Fahrenheit 451 (2018)

If for no other reason, HBO’s remake of Fahrenheit 451 stakes a claim on history, because it gives Keir Dullea bragging rights as perhaps the only actor to appear in films based on the work of both Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. Unfortunately, this adaptation is far too concerned with being “timely” and “relevant,” thereby limiting its long-term significance. Bradbury’s anti-censorship message is perhaps more needed now than in 1953 when he wrote his classic novel, but it doesn’t come through in an urgent, principled way in Ramin Bahrani’s Fahrenheit 451 (trailer here), co-adapted with the great expat Iranian filmmaker Amir Naderi, which premieres this Saturday on HBO.

Guy Montag is a fireman, just like mentor, Captain Beatty. As you should know, that means they set fire to banned books (pretty much all of them), rather than extinguishing accidental fires (come to think of it, wouldn’t they still need old-fashioned firemen in a dystopian world?). Montag has never really thought about the implications of his work, except maybe when a repressed incident from his childhood resurfaces in his memory. However, an encounter with Clarisse McClellan, one of Beatty’s reluctant sources, starts churning up vague doubts. Not long after, he secretly takes home a contraband book, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. With McClellan’s help, the book spurs Montag to start thinking for himself, perhaps for the first time.

Montag is further haunted by the horrifying sight of an old fashioned “Eel,” who opts to self-immolate rather than abandon her books. In a significant departure from Bradbury (and Truffaut), she also happens to utter a word she really shouldn’t have, because it gives the Firemen a clue as to a game-changing book-preservation initiative the dissident underground has concocted. (As an aside, Montag’s media-anaesthetized wife Millie was cast, but later cut from the final film, which seems like a rather Orwellian act to make such a major character disappear without a trace.)

Without question, the greatest misstep of this Fahrenheit is the attempt to update the near dystopia with elements of internet culture and reality TV that will be familiar to contemporary viewers. However, this just distracts more than it enhances the films credibility. It’s a constant source of business undercutting the starkness of Bradbury’s original vision. Bahrani and Naderi also ash-can the background drumbeat of impending war, which explained why all these thought police regulations were implemented in the first place.

Still, the ever-reliable Michael Shannon is quite intriguing and compulsively watchable, playing the hard-nosed Beatty, who has his own secret print vices. In contrast, Michael B. Jordan is rather inert and inexpressive as Montag, the Fireman supposedly wrestling with his conscience and doubts. Nor is there much chemistry between him and Sofia Boutella’s McClellan. However, Dullea adds a note of integrity as the learned “Historian,” who is also involved in the book-preserving underground. That really was perfect casting.

Fahrenheit just doesn’t hold together as a persuasive cautionary vision, which is a shame, because we could use a good version about now. Quite problematically, it plays ideological favorites with the books we see burning. You will not find any conservative classics like Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in the Firemen’s bonfires, but it is hard to think of a book that would be less acceptable to the dystopian powers-that-be. In fact, it rather mixes the message when one of the underground “Book People” is introduced as “Chairman Mao” because she memorized the Little Red Book—yet you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in history who did more to censor and eradicate books than Mao Zedong. Sadly, the film never really drives home the point that we should apply the 1^st Amendment most to books and articles that we do not agree with, or else we risk adulterating our own constitutional protections. A major disappointment, Fahrenheit 451 premieres this Saturday (5/19), on HBO.

Tribeca ’12: Cut

The Yakuza are nothing like Chili Palmer in Get Shorty. They do not care about the state of Japanese cinema. They just want a struggling indie filmmaker to pay off his brother’s debts. The would-be auteur just might do so, but in an absolutely harrowing fashion in Iranian expatriate Amir Naderi’s Cut (trailer here), which screens during the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival.

Shuji is one of the more annoying cineastes you could hope to run across. He spends much of his days decrying the commercialization of cinema through a bullhorn on busy street corners. He has made three poorly received films, finance by his gangster brother Shingo, with money unwisely borrowed from the Yakuza. Unable to clear the debt, Shingo meets a violent end. Now the Yakuza turn to Shuji, giving him a seemingly impossible deadline to pay-up.

Obviously, the immature Shuji has never been good at that whole money-making thing. However, a proposal made in contempt quickly turns into a Yen-generating enterprise that carries wider significance for the filmmaker. One of the thugs in the Yakuza headquarters-boxing gym-tavern offers him five thousand Yen if Shuji allows him a free swing. Shuji accepts on the condition he do so in the lavatory where his brother was murdered, extending the same terms to any and all takers. With the clock ticking, Shuji endures a nightly beating, fortifying himself with his love of art cinema and guilt over his brother’s demise.

Cut has polarized critics in its European festival screenings, but it is one of the best films screening at Tribeca this year. Naderi (who was in Japan working on Cut at the time of the earthquake and tsunami) subverts the established Yakuza movie conventions, producing one of the most visceral in-your-face indictments of thuggish violence you will ever see on-screen. No, he does not make it easy for viewers, but that is the whole point, forcing them to endure long sequences of violence stripped of any possible romanticism. Like Yoko, the attractive bartender, who has no trouble cleaning up the bloody mess of Shingo’s murder, but is eventually sickened by the pummeling Shuji voluntarily submits to, the audience is forced to confront their own complicity as witnesses.

Naderi is clearly operating on two levels, depicting Shuji’s extreme fund-raising as an act of existential contrition, while also presenting it as a challenge to our sensibilities. Yet, Cut also serves as a valentine to cinema, eventually evolving into the Devil’s own homage to Cool Hand Luke, featuring a countdown of Shuji’s top one hundred films, amid absolutely punishing circumstances.

Hidetoshi Nishijima delves into some very dark places, portraying Shuji with convincing grit. Haunted but grounded, his work never allows viewers to dismiss the frankly unbearable on-screen events as the stuff of fable or metaphor. As the reluctant facilitators, Yoko and Hioshi, an old timer Yakuza, Takako Tokiwa and veteran character actor Takashi Sasano give exquisitely subtle, finely calibrated supporting turns, expressing their mounting revulsion and ethical confusion when confronting Shuji’s spectacle.

As drama, Cut is as intimate as the Cassavetes pictures Shuji venerates, but it is definitely big idea filmmaking. There is real substance to it, but it does not spoon-feed a few politically correct bromides to the audience and then sending them off to bed with a pat on the bottom, content in their raised consciousness. Naderi calls us all out, daring us to turn away from the mayhem unfolding on-screen. It is an audacious film, bolstered by some uncompromisingly honest performances. Very highly recommended, Cut screens Monday (4/23), Thursday (4/26), and Friday (4/27) during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival now underway throughout lower Manhattan.

Canadian Front ’11: The Neighbor

The tragic events still unfolding in Japan even had repercussions at a screening of a Farsi-language feature at a Canadian film festival here in New York City. The producer Amir Naderi, who emigrated from Iran after several of his films were banned by the Islamist government, was in Japan working on his next project when the earthquake and tsunami hit. Clearly, he was on the mind of his former editor Naghmeh Shirkhan last night, despite the justly enthusiast reception for her directorial debut, The Neighbor (trailer here), at MoMA’s 2011 Canadian Front.

Though of somewhat middle-aged years, Shirin is still a strikingly beautiful woman. She is not particularly interested in men though, particularly the one she has been reluctantly seeing. In truth, there are not a lot of eligible men in Vancouver’s Iranian community. There are not a lot of men, period. There is a very real phenomenon causing this demographic state. Frequently, Iranian men working abroad who are called back on business or personal matters have trouble returning—or so they say. Such is the case for Leila, the attractive young woman who just moved in across the hall from Shirin with her little girl Parisa.

At first, Leila wants nothing to do with the older woman. In time though, she starts exploiting Shirin as an emergency babysitter, much to her concern. It is not that Shirin does not enjoy spending time with Parisa—quite the contrary—but Leila’s erratic parenting is obviously not healthy for her little girl.

As Shirkhan observed during her post-screening remarks, Neighbor could never play in Iran while the current regime clings to power. By American standards, it would probably be rated PG, at most. However, Leila’s implied post-coital scene would be unthinkable under Iran’s rigid censorship. Dancing is a definite no-no too, and there is quite a bit of it in Neighbor. Indeed, it is Shirin’s outlet, professionally, artistically, and socially. Her traditional Persian dance classes are popular with Vancouver’s Iranian ladies of means, but on her own time Shirin attends her tango club functions. Featuring close contact between couples and a smoldering sexuality, the tango would definitely be a non-starter in the Revolutionary Republic.

Of course, most average Iranians would love the tango and they would probably appreciate Neighbor too. Though geopolitical issues surely factor into the characters’ back-stories (the circumstances surrounding Leila’s absent husband are particularly murky), Shirkhan focuses laser-like on the two women’s intimate dramas.

In her first acting role, Azita Sahebjam is a remarkably assured presence on screen. Her thoughtful nuance and mature sexuality quietly but surely pull viewers into her life. She is also quite a dancer. Evidently, the tango was new to her, but as the director of the Vancouver Pars National Ballet, she is one of the world’s leading performers of Persian dance. (She was also formerly affiliated with the precursor Pars National Ballet in Iran, before the Islamist government prohibited such sinful practices.) As Leila, Sahebjam’s real life daughter Tara Nazemi is also rather effective in an often less than sympathetic role. Undeniably attractive, she has a far more interesting “look” than that of the current crop of bland Hollywood starlets.

Though always deliberately restrained, The Neighbor is markedly astute in its observation of humanity. Shirkhan displays a sensitive touch, deftly guiding her novice cast through material that must have hit somewhat close to home for them. It is a very good film, highly recommended when it screens again today (3/20) at MoMA as part of Canadian Front. One hopes Naderi will be able to enjoy its continued success and the Japanese people will quickly recover from this disaster. (FYI, our President is so concerned, he is currently on a Bossa nova fact-finding mission in Brazil. Since it is clearly up to private citizens, you can support the Japan Society’s relief efforts here.)

Naderi’s Manhattan By Numbers

Manhattan By Numbers
Directed by Amir Naderi
Pathfinder Pictures

Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris works to the extent it does in large measure thanks to Gato Barbieri’s passionate music. His lush themes and dervish-like tenor saxophone brilliantly suggest the roiling emotions subsumed beneath the acts of on-screen debasement. It is a different city and different emotions, but Barbieri’s soundtrack for Amir Naderi’s Manhattan By Numbers (now available on DVD) is equally adept at expressing inner turmoil.

Out of work and six months in arrears, George Murphy has one day to pay his back rent or face certain eviction. With Christmas fast approaching, Murphy pounds the pavement with his address book in tow, hitting up every former colleague he can reach out to, but his fellow journalists are either unable, or as he increasingly suspects, unwilling to help. The one name that keeps coming up is Tom Ryan, an estranged friend who was also laid off from his newspaper job.

At first, Murphy hopes that Ryan might be willing to help, if he could only find him. However, as he follows leads to Ryan’s whereabouts, it becomes apparent that if anything, Ryan is in worse condition than Murphy, both financially and emotionally. However, Murphy foregoes other potential courses of action, to continue his search, almost out of compulsion. Feeling guilt for turning his back on Ryan, Murphy seems to fear a similar fate will befall him if he cannot find his friend and make amends.

While all bets are off in the Village, most of Midtown and Uptown Manhattan is organized in a very logical grid format of conveniently numbered streets running across the borough and avenues running up and down. Murphy starts his day in his Inwood apartment on 215th Street and proceeds to work his down the numbers to Wall Street. Along the way he takes numerous detours, which provide a photographic time-capsule of New York some fifteen years ago. While most landmarks remain, much has changed. In most cases for the best, (but briefly seeing the late, lamented Dojo’s restaurant on St. Mark’s will certainly make some nostalgic for their cheap reliable eats).

As Murphy, John Wojda has a distinct Stephen Collins vibe, but is very convincing as the desperate everyman trying to hold his home and family together. Numbers was Iranian director Amir Naderi’s first American film after expatriating to New York for greater artistic freedom. While the film’s simple, uncomplicated plot arguably reflects a sensibility foreign to American mainstream cinema it is a perfectly accessible, linear story, nicely underscored by Barbieri’s music. Clearly, the studio agreed, because as a DVD bonus, they included behind-the-scenes footage of the Argentinean musician in the studio with Teo Macero (Miles Davis’s longtime producer), recording the Numbers score.

Unique as a film that will interest fans of Barbieri, movies set in New York, and Iranian cinema, Numbers is much like the city in which it is set. It can be cold and naturalistic, but it also holds some surprising charms.