Vanya on 42nd Street
This is, as far as I can tell, the first movie I've ever watched on the strength of an algorithmic recommendation — and the fact that it is now one of my favorite films speaks to something about how good these tools are getting. Certainly not taste, but correlation.
It is both correct and insufficient to describe this film as "a taping of André Gregory's adaptation of Mamet's translation of Uncle Vanya." Malle is diegetically mischievous: quick asides from the director, establishing shots of the actors as they file into a dilapidated downtown playhouse, the mundane rituals of preparation. And then the setup becomes the rehearsal (like a very gentle jump scare), and then the rehearsal becomes the play itself.
I wrote last week about stop-making-sense:
What Demme captures here is that same indelible feel of the best live music, where you feel in the same breath and beat both completely alone and completely surrounded by the only people who matter: building, building, higher, higher.
Something similar could be said here. Both films understand that the most powerful thing you can do with a camera pointed at a performance is to make the audience forget the camera exists. And, indeed, much of this enchanting two hours is in forgetting — the lack of set, the lack of wardrobe, the lack of framing device — until, at last, Brooke Smith delivers the final monologue and Gregory emerges from the shadows, and the beautiful spell is over.
(As good as that monologue was, and as great as Smith's performance is, it somehow ranks second to Drive My Car in terms of best I've seen.)
I'm sure Malle is using the staging — the crumbling New Amsterdam Theatre, street clothes instead of costumes, coffee cups on card tables — to say interesting things about the New York art scene, about the precarity and stubborn vitality of downtown theatre. Perhaps I will try hard to pay attention to that on a second viewing, in much the same way I always try hard to, upon waking from a dream, remember the next one.