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.