highly artificed melodramas
by
Douglas Messerli
Dimitri
Kirsanoff (director) Ménilmontant /
1926
Dimitri
Kirsanoff (director) Arrière-saison (Backward Season) / 1950
Estonian
born Dimitri Kirsanoff has been generally classified as an experimental
filmmaker, and, indeed, his films do present a great many images that remind
one of the Expressionist techniques and the later multiple and prismatic images
that one discovers in such filmmaking. Yet I might simply describe his as a
phenomenal cinematic artist who, like other great directors of the day, used original
and often previously unexplored techniques to enhance his tales.
If his work often displays the tensions between image and storytelling that one finds in more experimental works, it is because, despite the refined artistry of his images and even a ability through them to convey his tale, the stories he chooses are often basically naturalistic melodramas, as a director like Renoir, for example, had joined forces with Theodore Dreiser. The gritty stories he tells seem so elegantly told that Kirsanoff appears, at moments, to be a director akin to what the films of Douglas Sirk later in the century, remarkably crafted works based on overtly melodramatic scenarios. Ed Howard, in his on-line Only the Cinema blog, expressed this tension in yet another way: “The cinematography [of Kirsanoff] lurches between an almost 19th-century indebtedness to painter composition á la Gustave Caillebotte and the unhinged handheld camera Hans Richter’s Ghost Before Breakfast.
The very first scenes of Ménilmontant, for example, could not be more operatic,
as a curtain is torn from its doorway, as woman staggers out followed by a man
attacking her. She falls to the ground dying, while another man kills her
murderer, who, we quickly learn was her husband. The double homicide is
followed immediately with the appearance of two beautiful young girls, sisters,
one of whom is determined to bring down her cat, caught high above in the
branches of a tree. Moments later these innocents come upon the scene of their
parent’s murder.
The scene at the cemetery follows, and soon
after the film cuts again to the same cemetery where time has fallen some of
the wreaths. The girls, now grown up, are soon on their way to the extremely
busy streets of Paris, where we suddenly see the two working as flower girls, a
series of ring alarms awakening them to work each morning.
Within
a matter of moments, Kirsanoff presents us with a scene where a young man is
waiting for a girl, who turns out to be the younger of the sisters (Kirsanoff’s
photogenic wife, Nadia Sibirskaia.. A second encounter leads to the handsome
young man luring her into his apartment, where gradually and carefully, he
attempts to seduce her, while she, allured, attempts nonetheless to refuse
while gradually being drawn further and further into his arms.
A cut
to her elder sister, lying alone and unable to sleep, in their bed, reveals
what we might have guessed. The younger of them, won over by her lover, has not
returned home. In the same lovely lane where he first waited for her, she now
awaits him, as we are made privy to his drunken wanderings and, eventually, his
abandonment of her. Brilliantly, the director makes her condition clear by
having her chalk up the weeks on the alley wall that have apparently passed
since her last period. Soon after, she accidentally witnesses her former lover
with another woman about to enter his apartment: it is her elder sister.
Obviously
pregnant, the young girl is soon revealed leaving the maternity ward with a
baby in her arms, no longer the young sophisticate, shown without makeup and
obvious scared.
For one of the longest
scenes of the film, she wanders the Paris streets, pondering suicide on the
Pont Neuf, or, perhaps even more ghoulishly, throwing the child into the waters
to die. Starving, with no place to go, she sits on a park bench. A worker,
taking his dinner break, sits next to her beginning to eat his sausage of
baguette. Perceiving her next to him, he gradually breaks a chunk of the bread
and, in what has to be one of the most gentle gestures in all of cinema, places
it on the bench between them. She gazes at it with obvious hunger, but resists
the bread; soon after, he cuts off a piece of sausage and places in beside the
crust. Unable to resist any longer, she eagerly eats.
While
the new mother still sits on the bench late into the night, the director takes
us to a bar frequented by prostitutes, one, almost like gypsy, with large
earrings and bobbed hair, finishing up other’s abandoned drinks. Suddenly the
elder sister appears, clearly also now a successful streetwalker, since she appears
somewhat stylishly in a fur coat. Nearby, the younger girl recognizes her
sister and approaches her, clearly offering up her baby since she clearly
cannot care for her. The elder takes the babe into her arms at the very moment
when the drunken ex-boyfriend appears at the doorway, impatient for the elder,
apparently, to join him. Suddenly the other gypsy-like prostitute appears,
evidently bitter about his rejection of her, and accosts him. Another man joins
in the assault and together they kill the man, dragging him away in a manner
that can only call up the first scene of this drama.
In describing this plot, I realize the true beauty of this film absolutely disappears in the naturalistic detail; one simply has to see it to comprehend its remarkable power. I often disagree with the observations and judgments of the powerful critic Pauline Kael, but, evidentially, she once revealed to Roger Ebert that Ménilmontant was her favorite film, which almost makes the cranky anti-sentimentalist human.
24 years later, in 1950, Kirsanoff was still
making stunningly beautiful and innovative films, as apparent in his Arrière-saison
(Backward Season; I prefer to call it Late Season), a far
less plotted work, and much more poetic in nature. Indeed, Backward Season is
a kind of Chekhovian tone-poem with Ibsen thematics.
A woman
is poised at the window staring into the woods outside her cottage where her
husband and others are chopping down birch trees. He is, obviously, a
woodcutter, who spends his day destroying the beautiful landscape wherein this
couple lives. And his wife, quite obviously, is distressed, if nothing else,
isolated and lonely, just as the dog they have locked up in a small-wired cage,
who keeps circling in the pattern of a psychologically disturbed beast (I might
mention that in both films, Kirsanoff is remarkably able to demonstrate human
frustrations by observing the animals surrounding them).
A stew
simmers on the burner, and, slowly returning to her chores, brings out bread,
wine, and cutlery to serve her husband. He returns home for lunch, and she
serves him, hardly able to eat anything herself. He dons his coat, once again,
and leaves. She quickly washes the dishes, and pulls out her already packed suitcase,
obviously about the leave. A written message attests to the boredom of her
life. She is sorry, she proclaims, but she is leaving for ever. She puts on her
coat, drags the suitcase to the door and sadly accessing the simple elements of
their life, exits, placing her key, as the couple apparently do routinely, into
the nearby flower pot.
She has left a match for the
lamp, and when her husband again returns, he lights it, finding her note and
reading it with dismay and consternation. The stew remains on the stove, and he
serves himself before sadly retiring all alone.
The next
morning he returns to his forest of beautiful birches, slowly axing down other
tree. Some neighbors have gathered about the house, obviously having observed
the wife’s departure, but he hardly notices them, leaving the key in its usual
spot.
Soon
after, we observe the wife returning, suitcase in tow, to retrieve the key and
reenter the cottage. Like Ibsen’s Nora, perhaps, she had needed to leave, but
has had nowhere to go. This painfully silent film ends there. But the torture
she must endure is obviously just beginning, or, at least, about to be
continued. As in Bella Tarr’s more recent powerful tale of despair, The
Turin Horse, nothing in her world can possibly be altered. The window, the
trees and their falling, the stew, wine, and bread, the silence is all our
heroine might possibly experience in this idyll of a cottage in the woods.
But once
more, Kirsanoff’s film itself, despite its despairing figures, is so beautifully
realized in its images and quiet expressiveness that the audience might feel a
great illumination out of the stark emptiness of its character’s lives.
Los Angeles, July 10, 2015
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