Would that Woody Allen were a major film artist.  It would be good to have some artistically successful American comedies about how we live now, and that is not what Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, from 1986, is.

To begin with, it takes a long time for any of the movie’s humor to make us laugh (to make ME laugh, anyway, but I can’t imagine anyone finding the first 45 minutes of this film funny).  Further, Allen is pathetically sloppy at writing dialogue, which is often thin and banal.  And not all of the acting is good:  Mia Farrow and Max von Sydow are dull, Allen himself dreadful.  Finally, the film, though a comedy, is unpersuasively and even ludicrously optimistic.  Michael Caine stops obsessing over and pursuing Barbara Hershey, and an infertile Allen actually impregnates Dianne Wiest! 

Hannah and Her Sisters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dark Blue World (2001) is a Czech World War II film with a nifty story and well-known themes.  The dramatis personae includes Franta, a Czech pilot imprisoned by the Communists of his homeland because he fought German aircraft for the RAF and is now feared to be dangerously pro-freedom.

Flashbacks to the Forties exhibit Franta and his best friend Karel leaving Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for England in order to join the British armed services, and after a number of months they and other Czech pilots are allowed to fly missions.  One of them leads to Karel having to bail out of his plane and meeting an English lady whose soldier husband has been missing in action for a year.  Karel, liking her, puts the moves on Susan, the lady, but she is unattracted to him.  As it happens, she wishes to ease her loneliness with nice Franta, who, though he knows of Karel’s love for Susan, acquiesces.  The missing husband is forgotten.

What all this means is that Franta mistreats his best friend even after Karel valiantly saves Franta’s life in an air battle.  When the truth about Franta and Susan becomes known, the friendship dies; Karel is unforgiving.  There is, though, an instance of magnanimity which I must be sufficiently decent not to disclose.  After the war Franta, the lost soul, returns to a different Czechoslovakia.  It appears the pilot’s purgatory is right around the corner since he suffers in a Communist prison.  1951 is when Czech pilots like Franta were set free from the prisons, although the film tells us they perforce lived as outcasts.  In truth, Dark Blue World honors them.

The movie was directed by Jan Sverak and written by Zdenek Sverak.  Ondrej Vetchy, as Franta, is capable of force but has an easy manner.  Krystof Hadek displays boyish anger and purity of heart as Karel.  With now womanly good looks Tara Fitzgerald (Susan) is compellingly grave and as English as they come.

Dark Blue World (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The French Amelie (2000), a monster hit in the country of its origin, is as offputting as it is enchanting.  Winsome Audrey Tautou enacts an intensely shy, peculiar do-gooder of sorts who falls hard for a solitary fellow employed at a porn shop.

“Am I the only one who finds Amelie [the do-gooder] just a tad creepy?” asks critic Charles Taylor.  No, I do too.  I find the entire movie a tad creepy, for all its visual vivacity.  Should we expect anything different from a film whose treatment of sex is contemptibly cheap, a romp without consequences?  For one thing, even the porn shop receives a friendly nod from director Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Cover of Amelie

In Revanche (2009), from Austria, an ex-con named Alex (Johannes Krisch) works for a scurvy pimp and is secretly in love, and in a sexual relationship, with one of the pimp’s prostitutes, Tamara (Irina Potapenko).  Both wish to get away from the pimp and raise enough money to pay the drug-addicted Tamara’s debts, so Alex devises a plan.  He’ll rob a bank for some short-term cash, the two will flee Vienna for Ibiza where Alex has a chance of co-owning a bar.  During the execution of the plan, however, Tamara gets killed by a policeman, Robert (Andreas Lust), who is thereafter obsessed with what he’s done.  He doesn’t know exactly how the killing took place and his inner turmoil affects both his work and his marriage to Susanne (Ursula Strauss).  To Alex the shooting was murder (he’s wrong) and he doesn’t want Robert to go on living.  Early in the film, the pimp asserts that Alex believes he’s a tough guy but really isn’t.  While living with his grandfather in a rural area, where coincidentally Robert and Susanne also live, will Alex turn into a tough guy and avenge himself by killing the policeman?

Even viewing it on DVD, I can see that Gotz Spielmann’s film, which never played in Tulsa, is a terrific work of art.

The effect of being deprived of a lover and thereafter alone is staggering.  The scenes of city life in Vienna and then of doings in the countryside are equally compelling.  Except for Alex’s grandfather, the people in Revanche are incomplete, stunted, because of the lure of ill-gotten gain, because of drug addiction, because of childlessness (in the case of Robert and Susanne).  They face their own failure:  Alex himself gets Tamara killed, Robert wishes he hadn’t killed her.  Indeed, if the policeman did anything truly wrong, he eventually receives a comeuppance by being cuckolded.  He is a pitiable man, and so, in a way, is Alex.

The film is Austrian, the title is French.  “Revanche” is “revenge” in French.  Spielmann may have given it this title because in France romantic notions about revenge, as about so many other things, were generated over the years.  Even revenge against a policeman in the twentieth century–in French Algeria, perhaps?–could be considered as legitimate as revenge against the royal family during the Revolution.  Yet Spielmann, I think, rejects such romanticism for his Austrian milieu.  It never arises.

(This is a foreign film with English subtitles.)

Cover via Amazon

For a book published in 1977, Lewis Patten’s The Trial at Apache Junction might seem like a pretty tired Western.  But how tired, really, is such a novel when its story makes sense and its action passages are fairly imaginative?  It concerns a sheriff who knows the scoundrel he’s supposed to execute did not get a proper trial, and it’s fun despite a few stale details.  Throw in a perfidious deputy and a career-ending murder, and you just might end up with a notable entertainment.

Does the book have anything to say?  Nope.   It’s neither philosophical nor religious nor political.  It’s the usual trinket.  Have fun.

Sunset, 3/9/08, near Apache Junction, Arizona (Photo credit: gwilmore)