Photo © Film Movement
'200 Meters' film still
Ali Suliman in '200 Meters'
200 Meters
(Film Movement DVD)
Mustava is a middle-class dad with bickering children (overseen by a doting grannie) and a caring if hard-pressed wife with whom he argues about the kids, the money, their future. He’s Palestinian and because of the occupation, he maintains two homes separated by the security wall, and must pass through bureaucratic entanglements and hi-tech checkpoints for work. When his Israeli work permit is denied, he’s forced to seek the help of smugglers. In director Ameen Nayfeh’s feature debut, fully embodied characters enact precarious lives with sympathy and believability. The gap between reality and drama is almost nonexistent, even as tension and suspense mounts. (David Luhrssen)
Monsieur Hire
(Cohen Film Collection Blu-ray)
The mysterious Mr. Hire is a funereal figure, friendless, often irascible. When not working as a tailor, he’s at the window of his bed-sit, starring at the apartments across the street, looking into the lives of others. Because he’s the odd man out in the neighborhood, he falls under suspicion when a woman turns up dead.
Alfred Hitchcock’s influence on French filmmakers is often spoken of but seldom realized as well as in Monsieur Hire (1989). Working from a novel by Georges Simenon, the Dashiell Hammett of the Francophone world, director Patrice Leconte delivers Rear Window with a dash of Vertigo—and an unexpected twist or two. Mr. Hire becomes infatuated with Alice, a young woman across the way, and she gradually takes interest in him. He’s a hard protagonist to like, but sympathy grows as the story unfolds.
A few bars of music serve as a melancholy emotional through-line from scene to scene; the cinematography is subtle and superb. In one frame, Hire’s face appears in his window as seen from Alice’s flat, the brick walls of her building reflected in the window glass, emphasizing the emotional wall separating him from the joys and concerns of everyday life. (David Luhrssen)
Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
(Limited Theatrical Release, December 30)
Fifty years ago, after biographer Robert Caro completed his first work, The Power Broker, he had appointments with three editors. The first two wined and dined Caro, promising to make him a star. The third, Robert Gottlieb, invited the author to his office for sandwiches where he discussed how he planned to shape the book. Gottlieb won the job. Fifty years, and numerous biographies later, Caro, 86, and Gottlieb, 91, anticipate what could be their final collaboration on the fifth volume of Caro’s other definitive work: The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
Lizzie Gottlieb, the editor’s daughter, delivers an even-handed documentary that examines their processes. Gottlieb struggles to get control over Caro’s (seemingly unbridled) love of semi-colons and a list of words he states the biographer overuses. A pair of opinionated men, they almost never see one another outside editing sessions—sessions carried out in person. Caro still writes on a typewriter layered with two sheets of paper, carbon paper in-between (Lizzie discovers Caro saved every carbon sheet).
Beyond that, she explores both men’s monumental careers (Gottlieb as the editor of over 600 books, the New Yorker, countless other well-known authors, and as an accomplished author in his own right). Their journey as writer and editor is frequently contentious, but beneath it all an abiding respect for one another’s viewpoint. The creative process, and then the taming of it, provide a fascinating glimpse into a world of publishing that has all but disappeared. (Lisa Miller)
