World Cinema Review

the hell we have

by Douglas Messerli

Herbert Grevenius (screenplay, based on stories by Birgit Tengroth), Ingmar Bergman (director) Törst (Thirst) / 1949

Bergman’s 1949 film Thirst, although not as complexly plotted as many of his later works for which he provided the texts, is a psychologically revealing and emotionally compelling film that matches some of his best.

The tale consists basically of a long train trip from Italy back to Sweden, where a married couple, Bertil (Birger Malmsten) and Rut (Eva Henning), have been vacationing on a very low budget. The time of this trip is crucial, occurring as it does soon after the devastation of Europe by World War II, which helps create another layer of explanation for the couple’s obvious angst, the key to their “hunger” and “thirst.”

Their hunger, in part, has to do with the fact that they have so little money; yet they have been able to pack a rather ample picnic basket to fill their stomachs during their voyage home. But even before they set out, Rut rummages into the basket to sneak a slice of sausage, almost as if she were starving.

Yet, once they are on their way, it is apparent that her real problem is drinking to fulfill her thirst. At once point, when they encounter an entire train station full of starving children and adults, Rut readily hand out the basket’s contents to the post-war sufferers. It is wine, beer, and cigarettes that she

most desperately needs to fuel her endless battles with Bertil, seemingly a loving companion who often patiently puts up with her bouts of abuse followed by sudden attempts to make up. Yet, he too is not without his verbal assaults directed to her, and, often, he plays the tormented saint, together the two of them reminding one of a tamer Martha and George of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

And like Albee’s couple they have plenty of reasons to do battle with life. Rut, in particular, has lost not only a child, aborted by a callous earlier boyfriend, Raoul (Bengt Eklund), but in that process has become infertile, which has also ended her previous dancing career. Unlike the American play, however, this couple not only argue but toss out darkly witty observations a bit as if they were simply playing darts—but aimed, of course, at each other’s heads.

The amazing thing about Bergman’s film, in this case, is how quickly the action moves between a simple domestic comedy and a darker drama, while also fluidly shifting from past to present, present to past, all the while paralleling an early voyage between Switzerland and Sweden (both neutral countries at the time) with Rut and Raoul.

Simultaneously, the director takes us briefly through the lives of other friends of Rut, most notably her former co-dancer Valborg (Mimi Nelson), who disgusted by the men in her life, turns to lesbianism, attempting to seduce Viola (Birgit Tengroth, on whose stories this film is based), who has been equally abused by her psychiatrist Dr. Rosengren (Hasse Ekman).

In short, beneath the desperateness of what appears to be nearly the entire European population, these more middle-class survivors suffer the deprivations of love and career. At times, it’s hard to know who’s better off, the hard-drinking, obviously guilt-ridden Swedes, or the starving masses they encounter during their trip. Both may survive, but at what cost?

In some respects this film calls up the later Roberto Rossellini masterwork, Voyage in Italy, wherein another couple (played by another Swede, Ingrid Bergman and British actor George Sanders) who have a marital meltdown; or, in a kind a comic twist, the “visit to Italy” from 1956, by Lucille

Ball in I Love Lucy who suffers over not being back home for little Ricky’s 3^rd birthday, determining to celebrate it with a young shoeshine street boy, who brings all of his young friends to the party claiming that it is their birthday as well. It is perhaps the closest Ball ever came to a psychological meltdown in her entire series and is the least wacky of the entire I Love Lucy shows. Obviously postwar Europe, Italy in particular, not only attracted the tourists because of its post-war inexpensiveness, but revealed other tensions in their lives.

Thirst ends far more upbeat than it might have, with Bertil finally admitting that “despite the hell we have,” he would rather be with Rut than without her, rather be married than a lonely old man. And perhaps they can mend their seemingly fraying relationship.

Bergman, fortunately, does not attempt to hint at the future; they are quite apparently caught up now in their pasts. Whether or not they free themselves to the future is undetermined. Perhaps none of us ever have been completely able to. As an immediate postwar baby, child of a father who’d been stationed during the war in Italy, I’m still haunted by the event that serves as an important backdrop in Bergman’s movie.

Finally, what this film reveals is that before he became the great director that we now know him to be, he was making wonderful smaller films. Thirst was certainly on of them, and ought be watched by a far larger audience.

Los Angeles, August 15, 2018

a ferber fantasy

by Douglas Messerli

J. Grubb Alexander and Robert Lord (screenplay, based on the fiction by Edna Ferber), William A. Wellman (director) So Big! / 1932

William A. Wellman’s film So Big! from 1932 is based on Edna Ferber’s 1924 melodrama, a work in the manner of other of her such works as Cimarron, Giant, and long before, Show Boat. I recall my high school teacher, the wonderfully intelligent Elizabeth Belden, slightly scolding me for having chosen to write a Junior high school report on one of her books. She was right. Yet I loved them for their epic presentation of the American scene. And yes, they are about as silly and sentimental as you can get—as I perceive today—yet they still ring true with a ridiculous notion of what might have been the American Dream. Popular fiction, as bad as it generally is, can still pull us deeply into the emotional maelstrom of our culture, particularly at a time when we can only feel embarrassed for it.

Yes, it is certainly hard to believe the always amazing Barbara Stanwyck (playing the outrageously named Selina Peake) in her fall from a daughter of the dandy gambler (Robert Warwick), particularly given the vortex she makes from a finishing-school child living in Chicago’s Palmer House (where I stayed many a time on my visits to that city—even today I cannot imagine how my parents, totally middle class, allowed me to stay there on my bus trips to see plays in the windy city; perhaps it was just not as grand in those days, but I loved it!), to a local boarding house and, finally, after her father is murdered in a backroom gambling room, in her role as a school teacher living in the house of the course farmer Klass Poole (Alan Hale, Sr.), who mocks the young teacher’s admiration of his endless rows of cabbages.

And it is even more impossible to imagine that their young son, one of the many in those days who were not allowed to attend school because they were needed to work the farm, in this case the sensitive Roelf (Dick Winslow as the child and George Brent as the adult personae), whom she home-

taught, in this case evidently simply by asking him to read Ivanhoe and The Three Musketeers. Well, if you don’t believe this, you won’t believe I Remember Mama either, wherein the family son is educated by the nightly readings of a rogue to whom they’ve rented a room. These characters are out the US myths of underhanded education, which perhaps really existed. Roelf not only becomes educated but is transformed into an internationally known sculpture. Ayn Rand couldn’t have been prouder.

Yet the likely architect of this story, Dirk De Jong (Hardie Albright, played as a child by Dickie Moore), Selina’s “so big” son, born from her farm worker husband, Pervus De Jong (Earle Foxe), whom, when he dies obviously of his hard labors, she takes over, determining to replace his potatoes and cabbages with asparagus. Could Prairie Hill, Illinois truly have grown asparagus? It is centrally a product of Europe and, in the United States, California, Washington, and Michigan. Well, perhaps it grew in Illinois as well, but I never knew it as a product from that state. And the “Prairie Heights” do not seem a good place for this water-needy plant.

Well, this is Ferber fiction, isn’t it? Heroes come out of the woodwork, and Selina is definitely one, a larger than life figure who saves the farm, her now dissipated son (who despite his name grows increasingly “so small”), working eventually as a successful bond broker, who can no longer disguise his disdain for his hard-working farmer mother, whose hands show their hard work in the soil. We are now in James Agee territory, where the depression workers are lionized and celebrated. Although it’s a difficult stretch to see the sophisticated and smart-talking actress Stanwyck playing this role. Let us forgive it once more, this is just a Ferber fantasy.

Yet, when the spoiled Dirk finally meets the sophisticated artist Dallas O'Mara (played by the equally sophisticated Bette Davis), we must say, maybe this is enough. Fortunately, Dallas is out to teach the young Dirk a lesson. Although it’s apparent that she and Dirk have something sexual between them, it takes her to teach him the facts by inviting in the great artist Roelf, having conveniently just returned to the US, to teach Dirk a lesson, as the former student of his mother travels back to the home farm to pay homage. It’s all loving and very touching, if unbelievable. Dirk has his upbraiding simply in Dallas’ and Roelf’s simple admiration for her.

What becomes of all this is not clear. Will Dirk leave his position as a wealthy bond broker, will he marry the wonderfully open Dallas? We never know. But it’s fun to imagine the outcome, which Wellman allows us to contemplate, without moral complications. In this pre-code film, people were allowed to make mistakes.

Los Angeles, August 18, 2018

the winner

by Douglas Messerli

Jane Anderson (screenplay, based on a novel by Meg Wolitzer), Björn Runge (director) The Wife / 2017, USA 2018

Swedish director Björn Runge's 2017 film, The Wife, based on a novel by Meg Wolitzer, is not a great movie, although by the time I finish this review you might change your mind.

The rather pedestrian plot keeps getting in the way. Joe Castleman, evidently a great American novelist (writer of what appears are rather plot-driven novels, something that doesn’t exactly excite the Swedish Nobel Literary Prize committee, although this year, in complete chaos, we can no longer know), lies sleepless “waiting for the call.” I can’t quite imagine any great writer, given the whimsy of that Nobel committee, expecting a “call.” But that’s the story, always so intrusive here that it gets in the way of the cinematic revelations.

Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce, living in a “castle” of his own making) does get that call, and immediately—and even before that call—we recognize him, as we all know many a writer to be, as a narcissist, who seems to “expect” greatness, even though we quickly suspect he has no reason for that expectation. Even though we already don’t quite like this character, we pay attention simply because his wife, Joan (Glenn Close) seems to care for him, even allowing him to have sex, clearly unwanted, to relieve his tensions about the possible telephone message.

The plot is already, we perceive, almost a melodramatic-driven notion of what literary greatness is (not actually that very different, in some respects, from Mark Robson’s semi-turkey of a movie about a Nobel Literary winner, The Prize). How I wish this film were simply about a literary celebrity instead of a Nobel Prize winner; surely it might have made more sense.

But clearly Wolitzer and writer Jane Anderson wanted to up-the-ante, so to speak, to make their narcissist writer an international figure in order to give greater significance to “the wife,” who, we gradually discover, actually has edited or perhaps actually ghost-written her husband’s books.

To some viewers, surely, this will come as a slow narrative surprise. But the tensions, the immense mix of expressions that cross the brilliant actor Glenn Close’s face at every moment, quickly gives it away. We hardly need the flashbacks of their youthful encounters, she (played by Close’s own daughter, Annie Starke), and he (played by the handsome Harry Lloyd) to reveal the truth—although we do need these inserts just to comprehend why these beautiful youths fell in love, despite Castleman’s own marriage at the time.

The true issue of this film is a study about that love. Why has Joan kept the secret all these years, suffered through her husband’s numerous affairs, accepted the role of a simply supporting housewife, when she, after all, was the genius behind his career?

I suppose we could explore hundreds of great writers and their wives’ relationships. Dickens apparently abused his wife, as Joyce did his beloved Nora; didn’t poor Alice spend much of her life (as did the young Joan) typing up her lover Gertrude’s almost ineligible manuscripts. The list goes on. Joan, in this film, is complicit in the secret of his success (only later admitting her role as “kingmaker”) because of her love. She may be angry, even bitter for all the years in which she has had to stand aside while her husband basked in the endless praise of his peers; but like so very many wives (and occasionally husbands as well) before women’s liberation (and I suspect still today), she sacrificed her life to the man she vitally loved.

She has lied to her children—in particular, her troubled son, David (Max Irons)—to their friends, and now must supposedly lie to the world about her husband to help create him as a force of culture, although we recognize his near-complete failure. In fact, this couple, I am sure like so many thousands of couples, worked together to create a beautiful lie of success, particularly women of a certain age, who dressed their husbands, caressed their inadequacies, built up their egos, and made their homes a greeting place for others.

Yes, this is a familiar melodrama, which might have been played out even in a 1950s film such as The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and so many others. But here, we have something different simply because of Glenn Close.

Never before (well, seldom before) has an actress so portrayed the numerous contradictory feelings she has. In one shot, her face flashes signals of love, anger, bitterness, hate, and love again for the man to whom she is married. In a marvelous scene with the sleazy would-be biographer (Christian Slater) she plays a tough, totally perceptive opponent, a slightly drunken and bitter housewife, and a slightly flirtatious woman of an older age—without giving up any of her personae. This is, Close makes clear, a woman of such depth that we don’t quite know what to make of her. Joan Castleman is a woman no man should or could possess, a genius at knowing how to keep the man she loves while expressing her own identity—if only one might look deeply enough or might ask the right questions.

On the plane home from the Nobel fiasco (rather appropriate in hindsight), she promises her son that she will sit down with him and her daughter and tell them the “truth.” Strangely, and despite her fierce self-honestly, we’re not sure what she will tell them: that she has actually written all of their father’s books, that she has simply collaborated with him making editorial decisions, or allowing them to live in the myth of their father’s literary greatness. Perhaps “truth is not always truth.”

If Joan might not truly deserve the Nobel won by her husband, the actress certainly deserves an Oscar for this role.

Los Angeles, August 26, 2018

behind closed doors

by Douglas Messerli

Jean Cocteau (writer and director) Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet) / 1930

Many writers about cinema have described Jean Cocteau’s first film, The Blood of a Poet (1930), as a surrealist work, a fact which the director himself alternately denied and accepted, insisting he was the first to use such imagery. I see the work less as surrealistically conceived—as Julia Levin has argued, Un chien andalou (1928)and L’Âge d’or (1930) contain images that are far more frenetic and dissociative than Cocteau’s slower-paced and fairly dreamy piece—than it is a work of poetic symbolism, whose narrative is more associative than it is radically conceived.

As Cocteau later wrote:

It is often said that The Blood of a Poetis a surrealist film. However, surrealism did not exist when I first thought of it. the interest that it still arouses probably comes from its isolation from the works with which it is classified. I am speaking of the works of a minority that has opposed and unobtrusively governed the majority throughout the centuries. This minority has its antagonistic aspects. At the time of Le sang d’un poète, I was the only one of this minority to avoid the deliberate manifestations of the unconscious in favor of a kind of half-sleep through which I wandered as though in a labyrinth.

I applied myself only to the relief and to the details of the images that came forth from the great darkness of the human body. I adopted them then and there as the documentary scenes of another kingdom.

That is why this film, which has only one style, that, for example, of the bearing or the gestures of a man, presents many surfaces for its exegesis. Its exegeses were innumerable. If I were questioned about any one of them, I would have trouble in answering.

My relationship with the work was like that of a cabinetmaker who puts together the pieces of a table whom the spiritualists, who make the table move, consult.

The Blood of a Poetdraws nothing from either dreams or symbols. As far as the former are concerned, it initiates their mechanism, and by letting the mind relax, as in sleep, it lets memories entwine, move and express themselves freely. As for the latter, it rejects them, and substitutes acts, or allegories of these acts, that the spectator can make symbols of if he wishes.

If this seems to deny my observation about its poetic symbolism, I would argue that it merely proves my point, that he himself he needed to deny the notion, while allowing the viewer to reiterate it in his or her own manner. Surely, his symbols are not standard literary symbols nor even Jungian-like archetypes to be easily assimilated by the culture at large, but are far more of a personal kind, representing images, as he puts it, that “came forth from the great darkness of the human body.”

In fact, this is a seemingly biographical work, containing images of suicide and death likely influenced by the author’s own youth, when in his father committed suicide.

Moreover, his film is a kind of retelling of the Pygmalion myth. The artist (Enrique Rivero, at first wearing a wig that might remind one of the 18^th century, but later peeling it off to reveal a head of dark black hair) is described as a poet, although his poetic acts, in this case, mostly involve painting (an activity in which the multi-talented Cocteau was also involved). Like the great Renaissance artists which the movie invokes, Pisanello, Paolo Uccello and Andrea del Castagno, he becomes a “painter of enigma.”

He first begins to create an image of a male, but quickly rubs it out to create a female image, which, with a knock on the door by a seemingly intrusive friend (Jean Desbordes), and the artist suddenly rubs out the woman’s lips. But in his hurry to do so, he has imprinted them unto his hand, and when he goes to wash off the paint, it begins to bleed, as he discovers that he cannot erase the lips he originally painted.

Although he quickly dispenses with the intruder at his door, he finds that he cannot escape the lips, which quickly attach to a nearby marble frieze, whose arms are missing. Coming alive, the female figure commands that he step into the mirror, clearly a command for him to look into himself and his past. Like Cocteau’s later Orpheus, this half nude artist finds his way into the mirror, discovering himself in a shoddy hotel, where he voyeuristically peers into several keyholes, witnessing a hermaphrodite shifting sexes before his eyes, and opium smoke whose actions are played out with

shadow puppets, a terrified young girl who flies about the room in order to escape her whip-bearing mother, and a man who hands him a gun, explaining how to use it and commanding him to shoot himself; fortunately when the artist does so, he remains alive, or does he?

Finally, he cracks back through the mirror into the present (or is it the past?), since soon after he recalls a snowball fight from his childhood, where several innocent boys fight, until the two school bullies show up, throwing a snowball at a young boy who dies, his body remaining through much of a later scene—until the body is finally consumed (swept into heaven one presumes) by a black guardian angel (Feral Benga)—while a clearly bored woman is playing cards with a man, who, when she wins, commits suicide.

This last scene, at a grand opera was originally filmed with Cocteau’s financial supporters for this work, Vicomte de Noailles and his famed wife, Marie-Laure de Noailles, showing the wealthy donors gossiping with one another during the card-game action on the stage. When the supporters finally realized the ending of the film, they refused to participate, and Cocteau find substitutes, including the female-impersonator Barbette, all which delayed the film for more than a year, and threatened its release, particularly since it was now seen as being religious blasphemous as well.

Like the Pygmalion story, this work is mixed with a terror of the opposite sex, particularly the overwhelming marble bust come to life which insists the virile male be made to observe his own weaknesses, and results in the deaths of the both the child in the man and the player himself. Cocteau was an open homosexual who had sometimes notorious sexual relationships with numerous Parisian poets and actors, including Raymond Radiguet (the young poet-novelist who died of typhus), Jean Desbordes, Marcel Khill, Panama Al Brown, and his long-time lover Jean Marais, the latter of whom performed in several of his films. Unlike Eliza in My Fair Lady, in this version the marble statue come-to-life is shattered and destroyed, a dangerous figure to be shunned.

Finally, one might today even read this work as a kind of “infection” of the male ego of this obviously virile gay “poet” by the world around him. He is killed twice, once by bullying peers and a second time by an uncaring woman set within the context of a dismissive society. Contemporaries of mine might even read this as a kind of ur-myth that was later played out in the AIDS crisis, also a kind of disease of the blood. Who cares about this frail boy, the man losing the game to a bored woman, art patrons who could care less by their own patronage? Let them all die. We don’t want to hear their “dirty” secrets, their frightening observations of their pasts, even while they might create an art that is so “real” that it can truly come to life. Their mirrors, after all, are dangerous to the secrets that we all keep behind closed doors.

Los Angeles, August 31, 2018

the heart of the matter

Stewart Stern (screenplay, based on the fiction by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick), George Englund (director) The Ugly American / 1963

It’s hard to talk about the film version of the William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick fiction of 1958 and the movie of 1963. Everybody seemed to have read the book, along with the Alan Paton novel of a decade earlier, Cry the Beloved Country, as major political texts of the time. Even a much more serious reader, such as I, read both these popular fictions. I became determined in our own time of a truly ugly American in office to revisit both the film and book, placing them in context with the kind of new “ugliness” which Trump has visited upon the office of President and with which he has involved the country.

In retrospect, however, the handsome Harrison MacWhite (an endlessly pipe-smoking Marlon Brando), fighting a conservative Senate confirmation hearing to become ambassador to a non-existent southeast Asian country, Sarkan—the movie was primarily filmed in Hollywood and Thailand, trying to suggest a kind possible Viet Nam reality—hardly appears, at least on the surface as a truly “ugly” American, not only because of his still handsome physical demeanor, supported by his loving wife (the photogenic Sandra Church), but also because this man is an idealist who has spent a great deal of time in Sarkan, getting to know, at least, some of the language, and befriending a major figure in Sarkanese politics, Deong (Japanese actor Eiji Okada). The relationship between MacWhite and Deong, indeed, is so intense, that—even after an intensely threatening arrival, in which he, his wife, and assistants might have been killed—he seeks out and spends the entire night with his long-time “friend,” discovering in the process that his dear friend, what one might suspect as an almost homoerotic attraction, has ordered the protests.

If previously, the intelligent and rather rational ambassador has appeared to be anything but visually or politically “ugly,” he now suddenly appears to sense betrayal and jumps to the conclusion that Deong is a Communist determined in the downfall of American interests.

Unfortunately, the film, directed by George Englund does not make clear MacWhite’s sudden conservative transformation, except for Brando declaring that he had been lied to and was wrong. Moreover, we never quite comprehend why the Ambassador becomes suddenly determined to force the controversial American gift to this country, the “Freedom highway,” into new territory that moves toward its northern borders, threatening long-time racial issues and territorial disputes.

What he, unfortunately, is not able to comprehend is that a people of another country might be simply anti-American because of our country’s blatant disrespect for their own values, language, and politics, without them necessarily having come into the sway of Soviet and Chinese dictates.

The film hints of both alternatives, at one point showing Deong meeting with just such representatives, but at other times having his wife and others muttering that Deong is no Communist. And this is at the heart of the movie’s failure: it simply doesn’t quite show where it stands in the political spectrum. Are the US representatives simply fools who cannot perceive the actual political realities of this country or are they wild idealists who hope in investing on the inter-structure of this world that they will simply be loved and respected

There are some wonderful scenes where the US has brought into the rural area small hospitals which nurse and care for Asian children, providing them, through the existence of the highway, prolonged and better lives. But at same time there is a smug vision in this, presuming that only an intrusion of another culture upon the world they have come to inhabit, can bring meaningful change. And these extremes reveal some of the major concerns of the book as well.

Even the way Brando sucks on his pipe and swaggers his way through scenes in a world about which he is still fairly clueless gives us only vague hints on how you can be a caring man but still appear “ugly” to the culture at large. And, ultimately, it appears his deep friendship with Deong was based more on the liquor they shared that any true and deep inter-relationship, the fact of which MacWhite hints even while he is being interviewed by the truly uncaring Senate committee members.

If we hate the Senate committee interviewees, as we might well feel even today about some similar events, MacWhite, in the end, is also quite clueless in that he cannot comprehend that hate is a far deeper passion that cannot be resolved in a few friendly rounds of homebrewed liquor.

Despite the quite excellent performances by the major cast-members, however, Englund is never able to really put his finger on the substantial problems. Why is Deong so angry and why is the otherwise intelligent and sensitive MacWhite so ignorant of the role he has been asked to play? They seem to walk through this rather melodramatic work without quite knowing why they are behaving as they are, and with no idea why they cannot bring back the bon-vivantfeelings of the old days.

It takes the ironic and intelligent view of someone like Graham Greene in The Quiet American to truly get to the heart of the matter.

Los Angeles, November 11, 2018

going too far

by Douglas Messerli

Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Fumio Hayasaka, Hideo Oguni (screenplay), Akira Kurosawa (director) 生きものの記録(Ikimono no kiroku) (I Live in Fear) / 1955

In many respects Akira Kurosawa’s Ikimono no kiroku (I Live in Fear) is his most Japanese film, simply because it recounts the horrific fear that most Japanese must have suffered during the Cold War of the 1950s, particularly after being the homeland of the only 2 major atomic bombings on ordinary citizens in history. Every character in this complex work does, indeed, have fears of nuclear annihilation (as did numerous citizens around the world; as a child I was one of them).

Yet foundry owner Kiichi Nakajima (the always wonderful Toshiro Mifune) has, as most of his family perceives, gone a bit to far, first attempting to build a nuclear bunker at considerable expense in the south of Japan, but upon discovering information that if there was another bomb the residue would probably move from the north to the south, becomes determined to move his very large and urban family to a large plantation in Brazil.

Almost from the beginning of the film, as the family has gathered in a domestic court to air their grievances—Nakajima’s wife has flinchingly filed, with the help of her sons and daughters, a petition to that court to declare her husband mentally incompetent—and a local dentist, Dr. Harada (Takashi Shimura) has been asked to join two other judges in hearing their case.

It is clearly a highly contentious one, with family members exciting the hearing room to each utter their anger and pronouncements, while inside sits the resolute and stubborn father, flapping his fan endlessly in torture and anger, convinced that is family—including his immediate children and those he has fathered from an illicit relationship, all of whom we gradually come to perceive as a fictious and ungrateful lot, desperate to keep up their own financial support proffered them from this terrified industrialist.

If at first, we might certainly side with the family members, who perceive their father’s concerns, despite their own private fears, as “going too far” and as do two of the judges, through the careful and deep-thinking Dr. Harada we begin to realize just how deeply embedded are his fears in the society at large. Might not everyone, to a certain degree, silently and less explosively, be suffering the same fears? Even Harada’s son admits to such inclinations, but what can one do, he argues.

"Everybody has to die," Nakajima counters, "but I won't be murdered."

Ultimately Harada feels that if this man is indeed cantankerous, a danger for this contentious and selfish family, he is certainly not mentally insane simply to fear the worst, and, after all, it is his money with which to do what he wants.

The careful and caring Harada, in the end, is done in by the angry and impetuous businessman, who attempts to quickly work around the family and their financial restraints which the court eventually applies, by attempting to buy up property in Brazil and force his family to join him. But, his anger, in the end, does him in, and he is left simply as an old man in a kind of fever, ready to die before his time. Even Harada’s attempts to meet and talk with him have been to no avail. The fear, in which he lives, dominates everything else.

He is not even willing to discuss how this deathly “anxiety,” which poet W. H. Auden described a problem of the decade in his phrase “The Age of Anxiety,” has come about. Had he witnessed or imagined the Hiroshima or Nagasaki attacks? Or had he simply worried so much about his own country’s history that, despite his great financial success—working as, strangely enough, a kind of Hephaestus, a forger of war in the underground—he has become obsessed with nuclear destruction? If his family members are petty and selfish, so too has he himself been in his various affairs and business activities. Are his feelings of absolute terror a result of his own terrorizing of others, his absolute control over his sons and daughters?

In the end, I realized this film was far more Western and international in its subjects than merely representing a post-war Japanese statement of angst. It reminded me more than any other film of Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterful The Sacrifice, a movie wherein another family leader, terrifyingly fearful of nuclear war, is equally committed to saving his family and his society from the inevitable, in this case by burning down the house which he and his contentious family so loved. Nakajima also burns down his own “house,” so to speak, in destroying his factory, leaving not only his family but his loyal employees without any possible means of survival.

Perhaps in the process his has destroyed his own past connections with the capitalism that made nuclear warfare possible, or perhaps, just as in Tarkovsky’s films, it simply represents those acts of a kind of madness, of a man who has “gone too far” in his own thinking to retreat into rationality, the possibility of which composer Fumio Hayasaka (who died shortly after composing the music for this film, and a man who created some of the greatest of movie music through the years) eerily conveys through his combination of jazz music and Theremin.

Los Angeles, September 14, 2018

a sad vortex into the american heart of evil

by Douglas Messserli

Joan Tewkesbury (script), Robert Altman (director) Nashville / 1975

Maybe it’s just because as I get older epic-like complex plots seem basically uninteresting to me; but I think even the director of Nashville, Robert Altman didn’t quite know what the plot of his film was. With a cast of hundreds, its twists and turns in story don’t truly matter; what does matter are the various ways in which his characters seek either love (save for a few, nearly everyone in this work jumps in and out of numerous beds) or success (in music or politics). Very few of these silly folks from the city of Nashville find either, or if they have performed at the famed Grand Ole Opry, don’t appear to be very happy about what they have attained.

Indeed, singer Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) would rather be in politics, while the popular singer Barbara Jean(Ronee Blakley) has just suffered a burn accident—apparently related to what her husbandBarnett (Allen Garfield) later describes as “nervous breakdown.” The trio of Bill(Allan F. Nicholls), Mary (Cristina Raines), and Tom (Keith Carradine) (a satirical take on Peter, Paul, and Mary) are so confused in their love for one another that it might be better if they all fell into bed into a good-fashioned threesome.

White gospel singer who performs with all black choruses (another of Altman’s hilarious satirical jabs) Linnea Reese (a wonderful Lily Tomlin) would clearly rather be at home with her two deaf children (as if one were not enough) giving them her love, but since her husband Delbert (Ned

Beatty) is busy running Hal Philip Walker’s campaign in Tennessee and is lawyer for Hamilton, she finds herself instead in bed with Tom, who, the moment she rises from love-making, is on the phone to find another woman for the night. Singer Lady Pearl (Barbara Baxley), dedicated to the dead Kennedys, is mostly drunk throughout.

Naïve Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles), like a country version of Florence Foster Jenkins, hasn’t a clue that she can’t sing, and is forced to strip so that she might get the opportunity to perform with Haven Hamilton and Barbara Jean at a political fund-raiser at Nashville’s The Parthenon, which her airport cook friend, Wade Cooley (Robert DoQui) warns her against with his honest assessment that

she can’t carry a tune. Celebrity seeking teenager Martha, now LA Joan (Shelley Duvall) just wants to get close to any of these famous folks and probably into their beds as well, although she is supposed to be seeing her dying aunt. And only God knows what BBC correspondent Opal (Geraldine Chaplin) is doing in this film, randomly interviewing some of the figures and wandering in and out of junk yards and school bus-lots.

Nor do we have a clue why low-three-wheel bike rider (Jeff Goldblum) is tooling around town, or why the nice-looking, mother-loving Viet Nam veteran, Pfc. Glenn Kelly (Scott Glenn) has come to Nashville, supposedly in admiration of his dead mother’s appreciation of Barbara Jean. Or why Elliott Gould, Julie Christie, and Howard K. Smith show up to play themselves. While we see all these figures and numerous others, we never even get a glimpse of the would-be president, running on the Replacement Party ticket—in an eerie prescience of the Tea Party and its later manifestations.

But perhaps we have since spotted him and the disasters he threated (although Altman and writer Joan Tewkesbury’s candidate seems far more liberally or, at least, Libertarian- oriented than our current “outsider” President).

If anything, this Altman masterwork shows us just how crazy we USA citizens are as a people for whom desire plays the major roles in our lives. And the film, in the end, in its vast expression of those facts cooks up, finally, to be a kind insanely messy stew. But also there is a kind a sanity, which appears in several scenes throughout the film through its gentle and reassuring music, much of it by cast-members themselves—Keith Carradine’s “I’m Easy” and “Honey; Ronee Blakley’s “Bluebird,”“Tapedeck in His Tractor (The Cowboy Song),” “My Idaho Home,” “Down to the River,” “One I Love You,” and “Dues”; Henry Gibson’s (with Richard Baskin) “Keep A-Goin'” and “200 Years”: Karen Black’s (yes, she too stars in this movie) “Memphis” “I Don’t Know If I Found It in You,” and “Rolling Stone”; and Lily Tomlin’s lyrics for Richard Baskin’s music to “Yes, I Do.” Apparently, Altman required all of his major actors to compose as well as sing. Has there ever been a musical motion picture that has asked so much of its actors? Or, perhaps, looked at differently, that has given them so much opportunity for expression?

We know that when you have opened the pulsing heart of USA values, it will inevitably end in some kind of violence. Here, music itself turns against its performers, as loner Kenny Frasier (David Hayward) opens his violin case to take out a gun and shoot down Haven Hamilton and Barbara Jean. We can’t even quite imagine his motive in the shooting, just as it is so difficult to imagine hundreds of shootings throughout the USA each year.

But, finally, Altman pulls off a miracle by transforming the tragic-stricken audience as miraculously being given the opportunity, as Hamilton passes off the microphone to the shy, wannabe musician Winifred who has changed her name to Albuquerque (the always amazing Barbara Harris), who slowly settles in, Streisand style, to Keith Carradine’s “It Don’t Worry Me.” The song might almost be seen as a statement of so many poor American’s slavery to the system; but she slowly transforms some of the saddest lyrics of US existence, “Tax relief may never come,” “The economy may be depressed,” “You may say that I ain’t free,” etc, each stanza followed by “It don’t worry me.” “Life may be a one-way street,” “But it don’t worry me.” Somehow Harris turns this kind of “Trumpland” song into a kind of anthem of survival, a choral statement that whips up the shocked audience into a kind of delusional sense of possibilities simply by tuning out of the problems of their life

In retrospect, Altman’s satiric ending and Carradine’s nihilistic lyrics become almost a mirror to the pit of American horror, while at the same time restating the resilience of the American poor and middle class. It’s a painful if slightly ending to this bitter presentation of the greed and the endless chase of its characters for something that will never make them happy. Sex, success, celebrity and the implied money that goes along with this has not satisfied a single figure in what is not really a comedy, but a sad vortex into the American heart of evil.

Los Angeles, September 20, 2018

the click of a door

by Douglas Messerli

Neil Simon (screenplay, based on his 1968 play), Arthur Hiller (director) Plaza Suite / 1971

I’ve yet to find one film source or guide that has not described the three short plays by Neil Simon written under the name Plaza Suite as comedies. Perhaps it’s just the times or my current age, but this time returning to these pieces I saw the first two, at least, as sad tales of marriage and sex. Despite the fact that Simon, once again, in this work peppers his script with one-line zingers, only the last piece might truly fit the category, to my way of thinking, of comedy, ending happily with the marriage of a young woman terrified of the ceremony in which she must play the bride.

In may be, in part, that despite the loud-mouthed, angry-old-man antics of actor Walter Matthau, he has no ability for nuance; Simon, it is rumored, hated the acting in this film in general, particularly Matthau. Or perhaps it is just that director Arthur Hiller (who died in August 2016), despite the numerous comic films he churned out in his career, is not truly a director with a light touch. But, more importantly, it is the series of events that the first two playlets that seem to me so very sad and reveal, along with the third work, a kind a cynicism of married life that is embedded in nearly all of Simon’s plays, including even early more comic works such as Come Blow Your Horn, Barefoot in the Park, and The Odd Couple.

Although I’ve never been a big fan of Simon’s works, this one, in its somewhat bitter dimensions seems to have more heft than his comic recordings of squabbling couples.

If you’ve never seen this triplet offering, all three pieces take place in the same room, 719 of the Plaza Hotel, a hotel which almost didn’t survive a transformation of its building into a condominium reconstruction—which already in 1971 the seemingly prescient Simon script wondered whether, in its aged elegance, it might be torn down.

In the first piece, Karen Nash (the always marvelous Maureen Stapleton, who played all 3 women of this work on the Broadway stage) has traveled from her suburban home to the Plaza, planning to meet her husband Sam there to commemorate their 24th anniversary in the very suite in which they celebrated their wedding night. Stapleton, who in the script is supposed to be around 48 or 49 was actually 46 at the time of filming (which is funny given Sam’s comment that when she forgets her age she always rounds it up, not down like other women); yet she looks older and speaks more like she were woman in her late 60s, probably because then, old age was defined as arriving earlier that it currently is in those decades. In any event, she has clearly lost her youth, and carries herself like an older woman, wearing plastic galoshes over her shoes, and walking with a definite death-leaning slump.

Her husband has clearly been missing in action for a long while, spending more and more nights in the city because of his work, and she hopes that this celebratory evening might even ignite new interest in their relationship. There is something wonderfully innocent in her desires, as she chattily explains to bellhops why she is at the hotel and why she is now inhabiting this particular room, as orders up the same meal, hour'dourves (without anchovies; in Simonian logic they eventually appear with anchovies) and a French white wine (which with Simonian logic arrives late).

When Sam finally arrives, he is, presumably as he has been many a night, in a huff, determined to read through a contract between busy calls to his secretary Miss McCormack (Louise Sorel). Obviously, he hasn’t a clue why his wife has trekked into the city to meet him in the city, nor in any mood, even when she explains the occasion, to take joy in her company. They argue about everything from her birthdate, the floor on which they spent their wedding night together—he claims it was the 8^thfloor—and even the number of nights he has gone missing from his suburban home.

Despite her plucky determination to offer up a beautiful evening to Sam, moreover, it becomes clear that she also has a barbed tongue and, in her pain over the failure of their relationship, is equal to his dismissals of her, mocking Sam’s attempts to think himself thin and his naturally cranky behavior. At moments, they both attempt to stop the endless bickering, but always it begins again almost immediately, as the two clearly have lost touch with any of the love they might once have shared.

When the secretary finally does show up with a set of botched papers, which means, of course, that we will have to return to the office, Karen finally pleads with him to stay and almost jokingly—but obviously with deeper inner fears—claims he might be having an affair with Miss McCormack.

We have only to wait a few dramatic beats to hear him admit the truth, that he is having an affair with her and, despite his attempts, has no will to cut it off. Clearly always ready to play the victim, Karen suggests she is willing to forgive him, but her pleas that he might give their own relationship another try goes unheeded, and he walks out the door, leaving her to imagine the loss of her husband for the rest of her life.

Our final view of her might almost be out of her early film Miss Lonelyhearts, with overnight case in hand, trudging back the next morning to the train that will take her back to her empty house. If this is not tragic—even she excoriates her husband for the banality of his love interest, secretary and boss—certainly Hiller did not intend us to laugh.

The reason I returned to this rather insubstantial film was because of the second playlet which stars Barbara Harris (who died on August 21^st of this year; Simon dying five days later), in which another suburban housewife (Muriel Tate) drives into the city to meet up with a former beau,Jesse Kiplinger (again Matthau), who is now a successful Hollywood producer.

Muriel is a sort of less-wealthy housewife who might be right out of Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Company, which appeared only 2 years after the Broadway premiere of the Simon play, where the women who lunch order up another “vodka stinger.” Indeed, despite her best intentions, Muriel is quite delighted by Jesse’s clear attempts to get her into bed; and while endlessly saying, like Groucho Marx, “I must be going,” she is both attracted to the “stingers” and the possibilities of sex.

Like nearly all male seducers, once Jesse has lured Muriel back into his room for yet another round of drinks, he clicks the lock of the door shut. But in doing so, Simon, at least in the #MeToo generation, sucks any possible comic oxygen out of his work, leaving us with a kind of bitter Don Giovanni-like rape. If Muriel has another sexual round with Jesse—we never see the final conclusion of his sexual actions, but we presume it—we are certain that it will be quite uneventful for both; even if they did once, as kids, have great sex, they are no longer children and—as our nearly inarticulate President spoke the other night—the “lingering stench” of their now middle-aged bodies won’t be pleasant.

What is pleasant in this short piece is the kind of “ditzy” performance by Harris, who balances her horror of the event with her absolute delight in the fact that, given the unspoken sexual failure of her husband Larry, someone might still find her attractive. She’s ready from the start, despite her assertions, to drink herself into oblivion in order to submit, very gradually, into a salve of temporary pleasure—constantly postponing the time she must be home from 3:00 o’clock, to 4:00, and finally to 7:00 to allow herself the latitude for one last jump back into adolescent romance. She and we know, Muriel will face only utter disappointment, and that the next time Jesse is in town, she will also demur. But for Muriel it is a temporary ointment to the disappointments of her life.

If this slow dance of rape is funny, I must be missing something. It is now among the sad stories we daily hear about women, young and older, being trapped by power, fear, and sublimated desire.

The last piece of this not-so-funny comic opera might well rhyme with the central character of the piece (although never fully seen except for a couple of quick camera flicks), with the strangely waspish name—particularly given the overly stereotypical Jewish portrait of her not-so-loving parents—Mimsey (Jenny Sullivan)—“flimsy.”

Here, as in both the previous plays, a door suddenly clicks into a lock as the young would-be-bride closes herself into the bathroom of the same hotel suite, perhaps the only way to truly escape that claustrophobic suite with its mean history and her parents, equally hysteric (the male in Matthau’s case is the primary example of that word) and money-oriented life. Roy Hubley, after all, is paying for a highly expensive wedding which his daughter is refusing to attend; and his wife Norma (Lee Grant) is about to lose “face” and be treated with further abuse from her husband.

At the heart of this sillier pieces are numerous pratfalls, torn tuxedos, rained-upon head-wear finery, ridiculous treks across the outer ledges of the famed hotel, along with entries into other people’s bedrooms and endless calls from the panicked parents of the groom who must face the growing impatience of the wedding-goers.

So weak is this playlet, that all it takes is the rather chubby, long-haired groom Borden Eisler (Thomas Carey) to stand outside the locked-away Rapunzel and shout, “Mimsey, cool it,” and out she comes, ready to ride away on his motor-bike. Well, this, finally, is comedy, as empty as it can get, like an after-thought of the deeply disturbing betrayals we have previously witnessed. I suppose I might even have laughed—except that I am afraid that Mimsey can’t “cool it,” given her horrific childhood, for long. Someday, far too soon, she will trek back into the city to see the empty shell of her dreams.

Los Angeles, September 23, 2018

straightening up the quare

by Douglas Messerli

Arthur Dreifuss and Jacqueline Sundstrom (screenplay, based on the play by Brendan Behan), Arthur Dreifuss (director) The Quare Fellow / 1962

I have wanting to see the film version of Brendan Behan’s first play, The Quare Fellow for many years now, and finally ordered it through my subscription through Netflix. In part, I wanted to catch a glimpse, at least, of a play by a writer of the 1950s at a time of my extensive theater readings of Ionesco, Pinter, and Albee, whom I had failed to read. I suppose to my young 14-16 year-old mind, a drunken Irishman, no matter how good a writer, was simply not of interest to me. How little did I know!

Accordingly, I was delighted to finally have the opportunity to make amends. Unfortunately, the film version, directed by the grade-B Hollywood German-born director, Arthur Dreifuss, never quite gave me the opportunity to experience Behan’s dark, gallows-humor work.

The first act, which in the play was mostly outside of the prison, was quickly moved within so that prisoners could release their tensions through song and complaint as the new “screw” (prison overseer) arrives. Patrick McGoohan as the well-meaning rustic new prison guard Crimmin is quite excellent in his innocent eagerness to learn and in expressing his in-born sensitivity, despite his seeming ignorance of the brutal world in which he has just entered.

Fortunately, he has Regan (Walker Macken) as a seasoned guide to help him find his way. Although Crimmin believes firmly in the criminal system, Regan, who has served in the prison for many years, has a much more skeptical view of the entire system, particularly since there are now two “quare fellows” (queer men, men outside of the normal prison population) who are about to be executed, and Regan has seen far too man executions in his service.

In the play, Behan uses this first act, removed basically from the inner workings of prison life to help break down Crimmin’s naivete through the dark humor that characterizes much of his writing. By quickly jumping into the prison itself (realistic as it is: it was filmed in the real County Wicklow prison), we lose the objectivity that Crimmin must later come to, and the real horror of a system (much like that still in US prisons today) which still consider it permissible to kill certain prisoners, including one of the “quare fellows,” named as the silver-caned murderer, who, it appears, is actually a “gay” Wildean kind of man (not made evident in this film production), whose actual crime we never discover; one must recall, however, being gay was still a punishable offence in these days. It hardly seems to matter, since his punishment is stayed; yet, despite that fact he soon after he hangs himself, the fact of which perhaps says more than even his terrible punishment.

The other “quare fellow,” whose crime in the original play was also very vaguely presented, in this production we discover, has murdered his brother. And this is where the well-intentioned film really begins to unravel, moving to a kind of social documentation against capital punishment.

In its determined attempt to decry that terrible reality, Dreifuss’s and Jacqueline Sundstrom’s script, widely swinging away from Behan’s far subtler dramatization, introduces the other “quare fellow’s” wife (Sylvia Syms), who resides in the same boarding house as Crimmin, and gradually convinces him that her affair with her husband’s brother is behind the fraternal murder committed by her husband, who refused to mention the affair during proceedings in an attempt to protect her from being described as a “whore” In short, what was a story of male intrigue and governmental suspicion is turned in this director’s vision to a kind of melodrama about heterosexual jealousy and revenge, giving the comic and far darker elements of Behan’s play an almost melodramatic flair, in which she

and Crimmin attempt to save the day—without success. The drama of this film is entirely centered upon the events concerning the possibilities of saving her murderous husband, which we already know, given the dismissals and snobbery of the authorities will never happen.

There are some excellent moments in this film: particularly when two seasoned criminals drink down the rubbing alcohol that Crimmins is trying to administer to their knees. And the interchanges between Syms (as Kathleen) and Crimmins almost incriminates him in having a secret boarding-house affair, which, of course, transforms the innocent rube from the West coast into a kind of willing participant in witness tampering.

Generally, the acting, particularly by McGoohan and Macken is credible, and some of the moodily expressionistic cinematic images are quite arresting. But this is clearly not the Irish masterpiece of dark prison humor and suffering that the playwright intended it to be.

Although the movie received, in its day, general acclaim, Dreifuss, after, went back to grade B Hollywood films such as Life Begins at 17 (1958) and Juke Box Rhythm (1959). Too bad that the great Joan Littlewood, the original director (who died in 2002) wasn’t allowed to transfer this film onto screen.

Los Angeles, September 29, 2018

stalking death

by Douglas Messerli

Jean-Pierre Melville (screenplay, adapted from a novel by José Giovanni, and director)Le deuxième souffle / 1966

Anyone who has seen a film by Jean-Pierre Melville knows that the director is fascinated with crime and the societal outsider. Several of his films not only attend to the plans for robberies and heists but focus on the often brutal elements of such events. In the hands of a lesser gifted director one would perhaps not be able to feel any empathy for these outsider villains, their lovers and families. Yet in Melville’s works, if we do not exactly root for the murderers and thieves, we are nonetheless fascinated by their mindsets and the dangers they undergo.

The film begins with Gustave “Gu” Minda (Lino Ventura) making a daring prison escape with two others. The youngest and most handsome of the trio easily jumps from a tower across empty space to wall, to which he attaches a rope. The second follows allowing the first to, presumably, make his way down on the other side. Finally, it is Gu’s turn, but seeing already how dangerous it was even for these younger, thinner men, we truly wonder whether Gu is up to the leap, and it appears he too has second thoughts. He almost does fall, but is pulled up by his friend to safety, and both scramble down the rope, at the bottom of which they discover the first man dead, evidently having fallen on his way down or during the arrival of the second. Suddenly, we perceive this elder, the “hero” of our story, has, in fact, gotten his second breath, with the opportunity of now creating a new life.

But we soon discover just how impossible that will be, again expressed visually when Gu, following his cohort, can just barely leap on the slowly moving train that will carry the two survivors away.

Clearly Gu has been a quite successful thief, since his sister in Paris,Manouche (Christine Fabréga), who runs a rather expensive small restaurant, lives in a rather luxurious mansion. And it is clear, since she maintains a body guard, Alban (Michel Constantin), that she too has been involved in the so-called family “business.”

Melville does not use dialogue to tell us any of these things. In fact, there is not word spoken for the first several scenes of the film. But in his attention to detail we are told a story far richer that any dialogue might have revealed. We are not even surprised when Manouche later confirms our suspicions that she is also a kind of thief, and is ready to run off with her brother, with whom, —again without language—we recognize, that she has an incestuous-like relationship.

The first real sentence of this film is a date and time, evidently when a bar-keeper in Marseilles,

Jo Ricci (Marcel Bozzuffi) is planning his own heist. Ricci, we soon discover (again without verbal confirmation) must have been crossed by Gu, since his henchman and two goons soon show up to Manouche’s restaurant, killing her manager and lover, Jacques. Alban, who also works as the bartender, quickly pulls out a gun and shoots down the henchman, with the other two soon after showing up at Manouche’s house, evidently attempting to force her to pay a great deal of money for her survival. Gu, who has come there to seek asylum, saves the day; taking both the goons for a country drive in which he shoots them to death, his signature method of killing.

Nearly everyone in this “underworld” is almost mute, even Ricci dancers, long cigarette holders in their mouths sing nothing, although you can almost hear them counting out their routine maneuvers under their breaths.

It is only the police, in particular Commissaire Blot (Paul Meurisse), who speak in full paragraphs. Arriving at the scene of the murder Blot questions Manouche, Alban, and the other workers (the patrons having all run off), and when they refuse to speak ends up giving each them sarcastic alibis. It’s clear he knows these criminals far too well.

The plot, which is always complex in Melville films, hardly needs repeating; we know from the start in the film that it will involve a three-way showdown between Gu, Blot, and Ricci; and that there will be the inevitable heist, in this case to tide over Gu and his sister upon their escape to another country.

We hardly need the heavy-handed summaries of the various policemen to piece together the intricacies of story. The director simply counts down the hours through intertitles with the month and day, as we move from the late October of the first scenes through the end of the year and into January, when Gu, now involved somewhat inexplicably with Ricci’s brother, plans to rob a truck filled with platinum bars.

Ultimately, of course, the police do hunt down the two leaders, Gu and Paul Ricci, physically torturing and manipulating Gu into a vague admission.

In a kind of “third” breath, Gu escapes from a hospital to capture the Marseilles inspector and his assistant, forcing them to write out a letter of expunction before doing away with them in his usual manner.

By the time Commissaire Blot has arrived from Paris, there has been a final shootout between the robbers and their associate, Orloff, resulting in all their deaths. Discovering the letter confessing that Gu had no hand in their betrayals, the world-weary police head simply tosses it at the feet of a nearby journalist, as if it might stand as another kind of silent testament to the murderous criminal.

Words, in short, are nearly meaningless in this world. And that is the problem. When these men think, they do not speak, do not attempt reason out their ideas through language, but simply act, immediately and impulsively, sometimes simply circling in their actions as when Gu, prepared to make a hit on Gucci’s place, tells Alban to circle three times before he finally determines that something is not right.

Death, accordingly is always a step ahead or behind them since they have no concept of talking themselves out of inevitability. If the cliché of death being the “silent stalker” makes any sense, one might argue that in Melville’s film these men are the silent stalkers of death. And in their mute dance with death there is a strange kind of nobility.

We are asked not to judge the actions of either the criminals of this film nor those who mete out the justice. This is, as Melville makes clear, simply a fiction. Yet, I would argue, in his deep attention to details, it is a fiction to which we can only give credence.

Los Angeles, October 1, 2018

an act of disappearance

by Douglas Messerli

Toshiro Ide (screenplay, based on the novel by Fumiko Hayashi), Mikio Naruse (director) 妻 (Tsuma) (Wife) / 1953

The masterful Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse often deals with women at the edges of society— geishas, women trapped in abusive relationships—and with men married to their jobs and feeling frustrated with their lives.

His 1953 film, Wife contains all of these elements and more in its exploration of an unhappy couple, an everyday worker Nakagaa Toichi (Uehara Ken) and Toichi’s wife Mineko (Takamine Mieko). Their marriage is gradually deteriorating, Mineko being forced to do home sewing and renting out rooms to make ends meet. Toichi is clearly unhappy with both his low-paying job and his unhappy marriage, while Mineko has sacrificed nearly everything to being, as the film’s title emphasizes, a “wife,” which in this case means, given Naruse’s direction, a near endless prostration while serving and removing food, sewing, and, most importantly, accepting her husband’s silence and, later, his brief affair with a former secretary Fusako Sawara (Tanami Yatsuko)—the most banal of extra-marital relationships.

What’s made clear, although very subtly expressed, is that Mineko is the better business-person of the two (she does double-work as a household servant and a piecemeal sewer as well as renting out three rooms), and if only Toichi could allow her more possibilities—even an occasional movie which he attends with his secretary, or a dinner in a café where one of her renters works as a kind of geisha—their relationship might be restored. But theirs is a totally traditional Japanese marriage, wherein the wife has no role but to serve her husband, that permits no opening up of the very boundaries which also have caused Toichi to lose interest in his wife.

The other alternative, represented by two of her tenants, a husband and wife (the wife working at night as the geisha mentioned above), would be to simply separate, allowing both to live fuller lives. But, the second, obviously, given the mindsets of both Toichi and Mineko are totally inconceivable.

Mineko also rents to an artist, a single man frustrated by the lack of women in his life, but nonetheless a creative being who offers some small consolation to Mineko’s loneliness. And an independent woman friend, Sakurai Setsuko (Takasugi Sanae), who visits Mineko’s husband at his office. She also later rents out to a woman being kept by a wealthy industrialist, a kept-woman.

As film critic Brad Stevens has written, Naruse curtails nearly all of Mineko’s movements to the outer edges of the frame, even snipping out her few travels in space outside of the house:

Naruse’s meticulously organised patterns of imagery make it clear that the husband enjoys freedoms which, however compromised, are inaccessible to his spouse, even enabling him to have an affair with co-worker FusakoSawara (Tanami Yatsuko). For most of the running time, camera movements (aside from a handful of minor reframings) are motivated by the husband, the most significant exception being a shot in which Mineko’s independent female friend…visits Toichi in his office, her passage from one end of this small room to another being followed by Naruse’s camera.

For the most part, such stylistic assertion of agency is unavailable to Mineko; as she walks around the house, her activities are observed by a stationary camera, and when she exits a shot, she is rarely granted enough liberty to pass through the edges of the frame, instead disappearing behind partitions located at the edges of the screen. When Mineko visits friends or relatives, Naruse usually cuts from one location to another, eliminating her journey in its entirety. It is only ten minutes from the film’s end, when Mineko decides to take decisive action by confronting her husband’s lover, that camera movements are determined by her.

Even if Toichi is also trapped in his loveless marriage, he, at least, has methods of transportation, by train, automobile, and bus, to take him away and apart from his claustrophobic relationship.

With his boss Toichi travels out of Tokyo and meets up, later, with his former secretary in Osaka. Mineko is more like a prisoner, allowed out only to get groceries and other necessary items. Whereas in most of Naruse’s films the women, even if unhappy and maltreated, move in the geisha and other worlds freely and openly, the wife, in this case, is chained to her dinner table which he transforms on evenings to a sweatshop workplace. Her only contact with the outside world is through her boarders, who, together, do not represent a totally healthy picture of the larger society.

If, finally, Mineko is determined to and successful in stopping her husband’s affair with Sawara, the couple simply return to their unhappy conventionality. There is no escape for this determinedly heterosexual couple, who cannot even live out their traditional sexual values. By film’s end, we realize the “wife” will never become anything else, just as the “husband” will never be able to fulfill his desires sexually or as a worker, a theme explored that same year in another film by Naruse.

Naruse might almost have described his excellent film No Exit, the play by Jean-Paul Sartre which premiered just 9 years earlier. In short, if the geisha and kept-women of Naruse’s world were abysmally treated, the role “wife” was even more demeaning in post-war Japan. At least the geisha, even at an age beyond her beauty, might still climb the stairs to some sense of possibility; the wife of Japanese culture basically was an act of disappearance.

Los Angeles, October 2, 2018

the kindness of strangers

by Douglas Messerli

Aki Kaurismäki (writer and director) Mies vailla menneisyyttä (The Man Without a Past) / 2002

It’s a wide generalization, but I’d argue that most comedies these days are not all that naturally funny. Their humor derives, often, from a kind of maniacal series of events which reveal the absurdity of life along with the bad-boy and bad-girl behaviors of their characters.

Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki (who often writes, directs, and produces his own films), although entirely contemporary in his stories, seems more like a director out of another era, a bit like Pierre Etaix, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tatti, and even Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, whose films feature sad clowns, men and women who do not even perceive their lives as somewhat tragic but who simply suffer the “slings and arrows” which they almost expect to daily survive. It is only the viewer who perceives their suffering as beyond the normal, which reduces their lives to something that is painfully laughable from our presumably happier perspectives. And like those great comedic directors, Kaurismäki’s heroes are made more loveable by their unknowing recognition that they might be contemporary Jonahs.

Indeed, you might almost say that the hero of the now-fifth film I’ve seen of this director, The Man Without a Past, might be truly said to have been swallowed up in the wail (if not whale) of uncaring contemporary society. M (Markku Peltola), perhaps a reference to his identity as “man” but surely not without the overtones of Fritz Lang’s child murderer, has arrived in a city (evidently Helsinki) with only one bag. He clearly is at the end of existence, with nowhere to go and utterly exhausted: he falls to sleep immediately upon arrival on a park bench.

Lest you think that the highly touted Scandinavian-Finnish society is filled only with wealth and kindness, Kaurismäki immediately introduces us to three local thugs (Clark Coolidge and I were threatened by just such figures on our one night in Helsinki, and I encountered other versions of Finnish brutes in Estonia as well), who immediately beat the sleeping visitor, rob him of any money he has in his billfold and steal most of the useable contents of his baggage before again beating him with a bat into near-death amnesia.

M wakes up in a hospital, having been already pronounced brain-dead by the doctor, and inexplicably detaches himself from his life-saving tubes, staggering away, collapsing at the edge of a small body of water where, nearby, poor Helsinkians have been forced to seek residences in cargo containers.

Two young brothers find him and carefully bring him “home,” where, despite their own destitution their gentle father and caring mother shares their simple means of gruel, onions, and rice with the stranger, forcing the food into his mouth, cleaning his bandages, and gradually restoring him to “health.”

Like these outsiders, the sad-sack visitor, now must face a society that demands identification and history in order to even help with aid and public support. A man with no memory has no place in this well-run near-socialist society.

Yet M, finding a kind of “landlord” willing to rent him a nearby container in which to live—although threatening him with a brutal dog attack if he doesn’t pay up—he calmly cleans, turning this squalid space into what almost appears a true home.

Finding a job is almost impossible, but the good services of the Salvation Army, which provides these poor folks with regular meals, and the kindness of the hard-faced Irma (Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen) eventually leads to a job and, gradually to love, at the heart of every film of this director.

There is a kind of understated respect for each other in Kaurismäki’s films that his suffering characters award to one another that provides his films with their dignity and uplifting view of human life. The Man without a Past, in is simple representation of what it truly means to be dependent on “the kindness of strangers,” is so powerful that it frees us to find joy and laughter in M and Irma’s lives (she survives the demanding sacrifices of her daily job only by listening each evening to a heavy dose of rock’n roll), which is up-ended by a seemingly more destructive discovery of actually who, the now lost and found again, M actually is, as his wife contacts him after seeing his picture in a newspaper.

Fortunately, the wife has now found a new lover, and can only remind our forgetful hero that he lost all of his long-playing records on gambling debts. Her current lover is ready to defend his territory, but the always gentle giant, who incidentally has taken in the supposedly mean watchdog as a pet, is happy to give his old life up. After all, he now has his “doll” (as in the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls), the Salvation Army worker who, we know, will happily redeem herself and her new lover’s life.

In Kaurismäki’s pictures, nothing happens with great drama. The possibility of escaping the harsh worlds which the characters face, is so gradually revealed that neither they or we actually see it coming. It just naturally—an important word in this director’s films—comes to be through the humanity of all the work’s figures, both good and bad.

What this Finnish director’s films seem to make clear is that no matter how impossible the world seems to be—with soldiers chasing after you, machines and automobiles working against you, love constantly alluding you, the money you once had having completely disappeared—life is still redeemable; the human spirit is always capable of making something amazing come to be. It’s a comic possibility that we all pray for, dream of, imagine for ourselves. Perhaps Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois, in her desperate need to be love, was on to something: sometimes, even in the brutal context of a devastatingly bad life, you can, in fact, depend upon the kindness of strangers. Certainly, I have, as has every single character in Kaurismäki’s caring oeuvre.

Los Angeles, October 6, 2018

behind the mask

by Douglas Messerli

Yoko Mizuki (screenplay, based on the novel by Yasunari Kawabata), Mikio Naruse (director)(山の音Yama no Oto) (Sound of the Mountain) / 1954

It is somewhat surprising that a Japanese film—based on a novel by Nobel-Prize winning Yasunari Kawabata— made in the early 1950s, seems almost ripped out of the contemporary headlines. If Naruse’s film, in some respects, seems superficially tame, almost slightly “embalmed,” as film-critic Keith Uhlich describes it, some of those reactions emanate simply from the style: the realist settings of the picture (Naruse filmed on sets built to look like Kawabata’s own neighborhood) and his use of almost post-card-like vignettes, each framed with a slightly slow fade-out that suggests a further sense of nostalgia, as in Vincente Minelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis.

Even more importantly, in this male-dominated Japanese cultural moment, the major figure of the film, Kikuko Ogata (Setsuko Hara), who has evidently replaced the maid in her in-law’s household, seems ecstatic as she goes about her daily duties of shopping, cooking, and cleaning while in near-servitude to her family. The slightly hidden incestuous-like relationship with her kind and caring father-in-law, Shingo Ogata (Sō Yamamura), also dampens some of the emotional resonance of the movie. How can this woman be so seemingly joyful in her situation, we can only ask?

Yet this is hardly a valentine to the central Japanese values of the day. Shingo’s daughter Fusako (Chieko Nakakita) soon returns home with her two children unhappy with her relationship with her husband, and later, after returning to her marriage, escaping it once more to live temporarily with others before again moving back in with her mother and father. Fusako’s timid daughter seems emotionally scarred.

Even more disturbingly, Shingo’s main ally, Kikuko—his wife is a rather sharp-tongued complainer, who noisily snores each night—is equally unhappy in her own marriage to his son Shuuichi (Ken Uehara), a kind of spoiled drunk (in a manner very similar to what has been ascribed to the younger Supreme Court Judge, Brett Kavanaugh) who works for his father, and is witnessed by the older man as meeting several nights each week with his secretary. When he does return home, late most evenings, he is drunk and dismissive of his wife, continually referring to her as childish and ignoring any attempts she devotedly makes to please him.

What Naruse, working outside of many Hollywood conventions, doesn’t reveal is that inside her emotions are, as Uhlich characterizes them, “roiling and bubbling,” as if a volcano might lie within the mountain of the title, emotions sensed by Shingo—particularly since he is now confronted with his past disinterest in his daughter’s marriage—discovering from the secretary that his son also has another extra-marital affair, this, it is hinted, with a singer who has a lesbian relationship with her roommate, the two of whom in their evenings with Shuuichi, alternate musical interludes, hinting that they both share in his sexual activities. Welcome to the Kanagawa Prefecture of the late 1940s!

Ultimately, Shingo attempts to visit his son’s “other” lovers, but, at the last moment, refuses to encounter them. After all, as a younger man, he too apparently had had affairs. This is, Kawabata and Naruse remind us, a patriarchal society. Yet he is determined to protect his daughter-in-law at all costs by, at least, keeping his son’s philandering quiet.

What he doesn’t know is that Kikuko is aware of his husband’s sexual alliances and his alcoholic dalliances. The final scene of this sad film takes place on a park path where Kikuko admits to Shingo that she has had an abortion, unwilling to raise a son from the man who has fallen out of love with her; and, perhaps, we suspect, afraid that the son might be too much like his cruel father, a man clearly fascinated with and who himself hides behind masks.

Only occasionally did Hollywood films of this period attempt such intensive analyses of a family life that has fallen apart. One must recall that Eugene O’Neill’s tragic family drama did not premiere until 1956, in Sweden. This 1954 film, based on the novel serialized from 1949 to the year of the movie, deals with issues that might be seen as already sympathetic with our current #MeToo movement and the continued debates of Roe vs. Wade. Patriarchal society is deeply questioned, and, even though neither father-in-law nor his son’s wife act on their emotions, they have a deeper love and respect for one another than they do for the others by whom they are surrounded; throughout he brings Kikuko home small presents of fish and flowers, almost as if he might be courting her.

If Naruse’s film might appear, at first sight, a little tame, by the time we reach the last frame that safe world has been completely upended, and we are thrust into a world of different values. The characters, in various ways, reveal what might be described in those days as engaging in unnatural sex, struggles for dominance, and parental neglect. O’Neill’s family seems almost Victorian given the goings-on in the Ogata family. It’s little wonder that Naruse himself described this work as one of his favorites.

Los Angeles, November 9, 2018

how to react to hate

by Douglas Messerli

Paul Greengrass (screenplay, based upon the book One of Us by Åsne Seierstad, and director) 22 July / 2018

Reading various reviews of Paul Greengrass’ 2018 Netflix movie, 22 July, you feel the critics had seen two different films. And, strangely enough, there is another film about the events of that horrible day in 2011 when 77 children, some of Norway’s brightest and most promising, were shot to death by the rightist, anti-immigration terrorist Anders Behring Breivik (in this version played by the Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie); Erik Poppe’s U –22, also based onÅsne Seierstad’s One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway—and Its Aftermath, premiered in the same year.

Having not yet seen Poppe’s film, I cannot comment on that work; but even Greengrass’ production seems to have garnered widely varying opinions, some, such as that expressed in Slant and Variety, arguing that, as in his United 93 film, the director dramatized shockingly painful events in an attempt at “blunt moralizing,” while creating characters that seemed one-dimensional.

There is no question that there are elements of righteous indignation in these comments. Certainly, the monster of this film, Breivik, has little dimension; but as Glenn Kenny has argued, he long ago had given up the possibility of being a true human by his actions, even if, at times, the Norwegian government and Greengrass vaguely try to see through to some humanness beneath his ranting political views.

Other critics, such as Kenny and me, feel that the film is far more moving and nuanced, despite obvious political viewpoints expressed in this work. In part, for me, it was a very personal work, since I lived in Norway for about a year early in my life; and, along with Greengrass’ inevitable “outsider” view, it was one I shared. The director, using an all-Norwegian cast speaking in English—which most Norwegians do—clearly attempted as best he could to be accurate to events and Norway’s attitudes and moral values. I think he quite succeeded, and that, perhaps more than anything else, is what moved me about this film.

Unlike a certain American president, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg (Ola G. Furuseth), who plans that day, July 22^nd, to visit the students on retreat on the island of Utøya (a camp for the future leaders of Norway’s Labor Party), chastises his speech writers for not making his speech more personal—after all, he also attended that camp as a young man—and demands that he have a couple of hours after just to talk to the young women and men on a one-to-one basis. The rationality and empathy of his statements, in the first few scenes of this film, demonstrate it seems to me the entire nature of Norwegian culture.

If the arrival of these healthy-looking—most of them with ruddy red cheeks—and gender friendly boys and girls might seem almost out of a fantasy tale (these kids greet one-another with kisses and hugs and joyfully play co-ed soccer), these were the same kind of young adults I met when I suddenly landed in a Oslo fjord folk high school, as different from my previous American high-school experience that, at first, I simply didn’t know what to make of it. These children grew up in a society that simply liked one another.

True, Utøya may be a world of fairly like-minded kids, but it also reflects the newly opened-minded immigration policies of Norwegian authorities, with blacks and other minorities mixed into the blond, white Norwegians. These, moreover, were clearly the brightest of Norway’s children; as Breivik would later proclaim, as he arrives to shoot them down, “You will die today.Marxists, liberals, members of the elite.”

Unlike many contemporary populists, Breivik did not attack those immigrants he hated, but working in the forests of Norway, carefully built up an arsenal of bombs and weapons to attack at the very heart of Norwegian progressive politics, first bombing one of the major government buildings in Oslo, its façade blown to glass splinters before, dressed as a policeman aiming to check on and protect the Utøya children, demanding the ferry to quickly take him to the deaths of so very many beautiful beings.

There is no doubt that Greengrass’ presentation of the carnage that this terrorist caused—the monster murdered whole rooms of hiding children and anyone whom he could see—is absolutely horrifying, something which, at moments, we can only turn away from. Children race to the cliffs to hide, stumbling over one another before they are shot to death. The terror is palpable and overwhelming. How, in any honest film, could it not be?

But Greengrass, fortunately, tamps this violence scene down a bit by concentrating on just two children, brothers Sveinn Are Hanssen (Thorbjørn Harr) and his elder, protective sibling Viljar (Jonas Strand Gravli), who keeps the younger on the run. Yet, in the process he, himself, is finally found and shot—five times. Breivik, like so many mass murderers, was determined to assure that everyone he shot would be dead.

Viljar, the son of a female mayor in the far-north of Norway, becomes the central focus of this story, not simply the story’s victim, and that is what gives this movie its moral meaning and significance. His terrified parents rush to his hospital bedside, where, unbelievably, he remains alive—but not without losing one eye, the use of one arm, and retaining in his brain stem bullet fragments that the doctors dared not even remove for fear of killing him on the operating table.

The captured terrorist, although attempting to create a myth of complicity with a larger underground community, betrays himself with his insistence that he be represented with the liberal attorney, Geir Lippestad (Jon Øigarden), who by Norwegian law is obligated to represent the criminal if asked to do so, and, even after Lippestad and his team prepare a defense of insanity, makes it quite clear that he has carefully planned this attack as a statement of his opposition to Norwegian government policies.

Although, at moments, Breivik brings up issues that seem to put into question the entire society—at one point arguing that he represents the protection of societal values, to which the investigator argues, “It’s you on trial here, not the government,” the murderer responding, “Are you sure?”—ultimately his arguments, despite the humane treatment he receives (again so far different from USA prison procedures that it leaves one in tears), become almost irrelevant.

In this film, it is Viljar, endlessly working to rehabilitate his heavily-damaged body, who becomes the center of focus. The only drama of the last half of this film concerns whether or not he might return himself to the healthy society with which he began the film and if he will be able, physically and psychological, to testify against the man who hoped to end that.

As Kenny observes: “Greengrass doesn’t go for any big triumphalist moments; he doesn’t make Viljar’s courtroom speech a masterpiece of eloquence. This is a movie about difficulty and necessity.” And, obviously the very society that produced such a monster is regrettably undergoing a kind of trial. Can it survive such hate which exists with the reality of Breivik being one of them?

Every society on the planet, clearly, contains such haters and terrible murderers among them, but the truth of the values of each society are made most clear in their response and solutions to such deep hatred. Open vengeance, simple reaction, resistance to the reality of events, or sane social response makes the difference between these societies in terms of their survival. I might suggest that the US could learn a very great deal from the tortured but expedient Norwegian response.

Oddly enough Breivik was correct. When such terrible acts are committed, dozens of citizens meaningless destroyed, ignored, or simply given no way out of such horrible destruction, it is also the society that is under trial. Greengrass makes it clear that some countries and its citizens simply handle it better than others.

If 22 July is not a great film, it is, nonetheless, a quietly profound one.

Los Angeles, October 12, 2018

confused flies

by Douglas Messerli

Agnès Varda (writer and director) Les plages d'Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès) / 2008

You might describe The Beaches of Agnès as a sort of love poem celebrating, a bit like Whitman, the self. And also a bit like Whitman, French film director, Agnès Varda celebrates that self not through a catalogue of her achievements nor a telling of her life adventures—although she does visually take us to several of her childhood and adult homes and locations of family outings—but through the multitudes of daily workers, actors, directors, and lovers she has known; and in this sense, Varda’s cinematic autobiography is similar to what I have striven for in the many My Year volumes written since 2000 (I publish these “semi-autobiographical cultural histories” annually).

One might argue, in fact, that although she is viewing this work through the lens of her own life, it is more a poetic documentary about her life “gleaned” through (one should recall that one of her most interesting films was about “gleaners,” those people who sort through what the rest of the population leaves behind, searching for anything that might be of value) than it is a autobiography. She begins, in fact, on a beach of her childhood with a crew placing bothframes and mirrors horizontally and laid out upon the sand at various angles, signifying the method of her filmmaking, suggesting that she will both reflect upon and look through framed contexts in order to get to the heart of the 80 years this “little old lady, pleasantly plump” has experienced and achieved.

Without Varda having to thump her chest, she randomly shows us photographs (she began, we might forget, as a photographer), objects, recreated and vintage scenes from her films, and, of course, the faces of people: not only the numerous celebrities to whom she was close—her husband was another famed director, Jacques Demy, with whom she regularly entertained nearly every significant film personage in the world—but of fishermen, butchers, perfume and button sellers, and the members of her own parents and siblings (her father was of Greek origin), the last strung out in a series of photographs on one of her beaches.

Varda visits extras in her early films, lovingly allowing them, in the case of two fisherman, to see their performances for the very first time. She, herself, has photographed many of those she loved and admired. And when she doesn’t have a photograph, she creates her acquaintances and the laborers she loved with bits and pieces of their lives, a kind of bricolage of memorabilia that brings those who are now gone from life.

As Roger Ebert pointed out in his 2008 review of the film, five years before his death from cancer, throughout this film, Varda is seen walking backward, as if receding from view in recognition of her own inevitable demise. Yet, given her constant sense of wonderment, exploration, and humor, we recognize that she, even if always a bit plump, has not truly become “little old lady.” Rather, she’s a kind of mischievous force, poking around in the debris of her own past for new ways of seeing and perceiving what it all meant. As she alertly declares "I am alive, and I remember." I have never seen “a little old lady,” moreover, sailing alone a small boat down the Seine.

Much of Varda’s life is connected with the sea. She thinks of nearly every male as a potential Ulysses, a kind of wanderer. And throughout her childhood, living near various bodies of water, she learned not only how to sail, but to weave nets and tie knots—real-life talents that might almost be seen as metaphors for how she later conceives her cinematic works and her life. She and husband Demy bought an entire back-alley of several small, derelict shops, gradually redoing them into a series of two story “rooms,” in which they lived separately and apart from each other and their gifted children, Rosalie and Mathieu. One might argue that even at home, Varda and Demy lived less within themselves than in a kind of small community where they might call out for one another through open windows.

What you won’t discover in this loving film are gossipy tidbits of family life. Varda had already made a film before this, Jacquot, about her beloved husband as he was dying of AIDS (Demy was also a kind of “wanderer,” often engaging in gay sex). For Varda, it seems clear, the inner eccentricities of life do not matter as much as the way life engages people and things in space and in spontaneous acts. And, in many respects, it is that viewpoint that links her films with the French New Wave. Although she may not have “hung out” with Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, hers is, nonetheless, a kind of existentialist art, demonstrating what people do rather than merely what they claim to think. Varda never studied film and was no theorist; she worked by instinct through her personal values, and these could take her in many directions within different or, sometimes, within the same work, which is what excites us about her vision. Even memories, she insists, move in many contradictory directions, flying “about me like confused flies.”

Los Angeles, October 15, 2018

the prodigal son

by Douglas Messerli

Ming-liang Tsai (writer and Director) 青少年哪吒 (Qīngshàonián Nézhā) (Rebels of a Neon God) / 2009, US 2015

Somewhat in the tradition of Rebel without a Cause(a large movie poster of James Dean, in fact, shows up in the room of one of the movie’s central figures), and with relationships to Truffaut’s 1950s five Antoine Doinel films, Taiwanese film director Ming-liang Tsai’s Teenage Nézhā (shown in this country as Rebels of a Neon God) shifts the focus from the California and Paris streets to the neon-lit Taipei of 1992, it’s original release date; the film was not released into the US until 23 years later.

In Chinese culture, Nézhā is a kind of child-god born into a human family and who attempts to kill his father. The youngNézhā figure in this work, Hsiao Kang (Lee Kang-sheng), is evidently a not-so-bright student, who with his taxi-cab driving father’s and spiritual-impelled mother’s support (she truly believes her son is an incarnation ofNézhā) has been enrolled in an overcrowded school to cram for college-entry tests. Clearly his parents are determined that he will be able to achieve in a manner which was impossible for them. Yet the tortuously old-school teaching methods of the buxiban (cram school) are painful even to watch, let alone to actually have been suffered by a young man or woman in their daily sessions.

In one scene, as the children leave their crowded classrooms, we see that a young girl’s scooter has been meaninglessly towed while our “hero,” lower in the screen, discovers that his scooter has suffered the same fate. He can only get home through the arrival of his taxi-driving father, who briefly, sympathizing with his son, suggests they attend an afternoon movie—the first shared experience proffered evidently in decades.

Given the difficulties of city living in Taipei, everything soon changes, as two young “hoodlums,” Ah Tze (Chen Chao-jung) and Ah Ping (Jen Chang-bin)—petty thieves who steal the change from phone booths and abscond with the motherboards of many of the arcade games they nightly patrol—purposely break the side-mirror of the taxicab. The young boy is asked to return to his classes as the father angrily drives off.

Hsiao Kang opts out of his cram-class, asking for the money which his parents paid back, and moving into the world of the two small-time hucksters, presumably to track them down. Yet as we quickly perceive—although little of it has been spoken about in the reviews of this work—his stalking of these figures not only represents a desire for their desolate, but somewhat exciting life-styles, but signifies a kind of homoerotic fascination about them.

The central figure’s major focus is Ah Tze, who lives in an apartment that is nearly always under water, a slosh of debris and decay which he evidently shares with his elder brother. The wonder is that his brother can somehow still attract a young working girl, Ah Kuei (Wang Yu-wen), who eventually attaches herself to the younger sibling.

Ah Tze’s real emotional commitment, however, is focused on his friend, Ah Ping; and, although he eventually, and very much after the fact, does finally have sex with this clearly sexually available woman, he abandons her time after time, and finally, when Ah Ping is beaten for one of their petty robberies, offers her up to him for “hugs.”

Throughout—although nothing ever visually occurs or is even spoken about it—this film represents a ménage à trois between its three major male figures, two of them not even knowing about the existence of the third. The passion that embraces them is not so much a gay sexual desire as it is a dissatisfaction with their lives and, simply put, “the way things are.”

This entry into the dark neon-lit world of Taiwan’s major city never quite allows the sexual release that any of these trapped young men are really seeking. Instead of a love story it ends as a kind of strange revenge comedy, with Hsiao Kang spray-painting and glunking-up the engine of his idol’s scooter with glue. Symbolically, he strips his beloved enemy of his sexual power, the film ending, in fact, with Ah Tze giving up his woman companion to his own friend. Surely, he can now never win her back, so, in a sense, the invisible young stalker has turned his obviously heterosexual object of fantasy into a kind sexually neutered being, a boy in whom he might find some sexual release. And, in another respect, he has finally redeemed his father’s promise to take him to the movies by making his own “midnight movie” in real time and space in which, finally, things turn out “right,” or at least possible on his own terms.

If previously, his own father has locked him out of their home, one of the final images is of the father (or mother) carefully opening the door a crack which might allow their wild, disobedient son to return.

Los Angeles, October 17, 2018

you can’t go home again

by Douglas Messerli

Dudley Nichols (screenplay, based on the plays “The Moon of the Caribees,” “In The Zone,” “Bound East for Cardiff,” and “The Long Voyage Home” by Eugene O’Neill) John Ford (director) The Long Voyage Home / 1940

As I’ve expressed earlier, I’ve always thought the Eugene O’Neill’s SS Glencairn plays as slightly tacky theater, filled with a wide range of types (a brooding Englishman, a Swede, an Irishman, an American named “Yank,” etc.) who, in the playwright’s original script speak in accents that not only represent stereotypical attitudes about their cultural differences that are quite painfully inaccurate.

The production I recently saw at REDCAT by The Wooster Group changed much of that, while quite literally “accentuating” it and giving full force to the actual narratives O’Neill was attempting to tell. If it didn’t always work, it sheds new insights on the original short plays, revealing the dreams and desires of these sometimes stock characters, such as the relationship between Yank and Driscoll.

Accordingly, I thought it necessary to see the film version, rendered by the admirable director, John Ford. At first, I must admit, I was a bit leery of his updating of the tale to World War II, and his casting of Thomas Mitchell as Driscoll, Ward Bond as Yank, and, almost incomprehensibly, the Iowa-born actor with a drawling plainsman accent, John Wayne, as Ole Olsen, the simple-minded Swede who just wants to go home.

Can you blame him, given that the Glencairn is presented as vessel of bondage and servitude, upon which authorities have dumped a cargo of high explosives to be delivered up to England for the War? These men are rightfully terrified and, at first, quite forcibly rebel.

Thank heaven Ford, a master of filming male-bonding, tamps down the West Indies’ delights of these heavy drinkers—a young Mildred Natwick, if you can believe it, plays one of the hussies—quickly shifting to an adventure tale that kills off Yank as they move through the war-zone when he is injured by a shifting anchor, and, given their bad conditions—no doctor aboard on this almost suicidal voyage—who soon after dies.

Like so many of Ford’s movies, the rest of this work is an almost all male-tribute to survival and the deep-bonding of heterosexual men, with an occasional nod to the homoerotic possibilities that lie just beneath their hard-living love. This is Ford’s territory, and despite O’Neill’s sometimes clumsy and adolescent gestures, he transforms the play, with the help of screenwriterDudley Nichols and cinematographer Gregg Toland, into a quite successful film, wherein these men gradually grow to respect and love their fellowmen.

If the Conrad-like character, Smitty (Ian Hunter), in his insistent isolation from their raucous activities, may briefly appear to them as a Nazi-spy, the discovery of his love-letters between him and his wife, sadly reveal his real struggle with alcoholism, giving us a glimpse of a character who—given what we later learn about O’Neill family member’s problems—who is soon killed off by the author in a German plane attack on their ship. Smitty might have been one of the more interesting characters of this film had he been given a chance, but O’Neill was taking no chances, given the self-destruction of both his beloved brother and father.

Even the crew’s betrayals—when the ship’s agent spikes Ole’s drink when he is about to head off in another ship, theAmindra, back home to Sweden—prove positive, when he is unknowingly saved from being killed when the vessel is torpedoed by the Germans. When he and his fellow sailors hear the news, they know they are all damned to sign on again. There appears to other way out this indentured servitude.

These sailors are trapped within their lives, and there appears no way out except, like the men of Ulysses’ endless voyages, to move on from port to port, from adventure to adventure without any meaningful purpose in their lives.

This is Ford’s territory, and he presents it quite effectively, despite O’Neill’s best intentions to create an expressionist voyage of men-on-the-run. O’Neill new only too well what Thomas Wolfe later wailed, “you can’t go home again.”

Los Angeles, October 21, 2013

the outsider

by Douglas Messerli

François Ozon and Philippe Piazzo (screenplay, based on the film Broken Lullaby by Ernst Lubitsch), François Ozon (director) Frantz / 2016

All the time I was watching French director François Ozon’s 2016 film Frantz, I kept feeling that I had seen this film before; and, indeed, I had, evidently in a forgotten viewing of Ernst Lubitsch’s

Broken Lullaby of 1932. I still cannot recall when and where I saw the Lubitsch movie, but I do remember the power of its narrative: a former French World War I soldier who has killed a German soldier, who he realizes from a letter of the dead man’s body, was a pacifist, who had not even loaded his gun. The guilt of the murder leads him to follow the address back to Germany.

Ozon’s version is a much subtler and more intelligent version of the earlier film, bringing in many other elements which the original contained, based on the French play by Maurice Rostand and its 1931 English-language adaptation, The Man I Killed by Reginald Berkeley. Not only does this version present a truly sensitive portrayal of the leads of two still-opposing cultures, Anna (Paula Beer) and Adrien (Pierre Niney), but more clearly than Lubitsch’s version, suggests that— after Anna spots Adrien delivering flowers to her finance’s grave—that perhaps the two men, both aesthetes, had had a homosexual relationship. Certainly, his description of their sharing of music and art in Paris (both are violinists) was a deeply sensitive event, that strongly affected their lives.

The German family upon which he intrudes himself, the Hoffmeisters (Ernst Stötzner and Marie Gruber), who themselves are obviously of the upper middle-class, have brought up their son in an atmosphere of cultural involvement. In fact, it is, ultimately, their own cultural enthusiasm which allows them to let the French soldier—an outsider to most Germans, and in Lubitsch’s version someone to which the entire community negatively reacts—into their household. I think it’s more than a little interesting that in Ozon’s film, they quite quickly embrace the Frenchman, while in the German director Lubitsch’s earlier rendition their embracement is a far more laborious event. Nonetheless, the Hoffmeisters like the Holderlins before them, do emphatically allow Adrien into their inner circle, and permit and even encourage their son’s would-be wife to fall in love with him. The world of “them” and “us” easily fades away, as they perceive in the young friend of their son another image of him, which he carefully projects upon their suffering memories, a bit like the film Six Degrees of Separation.

In this sense, this work, in all of its forms, is actually a study of ingression, the entrance of one culture upon another, which, given the current American government’s stand against immigration, speaks more strong that it may have in Lubitsch’s day—even if the same issues were clearly there as well in 1932, when Hitler had begun to make such issues clearly visible.

The fact that what Adrien is really seeking is simply forgiveness, does not make him more loveable. He has murdered their son, and when he admits the truth to Anna he betrays her own belief in a reconciliation with her past. Yet his simple attempt to anneal the past draws Anna to him, even when she inwardly knows she must push away.

When, after he returns to Paris, and she attempts to reconcile her feelings for the “outsider,” she finally determines to not only forgive him but seek out what has seemed to be the relationship he has proffered her, she discovers, to her horror, that he is not at all the loving companion whom she might have sought; that, instead, he is a kind of “mamma’s” boy, who to please his domineering mother (Cyrielle Clair) he is now determined to marry his childhood friend, Fanny (Alice de Lencquesaing), an ever-patient and actually quite lovely woman who attempts even to embrace the woman who she recognizes as her sexual opponent. Yet, it quickly becomes clear that Fanny will win simply because Adrien is so very weak. His guilt is only a small part of the story: he is a man who cannot even face his own past actions.

The last few scenes of this wonderful film, which moves subtly between stark black-and-white and light color, are revealed by the “false news” she sends in her letters back to the hopeful Hoffmeister family, who have now psychologically adopted the French “murderer” as their own son, wherein she tells them of her nonexistent relationship with Adrien, attending concerts and art museums together. She does, indeed, attend these events, but now completely without him, even though the film ends with their joint viewing of Manet’s painting Suicide, which may, alas, signify one or the other’s end. In Orzon’s film, it is clear, any such action will not be that of the now independent and strong-minded Anna, but that of her weak would-be lover.

Both the men in her lives, it is now apparent, have left her empty-handed, the one by not even defending himself, and the other by refusing to embrace her open love.

Los Angeles, October 22, 2018

borders

by Douglas Messerli

Ryūzō Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Akira Kurosawa (screenplay), Akira Kurosawa (director)隠し砦の三悪人 (Kakushi toride no san akunin) (The Hidden Fortress) / 1958

If, when first watching Akira Kurosawa’s remarkable epic travelogue-adventure-comedy, The Hidden Fortress, you might think you’ve seen this all before, well just think back to the premiere of George Lucas's Star Wars, since he even admits to having been highly influenced by Kurosawa’s film. So, let’s try to forget plot, a somewhat affable tale of two would-be-warrior fools who are caught up in a battle which they never had imagined between the warrior Japanese kingdoms of the Akizuki and Yamana clans, and the friendlier Hayakawa territories.

This is truly a story of “borders,” both social and geographigal, how to get through one to the other and another, much like the migrant travelers from Central America to the US today. The story hardly matters.

Yes, there is a highly impudent princess of the Akizuki clan (Misa Uehara) who, hidden away in that fortress, must be moved out of harm by her loyal general Rokurota Makabe (the also loyal Kurosawa actor, Toshiro Mifune)—and, yes, he certainly enchants us with his daring sword-duels, his sweeping horse-borne salvations, etc—but it is Kurosawa’s comedic actors, Tahei and Mataschici (Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara) who are at the center of this tale, and whose plan to escape through the various borders that prevail, are at the center of Kurosawa’s film.

Even Rokurota recognizes that their rude plan of escape is worthy of attention, and he uses them, with bribes of gold to help in his attempt to lead his princess out of harm. In order to do that, of course, he has to convince the imperious princess to become a mute, literally muting her own “noblewoman” voice.

That’s all you need to know. The rest is played out in a spectacular, often comic, series of adventures in which or comic heroes are asked to climb mountains of loose rock, join in extravagant escapes, face execution, and simply run for it again and again. Like another version of Laurel & Hardy (or the Beckettian substitutes throughout his writing), Tahei and Mataschici become mere robots—which Lucas brilliantly perceived them to be—who keep the story boiling, while rushing head-long into terrifying territory, all the while trying to grab on to any money or sex—quite unsuccessfully—that might show up in their purvey.

If these two are completely incompetent, they are also, as Rokurota perceives, survivors, or, if nothing else, talismans who, despite themselves, represent the faith of the oppressed Akizukis. Just by traveling with them Rokurota and the princess Yuki are saved. They are clumsy, dangerous, greedy, impetuous cowards, but they are also heroes in their own voyage forward, leading the general and his princess out of danger. Carrying wood, like the peasants they truly are, they bear the wealth (the gold) of a kingdom upon their backs without even knowing it.

If they cringe and run away at the very first sign of terror, they serve as signals for the others of what they too must flee. Their simple instincts make it clear to the more removed social superiors what they to need to resist. Their stupid plots represent brilliant perceptions on how to survive.

The hidden fortress of this film is not, in fact, the beautiful country home wherein the princess lives among the birches, but the fortress of her fellow travelers, who rush into danger without even recognizing, at times, what that entails. They are there, constantly, despite their constant attempts to escape, to protect her and her general, men who know how to cross borders better than any expert on geological frontiers.

I was amazed on the day that President Trump ordered 5000 more soldiers to protect our already over-protected border with Mexico against what he described as an army threatening the country, I had watched this film, where two peasants knew how to escape and move into what had become enemy territory, saving a princess and her protector in the process, to claim a new heritage in a new world.

Los Angeles, November 1, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2018).

the male gaze

by Douglas Messerli

Roman Polanski and Gérard Brach (screenplay), Roman Polanski (director) Repulsion / 1965

It’s rather strange to think that Roman Polanski’s second feature film, Repulsion, is in some ways a pre-feminist work—particularly given the many claims of the director’s abuse of women over the years. One might even describe this 1965 as an early testament to the current #METOO movement.

The central figure of this film, Carole Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve), who works as a manicurist, lives with her sister in a somewhat upscale, if dowdily furbished Battersea (London) apartment, even while they apparently have a difficult time paying their monthly rent. Born in Belgium, the sisters

could not be more different. Hélène, a slightly frowsy woman which might have been found in the works of the British “angry young man” playwrights, gets her part of the rent mostly by turning tricks with her lover Michael (a lecherous Ian Hendry), whom she attempt to by fixing a rabbit dinner early in the film, a meal interrupted by Michael’s determination to eat out before returning back to her apartment for night of a noisy sex, which deeply disturbs Carole’s attempts to sleep.

The beautiful Carole, on the other hand, is dreamy and detached, clearly afraid of any male companionship, but almost equally terrified of making close contact with her women colleagues. Given Polanski’s example of the clientele of Madame Denise’s salon—Mrs. Rendelsham (Monica Merlin) who begins the film as a kind of mummy-like doyenne receiving a facial while Carole works upon her nails, and the daily pains of male companionship recounted by her salon assistant—we can well comprehend her fears. And, later, we recognize through a brief inter-clip that she may have been raped by her father or another older man.

Carole’s beauty, however, draws men to her, including street workers who give her a nod and hoot and a far more respectable and gentle suitor, Colin (John Fraser), who attempts to get her to go out on date, without much success. Colin, however, is befriended by bar-buddies who talk about women as trophies, and when he has no success with the off-putting blonde, is egged-on to make a more direct attack.

Most of the men in this film, moreover, are far more like the partying sex-fiend Michael than the kinder and handsome Colin, and we immediately perceive why, particularly given her background, Carole wants no contact. Yet we also perceive that the shy and distant beauty is attracted to Colin and even to the far more bestial Michael, at one point retrieving his underwear and putting them to her face, while also being disgusted by the fact that he has stashed his razor and toothbrush in her bathroom water glass.

All those who encounter her, however, do know that there is something wrong with this woman, Michael even suggesting, in passing, that she needs to seek help. And it doesn’t improve the situation that the sisters’ apartment faces a kind of Catholic cloister, whose nuns are constantly called back to prayer with a bell. The overbearing images of this film set a background to the young beauty’s gradual breakdown.

Throughout the film, moreover, Carole hardly ever eats. She can hardly bring herself to taste her fish and chips when she meets Colin, and her evening dinner, that unforgettable rabbit which keeps appearing throughout the film and winds up even in her pursue, is never cooked. Throughout the film, she seems to be unable to consume anything except coffee, and even that seems to be a kind Hitchcockian terror in the manner of the milk that Cary Grant fetches up for his wife, played by Joan Fontaine in Suspicion. Everything gets worse when her sister retreats to Italy with her pay-for lover for what was to have been an overnight visit but extends into several days. She wants to see, quite symbolically, the “leaning tower of Pisa,” as if she personally identifies with its gravitational pull to the lower earth.

If nothing else, the nearly starved Carole goes into a kind of hungry trance—hungry for all those things she dares not touch: food, male companionship, and female friendship. Given those terms, is it any wonder that her world literally “cracks up,” sidewalk splinters turning into earthquake-like fissures in the walls, further terrifying the already terrified woman who simply wants to be left alone instead of being, as Colin attempts after being goaded on by his bar-room friends, a sexual object for his pleasure. In our heroine’s mental breakdown, male hands reach out for her even through the walls. There is no escape here from the male gaze—or in Polanski’s version, the “male grab,” something he surely must have known about.

When Colin dares to break down her barriers, literally played out in surrealist imagery when he breaks down the apartment door, she responds in the only way that a strong Hitchcockian woman can, as in the master’s Dial M for Murder, Carole replacing that character’s scissors with a candlestick with which she clubs her would-be suitor to death.

When the landlord (Patrick Wymark), soon after, comes calling for the rent, she politely hands over the envelope which her sister has left her to pay him. But when he attempts to also embrace her, Michael’s misplaced razor is an easy solution to his would-be abuse.

It is true, Carole is now insane, or, as the males use inappropriately describe her behavior, has become hysterical, and in the process, loses herself entirely as surely as Blanche DuBois has lost her sanity in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire; but she has, perhaps, in that very fact, regained her integrity as a woman, freed herself finally from constant devouring of the males in the world in which she lives.

That a true rapist could actually write and direct this work shows me a deep comprehension of his own guilt, of his understanding of just how terribly he later abused his female prey. Like Hitchcock, Polanski knew what he was doing in his unwanted pressing upon the female body, which Williams could only imagine and concoct. And that realization is part of what makes Deneuve’s “repulsion” so very tangible and believable, despite the film’s surrealist-like presentation of reality.

Repulsion is a great film because it realizes the everyday horror women of having to escape the gauntlet of the male hunters of society. Unfortunately, in that process, even decent males suffer the for their raunchy brothers. In the end of Polanski’s moral tale—and it is a moral despite his most immoral personal actions—does not truly reveal which of the characters should be the subject of the “repulsion” which he announces, the frustrated and frightened murderer or the preying males who demanded her response. There is no answer here without complete sexual equality and liberation.

Los Angeles, November 16, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2018).

Ingmar Bergman | Törst (Thirst)

William Wellman | So Big!

Björn Runge | The Wife

Jean Cocteau | Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet)

George Englund | The Ugly American

Akira Kurosawa | 生きものの記録 (Ikimono no kiroku) (I Live in Fear)

Robert Altman | Nashville

Arthur Hiller | Plaza Suite

Arthur Dreifuss | The Quare Fellow

Jean-Pierre Melville | Le deuxième souffle

Mikio Naruse | 妻 (Tsuma) (Wife)

Aki Kaurismäki | Mies vailla menneisyyttä (The Man Without a Past)

Mikio Naruse | 山の音 Yama no Oto (Sound of the Mountain)

Paul Greengrass | 22 July

Agnès Varda | Les plages d'Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès)

Ming-liang Tsai | 青少年哪吒 (Qīngshàonián Nézhā) (Rebels of a Neon God)

John Ford | The Long Voyage Home

François Ozon | Frantz

Akira Kurosawa | 隠し砦の三悪人 (Kakushi toride no san akunin) (The Hidden Fortress)

Roman Polanski | Repulsion