Video surprises

Antonioni, The Fantasticks, more

By Gerald Peary

ANTICIPATING DVD: Monica Vitti and Franco Branciaroli in The Mystery of Oberwald.

Is there anybody out there who attended the 1980 Venice Film Festival? If so, you were among the disappointed when the great Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni (L’avventura, Red Desert, Blow-Up) unveiled The Mystery of Oberwald, a stage-to-screen rendition of a tediously talky Jean Cocteau chamber play, The Eagle Has Two Heads. Why would anyone wish to revive that dusty 1946 costume drama about a reclusive queen shut away in a castle since her husband’s death 10 years earlier who falls for the anarchist poet (Franco Branciaroli) sent to assassinate her? And why (this was 1980, remember) would anyone shoot this already offputting tale, as Antonioni opted to do, on lowly videotape?

No matter that Antonioni’s kinetic Eurostar, Monica Vitti, portrayed the smitten queen. The Mystery of Oberwald disappeared from sight after an abortive American opening in 1981. Now it’s back, lovingly copied from the original master, and available (Facets Video, $79.95) as of last Tuesday. What’s the 20-years-after verdict? Mixed. I have a lot of respect for Anýonioni’s odd venture, which is radically unlike any of his other movies, more in the line of Rossellini or Visconti. But I can’t claim to be swept away. The talk is trying, and there’s no way to burrow inside the ritualized melodrama, Racine/Calderón without the poetry.

Still, it’s neat watching Vitti stretch out with monologues and soliloquys; and The Mystery of Oberwald does have a fabulous double-death kitsch ending that (would Antonioni acknowledge a Hollywood Western?) seems an homage to the guy-gal shootout in the desert with which King Vidor’s 1946 Duel in the Sun concludes. Most impressive, and prescient, is the way Antonioni’s video experiment anticipates the DVD revolution for narrative films. The filmmaker who painted the park grass extra-green in Blow-Up here grooves on video-enhanced incantatory hazes and hues. To quote what he said in 1980 about his Edisonian techno-trailblazing: “The electronic system is very stimulating. At first, it seems like a game. They put you in front of a console full of knobs, and by moving them, you can add or take away color, meddle with its quality and with the relationships between various tonalities. . . . In short, you realize quickly that it isn’t a game but rather a new world of cinema . . . using color as a narrative, poetic means . . . with absolute faithfulness, or, if so desired, with absolute falseness.”

What other films that barely made it to the theaters, or never made it, have crawled recently, belatedly, onto video?

Stiff Upper Lips (1996). This one’s period-movie costs escalated when the filmmakers chose to shoot on location in India and Italy and on the Isle of Man. Billed as a hilarious roast of Ivory-Merchant movies, Stiff Upper Lips aims the bulk of its jokes — some mildly funny and smutty — at A Room with a View. If you didn’t see the 1986 E.M. Forster adaptation, you won’t get what’s being parodied most of the time. It’s perplexing how Miramax could have greenlighted this venture with the teensiest of potential audiences. No surprise that Stiff Upper Lips never made it to Boston, especially when the biggest star in the cast is the aged Peter Ustinov.

Screw Loose (1998). If you’ve waited years for a new Mel Brooks farce, as I have, well, here it is, sort of, and straight-to-video. Mel as his ditsy, shouting Jewish self plays a lifer lunatic-in-residence in a California mental hospital. He’s delivered suddenly to ýreedom by an Italian factory owner whom he had rescued from the Germans in World War II. Brooks is Harpo/Chico cartoonish, and having him on screen is a treasure. But he didn’t write or direct this movie: those tasks fell to Italian comedian Ezio Greggio. He’s the real star of Screw Loose as the middle-aged, pushed-about son of the factory owner. You get bursts of Brooks between long bouts of Greggio’s low-level comic antics.

The Fantasticks (1995). This Michael Ritchie–directed version of the Off Broadway musical languished in a can in Hollywood until, last year, Francis Ford Coppola edited 20 minutes out of the movie. It opened brie y last fall, but try to remember . . . even an astute positive review by my Phoenix colleague Peg Aloi couldn’t keep it at the Kendall Square. I didn’t see it, nobody saw it, and now it’s on video. Surprise! I’d proclaim it the most underrated picture of 2000. What’s been wrong with this movie all these years is that the treatment is so original, so artsy, so daring for Hollywood. Eschewing the minimalist set (the Mute, two sticks, a box), Ritchie located his movie in a dream 1920s on a stark Midwest plain, where a wonderful and weird carnival and sideshow saunter into view. It’s a walking vision from Ray Bradbury, or Fellini meets Willa Cather.

The cutesy scheming fathers are an archaic leftover from the play, and I’m not sure what to make of the “Theatrical Abduction!” tune that’s replaced the politically abhorrent “Rape” song. But Jean Louisa Kelly is a fetching Girl and Jonathon Morris a world-weary, bored-with-his-virility El Gallo, and between them they capture the romantic pessimism and tragic fatalism with which The Fantasticks told right is suffused. A lovely, lovely lm.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com.