Friday, July 31, 2020

Loves of a Blonde (Milos Forman, 1965)


It’s impossible to watch Milos Forman’s Loves of a Blonde (or any of the Czech films of its era) now without a major application of hindsight, as a key film in the run-up to the 1968 Prague Spring and to the subsequent August invasion and crack-down (during which Forman would leave the country). The film shimmers with the desire for freedom – not so much politically (although that can be inferred) but certainly personally and artistically. This desire is inherent in the structure, starting with a young woman who’s tangential to what follows belting out a boisterous love song direct to the camera, then pivoting to the protagonist Andula snuggling in bed with a girlfriend, talking about the man she loves, just as she’ll be doing at the end, except by then she'll be talking about a different person, and we’ll be better aware of how much wistful fantasy colours her account. She works in a small-town factory and lives in the hostel attached to it: there’s a military base nearby and the women are at least tacitly encouraged to be available for the relief of the soldiers posted there; it’s an eternal irony that the easiest way to dodge those unwanted advances is to submit to those of someone else, in her case those of a visiting piano player. The bedroom scenes that follow are daringly lovely, but when she follows him to Prague, it’s to end up spending time with his bickering parents, in an extended deadpan comedy set-up that at the same time is meaningfully poignant. But the movie’s quiet magic lies simply in the sense of delight and exercised liberty that underlies its choices: to observe one thing at such length while skipping over another; to rest on thisface or on that one, just because; to start and end as it chooses, with little implied capacity to foretell, much less shape, the future.

Friday, July 24, 2020

Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948)


Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman is one of Hollywood’s most deeply beautiful creations, because its beauty draws on that of cinema itself: the eternally addictive mystery of a projection that entirely captivates and shapes us while it’s playing, but then starts immediately to fade, inevitably becoming lost. In this case, the spectator is Louis Jourdan’s Stefan Brand, a gifted concert pianist and hopeless skirt-chaser, who bewitches Joan Fontaine’s Lisa Berndle through her entire adult life, and at one point spends a magical day and night with her during which he pronounces himself captivated and impregnates her, but then forgets, remembering only when it’s too late. Summarized that way, the film is a study of perpetual presence, but the narrative voice and primary focus is that of Lisa, from which it’s a tale of recurring absence and longing: Ophuls holds the two sides in perfect harmony. Fontaine is a study here in delicate but principled yearning; Lisa’s initial fascination with Stefan may be helpless, but at a certain point it becomes her defining characteristic, such that she perhaps comes to value the fantasy over the reality; the scene where they “travel” by train from one country to the next courtesy of simple fairground illusions sweetly embodies such preferences. The film starts with Stefan about to flee from a duel, and ends with him submitting to it: in a sense, we ultimately understand, his adversary is his own guilt, in the final flourish of the film’s structural magnificence. Writing this in mid-2020, it can almost seem that every movie is a kind of premonition of the current pandemic – it certainly lends an additional chill here to the moment where Lisa and her son get into an empty train carriage, followed by a guard reminding another that it’s quarantined and off-limits, the sweet escapism of that earlier artificial train journey replaced by a deathly reality.

Friday, July 17, 2020

La signora senza camelie (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953)


Michelangelo Antonioni’s La signora senza camelie immerses us immediately into modern-day myth – a young woman (Lucia Bose), discovered while working in a fabric store, becomes a star with her first movie, long before she has any sense of herself as an actress, or even as a woman. She allows the momentum to sweep her into marrying one of the film's producers, mainly because that's what he decides, and then into his unsuitable remake of Joan of Arc, a flop which immediately kills any sense of her (among industry and public alike) as much more than a pretty face. Summarized that way, the film may not sound much like Antonioni, and indeed the depiction of the filmmaking milieu (including some delicious looks at the filming of a cheesy sand and sandals flick) provides less exacting pleasures than we expect of him. But the film’s ultimate narrative and thematic architecture, built on bitterly ironic personal defeat, is entirely his. After a period of withdrawal and attempted growth, she suddenly realizes (while wandering among a desolate-seeming group of extras in Cinecitta Studio) that it’s all hopeless, and impulsively decides to embrace in all its superficiality the identity that the world seems to desire for her, accepting a superficial role that she’d previously turned down and even deciding to accept the ongoing advances of a man she'd also rejected, knowing the limits of his interest in her. In the final shot she poses for a celebratory group photograph – the photographer asks for a smile and she smiles, perfectly and chillingly, at once a star and a cadavre. The later Antonioni would no doubt have extended the sense of ambiguity and alienation in more complexly intuitive directions, but the sense of a director finding his fullest self is entirely apposite to the film’s theme; by the same token, it’s not necessarily a weakness that Bose doesn’t convey the emotional grandeur of Monica Vitti in the great works to come.

Friday, July 10, 2020

Privilege (Yvonne Rainer, 1990)


Yvonne Rainer’s amazing Privilege seems at first like a relatively conventional documentary on menopause, made up in large part of filmed testimonies: given society’s (as the film establishes) general unease with the topic, it would hold interest if it were no more than this. But things rapidly start to morph and pivot: a title card announces a new film within the film, also called Privilege, but now driven by a different Yvonne (played by an actress) interviewing a middle-aged woman called Jenny on the topic, which in turn opens up a dramatization of an anecdote from Jenny’s earlier days in New York, extending the canvas from biological determination to include issues of class and race (and, well, pretty much everything). The challenge of traversing the change of life becomes just one bridge in a dizzyingly complex landscape, in which awareness of one’s privilege in one area may only increase one’s blindness to in others: the film maintains its narrative and formal unpredictability to the end, shifting its focus and its technique, even to the point of sometimes hardly bothering to be a film (often we’re just staring at substantial blocks of text on a computer screen). The film’s challenge extends to the smallest matters of filmic convention, announcing itself as a film “by Yvonne Rainer and many others”, and starting to run the closing credits some fifteen minutes before the end, taking up much of that time observing a gathering of cast and crew, emphasizing the collective and essentially celebratory nature of the project. It’s a celebration, that is, insofar as attitudes have traveled some distance – a woman talks near the end about the relief of being able to talk openly now about not wanting children – but one carried out in full acknowledgment of remaining fractures, prejudices, blind spots and injustices.

Friday, July 3, 2020

Humain, trop humain (Louis Malle & Rene Vautier, 1974)


The act of observing industrial production is inherently political, inherently provocative, susceptible to radically different readings based on context. Watching Humain, trop humain’s images of workers engaged in menially repetitive tasks constituting tiny incremental steps in the production-line process, notions of exploitation of dehumanization run rampant, especially as the film barely shows any interaction between the workers, any expressions of pleasure or satisfaction. And yet, watched at almost fifty years’ remove, these may strike us as the “solid” blue collar jobs for which there’s so much (no doubt distorted) nostalgia. Actually, any such nostalgia is probably less for the jobs as such than for the communities built around them and the life structures they facilitated, an aspect of the “big picture” absent from Malle’s film. He does however include a long section in a trade show, including the only dialogue in the film (and a lot of it) as potential customers come out with their questions and criticisms and past grievances, all of it of course directed by individual desire, disconnected from any consideration of what might be involved in satisfying it. Obviously the film’s omissions are greater than its presences (which perhaps is only to say it’s not as big as the world), and it’s well-established that filming such structures constitutes its own intersection of chillingly abstracted beauty and fundamental ugliness. The final freeze frame of a woman’s blank face seems like a final testimony on the spiritual emptiness of her lot in life, but we might also recall Kuleshov’s experiment, and reflect how little we know about her, and how ill-equipped we are to make any judgment on the basis of such minimal exposure and investigation. All of which leaves us with a film which most of us would reflexively describe as (say) “valuable” or “interesting”, and yet which may obscure or even distort far more than it reveals.