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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Ingmar Bergman's last film? Plus: A look at the demented morality of the American South and "Murderball," a documentary about a randy band of disabled rugby players.
Jul 7, 2005 | From the late 1950s through the early '70s, you could speak of Ingmar Bergman, utterly without irony, as the most important filmmaker in the world, and maybe the most important artist, period. But the movie universe, along with the universe in general, has shifted on its axis since then. The art-house audience that made "Smiles of a Summer Night" and "The Seventh Seal" and "Persona" famous around the world was essentially an extension of the high-culture market of symphony halls, art museums and modernist drama, and has withered away.
The new art-house audience has been nurtured on a pop-culture smorgasbord of music videos, '70s and '80s sitcoms, horror movies and mock-serious cartoons. It belongs to either the big, sweeping gesture or the arched eyebrow (or to both at once) -- to Scorsese and Tarantino, to Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers. Bergman's demanding and often painful dramas -- stemming, as they do, from Strindberg, Sartre and the A-bomb, from the 20th century's existential and spiritual crisis -- are now dreaded as much as respected.
Bergman has made a new film, probably his last, and fanatics like me will be dragging our reluctant friends to see it over the next few months. I hope at least some of the newcomers will be surprised; "Saraband" is a knockout, a lean and energetic family drama, without a second wasted. In the great Bergman tradition, it's beautiful but unfussy. He's been working in high-definition digital video (DV) for several years, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that he has mastered the aesthetic possibilities of that medium more than many filmmakers one-third his age. To read my original review of "Saraband" after it premiered last October at the New York Film Festival click here. It opens July 8 in New York and Los Angeles, with a wider release to follow.
Frankly, it's tough for the proprietor of this column to focus on much else with a new Bergman film on the dance card, but as they say in the marketing world, the consumer demands alternatives. We've hit a minor lull in the indie release calendar around the July 4 barbecue season, but I can also recommend a tough and smart South American thriller -- which might be grimmer than anything Bergman's ever made -- a crowd-pleasing documentary about the world of quadriplegic rugby, and a lackadaisical musical tour through the American South.
"Crónicas": Good, bad and ugly (minus the good) in the Ecuadorian jungle
Sebastián Cordero's hit Latin American thriller "Crónicas" begins with a horrendous scene in which a lynch mob in a small Ecuadorian town nearly burns a man to death. It ends with a horrible crime that we only suspect is being committed; we don't actually see it, and with a little work we can allow ourselves to believe it's not happening at all. If that second probable crime is worse than the first certain one, it's a measure of the sweaty, claustrophobic power of "Crónicas," a collision between a slimeball TV reporter and a nefarious serial killer that dares us to decide whose evil runs deeper.
"Crónicas" isn't the kind of sweeping breakthrough picture represented by "Amores Perros" or "Y Tu Mamá También" (whose director, Alfonso Cuarón, helped produce this film), but it provides still more evidence that Latin American cinema has reached a new period of maturity. This tightly focused genre film displays its Hollywood influences proudly but boasts a creepy sensuality, along with a morbid cynicism, that feels distinctively Latin.
