Day: February 3, 2011

BREAKING: Lionsgate Acquires Uday Hussein Film The Devil’s Double for Distribution

Dominic Cooper and Ludivine Sagnier in "The Devil's Double."

By Jason Apuzzo. Deadline Hollywood reports today that Lionsgate has acquired North American distribution rights to the Sundance hit The Devil’s Double, director Lee Tamahori’s new gangster epic about Uday Hussein and his body double. Libertas’ own Joe Bendel saw The Devil’s Double at Sundance and loved it (see his glowing review).

The film stars Dominic Cooper as Uday, and Ludivine Sangier as his mistress Sarrab. [Side note: expect to see lots of pictures of Ludivine Sangier here at Libertas in days ahead.] For those of you not familiar with the film, here’s the official description:

The year is 1987 and Baghdad is the playground for the rich and infamous- where anything can be bought, for a price. When army lieutenant, Latif Yahia (Dominic Cooper), is summoned from the frontline to Saddam’s palace, he is faced with an impossible request – to be Iraq’s notorious Black Prince Uday Hussein’s ‘fiday ,’ his body double. With his family’s lives as well as his own on the line, his fate is decided. Latif begins his journey as Uday Hussein, a man as widely hated as he is powerful. As he learns to walk, talk and act like Uday, he experiences the extravagance of a world filled with fast cars, endless money, easy women, and deeply depraved violence. Knowing who to trust becomes a matter of life or death, as he battles to escape from his forced existence alongside Sarrab (Ludivine Sangier), Uday’s notorious concubine. In a dynamic and chilling portrayal of Latif Yahia’s autobiographical novel, THE DEVIL’S DOUBLE charts one man’s struggle in a world of bloodlust, power and seduction.

Congratulations to the filmmakers, and we look forward to the film’s release. Here’s an interesting interview below with director Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, Die Another Day) about the film.

Posted on Feburary 3rd, 2011 at 2:14pm.

The Russian Ark Screenplay

By David Ross. Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) is a marvel: a ninety-six-minute movie consisting of a single unbroken tracking shot. With a sensual fluidity unmatched except perhaps by Ophuls’ La Ronde, the camera follows two ghosts – one Russian, the other European, one earnest, the other ironic – as they stroll through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

The centuries swirl gracefully about them, the twentieth century suddenly giving way to the nineteenth, the eighteenth suddenly giving way to the twenty-first, as if time itself were a gently shifting breeze. The film is pregnant with a wonderful faith that time is not an erosion, but an accretion, that some great memory catches the falling drop of the individual moment, that all is somehow gathered to the breast. As they make their tour, the ghosts maintain a patter of wry commentary and affectionate observation, humanists mingling in the parade of humanity. They have no urgent message to deliver and nothing to teach, thankfully; their pleasure is the film’s essential communication, though there is also a clouding of elegy. Meanwhile the camera makes a tour of its own, lingering on the splendid details of the palace: molding, gilding, ironwork, marble-work, drapery, china, crystal. The camera provides an implicit object lesson in the tradition of disciplined form that has made the beauty of the West, and this aspect of the film can only seem a terrible if inadvertent reproach. In comparison to the door handle or to the lace of a tablecloth, calmly wrought for the eye of God, whose discernment is infinite, our contemporary masterpieces – a Jackson Pollack, say, or the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao – flail hysterically, as if the soul itself were abandoned and drowning.

To promote and honor the film – one of the greatest ever in my opinion – I have fully transcribed the dialogue and annotated some of the artistic and architectural detail. This task required perhaps fifteen hours of truly tedious labor. I drew upon and sometimes cribbed directly from Paintings in the Hermitage by Colin Eisler and The Hermitage Collections (2 vols.) by Oleg Yakovlevich Neverov, Dmitry Pavlovich Alexinsky, Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky (who possibly figures in the film; see here and here).

It is sometimes difficult to identify who speaks what words, and I can’t vouch for the accuracy of my transcription in every instance. I look forward to receiving corrections and additional annotations from our conscientious and knowledgeable readers. Please consider the script below a first attempt to map the fluid, elusive drama of the film. Hopefully somebody will find it useful in its present, rough form.

Continue reading The Russian Ark Screenplay

Frantisek Vlacil at The Lincoln Center: The White Dove

By Joe Bendel. Like many contemporary Iranian filmmakers, the late great Franstišek Vláčil often focused on ostensibly apolitical subjects, like children and animals. Yet, as a filmmaker in the vanguard of the Czech New Wave, his work was still considered suspect by the Communist power structure. Though his career would be put on hold for six years following the 1968 Soviet invasion, the international acclaim greeting his 1960 feature film debut The White Dove promised great things at the time for the filmmaker, making it the perfect selection to launch Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Fantastic World of Franstišek Vláčil retrospective.

A group of doves is released in Belgium. On a small Baltic island, their handlers eagerly anticipate their return. However, young Susan’s bird has a late start due to a twinge of the wing. While detouring through Prague, the wheelchair-bound Miša’s pellet gun nearly proves fatal. Shamed by Martin, the artist in the next door apartment, he nurses the bird back to health, while Susan faithfully keeps watching the skies.

Franstišek Vláčil.

Dove is a deceptively simple story, involving several themes Vláčil would return to in later films, such as the bond between children and animals. Reportedly reluctant to overwhelm his youthful cast with extensive lines to memorize, Vláčil makes his points visually rather than verbally. Stark but sensitive, nearly every artful black-and-white frame lensed by cinematographer Jan Čuřík is suitable for framing. Indeed, it is an arresting film to behold, effectively contrasting the claustrophobic, urbanized Prague with the idyllic sun and sea of Susan’s Baltic isle. Adding further texture, composer Zdenek Liska’s spritely jazz interludes and more suggestive chamber music nicely underscore and reinforce the power of the film’s speechless moments.

Vláčil elicits some natural yet restrained performances from Karel Smyczek and Katerina Irmanovová, as the dove’s two youthful caretakers. He also captures the artistic impulse better in Dove than nearly any other film, raptly observing as Martin creates a series of works inspired by Miša and the injured dove (which are credited to Czech artists Theodor Pištěk and Jan Kablasa).

At times, Dove seems to suggest deeper allegorical significance, but Vláčil judiciously keeps it all rather obscure—though perhaps not obscure enough, in retrospect. (Whenever you have a cat named Satan hunting a peaceful white dove, it could be rather awkward explaining what each represents to the occupying commissar .)

Many have likened Vláčil’s films to poetry. Indeed, like a good poem (at least by Poe’s standards) Dove is relatively short at seventy-five minutes. Though it memorably evokes a child’s perspective, it is unquestionably high art cinema, better suited to the discerning connoisseur. A major work from a filmmaker under-exposed on the American film scene during his own lifetime, Dove kicked-off the FSLC’s welcome reappraisal of Vláčil’s films yesterday at the Walter Reade Theater.

Posted on February 3rd, 2011 at 12:17pm.