9 to 5 (Colin Higgins, 1980)

It’s strange that as I write this in the late summer of 2018, Colin Higgins’ 9 to 5 remains a relevant enough cultural touchstone that ideas for a sequel are reportedly being kicked around. Of course, there’s a lasting feel-good rush to its depiction of collective female triumph, and it’s a little surprising (not really in a good way) how much of the film’s prescription for a productive office environment – equal pay, flexible work hours, job-sharing, onsite daycare, visually pleasing workspaces and so forth – would still constitute a cutting-edge employer. But the film is unnecessarily and counter-productively rigged, most glaringly by making the oppressive male boss, Hart, not just an adulterer, hypocrite, stealer of ideas etc. but a downright criminal embezzler; when he’s ultimately removed, it’s not through the operation of justice or transparency, but via the eccentric whims of the Board Chair (Sterling Hayden). It’s grating now that we never get to see one of the three women (Judy, the one played by Jane Fonda) contribute more to the office than to screw up the Xerox machine; even more so that the movie should remind us of this in the closing montage. Still, overall it’s pretty well-paced, and seldom actively grating: one appreciates the somewhat perverse streak evidenced in their early fantasies of how they’ll bring Hart down, or the sequence of stealing the wrong dead body, or the abidingly odd sight of the bondage-fantasy circumstances in which they keep Hart captive (for weeks). These amount only to a symbolic undermining though: in the end, the movie can barely chip at the power of corporatization (Fonda would take another, much underrated, shot at it shortly afterwards, in Pakula’s Rollover). Perhaps it’s not so surprising after all that it took over 35 years to gather the energy for a meaningful second attack…

La spiaggia (Alberto Lattuada, 1954)

Alberto Lattuada’s La spiaggia undergoes an interesting evolution from a blandly conventional study of a challenged woman to something more structurally unusual and sociologically astute. Anna Maria (Martine Carol) collects her young daughter from the nuns with whom the girl spent the past year, with no immediate plan beyond taking her to the seaside, with the hope of a new start beyond that. She rapidly attracts attention in the small, self-absorbed vacation community of mostly wives and kids: first for being habitually dressed in the black of a widow, then from some quarters as an object of desire, then later again for being a former prostitute. The latter development causes everyone to shun her, until a local billionaire who’s been observing her from the margins of the film intervenes with a simple yet powerful gesture of support that redeems her status and re-establishes her hope of a new beginning. Much of the film is ineffectually pleasant and scenic, although in retrospect Lattuada may appear to have been lulling us into complacency, into regarding the casual adultery (or attempts at such) and entitled venality as being somehow normal or inevitable. But the final stretch lays all this hypocrisy out in the open, damning the men as thieves and the women as chattels, all the more interestingly for its flagrant transparency; the billionaire seems to exult in his ability to reshape reality, to bend not just behaviour but underlying belief to his will (the town’s notional leader, its young mayor, having failed in his own attempt to help Anna Maria, can only look on impotently). Carol’s rather passionless presence seems for much of the film a relative weakness, but ultimately supports the film’s division of even well-heeled society into two essential groups: those who are written upon, and the much, much smaller group that gets to do the writing (a secondary female character gets at least an ambiguous foothold in that second group, recklessly living the life she desires, and then skipping town without paying the bill).

The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943)

The Seventh Victim isn’t the most satisfying of Val Lewton’s great films - the narrative feels overly condensed in some ways and oddly cluttered in others (injudicious editing may apparently have played a part in this)  – and yet it may leave the most complexly troubled aftertaste of any of them. There’s nothing supernatural in the film, but it’s suffused with a longing to transcend and escape – in its most benign form into the kind of playful poetry that attaches a narrative to a spotlight on the skyline; more darkly, into devil worship, although the adherence to Satan seems less significant than the unity of the group itself, and of the meting out of the death penalty to those who break its rules. Released in 1943, the film doesn’t explicitly reflect on the war, but it feels gripped throughout by threat, by a danger of being undermined from within by collaborators with an external enemy, and by persistent uncertainty about the best form of response. The ending is particularly bleak – Jacqueline, whose unexplained disappearance drives the early part of the narrative (her younger sister comes to New York in search of her, rapidly becoming suffused in Jacqueline’s world to the point of falling in love with her husband), escapes the pressure from the cult to become the “seventh victim” of its fatal doctrines and walks out alive, only to succumb on the same night to her recurring obsession with suicide. This doesn’t quite mark the film as an exercise in mere futility – other characters follow a more positive arc – but the film is much more an exercise in capture than in escape; eeriest of all is the sense that Jacqueline’s action constitutes a sort of triumphant fulfilment of destiny, insofar as she died on her own gloomy terms, not on anyone else’s.   

Un nomme La Rocca (Jean Becker, 1961)

It’s a bit strange that the title of Jean Becker’s Un nomme La Rocca takes the form of an assertion of identity, because the character barely has any coherence at all, beyond what flows from Jean-Paul Belmondo’s embodiment of him (which is obviously way more than nothing). After an almost Leone-like prologue, the movie takes La Rocca to Paris, where he effortlessly muscles in on the gambling and bar scene, shooting one antagonist and pushing others around like playing cards. That comes to a sudden end after he tangles with some American deserters and gets sent to jail, not inconvenient anyway as he’d been musing on how to spring his incarcerated best friend Xavier from there. The movie spends a while in conventional behind-bars mode, until the two men volunteer for a land mine clearing team in exchange for reduced sentences, and events shift into sweaty, stripped-down, existentially-questioning mode, pushing Xavier in particular to the limits of his tolerance. The final chapter, a couple of years later, has the men free again, maintaining an apparently chaste household with Xavier’s sister (La Rocca’s sexual prowess, emphasized earlier on, is off the film’s agenda by this point) and aiming to buy a farm property; Xavier taps his old shady connections to get the money, leading to a final tragedy, and La Rocca barely has any role in this final act other than to react, lament and ultimately walk away. The movie has a colourful supporting cast, dotted with portrayals that vividly impact before being summarily swept aside; the opening credits inform us it was shot at the Jean-Pierre Melville studios, and Becker’s direction sometimes feels Melvillian, although mostly only to the extent of a style, not a worldview or investigative method. Unless, that is, in the year after A bout de souffle, the title somehow means us to reflect on the emptiness of such filmic labels and narratives even as we succumb to them.

My movie confessions

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2000)

I’m very sensitive to people who talk or generally make a nuisance of themselves in movie theaters, although I usually just move to another seat rather than confront them. Earlier this year, I briefly experimented with a tiny flashlight, to illuminate the notebook in which I sometimes write notes for these columns. I took great care to sit in isolation and to use the light as minimally as possible. Even so, someone complained and told me I was being irritating. I was very ashamed at having become the very thing I deplored. Just as well the movie (Angela’s Ashes) was no good, because the shame would have ruined it for me either way. Of course, human nature being what it is, I still wished I’d told the whiny little nerd to go screw himself.

I’ve largely daydreamed through most of Jean-Luc Godard’s recent films, despite the very best intentions. The Cinematheque Ontario program stated of his Nouvelle vague: “A nocturnal sequence in which a servant moves through the villa lighting lamps is worth more than the rest of the decade’s commercial cinema put together.” I confess to only having half-registered that sequence.

(I don’t doubt the writer’s sincerity, but if he were being exiled to a desert island for a few years, I truly suspect he’d rather be accompanied by the thousands of hours of commercial cinema than the two minutes of lamp-lighting).

I went to see the lamentable Dog Park, solely because I have a little Labrador puppy and often go to the dog park myself (I’ve confessed to this before, but I don’t deserve to get off that easily). Judging by the film’s box-office performance, no other dog owners made this mistake.

He’s a great dog though. He’s named Pasolini, after Pier Paolo. Sometimes Pasolini and I lie in front of the TV together and eat peanuts. I watch the movie and he watches the peanut jar. On average it’s a ratio of three peanuts for me and one for Paso (which might by the way have been a reasonable value ratio to apply to the lamp-lighting sequence versus the commercial cinema). Sometimes, when we’re done with the peanuts, Pasolini brings over his soft-toy cow and shoves it in my face. It makes a rather loud moo-ing noise. Usually I have to rewind the movie.

Talking of the Cinematheque Ontario, they recently showed the consensus choice for best film of the 90s: Dream of Light, by Victor Erice. I’d never seen it, and still haven’t, because it played on a Friday evening and I thought it would be more fun to spend that time of the week drinking with my wife. I know some people may view this as a sign of hope, if not redemption, but I know in my moviegoer’s heart that I failed some kind of test. But sometimes I don’t use that particular heart.

I once reviewed a film for this newspaper and referred in passing to the occupation of one of the characters as a building contractor. My wife, who also saw the film, read over the article before I sent it in and pointed out to me that he was actually a drug dealer. I haven’t lived a lot.

I have a standard list of the films I’ve never seen and would most like to, and  - happily – it slowly dwindles down over time. Right now the top ten would probably include Jacques Rivette’s Out One, Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev – assuming they’re not playing on a Friday evening that is. I also thought the list included Josef von Sternberg’s Saga of Anatahan, until I looked back recently at the record of movie viewings I’ve kept since 1982, and discovered that I’ve in fact seen it – not once, but twice! Admittedly that was fifteen years ago, but still…how could I have completely forgotten about it? This is but one of the problems of having a passion with so little tangible residue – sometimes I really envy stamp collectors. Anyway, I’m eagerly looking forward to my third viewing of Anatahan.

I found the love scenes between Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin in the remake of The Getaway oddly arousing. And I think it must have had something to do with knowing they were really married, which must have kicked of some little voyeuristic trigger in my head. So you see, sometimes it pays to know your celebrity trivia. Imagine the thrill if Jack Nicholson and Lara Flynn Boyle ever make a movie together.

Not long ago, I saw a film by one of the most acclaimed current directors (on this issue, I’m too deeply embarrassed to specify further). I found the main character remarkably inconsistent in his behaviour, and couldn’t really make much sense of it. Only toward the very end of the film did I realize that there were actually two main characters, who looked somewhat alike, and that the film consisted of two intertwined stories. I decided it was best to exempt myself from ever attempting to comment on that director’s work, and I’ve stuck to it.

I usually take my used movie tickets and put them in a box, and on a couple of occasions I’ve made huge poster-sized collages out of them. They’re up in the house. I think they look terrific, and I even think I could make some kind of aesthetic case for them. Alternatively, they may be just sad. Maybe that’s why I do what I can to hang on to my wife.

I can’t believe in my heart (either of them) that films like The Godfather and The French Connection are approaching their thirtieth anniversaries. To me those still look and feel like contemporary films. I can’t fathom that there’s a generation for which those films are ancient history. And then I realize that for, say, a sixteen-year old, Five Easy Pieces would be- mathematically – as far away in time as was Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth from my own birthday. In other words, ancient history. I think I’m really beginning to see how the years can catch up with someone. Will The Godfather still seem contemporary to me in my eighties, and how much of a relic will I be then? (I think it will, and I won’t care).

I love movies. I love Welles and Hawks and Bresson and Antonioni and (for most of the way) Godard. But that doesn’t mean I have to love Fellini.

(2018 update – very little of this holds true now in the same way. Most obviously, I’ve seen all of the then-unseen films I wanted to see, mostly multiple times. Pasolini has long since been replaced by Ozu (another yellow Labrador). Fellini has grown on me over the years. 70’s films still feel pretty contemporary to me though, so maybe that one will never change.)

The Medusa Touch (Jack Gold, 1978)

Any modern-day remake of Jack Gold’s The Medusa Touch would probably skew much younger in its casting and energy-level, its plot fleshed out by race-against-time set-pieces. If Gold’s version works significantly better than seems likely, it’s largely because of its world-weariness and sense of crusty experience, allowing its melodramatic contrivances to seem like expressions of shared frustration and common anticipation of doom. Richard Burton is among the stiffest and intemperate of leading men, so it works pretty well to cast him as a man driven by those very qualities, allowed several vituperative rants about societal hypocrisy and the general mediocrity of people individually and collectively: the premise is that he has the capacity to destroy at will, from individuals who cross him, to planes that he pulls from the sky for the hell of it (the retrospective echo of 9/11 is impossible to shut out), or even beyond that, to tamper with the workings of manned space probes. Lino Ventura (his presence on the British police force amusingly attributed to an exchange program with the French) comes in to investigate after Burton’s Morlar is attacked in his home and left for dead – the film dramatizes the fruits of his investigation in flashback, interspersed with the growing anxiety as Morlar clings to life against all odds, his malicious capacities and intents possibly intact. The extensive use of other establishment actors in small parts, the alertness to time and place, and the breadth of Morlar’s fury (encompassing the family, the education system, the law, the church, etc.) gives the film an unlikely symbolic force, allowing the character to embody whatever undiagnosed or unaddressed ills are slowly poisoning us. At the risk of auteur-seeking excess, it’s thus tempting to see the film as a companion piece to Gold’s sensational The Reckoning, which dramatizes a very different form of rage-filled triumph over the English establishment.

Nea (Nelly Kaplan, 1976)

Nelly Kaplan’s Nea embodies some of the classic ambiguities of female-desire-centric cinema, as seen (at least insofar as the director comes first among competing inputs and influences) from a female perspective. The film (also known as A Young Emmanuelle and variations thereon) conforms to many aspects of the manipulative template: it undresses its women much more than its men, at intervals that seem (without having checked) pretty evenly spaced out so as to avoid fidgeting, focusing on particular on the sexuality of a precocious (and also frequently naked, in a way that encourages near-clinical examination) 16-year-old protagonist, Sybille. But it generally feels like an authentic attempt to excavate the girl’s perspective, frequently placing her in the position of observer (putting on her big glasses for emphasis) – the other main perspective is that of her cat, which seems broadly complementary. The plot itself emphasizes her as principal actor – she works up her fantasies into an anonymously-published book which becomes a best seller, but when her publisher Axel (Sami Frey, cool as ever) resists taking their relationship further, she decides to deploy the perception of her innocence as a weapon against him. The rape fantasy that ends up becoming true is another often-questionable device which here gets somewhat repurposed; ultimately, the (rather abrupt) ending certainly reflects Sybille’s desires and actions more than those of Axel (with the side benefit along the way of facilitating her mother’s sexual awakening also). None of this compares with Kaplan’s La fiancée du pirate, which is much more zestily provocative on its own terms, and more broadly resonant as a social critique (its knockabout rustic setting seems more productive than Nea’s standard-issue country mansion, notwithstanding at times that the interiors, especially Nea’s lair, carry an alluring fairy-tale-like quality), but the scepter of the earlier film is useful in focusing on Nea’s real, if inherently debatable strengths.

Blue Black Permanent (Margaret Tait, 1992)

Blue Black Permanent is the only full-length feature made by Margaret Tait, when she was already in her 70’s – it’s a work of consistent beautifully idiosyncratic wisdom, of someone deeply immersed in her environment and mode of engaging with the world, while in no way resisting the inevitability of moving on. In some ways, one might see some strenuousness in its periodic insistence on modernity, a visit to a night club for instance; certainly it feels like Tait was rather beguiled by recording the present in a way that would guarantee it becoming dated. This chimes with the film’s unusual structuring absences – it emphasizes its characters’ identities as poets or artists or photographers, but is reticent on actually allowing us into their work, especially to the extent it’s escaped from them to be exhibited or posthumously consumed. Tait spends as much time on moments that may seem inconsequential in themselves – a day at the beach, a visit to the shoe store – but only to assert the arbitrariness of memory, how it privileges strange shards of experience even as it erases major chunks of biographical data. In this sense, things that are painfully unknowable – preeminently here, even after decades of self-interrogation, the reasons why one’s mother would suddenly have drowned – may ultimately find rest, in the contemplation that even apparently objective truths become reshaped and eroded by the flow of time and memory (the sea is a major thematic force here, both as glory and threat). But this isn’t to deny the pleasure of looking back: some of the film’s loveliest sequences are flashbacks to the mother’s life, not least a trip to the island where her ailing father now lives alone, temporarily immersing us in the rituals of making tea and laughing with friends over old stories, and the delight of receiving a modest but personal gift (homemade honey, its impact as transcendent here as that of the more traditional arts).

The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973)

Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore is an astonishing, grueling chronicle of formative experience, allowing few points of easy clarity (certainly not regarding the straightforward sexual opposition that one might think to detect in the title) beyond the prospect of future disappointment and deflation. Jean-Pierre Leaud’s Alexandre lives an emblematic Parisian life of the period, free of most conventional obligations, exercising his whimsical conversational prowess, easily making intellectual and sexual connections, even while being put up by his tolerant lover Marie (Bernadette Lafont). For much of its three-and-a-half-hour length, the film has the quality of pure performance, like watching a tightrope walker; it follows that a fall of some kind is inevitable. He meets Veronika (Francoise Lebrun), marked as the relative “whore” by the volume of her past sexual partners and her straightforwardness in talking about them, but possessed by a certain severe, almost Gothic quality (chiming against her remark about liking old vampire movies) that gradually shifts the relationship’s centre of gravity, draining Alexandre of his glib assumptions, or the ability to fake them, whichever one it was. The film frequently evokes the events of 1968, and reaches further back to music and cultural touchpoints before that; Alexandre reflects on people who used to be in his orbit and dropped out along the way; he probes the world for rituals and signs and rhythms; but for all his externalized energy, his life is fatally unexamined in the ways that will ultimately matter. When Veronika evokes the importance of children near the end, to the extent of positing procreation as the only measure of love and meaningful sex, she’s defining territory he hardly knows how to enter, and his failure resonates as that of a generation lacking a clear path forward, and thus constituting easy pickings for the waves of capitalistic and technological upheaval to come. Eustache’s film is one of the greatest of its period – at once thrilling and draining, revelatory and tragic.

The Altman pretender

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2001)

Michael Winterbottom’s new film The Claim, a Western set in the snow of the 1870’s Sierra Nevadas, is regarded by some as one of the best films of the year – a premise that’s often been articulated by reference to Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. The two films certainly have a similar setting and general look, and there’s a broad parallel in some of the characters and themes, but I think this comparison represents an even greater misappropriation of Altman’s name than the recent comparisons between Traffic and Nashville.

Robert Altman

McCabe & Mrs. Miller was completely convincing as an evocation of time and place, full of fascinating characters and incidents, and dense in meaning and allusion, The notes I made when I last saw it are barely coherent to me now (the movie rather overwhelms your faculties), but they’re certainly gushing – Altman contrasts romantic idealism with entrepreneurial excesses, the stuff of legend and fable with pragmatism and calculation, the brutally clear with the mistily mystic. And just as in Nashville, he engineers a staggering finale, contrasting the death of McCabe with the effort to save a burning church, suggesting that community and symbolism – however embryonic – might provide a better basis for endurance than capitalism. Not that anything about the film is that straightforward.

As Altman films go, The Claim reminded me not of McCabe as much as of Quintet, his weird 1979 science-fiction thriller in which an icy city of the future is obsessed by a murderous game. Quintet stars Paul Newman, but resolutely resists the actor’s charisma: the notional dramatic highlights are wantonly understaged, and the film as a whole is distinctly off-putting, although not without a modestly persuasive, depressed vision of humanity. In the end, Newman heads off into the frozen waste, despite being told he’ll freeze there, and the camera watches him for a long long time as he recedes into the whiteness, balancing the similarly extended beginning (except that at the outset he was accompanied by a pregnant lover who’s killed during the course of the film) and suggesting that the film is primarily about emptiness and negation.

Victory over the elements

Accurately or not, Quintet looks like one of Altman’s rush jobs, as though he needed the money, but it seems to me that even this minor work provides greater satisfaction than Winterbottom’s film (which I take to be a conscious attempt to make a masterpiece). As The Claim begins, the wagon train brings into the remote town of Kingdom Come a party of railway surveyors. If they choose to bring the railroad through town, riches will follow. The town is run as the feudal property of its Scottish founder, a man who’s already made a fortune from gold, and dreams of more to come. Years earlier, as a struggling young immigrant, he sold his young wife and baby to a prospector in exchange for the land claim that would provide the root of his riches. Now the woman is dying and the child is a young adult, and they’ve arrived on the same wagon train in search of him.

Based on Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, the story provides an odd, unpredictable group of character dynamics in a volatile setting. America is in its infancy here, still discovering itself day by day, possessed by energy and ambition; Kingdom Come, however, is perpetually covered in snow, as if in premature hibernation, and every human contact is like a small victory over the elements. Winterbottom emphasizes the uncertain and evolving nature of the community here: for example, Milla Jovovich’s character is both a brothel keeper and as respectable a figure as there is in town.

I can’t decide whether or not Jovovich is an interesting actress. She seemed so in Million Dollar Hotel, and her conviction in the derided Joan of Arc epic The Messenger was largely persuasive. For now at least, she’s finding parts which render her stylistic flatness mysterious, even challenging. At best though, she seems to me to represent a limited avenue of investigation (to admit a predisposition that may color my opinion here, she doesn’t strike me as a great beauty either, contrary to reputation). Nastassja Kinski, on the other hand, has fascinated me for her entire career (and it’s astonishing to realize we’re talking about more than two decades there). The Claim essentially casts Kinski as the woman of the past and Jovovich as that of the future, which I think is quite a problem in itself.

Personal tragedy

Neither of these actresses is a particularly robust personality, and not really is anyone else in the cast. The characterizations are muted and largely distant – a far cry from the presence of Beatty and Christie in McCabe. In Mullan’s case, this seriously undercuts the personal tragedy that’s supposed to grip the film’s final passages. The intention seems to be to evoke a Lear-like madness, but instead it’s just one man’s folly.

When The Claim depicts the construction of a new town, overseen by Jovovich, one remembers Claudia Cardinale’s similar evolution into a frontier matriarch in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, which merely provides another perspective on the limitations of Winterbottom’s film. I sometimes find Leone’s desire for grandeur to be more than individual scenes can bear, but his film’s scope and confidence are unmistakable, and the long final camera pan across the diverse activity of an embryonic new American community is both as striking as documentary and as thrilling as giddy fantasy. The Claim never makes such an impact. It’s not about anything, except what it’s about. It tries to construct structures that might generate classic meanings and allusions, like McCabe, but seems to end up aimlessly shuffling the cards, like Quintet.

Michael Winterbottom is a remarkably versatile film director, apparently adopting a different style and outlook for just about every movie he makes, and that usually works fine for small-scale British movies. Personally I thought Welcome to Sarajevo was overrated, and I Want You underrated, but these are not issues that are likely to get too many people’s blood boiling. Even if The Claim were one of the year’s best films, at best I think the case would come down to a happy accident. Whereas Robert Altman, for all his love of chaos and sprawling canvases, has never been anything other than deliberate.

Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952)

The title of Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night and its placement in his filmography might lead you to expect a film noir, and a couple of its characters (played by Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan) express themselves almost entirely through noir-soaked barbs and aphorisms, reflecting the tortured worldviews beneath. But they’re heavily displaced from noir territory (Ryan’s character works as a projectionist, a neat evocation of such displacement), set down in a fishing village, both reeling from recent bumpy emotional rides. The film starts by immersing us in the ships, the unloading of the catch, the processing, the surrounding culture, and never loses its sense of that setting; at other times, in its growing sense of domesticity as prison and in the expressiveness of its interiors, it feels like Douglas Sirk as much as Lang. Despite her better judgment, Stanwyck’s May gives in to the pursuit of fishing captain Jerry (Paul Douglas), a man too decently straightforward to arouse her interest, and tries to make it as a wife and mother; it’s inevitable that his self-loathing friend Earl (Ryan) will eventually constitute a more interesting proposition. The movie teems with portrayals of flawed masculinity – old drunks, younger men with overly fixed ideas about what they expect of their women; it also has Marilyn Monroe as Stanwyck’s main female confidant, astute enough to see her point of view, but not to avoid similar traps. Whether one categorizes it as noir or domestic melodrama or an amalgam of both, it’s a compellingly articulated study, with a “happy” ending (at least in the sense that it tends to the imperatives of domesticity and continuity over those of uncertain desire) so compromised and understated that it allows no clear winners. In this sense, as in Lang’s greatest films, the implications run wide and deep, to a clash and a night that may never end.

Grand openings

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2000)

What an audacious film Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy is. An almost three-hour epic set in 1884, revolving around Gilbert and Sullivan’s creation of The Mikado, it appeared late last year and shocked some observers by stealing two of the major critics’ awards out from under American Beauty and The Insider and the rest. I must admit to some skepticism before I saw the film, but now I too am a believer. The film is 100% entertainment and 100% art – a happy total of 200%!

A look back at Leigh

Leigh is best known for Naked and Secrets and Lies, and for a working method that involves intensely close collaboration with actors; a rigorous approach to the discovery of what he regards as the material’s inner coherence and truth. As with the late John Cassavetes, it’s sometimes hard to decide whether this approach leads to a cinema of astonishingly raw psychological revelation, or merely to some bravura, shameless audience-duping hamming (I’d say maybe David Thewlis in Naked was closer to the former, and Brenda Blethyn in Secrets and Lies was closer to the latter, but both won acting awards at Cannes and in the US). In reviewing his last film Career Girls in these pages in October 1997 (yeah, I’ve been hanging around here at least that long) I said that Leigh’s technique was “somewhere between traditional notions of theme and organization and character development, on the one hand, and an idiosyncrasy taking in everything from idealism to savagery, on the other.”

Topsy-Turvy might seem like an odd departure – a relatively big-budgeted period piece, about a couple of old Victorian stiffs (Leigh’s very English, so maybe he just likes Gilbert and Sullivan – why not?) In any event, it’s a triumph for auteurship, because the film is entirely Leigh’s own. And that’s despite what seems, at least to this inexpert observer, like a rigorous, potentially embalming solicitude to period detail, mannerisms and verisimilitude. Indeed, the film’s ripely proper dialogue, and painstaking portrayal of such curios as the cumbersome ritual involved in using the telephone, provide some of its greatest pleasures.

The plot is this – after a string of enormous commercial successes, W. S Gilbert (who wrote the words) and Arthur Sullivan (the music) come to an artistic crisis when Sullivan describes he can no longer waste his talent on Gilbert’s formulaic crowd-pleasing plotlines (which involve an excess reliance on magic potions and elixirs and the like). The partnership seems to be at an end, until Gilbert attends an exhibition of Japanese culture and gets the inspiration for The Mikado. Sullivan is equally enchanted, and they achieve perhaps their most enduring work.

Two Halves

The first half of the film is a careful character study, contrasting the more workmanlike, regimented Gilbert with Sullivan’s loftier aspirations and libertine-oriented tendencies. Leigh employs a digressive approach, constructing an astonishingly comprehensive portrait of the rather insular community that revolves around them (the film barely sets foot outside – the brightness of the stage lights substitutes for daylight). But for all its exuberance, there’s genuine fear in this world of topsy-turvydom. In one remarkable scene, Gilbert is visited by his crusty aging father, who’s suddenly visited in turn by his inner demons in an agonizing waking nightmare, which Gilbert observes in silent horror.

Maybe Gilbert needs the theatre in some way as a corrective to his somewhat repressed conformity; much unlike Sullivan (who, the film suggests, doesn’t ultimately need much convincing to end his short retirement), whose aspirations are more recognizably artistic. But then the film also shows Sullivan getting his kicks in a Paris brothel by having the hookers put on a show. Somehow, these two opposites (each in his own way recognizably contemporary in his concerns) achieved synthesis. The film seems to respect the inherent mystery of their collaboration. At times it has a sense of quiet profundity that verges on the meditative.

The second half consists almost entirely of long extracts from the rehearsals for The Mikado – consisting primarily of perhaps six or seven set pieces, each lasting at least five minutes – blended in with scenes from the finished work. We observe Gilbert coaching a trio of actors, Sullivan remonstrating with the orchestra, contretemps over costumes and over choreography. Leigh’s patience and focus achieve extraordinary dividends here. Topsy-Turvy has perhaps as detailed a focus on the substance of theatre as any narrative film has ever had. The scene with the actors – perhaps ten minutes of fluffed lines and misconstrued intonations and so forth – is a mini tour de force: vastly entertaining in itself and intensely respectful and revealing about the creative process. Leigh also pulls off a perfectly realized mini-melodrama, about an actor whose heart is quietly broken when his big number is cut by Gilbert the day before opening night, only to be reinstated when the company rallies on its behalf.

Happy endings

Rather like Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (with which it seems to me this film might be intriguingly if, I suppose, not ultimately very usefully compared), the film culminates in an orgy of pure performance, within which the characters might easily have seemed lost or sublimated. But whereas Scorsese tacked on only a relatively modest bittersweet aftermath, Leigh comes up with a staggering, psychologically acute trio of final scenes that severely limit our ability to float off on a false cushion of air. I also thought of Tim Robbins’ recent Cradle will Rock – another film that ended with an extended recreation of a theatrical performance, this one in the 1930s. This was indeed the best part of Cradle, but seemed to me to close the film on a note of buoyancy that seemed – at best – a superficial resolution to the material as a whole (and Robbins’ smart-ass final image of modern-day Broadway didn’t help one bit).

In its coherence, in its depth and judgment, Topsy-Turvy towers over Cradle will Rock, and indeed over nearly all recent films. It has a sage-like serenity and wisdom that at times almost evoke Abbas Kiarostami. It’s completely true to its period, and – because of its sure understanding of humanity and complexity and artifice – completely true to our own. It’s both as easy-to-take and as subtly disorientating as its title. It’s Mike Leigh’s best film and surely one of the best films ever made about the theater.

Un borghese piccolo piccolo (Mario Monicelli, 1977)

For its first hour or so, Mario Monicelli’s Un borghese piccolo piccolo seems like a pleasant, moderately incisive comedy of modern life, focusing on Vivaldi (Alberto Sordi), a ministry bureaucrat whose ambitions begin and end with getting his accountant son Mario a job for life in the same department, which requires overcoming major competition in the entrance exam. After exhausting the potential of personal charm and cajoling, and then submitting to the supposedly influence-boosting step of joining the Freemasons, Vivaldi at least gets his hands on an advance copy of the essay question, and then on the way to the exam…Mario is shot dead by a fleeing bank robber. The grief and shock is mainly embodied in the stroke suffered by Vivaldi’s wife (Shelley Winters, for whatever reason), rendering her immobile; Vivaldi retains his external dignity and composure, while single-handedly focusing on finding the perpetrator and making him suffer, and the film is quite persuasive in depicting his success at this. The midpoint swerve is quite startling, in effect serving as a rebuke of whatever pleasure we took from the first half’s images of workers buried behind piles of paper, groveling before their self-absorbed bosses, devoting their lives to jobs that allow them homes little better than hovels, seeking redemption in superstitions they can’t even be bothered to enact with any passion. Toward the end, a priest expresses the view that mankind deserves no better than a deluge to wash it all away; it seems pretty much like an implicit invitation to descend deeper into sin, and the final scene suggests that Vivaldi will do just that, becoming a self-justifying monster. In retrospect, you might reflect on how Mario’s death immediately follows his ogling of an attractive woman walking before them, something that seems excessively emphasized at the time – the film seems to imply that the average man can barely be allowed his dreams, and a later remarkable scene makes it clear he can’t be allowed a respectful space for his coffin either. The film’s insinuating impact though lies largely in its elusiveness, the difficulty of knowing to what degree Monicelli is actually seeking to remake the complacent viewer, versus toying with him.

Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969)

It's rather hard to get a fix on Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz, and all too easy to reflexively brush it aside as an illustration of the director’s supposed late-career artistic exhaustion. As with many spy films of the period, exhaustion is actually central to its theme, of men (it’s usually men) in suits sublimating their personal lives to the grand geopolitical struggle, even though the specific contribution of their life-threatening exploits to that struggle is often unclear, especially on the many occasions when one’s masters prove untrustworthy (the treacherous scheme behind the film’s title seems like such an example of privileged access and power collapsing in on itself). Topaz has a lot of rather flatly played conversation between such men, interspersed with set-pieces which intermittently exhibit  Hitchcock’s legendary compositional genius and visual intensity. It makes you reflect though how often those fraught set-pieces drew on explicitly voyeuristic or neurotic underpinnings – Topaz by comparison is drained of much in the way of desire or obsession, or even recognizable human demonstrativeness. The film’s abstraction – its lack of interest in any kind of cultural specificity (the two main Cuban characters are played by a Canadian and a German) – becomes its own kind of statement on the milieu’s moral confusion, bolstered by an unusually sprawling narrative that keeps shifting focus between locations and protagonists, reflecting the underlying sense of ambiguous ethics and boundaries. While it feels like an old man’s film in many ways, the cast contains a startling number of actors from the French New Wave (it’s a rich resource for any Bacon-type degrees-of-separation exercise), providing its own sense of renewal; Michel Piccoli’s cheery wave in the final moments, and the final shot of a newspaper being blown away, suggest that whatever the momentousness of the world events in the background, the director is mostly interested in moving on from them.

Toronto film festival report, part three

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 1999)

This is the third of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 1999 Toronto international film festival.

Mr. Death: the Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (Errol Morris)

Leuchter is an expert in execution technology (designer of electric chairs, gas chambers, etc.), whose career was wiped out by his involvement in the Holocaust revisionism movement (he testified, as an expert witness in a defamation suit, that the Auschwitz crematoria could not and did not serve as gas chambers). In this vivid documentary, Morris lets Leuchter speak for himself (which reveals him to be a man of limited horizons with a – let’s say – quirky moral code, likely undone by hubris rather than evil [although Morris deliberately makes that, as far as possible, an eye-of-the-beholder-issue]), while providing a blizzard of visual accompaniments that emphasize – the lurid raw material of Leuchter’s life (a strategy indicated by the B-movie undertone of the title), and flirt with his obvious sense of his own heroism. Leuchter has more than enough rope here to hang himself, and pretty much gets the job done. Morris doesn’t try to explore the issue of Holocaust revisionism generally, pretty much taking our revulsion on faith, if anything, from my limited previous reading on the subject, that’s doing Leuchter a favour. Anyway, revulsion or not, it’s hard not to be fascinated by a man who can calmly chatter about his value-pricing approach to selling death machines (although custom-made, he tells us, they’re sold at “off the shelf” prices).

8 ½ Women (Peter Greenaway)

When a wealthy businessman’s wife dies, he emerges from his grief into a process of sexual rediscovery; inspired by Fellini’s Otto e mezzo, he and his son construct their own Swiss mansion harem of 8 ½ women, but their achievement soon starts to crumble. Greenaway’s films are getting no more accessible as time goes on, but they make for provocative visual and intellectual smorgasbords which, if you’re so inclined, can be consumed like grand banquets; they’re quite funny too at times. To illustrate what’s entailed here: the film starts with a full screen of text, which is then snatched away before you can possibly read it: at first you may blame your own slowness, then you realize the device – it shakes you out of the expectation of an easy narrative, primes you to think about the design of cinematic meaning…for some, it may also be a self-conscious arrogant annoyance. The entire film works much in that vein, but with countless stunning compositions, and what I found a strangely touching conception of its sexual odyssey, figuratively and literally stripping male desire down to its essentials, and encompassing allusions to just about the entire cultural history of female archetypes and myths (with an interesting sideline in Western versus Japanese culture); the ending satisfies both as sexual politics and as deadpan comedy. 8 ½ Women isn’t as seductive as Greenaway’s last film The Pillow Book, but Greenaway is a bull-headed artist in an almost parodically classic vein, and I find myself valuing him that more highly as time goes on.

Romance (Catherine Breillat)

A depiction of a young woman whose frustration at her male-model lover’s sexual disinterest sends her on a raunchy sexual odyssey. The film is already notorious for its explicit content, but ends up surprisingly tedious, churning through familiar notions of confused negotiation between self-respect and physical gratification; of the status of love when unaccompanied by sex; of how to reconcile exploration of one’s intimacy with the specter of obscenity and sluttishness. The film tosses off so many potentially misogynistic statements and attitudes that – given it was made by a woman – it starts to seem like a sustained test of both the filmmaker’s and the audience’s faith (it has a pseudo-devout, ritualistic kind of quality): it’s probably more verbally shocking than it is visually. It does ultimately put together a moderately moving portrayal, aided by a nuanced actress, but doesn’t go much beyond the cinematic territory mapped out in the 1970s by Godard, Last Tango and others, female director notwithstanding.

Mansfield Park (Patricia Rozema)

This version of Jane Austen’s novel crams so much contemporary politicking into its portrayal of its central character that it almost fragments altogether. A young girl from poor circumstances, initially a charitable afterthought of the rich relatives with whom she’s sent to live, grows into the primary redemption of that family’s moral character (the family lives mainly on the profits of Antiguan slave labor, and the landscape is strewn with lurking temptations of the flesh). This strange film, which over-exerts itself in some ways and is largely inert in others, sometimes seems to be merely guessing at what it wants to make of itself. “This is 1806 for heaven’s sake,” says a character at one point, but it’s rather hard to tell: the film is oddly claustrophobic, not showing us much of its time or place beyond the girl’s two homes; the characters lurch from one thing to another, so that it ultimately feels more like a series of set-pieces than a coherent whole. The banality of the well-to-do milieu is well-caught, but Rozema’s cinematic “enhancements” promote a largely pointless, intellectually arid disengagement. Whether viewed through the prism of past or present, it’s markedly less persuasive than other recent Austen adaptations.

Sweet and Lowdown (Woody Allen)
Allen’s latest is a sweet but minor compendium of fictionalized showbiz chestnuts, with Sean Penn playing a jazz guitarist who – despite drinking and womanizing and general unreliability – enjoys a brief 20s and 30s heyday before fading out of sight. The film keeps a brisk pace, and although Penn’s artfully stylized performance could have supported a more probing portrayal, that’s not on the agenda: the expressions of his neurosis are largely played for comedy (of the wistful smile rather than the laugh-out-loud kind). In its zippiness and general inconsequentiality and fake documentary trappings the film sometimes reaches all the way back to Allen’s debut, Take the Money and Run. The movie keeps emphasizing the unreliability of its own portrayal, stressing how the legend may have overtaken the facts, but it doesn’t really matter – the film aspires little to art or satire, and achieves its goal of mellow raconteurship.