Rumors of Delirium

Ah…The holidays! Thanksgiving was wonderful, with a special visit from my brother and nephew, but it put a dent in my blogging momentum. Soon to come — our verdict on The Ambassadors, a discussion on arranged marriages inspired by our film viewing of The Namesake, and the difficulties of choosing books.

Good and evil don’t exist in heaven or hell, they exist between people. The cinema exists for showing that, too. - Pedro Costa

Last night I saw Pedro Costa’s film Bones (Ossos) at the wonderful Amherst Cinema. If you live in the Five College area, please support this magnificent resource. They show an array of popular and “art house” films, as well as films you rarely have an opportunity to see in the theater.

We were lucky to have the filmmaker himself there to introduce the film and take questions afterwards.

This is a mysterious, exquisitely shot movie — fictional, but with the feel of a documentary. The setting is a slum on the outskirts of Lisbon. The pace is slow, but a meaning-filled slow that invites the observer to question and ponder the ambiguous significance of the elliptical plot and the equally ambiguous relationships between people.

Shot at night with little light, in crowded slum streets, or in interiors where the viewer is conscious of looking into a room, through a doorway or window, the visually the film is dark, color soaked, rich, and luminous.

Costa spoke at length –

• About his definition of realism — being true, he said if I remember correctly, to something you knew as a child.
• About the sexuality and tensions in the film — some of the female characters have a masculine aspect, the male characters feminine. The actor who played the father, in life a junky, told him that he felt more fragile than the baby he held.
• About the significance of the baby: a metaphor for life and rebirth.

The film is full of near deaths and re-awakenings, of waiting.

The visuals reminded me of paintings by Vermeer — seeing through doors and windows to a private world that remains in some ways unknowable, intimate, forbidden. The colors looming out of darkness are reminiscent of Rembrandt or Goya’s late “black” paintings.

Costa on the cinema as an art of absence:

Griffith saw that the cinema could show things that everybody knows, that everybody wants to recognise, and at the same time, not show certain things which are very violent, which must be hidden. (more…)

Last night I finally saw The Human Stain, adapted from Philip Roth’s novel. The film was moving and true to the book, but what was left out interested me.

It’s about a Coleman Silk, a New England college professor who loses his job over an unintentional racial slur against a black student who files a complaint. The twist is that the professor himself is African American, but has slipped across the racial divide and has passed as white and Jewish for his entire career.

In the novel Roth moves the narrative back and forth through time with tremendous ease. The film reflects this style. Seamlessly interwoven are moments in the Silk’s life–his first love, his first realization that he can pass for white, his estrangement from his siblings and mother. The main plot traces his love affair with a much younger woman who is being stalked by her ex-husband.

The tragic elements of the tale were beautifully portrayed in the film. There were stunning performances by Anthony Hopkins, who plays the Dean, Nicole Kidman, his young lover, and Ed Harris as her crazy ex-husband suffering PTSD from Vietnam.

In adaptations a lot of material has to be cut. Novels are complex, often sprawling, and films need to have clear, efficient plot development and risk losing an audience if they are much longer than an hour and a half to two hours.

This film, at about 100 minutes, leaves out a great deal. So it’s worth reading the book, especially for Roth’s humor. He’s at his virtuoso best in a scene, nearly over-the-top, where the manic Vietnam vet is attempting to overcome his post-traumatic stress by having dinner at a Chinese restaurant. It’s simultaneously hilarious, shocking, and tragic.

By all means, see the movie. Then go home and read the book.