When it comes to magazines, there are few so admired for their photography—and especially the awe-inspiring focus on our natural world—as National Geographic. Its impact, perhaps, is felt a bit less strongly today, when Google Earth can take you on a world tour from your kitchen table, but what it might lack in exclusivity it more than makes up for in richness. Leafing through it in a quiet library, it’s not difficult to imagine that today’s young readers, transfixed by images of a mysterious foreign land, will grow up to become tomorrow’s filmmakers, conjuring new worlds from those old photos.
But even for those who grew up on “Nat Geo,” last month’s feature on Vietnam’s Hang Son Doong cave was something special. This cave, discovered only a few decades ago, is the world’s largest, with caverns large enough to fit city blocks of skyscrapers. Also known as the Infinite Cave, its series of caverns stretches on for miles, contains its own jungle, and even, in some of the larger rooms, its own clouds. The images published in the magazine are breathtaking: strikingly beautiful to begin with, they force you to readjust your sense of scale when you finally pick out the tiny headlamp of a spelunker, resting like a mote of dust in the center of the frame.
The Hang Son Doong sprang immediately to mind the first time I saw a trailer for Sanctum, the cave-exploration thriller that is James Cameron’s follow-up to the titanic success Avatar. (Technically, the film was helmed by Australian director Alister Grierson, but the press rush makes it clear that it’s Cameron’s baby.) Shot in the 3D style pioneered by Avatar, this new film follows a team of underwater cave divers as they embark on an expedition to a cave system much like Hang Son Doong.
Of course, this is not National Geographic. As soon as the explorers are down in the ground, their exit is cut off by a freak flood. Forced deeper into the caves, master diver Frank (Richard Roxburgh) must lead a motley crew of film stereotypes—a rebellious teenage son, a rich man in (literally) over his head— through a harrowing underwater labyrinth that is their only hope of survival. It’s a scenario that is at least a bit more inventive than most cave thrillers—if only because there are no albino cave zombies. (You may wish there were.) But when you return from this bit of weekend escapism, be sure to pick up a magazine and look at the real thing.
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Also this week: Famed writer/director Mike Leigh (Happy Go Lucky) returns to area screens with Another Year, an emotionally forthright comic drama about the fraught terrain of adult loneliness. Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen star as Tom and Gerri—they get the joke, but are kind enough to laugh about it still—a longtime and loving couple whose warmth and security seem to attract all kinds of drifting souls.
In addition to their grown but unattached son Joe, the lonely hearts in their orbit include Gerri’s boozy co-worker Mary, who since her husband left blunts her raw edges with wine; Tom’s widower brother Ronnie; and family friend Ken, a good man whose sloppy exterior keeps people from digging deeper. Like much of Leigh’s work, Another Year isn’t always comfortable or easy, but as so often with his films, this one feels like a life we know ourselves.
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Finally this week, Pothole Pictures brings a classic to Shelburne Falls. Screening at Memorial Hall on Friday and Saturday at 7:30, La Strada is Federico Fellini’s masterwork, a touchstone of foreign cinema and the film that made him an international star—a one-name luminary. Starring Anthony Quinn as itinerant strongman Zampano, it uses a traveling circus as the set for its tragedy. A tale of love lost and chances squandered, its heartbreak is captured perfectly in the face of Fellini’s wife and muse Giulietta Masina—the innocent girl Zampano drives away before, too late, he realizes he loves her.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.