Our revels now are ended

The best film we saw in July was made in l947, Howard Hawks’s “Red River,” starring John Wayne and a young and improbably gorgeous Montgomery Clift. It happens that “Red River” is a great Western and a very good film, and this summer’s screen fare has been mostly dreck, but we found it curious that our peak viewing should happen in a re-run house, the Oak Street, which is now a part of Minnesota Film Arts along with University Film Society. Just remember when you need a movie and the listings are bleak that the Oak Street offers a steady stream of good product, culled from past decades, and U Film Soc usually has something of international interest.

The best current offerings were a bizarre little documentary, “Capturing the Friedmans,” and a profoundly depressing Swedish film, “Lilya 4-Ever.” “Friedmans,” expertly woven by director Andrew Jarecki and editor Richard Hankin out of hours of home movies and home videos, supplemented with filmed interviews, tells a sad, instructive story.

Arnold Friedman, a popular teacher and the father of three affectionate sons in an upper-middle-class Long Island suburb, was also a pedophile. He was appalled by his own sexuality and hid it from his family, friends and colleagues. Certain imported magazines in plain brown wrappers led a postal inspector to his house in 1987, at the height of a wave of day-care scandals and child molestation scares, many of them baseless and all of them inflated. Arnold was victimized by sex-panicked cops and prosecutors and finally framed for molesting children who came to his home for computer classes, confessing to abuses which he almost certainly did not commit. His worst crimes appear to have been lying to his wife and ordering child porn from the Netherlands, but his own complicated self-loathing—in association with dirty-minded law-enforcement personnel hell-bent on finding a molester—destroyed him and his family. He drew a long prison sentence and died while incarcerated. One of his sons—also almost certainly innocent—also confessed to abusing children and went to prison.

From the outside, the Friedmans looked like an ideally happy family, in part because they constantly filmed and taped themselves having good times: at birthdays, on holidays, and just clowning around. The films show each son as a small boy, an adolescent, and an adult, although Seth, the middle son, refused to participate in “Capturing.” The clown motif figured so strongly in their family story that the oldest son, David, turned it into a profession, becoming a popular children’s birthday clown in New York City. Jarecki and his colleagues thus had a wealth of images to select, and they’ve done a masterful job.

There is no judgment or real conclusion, just the painful events of the family’s destruction. We see and hear cops, lawyers and “witnesses” confidently describing events that we, at least, are certain never happened. The single voice of sanity in “Friedmans” is that of Debbie Nathan, a thoughtful writer who has studied sex panics for 25 years and who helps us to see the machinery in which Arnold and his son Jesse were trapped. It’s not an easy film to watch, but the images sear the viewer’s mind like John Wayne’s Red River brand on the rumps of his cattle.

“Lilya 4-Ever” won a flock of prizes at international film festivals, and it is neatly, even elegantly, made by director Lukas Moodysson, who also wrote the screenplay. That said, we must tell you that Moodysson so stacks the cards that we lost confidence in his film about halfway through. Not only does the heroine, Lilya (heartbreakingly beautiful Oksana Akinshina), consistently make excessively stupid choices but the others in her world behave like Hobbesian monsters in a war of all against all. Great art has been made out of stories unlit by a ray of hope, but we felt assaulted rather than moved by this brutal fiction that deals with the horrifying international sex traffic in children.

Lilya, a defiant 15-year-old abandoned by her desperate mother in a bleak post-Soviet city (it was filmed in the Estonian capital, Tallinn), tries to survive on her own. Soon she falls into the clutches of a pimp, who delivers her to colleagues in Sweden; they take her passport and lock her in. She is treated like a portable vagina, used by her captors, trotted round to clients and grudgingly fed McDonalds swill. Alone in a strange city, pinned into a ghastly life, she imagines visits from her only friend, a homeless glue-sniffer named Volodya who—in her dreams—has sprouted wings. If you’re feeling too cheerful and need to come down, this’ll do it.

Unfortunately, last months’s offering at U Film Soc didn’t delight us: “Chaos,” written and directed by Coline Serreau, the director responsible for the original “Three Men and a Baby,” grasped after major themes—feminism, anti-racism, trafficking in women—but let them float through its manicured fingers. The expert Vincent Lindon plays Paul, an executive with a chic wife, Hélène (Catherine Froh), and spoiled son, Fabrice (Aurélien Wiik). One rainy night a North African woman, Noémie (Rachida Brakni), who is fleeing several men begs the couple for a lift, but Paul rolls up his window and ignores her while her pursuers beat her. Stricken with guilt, Hélène goes to visit Noémie in hospital and finds herself drawn in to her various struggles for independence from her family and her exploiters. It ends, senselessly but happily, with the resolution of the couple’s conflict with Fabrice and the apprehension of an international ring of traffickers: Lilya Lite, maybe.

It’s also our sad duty to report that “Hulk,” Ang Lee’s long-awaited film of the rageful green hero/monster, fails to deliver much excitement or even interest. The bland Eric Bana plays Bruce Banner, a scientist whose father’s genetic experiments induced in him a condition that, when he is angered, causes him to turn emerald green, swell to giant size and hurl large pieces of machinery at anyone nearby. We mean large pieces, like fire trucks and army tanks. The only pleasure we found in the film lay in the animated transformations of Bana to Hulk, and there were only three of those. Jennifer Connelly as Eric’s girlfriend, Sam Elliott as her father, and Nick Nolte as Eric’s father all looked as if they wished they were in some other picture, and so did we. In the interest of full disclosure: our son-in-law Mark Goodermote worked on “Hulk” and warned us that Ang and the producers had had creative differences. Not creative enough.

“Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” stars the probable next governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Nick Stahl and Claire Danes as an endangered breeding pair of humans. As everyone but the terminally out of touch must surely know, Schwarzenegger’s Terminator is a robot who has been sent back from the future to a time near our own to either destroy (“T1”) or rescue (“T2” and “T3”) a certain human being or his mother. The human being, John Connor (Stahl), must survive because he and his mate (Danes) will “save humanity” when the machines attack. Here in “T3” Arnold’s task is complicated by T-X (Terminatrix?) a shiny new-model robot who can do things he can’t, like regenerate her parts and shift her voluptuous shape into a copy of anyone else’s (Kristanna Loken). We enjoyed the eye candy, but there aren’t enough jokes, and Arnold’s signature “I’ll be back” rings a trifle hollow.

Late-breaking news: John Woo has spent some of his millions rehabilitating classic films of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, and the most recent local release is Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle),” starring Bourvil, Alain Delon, Yves Montand and Gian Maria Volonte. It is a leisurely, masterful helping of film noir in which the brilliant Melville shows us how to film a proper slaughter in the woods, a creepy episode of delirium tremens, and a thrilling heist sequence lasting twenty minutes without dialogue. These are all techniques that Truffaut, Dassin, and others fooled around with but Melville offers what might well be definitive versions.

We fared better at the theater, enjoying the two offerings we sampled, Jungle’s “Orson Welles Rehearses Moby Dick,” by Kent Stephens, and at Theatre in the Round, Gilbert & Sullivan’s masterpiece, “The Mikado.” “Orson Welles” is a talky, literary play, interestingly conceived and wonderfully performed, about an actual production Welles mounted in London in 1955 starring himself as the obsessive Captain Ahab. (Yes, Jean-Pierre Melville admiringly took Herman M’s name for his own.) Stephens has a lively sense of structure and a real appreciation of Melville’s rich language, and he successfully evokes the theater scene in postwar London. The play is performed, as befits a rehearsal, on a bare stage. “No props!” Welles tells his cast at their first meeting, and indeed the actors make do with random-appearing clothes and nothing to hold in their hands but some loops of cable let down from the flies. In an expert cast, Beth Gilleland, Michael Ritchie and Ron Menzel stand out, and you have until Aug. 24 to catch them at it.

Community theaters are always a risky bet, but the Twin Cities’ oldest, Theatre in the Round Players, pays off big with the first production of—if I’m counting right—their 52nd season, “The Mikado.” So campy it doesn’t even get picketed, this Victorian treat set in a wholly fantastic “Japan,” features Sullivan’s loveliest music and some of Gilbert’s wittiest lyrics. Stage director Randy Winkler and music director Heather Payne manage the jokey text, stylized action, and nicely sung score with poise and panache, and you have until Aug. 17 to see the show. In the words of Gilbert & Sullivan’s contemporary Max Beerbohm, it’s just the sort of thing you’ll like, if you like that sort of thing.

Readers, this is our last column for Southside Pride, and before we end it let us urge you to patronize the Fringe festival, a rich source of innocent merriment, to quote “Mikado.” We haven’t seen a preview but we’re planning to go as often as we can. Two good-looking productions show at the Guthrie in August: an adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” at the mainstage, in a version imported from Dublin’s Gate Theater, and “Nickel and Dimed,” a play by Joan Holden of the San Francisco Mime Troupe based on Barbara Ehrenreich’s book about minimum-wage workers Next season looks full of promise, with Frank Theater’s productions of Friedrich Duerrenmatt’s modern revenge tragedy, “The Visit,” and Marc Blitzstein’s Brecht/Weill-influenced opera, “The Cradle Will Rock.” We’ve enjoyed our years together and we wish you many more urban amusements.

This is all they wrote.