The Meshes of the Afternoon

Maya Deren is a bit of a caricature -- she looks like a Russian Jewish Betty Boop with a tiny waist, huge breasts, and frizzy hair.  But she moves with the aplomb of a dancer, at least when gesturing statuesquely to the camera, putting her hand sideways to show denial, or floating in mid-air to observe herself sleeping in the avant-garde film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943).  (Deren's appearance when she runs on her short legs is more comical -- but the movie, which she directed, is tactful about portraying her in any way that might be unflattering.)  Deren made the film in Hollywood as an opening title proudly declares with her husband, Alexander Hammid.  Hammid, who appears in the second half of the 14 minute film, looks exceedingly worried -- clearly, Deren was a handful.  The film is an aria about sexual ambivalence, nakedly Freudian in its imagery and implications.  Deren's character wants sex, seems about to masturbate, but is also conflicted.  When she is finally seduced, after much coy foreplay involving knives, keys, and pursuing shadowy figures, she hurls a mirror, presumably symbolizing her vanity, virginity, and self-absorbed narcissism, through the wall of her bungalow.  The mirror lands in the surf in bright shards.  Hammid, as her lover, appears later as the maison de assignation, to find that Maya has slit her throat with a  shard of mirror and is lying dead in a chair in their living room.  So much for mutually pleasing marital relations!  Scored to Noh flute and drum sometimes interrupted by an ominous drone, the film is shot in clear, lyrical black and white images.  The girl, shown mostly in zaftig profile or shadow, picks up a large orchid on the lane in front of the place where the romantic rendezvous has been scheduled.  She drops her key to the house.  The key hops around like a Mexican jumping bean evading her for awhile, presumably signaling her ambivalence about the sexual assignation.  She enters the bungalow, apparently her house on King's Road in LA, and climbs some stairs to a bedroom.  Reclining in a chair, the girl makes a masturbatory gesture and, then, we see her eye in enormous close-up becoming drowsy -- her eyelids close and she dreams.  A shrouded female figure in a middle-eastern burka flees from her.  When the figure turns to face her, the girl we see that this hermetic psychopompus has a mirror instead of a face, a striking and poetically effective image.  The girl finds a record-player spinning a disk, a phone off the hook, a loaf of bread with a shiny and lethal-looking knife embedded in it.  The key keeps turning into a knife and vice-versa and, sometimes, the girl disgorges the key that is resting on her tongue.  She sets the flower on her bed.  After some dreamy and inconsequential pursuit of the rapidly fleeing, mirror-faced woman, the girl's lover appears.  Hammid knits his brows and frowns with obvious consternation since sleeping with Maya Deren is, apparently, a worrisome and arduous task.  And no sooner is the task accomplished, then the girl slits her throat.  Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most famous avant-garde films and it is fairly entertaining, if childishly obvious and schematic -- Deren had a poet's eye with the camera.  The short picture is massively self-absorbed and irritating, but it's not dull and still packs an erotic charge.