1. I spent many hours in the Vizio room today enjoying movies on the Criterion Channel.
I started by finishing The Horse's Mouth (1958), an offbeat comedy based on the novel by Joyce Cary. Alec Guiness wrote the screenplay and plays the primary subject of the movie, a rude, eccentric, often amoral, but brilliant painter named Gulley Jimson. Guiness is brilliant. If you've seen Guiness in multiple movies, you know that he has that rare ability of playing a wide range of comic and tragic characters and that he absolutely transforms himself into the being a wholly unique character with each role he plays. Guiness appears to me, at least, to be having a blast play Gulley Jimson. Jimson is an exaggerated character, satirizing (I think) all of the qualities generally thought to apply to an obsessed artist, and Guiness plays Gulley Jimson to the hilt with moments of serious insight into the life and thoughts of an artist and with many zany scenes of Gulley Jimson obsessively pursuing his art and the money to underwrite his efforts.
2. The Criterion Channel pairs movies and presents them as double features.
In listening to the people interviewed in the "Adventures in Moviemaking" series, nearly all of them talk wistfully about going to double features years ago and address their sadness that if any theaters still show double features, it's rare.
After I watched The Third Man, named by the British Film Institute as the best British movie of the 20th century, I decided to watch the movie that placed second, Brief Encounter (1945); to my delight, I discovered that the Criterion Channel paired it with In the Mood for Love (2000), a movie I'd never heard of from Hong Kong. Criterion titled this double feature Blue Valentines.
The rest of my day of watching movies was set.
Brief Encounter tells the story of a married man and a married woman who, after a chance meeting at a train station, begin to meet with each other weekly and fall in love.
It's a sensitive and complex movie. Both characters, played by Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, are simultaneously dedicated to their respective spouses and children and are delirious with excitement and passion about the mutual attraction they feel for each other, leaving them by turns confused and guilty, blissful and enraptured.
As enthralling as I found the story and the acting, most of all I enjoyed the visual experience of watching Brief Encounter.
The movie was shot in black and white. Like The Third Man (also a black and white movie), the director of photography (or cinematographer) for Brief Encounter was Robert Krasker. As a master of light and shadow, Krasker expresses externally what the two lovers are experiencing inwardly. His shots of the rushing trains amplifies the headlong momentum of the couple's passion and the billowing clouds of steam, having an effect much like fog, accentuate the lovers' inner uncertainty about their relationship.
In addition, faces shot in black and white are almost nakedly revealing of what's happening inside a character. In particular, as the Celia Johnson character tells the story of the affair she and her lover entered into, Krasker gives us a series of portraits of her face, of her joy and anguish, of her wide eyed peering into herself, of the complex emotions she feels while telling this story and felt while it was happening. I thought, at times, that the photography in this movie was so aligned with the story's emotional content and so brilliant in its capacity to tell the movie's story, that Brief Encounter could have, at times, worked brilliantly as a silent movie.
3. This evening, I settled into my viewing of the double feature's second movie, In the Mood for Love.
Written and directed by Kar-Wai Wong and set in Hong Kong in 1962, In the Mood for Love (2000) tells the story of a man and a woman, played by Tony Chiu-Was Leung and Maggie Cheung, who are next door neighbors in an apartment building and discover that their spouses are having an affair.
Told in a sequence of fragments that shift from place to place and are shot in tight hallways, crowded restaurants and food halls, cramped work places, in small rooms, and on the often rainy streets of Hong Kong, the movie charts the progress of the relationship between this man and woman as they suffer the pain of being cheated on and navigate the attraction they feel for each other.
Unlike Brief Encounter, In the Mood for Love is shot in color. Whereas light and shadow expressed the mood and inward struggles portrayed in Brief Encounter, in In the Mood for Love, the mood and emotions of these characters' inward life is expressed through colors of passion and by the claustrophobic spaces the man and woman occupy. I won't give away what these characters decide to do about their feelings for each other. I'll just say that I thought the different ways they felt and responded were in harmony with the movie's photography and visual textures.
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