Maria

 Maria is an account of the last week in the life of the opera star and diva, Maria Callas.  Directed by Pablo Larrain, the two-hour film on Netflix seems to be the third feature in his trilogy of movies about famous  and troubled women -- Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie, Lady Diana in Spencer, and now Maria Callas, a figure whose biography intersects with the life of Jackie Kennedy; Callas was the mistress of Aristotle Onassis, once the world's richest man, and, of course, after her husband's assassination, Jackie married the Greek shipping tycoon.  (In Maria, we see Jack Kennedy's half-hearted attempt to seduce Callas; as the movie portrays her, she's an even bigger and more selfish diva than was President Kennedy and, after insulting him with intimations about Jackie's infidelity, Maria shuts him down.)  Maria is stunningly beautiful and worth watching if you like opera for the soundtrack alone -- most of the scenes are underscored by Callas' famous arias -- but the silky material is paper-thin.  There's not much to the movie but Callas' self-destructive intemperance, her icy arrogance, and her inevitable death hastening to meet her.  The film is like an oratorio by Handel or Monteverdi -- it's a lavish spectacle composed on the theme of the death of a goddess.  Everything is preordained and there's no suspense.  A rare creature like Callas is too high-strung to survive and the film is basically a record of her arrogantly abusing everyone around her as she dies.  There's no suspense -- in the opening scene, framed by a languorous camera motion that frames a lavish room, we see Maria already dead on the floor.  Throughout the movie, Ed Lachman's camera slips and slides into compositions that use doors and corridors and windows as proscenium arches in which Callas performs -- her entire life is theatrical, operatic, larger-than-life and the camera centers her in ornate rooms as if she were on stage.  

I don't know much about Callas, but suspect that the film is largely accurate with regard to the details of the heroine's life.  Retired and alone in Paris, Callas plots to make a comeback.  Several times, she goes to a resplendent empty theater where she rehearses with a pianist -- but her voice is spoiled and she can't match the beauty of her singing when she was younger.  Callas is addicted to drugs, particularly something called "Mandrax".  The film personifies this medication as a strange-looking young man who imagined to be making a documentary film about Callas' life.  This peculiar and clever device allows Larrain to stage the movie as a memory play -- the picture flashes back to scenes in Callas' impoverished youth in Greece and her love affairs and her triumphs on stage.  "Mandrax" is said to "be an unreliable companion" by Callas'  longsuffering butler, Ferrugio.  Apparently, we are given to believe that Callas promenades around Paris talking with Mandrax when,  in fact, she is alone and speaking (and gesturing) to empty air.  Although Callas is badly wounded by her addiction and failing health, she's like the great operatic heroines that she has played on stage -- she isn't about to die without strenuously singing her way to the exit.  The film is rather arbitrarily divided into four acts with intertitles (clapboards) that refer to the imagined documentary by Mandrax and his cameraman.  There's a short prologue showing Callas dead on the floor under Old Master paintings in her palatial apartment; a short epilogue ends the film just before an obligatory montage of old footage showing the actual opera star.  (Callas is played with glacial aplomb by Angelina Jolie; in the old film, the real Callas looks much more girlish, vulnerable, and homely than the movie star impersonating her.)  Flashbacks show Callas at her first triumph at La Scala playing the role of Norma in Bellini's Il Puritani.  We see her interaction with Onassis -- a gala at which she abandons her husband to become the tycoon's mistress.  During World War II, German officers force her to sing -- she seems to be in a brothel operated by her avaricious mother with her more plain, but practical, sister. Callas is invited to President Kennedy's birthday party and we briefly see Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday" to him.  In a poignant scene, late in the film, Callas comes to Paris to bid farewell to Onassis who is dying.  He's married to Jackie who is on her way to his sickroom in a weird, gauzy room in a sort of round bunker -- it's an opera set, it seems, like everything else in the film.   Onassis says that he has always loved her.  There are scenes on Onassis' yacht -- he has a painting by El Greco in his bedroom.  In the present-day chronicle of Callas' last week, we see her tormenting her staff by making the butler, who has a bad back, move the piano at her whim -- he pushes the heavy grand piano back and forth with assistance of the long-suffering and servile maid (and cook) Bruna.  Callas interacts with her doctor who tells her that if she persists in singing she will surely die; the stress will be too much for her fragile body.  (The film is rife with cliches of this sort -- of course, Maria can't refrain from trying to sing and her aria at the end is literally her last gasp; we are shown a crowd of people smitten in the street by the sound coming from her apartment window.  Is she singing or just playing a record?)  Callas' rehearsals with the pianist are catastrophic.  A journalist tries to blackmail her by making a recording of her poor efforts at singing.  The loyal Ferrugio, who seems to love her, beats up the vicious newspaper man.  Callas' sister sends her narcotics by mail and there's a scene with the two women at cross-purposes, reminiscing in a Mexican restaurant in Paris called Acapulco -- this place reminds Callas of the Mexican restaurant where she finally broke free from her demanding stage-mother.  The picture is a bit like stylized version of Sunset Boulevard with the great diva in exile in her lonely, vast palazzo.  

The film is spectacularly beautiful as if in compensation for the very slender concept driving the narrative.  Callas hallucinates on the streets of Paris.  In one incredible sequence, she hears Puccini played by a full orchestra in a rainstorm -- it's a theme from Madama Butterfly.  The camera swoops forward in the rain, parting a crowd of blossom-like geishas in brilliantly red kimonos and the violins and cellos gush with water pouring off them in the strangely bright rain.  (The scene looks operatic itself, like Bertolucci at his most lavishly melodramatic.)  The music is gorgeous.  The movie is wonderful in its own way, but a sort of guilty pleasure -- there's not much in the way of content.  At one point, someone asks Callas:  "What is the reason?"  She replies "Opera has no reasons."

Black Doves and A Prairie Home Companion

 Black Doves is 2024 six episode Netflix series; A Prairie Home Companion was made in 2006 by Robert Altman and is that filmmaker's last movie.  The two pictures are polar opposites and, perhaps, worth considering in contrast to one another.  Altman's picture, a record of Garrison Keillor's long-running variety show on  public radio, preserves for history a live performance of an atypical episode of the program -- almost without exception, Keillor's radio show featured a monologue by the host chronicling events in "Lake Woebegone", the imaginary village in rural Minnesota described by Keillor each week and in a series of novels; there is no monologue in Altman's film and the show is essentially a revue of sentimental hillbilly songs.  Keillor's program was more eclectic with many cornball skits, not too funny, but mildly amusing.  The movie is warm and humane, alert to the foibles and vanity of its characters, and a moving meditation on the inevitability of death.  Altman was dying of leukemia when he made the picture in St. Paul; the auteur Paul Thomas Anderson (There will be Blood, Magnolia and Licorice Pizza among others) was on-hand to take over the film's direction if ill-health caused Altman to falter -- he didn't.  (Anderson is married to one of the performers in the movie, Maya Rudolph, who was heavily pregnant in real life when the picture was made.)  Altman's final picture -- A Prairie Home Companion (PHC) was released in June 2006; the director died in November of that year -- is successful, and although it's plot is silly, the movie is about something moving and important:  stoicism in the face of death.  By contrast, Black Doves, equally, or, even, more silly, is a meretricious thriller that stages two score showy deaths on-screen but that, in the end, fails because we don't care about who is killing whom.  After the first couple murders, death by gunfire or bludgeon or knife becomes commonplace; no one seems fazed by the carnage and the intricate plot is too implausible and complex to care about.

It's probably unfair to couple PHC with Black Doves to the disadvantage of the latter -- Altman was a famous, controversial director who either made great movies or miserable, idiosyncratic flops; he took risks and allowed his actor's improvise, devising his films on the fly -- when this worked, he created masterpieces; when things fell apart, his pictures, although never less than interesting, could be annoying, slapdash follies, self-indulgent to the point of calamity.  PHC falls midway between being a chaotic mess and a great film -- it's more great than chaotic, but throughout the hour and 45 minute work, the tightrope walker is always poised to fall off the high wire; this audacious risk-taking is part of the appeal of the film but the picture's plotless and improvised meanderings won't satisfy some audiences.  By contrast, Black Doves is very tightly scripted.  There's only one problem:  the script doesn't make a lot of sense and, since most of the show's players are just cannon fodder, we don't really care about their picturesque slaughter.

Black Doves names a secret cabal of spies.  They work freelance, are utterly ruthless, and, apparently, sell their intelligence to the highest bidder.  Helen Webb, played by Keira Knightly, is an operative married to conservative British MP; he's successful as a politician and the film suggests that he is in line to be the next Prime Minister -- some of the show's action takes place at 10 Downing Street.  Helen is transmitting information about her husband's activities to her handler, Reed, a plump woman with blonde hair who is also a brutal and pragmatic murderer.  The show's premise is that the Chinese ambassador to the Britain has been murdered under circumstances that suggest CIA involvement.  An international crisis is looming.  To add to the tension, the ambassadors daughter, a heroin junkie, has been kidnapped by person's unknown.  None of this would affect the show's protagonist, Helen Webb, except for the fact that her husband is managing the international crisis and her lover, somehow entangled in the intrigue involving the Chinese ambassador and his daughter, has been murdered.  Helen, who is a lethal killer, sets out to butcher the persons responsible for her boyfriend's death.  (Of course, her staid, virtuous, and dull politician husband doesn't known that his wife has been cheating on him with a hunky and shady spy.)  The ensuing bloodbath, extended over six fifty minute episodes, takes place around Christmas.  This allows the producers to inject into the mayhem a counter-point of hymns, Christmas pageants, and happy shoppers thronging the fashionable London stores.  The Christmas motif is used opportunistically for irony -- the rhetorical points about Christmas in contrast to bloody assassinations and shootouts are shallow and don't add much to the story.  Ultimately, it appears that a number of vicious groups of murderers are competing to either solve the diplomatic crisis or deepen it into a third world war -- MI5 gets into the act as do a mob of sadistic local gangsters, the Clark's, modeled it seems on the Kray crime family, as well as various CIA operatives and deadly Black Dove spies.  Everyone is killing everyone else to the point that there is a big shoot-out in Episode Five in which I had no idea who the combatants were -- although the fighting leaves the streets comically littered with gory corpses.  (There are no police in evidence and the show implies that mass killing on lonely London streets resulting in up to 17 casualties or more is simply commonplace in the British capital.)  Joe Barton wrote the script and it is intermittently ingenious although quickly devolving into absurdity.  To say that Barton is cynical would be a gross understatement -- the show is nihilistic with people tasked to kill their own fathers and relatives.  The first few episodes are reasonably compelling -- Webb's dilemma is that she may admire (if not love) the politician to whom she is married and by whom she has two children; but her metier is betrayal and, for about half of the show, we are interested to some extent in her conundrum.  But, when the bodies start piling up, and the show becomes too complex to understand, Helen's problems seem trivial compared to the apocalyptic stakes in which the show traffics:  the Chinese and Americans are about to get into an exchange of nukes.  There are colorful characters, a couple of female assassins are amusing (one of them speaks in an amusing Irish brogue); Sam, a gay "triggerman" (or assassin), is dispatched to protect Helen from the army of bad guys trying to liquidate her -- Sam is sad-eyed and sensitive when he's not shooting people and he's haunted by memories of murders in which he's been involved.  He's given a love-interest and, in the midst of massacres, pauses sometimes to kiss and caress his boyfriend.  Minute by minute, the show is well-made, the noisy action scenes are nicely choreographed (although idiotic -- as one might expect our heroine is essentially impervious to the holocaust of ordinance unleased on her) and the dialogue is sharp; some of the situations are interesting.  But there's no suspense and the narrative, although plotted to within an inch of its life, is incomprehensible.  The film-making is state-of-the-art, although there are way too many flashbacks that impede the progress of the story.  

These kinds of shows always feature evil masterminds delivering baroque threats to the protagonists in the story.  But these protagonists have distinguished themselves by murdering in brutal duels about ten people per episode.  So I'm always puzzled why these nasty villains dare to insult and threaten the assassins working for them.  Why don't these resourceful, athletic killing machines just put an end to the cruel bosses who are pulling their strings?  It's a puzzle that I found particularly distracting in Black Doves.  I recall Martin Ritt's Western Hombre.  In that film, Richard Boone, playing a particularly sadistic and vicious outlaw, goes for a parley with the hero played by Paul Newman.  Boone makes a number of hair-raising threats -- the scene takes place on an extended ladder-like flight of steps leading down into a mine pit in which Boone is torturing a kidnapped woman to death.  At the end of his harangue, Paul Newman responds:  "I've just got one question for you.  How are you going to get down these steps?"  Whereupon Hombre pulls his gun and drilled Richard Boone with a couple of well-placed (if non-lethal) shots.)  Throughout Black Doves, I listened to the bad guys threatening Helen Webb and her allies with all sorts of hideous torture -- so why didn't the targets of these gaudy rants just pull out their firearms and put an end to all this nonsense.  It makes no sense. 

Black Doves features about a dozen murders per episode -- it entertains us with violent death.  Only one person dies in A Prairie Home Companion, an elderly singing cowboy (played by one of Peckinpah's favorite thugs, L. Q. Jones).  The old man is preparing for a sexual tryst with a lunch lady who provides sandwiches to the cast and crew of the PHC show.  When the man's death by heart attack is discovered, the show members are distraught but continue with the program -- the show must go on.  This subplot mirrors the larger narrative of the movie:  the network on which the show is broadcast has been purchased by some religious businessmen in Texas who have decided to cancel the show and, even, tear down the regal old theater from which the program originates.  The movie is about death and facing death, mortality, and the inevitable end of things.  Performers in the show beleaguer Garrison Keillor, the program's writer, main singer, and producer, to memorialize the passing of the show and the old cowboy singer as well.  Keillor, who is playing a bemused version of himself, refuses -- he simply says that people serve best when they do their jobs and insists that the program come to an end without any showy eulogies or tributes.  The film's ethos is embedded in a particular form of Midwestern pessimism, the darkness of the Scandinavians who settled this frigid and barren country.  Emotions shouldn't be on display.  People need to do their work without much in the way of self-reflection or self-awareness.  Let the old, sentimental songs, as it were, carry the burden of the elegy that is implicit in the film's narrative.  (The music carries the emotion; the characters, if not laconic, are mostly incapable of expressing their feelings.)  Keillor's script adapts parts of his 1991 masterpiece, the great novel WLT: A Radio Romance and fans of the Prairie Home show will see on-screen many of the local stalwarts who made the program and appeared every weekend at the live shows at the Fitzgerald theater for more than 30 years.  Actors revered Robert Altman and would work for pennies to appear in his movies:  the film has an all-star cast that is very effectively deployed -- Woody Harrelson, Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, John C. Reilly, Lindsay Lohan, and Kevin Kline to mention just a few.  In effect, Altman's movie is a musical.  The show represents the ultimate development of the director's trademark dialogue style of chaotic overlapping voices -- the lines delivered by the actor's are illustrated by the songs that follow one after another and that form the subtext to the dialogue:  there is always music being played on-stage while the characters speak to one another as they wait in the wings to appear.  You have to be alert to listen for principal strands of discourse while, at the same time, hearkening to the musical commentary on the action.  Altman crowds his frames with bric-a-brac, backstage junk, posters, and souvenirs of all sorts, the kind of detritus that would accumulate in the studios of a show that has been on the air for thirty years.  There are only a few close-ups, elegant shots of performers on-stage, the camera sliding around them to keep them positioned at center frame.  Most of the images feature Altman's ensemble, groups of five or six figures all packed together in small dressing rooms or backstage waiting to perform.  There are only three or four exterior shots.  The bulk of the movie takes place in the network of small chambers and subterranean corridors at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul (from which the radio show was often broadcast) and where the movie was filmed.  (A penultimate sequence is shot on-location in the iconic Mickey's Diner near the Fitzgerald in St. Paul).  Paralleling the action of the "Axe-man", the corporate guy dispatched to shut-down the show (played by Tommy Lee Jones), an angel of death stalks the theater, a woman who is both a ghost and an emblem of mortality -- she died on the road in a car-crash while traveling to see her lover at a cabin up north.  (She is puzzled by the fact that she lost control of the vehicle because she was laughing at one of Keillor's cornball jokes that, she observes, wasn't even funny.)  The mise-en-scene and photography by the great Ed Lachman reminds me of the very crowded images in movies by G. W. Pabst, particularly The Threepenny Opera and Pandora's Box -- it's overstuffed with gorgeous actors bathed in shadows or amber light.  The feeling in the film is one of autumnal chaos -- the audience has to be complicit in constructing the story from the fragmentary dialogue, snippets of speeches, and the accompanying music performed on-stage.  This tone of autumnal chaos reminds me of Renoir's late films, particularly The River and The Golden Carriage. beautiful things with highly diffuse plots.  This is high praise, a big exaggerated I admit -- the movie is excellent but not transcendent -- but, I think, honest and valid.  The film is very moving, stands up to repeated viewings and is excellent in most respects.  It's not flawless:  some of the fart jokes are unnecessary and distracting and there are parts of the picture that lag.  But this film made by Robert Altman during the year of his death is a worthy valediction.

The Asthenic Syndrome

 Cinephiles keep lists of films that evade them, movies that are obscure but heralded as "masterpieces" by the fortunate few who have watched them.  I first encountered references to the cinema of Kira Muratova in a review written by Jonathan Rosenbaum, a critic who published his work primarily in the Chicago Reader.  In a 1996 review, Rosenbaum said that Kira Muratova's The Asthenic Syndrome was, perhaps, the greatest film ever made in Russia.  His description of the picture was delirious, insanely enthusiastic, and, of course, inspired me to search for the film.  However, Muratova's movies are almost never shown in the West and the director remains unknown even to most film critics.  At last, I have found a Russian DVD of The Asthenic Syndrome subtitled in English, albeit poorly, and have watched the two-and-a-half hour film.  (I have seen several of Kuratova's movies made after the 1989 Asthenic Syndrome -- Chekhovian Motifs and The Tuner.  Those pictures were challenging and, at least Chekhovian Motifs, completely unlike anything I had ever seen.  I'm not sure that I understood them at all.)  There is always a level of disappointment in bagging a "white whale" of this sort.  Of course, the movie is different from what I imagined and, as advertised by Rosenbaum's essay, extremely rebarbative and perverse.  As with Muratova's other pictures that I have seen, I will  not pretend to fully understand the film and, in composing this note, have had to rely upon a number of sources describing Muratova's career and The Asthenic Syndrome.  This  task is complicated by the fact that the Russian DVD available to me is somewhat murky, at least in parts, and is equipped with subtitles that are written in pidgen-English, often without verb tenses that make any sense and lacking both definite and indefinite articles.

The Asthenic Syndrome is divided into two parts.  The first section is shot on handsome sepia-tinted black and white film stock.  This part of the movie details a middle-aged woman's response to the death of her husband.  The second, and much longer, section of the picture, made in color, shows that adventures of a narcoleptic school teacher named Nikolai -- this part of the film chronicles Nikolai's wanderings in Odessa, the city where Muratova lived and worked (for Odessa Studios and Goskino).  There is an aspect of the second part of the movie that seems Joycean -- Nikolai walks around town like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses encountering various types of people and seeing all sorts of strange and absurd things.  The two parts of the movie are sutured together by an interlude, about forty minutes into the feature, in which it is revealed that part one (the mourning woman) is, actually, a film within a film.  We see that the sepia-toned picture is being shown in a large theater.  After the movie, the audience scrambles for the door, obviously angry with the film that they have seen.  One man grumbles to his wife that he is tired and, after work, would like to see something enjoyable, perhaps, with songs and dance.  This being a Muratova picture, the audience fleeing the theater can't get out the door (or even to the aisles) without a brawl -- people are fighting over someone's excessively large hat.  The emcee for this premiere of the movie has brought the actress who plays the protagonist on-stage and they invite questions.  But no one is interested in posing any questions -- the crowd just wants to get away from the theater.  Everyone departs, leaving the theater empty except for a sinister block of soldiers or police in black uniforms (at least forty of them) who get up and leave en masse.  In the middle of the auditorium, we see a man sleeping -- this is Nikolai, the somnambulant protagonist of the film's second half.  (I assume that the cops or soldiers, who march out under orders from their commander, represent in some way, the official censors -- The Asthenic Syndrome has the dubious distinction of being the only film banned in Russia during the relatively liberal glasnost period just preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union.)  The emcee and actress leave as well, the leading lady dropping her red flower on the stage.  This transition establishes the fact that ordinary film audiences, including those comprised of cinema enthusiasts, simply can't tolerate Muratova's work -- at least, as it is shown in the first forty-minute part of the film.  What follows will be even worse.

The Asthenic Syndrome begins with a shot of a battered doll on a trash heap. Bubbles float down on the doll.  A boy overhead in a window above the midden is blowing bubbles. Suddenly, the film cuts to three old women who proclaim their love for Tolstoy and how reading that author improves one's humanity.  Then, we see a deep crater at a construction site.  Two men are in the pit, torturing a cat by tying a can to its tail.  On the edge of the crater, an architect and engineer (with blue prints under his arm) look on approvingly. The film, then, shows us a huge cemetery where several funerals seem to be underway in a labyrinth of graves so tightly pressed together that there is really no place to walk or stand.  A man who looks like Stalin is being buried.  His casket is open and people are jammed in between the graves next to the coffin.  A blonde woman lets out a horrible, bestial cry.  She walks off before the funeral is done, zigzagging among the graves.  The woman seems demented and enraged -- she hits at everyone she encounters.  When a train arrives, she has to violently fight her way onto the car against a stream of passengers.  At a desolate bus stop, the woman asks a man if he wants to sleep with her.  Then, she starts sobbing and tries to hit him.  They wrestle for awhile.  The widow walks around town slugging and smashing into people.  We see her in her apartment slugging down vodka from a mason jar and chomping on black bread.  On the street again, the widow picks up a homeless drunk, brings him to her apartment and makes him strip -- he's so drunk, he has a great deal of difficulty getting out of his clothes.  We see them in bed together, but the widow is agitated and starts crying.  She dismisses the drunk and begins hurling her clothing on the floor and smashing wine glasses by dropping them off the edge of the table.  It turns out that the woman is a doctor.  She goes to the hospital where she works, a nasty place with long corridors and squalid toilets.  She submits her resignation to the dismay of her dignified older boss (we have seen him wearing a beret and with his hair disheveled at grave side.)  Riding down to ground level in an elevator, she keeps lifting the sheet over a corpse go peek at the dead face much to the dismay of the nurse with her. Back at home, the widow cleans up the mess of spilled wine and broken glasses.  She looks out the window and sees a hoist poised against the sky.  Somehow, she is atop the hoist (there's no cut to explain this) and it descends to earth, signifying, it seems, the deflation of her rage.  Some workers are moving heavy furniture out of a nearby apartment -- the architecture is all spalling and cracked Brutalist concrete.  The widow is shoved up against a wall and gets dirt on her coat.  A kind woman stops her and says that her back is dirty.  The woman tries to brush off her back.  Once she has done, the scene shifts to the dark auditorium where the film is being shown and, then, the picture moves into the transitional scenes introducing Nikolai.

The next hour and fifty minutes of the film is extremely complex, confusing, and difficult to follow.  Leaving the theater, Nikolai gets onto a subway train in which everyone seems to be sleeping.  He also falls asleep stepping off the train and falls to the ground, splayed out like a corpse.  People come and go, stepping over him.  We see a fat blonde woman, apparently, the vice-principal of a school that is crammed with Marxist-Leninist busts and  other knickknacks.  This turns out to be the place where Nikolai works, apparently as an English schoolteacher.  The students either flirt with Nikolai or ignore him.  When he tries to discipline one unruly kid, the student beats him up.  The vice-principal seems to despise Nikolai and harangues him for being late to work.  On the soundtrack, we hear a jaunty English pub-song, something about "Chiquita."  Outside a big queue of people are waiting for fish at an open-air market.  Shoving leads to an overall brawl.  The fish kee getting dropped in the dirt, something that upsets the angry female customers.  The shop girl tells them to just wash off the fish at  home, but people respond that they don't have running water.  (In one scene, we learn that three people in an apartment without water are using a bucket as a toilet).  On a bench, an elderly poet declaims verse while two old ladies gossip.  The poet admits his verse is pretty bad.  In giant close-up, someone picks up a distressed-looking black fish -- the things seems inedible.  Again, we hear the "Chiquita" song.  Some well-dressed women are looking for a lost dog.  Some hooligans taunt a mentally retarded man and beat him up.  Then, bystanders beat up the hooligans.  The retarded man fishes a pink slipper out of a murky pond of grey-brown water.  Someone pitches a big barrel through the window of a tenement, narrowly missing a baby in its crib -- the people in the apartment shout and complain.  A plump guy, first seen observing the hooligans bullying the retarded man, goes to his apartment where a young woman, possibly his daughter, is doing a seductive, slinky dance to an American pop song.  The plump man with owl-like glasses keeps caged songbirds and he plays with them.  Meanwhile a big cat, standing up like a man leans on a bird-cage hoping to get at the canary within.  The plump man chases the cat and tries to beat it.  This causes the dancing woman to attack him and they fight with the cat in the man's arms, tucked there like a football.  Nikolai goes to a house where he devours three cans of caviar.  He and one of the women in the house get into a fight over his gluttony and his hand is cut by a knife. (Nikolai, who says he is a writer, has been allowed to come home from work to work on his novel or short story -- but he's not inspired to write anything.) At another flat, filled with teacups, painted china, among mugs and small paintings, the fat vice-principal meets with a young man, possibly a student from school.  The blonde vice-principal removes some of her clothes.  The young man has been waiting for her, lolling on a settee and cradling a trumpet in his hand.  The young man and the woman talk and she eats a big bowl of some rather noisome-looking soup.  Then, she takes the trumpet and plays "Strangers in the Night" (not too well) while an orchestra swells to accompany her on the soundtrack.  We see a painting of an angel with a trumpet.  This picture turns out to be in a bureaucratic office where people are bickering to the point that a secretary begins to sob.  Nikolai is seen in a dark, closet-like anteroom trying to get into a suite of chambers.  In the rooms, naked people are posed next to tureens foaming with dry-ice fog.  The naked women are shapely and, it seems, as if some sort of pornographic movie is being made.  (There is lots of full frontal male nudity as well in this film, starting with the homeless man that the widow picked-up, and, also, featured in the scene showing the porno-shoot.)  Nikolai finally figures out how to get into the suite and wanders around with dazed-looking party-goers reaching at last the opulent chamber where the dirty movie is being made.  There he falls asleep again -- this is about the fourth time, we have seen him sleeping in the middle of crowds and noisy chaos.  (In Russian films, naked people have startlingly white skin.) Nikolia, then, appears in scene at the school, filmed against a floor to wall image of autumnal trees.  The teachers are vigorously debating their role in a State that no longer expects them to produce slaves.  Again, this is too much for Nikolai and so he falls asleep, snoring loudly as his colleagues argue.  We see the students in the school, a bunch of disrespectful and ugly brats, pressed up close to a grated window like monkeys in a zoo -- this image will rhyme with pictures in the extremely disturbing next sequence.  The sound track burbles with animal sounds, roaring and growling and barks.  Some battered-looking dogs are playing in a courtyard in front of grim industrial building.  The ladies looking for a lost dog go inside.  Trucks are coming and going and the thuggish workers recite again and again this question:  what is harder to catch? a cat or a dog or a venereal disease?  When the women enter the impound building, they are paralyzed in horror, hold their noses at the stench, and begin to weep.  Filthy cages are crowded with hundreds of mangy abandoned dogs, too sick and weak to even bark.  Some of the dogs are wounded or blind; many are covered with swarms of flies. Muratova lingers on horrific shots depicting the injured and dying dogs for five or six minutes, then, interposes a titles that says something like:  "You don't like seeing this.  I don't like seeing it either.  This has nothing to do with good or evil."  Nikolai wakes up in a madhouse where an inmate is talking very objectively and calmly about having a chest full of writhing snakes.  In an image out of Brueghel (and much of this part of the film looks like paintings by that Master), we see insane people wandering around in a snowy courtyard, fighting and wrestling.  A woman comes to the madhouse and says that she loves Nikolai and wants to marry him.  He agrees.  They set forth by subway to go to his home for the wedding. Another woman shrieks obscenities at the camera, howling like an animal.  (It was this tirade of verbal abuse that got the film banned, together with all the male nudity.) On the subway, Nikolai falls asleep and can't be awakened.  The train comes to the end of the line and everyone has to get out.  Nikolai's bride tries to arouse him but can't and, frustrated, begins to punch and claw at him. Nikolai falls on the floor of subway car.  The woman leaves and the train departs, going who knows where, with patterns of light and dark illumining the man sprawled on the floor of the car.  The "Chiquita" song plays again.

This summary leaves out about a third of the events, digressions, and inexplicable chaos in the film's second part.  For instance, in the scene in the madhouse, the insane man's account of the serpents in his bosom is interrupted by fragmentary monologues from other inmates.  The mise-en-scene resembles Alexei German's films -- the shots are crammed with people all crowded together among piles of stuff, mildewed overstuffed furniture, knickknacks. books and manuscripts, carpets on the walls, every kind of junk.  The porn scenes feature a naked woman, a naked man with long hair, but, then, also a half-dozen grips and cameramen and doped-up partygoers.  Apparently as a gesture toward feminism, Muratova includes not one but eight or nine shots of naked men, filmed with full frontal nudity -- if we are going to see naked women, we will see penises as well.  The editing harkens to silent Soviet films, cutting away to illustrative images that seem to be metaphoric, but that are, often, very difficult to interpret.  The movie is hectic, crowded, with confusing transitions and hosts of characters who we can't recognize and who simply come and go.  There are philosophical arguments about teaching, life and death, Shakespeare, and so on -- but the arguments often seem inane, shallow, and half-baked.  It seems that Muratova perceives the collapse of the Soviet union, obviously imminent at the time the movie was made, as inspiring agitation, even hysteria among the people in the movie -- although there is no trace of political discourse in the picture, except, perhaps, the debate about pedagogy.  There are two possible reactions to the chaos that seems ubiquitous -- you can mourn the death of the old regime (the widow's husband is dead-ringer for Stalin) and lash out at people or you can opt-out by simply canceling your consciousness, that is, falling asleep.  These seem to be the only two alternatives -- fight or flight (by narcolepsy).  This interpretation seems opportunistic, derived from the fact that the Soviet Union's authority over East Germany collapsed with the Wall in 1989 and that the Soviet Union itself dissolved two years later.  From accounts I have read of other Muratova films, all of them more or less suppressed, these pictures also seem quite chaotic and digressive, although not to demented level of The Asthenic Syndrome.  "Asthenic" describes Nikolai's condition -- the word means "weakness."  Whatever the politics of the situation, Muratova seems inclined toward violence, chaos, and savage bickering.  

In the immediate post-Soviet era, Russian films are described as exercises in chernukha -- that is, "bleak" films.  These pictures are said to depict the malaise and confusion accompanying the dissolution of the Soviet empire -- day to day despair is shown by depictions of byt, a word that means "slice of life" imagery. The Asthenic Syndrome is often said to represent this kind of film-making.  Muratova seems to feel that human existence in general is a parade of folly, misery, and sadism.  (I understand that she also made equally chaotic comedies and romances that were not overtly despairing -- over her career, Muratova directed more than forty films.)  An idea as to her sensibility is reflected in her comment on Ingmar Bergman.  Muratova admired Bergman and he was an influence on her early films but later she said:  "I don't like Bergman any more.  He is not barbaric enough for me."

The Asthenic Syndrome won the Silver Bear in Berlin in 1990. Muratova was born in Moldova, then Romania and spent her entire life working in Odessa.  She regarded herself as a Ukrainian filmmaker.  She died in 2018 at age 86.  Recent propaganda postings on YouTube claim her as a proud Ukrainian artist.

I saw the TV glow

 I saw the TV glow (2023) is an expressionist film on psycho-sexual themes.  The picture is fully assured, a morbid essay in body horror that looks (and sounds) like a combination of David Lynch and David Cronenberg but with its own peculiar palette and ambience.  Everything is disorienting, lurid with super-saturated colors and histrionic performances.  The hero, Owen, talks in a high-pitched squeaky voice and his female counterpart and antagonist. Maddy, seems half-comatose when she is not importuning people to bury her alive -- this is world in which torture of various sorts substitutes for suicide.  The film is extreme in style and content --  it's like the most perverse aspects of Teutonic expressionism involving tormented adolescents, channeling theater works like Hans Henny Jahnn's Pastor Ephraim Magnus and Franz Wedekind's Fruehlings Erwachen ("Spring's Awakening").  There's no doubt that I saw the TV glow is impressive in a macabre way and stylistically very effective -- but the whole enterprise is so radically and vehemently nasty that it's hard to recommend the film.  (I should note that Martin Scorsese is a fan and has enthusiastically endorsed this movie -- it's a little like Mean Streets in its use of color and location, but much more fantastical; Scorsese admires Pressburger and Michael Powell's work, films that adopt a similar expressionistic vocabulary in their more outrageous scenes.)  The film's premise is that sex is a curse and affliction -- this message is a bit retrograde in that the variety of sex that seems most nightmarish is homosexual.  

The film's action spans a period of about 12 years, requiring two actors (young and adult) for the role of Owen.  Owen is lonely seventh grader when we first meet him in his mother's tow;she is voting in 1996 for the "saxophone player", that is, Bill Clinton.  Owen wanders off and encounters Maddie who is in 9th grade.  She is reading a book about a TV show called "The Pink Opaque", an episode guide to the program.  All the hip kids are obsessed with "The Pink Opaque" and Maddie asks Owen if he has watched it.  He can't watch the show because it airs (on the Young Adult Network) at 10:30 and his bedtime, vigorously enforced by his rather brutish father is 10:00.  Maddie suggests that Owen come to her house to watch the show under the guise that he is attending a sleepover with his friend.  He comes to Maddie's house, also dominated by an unseen, but brutal stepfather, and watches the program.  It's a weird cross between the X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  The show's premise is that two teenage girls, Tara and Isabel, have met once at a "sleepaway camp" as it is called and formed some sort of psychic and telepathic bond.  Although the two girls are separate and live in different States, they collaborate on solving paranormal mysteries and battling dark forces -- embodied in the episode that we see involving a monster in the form of loathsome, melting ice cream cone.  The show, like The X-Files, apparently, alternates between "mythology episodes" carrying forward the overarching plot of the series and "monster-of-the-week" adventures.  Of course, Owen is enthralled and spends the night at Maddie's house sleeping on the floor under a murky-looking blue-tinted aquarium.  The central source of evil in "The Pink Opaque" is a figure called "Mr. Melancholy", visualized as a personified moon with cratered features and a vestigial face that looks a lot Georges Melies moon in the 1902 18 minute "trick film", A Trip to the Moon.  Although Owen's parents won't let him watch the show, Maddie video tapes it and sends him VHS copies.  Two years later, Owen and Maddie meet on the bleachers at their High School, rather endearingly called "Void" High.  Maddie is alone and has been stigmatized as gay -- she is accused of touching another girl who was previously her friend (and admirer of "The Pink Opaque") but who has betrayed her by becoming a cheerleader.  Maddie recognizes that Owen is also gay but in denial about his sexuality -- in a baroque speech, she establishes the film's controlling metaphor about being buried alive.  She says that Owen has allowed himself to be buried under dirt poured onto his chest and, therefore, interring his beating heart -- the film also uses still-beating hearts ripped out of people's chests as a metaphor for self-alienation.  Maddie wants Owen to flee this suburban wasteland with her.  He's terrified and admits to a neighbor lady that he's been deceiving his parents about the "sleepovers" which have not been at his friend's house, but at Maddie's place.  Owen wants to be "grounded" so that he can't elope from High School and his home with Maddie.  One night Maddie just vanishes.  Her TV set is set afire and burning in her front yard.  The movie starts with a puzzling image of a street covered in sinister-looking chalk fields on which small ghost-like pink apparitions are floating.  At the end of the street, we see an ice-cream truck with flashing lights and police cars.  Later, we learn that this is Maddie's house and represents the night that she vanished. (From time to time, the film reverts to this primal scene). Owen goes to work in a movie theater that ultimately closes for lack of an audience.  One night, coming home from work, Owen's road is blocked by a fallen tree and a live power line that flops back and forth on the asphalt.  In the debris, he finds the episode guide to "The Pink Opaque" discussing the sixth season of the show -- this is odd because Owen knows that there were only five seasons broadcast.  Owen's mother had died and his father tries to drown him in the bathtub in a weird inexplicable scene.  (The picture is full of images that elude my interpretation -- for instance, there are odd ruinous inflatables at "Void" High School, a translucent plastic dome of many colors under which Owen hides, and, later, a planetarium also in an inflatable dome with baroque images of the constellations as mythical figures.)

Eight years pass.  Owen has a family (we never see them) and works in a sinister "Family Fun Center", a sort of horrific amusement park.  One night while shopping in a strangely deserted grocery store, he encounters Maddie.  The film's imagery has become increasingly lurid and surreal -- the grocery store, invoking the idea of premature burial has a frieze of giant vegetables displayed above a compressed, green layer of produce where Owen is morosely pushing his cart.  Owen and Maddie go to a saloon called The Double Lunch where punk rock and extreme emo acts are performing in whirlpools of  blue and red light (here the Lynch influence is palpable).  Maddie says that she's been living in "The Pink Opaque" world for the past decade.  She tells Owen about hiring a kid to bury her alive.  This was accomplished but, after some horrific experiences under ground, she fought herself out of the premature burial and has now come to summon Owen to "The Pink Opaque".  Owen watches the last episode of the show on VHS:  Mr. Melancholy as a moon-monster with black empty eye-sockets and rippling craters on his face and brow forces one of the heroines in the show to be buried alive -- this is after cutting her open, pulling out her heart, and forcing milky "Luna Juice" down her throat.  Maddie tells Owen that he has suppressed his true self -- that is, buried himself alive.  She says that he must agree to be buried alive now to purge himself of  the impulse to repress himself.  A TV bursts into flames.  Owen takes a scalpel and cuts open his chest to reveal that where his heart should be there is only the luminous glow of the TV screen.  The film cuts to a nightmare birthday party in which the staff at the Family Fun Center are singing "Happy Birthday" to a child.  Owen begins to scream uncontrollably.  In the last shot, a long tracking sequence, we see him staggering through the amusement park begging everyone for forgiveness.  

As far as I can decipher this movie, the film suggests that in American suburbia, teenagers are required to repress and conceal their true sexual orientation and desires.  This is tantamount to being buried alive and, in fact, consenting to premature interment. There's really no escape from the repressive forces in suburbia except the TV, the cult show "The Pink Opaque" which seems to mirror the action in the real world:  the relationship between Tara and Isabel, the psychic girls, is similar to the interaction between Maddie and Owen.  And both "The Pink Opaque" and the real world (as posited by the movie) are imagined as haunted, and under constant assault, by Mr. Melancholy, the lunar force of depression and self-harm.  There's no escape:  Maddie has come out as a lesbian but this just inserts her deeper into the nightmare world of Mr. Melancholy.  Expressing your true self involves self-mutilation.  I read once that there is nothing within you that you haven't put there yourself.  It seems that Owen has clogged his torso with TV images so that the glow from the screen leaks out of his wounded flesh.  "The Pink Opaque" series when seen as an adult is puerile, 'cheesy' with bad special effects and worse acting.  Owen can't figure out why he was obsessed with the show. (We are shown a clip of the program late in the film and it looks nothing like the lurid, horror-show that we earlier saw in the film.)  This movie by Julie Schoenbrun is an impressive effort, intensely (even insanely) expressive, and I will be curious to see her next work.  (Schoenbrun, who uses the pronoun "they", is transgender.  They interpret the film as representing the moment when a transgender person realizes that they are embodied in the wrong sex.  This is not clear from the film in which the issue seems to be more about homosexuality.  However, on reflection, I think I can see a clue in the dialogue about the transgender theme -- when Maddie and Owen are sitting on the bleachers, Maddie says with disgust that people are saying that she is lesbian -- but, apparently, she identifies as transgender, although this isn't expressed except by her apparent anger at being called gay.  In any event, the themes involving burial alive, self-harm and mutilation, and being trapped in a hopeless universe apparently reflect the malaise of being transgender.)  

Only Murders in the Building and A Man on the Inside

 Geriatric crime shows have a long history.  TV programs of this sort feature a charismatic senior actor devoted to the solution of murders or other crimes.  Only Murders in the Building is a good example of this time-honored genre.  A Man on the Inside is an interesting variant on this formula.  Populated by older actors, the genre appeals to an increasingly elderly TV audience.  These shows are not too gruesome, avoid explicit sex (although on cable there is a lot of cursing) and, generally, adhere to genre conventions.  The audience knows what to expect, understands the format, and enjoys the interplay between the witty and familiar characters.  Expectations aroused are reliably met.  In many ways, these shows are throw-backs to the television conventions with which I grew up in the sixties and seventies.  There is a didactic edge to these programs -- messages about sincerity, open expression of feelings, honesty, and fortitude are reliably delivered.  The audience need not perch on the edge of its collective chair fearing some kind of shock to the system or subversive or disturbing content.  Mysteries are solved and malefactors brought to justice.  These shows depict a world subject to perverse and murderous passions that are ultimately subdued by the comforting presence of the old media figures with whom the audience is invited to identify.  The format is conservative in all senses, a TV genre tailored to audiences that watch Fox news.  Such programs are well-written and ingenious within the limitations of the genre, deliver plenty of surprising twists and turns without distressing the viewers, and are moderately entertaining -- the shows are sufficiently intriguing and have enough star charisma on display to hold your attention for eight, or so, episodes per series.  Furthermore, on Cable, these shows are successful enough to be renewed at the end of each year for an additional season.  Clearly, geriatric crime shows appeal to some deep-seated and mostly pre-cognitive emotional instincts in their viewers.  They depict old age as fulfilling, not lonely, full of interesting interactions with eccentric folk -- a rational universe in which evil exists but within certain bounds imposed by law and community.  The elder actors in these shows are reassuringly spry, intelligent, and have good memories -- although they often jest to the contrary.  Old age has not dulled them, but sharpened their wisdom and moral reflexes.  We don't need to be afraid of aging because it is possible to lead a productive and, even, exciting life into old age.  These actors haven't retired due to feebleness or inability to memorize their lines:  they are still going strong.  They embody the aspirations of their mostly older audiences.

Examples of this genre date back to Agatha Christie's Miss Marple mysteries, often dramatized on TV.  Matlock with Andy Griffith is another noteworthy prototype for the two Cable shows here under consideration.  Matlock, featuring Griffith as doughty, spirited defense lawyer (in the mold of Perry Mason) ran for nine seasons beginning in 1986 and spun-off two other series following the same pattern -- Jake and the Fat Man (with William Conrad), a show involving the prosecutorial equivalent of Matlock's defense lawyer, and Diagnosis: Murder with Dick Van Dyke as a forensic doctor who solved murder cases for eight seasons beginning in 1993.  A new series of Matlock is underway currently (2024) starring Kathy Bates.  As should be evident, these shows provide showy employment for TV and movie personalities who were famous and beloved in their youth -- such actors can be recycled in their old age in programs of this sort, capitalizing on resources of good will built up earlier in their careers.

In Only Murders in the Building, Steve Martin and Martin Short collaborate with Selena Gomez to solve homicides that occur in their expensive and exclusive upper West Side Coop, a building in Manhattan called the Arconia.  This is a tony residence in which people like Sting reside.  (The show features many cameo appearances by noteworthy stars and celebrities.)  Steve Martin's character, Charles Haden-Savage is a mostly retired actor, famous for starring as a TV detective, Brazzos, 30 years earlier.  Short plays Oliver Putnam, a flamboyant Broadway director, also mostly retired -- the part signifies as gay, but Putnam is heterosexual and, in fact, has a torrid romance with Meryl Streep.  Selena Gomez, playing against type as a rather dowdy character (she is not a glamor girl in this show) completes the trio as Mabel Mora, a twenty-something woman who between gigs -- she's house-sitting in her Aunt's apartment when the show begins.  The premise for the program is that the three lead actors, after "meeting cute" in the first episode, work together on a podcast directed toward solving a murder that happened in the Arconia.  There are now four seasons of the show, with a fifth to follow, so the formula has been successful and resulted in a large body-count at the Coop.  The shows are very ingeniously written with many twists and turns that the audience can not anticipate.  The Arconia with its colorful tenants, up-scale apartments and secret passageways is as much a character as the three actors that drive the stories.  Over four series (of eight 43 minute episodes per season), the audience is introduced to the characters' families and lovers (Selena Gomez' Mabel Mora is bisexual and has paramours that are both male and female.  There are a variety of clever sub-plots.  Each season is very formulaic -- the murder investigation focuses on three suspects seriatim; each suspect seems plausible as the murderer and sufficiently flawed to have committed the crime, but will, inevitably, turn out to have an alibi and not be the actual perpetrator.  In the last episode, the perpetrator is identified, cuffed and hauled away, only for another murder to immediately follow -- thereby, triggering another season.  Martin Short is the best performer in the show.  He's fantastically versatile and, after the manner of Jonathan Winters in the TV shows featuring him (for instance Mork and Mindy), seems to improvise all sorts of funny business for the show. It's reassuring that the two elderly actors retain their sexual charisma and each is supplied with age-appropriate romantic partners (Charles is briefly in love with a serial murderer who stalks him throughout the series -- she's too good and interesting to be put to pasture and has a reappearing role; as previously observed, Oliver Putnam romances Meryl Streep -- as I write, there are rumors that the love affair between Martin Short and Meryl Streep isn't merely fictional).  Selena Gomez is alternately irritated by the antics of the old men but, also, loyal and affectionate -- she's part of the wish-fulfillment apparatus of the series suggesting that old people and stylish young women can work together in a mutually gratifying way.  The show has a lilting theme that is an "ear-worm"; it's a bit like a less sinister version of the theme for Succession.  In my view, the show is a little too long and takes too much time to reach it's conclusion each season but it's sufficiently entertaining that I will certainly watch the Fifth Season when it drops.

A Man on the Inside traffics in the themes and structures developed in Only Murders in the Building and its many ancestors, but has a different, and more serious, approach to this material.  A Man on the Inside is written and produced by the people who made the metaphysical and eschatological The Good Place and, accordingly, is somewhat philosophical in its approach to this material.  Only Murders in the Building aspires to be a clever murder mystery with comedic overtones; A Man on the Inside pretends to be a mystery but, in fact, is a meditation on old age -- it's mostly serious in tone.  The premise of Man on the Inside is that Ted Danson is a retired architect and designer whose wife has died, rather horribly, of Alzheimer's disease.  Danson is at loose ends, lonely, and alienated from his perky daughter whom he rarely sees -- she lives in Sacramento with her family and he lives somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area.  A nasty businessman has deposited his elderly mother in an assisted living compound called Pacific View.  Someone has stolen her ruby necklace, apparently a very valuable piece of jewelry.  The demanding and brusque son hires a private detective firm to solve the mystery of this theft.  The owner of the private eye agency, a witty, hard-boiled woman in her thirties, needs someone to infiltrate Pacific View to conduct a investigation in that place.  You guessed it:  On a whim, Danson applies for the job and, then, moves into the Assisted Living facility as a mole.  Of course, the place is filled with grumpy and amusing elders who drink heavily, smoke dope, and engage in various sexual frolics.  Danson, whom everyone likes, becomes a center of Pacific View's social life.  After various setbacks and adventures, he solves the mystery and, then, leaves the Assisted Living facility, enraging many of its residents who trusted him with their confidence and friendship.  In the course of the series -- eight episodes that are a spritely 30 minutes each -- Danson reconciles with his daughter from whom he has become estranged.  The merry crew of oldsters at the facility forgive Danson's character and all ends well.  He goes back to his expensive home in San Francisco and, with the help of his daughter, gets rid of the mementos of his wife who tragically died due Alzheimers dementia.  He gives a lecture on the Golden Gate Bridge at Stanford, where he previously taught, and, then, gets a call from the detective agency --  the boss has another job for him.  There are many appealing and interesting characters in the show including Sally Struthers who plays the part of a sexually voracious old lady.  

These shows are implicitly about facing mortality with fortitude, wisdom, and good spirits.  A Man on the Inside makes these themes explicit.  It's an odd compound of wish-fulfillment fantasy and grim reality -- in the show, people become demented, die, and engage in vicious quarrels, but this all occurs in the context of the elegant Assisted Living facility with its fine dining, hair salons, and cocktail parties.  Some characters are lonely and isolated, but there is always the possibility of becoming involved in the warm and inviting community and experiencing fulfillment with the others.  A friend of mine lives in an Assisted Care facility and I have visited him several times.  It's an expensive place with a good view of a park among big, old churches and museums in Minneapolis.  In the dining room, the residents sat at their tables in stoic silence.  No one said a word.  My friend told me that there were many feuds and grudges poisoning the place.  We came to dinner late and, when my friend asked for piece of pie, he was rudely told that the kitchen was closed.  I didn't see any trace of the jolly, merry company in A Man on the Inside.  The food was tasteless and mediocre, served by preening kids who were the children of Somali and Sudanese immigrants listening to ear-buds and, more or less, unresponsive to the residents.  No one was enjoying cocktails or doobies when I was at the place.  Indeed, the milieu seemed nightmarish to me.  But A Man on the Inside assures its viewers that a meaningful, happy life can be lived in such places.  I'm skeptical, of course, but I think the message is reassuring to most older people.  Maybe, the horrors of the nursing homes and memory care places and Assisted Living facilities that we have witnessed are anomalies.  Perhaps, a better fate awaits us in a place like Pacific View.  I doubt it, but TV always reassures us with fantasies either about violence or love or justice and community.  A Man on the Inside seems oblivious as well to the enormous expense of such places -- what are the residents paying each month for their plush surroundings, the compassionate care attendants, and the various amenities such as fine dining and cocktail parties?  The fantasy structure, therefore, involves residents seemingly with great wealth.  But the show is amusing and I'm not so curmudgeonly as to suggest that the morals that it teaches are without value.   

Whistle and I'll come to you

 Whistle and I'll come to you is a BBC production from 1968, apparently broadcast as an episode of the arts documentary series called Omnibus.  This explains a documentary-style voice-over (the director Jonathan Miller) prefacing the program.  The show is genuinely frightening.  Shot in somewhat grainy black and white, an effect that enhances the sinister quality of the program, the movie is unpleasantly scary (I don't like horror) and unnerving.  It's an adaptation of a renowned ghost story by M. R. James, the British writer who specialized in tales involving antiquarian themes, macabre relics, and remnants of forgotten cults.  James is a somewhat pedantic writer, limited in scope, but within his bailiwick, his stories are memorable -- he's part of the generation of Edwardian writers that included Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood (all prominent authors of "weird" tales).  The name of the source story is "Oh, Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad" published in James' 1904 Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. 

Prof. Parkins, an academic from Cambridge, travels on holiday to a hotel located on the British seaside.  In the film, Parkins has something seriously wrong with him -- he fidgets, flinches, mumbles inaudibly, and suffers from spastic tics.  Whilst hiking along a seaside beach, he encounters a grave undercut by tidal erosion -- a femur is protruding from the sandy bank.  A strange bone-whistle inscribed with Latin words is also visible near the skeletal remains.  The autistic-seeming Parkins, who is always muttering to himself, says "Finders, Keepers!" and takes the bone, making a rubbing of the Latin words on it.  (The Latin translates to "Who is it who is coming.")  He clears the whistle and blows on it.  A figure appears on the strand, walking a couple hundred yards away from him. (Probably, it's just another person strolling by the sea, but who knows?)  That night, Parkins is afflicted by nightmares:  something is pursuing him along the beach and he hides but can't escape the apparition.  There are ghastly sounds and, then, when he awakes, noises in his room as well.  The next day, the maids inquire as to why both beds in his room have been slept in.  Parkins denies using the other bed which is, nonetheless, seriously rumpled.  That night, Parkins repeats the only really audible words on the soundtrack:  "Who is it that is coming?"  (he spoke these words the previous night).  There's something in the other bed.  Parkins cries out and another guest at the hotel enters the room to help him.  

The story is simple, even primitive.  The film is frightening because of the way that the anecdote is dramatized.  From beginning to end, the imagery is off-kilter and dream-like.  Some shots are held too long and the emphasis seems all wrong.  It's not scary, but rather mundane, even trivial in exposition until suddenly the show becomes very frightening indeed.  In the opening sequence, Parkins is driven to the hotel, sort of a nightmare version of Fawlty Towers.  A very corpulent man appears after Parkins waits a long time in the hotel hallway.  The fat man, who is old, carries Parkins two suitcases up the steps to the room, a task that seems almost herculean since the luggage is imponderably heavy and the steps steep and very long, in fact, two flights.  The effort of moving the luggage upstairs is palpable and disturbing.  Scenes are shot in mirrors creating disorienting spatial effects.  The colloquy with the fat man is shot from considerable distance and, since both men mumble and swallow their words, you can't tell who is speaking nor what is being said.  At supper, Parkins comes to the table in a sort of tuxedo seated apart from the other guests, flinching and whimpering and muttering to himself.  A woman with piercing eyes glares at him.  The scenes on the beach are shot to emphasize the notion that some unseen presence is following Parkins.  In a couple of sequences, a maid draws a bath for Parkins who whispers incomprehensibly to her and seems to be about to burst into tears.  When Parkins sits in the bath, the camera angle is obtuse and suggests that something is about leap out of the corner of the frame -- it doesn't.  Parkins' suitcase is heavy because it is laden with huge dark books.  When he cowers in his bed, the camera focuses on Parkins' terrified face, his brow furrowed and his wet eyes reduced to tiny, shivering slits.  An example of the film's idiosyncratic nature is a long opening scene that shows us two maids wearing caps changing the bedding in a room -- the mise-en-scene emphasizes the two beds in the chamber.  Sometimes, Parkins writes in a notebook or reads from the books, one of which is about spiritualism.  In the final scene, lit in a chiaroscuro style, Parker seems to have gone mad from terror.  He is whimpering and sucking his thumb.

Parkins is played by the famous English actor, Michael Hordern (1911 - 1995).  Hordern is instantly recognizable -- he made over 160 films and appeared as a character actor in numerous movies that everyone has seen.  (He was also a famous Shakespearian actor who played the parts of Polonius in Hamlet and, then, King Lear -- this is the sort of actor that seems very familiar, but can't name.)  Hordern's performance, apparently mostly improvised, is brilliant and very disturbing.  As the dictum goes, there are no "haunted places only haunted persons" -- and this is certainly true as to what we see in Whistle and I'll come to you.  The episode was directed by Jonathan Miller.  Miller was a physician, wrote several books about medicine, but is primarily known as a director of TV programs, theater, and opera.  It seems clear to me that Miller designed Hordern's performance to reflect some sort of medical pathology -- the man is clearly afflicted with some neurological disorder.  Whistle and I'll come to you is readily available in a reasonably legible print on YouTube.

About Dry Grasses

 Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 2023 film, About Dry Grasses poses this question:  Can a film sustain interest for 197 minutes when it's subject is a whining, self-centered asshole?  Ceylan is an important film-maker and there is much to admire in About Dry Grasses, but, on the whole, the project seems misguided.  The picture's hero (better said "protagonist"), Samet, is a schoolteacher who is too lazy to teach, a bad friend, selfish, and a caddish, indifferent lover.  The film explores some of the same bleak subjects featured in Antonioni films, but those movies are all at least one-hour shorter that Ceylan's epically proportioned essay in alienation and ennui.  Ultimately, beautiful film-making, superb acting, and fascinating locations are insufficient to elevate this film above mediocrity -- whatever it has to say could be said in ninety minutes.  But with a picture of this sort, one of the esthetic strategies is that extreme length and immersion in the dark waters of this movie for more than three hours does result in a sort of pay-off, although I think it is largely specious, more a product of the viewer's endurance than what we see on screen.

Samet has been teaching for four years in Eastern Anatolia.  For the film's first three-hours, the screen shows nothing but dim enclosed spaces, most of them crammed with junk, and vast empty tundra covered with dunes of snow.  I have never seen a movie so incessantly and relentlessly cold.  It seems to be snowing in every exterior shot and the accumulations of the stuff as shown in images of villages result in huge piles of ice and tunnel-like paths that cut through the white wasteland.  (The movie was shot in Erzuram and Adiyaman provinces -- these are largely Kurdish-speaking enclaves on the border with Armenia.  In fact, Erzuram, a big city, was once an Armenian capital.  The spectacularly wintry landscapes will be familiar to readers of Orhan Pamuk's Kar -- that is, "Snow" -- set in an adjacent area near the border with Armenia.)  This place is about as far away from Mediterranean Istanbul than can be imagined and Samet years for an assignment in the big city.  

Samet sort of teaches art, although his style of pedagogy tends toward telling the eighth-grade kids to draw something and, then, ignoring them.  (He posts an image for them to copy but can be persuaded to let them draw anything they want.)  After a complaint from some students sours him on the class, he simply sits at his desk sulking.  At one point, he writes the word "Perspektiv" on the chalk board with a Turkish phrase underneath but can't be bothered to explain what this means and ends up in futile argument with one of the boys about whether they are supposed copy into their notebook the word "Perspektiv" or the Turkish phrase below.  True to form, at the end of the movie, he has to be implored to turn in his grades.  None of the teachers in the school seem particularly motivated.  It's located in a small village, apparently one of six or seven hamlets scattered around a snowy plateau under some imposing mountains that are almost never visible.  The place seems depressed but not picturesquely poor -- it's just unpleasant.  We see a lot of bitching in the Faculty Lounge and snarky backbiting among the other teachers all of whom would rather be somewhere else.  Samet lives in a rented house with Kenan, another male teacher who is a social studies instructor.  Not much really happens.  The snow falls; everyone drinks gallons of reddish "weak tea" full of sugar.  The characters wander around in the blizzard or drive on narrow roads covered with snow and ice.  They're all somewhat unhappy, but no one seems desperate -- they are just mildly depressed and indolent.  

The principal action in the film's first half is a complaint made against both Kenan and the protagonist Samet about excessive familiarity with two girls in their classes.  Samet is flirting with the fourteen-year old Sevim.  (She's more or less the dominant partner in the relationship.)  When the principal searches the kid's backpacks and desks -- apparently, this kind of thing is common in Turkish schools -- a love letter written by Sevim is found.  The other students in the class, particularly the boys, resent the fact that Samet always calls on Sevim and her friends to answer questions -- he overtly favors the girl.  It's not clear what's in the love letter, but the film implies that Samet thinks it was supposed to be sent to him.  Later, a shot suggests that Sevim wrote the letter to an older boy with whom we see her plotting.  In any event, there's an accusation made by someone (the protocol is that complaints of this sort are kept anonymous) that Samet and Kenan are getting too friendly with the little girls.  In this part of the world, accusations of this sort can lead to assassination or lynching.  So the Superintendent summons Samet and Kenan and orders them to knock it off.  They are expressly told not to try to figure out who made the complaint.  But Samet, who is always insubordinate, sulks and berates his students and does everything in his power to figure out who ratted him out.  He confronts Sevim directly and humiliates her by making her stand outside in the hall during his class.  Remarkably, there's no real follow-through by the administrators; everyone is too dispirited by the perpetual blizzard to do anything to discipline Samet.  

The second half of the film involves a young woman named Nuray who has lost a leg in a terrorist (suicide) bombing.  Samet meets her for lunch and expresses some lackluster interest in  her.  When she seems to respond, he tries to foist her off on the lonely Kenan.  (Kenan comes from a sheepherding family up in the mountains and says that he would be happier tending his flocks than teaching in this "hellhole.")  Kenan expresses some interest in Nuray.  As soon as Kenan starts to like the girl (she's an English teacher at a larger "magnet" school on the steppe), Samet woos her again.  She invites Samet and Kenan, who she seems to like, to visit her at her parent's house.  (Like Kenan, she is an Alawi Muslim, a syncretist Islamic sect regarded as heretical by orthodox Muslims; their beliefs are secret and not well understood.  Politically, like the similar Alevis, they tend to be Leftists, the case in this film).  Samet tromps through the blizzard to visit Nuray, but has neglected to inform Kenan of the dinner party.  A long colloquy ensues between Nuray and Samet.  She accuses him of selfishness and nihilism.  He says that she is naive and foolish.  The half-hour scene involves an intensely argued debate about whether people should be politically engaged and fight for a better world.  Nuray asserts that values of solidarity, resistance, and political commitment are necessary to a decent life.  Samet argues to the contrary.  They both get drunk and it's pretty obvious what will inevitably happen.  Weeping, Nuray goes into her bedroom, disrobes, and removes her prosthetic leg.  Samet gets into bed with her.  In the morning, Nuray asks Samet to not tell Kenan.  It's apparent that she likes Kenan better than Samet and that her relationship with Samet was wholly disposable -- she just wanted to prove that she could attract a man and have sex with him notwithstanding her injuries.  (The movie is very elliptical -- this is my interpretation; others might perceive this differently.)  Samet goes home and  immediately boasts to Kenan about seducing Nuray.  Kenan is very hurt.  Later, Nuray comes to the house where the two bachelors live and confronts Samet, showing renewed interest in Kenan.  There's a quarrel and she storms out into the perpetual blizzard only to return sheepishly a few minutes later -- the snow is too intimidating for her to make her way home alone.  We see the three figures in her car, snow almost whiting-out the way forward on the road.  The falling snow turns to grass in a dissolve effect.  It's now late Spring.  The village is revealed to be surrounded by watery lagoons, marshes, and little creeks.  School is about to be let out for the Summer.  Samet has been transferred to another assignment. Little Sevim comes to see him and, obliquely, apologizes.  Samet continues to sulk.  (The little girl is wearing lipstick not allowed at school; when Samet criticizes her for wearing lipstick, she says "I'm sorry", an apology that, I think, is intended to apply to her earlier complaints about Samet.)  Samet with Nuray and Kenan (who are now a couple) go to an archaeological site.  Samet feels out-of-place and he climbs the steep hill above the ruins of the city where there are huge columns and the heads of kings set in a row in front of the acropolis -- it's Mount Nemrut.  The hill is covered with dry grass.  In this coda to the film, Samet's voice-over is heard.  He says that, in this part of the world, there is only Winter and Summer.  Summer dries out the grasses before they are even able to turn green.  Samet imagines that he is full of dry grass and that this means he is wholly inconsequential, withered-up and, at thirty five, seems, spent.  (Earlier he has told us that he is like an abandoned mill that no longer works, waiting to be torn down.)  A vast gulf separates him from Kenan and Nuray.  We see him in close-up scowling down the slope of the hill to where the couple stands in the ruins.  I'm not sure how we are supposed to interpret the disconsolate voice-over -- in my view, it may be that we can disregard all of Samet's pretty remarks as just another example of his histrionic self-pity.

The voice-over in the final scenes is intended to impart some gravitas to the loathsome Samet.  But it doesn't really work.  The guy remains shallow, treacherous, and self-centered.  He imagines little Sevim as a grown up woman (we see her standing in the snow dusted with the stuff) -- "she will be fierce, petulant and strong" he says, but he's not convinced and also imagines her as victim of the same entropic forces that have ruined him.  Samet is too superficial for us to care about and, although he pouts and postures like a Marvel comic books villain, he never gets his comeuppance.  (Samet glowers at people with his head slumped down but his eyes turned to look up at them -- this gives him a peculiarly menacing aspect.)  There are a couple of very noteworthy images in the film.  Samet and Kenan fill plastic bottles from a pipe that drizzles out spring water; the spring is high atop a snowy ridge and affords a spectacular vantage over the distant mountains.  In one scene, we see Samet, Nuray, and Kenan in a Honda.  (I think it's Nuray's car to which she is entitled because of her injury but which she doesn't know how to drive -- Kenan later teaches her to drive.)  They stop the car at the end of a lane next to some shacks, debris, construction detritus at the end of the rutted lane.  Walking about ten paces, the land suddenly drops away from under their feet and we are looking down into a gorge that is about two-thousand feet deep, viewing as if from an airplane a big river bending in a loop below their vantage and right below their feet. The image is shocking and induces a sort of vertiginous feeling in the viewer.  You are afraid that Nuray with her artificial leg will stumble and fall down the cliff -- Samet characteristically plunges downhill recklessly to seem to hover over the enormous landscape.  In the sex scene between Nuray and Samet, the protagonist gets out of bed and exits the room through a side-door.  On the other side of the door, there is a movie studio full of people working on sets or rehearsing, a big interior space where there is even a green screen for computer effects.  The camera follows Samet through this disorienting space to a lavatory where he stoops over a sink to take a pill (something like Viagra or Cialis?)  When we next see him, he's in bed with Nuray again.  What is going on here? I don't know how to interpret this sequence.  Why does Ceylan create this alienation effect, showing that the bedroom is just a little cubicle in a huge set, a big space that extends out to the horizon it seems?  The sense is similar to the wonderful ending of Kiastorami's Taste of Cherry in which a suicide on a mountain suddenly gives way to a complicated tracking shot that shows the movie crew filming the scene that we have just seen.  I found this sequence in Dry Grasses utterly baffling and, in fact, wonder if I actually saw it or merely dreamed the scene.  (Several other critics mention this odd divagation, calling it a "weird Brechtian flourish" in one case; but no one seems to understand why Ceylan would do this.) The movie is shot in the very best non-dramatic, de-emphasized style.  When Samet confesses to Kenan that he has slept with his girlfriend, the camera dispassionately views the scene from over the character's shoulders so we can't really see their faces -- these are long shots 20 to forty seconds in duration.  Ceylan uses this technique because five minutes later, he will need to show a discussion between Nuray, Samet and Kenan -- this is the scene where she confronts the caddish Samet and tries to escape (unsuccessfully) into the snowstorm.  The sequence involving the three actors is shot dramatically with big close-ups.  Clearly, Ceylan wanted to keep the close-ups in reserve until this later sequence.  The movie is exquisitely made and could serve as a master-class in photography and mise-en-scene but the subject matter is dull and picture is much too long.   

(Two aspects of this movie resonate with me.  First, there is the concept of the "weariness of hope".  Samet endorses this idea in contrast to Nuray's assertion that we must remain hopeful that a better world can be produced by our efforts. Elsewhere, I have written on this principle of Hope and find this concept somehow timely in our present political environment. Second, when I was in High School, someone made a complaint against a math teacher.  I don't know what the complaint was about.  But the teacher spent about three weeks sulking melodramatically, refusing to teach, and, when someone asked a question, shouting brusquely:  "You're all geniuses.  Geniuses don't ask questions!"  This was an odd experience that I have never fully, or, even, partially, understood.  But I recall the teacher's weird reign of terror, both frightening and pleasurable as well since he couldn't be prevailed-upon to assign any work to us during this period.)