August in Wonderland: Alice in Wonderland

The Alice books are a popular subject for the stage as well as film.  (Your humble scribe was once cast as the Caterpillar's butt.)  In 1983 PBS's "Great Performances" broadcast an adaptation of the recent Broadway revival of Alice in Wonderland, retaining Kate Burton as Alice but recasting most of the other roles.  And the end result is visually striking, recorded in a TV studio but with constructed sets and a light splashing of special effects and transitions, making it look like an enhanced stage play.

There is also a new framing device.  Rather than a bored Alice watching her sister read, Alice (Kate Burton) is an understudy for a stage production of Alice in Wonderland, desperately running lines as the rest of the cast and crew gossip about whether she's ready.  Alice flubs a recital of "Jabberwocky," then slips through the looking glass and meets a White Rabbit (Austin Pendleton.)  That is not the way this normally goes, but from that point onward it's a fairly faithful (if abridged) adaptation of the book.  Alice tangos with a Mouse (Nathan Lane), consults the Caterpillar (Fritz Weaver), argues with a Cheshire Cat (Geoffrey Holder), crashes a mad tea party (featuring Andre Gregory, Željko Ivanek, and Dean Badalto), plays croquet with the Queen of Hearts (Eve Arden) and then interrupts the trial of the Knave of Hearts (Tony Cummings) before declaring that they're "Nothing but a pack of cards!" and returning to her dressing room.

Only for a moment, though, because this is an adaptation of both books.  Alice meets the Red Queen (Colleen Dewhurst) and eagerly agrees to become a pawn in the ongoing chess game so that she can reach the Eighth Square and become a Queen.  That means more episodic adventure, including dancing with Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee (Andre De Shields and Alan Weeks) and assisting the White Queen (Maureen Stapleton).  

After a frustrating meeting with Humpty Dumpty (Richard Woods) Alice is on the verge of tears, and then the movie wheels out its secret weapon: Kate Burton's father Richard, playing the White Knight, riding on a pantomime horse.  There's a sudden shift from nonsense to sincerity, as Alice and the Knight have a brief but sincere conversation, the Knight sings a sad song, and then he goes on his way.  The two have managed to cheer each other up, and Alice is prepared for the madness of the finale.

The sudden shift in tone might be surprising, but it is exactly what happens in the book; in all of Alice's journeys, the White Knight is the one character who is consistently kind to her, and he is the one person she's said to remember fondly.

"Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday—the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight—the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her—the horse quietly moving about, with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the grass at her feet—and the black shadows of the forest behind—all this she took in like a picture, as, with one hand shading her eyes, she leant against a tree, watching the strange pair, and listening, in a half dream, to the melancholy music of the song"

 And the Burtons seem to be delighted to be on screen together.  It is a big shift in tone, but it works.

 Alice in Wonderland has a fabulous cast, and I haven't had time to mention them all.  While the whole production looks and feels stagey, most of the acting is understated and naturalistic, which really works; when the Mad Hatter isn't busy being flamboyant and wacky, for instance, the menacing tone of the text really comes through.  The one exception to this is, surprisingly, Kate Burton's Alice, who is almost aggressively chipper.  This is an Alice who is having a great time until she's not.

Finally, the costuming and scenery is gorgeous.  Everything is designed to look like a Tenniel illustration come to life.  Not inspired by Tenniel - the stage is made of black and white illustrations, and the costumes include cross-hatching and line work.  It's one of the best looking Alices I've ever seen, as well as a great performance.

August in Wonderland: Neco z Alenky

 Neco z Alenky (1988), known in English simply as Alice, is Czech artist and director Jan Švankmajer's take on the Wonderland story. Švankmajer felt that other Alice movies presented the story as a fairy tale, and he wanted to create a version that felt like "an amoral dream."  The Czech title is much better than the rather generic Alice; Neco z Alenky translates to "Something From Alice," and that's what we get.  It's a very carefully curated artistic presentation.

Right from the start it's clear that this Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) isn't the same as other Alices.  She's introduced in the traditional fashion, bored stiff as the sister next to her concentrates ona  book without pictures or conversations, but instead of musing about how to make a daisy chain without picking any daisies, Alice glowers as she tosses stones into the river.  A quick change of scenery and Alice is in the house, surrounded by detritus and clutter, throwing stones into a teacup instead.  And then things get weird.

A white taxidermied rabbit pulls the nails out of its feet, opens a hidden drawer to retrieve hat, gloves, and scissors, breaks free of its case, then runs across a field and disappears into a different drawer.  And Alice watches this happen and decides it's a good idea to follow this creature.  She slips into the drawer herself, and then things get really weird.

Of course that's more or less what happens in the book, and Neco z Alenky follows an abridged version of the plot of the book, though it's tilted to become more surreal and macabre.  Alice follows the White Rabbit deeper and deeper into  this found art Wonderland, always asking the Rabbit to wait, and the Rabbit either runs or responds with violence.  This White Rabbit isn't the same as other White Rabbits, either.  It's still a dandy, still perpetually late, but cuts a much more sinister figure and acts as the executioner for the Queen of Hearts, snipping off heads with an oversized pair of scissors.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Alice learns how to change size by eating small tarts and drinking ink; she becomes a porcelain doll when she's small, but doesn't seem to notice.  She nearly drowns in a  pool of her own tears and a rat tries to build a fire on her scalp.  She grows to giant size while in the White Rabbit's house, accidentally kills Bill the Lizard (he gets better) and is trapped in a plaster cast of herself.

And so it goes.  Alice meets a caterpillar made of socks, has tea with a puppet Mad Hatter and clockwork March Hare, and finally plays croquet with the King and Queen of Hearts, who get very annoyed when Alice refuses to stick to the script.

The movie is undeniably strange, and not just because of the visual style.  Kristýna Kohoutová voices all the characters (Camilla Power in the English dub) and serves as a sort of narrator; any time a character says something, there's a close-up of Alice's lips as she provides the dialogue tags.  On the other hand, we don't get to hear what Alice is thinking, and so the whole movie winds up feeling a bit more mundane than the books, since we're missing Alice's often bizarre musings on identity and biology and geography and Mabel's poky little house.  

More than anything else, Neco z Alenky reminds me of a pop-up book.  It delivers stunning and unexpected visuals, but there's story missing - it's something from Alice, heavily abridged.

August in Wonderland: Alice Through the Looking Glass

In "Through the Looking Glass", Alice has an actual motivation: she wants to reach the Eighth Square and become a queen.  It's still a hard plot to spin into a movie, though, because there's no actual antagonist.  Humpty Dumpty may be a pedantic jerk, and the Red Queen is bossy and rude, but they're not trying to prevent Alice from reaching her goals.  Nobody is!  However, Alice Through the Looking Glass (1966) solves the problem in a simple way, by ripping off "The Wizard of Oz."

Alice (Judi Rolin) is a bored early Sixties teenager sitting alone upstairs while her sitcom dad (Richard Denning) hosts a cocktail party downstairs.  She isn't bored for long, though.  Looking in the mirror she spots the Red King (Robert Coote), who is not asleep, which means this is already an incredibly loose adaptation of the book.

The Red King invites Alice to join him on the other side.  She does, and she's introduced to the Red Queen (Agnes Moorehead), the White Queen (Nanette Fabray), and the White King (Ricardo Montalban), and there is exposition.  The Kings and Queens don't really rule anymore, because the Looking-Glass Land has been conquered by the Jabberwock (Jack Palance), a creature so terrible that the cowardly royals don't dare say his name out loud.

Alice urges the royals to stand up and fight back, and together they come up with a plan.  Since Alice is enthusiastic about becoming a queen, she can follow the Yellow BrickBlue Road to the end of the board and earn a crown, and the Looking-Glass people will be so inspired by her example that they'll all rise up and overthrow the Jabberwock and live happily ever after.

It's obviously Oz inspired, but there is one key difference: Dorothy wants to go home, while Alice is determined to stay in Looking-Glass Land and rule as a queen, terrible and beautiful as the dawn.  Still, it's time to get on down the road, and so Alice sets out on her journey.

The Blue Road is really a trap.  The Jabberwock painted it blue so that it will be the same color as the sky, which means that careless travelers will go up rather than down and be lost in the air forever.  Alice passes the test, leaves the blue road behind, and walks down a different road, made of yellow brick.  She conquers the three fairy tale witches (Sara Taft, Georgia Simmons and Maryesther Denver) the Jabberwock sent to guard the path, meets the Jabberwock himself, and is saved by that beloved Lewis Carroll creation, Lester the Jester (Roy Castle).  

Despite the extended Oz riff, though, the movie does occasionally drift in the vague direction of the book.  In her wanderings Alice meets Humpty Dumpty (Jimmy Durante) and Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum (Dick and Tom Smothers), and she finds time for a long and melancholy conversation with the White King, who takes the White Knight's slot as "friendly older character who keeps alluding to aging and death."  (Montalban sells it; it's easily the most affecting part of the film.)  Still, Carroll's book is treated as more of an outline, and lines form the book are rare enough to be easily noticeable.

This version of Through the Looking Glass was made for TV, and the tone is set to "Sixties variety Show," though everyone is chewing so much scenery that it all comes across as a bit panto.  It's got a great cast, but Alice adaptations often have great casts; the books may not have much plot, but there are plenty of distinctive characters to choose from, and interesting scenery to chew.

This is not a great adaptation of "Through the Looking Glass."  It succeeds on its own terms, but those terms are very specific to its time and place.  Ricardo Montalban is great, though.

August in Wonderland: Alicja

 Alicja (1982) was a Belgian and Polish co-production, released internationally under a number of different titles; in English it's simply called "Alice," while in Germany the movie was released as "Alicija im Horrorland," which must have led to a lot of disappointed German horror fans; while it's weird and occasionally disturbing, this is not a horror movie.  The real terror here is ill-advised rebound relationships.

Alice (Sophie Barjac) leads a mundane life in an unnamed European city.  She used to be a stewardess, but now she works at a TV factory along with her three friends.  Turtle (Jack Wild) is bookish and completely smitten with Alice, but too shy to say anything.  Gryphon (Dominic Guard) is supportive. patient and sensible.  And Mona (Tracy Hyde) doesn't really have a Wonderland counterpart, but calling her Mabel would have been an excellent deep cut, since like Carroll's Mabel, Mona exists to define Alice by contrast.  Mona likes to go out and party, while Alice would rather stay home.  Mona is fine with dating married men, and Alice very much is not, especially since her separation from her philandering pilot husband Cheshire Cat (Paul Nicholas.)

One day Alice and her child friend (Julia Hubner) are in the park people watching, when Alice spots a masked man with a rifle take aim at a handsome older jogger.  He fires, the jogger hits, and Alice faints on the spot, but when  she opens her eyes the jogger is there and unharmed and very French and his name is Rabbit (Jean-Pierre Cassel).  Rabbit offers to give her a ride, she declines, and he leaves, because he's late for a very important date.

And then Rabbit shows up at the factory, ostensibly on business, but sneaks away so that he can follow Alice to the cafeteria and pretend to be a waiter, allowing him to flirt a bit and the audience to learn Alice's backstory.  The flirting doesn't take, so Rabbit shows up at her apartment and, during a charming song and dance number, bribes the concierge to find out more about Alice and exactly which apartment she lives in.

Turtle and Gryphon don't trusty Rabbit, and they are completely correct, because Rabbit has secrets.  He owes money to the wrong people, and he begs his wealthy friend Queenie (Susannah York), not realizing that Queenie is the wrong people he owes the money to.  

After permanently ending things with Cheshire Cat, Alice sings a duet about identity and change with a taxi driver who may be named Caterpillar (German Schlager and country singer Gunter Gabriel), convinces her child friend not to stab someone, then sings another song about love while walking for miles.  So she's in a more receptive mood when Rabbit shows up at her apartment disguised as a plumber, and agrees to join him at one of Queenie's parties, where she meets March Hare (Marc Seaberg) and Mad Hatter (Peter Straker.)

 

Alice dives headlong into a relationship with Rabbit.  Turtle and Gryphon once again warn her to be careful, and once again they are completely correct.  Queenie has grown tired of Rabbit, and she's dispatched a pair of bumbling but oddly effective assassins (Wieslaw Golas and Andrzej Wasilicz) to deal with the problem.  

 Rabbit breaks up with Alice, then goes on the run, and Alice swallows a handful of sleeping pills before slipping into a disco-fueled psychedelic nightmare which highlights her insecurities, makes some direct Wonderland references, and provides an excuse to but Sophie Barjac in a flimsy nightie with bright lights behind her.  And then things get weird.

Rabbit's characterization hasn't really aged well; the light stalking may have seemed romantic back in the early eighties, but from a modern perspective he's a singing and dancing collection of red flags in a nice white suit.  (Ladies, if you meet his friends and he has to assure you that they don't mean any harm, he is not for you.)  That said, the movie does seem to recognize that this is not a healthy relationship, and Alice traded one charming but secretive man with a tendency to abruptly vanish for another.

Still, the movie is consistently odd and entertaining.  The music is fantastic, with Scottish singer Lulu singing Alice's part.  Susannah York chews all of the scenery, Jean-Pierre Cassel dances brilliantly, and Sophie Barjac is by turns delightful and heartbreaking.

August in Wonderland: Alice au pays des merveilles

 Alice au pays des merveilles (1970) is a French TV movie that adapts Alice in Wonderland.  As an adaptation it's kind of surprising, combining fidelity to the original novel with a literally dizzying array of special effects, somehow taking one of the stranger children's books in English literature and making it even weirder.

 

The story begins on the island of Le Grand Jatte.  Not the actual island, though; instead Alice (Marie-Veronique Maurin) and her sister Lorina (Aimee Fontaine) are spending a hot summer afternoon inside the painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grand Jatte" by Georges Seraut.  However, while Lorina is reading a book, Alice is bored, at least until she spots a white rabbit with a waistcoat and pocket watch (Guy Grosso) run past.  She follows, only to fall down a rabbit hole and discover a strange new world underground.

From there the plot sticks very closely to Carroll's original story.  In other words, there's barely a plot at all.  Alice sees a beautiful garden and decides that she wants to visit it, but she spends much of the film just wandering around and meeting eccentric creatures who are varying degrees of rude and argumentative. 

There are changes, of course; the movie cuts out the sequence in which Alice meets a puppy (the puppy always gets cut), the White Rabbit lives in a house which is much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and the song the Duchess (Annette Poivre) sings to her baby has an extra gruesome chorus, but for the most part the movie plays the hits.  Alice has tea with the Mad Hatter (Hubert Deschamps), plays croquet with the Queen of Hearts (Alice Sapritch), and so on.  

However, there are two reasons to watch this adaptation rather than just reading the book.  First, the special effects are, to use the technical term, bonkers.  The movie makes extensive use of blue screen, combining live action with animation that looks like it's been lifted directly from Sesame Street, combined with swirling colors and screensaver technology decades ahead of its time.  Sometimes the effects are just filler, but there's always something happening onscreen.

The second reason is Alice herself.  Because there's barely a plot and Alice spends most of her time in Wonderland wandering from place to place, Alice often comes across as kind of passive in movies.  Not here, though; this Alice is spirited.  Spunky.  Shouty and kind of bossy.  This is an Alice who gives at least as well as she gets, and she also tramples all over the fourth wall like Deadpool crossed with Godzilla.  Combine that with the aforementioned bonkers special effects bringing Alice's musings to life onscreen, and for once Alice is the most interesting person in her movie.

Fortune's fool, fooling around.

The world of cinema has seen some great cinematic rivalries over the years: Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, Ecks vs. Sever, Kramer vs. Kramer, Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus, Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl,  Godzilla vs. Kong, and now, at long last, Romeo vs. Juliet (2015).  

Our scene is not laid in fair Verona, however.  Instead, the film opens in a small village in Bengal, as the village elders hold a meeting for anyone with complaints against Romeo (Ankush Hazra).  It's mostly an excuse to harangue Romeo's mother Bidisha (Tulika Basu), as the assembled villagers point out Romeo's flaws - he's a liar, he doesn't measure up to his late and respected father, he's a bad influence on the other village youth, and everyone is pretty sure that it's Bidisha's fault.

For all his many flaws, Romeo is a devoted son, and he can't let anyone treat his mother that way.  He's still pretty flawed, though, so his solution is to try and win over the village elder's beloved niece, Shyamali (Neha Gupta.)  The plan works a little too well, with Shyamali announcing their engagement to everyone, and now Romeo has a different problem.

It's time for a new plan, and this one is even worse.  Romeo announces that he's in love with someone else, and when pressed he names Juliet (Mahiya Mahi), a beautiful woman living in London; Romeo and Juliet have never actually met, he just found her picture while scrolling through Facebook.  The villagers are suspicious, probably because Romeo lies so much,, so he must fly to London to bring back Juliet as his bride in order to protect his mother's honor.

In London he meets fellow Bengali expatriate Anu (Nita Mistry), and she agrees to help, which is just as well, because Romeo is utterly clueless.  It turns out that Juliet is an heiress, soon to be one of the richest women in London, so winning her heart is probably off the table, and instead they try and fail to get a picture of Romeo and Juliet together, because that way he can at least send something home.  

 However, in the course of wacky sitcom shenanigans, Romeo manages to save Juliet from a gang of assassins, because  village rowdies will always be better fighters than trained goons.  Juliet's father left behind a very specific and confusing will, stating that if anything happens to her before her twenty first birthday, his estate will be divided between the rest of the family, and she turns twenty one in two months, so she selects Romeo as her bodyguard, which means that he finally gets his picture.

He also has a chance to get to know Juliet while repeatedly saving her from assassins.  She's not the shallow rich girl that she seems, and they're getting along well, but he also learns that she has a boyfriend named Rahul (Joey Debroy), who is currently in America.  

And then Romeo gets another terrible idea: he'll take Juliet back to his village in India.  Dramatically that makes a lot of sense; it means that sophisticated city girl Juliet gets a turn as fish out of water, taking over for country bumpkin Romeo.  It means that Romeo and Juliet will spend more time together in a new place, and Juliet has a chance to grow closer to Bidisha, discovering the warmth of a loving family.  It means new locations for the fight scenes when the assassins inevitably show up.  But it also means a constant juggling act to keep Juliet and Bidisha from learning about Romeo's many, many lies, and I have to admit the cycle of "Juliet discovers a part of the truth and Romeo comes up with a new lie" gets a bit tedious.

There's a lot to like here.  Romeo and Juliet have some actual chemistry by the end of the movie, and both songs and fight scenes are frequent, visually interesting and move at a good pace.  But the plot really doesn't hang together, and the villain's plan makes no sense.

The big problem is Romeo himself, though.  He's supposed to be a charming scamp, but too much of the time he comes across as a smug jerk (especially when dealing with Shyamali.  And he doesn't really learn anything, because he never really gets any sort of a comeuppance.  When each lie is revealed, Juliet is mad for a while, but both she and Bidisha are quick to forgive, so Romeo doesn't really grow.  And he really, really needs to.

Shah Rukh Week: Pardes

 Pardes (1997) is a movie with a message, and it conveys that message through a combination of dogged determination, arthouse symbolism, and all the subtlety of a Fourth of July Parade, but still winds up delivering a different message than intended.

Kishorilal (Amrish Puri) is a wealthy businessman who now lives in America; he might be the richest man in America if some of the dialogue is to be trusted.  On a visit to India he meets old friend Suraj (Alok Nath) and Suraj's large extended family, including an indeterminate number of nieces and nephews and one adult daughter, Ganga (Mahima Chaudhry).  

While he lives in America, Kishorilal loves India and Indian values, and he decides that Ganga would be the perfect wife for his son Rajiv (Apurva Agnihotri), acting as a living reminder of his spiritual home and passing on proper values to his grandchildren.  Suraj agrees, but before a match can be made the young couple have to meet.  Since Rajiv has lived in America his entire life, Kishorilal decides to send his foster son Arjun (Shah Rukh Khan) to make sure everything goes smoothly and prepare things for Rajiv's arrival.

Arjun is a mechanic and musician, with a studio above his garage so that he and his fellow mechanic/musicians can record their songs after working on cars.  He's kind and utterly loyal to his foster father.  He's also very fussy, and he clashes with Ganga and the children initially, but they quickly become friends.  Soon Rajiv arrives, and after a rocky start it looks like everyone likes each other and the match will soon be made.

Because Ganga and Arjun have become such good friends, she asks him directly if Rajiv is a good match and whether her future husband has any bad habits or vices that she needs to know about, because her future happiness depends on an honest answer.  Arjun assures her that Rajiv is a good Indian boy at heart, so she accepts the proposal, the couple are formally engaged, and Ganga and Ranjiv fly off to America.

America is not at all what Ganga expected.  There's the expected difference in values and culture, but almost all of Rajiv's family are awful people, especially his aunt Neeta (Madhuri Bhatia).  Arjun is there, but she's shocked to find that the rest of the family consider him a servant rather than a relative, someone to fix their cars and feed occasionally but not someone to socialize with.  

And worst of all, it quickly becomes clear that Arjun lied.  Rajiv smokes a lot.  he drinks, too, and he is a mean drunk.  Kishorilal urges her to teach his son proper values, but Rajiv is not interested in changing anything, and the situation gets worse and worse, and while she's still mad about the whole lying thing, Arjun is the only friend Ganga has in America.

The trouble is that the rest of the family notice the friendship as well, and convince Kishorilal to send Arjun to manage the family auto company in LA.  He leaves on a solo road trip, while Rajiv takes ganga to a wedding in Las Vegas.  And that's when things get much, much worse.  they have a fight, and Rajiv decides that he's tired of pretending to like India.  Ganga throws the engagement ring in his face and cancels the wedding, but Rajiv attacks her.  She knocks him out and escapes.  Arjun finds her and takes her back to India, but her father leaps to exactly the wrong conclusion, while Rajiv and Kishorilal arrive to bring Ganga back.

And that leads directly to the intended message of the film.  There's a lot of talk in the movie about traditional Indian values versus modern Western values, and it's clear which side we're expected to take.  The opening song is all about how great India is, and Kishjorilal and most of the nice character sing it at various times in the film.  Rajiv has been corrupted by growing up in America, while Ganga is sweet and pure and named after after the Ganges; much of the time she's more of a symbol of India than a character in her own right.

However, traditional Indian values don't really acquit themselves very well either. The village elders demand a kabaddi match to decide if Ganga can marry Rajiv rather than the distant cousin everyone assumed she was promised to, and when Suraj thinks that his daughter has eloped with Arjun, he threatens her with a sword, then locks her away until Rajiv and Kishorilal can come collect her, because she belongs to them now.

That's not how it ends, obviously.  Arjun wins the day through the classic Shah Rukh combination of persistence, noble speeches, and weaponized filial piety, and  it's left to Ganga's grandmother (Dina Pathak) to deliver the movie's actual message: women are people and they should be allowed to make their own decisions instead of always sacrificing themselves for everyone else's happiness.