This year’s Oscar for the best foreign film went to Roma rather than a much more ambitious and thought-provoking German film, Never Look Away. Roma presumably won because it pulled all the right political strings in its sympathy for the suffering poor South of the Border. (Take that, Donald Trump!)
Roma celebrates a warm-hearted Mexican maid, Cleo, the victim of poverty and extreme sexism. Her boy friend gets her pregnant and disappears. He turns out to be a right-wing thug who beats up protesting students and threatens to beat her up as well.
The secondary lead is Cleo’s employer, Sofía, mother of the several young children, and also – you guessed it – a victim of extreme sexism. Her husband, a physician, abandons her for his mistress. He refuses to send child payments and instead spends the money on expensive diving equipment.
The first half of Roma is an excruciating bore, unless one is excited by drawn-out scenes of tile floors being scrubbed, the house mutt jumping up and down and barking at passersby, clothes washed by hand and hung to dry on rooftops, and the children being awakened one by one and bundled off to school by the tireless maid. It’s the early 1970s in Colonia Roma, a suburb of Mexico City.
The film’s climax comes when Cleo saves two of the children from drowning in a rough ocean even though she can’t swim. The film closes with everyone hugging the maid and each other and gushing how wonderful she is.
The Washington Post blurbs that “Roma isn’t as good as you’ve heard. It’s even better.” The New Yorker’s Richard Brody isn’t quite as gushing. He complains that Cleo “remains a cipher.”
[The director] turns the character of Cleo into a stereotype that’s all too common in movies made by upper-middle-class and intellectual filmmakers about working people: a strong, silent, long-enduring, and all-tolerating type, deprived of discourse, a silent angel whose inability or unwillingness to express herself is held up as a mark of her stoic virtue…. The silent nobility of the working poor takes its place in a demagogic circle of virtue sharing that links filmmakers…with their art-house audiences…
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/theres-a-voice-missing-in-alfonso-cuarons-roma
Never Look Away
The film that should have won Oscar and Golden Globe triumphs instead of Roma is Never Look Away, by the German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. This is one of the finest films ever made and a worthy follow-up to the director’s better-received The Lives of Others. Both Donnersmarck films explore the struggles of an artist – the quintessential “I” or individual – in hostile political, social, and artistic environments. The defining feature of Never Look Away is its pervasive irony, a trait that many of the movie’s critics missed – the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday being a notable exception.
The film captures, through the artistic and personal development of the painter Kurt Barnert, life in three critical periods of German history. Kurt is a child during the Hitler period, a young man during the Communist era in East Germany, and a thirty-year-old man when he escapes to freedom in West Germany. Mediocrity, conformism, stupidity, and evil migrate successfully from one era to the next. But at least in the modern West, Kurt can create an art that captures his deepest thoughts and experiences.
The film is a cinematic Bildungsroman – the genre pioneered in Germany by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Plot, irony, and character development begin in the film’s opening moments, unlike Roma with its extended scene setting for the first half.
An irony external to Never Look Away is that its fictional protagonist, artist Kurt Barnert, is based heavily on the real-life German painter Gerhard Richter, who although he extensively cooperated with Donnersmarck prior to the film, harshly criticized the finished product. This may have hurt the film’s reception in Germany.
The irony is that Richter’s own artistic breakthrough consisted of painting subtly altered images based on personal photographs. Donnersmarck, in subtly transmogrifying Richter to Barnert, just took the same artistic license with respect to his original.
Richter seems to have forgotten how much great art is imitation with subtle modification. Think of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, based on an earlier Spanish play, or Shakespeare’s plays based on historical chronicles, Plutarch’s biographies, and other sources, often quite closely. Art and life imitate each other, but imitation with a difference, mimesis.
The poor reception of Never Look Away in the US and especially Germany is shameful. Germans seem to have overdosed on war guilt and are now compensating by trying to suppress the past entirely. Never Look Away is rich in historical memory of the past eighty years.
Victor Davis Hanson suggests that Germans have a tendency to do crazy things every few generations. Now they have turned against the US, which played the crucial role in putting Germany back on its feet. They cling to a chancellor, Angela Merkel, who has done much harm to Germany with her energy and immigration policies. She herself got her start in German politics under the sponsorship of figures compromised by collaboration with the Stasi, the East German secret police. The Germans seem to prefer looking away from these problems, a flaw Never Look Away does not fail to notice.
The insufficient US appreciation of Never Look Away may have been influenced by a snippy, patronizing review by the New York Times‘ lead movie critic, A.O. Scott. He dismisses the film with a wildly off-base remark:
[T]he distinction between art and kitsch doesn’t feel out of place here, since von Donnersmarck is essentially trying to use the tools of kitsch to illuminate the mysteries of art. Which is an almost-interesting idea. Or an interesting almost-idea.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/movies/never-look-away-review.html?referrer=google_kp
Scott to the contrary, Donnersmarck does not “use the tools of kitsch to illuminate the mysteries.” Kitsch is deliberately unserious art. In writing a deliberately unserious review, it is Scott who has purveyed kitsch.
— Richard Schulman
Revised 6/9/2019
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