By John Thomason
Terribly Happy (Oscilloscope Laboratories)
Release date: July 13
Standard list price: $26.99
Following in the footsteps of Roger Vadim (…And God Created Woman), George Sluizier (The Vanishing) and Michael Haneke (Funny Games), Danish filmmaker Henrik Ruben Genz becomes the latest foreign-language director to remake his own movie in English with his latest picture, Terribly Happy. This itch to Hollywoodize previous successes is a curious tendency that is probably worth an essay in itself, invariably suggesting creative stagnation, acknowledgement of imperfection in the original work, the chance to pursue new ideas in an old context or some combination of these motivations. Suffice it to say that in the particular case of Terribly Happy – Denmark’s official entry in this year’s Academy Awards – a Hollywood riff on the story makes more sense than any of these others, because Terribly Happy is already rooted in traditions of iconic American cinema; it’s a film that’s foreign in language only.
Perhaps the most immediate genre identification is that of the classic American Western, albeit a subversive one. The protagonist (and gradual antihero) of the film is Robert Hansen (Jakob Cedergren), the archetypal new marshal sent to clean up a corrupt rural town. He carries his own distressing emotional baggage – he was reassigned to the town after a violent domestic dispute – but compared to the area’s drunken, drug-addled, pockmarked denizens, Robert is a force of sanity and ostensible goodness, trying as he might to play things by the book. But he’s soon informed that the previous marshal, like many people in the town who didn’t play by its rules, “disappeared.”
The atmosphere of Terribly Happy is ominous, engrossing and sustained from the opening fade-in to the closing credit. The color-drained, barren tableaux of cows, mud and a forbidding bog provides a despairing context for the weird local color, including a shady doctor who shoots heroin (Lars Brygmann), a shopkeeper who locks children in storage compartments, and a little girl who pushes a stroller without a baby down desolate streets while her father (Kim Bodnia), the town’s intimidating kingpin, beats her mother (Lene Maria Christensen), the town’s closest approximation of a looker.
It’s through this prototype of the vulnerable, battered wife that Robert becomes entangled in his own sordid, bloody mess, calling to mind The Postman Always Rings Twice and the entire pulp-novel pantheon. Thus the film shifts from classic Western to classic noir faster than you can say “Anthony Mann,” while reinterpreting both Hollywood genres in a modern absurdist setting reminiscent of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and, as many critics have already pointed out, the world of early Coen brothers.
Like those directors’ best works, there’s an ironic smirk underneath the fatalistic terror of the practically predestined plot that many will find alienating. But I admire the film’s deliberate plunge into cult oddity, one that wears its cinematic references brazenly on its blood-stanched sleeve. Besides, beneath all the irony, there’s a bleakness no dark humorist could conceal. Robert becomes so hardened by his experience in the town – where it’s dump or be dumped in that hideous swamp – that the feeling you’re left with is fairly brutal and uncompromising, so much that no Hollywood ending could alleviate. Let’s hope Genz retains this atmosphere when he films his own Hollywood ending.
Everlasting Moments (Criterion)
Release date: June 29
SLP: $35.99
Shot appropriately in the faded sepia tones of turn-of-the-20th-century photography, Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments is a handsome memory film about the real-life Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen), a housewife locked in a repressive marriage to a violent drunkard in pre-suffrage Sweden, who finds a liberating creative outlet in a Contessa box-camera. Everlasting Moments is a novelistic personal narrative, but it’s also a sweeping look at Sweden’s social and political history in the early 1900s, refracted through the lens of Larsson’s camera and her ever-expanding family (in a sobering reminder of those pre-birth-control times, we see a pregnant Larsson repeatedly jumping off her kitchen table in an attempt to abort her seventh child). It’s an emotionally rich movie composed of tight, classical portraiture and little visual miracles, whether it’s a butterfly’s light reflecting onto the hand of a shopkeeper or a moving iris shot of Larsson, the unheralded photographer becoming, for once, the camera’s subject. Criterion’s two-disc, director-approved set includes an hour-long documentary about Troell titled Jan Troell’s Magic Mirror, a documentary spotlighting photographers from the real Maria Larsson and a featurette on the making of Everlasting Moments.
Lost Keaton (Kino)
Release date: July 6
SLP: $25.99
Unlike Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton never turned his iconic silent-film star status into an equally sensational career in the talkies. But this collection of “lost” shorts (if they’re lost, how are we able to see them?) debunks the popular wisdom that his career in sound cinema was a complete bust, and it’s due vindication for an actor I’ve always preferred over his main period rival. There are 16 shorts total here, shot between 1934 and 1937 and mastered from the archival 35mm source materials. The two-reelers, which run from roughly 15 and 20 minutes each, find Keaton exploring his comic ingenuity on the baseball diamond, the opera, the chemistry lab and much more, and the DVD also includes a musical montage of Keaton’s pratfalls and stunts titled “Why They Call Him Buster.” It’s a real gem of a set, and it coincides with the July 6 two-disc reissue of Steamboat Bill, Jr. ($26.99), also from Kino.
Pretty Bird (Paramount)
Release date: June 29
SLP: $14.49
This poor little dramedy about three men who attempt to design and market a rocket belt debuted at Sundance at 2008 and never found a distributor. Looking at its belated DVD release, it’s easy to see why; though it has some memorable characters and an appealing cast, its story is programmatic, never aspiring to anything more than going through the motions. Billy Crudup plays Curtis Prentiss, a delusional huckster and empty suit whose latest get-rich-quick scheme involves the development of a rocket belt, or jet pack, which has beguiled rocket scientists for decades. He culls his wisdom from corny self-help platitudes and tired Dead Poets Society dialogue; his lack of business acumen and decidedly unhip cultural references make him a pretty funny character until you realize he’s just doing Michael Scott from The Office. Curtis recruits old friend and mattress salesman Kenny (David Hornsby) to be the money man on the venture, and he discovers out-of-work rocket scientist Rick Honeycutt (Paul Giamatti in one of his more odious roles) to do all the work for what turns out to be none of the credit. Cue the requisite internecine conflicts and spewn invectives that accompany any story of greed’s corrupting influence in the face of potential profit. Actor Paul Schneider, who also wrote the script, directs for the first time, and he brings an unobtrusive, workmanlike style to the material. But still: been there, done that.