3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)

 

Possibly Robert Altman’s most intricately complex and strangely beautiful work, 3 Women might also count among his strangest (although it has some competition), especially if one tries to take it at any kind of face value. The film starts as a strange chronicle of Pinkie (Sissy Spacek), a new employee at a health facility for seniors, latching onto another employee, Millie (Shelley Duvall); the third woman, Willie (Janice Rule) is an artist married to Millie’s landlord, for most of the movie’s duration seeming too marginal a character to be coherently grouped with the others, her significance ultimately stunningly evident (the film’s men are all either flagrantly flawed, like Willie’s drunken, unfaithful braggart of a husband, or else non-entities of one kind or another). The film has a pervasive sense of the fluid and ungraspable, of something in formation, hinted at even in the opening scenes of the old-timers on their guided water-walking, to a pivotal swimming pool “accident,” to the startling climactic juxtaposition of Millie overseeing Willie’s delivery while Pinkie, instead of fetching a doctor as instructed, stands and watches from a distance, the aftermath carrying the quasi-ritualistic, bloodied impact of a horror film. And although Willie’s child doesn’t survive, biological destiny is realized in strangely displaced form, the three women forming a new living environment (Willie’s husband, it’s suggested, having been violently dispatched) which appears at least momentarily stable, but seemingly at the cost of a surrender of self, a suspension of growth in one woman counter-balanced by an acceleration of it in another, the suppressed mother-daughter elements always visible in the Millie/Pinkie relationship now explicit. This might all seem somewhat schematic if not for the film’s extraordinarily detailed texture, minutely realized in matters of clothing and décor and food, and more dramatically in the strange, sexually ambiguous shapes that Willie generates (often on the walls of empty swimming pools); Duvall and Spacek are in mesmerizing form from start to end.

Three Times (Hou Hsiao Hsien, 2005)

 

Hou Hsiao Hsien’s haunting trilogy Three Times casts its leads Shu Qi and Chang Chen in three stories of imperfect connection, set in three different decades. The 1960’s sequence is primarily structured around a soldier’s search, during a brief leave, for May, who worked at a pool hall he formerly frequented. The 1910’s sequence somewhat reverses the dynamic, the woman now a courtesan, always there, the man an occasional customer who she sees as her primary hope of obtaining freedom, even in the absence of any promises or stated intentions on his part. The woman in the technology-heavy modern-day is the freest of the three by most measures, but her situation remains defined by challenge and dysfunction. Both the main actors are perfectly cast and deployed, with Qi especially engaging and wide-ranging: the way May beams with delight when he unexpectedly turns up in the first sequence is particularly irresistible. The film suggests that the barriers to mutual discovery are ever-present, but shifting, the three stories drawing in the country’s vulnerability to foreign powers, the machinations of wartime, the indentured courtesan system, and more recently the impact of a speeded-up, connected society. That last sequence ends with the most explicit assertion of female choice, her on the back of his motorcycle after she tells him to take her to his place: such freedom is far removed from the plight of the poor courtesan, but as presented here hardly represents a straightforward expression of female progress (in a way, May’s perpetual changing of jobs and locations in the first story suggests an existential lightness of being that the other two woman lack, even though, or indeed because, we don’t know what underlines it). The non-chronological ordering of the sequences is just one way in which Hou discourages a simpler reading of the film, even as the multiple use of the same actors, and the director’s matchless formal grace, provide a binding sense of transcendent persistence.

Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes, 1998)

 

Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine is an intricate, outre delight that leaves you feeling empty and dissatisfied, at least in part by design, reflecting the passing of the short-lived glamrock era it swims within. To say that Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ Brian Slade is a “Bowie-like” figure hardly captures the extent of the correspondence, as the character appropriates the sound, the look, the cultural positioning, the fluid sexuality, and other big chunks of the biography: the big difference is that whereas Bowie renewed himself multiple times after retiring Ziggy Stardust, the more conventionally mortal Slade has to engineer a fake shooting before disappearing for years, eventually reappearing in such radically overhauled form that no one knows it’s him. The film is gorgeously and tangibly imagined, crammed with perfectly-judged costumes and videos and posters and album covers, and has some fantastically combustible sequences, all of this shoehorned though into a rather turgid (and pointlessly Citizen Kane-evoking) framework involving a journalist (Christian Bale) who ten years later tries to put the story together. There’s none of Bowie’s music in the film – apparently he refused permission – but we do hear instantly recognizable tracks from Lou Reed, T-Rex and others, giving the distractingly strange impression of a parallel universe in which music evolved in exactly the same way, with the same people (even Gilbert O’Sullivan!), minus that one vital figure. Another much-debatable point, the use of a different actor to play Slade in his new identity was criticized by Meyers, and perhaps too easily allows points of logistical quibbling (no plastic surgery was ever as successful…), but seems to me in a way to cement Bowie’s uniqueness, his near-supernatural capacity for renewal needing in his absence to be made literal (like Dr. Who, one might think). The film is brave, emotionally expansive, and galvanizingly slippery and unpredictable; little matter then if it’s often on the dull side too.

L'ami de mon amie (Eric Rohmer, 1987)

In Eric Rohmer’s L’ami de mon amie, Blanche and Lea, both in their early twenties, become friends; Blanche is single but develops a crush on Alexandre, a man she meets through Lea, and who feels nothing for her; Lea lives with Fabien but the relationship is bumpy, and then while Lea is away, Blanche and Fabien connect and sleep together. The theme of intertwining couples and mismatched desires is worthy of classic romantic comedy, and Rohmer delivers a finale in that vein, in which each of the two women misunderstands which man the other is referring to, a confusion that’s ultimately happily resolved. The film is unusual in Rohmer’s oeuvre for its setting, the “new town” of Cergy-Pontoise, an easy commute from Paris but a universe away in terms of its modernity and artificiality and sometimes rather bizarre-seeming concept of space. Cergy is conceived as a place one might barely ever have to leave, with work and home and play all within precisely-curated walking distance: Fabien refers to an occasion on which he ran into the same person seven times while out and about, becoming increasingly frustrated about how to respond, an anecdote that nevertheless in a way confirms the location’s effectiveness in promoting connectivity. Even more than in some other Rohmer movies then, there’s a sense here of social experimentation, that Cergy-Pontoise ought to be productive territory for relationships, thus adding to the characters’ frustrations at their own failures (Blanche’s crush on Alexandre is presented as utterly absurd, and the moment when she finally realizes that he’s more naturally drawn to Lea is quietly penetrating). Rohmer doesn’t seem cynical about the setting though, his film marked by both fascination and optimism, by a sense that the possibilities of Cergy at that time might have been running ahead of the capacities of its occupants.

Searching for Mr. Rugoff (Ira Deutchman, 2019)

 

Ira Deutchman’s Searching for Mr. Rugoff is a modest but cherishable piece of cinema history, packed with juicy anecdote and memoir. The now seldom-mentioned Don Rugoff was an exhibitor and distributor, his holdings including a group of upper East Side Manhattan theaters that embodied the “arthouse” of the 60’s and 70’s (Rugoff was as responsible as anyone, for example, for Lina Wertmuller’s short-lived preeminence). An emblematically colourful and turbulent character, he habitually slept through screenings (which didn’t prevent him forming strong opinions on what he’d missed) and had lousy personal habits, possibly exacerbated by an untreatable tumor in his brain; still, for a while he made a lot of things happen, with a flair for imaginative publicity ideas (such as pumping up the prospects of Pumping Iron with bodybuilding demonstrations in the theaters). The documentary’s title references the somewhat extraneous Searching for Sugarman-type strand in which Deutchman tries to track down a small-town cinema club which Rugoff ran at the end of his life, the details of which have fallen into obscurity; while this material illustrates the depth of Rugoff’s fall from visibility, that part of the narrative would be amply clear regardless. Among the film’s notable omissions is any detailed account of Rugoff’s distribution business, and its impact on cinema culture outside New York, an absence that seemingly underlines the narrowness of Rugoff’s core achievement. Even growing up around that time on the other side of the Atlantic, I recall how largely that strand of Manhattan cinemagoing loomed in one’s perception of various films, of what it was to be a cineaste; as wondrous a moment in time as that was, it may seem in hindsight that a culture rooted in such a geographically and sociologically specific, and to most of us distant piece of the world, and bolstered by an unsustainable amount of spending on stunts and overhead, might not have been optimally built to last…

Gwaed ar y Ser (Wil Aaron, 1975)

 

As in the joke about the piano-playing dog, one was probably never supposed to ask whether the 1975 Welsh-language Gwaed ar y Ser (Blood on the Stars) is any good, it being miracle enough that it exists at all. Lasting only about an hour, the premise is of a serial killer knocking off the line-up for an upcoming night’s entertainment at a village hall, the joke being that the victims were indeed at the time relative “stars” within the tiny confines of Welsh-language culture. The film places an uncertain foot in the folk-horror genre, the killer himself being less malign than the local kids’ choir that he notionally conducts, the threat from which will seemingly outlive his inevitable arrest. But any potential creepiness is swamped by a haphazard shooting style, scattershot jokiness and massive tonal uncertainty, devoting too much time to a way-over-the-top lead detective, and allowing minor characters to prattle on at pointless length. As a medium for the Welsh language, the film spans everything from ornate oracular eloquence to English-infused vernacular, and it dispatches with its celebrities in a varied bunch of ways, from a live-on-air DJ opening a package containing a deadly snake, to a folk singer whose dead body is found painted green (a sight the camera dwells on with particular relish), to a harpist electrocuted by her own instrument (after she leads a visitor through a gluttonous and mostly very starchy-looking cornucopia of local delicacies). Stuffed with in-jokes and references that probably barely resonated with its target audience (to the extent that one can imagine one) even at the time, the film was hardly designed to meet any kind of test of time; the bizarre fact of it popping up fifty years later on a Canadian streaming service seems then like a crazed vindication of sorts.

Caught (Max Ophuls, 1949)

 

Max Ophuls’ Caught follows the journey of Leonora Ames (Barbara Bel Geddes) and her relationship with two men placed at economic, social and emotional extremes from each other, the title seeming to refer primarily to the imprisoning gravity of money and the power it bestows. The film is driven by Leonora’s conflicted impulses and motivations: she enrolls in a “charm school” to increase her social effectiveness, takes a job as a department store model, and accepts an invitation to a party on a yacht belonging to the super-rich Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), but her ambivalence and reluctance are often evident, and although she’s frequently criticized during the film for being preoccupied with marrying well, it appears to be more of an imposed attitude than a deeply-felt one. Ohlrig does marry her, but with equal lack of conviction, perhaps primarily just to prove a therapist wrong, thereafter wearing her down with his disregard. The film doesn’t demonize Ohlrig, showing him to be in the grip of various kinds of malaise, but in the end he simply fades from relevance, a structural choice intriguingly balanced by how the other man in Leonora’s life, an idealistic doctor for whom she takes a low-paid receptionist job after attempting to break from her husband and who helps refine her values doesn’t appear until almost halfway into the movie (notwithstanding James Mason’s top billing). There’s something rather startling about the film’s ultimate deployment of death as a necessary ultimate step toward redemption, its twist on the familiar intertwining of biology and destiny, the impact into the material world rippling outward (the final image is of a once-prized fur coat being carried away). And if not one of Ophuls’ very greatest works, Caught is (of course) consistently visually eloquent and striking, whether exploring the alienatingly vast interiors of Ohlrig’s Long Island mansion or the drastically contrasting no-place-to-turn East Side spaces.

The Widow (Nam-ok Park, 1955)

 

Nam-ok Park’s 1955 film The Widow is highly worthwhile viewing, notable as the first Korean film to be directed by a woman, and marked by its sympathetic treatment of female perspectives. Shin is a single mother, widowed by the war, established in the early scenes as weighed down by money problems but also as independent-spirited, not inclined to settle; she’s financially assisted by an older acquaintance, but doesn’t sleep with him, contrary to his wife’s suspicions. Meanwhile the wife herself has a lover, Taek, who eventually in turn falls for Shin, their marriage plans imperiled by the return of Taek’s old love, whom he’d assumed to be also dead. The film’s examination of societal pressures on women evokes Ozu’s films of the period, but the comparison (not an entirely fair one of course) rather underlines The Widow’s lack of formal rigour and the relative softness of its approach (perhaps summed up by the recurring use of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Some Enchanted Evening). At the time of writing, the film can only be viewed in a truncated version in which the second-last reel is without a soundtrack, and the final reel is missing altogether, and although that’s obviously objectively not for the best, it does lend what’s left a rather singular vanishing quality. Just before the sound disappears, the film briefly detours for the first time into becoming a musical, and then a narrative that seemed geared toward a romantic coming together becomes one of separation, felt all the more deeply for the silence, underlined by a series of shots of her feet as she walks alone, and then later by a corresponding series of his feet, and a final shot of Taek alone in the night, staring in the direction of his lost love, the sudden imposition of the end seeming to define an absence and a longing that can never be filled or mitigated.

The Bible...in the Beginning (John Huston, 1966)

 

John Huston’s The Bible…in the Beginning is as misbegotten as any big-budget movie of its era, its superficial fidelity to the source and humorless solemnity embodying a perceived importance, if not transformative capacity, but barely coherent as conventional narrative while also lacking any sense of unifying mystery or basic theological curiosity. The film travels through God’s initial establishment of the light and creation of the world, through the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel, making dull use of the likes of Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole, sometimes momentarily impressing with its spectacle and resources, but never penetrating or moving: the episodically plodding, literal approach succeeds at least in establishing God’s unknowable, if not wantonly capricious, nature, but offers almost no discernible means of navigation. As presented here, for instance, the mythic grandeur of the Noah story can hardly surmount endless questions: how one old man and his family possess the resources and know-how to harvest so much timber, build such a seaworthy vessel and so on; what kind of land it is in which kangaroos, hippos and polar bears live in close proximity; what the point of the flood was when the movie depicts mankind rapidly returning to its fractured and sparring ways (even so, the Noah episode at least possess a sense of fun absent from the rest of the movie, with Huston himself turning in the film’s most enjoyable performance). The film concludes with its longest segment, the story of Abraham (George C. Scott), presented here as a one-note trudge, much of it likely to be mystifying to non-scholars (one’s resistance reaching a pinnacle in the brutal final testing of Abraham’s faith). The film’s approach ultimately might seem forged in veiled contempt as much as in intelligent engagement or respectful devotion.

Le deuxieme souffle (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1966)

 

Jean-Pierre Melville’s directorial control over Le deuxieme souffle sometimes seems to border on the supernatural, to be drawing from a liminal state of watching and waiting and calculating, one in which normal, law-enforced ethics are replaced by what might very loosely be termed “honor among thieves,” a label with bottomless layers of underlying complexity and subtext. The names of the main adversaries, career criminal Gustav Manda (Lino Ventura), known as Gu, and police inspector Blot (Paul Meurisse), evoke an elemental struggle, the “Gu” perpetually threatening a hole in the societal fabric, the “Blot” the primary means of repair; their opposition forming a kind of kinship (Blot’s precise early reading of a crime scene, complete with laconic predictions of what form the noncooperation of the eyewitnesses will take, is priceless). Gu escapes from jail at the start of the film, but a fellow escapee is killed during the attempt (and we later learn the other didn’t do much better); he shortly thereafter kills two thugs who cross his path, and from there his activities always feel stalked by death, even his smallest interactions carrying a heightened existential charge. Gu’s twisted sense of ethics generates some almost deliriously contorted rationalizations: tricked into naming one of his collaborators and labeled in the papers as a stool pigeon, he has a police inspector sign an account of what happened, and then cold-bloodedly kills the man, with no apparent sense that such a venal action might outweigh the reclaimed reputational virtue. But judgments and weightings are no clearer on the other side of the law: Blot in the film’s final moments has an easy opportunity to suppress the inspector’s brutally-obtained confession, but instead ensures it will be made known. Ventura and Meurisse, despite sharing very little screen time, are among the all-time spellbinding adversaries, one of several respects in which one senses a path being laid for Michael Mann’s Heat.

92 in the Shade (Thomas McGuane, 1975)

 

Thomas McGuane’s 92 in the Shade is, often simultaneously, a film made out of almost nothing (even at a late stage, it spends extended time observing one minor character instruct another in the names of fish) and one driven by profound existential tension: somehow, the meeting of the two creates something rather uniquely gripping, its essentially irresolvable quality indicated by the existence of two versions with alternate endings (I’ve only seen the bleaker and I imagine more haunting of the two). Peter Fonda plays Skelton, aspiring to become a Key West fishing guide, blowing up a boat owned by Warren Oates’ Dance as revenge for an elaborate practical joke; Dance then vows to kill him unless he quits the business. Skelton doesn’t seem to doubt Dance’s resolve, but keeps going anyway: it sums up the film’s evasive charm that one can hardly guess to what degree he’s driven by fatalism versus self-confidence versus idiocy, et cetera. The film frequently cuts off scenes that feel like they could have gone on longer, or refers to incidents and conversations that one might typically expect to have been part of the movie: while that could be held up as a failure of craft (Fonda for one was unhappy with the editing), it also lends it a kind of goofy authenticity, a sense that we’re peering into sometimes near-random chunks of the sunbaked intertwined lives. The fine and happy-seeming cast includes a blissfully unhinged Burgess Meredith (who even more than most of the others seems to be making it up as he goes along, especially in his scenes with Sylvia Miles), a wonderfully light-spirited Margot Kidder, Elizabeth Ashley demonstrating her baton-twirling skills, and William Hickey, recounting how he failed dismally at operating a whorehouse; it says something that Harry Dean Stanton has trouble stealing any scenes.

Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke, 2003)

 

The opening sequence of Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf might promise a relatively conventional society-breakdown film: a family of four arrives at their weekend cottage to take refuge, finding it already occupied; within minutes the father is dead and the mother (Isabelle Huppert) and two children are out on their own, stripped of their supplies. A little while later, they see a passing train and make their way to a railway station in hope of finding transport out, and that’s almost as much as ever happens: all the subsequent scenes are set at or around the station, with limited news of the outside world, and declining hope of that train ever showing up. It’s a set-up that might evoke Beckett, its dark ridiculousness increasing in proportion to the existential stakes, and Haneke very subtly teases us with portents and possibilities that never go where they might (for example, the station is initially dominated by a potentially dangerous man called Koslowski who lays down the law and controls the allocation of supplies, but as others arrive he fades into the mix; another character seems like a symbol of non-conformity and defiance, but his efforts end up as failures, stealing a precious goat and ending up pointlessly killing it; even Huppert’s character barely emerges from the crowd in the latter stretch, a confrontation with her husband’s killer likewise coming to nothing). Haneke orchestrates a typically strong, richly ambiguous finale, fusing elements of supernatural possession and ritual self- destruction with a comforting (if likely delusionary) assertion of all that was good and might be again; the final extended shot might belong either to the past or the future, might be either the expression of a wish or of the extinguishment of one. Overall it’s one of Haneke’s narrower and more withholding visions, but no less meticulously rewarding for that.

Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen, 1989)

 

An ambitious fusion of cold-hearted murder drama and poignant romantic comedy, Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors often feels on the edge of overreaching, but is ultimately as satisfyingly resonant as any of his pictures. One narrative strand follows Judah (the piercing Martin Landau), a successful ophthalmologist whose comfortable life is threatened by the demands of a mistress, Dolores, he’s grown tired of, turning to his shadier brother for help. The other strand (barely linked until the very end) has Allen as Cliff, an unhappily married documentary filmmaker commissioned to make a film about a successful brother-in-law he hates, falling for an associate producer on the film (Mia Farrow, naturally). Crimes and Misdemeanors is surely among Allen’s most ruthless works, his own character ending up in what seem like dire financial, professional and emotional straits, the look on his face when his greatest dream becomes a cruel taunt quite chilling. The film’s focus on sight, potentially a glib notion, becomes hauntingly multi-faceted here: for instance, Judah recalls in a speech how unnerved he was a child by the concept of an all-seeing God, but then half-jokes it may have had something to do with his choice of a career in ophthalmology; later on, the most formally unnerving shot links his horrified eyes and Dolores’s dead ones; another of the main characters, a moral centre of sorts, is going blind. The film has some of Allen’s most precise writing and imagery, and one of its strongest casts, and its musings on religion certainly surpass the trite: ultimately, Judah becomes almost frightening to contemplate, having traveled from the depths of guilt and self-revulsion to a near-gloating self-satisfaction, such that one can imagine further transgressions, the evolution of a sociopath, even a despot, a sense amplified by the suicide of another of the film’s lodestars, leaving behind a pitiful note that’s at once bleakly funny and utterly discouraging regarding humanity’s collective prospects.

Leave No Traces (Jan P. Matsuszynski, 2021)

 

Jan P. Matsuszynski’s Leave No Traces doesn’t make for the most comfortable viewing at a time of enforced deportations based on unfounded allegations and disregard for due process and constitutional rights; over more than two and a half hours, it patiently and (appropriately) drainingly explores a Polish legal system of astounding self-righteous malevolence, capable of drawing on seemingly unlimited resources for the sake of self-preservation. It focuses on the real-life case of Grzegorz Przemyk, an 18-year-old student who was detained by police in 1983 for trivial reasons and hideously beaten by them, dying of his internal injuries within a few days; given all the evidence, including a friend’s eye-witness testimony, the focus of investigation ought to be clear, but it comes more naturally to the authorities to slander, deflect and lie, most poignantly here in the character of an innocent paramedic who transported the already doomed Przemyk to hospital, targeted as a more acceptable scapegoat and placed under impossible pressure to make a false confession. The activity isn’t confined to the shadowy depths: when the country’s chief prosecutor (one of the few people in the film with an apparent ethical compass) comments that the whole thing would have been long forgotten if not for the near-crazed focus on protecting the identified officers, the next scene contains a radio news announcement that he’s been removed from his post. But the film, pointedly, excludes any examination of the offenders’ state of mind, of whether they feel guilt or remorse, this being irrelevant to the workings of the system. The viewer feels increasingly drained, furious, afraid, and hemmed in: early on, the BBC’s reporting, and considerations relating to an upcoming Papal visit, provide some momentum toward objectivity and transparency, but these eventually fall out of the picture, the process following no logic or morality but its own, even the sanest and most determined witness barely able to withstand the onslaught.

Ararat (Atom Egoyan, 2002)

 

Atom Egoyan’s Ararat is fairly typical of the director’s post-peak works: meticulously controlled, preoccupied with weighty themes, its structural intricacy spanning the public and the intimate; and, sadly, almost completely lacking in impact. The film concerns itself with the 1915 Armenian genocide, both as a valid subject for modern-day film-making (Charles Aznavour plays a director making a film called Ararat) and as a continuing source of preoccupation and trauma, both directly (Egoyan lumberingly contrives a reason for a customs officer to be discussing the history at length with a suspected drug smuggler) and by generational and cultural proximity (that same suspect’s father, an Armenian activist, was shot dead while attempting to kill a Turkish diplomat). The film’s thicket of interconnections (for example, the custom’s officer’s son is in a relationship with an actor in the movie, on which the suspect also works as a production assistant), seemingly intended to establish a sense of layered complexity, mostly feels over-determined and airless: the film lacks any hint of spontaneity or true discovery, its artifices and inventions at odds with any possibility of more than superficial empathy. It does evoke a nagging suspicion (or maybe it’s just a faintly benevolent hope) that Egoyan is playing a particularly sophisticated game (for example, why should we believe that a flashback seemingly showing the truth about a past death is any more reliable than the material we see being shot in a studio), that the earnestness and speechifying are parodic, mocking the whole notion that commercial cinema could possibly make a meaningful contribution to historical memory and understanding. But the weight of evidence indicates that the film is indeed as turgidly self-important as one experiences it as being. The actors are at best dull and poorly utilized (Marie-Josee Croze is one of the few centres of energy), and at worst (Elias Koteas is a prime offender) barely watchable.