Maroon Weekly

Branching Out:  3 Films You Won’t Find in B/CS Theaters

If you’ve already seen everything worth seeing at Premiere and Cinemark, this week provides an excellent opportunity to branch out, just in time for Spring Break.  MSC Aggie Cinema presents The Blind Side, and if you can swing a quick drive, you can also catch The White Ribbon and Last Year at Marienbad.  Let’s take them one by one.

The Blind Side

The Blind Side is exactly what you expect, a hackneyed cliché-athon with one charismatic lead performance.  Future star left tackle Michael Oher is a poor giant without a home who is taken in by the warm, white arms of the Tuohy family, led by their spitfire matriarch, and the film centers on the give-and-take between the magical Negro and the superheroine. Yes, the characterizations are that shallow, especially in the supporting arena with the precocious kid and the close-minded socialites. Sandra Bullock is undeniably charismatic as Mrs. Tuohy, the year’s most mesmerizing Mary Sue and The Blind Side’s greatest asset.

The Blind Side plays at Rudder Auditorium on March 5 at 7:00 and 9:30.

The White Ribbon

Like most of Michael Haneke films, The White Ribbon dominates us with all manner of domestic depravity, a riveting arty whodunit that plays its cards close to the vest like a distant father’s approval. But in a good way.

Set in a small German village in 1913, the film opens with a narrator who, after allowing that the story has been pieced together from memory and hearsay, a nod to the subjectivity of truth, explains the film’s intention: to “clarify some things that happened in this country.”  Thus we are thrust into the sprawling cast of families that comprise a village surrounding a baron’s estate during a period of strange incidents of violence: the doctor’s horse trips over a line, the farmer’s wife is killed in a machine accident, children are beaten, and more, while the camera holds back, silently witnessing without poking or exploiting.  Haneke patiently introduces us to the various villagers, floating from house to house as the tension mounts. With a rich black and white palette and a wealth of diverse characters, it’s like an August Sander volume come to life.

But The White Ribbon is no Steinbeck ballad of community. It’s a thorough account of how patriarchal abuse cultivated a society where repression and submission allowed the rise of the Nazi party. This thesis is accomplished by the mysterious attacks and the disgusting depiction of the village fathers—not coincidentally in roles of authority like baron, doctor, and priest. They’re physically abusive, emotionally manipulative, and altogether domineering figures, even in scenes with adult subordinates.

Spending much of its time with the town’s children, Haneke’s argument is a convincingly colored study of learned behavior.  At one point the villagers gather in the church, and, mistaking the baron’s absence as a sign of his displeasure, they grow uneasy, like children internalizing a parent’s passive aggressions. But Haneke fails to illustrate how early 20th century German society was uniquely repressed. I suspect there’s an argument about the psychological consequences of imperial government, but Haneke’s mind is elsewhere. Besides, he announces from the start that the truth is unknowable.

Formally accomplished in every respect—from the sumptuous black-and-white camerawork of Christian Berger to the screenplay by Haneke, which evokes a child’s quaking fear of parental punishment, to the sound editing which punishes us with the cry of a baby and the wail of a retarded child—The White Ribbon is a strong statement from Michael Haneke, winning the Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival. But the true marvel is that, even apart from its case against the patriarchy, The White Ribbon is so brimming with life and stories, yet, like Haneke himself, it still has some cards in its pocket.

The White Ribbon plays daily at the Angelika Film Center in Houston.

Last Year at Marienbad

If you love Memento or Lost or anything by David Lynch or Charlie Kaufman, you’ve got to see the original head-scratcher, Alain Resnais’ 1961 masterpiece Last Year at Marienbad, a captivating look at memory and truth.  Technically about a man who runs into a woman he swears he had an affair with last year—she doesn’t remember, but endures his pleading a little too easily—the couple are soon joined by a gun and a jealous third party and, well, you know.  The film is a postmodern landmark, the riddle of a narrative darting down empty corridors and looping back on itself, investigating hypothetical branches of a timeline that may in fact be real, or not, because what’s real anyway? Each of its formal elements—the needlessly baroque architecture, the haunting organ score, the dreamily gliding camerawork, everything—reflects the film’s riveting exploration of narrative and memory.  If you thought Pulp Fiction was innovative in its storytelling, just wait till you get a hold of Last Year at Marienbad.

Last Year at Marienbad plays at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston on March 7 at 5:00.