Lili Marleen (1981)

Second viewing; first viewed on November 13, 1988.

A fictional story inspired in some events of the life of German singer Lale Andersen.

Willie is a German cabaret singer living in Switzerland, where she meets and has a relationship with a Jewish member of the anti-Nazi resistance. She is, through a backstabbing maneuver of her lover's father, deported from Switzerland. The lovers then take separate paths: she becomes a National idol in Nazi Germany while her lover continues his resistance work in Switzerland. Their encounters become increasingly risky and rare.

This is not as bad as it seemed on my first viewing. The cinematography is good, and the film is well produced and flashy in an attractive way. The script is indeed weak, and frankly the whole thing took a slightly self-parodic air as it advanced towards the punchline-like ending. As some reviewers noticed, the plot mirrors the lyrics of the title song, which is played incessantly during the film. This is essentially a melodrama about lovers torn apart, and only marginally about the social responsibility of the artist, a theme which is better explored in Mephisto, released a few months later.

Rating: 31 (up from 25)

Arara Vermelha (1957)

At a mining community in Brazil, a hired miner tries to steal a diamond and is caught. The police chief is in serious financial trouble and decides to steal the rock himself, and flee with his pregnant wife to a big city. He takes the original thief as his guide through the region's rivers and wild country. Another woman blackmails the police chief into taking her with them as well. They are chased by the mine's owner and a man of partial indigenous origin whom he uses as a guide.

Simple-minded yet watchable adventure. It is technically well made, but I can't assess the cinematography properly since the copy I saw was of inferior quality -- it was dark and plagued with interlacing. Ethnographical documentary footage depicting indigenous people is edited into the film to give the illusion of a seamless narrative at some points.

Rating: 33

Ganga Bruta (1933)

A man kills his wife on his wedding night for "finding out" she was not a virgin. He is sent to a small town to work on a huge engineering project in the hopes of forgetting his "disillusionment". He feels attracted towards his host's fiancée, who retributes.

Partly silent with subtitles, partly spoken.

Interesting if imperfect drama. The premise is very promising: a man who feels cuckolded becomes subsequently the agent of another's cuckoldry. The film could be summed up as a study on masculinity in its purest state. The filming technique is far from flawless, but overall it is effective (I especially liked the brawling sequences). One problem for me was that it never transcended a mere realistic framework in which it clearly challenged credibility. For one thing, the main character is an educated man and thus is supposed to have more of a civilized veneer than he is shown to have. The ending is a bit of a stretch, too.

Rating: 58

Mulher (1931)

Love life of a woman of humble origins. Most of the movie dwells on her relationship and cohabitation with a middle-class writer.

A surprise. Although some parts of the movie are lost, there is enough here to satisfy lovers of good cinema. Not only it is rare to see a Brazilian movie this good, there aren't many films as well directed from any part of the globe. The film makes favors to no one: both poor and rich are depicted with all their faults and problems. The script may lack some plot elaboration at some points (which is anyway hard to assess given the incompleteness of the extant print), but this is easily forgiveable in face of the film's abundant qualities. Some sequences stand out: the protagonist doing the laundry outdoors while she is watched by strangers; the sequence at the tennis club, and many others.

Silent with intertitles, and a soundtrack of famous romantic short pieces.

Rating: 73

Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980)

Third viewing; first viewing was on June 15, 1987, and second one on May 1, 1989.

English title: My American Uncle.

Three characters whose lives cross paths at some points, and whose actions provide an illustration for a behavioral scientist's theories.

This has all the airs of a pretentious movie. If one takes seriously its pretention of exemplifying the expounded theories, it fails. The fictional sections are either flimsily related  to the theoretical narration, or -- and that is perhaps even worse -- are very trivial depictions. The non-fictional exposition is basically correct, at least from what I read in the science press; the exception to that is the ascribing of psychological causes for some diseases such as cancer and cardiac diseases. This is just false, according to recent scientific research; immunity is apparently influenced by a person's mood, but not to the extent which the scientist in the film implies. I couldn't help construing this film as something quite different from what its appearances showed. Its overall structure and the abundance of ridiculous details make the case that this is just a joint parody of the inanity of soap operas and of the sort of sacrality which is ascribed to scientists by laypersons. The film's ending reveals as a central theme the will to change the world by acting on people's minds; it is a recurrent theme in the "mad scientist" genre, and very much in evidence in the mindset dating from the 60s to the present day. Viewed from that angle, the film is not totally negligible, although it might be considered, judging from its length, as a joke on its audience as well.

Rating: 40 (down from 49)