International Cinema Review

2012-02-29T00:00:00.000-08:00

films discussed (listed alphabetically by director)

George Abbott and Stanley Donen Damn Yankees / 1958

George Abbott and Stanley Donen Damn Yankees / 1958 [short discussion]
George Abbott and Stanley Donen The Pajama Game / 1957
George Abbott and Stanley Donen The Pajama Game / 1957 [short discussion]

Irwin Allen Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea / 1961

Woody Allen Manhattan / 1979
Woody Allen Midnight in Paris / 2011

Pedro Almodóvar Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces) / 2009

Pedro Almodóvar La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In) / 2011
Pedro Almodóvar Volver / 2007

Robert Altman Gosford Park / 2001

Robert Altman A Prairie Home Companion / 2006

Michael Anderson The Quiller Memorandum / 1966

Wes Anderson The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou / 2004

Michelangelo Antonioni L'Avventura / 1960

Michelangelo Antonioni Blow-Up / 1966

Denys Arcand Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) / 2003

Miguel Arteta Chuck & Buck / 2000

Don Askarian Musicians / 2000

Yevgeni Bauer Posle smerti (After Death) / 1915

Yevgeni Bauer Sulmerki zenskoi Dushi (Twilight of a Woman’s Soul) / 1913
Yevgeni Bauer Umirayuschii lebed (The Dying Swan) / 1916

Bruce Beresford Tender Mercies / 1983

Ingmar Bergman En Passion (The Passion of Anna) / 1969, USA 1970

Ingmar Bergman Skammen (Shame) / 1968
Ingmar Bergman Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) / 1957
Ingmar Bergman Sommarnattens leende (Smiles of a Summer Night) / 1955

Busby Berkeley The Gang’s All Here / 1943

Kathryn Bigelow The Hurt Locker / 2008, USA 2009

Budd Boetticher Comanche Station / 1960

Budd Boetticher Ride Lonesome / 1959
Budd Boetticher The Tall T / 1957

Frank Borzage Seventh Heaven / 1927

Robert Bresson Au Hasard, Blathazar / 1966, USA 1970
Robert Bresson Le Journal d’un cure / 1951, USA 1954
Robert Bresson Mouchette / 1967, USA 1970
Robert Bresson Pickpocket / 1959, USA 1963

Richard Brooks In Cold Blood / 1967

Clarence Brown Flesh and the Devil / 1926

Luis Buñuel El Ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel) / 1962

Charles Burnett Killer of Sheep / 1977

Tim Burton Ed Wood / 1994

Tim Burton Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street / 2007

Juan José Campanella The Secret in Their Eyes / 2009, USA 2010

Henning Carlsen Sult (Hunger) / 1966

Claude Chabrol Les Biches (Bad Girls/The Does) / 1968

Claude Chabrol Le boucher (The Butcher) / 1970
Claude Chabrol À double tour (Leda) / 1959
Claude Chabrol Merci pour let chocolat / 2000

Chen Kaige Farewell, My Concubine / 1993

Lisa Cholodenko The Kids Are All Right / 2010

George Clooney Good Night, and Good Luck / 2005

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen No Country for Old Men / 2007
Ethan Coen and Joel Coen O, Brother Where Art Thou? / 2000
Ethan Coen and Joel Coen A Serious Man / 2009
Ethan Coen and Joel Coen True Grit / 2010

Bill Condon Kinsey / 2004

Francis Ford Coppola One from the Heart / 1982

John Cromwell The Goddess / 1958

George Cukor A Star Is Born / 1954

Michael Curtiz Casablanca / 1942
Michael Curtiz White Christmas / 1954
Michael Curtiz Yankee Doddle Dandy / 1942

Morton DaCosta The Music Man / 1962

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne L'Infant / 2005
Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardeene La Promesse / 1996
Jean Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne Le silence de Lorna (Lorna's Silence) / 2008, USA 2009

Byambasuen Davaa and Luigi Falorni Die Geschichte vom weinenden Kamel (The
Story of the Weeping Camel) / 2003

Steve De Jarnatt Miracle Mile / 1988

Roy Del Ruth Broadway Melody of 1936 / 1935

Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly It’s Always Fair Weather / 1955

Stanley Donen The Royal Wedding / 1951
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly Singing in the Rain / 1952

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Des Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) / 2006

Carl Theodor Dreyer La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) / 1928

Allan Dwan Robin Hood / 1922

Clint Eastwood Flags of our Fathers / 2006

Clint Eastwood J. Edgar / 2011
Clint Eastwood Letters from Iwo Jima / 2006

Atom Egoyan Krapp's Last Tape / 2000

Stephan Elliot The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert / 1994

Roland Emmerich Independence Day / 1996

Pierre Etaix Le Grand Amour (The Great Love) / 1969

Pierre Etaix Heureux Anniversare (Happy Anniversary) / 1962, USA 1963

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter
Tears of Petra van Kant / 1972, USA 1973
Rainer Werner Fassbinder Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun) / 1978,
USA 1979
Rainer Werner Fassbinder Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fox and His Friends) / 1975, USA 1976
Rainer Werner Fassbinder In einen Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year with 13 Moons) / 1978
Rainer Werner Fassbinder Liebe ist kälter als de Tod (Love Is Colder Than Death) / 1969

Federico Fellini La Dolce Vita / 1960, USA 1961
Federico Fellini 8 1/2 / 1963

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa I Love You Phillip Morris / 2009, USA 2010

David Fincher The Curious Case of Benjamin Button / 2008

David Fincher The Social Network / 2010

Victor Fleming, George Cukor, and Mervyn LeRoy The Wizard of Oz / 1939

John Ford Four Sons / 1928

John Ford The Searchers / 1956

Tom Ford A Single Man / 2009

Marc Forster Monster's Ball / 2001

Michelangelo Frammartino Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) / 2010, USA 2011

George Franju Les yeux xans verge (Eyes without a Face) / 1960, USA 1962

John Frankenheimer The Manchurian Candidate / 1962

Irwyn Franklin Harlem Is Heaven / 1932

Stephen Frears The Queen / 2006

Thornton Freeland Flying Down to Rio / 1933

Dan Futterman Capote / 2005

Matteo Garrone Gomorrah / 2008, USA 2009

Jean-Luc Godard Le mélpris (Contempt) / 1963
Jean-Luc Godard Pierrot le Fou / 1965, USA 1969

Julie Gavras La Faute à fidel! (Blame It on Fidel!) / 2006

Robert Guédigiguian La Ville est tranquille (The Town Is Quiet) / 2000

Lasse Hallström Mitt Liv Som Hund (My Life as a Dog) / 1985

Todd Haynes Far From Heaven / 2002

Andrew Haigh Weekend / 2011

Michael Haneke Code inconnu: Récit incomplete de divers voyages (Code Unknown:

Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys) / 2000
Michael Haneke Das weisse Band—Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White
Ribbon) / 2009

Byron Haskin War of the Worlds / 1953

Michael Hazanavicius The Artist / 2011

Howard Hawks Bringing Up Baby / 1938
Howard Hawks El Dorado / 1966
Howard Hawks Red River / 1948
Howard Hawks Rio Bravo / 1959
Howard Hawks Rio Lobo / 1970

Victor Heermann Animal Crackers / 1930

Werner Herzog Jeder für Sich und Gott gegen alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) / 1974, USA 1975

Jared Hess Nacho Libre / 2006

Alfred Hitchcock North by Northwest / 1959
Alfred Hitchcock Psycho / 1960

Alfred Hitchcock Rear Window / 1954
Alfred Hitchcock Rebecca / 1940
Alfred Hitchcock Shadow of a Doubt / 1943
Alfred Hitchcock The Trouble with Harry / 1955
Alfred Hitchcock Vertigo / 1958
Alfred Hitchcock The Wrong Man / 1956

P. J. Hogan Muriel's Wedding / 1994, USA 1995

Hsiao-hsien Hou Le Voyage du Ballon rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon) / 2007

Kon Ichikawa The Burmese Harp / 1956, USA 1967

Kon Ichikawa Nobi (Fires on the Plain) / 1959
Kon Ichikawa Sasme-yuki (The Makioka Sisters) / 1983
Kon Ichikawa Yukinojo henge (An Actor's Revenge) / 1963

Chuck Jones Duck Amok / 1953

Chuck Jones One Froggy Evening / 1955
Chuck Jones Rabbit of Seville / 1950
Chuck Jones Rabbit Seasoning / 1952
Chuck Jones Wearing of the Grin / 1951

Neil Jordan Not I / 2000

Garson Kanin My Favorite Wife / 1940

Elia Kazan Baby Doll / 1956
Elia Kazan Gentleman’s Agreement / 1947

Elia Kazan On the Waterfront / 1954

Aki Kaurismäki Kauas pilvet karkaavat (Drifting Clouds) / 1996

Aki Kaurismäki La Vie de Bohème (The Bohemian Life) / 1992

Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman The General / 1927

Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline One Week / 1920

William Keighley The Man Who Came to Dinner / 1942

Henry King Tol’able David / 1921

Stanley Kubrick Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and

Love the Bomb / 1964

Akira Kurosawa Ikiru (To Live) / 1952

Kiyoshi Kurosawa Tokyo Sonata / 2008, USA 2009

Gregory La Cava My Man Godfrey / 1936

Gregory La Cava Stage Door / 1950

Albert Lamorisse Le Ballon rouge (The Red Balloon) / 1956

John Landis Into the Night / 1985

Walter Lang The King and I / 1956

Fritz Lang Spione (Spies) / 1927, USA 1928

Giogos Lanthinos Dogtooth / 2009, USA 2010

David Lean Oliver Twist / 1948, USA 1951

Ang Lee Brokeback Mountain / 2005

Mike Leigh Another Year / 2010

Jean-Baptiste Léonetti Carré blanc / 2011

Mervyn LeRoy Gypsy / 1962

Richard Linklater School of Rock / 2003

Frank Lloyd Oliver Twist / 1922

Phyllida Lloyd Mamma Mia! / 2008

Ernst Lubitsch Trouble in Paradise / 1932

Sidney Lument Dog Day Afternoon / 1975

Sidney Lument Fail-Safe / 1964
Sidney Lument 12 Angry Men / 1957

Terence Malick The Tree of Live / 2011

Louis Malle My Dinner with Andre / 1981

Michael Mann Public Enemies / 2009

Tina Mascara and Guido Santi Chris & Don. A Love Story / 2007

Peter Masterson The Trip to Bountiful / 1985

Douglas McGrath Infamous / 2006

Jean-Pierre Melville Le Cercle rouge (The Red Circle) / 1970, USA 1993

Vincente Minnelli Brigadoon / 1954

Vincente Minnelli Meet Me in St. Louis / 1944

Robert Mulligan To Kill a Mockingbird / 1962

Cristian Mungiu 4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days / 2007

F. W. Murnau Sunrise / 1927

Mike Nichols Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? / 1966

Max Ophuls Lola Montés / 1955, USA 1959

Max Ophuls Madame de... (The Earrings of Madame de...) / 1953

Yasujirō Ozu Akibiyori (Late Autumn) / 1960, USA 1973

G. W. Pabst Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box) / 1929

G. W. Pabst Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) / 1931

Arthur Penn Bonnie and Clyde / 1967

Roman Polanski The Ghost Writer / 2010

Roman Polanski Nóz w wodzie (Knife in the Water) / 1962
Roman Polanski Oliver Twist / 2005

Abraham Polansky Force of Evil / 1948

Corneliu Porumboiu Politsit, adj. (Police, adjective) / 2009

H. C. Potter Three for the Show / 1955

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger The Red Shoes / 1948

Richard Quine My Sister Eileen / 1955

Nicholas Ray Johnny Guitar / 1954

Satyajit Ray Aparjito (The Unvanquished) / 1957

Satyajit Ray Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) / 1959
Satyajit Ray Jalsaghar (The Music Room) / 1958
Satyajit Ray Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) /1955

Carol Reed The Fallen Idol / 1948, USA 1949

Carol Reed Oliver! / 1968 [discussion of dancing]

Carol Reed Oliver! / 1968 [discussion of film]
Carol Reed The Third Man / 1949

Jason Reitman Up in the Air / 2009

Jean Renoir Le Carosse d'Or (The Golden Coach) / 1952, USA 1954

Jean Renoir Elena et les hommes / 1956, USA 1957
Jean Renoir French Cancan / 1954
Jean Renoir La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game) / 1939

Alain Resnais L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) / 1961

Alain Resnais Mon oncle d'Amérique (My American Uncle) / 1980
Alain Resnais Muriel ou le temps d'un retour / 1963

Wolf Rilla Village of the Damned / 1960

Martin Ritt Norma Rae / 1979

Jacques Rivette Ne touchez pas la hache (The Duchess of Langeais) / 2007, USA 2008

Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise West Side Story / 1961

Bruce Robinson Withnail & I / 1987

Alan Rudolph Choose Me / 1984

Mark Sandrich Top Hat / 1935

Barbet Schroeder Reversal of Fortune / 1990

Werner Schroeter Deux / 2002

Martin Scorcese After Hours / 1985

Martin Scorcese Hugo / 2011

George Seaton Miracle on 34^th Street / 1947

Richard Shepard The Matador / 2005

George Sidney Kiss Me, Kate / 1953

Don Siegel Invasion of the Body Snatchers / 1956

Don Siegel Invasion of the Body Snatchers / 1956 [short discussion]

Douglas Sirk Imitation of Life / 1959

Jack Smith Flaming Creatures / 1963

Susan Stroman The Producers / 2005

Andrew L. Stone Stormy Weather / 1943

Erich von Stroheim Queen Kelly / 1929

Preston Sturges The Palm Beach Story / 1942

Norman Taurog | Broadway Melody of 1940 / 1940

Andrei Tarkovsky Andrei Rublev / 1966

Andrei Tarkovsky Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan's Childhood) / 1962
Andrei Tarkovsky Offret (The Sacrifice) / 1986
Andrei Tarkovsky Stalker / 1979

Béla Tarr Sátántangó / 1994

Béla Tarr A Torionói Ló (The Turin Horse) / 2011
Béla Tarr Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies) / 2000

Hiroshi Teshigahara Suna no onna (Woman of the Dunes) / 1964

Hiroshi Teshigahara Rikyū / 1989

Guillermo del Toro El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) / 2006

Roger Vadim …And God Created Woman / 1956, USA 1957

Malcolm Venville 44 Inch Chest / 2009, USA 2010

Luchino Visconti Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Friends) / 1960

Luchino Visconti Senso / 1954, USA 1968

Andrzej Wajda Czlowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble) / 1977

Andrzej Wajda Panny z Wilka (The Girls of Wilko) / 1979
Andrzej Wajda Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds) / 1958

Charles Walters Easter Parade / 1948

Apichatpong Weerethakul Sud anaeha (Blissfully Yours) / 2002

Apichatpong Weerasethakul Tropical Malady / 2004
Apichatpong Weerasetakul Uncle Bonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives / 2010

Orson Welles The Lady from Shanghai / 1947

James Whale Show Boat / 1936

Mike White Year of the Dog / 2007

Robert Wiene Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) / 1920

Billy Wilder The Apartment / 1960

Billy Wilder Some Like It Hot / 1959
Billy Wilder Sunset Boulevard / 1950
Billy Wilder Sunset Boulevard / 1950 [short discussion]

Irvin Winkler De-Lovely / 2004

Robert Wise The Day the Earth Stood Still / 1951

William Wyler Funny Girl / 1968

Marina Zenovich Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired / 2008

Fred Zinnemann Oklahoma! / 1955
Fred Zinnemann Oklahoma! / 1955 [short discussion]

Alfred Hitchcock | Vertigo | Psycho

2012-02-28T11:17:00.000-08:00

murder for love: two hitchcock romances

by Douglas Messerli

at edge

AlecCoppel and Samuel A. Taylor (screenplay, based on a fiction by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac),Alfred Hitchcock (director) Vertigo /1958

For years I have put off writing aboutAlfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo, notbecause I have nothing to say about it, but because I have so much! As I'venoted elsewhere, the first time I saw this film at a small Manchester, Iowa theaterin 1958, I was only eleven years of age. The film whirled around me like amysterious, inexplicable virago. I was literally made dizzy by the film, and Iremember, as it ended, going into men's room on the second floor of the moviehouse, thinking to myself, "I am too young to see this film."Immediately, I went downstairs once more and saw the movie all over again!

Since that time I have seen the movie perhaps 100 times, both ontelevision and in theaters, on DVDs and computer screens. Only on the latter,did the movie suffer.

Even from the beginning I realized this film was about a romanticobsession—an obsession for a woman (Madeleine Elster/Judy Barton) dreamilyplayed by Kim Novak, and an obsession for a city, San Francisco. Just as thefilm's structure functions as a kind of double helix (the coil appears in thecredits, shifting at moments into a pattern very much like Crick and Watson'slater representation of DNA, and again in Madeline Elster's hairdo, in thepainting of Carlotta Valdes at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor,and in the rose symbolizing Scottie's descent into madness), in whicheverything that happens in the first part reoccurs in a slightly different formin the second, so too do these two obsessions weave around each other, the samewoman appearing slightly different the second part and city changing from amagical world of lights (both sunlit and artificial) to a darker world ofrestaurants and a night drive to Mission San Juan Bautista. Indeed, the twoparts of the film are played out in almost oppositional worlds, the first the story of aglamorously beautiful woman, traveling in a kind haze through the sun-filledstreets of the beautiful city and environs with Scottie (James Stewart)following and later joining her almost as if they were tourists, Hitchcocktaking his audience along for the ride. It is a slow story of developing love—lushly accompanied by Bernard Herrmann's Wagnerian-like score—which endstragically as the suicidal Madeleine Elster seems to jump from the tower of theMission to her death, from which Scottie has been unable to save her because ofhis vertigo.

The film then turns to Scottie's inquest ("Coroner: He did nothing. Thelaw has little to say on things left undone.") and his descent intodepression, a kind of madness that even his chipper and loyal friend Midge Wood(the wonderful Barbara Bel Geddes) cannot help him to escape.

The second roll of the helix begins with Scottie's accidental encounterwith a young woman who looks somewhat like Madeleine. But this young woman isdressed atrociously, her hair hanging in tasteless bangs. She works as a shopclerk. And there is little mysterious about her as she reports in her flatAmerican accent her background, even providing her would-be offender with herdriver's license. It has always struck me that if Judy had been made over byGavin Elster into such a beautiful woman in the first part, why should havechosen to revert to Judy Barton in the second? And reportedly—I have not readthe article nor have knowledge of its existence except for a message boardposting on the IMDb site for the film—Claude Chabrol, writing on Vertigo, claimed that she is not thesame woman, but another whom Scottie makes over to look like Madeleine. Yet,obviously, that does not account for the letter of admission she writes toScottie before tearing it up, nor her possession of the jewelry previously wornby Madeline, nor her verbal admission on the tower of the Mission near the endof the film. And that reading misses the point. While everything in the secondpart is the same, has the same genetic make-up of the first, everything haschanged, which gives the viewer the slightly sickening sensation that thingsare not right.

Indeed, they are not right. For by acting as Madeleine, Judy has helpedin the murder of Gavin Elster's real wife. She is a murderess first, but also acheat, a liar, even a kind of whore for allowing Scottie to dress and coif heras someone else:

Judy: If I let youchange me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me?

Scottie: Yes. Yes.

Judy: All right. All rightthen, I'll do it. I don't care anymore about me.

In Hitchcock's patterning of the humanDNA we recognize the potential for humans to be two beings, to have thecapabilities of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Although Scottie has throughout thissecond half of the film been seeking his past, in recreating Judy into herformer being he has also symbolically taken away her current life, which getsplayed out into the final incident where he forces her to return to Mission SanJuan Bautista and, overcoming his dizziness (not only his vertigo but the confusionof his thinking) forcibly grabs her, demanding the truth:

Scottie: And then whatdid he do? Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he

tell you exactly what to do, what to say? Youwere a very apt pupil too, weren't you?

You were a very apt pupil! Well, why did youpick on me? Why me?

The sudden appearance of a mission nunso startles Judy that she rushes to the edge, actualizing her previousperformance of death.

Again, Scottie has not been a truemurderer, but this time, he is thedirect cause. It is he who has forced her to return to the sight of the firstmurder and to confront her participation in it. And we know, in his almostexistentialist pose at the edge of the roof, that even if he escapes theaccusations of murder, he will never escape his anguish and guilt. In short, wecan describe, at least metaphorically speaking, Scottie's act as one ofrevenge—growing out a kind of fatal disappointment in the woman behindMadeleine Elster—as a murder for love.

Los Angeles,February 25, 2012.

the jealousmother

JosephStefano (screenplay, based on the novel by Robert Bloch), Alfred Hitchcock(director) Psycho / 1960

It was not until I began writing theessay above that I suddenly realized that Hitchcock's well known 1960 horrorfilm Psycho bears much in common withVertigo in the sense that it too is akind of romance—a very strange one to say the least—but still a romance betweena young man, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), and a passing stranger, MarionCrane (Janet Leigh), staying the night at his hotel. The two hardly meet,sharing only a short conversation over shared supper, where it becomes clearthat the lonely Norman, miles from the more-traveled highway, is fond of hisnew guest, and through his shy looks and comments we observe his interest inher. An supposed argument with his mother confirms his emotions:

Norma Bates: [voice-over]No! I tell you no! I won't have you bringing some young girl in for supper! By candlelight,I suppose, in the cheap, erotic fashion of young men with cheap, erotic minds!
Norman Bates: [voice-over]Mother, please...!

Norma Bates: [voice-over]And then what? After supper? Music? Whispers?
Norman Bates: [voice-over]Mother, she's just a stranger. She's hungry, and it's raining out!
Norma Bates: [voice-over]"Mother, she's just a stranger"! As if men don't desire strangers! Asif... ohh, I refuse to speak of disgusting things, because they disgust me! Youunderstand, boy? Go on, go tell her she'll not be appeasing her ugly appetitewith MY food... or my son! Or do I have tell her because you don't have theguts! Huh, boy? You have the guts, boy?
Norman Bates: [voice-over]Shut up! Shut up!

Unlike Vertigo, however, where Scottie—as akind of voyeur—and Madeline—as an observed performer—have long days together astheir love blooms, Marion is almost unaware of his feelings, and Norman has notime to develop a relationship. The two are completely pulled away from any possibleconsummation of feelings, she having stolen $40,000 and left her lover—for whomshe has stolen the money in order to marry—back in Phoenix, he having a morepowerful love-hate relationship with his mother. The romance of thisfrightening tale, from the beginning, is off kilter. Both the soon-to-be victimand the murderer are not who they pretend to be.

Like Madeline, Marion is a liar and, inthis case, a thief. The realization of her errors comes soon after herconversation with Norman, as she determines to return to Phoenix; and, like themythical bird, she clearly hopes to be "reborn," to rectify herbehavior. The shower, as numerous observers have noted, is a kind of ritualbaptism, a washing away of her sins with a hopeful return to innocence. Yet,the attentive viewer also knows that a resurrection will be impossible, for aswe have witnessed in Norman's room behind the motel's front desk, Norman'shobby is taxidermy: he stuffs birds,assuring no possibility of their being reborn out of the ashes.

Minutes later, dressed as his mother, he stabs Marion to death in thefamed shower scene, a scene so powerful that women all over the world becameterrified to take a shower. The three minutes of 50 cuts is a kind of small andmasterful film in itself, revealing in itsattention to the details to Marion's body just how obsessed Norman/his motheris with this woman. It is hard to perceive such a brutal murder as a kind oflove scene, but the way Hitchcock has filmed it, beginning with the sensualpleasure Marion finds in the shower, her scream upon the sudden intrusion, theoutstretched hand and fingers, the gradual fall, the appearance of blood, andthe final focus upon her dilated eye, it is almost a kind of dance, a dance ofdeath if nothing else.

Norman has to destroy her as his jealous mother to keep his psychosisalive; and it is that necessity—the acts of the jealous mother—that makes usrealize just how attracted he has been to Marion. In a sense, Norman has beenas obsessed with her as Scottie was with Madeline.

The rest of the story, how family and authorities discover the truth,hardly matters. The only thing that keeps the audience's interest—which is whythe director was so determined not to reveal the story's secret and would notallow audiences to enter after the movie had begun—is the fact that we do notyet realize that Norman is hismother, having killed her off long ago. What gradually becomes apparent is thathis real lover was his mother, a tyrant who would allow him no other lover,keeping him frozen in infancy forever. So, in the end, playing the role of bothhis mother and himself, he is, as his last name suggests, making love to himself,a kind of psychical masturbation. As the doctor summarizes:

Dr. Fred Richmond: Like I said...the mother... Now to understand it the way I understood it, hearing it from themother... that is, from the mother half of Norman's mind... you have to go backten years, to the time when Norman murdered his mother and her lover. Now he wasalready dangerously disturbed, had been ever since his father died. His motherwas a clinging, demanding woman, and for years the two of them lived as ifthere was no one else in the world. Then she met a man... and it seemed toNorman that she 'threw him over' for this man. Now that pushed him over theline and he killed 'em both. Matricide is probably the most unbearable crime ofall... most unbearable to the son who commits it. So he had to erase the crime,at least in his own mind. He stole her corpse. A weighted coffin was buried. Hehid the body in the fruit cellar. Even treated it to keep it as well as itwould keep. And that still wasn't enough. She was there! But she was a corpse.So he began to think and speak for her, give her half his time, so to speak. Attimes he could be both personalities, carry on conversations. At other times,the mother half took over completely. Now he was never all Norman, but he wasoften only mother. And because he was so pathologically jealous of her, heassumed that she was jealous of him. Therefore, if he felt a strong attractionto any other woman, the mother side of him would go wild.
[Points finger at Lila Crane]

Dr. Fred Richmond:When he met your sister, he was touched by her... aroused by her. He wantedher. That set off the 'jealous mother' and 'mother killed the girl'! Now afterthe murder, Norman returned as if from a deep sleep. And like a dutiful son,covered up all traces of the crime he was convinced his mother had committed!

So it is confirmed that Marion's murderwas indeed a murder for love.

At film's end, Norman sits covered in ablanket, as psychically dead as Scottie in Vertigo.But while Scottie stood at an ledge, reminding us of his 20th century angst,the last images of Norman look more like a scene out of Fellini than anythingelse, hinting at something similar to the postmodern absurdity of the yearsahead. Even Norman's thoughts—his absurd belief that "I'm not going toeven swat that fly" indicates that "he wouldn't even hurt afly"—seems to be something out of Ionesco or Beckett rather than takenfrom a high modernist literary text. Despite the fact that the two protagonistsstand and sit in similar positions, accordingly, Hitchcock's implication ofwhat it means is far more comic in Psycho,despite the horrors of the film itself.

LosAngeles, February 27, 2012

The Creepy Stuff I Did

2012-02-26T11:17:00.001-08:00

the creepy stuff i did

by Douglas Messerli

DavidLetterman Late Show with David Letterman,October 1, 2009, CBS

WoodyAllen and Marshall Brickman (writers), Woody Allen (director) Manhattan / 1979
JoeBini, P. G. Morgan, and Marina Zenovich (writers), Marina Zenovich (director) Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired / 2008, the showing I witnessed was atthe Melnitz Theatre, UCLA, on October 1, 2009

While recently listening to David Letterman's"confession" of his sexual encounters on late night television, I wasbemused and more than a little frightened, once again, by my fellow citizens'sexual prudery and by the underlying attitudes we Americans seem to have aboutsex in general.

Letterman, as most Americans now know, wasbeing blackmailed by CBS producer Robert "Joe" Halderman for havinghad—are you sitting down?—"sex with a woman who worked with me on thisshow." Allegedly these sexual relationships all occurred before hismarriage to Regina Lasko and the birth of their son, although there are nowsuggestions that he took one of the women, Stephanie Birkett, on a Caribbeanvacation with his wife and son.

However, unless Letterman threatened these women with dismissals fromtheir jobs if they did not have sex with him, it amazes me that anyone mighthave thought that he could get away with blackmail or that viewers might evenimagine this to be of interest except to Letterman, his wife, and the womenwith whom he had sex. Certainly, it can (and evidently has) lead to matrimonialdifficulties and may someday end up as an issue in divorce court, but in myestimation those issues have no place at all in the minds of prurient Americantelevision viewers, who every day, it seems, are shocked and absolutely amazedthat our celebrities and leaders lead lives as sexual beings!

Themedia, of course, mightily fuels this ridiculous outrage. In France or evenItaly, the public and press might hail Letterman as an ordinary man. But herehe is forced to describe his noncriminal behavior as "creepy," as ifhe were some strange deviant, hiding his actions from an innocent Americanmass. Although the American divorce rate, as some sources show, has decreasedin the last few years by 30%, it is still, according to The Marriage Index, 2-6times higher than in Canada and European countries. Obviously, divorce may occurfor numerous reasons, yet infidelity is obviously high among its causes.Accordingly, Letterman may be a veryordinary man. Why are we so fascinated by the topic?

Onthe other hand, if one of these women had been an underage intern, it would bea different matter. And that is what we must consider in the recent arrest ofRoman Polanski, to whose side numerous Hollywood figures have recently come insupport of his being freed from the Swiss prison and possible U.S. extradition.

Atsome point I would like to discuss American and current international attitudes(largely in response to American pressure) about sexuality and children. As asociety, the rising hysteria about child abuse—and I will assert that it hasreached that level of behavior since it has become something that cannot berationally discussed—is dismaying to the say the least. Our viewpoint is basedon a Victorian notion of childhood isolation, a blessèd time of innocence inwhich children are to be protected from the world at large, and there is acertain wisdom, I am sure, in this vision, even if the reality seems to be pointingto the opposite, that today's children are increasingly behaving, earlier andearlier in their childhood, as adults (with results both good and bad). Thosefacts, also fueled by the media, in turn, fan the flames of further fears whichAmericans play out.

Nearly everyone save sexual predators themselves, recognizing the poweradults have over children's minds and bodies, want to protect juveniles fromthe sexual advances of men and women who may psychologically hurt them, physicallyabuse them, or even kill them; most civilized societies understand thosedangers and seek to protect their young. But at what age to draw the line? Wehave somewhat arbitrarily named the age of 18, even though one can enlist,without parental consent, to go to war at age 17. Evidently, children havepermission to die, as long as do it as virgins.

Nomatter what age is chosen to be appropriate, on the other hand, there willalways appear to be exceptions, children more advanced, physically andsexually, than their peers. And one cannot expect the judge or jury to makesuch determinations, to pick and choose among the victims. On the other hand,in severe cases of murder and mayhem there seems to be an increasing decisionamong prosecutors to try some juveniles as adults. Not being a lawyer, I don'tknow what kind of criteria goes into these determinations, but it does seemsomewhat hypocritical when we can pick and choose how we can apply lifeimprisonment or even the death sentence to underage children, while making noallowance for their sexuality.

In his 1979 film Manhattan, Woody Allen flirts with this very issue. Recentlyrevisiting this film, I was a little abashed to remember that the girl Allenhas taken up with after his second wife (Meryl Streep) has run away withanother woman, is a 17 year-old high school girl (Mariel Hemingway). Althoughthe Allen character is clearly someone uncomfortable with the idea throughoutthe film—joking at one point, "I'm older than her father, can you believethat? I'm dating a girl, wherein, I can beat up her father."—noone elseseems appalled by the fact. Indeed all of Allen's friends in the movie seem tobe involved, like Letterman, in extramarital affairs (particularly thecharacter Yale, played by Michael Murphy) or, in the case of Diane Keaton'scharacter, easily shifting from bed to bed. Only Tracy, Allen's 17 year-oldlover, seems to know what she wants—an older lover to "fool around"with. Not until Allen has sent her packing does he realize how much he missesher; but she's now 18 and on her way to a new experience in life, a six-monthstay in England, which, incidentally, he had previously recommended to her.

That film received nearly unanimous praise,and no reviewer I've read seemed at all appalled that it was, in some senses, afilm about child abuse. Maybe because it was fiction it was saved from public outcry,although one must remember that just two decades earlier Lolita, another fiction about this subject, was banned in the USA.

Allen, one should recall, has had his own sexual scandale, involving himself in an affair with Soon-Yi Previn, theadopted daughter of Allen's lover of the time, Mia Farrow, a romance shediscovered by finding nude pictures of her daughter taken by Allen. Frankly, Imight describe Allen's actions as far more "creepy" than anythingLetterman has done. Ultimately, Allen married Soon-Yi, and they remain marriedtoday. It comes as no surprise, accordingly, that Allen is one of thesignatories of the petition demanding Polanski's release from jail.

Ifin the film-fiction Manhattan Tracy isapparently more mature than all the adults of that film, the girl with whomPolanski had sex in 1977, Samantha Geimer, although a mature looking girl, wasnot even close to legal age; she was only 13 at the time. Geimer, moreover,clearly did not want a sexual relationship with her photographer and reportedhis sexual advances as rape to the police. Whether Polanski had set out to rapeher or whether his sex with her seemingly arose from a too-intimate setting, asauna at Jack Nicholson's house, is not really the issue. Polanski fed her bothChampagne and part of a Qualude before engaging in sex. And even imaginingthat, as a sexual swinger of the international set, he was unaware of howserious Americans took such infractions, he surely couldn't have been so stupidto think his actions would have no consequence.

Although one might find it psychologically fascinating that he committedthese infractions just a few years after the brutal slaying by Charles Mansonand his dreadful followers of Polanski's beloved wife, Sharon Tate, events allfurther interwoven, surely, with his childhood memories of the murder of hisparents in the death chambers of World War II concentration camps, it can haveno direct bearing on his criminal behavior, particularly since he was twicefound to be free of serious psychological problems. It may be fascinating toconsider those issues when discussing his films, but cannot be seen, as somehave attempted, to be an excuse forhis actions.

Finally,it seems ridiculous to argue, as some in Hollywood have, that he should beexcused from this sexual "slip up" because of his immense talent.When will we learn that great artists, writers, and other geniuses oftensupport evil actions and those behind them? I love the writing of Knut Hamsun,but to do so one must also accept the fact that he was a supporter ofthe Nazi cause and actually met with Hitler. My own thinking about poetry hasbeen very influenced by Ezra Pound, but I cannot condone his support of theFascists and his anti-Semitic writings. Great artists can also be bad humanbeings.

YetPolanski's acts are even more muddied by the actions of the press, lawyers, andjudge overseeing his criminal case. As Marina Zenovich's 2008 film, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (screened at UCLA soon after Polanski's Swissarrest) reveals, from the moment of Polanski's act he was hounded by the newsmedia, who cast him as the perfect target for Americans who hated theintelligentsia, were xenophobic, and who feared the sexuality he exuded.

The appointed judge for the case, LawrenceJ. Rittenband, was noted for his relationships with celebrities, and sought outthe case, purposely generating news coverage of the hearings. The opposinglawyers, Douglas Dalton (Polanski's lawyer) and Roger Gunson (for the accuser)were intelligent and dedicated lawyers forced to play charades by the judge'sshifting impositions of law. Even when the parties agreed to drop all chargesexcept rape and that Polanski would undergo psychological observation,Rittenband further played to the grandstand, demanding a series of new tests inChino State Prison. Once again all parties agreed to his demands, yetRittenband audaciously made them perform his decision out in court, each lawyerplaying out the case that had been already previously decided.

Even after serving his time in the Chino prison, Polanski and his lawyerwere further threatened by the judge, and after flying to Europe, where thefilmmaker was captured in pictures at the Munich Ocktoberfest surrounded byyoung women (an event Polanski had not even wanted to attend, but wasencouraged to by a German friend), Rittenband threatened to sentence Polanskito more time in Chino and demanded, illegally,that Polanski give up his rights for deportation. Dalton and Polanski refused.Even the blue-eyed upstanding Mormon prosecutor Gunson admits, had he beenasked to do what Rittenband had demanded, he too might have left the country.In 1978, after almost a year of such public torture, Polanski illegally fledthe US.

Thatthe California enforcers are still vigilantly attempting to return Polanski tothe US for sentencing—a sentencing which clearly threatens, as the New York Times recently pointed out(Sunday, October 11, 2009), to be a less forgiving prison time for hisacts—seems unfair at best.

Although there is little question that Polanski "got off" thefirst time around, with a very short time in jail, in the end one must ask whatis justice, what is imprisonment about? Certainly, justice did not win out in1978, either for the accuser or accused. Why do we imprison people? Obviously,in part, we incarcerate the guilty as punishment for their crimes. But we seemto have forgotten that we also jail individuals with the hope of reformation,with the desire of somehow redeeming their lives. Today, it appears,particularly when it comes to sex crimes, that we no longer believe in thatpossibility. And we all know that some sexual abusers, particularly when itcomes to children, have committed crimes over and over again. I do think, however,that we should not presume by such recidivism that all such criminals areunable to be reformed. Clearly, Polanski has led, in the 31 years since hisescape from America, a productive and seemingly governed life. What can be theuse of trotting a 76 year old man off to prison for a crime he committed at age44? It seems to me that Polanski has been more than punished for his acts,unless, as I suspect, we are a terrifyingly vengeful society when it comes tosex.

LosAngeles, October 12-13, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (October 2009).

When Ishared some of the above comments with my M.F.A. students at Otis College ofArt + Design in conjunction with our reading a book that involved issues ofsexuality, I found their reactions very similar to what I feared were those ofthe general American public.

Several of my students insisted thatPolanski had to be returned if only to be made a symbol of the fact you cannotsimply escape our justice system and "get away with it."

I suggested that I had never been muchinterested in converting human beings into symbols. But even more importantly,one has to ask what is a symbol?

Noone in my class could say, although one ventured, "something or someonethat means something else."

"Perhaps, but such a trope could also bean allegory, where every time you see a figure or an image it also stands foranother thing throughout the entire text. A symbol, on the other hand, is not one other person or thing but represents a whole group of possibilities.

"In Eudora Welty's Golden Apples, for example, particularly in the firststory titled 'Shower of Gold,' we are presented with a character, Miss SnowdieMacLain, a woman who is nearly an albino, who from time to time is visited byher itinerant husband, King MacLain, who upon these occasions impregnates her,only to leave again for more than a year at a spell. The MacLain's arecharacters, a couple in Welty's fiction, who have a very strange relationship,but remain credible characters nonetheless.

"Surrounding this couple, however, area series of associations, the 'shower of gold' hinted at in the title, and thefact that she is an albino, unable, at some points, to explain her pregnancies,information we get from the narrator of this story, Mrs. Rainey. When Snowdieannounces she is going to have a baby, for example, the narrator notes:

She [Snowdie MacLain] lookedmore than only the news had come over

                      over her. It was like ashower of something had stuck her, like she'd been
                      caught out in somethingbright. It was more than the day. There with her
                      allcrinkled up with always fighting the light, yet she looking out bold as
                     a lion that day under herbrim, and gazing into my bucket and into my
                     stall like a visitingsomebody.

"Now that's good descriptive writing,we feel almost as if we can see Snowdie MacLain, a woman who is a bit confused aboutthe facts but nonetheless proud of knowing that she is soon to give birth. Thestory remains just that, a story. But for the knowledgeable reader, the waythis story is told suggests other things, stories, images, etc. Do any of yourecognize what that 'something else' is?"

None of them spoke.

"In Greek legend we have manystories about Zeus, his rape of Leda as he transformed himself into a swan, hisabduction of Europa while disguised as a bull, his love of the Trojan princeGanymede who was stolen by an eagle sent by Zeus. In short, Zeus, King of thegods, was a serial rapist.

"Another such tale concerns Danaë,the daughter of King Acrisius and Eurydice. When the oracle reported to herfather that he would be killed by his daughter's son, Acrisius locked Danaë upin a cave to keep her childless. But Zeus appeared this time as a golden rain,a 'golden shower' that impregnated her with a child, Perseus, who would laterkill Medusa, the female monster whose gaze turned people to stone. Perseuslater participated in the athletic games in Larissa, throwing a discus which,by accident, hit an attending guest, Acrisius, in the head, killing him andfulfilling, of course, the oracle's prediction.

"Welty's character Snowdie shares agreat deal with Danaë, and reading about her reminds one of that myth and othersuch myths Welty weaves throughout the stories of The Golden Apple. Snowdie is not Danaë, but shares things in common with her and the events surroundingthat Greek myth, and Welty's story is enriched by this combination ofassociations.

"That is a symbolic relationship. Butit works only if the reader knows the Greek myth. None of you knew it, which iswhy, I would suggest most writers don't use symbolism these days. In oursociety in which fewer books are read and we have forgotten much of ourliterary history, we have lost sight of many of the associations that allow forsymbols to properly function."

As I told this story, I privately wonderedhow Welty's brilliant collection—filled with tales of abduction and rape—mightbe received today. Would today's readers find the genteel Miss Welty an immoralwriter advocating child sexuality since, at one point, two young twin boys rapea girl their age?

"Perhaps you mean that Polanskishould be made an 'example,'" I suggested. "But, I might ask, in myrole as Devil's Advocate, what would his being sent back to jail be an example of, to whom would that example be conveyed?"

"An example of our justice system,"one student nearly shouted. "An example to others that you can't justexpect to run away from your criminal actions and live happily ever after justbecause you're rich and famous."

"I have my doubts," I answered, "aboutpunishment actually preventing crimes. I think most people who commit such actsas Polanski are either convinced that they are somehow above the law, that itdoesn't apply to them, or that they probably won't get caught. I suppose thereare some potential child molesters out there who might think twice aboutactually acting on their thoughts; perhaps there are more than I can imagine,and the other punishments meted out by the system prevent these men and womenfrom acting. I hope that's true.

"Yet it seems to me that criminalswill continue to proliferate, with or without examples of how our systemoperates. Just look at the overcrowded prisons we find throughout our country.Never before have our prisons been so full of men and women who have broken ourlaws; in 2008 almost 4 million people were incarcerated at year's end" (WhileI was editing this CNN reported that this year to date there have been 90,000rapes! Could that be true, I wondered to myself? Upon checking the statisticselsewhere I discovered that over the past two years 787,000 US women were thevictims of sexual assault! What can that say about our society, when even rapebecomes, in some perverse way, ordinary? Imagine every man and woman and childin the state of South Dakota, population 804,000, involved in such acts! I canonly ask myself, "What is wrong with this picture? Could it be that thereis a correlation between our fears about and lurid fascination with all thingssexual and the brutal behavior behind these acts?")

"When I hear, we have to make an'example' of someone, I think of something like a frontier posse angrilygathering to track down their man, an event that usually ends in a hanging or ashootout. Even if this posse were to catch their man and bring him safely backto justice I suspect any example it might convey would to the law-abidingsociety itself, which implies that the example works something like a pat onthe back: 'Good for us! Hooray! We've got a great system of laws.'

"I don't think I like the idea ofturning human beings into examples either."

"Justice has to be served!"proclaimed another student.

"That may be true," I argued, "butin this case it wasn't served. Judge Ritterband, as I told you, twisted thesystem for his own purposes. Were Polanski to have stayed for his sentencing, Ishould imagine his case might easily have been overturned given all the illegalmaneuvers the lawyers from both sides describe. What that would have meant forPolanski is probably numerous other courtroom battles. Whose justice is it,finally, to try a man over and over from the same crime? In a sense, by fleeingthe country, Polanski gave Ritterband just what he had illegally demanded.Polanski deported himself, and for all these years has never been able toreturn to the US."

Two of my women students stridently spokeup: "I think he should be locked up and they should throw away the key."

"Precisely my point," Iresponded, "with regard to sex we are a vengeful folk."

At that instant I don't think my studentsmuch liked me.

Evidently, the seemingly non-judgmental Swissalso felt that the American attitudes towards sex were slightly perverse, andlet Polanski out of prison so that he might return to his home in France.

LosAngeles, October 13-14, 2009

F. W. Murnau | Sunrise

2012-02-25T07:35:00.000-08:00

town and country

by Douglas Messerli

Carl Mayer (scenario, based on a storyby Hermann Sudermann), Katherine Hilliker and H. H. Caldwell (titles), F. W.Murnau (director) Sunrise: A Song of TwoHumans / 1927

Recognized as one the greatest movies ever made, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise uses a dazzlingmontage of imagery to tell one of the simplest of stories. Although Murnau'sscript, written by Carl Mayer, was based on an early Hermann Sudermann story,published in his Lithuanian Stories of1917, the plot will remind American readers of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy of 1925—althoughwith a much happier ending.

A young farmer, simply called The Man (George O'Brien), has fallen inlove with a woman from the city (The Woman from the City) (MargaretLivingston), ignoring his formerly beloved wife (The Wife) (Janet Gaynor) andtheir new baby. The intrigue of the story, in fact, has begun before the movie,and what we observe is simply the result of the affair and its aftermath.

Called out into the night by the evilcity woman, the man is overwhelmed by his love for the dark stranger, while thewife is left suffering alone. The city woman suggests that her lover join her inthe city, and when he asks "What about my wife?" she has a dreadfulsuggestion: "Well, couldn't she drown?" Momentarily the man isoutraged, but her kisses and embraces mesmerize him, and the plan is suddenlyunderway, as she suggests he buddle together bulrushes, like a surviving Moses,to help him float away from the boat after he has overturned it, drowning hiswife.

Despite his reluctance and obvious feelings of guilt, he invites hiswife on a trip across the water, which she mistakenly perceives as a new chancefor romance. Murnau brilliantly creates a sense of tension as the boat beginsits voyage by having the family dog break its chains, jump into the water, andswim out toward them. They return to land where the man again tethers the dogbefore proceeding. The wife, delighted by the prospect of travel, is allsmiles, dressed in her best bonnet; but the darkness and grimness of her husbandgradually registers upon her face, changing it to fear and doubt. When herises, ready to commit the dreadful act, she is suddenly aware of her fate, andpleads for her life. The man suddenly regrets his actions and rows to land,whereupon she races from him, catching a nearby trolley on its voyage to thecity.

He catches up to the trolley and joins her, attempting to reassure thatwill no longer hurt her. So has the couple unintentionally begun a journey intoa world opposite of theirs. The rest of the story is one of discovery andreconciliation as the two attend a wedding, visit a barber, dine out, drinkwine, and even dance. They are treated much like the country bumpkins they are:they are overwhelmed by the wine, encouraged to dance a peasant dance, and, atone point, even race after an escapedpig, the man capturing the beast who has created a furor in the music hall.Love and joy is rekindled, reflected most in of their quiet boat ride home—thatis until the director riles up a terrific storm, wherein they are certain to bedrowned. Pulling out the hidden bulrushes, the man straps them upon his wife'sback, as he dives in to attempt to swim back to land.

He is successful, but his wife appears to have not survived as he andothers search the waters after the storm. An older neighbor, however, travels"around the point" where he knows the currents move, finding thenearly drowned wife and bringing her home to safety. The couple fondly lookupon one another as the sun rises, the woman from the city returning to whenceshe has come.

It is analmost mythical story, played out in polar oppositions, sunrise/sunset,light/dark, farm/city, quiet/noise, etc., and Murnau uses those elements toconvey his film almost without any dialogue; there are just a few story boards.Still, if that were all there was to this film, it would be simply a slightmelodrama, a tale of infidelity and its results. It is Murnau's brilliant useof images that brings this film to such significance.

Although much of the film was shot in Lake Arrowhead, California, thefarm setting looks like something out of the Baltic instead of any Americanspace. The thatched huts at the edge of a what might be a huge lake seem anunlikely place for plowing, the raising of chickens and hogs. It is a fairytaleworld that is as unreal as the huge urban landscape of Murnau's city whichmight remind one of Paris or Berlin, but looks little like any American cityI've seen. The huge glass-vaulted railroad station, the cavernous restaurantspace, the crowded dancehall, the intense traffic of this city—all exaggeratedby the director's numerous superimpositions of images (created in the cameraitself by blocking out certain parts of scene and reshooting over them)—issomething right out of German Expressionism or even Futurist art. This Americanfilm, the only one to win an Oscar for "Best Picture, Unique and ArtisticProduction," is, one might claim, the most un-American-looking film evermade in this country, which is perhaps what makes it an even more thrillingartifact, wowing us with its magical sets and images.

The film also is far different in tone from what it might have been inother hands. Although Sudermann's story clearly is a rural apologia—a work inwhich the simple beauty and quietude of country life is presented as superiorto urban living—in Murnau's hands the city wins out. For while the lovingcouple at film's end have returned to country life, their redemption has takenplace through the vast energy of city living, even if it has been just for aday. And the film itself truly comes to life in its urban landscape. The lastthird of the movie is almost enervating after what Murnau has already shown us.The quietude of sunrise denotes a kind a protective stasis, in which bothcreators and audience can have little interest. And it is just that earlier darkfascination of energy and artificed beauty that so attracts The Man to TheWoman from the City, that so overwhelms him he is ready to kill for it. Thisfarm couple may live happily ever after, but for the audience it can onlysignify an "end" and is no longer of interest to us, and in thatsense these characters metaphorical die, while we long for that glorioustrolley ride and the clamorous adventure waiting at its destination.

Los Angeles,February 24, 2012

Federico Fellini | La Dolce Vita

2012-02-10T07:55:00.000-08:00

a state of enchantment
by Douglas Messerli

Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullo Pinelli and Brunello Rondi (screenplay, Pier Paolo Pasolini [uncredited]), Federico Fellini (director) La Dolce Vita / 1960, USA 1961

Fellini's great La Dolce Vita is less a forward-moving narrative with plot attached than it is a series of basically disconnected episodes, 7 days and 7 nights, each related somewhat to the others, as we watch the gradual disintegration of our "hero," Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), a reporter covering celebrities and sensational events. To read Fellini's work one has to be fluent in numerous film genres, including neo-realism and documentary, political caricature, Fellini's own kind of Italian magic-realism, meditation, and a simple love story.

Over the few days in which we follow Rubini's activities, he is pulled—one might almost say "ripped apart"—by the intense love of Emma (Yvonne Furneaux) and the warm intellectualism of his friend Steiner (whose house we later visit for a friendly, if sometimes absurd and shallow, party of self-declared intellectuals) and the pointless and self-deluded love and parties of the wealthy (most clearly represented by Maddalena [Anouk Aimée] and the actress, Sylvia [memorably portrayed by Anita Ekberg]). On the one side is intelligence, concern for others, and spiritual belief (Emma is moved even by the lie of two children who have claimed to see the Madonna); on the other is a series drunken nights in villas and stranger's houses, wherein the characters act out their sexual desires while seldom obtaining them.

The tension between the two is played out by Fellini from the very first image of the film, a flying Christ which helicopters are taking to the Vatican as the drivers buzz down upon three beautiful women sunbathers to see if they can obtain their telephone numbers. The sacred and the profane are clearly at war in the enchanted city of Rome.

The Vatican officials who believed the image to represent the second coming of Christ, were outraged by Fellini's early scene. But in fact, although the grounded figures of this film, Emma and Steiner, suffer, the empty party-goers whom Rubini joins night after night, are at the center of Fellini's satiric focus. Through the episodes, their revels grow stranger and stranger, as they move from simple apartments, restaurants, clubs, and late-night tours of the city, into castles owned by aristocrats (filmed at Bassano di Sutri outside of Rome), and, finally, a beach house. At the final bacchanal, true sexuality has so disintegrated that Rubini breaks down into a kind of would-be savage, tossing chicken feathers at the body of a woman whom he mounts as if he might ride with her into the sunrise.

Any love that has previously been proffered—whether by Emma, Maddalena, or even the public spectacle of Sylvia—has been abandoned for a kind an empty series of charades, in which the game players are not even aware they are engaging. If, as a character says early in the work, Rubini and his friends are in "a state of enchantment," it has been a song created by the sirens, not human women, and can only lead to everyone being cast into the sea, which is where the film ends.

Thrown out of the beach house, Rubini and his fellow "sailors" wander the beach. Nearby we see Paola, a young, fresh waitress Rubini has encountered days before. She calls out to him, while he mimes "I can't hear you," and rather than turning in her direction, rejoins the others observing a large stingray, looking like the leviathan of old, its eyes still staring outward even in its death.

For these damned beings, we realize, there can be no salvation. Or, perhaps Fellini is suggesting—since Emma finds no joy and Steiner shockingly kills himself and his two beloved children—there is no salvation in this modern world. Steiner, in fact, warms Rubini early in the film to not seek a safe and protective life:

Don't be like me. Salvation doesn't lie within four walls. I'm too serious to be a dilettante and too much a dabbler to be a professional. Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected.

The Christ of this film, after all, is only a symbol, a thing cast of stone. And the only real miracle of this film is that a small whirling engine can make it fly to its new home.

Los Angeles, February 9, 2012

Jean-Luc Godard | Pierrot le Fou

2012-02-07T07:44:00.000-08:00

what is a film?
by Douglas Messerli

Jean-Luc Godard (screenplay and director) Pierrot le Fou / 1965, USA 1969

Early in Godard's marvelous Pierrot le Fou, Ferdinand Griffon (wonderfully performed by Jean-Paul Belmondo, with a cigarette almost always dangling from his thick Gallic lips)—forced by his wife (Graziella Galvani) to attend a terrible party of greedy business men and mindless women—sees a man standing against the wall, all alone. "You seem to be lonely," he mutters, without the man's response. A woman seated nearby explains that he speaks only English, and serves for their short conversation as translator. The man, Sam Fuller (the beloved American director of grade B movies, who plays himself in this film) tells Ferdinand that he directs films. Ferdinand asks a truly unexpected question: "What is cinema?" Fuller replies: "Film is like a battleground. There's love, hate, action, violence, death...in one word: emotion."

Throughout the rest of Godard's film, the director explores that very notion, hardly coming up for air in his phantasmagoric mix of genres involving film, art, fiction, poetry, music and almost anything else that strikes Godard's fancy.

When describing this film, many critics have somehow made it literal, detailing Ferdinand's escape with the evening's babysitter, Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), the first step in abandoning all normal societal relations, as the two, like a less violent, but crazier version of Bonnie and Clyde, embark on a spree of crime which takes them across France, ending in torture, murder, and death. Godard would not deny that, I am sure. That does happen in this film—sort of. But that supposes only one reading, which Godard has clearly denied the audience, which may explain, furthermore, some viewers' distaste for this film.

From the very first scenes of Ferdinand reading about the artist Diego Velázquez to his very young daughter to the party itself, filmed in only three colors: blue, red, and green, Godard has made clear that he is not at all interested in "reality." His subject here is art, art in all its many diverse and multiple selves.

The partygoers are like stick figures who speak in a language of television ads, which is why the former television employee is so disgusted that he must leave the party and, soon after, his wealthy wife. These are not real people anymore than is his car ride with the babysitter—suddenly described as a former lover—is a real drive. The car seems to be moving only because Godard has bathed it in moving lights, perhaps representative, like fireworks of a few minutes before, of the overpowering emotions of the couple. Their new relationship, moreover, does not begin with action, a kiss or embrace, but with words, language that tells what they are imagining they might do: I am putting my hand on your knee, etc. From the very beginning, in short, Godard signals that his real subject is Ferdinand's very question. How do you determine story, what to film or not film, how to light it, how to convey its ideas or feelings—in short how to best express that group of "emotions" that make up a movie?

Like a hyped-up music sampler, Godard presents the couple's imagined adventures together as combining everything from the kitchen-sink (or refrigerator) realism of their first room, to comic book capers, crime adventures, musical comedy, political statement, mime, improvisational acting, poetic expression, travel scenes, and love scenes where the characters straight-forwardly say "Let's have sex."

If this sounds somewhat academic, at times it is. The long passages which Ferdinand reads, his aphoristic-like journals, and the hundreds of references to literary books (including another Ferdinand, Louis-Ferdinand Céline) at times grinds Godard's work to a halt. But such things, at least in meaningful films, exist at the edges of a film, and are often behind their creation.

Most of the time Godard and his characters, in this winding road trip, seem to just be having fun. Indeed, some of the love scenes, singing, dancing, arguing are quite hilariously funny. When, on a whim, Ferdinand drives their stolen Cadillac into the ocean, they walk off not in the direction of the shore, but away from the beach-positioned camera, as if they were seeking out further self-destruction. Moreover, Godard self-consciously positions them in relation to his camera, often treating their conversations as if they were being interviewed for a documentary. At another point, as the couple speak with their backs to us, Ferdinand turns to look at his audience, noting indeed that we are still "there." Marianne asks, "What are you looking at?" to which her Pierrot replies: "The audience."

Marianne continually refers to Ferdinand as Pierrot, the stock figure of the 17th century who, in his naïveté, loses his Columbine to Harlequin. And, of course, that will happen in this filmmaker's work; it is inevitable. Yet the main character continually corrects, "My name is Ferdinand," as if declaring his true role; the name Ferdinand comes from a combination of farð "journey, travel," and nanth "courage," both of which this hero is linked. In his intellectual concerns, Ferdinand may be a Pierrot, especially when faced with a woman who is only concerned with "feeling"; he may even be "crazy. But he is also a man of daring—at least in his own mind. Perhaps he has no choice, when his love lies to him and runs off with another man, but to cut himself off from feeling by killing her. His self-punishment for that act is as absurd as everything he—as an actor and a character—has endured in Godard's mishmash of themes and genres. Painting himself purple (instead of the white-face of Pierrot), he ties two brightly colored coils of dynamite around his face and lights it. Some claim that he tries to put out the fire, that at the very last moment, he has had second thoughts. But it does not matter. The work—the film's "story"—the form—its characters—everything, Godard reminds, might still blow up in your face.

Seldom has a film director taken so many chances, bothering to show us all the choices that go into any work of cinematic art.

Los Angeles, January 6, 2012

Terrence Malick | The Tree of Life

2012-02-06T09:12:00.001-08:00

A SENTIMENTAL LIFE
Terrence Malick (writer and director) The Tree of Life/ 2011

"There are two ways through life: the way of nature, and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow"
—Mrs. O'Brien in The Tree of Life

Winner of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and recipient of substantial critical praise to date, the movie I saw this past weekend was one of the most portentously pretentious paeans to American piety that I have ever witnessed. While one might certainly call Malick's The Tree of Life ambitious, the work was stretched so thin that its three parts almost snapped their sinews, leaving behind a tattered tale of the American dream of the 1950s.

Poor Jack O'Brien (Sean Penn), an extremely wealthy architect in (what I presume is) contemporary Houston, is in a funk, a real depression, conveyed from the moment he dresses for the office and continues while he drearily performs the tasks of his business day and prepares himself for his return home.

Companies are greedy, he quietly tells a cohort. The world is in a mess. Quite obviously, given the sleek high rise his company inhabits, he has been nicely rewarded for his greed. But we know already know through the first hurried scenes of the film that at the heart of his emotional problems is family life, most particularly the death at 19 of his younger brother, R. L., who appears to have died in the Viet Nam War. Malick's premise is that Jack has never completely come to terms with his brother's death, nor, so we later discern, with his own relationship to his father and mother.

Raised as a devout Christian (Roman Catholic), Jack is still unable to understand how a beloved creator can also destroy, how a caring parent can hurt their children. The film begins with a quote from Job, and God's torments of Job are repeated as a theme throughout. Jack's first cries (presented in voice-over) parallel those of numerous literary children, most notably the child in James Agee's poem "Knoxville, Summer of 1915," who puzzles that none of the beloved family around him can tell him "who I am." And how, moreover, can one ever come to comprehend one's own life without being able to reconcile a loving God with a destructive one? These are not stupid questions to be waved away, although they certainly have been voiced countless times. There are, of course, no answers for true believers. As priests and ministers have repeated over and over (and so do friends in this movie), "God acts in mysterious ways."

In order to explore this dilemma, Malick apparently feels he must take us back to the creation, and spends a long portion of his film with images from lush microbiological pictures, National Geographic-like spreads of oceans, Icelandic and Hawaiian volcanoes, marine life and other animals, and, finally, though his visual effects supervisor, Dan Glass, animations of dinosaurs, both preying upon others and in the throes of death. The publicity department described these scenes as not being narratively linked to the other parts of the film, and certainly there is some truth to that; but, in fact, it is clear that Jack must ponder these images—at least in his imagination—in order to comprehend the links of living beings. At least, this is what Malick seems to intimate. Unfortunately, the images he tosses out, while quite beautiful, in this cinematic context almost become kitsch, as Malick takes all those stunning scientific and geographical images and frames them, as if to say, here is my art. Do we really need to see frame after frame of whirling waters, fiery volcanoes, swirls of various early invertebrates and plants, and unconvincing animations of ancient animals, to comprehend that everything in life is interrelated, that there is, to use Malick's transparent symbol, a tree of life?

At least now the brooding Jack can focus on family itself, as the director turns his attention to Mr. and Mrs. O'Brien (the beautiful couple of Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) of Waco, Texas, beginning with their early years as a couple and growing a family of what eventually become three boys, Jack, R. L, and Steve. As in his other films, Malick works less through narratively conventional scenes than through a series of fast-moving images. As film critic Dave Kehr (in his 2011 collection of reviews, When Movies Mattered) describes Malick's Days of Heaven, so too might we characterize the director's approach to The Tree of Life:

Throughout the film, the director seems remarkably stingy
with his visual creations. A brief glimpse is all we are given of
a particular composition, and then Malick is off to something
else, rarely granting us the leisure to contemplate and assima-
late the images he puts before us. If this movie is a coffee
table book, someone is turning the pages too fast. For all the
languor of the plot, Days of Heaven plays like a taut, driven film,
relentless in its rhythm, hurrying the viewer along from image
to image, scene to scene, tableau to tableau. The dialogue
scenes, few and far between, are terse, clipped. Exchanges
seldom last longer than three or four lines, as Malick insists
on cutting away just as the characters seem ready to reveal
themselves.

For Kehr this creates a dynamic pattern or rhythm that makes for a graceful, moving film. And we must grant that Malick's approach is perhaps the best one for an exploration of childhood. For all we left as adults and, perhaps, all we can assimilate from childhood, is a series of glimpses of moments recalled or slightly perceived.

In one scene, in particular, I recognize the appropriateness of Malick's technique. An elderly man suddenly falls to the ground, suffering what seems to be a seizure, while in the foreground the mother draws her children to her, moving in the other direction, as if to protect them from what is probably the death of their grandfather. If we blinked we could miss the entire scene, but obviously Jack has subliminally witnessed it in a split-second that reminds us of another young child of cinema, from Carson McCullers' A Member of the Wedding, Frankie Addams' quick glimpse of boys sexually intertwined in an alley.

The trouble is that in shooting this glowingly-lit world of the 1950s, the camera becomes mannered, lingering endlessly on the strawberry-haired mother and the serious-minded music-loving father. The boys are all action, racing through the streets with sticks, cans, and other play toys with which boys have done battle since the beginning of time. In the fairly well-to-do neighborhood in which the O'Briens live, lights come on with a golden aura, children are called inside, and meals are served with formal pleasure. It is a flow of Norman Rockwell scenes that, at times, is so saccharine that I was afraid my teeth might rot. And, of course, there are trees, one tree in particular, that the camera, obviously flat upon the ground, looks longingly up at again and again and again.

I can assure you that in the 1950s small-town life was a sort of idyll. I lived, in many respects, with the same family as did Jack, with only superficial differences—a reversal of the characters of my parents, less participation in typical male behavior—during that same period. But I don't think I would want to impose that daily blandness upon anyone else. These may have been a magical "days of heaven," but gradually, as I grew older, they transformed into the days of hell.

Just as in that earlier film, Malick associates the shadowy figures of The Tree of Life with different natural elements. Mrs. O'Brien—a woman who believes less in nature than in grace, representative in the film of (who'd have guessed?) love ("Unless you love, your life will flash by," she tells her son)—is associated with water, as she sprays that element over the yard again and again, gracefully washing her feet in the pulse of the hose.

Mr. O'Brien—a would be musical artist, disappointed with his job, but determined to make the best of it, is tied to the earth, warning his son to make something of his life, continually insisting that he learn the simplest of gardening skills so that he might redeem their Eden. The impossibility of that redemption is what begins to transform him into a stern taskmaster, as simultaneously he turns his son against him and nature itself, the force he has chosen to obey.

That transformation, finally, is the most satisfying element of Malick's prose song to everyday American life. As one might not have perceived back then, the tensions between his parents, his secret witness of death and intimations of evil, ultimately begin to show up in psychological manifestations that include violence, breaking and entering, petty robbery, and even thoughts of patricide. He's on his way to becoming what we would have called a "bad kid." Disobedience clearly is the only way he can begin to define himself. In short, he associates himself with the element of fire, forging eventually the world of steel and glass he later inhabits.

In this rebellion he even comes to torture his beloved younger and more passive brother, a child who, like his father, is musically inclined, but gentler, lighter in manner, almost air-born, returned to them in the film's earliest scenes as a body borne by an airplane.

A temporary resolution comes in the form of the humbling of the ambitious father, as he loses his job, and they must move to another town or house. Father and son draw closer in the crisis, while his mother slides into silence. But the guilt of that childhood rebellion remains. Self-hate is inevitable, and we finally come to suspect it is what Jack describes as his life-long wrestling with his mother and father within that has brought this successful man to such a terminus.

The last scenes in Malick's film, while inevitable I suppose, are the emptiest, revealing just how vacuous is the director's vision. Exhausted by his memories, Jack plays out various Jungian tropes along with visions of an afterlife in a desert landscape, following figures of his mother, father, and brothers until he reaches a door frame through which, with some hesitation, he passes only to discover himself now walking a beach upon which the dead stroll in small groupings, greeting and holding one another with tenderness and love. To me it resembles something like a Mormon vision of the afterlife, a world into which I would never want to be reborn. But to Malick, clearly, it is a grand resolution to the questions Jack has posed: Who am I? Who is our creator? What is the purpose of life?

The film closes with an image of a bridge, connecting, quite obviously, Jack's past and present, while symbolizing his trip home to his possibly redeemed relationship.

Thinking back to my dismissals of the Coen brothers' approach to some of the same questions in their 2009 film A Serious Man, I now feel a little guilty; at least they had a sense of adolescent humor about it all. Malick is dead serious, and clearly doesn't give a damn about those of us who don't share his angst and ready-made solutions.

I am certain that those who desperately seek out this kind of spiritual reconfirmation, will love this film. If nothing else, one has to admire Malick for considering these issues and for presenting them in way that Hollywood producers might not have allowed. Yet, it seems to me that he might have been better served by an old-fashioned studio head shouting out, "Cut the crap!"

Los Angeles, May 30, 2011
Copyright (c) 2011 by International Cinema Review and Douglas Messerli

Woody Allen | Midnight in Paris

2012-02-06T09:12:00.000-08:00

into the past
by Douglas Messerli

Woody Allen (writer and director) Midnight in Paris / 2011

Woody Allen's romantic valentine to Paris, Midnight in Paris, is also his least intelligent film in that it presents the simplest of concepts embellished with the clichés of American Literature and Art History 1. For all that, there is something charming, almost magical about the flick, and despite what I'm about write below, most people will come away from the film having thoroughly enjoyed it.

We should start with the successful aspects of this fable. Although Allen is best known, perhaps, for the stories he tells and the "Woody Allen-ish" slightly screwball way of seeing the universe, he is also, in fact, a talented cinematographer working with gifted lighting designers. He is particularly brilliant with interiors such as those of Hannah and Her Sisters. Here, however, he brings a glow to the City of Light that one seldom witnesses in Paris itself. The city is always beautiful, but in Allen's hands—beginning with a long prologue which takes us across much of the urban landscape—it becomes a glowing gem that on a sunny day absolutely radiates in the way Rome sometimes does, and on a rainy night sparkles in a rainbow of colors reflected in small puddles. Wherever Allen takes us, it is so beautiful that we readily agree to the tour, particularly when the hero, Gil (Owen Wilson), travels back into the literary and art world of the 1920s. Much of this film, in fact, is concerned with tourist activities, as we visit Versailles, see Rodin sculptures, discuss paintings by Picasso and Matisse, and drop in at various antique shops. It is as if Allen was determined to take his audience on a small tour of the grand city, pointing out its wonders as we join him.

If only the pedantic and braggadocio Paul (Michael Sheen) and the arch-conservative waspish prigs Helen (Mimi Kennedy) and John (Kurt Fuller) would stay home! And then, of course, there is their daughter, Gil's contrarian fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams) who has so little in common with her lover that one can see their relationship is doomed from the start, and who gushes with enthusiasm over Paul, in Paris with his wife to lecture at the Sorbornne. Gil, who makes a good living by writing for Hollywood movies, feels that he is nothing more than a hack, and is attempting to change all that by writing a novel. A romantic, in love with the 1920s, he would like to remain in Paris, while Inez, whose parents are wealthy, wants Malibu for an address.

In Owen Wilson the director has found a perfect stand-in for Allen himself, whose nasal, Wilson's Texan twang nicely ricochets off of Allen's New Yorker whine. At times, the script comes dangerously close to Wilson's own personal history. While he could never be described as a hack, Wilson has acted in and written works that, it is evident, represent far less than his talents, and his love affairs have, apparently, left him depressed, resulting in rumors of an attempted suicide. Almost channeling Allen, Wilson creates an appealing fool that is behind nearly every one of the director's "heroes."

But here the "charm" disappears. For the rest of the film, in the manner of the dislikable Paul, spews out pedantic-like statements that summarize Allen's simple theme and even simpler way of presenting the imaginary worlds into which his character enters.

Gil, quite clearly, would like to live in the past, a phenomenon which Paul summarizes:

Nostalgia is denial—denial of the painful present...the name for

this denial is golden age thinking—the erroneous notion that a

different time period is better than the one one's living in—it's a

flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it

difficult to cope with the present.

So here is Allen's theme, which the rest of the film will obviously play out. After a wine-tasting party, Gil, slightly drunk, determines he will not join Inez and her friends, Paul and Carol, who intend to go dancing. He walks the streets before becoming lost and sits down for a rest while a nearby clock strikes midnight. A 1920's car suddenly turns the corner as its inhabitants, drinking heavily, noisily invite him to join; they are on their way to a party. Once he has reached the event where everyone, it appears, is dressed in costume, Gil begins to perceive something is amiss. His friends, the Fitzgeralds, are named, just like the famous couple, Zelda and Scott. At the piano sits a man singing Cole Porter songs who looks very much like Cole Porter. Other famed celebrities of the period pass by. When Fitzgerald later takes him to a bar where he meets Ernest Hemingway, Gil realizes he has somehow entered a "twilight zone," that he has magically returned to his beloved past.

Paris, in fact, is, as my poet friend Jerome Rothenberg once described it, a "living museum." Everywhere one goes in the city, there are small plaques reminding one of the famed figures who once lived or worked within. The city's several cemeteries, filled with the remains of renowned men and women, are regularly visited by both tourists and Parisians. I've been to all of them.

The problem is that Allen's vision of the past is as empty as Paul's pedantic speeches. One by one many of his characters speak dogmatic statements that sum up the vision of college freshmen English texts. Here's Hemingway (Corey Stoll), for example, speaking of his own book:

Yes, it was a good book because it was an honest book, and

that's what war does to men. And there's nothing fine and

noble about dying in the mud unless you die gracefully. And

then it's not only noble but brave.

Kathy Bates' Gertrude Stein seems to me more of a domineering scold than a great conversationalist; nothing is even mentioned about her being a writer. Other figures are names only: Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot. At least Cole Porter (Yves Heck) gets to sing, and Dali (Adrien Brody), in describing his Persistance of Memory (not painted until 1931), is humorously fixated on rhinoceroses. It is not even the fact that these people of the past are stick figures; perhaps that is the way Gil sees literary and art history. But by filling the most magical moments of the film with pop-up stereotypes, we quickly lose interest in Gil's nightly transformations. Few of these ghosts are figures any of us might wish to meet. Having met with and talked to Barnes—like Stein, a witty and imposing conversationalist—I cannot imagine her as a Charleston dancer of whom Gil quips "she wanted to lead." These sort of silly one-liners drain any wonderment from the fantastical events. Only the lesser renowned Adriana (Marion Cotillard), Picasso's mistress, has any flesh and blood about her, and it is natural, accordingly, that Gil falls in love with her.

Now truly torn between past and present, Gil must choose between his two loves: while it increasingly becomes apparent that he is not truly in love with Inez, how can he really embrace a woman living 90 years before his time? Besides that, for her the Golden Age is not her own generation but la Belle Époque, and while sitting one night in a cafe, the couple are magically invited to join people in a horse-drawn carriage. Together they attend a performance of the Can-Can at the Moulin Rouge, meeting, this time round, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Edgar Degas. Asked to design costumes for a play, Adriana takes Gil aside, suggesting they stay in her golden era. Finally coming to terms with his own "golden age thinking," Gil realizes he must face the present, while she is determined to remain in an even more removed past.

But first, he must take one last trip into the 1920s, where Stein, again with evaluative pronunciamentos, declares Gil's novel to be of value—although Hemingway (who has also now read it) does not understand how its major character would not perceive that his fiancée is having an affair "right before his eyes." The suddenly pained Gil turns away, suggesting "that might be described as self-denial."

The inevitable moment arrives, as he declares he is staying in Paris and leaving Inez, her father revealing that he has had Gil followed. Each night the detective has observed Gil getting into a car, but the detective himself is now missing. We see him at the Court of Louis XIV, being chased by guards our of Versailles.

In all his walks about Paris, Gil has fortunately met another woman, this one working in an antique shop that sells Cole Porter recordings. Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) accidently meets the down-hearted Gil walking along the Seine. It begins to rain, but like Gil, she enjoys walking in the rain, just as she loves her native city.

Los Angeles, January 3, 2012

Reprinted from Nth Position [England], (January 2012)

Michael Hazanavicius | The Artist

2012-02-06T09:11:00.000-08:00

quicksand

by Douglas Messerli

Michael Hazanavicius (writer and director) The Artist / 2011

George Hazanavicius' The Artist may not be the most original film of the year, but it is certainly one of the most enjoyable. Echoing as it does dozens of films which relate to acting and filmmaking, The Artist steals its situation from A Star Is Born, with a story that, like the Judy Garland/James Mason work, centers around a young up-and-coming actress falling in love with a matinee hero whose career is about to collapse, the former star sinking into alcoholism and suicide. The Artist's focus on the quick shift from silent films to talkies is parallel with much of Singing in the Rain. And the film's obvious love affair with silent film-acting demonstrates connections to Sunset Boulevard. But while those great films told their story through their character's words and songs, Hazanavicius' does it with it without a peep—well, not quite! The music—popular songs of the day, the poignant Bernard Herrmann love theme from Vertigo, and original music by Ludovic Bource—is crucial to the film. And, although doubt this will happen, the sound man should receive a major award. Despite the characters' silence, sound does play important roles throughout.

The story is almost insignificant. Noted actor (Jean Dujardin as George Valentin) accidentally bumps into a want-to-be chorus girl (Bérénice Bejo as Peppy Miller), he (trapped in an unhappy marriage) falling for her, she already in love. Peppy gets a small dancing role in his next movie which intensifies their relationship. But before anything can happen between them, the advent of talking films changes everything: Peppy is suddenly asked to star in a new film, while George is fired.

Using his own money and directing himself, George attempts a comeback, a silent film that ends, quite ridiculously, with the hero being swallowed up in quicksand, just as his life has been swallowed up by the new medium in which Peppy is featured. Both films are scheduled to open the same night!

Peppy is one of the few members of the audience for George's disaster, while her own film is mobbed. Suddenly, as the fan magazines might put it, she is "everyone's favorite," while George's wife leaves him, demanding that he clear out of their house. The stock market crash leaves him reeling. Spiraling into alcoholism, he is forced even to pawn his tux. He fires is loyal driver-butler (James Cromwell) and puts his few possessions that remain up for auction, Peppy secretly buying them.

The rest of The Artist is an artful seesaw between the two, as time and again Peppy—a nearly unstoppable force—attempts to create a deeper relationship, George, out of stubborn pride and self-pity, pulling away, until he finally tries to burn down his apartment with himself in it. His amazing pet dog, Uggy, races to a nearby policeman, who pulls George to safety. Peppy, rushing to his side finds him lying in a hospital in a near coma, and takes him home to her new mansion. She even blackmails the studio head (John Goodman) into featuring George in a talking picture. But when George gets wind of good attempts and discovers her purchase of his mementos, he once again returns to his burned-out hovel, taking out a hidden gun with the intent of killing himself. When Peppy discovers his absence she calls out for her driver, Clifton (the former driver for George, whom she has hired), but when he does not appear, she impatiently takes over the wheel herself, despite the fact, as it quickly becomes apparent, that she cannot drive. The tension between the possibility that she will kill herself in an automobile crash and George's slow employment of his gun is an exciting near-end for this melodrama.

I don't think it will ruin the film to tell what anyone who understands this work as a comedy will have already figured out. She hits a tree, but safely arrives, and although an intertitle shouts "BANG," George does not shoot the gun.

The final scene is a joyful filming of them dancing, a là Astaire and Rodgers. The pair, as the director declares, are sensational! With so much talent, one wonders why George has not previously attempted to act in talking films. Asked by the director to repeat the scene, George says—he'd be glad to—with the heavy French accent, of course, of Jean Dujardin!

It has all been great fun! But The Artist is not really about its clichéd plot but rather concerns silent and sound filmmaking. How does film mean? And how does film narrative get conveyed? It's not just that Hazanavicius's film is a valentine to silent film pictures; it is a kind of imaginary silent film that should/could have been made, had that era had all the technical abilities that we have today. And in that sense The Artist is a sort of wonderful fraud, a film that just like forged art works, looks like an original until you discover that the paint did not exist during the artist's life or that the canvas upon which the work has been painted was made years after the artist died.

I do not mean that Hazanavicius is attempting to fool anyone, and, in fact, the audience has joined in the pretense from the beginning. He makes his act of "forgery" quite obvious, and it is these obvious "clues" that make this work so interesting. When George first discovers the existence of talking films, for example, suddenly a brush and comb come to life in sound, a jar scratches across the table, the whole chattering world is blown in through his window. The noise is unbearable!

Later, in a moment of utter drunkeness, George suddenly sees miniature versions of himself and fellow cast members, and is about to wipe them off the bar counter before he falls stone drunk to the floor, as if in destroying his visions of himself, he has himself died. When the dog soundlessly barks at the policeman, the officer at first seems impervious to his calls for help. Is the dog barking or pretending to bark? If a tree falls in the forest without a witness, does make noise?

These inherent cinematic conundrums and numerous others enrich this work and transform it from a mere exercise in recreating an older form into a questioning of that form and of film genre in general. By film's end the director has publicly investigated the role of the artist, director, editor, composer, and actor. And, in doing so, Hazanavicius has truly brought some of the past back to life, or, more correctly, stolen some of our present to bring back into the past.

Los Angeles, December 14, 2011

Reprinted from Nth Position (January 2012).

Martin Scorsese | Hugo

2012-02-06T09:10:00.000-08:00

fixing things by Douglas Messerli

John Logan (screenplay, based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick), Martin Scorsese (director) Hugo / 2011

Scorsese's 3-D Hugo begins in Paris' Gare Montparnasse with the camera, slightly above the actor's heads, speeding through the crowds. It is a slightly dizzying and cinematically impressive start that also made me fear that the movie was going to be closer to animation than human drama. But, in the end, after the very satisfying human drama that Hugo is, one realizes that that first scene was simply presented as a kind tour de force, as Scorcese's way of showing off: "Look what I can do now that I'm filming in 3-D." Indeed Avatar director James Cameron has been quoted as telling Scorcese that Hugo represented the best use of 3-D he had ever seen.

One might argue that that first rush of filmmaking is part and parcel of what the movie celebrates. Like Michael Hazanavicius' The Artist, Hugo concerns itself with the history of silent film, but while The Artist can be said to truly celebrate the form, Hugo, even in its devotion to the films of Georges Méliès, uses that history as a celebration of cinema in general and, by extension, a hurrah for directors like Martin Scorcese. As Scorcese has admitted, the father-son relationship in Hugo reminded him of his own childhood experiences with his father sharing films.

Well, why shouldn't Scorcese celebrate himself? Although he has never been my favorite director, for years he has produced some of the most watchable movies of male vulnerability, from Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, After Hours, to Good Fellas, Cape Fear and Shutter Island. In Hugo he has marvelously worked against that type of film to produce a lovely fable that both children and adults can admire.

Young Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield)—a kind of 20th century Oliver Twist—due to the death of his mother and beloved father (Jude Law), as well as, as we soon discover, the drowning of his constantly drunken uncle (Ray Winstone), works as an unknown employee in the train station. His father, a museum worker who died in a fire, was a tinkerer who restored toys, clocks, and other machines, and, just before his death, attempted to bring to life a marvelous metal automaton which he had rescued from the museum's vaults of unwanted art. With his father's death, Hugo is literally whisked away to the clock tower of Gare Montparnasse by his uncle, where the uncle works as the official clock setter, winding up the huge clock and others each day at certain set hours. As we enter Hugo's world, the uncle has disappeared, and the boy has secretly taken over his position, stealing pastries and milk from the shops of the station in order to survive, living in the now-forgotten rooms originally provided for station employees.

The problem is that he has also been stealing bits and pieces, small mechanisms and springs, from a station toy shop owner in order to repair the automaton, and the shop owner (Ben Kingsely) is out to entrap him. Yet the major villain of Hugo's world is far more vengeful: the dreaded Stationmaster (Sacha Baron Cohen) whose central activity seems to be running down homeless urchins who frequent the station, so that he can deliver them up to the orphanage, where he suffered much of his own childhood. The Stationmaster has his eye on Hugo as well, and some of the most remarkable scenes of the film are their amazing chases.

One day, however, Hugo is caught by the toy shop owner, and made to empty his pockets, which contain not only the pieces of metal he has stolen over time, but a fascinating book, which we soon discover must have come with the automaton. Papa Georges, as the toy shop owner is known, seems more upset by the discovery of the notebook—which the child insists he return to him—than he does with the loss of metal parts. Georges announces to Hugo his intent to take the book home with him and burn it.

Why, we can only ask, is he being so vengeful to the boy? And what possible satisfaction might he attain by the destruction of this fascinating notebook? Like a forlorn puppy Hugo follows him home, continuing to demand the book's return, Georges attempting to rid himself of the nuisance. Once inside the house, Georges discusses the young annoyance with his wife. Hugo and the audience also discover in the house, a young girl, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), whom Hugo lures outside into the cold, pleading with her to help him regain his treasure. Isabelle agrees, at least, to keep the old man from burning it.

But the next day, the toy shop owner hands Hugo a small folded towel in which are only some ashes, evidence, presumably, of the book's obliteration. The child is in tears, and in some recompense, is offered part-time work in the shop. Georges is impressed as Hugo quickly fixes the mechanism to a small wind-up rat.

Reencountering Isabelle, Hugo discovers that the old man has not truly burned the book, and a tenuous friendship evolves between the two children. She is the more educated and forceful of them, he remaining, out of need, more secretive and fearful; yet they both gradually share their private worlds, Isabelle taking Hugo to a bookstore, he illegally entering a movie house with her through the back door. She has never been to a movie before, refused permission to attend films by Georges and his wife, her godparents, who have taken her in after the death of her parents. It is a day of great adventure for both; as they slip inside the movie house, Isabelle whispers: "We could get into trouble." Hugo declares, "That's how you know it's an adventure."

Yet when she demands to see where he lives, he backs away, forced to be protective of his hideaway and self-imposed job. That is, until he sees a necklace she is wearing: a piece of metal, shaped like a heart—the very "key" he has been unable to replicate in order to start up the automaton! Hugo is convinced that whatever the automaton might write will have a link to his dead father, revealing his course of life.

The boy can no long resist in showing Isabelle his clockwork's abode, as he brings her to his small room and to the automaton, the two of them putting the key into place as the machine rattles into motion. At first the metal man writes only a few unrelated scrawls in various positions on the page, a code that is impossible to crack. The child's disappointment is palpably displayed; after all, the hope of its message has been the only link he has left to his father.

Soon, however, the machine starts up once more, quickly composing a series of lines and images that reveal that the automaton does not write words but draws a picture: the very image which his father mentioned seeing as a child, a black and white version of the famed scene of a rocket crashing into the moon of Georges Méliès' 1902 film, Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon).

The automaton even signs the piece with the name of the film's director, Isabelle's godfather. What, they can only wonder, is the meaning of it all? How has Hugo's automaton known anything about Isabelle and her life?*

That first half of Scorcese's film, filled with mystery, wonderment, and adventures, is, frankly, the best part of the movie, and the heart of its charm. The second half, filled with sometimes flat-footed explanations and historical recountings is less convincing, as we gradually discover that the bitter old man in the toy store is actually the great early filmmaker, painfully hiding out from his own past life after having been rejected by the post World War I generation, his over 400 films having all been destroyed, some of them melted down for their cellulose.

Scorcese's attempt to educate both the audience and the children about Méliès and his films is exemplary, and the images from the films themselves are, as always, a wonder to behold. But this section is overlong, with the morose tone of the disillusioned filmmaker dominating the work. Only the continued energy of its young actors and the frantic chases of the Stationmaster after Hugo keep the movie going. Having met up with a Méliès' historian, who has, perhaps, the only copy remaining of the great filmmakers' A Trip to the Moon, Hugo is determined to play the film again in Méliès' own home, hoping to reveal to Papa Georges that he is not forgotten and his work is still beloved, at least by a few. But his dreams of the night before are horrific, as he, discovering the automaton's key on the railroad tracks, jumps down to retrieve it while a locomotive comes barreling forward, and, unable to stop, plows through the station, mowing down numerous travelers, diners, and workers in its path—a reference to the horrendous Gare Montparnasse train derailment of 1895, which, in actuality, killed only one person, but injured hundreds of the train's passengers.

At first, the intrusion into the Méliès' home is unsuccessful, as Mama Jeanne (Helen McCrory) attempts to protect her husband from further piquing his long heartache and disappointment. But finally, the film historian convinces her to view, once more, the copy of the film, which so delights her (and the children who also recognize Jeanne as one of its actresses), that the room is transformed into joy, Méliès himself coming forth after having apparently having watched from the hall, to answer some of their questions. Hugo, who sees himself as a fixer, has mastered a kind of transformation, as the old man recalls his wonderful life of the past. As Jeanne summarizes it:

Georges, you've tried to forget the past for so long, but it has caused

nothing but unhappiness. Maybe it's time you tried to remember.

Kingsley himself has described that transformation as being something like a young boy dragging an old and embittered man back to life.

But Hugo has yet one more great gift to bestow upon the old director. He returns to the station to bring back the marvelous automaton. This time, however, the Stationmaster discovers Hugo before he can return to his secret rooms, following him, as the young child is forced to hide outside the window, hanging from the face of the giant clock, much as had Harold Lloyd in the movie he and Isabelle attended. Unable to find Hugo, The Stationmaster turns back, while the boy grabs up his treasure and runs; but this time, through the Stationmaster's maneuvers, the metal man is thrown into the air, crashing down onto the tracks. Hugo's attempt to retrieve him echoes his dream, as a train bears down upon the trapped boy, pulled to safety at the last moment by the Stationmaster. He hustles the boy away, determined to finally send him off to an institution, just as the Méliès', Isabelle in tow, enter the station, claiming him as their own!

The story's ending is truly a kind celebration of all that has come before, as Méliès is inducted into the French Film Society which, after having tracked down and reclaimed 180 of his films, presents a retrospective, the family and Hugo in attendance.

So has the film successfully embedded a real story—almost everything about Méliès is true—within a fable. But I must admit, although I love Méliès' magical art, in this case I prefer the magic of the fable!

*Although Méliès did experiment with automata, the one used in this film, I have read, is a kind of hybrid of two famous automata by the Swiss-born clockmaker, Pierre Jacquet-Droz.

Los Angeles, December 22, 2011
Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (February 2012).

Phyllida Lloyd | Mamma Mia!

2012-02-06T07:48:00.001-08:00

music for the estranged
by Douglas Messerli

Catherine Johnson (screenplay, based on musical book), Phyllida Lloyd (director) Mamma Mia! /

2008

I have a confession to make. I do not nor ever have liked bubblegum. I also do not like bubblegum music, particularly when it comes in the form of the phenomenally successful Swedish group ABBA. To me their music sounds like it has been composed by a refrigerator—perhaps a result of the cold Swedish winters in which, surely, some of their music has been written. But then, to call their music "Swedish," would be absurd. It's hard to say where ABBA's music might be from, since the lyrics are in English and their sing-along close harmonies somewhat reminds one of campfire songs. Yet the lyrics are often so bizarre that it is difficult to imagine anyone having written them. Consider the strange nostalgic song of a "battle for liberty":

There was something in the air that night
The stars were bright, Fernando
They were shining there for you and me
For liberty, Fernando
Though I never thought that we could lose
There's no regret
If I had to do the same again
I would, my friend, Fernando
If I had to do the same again
I would, my friend, Fernando

Or the major refrain of an irresistible, but failed, love:

Mamma mia, here I go again

My my, how can I resist you
Mamma mia, does it show again
My my, just how much I've missed you

Their great paean to dance is just as absurd, with its sudden focus—"oh yeah"—on a tambourine:

You are the dancing queen

Young and sweet, only seventeen
Dancing queen, feel the beat
From the tambourine, oh yeah

And who else in the world might have conceived of a love song centered on Napolean's Waterloo battle?

No one else in the real world might possibly utter (or even sing) these lines. ABBA's songs, in short, come from nowhere but ABBA land, and have no specific ties to any particular place or county but, perhaps, the inner terrain of Bjoern Ulvaeus', Stig Anderson's, and Benny Andersson's minds. And it is this very isolation from anything real that drives their music, making it seem retro even when it first appeared. The strange English of these songs makes them feel as if they have come from some alien world, a world, which in its quirky but love-based messages, comes close to being ridiculously camp.

I think this very quality explains why outrageous gays such as those in The Adventures of Priscilla and outsider women such as the two central figures of Muriel's Wedding are attracted to ABBA, and why I am not.

Accordingly I did not see the movie nor theater version of Mamma Mia! Everyone had told me that no matter what I thought about the music, it was just plain fun. But as a contrarian, I skipped the pleasure. Besides, I have another quirk in not particularly liking the acting skills of Meryl Streep*(see below). I do, however, like Pierce Brosnan, Colin Furth, Julie Walters, and others of this cast, and, although few of them can keep up with the amazingly energetic and good-looking Streep, they do help stoke Phyllida Loyd's silly trifle of a movie. Along with these seasoned actors, the beautiful boys and girls, and the lovely Greek island of Sokpeles, I almost was able to swallow the ABBA pills, and sit back to enjoy this pastiche about a young soon-to-be bride who is desperate to discover her father.

As her handsome fiancée (Dominic Cooper) explains to her:

Sophie: I wanted to get married knowing who I am.

Sky: You don't find that from finding your father, Sophie, you find it

by finding yourself.

No more seriousness! The rest of this film is devoted to song and dance. The couple at the center, in fact, never do marry, but ride off into the sunset to discover each other and the world before they tie the knot. But family sentimentalists can still celebrate Donna's (Streep) marriage to Sam (Brosnan), Rosie's (Walters) proposal to Bill (Stellan Skarsgård), and Harry's new found love, a male Greek islander!

The director, realizing her bon-bon is only a sweet repast, does not attempt more than that, allowing the film to make millions of dollars at the box-office.

___

*Streep is an excellent actor, and certainly deserving of the many rewards she has received. But her immersement in character makes for the kind of acting of which I am least fond. The great actors, for me, are those who profoundly "play" the character while still remaining, somehow, themselves, or, at least, projections of who they might like to be—figures like Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and Bette Davis, and Marlon Brando. In theater and film, I want the actors to be just that, actors, larger than life figures who are able to competently play imaginary beings. The word "imaginary" is crucial; I want to be able to see the theater of the gesture without the actor overdoing it or hamming it up. With Streep, however, I never can get a sense of who she is underneath her character; she is so able to mime and imitate, that I cannot see the actress playing her role; even though my companion, Howard, met her when he visited her artist husband, I cannot imagine who Streep is off screen or stage. Perhaps that is why she has only played in what I suggest are "Hollywood" movies. Although she has played in dramas, she has, to my knowledge, never played in a "serious" film, by which I mean one that pushes the boundaries of cinema. She acts perfectly for a scripted idea of what character is, but can seldom create an original and memorable being since she will not reveal herself. In short, Streep acts without being an actor. She is a Polish survivor of the concentration camps, a brilliant Danish story-teller trapped in Africa, a wicked dictator of the clothes industry, an outsized chef dedicated to French cooking, a joyful hippie-like leftover, stranded at mid-life in Greece, even an "iron woman" of British politics—yet she has never performed as Meryl Streep. A chameleon is a cold-blooded being.

Los Angeles, February 10, 2012

Stephan Elliot | The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

2012-02-06T07:48:00.000-08:00

the abba phenomenon

bloody abba

by Douglas Messerli

Stephan Elliot (writer and director) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert / 1994

If the Australian film industry is to be believed, the 1977 tour of ABBA, in front of more than 160,000 fans, totally changed the country's personality. Certainly that is one of the unusual premises behind Stephan Elliot's Dadist-like road trip adventure, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Priscilla, incidentally, is not a human being, but a broken-down bus which speeds two Melbourne drag queens (Mitzi Del Bra/Anthony "Tick" Belrose, played by Hugo Weaving and Felicia Jollygoodfellow/Adam Whitely played by Guy Pearce) and one transgendered individual (Bernadette Bassenger/Ralph Waite, portrayed by the still elegant and stately Terence Stamp) into the desert. The mimed singing performances of Mitzi and Felicia are so stale that they've been booed off stage. Bernadette's young boyfriend, Trumpet, has been asphyxiated while dying his hair and has instead died himself. There seems no better time to get out of town and see the wondrous Australian outback that these three have seemingly never before encountered.

And what fun! We get to go along, watching them strut about in small desert towns in outrageous drag costumes with volumes of ostrich plumes, sequins, spangles, beads, bangles, and bows. Although these three may seem like ultimate victims, vulnerable outsiders in a world of pioneer-like homesteaders and native aborigines, they soon show their pluck: first by revealing unexpected aspects of themselves to each other, then by demonstrating even further surprises to the narrow-minded townspeople and dangerously bigoted miners.

The least able, and youngest of them, Felicia (whom the handsome Pearce plays with a crazed abandonment), simply needs to expand his/her experiences, and gradually does that as they move forward into space. Fixated on empty-headed gay concerns, he is literally left out in the cold by the other two until he can comprehend his ridiculousness. As the eldest of the group, Bernadette responds early in the trip:

I'll join this conversation on the proviso that we stop bitching about

people, talking about wigs, dresses, bust sizes, penises, drugs, night

clubs and bloody Abba!

Tick's response says it all: "Doesn't give us much to talk about then, does it?" Felicia is even more obsessed: one of his/her greatest possessions is a small vial wherein floats a piece of fesces—belonging to Abba singer Agnetha Faltskog! Felicia may be funny and even, at times, fun to be around, but she/he is also still a child who endangers all their lives by dressing up in drag and parading before a group of small-town miners, men who suffer most of their lives deep underground. Bernadette comes to the rescue by kicking the most threatening of them in the groin and forcefully finger-wrestling him to the ground. .

Earlier, at another small and not so accommodating community she out-drinks the most renowned drinker, the hostile owner of the establishment. When their bus breaks down, Bernadette bravely ventures off into the desert, ultimately bringing help. The man who finally comes to their rescue is Bob (Bill Hunter), whose mail-order wife has the most unusual talent—far more pleasing to the males of this outpost—of being able to expel ping pong balls from her vagina. Fortunately, the three cross-dressing performers find a far more receptive audience in the native aborigines, who readily join in on their dancing revelries.

When Bob's wife leaves him ("I no like you anyway. You got little ding-a-ling"), he joins up with the dancers. Having seen "Les Girls," a group with which Bernadette performed years earlier, he is, it becomes apparent, smitten with her, and the two celebrate with a night in the open air. The interchanges between to two are some of the best of the movie. Describing Bob as a "gentleman," Bernadette remarks: "[to Bob] Believe me, Bob, these days gentlemen are an endangered species. Unlike bloody drag queens who just keep breeding like rabbits."

Tic has the most revelations of the three, revealing not only where they headed—the resort town Alice Springs, where they are scheduled to perform, but sharing his secret that he has been married—has, as Felicia quips, "been playing for both teams"—with the consequences of a young son. As the manager of the hotel in which they will perform, his wife has requested that he take the son for a while so that she might find a few weeks of deserved vacation.

Suddenly, with that revelation we begin to see this silly set of figures as real human beings. The duality of their lives, represented by their real and fictitious names, becomes even more apparent as these cartoons pop out into real space, joining us. It is not a profound reality, and the believability of Elliott's transformative tale is, to say the least, shaky. But it is, nonetheless, meaningful, and changes the tone of the entire film.

Received by both wife and child with open arms and utter joy for their absurd performances, their dance becomes almost a war-whoop of retribution as they go through their paces—particularly Bernadette, whom Stamp plays as a tough, war-weary figure who's been through it all before. They are truly "Dancing Queens."

Bernadette and Bob determine to stay on at the hotel, managing it while Tic's wife is traveling. Felicia—a now somewhat calmer and less flamboyant figure—falls in with Tic's son. He is after all a somewhat elderly child who can readily play the role of older brother.

In the final scenes the three are back in Melbourne, performing at the local bar, the son happily helping out with the lights. What began as an kind of extremist parody of gay life has now been assimilated into utter normalcy.

Los Angeles, February 4, 2012

P. J. Hogan | Muriel's Wedding

2012-02-06T07:37:00.000-08:00

waterloo
by Douglas Messerli

P. J. Hogan (writer and director) Muriel's Wedding / 1994, USA 1995

1994 was a great year for Australian actor, Bill Hunter, who played in two of the ABBA movies I'm discussing, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel's Wedding. Although he appeared in no scenes in which ABBA songs were played or discussed, I'd be fascinated to know his opinion of the popular Swedish group.

A "gentleman" of the old school in Priscilla, in Muriel's Wedding Hunter plays a thorough scoundrel, Bill Heslop, a failed politician, now serving as Council President in the small town of Porpoise Spit. Heslop is an uneducated tyrant, whose four children appear to be slightly mentally retarded. His abused wife, Betty (Jeanie Drynan) seems to have lost herself along the way, spending much of the film in a kind empty reverie. Mostly the children sit watching the telly or, in the case of Muriel (Toni Collette), running to her bedroom to escape into the fantasy world of ABBA.

The film begins at a wedding of one of Muriel's high school acquaintances, as the bride tosses the wedding bouquet. Muriel, dressed in an outrageous leopard-topped outfit, catches the bouquet, much to the distress of the bride's close friends, a gaggle of young brats who have joined in the kind of imbecile clique one finds in any American high school—and apparently in Australia as well. These young women and their boyfriends, having served as homecoming queens and kings and their court attendants, never outgrow that glorious moment in their youths, even as their faces sag and their stomachs grow fat. For now, they are the "beautiful" set, to which Muriel, a hefty, awkward, and not-too-bright woman would love to belong.

As Muriel walks through the house she observes the groom having sex in a laundry room with another girl of the group, not the bride.

Soon after, the police show up, and Muriel is carted off. She has evidently stolen the outrageous costume upon her frame. The embarrassment and shame of her acts are all her father can comprehend, as he buys off the policemen by chatting up memories of their sports past and sending then off with a case of beer. Muriel's younger sister Joanie chimes in, as she does from time to time, "You're terrible, Muriel."

Soon after we witness a business dinner in which the despicable Heslop berates his family in from of his Japanese guests. Soon after, a friend happens to drop by:

Bill: Deidre Chambers. What a coincidence.

The event and reaction happens so many times throughout the film that the humor gradually begins to turn into a sharp knife that cuts through the comedic structure of Muriel's Wedding, particularly when we begin to perceive the consequences of his not-so-secret affair. His wife, however, currently remains clueless, as Deidre praises her as part of the distraction. Betty is so bruised that any kind statement absolutely lights up her face.

So too has Muriel loss any sense of self worth. As her "friends" plan a junket to an island get-away, Muriel fantasizes that she may join them. In no uncertain terms they tell her that they do not want her company any longer, not just on the holiday, but ever. Muriel bursts into tears, which they see as further proof of her inability to "behave" appropriately.

Not only is Heslop having a relationship with Deidre, but he requests his own wife weekly to write out a check to her. This time it is made out to cash with no amount specified. Since Muriel has made an appointment to meet with Deidre about selling beauty products, she is asked to deliver the check—with the near-inevitable outcome.

So begins the real story of Muriel, as she shows up, much to their dismay, at the same hotel where the girls are staying. This time something different happens: another woman appears, who seems to know Muriel:

Rhonda: Are you Muriel Heslop?

                     Muriel: No.
                     Rhonda: Yes, you are!
                     Muriel: Why?
                     Rhonda: I don't know why, you just are.

So begins a series of denials and lies about Muriel's own identity, as she attempts to carve out a new self that might be closer to her dreams—all of which include marriage and the joy, at least to her way of thinking, that comes with it.

Another of the girls whom the set rejected, Rhonda befriends Muriel and, being a gutsy, sexy individual, reveals what Muriel has told her, that the bride's husband has been having sex with friend beside her. Soon after, we see Rhonda and Muriel, the first time for the latter, utterly enjoying themselves, both dressed in white, as they mime the lyrics to ABBA's "Waterloo."* Although they cannot comprehend it themselves, their white apparel and the love lyrics they are mouthing are absolutely appropriate, for despite all the circumstances of the rest of the tale, they have, in fact, been spiritually wedded.

Those "circumstances" include an investigation of her father (since Muriel has written a check for far more than his own funds), her and Rhonda's escape to Sydney—where Rhonda initiates her into a world of wild heterosexual sex—and Rhonda's sudden collapse, signaling that she has cancer, the operation leaving her crippled for life. Through this whirlwind of events, Muriel matures somewhat—as she observes to her new friend:

                        When I lived in Porpoise Spit, I used to sit in my room for
                        hours and listen to ABBA songs. But since I've met you
                        and moved to Sydney, I haven't listened to one ABBA song.
                        That's because my life is as good as an ABBA song.
                        It's as good as "Dancing Queen."

Yet she has still not come to terms with herself and her desires—she is still, after all, a bit slow-minded; she has yet to comprehend who she is and what she might truly want out of life. Secretly, Muriel, who now calls herself "Mariel," begins to visit wedding dress shops, trying out various dresses and collecting the photographs into an album as if she has lived an entire life of wedding-going, with her always as the bride!

When Rhonda discovers the album and confronts her, Muriel cannot understand why this has caused such a rift between them. Soon after, she signs up for a sham wedding with a handsome South African swimmer, determined to join the Australian team by obtaining marital citizenship.

The wedding itself is a grand affair, with the braggart Heslop in his prime, Deidre at his side. Betty arrives late, but is not even observed by her excitedly giggling offspring. Even though it is a not a "true" wedding, Muriel obviously sees herself as having gotten what she so longed for. And, one must admit, she has suddenly blossomed into a beautiful bride. Rhonda's reaction, that of a spurned lover, severs their relationship:

You're right, you are a new person, and you stink. "Muriel Van Arkle"

stinks. And she's not half the person Muriel Heslop was.

Even her new "husband," David Van Arkle (Daniel Lapaine) cannot explain his wife's behavior:

David: What kind of person marries someone they don't know?

                      Muriel: You did.
                      David: I want to win. All my life I've wanted to win.
                      Muriel. Me too.

She has, of course, "won" nothing except the money she has been paid. A telephone call reports her mother's death. Suddenly, Muriel is forced to face realities she has never dared to. Her mother, having burned the grass her lazy son consistently refused to mow, has committed suicide. Deidre is already busy house-cleaning, intent, obviously, on immediately moving in.

The shock of her mother's unexpected act seems to awaken Muriel who finally comprehends that marriage is not a wedding ceremony, but a state of being, a commitment to love. Her final revelation comes through an admission to her husband, after a surprising sexual encounter, obviously her first:

Muriel: I can't stay married to you, David. I have to stop lying now.

I've told so many lies...I don't love you.

David: I don't love you either, but I think I could like having you

around.

Told to keep the money, Muriel returns to Porpoise Spit, sharing most of it with her father upon obtaining the promise that will stop verbally abusing her brother and sisters. Her next stop is ineluctable: the house in which Rhonda is now living with her mother.

Visiting her are the obnoxious "set" of the earlier part of the film. When Muriel asks if Rhonda will join her in Sydney, her friend's reply is immediate:

Sorry, Mum. You know I love you, but you drive me crazy. And you

three [the high school trio], what a bunch of cocksuckers.

Rushing off into the horizon with her friend, Muriel finally has come understand what love is.

Los Angeles, February 5, 2012

*Waterloo

My, my, at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender

Oh dear, and I have met my destiny in quite a similar way
This history book on the shelf
Is always repeating itself

Waterloo - I was defeated, you won the war

Waterloo - Promise to love you forever more
Waterloo - Couldn't escape if I wanted to
Waterloo - Finally facing my Waterloo

My, my, I tried to hold you back but you were stronger

Oh dear, and now it seems my only chance is giving up the fight

And how could I ever refuse

I feel like I win when I lose

Frank Lloyd | Oliver Twist / David Lean | Oliver Twist / Carol Reed | Oliver! / Roman Polanski | Oliver Twist

2012-02-01T08:31:00.000-08:00

four olivers
by Douglas Messerli

Walter Anthony, Frank Lloyd, and Harry Weil (screenplay and titles, based on the Dickens novel), Frank Lloyd (director) Oliver Twist / 1922

David Lean and Stanley Haynes (screenplay, based on the Dickens novel), David Lean (director) Oliver Twist / 1948, USA 1951

Vernon Harris (screenplay, based on the musical by Lionel Bart, based on the Dickens novel) , Carol Reed (director) Oliver! / 1968

Ronald Harwood (screenplay), Roman Polanski (director) Oliver Twist / 2005

The four major film productions of Dickens' great childhood fantasia on poverty and fate, Oliver Twist, are all, on the surface, more or less true to the great novelist's work. Strangely enough, however, the shortest of them, Frank Lloyd's 1922 silent version, just 74 minutes in length, is the closest to the rambunctious original. With great synthesis and the use of word boards, Lloyd manages to keep the Monks part of the story—the half-brother of Oliver out to swindle the hero of his inheritance—as well as the Rose Maylie sequences, wherein just as he was by Mr. Brownlow, Oliver is given warm love and attention. Lloyd even manages to bring the country bumpkin Noah Claypole to London and back into Oliver's fate.

Jackie Coogan's Oliver is the smallest and most frail of all of these heroes, and in many senses he is, in that fragility, the most charming—except for a kind knock-em-out swagger coupled by his wearing a hat similar to that in Chaplin's The Kid of the year before. Perhaps Lloyd's greatest scenes are those early in the film, in his depiction of workhouse life: the endless ironing of the women, the nearly meaningless unraveling of oakum by the young boys. Lon Chaney's Fagin is effective and played without the bravura stereotype of the "Jew" later actors brought to it. His Fagin is more of an eccentric crook than a devious outsider, and the character, accordingly, while less outsized, is also more sympathetic.

For all that, there is something a bit sentimentalized about the Lloyd version that, even outdoing the passively sweet John Howard Davies of David Lean's 1948 version, turns Oliver Twist more into a children's tale than the often gritty and horrifying social-political story that was Dickens' version. Lean's work begins with the melodramatic journey of Oliver's mother to the parish workhouse to give birth, presented against the backdrop of a stormy night that seems to immediately cast the film into an almost operatic mode that any moment might drown the rest of the tale. When Oliver finally escapes his apprenticeship with the undertaker Sowerberry, however, things pick up, with The Artful Dodger (a young Anthony Newley) sweeping up Oliver on the edge of the city before bringing him into the evil lair of Alec Guinness' Fagin.

Guinness is a better actor than Chaney, and is almost always fascinating to watch. But his Fagin is most definitely "the Jew" (as Dickens repeated in the original again and again)—so much so that the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the New York Board of Rabbis objected, causing a postponement of the American premiere for three long years. The film was banned—for opposite reasons—in both Israel (for its anti-Semitism) and Egypt (for its presentation of Fagin as a sympathetic being).

Lean also eviscerated a great many of Dickens' characters and scenes. Nancy's relationship with the young Oliver has almost disappeared, and Oliver's lack of relationship to her makes him even more of a passive being as he is shuttled about from poverty to luxury, and back to poverty again. Monks only briefly appears and seems to have no integral connection to Oliver. The Maylies are taken out of the story, while Oliver's mother becomes Brownlow's daughter rather than the lover of Oliver's father, Brownlow's former friend, bringing in a coincidence that seems even more outrageous than those the author relishes. Nancy is murdered not after a meeting with Brownlow at London Bridge but earlier in her house.

In short, Lean thins out his story, perhaps bringing some clearer logic to the whole, but also stealing much of the discombobulated energy that one associates with Dickens' fictional worlds. What he has gained in clarity Lean loses in the epic qualities of the work that are so clearly revealed in Polanski's 2005 version.

The dark palette of Polanski's Oliver Twist perfectly matches Dickens', and the color the director infuses into the film is as effective as the coloration of the original author's language. Once we have quickly slipped over Oliver's demand for "more" and his unfortunate time with the Sowerberrys, we enter a world that becomes epic in its dimensions as Polanski focuses, more than any of the previous directors, on the vast proportions of the young Oliver's (played in this case by Barney Clark) voyage to London, a trip of seven days! The tone of the work is set not only by the camera's loving embrace of the British landscape but by Rachel Portman's sweeping musical score. By the time Oliver reaches London, in fact, we feel almost as out of breath as does the young urchin, and The Artful Dodger's (Harry Eden's) salvation of the boy comes just in time.

Ben Kingsley certainly does not ignore the Jewishness of his Fagin, but he also does not play it to the hilt as did Guinness in Lean's version and Ron Moody in the musical Oliver!. He is closer, in his ugliness and demeanor, to Chaney's performance, without losing the delicious tawdriness and leering sexual insinuations of his relationship with his "boys." Barney Clark's Oliver, moreover, is far more feisty and determined than almost any of the other Olivers, bringing, for the first time, a different kind of energy into the film.

Polanski also takes liberties with Dickens' original, confounding the robbery in which Oliver is forced to join by Bill Sykes with the very house in which Mr. Brownlow so nicely kept him previously. Again several characters such as the Maylies and Monk are wiped out. On the other hand, Polanski does bring in the early incidents when Oliver might have been chosen as a chimney-sweep and the final scenes where he visits Fagin in prison, which most of these films have abolished. It matters, I would argue, that Fagin, faced with the British justice system, goes mad. In feeling and sweep, it appears that Polanski has been far more faithful to Dickens than even Lloyd's early silent version.

Obviously, I have said nothing yet about Carol Reed's 1968 version based on the musical by Lionel Bart. Perhaps it is simply unfair to compare that perfectly joyful and often charming tale to the grimmer realities of the real story. The musical is absolutely delightful. Even though it retains Nancy's murder, Sykes' death by hanging, and Fagin's abuse of young boys, Reed's work is ultimately so overblown with a singing, dancing street life that there seems little reason to scurry off the most passive of Olivers (Mark Lester) to a wealthy London house. Fagin and his dark hole seems so much more full of fun that one has difficulty knowing what all the fuss is about. As Nancy (Shani Wallis) ironically sings, "It's a fine life." But it ain't Dickens either. For there are few dark "twists" in this Oliver's life.

Los Angeles, December 31, 2012

Reprinted from Nth Position (February 2012).

Carol Reed | The Fallen Idol

2012-01-29T08:19:00.000-08:00

the case of the missing mother
by Douglas Messerli

Graham Greene (screenplay, with additional dialogue by Lesley Storm and William Templeton), Carol Reed (director) The Fallen Idol / 1948, USA 1949

Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol is a mystery movie with hardly any mystery to it. We begin with a grand exit from what is apparently the French embassy in London, as everyone, including the Ambassador says goodbye. Left behind are only the head butler and housekeeper Baines and his wife, two cleaning women, and a small boy, Phillipe (the loveable Bobby Henrey), the Ambassador's son.

The Ambassador evidently will be away for a few days, as he mumbles something to the effect that he will be bringing "back" the boy's mother. Accordingly, right from the beginning we observe things as they may appear from the boy's point of view, a bit confusing, with an ever-present sense of mystery in the air. What soon does become clear to us, however, is the Ambassador himself has not spent much time with his lonely son. A substitute father and companion has been found in the head butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson), who dotes on the boy, telling him larger than life tales about his adventures in Africa, taking him on daily walks, and sharing the secret of the boy's beloved pet snake.

Mrs. Baines (Sonia Dresdel), on the other hand, is almost as mean and unlikeable as any Dickensian harridan. A harpy (who later snaps out at him: "You're not such a child as you pretend to be! You've got a nasty, wicked mind and it ought to be beaten out of you!"), Mrs. Baines is in near constant motion as she floats through room after room covering the furniture with white sheets and ordering any remaining workers to speed up their activities. She is such an outright monster that at lunch in their basement quarters, Philippe admits that he "hates her," for which he is punished by her taking away his food and sending him to his room. There will be no walk to the zoo with Baines on this day. The gentle but pained look on Baines' face as he sneaks the boy the box wherein lies his snake, reveals his relationship with his wife is nearly unbearable.

In fact, Phillipe is a complete innocent, but is of that age when he is beginning to think things out, to makes sense of the adult reality which in a few yeaars he must embrace. Like Mrs. Baines, he too is nearly all movement as he flies around the large embassy, sneaking views of people from different vantages and levels of the multistoried building. Observing Baines leaving, he follows down the fire escape, but loses sight of his friend soon after.

As he strolls down the street, staring into store windows and even asking for Baines at a nearby pub, he suddenly comes upon his friend sitting in the corner of a tea shop with a young woman who is crying as Baines pleads with her in loud whispers. The adult audience immediately suspects what is going on; Baines obviously has a girlfriend who is threatening to leave the city. But the boy, blind to reality, quickly joins them. As Baines introduces his "niece," the girl Julie—who also works in the embassy—and he continue to talk about themselves in the third person, while they simultaneously attempt to distract the boy with milk and cakes. It may well be one of the most linguistically painful scenes of any film, as the loving couple attempt to resolve their problems in the third person while simultaneously trying to restrain their intense emotions. Just as intensely the boy sits, attempting to feed his snake, while sucking in every word.

Soon after, Baines asks the boy to keep their meeting secret, to which Phillipe, perceiving it as a sort of game, readily agrees. By evening Mrs. Baines, after detecting the word "they" in Phillipe's explanation of where he has been, also requests he keep their conversation a secret: "You can keep our secret now? Hmmm? Yes?" Suddenly we understand that the serpent in this Eden is not the boy's snake, but each of the adults as they, abusing the boy's innocence, strip it away through lie after lie.

Pretending to visit her mother in the country, Mrs. Baines announces her departure the next morning, while Baines, boy in hand, rushes to a meeting with his girlfriend, Julie, in the zoo. Again they attempt to communicate their differences while entertaining their young charge. Phillipe, quite expectedly, is keen on visiting the Reptile House. As he stares into the cage at a cobra, the snake spits venom onto the glass, demonstrating that—just as Baines has suggested "There are lies and lies.... Some lies are just kindness"— so are there snakes and snakes. Some of them will kill you. Later, Phillipe discovers that Mrs. Baines has found his hidden snake and destroyed it!

Returning to the embassy from their outing the two adults and child set themselves a little "picnic," and for a few moments play hide and seek with the boy with complete abandonment, as the three joyfully race through the house, pulling sheets off the furniture as they run. It is, in fact, a kind of undoing of what Mrs. Baines has so expeditiously accomplished, an exhilarating celebration of chaos. As the boy hides beneath a large dining table, the camera viewing the scene from his vantage, we hear the approaching couple coming toward him from another room while suddenly seeing at the other end of the table a pair shoes and legs—clearly those of Mrs. Baines, who has obviously remained in the house! Even their momentary joy is destroyed, with the boy at the very center.

A short while later, Mrs. Baines faces off with her husband at the head of the long stair case, demanding to know where the interloper is. Baines attempts to quiet her, fearing the boy will hear. Phillipe has in fact already been awakened by the woman and is watching the entire scene in terror. As he runs to another level of the house to witness the scene better, Mrs. Baines moves to a higher point to see if she might glimpse her nemesis below, only to slip, falling the several floors to her death. Seeing what has happened from the new vantage, Phillipe has no way of knowing what really occurred, and can only suppose that his dear friend has pushed his wife to her death.

Horrified by the reality he has thought he has witnessed, he runs, dressed only in his nightshirt, into the streets, racing away from anyone who might approach until he meets up with a friendly policeman who invites form a cup a tea—to be sipped, it turns out, in the police station. Queried, Phillipe will not speak, clearly out of horror, but also perhaps in fear of revealing anything more than he already has.

At this point a strange event occurs, which, I would argue, is perhaps at the heart of the real mystery of this work. The police have recently arrested a prostitute, who in a cockney accent, humorously claims she was "just walking in her sleep." When confronted by the policemen, Phillipe suddenly goes to the woman for comfort and solace. It is the first time he has touched a woman in the entire film, and in that act we are reminded that for some he has had no mother, evidently, for some time. The prostitute, Rose (Dora Bryan) comments—just as previously has Mrs. Baines—that the boy needs a haircut, reiterating the boy's lack of maternal attention. She finally elicits his address and, ultimately, his name. "Oh, I know your father," she proclaims.

At that point the film returns to its somewhat predictable "story," the mystery of which we have already shown, as the boy is brought home, Baines questioned, blood and fingerprints checked, etc. Questioned once more by the police, the boy continues what he believes is the protection of his hero by denying everything, even after the police have uncovered the relationship between Baines and Julie and suspect the butler of having killed his wife. Baines tells only the truth, but by refusing to say what he has seen, the boy almost convicts him. Julie finally tells Philippe that he must no longer lie: "The truth can't harm Baines. Don't you realize he's innocent?" Who is the child to believe?

Fortunately, the expert police find the dead woman's footprint in the dirt from an overturned plant on the higher overhang from which she has fallen, and recognize that she has not been pushed. Baines is declared innocent. Now the child suddenly is determined to tell the truth, but no one will listen him, no one will hear that it was he who had overturned the pot. Try as he might to relay his honest admission—which obviously has little to do with the police's determination—he is ignored. The adult world, for Phillipe, remains incomprehensible.

Will Phillipe continue to admire a man whom he believes actually did kill his wife and has lied to him about his African past? And what of his parents, who suddenly, at film's end, reappear? Where has Phillipe's mother really been? Some viewers have suggested that she has been in the hospital. But if so, why? And why did the Ambassador need several days to fetch her back? Was she in a French hospital? Perhaps the father has also been lying. Perhaps the couple, who seem to have been separated for some time, had marital differences. Clearly, we know the father has used the services of Rose!

The Fallen Idol of this film is not just Phillipe's friend Baines, but is truth itself. Encouraged to lie by almost all the adults of this film, the boy can never again be sure of anything he is told. Near the end of the work, the Inspector asks Phillipe: "Shall I tell you a secret?" to which Phillipe responds emphatically, "No!"

Los Angeles, January 28, 2012

Yasujirō Ozu | Akibiyori (Late Autumn)

2012-01-26T07:53:00.000-08:00

the oppositions
by Douglas Messerli

Kōgo Noda and Yasujirō Ozu (screenplay, based on a fiction by Ton Satomi), Yasujirō Ozu (director) Akibiyori (Late Autumn) / 1960, USA 1973

As in many of Japanese director Ozu's films, the story of Late Autumn is, superficially, quite simple. Commemorating the death of Akiko Miwa's husband, several of his close male friends, his wife, and daughter Ayako have gathered at a Buddhist temple. The men suffer the ceremony, commenting on the lengthy performances of the monks, but also gossiping, afterwards, about their own youthful love of Akiko (beautifully played by Setsuko Hara) and their worry over her daughter Ayako (Tōko Tsukasa) for her marriageless state. These three busybody and bungling businessmen—Taguchi (Nobuo Nakamura), Marniya (Shin Saburi), and Hiriyama (Ryuji Kita)—don't even have an available candidate in mind, but are determined to intrude themselves into the Miwas' life.

At a meeting with Ayako, one of them suggests an employee, Goto (Keiji Sada), an attractive enough man that Ayako does agree to go out with him on a date. But Ayako is quite insistent that she has no intentions of marrying; somewhat shocking all of the older generation, except perhaps her mother, the young daughter relates that "I'm happy as I am," later adding that love and marriage do not necessarily go together.

So the director sets up what might at first seem to be a statement of generational change, the older, more traditional generation, represented by the men, unable to comprehend the younger generation. Indeed, that is precisely what these meddlers proclaim! Yet, Ozu's carefully framed scenes reveal numerous contradictions or, better yet, oppositions—not so much between generations as within the emotional attitudes of most of the film's major figures. Two of the businessmen have very happy home lives, with smart, contemporary children who still seem to be friendly with and close to their fathers and mothers. The third man, although a widower, is apparently quite happy in his newfound bachelorhood. Yet, underneath each of these individuals is nostalgic for and, at times, apparently regretful for their pasts; perhaps they all would have, at one time or another, proposed to Akiko—the fact of which the two wives seem quite aware. Accordingly, what at first may seem as simple kind, if intrusive actions, are gradually recognized as attempts to once again make contact with Akiko and their own pasts.

Similarly, Ayako proclaims that she is perfectly happy living with her mother, and the two do seem to enjoy each other's company, shopping together, lunching, and later, even enjoying their time together at a country retreat. In short, despite their different dress and ways of communicating with the outside world, at home they seem to be pleasantly alike, so in tune with each other that you well understand Ayako's attitude towards marriage.

At the office, however, Ayako and her friend rush at a certain hour to the roof in order to see a train, filled with brides on their way to their honeymoons, speed past. They are disappointed that another friend, evidently just married, has not waved at them with her bouquet as promised. For a woman who declares no interest in marriage, Ayako seems to have secret yearnings that she has not quite explained to herself.

Unable to succeed in convincing Ayako to leap into the wedded state, the busy trio determine to find a companion for Akiko first, which will "allow" Ayako, as they see it, to seek out her own love. The widower among them finally realizes that he would enjoy the company of Ayako, and, after much confusion and misunderstandings (which results in a good scolding from Ayako's throughly modern friend Yukiko), he proposes. But instead of freeing Ayako, the idea of her mother rewedding shocks her, as she verbally lashes out at Akiko, somewhat like the children in Douglas Sirk's melodrama All That Heaven Allows, describing it as "filthy." If she has seemed of the new generation in her attitudes toward marriage and sex, she is a strong traditionalist in terms of her mother's situation.

As critics such as Adrian Danks have pointed out, however, there is a huge gap between the children of Sirk's film and Ayako. For ultimately, Ayako, who remains close to her mother, perceives the error of her ways, and agrees to marry Goto. It is perhaps inevitable, now that we better understand her attitudes, that she marries in the traditional Japanese wedding garb.

At movie's end, contradictorily, Akiko determines not to remarry, deciding to remain alone with her memories of her dead husband. Her final turn to the camera with a half smile restates all of Ozu's "oppositions," leaving the viewer with a mixed sense of joy and sorrow, as we recognize her emotions of acceptance and sadness of her future life.

With his low-set camera and straight-on portraiture of his figures as they speak—most often over food and, particularly, drink—Ozu has helped us to realize that people are complex beings. What they often say on the surface is not what they may do in their lives, and vice versa. Despite her traditional ways, Ayako has joined the new generation. But perhaps it is a generation that is not so very different, after all, from the past. For Ozu, what I have described as "oppositions," might be spoken of as a balance, a balance he displays in almost every shot of the film (for example, cases of Coca-Cola bottles placed outside a traditional Japanese bar), between the changes of the future and the values of the past.

If ultimately Ozu's work seems to be a profoundly conservative vision, his view also, laced with his sense of mono no aware (a recognition of the impermanence of things), accepts change.

Los Angeles, January 25, 2012

International Cinema Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Alfred Hitchcock | Vertigo | Psycho

The Creepy Stuff I Did

F. W. Murnau | Sunrise

Federico Fellini | La Dolce Vita

Jean-Luc Godard | Pierrot le Fou

Terrence Malick | The Tree of Life

Woody Allen | Midnight in Paris

Michael Hazanavicius | The Artist

Martin Scorsese | Hugo

Phyllida Lloyd | Mamma Mia!

Stephan Elliot | The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

P. J. Hogan | Muriel's Wedding

Frank Lloyd | Oliver Twist / David Lean | Oliver Twist / Carol Reed | Oliver! / Roman Polanski | Oliver Twist

Carol Reed | The Fallen Idol

Yasujirō Ozu | Akibiyori (Late Autumn)