Level 16
Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: Level 16, Bitter Moon, Ring of Bright Water, Surviving Birkenau: The Dr. Susan Spatz Story.
Level 16
The adolescent girls of Level 16 appear to be housed in a strictly run orphanage whose caretakers have definite ideas on “feminine virtue.” But we see them early on through surveillance cameras; alarm bells ring and summon burly guards over minor infractions. Sinister implications can be discerned. Are the girls really waiting for adoption? Level 16 gives up its mysteries step by step in a well-made dystopian drama about a future that seems close at hand.
Bitter Moon
Roman Polanski did his greatest works in Hollywood (Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown), and while never regaining his stride in European exile, his later films remain interesting. The art-house eroticism of the shipboard drama Bitter Moon (1992) hasn’t aged well, but the screenplay is an exploration of cruelty, boredom, hedonism and obsession. Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas star as a proper English couple encountering perversity in the form of Peter Coyote and Emmanuelle Seigner.
Ring of Bright Water
Graham (Bill Travers) dodges busy London traffic on the way to his dull, unfulfilling office job checking columns of figures. And then something calls to him—a sea otter in a pet shop window. When he takes the playful, mischievous creature home, his life changes course. Next stops for Graham: Escape the rat race? Find true love? Ring of Bright Water (1969) mostly manages to avoid the sentimentality of animal pictures through its dry British sensibility.
Surviving Birkenau: The Dr. Susan Spatz Story
Susan Spatz was 19 in 1936 when her family left Berlin. Regrettably, as she says in this documentary, her parents decided to go home to Vienna. They should have guessed Austria would soon fall to Adolf Hitler. What followed were border closings, family separations and a term at the Theresienstadt “showplace” camp before Auschwitz. In Surviving Birkenau, Spatz recounts her life with minimal visuals. Her story has been heard, but there are now fewer survivors to tell it.
