DVD Reviews

Juno

Starting a monthly round up of some recent DVD releases, we take a closer look at a sleeper that became a hit, rediscover a classic British silent film, and welcome a couple of road movies with children.

JUNO

Juno could almost be so hip it hurts.

It’s this amazing first-time script by a woman who had an erotic blog – she was, like, a stripper and everything – so, anyhoo, it’s about this super-cool teenager who falls, you know, pregnant, but, like, deals with it. And the soundtrack is real cool – filled with indie stuff, but, like, really good old stuff as well. Like that song about glue.

Will it be painfully saccharine? Could it be preachy? Will it bottle out of answering the questions it asks?

Well, it seems a lot of people were very happy with it. It picked up a fistful of awards, notably for Ellen Page as the wise-cracking, tomboy-ish heroine. In fact, the whole cast is strong. And director Jason Reitman knows when to stay in the background. Which, in a film like this, is most of the time.

16 year-old Juno falls pregnant on her first time with sort-of boyfriend Paulie. Her father and step-mother are supportive but at the last moment Juno changes her mind about abortion and decides to give the child up for adoption. She immediately finds a nice, middle-class couple – Mark and Vanessa – in the small ads (?!) assuaging the pain of their childlessness. Juno keeps them in the loop, popping over with news and being careful not to divulge, or even learn, the baby’s sex.
Things darken in act two as Mark and Vanessa seem not to be as perfect as it seemed and a slightly creepy relationship develops between Juno and Mark, while Juno and Paulie split up. Things reach a crisis point, whereupon Juno makes the difficult decision to press ahead with the adoption. She and Paulie get back together.

Obviously a crude synopsis like that could make Juno seem like pro-teenage-pregnancy propaganda. There was, of course, a backlash and, right on cue, a slew of girls blamed Juno for their bumps (or at least parts of the media did)
Thankfully, for anybody who actually keeps their eyes and ears open whilst watching a film, it’s a little more nuanced than that.

But perhaps not much.

Juno might not get pounded into the ground by red-neck classmates but she’s not exactly knocked down in the rush to help. And there are plenty of glances, comments and other little signs. Or big ones like the repeated shot of her walking down a corridor against a tide of oncoming people.

‘How to Write a Screenplay’ books are always banging on about ‘triumph over adversity’ and Juno is just that: the smart talk and cute soundtrack don’t really conceal a very traditional format.

And Juno herself is not so untraditional. As a feisty female, she could almost be a daughter of Katharine Hepburn. She gets herself into trouble, makes her own decisions (Paulie vanishes for most of act two), and finds her own way out.

The subject matter, though?

Juno may not be Reefer Madness, - of course it’s a comedy, not a documentary –  but it does give an idea of what it must be like to be a teenaged mother. Though only a small one.

But the film’s greatest strength is also its biggest weakness: Juno’s character. Apart from one outburst, her sunny, sassy, post-modern ironic shell keeps us at a distance from the reality. The brisk efficiency of her decision-making (“I’m calling for a hasty abortion”) are, in retrospect, disconcerting. And though there are tears at the end, the coda puts everything  back in place as if the previous 92 minutes hadn’t happened. Or as Syd Field would say, there’s no character arc.

Enjoyable, just don’t live your life by it!

The DVD has a host of features including the obligatory ‘gag’ reel, in which cast members forget the line they were just given, and utter a Wildean ‘oh, fuck!’

www.fox.co.uk/

 
A COTTAGE ON DARTMOOR
You may know Anthony Asquith for directing The Browning Version (1951), the best of his ten films with Terrence Rattigan, or Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). Great films, but necessarily talky, and they contributed to Asquith’s reputation for stagey dullness.

So it’s fascinating to see one of his silent films.

In A Cottage on Dartmoor, a triangle of misunderstood love leads to revenge which, in the end, finds almost unbelievable forgiveness.

It was made in 1929, just as sound film was being introduced so Asquith sonorised a couple of sequences, including a visit to ‘the talkies’. Sadly those bits of soundtrack are now lost. In its place we have Stephen Horne’s clever piano score, both accompanying the film and providing the music that the characters hear.

Asquith, the son of the Liberal Prime Minister, was a cinephile – a friend of Pickford and Fairbanks, and a stalwart of The Film Society, a 1930s cinema club that screened classics including banned Soviets and German expressionists.

A Cottage has bits of all these: the Germans’ moody and expressive lighting and camerawork, the Russians’ symbolism and clever editing, and the sheer entertainment of the Americans, shot through with mordant English wit.

Also included is Rush Hour (1941), six minutes of wartime comedy-propaganda about public transport (all too contemporary!) and Insight, a 15-minute profile of Asquith on the set of Libel (1959), a sort of Return of Martin Guerre starring Dirk Bogarde and Olivia de Havilland. This gives a chance to hear the painfully shy Asquith’s extraordinary strangulated camp-posh voice, which renders almost everything he says incomprehensible.

filmstore.bfi.org.uk/





ALICE IN THE CITIES

In the 1970s Wim Wenders was one of the heroes of New German Cinema, but twenty years later his association with Bono led to indigestible self-indulgence.

So Axiom’s DVD of Alice in the Cities (1974) is a refreshing reminder of his early work.

Philip Winter, a writer’s-blocked German journalist on a road-trip across America blows his deadline. On the way home he meets nine year-old Alice and her mother, who disappears, leaving Winter to help the girl find her grandmother, with only a photograph of her house as a clue.

With just this sketchy ‘plot’, Alice manages to be fantastically rich. The lambent black and white photography and gently arpeggiating soundtrack quietly underpin a touching but unsentimental portrait of two people, alone and together, finding their respective ways back home.

It’s an ambivalent meditation on American culture, an investigation into fatherhood and an existential look at identity.

It’s also one of the most scopophilic films you’ll ever see. Winter constantly takes polaroids: ‘When you drive across America something happens because of all the images you see’. But his photographs ‘never really show what it was you saw.’ Nevertheless, the act of seeing is proof of being.

As Alice, Yella Rottländer is amazingly fresh and natural, a disarming contrast to the rest of the cast’s deliberately downbeat, even flat, haltingly ‘second-language’ bilingual delivery.

Rüdiger Vogler, Wenders’ ‘elder’-ego, captures the tiredness of a man who has lost, or fears he is losing, his sense of identity. His writing and obsessive photography is an attempt – ultimately successful – to recapture it.

The DVD has a good, long interview with Wenders, but the stars’ interviews are brief and padded with long sections of Alice.

www.axiomfilms.co.uk/





THE ITALIAN

East European film-makers have a penchant for poppets: charming kids who win over stern adults or somehow show the triumph of innocence. Think of Kolya, Burnt By the Sun, The Steamroller and the Violin, The Thief … I could go on.

Andrei Kravchuk’s directorial feature debut adds to the genre, with the story of a boy in a Dickensian post-Soviet orphanage near Finland. Six year-old Vanya Solntsev turns his back on the prospect of adoption by an Italian family (hence his nickname), preferring to go in search of his real mother, not only for his own happiness but in the belief that his return will bring her comfort. Escaping the orphanage, he is pursued by the drunken headmaster and the adoption agent, looking to recapture a valuable commodity, which could be sold to another couple.

It’s not just the management that Vanya is escaping: downstairs the older boys raise money by thievery and pimping, putting the younger children between a rock and a hard place.

But it’s not all bad: one of the nurses helps Vanya identify the hospital where he was born as a staring point for his search.

Obviously The Italian has a ‘political angle’. Vanya Solntsev is not just an everyday name: it translates as Johnny Sunny and, like several of his fellow orphans, he has been given the name of a Soviet war hero.

But this apparent nostalgia is actually undercut by the film itself. Full of subtle ambiguities, it exhorts personal responsibility rather than institutional control while seeing the need for a social framework. It avoids a ‘patriotic’ ‘as-bad-as-it-is,-Russia-is-your-homeland’ ending; another orphan is more than happy to take Vanya’s place in Italy, but that must have happened to the adoption agent’s benefit.

Whether it would work that way in reality is another matter, but by this time we’ve entered the realms of fairy tale, so why not? Kravchuk has form on this: the end of The Christmas Miracle was similarly, well, miraculous.

But up to that point The Italian, like Alice in the Cities, is a road movie with a very unsentimental view of childhood and the knocks of growing up, helped by Kravchuk’s documentary training – he’d previously made a film about orphanages -  and the use of real locations and non-professional actors.

Actually it’s all a bit ambiguous at the end. Is it the sunny resolution that it first seems? Watch closely and make up your own minds.

www.sodapictures.com/

John Riley

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