Review: Mary and Max

Here's a review of "Mary and Max," originally published in the Australian newspaper, The Age.

There's an exquisite moment of operatic pathos in the final act of Mary and Max that is pure pins and needles. It's the type of moment embedded in every Disney classic when everything - technique, story, artistry - combines perfectly to deliver a jaw-dropping instant of pure emotion.

Writer/director Adam Elliot builds so subtly towards his Disney moment that it hits unexpectedly, but, when it does, it's with a wave of empathy and heart-crushing sorrow for the girl at the heart of his tale.

Only long after the film, and with considerable effort, do you have to remind yourself that what you went all weak-kneed and misty-eyed over was a blob of plasticine--a superbly directed blob of plasticine.

With Mary and Max, Elliot does not merely make good on the promise shown in his Oscar-winning 2003 short Harvie Krumpet, he exceeds every conceivable expectation. Mary and Max is an unqualified triumph--a beautiful, witty, deeply emotional film that explores the innate human need to connect.

Using the painstaking, defiantly non-digital animation technique of stop-motion, Elliot immerses us in the suburban world of Mount Waverley circa 1976. The warm centre of his story is Mary Daisy Dinkle (Toni Collette), a bright eight-year-old girl who possesses an engaging and optimistic disposition despite her dull father and alcoholic mother.

Playing on her curious nature, Mary begins a pen-pal friendship with Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a lonely, lugubrious, overweight New York shut-in who wears tracky dacks and whose main achievement in life is the invention of the chocolate hot dog.

In a story bursting with rich characters and comic detail, the pair maintains a correspondence over many years, exchanging lengthy accounts of their various travails and often sending each other boxes filled with gifts, mementoes and photographs.

The film is pitted with weighty themes such as loneliness, child neglect, cruelty, sexual naivete, clinical anxiety, betrayal, guilt and the mortality rate of apartment-bound goldfish. Yet to tag Mary and Max as a mordant comedy is to miss the point of the film entirely.

Elliot does relent to the darker emotions but only sparingly and with precise dramatic force and purpose.

Life might be an uphill struggle for these characters, but Elliot refuses to surrender to despondency or bitterness. The story is laced with delicious observational humour that is dry and often sweetly ironic, and the emotional undertow of the film is graced with a subdued sense of celebration.

A caution to parents, though. Mary and Max is an adult film and, much as I adore it, the film's PG rating is arguably too generous.

Mary's gorgeous bulb-shaped face might look like a Peanuts character but this is not a film for very young or sensitive children. It deserved an M.

At a cost of $8million and with the Australian film industry in dire need of connecting with audiences, one does, of course, hope the film promptly finds the public it deserves. But it could prove a tough sell. The film does not fit neatly into any genre and Elliot himself admits he has trouble defining what type of film Mary and Max is.

Regardless, Mary and Max has the unmistakable feel of an animation classic. This is not a film that will date.

Stimulating cinema: Reviewing "Harlan County USA"

For your reading pleasure (and mine), the original review of "Harlan County USA" that was published in the New York Times on Oct. 15, 1976. The writer is Richard Eder.

Coal miners are a permanent underground in more than the literal sense. They trouble any society they support: like feet, the more they are weighed down by their owners the more pain they give.

In East Germany and Poland the authorities treat them with a special deference. Even in its harsher times the Franco regime was never able to stop them from striking. Laws against assembly were useless. A hammer would stop a mile below ground; the man in the next chamber would go to see what the matter was; the silence would spread and a line of stubborn, blackened men came to the surface and stayed until the Government could figure out some way of getting them back down.

Miners' strength, their assertiveness and solidarity are based largely on their economic power; and where coal-mining becomes marginal to the economy of a region, they lose much of their ability to fight. There is another factor, though. Miners in their tunnels, vulnerable to explosions, cave-ins and destroyed lungs, weigh on a society's conscience as well as its economy. Their grievances command an instinctive respect.

One of the reasons for the defeat of Prime Minister Edward Heath in Britain two years ago was a widespread feeling that in choosing the miners as the target for his austerity fight he had picked just the wrong target.

"Harlan County, U.S.A.," to be shown tonight and tomorrow at the New York Film Festival in Alice Tully Hall, is a full-length documentary of the year-long strike carried on by the miners at the Brookside works in eastern Kentucky. It has flaws, some of them considerable, but it is a fascinating and moving work. Its strength lies chiefly in its ability to illuminate the peculiar frightfulness and valor of coal-mining, and made it clear just why coal-miners can never be rightly treated as a less than a very special case.

Barbara Kopple and her photographers have got right inside the life of the miners and their families in their long struggle against the operators of the Brookside mine and its parent company, the Duke Power Company. It is a brilliantly detailed report from one side of a battle that caused one death, several shootings and a flood of violent bitterness; and that brought back to Harlan County memories of the much-bloodier coal strikes of the early 1930's.

The strike began after the miners voted to join the United Mine Workers of America—which had lost its hold in eastern Kentucky—and the owners refused to sign a standard U.M.W. contract. It was not until more than a yaer later—after the violence had claimed the life of one striker — that Duke Power, under strong pressure from Federal mediators, agreed to sign.

The film shows the picketing, the use of state troopers to keep the road open for nonstrikers, the confrontations, a shooting, the efforts of the strikers and their families to remain organized and united through the long year. It intercuts old footage from the 1931 strike, where five miners were killed. It also details the successful battle of reformers to oust the old national leadership of the U.M.W.; and the support given to the Harlen County strike by the new leadership under Arnold R. Miller.

Some of the thematic interweaving is awkward, but this is more than made up for by the extraordinary intimacy Miss Kopple has achieved with the strikers and with the bitter life of the strike. There is an old miner, lungs torn by coal dust, who makes our chests hurt as he talks. There are frightening scenes of tight-lipped strike-breakers, guns openly displayed rushing through the pickets. There is a terrifying night scene where shots are fired and we see the leader of the strike-breakers brandishing a pistol in the cab of his pick-up truck. There is a heartbreaking scene where the mother of the slain miner collapses at his wake. There is much more, equally good.

The film is entirely partisan. Considering that the company's refusal to sign a contract was condemned by the National Labor Relations Board as a pretext not to recognize the union and considering that the film itself is forthrightly an effort to see the struggle through the miners' own eyes, this is no real drawback. Perhaps there is some skimping: it is something of a cinematic trick to film the President of Duke Power in such tight closeup that his face completely fills the screen.

More serious are the sometimes questionable ways in which the film advances its message: that the Harlan strike is only part of a struggle, and that the miners must go on struggling and striking. The instance I am thinking of comes in its suggestion that the reformist leadership of the U.M.W. may ave sold out in 1974—after the Harlan County strike was over—by recommending acceptance of a national mine contract that curtails local strikes.

The film does not call this a sell-out—it uses no narration at all and conveys its message by its editing—but all reactions of individual miners that it shows before the vote are negative. Yet the membership ratified the contract by 44,000 to 34,000. The film states this, to be sure; yet somehow all the faces we have learned to admire during the long Harlan County struggle seem to push us to feel toward Mr. Miller the same way we felt toward the recalcitrant mine owners.

Reviews: The Class

Here are two reviews of "The Class," written by Cosmo Landesman in the Sunday (London) Times and Philip French in The Guardian.

In the week when University Challenge gave us a new brain of Britain, Gail Trimble, to admire,along comes The Class, a realistic look at life in a rough, multicultural secondary school in Paris that challenges the pedagogic assumptions that produced Trimble and other successful students of the classics. It’s a film that starts with the hope of a new term and ends a year later with the sad admission of failure. “I learnt nothing this year,” says a young black student.

Stylistically, The Class is a curious hybrid. Directed by Laurent Cantet, it is based on a book by François Bégaudeau about his time as a teacher. Cantet workshopped the piece with non-professional teenagers, and actual teachers and parents, to produce a docu-like drama, with Bégaudeau as a fictional version of himself. And the performances from the non-actors are quite remarkable. But, please, sir, may I ask a question? Just as photography made a kind of naturalistic painting redundant, hasn’t reality television made reality-based fiction redundant too? Why fake a fly-on-the-wall style when you can shoot a fly-on-the-wall documentary that will be as good as any drama?

Still, there’s no denying The Class is a distinguished work that breaks with the traditions of the pedagogic pic. This is no uplifting tale of an idealistic teacher who, through sheer perseverance, finally reaches his disruptive class and shows them the wonders of knowledge and the joys of learning. It’s a dispatch from the front line of any urban school in western Europe.

We first see Monsieur Marin (Bégaudeau) sipping coffee, as if bracing himself to face another year. Once inside the classroom, we can see why: his is a daily struggle to keep his 14- and 15-year-olds calm, quiet and interested enough to be taught. He handles this unruly lot with a mix of encouragement, exasperation, Socratic probing and gentle sarcasm. Marin is neither a stuffy traditionalist nor a down-with-the-kids trendy. He believes in discipline and classroom etiquette, but wants his pupils to feel free to speak their mind. This can be problematic, as when one of his pupils, Souleymane (Franck Keïta), duly speaks his mind and asks him if it is true that he is gay.

What the film captures better than any other school film is the everyday reality — the social dynamics and cultural conflicts — of the modern classroom. Marin’s students constantly disrupt the learning process with questions that throw him off track. Two of his mouthiest malcontents are Khoumba (Rachel Régulier) and her sidekick, Esméralda (Esméralda Ouertani). They are mini-monsters, smart when it comes to pushing a teacher’s buttons. They ask for definitions of words; they question the raison d’être for elements of grammar; and, most of all, they challenge his sense of himself as culturally sensitive.

They want to know why, when giving examples, he always uses white names such as Bill, instead of African or Arab names. His self-evidently inadequate reply that going down that route “would never end” suggests he is the one with the closed mind.

The film takes its time to build up the drama, preferring a slow accumulation of small conflicts and incidents. Cantet wants us to see the good, bad and ugly sides of the classroom, and creates a constant dramatic tension between the didactic and the disruptive. He knows these kids can drive their teachers nuts or explode in anger at any point. It’s a fascinating study of how a dedicated teacher’s character — his ability to stay cool in the face of routine provocation — is challenged every time he enters the classroom.

The film raises important questions about learning, authority and discipline, and is honest enough to admit that it doesn’t really have any answers. The trouble is, it seems to think there’s plenty of real learning going on somewhere in that room. But Marin’s class is like a large therapy session in which the kids can learn about themselves. This becomes most obvious when they are given The Diary of Anne Frank to read — not as part of their Holocaust studies, but to inspire them to pen self-portraits.

The Class likes to think it moves from the observational to the dramatic without interposing moral judgments or taking sides. Clearly, it doesn’t want to be one of those scary Hollywood flicks about the horrors of the urban school. Yet it offers a more frightening look at modern education than anything Hollywood cooks up. If you think the plus side of what goes on here outweighs the negative, ask yourself: would you want your child to be in this class? Of course not. Now, here’s the really scary and depressing part: many of our children are already in classes like this one.

Laurent Cantet emerged on the world scene as a French director in the Ken Loach tradition with his first feature, Human Resources, in 2000. Using a non-professional cast, it dealt with matters of class and industrial relations through the story of a high-flying academic coming as a business trainee to a provincial factory where his middle-aged father works on the production line.

His second film, Time Out (2001), centred on a middle-rank executive who can't bring himself to tell his family he's been made redundant. His next film, Heading South (2005), took him in a slightly different direction and used three prominent actresses to play well-heeled American women visiting Haiti as sex tourists. Again, the themes were deception, self-deception and the confrontation of difficult truths.

For his fourth feature, The Class, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, he's reverted to a non-professional cast in adapting Entre les murs, a novel by François Bégaudeau. Like writers as varied as Evelyn Waugh (Decline and Fall) and Evan Hunter (The Blackboard Jungle), Bégaudeau has turned his teaching experiences into fiction and he himself plays a "prof" at a tough, racially mixed, inner-city school in Paris. There's a remarkable French tradition of school films, extending from Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite to Nicolas Philibert's Etre et avoir. Cantet, whose parents were both teachers, carries it on and he elicits marvellous performances from a cast who are, we're assured, not merely playing versions of themselves.

The film covers an academic year, beginning with the teachers gathering for the autumn term, introducing themselves to each other and being welcomed by the principal, an unsmiling figure wearing rimless glasses. It ends with an informal soccer match between staff and pupils and a long-held shot of an empty classroom, its blackboard pristine once more.

The camera never leaves the school. We just see the staff room, the claustrophobic playground (rather like a prison exercise yard), the principal's office, a conference room, and the classroom where François Marin (Bégaudeau) is form tutor and teaches French to a mixed group of 14- and 15-year-olds. We're shown nothing of the homes of staff and pupils and we never see what the school offers by way of a library, laboratories or sports facilities.

In a taut, hand-held, documentary-style fashion, the film concentrates on Marin as he tries to keep order in the class, mediating between conflicting ethnic groups, damping down the irreverently vociferous, bringing out the reticent and trying to educate them. How in God's name, many will think, can a teacher continue day after day in this brutal theatre of apathy and aggression? At one point, a new teacher comes into the staff room on the point of a breakdown, complaining about the impossibility of doing anything with these "animals". A colleague takes him outside for a "breath of fresh air", which seems to do the trick.

Marin's class is not an immediately endearing collection. They're querulous and quarrelsome and in some ways the brightest are the most disruptive and obstreperous. When he teaches them the complexities and subtleties of French verbs and tenses, they challenge the need to know such things. People don't talk like that, they say, which is amusing in a depressing way. He gives them The Diary of Anne Frank to study as a prelude to understanding and expressing themselves by writing self-portraits. But none of them bothers to read it and one of the smartest pupils, the near-nihilistic Tunisian teenager Esmeralda, says she can't be bothered with books. But Marin persists and they all end up writing something revealing and then visit the computer room to turn the texts into attractively produced folders.

Marin's big success comes when he gets the withdrawn, unco-operative, inarticulate Souleymane, a tall, handsome pupil from Mali, to develop his gift for photography and make his self-portrait a fully illustrated family history. But Souleymane also becomes his biggest failure when he's taken to the principal's office for the second time after a confused act of violence in class. Will the result be expulsion and his possible return to a village in Mali? This provides an involving vein of suspense that runs through the second half of the film.

We learn nothing of Marin's life outside the classroom other than his claim - when challenged by a confused, homophobic pupil during a classroom discussion - that he isn't gay. In this non-judgmental film, the audience is left to do the judging and the film is certainly a testing experience for someone of my generation reared in schools where strict decorum and severe discipline were the unvarying norm.

Neither weary cynic nor wide-eyed idealistic, Marin is a decent, determined realist, a Sisyphus of the schoolroom, pushing his boulder up the hill every day and occasionally getting to stay at the top overnight. He isn't one of those triumphalist Hollywood heroes who inspires a class of unruly Hispanic maths pupils from the barrio to get maths scholarships to UCLA and MIT, or persuades a generation of special students to worship dead poets. He tries to understand the boys and girls and when the parents visit him to discuss their children's progress we begin to understand with him the range of homes from which they come.

At one point, Marin loses his rag and calls the provocative Esmeralda and her collusive friend "pétasses", a term the Larousse Dictionnaire de l'argot defines as "femme vulgaire; prostituée debútante ou occasionnelle", and which the subtitles translate as "skank". The girls play up this insult for all its worth. They launch a vindictive campaign to destroy him and foolishly he engages them in the playground, provoking a second slanging match.

Fortunately, the matter is more intelligently dealt with than a similar incident in a BBC green room might have been. Marin is not a saint, though by the end of the school year he has exhibited certain of the necessary qualities.

Stiumlating cinema: Chan is Missing

Director: Wayne Wang
Year: 1982

I'm long overdue on writing up my thoughts on this one; I have seen it several times and I enjoy it more and more with each viewing. Movies like "Chan" are the kind of movies I like the best. It is independent in spirit and doesn't set out to do too much. It's pretty rough around the edges--if you are worried about things like cohesion and technical excellence, this might not be the movie for you. It was made on a low budget (according to the New York Times, it cost $20,000 to produce) and it shows--although the black-and-white cinematography works perfectly in capturing the foggy mood of San Francisco. I just think it's great and after several viewings I am not bored and still manage to pick up various nuances or insights with each viewing.

The plot boils down to this: Two cabdrivers in Chinatown, amiable, goodhearted everyman Jo (Wood Moy) and his outgoing, glib nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi) want to go into business for themselves. They pool together $4,000 for a license and give the money to a fellow named Chan, who is going to broker the deal. However, Chan mysteriously goes missing, leaving Jo and Steve to go the gumshoe route and try and track down his whereabouts. That's basically it, but there is a larger subtext too--the plight of immigrants living in the United States.

The focus here is on Chinese in San Francisco and I think its important to note that a similar film would not have worked as well by focusing on another immigrant group. Specifically because, many Chinese who immigrated to the United States saw their lives take a dramatic downturn in terms of their station. Jo mentions for instance, that his friend Chan was the brains behind the creation of the first word processor in Chinese but has had trouble finding a decent job in the States. Jo himself is something of an electronics wiz--he uses his oven not for cooking but for storing gadgets--but instead is driving a cab. And even though Jo is an "ABC" (American Born Chinese), you still get the sense that his race his somehow played a part in his career path not being everything it might be. As one character says to Jo, "We've been here for 100 years. If they don't notice us now, they don't want to notice us."

Jo and Steve try and track down Chan by searching the neighborhood, following up leads and clues like a couple of PIs. They talk to anyone who might be able to help and the more information they get about Chan and his life, the more fuzzy the picture becomes. Everyone has a different take on Chan: His haughty ex-wife thinks he's a failure because he is not as successful as the family's sponsor while a young man who works at a senior center where Chan was known to hang out recalls his fondness for cookies and mariachi music. One theory is that Chan has possibly returned to Taiwan to settle a property dispute with his brother. More fantastically, it also emerges that Chan may have played a part in a New Year's Day parade scuffle between those loyal to Communist China and those in favor of Taiwanese independence that resulted in the shooting death of an elderly man by another, even more elderly man . Could Chan himself have pulled the trigger and the accused is merely taking the rap for him? It's all as clear as mud to Jo and Steve.

Frustrations and paranoia begin to mount. Steve wants to turn the matter over to the cops, while Jo keeps preaching patience. Jo, meanwhile, begins to feel like he's being followed as he finds himself being drawn deeper and deeper into the mystery. Tensions boil over in a scene where Jo and Steve argue; Jo says that he feels bad for Chan and can empathize with his struggle to cope, while Steve counters with the argument that everyone has their own identity regardless of where they are and what they do and wonders why Jo is "tripping so hard on this one dude." The mystery is never really resolved but the ending works well within the context of the movie. The lives of the immigrant communities are mysteries--because we don't take the time to see.

The best thing about this movie is the repartee between Jo and Steve. The dialogue is improvised and Jo and Steve have a natural affinity to pull this off. You really root for them and the scene where they argue almost hurts to watch, simply because they are so close and such good friends despite their age difference. The movie is very funny too. Steve acts like a goof a lot of the time and the other characters have their moments too. The best scene in the movie comes early, when an earnest young lawyer meets with Jo and Steve. She too is looking for Chan because he has missed his court date after a fender-bender. She goes into this long spiel about "cross-cultural misunderstandings" that have Jo and Steve rolling their eyes almost audibly. It's great fun. The characters are not stereotypes and that's another thing that makes the humor so effective. We are not laughing at them (except the lawyer, who is just too much). They're just everyday people trying to make it as best they can in a strange world.

Edit: Here is Rogert Ebert's review of "Chan is Missing," originally published in 1982.

"Chan is Missing" is a small, whimsical treasure of a film that gives us a real feeling for the people of San Francisco's Chinatown. And at some point while we're watching this film, we may realize that we have very little idea of Chinatowns, in San Francisco or elsewhere, that haven't been shaped by mass-produced Hollywood cliches like the Charlie Chan movies.

The title "Chan is Missing" is almost a pun, because Charlie Chan is missing from this film, and what replaces him is a warm, low-key, affectionate and funny look at some real Chinese-Americans.

The movie's plot is simplicity itself. The heroes of the film, two taxi drivers, go looking for Chan because he owes them some money and he has disappeared. They search for him more out of curiosity than vengeance; they don't really think he intended to steal the money, but they can't figure out why he would have disappeared without paying it. Familiar with the ways of Chinatown, they knock on doors and talk to people and, almost without realizing it, we are taken beyond the plot into the everyday lives of these people.

The movie has an unforced, affectionate sense of humor about its characters. There's a cheerfully cynical analysis of how the annual Chinese New Year's parade has been turned into a competition between factions loyal to Taiwan and to mainland China. There's a philosophical cook, whose resignation in the face of the inevitable sounds anything but resigned. There's a political activist who dissects the politics of Chinatown with a fine-tooth comb.

And there's a fascinating discussion involving linguistics, as a young sociology student tries to explain why Chan recently said "no" to a cop when he meant "yes." We can almost follow her logic: Chan was replying to the truth of his action rather than to the meaning of the question, you see, and so although his taxi did indeed go through the red light, he did not drive it through the red light but was, in a sense, a bystander in the driver's seat as the taxi autonomously violated the law. I'm making it sound complicated; the linguist makes it funny.

"Chan is Missing" has already become something of a legend because of the way it was filmed. The movie's director, producer, editor and co-author is a young filmmaker named Wayne Wang, a 33-year-old San Franciscan who made the movie on a $22,000 budget, with a little help from his friends. He wanted to examine the ways in which Chinatown was both Chinese and American and who would be better qualified to do that than a director whose last name is Chinese and whose first name was inspired by John Wayne?

Wang's plot owes a little to "The Third Man," I suppose, as his heroes question people about a man who is presumed missing and whose life turns out to be more complicated than anyone would have thought. But "Chan is Missing" isn't really a thriller or a whodunit and doesn't pretend to be. It's an excursion. It takes us through a part of America we haven't been able to see before in the movies. It takes us into the kitchens of Chinese restaurants, and into the offices of Chinese-American social workers. It takes us into hotels for transients, sleazy bars and politician's offices.

By the time we've finished the odyssey, we realize a curious thing: There may not be a Chan, and it doesn't matter if he's missing. What's important is that everyone has a different idea of Chan, filtered through his own consciousness. And we realize (for ourselves, because the film is never obvious about this point) that Chinese-Americans, more than many other ethnic groups in this country, are seen by the rest of us through a whole series of filters and fictions. We "know" them from movies and walk-ons in TV cop shows, from the romanticized images of fiction and from ubiquitous Chinese restaurants, but we don't really know them at all.

This movie knows them. In sharing its characters with us, it opens up a part of America.

Stimulating cinema: Tokyo Sonata

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosama
Year released: 2008

The review is from Roger Ebert. I wanted to like this more than I did, having read lots of positive reviews like the one below. And it is a great film on a lot of levels--excellent cast, droll satire and a message that resonates long after the lights have been turned off. But the sequence towards the end--where dad, mom and youngest son each deal with a trying night of the soul--stretched the limits of believability after the movie had been established as a straightforward look at a dysfunctional, disintegrating family. But the ending was beautiful and ultimately hopeful. A good strong "B" that makes you think. Here's Roger:

Just as the economic crisis has jolted everyday life, so it shakes up "Tokyo Sonata," which begins as a well-behaved story and takes detours into the comic, the macabre and the sublime. All you know about three-act structure is going to be useless in watching this film, even though, like many sonatas, it has three movements.

It opens on a note of routine, of a family so locked into their lives that they scarcely know one another. Ryuhei is a salaryman in a management job. His wife, Megumi, is a source of predictable domesticity, centering on cleaning, sewing and the preparation of meals. His older son, Takashi, and younger son, Kenji, are filled with unhappiness but seemingly well-disciplined, although Kenji gets in trouble at school: The teacher unfairly blames him for passing along a manga, or graphic novel, and Kenji defiantly says he saw the teacher reading a porno manga on the train. Many men in Japan do the same, no big deal, but hypocrisy is the point.

In the opening scene, Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) is fired. He comes home, hands over his week's wages, says nothing. He is an autocratic father, filled with anger. Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) announces he has enlisted in the U.S. Army as a way to gain citizenship, as he sees no future for himself in Japan. His father forbids him.

Unable to lose face by admitting his job loss, Ryuhei leaves "for the office" every day and lingers in a cheerless concrete oasis with other jobless men. There is a soup kitchen. His wife sees him there, knows everything, stays quiet. Young Kenji (Kai Inowaki), no longer attending school, spends his money on piano lessons with the beautiful Kaneko (Haruka Igawa). His father, breaking with the Japanese tradition of encouraging children to study, has already forbidden piano lessons. Why? Perhaps he feels so inadequate he's threatened by any success involving his family.
What we seem to have are the outlines of a traditional family drama, in which tensions are bottled up, revelations will occur and a crisis will result in either tragedy or resolution. But that's not what we're given by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, best known for upscale horror films. He almost misleads us in the early scenes, by framing the family dinners in sedate and orderly compositions. We believe we know where "Tokyo Sonata" is going. We are wrong.

No, it doesn't turn into another horror film or a murder-suicide. It simply shows how lives torn apart by financial emergencies can be revealed as being damaged all along. Unemployment is the catalyst -- an unspoken reality that makes everyone in the family angrier than they already are. All of the performances have perfect pitch; the young son engages us in the same way as the hero of Truffaut's "The 400 Blows."

The directions the films takes I should not reveal. But notice how Kurosawa (no relation the the great filmmaker) permits his train to leave the tracks. Dramatic events occur that demonstrate how a routine, once broken, cannot easily be repaired. The entrance of a completely unexpected character results in an instinctive acceptance of the new situation, providing a sad payoff to what at first seems merely arbitrary.

At the same time, Kurosawa observes the agony of unemployment in Japan, which, like the United States, has been beset by outsourcing to cheaper labor pools. (The day when China and India begin outsourcing will be a historical turning point.) Ryuhei joins hopeless queues at an employment office. He finds work cleaning toilets in a shopping mall. His humiliation is underlined when all maintenance workers must change into one-piece coveralls at lockers in full view of passing customers. He has an encounter at work that is bizarre.

And then the film finds a form of release in another unexpected scene. Watch it play out. We are blindsided by its beauty. An extended passage is held in a medium-long shot in which nobody moves, and the effect is uncanny. Is there a happy ending? Nothing as simple as that. Simply a beginning. Debris has been cleared. Old tapes have been destroyed. Freedom has been asserted. Nothing is for sure.

A sonata is a classical form in which two musical ideas are intercut. In the beginning, they are introduced. In the following sections, they are developed in passages revealing the secrets or potentials of both. The conclusion does not resolve them; instead, we return to look at them, knowing what we know now. The "themes" in this movie are the father and his family. At the end, they feel the same tensions as at the beginning, but the facade has been destroyed, and they will have to proceed unprotected.

Stimulating cinema: Bolivia

Directed by Adrian Caetano and released in 2001, "Bolivia" is about the lives of immigrants in Buenos Aires. Freddy (Freddy Waldo Flores) has just arrived from Bolivia and lands a job working as a cook for Mr. Enrique (Enrique Liporace). The other worker is waitress Rosa (Rosa Sanchez), who is a Paraguayan with an Argentine mother and whose looks attract the attention of the men around her--co-workers and customers alike.

Freddy gets 15 pesos a day for what seems like a 10 or 12-hour shift. Obviously, that doesn't go far--it takes about half that just to make a 5-minute phone call back home (and that's with the "discount" he gets for dropping his boss' name). Freddy's sadness is palpable but he does good work and rolls with the punches, including some harassment from a pair of neighborhood cops.

Interestingly, except for peripheral characters like those officers, the only Argentine we actually see working is Mr. Enrique. And he more like a (less than) benevolent patriarch figure than a "get in the trenches and kick butt" worker. Freddy and Rosa carry the load and when they get together for a drunken one-night stand, you can understand (although Freddy is cheating on his wife back home and conveniently forgetting the love for his three daughters).

The patrons include cab driver Marcelo (Marcelo Videla) and his buddy, Oso, a totally pathetic figure. Oso (Oscar 'Oso' Bertea) has run up a big tab at the restaurant for which he has yet to settle up. He promises the money will come as soon as his nebulous lawsuit is settled and he is forever complaining about the "thieving Uruguayans" who have "gypped" him out of his car. Despite these woes, Oso manages to come up with money to support his cocaine habit. Another patron is the salesman Hector (Hector Anglada), who may or may not be gay and may or may not have a crush on Freddy.

Tensions rise over the course of the film, with Oso growing more and more irrational. If he worked at a job as much as he worked his mouth, he'd be the richest guy in Buenos Aires. But instead he begrudges Freddy and his lousy 15 pesos a day. His dislike for Freddy is almost immediate and his prejudices gradually ooze out, leading to a climactic showdown.

This is truly a great movie, much better than I am probably making it sound. It's filmed in black and white and is beautifully grungy. The music is really cool--I'm pretty sure it's indigenous Bolivian music mixed with modern touches. There is power in this film and it makes you stop and think too. Everyone in this movie has some kind of hustle but not everyone gets what they deserve.

Book review: Apollo's Angels

Not knowing anything at all about ballet--my only previous experience being a performance of "Romeo and Juliet" at my local performing arts center--I dove into Jennifer Homans' book with great relish. My co-workers scoffed but I enjoyed every single page. Homans is a very rare bird--she's both a ballet dancer and a historian. What she does best is put the art form in a historical context. Along the way, we meet a fascinating cast of characters, from Louis the XIV through to the modern stars of dance like Nureyev. Homans' excellent writing never wavers and the stories are lively, engaging and fascinating. Homans is pessimistic about the future of her passion and it's hard to disagree that--at least in the U.S.--it seems the art form has gone the way of other events that used to be big, like horse racing and track meets. But if ballet is indeed on its way out, Homans' work has given it the sendoff it deserves. Below is the review from the New York Times, which named "Apollo's Angels" one of the top ten books of last year.

It has never been done, what Jennifer Homans has done in “Apollo’s Angels.” She has written the only truly definitive history of the most impossibly fantastic art form, ballet, this most refined, most exquisite art of “aristocratic etiquette,” this “science of behavior toward others,” as a 17th-century ballet master put it, in which lovely young women perch upon their 10 little toe tips (actually, it is ­really just the two big toes that alternately support the entire body’s weight: think about it) and waft about where the air is thinner — but heaven is closer. She has taken this world where wilis, virgins, sylphs, sleeping princesses, the “women in white” embody the eternal — the eternally unattainable — and set it into the fabric of world history, and we see, miraculously, their pale tulle and satin pointes peeking out from the crevices of war, of revolutions, of political machinations, and on the ­stages of the monarchies and empires of the kings and czars who gave birth to this improbable art.

Homans’ accomplishment is akin to setting the most delicate and beautiful of all the imperial Fabergé eggs into a fissure high on Mount Rushmore and tracking its unlikely survival. And the question of ballet’s survival lies at the core of Homans’s moving story. “Ballets,” Théophile Gau­tier wrote, “are the dreams of poets taken seriously.”

The tale of the tutu is indeed the story of a bunch of crazy dreamers, dancers, warriors of anatomy who have worked ludicrously hard to formulate, shape and perfect the highest form of the human physique, and the result is a glorious paradox: the manifestation of morality in muscle, truly Whitman’s body electric. What a noble and superb cause! What folly in the face of guaranteed evanescence!

Ballet is the body divined, and it is not by chance that all the work started at the royal court in France in the mid-16th century. Homans begins with what has long been considered the first ballet, “Ballet Comique de la Reine,” which had its premiere in 1581. It was an extravagant six-hour affair, performed among the guests — elevated stages did not yet exist — in a large gallery at the Petit-Bourbon, and told an allegory of “the enchantress Circe vanquished by the powerful gods Minerva and Jupiter,” ending with Circe presenting her magic wand to the king himself before a ballet of naiads, dryads, princesses and a queen. The purpose of the ballet was nothing short of elevating man, “to raise him up a rung on the Great Chain of Being and bring him closer to the angels and God.” So the bar was set for this new art — and it couldn’t have been higher; ballet is about Highness — and the angels of Homans’s title take their first flight. Ballet became so revered in France that by 1636 the Abbé Mersenne, a contemporary of Descartes and Pascal, referred to “the author of the Universe” as “the great Ballet-master.”

Thus ballet was born as the dance of kings. Louis XIII designed costumes, wrote librettos and danced leading roles, being particularly fond of portraying the Sun and Apollo, god of music and poetry. His son, Louis XIV, made his debut in 1651 at 13 and studied with his ballet teacher, Pierre Beauchamps, daily, for more than 20 years. The dancing master in Molière’s “Bourgeois Gentilhomme” declares that “all the misfortunes of mankind, all the disasters of which history is full, the bungling of politicians and the mistakes of great generals, all come through not learning to dance.” Where, I ask you, is Obama’s Beauchamps?

It was Beauchamps who first codified the five positions of the body, providing “the crucial leap from etiquette to art,” and they remain to this day the beautiful base of outwardly rotated feet and legs from which classical ballet rises and expands centrifugally. Homans documents this passionate path with impressive grace — she was herself a professional ballet dancer and is now the dance critic for The New Republic — across Europe from its birth in France, with stopovers in Italy, Denmark, Germany and Austria, landing in Russia in the mid-19th century and then returning to Western Europe in the early years of the 20th century, and finally, here, to America, where it reached its apogee in the last half of the century.

The stops along the way often provide great charm. It was the enchanting French ballerina Marie Sallé in the mid-18th century who introduced the novel idea, with her revealing drapery and sensual movement (she was much admired by Voltaire and Montesquieu), that women, including ones of humble origins, might dance, not just men and kings. The history of ballet is also a story of class; ballet is a language of vertical ascent, physicalized nobility. “Ballerinas,” Homans writes, “acted like aristocrats even when in real life they most emphatically were not.” But mix they did, and more than one young dancer rose — or descended — to positions other than an arabesque in the famous corridors of the Paris Opera, “the nation’s harem,” as one police official termed it, where wealthy men trolled for pretty girls with limber limbs.

It was the magnificent French dancer Auguste Vestris, a favorite of Marie Antoinette’s, who “pried the feet open” to 180 degrees (Louis XIV had maintained a dignified 90), and they have remained there ever since. He also insisted on fully pointed feet, and thus soft, flat ballet shoes with ribbons wrapped around the ankles were born. A teacher of mammoth energy and passion, he gave lessons lasting three hours that would include “48 pliés followed by 128 grand battements, 96 petits battements glissé, 128 ronds de jambes sur terre and 128 en l’air.” Any dancers reading this are now rolling their eyes in empathic agony, but ballet, like prayer, is ritual repetition: the more you do, the closer you get to perfection, to God. (Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hours-to-genius rule is a mere drop in the rosin box for a ballet dancer.) Vestris also forbade any “provincial insecure shuffling of the feet.”

The French ballet master Charles-Louis Didelot, in “Psyché et l’Amour” (1809), kept “provincial” shuffling to a minimum, and his most famous ballet literally took flight not with angels but with 50 live white doves “outfitted in mini­corsets and attached to wires,” carrying the chariot of Venus to the heavens. What delightful imaginings are those of dancers, ever searching to soar — though one does worry about those corseted doves.

Marie Taglioni (left), the first ballerina still generally recognized, was born in Stockholm in 1804 into a dynasty of Italian dancers, and her rise to immortal fame is fascinating not least because she was one ugly duckling. According to Homans, she was “poorly proportioned, with a bent posture and skinny legs,” though she came to symbolize not only exquisite feminine beauty but the best kind, the kind you can’t have. How this determined young woman overcame these apparently extreme deficiencies and danced her way into history is a mesmerizing tale of body and soul outwitting gravity and that somewhat more horizontal pull: the male gaze.

She made her debut as ballet’s iconic sylph in “La Sylphide” in 1832, a super­natural creature who was “strong but frail, sexually alluring but chaste, in love but fiercely independent.” Inspired by Taglioni, Chateaubriand called the sylphide a “masterpiece” of a woman and was driven, Homans says, into “frenzied states of uncontrolled imagination and desire.” Not bad for a “famously ugly” woman.

Taglioni’s success reached far beyond the stage, and she became “a force of anarchy and dissolution,” Homans writes, “a woman’s dancer” (in Gautier’s words). “Decent” women “had to settle for a subdued and controlled life, but underneath they were desperate to ‘abandon their soft and calm existence’ for ‘storms of passion’ and ‘dangerous emotions.’ Taglioni lived what they could only dream: a . . . fully expressed life.” And you wonder why little girls want to dance? They intuit that inside a corseted tutu lies untold freedom.

August Bournonville, an almost exact contemporary of Taglioni and a friend of Kierkegaard, was born in Denmark, but he traveled throughout Europe, studied with Vestris in Paris and even fought a duel to defend his teacher’s honor. He came home from his sojourn to direct the Royal Danish Ballet for 47 years, creating some 50 ballets, though only a handful remain. In his emphasis on precise, unsentimental footwork, free of passion and angst, he added to the lexicon of ballet as few others have.

“Excelsior,” the most successful Italian ballet in history (that you have probably never heard of), claims its place in Homans’s narrative for less than artistic reasons: it has yet to be surpassed in sheer spectacular display and bad taste. Choreographed by Luigi Manzotti in 1881, it offered a cast of “more than 500, including 12 horses, 2 cows and an elephant.” The lead roles were Light, Darkness and Civilization (the ballerina), and they were joined by Invention, Harmony, Fame, Strength, Glory, Industry and Science. This extravaganza ended with Light banishing Darkness and communing in a “warm embrace” with Civilization.

“Excelsior” had 100 performances in Milan at La Scala, and then in virtually every other city across Italy before it zoomed around the world: South America, the United States, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Vienna and St. Petersburg. By 1931, the ballet had incorporated the “progress” of Fascism.

But as Homans points out so lucidly, while “Excelsior” was, well, ridiculous, it had an amazing side effect: it produced hundreds of performers who traveled abroad staging, dancing and teaching, spreading the seeds of ballet like dandelion florets. Among them were the illustrious Italian teacher Enrico Cecchetti, who staged Manzotti’s ballet in St. Petersburg, and Carlotta Brianza and Pierina Legnani, who became the first Princess Aurora and Odette/Odile, respectively, for the great Russian ballets of Marius Petipa, “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Swan Lake.”

While Manzotti spawned an international dynastic dancing family, all ballet dancers since the mid-19th century are the progeny of Petipa. Like Sallé, Vestris and Taglioni, Petipa was from a long line of dancers. Born in Marseille, he studied with Vestris in Paris, traveled widely and, like Bournonville, fought a duel, in Madrid with a French marquis, though Petipa’s was not over the honor of his art but over the apparent dishonor of a young lady. Petipa shot off the marquis’s jaw and ­jetéd away unscathed. It is comforting to know that two of the three great choreographers in ballet history — we will get to George Balanchine soon — were winning duelers, willing to risk their bodies for honor, as all dancers do.

Yes, only three men of such genius to add to and permanently change the language itself in all 400 years, so rare is the great dance maker. It would be as if all classical music had only Mozart, Bach and Beethoven, no Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, Schubert or Chopin, or all literature had only Shakespeare, Dickens and Tolstoy, no Dante, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Austen, Thomas Mann or Elmore Leonard.

Petipa (right) arrived in St. Petersburg in 1847 and lived there for more than 50 years, dying in 1910 at the age of 92. He had two Russian ballerina wives, nine children, and never learned to speak Russian, though he became an eager and respected member of the czar’s court. Interestingly, he produced his masterworks, the cornerstones of the art, the Latin of all classical ballet — “The Sleeping Beauty,” “The Nutcracker” and “Swan Lake” (he also rechoreographed “Giselle” in the form we know it today) — in an astonishing late flowering after the age of 70!

This outpouring — some done with the significant help of the ballet master Lev Ivanov — was attributable, in part, to Tchaikovsky, “the first composer of real stature to see ballet as a substantial art,” Homans writes. “Petipa became a great choreographer because of Tchaikovsky, and he knew it.” She evokes the sweetness of their close collaboration: Tchaikovsky would visit Petipa’s house and play his new composition on the piano “while Petipa shifted his papier-mâché figurines around a large round table.”

By 1903 Petipa was forced to retire, and the Imperial Theaters were floundering. But within only six years Serge Diaghilev brought Russian ballet back to Paris, the place of its birth — his company, the Ballets Russes, never danced in Russia — and unleashed a frenzy of modernist creativity the results of which were widespread and groundbreaking. Never before had so many artists of note been pulled together by one man, whose edict was “Astonish me!” His grand experiment lasted only 20 years, but its legacy is vast — perhaps most notable for two artists whom he helped usher out of Russia: Stravinsky and Balanchine. Working together and separately, they would become two of the great artists of Time, their shared subject.

Homans provides good overviews of the major players of the 20th century. British ballet, led by the formidable Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton and Margot Fonteyn, had its culmination in the ­Fonteyn-Nureyev partnership in the 1960s, though it produced its best — and certainly most enduring — gift to ballet in Michael Powell’s 1948 cinematic masterpiece, “The Red Shoes.” “During the war we were all told to go out and die for freedom and democracy,” Powell said. “After the war ‘The Red Shoes’ told them to die for art.” And why not?

Homans does justice — and then some — to the propaganda dram-balets under Soviet Communism and their extraordinary dancers: Galina Ulanova, Maya Plisetskaya — “a fierce and undying swan” — Vladimir Vasiliev, Natalia Makarova, Nureyev and Baryshnikov. While calling ballet “Britain’s finest cultural hour,” Homans states that “the Bolshoi’s rise signaled a sharp decline for the art of dance.” About its signature ballet, “Spartacus,” she writes, “Even at its most thrilling (Vasiliev), it was quite clearly a degraded form of art.” But ballet was an important national symbol, even if Nikita Khrushchev complained that he had seen so many “Swan Lakes” that his dreams were laden with “white tutus and tanks all mixed up together.”

The British Antony Tudor (William Cook) and the American Jerome Robbins (Jerome Rabinowitz) each get an in-depth assessment; together they form the angst-driven sadists — onstage and off — of 20th-century ballet, and each created a few classic ballets. Tudor, choreographer of “Pillar of Fire,” “Lilac Garden” and “Dark Elegies,” liked his performances to be “executed in cold blood.” “Breaking down a person isn’t hard,” he explained, but then “you’re terribly tempted to lay them flat and walk on them.”

Robbins is the undeniable King of Broadway, with works like “West Side Story,” “On the Town” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” but his ballets, his second language, never quite reached the same apoth­eosis. He was top second-rate (“Dances at a Gathering,” “The Cage,” “Afternoon of a Faun”), and Homans is unafraid to say so. His torture of his dancers and others — he named names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities — was matched only by his well-earned self-hatred. His parents owned a kosher deli on East 97th Street in New York, and he admitted to a strong desire “to become an American and by American I mean WASP American.” He wrote in his diary that he thought his fascination with ballet “has something to do with ‘civilizationing’ of my Jewishness. . . . The language of court and Christianity.”

And it is with “court and Christianity” that Homans arrives in the end. When she finally reaches the story of Georgi Balanchivadze, her book takes flight. She lets go of the professorial traces and dutiful descriptions that have occasionally punctuated previous pages — an editor should have fixed the multiple repetitions of “as we have seen” — and comes into her own with absolute authority. Her writing becomes inspired. Balanchine had that effect on people, and Homans was a student at his School of American Ballet (the “West Point of dance,” as his co-founder, Lincoln Kirstein, called it). Moreover, it actually feels as if she wrote the book in order to get to Balanchine, the one she loves, to put him in his deepest context, and to present him as the pinnacle of the towering pyramid of dance that she has built for him, for us. There he is, the undisputed “Yahweh” of all dance history, the Apollo of her title, accompanied by his beloved muses, his dancers, his angels, leading his chariot, no corseted doves in sight.

“His ballets are the jewel in the crown of 20th-century dance,” Homans writes. “Their depth and scope far surpass those of the dances made by Robbins, Tudor, Ashton or any of the Soviets. . . . Few doubted that Balanchine towered over them all.”

While it took a Frenchman, Petipa, to make ballet Russian, it took a Russian, Balanchine, to make it American — the most unlikely transposition the art form has ever experienced. “Classical ballet was everything America was against,” Homans explains. “It was a lavish, aristocratic court art, a high — and hierarchical — elite art with no pretense to egalitarianism,” designed “to promote and glorify kings and czars.” Whose divine right would it promote in the land of the equal, the free, the duly (and unduly) elected? But as Balan­chine was fond of saying in the face of the impossible, or highly inadvisable, “Nevertheless. . . .” And he proceeded to give American dancers an aristocracy all their own.

The story of Balanchine (left) has been told before and at greater length, but never better. Homans’s account is the best that exists — for both the novice and those in the know. The opening of the School of American Ballet in 1933, the short-lived companies, the work on Broadway, in Hollywood, and then in 1948 the birth of the New York City Ballet, the incubator for him and his dancers, where he produced his greatest work. She gives us terrific appraisals of “Apollo,” “Serenade,” “La Valse,” “Lie­beslieder Walzer,” “Agon” and “Stravinsky Violin Concerto.”

Homans even risks some close truths when she points out the reasons for the “unusual physical luminosity” of his dancers, who had “more dimension, more depth, more range” than other dancers. “Foremost among them was love,” she writes. “Not love for dancing, although that was part of it, but Balanchine’s love.” The fuel his dancers ran on was not the cottage cheese, muffins and Tab they consumed but the sheer adrenaline of love, that immeasurable, magical component that takes a body beyond itself.

Unlike Tudor and Robbins, Balanchine (right) “was not interested in ordinary people or real social situations,” Homans says. “Rather, for him ballet was an art of angels, of idealized and elevated human figures, beautiful, chivalric and above all strictly formal.” Balanchine brought the art full circle back to Louis XIV.

“Ballet is woman,” Balanchine proclaimed, and he elaborated in a letter to Jackie Kennedy in 1961: “Man takes care of the material things and woman takes care of the soul. Woman is the world and man lives in it.” Among his multiple images and portraits of women, one dominated: “a man and a woman who come together but cannot stay together,” Homans writes, “dances that show the man alone, or abandoned by a woman who is too independent, too powerful, too goddess-like to give him the solace he needs.” Balanchine said his biography was in the ballets — and Taglioni’s anarchist sylph reigns on.

“Balanchine’s legacy was immense,” Homans concludes. “He had given the world the greatest oeuvre in the history of dance and made classical ballet a pre-­eminently modernist and 20th-century art.” But “over the past two decades,” she writes, it “has come to resemble a dying language,” and thus she announces the awful truth. Ballet is such an ethereal, such a deeply moral exercise that it would appear to have less and less of a place in our current technology-driven world: there are no bytes for ­ballet.

But ballet always seems to be ending; it has been finished, in fact, many times. The ballet master Jean-Georges Noverre saw it sliding into “empty and meaningless virtuosity” by the late 18th century, and Bournonville despaired for his art when he saw the “disgusting cancan” showing its garters in Paris theaters. And in 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of “the catastrophe of the death of Diaghilev. The sorrow of it that Zelda felt, as did many others, who seemed to feel also that the ballet was ended.”

Now, it would appear ballet is ending yet again. But this time, Homans thinks, it really is the end. “In the years following Balanchine’s death,” she writes, “his angels fell, one by one, from their heights.” Her explanation is, sadly, convincing: “Contemporary choreography veers aimlessly from unimaginative imitation to strident innovation,” while “today’s artists . . . have been curiously unable to rise to the challenge of their legacy. They seem crushed and confused by its iconoclasm and grandeur.” Terpsichore, like Victoria Page, has put on the red shoes and danced her last, no longer willing to “die for art,” so her art dies.

“At N.Y.C.B.,” Homans writes of Balanchine and Robbins’s old home, “the understandable desire to preserve its masters’ legacy has led instead to a stifling orthodoxy,” and she reports with restrained outrage of “a small but telling departure” from its former grace. “The New York State Theater, named for the people it served, was recently rechristened: it is now the David H. Koch Theater, for the millionaire whose ego and resources substitute for the public good.” In a wickedly ironic footnote, bedbugs have also recently taken up residence with Koch in Balanchine’s theater.

The Fabergé egg has fallen. Today’s ballerinas use Twitter, securing the fall of the fourth wall, and even Darren Aronofsky’s new ballet film, “Black Swan,” presents, uncannily, a haunting final image of a white tutu oozing blood. So what is one to do now, having seen, having known, a thing of such beauty that is facing imminent extinction? Jennifer Homans has put her mourning into action and has written its history, an eloquent and lasting elegy to an unlasting art. It is, alas, a eulogy.