Messidor (Alain Tanner, 1979)

 

In Alain Tanner’s Messidor, two young women randomly meet while hitchhiking, sharing a ride and then getting out together when they decide the driver’s a creep, continuing along together for a while, spending the night in the woods, and then just going on and on, in a vaguely defined game of no clear purpose and with no way to win, especially after some of their actions (including stealing a policeman’s loaded gun) have their names and faces on TV as wanted and possibly even dangerous criminals. Looked at one way, the film presents a slow stripping-away of resources and possibilities, the girls visibly worn and hungry, and yet they keep going, surmounting occasional frictions, unlocking occasional ecstasies, getting help even from some people who recognize them. Tanner takes them through a dizzying volume of encounters and pivots while eliding some major points: whether the women at one point have sex with each other, or at another with two bikers (notwithstanding all the other men they resist, sometimes violently); there’s even a faint suggestion that a bullet fired into the sky as a plane flies overhead might have caused it to crash. It’s very much a product of the old Europe, with frequent language barriers and a recurring awareness of borders, but allowing glimpses of elevating release from stifling convention (the title, we’re told, refers to one of the months in the alternative calendar used during the French revolution). Near the end, one of the women muses on where all the people in the street can be going to or coming from, recalling how as a child she was amazed at the knowledge that everyone went home to their own bed; it’s both a fundamental incomprehension of the world’s organizing principles and also thereby a liberation, an ability to transcend, albeit only briefly, and in inevitably doomed fashion, such stifling structure.

Night of the Juggler (Robert Butler, 1980)

 

Robert Butler’s 1980 New York-set Night of the Juggler amply makes up in pace and aggressive local colour for what it lacks in other areas (plausibility, for one). Cliff Gorman plays Gus Soltic, driven by obsessive hatred of the real estate developers he blames (often in violently racist terms) for ruining his life; he plans to kidnap the daughter of one such tycoon, but gets the wrong girl, setting her ex-cop father Sean Boyd (James Brolin) on his trail, and the local cops chasing after both of them (including a crazed former colleague of Boyd’s bearing a murderous grudge, played with absurd relish by a heavily indulged, bulging-eyed Dan Hedaya). The film packs a tremendous volume of confrontation and incident into its hundred or so minutes, with some top-quality extended chase scenes (one of them featuring an uproarious, if again dubiously conceived appearance by an edge-of-stardom Mandy Patinkin). The film conveys a recurring faint sense of loss and longing: in Soltic’s constant references to his dead mother (he makes the kidnapped girl wear one of her old dresses); in the objectively inexplicable decision of a woman who helps Boyd along the way to drop everything and tag along with him, perhaps forever; even in the plaintive look of a nude Times Square dancer who passes along a key clue. But that’s all intertwined with a sense of teeming, often almost gleeful possibility, albeit of a kind that might at any moment become deadly, the city as depicted here being riven with factionalism and race-based suspicion. In the end, despite all the trauma, the girl asserts that she still doesn’t want to move to boring Connecticut with her mother: a glib wrap-up given all she’s endured, but in line with how, in classic action movie manner, the newly constituted family is allowed to walk away into something close to a sunset.

The Golden Fern (Jiri Weiss, 1963)

 

Jiri Weiss’ The Golden Fern is conventionally described as a “fairy tale,” and the story is certainly rooted in the supernatural, but such a label misrepresents the actual experience of watching the film, which is often bracingly pained and violent. Jura, a shepherd, finds the titular plant in the depths of the forest and brings it home, in turn summoning Lesanka, a mysterious and beautiful woman who asks him to give it back, but ultimately stays and becomes his wife. For a while the movie surrenders to dreamy romanticism, but Jura is far pricklier than a conventionally bland hero, overly sensitive for instance to any suggestion that he’s being laughed at, and one night takes off for a binge, drunkenly signing up for a long stint in the army, allowed only a cursory goodbye to Lesanka during which she gives him a shirt which she says will shield him from harm. Thus magically equipped, he becomes a military hero and is promoted to captain, but his desire to return home, and the machinations of a superior’s calculating daughter, lead him through a series of challenges at which he improbably succeeds (this element of the film, a staple of the folk tale, offsets its flourishing adventurism with depictions of the grisly consequences for those whom he outwits), but only to experience further frustration, and then catastrophe. The film is certainly in part a veiled comment on class, the venality of the military superiors emphasized at every stage: in exploiting poverty and fallibility, in flagrantly failing to live up to promises made, in treating enlisted men like playthings, or almost arbitrarily condemning then to death. But it also suggests that one can escape and transcend such grim confines, albeit perhaps only to escape into a different kind of despair, a lonelier and more mysterious one.

Twilight's Last Gleaming (Robert Aldrich, 1977)

 

Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming gradually reveals itself to be seeped in imperial America’s driving contradictions: it amply showcases the immense resources of both the military and the Presidency, their multi-faceted responsiveness in the face of an emergency situation, but also reveals the confused or absent moral and strategic purpose beneath, in this case harking back to a secret document that demonstrates the effort in Vietnam was always known to be hopeless, that indeed the hopelessness was largely the point, in demonstrating to its enemies the country’s capacity to shed its humanity. In extreme contrast to a present-day governing infrastructure that sublimates itself to Presidential willpower, Aldrich’s film indicates the supremacy of what would now be called the Deep State, the President accepting he may be collateral damage for the sake of greater interests; this may have been idealistic even at the time, but even the positing of it makes the movie a sobering monument to how far things have fallen (it’s rather amusing that the President, played by Charles Durning, is a particular accident of history, having won his party’s nomination only because of an old-fashioned deadlocked convention). The film is meatily cast, inevitably of its time in that the levers of power are entirely held by older men (mostly but not exclusively white): Burt Lancaster persuasively weary and unkempt, preeminent as a disillusioned former General and Vietnam POW who leads the hijacking of a nuclear silo, the character’s back story illustrating another aspect of institutional ruthlessness. Aldrich makes good periodic use of split screens in navigating the multi-faceted narrative, and if the film often falls short of realism (the final moments, played as stately and distanced, would surely in practice be marked with chaotic urgency; more generally, the film feels oddly under-populated, even tinny at times), it’s dramatically effective, and a lastingly fascinating reference point.

Phaedra (Jules Dassin, 1962)

 

Jules Dassin’s unappetizing Phaedra, vaguely rooted in Greek mythology, starts by immersing us in the opulent, hard-driving life of shipping magnet Thanos (Raf Vallone), his wife Phaedra (Melina Mercouri) positioned as a prize possession. He asks her to go to London to help talk his son and intended heir from an earlier marriage (Anthony Perkins) out of the dream of being an artist; instead, the two start an affair, of course knowing it can only end badly. There’s little sense of passion in the film though, given the significant lack of chemistry between the two actors: Mercouri is somewhat less grating than usual, but at the cost of merely being stiff and dull, and Perkins seems miscast and distant. The emphasis on wealth and privilege is off-putting from the start, attaining full-on moral bankruptcy in its climactic stretch, in which Thanos learns from his wife what’s happening and banishes his son, this taking place against the news that one of the company’s ships (the one named after Phaedra, naturally) has sunk off the coast of Norway; with the death toll yet to be reported, the black-clad wives of the crew crowd the corridor outside Thanos’ office to wait for news, the arrival of which is intertwined with the fate of the two transgressors. Whatever Dassin had in mind, the effect is of reducing calamitous loss and suffering to mere backdrop, embodied by the (albeit superficially arresting) image of Mercouri in a chic white dress and sunglasses pushing through the sea of black, gaining the entry denied to those others, her turbulent relinquishment of her place at the top flight of capitalism granted greater validity than the social tragedy unfolding around her (in which she shows not an iota of interest). If any aspect of this is intended to be damning, or even just darkly ironic, it’s hardly evident, any more than the film’s broader reason for existing.

Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, 2016)

 

Almost a decade on, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson remains a sublime counterpoint to prevailing concerns and moods, its protagonist exemplifying the elevating capacities of a focus on small pleasures. That individual, Paterson (a perfectly calibrated Adam Driver) is a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey, and also a poet, writing in his little notebook before each shift, during breaks, composing as he walks and in his little basement space at home. Paterson has at least one foot in a bygone age: he doesn’t have a smartphone – during an emergency he has to borrow one from a kid – and although we’re told his wife Laura has one, I’m not sure we ever glimpse it; in contrast, the shots of him holding and turning over beloved volumes of poetry carry a beautiful, unfussy weight, and when the couple goes to the movies, it’s to the 1932 Island of Lost Souls. Laura (a very sweet Golshifteh Farahani) is equally creative, but in a less-applied manner, more focused on notions of fame and money; during the film we see her paint (the apartment, the shower curtain, her clothes), start to learn the guitar, bake masses of cup cakes for a new stand at the farmer’s market, experiment with new recipes, all of which he’s supportive of in a sometimes rather nonplussed-seeming manner (we never learn how they got together, and the nature of their bond is a little mysterious, but unquestionably real and durable). Paterson, the city, probably isn’t many people’s idea of a must-visit, but the film establishes various points of beauty, and a diverse cultural history including as the birthplace both of Lou Costello and of a prominent Italian anarchist, the broader point being that even the most circumscribed life may find enrichment both through heightened attention to local possibilities, and by drawing on shared heritage. No doubt there’s an idealized aspect to the film, exemplified by how Paterson randomly meets not one but two fellow poets within a few days of each other, but the cumulative effect is at the very least warming, if not transcending.

Interview (Mrinal Sen, 1971)

 

Mrinal Sen’s Interview is in part a genial, sad-sack comedy of errors. Ranjit Mallick (played by Ranjit Mallick) gets an interview via his connected uncle for a job that pays double his current salary; he's led to believe it’s in the bag as long as he presents effectively, including wearing a Western suit. Mallick owns such a suit, but it’s been at the dry cleaners for months (he was worried about the moths getting to it at home), and now can’t be retrieved because they’re on strike, triggering a frantic against-the-clock attempt to find a replacement, which he then loses while intervening to thwart a pickpocket on the bus. The insistence on Western formality is depicted here as an imposition or affectation which nevertheless has severe economic consequences, as such symbolizing the ongoing pernicious legacy of the country’s cultural past. Sen’s critique further entails a disruption of familiar forms and conventions, a project dormant for the first half hour or so but then stunningly asserting itself when a woman notices how Mallick resembles a photo in a magazine she’s reading and he suddenly addresses the camera to acknowledge that it is indeed him, exposing the project’s artifice; the narrative continues, but playing now to a more critically heightened audience, culminating in a complete suspension of the filmic space, Mallick set down in a disembodied space and addressed by an offscreen voice that identifies itself as that of the audience, the ultimate tone a mixture of anger and defiance and plaintiveness. Sen further fractures and extends his film’s boundaries with documentary surveys of regular Indian life, of protest around the world, of (heavily Westernized) advertising posters, with written messages attacking the impact of computerization (that last item, at least, can’t help but appear quaint). It’s a remarkable, fresh, constantly surprising work, and surely far too little known, at least in the ever-bulldozing West.

Seven Days in May (John Frankenheimer, 1964)

 

John Frankenheimer’s 1964 drama Seven Days in May is inevitably dated, and a bit too arid, but remains a stirring reference point, not least for how its resonances shift with the times. The film sets out how Marine Corps. Colonel Casey (Kirk Douglas) stumbles onto evidence of a possible coup plot by his direct superior, James Scott (Burt Lancaster), and other military brass, in response to a recently-negotiated, highly divisive peace treaty with Russia (viewed in the age of Trump, one might almost shake one’s head at the inefficiency of plotting to subvert the democratic process by way of such cumbersome intervention, compared to the much more direct method of doing it from within). The movie’s aging President Lyman, embodied with great authoritative nuance by Fredric March, seems now like the kind of leader that’s lost in time (notwithstanding that Joe Biden was cut from similar cloth), even refusing out of basic decency to use some salacious letters that it seems would have done much to sully Scott’s reputation. But his instincts are sharp, seeing better than Scott that a United States in the hands of a military dictatorship would far more likely provoke Russian aggression than extinguish it, and here too, it’s impossible not to mull on how the current administration’s coup-like disregard for conventions and norms coexists with an inexplicable subservience to Russian self-interest and distortion of reality. Although some of the film’s devices now seem simplistic, such as the flurry of bland-seeming messages about a horse racing betting pool which turn out to be incredibly consequential communications about participation in the coup, these add to the pervasive sense of institutional vulnerability, to its excessive reliance on a few good men (and in this film, of course, they are all indeed men, a point underlined by the tediously shoehorned subplot involving Ava Gardner).

Two Girls on the Street (Andre de Toth, 1939)

 

Andre de Toth’s Two Girls on the Street is somewhat mistitled in that its two female protagonists, while initially down on their luck, spend most of the film more than adequately housed and financed, its primary concern being (of course) man-related. Gyongi, an aspiring violinist, is disowned by her father after an out-of-wedlock pregnancy and eventually ends up playing in a dive bar; she comes across Vica, a lower class factory worker, distraught after escaping an attempted sexual assault by Csiszar, a successful architect, and takes the dispossessed woman under her wing. Gyongi variously refers to Vica in terms evoking a daughter, a best friend, a little doll, or even a lover; the film drops recurring hints of some deeper communion between the two, a dynamic rendered peculiar though by the physical similarity between them, and the fact of the actress playing the often mothering Gyongi being two years younger than that playing Vica. The film makes many striking choices both cinematically -  such as scenes that often end more abruptly than one expects, or in the arresting deployment of montage (for example to depict the spread of gossip) and point of view – and narratively, as in the absence of any depicted reconciliation after Vica’s ongoing involvement with Csiszar drives a wedge between the two (although we see Vica celebrating Gyongi’s eventual professional success from  a distance). The film has a distinct strand of social awareness – Vica chides Csiszar for bragging about the buildings he’s built, saying the real work was that of the physical labourers – and yet seems to uncritically view the two women’s materialism once their luck changes, with the final moments appearing to exult in how Vica’s new wealth and status separate her from those masses. But the film’s choices, omissions and possible contradictions are consistently stimulating, even when rather puzzling.

Adam's Rib (George Cukor, 1949)

 

George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib is the smoothest of Hollywood comedies, flowing along as seemingly effortlessly and gracefully as any movie, its stars Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in perfect sync whether flirting or feuding: a single-take scene of them preparing an impromptu dinner embodies the film’s seductive flow (albeit there’s some major cheating in how quickly the meal comes together). The plot has Assistant D.A. Adam Bonner prosecuting the high-profile case of a woman (the fascinatingly singular Judy Holliday) who shot her cheating husband, with his wife Amanda Bonner taking on the defence, a set-up based in contrasting views of the law, morality, and of their own relationship. Amanda bases her defence in equal rights, in the premise that a man who defended his home, even violently, would be viewed as a hero, and that a woman’s actions should be assessed comparably; given though that the crime was committed far outside the home, after the woman stalked her husband to the apartment of his presumed mistress, the intriguing implication might be that a woman’s legitimate zone of “home” interest extends further than a man’s, that it’s as much a moral or emotional construct as a physical one; an implication nicely complicated in the final scenes when Adam seems to be the more invested of the two in their country home, and demonstrates how he can turn on tears at will (it’s a shame though that the closing line wasn’t stronger than a vague celebration of the “small differences” between men and women). Of course, the film is a work of its time, the relationship being of the kind where Adam demonstrates his thoughtfulness by buying his wife a new hat, in which even when things are in full flow she’s seen to be “managing” him, facilitating his crustiness in a way that needn’t be reciprocated. Still, it’s skillful enough that the dated certainties of other films register here as stimulating ambiguities.

Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf (Leonardo Favio, 1975)

 

Leonardo Favio’s Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf announces itself as based on a “famous radio drama,” but the narrative has agedly mythic roots, and the film often achieves a sense of not having been crafted as much as excavated or revealed. Nazareno is the seventh son of a father who was warned that such a child would be a werewolf; the father and other boys now dead, he’s grown to young adulthood without the curse coming to pass, but then he falls in love with the beautiful Grizelda, and the wheels of fate start to turn (the meeting of lycanthropy and sexual desire rather anticipates Paul Schrader’s approach to remaking Cat People). While feeling entirely distinct, Favio’s film often brings Pasolini to mind: in the rich and unfiltered-feeling local flavour and almost aggressive absence of conventional cinematic polish (the swooning treatment of the lovers is a prominent exception); in the use of non-professional actors and the very basic approach to evoking the supernatural (a sequence in which an old woman relishingly demonstrates how she can change into a variety of animals could hardly be more simply conceived, but is rendered irresistible through the woman’s robust and sustained laughter). The evocation of the underworld has its Trilogy-of-Life aspects to it too (for example, the glimpses of naked activity in the background), but the character of the devil comes as a surprise, marked by longing rather than malevolence, regretful that he experienced neither being or having a son (a recurring preoccupation of the film), quite poignant in the request he makes of Nazareno, rendering the film’s final moments both beautiful and melancholy . This viewer was rather surprised to hear the tune of Johnny Mathis’s When a Child is Born used as a recurring love theme; research indicates that the melody is Soleado, used here before its appropriation as a Christmas hit.

Exposed (James Toback, 1983)

 

In a way, the title of James Toback’s endlessly fascinating Exposed is diametrically misaligned with the underlying film, in that the trajectory of its protagonist Elizabeth Carlson is as much toward a kind of erasure or embalming as toward self-actualization. The opening stretch feels like a great American origin story, following Elizabeth as she quits school, returns home to her Swedish parents on their Wyoming farm, endures the ups and downs of New York at its most rough-edged, and then while reluctantly working as a waitress is discovered by a fashion photographer and becomes a world-famous model. An extended scene of Elizabeth dancing exuberantly in her new apartment, the embodiment of having arrived, is in hindsight a kind of conclusion, the film thereafter dominated by the rivalry of two men: a mysterious, at first seemingly romantic pursuer who initially calls himself Daniel Jelline (Rudolf Nureyev), his interest in her in fact partially or maybe primarily rooted in the knowledge that she fascinates the murderous terrorist Rivas (Harvey Keitel), and may be able to serve as bait. After initially resisting, Elizabeth starts following the trail by herself, finding her way to Rivas, who despite his suspicions allows her to observe the heart of his operation, including his murder of a group member who betrays him. The final freeze-frame of Elizabeth, at a moment of extreme trauma, bridges the many glamour photos we see of her and Jelline’s collected newspaper clippings of Rivas’ and other atrocities, as such summarizing the tension between image and action that propels much of the film, her activism and initiative having brought her to an existential dead end. The casting of Nureyev, and as a violin player rather than a dancer, might embody how the film seldom delivers its pleasures quite, or even at all, as one anticipates.

Distant Thunder (Satyajit Ray, 1973)

 

Satyajit Ray’s 1973 Distant Thunder, set in 1943, is one of his most quietly incisive works, charting how a tiny rural village far removed from world events becomes physically and spiritually decimated by their effects. The film initially focuses on a young teacher, Chakravarti, newly-arrived with his wife; as the only Brahmin in the village he’s also called on to be doctor and spiritual leader, exploiting his privilege with quiet smugness (when called to treat a cholera outbreak in a nearby community, he sizes it up as an opportunity to buy his wife a new sari). But the price of rice starts to rise as the war (directly evidenced only by the planes that occasionally fly overhead, a sight that initially seems wondrous) messes with supply chains, food rapidly becoming virtually inaccessible, prompting chaos and despair. By the end of the film, the perceived superiority of caste has been eviscerated: we realize the teacher’s ignorance on matters of world events (peddling bad information on foreign countries and their role in the war), his status as local leader meaning nothing in the face of escalating hunger, rendering him an ineffectual onlooker, increasingly and symbolically absent from the film as matters deteriorate. The narrative encompasses violent assault both sexually and financially motivated, desperation-motivated prostitution, and even a covered-up murder, but even at its most despairing, the film finds pockets of compassion and empathy (even for characters who Ray makes convincingly hard to put up with), ending in a vision of remade and even expanded community. The final shot, of silhouetted masses shuffling toward the spectator, rather evokes a horror film, and for all its humanity and restraint, Distant Thunder almost invites such categorization, as an examination of sustainable (if imperfect) community devastated by events beyond its understanding or even vague capacity to resist.

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.