Archive for year: 2009

In marked contrast to Vacation – who would think the first two films I see at the Santa Barbara Film Festival would both take place inside prisons! – the Bulgarian esthetic is apparently raucous and messy. Or, you could say, loud and lewd. The story involves a petty criminal who wades through unbearable shit in jail and out while protecting a rare black diamond, only to be betrayed in the end. His Steven-Seagal-toughness elicits our admiration, although it doesn’t quite explain how he fights through iridium poisoning and numerous jolts and blows to the head. Perhaps if one were Bulgarian the references to the Communist takeover would make the film symbolically coherent. Perhaps it would also make the characters, the stories they tell, Moth’s name and the aphorisms about shit – “zift” – meaningful in a way that escaped me.

Here are some of my questions: If Hannah was not intellectually curious, why did she take so readily to Homer, Chekov and Mark Twain? If she was intellectually curious, why had she not taught herself to read, or asked someone to teach her, before she was 60? If she was a shy recluse, why did she pounce so readily on the kid, and keep pouncing? If she wasn’t a recluse, why did she have no friends in the world, especially among the guards she served with in the war? Where did Hannah and the kid find the time, in one summer, to read aloud so many books, have sex and a shower every day, do homework, work a full-time job and still escape the notice of his friends and family? How did the kid spend so much intimate time with her and not discover that she was illiterate? Then there are the questions not involving plot details, but more serious ones involving human motivation: what were Hannah’s feelings toward the kid? Why did she abruptly quit the relationship, her apartment and her job? Why did the kid, now a young law student, not save Hannah by telling the court that she was illiterate? Why, later in life, did he send her tape recordings of all the books they had read, and more? Why was he cold toward her when she was about to be released from prison? And finally, why did she hang herself? Taking on the larger issue the film obliquely raises, how culpable was Hannah for the death of the concentration-camp inmates?

            I have some answers to the last set of questions, but my wife has others, and it is precisely this thought-provoking nature that is the strength of The Reader. The need to search for explanations to some of the mysteries is, conversely, a weakness. Kate Winslet is compelling as the bottled-up Hannah, but without a bit more background it is hard to accept a character with so much contradiction: beautiful, erotic and brazen, yet friendless at home, on the job, in the war, in prison. Ralph Fiennes, on the other hand, floods the screen with a plethora of facial expressions in every five-second shot, needlessly underlining the oh-so-serious nature of the matters before us. By contrast, a better film like The Lives of Others seems to be inhabited by real people, not actors.

The point, the argument, and the cases were muddled in this recap of Nazi art looting. What the Nazis did was despicable, of course, but the case of a distant heir against a good-faith purchaser (or beneficiary) is not a case of good v. evil, and the film never recognized this. Whether Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer should be in an Austrian national museum or Ronald Lauder’s Neue Gallerie depends, probably, on whether you live in Vienna or New York. And even the Austrian courts think this thing has been carried too far, as they have now denied a similar claim for a sixth painting.