Viva la rivoluzione?

My Brother Is an Only Child [Mio fratello è figlio unico] - dir. Daniele Luchetti - 2007 - Italy/France

The spirit of revolution has been a recent source of cinematic reflection among European directors in the past few years. Bernardo Bertolucci addressed the student riots of Paris in 1968 with The Dreamers, as did Philippe Garrel with Regular Lovers. Cannes is celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the events as I type this. Though My Brother Is an Only Child is set in Italy and only briefly mentions the events in France, it still falls into the same category of films: an idealistic portrait of the spirit of a political youth movement that spread across Western Europe during the 1960s. As important of a time period as it was, its sudden reappearance in European cinema is beginning to feel a little passé, and of no real fault to director Luchetti, I couldn’t allow the familiarity to disperse.

My Brother Is an Only Child depicts the struggle between two brothers who fall on different sides of the political fence. Accio (Elio Germano) is a rambunctious shit-disturber who quits his goal to become a priest in favor of becoming a communist. Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio) is Accio’s dreamy older brother, who becomes a union leader at the factory. And, of course, there’s a girl in the mix to bring further strife to the brothers, a half-French beauty named Francesca (Diane Fleri) who turns to her political opposite, Accio, for comfort as a result of Manrico’s constant snubbing. Ties are broken and mended throughout the film, as Accio’s devotion begins to swagger and Manrico’s involvement grows deeper.

As I said earlier, there’s nothing particularly wrong with My Brother Is an Only Child. It’s rather well-acted by the two leads, and Luchetti doesn’t infuse the film with an unwanted sentimentality or with easy solution. However, I couldn’t help but find the film unremarkable in both scope and dramatic resolution. Co-written by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, who wrote the screenplay for the four-and-a-half-hour long The Best of Youth, My Brother Is an Only Child feels rushed, unable to achieve the scale and detail of The Best of Youth, leaving its audience with neither a striking immediacy nor a lingering strength.

Here it is...

After a long delay, Paramount will finally be releasing two classic Bertolucci films, The Conformist (Il conformista) and 1900, on the 5th of December. The discs will be packed and reasonably priced (the 2-disc 1900 runs $19.99, while The Conformist is $14.99). Best of all, 1900 will be in its uncut 318-minute version. You can expect Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution sometime next year from Criterion.

Strand will be releasing François Ozon’s latest, Time to Leave (Le temps qui reste) on November 21st. The melodrama stars Jeanne Moreau, Valerie Bruni-Tedeschi, and Melvil Poupaud as a fashion photographer who finds out he has brain cancer. The film got much stronger raves than Ozon’s last film, 5x2, also with Bruni-Tedeschi.

If you’re in the mood for more melodrama, Criterion is releasing G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) on the same day, starring the iconic Louise Brooks. The disc will include two docs on Brooks, and I strongly suggest also picking up Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Véronique (La double-vie de Véronique), also from Criterion, on the same day.

If drugs-and-crime flicks are your thing (they certainly aren’t mine), Magnolia will be putting out the Danish Pusher trilogy on November 7th, each directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. The set will include the original Pusher from 1996, Pusher 2: With Blood on My Hands from 2004, and the conclusion, Pusher 3: I’m the Angel of Death from 2005. The discs are also available separately.

Nauseatingly, the Weinsteins will be releasing two special-er editions of their much beloved Cinema Paradiso, easily one of my least favorite films of all time, in November. The special-est edition will include the soundtrack. If you’re up for a disgustingly manipulative and “feel-good” time, have fun. And, yes, the discs will include both the U.S. theatrical version and the original director’s cut, which gives you over a half hour more shit to make you queasy.

Ryko Distribution will re-release two out-of-print video-nasties on Halloween, Cannibal Ferox (also known as Make Them Die Slowly) and Jörg Buttgereit’s Schramm. The discs look to be identical to the previous releases. Unfortunately, Cinema Paradiso comes out a week later, or you could have had a stomach-churning Halloween marathon.

Just in time for Christmas, Criterion will re-release Grey Gardens in a 2-disc set, likely to cash in on the Broadway play and upcoming narrative remake, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore (scary, eh?). The second disc will feature the Maysles brothers’ The Beales of Grey Gardens, which puts together additional footage they took of Big and Little Edie.

IFC Films will release Brothers of the Head, which I strongly recommend on November 14th. The film uses fake archival footage of a fictitious pair of conjoined twins who become punk rock stars. You can read my review here.

IFC will also be releasing Patrice Chéreau’s Gabrielle on the 19th of December. The film stars Isabelle Huppert in the title role, and while the film didn’t get a whole lot of critical praise, I hear both Huppert and the cinematography are exquisite.

Touted as one of the year’s biggest critical failures, Shadowboxer will be out on November 7th. How can you resist the sexual pairings of Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr. (who’s really trying to get his Oscar revoked), not to mention Mysterious Skin’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Mo’nique? Sounds like a winner to me. For additional fun, a cracked-out Macy Gray plays an alcoholic and a cracked-out Stephen Dorff shows his condom-sheathed penis. Read my friend Brad’s review of it here. I don’t know how you’ll be able to resist after that.

Oh, boy! Also in time for Halloween is Frankenhooker, which Unearthed Films will be releasing on the 17th of October. The tagline says something about “sluts and bolts.” Please pick it up and let me know if it’s worth my time. The title alone makes me wanna pre-order it, but I made a similar mistake with a film called Let Me Die a Woman!

Fantoma will finally be releasing the first volume of their Kenneth Anger box set. Despite the photo I’m using above, the set will not include his most famous, Scorpio Rising. So buy this set and convince Fantoma that it’s worth their time to release the rest. Plus, Fireworks is great.

Other Cinema is releasing video-artist Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, a film solely comprised of found-footage worked into a science fiction tale. My asshole film professor should be kicking himself right now, as he said the film would never be readily available to the public, and felt like fucking Jonas Mekas for having it.

For the first time on DVD anywhere (I think), New Yorker is releasing Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary (Je vous salue, Marie) next Tuesday. The film, which reportedly caused an outrage in the then-super Catholic France during the 1980s, reinterprets the virgin birth of Jesus in modern-day setting. A young Juliette Binoche has a supporting role as well.

And finally, Kino will be re-releasing Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker in a more affordable, more aesthetically-appealing disc on November 7th. Pick it up.

And I’m spent…

Beauté volée

Stealing Beauty - dir. Bernardo Bertolucci - 1996 - Italy/France/UK

After the international success of The Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci, once a powerful voice in world cinema, stopped making important films and started adding entries to Mr. Skin's database. Stealing Beauty was probably his more memorable of the 90s, but when up against The Sheltering Sky and Beseiged, it's not saying much. The film's a familiar tale of a young American girl Lucy (Liv Tyler) who comes to an artists' commune in Tuscany where her mother, a poet, once lived. The commune is inhabited by a variety of European folk: an Irish sculptor (Donal McCann), his wife (Sinéad Cusack), and adult children (Rachel Weisz, Joseph Fiennes), a former art dealer (Jean Marais), an Italian sex columnist (Stefania Sandrelli), and an English writer dying of cancer (Jeremy Irons), among others. All of this, though in the foreground, is simply a catalyst for the swiping of Lucy's virginity. Characters give her advise that appears to relate to some internal quest Lucy's seeking, but really, it's just aiding her in finally getting fucked.

When Bertolucci is honest about its intentions (those being about Lucy's fuckquest), Stealing Beauty works. It's a highly romanticized coming-of-age tale, beautifully set in Tuscany and with a fitting soundtrack. Along with The Dreamers, we get the feeling that Bertolucci believes that Americans can only become fully-realized sexual beings once they've been immersed in Europe, and that's fine, for it leads to visually lush, skin flicks. But when he tries to pretend his films are about more than that, we lose our trust. There are subplots about Lucy's search for her real father and a desire to rekindle a romance with an Italian boy (Roberto Zibetti), but all these, though still closely linked to Lucy's V-card removal, lead to obvious conclusions. Eventually, the film plays like a sexual whodunit, where characters are simply placed around Lucy just to steer you offtrack as to whom she's gonna bang. We can appreciate that Bertolucci rounded up some iconic screen icons like Marais (Jean Cocteau's former lover), Sandrelli (of his 1900), and Leonardo Treviglio (Italian stage actor, made famous by playing the title role in Derek Jarman's Sebastiane). But, don't be fooled; there's only one thing on Bertolucci's mind here.