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.