Madame Sata Madame Sata Directed by Karim Ainouz (Wellspring ...
Much like the figure at the center of another recent Brazilian film, the acclaimed documentary Bus 174, the protagonist of Madame Sata, Joao Francisco dos Santos (played with panache by Lazaro Ramos), is a dark-skinned outcast left to wander at society's margins. Joao, by virtue of being poor, black and gay, finds himself in the Lapa section of Rio de Janeiro, a vibrant slum where violent criminals vie for space with prostitutes, sexual deviants and upscale customers in search of a good time. He looks to make a living any way he can, working a number of odd jobs throughout the film, from serving as personal assistant to a particularly nasty diva, to bouncer at a bar.
For a film about a grifter, thief, gay man, kickboxer and part-time musical performer, there is a surprising amount of downtime here. Unlike Bus 174, Madame Sata does not provide much grist for audience sympathy with its downtrodden protagonist. Ainouz's direction lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, a Joao-like sense of performance and passion necessary to sustaining a feature-length film on so complex an individual.
The film, set in the 1930s, opens with a medium close-up of Joao's bruised, bloody face, his nostrils flaring as a psychological profile and description of his crimes is read off-screen. Joao's tangled self and his desire to blur boundaries render much of this profile effectively irrelevant. Joao's ideal country is one where all traditional categories are upside-down; where day is night, male is female, and so on. The only place where Joao can render all the gnarled, divided aspects of his personality whole is in the comfort of performing onstage. Part lover and part fighter, part man and part woman, part angel of kindness and part violent devil, Joao only makes sense to himself when pouring his house divided into the needs of performance, and by the magic of alchemy, turning it into gold.
Madame Sata becomes a sort of repetition compulsion, in which a scene of its protagonist behaving with artful gentleness toward his surrogate family (a male and female prostitute, and her infant daughter) is followed by one of Joao lashing out at the forces that conspire to keep him from the glory he is sure he deserves, be they cops, criminals or homophobes. This sequence, repeated multiple times over the course of the film's 96 minutes, rapidly becomes tiresome, a sign of the filmmakers' inability to make much of an interest out of Joao's predicament. It's a shame, for at his best Joao is a premier showman, as interested in how he looks while doing something as the nature of the activity itself.
?Saul Austerlitz
I tend to avoid concert videos?especially those shot in the 70s. The lighting was never quite good enough and it usually sounded like it was recorded through mics kept at the bottom of a kiddie pool backstage somewhere.
One of the first surprises of The First 30 Years is how good the concert material both looks and sounds. Considering that it was shot in 1974, the lighting was great and the audio, though perhaps not up to today's standards, is still a hell of a lot better than what you find on most similar discs. Die-hard fans get a 14-song greatest-hits selection from three concerts.
I could leave it at that, but there's something else going on here. Something strange. And something I certainly wasn't expecting.
As usual, in between songs you get the typical backstage material and interviews with band members, road managers and the like. Then, in a manner that seems almost offhanded, we find out about?the compound.
Everything's fine. There they are playing "Hey Y'All" and "Mutant." Then there's a little walk through the tour bus? when we suddenly learn that the members of Black Oak Arkansas?Black Oak Arkansas?had built themselves a walled compound somewhere in?Oakland, Arkansas. The band members lived there. Their extended families lived there. The road crew lived there. What's more, they're entirely self-sufficient. They raise their own livestock. They've established their own school and postal system as well. The number of guns around hints that they also had their own armed militia.
In interviews, band members speak of the compound very casually; they seem very proud of it, but they never really explain what the thinking was behind it, or what they'd hoped to accomplish with it?or even why they thought a walled compound was necessary. In the end, we never really learn what was going on there?which makes it all the creepier.
Not the sort of thing you'd expect from your typical Southern cock-rock band. In fact, it's a bit of a jaw-dropper?which is why this disc's a keeper.
?Jim Knipfel
Uptown Saturday Night features Poitier as Steve Jackson, a factory worker whose best friend, cabdriver Wardell Franklin (Cosby), convinces him to abandon his penny-pinching ways for one evening and attend a swanky party at Madame Zenobia's, whose house of elegant depravity could be a prototype for Stanley Kubrick's masked ball in Eyes Wide Shut. Steve and Wardell are on a preternaturally lucky run at the dice table when masked bandits break in to the party, taking their wallets along with their winnings. The true extent of his loss doesn't sink in until the next day for Steve, when he realizes his wallet contained a winning lottery ticket.
The bulk of the film concerns Steve and Wardell's efforts to recover the wallet, which takes them from private eye Sharp Eye Washington (played with delightful twitchiness by Richard Pryor) to Congressman Lincoln (Roscoe Lee Browne) who, discovering some of his constituents waiting to meet him, briskly replaces his suit jacket with an African pullover and reverses the framed portrait of Richard Nixon on his wall to reveal one of Malcolm X. Also on hand is the assured Harry Belafonte as Geechie Dan, a scratchy-voiced mobster with a rose in his lapel who bears a remarkable resemblance to a certain godfather of our acquaintance. Poitier plays straight man to Cosby's inspired silliness, which mostly consists of his getting the duo into enormous trouble and then extricating them by force of his remarkably agile tongue.
Wardell is such a big talker that even as he is in the midst of beating the living hell out of a gangster's minion at a seedy bar, he is narrating the entire event to Steve as an object lesson for future endeavors. One keeps expecting Cosby's character, both in this film and in Let's Do it Again, to finally receive the hellacious beating he is most assuredly owed, but his combination of pugilistic bravado and linguistic inspiration allow him to sidestep this destiny. Both as director and actor, Poitier is wise enough to step out of the way and let Cosby and the talented supporting casts work their mojos.
?Saul Austerlitz
The plot is reasonably simple, and at first not all that different from things we've seen before. John Randolph plays a New York banker who's bored with his job, his wife, his very existence. An old friend suckers him into visiting a mysterious company where he's offered the chance to start all over again. For a fee, they'll fake Randolph's death, then set him up with a new identity. Although he's more than hesitant about the idea, he quickly learns that he doesn't have much choice in the matter.
After extensive plastic surgery (they even change his voice and his fingerprints), Randolph wakes up to find that he's been turned into Rock Hudson. Following some physical therapy and career counseling (from Manchurian Candidate's Khigh Dhiegh), he's provided with a beautiful home in Southern California, where he will now lead the life of a mildly successful artist. He doesn't have to do anything at all?not even paint. Everything's been taken care of for him.
After some initial disorientation, he meets a cute gal, goes to a Renaissance fair, then gets drunk at a cocktail party. After that, well?
Well, things just don't turn out the way he was promised, put it that way.
On the surface, yes, the whole "plastic surgery/new life" business is nothing new. But the script, based on David Ely's novel, is pure Ira Levin. There is a level of cold paranoia here that grows almost unbearable as more and more of the story is revealed, and the film spins toward it's inevitably (and surprisingly) downbeat ending.
Contributing as much to the film as Frankenheimer's direction is James Wong Howe's cinematography. It's always shifting?sometimes it's as sharp and stark as Seven Days in May, at other times he uses fish eye lenses, off-kilter low angles or a handheld. It's unsettling, and subtly adds to the feeling of disorientation throughout the film. (The Renaissance fair scene goes on a bit long, though.)
The rest of the cast is composed of some truly wonderful character actors?Will Geer as the company's grandfatherly founder, Wesley Addy as Hudson's personal assistant, Murray Hamilton as the friend who initiates the whole idea and Richard Anderson as the chief surgeon.
The DVD includes the film's creepy trailer ("they could Be all around you!") and a commentary track from the late Mr. Frankenheimer.
The last sound you hear in this film, believe me, will stick with you for awhile.
?Jim Knipfel