Passion (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2008)

 

If Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Passion - essentially a student project, remarkably – pushes its characters and situations too hard at many points, it’s perhaps only out of a surfeit of infectious earnestness and curiosity. It would be worth seeing if only for an extraordinary central sequence in which a young teacher, Kaho, leads her class in talking about a classmate who recently killed himself, taking them through a consideration of modes of violence and appropriate responses. It seems doubtful that Kaho’s reasoning and conclusions are entirely coherent either to the film’s audience or to the pupils, and yet the process succeeds in prompting one classmate to volunteer that he had bullied the dead boy, and for others to follow, an early example of Hamaguchi’s interest in shifting and synthesis. The intertwining of choice and instinct and responsibility also informs the film’s main narrative, focused on the possibly misaligned desires of Kaho’s fiancée Tomoya and of his two friends, one of whom almost certainly loves Kaho more fully and alertly than Tomoya does himself, but without her reciprocation. That’s one of the movie’s many points of confusion and absence: it’s notable that the dead boy is never seen, or even referred to before that scene, echoing against a much-referenced cat, also deceased just before the events in the film, who when alive influenced the living arrangements of several characters. Passion has a playful side, but frequently seems to teeter on the edge of greater anger and danger, or of more fully expressed emotion and sexuality in general, albeit often with a sense of throwing stuff out there just to see if it works (and then, if it doesn’t, of leaving it in the final cut regardless). Still, the film is more absorbingly provocative than many more fully-achieved works (even some of Hamaguchi’s own, possibly).

The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)

 

Jerry Lewis’ The Ladies Man certainly lives up to its reputation for innovative design and technical elements, embodied in the early single-take scene in which Lewis’ character Herbert wanders through the seemingly empty house in which he’s just been employed as a handyman, the frame taking in the large central lobby and staircases rising therefrom, three floors of bedrooms on either side, and unseen to him, in the bottom right corner of the frame, a dining room crammed with young women, the very thing that Herbert had pledged to avoid. The movie’s main premise, that the women collaborate in keeping him busy to avoid him from leaving, strangely fails to land though, in part because Lewis, in typical style, plays Herbert in good and bad times alike as barely functional and always on the edge of becoming demented; it follow that the movie lacks any kind of sexual charge, the women barely registering as individuals (both as director and in character, Lewis seems more comfortable with the two older members of the set-up, a former opera singer who provides a home for aspiring performers, and a motherly housekeeper). The film amply illustrates the bizarre duality of Lewis’ creative sensibility: on the one hand engaging with relish with the then novel notion of live TV broadcasts and the attendant chaos, and luxuriating in spatial possibilities (extended further by the fact of one door which appears to open onto a world of pure imagination); on the other hand aggressively assaulting the viewer with his unbound narcissism and excruciating mugging. The aggregate effect is as troubling as it is funny, which of course amounts to a recommendation, supplemented by an all-time-great opening title sequence, and a weirdly affecting cameo by comedian Buddy Lester, his tough-guy character reduced to blubbering mush within minutes of encountering Herbert, in its way the movie’s most pointed illustration of the near-extortionate subtext to Lewis’ antics.

La vie revee (Mireille Dansereau, 1972)

 

Early on in Mireille Dansereau’s pioneering La vie revee, two young artistically-inclined women, Isabelle and Virginie, meet in a workplace washroom, exchange a few remarks about make-up and jewelry, and within moments of screen time become all but inseparable friends, summing up the film’s still-striking confidence and lightness of touch. They start to talk about bringing up a child together, and Isabelle has a father in mind, an older married man with whom she says she’s in love; eventually she and he get together and it’s a big letdown, but the friends rapidly realize that the release from their mythic three-corner structure (evoked in some of the film’s many brief fantasy sequences) opens up new possibilities, ending the film on a celebratory note. Among much else, the movie energetically serves as a fascinating Montreal time capsule, from recognizable landmarks to an economically quite wide-ranging survey of residential streets and neighbourhoods (there’s only one English-speaking character in the film, and pointedly he’s the man who fires Isabelle); there are multiple references to and visual hints of past family traumas, and almost every issue of the day (Quebec separation, abortion, woman’s equality) gets a passing mention. One rather regrets the ending, both because it doesn’t seem necessary for the film to be over yet (it’s actually too short!) and because the closing sense of liberation manifests itself in tearing down all the self-generated artwork decorating the apartment, as if it had been all along a manifestation of entrapment and limitation rather than meaningful expression (not an invalid idea, but one seeming to warrant more exploration, if that’s the intention). But on the other hand, the film retains a beguiling degree of mystery, contrasting an easygoing approach to female nudity with a refusal to explicitly define the parameters and potential limits of Isabelle and Virginie’s relationship.

The Man who Loved Women (Blake Edwards, 1983)

 

It’s easy enough to take shots at Blake Edwards’ The Man who Loved Women, starting with that not-quite-fitting title, for which possible replacements range from The Man who Had Sex on the Brain to (more intriguingly) The Man who Wasn’t that Comfortable Around Other Men. Certainly the stated premise that women obtained something rare and cherishable from their interactions with the recently deceased sculptor David Fowler (Burt Reynolds) doesn’t seem borne out by anything in the flashback-structured film, although that leads to one of its many points of low-key interest - David’s soft-spoken recessiveness, how he’s the least wolfish of compulsive predators. As the narrative begins he's stifled by indecision and uncertainty, a state visualized in his staring impotently at a block of granite, unable to get to work; Fowler’s home is almost stiflingly opulent, as are many of the movie’s settings, suggesting a stultifying cocoon of privilege and separation. And Edwards’ recurring interest in psychoanalysis runs wild here: his own analyst Milton Wexler is one of the credited scriptwriters; the film is narrated (adding a further layer of distance) by Fowler’s analyst, played by Julie Andrews, with many scenes taking place in her office, and the breakthrough that allows him to get back to work arriving when he suddenly starts to think of her in sexual terms. As always though, Andrews’ vibe is far more motherly than seductive, another aspect of the film’s recurring sense of displacement (whatever woman this man loves, it never quite seems to be the one he’s with): the most extended sequence has him relentlessly pursued by a reckless woman he barely seems even to like (Kim Basinger), her machinations causing him to tangle disastrously with a tube of Krazy Glue, ending up with one hand stuck to his lips and the other to her little dog, strangified to the point of barely being viable as a functioning human, let alone a lover.

The Hunters (Theo Angelopoulos, 1977)

 

At times, Theo Angelopoulos’ The Hunters weirdly evokes Luis Bunuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, as a central group of characters submits to a surreal series of events and time shifts, near the end even being lined up and shot, before the film revives them and resets to an earlier point. If nothing else, the comparison underlines Angelopoulos’ relative withholding of cinematic pleasure (although the movie does have its moments of deadpan farce): his mastery of long, complexly orchestrated takes is second to none, but seldom deployed here for the sake of conventional pictorial beauty (a few scenes of red-sailed boats stand out as almost the sole exception) – even the film’s various musical sequences feel dour and joyless. That’s appropriate though for a film that grapples with Greece’s post-war history of violence and turbulence, sometimes conveyed relatively straightforwardly (such as its depiction of the influx of American Marshall Plan aid and the ensuing economic optimism), at other times barely explained and thus largely impenetrable (at least to an outsider, at least at first viewing). Angelopoulos intensifies the sense of witnessing and spectatorship through his austere approach to performance, his characters moving in a kind of formation, with little sense of spontaneity (at its most extreme making them seem as little more than programmed zombies, which would however carry its own statement about the toll on the individual) The notional plot has the titular hunters finding a dead body in the snow and bringing it back to town for investigation, the corpse lying in the open through scene after scene as individuals provide their testimony (typically in the form of a theatrical performance or other non-naturalistic set-piece), people regularly remarking on how fresh the blood appears, another recurring reminder of the cost of political and social instability and the consequent disruptions and traumas.     

Les photos d'Alix (Jean Eustache, 1982)

 

In Jean Eustache’s captivating Les photos d’Alix, the real-life photographer Alix Clio-Roubard calmly talks the director’s son Boris through a series of her photographs, in some cases emphasizing technical matters, in others the nature of the underlying memory or personal connection, the film allowing both us and Boris time to absorb her explanation before moving on to the next; it gradually dawns on you that what she’s saying no longer bears any relationship to the picture she’s addressing, that she’s pointing out people and objects and effects that plainly aren’t there. The film is in a certain sense an extended joke, and as such works best first-time round: the viewer starts to register the difficulty of relating her words to the image before us, but in the absence of any signal to the contrary likely attributes the shortfall to his or her own deficiencies, perhaps a lack of concentration or an insufficiently refined aesthetic sensibility. Even as the film’s scheme becomes clear, it’s tempting to search for a rational explanation, that sound and image have somehow become decoupled: Alix’s explanations remain so calmly persuasive that one may see the photos she’s describing as clearly as the ones before our eyes, if not more so. The concept wouldn’t work so well if Alix’s photos weren’t indeed so beguiling, so worthy of being contemplated and curated (even if not in the actual way that she does it); Boris’s regular-guy-in-an-ugly-sweater vibe providing an ideally unprepossessing counterpart. But the film feels retrospectively seeped in tragedy: the director committed suicide not long after its completion (and before its 1982 Cesar win for best short film), and Clio-Roubaud died of a pulmonary embolism in 1983, at the age of just 31, a fact that makes the film seem even more ephemeral and elusive and seeped in transient illusion.

The Shout (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1978)

 

Not to even slightly disrespect the astoundingly variable and adaptable iconoclasm of Jerzy Skolimowski’s body of work, but it’s hard to discuss his film The Shout without acknowledging (in its blurring of myth and reality, its drawing on sexuality, the deliberately disorienting editing structure) a recurring feeling of Nicolas Roeg-lite. With that out of the way, the film ultimately stands on its own, albeit perhaps best categorized as a curio, but an utterly fascinating one, most absorbing (and often amusing) when at its most English, with an extended depiction of a cricket match that takes place on the grounds of a mental hospital (the snatches of conversation from the old-timer spectators almost feel Pythonesque), and drawing on the rhythms of village life with its shepherd and cobbler and the minimally-attended church at which one of the characters is the back-up organist (rushing away afterwards to rendezvous with the cobbler’s wife). The film’s core narrative draws strongly on the contrast between Crossley, the eccentrically dominating, perhaps supernaturally endowed character played by Alan Bates, and the married couple on which he imposes himself, with John Hurt’s Anthony almost seeming to exist only so can be pushed around and marginalized, and Susannah York maximizing her capacity to suggest the carnality that might underlie an unassuming country girl prettiness. The film skillfully weaves a zone of intertwining attributes and influences: myth and madness, intelligence and bluster, iconoclasm and criminality, Englishness as a comforting lattice of ritual and tradition and as a blanketing layer of denial and wilful blindness; it’s as attentive to sound as to vision, with Anthony working in his home studio on experimental music, a timid counterpoint to Crossley’s claimed (and perhaps actual) ability to generate a shout that can kill. The film is often as alluring in its silences though, whether they be bucolic or eerie.

La rosiere de Pessac 79 (Jean Eustache, 1979)

 

Jean Eustache’s 1968 La rosiere de Pessac chronicled the annual selection and celebration of a “nubile” and virtuous young woman intended to embody the town’s better nature and aspirations; it coincided that year with France’s chronic social upheaval, against which Eustache’s film stood in an intriguing, resonant tension. Returning to the same subject matter eleven years later, Eustache moves from black and white to colour, a choice which underlines how the annual event is gradually becoming less embedded in tradition and community, and more of a ceremonial abstraction serving as a basis for commerce and a generalized good time. The second film allows a fuller sense of Pessac, of the contrast between the “old town” in which the activities are concentrated and the apartment blocks and impersonal streets which presumably constitute the bulk of its growth; the film ends on an event not seen in the 1968 version, an open-air celebration which seems to become increasingly drunken and rowdy, the chosen rosiere (a highly reticent woman whom I don’t think is ever heard uttering a complete sentence) being pulled unenthusiastically from one table to the next, kissing a grueling volume of cheeks. There’s an undercurrent of desperation to the festivities though, linked to the film’s frequent evocation of economic hard times: the rosiere herself has to live elsewhere during the week for the sake of finding work, returning to Pessac only at weekends. On a more basic level, it’s intriguing to note how a selection process which was efficient and collegial in 1968 has become more halting and messy (the voting procedure has changed for unspecified reasons, with some uncertainty over how it now works, and there’s much more talk of neighbourhood associations and accompanying petty bureaucracy). And whereas in the original it seemed at least plausible that the process might yield an actual and not merely symbolic virgin, the update is laced with gossip about the secret pregnancies of former rosieres. Oh well, nothing stays the same…

The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, 1941)

 

Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture may lack the hypnotic unity of his earlier great work with Marlene Dietrich, but it lingers no less fully (if probably more bizarrely) in one’s mind. Apart from a few presumably stock snippets of Shanghai exteriors (which one imagines Sternberg might have included only with reluctance), the film is an utter artificiality, the central meeting point of “Mother Gin Sling’s” multi-tiered casino teeming with excited extras: they receive a rare mention in the opening credits as a group “who without expecting credit or mention stand ready day and night to do their best,” as if encouraging us to peer more deeply than usual into the movie’s folds and crevices, an exertion which would certainly be repaid. Those opening captions establish Shanghai as the ultimate melting pot, “neither Chinese, European, British nor American,” specifying that “its destiny at present is in the lap of the gods (but) our story has nothing to do with the present.” And implicitly then, nothing to do with the gods either, but rather with human machinations at their most slippery and uncategorizable, including lead characters that all use (or have used) names other than their own, and an absurd notion of Chinese-ness (supplemented by Victor Mature’s self-described “mongrel,” “Dr. Omar”). The movie’s notional plot driver is the attempt to evict Gin Sling and appropriate the casino site for redevelopment, but events carry an escalating sense of implosion: disparate characters including Gene Tierney (absolutely smoldering) Poppy/Victoria, Walter Huston’s “Sir Guy Charteris” and Ona Munson’s indelibly styled Gin Sling ultimately revealed as sharing closely (well, absurdly) intertwined pasts, the feeling of terminal claustrophobia resonating oddly against images of young women being hoisted up in cages to be auctioned off to the crowd of men below (supposedly an event that’s being staged as part of a New Year celebration, although a character observes that the mob looks real enough).

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

 

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman may cause a viewer to reflect on the intertwined wonders and banalities of existence: on how the smallest and most repetitive elements of our life can be recurring sources of structure and stability and even of contentment and joy, while also imprisoning and belittling us. As laid out by Akerman in the film’s opening section, Jeanne’s life is geographically small and economically constrained, but not devoid of activity or stimulation; one detects that the predictability and patterning is soothing, even fascinating, but that this depends on maintaining a precise perspective which is all too easily disrupted or shattered, opening the door to profound existential crisis. But the film is dotted with sudden outbursts which speak to a desire for greater intimacy or self-revelation, such as a neighbour erupting into a monologue about her family’s eating habits, or Jeanne’s mostly wordless son oddly choosing to end the day by musing out loud on sexuality (sex is, as in many things, the source of greatest strain - fundamental, economically significant, vital and mundane and worse). These moments contribute to a slippage containing elements of both liberation and terror (perhaps I’m not the only one who thinks of HAL in 2001, given the film’s now transcendent status in the cinematic rankings). The film’s ending is of course wondrously debatable, its long closing observance of Jeanne carrying elements of despair and doom and hopelessness, both personally and as a broader representation of the toll of patriarchal society, but also of transcendence and possibility (how significant is it that we watch the terrible climactic event reflected in a mirror?). Delphine Seyrig is one of the great screen presences, unselfconsciously ordinary and submerged, but subtly enabling us to tap into the performative resonances of Jeanne’s life, elevating this smallest of films to stand among the largest.

Sweet Substitute (Larry Kent, 1964)

 

Much about Larry Kent’s 1964 Sweet Substitute now seems plain or cursory, but it remains memorable if only for its breathtakingly cold-hearted closing moments, giving the bland-sounding title a startling spin (the alternative title Caressed is far less apposite). To summarize, student Tom finds out that his closest female friend Kathy is pregnant (as far as we know they only had sex once, entirely impulsively, although the film is coy on such matters) and reacts despairingly: his male friends gang together to protect him, cruelly dispatching her from the movie, then in the last shot he’s with his regular date Elaine, a new engagement date prominent on her finger. It’s been well-established though that Elaine’s view of their relationship is entirely calculating, that she’s strategically withholding sex until the marriage she’s been manipulating him into, that she dumped (if indeed she fully did) her preferred mechanic boyfriend only because Tom has better financial prospects (he plans to be a high school teacher!) and she won’t need to work; the conversations between them are trivial and desultory, where those between Tom and the much more independent-minded Kathy are vibrant and multi-faceted. The film roots Tom’s astounding wrong turn in an amusingly bored depiction of car-less life in Vancouver  (at one point he and a friend rhapsodize about the cross-country trip they could take, if only), providing enjoyable time capsule glimpses of downtown (movie theaters showing A Hard Day’s Night, that kind of thing) and the beach; Tom’s academic struggles, it seems from what’s presented, are based partly in sexual frustration, and otherwise in his push to finish reading From Here to Eternity. The film seems incurious at best in its approach to some of the other female characters, and is shaky in various other respects, but this generally adds to the historical interest, with Tom’s chronic lack of constructive introspection seeming to tap a broader societal, if not national precariousness.

 

Looping the Loop (Arthur Robison, 1928)

 

Arthur Robison’s 1928 silent film Looping the Loop is never less than sturdy, and often captivating, rooted in a well-lived-in sense of circus life (it’s a sometimes disquietingly good source of footage of now-taboo sights such as performing bears and elephants). The film is capped by its protagonist Botto the clown, his white face and bald head and baggy clothes making an indelible visual impact, at once hilarious and poignant and somewhat unnerving, especially as his act involves a dummy that’s his exact double, and that in the film’s most nightmarish sequences appears to be the more alive of the two. Botto is consumed with the idea that a woman could never fall for a man she knew to be a clown, and therefore tells his younger love Blanche that he’s an engineer who has to work at night; despite all his efforts, she falls for a colleague of his, the acrobat Andre (Warwick Ward), enthusiastically depicted as one of the most single-minded and shameless horndogs in the history of film. The title refers to an ambitious set-piece into which Andre pulls the untrained Blanche as an assistant – one of the film’s most striking reveries (which would seem like a deliberate echo of King Kong if this movie hadn’t been there first) has a giant Botto towering over the apparatus, his fist clenching around the tiny Andre, before dropping him to the ground and crushing him underfoot. The film flags at times, but has a good feel for the limited choices available to women - Blanche’s parents all but push her into the arms of the blandly well-to-do engineer, her ultimate return to him appearing as much a fatigued strategic retreat as a heartfelt realization of where her heart lies - and a very enthusiastic performing dog, who unsurprisingly lands the closing shot.

Parking (Jacques Demy, 1985)

 

Jacques Demy’s poorly-received Parking, his modern-day musical version of Orpheus (decades before the wonderful and obviously much better known Hadestown), barely rates a mention in many accounts of the director, as if pushed into its own underworld. Indeed, much about the film is dated (man oh man, those hairstyles) or jarring, and on its own terms it often seems shakily plotted and superficial; Michel Legrand’s music is too often thudding and grating in comparison to his other work for Demy (which actually might speak to the composer's skill in channeling coarser cultural norms). The film works best if taken as a more despairing and desperate expression of Demy's bittersweet, often ambiguous romanticism: despite Orpheus’ great love for his wife Eurydice, it’s suggested that he’s bisexual, and another character (albeit not one of the human ones) refers to having married her uncle (not the only instance of incest in Demy’s work); there are also references to pimping and drug use and intimations of kinky sex. The film takes an intriguingly tangible, low-tech approach to evoking the beyond, as an environment of greys and whites and splashes of red, its administrative structure evocative of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death but with a more industrially grungy vibe – the title refers to an unprepossessing parking garage that contains an entry portal (a particular spot on the wall becoming visceous and permeable, allowing the intermediary’s black Porsche to travel through). That’s just one respect in which Demy's take on the myth evokes Cocteau’s; another is the casting of Jean Marais as Hades, but for every instance in which such references are meticulous and pleasing, there’s another in which they’re rushed and cursory. Still, the film certainly channels Demy’s wondrously singular sensibility, and is utterly cherishable for all its weaknesses and peculiarities.

The Ugly American (George Englund, 1963)

 

George Englund’s The Ugly American might have turned out to be a memorable instance of an inexperienced director biting off more than he could reasonably hope to have chewed: a complex political-charged South East Asian narrative with major logistical demands, built around Marlon Brando in one of his most waywardly uncooperative periods. Given the challenges, the result remains at least respectable, albeit limited by any amount of over-compression and simplification. Brando is MacWhite, the newly-appointed ambassador to “Sarkan” (largely shot in Thailand), his qualifications based in part on a long friendship with anti-government activist Deong: at his confirmation hearing he defends Deong against charges of being a Communist (and in turn of leading a potential military uprising) but later changes his mind and accordingly adjusts his policy positions in a pro-Government direction, before dramatic events and realizations change his perspective yet again. Brando is laconic and amused at times, steely and resolute at others; he’s inherently fascinating at every turn, while failing to make MacWhite particularly credible or comprehensible as a human being, let alone one who might plausibly be nominated as an ambassador. The character goes through whiplash-inducing changes of perspective, making up major US policy seemingly on the fly, which does of course succeed in conveying the arbitrary nature of international realpolitik, the malleability of the concepts of allies and adversaries; MacWhite’s final address pointedly underlines that the US’s choices in this regard don’t consistently reflect its founding values (and the movie’s final shot succinctly indicates that plenty of people just don’t care). The film handles the chaotic spectacle ably enough, and if nothing else is an intriguing historical reference point: for instance, MacWhite’s proposal to reroute a so-called Freedom Road through the largely unspoiled north of the country and open up “economic development” doesn’t arouse an iota of environmentally-minded objection.  

Madame Freedom (Hyeong-mo Han, 1956)

 

Hyeong-mo Han’s ironically-titled 1956 film Madame Freedom isn’t as potently accomplished as some of the similarly-themed Japanese films of its period, but it’s an absorbing portrait of thwarted material and sexual ambition. The unfulfilled Madame Oh, married to a self-absorbed academic, mostly stuck at home with her young son, takes a job in a store selling high-end imported goods, rapidly getting drawn then into liaisons with other men and involvement in shady financial schemes, such that she’s almost never home; the husband meanwhile has his own, much more restrained quasi-flirtation with a young woman who attends a nighttime grammar class he teaches for a group of typists. The film focuses mainly on a narrow, relatively privileged echelon of Korean society, defined in part by the perceived superiority of Western products and culture (standards like Someone to Watch Over Me and Autumn Leaves dominate the soundtrack) and material striving, a reference point which allows its female characters a new-found confidence and sense of achievement, but at significant personal risk. The film gains much from the withholding quality of lead actress Jeong-rim Kim, her almost mask-like appearance contributing to a productive ambiguity: even as she blatantly flirts with and makes arrangements to meet with other men, it’s unclear how far her desire truly stretches (some of the quietly saddest moments involve the little boy, perpetually sitting alone at his little desk). The ending however leaves no doubt that if her husband, now aware of her conduct, allows her to remain in the home, it will only be as a properly dutiful and compliant mother and wife, in this context a fate at least preferable to that of some of her business associates. The film slows down along the way for several musical numbers, often again Hollywood-influenced, including a charming if drastically out of place “mambo” number.