The Touch (Ingmar Bergman, 1971)

Ingmar Bergman’s The Touch is a work of contrast and opposition, inevitably (for better and for worse) less unified and imposing than we often expect of his work. The most obvious contrast exists between the Bergman milieu we’re accustomed to (Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson’s long-married couple) and the very different cultural resonances attaching to Elliott Gould, playing David, a visiting archaeologist who has an affair with Andersson’s Karin (the optimal prints are those in which the couple and others use English with Gould, and Swedish otherwise). Bergman presents the marriage as being essentially happy, if stagnant - Sydow’s Andreas is submerged in his work, Karin in domesticity and ritual (the film is sometimes oddly and parodically peppy in portraying this); in contrast, David is unstable and destabilizing, subject to erratic impulses and mood swings (and frequently changing hairstyles). The demands of the present – the lying and evasion required of Karin in maintaining the affair – contrast with the inescapable burdens of the past: the evocation of the Holocaust in David’s family history, and of centuries past in his work. It’s never that simple though, and Bergman keeps challenging our understanding of the relationship and the film: an almost offhand reference to a suicide attempt by David and an even less resolved one to Karin’s pregnancy; the late introduction of David’s sister in London, heavily trailing other unexplored narratives; a long-dormant cluster of larvae that come back to destructive life. The ending, somewhat displaced from the main body of the film, places us in a garden, and a final attempt at paradise that rapidly disintegrates into further disrepair and separation. If the film under-achieves and frustrates, as has often been claimed, then that may be because of its unusual and productive openness and receptivity; either way, it ranks in Bergman’s body of work as more than a mere oddity.

Scrubbers (Mai Zetterling, 1982)

Mai Zetterling’s Scrubbers certainly feels sociologically and humanly scrupulous, examining the fraught community within a female borstal while largely avoiding swaggering stereotypes and easy titillation.The recurring use of bawdy folk-type songs is just one suggestion that for all its forced unnaturalness, the world that the inmates craft for themselves may preserve English community and culture more fully than what lies outside – by comparison the portrayal of the staff is mostly clipped and sparing and deliberately disconnected. Zetterling seems most artistically stimulated by the environment’s inherent abstraction, triggering the film’s most unexpected impact, its outbursts of visionary Kubrick-like strangeness. That would be both Kubrick past (a dispossessed mother’s dreams of her kid might almost have slotted into The Shining) and even – relative to the film’s 1982 release date – Kubrick future: the prison might well share a designer and all-seeing cinema-eye with the dorms of Full Metal Jacket. Just as in Jacket, the rituals and tasks (such as assembling cheap plastic dolls) of the institution barely contemplate the chaos of the real world battle to come - the institution seems in no way to provide a meaningful response to the transgressions of its two main protagonists (one can only think of being reunited with her infant daughter; the other was motivated primarily by apparently unrequited love for another inmate), whether as punishment or rehabilitation (a more conventional but still well-handled vignette has one of the tougher inmates released into a world for which she’s entirely unprepared). It follows that the film withholds any kind of closure, leaving the prospects of its key characters uncertain after a final disorientating plunge into the outside world, ending on a recurring exterior nighttime shot that eavesdrops on the inmates as they yell out their goodnights and other parting shots for the day. This device may seem to evoke The Waltons of all things, but it’s certain that nothing else in the movie will.

Mille milliards de dollars (Henri Verneuil, 1982)

Henri Verneuil’s Mille milliards de dollars doesn’t rank as a major film: among other things, it’s of limited stylistic interest, and the narrative mostly takes a familiar form of notable actors (Jeanne Moreau, Charles Denner and so forth) popping up for a scene or two to point the way to the next link in the deductive chain. Patrick Dewaere plays a journalist who receives a tip-off of scandal surrounding a notable public figure: the investigation leads him deep into the machinations of an American multi-national, and ultimately into the lingering moral stain of WW2. The film retains interest for several reasons though. Viewed as a time of anxiety about corporate power that transcends national boundaries and evades political or regulatory control, it’s rather darkly instructive to view a 1982 film driven by similar concerns (albeit of course under very different technological conditions): the influence is so invidious for instance that the French subsidiaries are forced to exist on New York time, holding key meetings in the middle of the night.Verneuil devotes a surprising amount of time in the corporate weeds, inviting for us for instance to dive into the mechanics of a particular corporate result that falls far short of the forecast, and having the corporation’s leader (Mel Ferrer) deliver a mini-lecture on international transfer pricing. The film’s tone can’t help but draw on the sad resonances surrounding Dewaere, who would be dead by his own hand within months of the film’s release (a scene in which a would-be assassin writes a fake suicide note on his behalf thus assumes a particular chill). The closing stretch allows us some room for hope that the truth can come out (an independent newspaper plays the role that nowadays would most likely be filled by citizen journalism) while allowing the journalist’s personal concerns rather to push aside the larger story. But maybe that’s a mark of one thing that hasn’t changed over thirty-seven intervening years: that the liberal and anti-corporatist cause must too often content itself with strictly incremental steps forward.

The Coca-Cola Kid (Dusan Makavejev, 1985)

I doubt that many unprompted viewers could identify The Coca-Cola Kid as the work of the director of Sweet Movie, especially as they’re only separated by one intervening film (Montenegro). The earlier picture is outrageous, shocking and compelling, taking its celebration of freedom to unsettling extremes, constantly asking us what price we’re willing to pay for it, and apologizing for nothing; in contrast, The Coca-Cola Kid timidly opens with several screens’ worth of disclaimer regarding its very title. The movie sounds in summary like a satire – an American whizzkid “fixer” comes to Australia, his focus entirely on monetization, only to become sidetracked by local oddities and temptations – but the focus is obscure, and the sainted brand gets off pretty lightly. Where Sweet Movie revels in sexuality, the fixer spends most of the movie trying to avoid it; his eventual change of heart in this regard seems under-motivated, a product of movie calculation rather than ideological triumph. The film focuses, strangely, on something that would seem tangential at best: the fixer’s fixation on bringing Coke to the one region of the country from which it's excluded, a local magnate monopolizing the market with his own brews, but the resolution of this too is grim and murky, certainly not allowing much in the way of symbolic victory. Perhaps then the main point of the film lies in this very sense of defeatism, in positioning such global brands and infrastructures as essentially impervious to meaningful mockery, or even to normal narrative forces and influences: the closing caption tells us that the following week in Japan the next world war began, which might appear only to acknowledge that the whole movie has been an exercise in looking in the wrong place, for the wrong thing. In that sense it draws nicely on Australia’s established peculiarity – as a place that looks exactly like the West, while gradually revealing itself as being stubbornly and unyieldingly Other.

L'amour fou (Jacques Rivette, 1969)

It’s only in the closing moments of Jacques Rivette’s L’amour fou that we learn the rehearsal process we’ve observed for much of the preceding four hours was limited to three weeks and that an opening night is looming; for much of the film we might have believed the process to be effectively infinite and self-justifying, the idea of a finished performance solely notional. In this regard, the play mirrors the challenging length and rhythms of Rivette’s film, and of his cinema as a whole – he would go from this to the twelve-hour Out One (for which L’amour fou often in itself resembles something of a rehearsal). It’s among his more pessimistic and closed films though, with a strong, entropic feel: the viewer might take from it the sense that such an artistic exploration is inherently capable of reaching an end, and that the attempt may only cause stagnation and collapse. As the film starts, the married couple Sebastien and Claire are respectively director and star of the play (Racine’s Andromaque) – she rapidly flees the production, ostensibly unable to tolerate the film cameras that he’s allowing to film everything. He recasts the role with an old girlfriend, while Claire continues to hover around the edges of the production: as his creative process breaks down, she experiments with finding her own mode of expression, some of this entailing the film’s most comic notions (as when she becomes obsessed with bringing home a particular breed of dog). Rivette deliberately confounds any clear reading of their relationship – a scene of apparent rupture might be followed by one of togetherness; ultimately they withdraw entirely from the world for several days, wrecking the apartment and seeming on the verge of becoming feral, but this too suddenly comes to an end. Claire ultimately breaks out, commenting that she’s “woken up”; Sebastien, it seems, can be allowed no such escape, art being ultimately less malleable than life. Rivette’s body of work would evolve toward easier pleasures and more composed expression: L’amour fou almost carries the sense of incubation, of one of cinema’s greatest artists ruminating and pondering his own future direction and its attendant limits.

Flying Deuces (A. Edward Sutherland, 1939)

In most respects, Flying Deuces is run-of-the-mill Laurel and Hardy – rickety in much of its plotting and execution, and not particularly inspired in most of its set-pieces. It warrants some serious reflection as a contribution to their oeuvre and mythology though, for its (I would say) quite unnerving preoccupation with death, and worse, suicide. It’s not so much that Ollie decides to kill himself after being rejected by the girl he loves, but that he assumes Stan will come with him, cold-bloodedly painting him a picture of the derided, unviable existence he’ll lead, absent Ollie’s oversight and guidance. The argument works too, until external intervention sends them on another path - into the French foreign legion, where they’re again rapidly faced with a mortal threat, sentenced to death for trying to desert. But then, at the end, Ollie actually does die, leaving Stan alone (and looking as happy as he does through the whole film) until a bizarre reincarnation/transmigration intervenes. Perhaps there’s something inherently metaphysical in the discontinuous L&H universe – for example in how they go from having wives and apparent social respectability in Sons of the Desert to having no apparent life experience at all in other movies, the only fixed point being each other – but Flying Deuces makes that weirdly explicit. But in case this makes the movie sound like an anticipation of Ingmar Bergman, there’s the offsetting moment where even in the midst of life-threatening mayhem as they run from pursuing soldiers, they’re captivated by a bunch of musicians and stop for Ollie to sing Shine on Harvest Moon while Stan performs a lovely little dance. Their work wouldn’t be so beguiling if not for the recurring optimism, for the regular surrender to something hopeful and elevating, even as their dimension-spanning mutual dependence provides an existential barrier to such opportunities being more than fleeting.

Un flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s last film Un flic may not necessarily seem to add much to his filmography: it’s another terse, tight-lipped crime thriller, shot through with isolation and alienation. The film’s primary (and tertiary) interest may lie though in just how far it takes those attributes, seeming to push with chilling certainty toward a kind of vanishing point where people might hardly register at all, except as disillusioned, hollowed-out markers, playing out a pointless destiny. The film features one of the most passionless sexual triangles in memory: Simone (Catherine Deneuve) sleeps with both the policeman Coleman (Alain Delon) and a villainous club owner Simon (Richard Crenna), apparently with the knowledge of both, but Melville makes such limited use of Deneuve that her presence almost seems to pose some kind of puzzle. The film contains several counterpointing portraits of quiet anguish – one of Simon’s partners in crime who’s driven by unemployment, watched over by his anxious wife; a transgender informant who seems to stare at Coleman with unexpressed longing – but they mainly only serve to underline the detachment of the principals. The major wordless set-piece – the daring theft of a consignment of drugs from a moving train – is largely self-contained, with only minimal narrative connection to what comes before or afterwards; when resolution comes, it’s without even a moment of exultation, and the concept of closure hardly comes to mind, partly because of what still hangs (or at least should hang) over Coleman and Simone (he shot too soon and killed an unarmed man; she carried out cold-blooded murder) and otherwise because it’s never clear what exactly was open. Melville’s choice of exteriors – from the most isolated bank to be found anywhere outside a Western; to the modernist exterior of the police headquarters – supports the sense of abstraction; he drains the interior of Simon’s club of any sense of pleasure or eroticism. One certainly wouldn’t recommend the film as the place to begin with Melville; but it’s a disquietingly apt place to end.

Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)

From one perspective, the use of Billie Holliday’s “It’s the Same Old Story” over the closing credits of Bad Timing might seem like a rather tritely ironic take on the disturbing narrative we’ve just witnessed, an implication that every dreamy love story is just one twist away from comparable sickness. But the song’s greater resonance is in the invocation of stasis and repetition, of events being drawn toward a singularity or vanishing point. At one point, Theresa Russell’s Milena expresses a wish that Art Garfunkel’s Linden would understand her less and love her more, or put another way, join her in following the emotional and sensual demands of the moment over those of a structured narrative (Linden is a research psychoanalyst who we pointedly see at work in Vienna’s Sigmund Freud museum). The film works toward a particularly nasty granting of her wish, circling around a moment where Linden indeed submits to the demands of a key moment, but at the cost of completely objectifying and dehumanizing her, even of bringing her to the brink of death. The third main character, Harvey Keitel’s detective, doesn’t so much investigate the event as will himself into being a displaced participant in it, seemingly seeing in Linden’s transgression some kind of terrible, humbling artistry (that of the director behind it?). Several scenes take place on the border between Austria and (as it was then) Czechoslovakia, on the border between freedoms and ideologies, and Linden periodically does profiling work for the US army, an underdeveloped strand that nevertheless feeds a sense of paranoid destabilization. For all the fragmented evasiveness of the film’s structure, Roeg’s visuals are direct and intimidating and accusatory: it isn’t a particularly “pleasant” watch by conventional measures, its prevailing tone drawing heavily on Garfunkel’s snotty, self-righteous Linden, but that’s just another measure of Roeg’s aesthetic fearlessness during his peak period.

Les uns et les autres (Claude Lelouch, 1981)

Claude Lelouch starts his epic Les uns et les autres by citing Willa Cather: “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” This initially plays as an acknowledgment of the universal calamity of war: the film sets up scenarios in France, Germany, Russia and the US, then plunges them into immediate upheaval, dispatching some people whom we might have expected to be major characters so rapidly and cleanly that the impact is almost subliminal. As it travels into the present day, the film’s narrative keeps gathering speed, often carrying the sense of a teetering helicopter: transitions from meetings to relationships to break-ups take mere seconds; fates are sealed in a couple of lines. Intentionally or not (it’s hard to tell), Cather’s maxim comes to seem not so much like an assertion of shared experience but as one of existential meaninglessness and stasis, in which nothing really evolves across generations (underlined by casting several actors as both mothers/fathers and their daughters/sons, and minimizing the use of aging make-up) or borders or transitions, and in which the national and social distinctions of the earlier sequences fuzzily converge. The redemption, it seems, lies in music: the movie overflows with performance – spanning dance and orchestral and pop videos and jazz bands, played to large crowds and empty halls, before cameras and in rehearsal rooms – culminating in a final extended showpiece that brings together most or all (it’s hard to keep track) of the surviving characters either as performers or as spectators (the notion of sublimation into spectacle is one of several respects in which the film brings Scorsese’s New York New York to mind, although the comparison only underlines the recurring passionless of Lelouch’s creation). The film has no shortage of diversions then, and the ambition is almost hypnotic, but the further it pushes toward greatness, the smaller and emptier it ultimately feels.

A Countess from Hong Kong (Charles Chaplin, 1967)

Chaplin’s A Countess from Hong Kong certainly encapsulates the recurring quandary of engaging with an auteur’s late work, persistently raising the question of how to distinguish a knowingly backward-looking, honed-down classicism from mere outdatedness, artistic fatigue and irrelevance. In this case the evidence for the latter position is fairly extensive: the film contains long stretches that appear intended to function as screwball comedy (Marlon Brando’s Ogden is hiding a stowaway, Sophia Loren’s Natascha, in his cruise ship cabin, triggering endless outbursts of running and flapping around in response to knocks on the door) but in practice just die on the screen, the victim of flat staging and pacing and unengaged acting; a romance develops between Ogden and Natascha, but if this wasn’t spelled out in the dialogue, we likely wouldn’t be able to tell from anything that’s visible on the screen (the lack of chemistry between the stars is overwhelming). It’s probably most interesting in the brief bits of business that one can imagine a younger Chaplin reserving for himself: an extended sequence in which Ogden’s butler Hudson (Patrick Cargill) prepares for bed while dizzy from Natascha’s presence in the same room; the diversionary sleight of hand exercised on another passenger who’s on the prowl for Natascha. There’s something stubbornly admirable too about the extent of the film’s artificiality: the external shots are so few and for the most part so indifferently integrated that one wishes Chaplin had dispensed with them altogether. In the end, the film feels stubborn to the point of solipsism, treating the Hudson character with significant callousness, dumping the key emotional and financial negotiation between Ogden and his wife (Tippi Hedren) in mid-stream, and ending on a most stiffly and formally conceived romantic reunion (“Shut up and deal,” it isn’t). The occasional evocation of “world peace” and political unease is surely counterproductive in reminding us that the film is indeed set on this specific planet in the 1960’s, rather than in the sealed-off, timeless studio world for which it appears to pine.

L'homme en colere (Claude Pinoteau, 1979)

The quality of Claude Pinoteau’s L’homme en colere might be summed up by the slapdash misspelling of several lead actors’ names in the opening credits, and by the presumably inadvertent omission of Lisa Pelikan’s name altogether from the end-roll. This merely sums up a pervasive quality of vagueness and displacement, typical of the era’s co-productions, and extended here in consistently perplexing, and thus rather fascinating manner. Lino Ventura plays Romain Dupre, a retired pilot summoned from France to Montreal by the reported death of his estranged son; the corpse turns out to be that of another man, setting off Dupre in search of the truth. Much of the interest merely comes from seeing Ventura (inherently searching and substantial, but less compelling and engaged here than in his previous year’s visit to Britain in Jack Gold’s Medusa Touch) in particularly time- and place-stamped settings: at a Montreal disco; in a restaurant where the menu is splattered with gaudy pictures of horrible-looking food; at a Canadiens’ hockey game; standing in front of a marquee for Burt Lancaster’s Go Tell the Spartans; and most spectacularly of all, playing scenes (albeit in different tongues) with a dubbed Angie Dickinson, faintly echoing her Hawksian peak as a woman with little distinct direction or agenda, who almost instanteously hitches her fortunes to his. The plot is convoluted and hard to follow, working its way to a distinctly under-powered new beginning between father and son (the film’s deployment of flashbacks to evoke their past conflicts is among its least artful points, which is indeed saying something). The movie conforms to all the underwhelming preconceptions about the dominant Canadian cinema of the time, exhibiting little or no artistic personality, relying on extremely cursory plotting and staging, and seeming to be besotted with the availability of international “names” (Donald Pleasence also turns up for two brief, meaningless scenes). As noted, I managed to extract a few compensations from it; more discerning viewers may not even come away with that much.

To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)

Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief is generally classified, not too inappropriately, as a relatively light-hearted diversion between weightier efforts: although the plot is organized around the mystery of the identity of the thief to be caught, any suspense is entirely notional. The film is heavy with established signifiers of “sophistication” – gorgeous French Riviera settings (it duly won an Oscar for its cinematography, although of all Hitchcock’s films, it often comes closest simply to assembling pretty pictures) with costumes and jewelry to match; it has Cary Grant and Grace Kelly (of whom, likewise, little more is asked than to stand in the foreground of those pretty pictures – the film in no way engages with Grant’s presence in the way of the later North by Northwest). Certainly it has its recognizably “Hitchcockian” elements, but those elements seem generally disembodied, almost abstract, as such signalling a tendency which would become increasingly prominent in the director’s later work: consider for instance the placement and effect of such devices as the opening close-ups of screaming victims intercut with black cats on the roof; the cutting from a seduction scene to an explosion of fireworks (so overemphatic it almost transcends the cliché) and the almost equally overwhelming explosion of flowers during a chase scene; the use of back projection at various points; the costume party finale, with Grant (or is it?) clad in a bizarre black-masked get-up. The movie hints at psychosexual undercurrents of the kind that would be more fully developed in Marnie – Kelly’s Frances Stevens is a sexual aggressor with a somewhat sordidly facilitating mother, clearly drawn to Grant’s John Robie for his deviant past (and she’s not even the only age-inappropriate woman trying to throw herself at him) – but these remain defiantly underexplored, no less so than the weightless evocation of lingering allegiances and resentments dating back to the French resistance.

La belle noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)

Viewed from one perspective, Jacques Rivette’s La belle noiseuse is one of the most specific films ever made about the creative process: it spends well over an hour of screen time observing the painter Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli, with a major assist from the hand of Bernard Dufour) as he prepares to paint a long-brooded-over project for which Marianne (Emmanuelle Beart) will serve as the model: his process involves first sketching in a book and then progressing to large canvases, studying her in ever-more rigorous poses in a search to excavate some kind of truth. One may often get lulled during these sections into the feeling of watching a form of displaced documentary, but Rivette’s rigour and scrutiny mystifies as much as it clarifies, and this is the source of the film’s true genius – to evoke, in a way which evades precise explanation no matter how often one sees the film, the capacity of art to bend perception and behaviour and understanding. Like many Rivette films, the film has elements of classic myth or fairy tale: Frenhofer’s vast home evokes an ancient castle with endless rooms and possibilities; his wife (Jane Birkin) evokes a lovely but somewhat doomed princess; there are hints of past traumas and conflicts which manifest themselves in various forms in the present; the finished painting is in various ways a site of danger and rupture, and must be banished for the sake of stability. All of this suggests an inwardness and hermeticism, but at the same time the film feels wondrously open and probing.The climax plays like a form of dance, the characters swirling around each other, testing new parameters and chemistries, but the final note suggests a wound that won’t readily be healed. The film is playful but never trivial, beautiful but never merely scenic, erotic but never prurient; it’s long (although not by Rivettian standards) but inexhaustible.

The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949)

Max Ophuls’ (or as the credits have it, Opuls’) The Reckless Moment is a fascinating incursion of noir-ish menace into superficially perfect domesticity, a thematic precursor of sorts to Blue Velvet. The two worlds cross in the opening sequence, as Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) drives from her bucolic small town into the sleazy heart of LA, to confront a low-life who’s dating her teenage daughter; within days, he’ll be dead, killed by the anchor attached to the family’s boat, and she’ll be dealing with a blackmailer, in possession of an intimate stash of letters. Ophuls portrays Lucia’s life as a relentless treadmill of undisciplined children, an ever-present and largely infantilized father-in-law (who sleeps in the same room as her young son), runaway expenses, and limited privacy, whether at home or elsewhere (this being a community where everyone knows everyone) – the husband’s chronic absence for work, even over Christmas, underlines the structural imbalances (the film’s treatment of the family’s black maid Sybil - a major supporting role for which Frances E. Williams goes scandalously uncredited – might warrant an essay in itself). The blackmailer Donnelly (the always marvelous James Mason) is as much poignantly would-be lover as adversary, seeing in Lucia’s life an embodiment of his own failure; and yet the movie suggests we’re merely observing contrasting forms of confinement (“You have your family, I have my Nagel,” says Donnelly in one of the film’s more memorably odd lines, referring to his menacing business partner) Ophuls presents the house as a spacious, materialist dream, its underbelly revealed through the vivid play of nighttime shadows. The ending closes off the incursion, reasserting the family imperative, but underlining the husband’s continuing absence; Ophuls’ brilliant framing leaves a sense of submergence and defeat as much as triumph. Further disquiet flows from the (still relevant) moral question that runs through the movie: how strongly should the interests of the privileged override the rights of a more visibly tainted underclass…?

Quelques jours avec moir (Claude Sautet, 1988)

The conventional view of Claude Sautet tends to overlook the frequent eccentricity of his narratives, and Quelques jours avec moi pushes that tendency almost to a break point, before the director’s two quieter final films. In disconcerting short order, a troubled retail executive (Daniel Auteuil, holding his cards close to the chest throughout) is released from a mental hospital and returns uneasily to work, then accepts a road trip to check out some underperforming stores before impulsively deciding to stay on in the first location he arrives at, Limoges, largely because of his attraction to a woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) who works for the local store manager, and regardless that she continues her relationship with her boyfriend (Vincent Lindon). The plot goes on adding further elaboration, eventually and improbably embracing outright melodrama, but Sautet’s primary interest is in community and connection, in tracing how such an arbitrary-seeming trajectory might nevertheless provide the momentum that crosses lines of class and money and attitude and brings disparate people together. In this case the project takes on an air of borderline goofiness, as the chief of police and other pillars of the establishment take to partying or hanging out in dive bars with the dive bar crowd (the closing stretch of Mado comes heavily to mind here); fiscal and other transgressions are forgiven (and as an aside, has any other director seemed so intrigued by finance and accounting as a plot motor) and long-fractured relationships are refreshed. If the ending seems somewhat arbitrary and unresolved, it only underlines how the interest here is much more in the discoveries that attend the journey than in the arrival point. At times the movie may seem rather coarse and overdone, but even that much is refreshing for a director usually better remembered for small-scale observation and “humanism” than for his more elusively substantive traits.