Robert Tanitch review the latest DVDs
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP (Artificial Eye). Whit Stillman directs a charming and exquisitely costumed adaptation of Jane Austen’s epistolary novel, Lady Susan, written when she was only 19 and not published until long after her death. Can a naive young nobleman (Xavier Samuel) be rescued from the clutches of a devious, manipulative, money-searching widow (a fiendish Kate Beckinsale), whom he knows to be the most accomplished flirt in England? She is also the most terrible mother. Scene-stealer Tim Bennett (as a rich and gauche blockhead) has one of the best comic entrances ever with as witty a piece of dialogue as you could hope to find in the very best comedies of manners.
DEPARTURE (Peccadillo). English Mother and her teenage son are having a difficult time on holiday in rural France coming to terms with their lives. She (Juliet Stevenson), fragile, fraught, is having to let go of husband, country house and son. He (bilingual Alex Lawther), self-absorbed and pretentious, dotes on a visiting French teenager from Paris (bilingual Phénix Brossard) who more than copes and has a really good time whilst boating on the lake. “You’re a bit of a cliché!” says the French lad, who is no fool. Writer/director Andre Steggall takes his intimate and poetic feature debut very slowly and very gently.
FEDORA (Eureka). Billy Wilder in 1978 one again bit the hand that fed him and another attack on Hollywood. A legendary and great movie star lives in seclusion on an island off Corfu. An independent producer (William Holden) on the skids wants to persuade her to make a comeback. Thanks to plastic surgery she has miraculously not aged; but plastic surgery brings its problems. Holden will bring back memories of Wilder’s 1950 classic, Sunset Boulevard, but Hildegard Knef and Martine Keller as mother and doomed daughter do not automatically have the impact Gloria Swanson and Eric Von Stroheim had and which this outre melodrama really needs. The film opens with the legend’s suicide and closes with a funeral to match Valentino’s. Wilder drops a lot of famous names throughout.
THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA (Odyssey). Italy 1943. The good news is Mussolini is dead and the Fascists are kicked out. The bad news is the Germans are going to steal one million bottles of wine. The mayor, a drunken buffoon (Anthony Quinn, over-acting) fends off the decent German commander (Hardy Kruger, dull) who threatens to shoot him if he doesn’t reveal where the villagers have hidden the bottles. The only authentic thing is the picturesque village of Anticoi Corrado standing in for Santa Vittoria. Stanley Kramer directs. The film, released in 1969, is never believable and desperately needs editing. There is no urgency, no fear. Anna Magnani in the poor role of the mayor’s termagant wife gives a parody of Anna Magnani overacting.
FIRE AT SEA (Artificial Eye). The refugee crisis is the biggest tragedy since the Holocaust, Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary is about the locals and the refugees on the 8 square mile island of Lampedusa off Sicily. There have been 400,000 refugees in the last two decades and 15,000 dead. Rosi spends an inordinate time observing a small local boy with bad eyesight when you feel he should be concentrating on the refugees. But the locals and refugees never meet in the film. There can be no doubt, however, about the message. There is no commentary as such, but the local doctor spells it out: “It’s the duty of every human being to help these people.”
To learn more about Robert Tanitch and his reviews, click here to go to his website
