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ALEXANDRA

“Alexandra” (Cinema Guild) is the great Russian writer-director Alexander Sokurov’s latest film, a small scale humanitarian portrait concerning a kind-hearted, elderly Mother Courage (not in the least like Brecht’s tough trader) who gives away her goods to a front line troop of Russian soldiers fighting in Chechnya.
The generous old lady, Alexandra Nicholyevna is played by the octogenarian Russian soprano, Galina Vishnevskaya (the widow of the equally famous Russian exile, the cellist and conductor, Mstislav Rostropovich). This heavyset elder, who is literally on her last legs, makes an exhausting journey by train in order to pay a farewell visit to her beloved grandson (Vasili Shevtsov) whom she has not seen in the seven years he has been away fighting.
He is an officer in a garrison that is short of food and bathing facilities. His uniform is tattered and unwashed and his body odor is overpowering. When Alexandra quizzes him as to why he has reached the age of 30 and has not married, he admits that not only does he dread the tyranny of women, but that he has no savings, after years in the military, and could never afford to wed.
Demoralized yet hardened by the fighting, these prematurely aged young men are quartered near a bombed-out Chechnyan village, where Alexandra goes to obtain cigarettes and foodstuffs for the starving corps.
The ambiance of one hundred degree heat and dust are conveyed by the film’s bleached color, which turns to near black and white for its night scenes. The heat and dust of the setting, although we see no combat, forcibly reminds me of the futility of our military presence in the furnace of Iraq. All war is hellish but war in a hot climate is even more so.
There is a profound sense of sadness and loss on both sides of the barricade that Mother Russia traverses. The grabber is when a handsome, Chechnyan youth, of 18 or so, laments to Alexandra, “I know you can’t do anything, but we must have freedom. This endless fighting has left us terribly weary. It must stop.”

MR. WARMTH: THE DON RICKLES PROJECT

John Landis’s “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project (HBO) is a sensationally funny combination of Rickles’ inimitable, insult humor act, filmed in Las Vegas, and a vast number of talking heads, young and old (although Steve Lawrence has attempted to reverse the aging process by some very curious facial surgery), all of whom have been anointed by the poisonous tongue of Rickles, the slice-and-dice merchant.
Now 81 and portly, but still going strong, Rickles has outlived most of his show biz contemporaries, but, on tape, he nails Clint Eastwood as “a truly rotten actor,” (which is not too wide of the mark), and when his late pal, Frank Sinatra, guest-hosting “The Tonight Show” asks him to name his favorite male singer, Rickles replies, “I’d have to say Dick Haymes,” at which Sinatra visibly blanches.
Landis was 18 when he got his first film job working as a gopher, in Yugoslavia, on “Kelly’s Heroes” (1970), in which a clip shows Rickles feeding a machine gun belt to Eastwood. On completion of “Kelly’s Heroes,” Landis received a lavish $50 tip for his “attention,” which he remembers, as largely bringing the Don hot coffee. Rickles is one of the last of the big tippers. He gets major attention from the staffs of all the Vegas casinos and Miami hotels he has played.
All the Vegas old timers evince nostalgia for the racketeering era in Vegas, as opposed to today’s corporate number crunchers, who have taken over the Strip. The mobsters were completely laissez faire when it came to paying their high entertainment budgets. They knew that the big stars brought in the players, and all they cared about was trimming their gamblers.
If you ever wondered why Rickles was so good in supporting roles in films (the clip of him as a hoodlum opposite Debbie Reynolds in “The Rat Race” [1960] is scary) and TV shows, as opposed to the stand-ups who can’t act a lick, it’s from his training at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York, in the 1950s, when Grace Kelly and a host of other future names were learning their craft alongside him. Of course, Rickles truly gained his chops as a stand-up by working some of the same strip clubs as Lenny Bruce.
Sarah Silverman may be the insulting sultana of today, but she and her boyfriend, Jimmy Kimmel, are two of the duller talking heads in this terrific documentary. That is, Don is still keen, but Sarah is leaden and Jimmy is truly bland.

THE LAST MISTRESS

I have repented over two of my reviews of important films at the Festival, in the delay between thinking about them, retrospectively, and putting my thoughts down.
The first, “The Last Mistress” (IFC First Take) is a departure for French writer-director Catherine Breillat, among whose first ten films were the shocking “Romance” (1999) and “Fat Girl!” (2000). Her new one, “The Last Mistress” (actually, “An Old Mistress,” in French) is drawn from a classic 1851 novel by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Breillat terms it her “most accessible” and least sensational work, possibly because the genitalia of the nude lovers in “The Last Mistress” are artfully concealed by their entwined limbs.
But I jest a little. “The Last Mistress” is very comparable to Eric Rohmer’s adaptation, in German, of Von Kleist’s novella about aristocratic scandal, “The Marquise of O” (1976 – the year of its American debut at the New York Film Festival), in its loquacity, formality, and painterly derivation (Delacroix, in particular. among various German and Italian Renaissance painters) with each costume handcrafted to reproduce its 19th century counterpart, and the director giving each principal a studied, period gait. (Breillat’s own movement, at 59, entails a limp from her stroke, which she calls “my accident,” that she suffered the year before making the film.)
The film concerns a triangle, at whose apex, the Spanish La Vellini (Asia Argento) is such a torrid femme fatale, it is no wonder she retrieves her former lover, Ryno (the wonderful-looking Breillat discovery, Fu’ad Ait Aattou) from the arms of the aristocratic Hermangarde (played by the pretty Roxane Mesquida, who appeared in Breillat’s “Fat Girl!” and “Sex is Comedy.”)
This triangle very much resembles the one in Prosper Merimee’s “Carmen” of 1845, except for “Carmen”’s bloody ending. Hot-hot Latino wench steals enthralled but engaged Don Jose from the arms of his virtuous fiancée, Michaela. Sound familiar? But Merimee’s and later Bizet’s 1875 characters are peasants, which d’Aurevilly upgraded to upper class lovers. The straight-laced Hermangarde is from such a wealthy aristocratic family that she is able to repair the fortunes of her dissolute new husband, Ryno (one thinks of the horny beast) who has squandered his wealth on gambling and other women. When we learn how painful it was for Ryno to enter the tightly clenched loins of Hermangarde, we sense he will return to his Latino O-lay when she comes to collect him, though he has previously broken with this hot-as-Hades mistress to marry wealth, looks and social position.
Asia Argento, whom I had never seen before, was so magnificently fiery (she moves up and down on Fu’ad in the dominant missionary position) that she makes her co-stars seem pitifully pallid and tame, and I thought this inequality worked against the film. But “The Last Mistress” has a curious magnetism. I want to view it again and own the DVD.

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