One Way or Another (Sara Gomez, 1975)

 

Sara Gomez’s One Way or Another is a highly arresting blend of fact and fiction, announcing itself at the outset as a story of people some real and some not, never quite clarifying where the lines are drawn. The movie is in part the story of a relationship, between Mario, a manual worker, and Yolanda, a teacher, the class and other differences between the two embodying the broader cultural and structural divides that post-revolution Cuba struggles to integrate (the film’s rough-hewn black and white visuals and tentative or retrograde aspects often make it feel older than it actually is). For Mario, this means suppressing his natural tendency toward domination (Gomez’s My Contribution delved more specifically into the country’s engrained machismo); at times he seems gripped by frustration at all that he has to carry and calibrate within himself (several people suggest the relationship is changing him for the worst), his tension exacerbated by a workplace dilemma that pits personal loyalty against the collective good. For all its open-mindedness, the film betrays little skepticism regarding the righteousness of Cuba’s trajectory and dominant ideology, analyzing the lower classes in terms of their lack of access to capital, and coming close to condescension in noting how access to more modern housing and amenities doesn’t necessarily cause a break with the old, marginalizing worldviews and rituals (sacrificing a goat, for instance). When Yolanda is chided by her colleagues for talking too impatiently and stridently to the less-educated parents who fail to get the message about parental discipline and involvement, it's hard not to think her frustration is partly also Gomez’s own. But the film is by no means heavy going, although even its moments of lightheartedness – such as a bedroom scene when Yolanda teases Mario with her impression of how he walks differently with men than he does with her – carry a pointed undercurrent.  

Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter (Saul Swimmer, 1968)

 

Saul Swimmer’s Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter is a strange and rather downbeat showcase for the pop group Herman’s Hermits, following the general blueprint of  A Hard Day’s Night and others but with limited sense of exuberance, almost seeming inclined to hold the pop music racket at arm’s length. The peculiarly conceived plot revolves around a racing greyhound (the Mrs. Brown of the title) owned by Peter Noone’s Herman, he and his four friends (largely interchangeable in their blandness, physically and otherwise) seemingly keeping the band going mainly as a way of financing the dog’s activities; when it goes missing they return to their various menial jobs, apparently not much caring. The film feels somewhat depressing from its very first shots, driving through a horrifyingly derelict Manchester: a scene in a raucous local pub built around an old-timer singing My Old Man’s a Dustman carries much more spirit than its tentative ventures into “Swinging Sixties” territory, which carry an air of merely hoping to get out alive. The film’s diffidence extends to its romantic inventions: Herman barely acknowledges Tulip, the neighbourhood girl who openly pines for him, falling instead for an out-of-his-league model, but in the end the model is working in Italy and thereby seemingly unattainable, so it seems Herman will probably settle for Tulip anyway, as long as she realizes she may be cooking and cleaning for five men (no problem!) The songs are tuneful enough (There’s a Kind of Hush is likely to be the most recognizable nowadays, largely by virtue of the Carpenters’ cover) but it doesn’t say much for the Hermits’ legacy that the two musical highlights focus on others: a silly song about the joys of selling fruit and vegetables performed by Stanley Holloway, and a plaintive number about love being mainly for the young, somewhat reminiscent of Gigi’s I Remember It Well.

Caligula: the Ultimate Cut (Tinto Brass, 2023)

 

Even in its restored “ultimate cut” version, Tinto Brass’s Caligula is mostly a joyless one-note slog, its almost three-hour length often feeling static and repetitive. The film’s signature move sets its main actors against multi-layered backdrops of eye-filling activity: people juggling, fire-eating, (very often) copulating or masturbating, or just hanging around with sex organs exposed, none of this yielding much sense though of circus-like decadence, let alone of historical engagement or exactitude. Malcolm McDowell easily embodies the ruler’s perverse, wayward self-righteousness, but his performance is pitched throughout at the same impervious level, allowing little sense of the unraveling that causes his downfall. The narrative starts with him in bed with his sister (Teresa Ann Savoy), proceeds through his murder of the ailing emperor Tiberius (Peter O’Toole, wearily ranting and made up to look ravaged) and spends much time on his selection of and apparent increasing co-dependency on a wife (Helen Mirren, seeming to be exploring a parallel universe in which her career became mired in Euro-trash). One perks up a bit on a few occasions when the movie shakes things up, such as in depicting Caligula’s perverse fixation on the wedding of one of his soldiers, which he disrupts in depraved fashion, or in the sequence of his would-be invasion of Britain, consisting of traveling a few miles from Rome and sending hoards of naked men into the water to reap papyrus, which he then brings back as “proof” of his triumph. Time and again, the movie pushes its people into strange poses and gestures and interactions, the sum of which might have cast a mysterious displaced spell if it didn’t all seem so arbitrary: sometimes one wonders if it would have been happier dispensing with any pretense of narrative, organizing itself instead as a series of ornate fragments. At other times, studying the dutifully but mostly unexcitingly staged creations, I started thinking about Peter Greenaway might have done with all this (and without even cutting back on the nudity…)

Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis, 1992)

 

Seen now, Robert Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her might almost be a prequel to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, the latter film taking Zemeckis’s themes of overpromising and grotesquely misdelivering remedies to aging, and of reluctantly co-dependent women, and ramping them up for an even more sensation-seeking audience. The comparison especially comes to mind given the blandly rarified Hollywood setting of both films, and the reliance on female protagonists with no apparent inner life or aspirations other than youth itself; Fargeat at least provides the sense of a concept pushed to the very edge, making Zemeckis’ film feel even blander and complacently hysterial than it already did. The plot, such as it is, introduces a lifelong rivalry between two women (Meryl Streep’s Madeline and Goldie Hawn’s Helen), unaccountably coming to a head over plastic surgeon David (Bruce Willis, going through the motions as if under his own kind of life-depleting spell) who breaks an engagement with one to marry the other; eventually they both separately find their way to the mysterious Lisle von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini, doing her own barely-clad thing), whose anti-aging remedies come with awful and unavoidable side effects. The film’s squandered concepts and assets (in addition to its one-note lead actors) include the notion that all of Hollywood’s legendary premature victims (Monroe, Dean etc.) are still alive and youthful-seeming, executed with all the panache of a half-hearted flick through a Madame Tussaud’s brochure; the special effects are inevitably somewhat dated, which wouldn’t matter as much if they were used to more enjoyable ends. Further low points include the cringe-inducing depiction of Helen in her overweight cat lady phase …well you get the point. An early musical number, performed by Madeline in an ill-fated Broadway show, is one of the more enjoyable sequences, but it’s apparently intended to be so bad that half the audience walks out, so even that doesn’t work as intended.

Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)

 

Cries and Whispers ultimately stands among Ingmar Bergman’s most unsettling, pitiless films, such that a character’s closing memory of a day of happiness with those she loved most seems drenched in cruel self-delusion, a scavenging of scraps from a largely desolate life. The film is built around three sisters: the unmarried, dying Agnes (Harriet Andersson, whose screams of pain penetrate to the bone), cared for in her final days by Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), and by a maid, Anna (Kari Sylwan), the person on whom Agnes is most functionally dependent, sometimes cradling the dying woman against her naked breast. The scheme includes glimpses of the past, and scenes of Karin and Maria’s married lives, both involving incidents of desperate self-harm: Karin’s husband is shown to be particularly insufferable in his self-righteous formality, embodying a hypocritical society mired in rigid expectations and judgments (a scene where Karin’s maid helps her undress illustrates clothing as a medium of this layered oppressiveness). The stunning blood-red décor that dominates the film’s first section seems to express all that’s repressed and unsaid, while also inviting the violence and breakdown to which the film often feels on the verge of succumbing. But the film is as bleak in its small cruelties: Karin and Maria seem for a while to repair their long-fractured relationship, talking deep into the night, expecting to move forward on a better basis, but in the last exchange between them we see old micro-aggressions creeping back, albeit now in somewhat different form. In this regard, the film’s close-ups of clock hands heavily moving, and an early scene in which Agnes gets up from her sickbed to adjust the time, apparently just to produce a single chime, speak to a milieu divorced from its most basic capacities for measurement and control, for evaluation and action.