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).  

To Be Twenty (Fernando Di Leo, 1978)

 

Near the start of Fernando Di Leo’s To Be Twenty, Lia and Tina meet on a beach and immediately bond over their shared mantra of being “young, hot and pissed off,” joining up to hitch a ride to Rome, with some petty shoplifting along the way. Based on that set-up, and on being told that they make a way to a commune where they’re expected to pay their way largely by having sex with the male residents, the film sounds like low-level exploitation, and indeed provides large dollops of ogling, gratuitous nudity, and coupling. It has other things on its mind too though, including providing a surprisingly thorough immersion into the commune’s odd ways (and it should be noted that the men, mostly all stoned, show little interest in the proposed arrangement), allowing the women space to talk about their bumpy personal histories (although it’s staged as a performance and it’s not necessarily clear how much can be taken at face value), and spending extended time on a police raid and subsequent interrogations (this is the portion of the movie that most obviously evokes the action-oriented bulk of Di Leo’s work), in the course of which Lia and Tina are summarily dismissed as “airheads” and kicked out of the city. The final act is genuinely unpleasant to watch, providing a climactic dose of potentially titillating activity while rapidly stamping out any sense of ensuing pleasure (the ending burst of jaunty music seems like a particularly cruel touch), plausibly straddling expectations of an inevitable “come-uppance” for Lia and Tina’s often caution-shedding exuberance, while painting the coldly self-righteous, violent men who deliver that fate in a properly wretched light. Although the film is on its face a major outlier in Di Leo’s oeuvre, it could also be seen as an extension of the sociological curiosity evident in a film like Caliber 9, and of his frequent sympathy for the women occupying the edges of the masculine-dominated action.

Enemies, a Love Story (Paul Mazursky, 1989)

 

Paul Mazursky’s filming of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story is a flavourful, intelligent pleasure, its well-balanced complexities placing it almost incalculably above most of the director’s coarse later work. In likely his best screen role, Ron Silver plays Herman, living in Coney Island in 1949, married to Yadwiga, the Gentile former servant who helped save his life during the war, while having an affair with Masha, a camp survivor separated from her husband, and then suddenly learning that Tamara, the wife everyone assumed was dead, is alive and also in New York: the situation is inherently comic and sometimes played as such, but it’s a comedy based in the Holocaust’s terrible, multi-faceted, ongoing proximity. It’s tangibly present, in the tattoos on several forearms, as visible and unremarked on as vaccination scars, in thoughts and conversations and speculations; when Herman sees Tamara after so many years, the magnitude of the secular miracle overwhelms his ability to welcome it as such, gratitude or joy overwhelmed by logistical panic. The film balances between a sense that almost all things might properly be allowable in the wake of such suffering, and the practical fact of laws and ethics and the human propensity to judge and envy and gossip remaining unchanged; Herman initially seems exultant at what he’s getting away with, the stress of keeping the balls in the air all part of the transgressive thrill, but by the end he’s hemmed in to the point almost of total erasure. The subtle ending suggests the possibility of new structures and allegiances though, with two of the women bringing up the absent Herman’s daughter together, while also indicating the persistence of old hierarchies (although the child is Yadwiga’s, she retains her old subservience to her former employer Tamara, almost seeming like a maid engaged to assist the real mother).

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.