The Medusa Touch (Jack Gold, 1978)

Any modern-day remake of Jack Gold’s The Medusa Touch would probably skew much younger in its casting and energy-level, its plot fleshed out by race-against-time set-pieces. If Gold’s version works significantly better than seems likely, it’s largely because of its world-weariness and sense of crusty experience, allowing its melodramatic contrivances to seem like expressions of shared frustration and common anticipation of doom. Richard Burton is among the stiffest and intemperate of leading men, so it works pretty well to cast him as a man driven by those very qualities, allowed several vituperative rants about societal hypocrisy and the general mediocrity of people individually and collectively: the premise is that he has the capacity to destroy at will, from individuals who cross him, to planes that he pulls from the sky for the hell of it (the retrospective echo of 9/11 is impossible to shut out), or even beyond that, to tamper with the workings of manned space probes. Lino Ventura (his presence on the British police force amusingly attributed to an exchange program with the French) comes in to investigate after Burton’s Morlar is attacked in his home and left for dead – the film dramatizes the fruits of his investigation in flashback, interspersed with the growing anxiety as Morlar clings to life against all odds, his malicious capacities and intents possibly intact. The extensive use of other establishment actors in small parts, the alertness to time and place, and the breadth of Morlar’s fury (encompassing the family, the education system, the law, the church, etc.) gives the film an unlikely symbolic force, allowing the character to embody whatever undiagnosed or unaddressed ills are slowly poisoning us. At the risk of auteur-seeking excess, it’s thus tempting to see the film as a companion piece to Gold’s sensational The Reckoning, which dramatizes a very different form of rage-filled triumph over the English establishment.

Nea (Nelly Kaplan, 1976)

Nelly Kaplan’s Nea embodies some of the classic ambiguities of female-desire-centric cinema, as seen (at least insofar as the director comes first among competing inputs and influences) from a female perspective. The film (also known as A Young Emmanuelle and variations thereon) conforms to many aspects of the manipulative template: it undresses its women much more than its men, at intervals that seem (without having checked) pretty evenly spaced out so as to avoid fidgeting, focusing on particular on the sexuality of a precocious (and also frequently naked, in a way that encourages near-clinical examination) 16-year-old protagonist, Sybille. But it generally feels like an authentic attempt to excavate the girl’s perspective, frequently placing her in the position of observer (putting on her big glasses for emphasis) – the other main perspective is that of her cat, which seems broadly complementary. The plot itself emphasizes her as principal actor – she works up her fantasies into an anonymously-published book which becomes a best seller, but when her publisher Axel (Sami Frey, cool as ever) resists taking their relationship further, she decides to deploy the perception of her innocence as a weapon against him. The rape fantasy that ends up becoming true is another often-questionable device which here gets somewhat repurposed; ultimately, the (rather abrupt) ending certainly reflects Sybille’s desires and actions more than those of Axel (with the side benefit along the way of facilitating her mother’s sexual awakening also). None of this compares with Kaplan’s La fiancée du pirate, which is much more zestily provocative on its own terms, and more broadly resonant as a social critique (its knockabout rustic setting seems more productive than Nea’s standard-issue country mansion, notwithstanding at times that the interiors, especially Nea’s lair, carry an alluring fairy-tale-like quality), but the scepter of the earlier film is useful in focusing on Nea’s real, if inherently debatable strengths.

Blue Black Permanent (Margaret Tait, 1992)

Blue Black Permanent is the only full-length feature made by Margaret Tait, when she was already in her 70’s – it’s a work of consistent beautifully idiosyncratic wisdom, of someone deeply immersed in her environment and mode of engaging with the world, while in no way resisting the inevitability of moving on. In some ways, one might see some strenuousness in its periodic insistence on modernity, a visit to a night club for instance; certainly it feels like Tait was rather beguiled by recording the present in a way that would guarantee it becoming dated. This chimes with the film’s unusual structuring absences – it emphasizes its characters’ identities as poets or artists or photographers, but is reticent on actually allowing us into their work, especially to the extent it’s escaped from them to be exhibited or posthumously consumed. Tait spends as much time on moments that may seem inconsequential in themselves – a day at the beach, a visit to the shoe store – but only to assert the arbitrariness of memory, how it privileges strange shards of experience even as it erases major chunks of biographical data. In this sense, things that are painfully unknowable – preeminently here, even after decades of self-interrogation, the reasons why one’s mother would suddenly have drowned – may ultimately find rest, in the contemplation that even apparently objective truths become reshaped and eroded by the flow of time and memory (the sea is a major thematic force here, both as glory and threat). But this isn’t to deny the pleasure of looking back: some of the film’s loveliest sequences are flashbacks to the mother’s life, not least a trip to the island where her ailing father now lives alone, temporarily immersing us in the rituals of making tea and laughing with friends over old stories, and the delight of receiving a modest but personal gift (homemade honey, its impact as transcendent here as that of the more traditional arts).

The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973)

Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore is an astonishing, grueling chronicle of formative experience, allowing few points of easy clarity (certainly not regarding the straightforward sexual opposition that one might think to detect in the title) beyond the prospect of future disappointment and deflation. Jean-Pierre Leaud’s Alexandre lives an emblematic Parisian life of the period, free of most conventional obligations, exercising his whimsical conversational prowess, easily making intellectual and sexual connections, even while being put up by his tolerant lover Marie (Bernadette Lafont). For much of its three-and-a-half-hour length, the film has the quality of pure performance, like watching a tightrope walker; it follows that a fall of some kind is inevitable. He meets Veronika (Francoise Lebrun), marked as the relative “whore” by the volume of her past sexual partners and her straightforwardness in talking about them, but possessed by a certain severe, almost Gothic quality (chiming against her remark about liking old vampire movies) that gradually shifts the relationship’s centre of gravity, draining Alexandre of his glib assumptions, or the ability to fake them, whichever one it was. The film frequently evokes the events of 1968, and reaches further back to music and cultural touchpoints before that; Alexandre reflects on people who used to be in his orbit and dropped out along the way; he probes the world for rituals and signs and rhythms; but for all his externalized energy, his life is fatally unexamined in the ways that will ultimately matter. When Veronika evokes the importance of children near the end, to the extent of positing procreation as the only measure of love and meaningful sex, she’s defining territory he hardly knows how to enter, and his failure resonates as that of a generation lacking a clear path forward, and thus constituting easy pickings for the waves of capitalistic and technological upheaval to come. Eustache’s film is one of the greatest of its period – at once thrilling and draining, revelatory and tragic.

The Altman pretender

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2001)

Michael Winterbottom’s new film The Claim, a Western set in the snow of the 1870’s Sierra Nevadas, is regarded by some as one of the best films of the year – a premise that’s often been articulated by reference to Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. The two films certainly have a similar setting and general look, and there’s a broad parallel in some of the characters and themes, but I think this comparison represents an even greater misappropriation of Altman’s name than the recent comparisons between Traffic and Nashville.

Robert Altman

McCabe & Mrs. Miller was completely convincing as an evocation of time and place, full of fascinating characters and incidents, and dense in meaning and allusion, The notes I made when I last saw it are barely coherent to me now (the movie rather overwhelms your faculties), but they’re certainly gushing – Altman contrasts romantic idealism with entrepreneurial excesses, the stuff of legend and fable with pragmatism and calculation, the brutally clear with the mistily mystic. And just as in Nashville, he engineers a staggering finale, contrasting the death of McCabe with the effort to save a burning church, suggesting that community and symbolism – however embryonic – might provide a better basis for endurance than capitalism. Not that anything about the film is that straightforward.

As Altman films go, The Claim reminded me not of McCabe as much as of Quintet, his weird 1979 science-fiction thriller in which an icy city of the future is obsessed by a murderous game. Quintet stars Paul Newman, but resolutely resists the actor’s charisma: the notional dramatic highlights are wantonly understaged, and the film as a whole is distinctly off-putting, although not without a modestly persuasive, depressed vision of humanity. In the end, Newman heads off into the frozen waste, despite being told he’ll freeze there, and the camera watches him for a long long time as he recedes into the whiteness, balancing the similarly extended beginning (except that at the outset he was accompanied by a pregnant lover who’s killed during the course of the film) and suggesting that the film is primarily about emptiness and negation.

Victory over the elements

Accurately or not, Quintet looks like one of Altman’s rush jobs, as though he needed the money, but it seems to me that even this minor work provides greater satisfaction than Winterbottom’s film (which I take to be a conscious attempt to make a masterpiece). As The Claim begins, the wagon train brings into the remote town of Kingdom Come a party of railway surveyors. If they choose to bring the railroad through town, riches will follow. The town is run as the feudal property of its Scottish founder, a man who’s already made a fortune from gold, and dreams of more to come. Years earlier, as a struggling young immigrant, he sold his young wife and baby to a prospector in exchange for the land claim that would provide the root of his riches. Now the woman is dying and the child is a young adult, and they’ve arrived on the same wagon train in search of him.

Based on Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, the story provides an odd, unpredictable group of character dynamics in a volatile setting. America is in its infancy here, still discovering itself day by day, possessed by energy and ambition; Kingdom Come, however, is perpetually covered in snow, as if in premature hibernation, and every human contact is like a small victory over the elements. Winterbottom emphasizes the uncertain and evolving nature of the community here: for example, Milla Jovovich’s character is both a brothel keeper and as respectable a figure as there is in town.

I can’t decide whether or not Jovovich is an interesting actress. She seemed so in Million Dollar Hotel, and her conviction in the derided Joan of Arc epic The Messenger was largely persuasive. For now at least, she’s finding parts which render her stylistic flatness mysterious, even challenging. At best though, she seems to me to represent a limited avenue of investigation (to admit a predisposition that may color my opinion here, she doesn’t strike me as a great beauty either, contrary to reputation). Nastassja Kinski, on the other hand, has fascinated me for her entire career (and it’s astonishing to realize we’re talking about more than two decades there). The Claim essentially casts Kinski as the woman of the past and Jovovich as that of the future, which I think is quite a problem in itself.

Personal tragedy

Neither of these actresses is a particularly robust personality, and not really is anyone else in the cast. The characterizations are muted and largely distant – a far cry from the presence of Beatty and Christie in McCabe. In Mullan’s case, this seriously undercuts the personal tragedy that’s supposed to grip the film’s final passages. The intention seems to be to evoke a Lear-like madness, but instead it’s just one man’s folly.

When The Claim depicts the construction of a new town, overseen by Jovovich, one remembers Claudia Cardinale’s similar evolution into a frontier matriarch in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, which merely provides another perspective on the limitations of Winterbottom’s film. I sometimes find Leone’s desire for grandeur to be more than individual scenes can bear, but his film’s scope and confidence are unmistakable, and the long final camera pan across the diverse activity of an embryonic new American community is both as striking as documentary and as thrilling as giddy fantasy. The Claim never makes such an impact. It’s not about anything, except what it’s about. It tries to construct structures that might generate classic meanings and allusions, like McCabe, but seems to end up aimlessly shuffling the cards, like Quintet.

Michael Winterbottom is a remarkably versatile film director, apparently adopting a different style and outlook for just about every movie he makes, and that usually works fine for small-scale British movies. Personally I thought Welcome to Sarajevo was overrated, and I Want You underrated, but these are not issues that are likely to get too many people’s blood boiling. Even if The Claim were one of the year’s best films, at best I think the case would come down to a happy accident. Whereas Robert Altman, for all his love of chaos and sprawling canvases, has never been anything other than deliberate.

Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952)

The title of Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night and its placement in his filmography might lead you to expect a film noir, and a couple of its characters (played by Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan) express themselves almost entirely through noir-soaked barbs and aphorisms, reflecting the tortured worldviews beneath. But they’re heavily displaced from noir territory (Ryan’s character works as a projectionist, a neat evocation of such displacement), set down in a fishing village, both reeling from recent bumpy emotional rides. The film starts by immersing us in the ships, the unloading of the catch, the processing, the surrounding culture, and never loses its sense of that setting; at other times, in its growing sense of domesticity as prison and in the expressiveness of its interiors, it feels like Douglas Sirk as much as Lang. Despite her better judgment, Stanwyck’s May gives in to the pursuit of fishing captain Jerry (Paul Douglas), a man too decently straightforward to arouse her interest, and tries to make it as a wife and mother; it’s inevitable that his self-loathing friend Earl (Ryan) will eventually constitute a more interesting proposition. The movie teems with portrayals of flawed masculinity – old drunks, younger men with overly fixed ideas about what they expect of their women; it also has Marilyn Monroe as Stanwyck’s main female confidant, astute enough to see her point of view, but not to avoid similar traps. Whether one categorizes it as noir or domestic melodrama or an amalgam of both, it’s a compellingly articulated study, with a “happy” ending (at least in the sense that it tends to the imperatives of domesticity and continuity over those of uncertain desire) so compromised and understated that it allows no clear winners. In this sense, as in Lang’s greatest films, the implications run wide and deep, to a clash and a night that may never end.

Grand openings

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2000)

What an audacious film Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy is. An almost three-hour epic set in 1884, revolving around Gilbert and Sullivan’s creation of The Mikado, it appeared late last year and shocked some observers by stealing two of the major critics’ awards out from under American Beauty and The Insider and the rest. I must admit to some skepticism before I saw the film, but now I too am a believer. The film is 100% entertainment and 100% art – a happy total of 200%!

A look back at Leigh

Leigh is best known for Naked and Secrets and Lies, and for a working method that involves intensely close collaboration with actors; a rigorous approach to the discovery of what he regards as the material’s inner coherence and truth. As with the late John Cassavetes, it’s sometimes hard to decide whether this approach leads to a cinema of astonishingly raw psychological revelation, or merely to some bravura, shameless audience-duping hamming (I’d say maybe David Thewlis in Naked was closer to the former, and Brenda Blethyn in Secrets and Lies was closer to the latter, but both won acting awards at Cannes and in the US). In reviewing his last film Career Girls in these pages in October 1997 (yeah, I’ve been hanging around here at least that long) I said that Leigh’s technique was “somewhere between traditional notions of theme and organization and character development, on the one hand, and an idiosyncrasy taking in everything from idealism to savagery, on the other.”

Topsy-Turvy might seem like an odd departure – a relatively big-budgeted period piece, about a couple of old Victorian stiffs (Leigh’s very English, so maybe he just likes Gilbert and Sullivan – why not?) In any event, it’s a triumph for auteurship, because the film is entirely Leigh’s own. And that’s despite what seems, at least to this inexpert observer, like a rigorous, potentially embalming solicitude to period detail, mannerisms and verisimilitude. Indeed, the film’s ripely proper dialogue, and painstaking portrayal of such curios as the cumbersome ritual involved in using the telephone, provide some of its greatest pleasures.

The plot is this – after a string of enormous commercial successes, W. S Gilbert (who wrote the words) and Arthur Sullivan (the music) come to an artistic crisis when Sullivan describes he can no longer waste his talent on Gilbert’s formulaic crowd-pleasing plotlines (which involve an excess reliance on magic potions and elixirs and the like). The partnership seems to be at an end, until Gilbert attends an exhibition of Japanese culture and gets the inspiration for The Mikado. Sullivan is equally enchanted, and they achieve perhaps their most enduring work.

Two Halves

The first half of the film is a careful character study, contrasting the more workmanlike, regimented Gilbert with Sullivan’s loftier aspirations and libertine-oriented tendencies. Leigh employs a digressive approach, constructing an astonishingly comprehensive portrait of the rather insular community that revolves around them (the film barely sets foot outside – the brightness of the stage lights substitutes for daylight). But for all its exuberance, there’s genuine fear in this world of topsy-turvydom. In one remarkable scene, Gilbert is visited by his crusty aging father, who’s suddenly visited in turn by his inner demons in an agonizing waking nightmare, which Gilbert observes in silent horror.

Maybe Gilbert needs the theatre in some way as a corrective to his somewhat repressed conformity; much unlike Sullivan (who, the film suggests, doesn’t ultimately need much convincing to end his short retirement), whose aspirations are more recognizably artistic. But then the film also shows Sullivan getting his kicks in a Paris brothel by having the hookers put on a show. Somehow, these two opposites (each in his own way recognizably contemporary in his concerns) achieved synthesis. The film seems to respect the inherent mystery of their collaboration. At times it has a sense of quiet profundity that verges on the meditative.

The second half consists almost entirely of long extracts from the rehearsals for The Mikado – consisting primarily of perhaps six or seven set pieces, each lasting at least five minutes – blended in with scenes from the finished work. We observe Gilbert coaching a trio of actors, Sullivan remonstrating with the orchestra, contretemps over costumes and over choreography. Leigh’s patience and focus achieve extraordinary dividends here. Topsy-Turvy has perhaps as detailed a focus on the substance of theatre as any narrative film has ever had. The scene with the actors – perhaps ten minutes of fluffed lines and misconstrued intonations and so forth – is a mini tour de force: vastly entertaining in itself and intensely respectful and revealing about the creative process. Leigh also pulls off a perfectly realized mini-melodrama, about an actor whose heart is quietly broken when his big number is cut by Gilbert the day before opening night, only to be reinstated when the company rallies on its behalf.

Happy endings

Rather like Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (with which it seems to me this film might be intriguingly if, I suppose, not ultimately very usefully compared), the film culminates in an orgy of pure performance, within which the characters might easily have seemed lost or sublimated. But whereas Scorsese tacked on only a relatively modest bittersweet aftermath, Leigh comes up with a staggering, psychologically acute trio of final scenes that severely limit our ability to float off on a false cushion of air. I also thought of Tim Robbins’ recent Cradle will Rock – another film that ended with an extended recreation of a theatrical performance, this one in the 1930s. This was indeed the best part of Cradle, but seemed to me to close the film on a note of buoyancy that seemed – at best – a superficial resolution to the material as a whole (and Robbins’ smart-ass final image of modern-day Broadway didn’t help one bit).

In its coherence, in its depth and judgment, Topsy-Turvy towers over Cradle will Rock, and indeed over nearly all recent films. It has a sage-like serenity and wisdom that at times almost evoke Abbas Kiarostami. It’s completely true to its period, and – because of its sure understanding of humanity and complexity and artifice – completely true to our own. It’s both as easy-to-take and as subtly disorientating as its title. It’s Mike Leigh’s best film and surely one of the best films ever made about the theater.

Un borghese piccolo piccolo (Mario Monicelli, 1977)

For its first hour or so, Mario Monicelli’s Un borghese piccolo piccolo seems like a pleasant, moderately incisive comedy of modern life, focusing on Vivaldi (Alberto Sordi), a ministry bureaucrat whose ambitions begin and end with getting his accountant son Mario a job for life in the same department, which requires overcoming major competition in the entrance exam. After exhausting the potential of personal charm and cajoling, and then submitting to the supposedly influence-boosting step of joining the Freemasons, Vivaldi at least gets his hands on an advance copy of the essay question, and then on the way to the exam…Mario is shot dead by a fleeing bank robber. The grief and shock is mainly embodied in the stroke suffered by Vivaldi’s wife (Shelley Winters, for whatever reason), rendering her immobile; Vivaldi retains his external dignity and composure, while single-handedly focusing on finding the perpetrator and making him suffer, and the film is quite persuasive in depicting his success at this. The midpoint swerve is quite startling, in effect serving as a rebuke of whatever pleasure we took from the first half’s images of workers buried behind piles of paper, groveling before their self-absorbed bosses, devoting their lives to jobs that allow them homes little better than hovels, seeking redemption in superstitions they can’t even be bothered to enact with any passion. Toward the end, a priest expresses the view that mankind deserves no better than a deluge to wash it all away; it seems pretty much like an implicit invitation to descend deeper into sin, and the final scene suggests that Vivaldi will do just that, becoming a self-justifying monster. In retrospect, you might reflect on how Mario’s death immediately follows his ogling of an attractive woman walking before them, something that seems excessively emphasized at the time – the film seems to imply that the average man can barely be allowed his dreams, and a later remarkable scene makes it clear he can’t be allowed a respectful space for his coffin either. The film’s insinuating impact though lies largely in its elusiveness, the difficulty of knowing to what degree Monicelli is actually seeking to remake the complacent viewer, versus toying with him.

Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969)

It's rather hard to get a fix on Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz, and all too easy to reflexively brush it aside as an illustration of the director’s supposed late-career artistic exhaustion. As with many spy films of the period, exhaustion is actually central to its theme, of men (it’s usually men) in suits sublimating their personal lives to the grand geopolitical struggle, even though the specific contribution of their life-threatening exploits to that struggle is often unclear, especially on the many occasions when one’s masters prove untrustworthy (the treacherous scheme behind the film’s title seems like such an example of privileged access and power collapsing in on itself). Topaz has a lot of rather flatly played conversation between such men, interspersed with set-pieces which intermittently exhibit  Hitchcock’s legendary compositional genius and visual intensity. It makes you reflect though how often those fraught set-pieces drew on explicitly voyeuristic or neurotic underpinnings – Topaz by comparison is drained of much in the way of desire or obsession, or even recognizable human demonstrativeness. The film’s abstraction – its lack of interest in any kind of cultural specificity (the two main Cuban characters are played by a Canadian and a German) – becomes its own kind of statement on the milieu’s moral confusion, bolstered by an unusually sprawling narrative that keeps shifting focus between locations and protagonists, reflecting the underlying sense of ambiguous ethics and boundaries. While it feels like an old man’s film in many ways, the cast contains a startling number of actors from the French New Wave (it’s a rich resource for any Bacon-type degrees-of-separation exercise), providing its own sense of renewal; Michel Piccoli’s cheery wave in the final moments, and the final shot of a newspaper being blown away, suggest that whatever the momentousness of the world events in the background, the director is mostly interested in moving on from them.

Toronto film festival report, part three

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 1999)

This is the third of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 1999 Toronto international film festival.

Mr. Death: the Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (Errol Morris)

Leuchter is an expert in execution technology (designer of electric chairs, gas chambers, etc.), whose career was wiped out by his involvement in the Holocaust revisionism movement (he testified, as an expert witness in a defamation suit, that the Auschwitz crematoria could not and did not serve as gas chambers). In this vivid documentary, Morris lets Leuchter speak for himself (which reveals him to be a man of limited horizons with a – let’s say – quirky moral code, likely undone by hubris rather than evil [although Morris deliberately makes that, as far as possible, an eye-of-the-beholder-issue]), while providing a blizzard of visual accompaniments that emphasize – the lurid raw material of Leuchter’s life (a strategy indicated by the B-movie undertone of the title), and flirt with his obvious sense of his own heroism. Leuchter has more than enough rope here to hang himself, and pretty much gets the job done. Morris doesn’t try to explore the issue of Holocaust revisionism generally, pretty much taking our revulsion on faith, if anything, from my limited previous reading on the subject, that’s doing Leuchter a favour. Anyway, revulsion or not, it’s hard not to be fascinated by a man who can calmly chatter about his value-pricing approach to selling death machines (although custom-made, he tells us, they’re sold at “off the shelf” prices).

8 ½ Women (Peter Greenaway)

When a wealthy businessman’s wife dies, he emerges from his grief into a process of sexual rediscovery; inspired by Fellini’s Otto e mezzo, he and his son construct their own Swiss mansion harem of 8 ½ women, but their achievement soon starts to crumble. Greenaway’s films are getting no more accessible as time goes on, but they make for provocative visual and intellectual smorgasbords which, if you’re so inclined, can be consumed like grand banquets; they’re quite funny too at times. To illustrate what’s entailed here: the film starts with a full screen of text, which is then snatched away before you can possibly read it: at first you may blame your own slowness, then you realize the device – it shakes you out of the expectation of an easy narrative, primes you to think about the design of cinematic meaning…for some, it may also be a self-conscious arrogant annoyance. The entire film works much in that vein, but with countless stunning compositions, and what I found a strangely touching conception of its sexual odyssey, figuratively and literally stripping male desire down to its essentials, and encompassing allusions to just about the entire cultural history of female archetypes and myths (with an interesting sideline in Western versus Japanese culture); the ending satisfies both as sexual politics and as deadpan comedy. 8 ½ Women isn’t as seductive as Greenaway’s last film The Pillow Book, but Greenaway is a bull-headed artist in an almost parodically classic vein, and I find myself valuing him that more highly as time goes on.

Romance (Catherine Breillat)

A depiction of a young woman whose frustration at her male-model lover’s sexual disinterest sends her on a raunchy sexual odyssey. The film is already notorious for its explicit content, but ends up surprisingly tedious, churning through familiar notions of confused negotiation between self-respect and physical gratification; of the status of love when unaccompanied by sex; of how to reconcile exploration of one’s intimacy with the specter of obscenity and sluttishness. The film tosses off so many potentially misogynistic statements and attitudes that – given it was made by a woman – it starts to seem like a sustained test of both the filmmaker’s and the audience’s faith (it has a pseudo-devout, ritualistic kind of quality): it’s probably more verbally shocking than it is visually. It does ultimately put together a moderately moving portrayal, aided by a nuanced actress, but doesn’t go much beyond the cinematic territory mapped out in the 1970s by Godard, Last Tango and others, female director notwithstanding.

Mansfield Park (Patricia Rozema)

This version of Jane Austen’s novel crams so much contemporary politicking into its portrayal of its central character that it almost fragments altogether. A young girl from poor circumstances, initially a charitable afterthought of the rich relatives with whom she’s sent to live, grows into the primary redemption of that family’s moral character (the family lives mainly on the profits of Antiguan slave labor, and the landscape is strewn with lurking temptations of the flesh). This strange film, which over-exerts itself in some ways and is largely inert in others, sometimes seems to be merely guessing at what it wants to make of itself. “This is 1806 for heaven’s sake,” says a character at one point, but it’s rather hard to tell: the film is oddly claustrophobic, not showing us much of its time or place beyond the girl’s two homes; the characters lurch from one thing to another, so that it ultimately feels more like a series of set-pieces than a coherent whole. The banality of the well-to-do milieu is well-caught, but Rozema’s cinematic “enhancements” promote a largely pointless, intellectually arid disengagement. Whether viewed through the prism of past or present, it’s markedly less persuasive than other recent Austen adaptations.

Sweet and Lowdown (Woody Allen)
Allen’s latest is a sweet but minor compendium of fictionalized showbiz chestnuts, with Sean Penn playing a jazz guitarist who – despite drinking and womanizing and general unreliability – enjoys a brief 20s and 30s heyday before fading out of sight. The film keeps a brisk pace, and although Penn’s artfully stylized performance could have supported a more probing portrayal, that’s not on the agenda: the expressions of his neurosis are largely played for comedy (of the wistful smile rather than the laugh-out-loud kind). In its zippiness and general inconsequentiality and fake documentary trappings the film sometimes reaches all the way back to Allen’s debut, Take the Money and Run. The movie keeps emphasizing the unreliability of its own portrayal, stressing how the legend may have overtaken the facts, but it doesn’t really matter – the film aspires little to art or satire, and achieves its goal of mellow raconteurship.

La naissance du jour (Jacques Demy, 1980)

Jacques Demy’s 1980 TV movie La naissance du jour is perhaps the least visible of his full-length works, seeming like a work of deliberate retrenchment after a professionally and personally bumpy decade. The film depicts the writer Colette in her summer home, moving within highly-ordered daily rituals and reflecting on her past – there are only two other major characters, and only a handful of scenes in other settings. The plot concerns a love triangle of sorts, but it’s barely evident as that, in large part described rather than shown; the film is tasteful and scenic, but hardly lends itself to the kind of delighted compositional beauty for which we cherish Demy. As such, it’s tempting to see it as a conscious repression, most intriguing for its glimpses of greater complexities below the surface. Take for instance the primary male character played by Jean Sorel, and how the camera’s focus on his naked torso seems to go beyond what’s required to express Colette’s own musings on the topic, or the later moment in a bar where we watch two men dancing together (a character asks them why, receiving the explanation that the girls don’t dance well). Given what we now know of Demy’s bisexuality, it’s hardly gratuitous to see here an accepting expression of more complex interests and desires than are expressed in Colette’s tidier (although thematically not uninteresting) formulations. This messaging would continue through the raw desires depicted in Demy’s next film, Une chambre en ville, to his underappreciated final works; Parking also contains a distinct strand of bisexuality, and his last film Trois places pour le 26 contains an accidental incestuous encounter, happily shrugged off on its way to a happy ending. In this light, just as La naissance du jour intermittently depicts Colette’s memories as vividly as it does her present, its absences seem as meaningful as its bucolic actualities.

Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1975)

Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo is a terrifying, thematically labyrinthine portrait of slave-owning America’s moral and psychological wretchedness, positing a corruption so deep that generations won’t succeed in washing the stain away (and haven’t). Reduced to a plot summary or recounting of “high points”, the film sounds lurid and exploitative, and has often been dismissed or mocked as such. But in its embrace of melodrama and what’s sometimes labeled “scenery-chewing” acting, it digs painfully deep into the sick underpinnings of the culture – one in which the economic model demands that the humanity of the slaves be denied, and yet in which their presence makes that impossible, generating hypocrisy upon perversity. Physicality and sexuality lies at the centre of the madness of course – the absence of imprisoning formal structures makes their relationships with black women more satisfying to the white men than those with their wives, to a degree that’s all but formally admitted and embedded in the culture, with the consequent flow of children being regarded as so much by-product; in contrast of course, the prospect of male black sexuality crossing the colour line is the ultimate horror (and a white woman who invited this would merely be sacrificing her right to go on living). But at the same time, the film takes us deep into how the white males project their own physical inadequacies onto their prize “inventory” – a prizefighting scene goes on virtually in agonizing real time, forcing us to confront the depth of the investment in blood and brutality and enforced submission. Indeed, the whole film is unnervingly direct and visceral, seeped in its time and place, even as the viewer inevitably looks for broader parallels or redemptions. But the only organized revolt depicted here is rapidly extinguished, and the ending suggests no immediate prospect of sustained resistance or relief, only of continuing madness in shifting configurations.

Cesar and Rosalie (Claude Sautet, 1972)

The title of Sautet’s film is a bit of a tease – the fairer title might seem to be “Cesar and Rosalie and David,” or even some other subgroup of the three. The chosen title prompts us to regard the relationship of Cesar and Rosalie as a normative benchmark and David as a threat, as such taking the viewpoint of Cesar – a self-made man overawed to have Rosalie as a partner, but not knowing how to express it except by aggressively filling every silence with his own voice and by relentlessly reciting how much money he spent on this and that (Yves Montand is just sensational in the role). David (Sami Frey) returns after five years in America, still pining for his old love, and through his youth and handsomeness and (as Cesar puts it) greater cool seeming to stand a chance of getting her back. Cesar rapidly succumbs to obsessiveness, and then to outright violence, but even as his actions threaten to push Rosalie away rather than secure her, his fraught interactions with David are actually becoming more meaningful to him, perhaps to both men. For a while, the film seems rather offputtingly dominated by Cesar and David, even to the point of underlying misogyny, but by the end Sautet has repositioned that impression to a degree that seems quietly radical (the movie stops short of any sexual implications between the two men, but then it’s mostly discreet about sexuality throughout). In the end, Rosalie is nothing more than pure image, observed from a distance, captured in a final freeze frame, making the point that perhaps that’s all she ever was, and that the apparent lack of attention to her inner life in the earlier stages wasn’t an oversight, but a quiet rebuke of our expectations of women in cinema, and beyond it. The fact that Rosalie is embodied by Romy Schneider, in all her mesmerizing reticence, dares us to see beyond the image, while simultaneously acknowledging we may not think to.

Fighting back

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 1999)

My place in the hierarchy of Toronto film critics doesn’t amount to much of anything, but even so I feel like resigning it in disgust after looking at what’s been written locally about the current film Fight Club. An excessive response on my part? Of course, but folly on this scale demands no less. It’s the edge-obsessed passivity of the reactions that’s so annoying. Malene Arpe in Eye: “A demented, funny and brutal exploration of manhood, Fight Club posits that irony, clever post-modern references and style for the sake of style suck – all the while employing those very devices liberally and to great effect.” Sounds to me like that ought to be setting up a condemnation of the film’s cynicism and hypocrisy, but instead it’s the start of a rave, five-star review. Cameron Bailey treads almost identical territory in Now: “The way (the film) tries to resolve (its) contradictions is so obviously weak that I have to imagine it means Fincher agrees to let them stand.” He cuts the movie another five stars worth of slack. Even the semi-mighty Rick Groen in The Globe and Mail goes along for the ride, noting that the film “inevitably degenerates into the very thing it derides – a saleable commodity” but deeming it an important work nonetheless.

Man’s fate

Fight Club is an ugly, incoherent piece of work that pushes its incoherence right up tight against your face until the thing virtually splatters into pieces, and then goes on pushing. The attention given to the film focuses mainly on the concept in the title: the notion of an underground club where men go at each other with bare fists, rediscovering their stifled identity through violence. Edward Norton plays a pathetic, directionless middle-manager who hooks up with Brad Pitt, a charismatic, self-driven, perpetually self-renewing rebel. Pitt’s reinvigoration of Norton, initially fairly benign, takes off when they discover the liberating impact of a tussle in a parking lot; as other men gather around them, the official fight club soon springs into life.

For some reason, most of the reviews of Fight Club seem to be written as though the film more or less ended there; had it done so, it would have been merely a shallow, forgettable, efficiently handled piece of glossy exploitation – certainly capable of prompting a discussion about the place of manhood in society, even if the film’s tangible contribution to that discussion is negligible. But there’s much more to come, as Pitt parlays his leadership of the fight club into the assembly of a fanatical fighting force: a dark-suited fascistic crack squad that worships him as a Messiah, and meticulously prepares for a revolution of sorts. And the plot turns out to have a Sixth-Sense-like “twist,” although one which leaves the movie looking like a partial retread of Fincher’s last work The Game, and which makes a mockery of most of what’s gone before (rather than, as in Sixth Sense, enhancing it). Long before the end, Fight Club has become tedious in that particularly barren, monotonous way that only a big-budget Hollywood extravaganza can manage.

Coddled in stuff

But what about this central thesis that (per Arpe’s synopsis) “contemporary man is emasculated by a society that offers him no outlet for aggression and no real purpose and instead coddles him in stuff?” Well, I doubt the notion has any merit. Who does this emasculating “society” consist of? Contemporary woman? (Fight Club has no insight on this side of the equation, having virtually no female roles other than a freakish, inaccessible Helena Bonham-Carter, and a briefly glimpsed dying cancer sufferer longing to get laid one last time). What is the “real purpose” that contemporary man lacks – and that, presumably, some pre-contemporary generation of man possessed? The honest trade of a dirt-poor farmer? Cannon fodder in the army of a feudal leader? Of course one can meaningfully talk about the emasculation that accompanies – for example – economic deprivation or systematic racism? But to suggest that a well-paid corporate up-and-comer like Norton has an even faintly legitimate interest in surrendering to violence is a careless, complacent brand of armchair anarchism. (Similarly, Bailey adopts a goofily pugilistic approach to writing his review: “What do you hate about your life? Who do you want to kill? What’s stopping you?”)

Along the way the film has some good lines, some imaginative individual scenes and ideas, and – whether intentionally or not – some intriguing echoes of other, better movies. But Norton gives his least interesting performance to date, and Pitt’s work merely confirms that he’s only at all worth watching when playing ghosts or weirdos. Obviously  the whole thing rubbed me the wrong way. It would be pointless (and hypocritical on my own part) to insist that filmmakers must practice what they preach, but I find something particularly galling about the way Fight Club relentlessly lectures the audience. Ikea, for instance, is constantly attacked as a symbol of the pernicious consumerism in question, but I see no significant way in which a multi-million dollar, intensively-marketed, string-pulling Hollywood movie has a moral upper hand over such products.

It’s all crap

As I write that, I can already hear the film’s defenders protesting: well, that’s one of the points, that’s part of the self-reflective irony. Which is the sort of application of irony that makes you want to jump on the Jedediah Purdy wagon. If any criticism of Fight Club can be absorbed by positing that the film anticipates and provides for them, then that seems to me like the ultimate proof of its self-regarding vacuousness. What kind of achievement would that be, anyway, once you get past Philosophy for Dummies – to have grandiosely undermined everything we think we know (or everything, that is, except the manipulability of the audience, in which the film most assuredly does believe)? Shouldn’t a five-star movie have a better message than (approximately): it’s all crap?

Is the film, as some have charged, irresponsible? Arpe considers it “sure to inspire dimwits to copy what’s going on onscreen” (the rest of contemporary man – you know, the portion that aren’t dimwits but nevertheless are emasculated with no real purpose – will presumably have to go on suffering). But I suggest that the film, for all its insistent immediacy, is stifled by its hysterical virtuosity – that even dimwits will be repelled by the weight of the calculation. Having been pummeled to the limits of endurance by the movie itself, few will be inclined to experiment further. “It’s an open text,” raves Bailey. “An open wound. It’s bleeding.” And so, for the lack of a Band-Aid, two hours were lost.

The Domino Principle (Stanley Kramer, 1977)

In its two unsubtle references to Franz Kafka, Stanley Kramer’s The Domino Principle seemingly means to impress on us the immensity of what its protagonist finds himself within – a network of such reach and influence and connection that any attempt at defiance or assertion of free will is doomed to failure. But the effect, if anything, would be instead to point out the relative artistic blandness of Kramer’s film; how the character’s dilemma largely fails to illuminate anything meaningful about power and connection, or about our own natures, at least not in the way it intends to. Gene Hackman plays Tucker, languishing in prison with at least fifteen years left on his murder sentence; the unnamed organization, fronted by Richard Widmark’s Tagge, offers him freedom, a well-funded new identity, and a resurrected relationship with his wife (Candice Bergen), all in return for unspecified services to be performed later (given that the movie starts off by flashing the term “Assassination” on the screen in several languages, the services will be obvious to the viewer at least). It might seem like a simple narrative weakness that of all the available stooges in all the country’s prisons, the organization chose in Tucker just about the most contrary, uncooperative subject imaginable. On the other hand, that points to the most intriguing sub-textual question – if these guys (they’re mostly although not exclusively guys) are so powerful, shouldn’t their control on things be tighter, removing the need for such expensive, drawn-out convolutions? In this sense the movie resonates against incomprehensible contemporary theories of the “deep state” and the like, which mainly serve as rather plaintive assertions of (if not disguised wishes for) dark underlying order, even as all the evidence only suggests we’re being dragged into increasing global chaos and erosion. Kramer’s direction is perhaps a little more fluid than his sticky reputation suggests, leaving aside the thumping quasi-sermon at the start, but given such fanciful underpinnings it’s all doomed from the first narrative domino.