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).