Breakout (Tom Gries, 1975)

 

Within the first fifteen minutes of Tom Gries’ Breakout, we see Mexican authorities set up a murder and then swoop in to arrest American businessman Jay Wagner, who in what appears to be the sketchiest and most evidence-deficient trial of all time is convicted and sentenced to twenty-eight years in a Mexican prison; we rapidly learn that some unspecified aspect of Jay’s approach to business threatened the interests both of the company headed by his grandfather Harris and of the CIA, the old man collaborating in framing his grandson on condition that he be kept alive, however meagrely. The fact of Jay being played by Robert Duvall and his grandfather by John Huston might have lent this highly shaky set-up a patina of class and persuasiveness, but their presence in such low-grade, functional roles remains bewildering to the end. The primary focus is on pilot Nick Colton (Charles Bronson), engaged by Jay’s wife (Jill Ireland) to get her husband out; Bronson is genial and amused, at the centre of much easygoing banter and knockabout comedy, his portions of the movie in no way coalescing with the conspiracy-heavy framework. The film lacks much atmosphere or tension, with a highly sanitized portrait of the prison, its deprivations mainly conveyed through a sense of Wagner’s strength ebbing away (although in this case that’s hard to distinguish from actorly disinterest); the action scenes are crisply executed but hardly plausible, and the ending strangely fails to close the loop on the overriding narrative, lacking for example any confrontation between Wagner and the conniving old man. The film slightly departs from the usual Bronson-Ireland paradigm in firmly attaching her character to another man, but then can’t resist hinting at a mutual attraction between her and Colton; Ireland’s stiffness is far outshone though by Sheree North in the role of another team member, even if much of what she’s given to do and say is distinctly demeaning.

Oedipus Rex (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967)

 

Pasolini’s version of Oedipus Rex is as mesmerizing as any of his works, seeped in his extraordinary visual vitality: his people intensely and vividly present, all the more so for their lack of actorliness (even the film’s star presence, Silvana Mangano, is used primarily as a blankly impassive canvas), the settings and trappings tangibly present in all their dusty, sweating, crumbling, threadbare glory. The film’s boldest device places the historical recreation within a modern-day framework, underlining the story’s eternal urgency and ominousness, the relevance of its implication that societies built on myth-based idolatry will collapse into perversity and corruption, and also (in how the closing modern-day section emphasizes people going about their business, with even Oedipus’ guide distracted by kids playing soccer and the like) the near-impossibility of ensuring that such a message will reach the ears of those who need to hear it. For all the story’s reliance on coincidence and oracular revelation, Pasolini emphasizes rationality and investigation, spending no time on the reign of Oedipus the king, but patiently setting out the events and exchanges by which he learns the truth of his past, and how the prediction he took such steps to avoid – that of being destined to sleep with his mother and kill his father – ensnared him nevertheless (the long sequence in which Oedipus’s encounter with a party of travelers turns murderous indicates that Pasolini could have cut it as a director of action). But the film doesn’t particularly dwell on the incest: in this rendition the details of Oedipus’ fate are perhaps less impactful than the dawning sense that his self-determination was always illusionary, that his great choices and acts of courage were irrelevant to a predetermined entrapment that gradually reveals itself, Franco Citti’s Oedipus visibly straining to understand how this could all be, his ultimate self-imposed blindness an inevitable (if inadequate) response to a world far beyond his capacity to understand or to shape.

Skip Tracer (Zale Dalen, 1977)

 

The most abiding impression left by Zale Dalen’s 1977 Vancouver-set drama Skip Tracer is of basic cheerlessness – there’s perhaps not a single scene in the film when anyone seems to be experiencing any very deep or meaningful pleasure (even the scene set in a strip joint is about as drab as they get). The film focuses on John Collins, collector for what we take to be a predatory lending agency (the title fits a little oddly as the film doesn’t depict too much difficulty in tracking down his targets, and it seems his workload also encompasses taking loan applications); he’s won the company’s “man of the year” award three straight times and is gunning for a fourth, but there’s little sign that the relative success does much for him, as his vehicle and apartment are both fairly non-descript and there’s no sign of a meaningful personal life. In the somewhat over-conventional closing stretch, Collins is faced with brutal evidence of the human cost of his efforts and quits after a final act of rebellion; the details aren’t particularly convincing though, either in terms of his own moral awakening or those of the actions he takes (from today’s perspective, it’s poignant to note the relative modesty of the delinquent amounts for which lives are ruined). The film is at its best in depicting the deadening office culture, in which women are habitually called “sweetheart” and there’s never a vague suggestion they might fill anything more than support roles, and in which Collins one day finds that his coveted personal office has been taken away at the behest of the unseen “kids with business degrees” who seemingly treat the experienced (but not formally educated) likes of Collins merely as manipulable data points. And as in so many Canadian films of the period, one strongly senses that the malaise and drabness extends far beyond the film’s narrow parameters.

Out 1, noli me tangere (Jacques Rivette, 1971)

 

Jacques Rivette’s twelve-hour-plus Out 1, noli me tangere richly justifies the investment made in watching it (and that even goes for multiple viewings - I’ve completed it three times), even if it’s confoundingly difficult to summarize how that is. To make just a few random and inadequate points, the great length, and large blocks of time in which very little happens (nothing at all by conventional narrative measures) exists in tension with a sense of temporal fluidity and uncertainty: for example, the fact of so many characters wearing exactly the same clothes in scene after scene suggests a recurring state of stasis (while also constituting a kind of coding, and also channeling the recurring sense of limited economic resources); even more than usual, a cut from one scene to another in no way indicates here that the linked events are taking place simultaneously. The film follows two sets of characters working on classical texts, differing in their methods but neither seeming to approach a performance (the leader of one group, Thomas, mentions at one point that three days have gone by without really dealing with the material); the tightly focused nature of these projects contrasts (and intertwines) with two other characters preoccupied by hints of a mysterious group of thirteen that may or not actually exist, and if it does, may or may not be of much import (we eventually learn that the group did exist in a formative stage but is now dormant, its purpose never fully formulated, the fact of the investigation itself possibly inadvertently prompting it back to a kind of life), their efforts likewise carrying recurring aspects of play and performance (the film at various times references chess, solitaire, numerology, secret messages, dress-up and other forms of play). Likewise, while there’s no sex in the film as such, the rehearsals often crackle with erotic possibility (even from the very first shot); conversely, the few scenes that most seem to be heading toward carnal intimacy usually trail off into stilted, melancholy-tinged game-playing. There’s a constant sense of reinvention: a character wins a million francs and briefly speculates dizzily on what might change before the money is stolen, he and his friends then channeling their efforts into searching for the perpetrator, a project carrying, in an albeit limited way, a renewed sense of experimentation and improvisation (in these scenes, as in many others, we’re often aware of passers-by staring at the film-makers, which adds to the sense of vivid engagement with the possibilities of the immediate). Ultimately, the film confirms certain aspects of possible conspiracy while leaving others open (the prime mover “Pierre” is never seen or heard, although it’s tempting to think he’s in effect director Rivette, or an avatar or derivative thereof); it moves closer to intimations of the supernatural; it positions some characters for apparent fulfilment while leaving others dead or bereft, with a final shot reminding us of something we witnessed (much) earlier and which was never adequately explained, indicating that the end of the film, even one as long and stimulating and mind-altering as this one, is a merely contingent thing.

The Falls (Peter Greenaway, 1980)

 

For all the inherent absurdity of its premise, Peter Greenaway’s The Falls often almost convinces you to take it at face value, as a public-service-oriented alphabetically-ordered three-hour-fifteen-minute cataloguing of 92 people affected by a “Violent Unnamed Event” that among other things left its victims bearing mutations and afflictions both minor and outlandish (including in some cases being rendered immortal), and spawned multiple new languages; the film’s persuasiveness lies largely in its very existence, because if it weren’t in some respect true, or at least necessary, who would ever think to invent it? The Falls is in part then a great cinematic joke, maintained beyond what anyone else would judge to be reasonable (this is the only respect in which someone like Andy Kaufman comes to mind), its inventions often objectively funny, but never delivered in a way that encourages or even allows laughter. Indeed, the accumulation of so many ordinary-looking faces in dull interiors, of mundane traveling shots along inner-city London streets, of outdated typefaces and technologies, of so many references to birds (which in some way may have been responsible for the Event) and other recurring motifs constructs its own sense of entrapment, of being trapped in a work which might be not so much cataloguing as embodying the trauma (Borges is a compelling reference point). One of the film’s final case histories, involving a professional storyteller, cites an uncertainty over whether his creations were received primarily as allegories or as metaphors: similar questions might be applied to The Falls itself, being both a parody of the classically well-made, po-faced British documentary tradition and a near-ultimate application of it, exhaustingly trivia-obsessed and grandly all-seeing, studded with alluring mysteries (including the citing of other Greenaway works, such as The Tulse Luper Suitcases, which wouldn’t exist until decades later, as if transcending normal rules of chronology and causation).