the Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Odd Man Out
try the Man Between.
Once again it's Carol Reed filming amongst the broken shards of a postwar city, this time Berlin. Once again James Mason is a political fugitive, this time trying to free himself from the Cold War trap of the East and flee to the West. Reed has a stunning talent for communicating the cynical amorality which takes hold during difficult times, and Berlin as he films it feels like walking back into an unreproducible moment. Like Spy's Richard Burton, Mason's best brilliance lay in communicating the tumultuous inner life of a particular brand of cold, arch, cerebral character, and this is a very well-written example. That lovely, subtle irony at the end, which I won't give away, involving an ever-lurking boy on a bicycle, is heart-breaking.
If you liked Birth
Secretary
Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast
then try Fur: an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
Leonard Shainberg, who directed that most unconventional love story, Secretary, turns his camera on another, equally unconventional, but for different reasons. Fur is the sweet, sensuous, visually compelling story about a fictional friendship which led Diane Arbus into her life's work. Critics thought it was over-sentimental and wallowed in its own strangeness, but it's well-acted, with strong chemistry between Nicole Kidman as Arbus and her fur-covered beloved played by Robert Downey Jr. The photography is both gorgeous and intimate, giving us that same feeling that Birth did of being simultaneously inside Kidman's head and just beside her, intimately and endlessly watching her reactions. As she's one of those rare actors whose face I could happily watch for a very long time, and as one of the main objectives of this film seems to be to hypnotize its audience into a sort of sensually opiate state (much as that old, strange Beauty and the Beast did), I thought it was well worth the time.
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