Araya (Milestone)
Release date: May 10
Standard list price: $29.95
Milestone Films releases many different kinds of movies, but if the distributor has a signature style, it’s the merger of documentary and fiction – depictions of real life colored, in one way or another, with the aesthetic control of fiction.
I am Cuba, The Exiles, On the Bowery and In This World all fulfill this compelling generic tendency. Araya, the lone feature from Venezuelan cineaste Margot Benacerraf, is only the latest luminous example of this multidisciplinary approach to cinema.
Like few films before or after it, this 1959 movie shatters the boundaries between narrative film, documentary and avant-garde cinema, fitting liberally into any and all of these distinctions. Its compositions rich with painterly elegance – the photographs of Walker Evans come to mind – Araya is a document of the three families living around and working on the titular peninsula in northeastern Venezuela. Benacerraf observes the people’s lives from sunrise to sunset and beyond, as they cut salt from the era’s massive lagoons, sell fish, grow food and make pottery.
And that’s it, really. Though the director films the inhabitants’ routines with a majestic, un-documentarylike, almost certainly storyboarded pattern of gliding, soaring camerawork, there is no story to speak of. Sharing the ethnographic passions of early documentarian Robert Flaherty, Benacerraf allows us to contemplate a culture, illuminating the repetitive lives of people who labor, day and night, for basic necessities.
The beautiful Spanish-language narration is more poetry than prose, lending itself to florid, strangely appropriate sentimentalizing of the action (Shoveling salt will be one character’s “soul memory of childhood”). The sound of the narrator’s words, with their mixture of poetic reiterations of tropes and elliptical reportage, join with the movie’s natural soundscapes, which are borne of the same atmosphere: The metronomic beating of salt is an aural reminder of the repetition of the dwellers’ lives.
The way Bencerraf tells it, the Arayan Peninsula — itself a living, breathing, heaving organism — has been untouched by industry and progress for some 450 years. The laborers who live and die on the land are skipping records of sweat and scars, forever enacting the same menial tasks.
It’s no surprise that Stuart Klawans praised the recent 35mm restoration of Araya, calling attention to its “outraged social conscience.” This is a people’s movie, perhaps the ultimate study of a class of peasants in perpetual toil; a similar film could surely be made about the migrant workers who work under slavish conditions to grow our affordable supermarket produce.
But I’m not sure I see the outrage Klawans does, because according to the information we’re given, the workers’ spoils don’t go the pockets of multinational corporations but rather to create self-sufficiency on their cloistered peninsula. The politics of Araya are never more than subtextual and open to interpretation. If anything, Benacerraf sides with the preservation of the hardscrabble lifestyle: When industrial development finally arrives on the land at the end of the film, and we learn that machines may finally usurp the human hand, it’s depicted as a menacing scourge, scored by music that might accompany an enemy’s advance in a war movie. At any rate, there’s no denying the beauty of Benacerraf’s bravura vision, a cinematic tour de force that remains immortal, even if the Arayan Peninsula has, finally, changed.
The Milestone disc is loaded with Criterion-worthy supplements, including Benacerraf’s 22-minute film Reveron, about a Brazilian artist, two TV interviews with the director, a documentary about Benacerraf from 2007 and two audio commentaries.
Something Wild (Criterion)
Release date: May 10
SLP: $20.99
Something Wild is a pretty unserious movie, and a curious choice for Criterion to reissue. But it holds up well nonetheless, feeling hiply postmodern compared to many of its ‘80s contemporaries. Jeff Daniels gives one of his signature performances as Charles, a flustered, straight-laced workaholic who falls under the convincing spell of Melanie Griffith’s impulsive punk and ultimately fights for her love against her secret husband, a convict played with psychotic gusto by Ray Liotta. Director Jonathan Demme knows exactly how over-the-top this source material is, even when it mutates into a bloody thriller, and if you surrender yourself to its whims, it’s a lot of fast-paced fun. The credits are a rogue’s gallery of counterculture hipsters, from John Waters as a used-car salesman to John Sayles as a motorcycle cop to post-punk act The Feelies playing a high-school reunion house band and covering I’m a Believer. The bonus features are scant for a Criterion disc; we just get new interviews with Demme and screenwriter E. Max Frye and an essay by David Thompson.
Such Good Friends (Olive Films)
Release date: May 17
SLP: $22.49
One of the final films by the great Otto Preminger, 1971’s Such Good Friends shares more in common with the films of Mike Nichols and Elaine May (the latter wrote the screenplay under a pseudonym) and even Robert Altman. Dyan Cannon plays Julie Messinger, a mentally unbalanced housewife turned emotionally numb stoic of sarcasm when her prickish, impotent husband’s (Laurence Luckinbill) simple mole-removal surgery goes horribly awry. Such Good Friends is a smorgasbord of sexual depravity and dysfunction, a sobering reminder of free love’s disastrous consequences and a wry reflection on man’s (not woman’s) narcissism and selfishness. A nice addition to the aimless, reckless ’70s cinema ethos.
Ward No. 6 (Kino)
Release date: May 3
SLP: $26.99
Russia’s official entry in the recent Academy Awards, Karen Shakhnazarov’s Ward No. 6 is a strange, willfully obtuse art-house shape-shifter based on a Chekhov short story of the same name. Told with a mixture of pseudo-documentary interviews, flashbacks and ersatz home movies, Ward No. 6 is an existential anti-mystery with no resolution, a puzzle with no clear image even when completed. It concerns a large-foreheaded doctor at an insane asylum who is admitted into the psych ward himself after a series of philosophical conversations with a mania-suffering inmate changes his perspective on life. The source material may be brilliant – it’s Chekhov, after all – but Shakhnazarov’s film is a dry and ponderous exercise in style and theory, and about as unsatisfying as cinema gets. Beware the faint yellow English subtitles, whose transposition over the images is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Many of the translations are unreadable.