The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger

If you’re interested in seeing Tilda Swinton peel apples while the novelist, screenwriter and art critic John Berger discusses his father’s technique of peeling apples and if you’re interested how both of their fathers were not forthcoming about their wartime experiences you’ll want to rush out to see The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger, currently playing at Film Forum. You'll also learn that both Swinton and Berger were born on Guy Fawkes Day. The film directed by Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth, Bartek Dziadosz and Tilda Swinton is a tiresome hagiography of the writer who's perhaps best known for his book and TV series Ways of Seeing and the screenplay for The Salamander.  The simple peasant existence Berger has lived for decades in the French alps is juxtaposed to the juggernaut of global capitalism, which the author animatedly and repeatedly condemns. It makes one cringe to see an otherwise inspired and complex writer like Ben Lerner, who appears in a segment of the film, looking with doe-eyed admiration at a figure whose nostalgic Marxist fiats are treated like scripture. Those who grew up holding Berger’s art criticism in high regard will be disappointed to hear him trumpeting Leger, a techno-cubist who’s a curious choice for someone for whom industrialized society is anathema. Archival footage of  Jacques Derrida is employed in a section of the film dealing with animal consciousness and in support of Berger’s idea that mankind doesn't possess a superior apprehension of death to animals, despite humans' vaunted consciousness. The story of a pig’s demise is brought to bear in support of the author’s point. If you unconditionally love Berger and everything he says, then The Seasons in Quincy will be manna. If you regard yourself as a humanist who's vaguely indisposed to the excesses of materialism, but realizes that the Latin for utopia translates as “no place,” then you might be disinclined to worship at this Berger altar. 

I am Love

Luca Guadagnino’s I am Love is an essay on superficiality posing as profundity. The film begins in snow and ends with rain falling on statues. Using these images, Guadagnino introduces the classic elements of the pathetic fallacy, with nature mirroring the emotions of delusion and sorrow. Add to this the stylized title sequences draped in Art Deco fonts. Name your scandalous heroine Emma and cast the role with an actress who has made a reputation in high-art cinema, like the film based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Have her fall in love with a chef. Is it her love of his shrimp that is the turning point of the drama, or is it her lust for him that makes her eventually fall in love with the shrimp? Establish the aristocratic, novelistic Italian drama, which is immediately suggestive of truly great works of cinema like Visconti’s The Leopard, and then add lush lyric sequences (including, naturally, the friezes of auspicious edifices) that conjure the sweep of history in movies like De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Bertolucci’s The Conformist. Portray doting servants of the kind that appeared in the self-same Italian epics. Create leitmotifs like a cropped hairstyle shared by an adulterous mother and lesbian daughter to establish a relationship predicated on rebellion. And then, as the coup de grace, create the ultimate piece of melodrama in an adventitious and tragic accident that reveals the falsity of a world. In The Leopard, as a case in point, Visconti created a tragic figure defined by the complexity of the historical context in which he found himself—an aristocrat at the time of Garibaldi, facing the economic exigencies of an aggressive new mercantile order. Based on the novel by Lampedusa, The Leopard was a profound meditation on the passing of a way of life. Ironically, there are Tancredis in both movies, but the similarity is in name only.