Immersion

I saw two films recently -- neither film was released recently, but I experienced them that way, within a proximity of weeks, and although their intentions were utterly apposite, one to entertain, the other to inform, they seemed to me to both be attempting to create an immersive experience on film.  That one failed and the other succeeded and the means by which they did that seem worth examining.

The first was Cinerama Holiday (1955) one of the original feature-length films designed to demonstrate the three-camera, three-projector Cinerama format, develop and audience and a a demand and possibly suggest to filmmakers that what might be seen as a gimmick might have narrative possibilities.  The film has been restored for Blu-ray and evidently does the best it can to simulate that overwhelming experience in the home setting.  Actually, the photography and sound are still impressive.  What prevents it from becoming overwhelming is the overall mundanity and lack of imagination in the design of the film.

The content is simply two intercut travelogues, representing a young American's trip through Europe, and a young Swiss couple's trip across America.  Thankfully, there is no phony story cooked up, no chase, no lost passports or jewelry, no getting caught up in foreign intrigue.  There is a certain goofy naive integrity to the whole Cinerama project, which probably inspired the hiring of one of the squarest of the square filmmakers, Louis DeRochemont, creator of The March of Time to execute CH.  After all, the financiers didn't want anything "extra."  They just wanted to show the world how awesome Cinerama was, with no other frills or furbelows.

Cinerama projects at about a 2.75 ratio, but on an enormous screen that was often 40 feet high and about 110 feet wide.  If you sat inside the curve, the projected picture could occupy your entire peripheral vision.  You were literally inside the picture.  This was augmented by super-duper-multi-stereo recording, which must have been pretty startling to mid-50s filmgoers (remember home stereo records didn't arrive until 1958) and still sounds pretty good, especially in the field recordings of actual sounds, such as the bobsled run and the hiss of skis on snow.  The approach is to envelop, surround and dominate the viewer, reduce him or her to a state of helpless surrender to the sheer scale of this form of filmmaking.

(In home video, the picture is deliberately distorted in a "Smile Box" as show in this video, to simulate in two dimensions the look of a huge curved screen.)

It's really not too bad -- the sheer novelty holds the interest for most of the two hours, although some of the scenes of the country fair in Vermont hardly justify this kind of spectacular approach, and their are interludes that lag.  Still, to blow up what is ordinarily a 10-minute feature before the film, the travelogue, and make it a feature attraction has its own sort of audaciousness.

But you can't call this a moving or an emotional experience.  And strangely, it's not really that immersive, at least not in home video.

On the other hand, the winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 2015, Son of Saul, takes what might be called the reductive approach to immersion.  Released in Academy ratio, that is commonly known as 4:3 or 1:37, the camera doggedly follows a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz carrying out his hellish duties in a hellish environment.  When I say follow, I mean follow.  Probably two-thirds of the film is a shot of his upper back and shoulders.  The camera uses a very short focal length, which means that nearly everything except that which is very close is out of focus.  It is hard to make out what is going on, which at times is a mercy, especially in the most ghoulish and horrific parts of the story.

Conversely, the soundtrack is rich and complex, if just as incomprehensible.  I am told eight languages are heard, or rather barked, languages of captors and the captured carrying out their literally insane duties.  In the clip I've embedded here, you can see just what a confusing and relentless existence this is.

And yet, better than any documentary I've seen, any dramatic film from Schindler's List to Europa Europa to Fateless to The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, etc., etc., Son of Saul conveys the feeling of being inside this bizarre and historically unparalleled phenomenon.  There is no solemn music, no extended speeches (barely any complete sentences in the entire film), no musing on the meaning, no plea for help or understanding or anything except a request that a boy's body not be burned, so that Saul, who believes the boy to be his son (the film never resolves that question) may have the Kaddish said over him and buried with proper respect.  There is a parallel story about the attempted uprising of the Sonderkommandos -- I'm not sure if it was necessary, and it certainly never becomes central or even very well explained.

But that's the point.  Nothing is explained.  No one makes sense of anything, because this is a world without sense.  Instead of pre-empting your peripheral vision, like the Cinerama screen, director Lazslo Nemes has chopped off your peripheral vision with the use of the square format picture.  In its place he has given you super hearing, but what you can hear is chaotic and untranslated, and is mostly of little help, being its own source of confusion and terror.

And so, by cutting off your senses and forcing you to try and piece together what is happening, Nemes has provided much greater immersion than Louis DeRochemont's gigantic Cinerama experience.  Which is just the kind of paradox that a filmgoer has to love.

See Son of Saul even if you're fed up with Holocaust films.  I promise you, you will not be bored for one single solitary second.

Surprises from the pre-classical era

I've only just gotten around to The Phantom Carriage (1921) which has been rediscovered and hailed as an early landmark of Swedish and of silent cinema.  As for the content of Victor Sjöström's remarkable and haunting film, I don't have anything to say beyond the reams that have been written, either about the contemplation of death-in-life, nor about the impeccable in-camera double-exposure effects that seem incomprehensibly impossible before the advent of the optical printer.

But it is always a pleasure to see films made before styles and studio procedures were set into the hard expectations of the market and of genre itself, which is one of the principal rewards of early silent cinema itself.  The filmmakers were still working out the rules, syntactical, stylistic and commercial.  And one of the issues that most concerns the producers and exhibitors is making sure that the actors are clearly visible at all times, so that the audience knows that they're seeing the people they paid to see.  This is no concern of the filmmaker, who is driven primarily by narrative (which is not the same thing as plot or story).

So look at this still, which (unlike many production stills) is an accurate reflection of this scene in the film.  The low and partially obscured light source perfectly sets the hushed, anxious yet warm tone of the scene.  Is there any question that this is a deathbed, albeit not a frightening one?  This is the deathbed of a person who is lived well and wishes to die well.  The light is neither evenly balanced, as Classical Hollywood would demand, nor is it dramatically expressionistic, as in Citizen Kane and its film noir offspring. The effect is oblique, but not in overstated way. The light throughout Phantom Carriage is rarely realistic, yet it often seems that it is, because--although it is NOT expressionistic--it is highly expressive of the inner states of the characters.  A photographer like Julius Jaenzon becomes a true co-author in a work like this, especially in silent film, in which dialogue is not a significant factor.

Students and even devoted film lovers are always resisting silent film, perhaps sensing that it requires closer attention and is therefore, harder work.  But without a stream of chatter, sound effects and music closely synchronized to the image, the viewer is forced to shut up and look.  And when it comes to film, the pictures, there's where the goodies are.

Appealing to all the senses

Most Americans don't watch enough foreign films. I say that not because I'm a snob or I think you should be one, but if you're a film buff, watching a film in another language opens you up to the purest idioms of film, unencumbered by either the felicities or the clunkiness of language, and the distraction of jokes and flippancy. It's closer to watching silent film, but better, and yes, there's a synchronized music score, but more importantly, even if one doesn't understand each word as it is coming out, one can hear the inflections, the rhythms, the timbre of the speaking voice, coupled with the expressions of the face, the tilt of the head, the roll of a shoulder which convey the speaker's meaning at a deeper and truer level than the words selected.

And I Am Love (2010) isn't about talk very much, anyway. There are sights and sounds, sure, but I can't think of another film that endeavors to evoke smell, taste and touch so thoroughly as this. I Am Love will surely be remembered as the film in which a woman had a virtual orgasm and fell in love upon biting into a prawn. I mean, this was some terrific prawn. And the thing is, this woman did not expect to fall in love. She didn't want to fall in love. She had a husband and a family. A big family. A big rich family (her husband's). There was no good reason to fall in love except for this fantastic prawn.

I Am Love is one of the most sensual movies it is possible to see with your eyeballs. It is a film of textures, of surfaces, of warmth and cold, of brisk mountain air and seaside breezes, of flavors, some dark, some pungent, of the touch of fingers, a massage, a haircut, of lying in the tall grass with warm sun on top and sharp jabs of long grass on the bottom. That feeling is--I presume--intensified by having to rely on subtitles to follow the relatively minimal dialogue. And to complete one's verbal disorientation, Tilda Swinton speaks Italian with a Russian accent, as she is playing an emigre. In one scene it is evident that her character does not understand English! How completely appropriate then, that her character turns away from the seemingly obvious advantages of having married into a wealthy and prestigious Milanese family, to a romance with a humble chef, whose mode of living embodies all those sensual pleasures.

You cannot write about I Am Love without talking about the exciting and surprisingly suitable score from the works of concert composer John Adams. Adams, with Phillip Glass is probably our most influential composer today. He was grouped with Adams as a minimalist, for his accompaniments often rely on simply triadic harmonies, rejecting the harmonic density of mid-20th century music. But Adams has a gift for melody and development of form that Glass has not chosen to explore, and he is our best and most interesting opera composer alive. If you haven't heard his song-cycle/music I Was Looking At The Ceiling and Then I Saw The Sky is a neglected masterpiece. Go seek it out. You won't be sorry.

Adams has never licensed his music for work in film before, and did not write anything especially for the film. Instead the music was culled from his recorded catalog, and sequences were even written, shot and edited with pre-selected music in mind, most notably a sequence in which Swinton's character sort-of stalks her lover-to-be (who is a friend of her son's) through the streets of San Remo, finding herself in a Russian Orthodox Church, where she involuntarily stumbles onto her former self. The music both chugs (like the fabric mills which are the basis of the family fortune) and sings (like the souls of the lovers). If this movie can't make you want to go out and eat gourmet Italian food, it should make you seek out the work of John Adams.

There are a few ways a story of a wealthy middle-aged woman going off with her young lover can go. It can be a super-charged, rediscovering passion story like a Diane Lane movie, it can be a story of regret and despair--separation from her children and hurting her former spouse. And indeed there is tragedy in the story, but it is incidental to the main motion of the narrative, and in a way, releases Swinton's character to embrace her new path. The result is not melodramatic or romance, nor tragedy, but the difficult process of being reborn, of embarking a new life with no promises, no guarantees, but new hope of living one's true nature.

I try to refrain from straight-on reviewing or recommendations, but I Am Love, co-written and directed by Luca Guadagnino, is easily one of the best films of 2010 and I couldn't get to the end of the year without saying so. I am sorry I was not aware of it during its theatrical run and didn't see it on a big screen. If you do seek it out, try to watch it on a large monitor or projected and be sure to run the sound through a decent audio system. This movie goes straight past the intellect and goes straight for the senses like nothing I've seen.

In similar fashion, The Secret In Their Eyes (2009), last year's Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, looks as though it's going to be a movie for the brain, but goes instead for the heart. It begins like an Argentinian version of TV shows like Law and Order or House, both programs that co-writer, director and editor Juan José Camapanella has worked on. A retired investigator is revisiting a case from 20 years before, but what is being revisited is not just a case, but the life lived prosecuting all those cases, and the opportunities lost or disregarded along the way. In particular, he is reflecting on The Girl That Got Away, his superior at work, in social class and in education, who married suitably and had a family. Now they re-meet to discuss his investigation into this old, dead case and discovers things may not be as old and dead as he thought they were.

The secret of the film is in its titles. The clues are not bits of carpet fibre and DNA. They are looks between the adoring and the adored, returned or not. There is a beautiful echo early in the film, when the investigator intuits the perpetrator of a violent crime by the look he is giving the victim in an old photograph. Only a few minutes later, we seem the same investigator in another old photo, giving the same look to his unobtainable adored. The picture above is a vivid demonstration of what this film does so well. The investigators have identified the violent offender, Gómez, but he has been released because he is a hired killer useful to the Peron regime (in power at the time). The prosecutors learn they have been bested and get on the elevator. A moment later, Gómez boards the elevator. Not a word is exchanged. Gómez loads and checks his gun. The threat is all the more undeniable for having remained verbally unstated. It is like the thriller film's equivalent to a Lubitsch moment.

One of the pleasures of this film is that everything is of a piece: the "top story", the crime investigation and the "under story", the lost romance or organically intertwined. The low-key, amber-toned cinematography, understated music score and Campanella's own crisp editing all fit together as if conceived all at once in a single burst of creativity. It is a film of discretion, of understatement, of respect for its audience, confident that the audience will put together the pieces of both stories and see the connections without being whacked over the head with them. It is a lean-forward, not a sit-back, film. Lead Roberto Darin reminds me of Joe Mategna, with even more soulful eyes, appropriate for a film about seeing.

The Dragon Tattoo series, Let The Right One In and The Secret In Their Eyes demonstrate (if it needed demonstrating) that a foreign language film can be a high-quality, relatively conventional commercial and accessible film. It need not be either experimental and off-putting or derivative and schlocky. All these films will receive (or have received) American remakes. Don't wait for them. Check out the originals. The week between the holidays is a great time for cocooning with movies. Put some foreign language films on your list. It's true that if your eyelids droop, and you miss a subtitle or two, you might feel lost. But have a sip of coffee and stay with it. Your eyes, and perhaps your other sensory organs, will thank you.

You say "prostitute" like it's a bad thing

Diary Of A Lost Girl (1929) has always been treated as the lesser younger sibling of the first collaboration between director G.W. Pabst and incandescent actress Louise Brooks, Pandora's Box. And certainly, it has nothing like the light, glancing touch or the existentialist amorality of the earlier film. Diary is a melodramatic fable, of how broken families breed corruption. Nonetheless, it still has the amazing Brooks and its share of iconic images and moments. For example, if you're in a rush (and why are you reading my blog when you're in a rush?), start the video above at around 1:35. There in a luminous close-up, Brooks enjoys her first trepidatious sip of champagne (translation: illicit sex) and finds she enjoys it. There is as good an example of silent film acting as you could see. (I wish I 'd known Brooks's work during my film course last year -- I used Lon Chaney as my exemplar of silent film acting, but he is too often unreliably stagy, whereas Brooks is Pure Film.)

This close-up contains almost the entire essence of the film -- that without a real sense of identity, as provided by a circle of loving people -- putting yourself for sale in the world, as represented by literal prostitution in this case, is as good a way as any for defining yourself and obtaining power over your circumstances as any. (Especially true when your family is ready to sell you and not even let you share in the profits!)

Late silent film reached an astonishing height of efficiency, compression and expressivity. Even today, screenwriters wrestle with backstory -- how to get the information out with an elegant and organic way, rather than the manner of the housekeeper in The Real Inspector Hound: "Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon's country residence one morning in early spring...I hope nothing is amiss because we are completely cut off from the world..." etc.

Look at the first few minutes of the film, which get so much information across so quickly with the minimum of titles and the maximum of facial reaction, setting out not only the facts but the social context of those facts:



The film is both more explicit about sex and more conventionally moral than Pandora's Box (could this be because it's based on an actual memoir of a "fallen woman"?), and even contains the kind of message for the audience, satirized by the play and film Chicago: "My audience loves me. And I love them. And they love me for lovin' them and I love them for lovin' me. And we love each other. And that's cause none of us got enough love in our childhoods."

Never mind. There's not much to analyze in this film, and if I continue it will be only to describe and praise the subtextual clarity and precision of its storytelling, time better spent seeking out the movie and watching it from beginning to end.

Grace under pressure

Leave it to the Germans to make a great Hemingway movie without Hemingway (which is the best way). It is best to get the spoiler out of the way-- North Face (2008) is about the failed effort to scale the north face of the Eiger (the Ogre) in Switzerland on the eve of the Second World War. The people of the time wanted to make this a nationalist phenomenon, but neither the protagonists nor the film are having any part of that claptrap. They want to climb because they want to climb; the film wants to follow them because that's what film wants to do.

Much has been made in the reviews of the authenticity of this film, and it certainly appears that way, but the special features on the DVD reveal just how extensively greenscreen and indoor sets were used ; most probably this is the only way such a brutally physically demanding story could have been told. The mountain has done away with more people than your average serial killer, and it would be inconceivable to work at the actual site, not least because it is always in shadow (hence the constant ice and snow). Nonetheless, almost none of the digital trickery is apparent on first viewing of the film--in fact, the film is too engrossing for the question of how it was accomplished to arise. Perhaps this marks a small moment in the maturity of digital effects--here is a film for which digital effects are a sine qua non, and yet they do not appear to be evident, so thoroughly convincing is the film. Nor would it be termed an "effects film" and yet they are more pervasive here than in many an action film.

Because it's never about the effects. It's about man versus mountain, and mountain wins decisively, but not without man giving a hell of a fight. Admittedly, the men look much the worse for wear, and if they had all survived, one harbors doubts about the quality of each of their lives thereafter. The point is, the film remains gripping and convincing in a way literally impossible just a few years ago. I wonder if we will become more sophisticated about such things, and in time the CGI in this film will look as fake as cheesy rear-projection from the 1940s looks to us now. Better not to wait to find out and appreciate these films now.

Brain trust

For a film about the development of trust, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2009) doesn't trust its audience very much. It turns out the lights, turns up the music, and bangs us over the head with some of the most grotesque and nauseating personal violence ever seen in a mainstream movie. It purports to condemn violence against women, then serves up a big steaming bowl of it, including attacks on and by the title character (who is not the central character).

Most of the film occupies that newly-established place bridging mystery, thriller and horror film, pioneered by Silence of the Lambs and continued with 7even. The addition of horror elements means not only horrific depictions of the murders, previously only described in more polite mysteries, but also violence upon one or more central characters, and thereby to be experienced by the audience.

That accretion of new genre conventions is almost necessary, because once the audience is past the preliminary investigation into piles of original documents and photos, the principal mystery becomes fairly easy to guess--I did so, and I'm terrible at solving mysteries. Thus, the final bursts of violence are perversely welcome after a long becalmed period, incorporating an improbably romance between the protagonist, a middle-aged reporter and the title character, a badly damaged young woman who has discovered a talent and passion for hacking. After that, there is a very limp resolution of the "outer" plot, in which the inner story has been nested. Thus, Dragon Tattoo has some unintended common ground with Inception, in their mutual Russian-nesting-doll structure.

The trust trope is thoroughly infused into the narrative: most institutions in this universe betray and degrade the people they are meant to serve. Government employees, businessmen, guardians of minors, lovers, fathers, brothers--none of them are trustworthy. It's a miracle that Blomqvist or Lisbeth can look anyone in the eye. And although the romance does not necessarily pan out, it's very existence, though brief, is a spiritual triumph.

The color palette is washed out as is de rigeur these days to indicate "atmosphere," and the production design is oppressively drab. Presumably this was deliberate--everyone seems desperate to find happiness or joy in this very bleak world. This movie's going to kill Swedish tourism.

Finally, although this is not a reflection on the film itself (which is what I try to confine myself to), one must applaud the producers' boldness in committing to filming the entire trio of mysteries at once. The Americanized version will not be done that way--there will be a slow, tentative stab at the initial installment, then a reluctantly made decision to go ahead, by which time the original actors and/or director will not be available, or perhaps the series will be abandoned incomplete due to the natural gutlessness of the American film finance market.

And will the villains in America be Nazis? That does not have the resonance in the States that it has for Europeans, who were faced with the actual option to join the party. American Nazis are fringe cuckoos. European Nazis could be either evil or careerists (like Herbert von Karajan).

But then driving out ambiguity is what American mainstream filmmaking is all about. At least they hired David Fincher for the remake, so we can hope.

Feeling Phlegmish

Sadly, Moscow, Belgium (2008) is not an ironic or paradoxical title. It's just the name of a rather pedestrian town in Flanders, which is part of Belgium, in which this very pedestrian love story takes place. It's an example of the, "See ordinary, middle-aged, non-glamorous people can fall in love and have sex just like Brad and Angelina do." Is anybody laboring under the illusion that this is not so?

Evidently, the picture made a splash on the festival circuit, and so becomes one of the first Belgian pictures to have achieve international distribution; probably the first Flemish-language film to do so in a long time, if ever. The film is not unpleasant, but it is not surprising, funny or moving either. Nor is there anything much to say about the cinematic qualities. The only observation I have to make about this movie is that Flemish sounds almost as horrible as Dutch, a language that makes one sound as if one is suffering from terrible bronchial congestion. [Full disclosure- the Lockhart ancestors originate from Flanders.]

Judging by the film In Bruges, that place seems much more interesting than Moscow.

Stress points

Seeing the fine Danish film Brødre (2004) made me feel depressed about Jim Sheridan's career status that he felt compelled to take on such a pointless exercise as directing the American scene-for-scene remake Brothers. One measure of the level of misfire is list some of the differences between the two films:

1. In Brødre, the officer brother briefs his men on their mission and assures them it is acceptable to be afraid.

2. Brødre has scenes and dialogue which explain why and how the younger brother was in prison and his feelings about what he did and who he hurt.

3. In Brødre, the protagonist truly gets to know the man he feels to compelled to kill later.

4. Connie Nielsen and Ulrich Thomsen are simply more believable as the parents of two young girls than Natalie Portman and Tobey Maguire, who still look they just came back from the prom. Not their fault, but...

5. Brødre makes it clear that the father's breakdown has to do with the stress and guilt over what he did in the war than it has to do with sexual jealousy. That is just a premise. In the remake, Maguire's outburst, driven as it seems to be by jealousy makes even less sense because Gyllenhall and Portman have very little chemistry between them.

6. Since Denmark hasn't much of a film industry, the children don't seem so much like professional actors.

7. Brødre has a clear visual design, with some hypnotic transitions using a thrumming music score and a montage of different types of blue eyes. (I guess there are some brown-eyed Danes, but you couldn't prove it from this film.)

The entire American version feels as though it were lurching from plot point to plot point without any real conviction, because what we have is a copy. As Brødre clearly comes from the writer and director's hearts, it is real and honest and truly felt; whereas Brothers feels as though it is going through the motions. Jim Sheridan has made wonderfully honest personal films himself, and he has no more business remaking Brødre than Marc Forster should be remaking In America.

The strange thing is that, given the difficult painful story told in Brødre and Brothers, the original feels more hopeful, more resolved, with more possibility of recovering a decent future, than the remake which starts "down" and stays down.

An addition to the pantheon (seriously)

If you have an hour and a half, sit down and watch this movie. I'm not kidding. It is the stunning The Cranes Are Flying (1957), directed by Mikhail Kalazatov and photographed by Sergei Urusevsky, the team the created I Am Cuba . I would place it in my list of the Top 5 movies filmed in black-and-white. (Don't try and nail me down on the others. The Long Voyage Home and Touch of Evil would be in there, for sure.)

If you don't have time to see the whole film, let me point out a few key sequences.

First, starting at about 24:46, the heroine is on a bus to say goodbye to her fiancee, who has volunteered to fight in World War II (in Russia, that was damn near suicidal). We start with her on the bus, then, without any fuss, follow her through the crowd in the street, and suddenly, as she bursts onto a street filled with tanks, the camera cranes up to take in the whole scene. There is no air of "showing off" about this shot--it's just what the story wants.

I also recommend the entire botched leave-taking, in which man and woman never meet. It begins at about 28:25. If Kalazatov had directed Gone With The Wind (and he would have done a hell of a job), it could be taken seriously as a film (David Lean must have been seriously jealous of this sequence).

Next is the death of the young man, Boris, which begins at 50:14. Boris is being sent back from the front to be disciplined for fighting. With him is the man he was fighting with, who Boris has been carrying for a while now. Suddenly, the sniper shot comes. Boris looks up and sees the sky recede. Then the forest begins to swirl before his eyes and the swirl merges with the swirling motion of the camera as he remembers running up the stairs to see his beautiful fiancee. The memory merges into a dream or a wish of a wedding, until Boris finally collapses into the swamp. Here Kalazatov's roots in silent film are evident, as the sequence rivals Murnau.

Finally, at 1:07:56, we see the heroine, filled with shame and regret for marrying the sexy but amoral brother of her fiancee, runs into the street, apparently outruns a train, apparently with the intent of throwing herself under the train in the manner of Anna Karenina, but instead rescuing a toddler who has about to wander into the path of a truck. Here Kalazatov shows himself a worthy son of Eisenstein, the father of Russian cinema. If you have time, stick with it for the darkly humorous scene that follows as a group of women cluck over what to do with this lost child in overlapping and simultaneous dialogue as they loom into the foreground, foreshortened with a short lens and then and just as quickly recede into the background, nearly spinning in hysterics as the heroine quietly bonds with the child.

But these are bravura sequences and do not justly represent the balance, the restraint, the poetry of so much of the staging, photography and acting of this film. It is virtually a perfect romantic melodrama, with a heartstopping tearjerker of a final scene.

Why did our college professors start us on foreign film with the impenetrable Bergman, the surreal Fellini, the languid Satijat Ray? We got the idea of foreign film as hard work. We should have started with The Cranes Are Flying, with a familiar type of story, albeit with deeper resonance and more genuine emotion than in most American commercial films, certainly those of its era, but with a bold and expressive vocabulary that had become dessicated and stultified in the American film factories. Then we would have seen the real kinship among humans that is celebrated and indeed fostered by the best of international film. And the beautiful Tatiana Samoilova would have been a movie star anywhere.

Really, see this movie.