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.