Forest Whitaker

I saw The Last King of Scotland on Saturday, and as I expected to be, I was overwhelmed by Forest Whitaker's performance as Idi Amin. (As I just noticed in a New Yorker commentary on another film with James McAvoy in it, McAvoy was not bad either!)

But my love of Whitaker's acting comes from Ghost Dog, by Jim Jarmusch, a movie that provides the pleasure of watching Whitaker develop a character without any music-video-style editing. The editing in The Last King of Scotland reminded me of the editing of the key scene in Philadelphia. In that scene, Tom Hanks, wearing a bathrobe and hooked up to a walking IV, explains opera to a flabbergasted Denzel Washington. But instead of letting Hanks dance with his IV and blow the audience away with his acting, Jonathan Demme pretended it was a video and did all kinds of swooping and cutting and general messing around with the images.

At least in Philadelphia it was only the one scene that was almost ruined by such editing. In The Last King of Scotland, almost every scene with the brilliant Whitaker was cut to pieces, as if Whitaker's acting were not more than enough to communicate Amin's frightening blend of charisma and brutality.

I'll take Jarmusch (or Jacques Rivette, another director who lets his actors act) over Kevin Macdonald any day!

And something happened at the cinema that I have never experienced before: the movie was interrupted, during the climactic scene, by the house lights, because someone was having a medical emergency. We had to wait 10 or 15 minutes until an ambulance came and took the stricken person out. Then the movie started again!

La bande des quatre

Andrea and I bought ourselves a six-film set of Jacques Rivette on DVD for Christmas, and we just now finished watching the first of them, La bande des quatre.

My French has deteriorated over the past few years (it was, naturally, much better when Andrea lived in France and I was spending a lot of time there), so I enjoyed the feel of the movie as much as anything else (although I was able to follow the story well enough, a lot of the nuances surely were lost on me). The one thing I thought I would comment on here is the presence in this movie of a subtle variation on the old play-within-the-play motif.

Sometimes, movies contain scenes where actors are performing on stage. This creates subtle nuances, of course: the actor is playing an actor playing a role. A variation on this is the actor rehearsing—a scene with a somewhat different ontology, if you will: now the actor is playing an actor who is not losing himself in the role but, in fact, quite the opposite, as the actor rehearsing is often as self-conscious as the actor performing is not.

But La bande des quatre puts a new spin on this. Many of the scenes in the movie involve not the rehearsal of a play but preparation for a production of a play (by Marivaux) in an acting class. The actresses, then, are not playing actresses rehearsing but something even more self-conscious than that: student actresses learning, under the critical eye of their teacher, played by Bulle Ogier.

If this were a play-in-a-movie, the actresses would lose themselves in the roles of actresses losing themselves in their roles. If this were a rehearsal-in-a-movie, the actresses would lose themselves in the roles of actresses self-consciously working out their roles. But it is an acting-class-in-a-movie, so the actresses are losing themselves in the roles of actresses both self-consciously working out their roles and self-consciously pondering what the acting teacher thinks.