"Ashes and Diamonds" (1958)

“You can’t change things?” -Krystyna, Ashes and Diamonds

Forging a new nation requires compromises, and yet in the process of crafting a new national identity nations tell themselves, "This time things are going to be different: we’re not going to fall into the same traps as people did in the past". Ashes and Diamonds is about identity and compromise, nationally for Poland and personally for Home Army Soldier Maciek Chelmick (Zbigniew Cybulski), a resistance fighter who takes an assignment to assassinate a Russian official – representative of the new, growing communist threat from the Soviet Union. The film is set on the closing days of World War II in a small Polish town celebrating the end of the war with occupying Russian troops. Everyone in the film claims they are content with themselves, but we can tell they’re settling for second best. When the Maciek botches the assassination attempt, he hangs around the town in hopes of getting a second chance to eliminate his target. While killing time, his eye is drawn to the attractive and equally uncertain bartender Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska). Maciek falls for her, and not simply because he’s necessarily in love with her but because she represents for him a whole life he’s missing out on by being the gun for hire he is. Maciek contemplates getting out of the resistance life, realizing its futility, but if he doesn’t finish his assignment it will cost him his life. There’s no victory here for him. No matter what choice he makes he loses, and that’s the problem with the dawning of new eras: eventually they end, reality sets in, and everything is back to square one. Set against the gorgeous black and white cinematography of Jerzy Wójcik and marked by the coolness of Cybulski’s James Dean-aura, the fate of Maciek and his country is made all the more devastating and poignant. 

Grade: A-

"Ernest and Celestine" (2013)

Ernest and Celestine is a film of pure joy for an hour and twenty minutes. There is simplicity to its storytelling and its imagery that belies a precision and exceptional craft. The film reminds me of the films of Charlie Chaplin, or, perhaps more appropriately, Jacques Tati: pure, beautiful, and utterly enchanting. Celestine is a mouse and Ernest is a bear, and they live in a Metropolis-like world of above ground and below ground cultures, divided by differences and reasons that have long faded into memory. The mice tell their children about the “big evil bear”, but Celestine, adventurous and precocious, doesn’t buy it. The film builds up a fully inhabited world, defined by its own logic and rules, and filled with memorable characters and locations. The mice steal the baby teeth from the bear world above to be used replacing their more delicate canines. They’ve built a culture around dentistry, but Celestine has aspirations to be an artist. Ernest, bumbling yet well-intentioned, is down on his luck and desperate to find some food. When he comes across Celestine he intends to eat her but soon becomes fast friends with her when she introduces him to the storage basement of a candy shop. The hand drawn animation is gorgeous: picturesque, delicate, and charming. Ernest and Celestine’s friendship makes sense to no one but themselves, and in that way it is, like all great friendships, a world onto itself. 

Grade: A-

"Born Yesterday" (1950)

Classism is sharply written into the plot and characters of Born Yesterday. But my favorite place it appears is in Judy Holiday’s wonderful, unconventional voice. Her voice is high yet soft, just a register off from shrill. It has working class written into its every syllable. But her voice also makes us almost immediately endeared to and interested in Emma "Billie" Dawn, a woman thanklessly engaged to crass businessman and con-man Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford). Harry has moved down to Washington D.C. in order to make some illicit deals with members of Congress, but Billie sticks out like a sore thumb in the polished, tasteful elitism of capitol culture. To remedy this Harry tries to pull a Pygmalion on Billie by hoisting her off on refined journalist Paul Verrall (William Holden) to be educated. Instead, Billie falls for the journalist and, through her studies, begins to realize Harry’s mistreatment of her. The drama and critique here are tame, reminiscent of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But it’s not really the point; the Capra-ian sincerity caters to a screwball sensibility, clashing Billie’s lack of formal learning with her crash course in culture. Throughout all of this, Holiday’s remains a thoroughly appealing presence. It’s easy to overlook what Holiday is doing here. She's playing a dumb blonde but the film doesn't pigeonhole her as only that persona. Notice the subtle changes in Holiday's voice. She's not only got great comedic timing, but she’s also doing small but significant vocal changes that not only win us over but also build an inner world, one that’s yelling, or, rather, squeaking, to be free. 

Grade: A-

"Gabbeh" (1997)

How much of Gabbeh is memory and dream? It’s hard to say; what is certain is that a young woman, named Gabbeh, is looking to marry a man who her father does not approve of. But it really isn’t about this because these events happened many years before, and Gabbeh, whose story is now woven into an old rug, suddenly appears and recounts this story to an elderly couple washing the carpet. This is a simple, what might be called magical realist, story but director Mohsen Makhmalbaf tells it in atypical ways. The film lacks really anything resembling a typical narrative structure. The old couple interacts with the people of the past, and they watch, almost as if watching a film or a theater performance, these memories, these parable-like stories, just off screen. Makhmalbaf will then intercut the story with digressions about life. And the film is ultimately about, nothing short of, life. The film tells its story in fragments, stops and stutters, and slowly accumulates meaning. Under what appears to be abstraction is a story of fable-like transparency. Memories do not flow out of us in nice, straight-forward packages but in shapeless, formless staccatos, and fables may resemble fairy tales but they are rooted in a much harsher reality. 

Grade: B+

"Glengarry Glen Ross" (1992)

Writer David Mamet’s dialogue has a distinctive cadence to it that makes it instantly recognizable. In Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet’s foul mouthed, stylized dialogue is the showcase of the film. Wonderfully recited by Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, and, in a scene stealing cameo, Alec Baldwin, the dialogue is fueled by an internal logic that creates a world onto itself. Glengarry Glen Ross is Death of a Salesman for a modern age. The film is about salesmen of worthless real estate property in a company that is long past being on its last leg. These men are informed that if they do not improve their sales they will be fired by the end of the month. They scramble to make sales to people desperate, foolish and dumb enough to buy into what borders on a scam. These salesmen should be slimy; they are often duping people, and they scheme and lie in order to get the sale done. Yet we never feel anything but sympathetic for these sad, sometimes awful, characters (and there is never a time where they don’t feel like larger than life presences that make them read more like characters than humans). Like Willy Loman, they’re oddly noble even when they’re pathetic. How much of this is due to Mamet’s dialogue? Mamet gives such interesting things for these people to say that we can’t help but listen, even when they’re selling bullshit even they wouldn’t buy. 

Grade: A-

"The Ful Monty" (1997)

The Full Monty is a bawdy comedy built on a foundation of melancholy. The film centers on a story of working class men out of work who turn to stripping to make cash off of one big performance. These men are desperate, and trapped in the  formerly prosperous industrial town of Sheffield, now slowly decaying. Flighty yet lovable Gaz (Richard Carlyle) needs money to maintain custody of his son Dylan. To ensure that the crowd comes out to their act, the men decide that they will make their burlesque act the “full monty”, aka a completely nude strip. Simon Beaufoy's script scores some convenient points off of the sexual and farcical nature that this story entails, but it also seriously considers some relevant issues about what it means to be a modern man. These are not conventionally attractive men, and they know it. They worry about their appearances and body image, and they fret over no longer being bread winners. The Full Monty is consistently uproariously funny but inside its traditional narrative structure is an insightful and incisive examination of masculinity. While these men shouldn’t be sexy, especially not performing a Chippendale number, the film provides sharp characterizations that make us sympathetic to their crisis of identity and remind us that beauty is far from skin deep. To be a real man means allowing yourself to be as emotionally naked as a striptease might leave you physically naked.

Grade: B+

"The Burmese Harp" (1956)

Rarely has the use of sound and silence been used as effectively and evocatively as it is in Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp. Private Mizushima (Shoji Yasui) has learned to play a Burmese harp for his Imperial Japanese Army regiment. His harp and the regiment’s singing are the only things that maintain the troops’ peace of mind. They’ve fled war-torn Japan to Burma when British troops inform them that Japan has surrendered. The scene where the British soldiers approach the regiment is a work of beauty by Ichikawa. The Japanese soldiers do not yet know of the surrender, and they play music to make it appear as though they are unaware of the British soldiers. There is a tension between the sorrowful joy of the music and the stakes of the situation. When the British give them the news, the music slowly transitions to something just as potent and poignant but with a completely different context. Mizshuma’s story leaves him stranded from the regiment. He poses as a Buddhist monk to make it safely back to his company. In his journey across Burma he witnesses the tremendous destruction wrought on the land, told in near silence. Ichikawa’s compositions are elegant and yet haunted, and the sights transform Mizshuma. He becomes a monk and vows to bury the nameless soldiers scattered endlessly across the country. Once such an affable individual, the war has broken what little remains of his constitution, and even his regiment’s sincere, warm outpourings of loyalty and friendship cannot restore him. Though The Burmese Harp is an anti-war film, it more often has the ethereal quality of a ghost story, with the specter of lost souls from the fighting hanging over everything. 

Grade: A-