Wednesday, the 26th of October
‘Foreign Film Night’
‘Schultze Gets the Blues’
I'm swiss, I do
know the german mentality and culture
very well, so this flick wasn't as alien to me as it must have been to
many other people, and I'm also talking about the slow pacing and style
of close intimate privacy that is very difficult and seldom to find
this honest and real in US movies.
This flick has a lot to offer if you're the kind of watcher that is paying attention to the details. On the surface we watch an old man getting retired and fearing that the gap of loneliness in front of him will be his dead end road. The man is single and alone, but loneliness is also present when he's sitting in the middle of a crowd of people. When one evening, while tuning throught the radio channels, he gets to hear some few tones of a much faster accordeon music style, things begin to change in a surprisingly subtle way.
Something that seems very important to me is that you definetly do not have to like Polka music or US blues to watch this movie. In fact, it's pretty unimportant on that aspect but off course it surely helps if you're a fan. Anyway, this movie shows that there is music and rhytm in everyone, every single person has it and kinda applies to it, or does the rhythm apply to the person...? However, the german villians in the movie seem to function with 30 BPMs (beats per minute, so slow that close to standing still) as everything seems to have more weight, everything requires more time and energy than elsewhere, even ordering three beers in a boring pub is being executed with a minimum waste of energy, there's one hell of a lazy heart beat in everybody there and only some can overcome their mental walls to show signs of goodwill and true charity.
Now early on we come to learn that Schultze isn't an all too social guy: he only talks if absolutly necessary and by doing so he only names to most important facts, he almost bisects even the shortest phrase to an even shorter phrase, and he never smiles. This person is not much of a useful addition to the people there. If anyone could change anything, it surely wouldn't be Schultze to do so. That is until his own life rhythm is subtly changing due to the new musical influence. While Schultze keeps doing "his own thing" (that is playing solo accordeon, only faster this time) the people still tend to shake their heads as this "new stuff" is absolutly alien to them that cannot be accepted this easily. They show signs of excitment but need assurance afterwards, that he will "turn back to the old gold polka again, okay Schultze?" But then, there seems to be more than meets the eye (ear) as all of a sudden two fellows get invited to a tasty dinner - for the first time in 30 years.
Pay attention to the details and you will realize that there are new things going on in this man's life. He seems to have answered to an inner natural urge of enlarging his field of interests and perceptions. The accordeon club got invited to a german meeting over in the states. The members decide to send Schultze over there as a representative. What Schultze experiences over there is just enough to let him forget about that gap in front of him. He doensn't turn into a party goer, to be sure, but there's life coming back, excitment about spontaneously being invited to dinner by a black mother.
In the end, back in germany, they burry this man who had in the end found new sources of freedom to untie yourself from any compulsions of accepted loneliness and unsatisfying deadlocks.
During the final scene I felt sad about the ending. An old man had somehow found out he's got more mental wings in his mind than he would ever have imagined before, but why couldn't he have found these new sources earlier in his life? I thought the ending was too melancholic, but then, right before I started whining I payed more attention to the other members of his funeral: they were playing Schultze's faster accordeon style, additionally, a black umbrella was sometimes "dancing" between the others, a lady was moving her hips, an old man at the end of the queue was doing a pirouette etc. I'm sure they couldn't name the reasons about the subtle change in everyone's life rhythm, but exactly that has happened.
Schultze was gone, but his discovery had planted a seed. Music is life and this flick is just a very very sweet and realistic tale on that subject that you won't soon forget. Wux Iapan "Fantas" (Zurich, Switzerland)
This flick has a lot to offer if you're the kind of watcher that is paying attention to the details. On the surface we watch an old man getting retired and fearing that the gap of loneliness in front of him will be his dead end road. The man is single and alone, but loneliness is also present when he's sitting in the middle of a crowd of people. When one evening, while tuning throught the radio channels, he gets to hear some few tones of a much faster accordeon music style, things begin to change in a surprisingly subtle way.
Something that seems very important to me is that you definetly do not have to like Polka music or US blues to watch this movie. In fact, it's pretty unimportant on that aspect but off course it surely helps if you're a fan. Anyway, this movie shows that there is music and rhytm in everyone, every single person has it and kinda applies to it, or does the rhythm apply to the person...? However, the german villians in the movie seem to function with 30 BPMs (beats per minute, so slow that close to standing still) as everything seems to have more weight, everything requires more time and energy than elsewhere, even ordering three beers in a boring pub is being executed with a minimum waste of energy, there's one hell of a lazy heart beat in everybody there and only some can overcome their mental walls to show signs of goodwill and true charity.
Now early on we come to learn that Schultze isn't an all too social guy: he only talks if absolutly necessary and by doing so he only names to most important facts, he almost bisects even the shortest phrase to an even shorter phrase, and he never smiles. This person is not much of a useful addition to the people there. If anyone could change anything, it surely wouldn't be Schultze to do so. That is until his own life rhythm is subtly changing due to the new musical influence. While Schultze keeps doing "his own thing" (that is playing solo accordeon, only faster this time) the people still tend to shake their heads as this "new stuff" is absolutly alien to them that cannot be accepted this easily. They show signs of excitment but need assurance afterwards, that he will "turn back to the old gold polka again, okay Schultze?" But then, there seems to be more than meets the eye (ear) as all of a sudden two fellows get invited to a tasty dinner - for the first time in 30 years.
Pay attention to the details and you will realize that there are new things going on in this man's life. He seems to have answered to an inner natural urge of enlarging his field of interests and perceptions. The accordeon club got invited to a german meeting over in the states. The members decide to send Schultze over there as a representative. What Schultze experiences over there is just enough to let him forget about that gap in front of him. He doensn't turn into a party goer, to be sure, but there's life coming back, excitment about spontaneously being invited to dinner by a black mother.
In the end, back in germany, they burry this man who had in the end found new sources of freedom to untie yourself from any compulsions of accepted loneliness and unsatisfying deadlocks.
During the final scene I felt sad about the ending. An old man had somehow found out he's got more mental wings in his mind than he would ever have imagined before, but why couldn't he have found these new sources earlier in his life? I thought the ending was too melancholic, but then, right before I started whining I payed more attention to the other members of his funeral: they were playing Schultze's faster accordeon style, additionally, a black umbrella was sometimes "dancing" between the others, a lady was moving her hips, an old man at the end of the queue was doing a pirouette etc. I'm sure they couldn't name the reasons about the subtle change in everyone's life rhythm, but exactly that has happened.
Schultze was gone, but his discovery had planted a seed. Music is life and this flick is just a very very sweet and realistic tale on that subject that you won't soon forget. Wux Iapan "Fantas" (Zurich, Switzerland)
‘Un
homme et une femme (1966)’
aka ‘A Man and a Woman’
aka ‘A Man and a Woman’
"Un Homme et
une Femme" holds up quite well some 32
years hence. Younger viewers may not realize that a lot of the montage
devices and tricks that may seem 'dated' were actually popularized
and/or invented herein by Claude Lelouch. I actually found myself
rewinding to watch the color sections a couple of times, especially the
mid-film sequence scored to Francis Lai's achingly sentimental and
lovely "Stronger than Us" as Anouk Aimee (the world's most beautiful
woman) and Jean-Louis Triginant stroll the Deauville shore and muse on
art and life. The tinting and grain of those sections - the boat ride,
Anouk remembering her dead husband (Pierre Barouh) as he sings "Samba
Saravah" to her - set a trend I pine for again.
The story? Well, thin, even by today's lughead standards (widower and widow fall in love against some lovely French scenery shot in winter), but it's obvious Lelouch was going for something that was quite new, then: a marriage of film and music that was not a "musical" per se, but rather, the forerunner of MTV (well, MTV with a soul, let's say). Cut loosely but thankfully not on-the-beat to Lai's jazzy/lush mid-60s score, Lelouch suceeds darn well. The freeze-frame ending cued to the final electric piano note, and that moment when Anouk Aimee pauses for the longest time and says to Jean-Louis, "You never told me about your wife", are two of my favorite filmgoing moments.
"Un Homme et une Femme" is emblematic of a world-view which I, for one, wish would take hold of folks again and topple the psychotic-trash-nihilistic consciousness now dominating pop culture. It was thoughtful, romantic, inward and outward at once, loving of sentiment but not wallowing in sentimentality, sophisticated, in love with love and with being alive in the world... not afraid of seeming tender. If any of this strikes you as square or passe or naive, then, this ain't your movie.
L. S. Slaughter "silvox" (Chapel Hill, NC)
The story? Well, thin, even by today's lughead standards (widower and widow fall in love against some lovely French scenery shot in winter), but it's obvious Lelouch was going for something that was quite new, then: a marriage of film and music that was not a "musical" per se, but rather, the forerunner of MTV (well, MTV with a soul, let's say). Cut loosely but thankfully not on-the-beat to Lai's jazzy/lush mid-60s score, Lelouch suceeds darn well. The freeze-frame ending cued to the final electric piano note, and that moment when Anouk Aimee pauses for the longest time and says to Jean-Louis, "You never told me about your wife", are two of my favorite filmgoing moments.
"Un Homme et une Femme" is emblematic of a world-view which I, for one, wish would take hold of folks again and topple the psychotic-trash-nihilistic consciousness now dominating pop culture. It was thoughtful, romantic, inward and outward at once, loving of sentiment but not wallowing in sentimentality, sophisticated, in love with love and with being alive in the world... not afraid of seeming tender. If any of this strikes you as square or passe or naive, then, this ain't your movie.
L. S. Slaughter "silvox" (Chapel Hill, NC)