THE NEW SEASON FILM; A Nice
Place to Film, But Heavens, Not to Live ".....''THE essential American soul,'' D.H. Lawrence once wrote, ''is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.'' To judge by a handful of notable foreign films opening this season, it still hasn't......" ".... In their new films, directors like Wim Wenders, Lars von Trier and David Cronenberg are holding up fun-house mirrors to America, creating reflections that are alternately quixotic and grotesque, and at times wincingly true. In Mr. Wenders's ''Don't Come Knocking,'' Sam Shepard plays an over-the-hill movie actor, a boy with a face full of wrinkles, who suddenly goes searching for a past he ditched long ago. In Mr. Cronenberg's latest, ''A History of Violence,'' Viggo Mortensen plays a small-town American paterfamilias, equal parts Marlboro Man and Terminator, whose past comes searching for him in turn. Meanwhile, in ''Manderlay,'' the second film in Mr. von Trier's trilogy about America following ''Dogville'' -- and like that cinematic screed, shot entirely on a soundstage -- the country's history of slavery is repeated, this time as farce and in blackface...." "......''Don't Come Knocking'' was written by Mr. Shepard, who wrote one of Mr. Wenders's best-known films, ''Paris, Texas.'' Like that 1984 art-house favorite, the new film pivots on a negligent father who, by reuniting with his estranged progeny, also comes to terms with his past. Twenty years ago, Mr. Wenders washed this reunion in a romantic haze as plaintive as the sounds of Ry Cooder's guitar twanging on the film's soundtrack. ''Don't Come Knocking'' is also a soft movie, filled with tender scenes of characters grappling with emotion, but there is a new edge to this vision of the errant father, and despair tinged with rage. As Mr. Shepard's character played cowboy, the world spun, an old lover died and his children grew up without him....." ".....Mr. Wenders, for his part, grew up in post-war West Germany reading American comics, listening to American music, watching American movies and reading American books. ''Huck Finn's Mississippi,'' he said once, ''was more real to me than the Rhine and the Moselle.'' It's no wonder that in his 1976 film ''Kings of the Road,'' a German man complains to another that ''the Yanks have colonized our subconscious.'' The title characters are tooling through the old Germany, a landscape of wide-open spaces that bear a striking resemblance to the American West, particularly that of John Ford. Westerns had a particular hold on the director. As he has argued, as a German born in a country without myths and engaged in denying its past, this America made him ''easy prey......'' "....These myths have long intoxicated (or indoctrinated) foreign filmmakers. At the very least, because America has long exported them to the world, these stories couldn't be avoided. Mr. Wenders's immersion in all things American recalls something Mr. von Trier once said: ''Eighty percent of what enters my skull is American in origin.......'' ''Don't Come Knocking'' opens Feb. 17. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company |
