MOVIES
FROM THE LAND OF THE MOON We fall hard for director Nicole Garcia’s melodramatic tale of amour fou in the French Alps, From the Land of the Moon
From the Land of the Moon is crazy good; the ineffable dons a sheet in A Ghost Story; The Black Prince is on a serious mission; history thaws in Dawson City: Frozen Time
To some, Marion Cotillard’s latest depiction 2 of a damaged, sexually charged woman in From the Land of the Moon will seem overwrought, melodramatic, and maybe, by the end, a little silly. To others, this will be the film equivalent of their favourite summer beach read, a sensual, all-consuming tale of amour fou, set in impossibly gorgeous ’50s French locations.
In case you haven’t guessed, we’re in the latter camp. Guilty as charged. Don’t judge, s’il vous plaît.
It’s hard not to get swept away by the early setting, with Cotillard’s Gabrielle growing up in rural Provence, the Spanish workers on her family farm harvesting fields of purple lavender under hazy heat to a buzzing chorus of grasshoppers and bees. At night, they eat at long tables outside, under strings of lights that sway in the mistral.
But Gabrielle is too hot to handle for this conservative Catholic setting—so fired up over her teacher at one point that she has to wade in the local creek, her full ’50s skirt floating up at her waist. This is Cotillard at her fearless best (in what may be her best offering since Rust and Bone), an enigmatic mix of stubbornness and petulance, with a dangerously romantic heart. After Gabrielle expresses her unhinged passion a little too publicly, her mother gives two options for saving the family’s reputation: Gabrielle goes to the insane asylum or she gets married off to a stranger, the even-tempered Catalan farmhand José (Àlex Brendemühl). Gabrielle goes with the latter, but tells José she’ll never love him. She’ll never sleep with him, either, but her parents will set him up in his own business; till now, he’s had nothing, so he agrees.
Years later, the sickly Gabrielle is sent to a picturesque old spa in the French Alps to find a cure. There, she finds her ideal lover: the poetic, darkly handsome, and tragically ill young soldier André Sauvage (Louis Garrel), sparking a relationship that will send her into another spiral of obsession.
There’s more, including a plot turn that stretches all believability. But depending on how susceptible you are to your own amour fou, you’ll submit to it willingly by the time it rolls around. Cotillard casts a spell here, even when Gabrielle is being cruel. But watch Brendemühl, too, stoic and enigmatic, a man who has learned to bury his past, his pain, and his identity.
It isn’t all as tawdry as it sounds: in her exquisitely shot film, director Nicole Garcia poses some compelling questions about class and war—both Franco’s in Spain and the Indochinese battle that’s ravaged Sauvage.
But now it sounds like we’re making excuses, doesn’t it? > JANET SMITH
A GHOST STORY Starring Casey Affleck. Rated PG
Superficially, A Ghost Story can be said to resemble the prototypes laid out by Ghost and Truly, Madly, Deeply, in that one half of the love equation leaves the story early, but then spends the rest of the time, if not eternity, hanging around the other. Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara play the nameless couple occupying a small ranch-style home in a similarly unnamed rural place (actually Texas).
An off-screen event quickly leaves Mara’s character to do the moping, pretty much like she did in Terrence Malick’s Song to Song. Malick’s ponderously poetic whateverism informs the pacing here, although writer-director David Lowery’s 90-minute mood piece is certainly a bit tighter. Which doesn’t mean it aims for streamlined entertainment. The only thing seamless here is the sheet, complete with Halloween eyeholes, worn by Affleck once he returns to the couple’s abode. Better known for Disney’s big-budget Pete’s Dragon,
Lowery has a fetish for holding shots too long and repeating images that sufficed the first time. But when scared sheetless, in flashbacks, the mumbling Affleck is no Patrick Swayze. Mostly, his presence is unobtrusive, even if our gloomy spirit is able to interact with the physical world on occasion. Flickering lights and thumped piano strings—that sort of thing.
So it’s weird when his first full-blown actingout consists of scaring away the Mexican family that replaces his ex in the house. Later, in the film’s most bravura sequence, our ghostly protagonist flies forward, briefly, into the future and then back to the home’s 19th-century past, in time to see settlers wiped out (off-screen) by pesky “savages”.
Lowery appears tone-deaf on race and history. And although his film doesn’t lack humour of a subtle kind, he misses opportunities for fun and tonal variety, as when ol’ Ghosty wanders through a big stoner party without spooking the guests. Instead, we’re treated to a numbing lecture from cult musician Will Oldham on the themes of the movie itself. Cut!
Most impressively, this Story—shot in the blunted aspect ratio of old home movies—is good at capturing that sense of ineffable connection with what has come before us and what persists when we are gone. The living part’s a little weak, though. > KEN EISNER DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME A documentary by Bill Morrison. Rating unavailable Despite the misleading title, Dawson City: Frozen Time is not simply a parochial tale of a faraway place in another era. Veteran filmmaker Bill Morrison has made a career of turning found footage into evocative poetry. So it makes sense that he would go the extra mile with a truckload of ancient stuff found in a frozen swimming pool beneath the former community centre of what was once the most bustling place in the Yukon.
In 1978, an excavation behind Diamond Tooth Gertie’s Gambling Hall in Dawson City unearthed 533 reels of very early cinema. Much was badly damaged, but since roughly 75 percent of all silent films have been lost, any restoration was welcome. In earlier films (most notably 2002’s Decasia), Morrison exploited the hypnotic beauty of corroded celluloid. So he obviously wasn’t put off by accidentally distorted effects on footage from the early 20th century. Wear and tear actually helps tell a story stacked with meta-implications—some inspiring, in terms of human enterprise, and others more disturbing for the patterns of destruction so evident today.
On another level, these black-and-white newsreels and features—offering glimpses of the First World War, the U.S. National Guard shooting striking miners, the 1919 World Series, Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush—also map out changes in a place like Dawson. To carve out remote places for movies to be seen, whole Indigenous populations were forcibly moved, and the natural environment contaminated by industry. The Yukon’s icy redoubt gave rise to future exploiters of captive money, from Greek-born theatre impresario Al Pantages to German draftdodger Fred Trump, who made a fortune with— what else?—brothels and casinos.
While it’s risky to forget history, it was also dangerous, until the 1940s, to record and store it. Cinema itself was literally volatile, with the nitratebased stuff an inadvertent offshoot of dynamite. Dawson City, in fact, burned down every year of its first decade as the boomtown centre of the Klondike Gold Rush, with nitrate film repeatedly the cause. (A constant threat here, fire also consumed warehouses belonging to Thomas Edison and the NFB, among many others.)
An obvious must-see for students of film history and history in general, the two-hour movie is somewhat overcrowded by Morrison’s clearly passionate ambitions. Talking heads appear only see next page
Starring Satinder Sartaaj. In Punjabi and English, with English subtitles. Rated PG
To be the “last king” of anything 2
means you left this world either a legend or a tragic figure. Maharajah Duleep Singh, the final monarch of the Punjab kingdom, who was forcibly separated from his family as a child, converted to Christianity as a teenager, died a penniless, broken man in Paris, and is today buried in England, clearly falls into the latter category. Sikhs living in the U.K. and Canada, however, are striving to rehabilitate his victim legacy.
Veteran U.K. actor and filmmaker Kavi Raz is one of these reformers. The Black Prince is about the life of the deposed monarch, who as an 11-yearold was removed from the throne and by 15 was exiled to England after his kingdom was annexed by the British in 1849. Singh would live out his life cut off from his homeland, remaining forever hidden away, if not lost, from his people. For Raz and his fellow producers, The Black Prince is clearly a passion project; the period piece is scripted in a mix of English and Punjabi, showcases an international cast, and features detail-oriented sets of Victorian England.
Raz has crafted a story to win the hearts and minds of Sikh audiences. Unfortunately, this comes at an artistic cost, as The Black Prince seems more like a mission than a movie at times. Raz presses hard to recast Duleep Singh as a freedom fighter and a devotee of the Sikh faith, selectively omitting facts to make this case. The oversimplification of Duleep Singh’s re-initiation into the Sikh faith is one example of the film’s rolling-pin approach to storytelling. This heavyhanded treatment of the script flattens characters throughout the movie.
Raz’s Duleep Singh is a strippeddown, joyless version of the exsovereign, who was known to have thoroughly appreciated the velvet trappings of aristocratic life. This “Black Prince” is constantly in a black mood. Played by Punjabi musician Satinder Sartaaj, the maharajah broods through his lines and lengthy awkward silences that ask too much of his acting skills.
While The Black Prince pays tribute to the maharajah by rescuing him from the shadow of history, it does not set him free. Well over a century since his death, Duleep Singh remains a pawn—now seemingly of modern-day Punjabi and Sikh identity politics—as he once was during the Great Game of colonialism in the 19th century.
> JAGDEESH MANN