Orlando-10

Claire Danes does well as a young woman, moving from a slightly over-sensualized relationship with her father (Byrne) to an overzealous first physical "relationship" with an older boy. While the script is not perfect, the visual rhythm of the film supports Chala's struggle admirably. The film uses color particularly well, and builds meaning by posing relationships against one another-- father, husband, wife, lover, daughter, mother. These roles unite or cause misery in many permutations, and "Polish Wedding" does a better job than many films of showing us a glimpse of the complexity of these relationships in life. The story is played out against the backdrop of a Polish Community in, I believe, Detroit, where the reality of family makes tough decisions like Chala's even more difficult. Whether or not you feel you would have made Chala's choices differently, there are many redeeming qualities to the poetic truth of her portrayal; the film mixes beauty with misery well throughout, particularly in the culmination of the "Parade of the Virgin". Worth seeing, to say the least.

Tilda Swinton was born for this role. She IS Orlando. But that preoccupation aside, the first striking aspect of this film is the costumes! It opens on a scene with Orlando in Elizabethan finery, and moves through several historical periods, not least of them 18th Century literary England. That's something to see. The film is, as you would expect, very literary. You don't need to have read the book, but a working knowledge of typical euro-centric history and literature is helpful, I guess. Quentin Crisp plays a perfect Queen Elizabeth, the grotesque Institution herself, opposite Swinton's birdish Orlando. The photography is clear and even luminous at times, and the story moves along quite well--I consistently wondered what would happen. The exploration of gender, while it was obviously "the point", was not overdone, in the last analysis. Our freakish Orlando turns out to be quite human, which is a relief. The film is very well done; Swinton is a rare bird, never boring, and not to be missed.

The drifting curiosity of Claire Tourneau lends a feeling of calm to UTEOTW; she is the still center of this quiet film, which occupies a poetic lull before the millennial storm. As in most of Wenders' films, there are moments of great beauty, elevated by the use of silence-- the sudden quiet in the plane, as the shadow slips over the hills (this is my favorite moment in the film)-- and there are Wenders' usual striking, trademark images from a moving vehicle of the landscape racing by. This movie, about vision and re-vision, also has a lot to do with poetry and transportation, like "King of the Road" and "Alice in the Cities". The soundtrack is altogether delightful. Like all of Wenders' films, it is exactly a half-hour too long, but like most of his work, it just manages to redeem itself. I believe this is his best film after his masterpiece, "Wings of Desire".