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Restored 'Umbrellas..' is a Rare Candy-Colored Treat

reviews by Paul D. Goetz
Free Press staff writer


The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
June 14-20 at The Varsity
Written and directed by Jacques Demy
(in French with English subtitles)

In a movie climate in which downbeat irony prevails as realism and freshness is measured by the latest dispassionately escapist special effects, it's bracing to come upon a movie about first love's rapture, pain, and permanent scars that is as straightforward in its attitude and as bold in its approach as this newly-restored gem. One might expect to be put off by dialogue that is sung and by sets and props painted in Popsicle hues, but the exquisite precision of Demy's direction and Michel Legrand's jazzy, seamless score result in a world as self-contained and captivating as a fairy tale come to life. Seen from the very beginning, it's a thoroughly composed, candy-colored continuum - a seemingly self-navigated dream passage. But come in after it's started and you'll have difficulty getting into its jetstream of consciousness.
Demy's deceptively simple tale is a bittersweet lesson on life's capriciousness. Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve), a 17-year-old umbrella store shopgirl, falls rapturously in love with Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), a 20-year-old gas station mechanic, before he is drafted into the Algerian War. When his absence begins to weigh heavily on her, her mother's self-serving suggestion that she marry a wealthy diamond merchant begins to make chilling sense. Demy captures the evaporation of youthful effervescence, while his umbrellas become signifiers of how we shelter ourselves from life's punishing torrents, and the price we pay to obscure the sky.
The June issue of Spin magazine opines that it's "something like being buried alive in lollipops, and there hasn't been anything remotely like it since." But it's influence can be seen in Dennis Potter's "Pennies from Heaven" (1978) and, especially, in Chantal Akerman's "Window Shopping," one of the brightest films of the late 80s.


Catherine Deneuve stars in
"The Umbrellas of Cherbourg"




The Horseman on the Roof
at the Seven Gables Theatre
directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau
(in French with English subtitles)

The gushy press guide to The Horseman on the Roof describes Jean Giono's 1953 novel about an Italian freedom fighter fleeing through nineteenth-century France during the oppressive rule of the Austrian Empire as a "literary masterpiece...a lush story of chivalry and love." I confess I've not read it, but based on this adaptation, I would not be surprised to find a reprint at the grocery store check-out alongside other disposable romantic sagas.
The film's Stendhalian hero, Angelo Pardi (Olivier Martinez), is described as a romantic figure of mythic proportions, "an indestructible force of nature who conquers danger, temptation, tragedy and illness through sheer will." Unfortunately, the actor is not up to it, and neither is the director. Martinez lacks the presence and passion for a larger-than-life character who handily defeats or evades soldiers, secret police, hysterical mobs, and who remains impervious to a highly lethal cholera epidemic sweeping the countryside.
Juliette Binoche fares no better as the opaquely beautiful Countess Pauline de Theus who initially protects him and whose determination to find her husband distracts Angelo from returning to Italy with gold for the revolution. Angelo becomes increasingly devoted to her but, of course, remains honorably reserved. Unfortunately, neither actor generates the erotic electricity underlying their chaste facade.
Director Rappeneau, best known for his 1990 Oscar-winning adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, is even more lacking in conviction and aspiration this time. His lack of an overriding point of view results in jarring tonal inconsistencies. Scenes depicting the epidemic's grisly effects clash terribly with flippant lines like Angelo's "Cholera avoids me like the plague." Then, too, many of his key action scenes lack thrills. When a mob straight out of a bad zombie movie ineptly chases Angelo through a maze of streets, or when a contingent of armed soldiers allows Angelo and Pauline to slip through their midst simply because the sun is in their eyes, you want to laugh derisively.
Set against a backdrop of tragic historical facts, a story like this begs to be grittily realized, mythically aggrandized, or maybe even impudently lampooned. Steven Spielberg or Mel Brooks would have had a lot of fun with the material. Perhaps only the great director Luis Bunuel, who was interested in directing The Horseman in the 50s, could have revealed the depth of the epidemic's surreal horror and satirically set it against the crumbling conceits of the haute bourgeoisie. One suspects his Angelo would have been nearer to us, too-perhaps still courageous, but helplessly human. It's difficult to care much about Rappeneau's Angelo; he's lost and lonely in a pretty landscape somewhere between mythic hero and flesh-and-blood human being.




Dead Man
at the Harvard Exit
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

In this darkly comic western, Johnny Depp plays William Blake, a prim Cleveland accountant and American Everyman looking for opportunity in the West of the 1870s. In the film's Fellini-esque opening sequence, Robby Muller's exquisite black and white photography dislocates and suspends us in the interior stillness of a time machine. As Blake nods in and out, and the train's passengers become increasingly primitive, the western landscapes of our dreams roll past.
Our destination is Machine, a run-down town at the end of the line where Blake hopes to work in a factory. Instead, he finds the job's been given to someone else. Later, easy access to a gun (a key ingredient in American history) turns him into an inadvertent killer when he's found in bed with a saloon girl by her ex-fiance who also happens to be the son of the factory's owner.
With a bullet lodged near his heart, Blake escapes Machine with marshals, bounty hunters, and the factory owner's hired killers on his trail. Along the way, he is befriended by an outcast Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer) who believes him to be the dead poet William Blake, and who feels compelled to guide him home to the world of spirits. Eventually, when there seems to be no other choice, Blake accepts his identity as the killer/poet he's expected to be. Nobody tells him, "That weapon will replace your poetry." And so the word becomes flesh. America, born in abstract ideals of freedom and equality, will write out its history in blood. The idea of a displaced Native American finding connection in the transcendent writings of an English poet, and who signifies the only way out for a nation bent on destroying itself is inspired, beautifully realized, and the best thing about the movie.
Certainly, Dead Man is Jarmusch's most ambitious and original film to date, but it's exceptionally disappointing to see him fatally undermine what could have been an allegorical masterpiece on the order of Werner Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Jarmusch works against Muller's hypnotic camera work and Neil Young's hauntingly beautiful score with scenes depicting cannibalism, cross-dressing, and killers with teddy bears that are glibly funny and contemporary in tone. The film is littered with decidedly eccentric cameos by the likes of Iggy Pop, Crispin Glover, and Robert Mitchum. Frequently, you feel Jarmusch snickering behind the scenes.
I've often considered Jarmusch to be one of our most important and thoroughly American voices. His small, deadpan road movies (Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law) are quietly observed, finely detailed portraits of excluded Americans who prod our collective conscience. Castoffs and casualties of the perverse evolution of the American Dream, their off-beat, broken-dream behaviors resonate with authenticity. That is why I eagerly hoped this new film would be his graceful leap to an epic perspective on the spiritual and physical voyage of a nation. Indeed, Dead Man is often a sublime journey with ideas and images that resonate long after it is over. It's just too bad that, along the way, Jarmusch keeps shooting himself in the foot.




Lone Star
opens June 19, Seven Gables Theatre
written and directed by John Sayles

John Sayles has been writing, editing, directing, and even, at times, acting in his films since 1979. This independent spirit has in no way prevented him from painting richly intelligent canvases of personal relationships framed within socio-political issues. And while Sayles claims to be interested in people over the cinematic arts, the crisp, economic execution of his scripts works well to strengthen the vibrancy of his characters.
Set in a multicultural Texas border town, Lone Star is both a fascinatingly convoluted mystery and an emotionally satisfying archeological dig into the rich loam of the American experience. The discovery of the skeleton and rust-encrusted badge - buried nearly 40 years - of ruthless sheriff Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson) leads Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), the new sheriff, to unearth the truth about his late father who was Wade's deputy at the time of his death. Through the deft use of flashbacks, Deeds' investigation stirs up his own troubled past and earns the ire of local politicians whose self-serving plans for a new jail in place of the closing military base depends on keeping the truth buried. Injected into the story's dense weave are comments on, among other things, racial and familial divisions, the plight of illegal aliens, the teaching of myths in schools, and the attempt by minorities to escape the chaos of an inequitable society by entering the military. But Sayles does not let the complexity of his tale overwhelm what ultimately coalesces into a hopeful, inspiring examination of our capacity for reconciliation.

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Contents on this page were published in the July/August, 1996 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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