The Furniture: Ammonite's Many, Many Fossils

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Fossils! They’re cool.

In Ammonite, they’re also a metaphor - a simple one, I’d argue. To be frank, I found the 19th century seaside lesbian paleontology drama to be a bit dull, throwing quite a bit of symbolism up on the screen without ever making a real case that this director needed to make this film about these women.

But I did quite enjoy the sheer number of visual cues, some of which do work quite well. Victorian women, the film suggests, were like fossils. Society confined them to small, dim spaces where they slowly ossified...

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The Furniture: The Nest and Its Not-Haunted House

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Don’t marry an investment banker!

This, as far as I can tell, is the central message of Sean Durkin’s The Nest. And it’s good advice! Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) is a Gordon Gekko without any of the charm, a stiff Englishman determined to perform his financial success in front of a vaguely imagined audience of the rich and powerful. His wife, Allison (Carrie Coon), is miserably along for the ride. It’s a period piece, but it’s laser focused on toxic aspects of our culture that certainly haven’t gone away. The ‘80s never ended, not really.

And so we watch as Allison and her two children are dragged from their house in the US, already their third home in 10 years, and across the pond to an enormous old mansion in Surrey. Rory’s determination to make it big back in the UK upends everything, from Allison’s equestrian interests to their daughter’s gymnastics. I bring this up because it’s one of our few glimpses at the life before, represented in wide spaces like the sun-dappled walls of the stable and the well-lit, colorful gym...

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The Furniture: "À Nous la Liberté" and Freedom from Industrial Design

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Once upon a time, the Oscars were in November! Well, thrice upon a time. The 3rd, 4th and 5th Academy Awards were held in the fall - the last of them on November 18th, 1932. Nathaniel covreed the biggest piece of trivia from that night earlier this morning. But there were also a few firsts, including the debut of the short film categories and the first-ever foreign-language nominee. René Clair’s À nous la liberté was nominated for Best Art Direction, an award it lost to a cruise ship comedy called Transatlantic.

But it’s Clair and art director Lazare Meerson who have the last laugh, as their losing film is now largely regarded as a classic and Transatlantic barely has a Wikipedia page. A nous la liberte is a charming little oddity, a musical comedy about the alienation inherent in modern industry. It opens in a prison, where cellmates Émile (Henri Marchand) and Louis (Raymond Cordy) are at work hand-carving toy horses. The cavernous space evokes the ominous architecture of the modern prison, its high balconies a reminder of constant surveillance...

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The Furniture: Promoting the Forbidden City with The Last Emperor

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

The Last Emperor is enormous, as is its reputation. The shorter version is nearly three hours long. It swept the 1987 Oscars, winning all nine categories in which it was nominated. Its plot tracks events of global significance, across nearly six decades of Chinese history. The production required more than 10,000 costumes and 19,000 extras, many of them recruited from the People’s Liberation Army

But beyond its stature as a film, it is also something of an act of economic diplomacy. China, which had heavily restricted tourism before the late-1970s, began a major about-face with Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 “Reform and Opening Up” program.  Part of this effort included the promotion of heritage tourism. China ratified the World Heritage Convention in 1985, and added its first six World Heritage Sites in 1987. The Forbidden City was at the top of the list.

It’s not a coincidence that Bernardo Bertolucci was granted permission to film in the Forbidden City right at this time, the very first Western production allowed through the palace gates...

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The Furniture: Finding the Fear in "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Watching The Picture of Dorian Gray as a horror film in this, its 75th anniversary year, is a bit of a puzzle. It’s almost unrecognizable within the genre, though director Albert Lewin does treat the revelation of the deformed painting itself as something of a jump scare. But the overall vibe is more akin to a period drama or a film noir than anything we would consider spooky today.

That is, until you think about it a little more closely.

 The Picture of Dorian Gray is an atmospheric horror film about things that don’t necessarily scare us nearly as much anymore: arrogance, beauty and the simple fact of sexuality. In this way it does actually resemble the great horror films of its time, monster movies that make much out of giant laboratories and cavernous castles, unnerving the audience through the use of production design. Dorian Gray’s home is of a piece with Dracula’s castle and the Mummy’s tomb...

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