Cine, No! Teatro, Si!

This has been a disappointing year for American films so far, but we’ve seen a few good foreign flicks: The Brazilian “City of God,” directed by Katia Lund and Fernando Meirelles, moved and horrified us with its fast pace, gritty textures, and ultra-violent action. The enormous cast of beautiful Brazilians, most of them children, raced and tumbled through 150 minutes of nonstop action in and around a favela, or slum, in Rio de Janeiro called, ironically, the City of God. In its mud streets, living in wave upon wave of cheaply built shacks among street vendors and predatory police, a horde of children, as numerous and destructive as rats, erupt in a series of interlacing stories somewhat in the style of “Pulp Fiction.”

We meet a handful of main characters, mostly male, most of whom meet grisly early deaths (although one heroic chicken appears to survive, along with the hero who trades in his gun for a camera and becomes a photo-journalist). The easy availability of guns and drugs—depressingly familiar to viewers of American TV—limits the action to the temporary rise and ultimate fall that chart young gangsters’ careers. Yet the film is not depressing; its visual juice kept us jumping despite an almost total absence of dramatic complexity; we also admired the bold narrative engine that drives the film.

Adult women and men are in short supply, but it’s not hard to see why. There are no jobs in the City of God except what can be scrounged within the slum itself: peddling fish, selling soft drinks, selling drugs or selling oneself, either as muscle to the drug lords or as meat to outsiders who cruise the favela looking for cheap thrills. The police make hostile sweeps and kill slumdwellers so casually that mere survival approaches the miraculous. Within these grim limits the young actors do brilliant work, especially Leandro Firmino da Hora as Little Ze.

When we tell you that our next favorite film was “Old School,” one baby step up from “Porky’s,” you’ll understand what we mean about disappointment. A successful agreement not to overestimate audience intelligence, “Old School” stars a reptilian Vince Vaughan, clean-cut Owen Wilson, and thickly furred Will Ferrell as chums who decide to open an adult frat house on the campus of a bonehead college whose killjoy dean, Jeremy Piven, behaves like every college dean in every campus movie since “Horse Feathers,” (only here he has fake buck teeth).

It’s slightly—but only slightly—more intelligent than many such films and suffers from an almost total absence of speaking parts for women. There are shrewish-wife parts, chocolate-pudding-wrestling parts, take-off-your-shirt-and-give-an-old-man-cardiac-arrest parts, and even a few get-into-bed-with-the-leading-men parts, but it’s pretty much a guy thing. That said, we had a reasonably good time.
If it weren’t for “Monsoon Wedding,” “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” and “Chutney Popcorn” we might have liked the Anglo-Indian comedy “Bend It Like Beckham” even more than we did, with its story about a suburban London schoolgirl who becomes a soccer star despite her traditional Sikh family’s objections. But the scenes of engagement party, wedding preparation, and wedding celebration all looked recycled, especially in comparison with the fast, fresh footage of women playing soccer. Young Parminder Nagra plays Jesminder (“Jess”), the lead, and she is charming; Keira Knightley plays her best friend, Jules, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers struggles with the butch role of their coach. Director Gurinder Chadha (“Chutney Popcorn”) has a lilting eye for the rhythms of the game, but she could have cut 20 minutes without harm.

Don’t forget to see as many films as you can at the 26th annual Rivertown Film Festival, opening the first week in April, particularly such gems of the international festival circuit as Elia Suleiman’s “Divine Intervention.” The only film we previewed plays on Saturday morning, April 5: it’s local filmmaker Kathleen Laughlin’s “The Children Remember,” a documentary about Minnesota’s public orphanage in Owatonna, where thousands of neglected, abandoned, or orphaned children lived between the 1880s and the 1950s. Interviews with surviving residents, now in their 70s and 80s, make up the bulk of the film, textured with archival footage and minimal reenactments suggested by their memories. “Remember” is saddled with a pedestrian narration, nicely delivered by Kevin Kling, but the stories and faces of the interview subjects are riveting. At this moment, when orphanages are once again being considered as possible solutions to the problems of child welfare, this film provides a lot of material for reflection.

On the other hand, we had some good times at the theater, beginning with an accomplished Guthrie production of John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation,” the story of a lying, scheming charmer who just happens to be a Black teenager. Paul, the teenager in question, bursts in on the posh apartment of Flan and Ouisa Kittredge, a New York art dealer and his wife, pretending to be Sidney Poitier’s son and claiming that he went to school with their children. In the course of the action he is revealed to be both gay and a sociopathic liar, but Ouisa is charmed by the way he loves her life, and if the play has any real heft it is in her self-examination. Amy Van Nostrand made a smart, touching Ouisa and Danyon Davis as Paul, the wannabe, matched her elegance. The rest of the actors weren’t quite up to these two, but director Ethan McSweeney kept the pace up for a highly satisfactory evening. The scene in which the main characters’ pampered children throw a variety of tantrums over their parents’ mishandling of Paul’s imposture has two audiences, it seems: over-30s laughed themselves sick and under-30s frowned at the easy shots. “You said drugs and you looked at me!”” squeals one unattractive specimen. “Six Degrees” closes April 6.

Minneapolis Musical Theatre has moved from the tiny stage at Bryant-Lake Bowl to the narrow space of Hey City Upstairs, where stage director Steven Meerdink and musical director Kevin Hansen continue their heroic efforts to stage high-quality musicals with “Sunday in the Park with George.” We missed Latte Da’s production of the same show but were delighted with MMT’s. The four musicians including Hansen gave Stephen Sondheim’s beautiful, layered, minimalist score such an affectionate reading that it rang in our heads as we left the theater. We were reminded again just how important Sondheim’s quirky moves are to the musical theater in its decadence and how essential Minnesota Musical Theater is to the cultural life of the Twin Cities.

This production belonged to Stacey Lindell, who sang and performed impeccably in the roles of Dot, mistress of the painter Georges Seurat (get it?), and Marie. In the role of George, a part written for Mandy Patinkin, Christopher Zenner lacked the vocal chops to hold his own on stage, and the rest of the ensemble varied all the way from terrific to adequate. Meerdink & Co. made a wise decision not to try to bring off the Broadway dazzle of replicating the painting. The night we saw “Sunday in the Park” some of the scenery flats threatened to totter, but cast members kept their aplomb and there was scarcely a break in the action.

At the Minnesota Opera, Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman” received an elaborate, awkward production requiring soprano Eilana Lappalainen, who sang the heroine Senta, to sit in a straight chair and writhe for the entire first act. Her singing, and that of other cast members, was memorably luscious although she either totally lacked acting ability or else had been badly misdirected. The Minnesota Opera chorus sounded wonderful in many choral sections of the score, and the staging managed one satisfactorily creepy moment when the Dutchman’s crew are revealed to be corpses.

We’ve never seen a perfect production of any Chekhov play, but Jeune Lune’s “The Seagull” came as close as any American staging to expressing the dry humor and delicate sadness of this first of his four successful scripts. Kostya is the son of a famous actress and he lives on her brother’s country estate where he has fallen in love with Nina, the stagestruck daughter of a neighboring landowner. Kostya in turn is loved hopelessly by Masha, the bailiff’s daughter, who is loved hopelessly by the local schoolteacher. When Kostya’s mother, the actress Arkadina, comes to the country for the summer she brings her new lover, the fashionable novelist Trigorin. Nina performs for them in a play Kostya has written. Both mother and lover cruelly dismiss the play although the local doctor, Dorn, a former lover of Arkadina’s (who is hopelessly loved by the bailiff’s wife), praises it. Trigorin is drawn by Nina’s youth and beauty and seduces her on a whim. Idly Kostya kills a seagull and then wounds himself in a shooting accident.

Two years later Kostya still loves Nina, who has been abandoned by Trigorin. Masha has married her schoolteacher but neglects her husband and child to moon over Kostya; Masha’s mother still follows the doctor around like a puppy; Trigorin has gone back to Arkadina. Kostya has had some success as a writer. He meets Nina again and she compares herself to a restless seagull; he sees how her vitality and youth have been crushed by her hopeless passion, and how his mother and Trigorin are protected by their selfishness from the emotional damage suffered by him and Nina, and he shoots himself again.

Dominique Serrand’s production almost brings off this pitiless and pitiful little clockwork mechanism, jeweled with wit. His scenic design, featuring a grove of real birch trees, worked well, but we thought the actors traipsed through the trees distractingly. Still the production managed to catch the comic quality Chekhov insisted on in his depiction of an emotionally and intellectually superannuated social class that talks and races about endlessly to stifle a threatened cry of anguish.

Jason Lambert made a brilliant and moving Kostya, and Sarah Agnew was a lovely Nina; Steven Epp shines as Trigorin, a handsome monster (although his approach to the character seems to come from a gangster comedy), and Barbara Berlovitz brings out Arkadina’s capriciousness if not her regal allure. Charles Schuminski, double-cast as the uncle and the bailiff, Nathan Keepers as the schoolteacher, and Natalie Moore as Masha all gave fine performances, and pianist Kathryn LeBlanc and violinist Alison Pincus provided perfect occasional music. “The Seagull” plays through April 27.