Fate of a Man (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1959)

 

Sergei Bondarchuk’s Fate of a Man ends with a citation from Mikhail Sholokhov, the author of the source material: “I’d like to believe that this Russian, this man of unbreakable will, will stick it out, and that the boy will grow at his father’s side into a man who can endure anything, overcome any obstacle, should his country ever call upon him to do so.” The words may sound stirring, but when attached to a work that so amply demonstrates the horror of war, it forms a rather depressing final note: that is, when applied to a protagonist, Sokolov, who lost his wife and three children, the boy in question being an orphan to whom Sokolov becomes a symbolic father after coming across him alone and scrounging for food, one might feel the measure of future success ought to be greater than the opportunity to be fodder in a further cataclysm (a thought that takes on extra resonance when considered in the context of Ukraine-related losses). But then, even after all he suffers (facing an apparently imminent death at least three times, and more broadly living through unimaginable deprivation and battering), Sokolov (memorably embodied by Bondarchuk himself) still takes an almost childish pride in knowing that his son rose from humble beginnings to reach the rank of captain before being killed, and while the film contains several performatively cruel or useless Nazis, the Russian side is spared such dissection, the film implicitly approving of Sokolov’s murder of a countryman who fails to show adequate solidarity (it also demonstrates, in one of its most intimately tense sequences, how the Russian capacity for alcohol might be a life-saver). Still, it’s stunningly visualized throughout, providing any number of eye-filling vistas, and the human chronicle at its core is often mesmerizing, no matter one’s awareness of its stacked ideological underpinnings.

Bluebeard (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1944)

 

Edgar Ulmer’s somewhat plaintive version of the Bluebeard story doesn’t focus on a man who murders his wife; indeed, eroticism and conventional desire are entirely absent, the killer shown early on to be Gaston Morel (John Carradine at his most austere), a puppeteer, formerly a painter, whose murderous compulsion is driven by the gap between artistic idealism and often sordid reality. He hopes the retreat to puppets, in all their miniature abstraction, will suppress his instincts, but his compulsion pushes him toward greater fidelity in their creation and costuming, eroding their value as a suppressant, which in combination with economic realities draws him back toward the easel and its inevitable consequences (Morel’s art dealer is shown to be paying him only a fraction of what he charges for his paintings, adding to the sense of diminished agency). Beyond the establishing shots of Paris at the beginning and the end and the French-sounding character names, the film hardly reflects its setting, taking place in a shadowy, oppressive environment; a climactic chase across the rooftops, if not again for a few glimpses of painted landmarks in the background, would seem like an escape into pure angular abstraction. The budgetary limitations are obvious, but Ulmer renders it all tonally and visually coherent, almost inevitable-seeming, as if any easing of constraints would be to yield to undesirable temptation: the climax’s shots of real water, for instance, feel in this context intrusive, even gauche. The sense of claustrophobia is amplified by the implosive nature of the plot, the intersections between the few key characters allowing Morel’s latest love object not only to have access to the police’s key clue but also to know its meaning, and by an almost aggressively ever-present music score (if there’s an unscored moment in the film, I didn’t register it).

Occupied City (Steve McQueen, 2023)

 

Steve McQueen’s imposing Occupied City, running over four hours, consists of scenes of modern-day Amsterdam, observing people working or playing or hanging out, with a voice over that identifies each location and relates it to a piece of WW2 history. My memories of the city are hazy, but the film conveys the impression that there’s hardly a street or public space untouched by this part of its history, that doesn’t carry the traces of individuals who hid or were betrayed or were snatched away or shot on the spot (or who collaborated, or sold their souls): if nothing else, McQueen’s work (based on a book by Bianca Stitger) would be dauntingly impressive as a research project alone. The information provided is often wrenching, and the even-toned, unhurried narrator gives each an appropriate weight, but the film’s nature and length are such that we can’t possibly absorb and hang on to the details of each (they’re also not in any kind of chronological or other easily discernible order); even as the film embodies the necessity of memory and engagement, it acknowledges the impossibility of fully attaining it. It suggests in turn that almost any present-day action carries elements of both submission and resistance (one of the final sequences follows a climate action protest), molded by our alertness to history and context, to connections and consequences; deepening the resonances even further, the film was partly shot during the pandemic, allowing scenes of lockdown announcements, social distancing, vaccination clinics and so forth, another form of “occupation” leaving its own toll and traces. McQueen’s brilliant ending emphasizes the specifically Jewish nature of the Holocaust, noting the perseverance of belief and tradition while acknowledging intertwined cultural evolution (resonating against what the film tells us about the anti-Black racism of the Dutch wartime leadership), and providing a final note of blended ominousness and celebration.

Only Yesterday (John M. Stahl, 1933)

 

The opening scenes of John M. Stahl’s Only Yesterday plunge the viewer into the midst of the 1929 market collapse, fluidly capturing a high-society New York milieu of aggressive superficiality going over a cliff, including a memorably extended single shot of a devastated man walking from the exchange floor, stopping in a daze for a shoe shine, and leaving a big tip before walking into a restroom from which a gunshot then rings out. John Boles’s James Emerson is introduced as another ruined investor on the verge of suicide, before discovering a newly-delivered letter on his desk that takes us into the flashbacks that form the main narrative, the perspective now that of a young Southern woman, Mary Lane (Margaret Sullavan) who falls for Emerson during WW1 while he’s at a military base before being shipped out, has a child in his absence, then wrenchingly learns on his return that he doesn’t even remember her, eventually accepting her lot as a single mother. The contrast of urgent societal disarray and protracted personal endurance is both ungainly and intriguing; likewise that between Mary’s clarity of motivation and expression and Emerson’s relative ambiguity (deliberately or not, it’s never entirely clear whether he’s a breathtakingly self-absorbed sexual adventurer or rather an easily-swayed dolt). The misalignment of perception and motivation culminates in grandly melodramatic fashion, the two “reunited” and knowledge restored under circumstances that seal their separation; the scenario’s improbability seeming less strained than it otherwise might, given the film’s grounding in a then-current crisis that might likewise have been dismissed as impossible if it hadn’t actually happened. The title perhaps sums up the sense of fracture, attaching to a film concerned less with the collapsing of past and present than with a life lived in full awareness of what might and should have been, but was incomprehensibly denied.

Playing 'In the Company of Men' (Arnaud Desplechin, 2003)

 

The title of Arnaud Desplechin’s Playing ‘In the Company of Men’ announces the most obvious of the film’s strange layerings: it’s an adaptation of Edward Bond’s play of that name which is also to some degree a record of the adaptation, with the actors seen working out and discussing scenes in the rehearsal room. That device is used more sparsely than one might expect though, and since few viewers will have any knowledge of the underlying play, it’s difficult to fully gauge its significance. Early on, it appears that Desplechin intends it to add a layer of playful illumination to the somewhat dark and claustrophobic text, best exemplified by a midway acknowledgment that Bond’s play lacks any female characters, “solved” in the film by importing Ophelia from Hamlet for the purpose of a few grafted-on scenes; it’s also notable that the film’s most fully-realized passages, in conventional terms, are flashbacks, depicting a character’s accounts of time spent serving on a submarine. But any resulting sense of an “opening out” is counterweighed by a core narrative that if anything becomes more interiorized and quasi-impressionistic as it goes along, leaping over several major decisions and actions, culminating in a dramatic action which barely seems “justified” in conventional terms by anything that preceded it (the plot turns on some major corporate scheming and deal-making, almost all of which is presented here as a matter of briskly intense discussions between a few people at a time). Any sense of abstracted remove (also inherent in the core familial relationships, between a father, an adopted son and heir, and a servant who comments that he also perceives himself as a kind of son) is again offset though by a couple of startlingly visceral moments, both involving intimate and potentially repulsive engagement with the blood of others, and as such countering what might be seen as the figuratively relatively “bloodless” presentation elsewhere. Ultimately, the film is as slyly enveloping as Desplechin’s best, evoking an unusually knotty blend of reactions and aftertastes.

My Ain Folk (Bill Douglas, 1973)

 

Although Bill Douglas’ autobiographical trilogy about his Scottish upbringing makes for tough and generally cheerless viewing, the use of the possessive pronoun in all three installments (My Childhood/My Ain Folk/My Way Home) denotes a certain stubborn pride, one indeed inherent in the very choice of project, and beyond that in the sense of exacting attention to detail however painful. The trilogy is almost all in black and white, the only exception in the second installment coming at the very start, with the young protagonist Jamie watching the end of Lassie Goes Home, its ravishing colour momentarily seeping to the surrounding frame; it suggests that Douglas intends to position cinema as a site of transformation, but the film never returns to such transcendence (rather amusingly, a later glimpse of the cinema has it showing a George Formby vehicle, more likely a medium of cultural fixing than of escapism). Indeed, Jamie is denied the most basic elements of childhood stability (the title is bitterly ironic in this regard), his mother dead and his father only fitfully interested, living with a grandmother whose attitude toward him is wildly variable, seemingly subsisting mostly on apples: it’s sometimes unclear exactly what we’re watching, but this reflects the boy’s marooned, under-nurtured state. Whatever the physical, material and psychic limitations of the lives Douglas observes, his people fill the spaces they occupy with their eccentricity or character or willpower or localized form of charisma; Jamie’s ultimate removal to central Edinburgh is a potential liberation, but any sense of exultation is tempered by him being locked up in the back of a van, as one might transport a diseased person, or a criminal. The third film will confirm that his transplanting to the city yields no easy redemption or renewal, that his way “home,” or to a means of productively engaging with home, is to be far more circuitous.

Vie privee (Rebecca Zlotowski, 2025)

 

If someone who’d sat through most of Rebecca Zlotowski’s Vie privee were unavoidably prevented from seeing the last twenty minutes, they’d probably assume (however regretfully) that they weren’t missing much, that the “reveal” would likely be as lumpily unconvincing as much of what preceded it. They’d be wrong though: this is a rare film in which the final stretch substantially elevates one’s retrospective assessment of the work as a whole. For most of its length it’s yet another shakily “Hitchcockian” contrivance, the psychiatrist Dr. Steiner (Jodie Foster) shocked by the sudden death, apparently by suicide, of one of her favourite patients, convinced she must have been murdered by a family member, coming up in short order with a motive and apparent evidence, roping in her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil), with whom she’s still more than friendly, as co-investigator. The revelation in effect (and this is all already under spoiler alert) is that Steiner really isn’t that good at her job: she doesn’t listen adequately, lets her imagination run away with her, and doesn’t recognize the boundaries and compromises of the doctor-patient relationship (the symbolic slapping down even extends to providing three possible explanations for something she considered an important clue, and then dismissively asserting that it doesn’t matter which is true). The movie is bogged down by heavy-handed dream sequences (cementing Spellbound as the most prominent Hitchcock reference) and some turgid writing, but elevated (when is it ever otherwise?) by Foster in her predominantly French-speaking role, seeming particularly engaged in her scenes with Auteuil, in whose company her somewhat pinched, worn quality yields to greater lightness. At the end, Steiner’s ex asks if she ever considered that he orchestrated the whole thing to win her back; she laughingly dismisses the idea, but it playfully reinforces the notion of reality as often being a matter of who tells the best story.

Mr. Hoover and I (Emile de Antonio, 1989)

 

Emile de Antonio’s last film, Mr. Hoover and I, is an engagingly self-revealing final statement, providing conveniently potted reasons why we might feel like going back to rediscover his earlier work (which covers McCarthyism, Vietnam, the JFK assassination, Nixon and more), laying down a case for his own importance even if we don’t do that. The film consists largely of direct-to-camera address, interspersed with loosely-curated life glimpses, primarily of de Antonio hanging out in John Cage’s kitchen (given the time spent on watching Cage preparing bread, it’s perhaps peculiar we never get a glimpse of the finished loaf) and getting a haircut from his wife. De Antonio slips in the fact he’s been married six times and name-drops a plethora of other famous friends, and his self-mythologizing sometimes becomes a bit excessive, such as in his assertion that he’s had to endure everything short of the death penalty. His factoids and reminiscences often seem somewhat disconnected - for example, he dangles a single observation that he suggests goes a long way to proving Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t have acted alone, before immediately moving on (this is one movie you wouldn’t mind being longer, assuming the added time went into hard information rather than into more haircut footage). The peculiar shapelessness is particularly evident in the treatment of its titular subject, with long stretches where J. Edgar Hoover isn’t much mentioned, the scattered anecdotes and indictments not quite adding to a coherent sense of Hoover’s overall place in history. De Antonio comments that aspects of Hoover’s behaviour betrayed delusions of royalty (for example, his insistence when staying in a hotel that an elevator always be waiting on his floor with the doors open); it’s one of several respects in which the film, when viewed in the age of Trump, brings to mind that while (as per the director’s closing comments) history may not repeat itself, it persistently throws up corrupted and degraded echoes.

R.M.N. (Christian Mungiu, 2022)

 

The title of Christian Mungiu’s R.M.N. refers to the Romanian acronym for a brain scan, which would perhaps signpost the director’s diagnostic intentions a bit too neatly, except that the title isn’t explained in the English subtitles at least, and one would perhaps guess it’s a short form for Romania itself. It encapsulates then the film’s slippery nature, often seeming close to laying it on too thick, but consistently swerving and layering and challenging one’s interpretation. The main narrative intertwines Matthias, a Romanian who returns to his home in Transylvania after working in Germany, and Csilla, a former girlfriend now managing a bakery operation which brings in several workers from Sri Lanka after failing to fill the positions locally, their arrival potentially snapping the tolerance of a community already under economic strain (and in which a mixing of Hungarian and Romanian ancestries and day to day languages already constitutes a degree of challenge). Mungiu makes it clear that much of the opposition is fueled by ignorance and ungrounded paranoia, but also sympathetically observes a culture straining (particularly the traditionally dominant masculine part of it) to adapt to the demands of a fluid, modern, diverse Europe; he hints at ruptures in perception and causality, with his son traumatized by having “seen” something that appears to occur much later (or perhaps is that it’s strangely duplicated, among other possible explanations).  The ending is almost swooningly abrupt and ambiguous, but to my mind carries an elegiac air: a character issues a desperate apology (less for a specific action, it seems, than for all that the integrated, multi-cultural continent leaves in its wake) followed by a return to something of previously secondary importance, that the EU is funding a French researcher to count the local bear population, which might seem like respect for local ecosystems and habitats, or alternatively to be an absurd misallocation of resources, the final note carrying a hint of both.

Hi De Ho (Jack Binney, 1947)

 

The 1947 Hi De Ho, a Cab Calloway vehicle directed by Josh Binney, delivers in the area that most matters, some eighty per cent of its seventy-two minute running time consisting of straightforward performance, mostly by Calloway with or without his band, but several times yielding the spotlight to others, and in fact allowing a sensational tap dance team, Miller Brothers and Lois, to steal the show. The other twenty per cent goes mostly into a half-hearted melodrama involving a jealous lover and a villainous club owner, with Calloway (playing himself) foiling an attempt on his life and having his lover die in his arms: that’s all wrapped up with a half hour to go though, rapidly shrugging off the tragedy to pair the star off with someone else, culminating in an on-stage marriage. Some might judge the structural oddity as simple ineptitude, likewise the apparent lack of finesse in such matters as framing, writing and acting, exemplified by the (conceptually rather chilling) scene in which the police show up to find a dead body and a dying woman and, given that there’s an apparent perpetrator to be immediately apprehended and removed, can’t be bothered even to cursorily investigate what went on. But such a judgment would ignore the film’s historical significance as a “race film,” cheaply made for Black audiences, set in an entirely Black universe, with no white faces on screen as far as I could see, no acknowledgment of the dominant film-making culture. The film’s avoidance of familiar techniques and codes confirms a rejection of the dominant ideology, marking a film fully of and comfortable within its own alternative paradigm, built around a true Black star whose stature and resonance owe nothing to imposed machinations or endorsements, his impact reflected in the film’s many shots of Black patrons (one of whom, amusingly his own bodyguard, hardly ever looks up from his copy of Variety, as if eternally waiting for it to yield some relevance).

News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1977)

 

In Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, an unseen female reads a series of letters received from her mother in Belgium, while we watch a series of long takes of New York City, and that’s it. We glean easily enough that the recipient has moved to the city, that her mother constantly worries about her, but much basic information is absent (it must also often be lacking in the recipient’s responses, given the mother’s regular comments about their brevity and absence of hard facts). One might correctly guess that the voice is Akerman’s own, that the places we see (predominantly far from postcard-worthy, much of it transit-related) reflect Akerman’s own time in New York, but it wouldn’t be as apparent that the letters and images are separated by several years, the latter gleaned on a return trip. It amounts to a strangely moving representation of absence and unknowability, the letters consisting largely of mundanities, but occasionally referring to life events (her father’s illness; the closure of part of the family business; the purchase of land to build a new home) which as lived events were no doubt virtually all-consuming. Akerman’s reading hardly distinguishes though between the monumental and the ephemeral, her voice often barely audible over the noise of the subway or the traffic, on occasion getting drowned out altogether. Most of the people observed in the film either don’t notice the camera or seem barely interested; in one strangely gripping exception, a man draws himself up and stares in its direction almost as if about to charge, before withdrawing and retreating far into the background, a small sign perhaps of cinema’s power, even in this minimal mode. Another comes from the final shot, taken from a ferry traveling away from shore, the skyline and the film itself receding in unison, the sense of absenting deepened now by the pre 9/11 presence of the twin towers.

Millhouse (Emile de Antonio, 1971)

 

If one can say nothing else good about Richard Nixon, we can stipulate that the most cringe-inducing moments in Emile de Antonio’s Millhouse: a White Comedy belong not to the 37^th President but to Bob Hope, seen cracking some wretched jokes at the expense of the gay-themed movie Staircase. That aside, much about de Antonio’s film inevitably lands differently in an age of unbound Trump: it’s commented and illustrated that Nixon’s policies regularly serve the interests of the elitist class, that he smears his opponents, that his statements don’t always align with the facts, but by current standards, he seems virtually quaint as an embodiment of such transgressions. The film’s broadest strokes – such as imposing extracts of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech over one of Nixon’s own, presumably to evoke a gap both in vision and rhetorical power, or contrasting an optimistic economic assessment with something comparably upbeat delivered by Herbert Hoover before the great depression – feel more laboured than insightful, and even if considered as a record of its own time and place and culture, it often seems more ambiguous than perhaps intended. For instance, de Antonio includes the “Checkers” speech in largely unexpurgated form, and while elements of that now seem clunky, it also has a degree of methodical self-exposure (Nixon, seemingly diligently, sets out all his personal assets and liabilities) that doesn’t readily invite straightforward mockery on its own terms (on the contrary, he remains fascinating in his contradictions, somehow at once both deeply off-putting and poignant, both strategically astute and hapless). In truth, the film asserts Nixon’s inadequacy and wretchedness more than it dissects and demonstrates it, a rhetorical excess also evident elsewhere in de Antonio’s work (In the King of Prussia for example is limitingly one-sided, notwithstanding the viewer’s likely broad agreement with that side).

Me and You (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2012)

 

At one point in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Me and You, the turbulent Olivia muses about Buddhism, about being able to transcend one’s confining point of view and achieve an elevating objectivity, an aspiration denied within the film if only by the extreme specificity of the situation: the teenage Lorenzo, given money by his mother to attend a school ski trip, instead spends it on an ant farm and a week’s supply of food and holes up in a room in the building basement, eventually joined by Olivia, an older half-sister who needs a place to go cold turkey. The film has a predictably redemptive arc – he makes her promise not to take drugs again, she makes him promise to stop hiding and live a fuller life – but there’s no particular reason to think either commitment will be kept, the film being more possessed by the allure of stubborn denial and self-indulgence than by resistance to it. Bertolucci explores the possibilities of the space with practiced ease, but Lorenzo’s withdrawal (juxtaposed against a poor little armadillo he sees early on in a pet store, endlessly doing figure eights around its tiny cage) mirrors that of the director’s own: this is yet another late film (after Stealing Beauty, Besieged, The Dreamers) set predominantly at a bourgeois remove from the messy external world. Even at her young age, Olivia is an artist who’s already had some exhibitions, with at least a few moneyed contacts; the basement space far exceeds in volume and the included trappings what anyone would likely be able to access for such a purpose; etc. etc. The film lands then primarily as peculiar fantasy, an impression bolstered by the prominent use of David Bowie’s Space Oddity in the closing stretches; typical though of of Bertolucci’s facility for expanding and ventilating even small cinematic gestures, the familiar version is preceded by an Italian-language one, the lyrics of which seem to be in no way a direct translation of the original.

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (Blake Edwards, 1976)

 

No matter how generously inclined you are towards the Pink Panther series (a lot, in my case), it’s hard to find much to praise in the fourth installment (not counting Bud Yorkin’s Inspector Clouseau), The Pink Panther Strikes Again: complacency and slackness intrude at virtually every point, and whereas Christopher Plummer and Catherine Schell at least seemed to be enjoying themselves in the previous film, everyone here seems either tetchy or listless. Inspector Dreyfus, this time round a Bond-level madman who gets hold of a death ray machine that can erase entire buildings and cities from thousands of miles away, spells things out all too explicitly by calling Clouseau more powerful than his deadly machine, but it speaks to the series’ most intriguing element, the consistent sense of a universe bending its laws around its protagonist. Clouseau misses the most obvious clues and indicators, yet is inexorably drawn to the heart of things; he survives serial assassination attempts without even realizing they existed; he embodies the self-involved ineptitude that’s poisoning our world (it’s not too much of a stretch to find some contemporary political resonance) and yet thrives (despite apparently rendering walls and floors strangely fragile): seen as such, Dreyfus is fundamentally a righteously poignant character, a quality undermined here by the absurd and shoddy plotting. But in contrast to the average comic child-man, Clouseau is specific in his physicality, often seen stripped down to his hairy torso, driven by primal urges which he presumably knows how to satisfy (despite being unable to execute the most basic aspect of the surrounding rigmarole), the effect drawing on Peter Sellers’ well-known personal turbulence, feeding into making Clouseau a more immediate and vaguely threatening presence than he might otherwise be (especially when supplemented with the sadistic undertones of the random attacks by his manservant Kato, which make no allowances for bedroom guests).

The Devil's Exorcist (Jorge Darnell, 1975)

 

Jorge Darnell’s The Devil’s Exorcist is a surprisingly effective meeting of disparate elements, from the clinical  to the woozily transgressive, blurring the line between haphazardly opportunistic and shrewdly evasive. The film was made a couple of years after The Exorcist and starts with a shot of a young girl writhing in possessed manner on her bed, but instant expectations of a Friedkin knock-off are never quite realized: the main narrative line involves a doctor (seemingly a behavioral specialist of some kind) trying to help the girl, but her efforts aren't conceived or described as an exorcism, and it’s only at the very end that the film presents an event that can’t be attributed to mental illness or interpreted as a subjective vision. Made in the dying days of Spain’s Franco era, the film draws (cautiously) on expanding artistic freedom, while remaining tethered to the past, a tension encapsulated in the contrast between the girl’s wealthy family (the father’s disinterest is cited as one possible cause of her dysfunction) and the old family servant, whose every appearance evokes a vanished culture, and in the contrast between overbearing formal spaces (the girl suffers near-meltdowns both in a church and on a visit to a wax museum) and the clean white lines of the institute where the doctor practices; some of its imagery, such as disembodied arms protruding from swimming pools and walls, might have been plucked from a fuzzily-conceived art exhibit. The film presents other extreme contrasts of tone and content, for example between the girl’s chillingly matter-of-fact murder of a sick child in the hospital (one of several events made all the more disconcerting by the absence of any subsequent mention or consequences), and the climactic prominence of a stuffed fish seemingly almost daring us to scoff (I somehow resisted).