewatched the movie as recently as five years ago, but still not having the familiarity necessary for full recall. 

However, the idea of the Italian piazza -- in movies ranging from Suspiria to Cinema Paradiso to the aforementioned films of Federico Fellini -- has been fully established for us, meaning the familiarity feels strong.

And then we discovered the view. 

We ascended to what we thought was Arezzo's highest point to look at a medieval cathedral, and then noticed the park beyond that. Which -- very casually, it seem to us -- had this view:

I know this doesn't even really convey it, but it's the best I've got without including members of my family.

So at this point I inevitably thought of a different sort of film set in Italy, the sun-drenched romantic films such as Under the Tuscan Sun, if you want a movie I haven't actually seen, or La Dolce Villa, not to be confused with La Dolce Vita, which I saw earlier this year, if you want films I have seen. And though I can't name them at the moment, I've seen a lot of films like this, travelogues with a lot of food porn at their center. 

So I guess I am reaching the following not very interesting point: I've seen a lot of depictions of Italy on film, and being in Italy proves that these films were actually shot on location?

Two other quick general thoughts about Italy in terms of its role in film:

1) When we were making our way through the rabbit warren of Venetian streets, I found myself wondering where they showed the films in the Venice Film Festival. There was not a single place I saw that I recognized as a likely, or even potential, screening area.

2) In Arezzo I ended up wearing my "The Good, The Bad and The Wookie (sic)" shirt, which you can see below, which I thought was appropriate as it invokes spaghetti western master and revered Italian director Sergio Leone.

Oh and here's another panorama image of Arezzo, just because:

A blue Don't Look Now

When you are an American expatriate cinephile living in Australia, you long for the sense that you are actually seeing movies around the same time as, or even before, other people. Instances of that come to feel few and far between.

And so it was that I seized an opportunity to see something fairly fresh and new Wednesday night, when I determined that Blue Ruin -- a new Kickstarter-funded indie released in the U.S. in theaters and VOD on April 25th -- was available for rental on iTunes. (My email address is still associated with the American iTunes store, which is great for renting things on an American schedule -- not so great for using iTunes gift cards given to me as gifts in Australia.)

Having only a half-dozen other 2014 movies to my credit, I sprung for the $6.99 rental. It downloaded surprisingly quickly -- more quickly than these movies usually download on our iPad -- and after kicking off the download around 7:15, I was watching by 9.

I didn't know anything about Blue Ruin except for that nebulously malevolent title, and that it was funded by a Kickstarter campaign. I didn't know, for example, that it was a revenge story, and that Jan Brady appears near the end.

But I don't really want to talk about those aspects of Blue Ruin. What I do want to discuss are its similarities to a movie that came out four decades earlier.

I may have seen Nicolas Roeg's 1973 psychological horror Don't Look Now in film classes in both high school and college, though I can only be certain of college, because I remember doing an assignment on it. I think it was both, though. I know I've seen the movie at least twice, in any case.

And though I remember a lot about it, what I remember most was the fact that each shot in the film -- and I mean each and every shot -- contains at least a snippet of the color red. It's meant to be some comment on the omnipresence of evil or the devil, or just a byproduct of Donald Sutherland's henpecked mind, as his daughter was wearing a red coat when she died.

Well, Blue Ruin does for blue what Don't Look Now did for red.

I couldn't swear to "each and every shot," but Jeremy Saulnier has definitely worked overtime to incorporate the color blue into the vast majority of his mises en scene. (Is that the correct plural of "mise en scene"?) There are large, honking instances of the color blue, like the main character's car and the brilliant blue tarp that covers a different car, and then there are the more subtle appearances of the color, like the hue cast over the character's face as he watches TV. But one thing that's for certain is that blue haunts this movie the way red haunted Don't Look Now.

Only thing is, I'm not sure if it works, exactly.

I guess my feeling is that a stunt like this is audacious the first time someone decides to do it, then tired as soon as the next person does it. Granted, 40 years should far exceed the statute of limitations on a good cinematic stunt, and I'm sure Saulnier wasn't expecting a big chunk of his audience to recognize it as an homage to Roeg's movie (which I certainly think it is). You might take that one step further and say that this main character (let's name him: Dwight Evans, played by Macon Blair) even bears a bit of a resemblance to Sutherland. That's despite his two extreme appearances in the film -- the grizzled beardedness of a homeless person and the clean-shaven tabula rasa of not being recognized as that person -- falling on either side of the mustachioed Sutherland in Don't Look Now.

The reason I'm not sure it works is that I found myself looking for the blue in every shot, and not always concentrating on the rest of the beautifully realized camerawork. That might have happened also in Don't Look Now except that I wasn't looking for the red on the first viewing, because we didn't talk about the film analytically until after we'd watched. That let me concentrate on the movie's story, or more accurately, its mood. The second viewing was when I got a chance to count all the instances of red.

The thing is, since Don't Look Now already did that, now I'm much more likely to pick up on it if someone's doing it again. I've become a critical enough watcher of films (that may be an understatement) over the years to notice right away if someone is trying to "pull a Don't Look Now." I guess you might say I've been waiting to see someone do it again since then. So I was attuned to those blue color bursts from the get go, and eventually was straining to extract the blue from every composition. It became a distraction, and I also started to puzzle about what it was supposed to mean. If the red was blood or evil or the devil or that little girl's coat, what was the blue? Depression? Literally that the main character is "feeling blue"? I'm not sure.

I guess the whole movie left me with the feeling that it was about this percentage of a really successful idea. There's something definitely indelible and unforgettable about the movie, and indeed, it does feature Jan Brady. But I guess the extent to which I wanted it to be great was not quite in sync with how great it actually was. Or maybe I was just tired of handing out four-star reviews to 2014 movies, having honored each of the last four I've seen with that star rating.

So Blue Ruin is a 3.5-star movie with a chance to move up upon further reflection.

And, it's got a lot of blue in it.

Fahrenheit's 451 influences

You won't believe what an hour-long nap at 6:30 p.m. can do for your evening's longevity.

Not only did I never succumb to sleep during the 2-hour-and-26-minute running time of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, but I fancied myself up for an entire other (short) movie, starting at just before midnight. I didn't finish it, but did watch a whole hour before finishing up this morning.

It was totally unpremeditated: Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, for the second time. I can't remember whether we had it in our streaming queue because I put it there, or because my wife did and wanted to watch it with me. But there are lots of movies out there, and I decided there were other movies I could watch with her.

As I was watching, not only was I reminded of how great it is, but of how many other films it may have influenced in one way or another. (Topic: Were these other films influenced by Truffaut's movie, or Ray Bradbury's original book? Discuss.)

Okay, so there aren't 451, but there are 4 or 5:

1) The Lives of Others (2006, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck). The 2006 best foreign film Oscar winner concerns an Eastern German Stasi captain who's charged with ferreting out suspected traitors who may threaten the state. His dogmatic principles are ultimately thawed when he spies on a pair of artists for an extended period of time. Although the activities of the firemen in Fahrenheit 451 are much more overt -- they arrive at domiciles with plenty of pomp and circumstance, openly seizing and burning the contraband books -- Fahrenheit's central figure is also an operative of the state who loses his belief in the big-brother methods of his government, in large part due to his interactions with a woman he suspects of being a book owner.

2) Equilibrium (2002, Kurt Wimmer). Wimmer's film consists of a more direct homage to Fahrenheit 451, as it portrays a future world where emotions are forbidden. In fact, law-abiding citizens take a regular regimen of mood-controlling drugs, hence the title. In this society, anything that inspires emotion, which includes works of art of any kind, is banned. That's the reason given for why the books are verboten in Fahrenheit -- that they agitate people too much emotionally. In Equilibrium, Christian Bale plays an enforcement agent who's charged with rooting out those who oppose the state, must like Oskar Werner's Montag in Fahrenheit. He too sees his resolve crumble due to his interactions with a beguiling woman (Emily Watson).

3) The Book of Eli (2010, Allen & Albert Hughes). If you don't want a "surprise" near the end of either Fahrenheit 451 or The Book of Eli revealed, skip this one and go on to the next. For those citizens who oppose the book banning in Fahrenheit, but also want to stay out of jail, they have a novel (no pun intended) method of keeping books alive in a form other than physical: They commit them to memory, and "become" the book. Love that concept -- in fact, Eli screenwriter Gary Whitta seemed to love it too. The big secret (one of two, actually -- I won't reveal the controversial and somewhat dubious second secret) of Whitta's mysterious protagonist, Eli (Denzel Washington), is that he has committed the Bible to memory, in the hopes of reciting it for eventual republishing in this post-apocalyptic world devoid of the written word.

4) Don't Look Now (1973, Nicolas Roeg). When I studied Roeg's masterpiece Don't Look Now during my first film class in high school, my film teacher emphasized the fact that this odd mystery set in Venice has at least a small amount of the color red in every single shot. I'd have to watch it again, but I think that's correct -- every single shot. It's the main detail about the movie that's stuck with me in the probably 18 years since I last saw it. Well, when I watched Fahrenheit 451 this time, and herd Roeg's name in the cast as the cinematographer (marvelously, the written word is banned even in terms of the film's credits, which are read aloud), I put two and two together. Fahrenheit 451 is a film with a ton of red in it, most notably the ominous truck that carries the firemen on their calls, as well as the firehouse from which they originate. As Roeg's film came seven years later, I have to wonder if his use of the color red in Don't Look Now was a seed that had been germinating since he shot Truffaut's film.

Okay, there were four, not five. Actually, I'm sure there are a ton more. But this is already more of a blog post than I ever thought I'd get to write on a Saturday morning while on daddy duty.