Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

This week is the fifteenth anniversary of Yesterday’s Movies, and it seemed appropriate to do a special piece for that. In the past I’ve revisited the first movie reviewed here and the first movie reviewed going from twice a month to weekly. In this case though, I feel like I’m out of significant early reviews in that vicinity to revisit (though I could go back to the first review that I felt I’d figured out the format.

However, I’ve never liked non-narrative series that make the last installment a retrospective or otherwise more of a special thing about the project as a whole than another installment that can mostly stand on its own, leaving the penultimate entry as the actual last one. So even though retrospective is an easy way to fill space, I wanted to resist that urge and end Yesterday’s Movies with a normal review. But what to pick, if not a Rewind?

I’ve always felt a bit strange about the blog outlasting its moratorium. This is a fifteen year old project that’s allowed to reach back ten years. So it occurred to me to check out the movies that released around the date that Yesterday’s Movies launched. And I got lucky. The same week, a movie called Nine had its initial limited release. It’s a musical, which is a bonus, and it’s about making movies. It’s about an Italian director trying to work out what his next movie should be. And that’s about all I know about it.

After watching the movie:

It’s 1965, and auteur Guido Contini’s brilliant films have built the Rome-based Cinecitta studios into a media giant. In ten days, Cinecitta will begin shooting Guido’s latest film Italia, sure to bring the art of cinema to new heights and inspire the world yet again. But nobody’s seen a script. The investors are getting worried, and the crew are getting anxious. Guido is getting panicked. No longer a young and hungry artist at 50 years old, Guido has hit an insurmountable writer’s block, and has no idea what this movie is even about. It seems every time he tries to focus on writing, his mind is drawn to carnal distractions and feelings of having failed his recently deceased mother. It doesn’t help that he promised his wife Luisa that he was done having affairs, and his mistress Carla has come to town demanding attention, put out because she was expecting to stay at his hotel with him and gets hidden in a flophouse instead. As he recalls formative boyhood experiences and tries to channel that boy’s imagination, some vague concepts begin to gather in his head of a story of a man pulled in many directions because he is in love with many women who all demand his full attention, maybe as a collage of the great men of Italy’s past being inspired by the Muses. But as the first day of shooting arrives and he still hasn’t written a line, he might get by with improvising for the camera, as long as his muse, leading actress Claudia, can inspire him, and maybe he can convince Luisa (and himself) that he’s fully committed to her too.

For a movie set in Rome, the cast is all over the place. It makes sense that people from all over Europe and even America would end up in or at least be passing through Rome, but I’m not sure any of the leading cast aside from Guido’s mother are the ethnicity of their characters. I think Judi Dench’s character is French, I think Carla is meant to be Italian but she’s played by Penelope Cruz This is however a good example of Daniel Day-Lewis disappearing into his roles. The only reason I suspected he wasn’t actually Italian was because I was pretty sure there aren’t any Italian actors big enough in the US that a Hollywood studio would trust them to lead a big budget musical.

This is a frustrating story, in that it’s all about the dilemma of the days leading up to shooting that’s been caused by Guido’s behavior over his entire life, and then the happy ending feels more like an epilogue to a failure. The flashbacks profess to explore how Guido got to be the way he is, but they feel more like a distraction from the plot, which is itself about distractions from the central problem. I wish I could be invested in the romantic plot of Guido being pulled in every direction, but it’s a distraction from the problem of the moment, so I don’t care so much. The script is a macguffin that’s only important in its absence, so I can’t care much about that either. And the main song that I enjoyed as a song is a complete diversion from every other plot thread, as it’s a reporter who’s in all of two sequences trying to and nearly succeeding in seducing him into a one-night stand. That said, there’s some good discussion of the magic of movies and where inspiration comes from, even it never feels like it has enough focus to be what this movie is trying to say.

Like Chicago, the musical numbers go in and out of a more stylized nondiegetic staging, and I’m not sure if I had an easier time following because I was more familiar with the technique or because it was better primed. The stagey scenes are also a place that exists within the world, as they at least mostly take place on the constructed sets of Italia, which could be a factor. And there was one artistic concept delivered through this using a film projector that made me sit up and take notice.  It’s clever and beautiful, and striking all at once. That’s the magic of filmmaking, that even in a movie that was mostly uninteresting, sometimes there can still be a spark of a dream made real.

I guess it makes sense that a musical I haven’t been made aware of through a vocal fanbase turned out to not be as engaging as I hoped. I’m still glad I watched it rather than leaving it. The main reason I started this blog is to prove I could deliver something every week, and my schedule only slowly started sliding in the last year or two. But another reason was to spur me on to watch movies I didn’t have as much urgency to get to, and that’s where this movie lies. I may not have chosen it without a catalyst, but I’m happy to have seen it, and happy to have seen almost every movie reviewed, and found something worth it in almost all of those.