Italian director Giuseppe Capotondi’s directing career kicked off at age 23. He cut his teeth on music videos and over 250 TV commercials, subsequently winning international awards. The Burnt Orange Heresy, his second feature, is a fascinating Hitchcockian mystery which has more twists and turns than a salted pretzel. Capotondi’s casting is superb with Danish Claes Bang as James Figueras, an art critic whose successful days are behind him.  He fills his time giving lectures to uninformed art audiences, which changes quickly when he meets Berenice Hollis played by Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki.

Their romantic adventures takes them to the magnificent Lake Como home of Joseph Cassidy, a wealthy art dealer played by Mick Jagger.  He commissions James to steal a painting from the reclusive, famous artist Jerome Debney, played by the iconic Donald Sutherland.  Once James and Berenice meet this eccentric artist, the story does a 360 and takes off into the most unexpected, dark places with James’ desperation catapulting him into a complicated web of deceit out of which there is no escape.  Just when you think you’ve figured it out, along comes another totally unexpected, shocking turn of events that will leave you on the edge of your seat to the final frame and beyond.

Director Capotondi and Claes Bang sat down for an interview with a small group of select journalists and the following has been edited for content and continuity.

How did you learn about the book and did the script stick close to the original story?

Guiseppe: Charles Willeford’s novel is set in Palm Beach, Florida but it was hard to shoot there, so we moved the action to Lake Como.  Also, the character of Berenice is developed a lot more than in the book in which she was a marginal character.  But, the story is more or less the same.

How did you find that beautiful manor at Lake Como?

Guiseppe:  Actually, nobody lives there so we had to totally redecorate it. You can rent it.  It’s a huge house and very cold in the winter.

When you read a script, what three things jump out that makes you want to play that character?

Claes:  It’s never about three things. Every script is different and it wouldn’t be good to tick off three boxes.  It has to say something to me – sort of like wow, I just want to start doing these scenes.  With this one, it was very much about that twisted, weird relationship between James and Berenice.  Like, whoa, what’s going on here?  What’s the dynamic they have with each other?

You just came off The Square, which also dealt with art.  How is your knowledge of art?

Claes:  I’ve always been super interested in art.  I’ve been going to museums and involved in art forever.  Obviously, for The Square, I talked to a lot of museum art directors to find out about that job.  That research really came in handy for this film.

Guiseppe:  I don’t think we were trying to make a satire on the world of art. (Laughs)

Claes:  We are not trying to say something about the art world per se; it was just about my character’s job and obviously it gives us a chance to talk about the perception of art and its seduction.

How was it working with Mick Jagger and Donald Sutherland – two icons.

Guiseppe:  It was different because Donald is a legend and I was nervous about the idea of working with him.  But, he is a very sweet man and very generous.  Before I met Mick in London, I was really sweaty and didn’t know what I was going to say to him.  The moment you get to know him, you find that he very approachable and is quite normal, funny, and very sweet.

After the ordeal she just went through, what was Berenice’s motivation for returning to the apartment? (Laughter)

Guiseppe:  If you think about it, many women who are abused by their husbands always go back.  First of all, we tend to hope that people we like walk a straight line, but they don’t always do that.  Maybe she was in shock.

Claes:  It’s always about finding something irrational in your character.  Like why would you ever go and do that?  As an audience, it actually engages you and you want to shout no, no, no.  Don’t do that!  (Laughter)

Guiseppe:  We did have a lot of conversations about that scene.

Claes:  My character of James is pushed over the edge, which is why he takes those actions.   The Jagger character basically has him by the balls so either he does what he says or there will be no way back to his career in the art world.  He’s fallen from grace and is a persona no gratis and is fed up with lecturing.  Berenice catches him red handed and reacts negatively. We worked hard to get that bathroom scene. He had no idea that in three days, his life would do a 360.  He’s just trying to survive and that ambition drives him too far.

When you are in an emotionally intense scene, how do you decompress?

Claes: I’m not a “Method” actor. I like to think of myself as an instrument – like a piano you can play. That’s in an ideal world but sometimes I’m a bit too opinionated so I’m not a totally neutral instrument, but I try to be.  I have the feeling that if I lose myself too much, I won’t be able to take direction.  For a very long time I heard all these teachers from drama school in my head – remember to stand like that, to talk like this, do this and that and I would l think can you get the f…ck out of my head and just let me just be.   You have to keep a distance in a way and I don’t go home devastated.

Did you give a lot of character direction?

Guiseppe:  No. I think they all drew from personal experiences, except maybe the killing experience. We talked before and then I would just smoke my cigarettes (Laughter)

Claes:  You have to get use to that.  I was always wanting to do more takes, but

Guiseppe would say, no, no. We’ve got what we need.  (Laughter)

The end of the film is a cliffhanger. 

Guiseppe:  We talked a lot about that ending and that was the biggest change.  It wasn’t written like that.  I didn’t want to give this character absolution and wanted to just leave the ending with a question mark.

Claes:  Our ending is mysterious.  Now you leave the cinema wondering what’s going to happen.

Best of luck with the film.

“The Burnt Orange Heresy”

Presented by: Sony Pictures Classics; Ingenious Media Presents an MJZ Production; A Wonderful Films Production; A Rumble Films Production; In association with HanWay Films; In collaboration with Indiana Production; S.PA., In association with Carte Blanche Cinema

Directed by: Giuseppe Capotondi
Screenplay by:  Scott B. Smith, Based on the book by Charles Willeford
Director of Photography:  David Ungaro, AFC
Production Designer:  Totoi Santoro
Edited By: Guido Notari
Music by: Craig Armstrong
Costume Designer:  Gabriella Pesucci

Genre: Mystery
Language: English
Rating: R
Running Time: 98 Minutes

Cast List:  Claes Bang, Elizabeth Debicki, Mick Jagger, Donald Sutherland, Alessandro Fabrizi, & Rosalind Halstead.

Playing at the Landmark Theatres

The post “The Burnt Orange Heresy” – A Super Mystery Thriller appeared first on Traveling Archive.

Director

Writer: Dalton Trumbo (novel), Dalton Trumbo (screenplay)

Cinematography: Jules Brenner

Music: Jerry Fielding

Special Effects: Dick Williams

Stars: Timothy Bottoms, Kathy Fields, Marsha Hunt, Jason Robards, Diane Varsi, Donald Sutherland (As Christ), Dalton Trumbo (Orator), Winston Churchill (Himself – archive footage)

Johnny Got His Gun

By Walt Mundkowsky

The praise that has rained on Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun has a desperate ring, citing it with All Quiet on the Western Front and La Grande Illusion in the roll call of antiwar classics. Trumbo, of course, was one of the Hollywood Ten, refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 and eventually imprisoned for 10 months for contempt of Congress. To see this film as short of towering greatness is evidently to be a HUAC assassin.

However highly one values Trumbo’s personal integrity, his profile as a writer is another matter. Pauline Kael aptly described him as “the leading exponent of the dictates-of-conscience and the dignity-and-indomitable-spirit-of-man school of screenwriting.” I can’t think of a Big Theme he or Stanley Kramer hasn’t botched. This film is no different: From the start clichés fall like well-cut pines. Above the credits is a typical newsreel montage, accompanied by the usual snare drums: shots of W. W. I leaders — a young Churchill, Clemenceau, Czar Nicholas II, Marshal Foch bestowing an embrace on a soldier, King George V, Kaiser Bill; troops and cavalry pass in review; Woodrow Wilson waves, Teddy Roosevelt makes a speech, Wilson signs papers. Over a shot of Yank soldiers boarding a ship, the whistle of an incoming artillery shell. We see the explosion and the screen goes black.

The victim of that explosion, a young soldier named Joe, loses his arms, legs and face. He is kept alive as a medical curiosity, and the officer in charge writes, “It follows, then, that this young man will be as unthinking and unfeeling as the dead until the day he joins them.” That is not the case (if it were, the movie would be different): Joe remembers and dreams and tries to comprehend his present condition. Already the film gives off a considerable stench. Trumbo’s method has always been to take an uncompromising stand (here, against mutilation) in terms so broad and banal that debate is not possible this side of sanity. This speechless basket case is just about the perfect vehicle for the ideas on display, given their quality. Inarticulate movie heroes (The Graduate, Easy Rider) are always in fashion, and how could one hope to improve on this one? Who wouldn’t feel pity for this “piece of meat that keeps on living,” as Joe calls himself; Timothy Bottoms voices him in his debut.

Worse yet, the prevailing cheapness is rendered unendurable by the sentimental muck piled on top of it. The present is shot in black and white, while Joe’s fantasies and memories are in color. “I don’t know whether I’m alive and dreaming or dead and remembering,” Joe thinks at one point, but the film never suggests the lightning-like play of conflicting, misshapen images that statement implies; everything is heavy, plunked down. Many of the scenes come not from Joe’s consciousness but Trumbo’s — the gross gibes at W. W. I slogans (“Gonna make the world safe for democracy, aren’t you?”). The scene in which Joe delicately deflowers his girl may become a model for the protractedly coy and cutesy. Joe’s gradual awareness of his state (“No eyes … I … I haven’t got any eyes!”) is meant to be horribly moving, but it brought Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587?) to mind:

O eyes! no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
O life! no life, but lively form of death;
O world! no world, but mass of public wrongs.

For bombast, the lesser Elizabethans rule. Better (or worse) is the sympathetic nurse, for whom Diane Varsi does her considerable best, hurtling into the grotesque. Joe thinks, “Something fell on me. Something wet. What was it?” A tear. Later she writes “Merry Christmas” on his chest. (I wouldn’t call Trumbo’s touch light.)

Joe eventually hits on the idea of tapping out Morse with the back of his head. The Army brass are astounded, since they would never have allowed him to live if they had thought he wasn’t “decerebrated.” His message to them is “I want out, so people can see what I am. Put me in a carnival show where they can look at me. Let me out.” And then: “If you won’t let people see me, then kill me.” The Army (of course) does neither. Presumably they will not accept responsibility for his present state or for killing him. The friendly nurse tries to kill him but is discovered and sent away. At the end Joe is alive and alone.

One exchange prompted wild applause both times I saw the film. A high-ranking officer asks the chaplain if he has anything to say to Joe. The chaplain answers, “I will pray for him for the rest of my days; but I will not risk testing his faith against your stupidity” — and a great many cheered (the one who applauds loudest hates war the most?). An antiwar film that lets everyone off the hook is by definition a flop. I yield to many in my approval of Godard’s Les Carabiniers, but it is to be commended for its refusal of easy emotional escape-hatches. Johnny Got His Gun sees to it that one leaves with a mind unengaged and assumptions undented. Besides, the tragedy of war is not that perfectly healthy young people are turned into basket cases in a split second; automobile accidents can do that.

George Orwell wrote in 1944: “By shooting at your enemy you are not in the deepest sense wronging him. But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing children up to believe them, by clamouring for unjust peace terms which make further wars inevitable, you are striking not at one perishable generation, but at humanity itself.” If one bothers with antiwar films at all, it should be to learn something we don’t already know, not because we want our sympathies reinforced.

Extra: Timothy Bottoms Interview (2009 Video)

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By Walt Mundkowsky

Directed by: Alan J. Pakula

Writing Credits: Andy Lewis and David E. Lewis

Cinematography: Gordon Willis

Cast: Jane Fonda (Oscar winning performance), Donald Sutherland, Roy Scheider, Charles Cioffi

Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (Warner Bros.) represents a considerable advance over the first film he directed, but what wouldn’t? The Sterile Cuckoo was an abomination, from the clunky camera set-ups and music to Liza Minnelli’s uncontrolled performance, all emotion and no design. Throughout I was struck by the chasm between what the picture thought it was presenting (a love-starved, skittish adolescent) and what I saw (a deranged girl crying for love and killing it off in one motion). Like its predecessor, Klute has been greeted with extravagant praise; Pauline Kael’s paean led me to expect a film half “full-scale, definitive portrait of a call girl” and half “powerful, scary melodrama,” which sounds rather like constructing a novel by alternating chapters from Zola’s Nana and Psycho. At any rate, no such luck: The thriller half does not compare with Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, from which it appears largely derived; the call-girl half is mostly shallow and sketchy.

The screenplay by Andy and Dave Lewis fails to fuse the two halves for any length of time; they keep breaking apart and jostling each other. The thriller half contains the plot. John Klute is a small-town policeman who comes to New York to investigate the disappearance of a friend. The missing man seems connected with a call girl named Bree Daniels — he wrote her some obscene letters — but she doesn’t remember him. (A New York detective says of her, “A good call girl — she’ll turn six or seven hundred tricks a year. Faces get blurred.”) Klute starts with her and they pursue the slimmest possibilities — an ex-roommate of Bree’s and junkie who could be anywhere, and a phantom-like maniac who likes to beat up women. Bree begins to fall in love, somewhat unwillingly, with Klute. Unsurprisingly, the investigation comes full circle: The maniac is the man who sent Klute to New York in the first place. Bree and Klute leave together, though she’s iffy about their future.

I can’t think of anything in this part of the movie that does not misfire. Plot mechanics — threatening phone calls, killer following and attacking lone girls — invite comparison with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and Michael Small’s music is a blatant rehash of the wonders Ennio Morricone worked for that film. Morricone’s thriller scores are stamped with catchy tunes of economy and simplicity; grating, incisive, tense harmonies; “sweet-and-sour, now jaunty or jeering, now sensual and insinuating,” as John Simon wrote. Small provides none of this, and proves what I’ve never doubted — if you want a Morricone score, go to the source.

Klute plods, the one thing a thriller, even a semi-thriller, must not do. Pakula’s sense of where his camera should be has improved only slightly; he has some ease but no real fluency. The camera movements — down the dinner table at the film’s start; retreating as Bree sits up in bed, paralyzed by the ringing telephone or as she slowly undresses for an old client; panning down the face of a skyscraper; through the empty factory where Bree is trapped — are pro forma. Compositions for the Panavision screen are careful, studied and for all that, unimaginative. Besides Argento’s deftness, which lends him an articulate and subtle visual style, he believes in the horror conventions he applies — the pale, lean erotic / murderous witch in her wide-brimmed hat and shiny leather coat. The mystery part of Klute lacks urgency mainly because Pakula has no conviction in what he is doing. He doesn’t seem to buy it for a moment, so neither should we.

The call-girl sections are better, as they benefit from Jane Fonda’s remarkable portrayal. To Time it is “her best performance to date,” and Kael says, “There isn’t another young dramatic actress in American films who can touch her.” (Uh, okay.) I would not call it great. Ms. Fonda immerses herself in the role and brings to it bite and smarts. She makes the most of what contradictions she can find, and that is all. The contrast in Bree’s two sides is perfectly realized: With her clients she is assured, openly provocative, wholly in command (“We could have a good time for fifty. Or if you wanted something extra, it would be a little bit more”); alone in her cluttered flat she looks fragile, hurt, lost. She is trying to get out of “the life” and into modeling and acting — with no success in the episodes we see. She is going to a psychiatrist. The confusions of her life are dramatized in the opening minutes; Carl Lerner’s editing is snappy and telling. But things go wrong.

The subsequent attraction to Klute and the affair that follows are ambiguous rather than complex. The script would have us believe that Klute wants to make an honest woman out of her, and that she is drawn to his decency and concern for her future. A standard Hollywood motive is just as plausible: The girl falls for the guy who first ignores her. Early on she remarks with some amusement, “Men have paid two hundred dollars for me and here you are turning down a freebie.” The tensions Bree feels between viewing Klute as an escape from her crushing present, and seeing him as a painful involvement that must be destroyed are achingly captured. After she finally seduces him, she says, “Don’t feel bad about losing your virtue. I sort of knew you would — everybody always does,” and bounds out the door. Her jauntiness is too forced to convince. Sometime later, in bed with Klute again, she asks, “You’re not gonna get hung up on me, are you?” The thriller plot keeps getting in the way of all this, and the resolution defeats any more genuine impulses.

As any kind of clinical study of a call girl, Klute is hopeless. It has no awareness of ritual relationships with pimps and clients. “Pimps don’t get dates for you, they just take your money,” Bree says, and that is all the film has to offer about them. We know nothing of Bree’s background, of how and why she became a call girl. Here again, the thriller material works against an understanding of character.

The scenes with Bree and her analyst form the core of the film; for me, they most clearly illustrate its failure and desire to have things both ways. They are not badly written and Ms. Fonda is superb in them, but they externalize conflicts that should be, and to some extent are, present elsewhere. It would hardly be more obvious if the psychiatrist wore a DEVICE sign around her neck. She intrudes so rarely that Bree’s impact is similar to those times in Godard when a character (Léaud all too often) faces the camera and spouts away. Such scenes can be effective in two modes: Keep the camera on the patient throughout and have the questions issue from offscreen, as Truffaut did in The 400 Blows; or make the questioner substantial in his own right. In The Pumpkin Eater Eric Porter was allowed to act a human being with a set of responses: He got annoyed, bored, interested; he even went on vacation. Klute takes an approach somewhere between the two — cutting is lazy shot / reverse shot ping pong. The analyst hasn’t the status of a recognizable person, yet the emphasis on Bree is diluted. We get neither an intense subjectivity nor a finely delineated objectivity. It’s the problem with the whole film in little.

Pakula’s successes are with his actors. Klute is a thankless, monotone part. Donald Sutherland supplies some dimension by playing him as a methodical, faithful, humorless clod. Supporting parts are solidly cast and acted, but I must point out two women: Betty Murray has a distraught and nervous loveliness in her fleeting appearances as the missing man’s wife, and Dorothy Tristan, splendid in the otherwise dismissable End of the Road, makes a shattering impression as the junkie without once resorting to the battery of actorish mannerisms one usually finds in the role.

I used to think the thriller form could be adapted to all sorts of uses, but I grow less and less sure of that. As for Pakula: He has tact and undeniable ability at handling actors. Today neither of those is a common gift, and he may make a consistently fine film.

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