World Cinema Review

throwing him to the rats

by Douglas Messerli

David L’Estrange (Ivor Novello and Constance Collier) (screenplay), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Downhill / 1927

Alfred Hitchcock’s 5^th movie, the silent film of 1927 Downhill, strangely enough is one of his very best. I characterize this as somewhat “odd” simply because several later films, far better known and admired by his audiences, are simply not as innovative and cinematically brilliant as this early work.

The story, based on a play by the film’s star, the beautiful Ivor Novello and Constance Collier under the shared alias David L’Estrange, is far less important than Hitchcock’s cinematic telling of it.

Roddy Berwick (Novello), his school’s star Rugby player, has a flirtatious relationship with a local waitress, Mabel (Annette Benson). On one such visit Roddy brings along his school friend, Tim Wakely (Robin Irvine) who takes the relationship with Mabel much further than the dances Roddy engages her in; and soon after the boys are called into the office of the school’s head, where Mabel sits, explaining that she is pregnant and that the father is Roddy, a lie told, in part, because she suspects she can get more financial support from Roddy’s wealthier parents. Tim must get a scholarship if he is to go to Oxford.

Roddy accordingly takes the blame, although he knows the truth, and is not only ousted from his school but his family as well.

As the title suggests, the rest of this film portrays his “downhill” progress, as he works, first, in Paris as a bit actor, marries one of the major actresses of the day, Julia Fotheringale (Isabel Jeans),

suddenly receives a financial windfall from a relative, and loses it through Julia’s extravagant spending. She has also continued her affair with her former sleazy boyfriend, matinee star Archie (Ian Hunger).

Psycholocially broken and mentally and physically ill, Roddy ends up in a Marseilles fleabag hotel room, pitied by sailors who agree to “throw him to the rats,” in this case, shipping him back home.

In the interim, his parents have discovered the truth, and have been desperately searching for him, so all ends well.

But the director tells another story, filming his images in sickly colors of pea-green, yellow, brown and blue to help us perceive the nauseous journey that our hero must undergo. More importantly, Hitchcock,

particularly in the later nightmare scenes, overlays images, focusing on machine parts and other mechanical devices that might make even Fritz Lang envious, creating a generally vertiginous sense of reality that he would not return to until the middle of his career with Vertigo and North by Northwest.

Finally, the casting of pretty gay-boy Novello as the hero is brilliant because, just as in The Lodger of the same year, it makes the audience totally sympathetic with a character who otherwise might simply be seen as a spoiled schoolboy, or in the other film as a dangerous murderer. Here he becomes a tortured beauty who we hardly can take our eyes away from. Hitchcock was brilliant in this, often using handsome gay actors—Montgomery Clift, Cary Grant, Farley Granger, and Anthony Perkins to name only a few. One might argue that by using gays as potential or actual villains the great director was simply playing into the prejudices of the day; but I’d argue that he chose these beautiful figures in order to challenge and make us question our easy assumptions. And the many subtle homosexual relationships that Hitchcock concocted in his films help also to force us to query assumptions. Are Roddy and Tim, in Downhill, more than simply “friends,” and mightn't help explain why Roddy allows himself to become the guilty figure; after all he is later betrayed yet again by his wife; he is clearly a weak man who nonetheless attracts all those around him.

Betrayal is, in fact, the common theme of this work. To the outsider Roddy has betrayed his school, his sport, his family; and he, in turn, is betrayed by his best friend, his school, a local girl, his parents, and his theater-star wife. Even though the Marseilles sailors ultimately save his life, they too are ready to present him with whatever fate might await, why they describe it as “throwing him to the rats.”

It is not a happy tale, despite its restoration of the hero by the film’s end to his loving family. It is perhaps already too late in Roddy’s now ruined life to allow him to return to normality. As in so very many of Hitchcock’s works, life after accusation, mistaken identity, inexplicable assault, or, especially, actual criminal involvement, can never be the same again. In film after film, Hitchcock presents us with figures whose lives are forever altered by accident, chance, or simply involvement with the wrong people at the right time. And it is almost always a journey, by train, plane, or simply through the courts and conscience to a world you will never wish to return to.

Like a “downhill” skier, the good-looking kid of Hitchcock’s 1927 masterwork will probably never be able to be lifted to the top of the mountain again.

Los Angeles, June 10, 2018

standstill

by Douglas Messerli

Ingmar Bergman (writer and director)Gycklarnas afton (Sawdust and Tinsel) / 1953

I was absolutely delighted yesterday after watching Ingmar Bergman’s early (1953) film, Sawdust and Tinsel, a film that in my estimation is quite related to his 1955 masterpiece, Smiles of a Summer Night, even if at least one critic has argued it was that this film had more in common with The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring. True, there is something desperate about the dying circus company at the center of this story, and its wagons do visually wind up-hill in a manner that can only call up the ghoulish dancers of death in the medieval-set The Seventh Seal. But Sawdust’s heart is set on love instead of death, and its very mortal characters have aspirations and dreams that are far more open and hopeful than the other darker films. This work, like Smiles and Wild Strawberries belongs clearly with his gentle ruminations of love and aging as opposed to his symbolic-laden discussions of moral values and existential meaning.

Moreover, the early Bergman work seems to have far more of a relationship to Fellini and even Chaplin that any of his other films. And it is a rather profound questioning of theatrical values that was later posed in both Smiles and the much later Fanny and Alexander: what is art? Can a circus be an artform; is theater superior; is film better yet? Of course, to the bourgeois townsfolk in which this film is played out there are definite hierarchies. These intruding circus folk are simply carnies, no better than gypsies suddenly intruding upon the upright townspeople’s well-maintained lives.

Even the circus head, Albert Johansson (Åke Grönberg) and his current young wife, Anne (Harriet Andersson) seem to want out of their endless wanderings, particularly since Albert’s tent world is on its last legs, with most of their costumes sold in order to survive, and with few animals other than a starving bear and highly overworked horses, some of which are confiscated by the local authorities when the group attempts to perform a circus parade in the manner of America’s celebrations (recreated in films such as Show Boat and Jumbo). Charles Ives even composed a song about such circus parades.

But this Swedish rag-tag company is on its very last legs, as they arrive in this outlying community in the rain, every last one of them, men and women, struggling against the elements just to raise their tent. They cannot even imagine how they can perform without costumes, without animals, without any true spirit left.

Silently suffering their complaints, the ringmaster suddenly has a burst of inspiration: he and Anne will go to the nearby theater where a famous director is featuring what appears to be an absolutely mediocre play, titled Betrayal.

Albert is clearly terrified of the encounter, but Anne dresses up in her only remaining formal dress and wows the aging theater-director, who goes along with the circus-owner’s suggestion they might borrow costumes from the theater’s wardrobe in return for a huge party after the circus event, which, of course, the high-bred theatrical folk will also attend.

At this meeting, the handsome matinee idol, Frans (Hasse Ekman), also catches a glimpse of the beautiful Anne, and with whom, so he declares, he immediately falls in love. Surely, Anne is allured by the beautiful man, and why shouldn’t she be? He’s closer to her age, he’s—a least superficially—well spoken, a true romantic being. At one point later, he even gently advises her on make-up, suggesting she apply far less of it in order to expose her beautiful face. Who wouldn’t be pleased to have a handsome make-up artist ask you to share his bed—variations of this theme have been played out in nearly every Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musical.

Yet, Anne remains loyal to her lumpy, elderly man. It’s only when she perceives that they are visiting this backwoods town so that he might visit his ex-wife and his three boys, that she rebels.

Indeed, Albert is plotting to escape circus life by returning to his now quite well-off former wife, who freed from him, has bought several stores in town and made life for her children in a solvent and respectable upbringing. Encountering her restrictive spouse, she not only cooks a breakfast for him, but offers him financial help. But she will not, she insists, allow him to return. For her, his abandonment has made her life better; and, in fact, if you subscribe to her bourgeoise values, she is absolutely right.

Angry with Albert’s attempt to return “home,” Anne makes her own return to the theater and into the arms of Frans, who, after locking her in and promising her a gift of what he promises is his valuable necklace (another indication that this would-be ladies’ man might also be a closeted gay), he basically rapes her. Visiting a local jeweler, she quickly discovers that the necklace is worthless, and that her attempt to raise funds for the failing circus has been pointless. Not only that, but Albert, returning “home,” watches his wife enter the jewelers, quickly perceiving what has occurred.

Accordingly, as one character announces, “Everything now stands still,” as we recognize that events will have to be played out in hellish circles of the circus ring.

Perceiving Frans in the audience with yet another woman, Albert goes ballistic, particularly when Anne, who performs in an equestrian act, moves forward on her horse. Albert threatens the hierarchy and pretense of the actor. But as an older man—like the clown Frost (Anders Ek) in an earlier scene—Albert is beaten and nearly destroyed in the process of protecting his honor.

Although Frans has temporarily won this bout, however, we now know that Albert and his ilk are beings of honor, representing a kind of mutual caring and respectability that none of the theater folk nor the town’s church-going folks can ever match. And we know that, without or without makeup, the pretty boy Frans will very soon no longer be able to lure women into his bed, while Albert, who forgives Anne, still has a beautiful and loving woman at his side for, presumably, the rest of his life.

Los Angeles, June 13, 2018

fool’s paradise

by Douglas Messerli

Anita Loos and Jane Murfin (screenplay, based on the play by Clare Boothe Luce), George Cukor (director) The Women / 1939

It had been many years since I last George Cukor’s The Women, and I can’t say that it has entirely aged well. At many points, Clare Boothe Luce’s witty language (spruced up to fit into the Film Production Code by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin) the film is still fun in a truly “bitchy” manner, particularly through gossipy chatter of Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell) and Edith Potter (Phyllis

Povah) and others of Mary Haines’ (Norma Shearer) supposed friends. Sylvia has gotten news from a manicurist that Mary’s husband Stephen has been having an affair with a perfume counter clerk, Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford)—and within hours she and her friends have passed it on to one another, even gathering a kind of small scouting party to check the counter-clerk out.

At moments their comments, especially those of the lesbian-like writer, Nancy Blake (Florence Nash), are brilliant, presenting a much different view of New York house-wives that any film after far into the 1960s presented. These women are not only quite independent, but—at least two of them, Mary and Peggy Day (Joan Fontaine)—are pleased with their companions. If you might have ignored Cukor’s credits, wherein he equates each of these figures with animals, you might even think that these smart women are proto-feminists. They’re certainly not stupid or passive.

Sylvia Fowler: Well, heaven be praised, I'm on to my husband, I wouldn't trust him on Alcatraz, the mouse.

Peggy Day: Sylvia, you oughtn't talk about him like that! Why, I think it's disloyal!

Sylvia Fowler: Oh now, listen Peggy, do we know how the men talk about us when we're not around?

Nancy Blake: I've heard rumours.

Sylvia Fowler: Exactly... And uh... While we're on the subject, have either of you wondered whether the master of this maison might not be straying?

Nancy Blake: I haven't.

Sylvia Fowler: Well, for all you know Mary Haines may be living in a fool's paradise.

Nancy Blake: You're so resourceful darling. I ought to go to you for plots.

Sylvia Fowler: You ought to go to “someone.”

Yet, we soon perceive that, like the women of whom Elaine Stritch sings in the musical Company, these are “the ladies who lunch.” When they’re not busily gossiping or, metaphorically speaking, stabbing one another in the back, they shop, attend fashion shows, and, yes, lunch. Indeed, I

had never before seen the long center of this movie, a scene in the middle of this black-and-white film that, like The Wizard of Oz (a film that appeared in the same year), was shot by Cukor in color: a long fashion parade that might almost have been stolen right out of a Ziegfeld Follies routine. Many of outrageous costumes by Adrian, in fact, appear to have been inspired by the Emerald City.

Certainly, there are witches here by the dozens. Not only, as Mary’s intelligent mother tries to tell her, are these “friends” eager to dish the dirt, but almost force Mary to confront her bedroom competitor and seek a divorce from the husband she still loves. And if their mean behavior were not enough, Cukor drags in a real “witch” in the form of Hedda Hopper (playing Dolly Dupuyster) who takes the affair to new levels by plastering the news all over the daily papers. Like the character Mrs. Lord (Mary Nash) of the The Philadelphia Story—a film that was released the following year—Mrs. Morehead (Lucile Watson) advises her daughter to simply wait out her husband’s current obsession, just as she did in her own long marriage. (Two of the actors in The Women also appeared in The Philadelphia Story, Ruth Hussey, and Virginia Weidler, the latter playing Mary’s daughter.)

If the film is sometimes fun in its satire of female gossip, it turns very sad, however, on the train to Reno, particularly since two of the Reno ranch tenants, Mary and Peggy, really don’t want their

divorces. The script and Cukor try to keep up the spirits of the clever play by introducing the hilarious, serial divorcee, The Countess De Lave (Mary Boland) and the ranch owner, Lucy (Marjorie Main). Peggy, who finds herself pregnant, returns to her husband; but when Mary attempts to call him with hopes of a reconciliation, he calls her, instead, to let her know, since the door has now gone through, about his own marriage to Crystal.

Even if, a bit like All About Eve, everything does work out in the end—particularly since the nasty Crystal has now taken up with The Countess’ most recent husband, a Reno cowboy turned, through her money, radio broadcaster—there’s something more than sad about the horrible behaviors of all, male and female, involved. And we know by film’s end, that the lovely mother that Mary portrays at the beginning of The Women will never quite be restored. She may be the “owl,” which her mother represents, but she will never again be the loving wife and mother the work’s first scenes.

In a sense, The Women is a kind of playing out of the Garden of Eden myth, but from the perspective only of Eve, as if Adam didn’t truly matter. In such a world, as one character suggests early on, there is no forward movement, no possibility for a new world: “everything is going in circles.”

Los Angeles, June 15, 2018

night and day

by Douglas Messerli

Catherine Vimenet and Jean-Luc Godard (writers), Jean-Luc Godard (director) Deux ou Trois choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) / 1967, USA 1968

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Two or Three Things I Know About Her, appeared during a period when his films were not only moving to more political concerns and, despite his love of all things American earlier his career, a time in which Godard was shifting to a strong anti-American sentiment.

These are very much the issues of this film, which is not a typical film narrative as much as it is a kind of essay on the condition of all things French in relationship to the seemingly endless involvement in Viet Nam, which I think it is important to remember, began with the French political and social involvement with that country years earlier.

It’s clear that Godard is highly disturbed throughout not only by the appropriation of American values on French culture, but the culture’s own appropriation of itself; one of the central scenes takes place in a bookstore where a writer and his assistant quote passages randomly out of piles of nearby books, presumably creating a collage of narrative fiction, perhaps not so far different from Godard's own work.

One might also describe this work as a critique of a world, so influenced by US values, that “she (France),” too has turned into a kind of consumer world, in which even the bourgeois housewife at the center of this work, Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady) turns herself into a commodity, loaning out her body to loveless encounters each day to earn a little extra cash in order to purchase the new dresses, washing machines, and other products she also daily shops for.

Underneath her everyday movements of shopping, housework, and child-rearing, the voice of Godard himself, kept to a near whisper, speaks of the attempt by the French government, in their attempts to build major new communities on the edge of Paris, critiquing the current politics, and attacking the US involvement in Viet Nam. These seemingly ordinary events accordingly are connected with global governmental forces who, the voice argues, are working to make all of us into mindless consumers—not only of products, but events, and even emotional relationships.

At one point, Juliette visits the garage where her husband works to get the car washed, her best friend, also a day-time prostitute, having joined her. Her apparently near sexless husband greets her simply as if she were another customer, simply briefly conversing with her, before sending her on her way.

How different is Juliette’s day-time sexual activities from that of the central character of Buñuel’s heroine in Belle de Jour, a film made the very same year, and released a couple of months later. SéverineSerizy, married to a handsome doctor, is obsessed by the sexual secrecies of being a day-time prostitute, excited by her new encounters, particularly with a handsome young thug, Marcel—who ultimately turns her everyday life into a role of being a kind of nurse to her husband.

The sexual activities of Juliette, on the other hand, are absolutely banal and as aesthetically boring as the dresses and products she purchases. Her dresses are clearly mass-produced pieces, usually in stripes, whereas Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour wore dresses designed by St-Laurent. If Séverine lives with a handsome man, who clearly loves her, Juliette lives with a mechanic who believes life consists of working, eating, and sleeping; along with a constantly crying young boy, she does not live in a stylish Paris apartment, but in the bland high-rise that government has built to house its poorer citizens.

Séverine works in a discrete apartment complex, whereas Juliette encounters her men in dreary hotel rooms or, even when she and her friend actually encounter an American in an expensive hotel, want to play games more than actually have sensual sexual encounters. The American, named by Godard as John Bogus (Raoul Lévy) dressed in an ugly T-shirt emblazoned with the American flag—himself a former American advisor for the Viet Nam War—asks Juliette and her friend to cover their faces with air-line shopping bags while he films them. Juliette passively opts out of any later activities in which her “friend” participates.

In fact, the “her” of this film is not simply the mindless female protagonist, but is, given the French feminine endings of so many words in the language, many other things, a thing that stands in for all those “others.” As the promotional film poster argued, “her” is the subject of :

HER, the cruelty of neo-capitalism

HER, prostitution

HER, the Paris region

HER, the bathroom that 70% of the French don't have

HER, the terrible law of huge building complexes

HER, the physical side of love

HER, the life of today

HER, the war in Vietnam

HER, the modern call-girl

HER, the death of modern beauty

HER, the circulation of ideas

HER, the gestapo of structures

Yet, ironically, as the title of Godard’s film admits, he only knows 2 or 3 things about “her,” or evidently about all these other issues. This film is not, after all, not a listing of endless grievances, but a kind of playful discussion about the problems of mid-20^thcentury life in Paris, given the world which surrounds it. If that world has become a bit tawdry with all of, particularly its American influences, it is still a kind of charming fantasy. As the Caterpillar tractors remake the very nature of the outlying regions of the city, they also churn up the ugliness of the former concrete and asphalt

landscape, bringing, if nothing else, new life to the region. This neo-capitalism may, as Godard seems to be arguing, break up also the charm and former structures of French life, but the habitants of these new spaces, like Juliette, seem happily enchanted by their lives, the rhythm of which seems to be, drop the kid off at the daycare center, go shopping for a new dress, have a little sex on the side, meet up with friends or even flirt with local coffee-shop customers, get groceries, pick up the child, go home and cook your husband a good dinner.

If Godard is clearly mocking mid-century French life, the people who suffer it seem placid as sheep walking into the slaughter-house. And like a neighborly gossip, the 2 or 3 things that the director whispers into our ears, ultimately don’t add up to much. His goal, it appears, is simply to get us thinking about a much longer list.

Los Angeles, June 20, 2018

hunger

by Douglas Messerli

Mario Monicelli, Age & Scarpelli (writers), Mario Monicelli (director) I compagni (The Organizer) / 1963, USA 1964

Italian director Mario Monicelli’s I compagni (The Comrades, translated into English as The Organizer) is a fairly realist fantasy that is beautiful to watch, at times comic and heart-warming and at other times painfully touching. Yet ultimately this film is utterly frustrating, for at its heart it is a portrait of stasis. Nothing truly changes in this work despite all the hoopla of its beautifully portrayed characters. If the film begins with a young teenage boy, Omero (Franco Ciolli) forced to abandon his bed at 5:00 a.m. in order to join the others of this Turin community in their daily trek to the giant textile plant where nearly all of these poor men and women work from 5:30 to 8:30 each evening, 14-hour days with only a short break for lunch or “requested” bathroom breaks, the film ends with the same trudge to work, after Omero’s death from a police shooting to quell the workers’ protest, with his younger brother—whom Omero has become determined to protect and help him get an education so that we would be free from such brutal employment—now at the rear. His family needs his employment if they are to survive.

Soon after Monicelli’s camera follows this 19^th century workers to their factory, we see them briefly enjoying their lunch before being called back into their endless labor. By the end of the day they have all become so exhausted that one of their fellow workers nearly falls to sleep, mauling his hand in a machine.

A group of workers, the heavyweight Pautasso (Folco Lulli), Martinetti (Bernard Blier), and the tough woman worker Cesarini (Elvira Tonelli) form a committee to argue against their 14-hour work day, only to be entirely ignored with the Dickensian-like management force who not only ignore their protests but hurry off to their own leisurely lunches.

Later, a bit as in the later earlier American musical The Pajama Game they plan a walk-out an hour earlier that their normal quitting time. One of their group sneaks away to set off the whistle, while the others prepare to leave the moment they hear it. But a stray dog betrays him, and despite having released the call to quit work, factory owners not only pull him out of hiding, but threaten their employees who might leave with firing; they remain until the regular closing hour.

The point, of course, is that these mostly illiterate and disorganized workers will never succeed given their inability to work out logical alternatives; all they can comprehend is they have feed their families and themselves. Even their attempts to educated themselves in afterwork school lessons they are too tired to take in their lessons. At one point, asked to tally up a vote, Omero himself admits that he cannot read. Others have given their vote only with an X.

Into this comic-tragedy Professor Sinigaglia (Marcello Mastroianni), evidently a labor agitator on the run from police in Milan, suddenly appears. Unlike the experienced labor leader Reuben Warshosky of the 1979 drama, Norma Rae, Sinigaglia is more like a Fellinesque-like clown, a man, as J. Hoberman describes him, like: “a hobo in a battered hat and a greasy, threadbare cloak, a stooped fugitive on the run from the police in Milan. In a movie where neither Karl Marx nor any of Italy’s working-class heroes are ever mentioned, Mastroianni’s professor is a stunningly perverse embodiment of revolutionary hope.”

He is also hungry, in every sense of that word. Sharing a bed on the floor of the local teacher's hovel, he awakens to wake up the workers as well, using his skills as a rhetorician to convince them that they have made all of the wrong decisions. But when they leave for the night, one worker forgetting his sandwich, the would-be “organizer” eyes the sandwich, grabbing it up with a desire other films might have expressed for a beautiful leading-lady (that comes later). When the worker returns to reclaim his trophy, Sinigaglia woefully gives it up, truly becoming another version of Chaplin’s Tramp. Later, he eyes the window of a local chocolatier and restauranteur. He’s clearly starved, even more than these poor provincials, for food and companionship.

Nonetheless, he engages the community through words, convincing them to go on strike, but first buying up food and supplies on credit for the long period he knows it will take. Of course, in doing so, these peasants, are quite literally selling away their lives. To survive the long period, some of their group highjack a coal car of a train, tossing the precious commodity up to the waiting women and men, who scoop them up in order to warm their cottages. Even when a local man is killed, Sinigaglia claims it has only helped their cause, that their case is now national news. As if taken from today’s papers, when the company attempts to hire outsiders from another city to replace their workers, the “comrades” threaten them and force them to disperse, although some actually do make it into the textile mill.

Finally, when Sinigaglia attempts to reenergize his base by encouraging them to march in protest, they are, this time, met by the police, when the young boy Omero is killed. As if we are hit by a sudden jolt of reality, the viewer can now only see the total futility of this series of events, both comic and dramatic. We can only recognize La commedia è finita!

Hoberman argues that “although the movie closes with a long shot of the defeated workers reentering their factory prison, including a child forced to take his older brother’s place at the machines, the mood is not exactly unhappy. The gates close, yet minds have been opened. The Organizer is a historical comedy that demonstrates a very Gramscian [Antonio Gransci was the founder of the Italian Communist Party] formulation (pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will) and a very popular one, to take another Monicelli title: Viva Italia!”

I wish I could see it that way. But the fact that no change has been possible, even if we know that changes in labor laws always come in small increments, and certainly did not happen overnight in Italy or even the US, I can only see the film today as confirming the gradual erasement of labor rights across the world. Italy may well be alive today (I love the country) but can only perceive at how the Right now controls it. Just as in the US, immigrant workers are daily being turned away. Gradual change has seemed to be replaced by endless reversals. Perhaps the honestly of this film is precisely Monicelli’s achievement. Things in 1963 were perhaps not that completely different from the Risorgimento-era this movie presents or are not so totally different from today in the US. And we all know what has become of the Turin—auto workers struck the Fiat plants in that city the year before this film—which soon after the events in this film grew into Italy’s version of Detroit, and what happened to America’s own city of that name. People are still very hungry, even if our government does not wish to truly investigate that fact, despite the United Nations’ demands that we do; and they will steal even from those poorer than them in order to survive.

Los Angeles, June 25, 2018

travelers without a destination

by Douglas Messerli

Mark Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci (screenplay, based on the fiction by Paul Bowles), Bernardo Bertolucci (director) The Sheltering Sky / 1990

Although I had seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1990 film, The Sheltering Sky when it premiered, I wasn’t truly looking forward to watching this rather long (138 minutes) film again. I had taught Paul Bowles’ original fiction several times at the University of Maryland, and I remembered the film as a rather plodding and straight-forward rendition of a work that, at least when I first read it, seemed far more suggestive and even mysterious. Bowles himself has written, “The less said about the movie the better.” As writer Frederic Tuten commented on my review, "Hard to make a film of that novel. Much of it is a gorgeous National Geographic film."
Perhaps I should add that in Sun & Moon 11 I published several small pieces by Paul Bowles as part of his "Points in Time."

I knew something of the lives of the author and his amazingly talented wife, Jane, but I had not yet read all of their works nor quite perceived the extent of their open bisexuality.

This time around I liked the movie much better, although I still found it, at times, a rather a flat-footed version of the original. But then, perhaps that was part of the problem with the original fiction as well, wherein the character Port Moresby is clearly a kind of heterosexual stand-in the homosexual Bowles and Kit, another heterosexual version of the lesbian Jane. Perhaps the author, writing in 1949, was simply trying to make his couple more palatable to the general audience at a time hostile to LGBTQ identity (long before there were even such a term). I feel he was also quite-reticent about his gay identity, particularly in the US, while he felt freer to express it in Central America and Morocco, despite consorting with major gay American and British figures—he was a music student of Aaron Copland and became good friends with Gertrude Stein, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal, while later drawing nearly every gay writer and poet to his residence in Tangiers, including Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Even my Spanish book agent joked that when she was young her mother would not allow her to visit the Bowles’ in Tangiers. My former agent is now dead.

Perhaps his fiction was simply a kind of fantasy to play out the difficulties of this bi-sexual couple in a more simplistic context than their real lives allowed. Yet, in the novel there are all sorts of hints that something else was going on, while in Bertolucci’s film there are only a couple of occasions when the screenwriters suggest there might be something more here, as when Kit (Debra Winger), now attracted to their handsome traveling companion, George Tunner (Campbell Scott), declares that it is not her problem as much as it is her husband’s. Mostly, Bertolucci simply skips over any attempts at explaining what these “travelers,” as opposed to “tourists” are truly seeking.

In short, I now feel there was something inherently dishonest in Bowles’ original work, which shows up in the Bertolucci film as a kind clumsy lie.

But if you forget that there is anything even slightly autobiographical about this work, or that an openly gay man is writing about the collapse of the heterosexual romance, the movie actually works quite nicely. It is beautifully filmed by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (who won awards from BAFTA and The New York Film Critics Circle), who, after introducing the credits in a black-and-white paean to New York City—presumably to establish the period and the characters’ roots—turns his lens to tawny browns and yellows to establish the Moroccan and Algerian landscapes.

Moreover, the music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, combining Arab calls to prayer, North African music, and a lush Hollywood score, is equally memorable, winning him several awards as well.

If at first I was a bit disturbed by John Malkovich’s deadpan portrayal of Port, I realized by film’s end that it was not, perhaps, so very different from the kind of high-cultured disdain of Bowles himself, who narrates a few passages (as an observing dinner guest in a hotel restaurant).

Winger as Kit is a bit more problematic. In her perky, raspy-voiced characterization of Kit, she doesn’t quite fit the superstitious and problematic figure who, on some days, we are told, sees signs in everything about her, falling into bouts of inexplicable fears and depression. In this version she seems far more hardy and ready for battle than the character who Bowles describes needed Port to make all decisions so that she might not be responsible for life. Here, she becomes the far dominant figure, as Port moodily moves through the desert spaces, particularly after he begins to suffer the signs of Typhoid Fever. She, in fact, appears to be the far stronger individual in their relationship, and even attempts to nurse her dying husband back to health.

Only after his death does she fall again into near passivity, flagging down a local Bedouin group, whose leader takes her on by dressing her up like a boy (another almost unobtrusive reference to Jane’s identity) so that he might sexually assault her. What is interesting about Bertolucci’s portrait of Bedouin life is that it is the men who wear the burkas, while the women openly expose their faces.

In her passivity at the end of the film, it is almost as if Kit were allowing into her life all of the others whom Port (and she) had previously attempted to escape from, including Tunner, whom Port plots to send off to other desert frontier cities to keep him away from Kit, and the Lyles, the nasty British travel guide writer and her monstrous adult baby, Eric (the always wonderful Timothy Spall), who she keeps at her side by denying him money or any of his adult desires for drink and, presumably, male companionship. He represents one of the most notorious examples of a mamma’s boy outside of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? or Psycho.

Yet, strangely, it is precisely these reprehensible people who this generally incompatible couple need: if nothing else the Lyles bring some comic relief to their unhappy lives, and Tunner provides (perhaps for both) some empty-headed romance, as well as some financial stability that Port and Kit might seek, particularly after being robbed of both billfold—although Port does retrieve that—and his passport, which he refuses to retrieve in order to escape further encounters with Tunner. One might almost argue, in the end, that the Moresbys' problem is that despite their adventurous personalities, they won’t dare themselves to hang out with all the wrong people, who could, in fact, bring them closer to one another. They want to be travelers without a true destination, making them, in fact, more tourists than the people whom, they describe, “when they arrive somewhere immediately want to go home.” Tunner, indeed, in his attempt to reign in Kit’s almost mad wanderings, is perhaps more of a true world traveler than Kit and Port were ever destined to be. In the end, Kit simply disappears into thin air, while the handsome Tunner stands still as a testament, if nothing else, of himself and his jaunty American-ness.

Perhaps the reason The Sheltering Sky’s major characters both die and disappear is the fact that they simply cannot put down real roots. The images of Manhattan in the credits are all an illusion. They might have lived in that city (actually for a brief period of time they resided in a Brooklyn Heights house with other noted gays and open-minded artists W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Richard Wright, and Gypsy Rose Lee), but they could never stay too long in one place, which is really what Bowles’ novel and Bertolucci’s film are all about; endless traveling can ultimately look a lot like tourism, and wise Americans such as they were can easily become ugly.

Los Angeles, July 1, 2018

don juan with migraines

by Douglas Messerli

Paz Alicia Garciadiego (writer), Arturo Ripstein Profundo carmesí (Deep Crimson) / 1996

For several decades now, Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein has been making memorable films about people who are propelled into dangerous or complex relationships by the sometimes near-inexplicable forces of love. Some of the best of these, such as Love Lies, Foxtrot, and Hell Has No Limits have been internationally shown, nominated for and winning film awards. Others such as the 1996 Deep Crimson, recently released by Criterion Films, are lesser known, but should be more renowned, at least as well known as the other cinema version based on the 1940s true story "Lonelyhearts Killers," made into the 1970 cult film, The Honeymoon Killers.

Ripstein’s version begins with a short almost sepia-colored portrait of the heavyset nurse, Coral Fabre (nicely played by opera singer Regina Orozco), who works mostly out of her home when she doesn’t go to the hospital to help with embalming or simply lay in bed reading romances under a portrait of her favorite lover, Charles Boyer. She clearly resents the existence of her two children, the eldest of which tries to remind her mother of her familial duties. In this first sequence, the children go to bed hungry out of punishment for their mother having tortured an old man by failing to find a vein in which to properly inject his medicine.

Boyer, who played cads and murderers in several love films (Back Street, Gaslight, The Earrings of Madame de…) is perhaps the perfect match for this self-obsessed woman, desperate to find a lover. She finds that lover in another low-minded cad, Nicolás Estrella (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who a bit like Hitchcock’s Charles “Charlie” Oakley in his Shadow of a Doubt, who, if you recall, marries and kills off wealthy widows for his financial benefit. Estrella, however—although fairly handsome when he dons one of his hair pieces—is far lower on the totem pole of shadiness. His victims are single, divorced, or widowed women of limited means, whom he romances and, without bothering to marry them, engages in sex before he steals their purses, jewelry, or cars.

Coral, however, is below even his standards. She smells of formaldehyde and, despite her complete readiness to give in to any requests for sex, she is no beauty. Claiming a migraine headache—a real infliction suffered by this third-rate Don Juan—he, upon saying hello immediately claims he “must be going,” his quick departure signaling the Marx brother comic elements of much of this movie.

But baby, “it’s raining outside,” and the gigolo soon returns to take his prize, a quick fling with the large breasted woman and the contents of her coin holder, a robbery she spots without saying anything, as if she had already expected that she might have to pay for sex, later joking that she was charged by the pound.

But this is no fragile victim who might believe the lies he tells. The next day she shows up in his house with her two children in tow, demanding that he take them in. Shocked by her hutzpah, he insists that his life has no room for children yet permitting them to spend the night.

Without blinking an eye, Coral trots off her kids to the local adoption agency, returning to pry open her new lover’s front door before rifling through his files to perceive the true nature of his vocation.

Hardly bothering to drop a tear, she suggests that they go into business together, she acting as his sister, while serving, so to speak, as his manager, selecting and arranging for possible victims.

The remainder of the film is a gradual deterioration into another kind of hell, as they uncover all the wrong women and she, jealously, spins the team into murderous behavior beginning by sickening with rat poison one rather elderly woman who, to escape her boyfriend’s observation has met them at a seedy, outlying bar. They give her a bus ticket to home, while driving away in her rather stylish red sedan, later exchanging it for a far cheaper model.

But it is clear that preying on women to steal their love and assents is no easy job. As film critic Keith Phipps quipped “there's no thrill to the kill, because there are always those bodies to bury and stains to clean.”

When they decide that they have to kill one of their would-be victims, along with her bratty little girl, because of her demands that Estrella work as her mechanic for several months while she insists on almost daily sex, they finally are so exhausted that they turn themselves it, and openly accept their execution. Given the permission to run for their lives as the local police stand behind them with their guns cocked, the worn-out lovers simply stand in place, accepting their Bonnie and Clyde-like end.

There is often a very dark humor in all of Ripstein’s films, but this has to be one of the most notable examples in history of the clichés that not only “crime doesn’t pay” but that “love can make you crazy.”

Los Angeles, July 3, 2018

heart of darkness

by Douglas Messerli

Tim Wardle (writer, with the help of Lawrence Wright; and director) Three Identical Strangers / 2018

The director of the 2018 documentary Three Identical Strangers, Tim Wardle has encouraged critics not to reveal the ending (or even the second-half) of his film about the triplets who suddenly discovered, at age 19, the identities of one another. Yet, I’d argue that it might be better to know the second half of the film without knowing the early, rom-com, part. In a sense, it is like asking one to read The Heart of Darkness without knowing that things go bad for Kurz and other Belgian occupiers in the Congo, which misses, perhaps, the very reason one might wish to read that book, or, in this case, take a visit to your local movie theater to see this remarkable piece of filmmaking.

If you don’t want to know anything about this movie before seeing it, please feel free to skip this review. It has never bothered me to know as much as I can about a film before seeing it so that I might better comprehend and enjoy its images.

As the many critics writing on this film have revealed is the wonderful accidental encounter by Robert Shafran, a 19-year old freshman at Sullivan County Community College in upstate New York, of a series of people who greeted him with great enthusiasm, pats on the back, and even kisses on his very first day on campus. That alone might have made anyone suspicious something was amiss, but the fact that many also called him Eddy might have made any of us feel we were in a slightly surreal experience. When he finally met his dorm room mate—who, recognizing that Eddy (Galland) had previously determined to not return to campus and was slightly different from his new roommate—asked Robert whether he was a twin, the news might have set off shocks of incredulity to the new freshman. We never discover in this film why the evidently popular Eddy had decided not to return to the community college or how Robert had determined to attend the very same institution, a semester later, but it clearly did trip off clues that something was very strange; and before he knew it, Robert was in a small phone booth with his new roommate dialing up Eddy Galland and, soon after, speeding in his elderly car about two hours away to meet, at the doorway of the house, his mirror image.

Discovering that they not only shared the same birthday, the same adoption center, and many of the very same habits, newspapers, particularly Newsday, quickly glommed onto the news item, much to the delight of the sudden discovered twins. Meanwhile, as their stories and pictures begin to appear in local papers, another young freshman at Queen’s college in 1980 saw himself in the pictures that he witnessed and, particularly, after confirmation from his mother and his proud father, nicknamed “Bubbalah,” he too called the media, where after suddenly the long-lost twins became triplets.

The euphoria of the discovery of two other versions of yourself swept up the three boys into a new world of self-love, propelling them almost immediately into, as an aunt describes it, a world in which the 3 former wrestlers joined one another of the floor in a kind a roll-around that she describes as a somewhat like “puppies.” The three, Eddy, Bob, and Dave hit all the talk shows, dressing alike, talking alike, and interrupting each other’s comments while commenting on their shared interests in the same kind of women, Marlboro cigarettes, and taste in color. There had been numerous other pieces on how rediscovered twins or even those knowledgeable of their kinship, shared conversational habits, patterns of thought, and tastes, and these triplets simply fueled that concept, as newspeople promoted their similarities as opposed to questioning their differences. As they later assert, we wanted and were encouraged to show how much we were like one another without anyone asking anything else.

They had, however, big differences in their upbringing. Eddy, raised by a strict and authoritarian school teacher, did not have a close relationship with his father. Even in interviews, Eddy’s father still seems to have no clue why he did not have a deep connection with his son. Robert’s father, a physician, although deeply supportive of his son, was often missing; Bob’s mother was herself a successful professional. It was David’s more lower-class father and mother with whom the trio most bonded. If you sense a series of class differences here, it is no accident, and might have been one of the first things that the triplets questioned about themselves; the Jewish adoption agency purposely put them into families of different financial and parenting skills, having already also helped their adoptions of older sisters for the three.

If the adopted families grew angry for not having been assessed of the fraternal relationship of their beloved sons, the triplets themselves moved in together in a bachelor apartment, showed up at nights in many 1980’s bars and dancing clubs, and even appeared in a Madonna movie. You might say they became enamored to their own triplicate identities. How might anyone not have been: you who were alone most of your life, and who, in this case of all 3, sensed something missing in those years, acting out hostility in their early teen years. The trio even opened up their own SoHo restaurant, Triplets, serving up steaks and dancing with their customers each night. In the first year they made more than a million dollars.

If it’s delight to see these smilingly toothy, pudgy fingered, curly-haired boys in their early encounters, things soon begin to fray. Each of them found women whom they married, not, as they had previously argued, all similar in type. Eddy, who fought hard to keep the families they created together, was devastated when his broth Robert left the business, unable to work successfully with the other two. And, although David remained close to Eddy, living across the street, he could not stop his brother’s eventual suicide. Darker elements had existed in all our lives which involved a sense of abandonment, and later, of having been forced to live a life over which they had had no control.

When the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower, Going Clear) began to write about “twins” in the late 1990s, he discovered a great deal of information that suggested that the triplets and several twins had been intentionally separated from their birth mothers by late child psychiatrist Peter Neubauer, an Austrian Jew who had fled the Holocaust, using the Jewish Louise Wise Agency. The experiment, which might have been interesting had all parties been alerted to its existence, was an attempt to determine the difference between nature vs. nurture.

If Wardle’s film begins rather solidly on the side of nature—these guys, after all, seemed at first to be so very alike that only nature could have explained it—we gradually come to perceive that perhaps their upbringing did make an enormous difference. Robert admits that too had had suicidal thoughts, but that he couldn’t bring himself to carry them out. David, although stunned by events, seems rather blessed by having the beloved “Bubbalah,” as his father. Perhaps wealth and permission are not the things that most sustain an individual this film suggests. Just a daily hug might make all the difference.

Yet, the even darker story of a purpose experiment on human beings, the findings of which will never be published and whose files cannot even be opened in 2066, are the most sinister elements of this tale. Why can’t the overseeing Jewish Federation open those Yale files, or why won’t Yale themselves admit that they might be opened? One of Neubauer’s unwitting confederates perhaps says it best. Those twins who don’t know about each other may be better off, without being torn apart by the news that these triplets had to endure. If the actions of those with they worked were indeed corrupt, cynical, and even inexcusable, the pain these three brothers had to endure by the discovery of the truth might not be worth it. Yet, at least the two remaining brothers now know one another, and speak out strongly about the truth; and that is the undeniable power of Wardle’s film.

Los Angeles, July 5, 2018

splendor in the sun

by Douglas Messerli

Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress (writers and directors) Sebastiane / 1976

Surely the only soft gay porn in which the characters speak Latin, Derek Jarman’s 1976 film, Sebastiane, is like no other movie ever made. While it is true that this work begins with a long orgy scene in Diocletian’s court that might have come out of a film by Fellini, and then shifts, throughout the rest of the film to long Pasolini-like images and story; and while the hilarious orgy dance itself that might have choreographed by Busby Berkeley performed in front of an audience that includes at least 3 Rocky Horror Film alumni, the whole is a product only of the imaginations Jarman and his co-director Paul Humfress.

This is not your mother’s Christian saint, despite small bows to church history. Yes, Sebastiane (Leonardo Treviglio) here is also a captain of the Praetorian Guards, but unlike the saint’s hagiography, Diocletian does not personally order his death, and the handsome Christian youth is most definitely not a figure who converts others. His major action in this work is to attempt to dissuade the Roman emperor from killing his two current boy bedmates, the second of who, Diocletian claims, tried to set his bed afire. His interference does not save the boy and gets Sebastiane, in the first act of his endless acts of martyrdom, sent off to a desert garrison headed by the hunky ruddy-faced Severus (Barney James), who, stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no battles to fight, simply wants the beautiful young man to share his bed now and then, a pleasure which time and again Sebastiane refuses.

It’s not that the eventual saint is against homosexual dalliances. As one of the favorites of Diocletian he must surely have also had to share his bed; and his relationship to his friend Justin (Richard Warwick) comes very close to being sexual while presumably chaste—even his fellow soldiers describe Justin as a Sebastiane-lover—and, finally, there is that blue-eyed mysterious young Leopard Boy (Gerald Incandela) who shows up as a vision while Sebastiane is bound and staked out naked in the desert sands; although he expresses his love in semi-natural terms, as is his wont—nearly everything he speaks is about the sun and water—even he declares he loves this boy, whom he has only glimpsed as in a feverish dream, and whom Justin cannot even imagine exists.

Besides what else is there to do in this desert, heated-up outpost but to wander around naked or in cod pieces, eying the other eight soldiers with whom you’re daily sharing your lives? One of their group, the least beautiful of them, wants nothing more than to return to Rome and get himself a female whore. Another young boy seemingly resists all attempted assaults. But all the others, particularly Adrian (Ken Hicks) and Anthony (Janusz Romanov), spend most of their days, when not being forced by Severus to play out mock battles and enter into wrestling matches, to put it simply, kiss, make-out, and fuck. Indeed, Jarman’s and Humfress’ depictions of their tender love-making is the closest this film gets to the truly spiritual, as one of the pair is even allowed to get an on-camera erection. And almost all of these thin and muscled soldiers spend most of their days in naked

splendor in the sun, a bit like a gathering of gay magazine models, entertaining both the voyeur Severus and the audience itself. I think anyone who likes the male body, man or woman, might enjoy just staring at the directors’ screen.

Yet Jarman knows well the entire genre of gay film-making, spending long periods with S&M scenes in which Severus, the continually spurned lover, finds new ways to torture the boy he so admires. There’s whipping, hanging, binding, and staking enough for any S&M admirer (of which I’m not). But this is, if you recall, a supposed rendition of the martyrdom of a saint.

Finally, after a particularly frustrating night alone while drinking, Severus orders up the famed scene of arrows being flung through the air into Sebastiane’s body. It can hardly be a surprise that this scene of a naked beauty being put to death by other naked beauties attracted nearly every Renaissance painter. Only Christ and Sebastian might have been painted naked, or at least, semi-naked, a titillation for both Renaissance men and women. If in the saint’s story Sebastian survived all the slings and arrows, and he was ultimately killed with cudgels, Jarman and Humfress know a good image when they see one and end their Sebastiane’s life with an arrow through his neck, the whore-loving rascal organizing and overseeing a death which he has long been wishing for, particularly since it is now a war between the beauty and the beast.

One can well understand why this film was so controversial in its gay and unauthorized telling of a Christian believer who had attempted to stop Diocletian from his endless murder of the converted. How Jarman even cleared the British censors is beyond me. While the US was tsk-tsk-ing over The Boys in the Band tame row-line dancing, Sebastiane presented its hero in a wild dance to the sun and body that Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis might have died for.

Yet, for all of its languishing over male buttocks and genitals, there issomething very pure about Jarman’s and Humfress’s work. In their simple celebration of the male body we do come to a kind of testament to the human bodies that God chose us to inhabit, with all of its appendages and beckoning entries. Eyes, nipples, noses, and yes penises, buttocks, and any other orifice is explored here, not in titillation (although these directors are not against that, and certainly Severus is not appalled by all their sexual exploration), but in a kind of expression of the sacredness of human life. We know that in killing of Sebastian that Severus and the others who are charged to carry out the act, have certainly lost something of their own sacred existence in that act.

And, in large part, Jarman’s “gay” film is not simply about homosexual lust, but about the power of sex of any kind: transgender (as in the film’s first scene), lesbian (Diocletian’s wife has her own favorites), and, perhaps too shocking for many, man-boy love. It’s a bit strange, but perhaps appropriate that in casting his figures in Latin, Jarman is restating that these loves are those that still cannot speak their names—at least in English. What is there left to do but to observe and watch?

Los Angeles, July 6, 2018

outrage

by Douglas Messerli

Ken Butler, Derek Jarman, and Stephen McBride (screenplay, based on the play by Christopher Marlowe), Derek Jarman (director) Edward II / 1991

Somewhat like his 1976 Sebastiane Derek Jarman’s Edward II is a film about gay men who were martyred for their love. In both films the language used is from other times, the first presented in Latin, the second using the language of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. And both of the movies juxtapose scenes of the period with postmodern intrusions, particularly in Edward, in

which characters sometimes appear in Elizabethan garb, but just as often appear in modern suits and dresses. Furthermore, overlaying the Marlowe work are scenes of contemporary gay protestors and a singer (Annie Lennox) performing Cole Porter’s "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye." Yet, even with these clashes of purposeful anachronisms, there is something lean and spare about Jarman’s direction, allowing us to focus on the language itself.

The film begins with the death of Edward’s father, and Edward (Steven Waddington) calling home his lover, Piers Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan) who has been banned from England by the Bishop of Winchester (Dudley Sutton) for his relationship with the then-Prince. Now, after being given several royal titles and full use of the exchequer, Gaveston tortures the Bishop with a mock sex orgy and targets various barons and other royals who long disdained him with imitative monkey-like gestures. He is a rather unlikeable fellow, whom only Edward loves because of his unequivocal love of the King.

One of Gaveston’s most mocked targets is Isabella (Tilda Swinton), the wife Edward married in France, who hurries back to the castle and hopefully to her husband’s bed the moment he is crowned. Edward rejects her, while replacing her position in bed with his male lover.

In revenge, Isabella joins up with the chief of the army’s forces, Mortimer (Nigel Terry) in the hope to agitate among the royals and citizens for the ouster of Gaveston and her return to the Edward’s favor.

If, at first, their attempts to disrupt the homosexual relationship, seem to fail, they ultimately get the barons, the bitter Bishop, and others to sign a document demanding Gaveston’s banishment once again. In order to retain his power, Edward is forced to sign, saying goodbye to his lover in the beautiful Porter ballad with a final dance, one of the most lovely and peaceful scenes in the film. Porter might have been proud.

Isabella, who now hopes to regain her proper role, is rejected even more thoroughly by Edward, and in the hope of maintaining any power, allows Gaveston to return. But when this still has no effect, a bit like Sebastian’s Serveus she plots Edward’s and Gaveston’s deaths.

Returning to England, Gaveston and his friend Spencer (who apparently also shares the King’s and Gaveston’s love) the two outsiders are captured and tortured by the sadomasochistic Mortimer. When Edward’s brother Kent attempts to warn him of what is happening, he too is killed by Isabella. Edward to locked up, and we see a man arriving to kill him, presumably with an insertion of a hot iron poker into his ass, apparently so no one might perceive any outward bodily harm.

We soon discover this has actually been Edward’s nightmare, and when his executioner actually does arrive, he simply kisses the King.

If Isabella and Mortimer might now hope to enjoy their power-grab, it is short-lived. In the last scene of the film we see them both in metal cages, above which Isabella’s, child, Edward III, dances with his Walkman, dressed in his mother’s earrings, heels, and hat. The basically ignored child, who had perhaps seen too much of the palace intrigues, becomes, in this version, a “girl boy,” the moniker which Mortimer had attributed to Spencer. Although, in reality Edward III was more of a warrior and loyalist than a sexual rebel, he did rise to power at an early age to take the rule away from Mortimer and his minions.

In Jarman’s version, accordingly, the gays win their freedom. It is interesting the document the barons and Bishop sign for Gaveston’s banishment is dated 1991, the same date as this movie, described by many critics as an important document of queer film, only a year after gays had established Outrage, clips of which can be seen as supporters of Edward in this film. In that respect the film celebrates its own audacity and expression of gay rights, turning Edward’s reign to an expression of their own values.

If Edward II is not as sumptuous and beautiful as Sebastianeand Caravaggio, it stands as the most straight-forward and Brechtian statements of Jarman’s beliefs. The Isle of Man rejected its sodomy laws only a year later. Three years after this film, the director sadly died of AIDS.

Los Angeles, July 8, 2018

characters of many faces

by Douglas Messerli

Jacques Champreux and Francis Lacassin (screenplay), Georges Franju (director) Judex / 1963, USA 1966

Georges Franju’s 1963 film, Judex, is one of those films that critics might be immediately puzzled about how to describe to viewers who have never seen it. Despite Franju’s often very original filmmaking, this work is based on a 1916 French film by the great serial cinema-creator, Louis Feuillade (several of whose shorter films I have previously reviewed), in which the same character and some of the same events enchanted the early 20^th-century filmgoers.

Yet, Franju makes this film, suggested to him by Feuillade’s grandson, Jacques Champreux, who also as a collaborator on the script, with many completely contrary movies from the original. Franju has long wanted to remake Feuillade’s Fantômas, for which he could not get permission. No matter, Franju took matters into his own hands, focusing on his own beautiful black-and-white images, which he’d already established in his 1960 classic, Eyes Without a Face, while, as he had also done in that film, basically ignoring the acting talents of his characters. Franju loved the inter-connectedness of

all his films, while embracing film history in general. In this case, he hired Édith Scob, who played the terribly scarred and frightened daughter in that earlier film to play the villain’s daughter Jacqueline; as the hero he chose the handsome American actor, Channing Pollack to be Judex, but dressed him up throughout much of the film as an elderly bearded man, Vallieres, serving as secretary to the film’s villain, banker, Favraux; the building-climbing cat-like woman, also nanny to Jacqueline’s child (Francine Bergé), is eerily similar to another Feuillade villain, Irma Vep in his Les Vampires; and Franju even manages to bring in Fantômas as reading matter for the bumbling but gentle detective Cocantin (Jacques Jouanneau).

Indeed, it appears that the director spent more time on his cinematography and numerous film associations than on finding actors who could fully express his characters psychology and motivations. Entire portions of the original were jettisoned, making, at times, for inexplicable behavior and acts. Why, for instance is Vallieres so determined to out the evil-doings of his employer, and why has he waited so long to accomplish what we gradually perceive is revenge? Why does the same rather staid and boring Vallieres suddenly become a kind of bird-loving magician, returning to life a seemingly dead dove before conjuring up an entire flock of the same birds, and how does he poison Favraux without the man drinking a sip of the poisoned wine he has offered? These and dozens of other questions throw the viewer into a sense of utter confusion, which, evidently, is was Franju sought.

For any excitement in this film lies within its sudden and utter transformations: Vallieres becoming the matinée idol-like figure (the producers noted his facial resemblance to Rudolph Valentino), Favraux, a dead corpse, suddenly returning to life, and the formerly demur nanny becoming a knife-packing cat before transforming herself again into a nun right out of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. The previously passive Jacqueline, after her father’s apparent death, even becomes noble, denying her inheritance to help pay back those whom her father has defrauded. In his story-telling capacities (he begins the tale of Alice in Wonderland) to Jacqueline’s daughter, Cocantin becomes a better teacher than her nanny, Diana, might ever have been.

With each of these shifts, moreover, Franju’s film also sheds its genre, taking on various movie types: a revenge drama, a spooky murder mystery, a devious film about kidnapping, with its almost comic intertitles, a silent movie with spoken dialogue, and, finally, in its absolute devotion to birds, a kind of tribute to Hitchcock’s movie of the same year, The Birds. As The New York Times justifably commented at the time of Judex’s US release: “It is hard to tell whether Georges Franju, who made it, wants us to laugh at it or take it seriously."

Given my basically contrarian nature, I’d argue that the film is both a loving and almost comical tribute of the absurd Feuillade original while also being a kind of serious exploration of the very tropes of filmmaking that for so long dominated French cinema. One must remember that Franju, as co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française film archive, knew film history intimately, and in this film was not only exploring some of its various manifestations but putting himself and his films into that context. If to many viewers of Judex the work might seem more like pastiche than a coherent movie, I agree with them, but simply ask them to enjoy the circus of nods to popular film history. This may be a kind of silly movie at times, but it is also an extremely intelligent one which ought to be take utterly seriously. The film is clearly not one of his greatest, but if seen from the right perspective is so fascinating that it cannot be forgotten.

Los Angeles, July 10, 2018

pilgrim’s progress

by Douglas Messerli

Ruben Östlund (writer and director) The Square / 2017

Late last year my art-curator husband came home from the film The Square expressing his dislike of the movie. Its visions of how curators make their decisions and what they do is disturbing and wrong he argued.

In fact, after seeing the movie for myself the other day, I’d argue there are very few curators shown in this film and the work is centered almost entirely on the museum director, Christian (Claes Bang), who is basically a well-meaning gentleman with some very human flaws which, giveen his high voltage position, where he has few moments before he is not trotted out for an interview or a speech to powerful museum supporters, become all too apparent.

Christian, indeed, does remind me of museum directors I know, many dedicated individuals who want to show daring contemporary art, yet must daily cope with finances just to keep his or her museum, in this scase the X-Royal art museum in Stockholm (formerly the Royal Palace) open. And some of directorÖstlund’ssatiric riffs—for example, when the chef attempts to explain what museum guests will be eating that evening, the crowd rises en masse and like a herd of buffalo charge to the banquet table—are very close to the truth. I myself have seen it, perhaps even participated in the rush to devour the food.

More importantly, however, I feel that the film is not really about the museum world, but merely uses it as a metaphor to explain the discrepancies of Swedish society. Although the arts are highly supported by the government in Sweden, they too must work to keep their doors open, attempting to wow their audiences while reflecting Christian’s tastes in conceptual and performative art that raises serious questions about art and the society in which it exists. Although neither Howard nor I share Christian’s aesthetic tastes, we must comprehend the fair-mindedness of the film’s title art piece, “The Square,” byLola Arias (I believe there is no such artist, but there an Argentinian songwriter and performer by that name), a work described in the artist's statement: "The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations."

In short, Christian has chosen a work of art that asks us to recognize what we share in any society or space with others, responsibility for one another while still allowing freedom to be ourselves, a rather lofty goal I might suggest.

In a sense, this reflects the entire doctrine of the good-doing and good-thinking Swedish vision of society (what several critics have described as a correct-thinking mentality). Yet Östlund’s work goes out of its way to demonstrate that the truth is not always what it might seem. If the sociable Swedes outwardly care for one another, they rush to work each morning ignoring the pleas of poor and immigrant citizens for a few coins. Time and again they rush forward, not just for the banquet table, but simply to get to work in order to save their “fair” place at the table. Christian, who is basically more caring than his neighbors even falls for a frightening performance by con-men, as a woman rushes forward yelling “He is going to kill me,” while a man menacingly runs after her. When the museum director and another man attempt to protect the woman and stop the attacker in his tracks, they soon discover that their wallets, cell-phones, and in Christian’s case, even his special cuff-links, have been stolen.

Like many in our society, Christian has basically put his entire life—personal and professional—onto the phone, and the cufflinks were given to him from his presumably now-dead father. Surely his wallet, even if he can easily afford the money within, must contain numerous credit cards and other pieces of information necessary to live his daily life and which may be used for other nefarious purposes.

I don’t have a cellphone thankfully, but my wallet was recently pickpocketed, and it took weeks to get new cards, licenses, and medical confirmations.

Christian’s communications assistant, Michael (Christopher Læssø) quickly finds the location of the cellphone, a large apartment complex, suggesting that Christian write a threatening letter to all its inhabitants. Christian reframes Michael’s crudely framed language, but still goes through with it; yet when they arrive at the complex with the messages, Michael refuses to do it, and his boss is forced to take on the improper task. And it is at this moment when we begin to realize that even the most charmingly officious of those in this society have far darker aspects underneath their handsomely hirsute bodies and their well-tailored clothes.

Yet, this is after all, a well-bred society, and amazingly, through a delivery at a local 7-Eleven, Christian receives a package containing all of the missing items, cards and money intact.

At the opening of the show, Christian again runs into the American correspondent with whom he had previously had an interview, Anne (Elisabeth Moss), who seduces him into her bed and, after having sex with him, demands his condom.

Östlund’s films have often involved the strange politics of male/female relationships, but this surely is one of the oddest, as he refuses to give up the condom; if at first it may seem he is hiding the fact that he did not actually have an orgasm, when he finally hands it over, we realize he is actually fearful that this woman, who later claims she doesn’t want simply a one-night stand, might impregnate herself with his semen. After all, women in this director’s films have played meaner games (see my review in My Year 2017on his Force Majeure).

Soon after, Christian’s reserve and attention are even further strained when he receives another delivery at the same 7-Eleven, this one threatening revenge. A young immigrant boy, living in the same complex with the robbers, is accused of robbery by his own family, and wants Christian to absolve him. But by this time the museum director’s openness and sense of fairness has perhaps been tested too many times, and he refuses. It is time to attend the business for which he has been hired. He too has suddenly become one the many Swedes rushing through the streets to attend to their work. In a strange way (or, perhaps, I should say, in a predictable way) he too has retreated from “the square,” the public marketplace, to perform responsibly for himself and his institution.

But it is too late, for he has now too thoroughly revealed his own humanity. A performance piece at an opening dinner for “The Square” goes awry when the performer Oleg Rogozjin (Terry Notary), acting as if he were a threatening chimpanzee, terrifies several of the women patrons, a scene that reminds me of the hostesses strange dinner-time performances in Luis Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel.

A symposium on the new art work is interrupted by an audience member suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome.

While he has been out of the office, the publicity department and their two out-of-museum consultants have developed their own publicity campaign featuring a small blond child entering the square to suddenly be blown up. Christian’s and the artist’s gesture of civil community has, without

his knowledge, been turned into a statement of rightest protectionism, or, at least, a statement that suggests it is dangerous to enter a public forum. After the clip goes viral with 300,000 YouTube visits, the press angrily attacks the museum, and Christian realizing his failures, is forced to resign.

Even when the former director attempts to return to the public world, trying to visit the young boy accused of acts he did not commit, he is told that the family has now moved. True public interchange, so the movie suggests, is a truly dangerous thing.

Yet Östlund’s work, I would argue, is not simply a skeptical or satirical statement. Christian, a bit like the similarly named character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, is a man who having suffered the many troubles of believing has done so in order to survive in a meaningful spiritual life.

Obviously, I don’t truly agree with Howard, and I do understand, although I am still a bit surprised, why this film was chosen as the winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Los Angeles, July 14, 2018

a different kind of bond

by Douglas Messerli

Craig Johnson (writer and director) Alex Strangelove / 2018

Having truly enjoyed Craig Johnson’s second feature film, The Skeleton Twins, of 2014, I determined yesterday to watch his most recent work, Alex Strangelove that was released by Netflix this year.

His earlier film had been a clever family drama, starring Bill Hader and Kristen Wigg, which featured a rather unhappy housewife and her gay brother who both attempted to nurse one another, often rather clumsily, back to health, after attempting suicide; the ending of this black comedy being rather uncertain.

Accordingly, I wasn’t quite prepared for the rom-com sitcom-like Alex Strangelove, although the title might have easily tipped me off, since the character’s real name is Alex Truelove. In a sense, it’s just a sex and drug-infused movie that, like another recent film, Love Simon, tells the tale of a handsome and quite popular young high school student who is in the process of “coming out.”

Like that film, the central character doesn’t yet quite perceive that he’s gay. But things are so far different from the days I attended high school, that the entire decision of whether to be heterosexual, gay, pansexual, whatever, sees simply to be a matter of choice, like picking items from a Chinese menu. As the comic straight-guy in this film, Dell (Daniel Zolghadri), argues you just need to choose. Their school even seems to have an active LGBTQ community, the drama kids, who hold their own parties to which heterosexuals are also invited.

But Alex Truelove (Daniel Doheny), now the popular class president and a dogged cultural conservative—he’s carefully laid out all his plans for his life, determining upon studying marine animal biology at Columbia University, getting married, and having children—and he’s already found the girl of his dreams, his long-time friend, Claire (Madeline Weinstein).

Although Alex is clever, witty, and even enterprising—he and Claire perform together in a popular on-line school web series, featuring the sexual habits of and other eccentricities the school’s students—there’s still something slightly nerdy about him (at least in his own mind), and like most of these teenage comedy-dramas, he hangs out with a group of rather dorky friends who spend far too many of their hours describing their heterosexual conquests. Something doesn’t seem right. Why is this bright kid not moving on? And, most importantly—at least in terms of teenage hormones—why us he still a self-admitted virgin, particularly given the fact that Claire herself insists she has been desperately trying to “de-virginfy” him. He keeps putting off the event.

Finally, embarrassed in front of his bragging bodies, he determines to do something about it, setting up a hotel room so that he and she might finally have sex.

The plot needs time to hatch it’s secret, of course, so the sexual encounter is put off for a few weeks, while the meandering story takes him to one of the “drama kid” parties (consisting of numerous ridiculous stereotypes, including one male who obviously believes he is the permanent host of Cabaret and a hallucinogenic turtle which Dell immediately picks up and licks sending him into comic hallucinations that might have served nicely for a backstory to Todd Phillips’ The Hangover. Oddly there seems to be a lot a role playing and very little sex. Maybe that is what Johnson meant by “Strangelove.”

Obviously, anyone with a sense of film history knows that gay director Johnson means that other “strange love,” even if there seems nothing at all strange in being gay in this progressive high school community.

By accident, Alex stumbles into the more normative “pot” room, where a handsome young man, Elliott (Antonio Marziale) and what we used to call a “fag-hag” (a heavyset young girl who is best friend to a gay boy) are about to light up. Clearly not inexperienced with pot and quite obviously intrigued by this open gay guy, Alex joins them ending up head to head in bed with Elliott; and a day or so later, meeting up with him for a concert and slow walk, so to speak, around the park.

Claire clearly begins to suspect something’s up, but Alex (I must admit, a bit like me at his age) is slow to wake up to the reality of his feelings. He still takes his girlfriend to the hotel, but in the midst of clumsy sex tells her there’s someone else.

It takes a final deep dive into a suburban pool to make him come to his senses, finally admitting to himself that he is gay. (As I’ve written in My Year 2005, it took me a bad showing in an ROTC test and a few circles around my bedroom to come to that same realization).

What’s a guy to do? After admitting to Claire that his “Truelove” has reverted to a “Strangelove—a moniker, as a gay man, I rather resent—they still agree to go with one another to the prom party. Claire, perhaps the wisest figure in this film of dumb-headed adolescents (she has also the wisest of mothers) arranges for Elliott—how she knows the address of a boy who has graduated from another school the year before is never quite explained—to also attend.

Suddenly faced with the boy he now knows he loves in a room with his high school chums, Alex gets cold feet once again, rushing off to the bathroom and almost losing his chance for maturation and true love. Returning just in time, he kisses Elliott, expressing his sexuality for the first time in the very judgmental public of young evaluations of life.

I presume we are meant to be touched and overjoyed in that fact. But for me, there is something sad in the final image. Let us hope that Elliott does not have to wait for the sexual consummation as long as Claire and we have. But worse, can the otherwise excellent director, Johnson, release himself from this kind of teeny-bop writing to again create a sophisticated adult comedy-drama such as his earlier works? Or have we lost him to Netflix gay “feel-good” fantasies?

This is not seriously a gay film, but a rather silly tribute to an LBGTX nostalgia, where all is ultimately just fine as long as everybody just finds their own groove. I doubt that’s the way, even today, that most kids see those difficult years.

the subjects of their hate

by Douglas Messerli

Claude Lanzmann (director) The Last of the Unjust / 2013

Critic Richard Brody and others have described the filmmaking of Claude Lanzmann, who died this past week at the age of 92, as “the personal assumption of the burden of Jewish history (in particular, the black hole of devastation that is the Holocaust) in order to embody and to transmit Jewish identity in [the] present tense.”

In honor of the great creator of Shoah (a documentary which I review in My Year 2015) I decided to watch his great second documentary, based on interviews with the Viennese rabbi, Benjamin Murmelstein, done in preparation for that earlier film but not included within it. Murmelstein, the only surviving “Elder of the Jews” from the camps—significant Jewish leaders who were forced to become emissaries between the Nazis and the millions of individuals trapped in ghettos and concentration camps, often given the devastating power to make choices about who might live and who might die—was, along with others after the war, perceived by many survivors simply as collaborators, Murmelstein being no exception, being tried and found not-guilty in the Czech courts. It is obvious why Lanzmann deleted this long sequence of interviewing from his original documentary, fraught as it is by so very many impossible moral choices.

Yet, almost 40 years later, Lanzmann inwardly struggled with the information presented in his interview with Murmelstein, determining that he felt an obligation to present the information before he died. The result, The Last of the Unjust—the title that the interviewee applies to himself—is in its simple focus on one individual, as opposed to the hundreds of Shoah, in some respects, is even more powerful that that great earlier work. For in Murmelstein’s determined words, we see the complex webs of lies and deceptions (self-deceptions and community illusions) that any man or woman taken away by the Nazis had daily to face. Reality had been, as Murmelstein writes, “turned upside down.”

On the surface, Murmelstein is not at all a likeable being. Argumentative, often cynical, even irreverent, and speaking emphatically in the very language of the oppressor, he seems, at different moments, self-justifying and yet completely broken by the series of events he had to endure and by what he admittedly did to others of his religion. This is a tale of beings who were forced to pretend to be what, at heart, they were not, simply in order to survive and to help others to live out the devastation of their culture.

To ease us into the story, Lanzmann scrolls through the history of events, including the deaths by the hands of the Gestapo of previous Jewish Elders, Jakob Edelstein, a Polish-born Zionist and former head of the Prague Jewish community, Paul Eppstein, a sociologist originally from Mannheim, Germany, and—after they were each shot or hung—Murmelstein, the only survivor. From that introduction, we are introduced to the small train station in the Czech Republic where often deceived elderly Jews, who had been told they were on their way to a special city, Theresienstadt, a gift to the Jewish people from Hitler, were, as Murmelstein himself later describes it, forcibly “disembarked,” and thrown into barrack-like buildings, often forced to sleep on the floor. In some respects, the shock for these deluded individuals must have been even worse than those who surely guessed they would end up in terrible deaths.

At the station, Lanzmann, himself at the time filming now 89 years of age, begins reading from the highly intelligent book, written by Murmelstein in Italian, Terezin, il Ghetto Modello di Eichmann (Theresienstad, the Model Ghetto of Eichmann). Murmelstein had previously been forced to work with Eichmann in Vienna, where he headed the largest city synagogue, when in Eichmann’s early years he had been seeking for ways to get rid of the Jews through mass emigration, first to the Palestine, then, in a kind of mad, made-up project, to Mozambique. Murmelstein became the investigator he needed to explain where, when they emigrated, Jews went. Obviously, this sounds a bit like something Trump himself might have imagined for those he does not like. But, if nothing else, Murmelstein’s experiences and his personal involvement in Kristallnacht make all of Hannah Arendt’s suggestions of Adolph Eichmann’s “banality” pure nonsense. Eichmann, through Murmelstein’s sharp memory, is as knowledgably complicit in the creation of the camps and the killing of Jews as anyone in the Nazi hierarchy.

When we finally meet Murmelstein, somewhat later in the film, we perceive him as a rabbi who had helped many Jews to escape, and as a man of moral principle and high intelligence—all of which help us to recognize his impossible dilemmas.

The “model” camp, created by Eichmann and others to make outsiders believe that the Nazis were acting in the best interests for the Jews, was anything but that within. The elderly died quickly and sometimes got lost—to never return—on the streets of the so-called model city. Any of even slightest grievances meant that individuals were daily sent “east,” which meant usually to Auschwitz, although Murmelstein argues they didn’t know the name and destination of that camp. Others were sent to Treblinka and the concentration camps in Latvia and Estonia.

When a typhoid epidemic threatened the camp, Murmelstein, then head of the health services, demanded beds for the sick and elderly, and helped to curtail the illnesses. Nonetheless, it is estimated that about 33,000 people died in the “model camp,” although a few over 17,000 did survive it, many of them musicians, artists, and other notable figures.

Whatever one might think of Murmelstein’s actions and motives, he is certainly one of the most knowledgeable and credible historians of the period, describing himself as having to play a kind of Scheherazade in order to rescue Jews, and who rescued himself, by helping the Germans tell a propagandistic story. As long as they were determined to create the myth of a model camp, the Nazis could not totally destroy its inmates, or himself, he argues. They needed him and its distressed citizens to pretend to themselves and others about their good intentions.

In the end, one can’t help but being a bit charmed, despite Lanzmann’s sometimes highly charged questions, by the brilliance of this survivor, now living in what he describes as a kind of complete cultural isolation in Rome.

The director, moreover, keeps us aware of the great loss of European culture through the Holocaust by telling us again of the roots of Hanukkah, and filming a cantor chanting Kol Nidre (from the service of Yom Kippur) and the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, in the last surviving synagogue in Vienna, Murmelstein’s previous home.

What we perceive is that in those terrible camps and ghettos, there was no justice, and that no one might possibly be described as “just” who didn’t themselves die. To survive, you had to eat, you had to collude, you had to give up everything in which you believed. The Nazis made sure that even those Jews who might escape their vengeance could never fully forgive themselves for having been the subjects of their hate.

Los Angeles, July 24, 2018

running off with the dinner

by Douglas Messerli

Shyam Benegal, and Girish Karnad (screenplay, based on a work by by Sangtye Aika on Hansa Wadkar), Satyadev Dubey (dialogue), Shyam Benegal (director) Bhumika / 1977

I had never previously seen a film by Indian director Shyam Benegal and was delighted to see some of his works posted on Filmstruck. This work, Bhumika, with a script by Benegal, Girish Karnad, Satydey Dubey, and others based on the work by Sangtye Aika on Hansa Wadker, a widely transgressive and stunning Indian film star of the 1940s, is a truly fascinating film about the Indian film tradition, particularly the Bollywood filmmaking, although the film itself lies outside of that cinema tradition.

Certainly, this film has many of the Bollywood tropes, a woman who, as a child, was taught the music of the old tradition from the Devadasi community of Goa by her grandmother, a famous singer of that tradition, dismissed by Usha’s mother (Sulabha Deshpande), who is clearly a bourgeois religious woman, herself married to an abusive and alcoholic Brahmin. But in Usha’s world, everything is still based on a hierarchical cultural perspective, which she quickly, even as a child, rejects, running off with a chicken, for example, that is about to be slaughtered for a Korma dinner.

She is clearly a rebel who needs to be constrained, that is until the family loses any financial standing, and must use their daughter’s musical and acting talents in order to survive. In a strange sense, this musical parallels the Hollywood film, A Star Is Born, but with little of the possible passion available to that film’s actress.

Here, Usha (the wonderful Smita Patil) is quickly married off to the family friend Keshav Dalvi (Amol Palekar), who pushes her into the Bombay film industry, while also getting her pregnant with a child. This is not only a man who uses her to create his own financial success, but has lusted after her from childhood; and it is quickly apparent that he is not only an abusive husband, but, as Usha’s mother perceives, not of her own caste. For the young wife, it is not the caste that matters as much as his inability to perceive Usha’s worth and talent, using her to help support himself while also verbally attacking her. When she determines, finally, to leave him for the second time, she is not allowed to take her daughter with her.

What is less obvious is why the handsome Bombay movie star, Rajan (Anat Nag), who clearly adores Usha and would provide her a comfortable life, is a person of no interest for the younger woman. Benegal’s film only subtly suggests, through the introduction of an obviously gay director, hinting perhaps that despite Rajan’s attending to Usha, that he too, the heartthrob of the film industry, might well be gay. Throughout the film, despite Usha’s rejections, he never marries. Benegal does not reveal why Usha rejects his advances, but it is clear that she perceives his advances as “unreal,’ and even mocks them, with a friend, by singing a song that dismisses his fervent attentions.

Nonetheless, fed by the film magazine gossip, her worthless husband, Dalvi, is convinced she is having an affair with Rajan, and when she finally leaves their dark relationship, she is left without ties to her former family life.

Now forced to stay in a hotel, the unhappy singer develops a relationship with another self-centered man, Sunil Verma (Naseeruddin Shah), developing with him a pact for a double suicide, which he does not carry out.

Clearly, not a good judge when it comes to men, Usha then develops a relationship with a wealthy businessman, Vinayak Kale (Amrist Puri), whom she happily marries. But despite his lavish life-style, she soon after realizes that he intends to keep her house-bound, refusing to allow her to leave the house, let alone the palatial estate. Furious with the restriction, she calls on her hated former husband Keshav, who with a militaristic-like maneuver, rescues her, now bringing her back to Bombay, where he has plastered the streets with billboards of her picture. But her life soon after finds her back in drab hotels with little prospect of change.

As Kale’s bedridden first wife observes, as Usha prepares to leave, "The beds change, the kitchens change. Men's masks change, but men don't change." In short, Benegal turns his musical into a kind of ur-feminist tract, making it clear how young women—even those who become, like Usha, successful—have little possibility of true happiness in a world controlled by men.

Like her own grandmother, we suspect she will one day become part of her daughter’s household, secretly teaching a granddaughter the secrets of the musical tradition in which she so brilliantly performed.

The director here presents his musical interludes as a mix of comic irreverence (their plots are clearly static and hackneyed) and high respect, particularly when Smita Patil is on stage. A bit like an Indian Judy Garland, when she sings she transforms this sad tale into a wondrous spectacle that surely would appeal to the hundreds of locked-away housewives.

Los Angeles, July 29, 2018

speaking up

by Douglas Messerli

Hannah Gadsby (writer), Jon Olb and Madeleine Parry (directors) Nanette / 2018

As philosophers and others such as Henri Bergson have long argued, laughter—although seemingly giving us pleasure—is not always grounded in joy, but much like growling, is often a way we have of dealing with the tension between reality and what we would like to be the truth. As comedians well know—John Osbourne showed us this in his The Entertainer, just as Robin Williams demonstrated it in his suicide—comedians are not always happy folks, often using humor as a kind of armor, deflecting their own feelings of insignificance and fear to hide what they most feel inside.

The wonderful Tasmanian-born stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby explores this territory in her performance titled Nanette, which is filled with laughter but also with a great deal of anger, aimed particularly at self-privileged males.

Born lesbian into a society that simply did not accept the idea of homosexuality, time and again, throughout her youth, she was awarded for her successful golf tournaments with dishware, while the male competitors were given money and other more solid awards. Her grandmother, she quips, kept telling her that “Mr. Right was just around the corner,” forcing her to be very warry about the corners in her life.

Gadsby takes the opportunity of her stand-up show to help educate us about comedy and how it works. She argues that basically a comic line depends on a two-part structure, the short narrative which builds the tension and the release of that tension with a quick twist in the tale.

Yet Gadsby’s performance, in this case, is basically written in three parts, the first of which—part of the build-up—reveals the problems of her childhood, those problems, as in most comedy conclude with quick zingers that shuffle those problems into another dimension, as we, seemingly with her, laugh them off.

In the second part, this skilled dialogist, suddenly declares that she may be giving up comedy, as she explains the nature of a joke and how for all these years she used those quips to protect herself from having to actually face those childhood difficulties. Still, she allows some remarkable releases, allowing us to share some of her informative explanations of her craft in between bits of laughter.

By the third part of her amazing “talk,” one that bears similarities to another comic-dialogist, Spaulding Gray (who also committed suicide, he by drowning), Gadsby switches gears, letting out the very anger which has allowed her to deflect the truth over and over again, and turning against the male aggressors in her life, whether passive simply in the male presumptions of priority or active in what appears to have sexual abuse (she insistently names no names and refuses to indicate what relationships these men might have had to her), but as she recently mentioned in an interview with The New York Times, this film-version of her piece, was the very most difficult since her mother in the audience.

What we have previously released in our growls of laughter now quickly turns to tears, particularly if you have any empathy, which even uncomfortable straight men in the audience should have developed by this time given the amazing talents she already revealed. Many critics have characterized this last section as going “beyond” comedy, of taking the genre into new territory. But I might suggest that she is simply returning to the first part, the narrative build-up, but projecting with an entirely different lens, of opening herself up to show us the real pain and suffering she endured for all those years. Instead of continuing to protect herself through the armor of laughter, she has permitted herself to talk to us straight-forwardly, to ask us to truly hear her pain and anger that she still retains for having to suffer in silence for so many years.

As she insists: “You wrote the rules, and I read them!”

I was startled, I admit, to hear her report that as a child she become silent, seemingly appearing to be shy and unsocial, when she obviously was a quick-witted, intelligent woman. Just the week before I had read an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Guy Branum, describing how, even as a young man, his obviously effeminate gay voice while growing in Sutter County, California—a place clearly not that very different from the Tasmanian island of Australia—altered his behavior; as he puts it:

By the fourth grade, I learned that there was something about me that

made me audibly different from the other boys my age. I could not mask it,

I could not change it, I could not fight so well that I could earn the

respect of my classmates. My voice evoked rage and disgust from

my peers and teachers. I kept it hidden and tried to fit into a role that did not

fit me. I played football, I tried to date girls. None of it worked, so I

became quiet, very quiet, for a long time.

And suddenly I recalled a piece I’d long ago written about my own childhood, something to the effect, after being terrified on the playground by the school-yard bully, that for years after I grew silent, turning in to read, write, and dream in private. I am sure that no-one who reads this today might ever believe it! When you're quiet for so many years, perhaps you feel you have to make up for it.

I was, nonetheless, still a privileged male, and was never abused by a grown-up that I know of—except for my father’s almost hysterical view of homosexuality. And Gadsby is still very righteously angry at a time that I realize I led a rather fortunate gay life. We all adapt differently to the bigotry against lesbianism and gay life. Moreover, things have changed much, if not yet sufficiently.

I think Gadsby’s moving performance ought to be perceived as both a Kaddish for all the lives of those in the LGBTQ community who have been traumatized by the dominant heterosexual world and, particularly during the AIDs crisis, even died for their sexual identities. Here, finally, we have a new conversation that needs to be heard and at least listened to by even those who may feel uncomfortable by its truth. Simply being quiet or laughing, for that matter, is no longer an solution.

Los Angeles, August 1, 2018

someone to preen to

by Douglas Messerli

Patrick Bauchau, Haydée Politoff, Daniel Pommereulle, and Éric Rohmer (writers), Éric Rohmer (director) La Collectionneuse (The Collector) / 1967

Éric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse, the 4^th of his “Six Moral Tales” (it was actually the 3^rd of the series made, however) is perhaps one of the most revealing concerning Rohmer’s major concerns in these works and aspects of his own life.

Although the two males of this tale, Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) and Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle) might like to think of themselves as the moral centers of their world, particularly when compared to their accidental house-mate, Haydée (Haydée Politoff)—an attractive but apparently empty-headed young girl who each night brings home another young man to have sex—they have borrowed their friend Rodolphe’s mansion primarily to evade working and to live out the summer in conditions of intellectual non-existence.

True, these two friends consider themselves as total intellects—the beautiful Adrien wants to begin an Asian art gallery and the fair-haired Daniel is described by Adrien as a conceptual artist—they are both truly somewhat empty-headed drifters, whose major abilities seem to be in entertaining or even preening themselves to those around them more than accomplishing anything. Indeed, Rohmer evidently selected these two unknown “actors” primarily because they lived the dandyish lives of his own characters. After hours of conversation with the three major actors, Rohmer credited them as co-authors.

If Haydée is, in fact, a “sexual slut” and they later describe her to her face, or, as they and the film’s title describe her, a female “collector” of men, Adrien himself, as a would-be art dealer, is himself a collector of meaningless objects (particularly since he seems to have little knowledge of history or art except what he has been told), just as Daniel is a collector of art ideas which he never truly realizes except in small macquettes, in one of which the walls in a spherical form are protected with razor blades, a metaphor that surely applies to his and Adrien’s own lives.

They need Haydéeto demonstrate their prowess more that she, who will sleep with nearly anyone who looks good, more than she needs them. Yet she allows to basically imprison her in the mansion, refusing to help take her to her various rendezvous or to allow her young men to enter their shared domain.

Together, they mock her and attempt to pyschologically torture her, Adrien by pretending to be disinterested in her physicality and Daniel by taking advantage of it, making love to her before turning rather violently against her and ultimately leaving the would be “paradise.”

The self-enchanted Adrien, constantly fidgeting with his hair and presenting himself in various forms of half-nakedness, is perhaps the worst, simply because he is so self-centered that he sees himself as the center of the young girl’s attentions as well, imagining that she has some elaborate plan to seduce him. In the end, it is he who attempts to seduce her, without much success.

Having refused any of her previous advances, when Adrien makes his move she rejects him—which he believes is merely another move to reel him in. The delusion of these macho-fools should truly the subject of the movie, but sinceHaydée, herself, is so mindless and purposely self-destructive, it is hard to side with the misunderstood female as well.

Fixing her up with his possible backer of the gallery, Sam (Seymour Hetzberg), Adrien is even a bit disappointed when she reports that she only shared a boat ride and a pleasant dinner. In short, he has played pimp to the young woman, a role which she joyfully punishes by destroying his priceless Chinese vase, and probably, by that act, nixing any hopes that Sam may continue to support Adrien’s future gallery.

Finally admitting Haydée’s sexual prowess, he attempts to drive off with her into a sort of romantic sunset; yet she soon encounters friends traveling in the opposite direction, and just as quickly abandons Adrien to travel back the way she has come.

The slightly chastised Adrien flies off to London where his girlfriend, Mijanou (Mijanou Bardot, Brigitte’s sister) appearing only in the film’s first prologues, has gone, catching the first plane to join her. But we can only suppose, given what we’ve seen of his views of women, that he probably will also fail at that relationship as well.

We might deduce, accordingly, that the true moral of this story is simply that Adrien should not have left the woman who was best for him in the first place, a story, as are most of the “Six Moral Tales,” about comeuppance. However, as Maura Edmond, in her 2017 review of the work in Senses of Cinema reminds us, Rohmer was himself a kind of dual person, hiding under the identity of a highly religious family man,Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer, who worked as a classics teacher, while actually spending his life (unknown even to his mother) as the famed filmmaker, who hung out with just such Paris starlets and self-enchanted young men.

In a sense, accordingly, the “morality,” if there truly is any, of this tale turns inward, into a kind of self-observation that uses the director’s “real” lost figures as symbols. And there is a kind of self-revelatory dishonesty, that Adrien reflects, in this, one of Rohmer’s best films.

Los Angeles, August 3, 2018

cod roe

Keiji Hasebe, Kon Ichikawa and Natto Wado (writers, based on the fiction byJun'ichirō Tanizaki), Kon Ichiwawa (director) Kagi (“The Key,” in the west described as Odd Obession) / 1959

Kon Ichikawa’s 1959 film, based on Japanese fiction writer’s Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s The Keyfalls into the cracks of so many genres that it is difficult to know where to begin to describe it. It is, overall, a kind of murder mystery overlaid by a romance, not just a daughter / suitor affair but a mother / daughter’s boyfriend affair, a story of an old man’s delusions and his attempts to stave ff death through his own voyeuristic proclivities, a tract of correct society’s inability to perceive the truth, and story of extreme jealously on many of the characters’ parts. It’s also, unequivocally, the story of a cultured man’s destiny in a society which does not truly appreciate poetry and art.

And then it gets more complex when you include sexual incompetence (an issue seldom discussed in Japanese culture of the day—or in the US during the same period for that fact) and add in a bit of psychological incest. And then, of course, we must face the issue of the good young doctor’s manipulation of the family for his own financial gain, which also links it, tangentially, to Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity of a decade earlier. And that’s just the beginning.

American critics seem to focus in on the fact that the elderly “hero” of this tale, Kenji Kenmochi (Ganjirō Nakamura) is obsessed (as the Western title shouts) with his lack of sexual prowess. In this pre-Viagra period one might have thought that the movie was simply arguing for this elderly man to get one more hard-on with his quite beautiful wife, Ikuko Kenmochi (Marchiko Kyō). Yet, it is truly represents all aspects of old age that haunt this elderly gent: he can no longer remember telephone numbers, names, etc. In short, it is not only his sexual condition, but his growing dementia that haunts the work. And that fact creates a kind of darkly comic aura to the film, as he increasingly plots his wife’s encounters with the handsome young doctor Kimura (Tatsuya Nakadai). The ambitious young man has long been the boyfriend of Kenji’s plainer daughter, Toshiko (Junko Kano), and has even had a rendezvous with her in Osaka—evidently a popular sexual retreat of the day. But now, with the excuse of the cod roe he brings the family from his home, he enters increasingly the world of the Kenmochis, discovering that the much younger wife to be quite charming, she, in turn, suddenly turning from the highly obedient world in which she has suffered, to be able to laugh and even charm the younger man.

Even darker, Kenji not only encourages the relationship between his wife and the young man but uses it as a way to excite himself sexually, attempting—after their meetings—to be reunited with his supposedly “erring” wife. Throughout most of the film, Ichikawa does not let us know about any sexual picadilloes, of which they are seemingly innocent. But it is through his imagination that the old man now lives, and that discharges a contagion over the entire family, as the daughter and their housekeeper Hana (Tanie Kitabayashi) begin to suspect the worst of Ikuko. They are both convinced that she is now trying to “murder” the old man through sexual excitation, without realizing that it is he himself, suffering from high blood-pressure and numerous other psychological and physical pathologies, who is determined to keep up some kind of sexual contact.

In the closeted world of the Kenmochi household no one seems to perceive that it is Ikuko herself who is in danger, forced to drink alcohol by her husband, after which she falls into real (or, perhaps, we can never know for sure) afflictions, usually ending with her having passed out in a hot bathtub.

It is only when she finally admits to her husband that she has been privately seeing the young doctor—although intensely denying any sexual activity—that her husband is sexually aroused once more, attempting to have sex with his wife but nearly dying of a stroke in the process. Of course, both onlookers, daughter and cook, once more presume the worst of Ikuko, imagining that she has attempted to kill him.

Both the original story and Ichikawa turn this into a truly darker tale when we realize that Ikuko and Kimura have perhaps actually been having a sexual relationship when she offers him the key to the house, telling him when everyone else will be asleep or out. It is the sound of Kimura’s footsteps as he arrives that betrays both nurse and her elderly husband that he has returned to have sex with Ikuko. And when Kenji awakens from his coma, the first thing he attempts to relate are the words “F-O-O-T,” representing the “footsteps” he has heard in the night.

When Kenji finally does die, his wife seems almost joyous, celebrating with a small dinner with Kimura and her daughter, while Kimura, by this time—perceiving the true poverty of the household, who survived primarily on Kenji’s art dealings and poetry involvements (none of them truly representing any wealth)—begins to truly regret his involvement with the family.

The daughter, Toshiko, attempts to poison the couple through a pesticide she injects into the tea. It doesn’t work, since Hana has already transferred that poison to another container, which she pours upon the salad.

All three are killed, but even her admission to the crime is ignored as authorities who presume it is a triple suicide due to the poverty of the family, an irony that can’t be missed. Evidently, the symbols of art and wealth are far more important than the actuality, just as the appearances of adultery are far more important than the possibilities of a real love, or the avarice of a young doctorial striver. This is a world of many overlying levels of sexual and cultural corruption. The key, is precisely that, an indexical revealation all their multifarious actions. The corruptness of the society has permeated itself into the very core of family life: a man who cannot accept his aging, a young woman who cannot accept her lover’s attentions to her mother, a mother who is willing to forget her role in order to seem again attractive and young, and a doctor who attempts—as Kenji himself admits earlier—to use this family for his own advancement.

Despite all of the plot development, an essential aspect of this film, Ichikawa balances the inner turmoil of his characters with the rhythmic patterns of nature, the trees and reeds blowing in the wind, the corrugated rooves of houses, the very stones, covered with leaves, on which Kimura walks to get to his mistress, even the trams (which he shoots from underneath) that take these characters on their journeys. When Kenji falls into his coma, he sees his own wife as a vision of the desert, with layers of endless waves of sand.

Despite the perverse and intense desires of his figures, Ichikawa reveals that patterns are still at the heart of their behaviors. There was perhaps no more docile and obedient wife than Ikuko or a politer and more respectful suitor than Kimura. These are not monsters, but simply sexual beings caught up in the process of living. Kenji simply cannot accept the fact that he will soon be no longer be part of that process, just as Toshiko cannot accept that in her bitterness she has been left behind.

Los Angeles, August 8, 2018

born to dance

David LaChapelle (director) Take Me to the Church (with Sergei Polunin) / 2013

Steven Cantor (director) Dancer (with Sergei Polunin) / 2016

Ford Maddox Ford begins his great novel, The Good Soldier, with the statement "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." In many respects this is an ironic statement given the near perfect life the central character Captain Edward Ashburnham leads. But it haunted me yesterday while watching Steven Cantor’s documentary of the amazing Ukrainian-born dancer, Sergei Polunin, titled simply Dancer. The movie and its haunting sense of sadness is still with me this morning as I write.

In the south Ukraine city of Kherson in 1989, a basically working-class city, there was little opportunity for advancement. But Polunin’s mother, as Sergei himself has admitted in an interview with BBC Television, was a visionary, who imagined something else for her child. He began dancing

at age 3, along with a training in gymnastics in which he was also talented. But when it became clear that he was a natural dancer, Polunin’s father immigrated to Portugal, and his grandmother to Greece to get better jobs in order to support Sergei’s training at the famed ballet school in Kiev, a very expensive proposition.

Indeed, much of this film is about immigrants sending back their paltry wages, sacrificing everything for the betterment of their children, a centuries’ old pattern that seems to have been forgotten or willfully ignored today. Most American families had just such parents, who lived their own lives simply with the hope of helping the next generation to be better off than they had been. Even Polunin admits he did not quite comprehend the sacrifice his family made in for him to become such a remarkable dancer.

Even as a teenager, Sergei was an amazing performer, eventually showing such talent that his mother realized that he had to study at a more renowned institution, in this case the Royal Ballet in London. It is so touching when mother and son can hardly find the audition venue, buried as it was within, as they describe it, a park. Still, they did find it and, after waiting for weeks to hear, he received a grant from the Nureyev Foundation to study there—and at the shockingly young age of 19 was appointed their principal male dancer.

Talent he had, and crowds of admirers crowded into his performances, asking him to sign their programs, to take selfie photographs, or just to ogle the beautiful dancer. I think it is difficult for even a viewer of Cantor’s quite revealing film to comprehend just what kind of life such a dancer must lead, working 11-12 hours every day without being able to question the ballet-master’s or choreographer’s instructions, being drilled even as he had as a child in gymnastics and ballet movements without any possibility but executing them precisely. And Polunin was still an obedient child, despite the fact that as a young man he naturally began to experiment with tattoos, drugs, and other forms of rebellion, which resulted in him being described as the bad boy of dance. But even he, as he righteously argues, never missed a performance or a rehearsal. He had become at age 20 a kind of automaton, a beautiful creature who could wow the crowds with his Giselle, Spartacus, and other traditional dances.

His sacrificing mother was not even allowed to view his performances, and, moreover, could not afford the trip from Ukraine to London to see them. When she and the long-separated father finally divorced, something clearly snapped in his personality. If the goal all along had been to provide hope and financial stability to his family, there was no longer any family there. As one of his dancer friends reminds us, Sergei was just 22 when he decided to abandon his illustrious career.

At the very same age, I abandoned college for a year to explore my sexuality in New York City—without even telling my parents where I’d gone. As Polunin himself admits, I was playing games with the press without comprehending what that meant. Now branded as unreliable, he was unable to reenter the ballet world which he still loved.

Returning to Ukraine, Polunin determined to perform one last dance, this filmed by friend David LaChapelle, of Sergei dancing, bare-chested, without the powder-puff covering of his several tattoos of his self-choreographed version of Hozier’s bitter “Take Me to the Church”:

My lover's got humour

She's the giggle at a funeral

Knows everybody's disapproval

I should've worshipped her sooner

If the heavens ever did speak

She's the last true mouthpiece

Every Sunday's getting more bleak

A fresh poison each week

"We were born sick"

You heard them say it

My church offers no absolutes

She tells me, "Worship in the bedroom"

The only heaven I'll be sent to

Is when I'm alone with you

Danced in a skin-colored half leotard, Polunin alternates between floor-bound rolling’s and sudden bursts of air-flight (the only way to describe his astonishing tombés, pirouettes and Tour en l’airs). This is a somewhat angry dance, a kind of war-whoop that expresses his issues of control and worship, while subtly mocking the world that determines such values. It became a UTube phenomenon which recharged his career.

Even though he had to detour to Russia, Polunin is now a guest artist in many major European companies, planning a performance with this girlfriend, the ballerina Natalia Osipova, in New York late 2018. And he is also now working at an attempt to help dancers to seek agents and other negotiators to help them from being so bound to the theaters in which they dance.

So, perhaps it is not the “saddest” tale one can imagine. Yet, this beautiful young man, who still loves the craft he had so definitively been trained to achieve, seems to represent a sort of very sad life, with his youth—like so many ballet dancers, musicians, singers, athletes, or even young maniac publishers like me (I too danced, sang, and played an instrument)—whose very talents do not permit them to live a normal life. Fortunately, I now realize, I was not as talented, and did not have parents willing to give up their lives for my own.

Los Angeles, August 10, 2018

no heroes here

by Douglas Messerli

Jean-Pierre Melville (writer and director) Un flic (The Cop) / 1972

Whenever I sit down to watch a film by French director Jean-Pierre Melville, I relax. I know, just as I know whenever I see a film by Alfred Hitchcock (although he has occasionally disappointed me) that I will be taken into a strange world which I might never have imagined but will be rewarded with a wonderful tale that can only amaze me in its complexities.

Melville’s specialties generally involve a deep entry into the criminal mind, where we watch the complex intricacies of crime figures—generally those who are planning a deep heist, although sometimes only so that they might turn that into an even greater complicity that might include drugs, betrayal of crime friends, and, often police involvement—in which they often get off scot free. Unlike Hitchcock’s highly moral world which reveal his paranoia about evil in the world, Melville’s films often promote their criminal figures and associates, who are treated in fact as interesting individuals, and sometimes do not get punished. Truth is never so simple in Melville’s world, and everything is made even more complex by the outrageously convoluted plotting of their absurd machinations.

Yes, Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible films leaps off buildings, dives deep into the ocean, commandeers helicopters which he must fly through dangerous mountains; James Bond jumps into action against some of the most impossibly nefarious forces of evil. But Melville’s flat-footed, nonetheless clever and often handsome policemen such as Commissaire Edouard Coleman—in this film Alain Delon, who previously played criminals in other Melville films—have a difficult time in tracking down their obviously plotting nemeses, in this film the American actor Richard Crenna—playing the very clever Simon, who robs a bank not for the money but as a payment to plan his robbery of a stash of cocaine aboard a moving train. Possibly the only match to him in American film is Hitchcock’s sophisticated villain Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) in North by Northwest; but Vandamm, who may have taken down an entire plane to protect his international intrigue, is clearly a morally despicable individual.

Melville’s plotting criminals work much harder for their “supper,” and often get tripped up by the complex situations they have negotiated, such as in this film, when a simple teller is able to retrieve a gun and wound one of the robbers, which forces them, in turn, to do-in their friend. Melville’s films are filled with aging gay men whose young tricks attempt to steal their artwork, and by betraying women, or in this case, a transgender woman who reports directly to Coleman.

And even the so-called “moral” authorities in this director’s works are often misled and confused. In this case Coleman, the “flic” or cop, is desperately attracted to Simon’s “moll” (as the American film noir works might have described her), Cathy (Catherine Deneuve). She throws him kisses even as she whispers about her involvement with Simon’s criminal activities. And she runs a kind of ur-strip club in which no respectable American cop would dare be seen. In short, the differences between the immoral figures and the supposedly moral upholders of society’s values are very unclear in this and other Melville films.

Although this work, as in nearly all of the French director’s films, does not disappoint in creating a great deal of highly plotted-out criminal undertakings, fun to watch simply because of details they reveal about these clever evil minds; but in this Melville film, the real subject is not the achievement of capturing the money, the drugs, or even the criminals, but is really far more about mortality itself.

The heroes, this time around, are not just fated, but in Un flic are meeting up with their own inevitable deaths. Melville uses the craggy faced Crenna, 46 at the time of this film, precisely to represent the aging process having taken over the actor known to American audiences as a young, handsome child-actor in Our Miss Brooks and as the young Luke McCoy in the popular television series The Real McCoys, At the early age of 46, Crenna clearly looked far past his prime.

More startling was the fact that the always beautiful Delon no longer looked quite so handsome. He major roles were behind him, and here he is a slightly pudgy-faced, if still strikingly beautiful, at age 37, in a period right after the so-called "Marković affair,” when his bodyguard, Stevan Marković, was found dead after being dropped into a rubbish dumper. Delon was a person of interest, since he and others, including Claude Pompidou, the future wife of Georges, the French Prime Minister, had been evidently involved in lavish sex parties, whose members revealed that Delon himself may have been homosexually-inclined.

The relatively young Catherine Deneuve, who had already appeared in her major movies, at just 29 is made-up in this film to look thin, drawn, and stringy-haired, not at all the alluringly beautiful figure she usually played.

These figures, criminal and supposedly defenders of cultural values are all worn out and tired in Melville’s Un flic, characters who work so hard to accomplish their night-bound tasks that they might have been better working in a local factory or as shopkeepers. They have hardly anything to show for their endless plotting and search of the truth. By story’s end, it is apparent that Simon has plotted his own suicide, as he pretends to pull out a gun to kill the “flic,” who shoots him dead. No gun is found, and Cathy is left, empty handed, in the nearby get-away car. Each of them comes away with nothing: no money, no proof, no love.

As always, Melville argues that the criminals work just as hard to do what they want as daily laborers, or even the police to un-do them. Life is never easy for those who question the authority of law, nor for those who attempt to carry it out. No heroes here, despite what cinema often attempted to suggest. And, in that sense, perhaps Melville was a greater moralist than even the more comically oriented and cynical Hitchcock.

Los Angeles, August 12, 2018

Alfred Hitchcock | Downhill

Ingmar Bergman | Gycklarnas afton (Sawdust and Tinsel)

George Cukor | The Women

Jean Luc-Godard | Deux ou Trois choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her)

Mario Monicelli | I compagni (The Organizer)

Bernardo Bertolucci | The Sheltering Sky

Arturo Ripstein | Profundo carmesí (Deep Crimson)

Tim Wardle | Three Identical Strangers

Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress | Sebastiane

Derek Jarman | Edward II

Georges Franju | Judex

Ruben Östlund | The Square

Craig Johnson | Alex Strangelove

Claude Lanzmann | The Last of the Unjust

Shyam Benegal | Bhumika

John Olb and Madeleine Parry | Nanette

Éric Rohmer | La Collectionneuse (The Collector)

Kon Ichikawa | Kagi ("The Key") translated into English as Odd Obsession

Steven Cantor | Dancer and David LaChapelle | Take Me to the Church

Jean-Pierre Melville | Un flic