For the month of love, another batch of movies is being added to the Collection. All five films are new to the C and touch independent tones and commercial viability, with only one of them being not produced in the United States. Two come from the same director and two more come from directors who had one film that was already given the treatment, and another coming with one of the more hidden films in American cinema during the independently buzzing 80s. It’s an electric selection
Mandabi (1968)
Ousmane Sembène’s follow-up to the breakthrough film, Black Girl, was the first movie ever made in the Wolof language from Sembène’s native Senegal. An unemployed man with his wives and children tries to get a money order from his nephew living in France but faces several hurdles in retrieving it while others seek to get some of that money from him. As in his previous film, Sembène deals with colonialism factors and the bureaucracy it creates, but also Sengalase society as a whole under the spell of greed and religion. It’s a scathing film in his home country who seek their own identity yet remained affected by the remnants of being a colonial state.
The Parallax View (1974)
Warren Beatty plays a reporter who investigates a prominent politician’s assassination inside Seattle’s Space Needle after his ex-lover, a witness in the killing, becomes the latest person to die. But as the reporter digs deeper, he discovers the conspiracy behind it all which leads him into the lower depths of who really has the power and how they use it. Part of director Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoid trilogy,” this story makes allusions to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy six years prior to the movie’s release and reflects the growing disillusionment and distrust Amerian society had for the era’s establishment and was released two months prior to President Nixon’s resignation.
Smooth Talk (1985)
One year before Blue Velvet, Laura Dern took the lead role as a teenage girl whose flirtations with another young man exposes the dark side of the male ideas of love. Based on Joyce Carol Oates’ short story, the film would win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance but was a low-key film when it was released. Clearly, the dark’s subject manner brought attention to David Lynch in casting Dern for his shocking seductive masterpiece. As the protagonist Connie, Dern plays a silly, hopeful, and doomed figure whose interest in a groovy figure (played by Treat Williams) shows its initial sparks and the charm anyone can put on before shifting gears to its more controlling ways.
Man Push Cart (2005)/Chop Shop (2007)
Both come from Ramin Bahrani, who would later direct 99 Homes and the HBO adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. These are his first two features, small independents that provided a form of American realism in the early 21st Century. His debut film is Man Push Cart, a story about a Pakistani immigrant who sells bagels and coffee on the streets of New York City who seems to find some luck along the way by another fellow Pakistani, only to have a fateful encounter that ruins him. Roger Ebert gave a glowing review, stating the film, “embodies the very soul of Italian neorealism.”
His followup, Chop Shop, debuted at Cannes in 2007 and also used non-actors to continue his neorealism, following a Hispanic street orphan working out of an old repair shop in Queens while trying on his own to save enough money for him and his older sister to live away from the streets so she doesn’t have to continue prostitution. As with his first feature, Bahrani uses the theme of survival to push the narrative on everyday people who go through similar struggles in the major cities and that it is not just limited to adults.
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