Tetro (2009)

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1946 fantasy romance film A Matter of Life and Death (released in the United States as Stairway to Heaven) the sequences in Heaven are done in black and white, while the sequences set on Earth are presented in vibrant Technicolor, a deliberate inversion of how one might expect a bichromial film to render those two realms. In Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro the present is shown in black and white, while flash backs and fantasy sequences appear in color that looks like its from a 1940's film stock. This is one of two major tributes or homages in this movie to the work of the writing and directing team known collectively as The Archers. The other tribute is showing around a full minute clip from "the doll sequence" in P & P's 1951 film The Tales of Hoffman, and then later recreating that scene with contemporary actors.

The influence of mid century British art film combines with that of later motion pictures, largely indie, that used black and white film for artistic, and sometimes budgetary reasons, while the plot of Tetro barrows heavily from the dysfunctional family and angst of expectations motifs associated with the works of Tennessee Williams. Tetro (Vincent Gallo) the films title character is the son of a famed American orchestra conductor who flees to Argentina to escape from the oppressive presence of his imposing and difficult father. After years living mostly below the radar, shacked up with a lovely doctor (Maribel Verdu) and doing lighting work for a local theater troop, Tetro is visited by his much younger half brother Bennie (Coppola find Alden Ehrenreich in his film debut), who takes advantage of work being done on the cruse ship on which he is a waiter to see the sibling he idolized as a young child. Tetro isn't super happy to see him, and it turns out both brothers have a lot to work through vis-a-vis each other and their father.

There are a lot of really beautiful novelistic elements to this film, which is also rather routinely a work of character study as high opera. The film went in a number of directions I was not expecting but they mostly work. One of the most fascinating things about this film is comparing it to earlier works by its famous director, and how different it is from them, while at the same time still very much at peace in his criterion. Tetro would certainly seem dull going to many, and unexpectedly has a fair amount of nudity in it, something which historically Coppola hadn't gone that much in for. Still if you tend to enjoy filmmaking that is a little textually dense, you could be impressed, I was. ****