Only The Cinema

Patriotism

2009-11-19T23:15:00.003-05:00

[This review is posted in preparation for the latest discussion for The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be discussing Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters this month. Stop by Krauthammer's blog Crips and Mutes on November 23 to join the discussion.]

Patriotism, the sole film made by famed Japanese author Yukio Mishima, is a weird artifact, a thirty-minute short film with no dialogue. It's obviously a deeply felt film, a sensual and serious presentation of the ritual suicide of a soldier and his wife, with each detail lovingly examined. On the other hand, it's also an incredibly preposterous film, plodding relentlessly through a preset sequence of events, towards an unavoidable conclusion. The film's story is set up entirely in text with a scroll that appears before the film proper begins; the short was adapted from one of Mishima's own short stories, and it shows in this overly literary grounding. Mishima himself plays a soldier named Takeyama, who is in a tough position: having remained loyal to the Emperor during a failed coup attempted by his friends, he is now scheduled to preside over the execution of the rebels. However, he is unable to face killing his friends, and instead plans to kill himself by harakiri. His wife, Reiko (Yoshiko Tsuruoka) vows to join him in the act, so that they might die and enter the afterlife together.

It's virtually impossible to watch this film without thinking about what it reflects about the film's director/writer/star. Only four years after this film was made, Mishima himself committed harakiri, so the film's meticulous, step-by-step depiction of the ritual suicide and the preparation for it comes across as a dress rehearsal for the act Mishima dreamed of committing in reality. It's no surprise, then, that the film is an almost erotic celebration of suicide. The film is derived from Noh theater and takes place on a minimalist Noh stage, where the setting evokes a bare frame of a house, its surfaces all white and nearly empty. The gestures of the two actors are also derived from Noh, and they're suitably overblown and stylized; Reiko and Takeyama both move slowly and deliberately, emphasizing every least movement as they make their preparations. This is sometimes affecting and sensual, but just as often comes across as forced and even kind of silly.

During the sex scene between the couple, their last carnal embrace for their last night together, the film vacillates back and forth between poignant sensuality — the quivering of muscles beneath taut bare skin — and overwrought goofiness. The images are crystalline and beautifully crafted, it's undeniable. The actors, set off from the stark emptiness of the stage, caress and lounge naked together, and lights twinkle in their eyes during the frequent closeups. It's perhaps unfortunate, but it comes across as a parody of an art film, taking itself too seriously, investing every image with over-the-top emotion and sentiment.

Of course, part of the problem is perhaps the short's very premise, its lush romanticism of ritualistic suicide. At the core of harakiri is a conception of honor, but this does not seem to be of interest to Mishima. He presents the entire justification for the act, the soldier's tale of woe about betrayal and divided loyalties, in the introduction as a scrolling text. It is as though he is in a rush to get to the ritual itself, ignoring its historical meaning and context, or rather taking them for granted. What he's interested in is a kind of sexual embrace of death. He wallows in the details of the deed with an intense focus, admiring the way the blade cuts through the soldier's stomach, the way the blood, black and sticky, pours out between his fingers, the way his guts spill out into his lap. And then, he dedicates the same attention to the wife's suicide — because, of course, the subservient woman must passively follow her man into death, killing herself so that she falls, swooning, on top of his disemboweled body for the film's morbidly romantic final image. Mishima isn't interested in why she does what she does, not really, and he's certainly not interested in considering the implications of a woman mutely following her husband into death for reasons that have nothing to do with her. He's only interested in her photogenic death, and in the copious, sparkling tears streaming down her cheeks as she watches her husband die.

This unquestioning acceptance of a death dictated by ancient rituals and concepts of honor is at the heart of Patriotism. As the sole film made by Mishima, an undiluted expression of his psyche and aesthetic, it's of course interesting at least for that. And its gorgeous black and white photography is expressive and frequently evocative, capturing such unforgettable images as Reiko lustily licking her knife's blade before putting it to her throat, or the overlapping collage of memories layered over her face as she thinks back on her happy marriage. As potent as some of these images are, however, the film as a whole is simply the overcooked morbid wet dream of a man obsessed by death, romanticizing the spilling of guts with his pristine imagery.

La cérémonie

2009-11-13T07:30:00.000-05:00

Claude Chabrol has always been especially interested in the dynamics of class power, examining the nature of class with a dry, caustic wit. In La cérémonie, this examination plays out in a remote small town where the isolated lower-class maid Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) is hired by the Lelievre family. They're a typical bourgeois family, aloof and condescending. The father, Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel), is an authoritarian Mozart lover, and his wife Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) is a slightly bitchy control freak, while their kids Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen) and Gilles (Valentin Merlet) are mostly just indifferent. These people aren't evil, they're just wrapped up in themselves, to the point that they virtually ignore Sophie once she's in their house. As Melinda says, they treat the maid like a "robot," but despite Melinda's enlightened pose, she's really no different than the rest of her family, elitist and snooty, at heart concerned only with her own problems.

For her part, Sophie is insecure and introspective, locked up inside herself. She has no hobbies or interests of her own, and her only activity is to drown herself in the glow of the TV screen. Melinda, always playing at the liberal role, says that her parents are trying to hypnotize the maid with the TV, suppressing her with it: the television as an instrument of bourgeois control. In fact, Chabrol presents the television as central to this bourgeois existence. Both classes watch the TV, though they use it in different ways. Early on, Gilles and Georges are experimenting with a new satellite TV set, changing channels so fast that each one is just a momentary flicker: they're not so much watching anything in particular as demonstrating the excess that their wealth has purchased, an overload of so many channels that it'd be impossible to ever watch them all. Later, when they finally do watch something in earnest, it's a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni, with the whole family gathered on the couch, weighed down with a thick libretto and recording equipment and the father dressed up in a tuxedo as though he was actually going to the opera rather than watching it on TV. Chabrol even makes a joke at his own expense by having the Lelievre family watch his 1973 film Les noces rouges on the TV, Stephane Audran and Michel Piccoli clenching and plotting murder on the small screen; it's a suggestion that all films, no matter their content, can be subsumed as commercial, bourgeois entertainments.

Sophie is indiscriminate in her viewing, sitting down in front of the television's pale blue glow, illuminating her face in the dark of her room: she watches game shows and commercials and televised movies without ever seeming to care what's on the screen, as long as it's on. She doesn't even seem to know how to change the channels or operate any of the TV's for-her-daunting set of buttons. Often, she is joined by the local postmistress Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), who's despised by the Lelievre family for her insouciant attitude and defiant bad manners. Jeanne is, in contrast to the tightly wound Sophie, a true free spirit, angry and flighty and goofy, as full of gossip and nasty words as Catherine herself. The two lower-class women bond over a shared violent past. They trade stories — Jeanne was responsible for the possibly accidental death of her own baby, while Sophie heavily implies that she murdered her father through arson — then collapse on Jeanne's bed giggling and tickling one another. They're like sinister sleepover pals, coming together based on their shared pain and isolation, and the shared impression that they are trampled on by the upper classes. As their relationship develops, they become inseparable, watching TV with arms wrapped around one another, bathed in the same blue glow that was once Sophie's solitary comfort. The way Chabrol constantly shoots them so close together, their faces pressed against one another, emphasizes their similarity, the resemblance in Bonnaire and Huppert's angular features and hard stares. Their relationship hints at a lesbian sexual undercurrent — especially at the climax, when Jeanne poses seductively against her friend, her stockinged leg lifted up at an angle — but mostly they seem to be becoming the same person, morphing together.

Chabrol observes all of this activity from his characteristic wry distance; the film's tone is flat and nearly affectless, and its small touches of humor are all the more surprising because of it. As Jeanne and Sophie grow closer, and the postmistress begins to inculcate the maid with her revolutionary, anti-bourgeois attitude, the tone around the Lelievre house begins to change. It's all about power games for Chabrol, about who's in control. Sophie's rebellion begins with a birthday party for Melinda, which she leaves after preparing all the food and getting everything ready. She'd told Catherine beforehand that she had somewhere to go, and her employer accepted it grudgingly, but when the moment actually comes and Sophie has the nerve to leave, Catherine feigns shock and outrage. It's as though the family doesn't really expect their servant to have her own life — Georges prefaces one conversation by telling Sophie that her life is her own and he doesn't want to intervene, then proceeds to forbid her from seeing Jeanne anymore. For Chabrol, class is power, and more than that class is freedom: Sophie's life is constrained and hemmed in merely because of her station.

In that respect, Sophie's dark secret, hinted at from early on, is a visible indication of her lower rank, her limited opportunities: she cannot read, and she proudly does anything she can to mask this humiliation, to prevent others from discovering her inability. This marks her out as an inferior in most interactions; it is a physical manifestation of her lower class and limited education. Chabrol is driving home, again and again, how class defines choice: even when Melinda accidentally gets pregnant, it doesn't destroy her life, not in the same way that Jeanne's life was changed by her pregnancy. In fact, the only one to truly suffer from Melinda's pregnancy is Sophie herself; the family shrugs off the revelation, knowing they have the means to deal with this problem however they choose.

La cérémonie is a dark and mordantly funny satire of class relations from one of the cinema's most persistent probers of class. As the film patiently peels back the layers of convention and artifice from class interactions, the tone gets steadily uglier and more bitter. Resentments and tensions boil over, and Chabrol once again tears apart bourgeois pretensions and the implicit hierarchies of bosses and employees.

Films I Love #45: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976)

2009-11-11T10:30:00.000-05:00

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is, at least superficially, John Cassavetes' stab at a gangster thriller. In fact, though, the film's genre trappings are incidental to its central purpose, a character study of the charismatic loser Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara), a strip club owner who fancies himself an artist as he arranges his club's lame, unsexy nightly shows. Cosmo is a kind of vaudeville showman, orchestrating grandiose entertainments in which his dancing girls gyrate on stage while "Mr. Sophistication" (Meade Roberts), a fat, balding little man with white-face makeup and a greasy combover, sings out of tune and tells stories. The whole thing is rickety and appalling, and Cassavetes (at least in his longer, original cut of the film, before a 1978 recut) lingers on these painful stage shows, punctuated by occasional hoots and hollers whenever a girl flashes a breast. It's all so joyless, so self-evidently amateurish and boring, and yet Cosmo believes that he is an artist. He cares deeply about his club, loves his dancers, and pays careful attention to every detail of his shows. In his own weird way, he's a perfectionist, it's just that his idea of perfection is poorly staged strip shows with very little skin showing.

Basically, Cosmo is afflicted with the belief — or maybe just the half-believed hope — that he's bigger than he actually is, cooler than he is. He seems to view himself as a real player. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the sad faux-glamour of Cosmo's big celebration after he finally pays off the last of his loans on his club. The film's opening scene, with Cosmo making his last payment, is his moment of glory, his apex; he has nowhere to go but down from there. He immediately decides to celebrate by taking out three of his dancers for a day on the town. He hires a limo, dresses up in a tux, and goes to pick up each of the girls in turn, acting as though he's picking them up for a prom. They all go out to a ratty gambling parlour, where the girls, in their glam makeup and slutty, shiny dresses, lounge around rolling their eyes and looking bored, while Cosmo tries to act like the high roller they all know he isn't. It's a sad, pathetic affair, this very limited man's idea of living the good life. Moreoever, Cosmo quickly undoes the fleeting victory he enjoyed in the opening scene: after a spurt of wasteful gambling, he winds up deeply indebted to the mob, who insist he pay back what he owes by committing a murder for them. For any other director, this would be an excuse for a gritty, violent mob thriller; for Cassavetes, Cosmo's entanglement in this gangster drama only reinforces just what a lonely, out-of-place figure he is, comfortable and happy nowhere except in the shoddy fantasy world he's created within his strip club's boundaries.

The Box

2009-11-09T08:00:00.005-05:00

Although Richard Kelly's third movie The Box has been advertised as an edgy thriller, an attempt for the director to claim some mainstream cred after the lackluster response to his messy, ambitious (and sadly undervalued) Southland Tales, this film merely confirms that Kelly is incapable of making anything as neat and tidy as a conventional thriller. This is both to his credit and his detriment. The Box is a deeply strange and broken movie, seeped in Kelly's Lynchian influence, which is still almost wholly undigested. He skillfully apes the patterns of Lynchian dialogue, the off-kilter conversational rhythms and deadened, eerie silences, and like Lynch's movies, Kelly's seem to take place in some slightly out-of-whack suburban American netherworld. The Box is set in Kelly's alternate reality 1970s Richmond, Virginia, a sleepy satellite to the government NASA, CIA and NSA outlets at Langley and other Washington suburbs. Here, government bureaucrats speak in clipped, enigmatic tones, and scenes play out in the kind of strange in-between state where it's not clear if they're meant to be dramatic or ironic.

In this sitcom suburb, married couple Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) are living out a postcard suburban existence with their young son (Sam Oz Stone). He's a low-level NASA grunt who wants to be an astronaut, and she's an English teacher. Sure, they're struggling, but they're reasonably happy. Then their quiet life with its modest troubles is disrupted by the appearance of Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), a former NASA scientist who lost half his face in a lightning strike and seems to have emerged from the experience mysteriously changed. Now he visits the houses of randomly selected couples, many of them NASA employees, and posits a moral dilemma for them. He gives them a plain wooden box with a big red button on top, and tells them that if they press the button, they will receive a million dollars in cash and someone they don't know will die. It is, quite obviously, a very basic moral quandary, the kind at the heart of many classic science fiction stories, or stuff like The Twilight Zone (which indeed once based an episode on the same Richard Matheson short story that Kelly takes as his source here). It is a moral test: will these ordinary, relatively happy people reveal their constant desire for more, their dissatisfaction with their seemingly contented existences? Moreover, as Arthur asks when wrestling with whether or not to push the button, what does it really mean to "know" another person; the film posits webs of unseen and unimagined connections between unrelated people.

That reference to science fiction isn't offhand, either. After a first half that treats this intriguing premise in a relatively straightforward way, the film increasingly goes off the rails, spiraling into absurdity and loony sci-fi pseudo-philosophy. Much like Kelly's breakthrough debut Donnie Darko, come to think of it. Kelly seems irresistibly drawn to these kinds of metaphysical loops and narrative disjunctions. As the film progresses, it turns from a straightforward moral thriller into something else entirely, and the more Kelly's script tries to explain what's going on here, the more confusing and ridiculous the film becomes. The second half of the film somehow both explains too much and too little, spelling out the ideas — like the fact that the box is a morality test — that should have been left between the lines, while also tangling the plot up in a convoluted muddle. The film is bursting with ideas, both visual and philosophical, and Kelly leaps from one thing to the next without ever quite settling into one mode. The film is at its best when it's simply building suspense and tossing off inspired bits of nonsense left and right, crafting creepy and mysterious images. Kelly builds the film on what initially seem like non sequiturs, like Norma's creepy student (Ian Kahn) who humiliates her in class with a sinister leer. Or the sporadic appearance of people suffering unexplained nosebleeds, which at first seems like just another bizarre Lynchian touch before Kelly folds it into his nutty plot as well. Or the snippet we glimpse of a rather unlikely school play: a performance of Sartre's No Exit, references to which recur throughout the film.

This plot is, as the film goes on, more and more just a series of weird metaphysical flourishes and absurd sequences, with Norma and Arthur going in circles as the weird occurrences pile up. Along the way, Kelly does come up with a number of striking images, like the sequences of Langella's earnestly unsettling Steward presiding over a massive wind tunnel that he's made his base of operations. Elsewhere, Arthur walks into a column of viscous jelly-like fluid and emerges floating above his wife in bed. These moments are best appreciated as outbursts of goofy surrealism, since trying to fit this all together into a coherent whole is headache-inducing and not especially satisfying.

Despite all this, Kelly undoubtedly has real affection for these characters. He shares his idol Lynch's knack for infusing what might've been cardboard archetypes — a chipper middle American working class family straight from sitcom TV — with unexpected emotional depth. There's real feeling in a shot where Arthur sits on the bed, casually placing a present behind him, as his wife dresses in the next room. The scene where he actually gives her this present — a handmade experimental prosthetic to ease the pain on her radiation-deformed foot — would have been maudlin and melodramatic coming from a director without Kelly's precisely calibrated balance between ironic distance and emotional engagement. Kelly manages to make this marriage feel simultaneously like an unreal dream, overblown and kitschy, and also a real relationship. This pays off in the stunning — and stunningly manipulative — finale, which is both blatant tearjerking and a harrowing denouement. As with so many aspects of this film, it's hard to know what to think about this ending, whether the aggravation of its very obvious manipulation is earned by the emotional connection between Norma and Arthur or not.

As a whole, The Box is an uneven and compromised third feature from Kelly, who continues to display a genuinely interesting sensibility without quite making a film that's satisfying or coherent from start to finish. He's still working through his Lynch obsession, and still struggling to get his ideas onto the screen intact. One senses that the film was so much clearer in Kelly's head than it is in practice. Ultimately, it's a failure — certainly a failure in terms of creating a potential box office blockbuster, if that was the aim — but it's an interesting, ambitious failure, and that at least counts for something.

The Conversations #10: Trouble Every Day

2009-10-30T08:29:00.000-04:00

The tenth installment of the Conversations is here, just in time for Halloween. In this latest discussion, Jason Bellamy and I turn our attention to Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, a startling and deeply enigmatic film about vampirism, lust, infidelity and addiction. As usual, our discussion is fairly lengthy and intensive, covering not only the film itself but also diverting into a debate about what constitutes the horror genre. We always hope with this series that our piece will be just the beginning of a larger conversation, so please stop by and weigh in with your own thoughts, either about this film or about horror in general.

Continue reading at The House Next Door

The Gingerbread Man

2009-10-20T07:20:00.000-04:00

A John Grisham potboiler would seem an unlikely subject for director Robert Altman, who nevertheless made Grisham's The Gingerbread Man his own, mapping the familiar Altmanesque casual pacing and loose aesthetics onto this lurid thriller plot. The film opens with a lengthy aerial shot of a Southern delta on an overcast day, suggesting a storm about to come. Indeed, the entire film is building towards the not-so-threateningly-named Hurricane Geraldo — not the TV personality, as one character wryly points out. Altman is essentially telegraphing the Short Cuts-style ending that he so loves, writing the internal anguish of his characters onto the landscape itself, into nature, which grows more and more ugly and sinister as the central character, the lawyer Rick MacGruder (Kenneth Branagh), spirals into confusion and despair. From the beginning, we know that a storm, both emotional and physical, is coming, and its threat hangs over the whole movie, even when the sun briefly breaks out.

This tension and moody build-up adds some much-needed heft to the film's rather silly and convoluted story, built on a series of genre clichés and reversals of expectations: the dark-haired, sexed-up damsel in distress (or femme fatale?) and the sinister, crazy hillbilly. MacGruder's downfall begins when he gets wrapped up with the waitress Mallory Doss (Embeth Davidtz), who strips off her clothes at the slightest provocation and quickly embroils MacGruder in a tale about her crazy father, who's been stalking and harassing her. The lawyer, who normally wouldn't think of doing anything not on the payroll, is suddenly convinced that he can do a good deed for this woman he wants so badly, and he helps her commit her nutty father, the unruly wild man Dixon Doss (Robert Duvall, communicating menace with his clear blue eyes and language of grunts and muttering). This is only the beginning, of course, as Dixon quickly escapes from the mental institution with the help of his hillbilly posse, and goes cavorting off through a graveyard in a wonderfully silly/creepy night scene, wisps of fog hanging over everything, white and fluffy in the darkness.

The film's plot takes some increasingly loony twists and turns from there, but it's clear that Altman isn't so much interested in delivering a satisfying genre experience so much as just riffing on all these unlikable characters. Certainly, MacGruder is an astonishingly rotten protagonist: a self-centered jerk, a womanizer, and of course that oldest of crime fiction archetypes, the high-priced defense lawyer who keeps getting "scum" released back onto the streets. He's divorced from Famke Janssen's Leeanne, who's taken up with the couple's divorce lawyer now; another genre cliché fulfilled. When MacGruder gets his kids for visits, he's so inattentive that he lets them wander off everywhere while taking cell phone calls, even when he starts receiving threats about them, presumably from the missing Dixon. All this lazy parenting sets up the wonderfully handled late scene where MacGruder is making a call at a phone booth, with a visual line of sight to his kids through a hotel room window across the way, when a truck pulls up right in front of him, cutting off the view; it's a great sight gag and also a piece of formalist visual suspense worthy of Hitchcock.

There are many other pleasures to be found here as Altman lazily meanders through this story. There's a great shot where Mallory lights a cigarette and Altman syncs the flash of the lighter's flame against the cigarette tip with a crack of thunder outside, making a simple gesture seem epic. At the finale, all this sturm und drang pays off in the fantastic hurricane sequence, which makes suspense from missed cell phone connections and the flickering of lights, where everyone is silhouetted in windows, framed against the stormy perpetual night outside. MacGruder goes running around through the storm like a lunatic, always missing the obvious, always thrusting himself into danger — he's a totally incompetent thriller hero, but the film's arc is about him realizing what a lousy guy he's been, deciding at the end to stop fighting, that he deserves what he gets, that he shouldn't try to wriggle out of it even if he probably could. Meanwhile, Altman's camera is as busy as ever, using zoom as a device to make right-angle turns within a scene, unexpectedly pointing out details of interest, as when a slow zoom into a meowing cat foreshadows its grim fate.

Altman also has some fun with the character of MacGruder's private detective, Clyde Pell (Robert Downey, Jr.). Downey is always a blast to watch, and his leering, drunken private eye is a welcome presence in this film that so thoroughly mocks thriller conventions: just as the hero is a jerk who's blind to what's going on around him, the detective is sloppy but also strangely effective, always seeming to know exactly what's going on. In one of the film's funniest scenes, while Mallory is taking a call from MacGruder, Clyde lurks outside, pressing his ear against a window, listening in. Altman is frequently composing in depth like this, shooting with windows revealing crucial information or sight gags outside, like the spectacle of Downey exaggeratedly listening in, his whole body leaning in towards the phone conversation. Even funnier are the scenes with Downey hanging out in a bar with a couple of trashy-looking girls; when he's pulled away for a case, the girls shrug, look at one another, and kiss, as though with him gone they'll just have to settle for each other tonight. These little throwaway touches are so obviously Altman's work, infusing some quirky eccentricity into a film that could've been a paint-by-numbers thriller.

On the whole, The Gingerbread Man is a rather slight and goofy offering from Altman, a film that finds the director dabbling once more in the thriller genre. It lacks the self-assurance and thematic depth of his better genre deconstructions like The Player or The Long Goodbye, but it's nevertheless a fine example of Altman playfully mixing together noir and legal thriller conventions into an off-kilter confection. The film is more satisfying for its textures, for its small touches, than for its actual plot.

Judex (1963)

2009-10-13T08:30:00.001-04:00

Georges Franju's Judex is an arch, playful tribute to the serials of the influential silent filmmaker Louis Feuillade. Franju shuffles through the plot of Feuillade's lengthy serial of the same name, about an adventurer named Judex (Channing Pollock) whose revenge against the corrupt banker Favraux (Michel Vitold) unleashes a complicated series of schemes. The film is defined by its complex twists and turns, its melodramatic indulgences: a wronged father (René Génin) who's searching for his missing son; the fiendish femme fatale Marie Verdier (Francine Bergé) who faces off against Judex; the plots centering around Jacqueline (Edith Scob), the daughter of Favraux; the incompetent detective Cocantin (Max Montavon), who seems more comfortable as a babysitter than an investigator. The film opens with Favraux being blackmailed by Judex, who threatens to expose the banker's many crimes if he doesn't give his ill-gained fortune back to his victims.

Fittingly, Franju opens with an iris-out, and will close the film with an iris-in, only the most obvious of his nods to his inspiration. Franju sets his film primarily in the same kinds of gritty, realistic locales favored by Feuillade, who loved shooting on the streets and in scenic exteriors. The texture of the image here is grainy and dark, tending toward shadowy nighttime scenes where cloaked figures skulk through the abandoned streets, framed against the moon, heading out on mysterious errands. Franju is riffing on the magical, playful qualities of Feuillade's classic serials, and the imagery is lush. Judex's grand entrance in particular is stunning, set at a costume ball where he arrives in a massive bird mask, his outstretched, upturned palm holding a seemingly dead bird before him as he weaves through the revelers, with Franju's camera bobbing behind him. He then proceeds to perform a series of magic tricks for the assembled guests, pulling scarves from his sleeves and turning them into doves, which then flutter around the room. And, foreshadowing one of the film's central twists, he even brings the dead bird back to life with a gesture, allowing it too to fly off his palm into the audience. It's an amazing introduction, establishing the film's basic theme, its tribute to the magic and mystery of the cinema, the sleight of hand by which the filmmakers can divert the audience's attention and create startling effects.

This scene establishes the sense of low-key fun at the film's core, its predilection for toying with genre elements. This is especially true of the gleefully evil femme fatale Marie, the film's best character — and its best performance in Bergé, who really projects the slinky, haughty evil of her versatile seductress/criminal. Stalking through the night in her tight black jumpsuit and domino mask, she seems like a master criminal, which makes it easy to miss the fact that all of her schemes actually don't go so well. In one of the film's most delightful inventions, when she's breaking into Favraux's house, her henchman is snared by a handcuff trap that unexpectedly pops out of a desk, right at the spot where the crook had his arm resting to pick a lock. Marie is actually foiled at every turn, often by the unflappable Judex, who drifts around with his black cape flopping behind him and a black hat on his head.

Franju's approach to this story is inherently anti-logical, infusing Judex's adventures with a laidback, drowsy surrealism. The spectacle of the bird-headed hero performing magic tricks is absurd enough, but more subtle is the way the film utterly rejects the idea of death, allowing characters to pass fluidly between states. Characters are constantly being declared dead, sometimes even buried, only to suddenly come back to life, as though they had merely fainted and were able to recover: the convention becomes so familiar that when the villainess actually seems to remain dead after falling off a building at the denouement, it's startling. Franju's characters defy death, not because of any narrative logic — these resurrections are never explained — but simply because the magic of cinema and the strange anti-logic of this film allows it. Similarly, Franju creates complex shots where the camera starts from the distinctive Feuillade static camera angle, at a medium distance from the action, only to begin flowing into the scene, creating new compositions. This fluid camerawork suggests the technological limitations of Feuillade's cinema only to replace it with the more sophisticated possibilities available to Franju. At other times, he achieves striking effects with the editing, as when he cuts from Jacqueline walking up a staircase in her home to Marie walking up one as she schemes against the other woman.

The film's pacing is languid despite all this plotting, allowing plenty of time for Franju to explore the texture of the images, the vibrant characters, and the subtle jokes embedded in the mise en scène and performances. Perhaps the best sequence is the denouement, which keeps escalating as Judex and Cocantin engineer a showdown with Marie and her lover. It's a rich scene, though the action is less important than the whimsical touches, like the way the detective acquires a young sidekick who imitates his idol's every move, parroting his shuffling gait, the way he folds his arms behind his back, the way he nervously paces while waiting for Judex to save the day. At the scene's climax, a circus suddenly pulls up, owned by one of a Cocantin's friends, an acrobat (Sylva Koscina) who thrusts herself into the middle of the action by climbing up a sheer brick wall to the top of the building, where she rescues Judex from the clutches of the villains. Before she does, however, she pauses at the top, smiling and waving as she looks down at Judex's masked henchmen clustered below, looking up with the white eyeholes in their masks seeming to glow in the dark. She finally winds up stealing the show from the titular hero, even getting the final battle with Marie. The villain in her tight black jumpsuit and the acrobat in an equally form-fitting white outfit: light and dark, white hats and black hats, good and evil, all the movie conventions about heroes and villains inscribed in the clothes of these two women.

Franju's Judex is a compelling tribute to the silent cinema and the conventions of classic, pulpy genre storytelling. This film takes what might've been a straightforward story and infuses it with a moody visual sensibility and a subtly surrealist perspective that really locates the magic and mystery in these well-worn genre archetypes.

Some announcements

2009-10-09T14:40:00.001-04:00

I've got a couple of updates here, for those who are interested. The first is that, as some of you may have noticed, my brief attempt to start a calendar to keep track of film blog events was quickly aborted. The fact is, I underestimated how much work it would take, I couldn't settle on a good format for updating, and when you get right down to it, I'd much rather be doing actual writing — or watching movies, for that matter — in my free time instead of working on a project like that. I do really apologize for not following through on that site for longer, and I thank everyone who supported and helped promote the idea after my initial announcements.

In somewhat better news, I've started writing about comics for the online comics community and shop Poopsheet Foundation. I'll be writing about small-press and independent comics and minicomics there, at a fairly regular pace. My first review, of the anthology Ghost Comics, has been posted already, and I'll have much more to post there in the coming weeks.

If you're interested in following my writing about comics, take a look at my newly revived other blog, Disorder & Its Opposite. Over there, I'll be putting up links to all my Poopsheet reviews as they're posted, and will also likely be doing other sporadic posts about comics and music. Since this blog is exclusively focused on movies, I'll be using that site for anything else I want to write about. Check it out.

The Conversations #9: Pixar

2009-10-07T08:30:00.001-04:00

The ninth of my conversations with Jason Bellamy has now been posted at The House Next Door. This latest installment of the series is a contribution to the Pixar Week event, which is running from October 4 through October 10. Our conversation focuses on some of Pixar's recent output — especially WALL-E, Ratatouille and The Incredibles — in order to evaluate the animation studio's place within contemporary cinema. As with most of this week's pieces at the House, this conversation is an attempt to challenge some of the conventional ideas about Pixar and to take a more serious, in-depth look than usual at the studio's acclaimed films. It's also an opportunity to air some of my grumpy contrarian rebuttals to the commonly accepted wisdom about the quality of Pixar's films.

As usual, we hope that this piece will spark a larger conversation, so please stop by, read what we have to say and offer your own thoughts and reactions in the comments.

Continue reading at The House Next Door

Blue, White and Perfect

2009-10-05T08:00:00.003-04:00

Blue, White and Perfect is the fourth film in the Michael Shayne mystery series, starring Lloyd Nolan as the hapless private detective who's always down on his luck, and who often bumbles through his cases on pure luck and the intervention of others rather than his own sleuthing skills. That's the case here as well, though this film puts the focus more on Shayne himself than the earlier films, with their great casts of character actors, did. Nolan has a lot of fun with this role, playing Shayne as a comic figure rather than an actual good detective: it's only in the film's increasingly less interesting second half that the film really settles into the mystery mold. It's much more fun when the script gives Nolan some comic business to do, like the great series of gags involving a convenience store that Shayne stumbles into, shocking the proprietor and his wife with his odd, plot-motivated behavior. First, he makes a call to his girlfriend Merle (Mary Beth Hughes, who played a different part in the earlier Shayne outing Sleepers West). She thinks he works in an airplane factory, so he accompanies the call with improvised industrial noises using a fan, blender and various metallic banging sounds. Of course, he's really on a case, trying to route out a gang of Nazi diamond smugglers, so when he next returns to the store, he's hiding from the bad guys by trying on a series of scary masks. Finally, he nearly lands on the store owners when leaping through their awning from a second-story window. It's all played for humor, with Nolan's broad mugging matched by the deadpan reaction shots of the store owners, who look on in amazement at all this buffoonery.

Equally fun is the gag where Shayne keeps returning to the office of a printer (Charles Williams) to get new business cards printed out, each time with a new name and a new occupation, and sometimes a horrendous accent to go with it — it's not clear if Shayne's hapless lack of talent as a master of disguise is an intentional part of the joke, or if it's simply a result of Nolan's limits as an actor. Probably, the filmmakers are in on the joke, especially since when Shayne disguises himself as a distinguished Southern gentleman, he tells the printer to "throw a 'Colonel'" in front of his assumed name, and opts for Lee rather than Sherman as an appropriate surname. This is the level of the film's corny humor, and only Nolan's laidback persona and sly wit can bring across the film's low-key pleasures.

Of course, in the film's second half the mystery itself comes to the forefront, though as usual in this series calling it a mystery is something of a misnomer. Because the film doesn't strictly follow Shayne but also spends time with the villains, the audience is ahead of Shayne in knowing what's going on. So there's no mystery, only the question of when (or if) the detective is going to catch on to the plot. The German smuggler Vanderhoefen (Steven Geray) is bringing stolen industrial-strength diamonds to Honolulu on board a steamship. (Never mind why the Germans are shipping things through Hawaii; don't look to these films for any kind of sense.) To help with his scheme, he enlists the lovely, crooked Helen Shaw (Helene Reynolds), who turns out to be an old friend of Shayne's. The onboard shenanigans are complicated by the presence of the absurdly named Juan Arturo O'Hara (George Reeves), a Latin/Irish playboy whose role in this plot is ambiguous, and the courtly steward Nappy (Curt Bois), who seems to be working for everyone and keeping an eye on everything from his inconspicuous vantage point. The action on the ship is largely static and circuitous, moving at a slow pace that defuses any real potential for suspense or intrigue. The mysterious gunshots that ring out periodically, always just missing any potential targets, only add to the pointless confusion.

The only real fun here comes in the interaction of Nolan with his supporting cast, especially the lively Reynolds, who's a far better romantic/comic foil for the leading man than his actual girlfriend, who's mostly reduced to stock throwing-objects-at-the-cad humor. Reynolds gives her character some real femme fatale frisson, casting electrically charged glances at Shayne as she covers her scheming with thick layers of playful banter. Director Herbert I. Leeds, taking over the series from Eugene Forde, who directed the first three films, proves himself just as anonymous and inconsequential as his predecessor. The staging is flat and sometimes awkward, and scenes drag on for too long with no real point. Leeds' one real saving grace is a modest feel for comic timing in some of the earlier scenes. No one would ever call the Michael Shayne movies great cinema, but they're fun enough for a light diversion, and Blue, White and Perfect encapsulates both the series' minor charms and its limitations.

Films I Love #44: Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

2009-09-29T10:30:00.000-04:00

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is not just a film about a murder mystery, but a film about voyeurism, about how and why we watch other people — and by extension, how and why we watch films themselves. It is one of the greatest of meta films, although it is on its surface not about the cinema at all. Its plot concerns the adventurer/photographer Jeff (James Stewart), who is confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg after an accident (brilliantly conveyed by Hitchcock, entirely visually, by panning across a series of photos and objects at the start of the film). Locked up in his apartment, Jeff is unable to work or move around much. So whenever he's not being visited by his nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter) or his glamorous lover Lisa (Grace Kelly), Jeff takes to spying on his neighbors through a pair of binoculars. Jeff's window faces the courtyard of his apartment complex, and from this vantage point he can see into the windows of his neighbors across the way. Through these portals, he catches glimpses of their lives in action, their daily routines and private little peculiarities. He doesn't see anything particularly fascinating in itself, other than the contortions of the statuesque blonde dancer across the way. Mostly, he just loves to watch. It has often been remarked that Jeff's experience mirrors that of the cinema audience, uniquely situated between passivity and activity: he is confined to one spot and given a choice of spectacles, and he turns his gaze on those corners of the image that he wishes to observe at any given moment.

One of these images turns out to be a murder mystery story, in which Jeff begins to suspect that one of his neighbors (Raymond Burr) has murdered his invalid wife. This story slowly comes together and begins to occupy more and more of Jeff's attention, causing him to fixate on his neighbor's often-darkened window, with the man's cigarette ominously sparking in the blackness inside. Jeff even enlists Lisa to help him in his amateur investigation. The actual thriller aspects of the film are almost inconsequential, however, in comparison to the simple pleasures of voyeurism that Hitchcock offers up here. The film implicitly makes its audience complicit in Jeff's peeping tom habits, unifying the protagonist's gaze with the audience's. We love watching, along with Jeff, as miniature narratives play out within all the windows across the way, fragments of people's lives. And at the same time, we love watching James Stewart at his wittiest and Grace Kelly at her sexiest, the voyeurism of watching movie stars be movie stars, an enthusiasm that Hitchcock, with his love of working with big stars, again shared with his audiences.

A Short Hiatus

2009-09-25T21:00:00.001-04:00

I will be taking a short break from blogging over the next week or two. I'm getting married, and will be happily busy away from the computer. There are one or two posts scheduled to go up automatically next week, but otherwise this blog will be pretty much inactive, and I won't be around much to answer comments or any other communication.

I'll be back eventually, though, so watch this space. At the very least, in early October you can look forward to the next installment of my Conversations series with Jason Bellamy, which this time around is scheduled to coincide with the "Pixar Week" event going on at The House Next Door from October 4 through October 10. Our conversation, which touches on recent Pixar features The Incredibles, Ratatouille and especially WALL-E, will be posted sometime during that time frame.

Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train

2009-09-23T09:30:00.001-04:00

When the filmmaker François Reichenbach was dying, he told his friend, the screenwriter Danièle Thompson, that he was going to be buried in his family plot in the country town of Limoges, and that any of his Parisian friends who really cared would have to take the train to visit him. These words, so charged with meaning and feeling, became the centerpiece of Thompson's script for Patrice Chéreau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train. The title phrase represents a dying man delivering a last command to those he gathered around him in life, his friends, relatives and lovers: come see me, take a journey, because paying your respects won't be easy. The geographical displacement transforms the funeral and its aftermath into an adventure, into something grand and epic, freighted with meaning: it's like a pilgrimage, where the distance traveled adds to the spiritual and emotional impact of what's experienced at the destination. By delivering this commandment, Reichenbach's stand-in for the film, the "minor painter" Jean-Baptiste Emmerich (Jean-Louis Trintignant), turns his death into a test for his friends, an opportunity to bring them all together, a last game for him to play.

The film is thus a prolonged meditation on death, on friendship, and especially on families, both the ones we're born into and the ones we make for ourselves with those we meet in life. A huge, unwieldy cast of characters gathers at a Paris train station, finding one another through the bustle and chaos: various friends and enemies, ex-lovers and estranged friends, all of them bound together by complicated relationships. All of them also revolve around the common nexus of Jean-Baptiste, who in life seems to have been a much-beloved central figure in many people's lives, but also a figure of destructiveness, causing much pain to those around him, all these people now journeying so far for his funeral. Jean-Baptiste himself remains an enigma in the film, never present directly: he speaks on the soundtrack periodically, his voice preserved for a magazine interview, and he appears, silent and brooding, walking around his art studio in elegiac interludes that Chéreau inserts into the loose flow of the narrative.

Mostly, though, Jean-Baptiste is present in the stories and recriminations of the people attending his funeral. For his nephew Jean-Marie (Charles Berling), he was a "spiritual father," much preferred to Jean-Marie's real father, Jean-Baptiste's twin brother Lucien (also played, later in the film, by Trintignant). But Jean-Baptiste also determinedly injected strife into Jean-Marie's marriage to the drug-addicted Claire (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), to the point that the couple is now on the verge of divorce, barely able to speak to each other. There's also Jean-Baptiste's ex-lover François (Pascal Greggory), traveling with his new lover Louis (Bruno Todeschini), who's instantly distracted by the appearance of the young, HIV-positive pretty boy Bruno (Sylvain Jacques), who has also slept with both François and Jean-Baptiste. Other cast members hang out around the fringes. The mean-spirited Thierry (Roschdy Zem), Jean-Baptiste's former nurse, drives his patient's coffin across the countryside, sometimes parallel with the train, while his wife and kleptomaniac daughter Elodie (Delphine Schiltz) ride with the others.

Nearly a dozen other characters drift through the film, part of this crowd traveling to Limoges for a man they all loved and hated in roughly equal measure. In the film's frantic opening scenes, Chéreau shows little concern for stabilizing the audience, instead letting his handheld camera bounce and jangle through the crowded station and train, picking out the faces of the principals as though discovering familiar friends within the chaos. Facts and details start to accumulate, stories start to take shape, hints of the past appear as bitchy rumors or harsh accusations, and names are thrown about with little concern for identifying anyone or making the relationships truly clear. It's an audacious opening, thrusting the audience into the midst of this well-established network. Chéreau simply lets the stories and characters emerge naturally from his dense, free-associative montage. Little details stand out: the charged glances between Louis and Bruno, the sprite-like smile of Elodie before she steals a pack of cookies, the frazzled urgency of Claire as she hastily prepares herself in a shaky train bathroom before going out to meet the others.

Once in Limoges, the film settles down into an explosive melodrama, as all these people, many of whom haven't been in the same room with one another for years, are reunited, bringing up old fights and jealousies, as well as further opening the cracks in their current relationships. It's all tense and brilliantly acted, and Chéreau navigates these unstable conversations and arguments with his fluid camerawork, sometimes gliding gracefully through a scene, letting the rigid blocking define the relationships, while at other times cutting fast and ragged while the handheld camera spins and shakes to follow the action. Thompson's script deserves a lot of the credit as well, for saying so much between the lines, leaving important matters unspoken, but also knowing how to have the characters just blurt things out without allowing it to verge into naked exposition. There's a wonderful scene, late in the film, where a phone call between François and Louis, with Bruno listening in, becomes a beneath-the-surface conversation between François and Bruno instead, with the former indirectly apologizing and explaining himself, letting his ex-lover know why their relationship fell apart. It's all handled subtly, with discrete exchanges of closeups and pointed dialogue that seems to be directed at Louis but delivers an entirely different meaning to the eavesdropping Bruno.

There's a similar grace and subtlety in the treatment of Viviane (Vincent Perez), a transsexual once better known to the assembled guests as a man. Now she drifts, mysterious and strange, through the crowd, unrecognized, provoking murmurs of wonder about who this stranger could be. Chéreau communicates this mystery in the way he has her move, her hair falling around her face, through the Emmerichs' palatial but decaying family home, and then pulls aside the curtain of mystery in a series of scenes, late in the film, where Viviane increasingly bares her soul to Claire in intimate conversation, and then literally bares her/his body for the camera. She arrives late but winds up being one of the film's most fascinating characters, particularly during an unlikely seduction/flirtation between her and the melancholy Lucien, who comes alive, free of the weight of the past, when talking to her.

This lovely, powerful film boasts a wide assortment of strong performances, as well as Chéreau's self-assured direction. He deliberately montages together the tightly cramped Cassevetes-like improvisation of the messier crowd scenes with formalist deep-focus shots, complex tracking movements in which characters are constantly moving in different directions, the camera following different ones at different times, and those stark, silent intervals in the dead man's studio, reminders of the film's triggering personage. His soundtrack is equally bold, encompassing a broad array of pop songs, many of them sung in English: Jeff Buckley, Portishead, Björk, Nina Simone, even Cake's deadpan, halting cover of "I Will Survive." These musical choices are sometimes absolutely perfect: the late appearance of Portishead's gorgeous "Western Eyes" is wonderfully suited to Chéreau's slow track along the exterior of the Emmerich house as the lights are put out in one room after another. At other times, however, the soundtrack is invasive and distracting. The taste in songs is impeccable, and there's no arguing with the quality of the music in general, but the way Chéreau uses it sometimes causes the music to sit uncomfortably against the images rather than really enhancing and supporting them. Using Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye" for an otherwise moving scene where the train's passengers see Thierry's car speeding along on a parallel road, carrying Jean-Baptiste's coffin, is certainly too spot-on, too obvious and sentimental a choice. The music sometimes becomes like a pop radio collage layered over the images, slightly muted to allow for dialogue, then clumsily bursting back to full volume when the characters aren't speaking. In a film that's otherwise so nuanced and perfectly pitched, the occasional distractions of the soundtrack definitely stand out.

On the whole, however, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train is sublime and exciting. Its filmmaking is visceral and intuitive, fluidly shifting gears as required, encompassing a wide variety of approaches to the expansive, Altmanesque drama that comprises its core. Chéreau's approach is as bold and free-spirited as his title's ultimatum, suggesting a challenge: either love this film, in all its messy excitement and excess, or get off the train.

Nénette and Boni

2009-09-21T07:28:00.000-04:00

Claire Denis' Nénette and Boni is a low-key, understated family drama, blending fluidly between observational pseudo-documentary scenes of lower-class life and the characters' stylized fantasies. The title characters are Nénette (Alice Houri) and her brother Boni (Grégoire Colin), who have been separated from one another for years, following their parents' divorce: Nénette went to live with her con man father (Jacques Nolot), while the older Boni went to live with their mother, carrying on alone after her death. Boni lives now in a big house that's he allowed to become rundown, sharing it with his friends as they deal in stolen goods, run a pizza van, and dream of something better. Nénette, meanwhile, has run away from home after discovering that she's pregnant, and she winds up running to the only place she can think of, to her estranged brother's house. This strained, difficult reunion is at the heart of the film: the pull of family, the desire for connections and stability and someone to care for you. Nénette and Boni are both essentially alone, without real support. Boni is living a minimal existence in a house that never seems to have any food, where even the pet rabbit has to scrounge around for bits and pieces, and Nénette, with her undependable criminal father, isn't much better off (especially considering the subtextual hints of incest and the film's pointed refusal to identify the father of her child).

They are fending for themselves, but they offer to each other the only real hope of finding some real family, some real support. Nénette is struggling with her burden, unready and unwilling to become a mother to her baby, but at times she nearly becomes one to Boni, watching over him as he sleeps, mashing up bananas and feeding them to him when he feels ill. There is a nascent maternal quality in her that she directs at her brother even as she tries to ignore the baby growing inside her. At the same time, her presence awakens an unforeseen nurturing quality in the immature Boni as well. He's an oaf and a horny teenager, obsessed with the neighborhood baker's wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), immersed in fantasies of rape and domination in which he can be a very different person than the shy, quiet boy he actually is. He's a self-absorbed jerk, and his initial dismissive reaction towards his sister is very much in character, but eventually her persistence wears him down, and in his own weird, awkward way he actually begins to care, to protect her — at one point, in a bit of foreshadowing of the over-the-top denouement, he actually wards off their father by shooting at him with a BB gun.

The film is episodic and languid, drifting through these aimless lives. Denis is always attentive to the way people live their lives day to day and minute to minute, and that is especially the case here, with this film's emphasis on poverty, struggling for money and food, loneliness and disconnection. It's a true urban film, and a modern one as well. It's about a city where no one knows anyone else. When Boni first sees Nénette early in the film, he simply looks at her and then passes by her, as though he doesn't know her; and as far as the audience is concerned, he doesn't. There's a sense of how difficult it is to get to know people, to really connect. Later in the film, Boni meets the baker's wife, his ultimate fantasy, while she's out shopping, and unexpectedly she latches onto him as a familiar face "from the neighborhood." It's apparent that she's happy to see him, that she's just eager for some human connection amidst the holiday rush of Christmas shopping, the anonymous crowds crushing in around him. She's even flirtatious with the younger man, but he can only stare blankly at her as she nervously chatters to fill the silence. Denis holds a closeup on his glassy stare, a faint ghost of a smile dancing across his lips, for an uncomfortably long time, driving home just how empty his earlier bravado was, just how far he actually is from the crass, nasty persona he's imagined for himself. He's locked up inside of himself, unable even to hold a conversation with the object of his desire.

Throughout the film, Denis explores her central characters through small details, through the accumulation of such telling moments, as well as incidental observations, like the momentary shot of Boni and one of his friends playfully dancing to hip-hop while serving pizzas. There is also, as usual with Denis, a real sensual quality to the imagery, both in the gorgeous Agnès Godard-lensed street scenes and vistas, in the fantasy interjections, and in the moments of surprising, unusual sexuality scattered throughout the film. At one point, Boni kneads a ball of dough with the urgency of a lover's caresses, moaning and letting out sexual exclamations as he thrusts his fingers into the dough, beating and molding it in his hands and then finally thrusting his face into it in sexual exhaustion. In an earlier scene, he holds his pet bunny, that symbol of fecundity, in one hand, while thrusting his other hand into his boxer shorts. These incongruous outbursts of sexual feeling suggest Boni's out-of-control teenage hormones, his inability to channel his sexual impulses into acceptable outlets.

In contrast, throughout the film Denis inserts silent, lyrical interludes between the baker's wife and her American husband (Vincent Gallo), who if one such interlude is to be believed, was a sailor who stayed on in France to marry a French girl and become a baker. These scenes are outrageously exaggerated visions of a happy marriage, conjured up possibly from Boni's mind as a corrective to his own damaged existence and that of his sister. The baker and his voluptuous, sexy wife represent for Boni a kind of ideal, and he imagines them meeting and falling in love, having sex, having a baby together. Boni himself sometimes appears in these fantasies as well but his presence is ephemeral, as though even in dreams he can't really imagine himself coming between this couple. It doesn't matter that the real couple doesn't really warrant Boni's rapturous vision of them — they bicker, and the woman is often heavily made up and crass, as well as flirting suggestively with Boni when she meets him outside the bakery — all that matters is that Boni imagines them as a fairy tale perfect couple, happy and well-adjusted. Certainly nobody else in this film meets that description.

As a whole, Nénette and Boni is an interesting smaller work from Denis, evincing her usual concerns — sensuality, race and class — and exploring them in a decidedly relaxed, minor key. The film's observational subtlety is anchored by the fine, naturalistic performances of the leads, as well as the more stylized depictions of Bruni-Tedeschi and Gallo, whose worldly vivaciousness provides a contrast to the inward-looking siblings. The film simply meanders along, dealing as it does with growing up, with stumbling towards maturity and the dangers of falling back into the trap of immaturity. It's as poetic and elliptical as all of Denis' films, but lacks some of the punch and passion of her best work, and it's sabotaged by the melodramatic outbursts of the final fifteen minutes. Still, it's a typically fascinating film from a director who's always worth watching.

In the Mirror of Maya Deren

2009-09-17T11:30:00.000-04:00

Maya Deren is a legendary figure in avant-garde cinema, a true visionary who completed just six short films in her brief life, but whose reputation has endured on the strength of this small but utterly original oeuvre. Martina Kudlácek's documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren is an attempt to grapple with this tremendous legacy, to trace Deren's eventful, complicated life, to explore the ideas and preoccupations at the heart of her cinema, to gather the testimonies of those who knew her, who were affected by her incandescent passion and energy. All of this comes across beautifully in Kudlácek's film, which is a true ode to its subject, a poetic assemblage of reminiscences, fragments of film, excerpts from Deren's finished works, and audio recordings of her voice, delivering lectures on filmmaking, voodoo, art and philosophy.

Deren's work as a filmmaker began with Meshes of the Afternoon, made in 1943 with the help of her then-husband, the experimental filmmaker Alexander Hammid. This epochal film, nearly on its own, is responsible for Deren's legacy: it is a trancelike psychodrama, steeped in the logic of dreams and nightmares, populated with doubles and mirrors and an eerie sense of danger and sensuality intertwined. Kudlácek's film touches on the making of this short, but her focus is not necessarily on the details and intricacies of the filmmaking process — this documentary gives little sense of Deren at work, only momentary glimpses of her process behind the camera. It is not a behind-the-scenes documentary, nor is it a comprehensive biography, though it veers closer to the latter. Kudlácek seems chiefly concerned with getting as close as possible to a vision of who Deren was, what her creative philosophy was like, what she thought about and imagined when she was creating her visionary works. The film follows the arc of Deren's life, tracing her biography, often filling in details with onscreen texts that describe pivotal events — childhood background, marriages, divorces, moves, publications. But these are facts, only, and the interviewees who Kudlácek includes in the film, all of whom knew Deren very well, rarely talk about the facts of her life. Instead, they discourse on her personality, on what made her special and what made her films special, on her ideas, on her mystical and spiritual qualities.

It is fitting that a poetic, evasive figure like Deren should be treated to such a poetic, evasive biography, one that establishes certain basic facts but is much more concerned with the ephemeral and the sublime. Kudlácek's own voice never enters the film; she never offers her own commentary but allows everyone else to speak, to offer their own individual commentaries on who Deren was and what she represented. The voices here range from Hammid to future IMAX filmmaker and personal friend Graeme Ferguson to fellow avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas to Film as a Subversive Art author Amos Vogel to the performers who appeared in Deren's dance films to the Haitian friends she made on her many visits to that country, working on a film she never completed. These people offer many contrasting visions of Deren: personal reminiscences, admiration for her commitment and craft as a filmmaker, and in many cases expressions of her supposed mystical and even magical power. Brakhage tells a story about the diminutive Deren, possessed by a Haitian god during a ritual, actually throwing a refrigerator across a room, and the Haitian painter André Pierre tells about a time when Deren disappeared from a boat only to reappear floating way out in the ocean, singing.

All of this, like everything else in the film, is presented without comment, as one more indication of the legends and stories that have accumulated around this extraordinary figure. There is a certain amount of pretension in Deren, in her mysticism and her speeches about filmmaking. Sometimes in her filmmaking as well: Brakhage laments that her final film, The Very Eye of Night, was misunderstood by practically everyone, but the film itself is tiresome and inscrutable, consisting entirely of negative-image dancers superimposed upon a field of stars. As with most of Deren's work, there's an elaborate intellectual justification for everything here — something about myth and the movement of "celestial bodies" — but unlike in her earlier work the film itself is largely inaccessible without the benefit of this context. Whatever meaning Deren intended for the dreamlike Meshes and At Land, or the rigidly choreographed earlier dance films like Ritual in Transfigured Time and Meditation on Violence, the films themselves have a sensual and visceral quality that goes beyond mere conceptual games.

Thus, when Deren's voiceover is heard describing her films in lectures, speaking over images from her own films, it is undeniable that the images possess a power and beauty that cannot be captured in words, not even the words of the filmmaker herself, whose explanations for her every choice fall short of the ineffable quality that made her films truly great. Kudlácek's film is fascinating for providing a glimpse into Deren's thinking, into her creative process, but ultimately all these words can only be a glimpse, dwarfed by the mysterious power of the films themselves. In the Mirror of Maya Deren also proves valuable for its insight into Deren's collaborative process, for the way she would draw in multi-talented people to work with her. Although she worked entirely outside of the conventional Hollywood system of her time, she was also distinct from most of her contemporaries in the avant-garde, including Brakhage and Mekas, who tended to be solitary figures making personal films on their own, with just a single camera and their own two hands. At one point, Brakhage himself is shown at work on the film Water for Maya, his tribute to Deren, and it's a very different working method from Deren's expansive, collaborative ventures: Brakhage sits alone, holding a filmstrip up to the light, carefully dabbing paint onto the strip.

In contrast, Deren worked with crews; never traditional crews, in the usual sense, but free-floating ensembles where people would come and go, doing whatever needed to be done on the set. Her first film was made in collaboration with Hammid as co-director and co-star, and on subsequent films she would often include choreographers and musicians as key collaborators, their contributions as integral to the finished work as her own. It's telling that she viewed her dance films, especially, as interactions between the dancer's body and the camera, two equal partners creating a unified motion together. This is especially apparent in the way these films frequently play fluidly with a sense of space and time, cutting together shots so that a dancer may start a motion in one place and complete it somewhere altogether different, bridging space and time with the arc of a leg.

Kudlácek's film is especially good when dealing like this with the formal qualities of Deren's cinema, the way she would use her editing to transcend a limiting, realistic view of the world. That's perhaps why, as Mekas describes it, she was contemptuous of his improvisational, naturalistic method of shooting, preferring art that is planned out, that has a definitive form and meaning. Kudlácek herself subtly undermines her subject here, though. Right as Mekas is talking about the value of improvisation and random footage, and Deren's dim view of such spontaneity, Kudlácek inserts some of her own footage, of an Anthology Film Archives employee accidentally stepping into a shot and then ducking back out abruptly. It's as though the documentarian is silently making her own position known, gently underlining Mekas' point with this quirky little moment.

Perhaps it's also because of Kudlácek's sympathies for improvisation and accident that the film's best moments consist of archival footage that Deren never assembled into a finished work. Kudlácek samples generously from Deren's hours of Haitian footage, and there's a joyous energy and unpredictability to this material that belies Deren's own ethos — who knows what the Haitian film would have been like had she actually ever made it, but her footage from her trips there has a spontaneity and raw beauty unlike anything in her more lyrical established oeuvre. The same is true of a phenomenal outtake from Ritual in Transfigured Time, in which Deren herself throatily sings a folk ballad while dancers twirl about, their bodies thrusting together in openly sexual ways, smiling and laughing with the same unselfconscious openness seen on the faces of the voodoo dancers. In the Mirror of Maya Deren is a valuable, fascinating documentary, cutting to the heart of one of avant-garde cinema's most beguiling and interesting figures.

Films I Love #43: La belle noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)

2009-09-16T09:30:00.001-04:00

La belle noiseuse is a late masterpiece from Jacques Rivette, a typically haunting and enigmatic study of the mystery inherent in artistic creation, and the ways in which art and life inform and bleed into one another. The film centers around the aging and increasingly unproductive painter Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli), who is rejuvenated by the appearance at his country estate of a young woman named Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart), who inspires him to begin painting again. The film is sensuous and quiet, slowly exploring the developing relationship between the painter and his muse through lengthy, nearly silent scenes in which Frenhofer poses the nude Marianne into stiff, contorted poses, molding her body, frantically trying to capture her essence. Throughout these scenes, the only sound is often the scratch and scrape of Frenhofer's brushes and pens on paper and canvas, and Rivette frequently points his camera for long stretches of time at the painter's work area, tracing the progress of his art from a blank page to a developed sketch. The film's rhythms are slow and measured, appropriate for a document of the artistic process, the slow carving out of a creative statement from paints and inks on a plain white expanse. Forms and ideas take shape slowly, and the longer Frenhofer paints, both artist and model become more confident, more emotionally invested in the work — Frenhofer finds his passion for painting reawakening, even taking over his life, while Marianne develops from an introspective, nervous model to a passionate, deeply engaged collaborator, sharing in the demands and rigors of Frenhofer's art.

Rivette's deliberate pacing and careful eye lend themselves well to this exploration of creation. His camera circles the protagonists, lingering on Béart's nude form as though it was a statue, staring at Frenhofer's canvases and sketchbooks as the painter's ideas take shape, all of it accompanied by the distinctive scritch-scritch-scritch sounds that, by the end of the film, are subconsciously associated with artistic creation. Although the center of the film, and its heart, is dominated by the lengthy, intense scenes between Frenhofer and Marianne, ancillary characters linger around the edges, affected in various way by the all-encompassing passion of this artistic collaboration. Frenhofer's wife Liz (Jane Birkin) is increasingly driven away, shut out, conscious that Marianne is replacing her as her husband's muse: at the height of his passion for his art, Frenhofer even pulls out a long-abandoned painting of Liz and begins reimagining it, painting over it with images of Marianne, striving to create his masterpiece. Meanwhile, Marianne's immersion in Frenhofer's art causes her to neglect her own lover, Nicolas (David Bursztein), who is left to chat with the disconsolate Liz and his friend Magali (Marie Belluc). Rivette's film not only traces the process of creation and limns its mystery and magic, but examines the effects of such intense creativity on those who surround the artist and inspire his work.

TOERIFC: If....

2009-09-15T10:00:00.010-04:00

[This post is prompted by The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be spotlighting a different blogger-selected film every month. This month's selection is courtesy of Pat Piper from Lazy Eye Theatre. Visit his site to see his thoughts on the film and to join the main discussion.]

Lindsay Anderson's If.... is a harsh, uncompromising nightmare vision of British society as a culture unhealthily obsessed with tradition, locked into brutal, nearly fascist rituals and a blind, cowering respect for authority. Set in a British boys' college where the discipline is draconian and completely without rationale, the film examines the peculiar pressures placed on young men in a society where militaristic virtues such as loyalty, obedience, servitude and conformity are held up as the example. This school establishes a rigorous chain of command, selecting the most obedient of the older boys as "whips," who then become disciplinarians, keeping the younger boys under control. The result is that the school seems structured not so much for real education as for indoctrination and control — the only thing these boys are learning is that, in order to get by, they must learn the rules by rote, parrot back what they're told, never question orders, never think for themselves. Anderson juggles multiple storylines throughout the first half of the film, showing the way the school is run from multiple perspectives.

Jute (Sean Bury) is a new boy in the school, and he provides the newcomer's perspective in the early scenes, looking at the chaos around him with wide, terrified eyes. He is quickly taken under the wing of another boy, who impresses upon him the importance of obedience, of learning the rules quickly and being able to pass the complicated tests that will be imposed upon him. Jute is the film's icon of innocence, a usually silent and cherubic witness to the horrors around him, confused and disheartened by what he sees, unwilling to be shaped into the cold, brutal thing that this place seems design to churn out. There are other boys drifting around the film's edges, too, mostly stock types like a scrawny loser who's constantly being beaten up, a fat kid, and a quiet intellectual who generally buries himself in his telescope or his studies. But the film quickly centers itself around the school's trio of rebellious outcasts, the three friends who refuse to conform, who refuse to bow politely before the pointless discipline and cruelty of this place. Mick (Malcolm McDowell) is the de facto leader of the trio, with Johnny (David Wood) as his best friend and co-conspirator, and Wallace (Richard Warwick) as their somewhat slow-witted, dopey buddy. These three boys have the only reasonable reaction to the absurd regulations of power-hungry whips like Rowntree (Robert Swann) and Denson (Hugh Thomas).

Anderson presents this college as a nasty, suffocating place, piling on one infuriating incident after another until it seems obvious that something has to break, that no one could sustain this much tension and pressure. There is more than a hint of the absurd here, too. The whips are fey and masochistic, fingering their canes as though they'd really love to use them at any moment. They shout at the students to stop talking even before anyone has talked, as though always anticipating some minor infraction over which they can exercise their power. They survey their fellow students in the lower levels like military drill inspectors, advising them to cut their hair, making sure they're docile and ready for bed at the proper time, and capriciously confiscating any trivial item they deem unnecessary. The teachers are no better. The headmaster (Peter Jeffrey) is a pompous elitist who seems to fancy himself an education reformer, adapting to new times, when in fact his school is run like a barbaric Middle Ages prison. He leads the whips around the grounds at one point, boldly orating about the necessity to encourage creativity in young minds, to enlighten the next generation, to prepare them for life. His words are hypocritical, of course, considering his audience — the brutish thugs whose job it is to beat and suppress the younger students — and his spiel about education is especially empty when contrasted against the scenes in actual classrooms.

The teachers, for the most part, barely engage with their students. A professor of mathematics marches around the room intoning abstract phrases about geometry, lessons that can have no real meaning without demonstrations and diagrams, and yet he randomly stops every so often to ask a student if he understands. Then, even if the poor boy says yes, he slaps him in the head, or molests him in some way, at one point worming his hand inside a boy's shirt to caress his chest. Anderson's style is exaggerated and absurd, presenting these shocking, over-the-top images side by side with more naturalistic and conventional presentations of college life, the brutality and oppression of students guided by pointless rules. The result is metaphorical more than realistic: Anderson views education as a process of molesting and deadening the minds of the young, so he presents the education system in his film as literally abusing and violating the children it's supposed to be teaching. Only one teacher here even tries to engage his students, talking about the power of fascism and asking the students if they believe that fascism arises because of one powerful, evil leader, or because of a whole society of docile, casually evil people. As if to prove his point, the students simply stare back at him, uncomprehending.

This question is a central theme of the film, particularly in its final acts. The film slowly slips more and more into an absurd, surrealistic dreamworld in its second half, particularly after Mick and Johnny go out on a trip to town. The two boys steal a motorcycle, riding through the lush, open green fields of the countryside, laughing as the speed blurs their faces; it's a potent image of freedom in a film where these boys are hemmed in on all sides by oppression and a denial of free will. At an empty offroad café, the two boys meet a young girl (Christine Noonan), a waitress who will turn out to be a pivotal and mysterious presence, gently nudging the film into the spiraling surrealism of its denouement. At first, her confrontation with Mick and Johnny is utterly prosaic and nearly silent, as the boys snarlingly order coffee and Mick tries to grab her for a kiss, getting violently slapped for his efforts. But then the tenor of the scene abruptly changes, as the girl begins seducing Mick; they act like tigers, snarling and clawing at one another, rolling around on the floor tearing at their clothes, until suddenly their clothes disappear altogether and the girl is biting Mick's arm. The whole interlude is over as suddenly and inexplicably as it began: a lurid and transitory dream vision of animalistic sexual release. It's a true down-the-rabbit-hole moment, signaling the film's increasing departure from reality into a netherworld of dreams and nightmares.

The girl, who periodically reappears without explanation as an icon of freedom and sensuality for the three rebel boys, leads them into the final act of the film, in which the school is taken over by militaristic fervor. Generals and bishops visit, along with distinguished men and women dressed up for some pomp and circumstance, while the students, now dressed as soldiers, march around in formation, chanting and playing tightly controlled war games with paintball guns and firecrackers. This, Anderson suggests, is what this kind of oppressive conformity is grooming people for: to be soldier-automatons, ready to die for God and country, always willing to obey, never questioning orders. Only Mick, Johnny and Wallace really stand out, refusing to go along with this absurdity: while they lounge around in exhaustion, bored with this ritualistic violence, other students teach each other the "scream of hatred" that's yelled out when charging one's enemies. Then, just as these war games are starting to die down, the three boys begin shooting real bullets at the administrators and teachers, finally shooting and then bayoneting a priest in a general's garb. Absurdly, the boys are given a slap on the wrist for this offense, and asked to apologize to the dead man's corpse, which is kept in a wooden drawer in the headmaster's office and sits up to shake their hands before lying back down, playing dead. Obviously, the film has departed from reality by this point, increasingly existing in a fragmented fantasy in which these boys are finally able to strike back at their oppressors, using the headmaster's much-vaunted creativity and imagination to fashion an alternative world, one in which they're actually free.

The paradox, of course, is that having been themselves created by an atmosphere of cruelty and violence, the only freedom they can imagine is the freedom to wage war. The film's final scenes are a horrific vision of anarchy and destruction in which the rebels and the authorities (the latter represented, cartoonishly, by stereotyped authority figures like generals and bishops, as well as a knight in armor) go to war, everyone handling submachine guns as though they were born to. This anarchic finale suggests burning everything down to start anew, but Anderson's vision is more nuanced than Mick's punk rage. There's a moment earlier in the film that suggests a more utopian possibility for change, when Wallace's graceful exercises on a high bar halt a gym class, as the younger students, including the gay Phillips (Rupert Webster), stare at him in awe and admiration. The scene is staged in languid slow motion, as the younger students watch the fluid movements of the older boy as he spins around the bar, his body curling up and unfurling like a jackknife. There's a sense of wonder in this scene, a sense of real connection, that presents an alternative to the violence, hatred and disconnection that's everywhere else in this film.

This scene, like many others dotted throughout the film, including the café scene, is shot in black and white, which Anderson randomly intersperses with the color footage, creating disjunctions that call attention to the film's essential unreality. This approach separates Anderson's If.... from its obvious black and white influences, Zero For Conduct and The 400 Blows, the seminal French films of youthful rebellion and authoritarian oppression. Anderson nods to those films, but tweaks their verité aesthetics by often setting his most disjunctive and surrealist scenes in black and white, reversing the usual conventions about black and white stock versus color. Elsewhere, during a church service that's shot in black and white, Mick looks up briefly and sees a stained glass window in dazzling, brilliant color, a sudden vision of spirituality and clarity to offset the numbing banality of this college. This is a startling, utterly original film, a potent and unrestrained critique of a society seemingly teetering on the brink of fascism. Anderson is spitting in the face of the establishment, crafting a film as rebellious and revolutionary as his proto-punk protagonists.

The TOERIFC discussion of If.... starts now

2009-09-14T10:20:00.000-04:00

Pat Piper at Lazy Eye Theatre has just posted his writeup of Lindsay Anderson's If.... for the latest installment of the Oldest Established Really Important Film Club. For those who have participated in the film club before, you know the deal; head over there now! For those who haven't joined in previously, you're welcome to start participating now. This film club has no set membership, and everyone is welcome. If you've seen If...., just go read Pat's piece and then post your own thoughts in the comment section. There should be an active and fascinating conversation going on there all day today, and beyond, for as long as people keep stopping by to contribute. I'll be back tomorrow with my own post-discussion review; in the meantime, go here to join the conversation.

The Indomitable Leni Peickert

2009-09-11T09:00:00.003-04:00

The Indomitable Leni Peickert is a loose, half-hour sequel to Alexander Kluge's second feature film, Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed. This shorter work, seemingly assembled from leftover footage from the longer film, continues the story of the circus owner Leni Peickert (Hannelore Hoger) after she first abandoned her idea of a radical circus in favor of a job in television. It opens where the previous film left off, at a TV station where Leni and her friends have gathered as employees, attempting to infiltrate the corporate establishment with their own revolutionary ideas. This radicalism is somewhat undercut by the way that Kluge deliberately shoots down the low-cut blouse of one of these young revolutionaries, the camera eyeing her cleavage and then panning down, to the text she's reading, and then back up again, finding her sexuality ultimately much more interesting than her radicalism. This lascivious camera movement is then mirrored in the young radicals' plans to create "sex education" movies that somehow change the world by categorizing and numbering the sexual positions — after all, the Hindus have 365 positions already, one vapid would-be filmmaker says, and wouldn't it be better to have even more?

Even more than its predecessor, The Indomitable Leni Peickert is an inquiry into what all this chatter and ideology actually means; Kluge seems to be wondering, how much actual substance is there in all these half-baked 60s ideas about sex, free expression, equality, peace, love and all that good stuff? Is the sex film made by Leni and her friends a real expression of sexual liberation, or is it just as exploitative and perverted as Kluge's own ostentatiously ogling camera move? In any event, despite its title, The Indomitable Leni Peickert finds the titular heroine even more besieged and overwhelmed than in her first appearance, less able than ever to fulfill her ambitions and really create a lasting and important statement. She's always putting things off, dithering and delaying, telling herself that she's building foundations, that she shouldn't rush. Her plan for TV is a very long-term one, to eventually become the head of a station; in the meantime, she's just been promoted to manage the building's heating system. Later, she's fired from the station and returns to the circus, but only for commerce this time, abandoning her ambition to make a challenging new kind of circus: now she only wants to make money at it. Soon enough, she grows disillusioned with that as well and quits, or at least says she quits: in a typical example of Kluge's clever use of voiceover, the omniscient narrator announces that Leni has quit the circus and then, without acknowledging the contradiction, continues to talk about her working for the circus.

This disconnect between talk and action is at the heart of these two films, which is probably why Kluge, following earlier French avant-gardists like Godard and Debord, has so radically separated sound and image here. He allows the two halves of the cinema to exist independently, sometimes commenting upon one another, sometimes syncing up, almost as if by accident, but more often going their own separate ways.

Although in many ways The Indomitable Leni Peickert seems like simply an extension of Artists in the Big Top, utilizing the same style and exploring similar themes, it does differ in that it's more of a straightforward narrative film than its predecessor. Despite its disjunctive audio and its habit of narrating events from a distance, the film tells its story succinctly and with relative directness. The one notable exception is the denouement, which montages together classical drawings and paintings, taking Leni's struggles to a symbolic plane: through a progression of still images, these paintings tell a story of oppression and struggle between authoritarian forces and the rebellion of the masses. It's a clever way of universalizing the film's story. It transforms Leni's personal struggles — with artistic expression and with maintaining her individuality against smothering capitalistic constraints — into the larger story of the common people throughout history. It also unites Leni — and by extension, Kluge — with the artistic lineage of the West, with the artists who documented various populist uprisings of the past. This sequence suggests the interplay between art and reality, with the former both documenting the latter and echoing down through history to eventually have an influence on reality as well.

The Indomitable Leni Peickert is thus much more than a simple coda to Artists in the Big Top. It extends the longer film's themes into a broader social and political context, making explicit a few of the connections and ideas that were merely implied in the earlier work.

Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed

2009-09-10T21:37:00.002-04:00

Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed was Alexander Kluge's second feature, an unusual collage film that deals with the frontiers of human possibility, with the problems of creating art that truly pushes boundaries and broaches uncomfortable subjects to an audience largely unwilling to hear about anything unusual. Naturally, the film is in part about Kluge's own dilemma. Taking the circus as an unlikely metaphor for all artistic pursuits, Kluge is wrestling here with central issues: how to create art when audiences want merely to be entertained, how to balance art and commerce, how to find the proper medium in which to express one's ideas. On a narrative level, the film is about Leni Peickert (Hannelore Hoger), the daughter of a trapeze artist, who desires to create her own circus, a circus that would reinvent the form and express new, revolutionary ideas through performances with animals, acrobats and clowns. But describing the narrative does little to describe the actual texture of Kluge's film, which is comprised of a collage of improvisatory fragments and brief scenes, while on the soundtrack various competing narrators tell stories, recite philosophical ideas, laugh and read dialogues as if from plays, with identifications for the speakers. The audio frequently cuts off in midstream, and it is only sporadically synced to the actual onscreen images, instead flowing languidly in and out of sync. Sometimes a scene will start with two characters speaking to one another, but as they continue speaking, Kluge cuts away to something unrelated, or else cuts in footage where the characters simply stare blankly into the camera, while on the soundtrack their voice continues on. At other times, Kluge's jump cuts wreak havoc with the flow of time and reality, as when the glasses on the face of a journalist appear and disappear between sentences.

These multiple voices create a democracy within the film, in which no single narrative voice is dominant, and the audience's own experience of the film is privileged. The evidence of the film's construction is frequently evident, in scenes that cut off abruptly, the actors breaking into laughter or stammering incoherently as they lose track of their lines and respond simultaneously to the conditions of production. Kluge leaves these moments in. At one point, Leni's business partner Von Lupetow (Bernd Höltz, also the sound man) is eating a sandwich, stuffing it rapidly into his mouth. He laughs, spitting the food, and the scene cuts off, only to return to a straight-faced continuation, as though nothing had happened. The damage is done, though, and the rest of the scene can only be taken with a self-conscious smirk, aware of the shattering of the artifice. Elsewhere, when a female voice questions a story about a sex-starved astronaut filling up a vase with semen upon his return from space, a male narrator admits, "the story is exaggerated to emphasize the point."

These disjunctive techniques are appropriate for a film that's all about the issue of audience participation and audience connection — Kluge wants to foreground the effect of artistic techniques on those who experience an artwork. There's an undeniable playfulness to the way Kluge toys with artifice, presenting a loose patchwork that is all-encompassing enough to include both the opening's color, faux-documentary footage of Leni's father Manfred (Sigi Graue), the grainy newsreel inserts that appear throughout the film, and the crisp black and white of Leni's own story. There's play, too, in his chosen metaphor, in the idea of using the circus as a vehicle for expressing grand ideas. Leni's circus, like her father's proposed radical circus, would include animals suspended from the roof of the tent, barrier-breaking acts in which wild elephants seem to charge at the audience, and an absurd, theatrical staging of the assassination of an emperor, with all the participants wearing animal masks. It's all about confrontation, about presenting challenges to passive spectatorship. Just as Kluge's non-diegetic sound and jittery editing rhythms challenge conventional responses to a narrative film, Leni's revolutionary circus would challenge audiences to find new ways of thinking about this kind of entertainment.

Of course, implicit in this exploration is the possibility that challenges like this can push an audience too far. One of Kluge's interests here is the tension between giving an audience what they want and remaining true to one's own ideals. Ultimately, Leni's circus falls apart as she realizes that her ideas are impractical, that they can't be communicated in any real way to an audience, and that her vision is being diluted with the ideas of others, her collaborators on the project. It's a film about artistic disillusionment, then, about failure, and Kluge is open to that possibility as well. His own work is open-ended, not so much a finished project as a compendium of raw material, assembled by patchwork procedures that could result in a theoretically endless number of possible films. (The evidence of this is apparent in the short sequel, The Indomitable Leni Peickert, which seems to have been assembled in an analogous fashion from leftover footage.) Kluge knows that the upshot of artistic experimentation is the risk of losing the audience, and his resulting film is sometimes entertaining, sometimes boring or baffling, at other times enlightening and insightful, but always above all a challenge, a starting point, a call for serious thought about artistic expression.

His own starting point is announced at the very beginning, with a montage of newsreel footage from a 1939 Nazi rally, which included parades and elaborate pageantry. In light of the remainder of the film, it's obvious that Kluge is calling attention to the tremendous power of spectacle as a vehicle for expressing ideas (or ideology) in a populist form. He's implicitly suggesting: if the Nazis used performance and entertainment so effectively, could the same means be put to use in order to express anti-fascist ideas, anti-totalitarian ideas? Leni fails in her quest, but the film's answer is not so much a definitive no, so much as a "why not try?" It's the effort that counts here, the effort of grappling with the obstacles to art.

Initially, it seems like it's only money that's holding Leni back, that if she only had the resources she could express herself freely. So she experiments with various compromises and negotiations with capitalism, trying to gather the necessary funds while maintaining her independence, eventually concluding that it's impossible. Then, when a sudden inheritance — a deus ex machina inserted by Kluge as a way of working through his schematic diagram of the artistic process — allows Leni to pursue her dream unhindered by monetary woes, she discovers a whole new set of barriers: the disconnect between theory and practice, the difficulties of collaborating, the challenge of communicating with an audience. It's a rebuke to the tired old excuse that one could really make a statement if only one had the money (or if only anything, really). Kluge is advocating action, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, and the scenes of Leni's radical pals endlessly debating and tossing around ideas might be seen as an implicit critique of all the empty talk floating around among leftists in 1968, none of it adding up to much at all.

Indeed, the film ends with Leni, disillusioned with the circus, taking a job in television instead, essentially capitulating to the corporations, although she tells herself she's doing it in order to one day control the TV station for her own ends. The film ends on this skeptical, critical note, but Kluge retains his optimism about the potential power of art, best expressed in the repeated declaration that work without an ultimate goal or meaning is worthless. Extrapolated to art, Kluge seems to be saying that art made merely as spectacle or entertainment is empty, and that the best art has something to say, even if it perhaps says it incompletely or clumsily: the goal is what counts. This doesn't suggest an anything goes egalitarianism, however, so much as an encouragement that everyone should try, should do their best, should like Leni attempt to make something big and dangerous and original, even if everything falls apart in the process.

Don't Look Back

2009-09-06T09:00:00.003-04:00

D.A. Pennebaker's seminal documentary Don't Look Back remains the startling work it was upon its release: not only a revolutionary cinema verité approach to a rock tour, but one of the most intimate glimpses possible of the perpetually elusive Bob Dylan. The film was made on Dylan's 1965 U.K. tour, a pivotal moment in his career, as he began to move away from the folk movement from which he'd emerged. He'd just released Bringing It All Back Home, which featured rock instrumentation on its second side, a source of some controversy among his rabid folkie fans — at one tour stop here, a couple of young schoolgirls nervously tell him that it doesn't sound like him, that it sounds like he's only goofing around. In fact, it was no joke. This would be Dylan's final acoustic tour, and when he returned to England in 1966 it was for the electric tour that yielded one outraged fan's accusing cry of "Judas," a legendary moment. Pennebaker couldn't have known all this was coming, but it must have been apparent that Dylan was poised on the brink of something. The film captures an artist in flux, trying on different identities, experimenting with a playful sensibility that sometimes bleeds over into perversity and willful obscurity.

What Pennebaker's restless camera captures, more than anything, is a man whose personality is always shifting; Dylan is almost always performing in some way, always trying on different guises, covering up what he's thinking with strings of non sequiturs, turning interviews back on the interviewers with probing, unanswerable questions of his own. Pennebaker's handheld camerawork is perfectly suited to examining such a slippery figure; when Dylan bobs and weaves, figuratively speaking, the camera is with him, subtly zooming in to probe the intricacies of his face, his expression, trying to reveal what might be hidden behind his ever-present dark sunglasses. What Pennebaker seems to find is a guy who contains multitudes, who's many different things at different times. In unguarded moments, he sometimes seems like a kid — Dylan was 24 at the time — hanging out with friends, goofing around, telling jokes. At one point, listening to a jazz band, Dylan and several friends don dark glasses and snap their fingers, aping beatniks, laughing as they drop "hip" phrases. The Dylan who appears in interviews is someone else altogether, confrontational and aggressive and gnomic in his pronouncements. In one of the film's most prolonged scenes, a British journalist comes into the dressing room before a show and finds himself drawn into a battle of wits with Dylan and his friends, who are constantly challenging the guy, asking him questions about himself, basically asking him to defend his very existence to them.

It's amazing, and reveals a certain antagonistic streak in Dylan, a tendency to go on the attack, to prevent anybody from understanding him or pinning down anything about him. Pennebaker, by simply observing, by letting his camera unobtrusively weave through the scene, getting a rough fly-on-the-wall perspective on the singer, arguably understands much more than almost anybody else who Dylan encounters over the course of this film. He gets Dylan's need for mystery, for myth, and recognizes it as a bit of an act. He's also perceptive enough to see a different Dylan, the charming, bashful young boy who's so polite with an older British woman who comes to pay her respects, enthusing about his songs and earnestly asking him to come stay at her country mansion. There's a moment, towards the end of a particularly ornery and provocative "interview" with a reporter from Time magazine, when Pennebaker's camera zooms in on Dylan's face, capturing the bemused, playful smile dancing across his features as he answers a few questions. It reveals his famed aggressiveness towards the press as a bit of a joke, a put-on, a game to create a certain persona — Dylan's having fun with it, enjoying the clash as a sport.

If Pennebaker's film is enlightening about Dylan the man, it remains even more worthwhile for its portrayal of Dylan the musician. In rehearsals, in ad-hoc jam sessions at house parties, on stage, in loose songwriting sessions at a piano, Dylan always seems utterly focused, utterly alive, never simply tossing something off. His energy and passion for his music is obvious. If the public Dylan was always changing, always playing games, there's something dead-serious about Dylan the musician, which made that schoolgirl crack about Bringing It All Back Home kind of sting; he shrugs it off with a joke but the annoyance shows through anyway. The film is alive with Dylan's music, with snippets of concert footage; he rarely gets to play a whole song through, but Pennebaker collages together more than enough music to capture what it was like to see Dylan live on this tour. He sings through the first three verses of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" at one point, and Pennebaker films it in a closeup, because Dylan's face is very much alive when he sings, seething with the bitter irony of the lyrics. Dylan's best songs hurt, they're dangerous: the story of rich tobacco farmer William Zantzinger and poor maid Hattie Carroll is unforgettable to anyone who's heard it, because Dylan doesn't just tell the story, he brings its images to life, and he infuses it with the depth of his own outraged emotions. When he sings this song in Pennebaker's film, his face communicates everything that the lyrics do, the heartache and acute sense of injustice.

What's remarkable is that this is true even of Dylan's more elusive later songs, after he abandoned this kind of topical rant. The film closes with an equally heartfelt rendition of "Love Minus Zero/No Limits," one of Dylan's best songs from this era. Its poetic evocation of love isn't direct or representational like Dylan's earlier songs, and its images are figurative rather than visual, but it's obvious that it is no less deeply felt, that its emotions well from somewhere deep inside. The final moment of music in the film, the penultimate shot before a chatty, informal car ride, is accompanied by Pennebaker's most ostentatious camera move in the whole film. The camera, behind Dylan, floats aloft towards the high rafters of the theater, looking down at the musician within a small circle of pure white light at the edge of a dense darkness, and then the camera looks up, out at the house lights as the final notes of the harmonica fade away. It's a gorgeous moment, as mysterious and strangely poetic as anything in Dylan's songs. Pennebaker has a lyrical sense that's sometimes lost or ignored in his frenzied, off-the-cuff backstage camerawork, but that's readily apparent in his soulful closeups and the more formalist austerity with which he films Dylan's concert appearances.

Pennebaker is equally interested in Dylan's musicianship offstage, in the way any gathering with his friends might suddenly burst into song, with Dylan or Joan Baez or anyone else who happens to be around. (Though an interlude with Baez where she sings a few Dylan compositions inadvertently winds up as further proof of Dylan's artistry; despite her lilting, lovely voice, there's no escaping just how boring Baez is, how flat and lifeless her performance is, how lacking in Dylan's crucial energy and passion.) Pennebaker also evinces some curiosity about the character of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman, who with his bushy black eyebrows and big glasses and noncommittal expression is in some ways even more gnomic and inscrutable than Dylan himself: who knows what this guy is thinking? There's an enlightening scene where Pennebaker films the merciless negotiations Grossman conducts with several British promoters for a few shows, hammering away until he gets the tremendous sum he wants for Dylan. Throughout it all, Grossman shows no expression, no trace of anything; he's almost creepy, like a mob boss delivering ultimatums.

The point of the scene is obvious, of course, Pennebaker's not-exactly-revolutionary suggestion that it all comes down to commerce, that beneath all the artifice, on at least one level, Dylan's just another pop star. He's what the kids are listening to this month instead of the Beatles, as one newspaper article has it. That's part of it maybe, but Pennebaker seems to know it's only part, that there are many parts to Dylan, which is why Don't Look Back is structured as such a collage of public and private, performance and backstage, "in character" and out, rock star and folk singer and pop idol and just a guy enjoying himself and doing what he wants. All of these things are in Dylan, and all of these things are in Pennebaker's film as well.

Mademoiselle Fifi

2009-09-04T07:26:00.000-04:00

[This is a contribution to the Robert Wise Blogathon being hosted at Octopus Cinema from September 1-7.]

Mademoiselle Fifi is a curious bit of World War II propaganda, made at the tail end of the war and drawing none-too-subtle parallels between the then-current German occupation of France and the 1870 occupation of France during the Franco-Prussian War. It was the first film of director Robert Wise, stepping in to helm the first of producer Val Lewton's non-horror properties. After producing a string of B-movie horror classics during the early 40s, Lewton, always more ambitious and literary than his low-budget films really required, was eager to branch out into a different kind of film. Mademoiselle Fifi thus initiated the general shift away from horror that characterized Lewton's later features, in which the horror elements increasingly became incidental to the stories he was telling. This film was also the beginning of Wise's fruitful collaboration with the producer, which would also yield The Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher. Moreover, this film continued Lewton's collaboration with Simone Simon, who starred in both his Cat People movies.

Mademoiselle Fifi is thus important in relation to the careers of both Lewton and Wise, but it's also interesting in its own right. For one thing, it's an especially naked piece of propaganda — its narrative, adapted from the stories of Guy de Maupassant, is set during the Franco-Prussian War but every line is clearly crafted to refer directly to the situation of the occupation and the Resistance in 1940s France. It's blunt and forceful in delivering its messages, as was increasingly the case with Lewton, who often presented his rhetorical points with hammering zeal. Simon plays Elizabeth, a proud laundress with a patriotic love of her country and a corresponding hatred for the invading Prussians. She is being forced out of a town because she refuses to eat with the soldiers, refuses to do anything for them, because she heckles and throws things at them in the streets. She winds up in a coach full of rich snobs, initially gaining only the trust and companionship of the leftist political activist Cornudet (John Emery). Of course, in the fashion of a true fairy tale (or a moralist fable) it winds up being "the little laundress" who's able to teach the other passengers about dignity and compassion, generously sharing her food with the starving rich folks even after they've openly insulted her.

This kindness is repaid by the other passengers with contempt and betrayal. The carriage is detained along its route by the Prussian officer Von Eyrick (Kurt Kreuger), who the other Prussians have dubbed "Mademoiselle Fifi" because of his fey, bitchy manner. This officer with the feminine nickname is cruel and unyielding, and will not let the carriage pass until the proud Elizabeth has bent to his will by agreeing to have dinner with him. The other passengers, though initially in solidarity, eventually decide that their business interests are more important than this girl's patriotic idealism, and all but force her to give in. The film's preachy sermonizing would be deadening were it not for the performance of Simon at its core. The character of Elizabeth, this good, noble, saintly young girl who's implicitly compared to Joan of Arc in the film's opening minutes, would be insufferable and unbelievable if played by anyone but Simon, who radiates such sweetness and warmth and innocence with every smile. Her gentle demeanor makes her pious patriotism seem genuine rather than smug — and makes her eventual suffering and betrayal all the more heartbreaking.

Though the film is far from nuanced in its political content, it's nevertheless fascinating for the way it examines the shifting double standards and hypocrisies of the bourgeois. The coach's rich passengers snub Elizabeth and make snide remarks at her expense until they discover that she has food, at which point they begin thawing and making expansive remarks about "brotherhood," as though suddenly they are all the same. This camaraderie only lasts, however, until the girl inconveniences them, and then suddenly they are cavalier about her honor. There is a real undercurrent of sexual snobbery in these people, who seem to assume that any girl of a lower class is promiscuous and easy, with no real honor worth preserving. Thus they feel no guilt or shame in essentially offering up their young companion to the Prussian officer when he demands she have dinner with him. While Elizabeth is upstairs with the officer, below they are celebrating, getting drunk on champagne, laughing at what they assume must be going on upstairs, happy that they'll finally be able to move on in the morning.

Wise cuts purposefully between the dinner upstairs and the dinner downstairs, contrasting Elizabeth's quiet suffering with the reactions of the bourgeois revelers below. Von Eyrick forces her to sing at one point, and the diners downstairs take this as an indication of the charming dinner the couple are having. But when Wise cuts upstairs to Elizabeth, she is in tears as she sings, absolutely ashamed of herself, only going through with it because she has been convinced that it's for the greater good. Later on, when the couple upstairs fall silent, the bourgeois downstairs listen intently, looking at each other knowingly, implying that the officer and the girl are having sex now. But in the officer's chambers, Von Eyrick simply humiliates Elizabeth, pulling her close for a kiss and then blowing smoke in her face instead, then forcing her into his lap only to reject her offhand. He wants only to humiliate her. (And, indeed, it's here that his character's feminine nickname takes on an interesting subtext of homosexuality and misogyny.)

In scenes like this, Lewton's hand is apparent: the producer was frequently interested in issues of class and sexuality, in the hypocrisy and moral censoriousness of those who consider themselves superior to others, and especially in the treatment of women. This theme played out as a consideration of the eroticization and fear of the foreigner in Cat People, and here shows itself in the way these elites treat a poor girl who they seem to consider simultaneously naive and debased. The film is also distinctively Lewtonian in its atmosphere, its foggy nighttime streets, lit by gaslight, and its denouement with Elizabeth darting through this shadowy emptiness, hiding and fleeing. The film is marred by its performances, which besides Simon's incandescent innocence and Kreuger's polished Aryan evil, range from utterly forgettable to theatrically overwrought. Even so, despite the overbearing political parallels and a certain period stiffness in the adaptation, Mademoiselle Fifi is an interesting work in the Lewton/Wise oeuvre, a chance to see Lewton's unique sensibility separate from the horror premises with which he usually worked.

Films I Love #42: The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949)

2009-09-03T08:30:00.002-04:00

[This is a contribution to the Robert Wise Blogathon being hosted at Octopus Cinema from September 1-7.]

Robert Wise's The Set-Up is one of the great noirs, a crisp and economical B-movie, its gritty, stripped-down story told almost entirely in real-time, with not a second of excess. The film is as lean and punchy as its washed-up boxer hero, Stoker (Robert Ryan). Stoker's a struggling boxer who can't win a fight, who always seems to be one punch away from a big break; he can never quite manage but he can never quite give up either, even though his miserable wife Julie (Audrey Totter) wants him to quit. Nobody has any faith in him, least of all his manager (George Tobias), who sets him up to throw his next fight, against Tiger Nelson (Hal Baylor), but is so confident Stoker will lose he doesn't even tell his fighter about the score. The film tracks Stoker from before the fight, arguing with Julie in their hotel room, then the long period of waiting in the locker room, laconically trading stories with the other boxers as they all try to warm themselves up for their fights, then watching as the boxers come back afterward, some of them jubilant and victorious, others carried in nearly incoherent. In these men, Stoker sees his future, his brains scrambled by one too many punch, never making it past this low level of the sport.

After all this build-up and waiting — which also includes periodic cutaways to Julie wandering around the city, utterly depressed, not wanting to see her man get beaten yet again — Stoker's fight itself is fierce and energetic, as good a staging of a boxing match as there's ever been in the cinema. The camera maintains a low angle, looking up at the boxers, mostly lingering at the edge of the ring, watching through the ropes as these men pound away at one another. When the camera cuts in close, it catches the boxers in blurry, shaky closeups, the sweat beading on their skin, their faces bloodied and distorted. Wise also captures the bloodlust of the crowd, frequently cutting away to various caricatured audience members cheering on the carnage: a frenzied woman who gets angry anytime the ref threatens to break up the brawling, a man who keeps throwing imaginary punches of his own as he watches the fight, and various others who get charged up by seeing these men hurting one another. Most of all, though, there's the gangster "Little Boy" (Alan Baxter), a Richard Widmark-esque sadistic creep with a sinister grin and an over-eager moll gambling by his side. This is the man who has his money riding on Stoker taking a dive; that's his sole interest in the brutality on display here.

The Set-Up is a harsh, tough movie, with Ryan's bruised, battered Stoker the ultimate noir hero, way out of his depth, lost in the shadows. It's a film about a desperate man trying to prove himself, pushing himself past his limits without realizing that his big moment will be a Pyrrhic victory at best.

The Conversations #8 (part 2): Inglourious Basterds

2009-09-02T07:30:00.000-04:00

As previously announced here, Jason Bellamy and I have completed the latest installment of our Conversations series at The House Next Door. This eighth conversation is a discussion of the work of Quentin Tarantino, divided into two parts. The first part, published earlier this week, was a career overview of Tarantino's career from Reservoir Dogs through Death Proof. The second part has now been published as well. It's an in-depth discussion of Tarantino's latest film, Inglourious Basterds, a film so exciting, so dense and rich and unusual, that it's ignited an urge to talk about it in seemingly everyone who's seen it. Jason and I are no exceptions, and now we somewhat belatedly join the conversation that's been raging all over the Internet for the past week or so. Click below to read.

Continue reading at The House Next Door

To Be Or Not To Be

2009-09-01T09:00:00.004-04:00

It's an irreverent, silly, lightweight World War II comedy/thriller that plays fast and loose with historical facts, including having some fun at Hitler's expense, with a grand climax at a theater, where actors mingle among the Nazi elites. And no, it's not Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. (Though, as promised, more on that tomorrow at The House Next Door.) It's Ernst Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be, released in 1942, just shortly after the US finally entered World War II. It's an interesting film, mixing elements of drama and thriller plotting with lightly comic sexual wordplay and dark-edged satire. The film centers around the Polish underground resistance during the Nazi occupation, particularly the actors in a theatrical troupe who get mixed up in a plot to prevent a Nazi spy from delivering information to the gestapo. The Polish bomber pilot Sobinski (Robert Stack) returns to Warsaw on the trail of Professor Siletsky (Stanley Ridges), who is supposed to be working with the Polish resistance but instead plans to turn everything he knows over to the Nazis. In order to prevent this, Sobinski reunites with some friends back in Warsaw — or more accurately, one friend, the famed theater actress Maria Tura (Carole Lombard), and her jealous actor husband Joseph (Jack Benny), who suspects, perhaps rightly, that his wife was having an affair with the young Sobinski.

These melodramatics are pushed aside, of course, in order to foil Siletsky's planned rendezvous with the Germans, and that's when the fun really starts. The film opens slowly, particularly when dealing with the possible romance between Sobinski and Maria. These scenes, set immediately preceding the Nazi invasion of Poland, establish the characters at the theater: the domineering director Dobosh (Charles Halton), the hammy Rawitch (Lionel Atwill), the earnest Greenberg (Felix Bressart), who was born to play Shylock, and the sidelined Bronski (Tom Dugan), who doesn't even get a big break when he's asked to play Hitler in a forthcoming play. His ad-libbed line, "Heil me," does indeed, as Greenberg says, get a big laugh, though Dobosh won't allow such innovations from the lowly actors. In any event, the Hitler play gets put off by the arrival of the real Germans, and the film's uneven pacing finally begins to kick into high gear once Sobinski arrives back in Warsaw. Lubitsch skims over the details of his arrival and various escapes from the Germans, eliding much and skipping straight ahead to the sight of the young soldier sleeping in Maria's bed. This in turn leads into a complicated and very funny three-way exchange of wits between Maria and Sobinski, who are trying to halt a spy plot, and Joseph, who can't get past the fact that there's a young man in his wife's bed.

The arrival of the young man in question gets Maria and Joseph, along with the rest of the actors, embroiled in a plot to stop Siletsky and destroy all the evidence he planned to hand over to the Germans. From this point on, the film is a delight as Lubitsch revels in the deceit and disguises and elaborate performances within performances: no one is who they seem, everyone's playing a part, and life frequently imitates art. At one point, Joseph poses as a Nazi officer for Siletsky, and later finds himself in the exact opposite position, playing Siletsky in front of the real Nazi officer he'd imitated earlier. He's gratified to find that the real officer is using some of his own lines: "yes, that's how I thought you'd react," he says after the officer unknowingly repeats one of Joseph's own ad-libs, and the officer misses the hidden double meaning, the satisfaction of an actor who realizes he'd played his part well. Moreover, the officer repeats a joke that was told earlier in the Hitler comedy the theater troupe had been planning to put on, and Joseph naturally falls into the rhythms of the scene, letting it play out the way it had in the script.

This kind of joking interplay between reality and art reaches its peak at the climax, an absurd farce in which Bronski's turn as Hitler comes in handy, and a couple of actors get to lead around an SS troupe, blithely commandeering an enemy plane for themselves. Even better is the moment when Bronski, still disguised as Hitler, sneaks into an apartment, confusing a Nazi officer who thinks the Fuhrer is here for a secret tryst. These confusions and missed meanings proliferate throughout the film, in which dual identities and fake beards are everywhere, so much so that Rawitch's line as a fake Nazi officer — "What do you have to say for yourself? Here is a man with a beard and you didn't even pull it?" — actually makes a weird kind of sense. It's great fun, but always tinged with an element of dark humor, and an acknowledgment of the genuine horror of the Nazis. Sig Ruman and Henry Victor, as a pair of bumbling Nazis, are cartoonish but also casually evil, reporting on shootings with a smug satisfaction; their tone implies, "of course we shot him." Lubitsch treats them as ridiculous, and pathetic, completely blind to their own evil. Ruman's Nazi colonel is fascinated by the Fuhrer as though Hitler was a glamorous celebrity, and he eagerly awaits anecdotes about his leader, basking in the presence of someone who's even met the great man. Lubitsch makes these characters absurd, but no less dangerous for it — they're cruel and stupid in roughly equal measures.

Siletsky, on the other hand, is not so stupid, though he is perhaps just as easily fooled by the disguises and guile of actors. He's also of course easily seduced by a pretty face, and Maria allows herself to be wooed by him at one point, woozily slurring "heil Hitler" after being kissed, as though his affection had changed her affiliations. The film all works on cartoon logic like this, and at its best it has a kind of Looney Tunes energy, as in Joseph's uncomprehending double takes upon finding Sobinski in his wife's bed. There's also of course much wit in the sexual double entendres of the script. In one of the best, Siletsky asks Maria, "should we drink to a blitzkrieg?" Her retort, delivered with a deadpan purr and a raised eyebrow: "I prefer a slow encirclement."

To Be Or Not To Be is a charming, sophisticated black comedy, one which simultaneously mocks the Nazi enemy and exposes the ugliness of the situation, the terrible things done by these ludicrous cartoons (there's a montage of Nazi street signs early on, promising multiple varieties of horrible death for various minor infractions). The film is far from perfect, and gets bogged down in its first half-hour by routine melodramatics and the boring performance of Stack as the would-be young lover. It's also marred by the periodic appearance of an overbearing "stirring" voiceover, which thankfully disappears once the main story starts coming together. A more basic problem is the inconsistent accents and the fact that Germans and Polish alike are all speaking English. This is to be expected, of course, in a Hollywood film of the time, but it's always distracting in films like this, especially ones where the differences between languages are so crucial to the plot. One inevitably wonders how the Poles keep posing as German soldiers so convincingly. The accents, some of them theatrically British and some of them more authentically eastern European, are a further distraction.

Even so, within this context Benny and Lombard deliver fine comedic performances, broad and delightfully hammy, particularly in the scenes where Maria has to convince her husband that he's a fine actor before each performance. These scenes are hilarious because it's so obvious that Maria is acting, that this is a routine and that there's no real feeling in all their melodramatic spats and tearful reunions. They're characters who, as with Lombard's earlier, similar turn opposite John Barrymore in Twentieth Century, are always acting. The film doesn't always hold together, and its nonsensical plot is just the flimsiest of excuses on which to hang its comic set pieces. But it is a weird and low-key delight all the same.