THE MAINE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2004 Diary

By Laurie Meunier Graves

DAY 9

This afternoon we play hooky. After perusing the schedule, we decide there isn’t anything we really want to see. If we had more stamina, we would go to Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, the three-and-half-hour Bollywood extravaganza, but we know that at this point, if we start the day with something that long, we won’t be able to sit through much of anything else. The Last Temptation of Christ is also tempting, but Joel Johnson has the DVD, which he has promised to lend us.

Instead, we spend the afternoon idling. We have a long lunch at a Mexican restaurant and then repair to Jorgensen’s café for dessert and the paper. Feeling very much refreshed, indeed almost normal, we amble to the Opera House for our first movie of the day. Our youngest daughter Shannon meets us, and when she hears about our shiftless day, she scolds us and proposes that we would not be so lax if our eldest daughter were here to keep us in line. This is probably true. A true cinephile, Dee would not put up with a movie-free afternoon on a Saturday during the film festival. Unfortunately, she could not come to the film festival this year. With her new job, there wasn’t enough vacation time, but she’ll be coming next year. In the meantime, while the cat’s away, the mice, they play.

DOLLS
Japan, 2002; 113 minutes; 35mm; in Japanese with English subtitle



A baffling, beautiful hallucination of a film that leaves this viewer baffled. Yes, it is about love and death, but, in the end, what does it all mean? Dolls opens with traditional Japanese puppet theater, complete with large white-faced dolls, black-clad puppet masters, and a chanting narration. The story is about doomed loved, and the movie then shifts to modern-day Japan to follow a gangster and the woman he left behind to pursue his “career.” It also follows a pop star who loses an eye in a car accident and her devoted groupie who blinds himself when he hears of her accident. The most arresting and ultimately the strangest pair are a young man and woman, Matsumoto and Sawako, who are bound by a red cord and spend most of the movie wandering silently across the Japanese countryside and through the seasons.

Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that the bound pair was once a normal young couple about to be married. However, Matsumoto’s parents push for him to break his engagement with Sawako and instead marry the boss’s daughter. He reluctantly agrees, but on his wedding day, he learns that Sawako has tried to kill herself. She fails but loses her mind, unable to recognize anyone. Filled with remorse, Matsumoto jilts the boss’s daughter and rescues Sawako from the hospital. Naturally, he loses his job and in the process becomes an outcast as he devotes himself to the silent Sawako, who has an alarming tendency to wander away. Hence the red cord, and the movie becomes Becketlike as the couple walks and walks and walks, with their costumes changing so that they are color coordinated with each season.

Coming from a completely different culture, I won’t pretend I understand all the symbolism in this movie—the dolls, the lovers, the red leaves, the kimonos, the juxtaposition of the story of the dolls with the story of modern-day Japan. However, it’s my guess that it does make more sense to the Japanese, who surely have internalized all the symbolic imagery. Nevertheless, Dolls is arresting and even haunting, one of those movies that will stay with me for a long time.

DE-LOVELY
USA, 2004; 125 minutes; 35mm; in English

1/2

A bio-pic of the composer Cole Porter that centers on his uneasy but fruitful (at least for him) relationship with his rich, well-connected wife Linda. It’s another one of those stories where the male artist finds a “wifey” to help him with his career and his life. In this case, the movie suggests that Linda was absolutely essential to getting Porter’s career started, and it’s reasonable to conclude that without her, he would not have been the star that he was. Because Porter was gay, De-Lovely takes a little twist in that the inevitable infidelities are with men rather than women. Ultimately, I’m not sure what difference this makes, but the homophobia of the times (from the late 1920s to the late 1950s) does make it more dangerous for the flamboyant Porter, who is unable to be discreet.

Aside from his various liaisons with young men, Porter’s outward life is not that eventful (at least not the way it’s portrayed in the movie.) Basically, he composes, has his flings, and fights with his wife. This is slim material for a two-hour movie, and director Irwin Winkler and screenwriter Jay Cocks spice it up in two ways. First, they make it a true musical that not only features many of Cole Porter’s songs but also has the various characters singing and dancing. Second, in the tradition of Robertson Davies’s Murther and Walking Spirits, they have Cole, at the end of his days, see his life reenacted on “stage.” The movie alternates between scenes from Cole’s life and comments between Cole and a dark man, the ultimate director, who controls the action and the singing. For me, it’s a device that works, and it adds a little zip to what otherwise would be a conventional story of an artist and his wife.

The luminous Ashley Judd plays Linda Porter with just the right amount of wit, vulnerability, and strength. Kevin Kline is, well, Kevin Kline, and he would be terrific in a Wheaties commercial. He can play just about anything he puts his mind to, and he is one of the great American actors of our times. His Porter is sharp, witty, decadent, yet compassionate. In the end, we really do get the impression that he loves Linda, even if it’s not the traditional love that most husbands feel for their wives. Their parting scenes are moving and left me with an appropriate sense of loss.

Despite the sad ending—an ending that comes to us all—this is a will-o'-the-wisp movie, as light as the subject it portrays. Porter was not a great artist, but he wrote snappy, sassy songs that were exactly right for the times. The movie portrays this lightness in a pleasing way, and while it is certainly no Pollock, there are worse ways to spend two hours.


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