So after WALL·E I was in the mood for Pixar and got hold of The Incredibles, which it turns out is on tv this weekend to coincide with "the Ledger movie" (which I'm IMAX-ing on Monday). I had an experience rather similar to when I saw The Elephant Man : either I've seen it and can only remember the Jason Lee scenes or I've seen clips which were the Jason Lee scenes. I honestly don't know which. It's just an excellent film - wonderful Bond-inspired score, very good animation, a witty, clever script and some very nice vocal performances. I enjoyed it a lot.
Ridley Scott's debut, The Duellists, has been doing the rounds on sky recently and I eventually caught it. It's a very handsomely made story of two officers in the French army who fight a series of pointless duels over the course of the Napoleonic wars. It's very light on character, especially Harvey Keitel's who is just a belligerent hooligan, but it rattles along at an extremely fast pace and the storytelling is first rate. There are glorified cameos left and right (Edward Fox has two scenes, Albert Finney just the one) and the lead actors don't even attempt accents but it's very much a good thing as I'd rather a consistent natural voice rather than a botched attempt at a foreign one. I do think the characterisation (or lack of it) hurts the film, especially given the way they end it (lingering on Keitel, who we don't know at all) but a more than solid, entertaining, beautifully made film to begin Sir Ridley's career.
So on to the misogyny, namely the Italian film Seven Beauties, which the oscars (now rather embarrassingly so) embraced so much in the mid-70s. 1976 is a very strange year for American cinema (the decade follows this pattern too) in that there are a few films which are regarded, for different reasons, as classics - All the President's Men, Taxi Driver, Network and Rocky - yet the year is actually rather poor as there is very little beyond that "top end" and the top end isn't that fantastic anyway. When you have 3 foreign language performances nominated in the lead categories at the oscars that should be a red flag straight away letting you know something was very wrong with American cinema if they had to resort to so many foreign performances (even if Liv Ullmann's was probably the finest ever captured on film). The "5 minute" nominations in support for Jane Alexander and Beatrice Straight also set major alarm bells ringing for the quality of the year.
It is in this background that Seven Beauties received its American acclaim and it is quite embarrassing retrospectively. This is due to the misogyny (some may say misanthropy) of Lina Wertmüller's film. Maybe it's an inherent product of the society and the stories that come out of it, but it's a very difficult one to justify especially coming from a woman who is clearly as far from a feminist as you can get. The story is that our man (we're supposed to like him) is an Italian soldier who has deserted and is captured in Nazi Germany during the war. We then see him being shipped off to a concentration camp intercut with his previous life of contempt for his sisters, cold blooded murder and rape. Problem is when your point of the movie is that after going through the war and the horrors he's dead inside ... you may have wanted to not make him a murdering rapist to begin with because a/ there's no character journey and b/ anything he gets is no less than he deserves. This coupled with a truly alarming mishandling of tone (she rambles from slapstick to grotesque to coldly detached to music montages) absolutely murders the film. Misanthropy? Probably. Does that justify the misogyny? Hardly. An awful film which is all over the shop both in terms of message and tone. Lauded American reviewers in the 70s admitted being confused by it. That didn't stop them raving it. A prime case of the Emperer's (or Empress's) New Clothes.