NYFF 2010: Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff

Let's say you've just had a nasty personal shock, and whoever happens to be with you at the moment wants to console you. A New Yorker will keep you company on a subway platform as you stand in a fog, patiently waiting as you let three trains pass. One of the Siren's fellow Southerners will offer you a Coca-Cola or, as they say in Alabama, Co-Cola, and that means the kind with sugar, hon, you need the sugar to perk you up. An Arab will make you coffee and make sure your cup is poured from the top so you get the foam. A French person usually offers the Siren a pastis, one of the many things that endears that country to her.

A cinephile, probably, would offer you Jack Cardiff, and that was what the Siren got the first day she went to the New York Film Festival, a day that already had announced itself as the rotten climax of a personally trying September. And she sat and drank every image to the dregs and felt a bit better, at least until the lights came up. So it feels churlish to say, as the Siren must, that the film is a rather pedestrian affair that will give a Cardiff fan little fresh insight. It's like telling the consolatory Frenchman there's too much ice in the pastis. All the same, despite its having provided much balm for the Siren, it's an odd duck of a documentary.

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff gives you the work with Powell and Pressburger, zips back around to cover the Hollywood period with The African Queen, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The Barefoot Contessa, War and Peace, The Vikings and Errol Flynn's hell-raising. It then goes into Cardiff's work as a director, giving pride of place to Sons and Lovers and a bit of Young Cassidy before trailing off at the end with the likes of Rambo: First Blood Part II.

The film sticks almost entirely to the professional aspects of Cardiff's life; the one personal revelation is a brief discussion of his actor parents and his stint as a child actor. The Siren confesses to disappointment with this approach, although she knows she's supposed to pretend not to care. Cinematography is, to the Siren, the sexiest job on a set, and plenty of stills attest to the fact that Cardiff was a handsome devil. There must be more to tell than the old story about Ava Gardner wanting to be well-lit when she had her period. Oh well; Magic Hour didn't have much of the off-set life either.

Over at The House Next Door, Aaron Cutler goes into how the film was digitally projected. This the Siren, with her vast technical knowledge, registered as "hmm, the Powell-Pressburger stuff looked better at MOMA;" but with Cardiff it's an important point. The movies are represented mostly by rather brief clips, too brief for a Technicolor worshipper like the Siren. There's a great deal of Cardiff's musings on the artists that influenced his imagery; a painter himself, Cardiff loved Vermeer, Turner, the Impressionists. You also spend a lot of time with the still photos Cardiff made of actresses over the years, portraits that didn't give you much of the ladies' psychology but did show an unbelievable eye for their beauty. There are plenty of interviews--the Siren is pleased to report that Lauren Bacall looks great--but not much depth to the discussion. Cardiff talks a lot on camera but much that he says will already be familiar to anyone who's read Magic Hour.

The fundamental problem with Cameraman is that it concerns a figure who's a god to movie hounds, but (much as it pains the Siren to say this) is barely known to the general public. The director, Craig McCall, chose to pitch the movie to an audience only vaguely familiar with Cardiff. But the Siren suspects such people might not be watching a movie about a cinematographer in the first place, so why not get more daring? In another documentary screened at the NYFF, A Letter to Elia, Kent Jones and Martin Scorsese took a personal approach. So while A Face in the Crowd might be the consensus blogger vote for Best Kazan at the moment, it gets scant screen time compared with East of Eden, for which Scorsese feels a deep personal attachment. And the Siren didn't feel cheated at all. She felt like she needed to see East of Eden again.

So the Siren feels gratitude for the 86 minutes she spent with Cameraman, as she feels gratitude for the coffee, the pastis and the friend who finally waved her onto an F train. But if someone were to ask her which Cardiff scenes she'd like to see screened and discussed, in defiance of an audience wondering "hey, where's Black Narcissus," here are just three:

1. The love scene on the pier between Horst Buchholz and Leslie Caron in Fanny. The Siren would have loved to ask Cardiff about working with a director like Josh Logan, whose sense of cinematic visuals was, to put it charitably, nowhere near the level of Cardiff's own. Cardiff did say in his memoirs that he thought Logan's film had more heart than the original Pagnol trilogy.

2. The closing of King Vidor's War and Peace, with Audrey Hepburn in her red velvet dress standing out like a torch amidst the blanched ruins of her Moscow home. This movie could use some sprucing up, too, judging by the Siren's anemic-looking DVD.

3. Edmond O'Brien's telephone scene in The Barefoot Contessa, the one where he's trying to prevent a torrent of bad publicity from the title character's father having committed a murder. Shooting Ava Gardner beautifully is a wonderful thing, but getting the light just right on Edmond O'Brien's nerve-sweat is art, too.

More links:

Marilyn Ferdinand on Cameraman.

For balance, the delightful Amber Wilkinson at Eyeforfilm.co.uk, who liked Cameraman more than either Aaron, Marilyn or the Siren.

Glenn Kenny on Cardiff, here, here, here, here and here.

New York Film Festival 2010: Tuesday, After Christmas

Attend, please, to the Siren's tale of the venerable New York Film Festival, a tale with moments of pathos and a Code-mandated happy ending. In 2008, her friend Filmbrain prodded her to apply for press accreditation, and so the Siren did, with a neatly filled-out online application and a brief diffident email that never got a response. She was disappointed, but unsurprised.

Scroll down to the summer of 2009. Filmbrain, warmly supportive and lovely man that he is, once more encouraged the Siren to apply. She composed a longer supplication, which she paraphrases here: "Behold, I have a blog. This blog has readers. Nice readers. Smart readers. See the nice smart people who read my blog and blogroll it and link to it. Please, permit me to attend your filmgoing hoedown at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theatre in the heart of Manhattan."

This time the Siren received a polite, but firm reply telling her she had applied too late and the cupboard was bare. How well the Siren took this second rejection may be gathered from the email she sent a friend comparing herself to Stella Dallas at the birthday party.

Another year, 2010, and an even more desperately detailed application, in which the Siren fought to keep herself from quoting Vertigo: "Couldn't you like me just the way I am?"

And the NYFF press office said, "Please don't cry anymore. I'll get you in somehow. Come on. I had an Aunt Em myself once."

Just kidding. The Siren got an email with the press schedule and details of where to pick up her pass, which was adorned with a picture she pretty much hates, although she was the one who sent it in so she can't complain too much.

Nevertheless, for three weeks the Siren had the whole world on a plate. She was at the New York Film Festival. She met wonderful people and saw movies. Really good movies.

Now it's time to justify the press office's possible pity pass and start posting some things about the movies. In last week's Barron's the Siren had a brief review of the excellent Inside Job, Charles Ferguson's documentary about the 2008 financial crisis, which was shown at the festival. This followed on the heels of the Siren's full page review, also in Barron's, of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. The Siren assures you that the Ferguson film justifies her assertion that real-life Wall Street types are much funnier than in Stone's movie, sometimes even when they are trying to be.

Meanwhile, first up here at the Siren's place: what everyone was calling "the Romanian adultery movie" before it screened. The Siren was calling it that, anyway. If no one else was, it would not be the only time her take on this film diverged from others. Remember Oleanna, the David Mamet play and later movie about sexual harassment and the scourge of political correctness? The Siren saw it off-Broadway. Remember how Oleanna was supposed to divide everyone along gender lines, with women thinking the female character was a righteous avenger and men thinking "geez, poor William Macy"? Balderdash. It didn't play that way at all. That woman looked crazy to just about everybody, and she was meant to.

Tuesday, After Christmas, however--here we apparently have an actual gender-based Rorschach test.

Radu Muntean has made a brilliant movie; it was the Siren's first encounter with the so-called Romanian New Wave, and she loved it. This simply constructed domestic drama is composed of long widescreen takes in naturalistic light, but at no point does it seem static. Tuesday is indeed an adultery tale, opening with Paul (Mimi Branescu) in bed with his lover Raluca (Maria Popistasu). Paul is vaguely but gainfully employed, married to the faded and comparatively unexciting Adriana (Mirela Oprisor), and they have a nine-year-old daughter, Mara, played by a marvelously genuine child actress whose name the Siren hasn't been able to discover.

Raluca is a dentist, and Paul's decision to take Mara to his lover for braces prompts a scene between all four main players in Raluca's office. Raluca is none too pleased to be confronted with the entirety of Paul's domestic life. Adriana doesn't suspect anything, but neither does she want this pretty young woman pushing her into making hasty decisions about her daughter's teeth. Paul stands in acute discomfort, aware that Raluca is getting upset, and he tries to get his wife to agree to the damn braces so he can get out of there. Mara, in fourth grade but still so mentally young she believes in Santa Claus, just wants to look at the sheet with the colored bears on it, happy to let the clueless adults make the decisions. The long, agonizingly tense scene is a testament to just how good a film can be when all you do is turn the camera on gifted actors and let them tear into their characters.

It is all building to a confrontation, of course. The Siren knows of no adultery movie, past or present, that doesn't end in crisis--discovery, confession, murder, something. But the scenes in Tuesday that get you to that big moment--and when it comes, it's a lulu--are a marvel. The Siren particularly adored the sequence where Raluca, agitated after the braces debacle, goes home to her mother. Paul shows up; Mom knows who he is, and she quietly, cordially loathes him. Raluca's in the shower, so Mom offers him some cake, a social nicety that plays as the most hostile act possible short of cold-cocking the man. Mom slices into the cake like it's a frog in biology class. Paul chews with an expression appropriate to biting into a Tylenol capsule and Mom watches him, high hopes for his having a brain aneurysm stamped all over her face. Not since Meet Me in St. Louis had the Siren been this enthralled by cake-serving.

Who gives a damn if it's an old theme, when it's played with such brutal, entrancing authenticity?

[Extensive spoilers lie ahead, although this movie's plot will surprise no one.]

So now you are wondering, where is this alleged gender split? The Siren didn't realize there was one until she started reading the reviews, most of them by critics who were also enthusiastic about the film. She liked the reviews, and the Siren isn't picking on anybody; she was just gobsmacked at how differently she perceived the movie.

You see, the Siren despised Paul as much as Raluca's mom did. She thought this was a movie about a man who got bored with his wife, took up with a beautiful woman who had poor taste, pursued the woman even when her conscience started to bother her and finally, with lordly disregard for anything he might owe his wife of about a decade, let alone the daughter whose innocence is underlined every time she appears, decides to go off with his girlfriend because he's "very much in love."

The Siren can muster all sorts of sympathy for all sorts of adulterers, and she has the posts to prove it. But Paul is a toad. And the Siren is completely, fully, firmly convinced that the movie shows he is a toad. However, a lot of critics don't see it that way, and, well, they're all men. So, permit the Siren to make her case.

Let's start with that opening scene. The Siren was startled to read Robert Koehler at Film Journey describing it as "erotic." Look at the still above. There is gorgeous, stark-naked Raluca, and believe me you get a much closer look when she gets out of bed. If you are a man, OK, erotic. But, ahem, what is the Siren supposed to look at there? The stereo speakers? The couple's banter played as relaxed and intimate to Mike D'Angelo; the Siren shuddered as she listened to Paul bragging about his penis size, whining for a cigarette and blowing raspberries on Raluca's stomach. At this point the Siren didn't hate Paul, however. She thought he was a charmless oaf, but she didn't hate him. Charmless oafs have feelings too, you know.

Nor did the Siren turn on Paul when the scene shifted to a mall. In fact, the Siren felt a twinge of sympathy; Adriana tries on a purple shirt that doesn't fit and would be frumpy even if it did, and Paul has to tread around this fact in a way familiar to every man who ever went shopping with a woman. Vadim Rizov, in the Siren's favorite review of Tuesday, After Christmas so far (please, go read, it's excellent) saw the movie largely in terms of what it said about modern Romania, and mentions the mall as a shiny temple of Romanian capitalism. The Siren's notes, on the other hand, read verbatim, "Jesus Christ the clothes in Romanian malls are hideous." This does not count as a gender split, since Vadim and I are both right.

Vadim and I diverge on that opening though; he says "widescreen and plausibly warm light turn the potentially sordid into something that glows as much as the couple." The Siren emailed him to say she missed the part where Paul glowed and Vadim replied that "by the baseline standards of recent Romanian cinema, that guy's a dreamboat." The Siren told Vadim that if her choices are Mr. Lazarescu and "that guy," it's still a man's world, all right.

Paul goes to pick up Mara at school en route to the fateful brace-fitting. In the opening, Raluca gave him some nicotine gum to chew so his teeth wouldn't get stained and ruin his boyish looks. As Paul drives, lost in apprehension over the possible unraveling of his lies, he fails to notice Mara opening the package and popping a piece of Nicorette into her mouth.

That was when the Siren began to despise him. Oh, there are some arguable moments, like the scene where Adriana is cutting Paul's hair. He's naked, full frontal, turning around as she cuts, and you can read it as emasculation--his wife is absorbed in her task, his nudity irrelevant. But the Siren remembered the opening scene, which establishes so much more than it seems to, where Paul was bragging about his endowment. In a movie full of straight-on shots, this one scene is shot from a slightly higher angle. And there's this effect called foreshortening. Maybe this was a play for sympathy. But the Siren thought it pointed straight back to Paul's egotism.

Later Adriana, out of camera range, has Paul massage her foot, clad in a decidedly anti-erotic white athletic sock. Paul rubs it and stares off into the middle distance, while she makes happy, oblivious noises. It's a moment of intimacy that could escalate, if she tried to be seductive instead of domestic and cuddlesome, or if he had tried to rekindle things instead of taking his needs elsewhere. But it doesn't. He's already wondering how the hell to get out; his thoughts are, as always, with himself.

Paul confesses to the affair and the showdown begins, in a scene Aaron Cutler saw as the wife focusing solely on being turned into a fool. (Aaron's piece is very personal and touching.) But the Siren saw it as Mary Corliss at Time did. Adriana throws her hurt at her husband with increasing venom and violence, at one point almost spitting out that Paul had his daughter in the dentist's chair being examined "by the same hands that were giving you a hand job." And he cringes--how can she be so crude? Well, because she's right. The Siren has never been to Bucharest (pop. 2 million), but she's willing to go out on a limb and say it has multiple dentists. He didn't have to take his daughter to Raluca. Everything Adriana says is true, and Paul's sole reaction is defensiveness.

She tells him there's no way he is taking away her child. His expression tells you this was the first time the thought of who got Mara had occurred to him. She asks him whether he's going to have another child with Raluca, and he responds that he hasn't completely decided, for all the world as if asked whether he and Raluca were going to trade up to a two-bedroom. Much more than anything else, it's Paul's lack of thought, any thought, about Mara that breeds contempt.

And it is Mara to whom Muntean gives undiluted sympathy. In the final Christmas sequence, Adriana shows up, looking pretty for the first time, hair down, dressed up and still furious, not one bit interested in getting her husband back. Mara is lured away to sing Christmas carols so the adults can put out the presents from Santa; they're going to tell her about the mess her father has made of her life after Christmas. And what will the girl's fate be? It's right there in her Biblical name: Mara, "bitter."

(A great review by Marilyn Ferdinand, much more detached than mine, right here.)