Elisa, vida mia

Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of Oona and Charlie and granddaughter of Eugene O'neill, has been making a bigger spot on my radar recently since I saw her in Carlos Saura's undoubted masterpiece Cria Cuervos, playing the frail, pianist mother with health failing as she copes with the philandering cruelty of her uncaring husband. Then I saw her in Alan Rudolph's Remember My Name playing a woman, fresh out of jail from a twelve-year sentence for murder, barely stable and pestering her remarried ex-husband back into her arms. Now this film, where she plays a strong woman remaking her relationship with her father during a stay with him, while slowly realising that she can never return to her partner of seven years. Previously, to me, she was just the unfortunate who fetched up with that stupid and irritating part in Nashville. Nashville was made one year before Cria Cuervos. She was Suara's long-time partner, and they have a child. In this film, Elisa, vida mia, Saura's fascination with Chaplin is as apparent as is Godard's with Anna Karina in Godard's early films.

Cria Cuervos played fast and loose with reality, navigating with uncanny sureness between an account of events in a houshold and a child's misconstrued perception of them. This film is more ambitious in playing with reality and as a result is more obscure and opaque. I can't explain everything in the film.

It starts as Elisa (Chaplin), her sister and her sister's husband arriving by car at the remote farmhouse where Elisa's father lives, to celebrate the father's birthday. The father is played by Fernando Rey. We hear in voice-over Elisa's account of that time - her intermittent contact with her father who had abandoned the family, and her doubts about her relationship with her partner, but read by a male voice. The final scene of the film is the same arrival with the account again in voice-over, but this time read by her voice. What happens in between - - ? There are many scenes of her being warm and bonding with her father. There are confusing scenes to do with a woman who's dead body was found on a path near the father's house. There are industrial noises, shots of skinned horses' heads, scenes with the mother, also played by Chaplin (as was the case in Cria Cuervos).

I came across this summary of the film and it is as good as anything I might write:-

In ELISA, VIDA MIA, Fernando Rey stars as Luis, a contemplative writer, now in his sixties, who years ago moved to an isolated cottage in rural Spain to escape everything he hates about modern life. He is visited by his daughter, Elisa (Geraldine Chaplin), who he had abandoned years ago when he decided to leave her mother and become a writer. As the film opens Luis is reading from a memoir he is writing, but the story he's telling is written from the point of view of Elisa. Carlos Saura uses the full range of narrative possibilities in this film, including internal monologues, dreams, fantasies, wish fulfillment, and multiple view points. Sometimes Saura switches the narrative from Elisa's point of view to her father's internal imagining of what she's telling him. When she tells her father the story of her husband having an affair with her best friend, Sophia, it ends in a wildly unbelievable fashion. Is this story a wish fulfillment of hers? Or was the fantasy in the mind of her father as he writes the story of her visit? The film presents a stream of consciousness narrative that allows the characters to take shape not just through their words and actions, but actually through the progression of their thoughts.

Taipei Story

This film was made my Edward Yang in 1985. Yang is widely thought of as a gifted film-maker, but very few of his films are accessible because they are rarely shown and they are not available on DVD. The Exception is Yi-Yi (aka A One And A Two), which won too many awards to be listed here and was named by the magazine Sight and Sound in 2002 as one of the greatest films of the previous twenty-five years.

Pretty well all of Yang's films are of high quality and that includes the film here under consideration, Taipei Story.

It has often been remarked that one of Yang's talents is to maintain two planes of focus in his films: The socio-political-cultural plane, and the personal plane, and that is evident in this film that, in telling the story of a couple who have been together since childhood but who are growing apart, presents a panorama of life in Taipei in 1984. Chin, played by Chin Tsai (who subsequently became Yang's wife) has an executive desk-bound job, wears sharp suits to work, and is becoming yuppified; while Lung, played by Hou Hsiao Hsien, stays closer to his traditional roots. Edward Yang, who died of cancer (he was a heavy smoker) in 2007, aged 60, was an exponent of the Taiwanese New Wave, that sought to reject the previous light-weight Taiwanese cinema. Yang's reputation was slightly eclipsed by that of Hou Hsiao Hsien, who took the lead role in this film as a favour to a friend. Hou became much more prolific and acquired a wider reputation as an exceptional film-maker (not in the UK, unfortunately!). Hou Hsiao Hsien and Edward Yang have currently the two biggest reputations in Taiwanese cinema.

Yang assembles his narrative from several threads in a way that is not so dissimilar to Altman's. Chin loses her job and and Lung, between his work with Chin's father and his interest in baseball, considers emigrating to the USA. Yang does not often use close-up shots and is not afraid to hold a stationary wide-angle shot for the duration of a scene. He paints a picture of a society coping with change and modernity.

Remember My Name

This is a film made my Alan Rudoph and released in 1978. It stars Geraldine Chaplin and Anthony Perkins. Emily (Chaplin) is recently out of a twelve-year jail term for murder and she is pestering ex-husband Neil (Perkins), who has a hard-hat job and a good relationship with his current wife, Barbara, played by Berry Berenson, Perkin's real-life wife. It is of some interest to note that Berenson was Perkin's wife until he died of AIDS aged sixty in 1992. She died on American Airlines flight 11 in the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001, one day before the ninth anniversary of Perkin's death.

Remember My Name was the film Ruldolph made after Welcome to LA. The film was produced by Rudolph's long-time mentor, Robert Altman, and Altman's influence can be seen thoughout the film in its shooting and narrative methods. There are many slowly panning zoom shots following the narrative, and the narrative is not causally driven like many Hollywood films but slowly 'comes together' from a series of seemingly disparate scenes. There is a strong blues soundtrack that significantly adds to the pleasure in viewing the film.

The film is a strong outing for Chaplin, who had never impressed me until I saw recently Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos. Here she is attractive, and plausibly malign and intelligent. She plays a chain-smoking and manipulative person intent on making contact with her ex-husband initially by hanging around his house and later by invading it. Perkins, as thin as a skeleton, also makes a strong contribution as a straight, working-class guy.

I was very pleased to see this film at the Cine Lumiere in London. The print was in fair condition, although the colour had very much deteriorated.

Floating Clouds

This film was made by Mikio Naruse in 1955. It is the story of a couple who met in Indo-China before the war, before the film started, and we seem them resume their relationship in postwar Japan.

He, Kengo, played very persuasively by Masayuki Mori, is a married man who uses women for what he can get and he uses Yukiko, played very movingly by Hideko Takamine, for occasional distractions and to borrow money from her, but he never cares for her any more than he has cared for any woman. She becomes addicted to him and is always forgiving and is unable to give him up. She understands him well and, very movingly, she smiles as she broaches the topics that must be most hurtful to her and discusses with him his adventures with other women.

Their entanglement continues in an on-and-off way in the devastation of post-war Japan. He is a forester and is unable to find work and she, a secretary, can find no work. Finally she follows him, almost literally, to the end of the earth when he finally finds a job as a forester, and the film ends tragically.

This is a bleak and pessimistic film. The couple are dragged down by their own weaknesses and by the social and economic circumstance of Japan in the post-war period. She is attractive, kind and sympathetic; he is good-looking (a bit like an orientally-inflected Gregory Peck!), uncaring, womanising and self-interested.

Naruse, considered in many quarters as one of the Japanese masters alongside Ozu and Mizoguchi, was at the same studio as Ozu, was promoted more slowly. He has a less idiosyncratic narrative style veering, with its use of background music slightly more to our expectations in viewing a melodrama, but it remains a starkly realist and moving film.