On Marcelino Pan y Vino (1955):

A group of monks, living long ago in Spain, adopt an orphan child left at the monastery door.  Given the name of Marcelino, the boy (Pablito Calvo) grows to be both a delightful and a mischievous 5-year-old, though also one who is lonely.  He invents an invisible friend, who is gradually replaced by a visible one:  a statue of Jesus Christ, crucified, come to life!

Because the God-man is hungry, the boy brings him bread and wine from the monks’ kitchen, thus inspiring Jesus to rename the child Marcelino Pan y Vino (Marcelino Bread and Wine).  Problems the monks have with a hostile town mayor and probable freethinker are solved through a final stunning miracle Jesus performs and which the monks ecstatically witness.  Once again it’s a miracle involving Marcelino.

This is an imaginatively made, deeply religious Spanish film directed by Ladislao Vajda (a Hungarian!)  In a way it confirms the words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes:  “the day of death [is better] than the day of one’s birth” (7:1).  Marcelino misses having a mother, and for him, not having a mother on earth means having one in Heaven.  The boy asks Jesus, “Where is your mother?”  “She is with yours,” Jesus replies.  Several low-angle shots of the landscape under a spacious sky are meant to emphasize the existence not only of God but also of Heaven.

For God, to be sure, is not simply up above.  “Do you know who I am?” Jesus asks Marcelino.  ‘Yes,” says the boy.  “God.”  This after a crucified man appears in a monastery’s attic.  Marcelino Pan y Vino is a gentle picture truly accepting of the supernatural and the miraculous.

Cover via Amazon

(In Spanish with English subtitles.)

The wonderful Carol Reed film from 1951, An Outcast of the Islands, is an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad novel (no, I haven’t read it).  Critic Charles Thomas Samuels is right that it’s “the story of a charming hedonist whose fundamental egotism turns wicked under the pressure of his environment.”  The hedonist in question, Willems, is played by Trevor Howard, and there is no miscasting.

Staying at an outpost near the coast of Indonesia, Willems suffers because he cannot satisfy his intense desire for a girl named Aissa (Kerima) without betraying Captain Lingard (Ralph Richardson), his benefactor.  A betrayal takes place because one unworthy man, Willems, is hated by, and himself hates, another unworthy man, Captain Lingard’s son-in-law Almeyer (Robert Morley).

Man as a wreck.  The failure, due to sin, to win sympathy.  When two people—viz. Willems and Aissa—do not share a culture but do share isolation.  This is what Outcast is about.  It is a fascinatingly shot outdoors drama, too fast moving but also explosive. It is a pleasure to see Howard, Richardson, Morley and Wendy Hiller, histrionically authoritative, in verdant Sri Lanka, where much of the enterprise was filmed.  It is an unusual and disturbing movie.

The Polish film Cold War (2018), by Pawel Pawlikowski, concerns two lovers who live and travel in a 1950s-early 60s Europe that wants to be, and must be, divided.  Why?  Because of communism.

The Poland in which Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig) meet goes Red, then Wiktor resides for a time in Paris.  There, a musician, he can play music dissociated from Stalinist politics; in Poland communism is contaminating the arts.  Also, he makes love there to the visiting Zula despite a straw marriage she is in.  This is Europe of the Cold War, although there is, as well, a certain cold war imposed on Wiktar and Zula’s relationship.  Once in a while it heats up.

As with his movie Ida, Pawlikowski filmed Cold War in black and white, which is palpably austere but also unnecessary and a trifle too lustrous to be deeply artistic.  And yet the movie is artistic.  It can’t be denied that, as Manohla Dargis said, “it is filled with ordinary and surprising beauty.”  Of various kinds.

(In Polish with English subtitles)

The Polish film Cold War (2018), by Pawel Pawlikowski, concerns two lovers who live and travel in a 1950s-early 60s Europe that wants to be, and must be, divided.  Why?  Because of communism.

The Poland in which Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig) meet goes Red, then Wiktor resides for a time in Paris.  There, a musician, he can play music dissociated from Stalinist politics; in Poland communism is contaminating the arts.  Also, he makes love there to the visiting Zula despite a straw marriage she is in.  This is Europe of the Cold War, although there is, as well, a certain cold war imposed on Wiktar and Zula’s relationship.  Once in a while it heats up.

As with his movie Ida, Pawlikowski filmed Cold War in black and white, which is palpably austere but also unnecessary and a trifle too lustrous to be deeply artistic.  And yet the movie is artistic.  It can’t be denied that, as Manohla Dargis said, “it is filled with ordinary and surprising beauty.”  Of various kinds.

(In Polish with English subtitles)

The film opens with an adulterous couple, Paul and Raluca, naked in bed.  Then we see Paul, a married man, doing ordinary domestic things with his wife and daughter.  Afterwards there is an increase in silent pain and silent stress, followed by . . . nothing good.

Tuesday, After Christmas (2011) is a deeply sophisticated and realistic Romanian movie about marital infidelity.  Its characters live for the love of an adult, for amatory love; and the new adult for Paul, Raluca, is a trade-up to replace good wife Adriana (go figure).   The film reveals the easy destruction which immorality brings about, and the frequent quietness with which people introduce disaster to a particular sphere.

It’s a subdued work directed by Radu Muntean, who uses no music to speak of and a myriad of medium shots in long takes.  As for the acting, Mimi Branescu (Paul) is perfectly true as a middle-class man who is ordinary but not boring and hardly without moral awareness.  Marie Popistau (Raluca) supplies subtlety and nimbleness as a dentist-cum-mistress.  Exquisitely Mirela Opriser gets everything right as Adriana, a conventional woman suddenly thrust into anguish and rage.

By the way, what negative criticism this fine film received was sadly stupid.

(In Romanian with English subtitles)

Tuesday, After Christmas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)