Zama

Zama is Lucrecia Martel's film adaptation of a celebrated Argentine novel bearing the same name and written in the fifties by Antonio de Benedetto.  I have recently read that novel and, indeed, posted an essay about the book -- the essay is called "On a Boring Novel" (October 2017) and details my objections to de Benedetto's novel.  (I should note that I express a minority opinion -- a number of critics have claimed that the book is wonderful and fascinating.)  Martel's encounter with the book is sometimes literal-minded in a suffocating way -- what she keeps from the novel, she films faithfully and shows astonishing proficiency in capturing the book's general tenor:  an aura of humid, somnolent fecklessness suffuses the film:  people seem to have scarcely the energy to trudge back and forth in their claustrophobic mud-wattled shacks and, so, when the picture shows us violence, the sheer physical energy embodied in those actions seems improbable, even, somehow, fraudulent -- we are underwater, drowned in a syrupy tumid river in which huge catfish grope like blind things in the dense, brown murk.  However, Martel doesn't give the audience much quarter:  de Benedetto's book, at least, provides sufficient exposition for us to know that the action takes place in Asuncion, Paraguay and the author captions the three subparts of his book with the year in which the events take place (around the end of the 18th century).  We get no such information from Martel and she doesn't even afford us the luxury of an establishing shot.  The topography where the film's events occur is unclear, febrile, the landscape of a dream and it's uncertain what era exactly the movie depicts:  people struggle to put on floppy white wigs on occasion, but, when we hear music on the soundtrack, it's sloppy steel guitar, slack-tuned, a sort of jaunty Polynesian mambo, muzak piped in from an elevator in the 1950's.  (The music occurs only sporadically -- mostly the soundtrack buzzes and hums and screeches with nameless insects:  we hear creatures seemingly being eaten alive, crying out and there are ugly thumps and bumps and, sometimes, a kind of percussive fury, other times, a hum that either rises in volume and pitch or bends wildly downward as if simulating some awful kind of tinnitus.)  Martel shows scenes from the book, but she doesn't "narrate" them -- rather, she seems to be simply citing a page here or there.  In one scene, we see Zama's common-law wife with his apparently retarded son happily walking with Zama's scribe and amanuensis, Fernandez.  The scene passes quickly and isn't emphasized -- but, in fact, it stands for about 15 pages in the novel in which Zama inexplicably decides to gift his common-law wife and son to Fernandez, a gift that Fernandez gladly accepts.  Similarly, in one scene shot in near darkness, Zama is lodging in a spooky, haunted house on the edge of town -- we see him talking to a woman who appears as a black silhouette with weirdly frizzy hair; when the woman departs, another woman who looks  just like her unexpectedly emerges from the shadows to take her place:  apparently, she had been lurking there all along.  This scene, which is otherwise scarcely comprehensible, stands for a long section in the book in which Zama tries to figure out exactly how many women are living in the haunted compound that he occupies -- there always seems to be one woman around that he can't quite see.  These examples must stand for many -- Martel adapts the book, but so elliptically that unless you've read the novel, most viewers will have only a dim understanding of what is going on.  Furthermore, she renders the book in the film language deployed so effectively in her first picture La Cienaga ("The Swamp"):  for the most part, we are trapped in hot, humid filthy rooms -- the outdoors is all glare and menace; we often can't tell how the people are related to one another and the camera always seems too close to them -- there's no distance, no landscape really, just moist proximity.  The novel takes place in an Asuncion with churches and a harbor with piers and most of the fixtures of a real city -- Martel films Asuncion as if it were a Neolithic settlement:  it's like Pasolini's approach to Greek myth:  everything takes place is a weird eroded badlands on the edge of a river that looks more like a sea:  the houses are mere mud huts with twig and leaf roofs; in one rare long shot, we see the eroding white chalk cliffs and the scatter of huts with primitive-looking fowl strutting around them and it looks like nothing really on earth. 

Zama is a Spanish bureaucrat, a kind of magistrate judge, assigned to Paraguay.  He years for his wife Marta who he has left behind in Montevideo five-hundred miles down the immense River Plate.  Zama has an insolent subordinate named Ventura Prieto whom he beats and, then, dismisses.  He engages in a flirtation with a merchant's wife who is always drinking small cut-glass snifters of brandy.  The merchant's wife has a mute Black servant who's feet were skinned to keep her from running away -- when Zama comes to visit the woman, the black servant hovers nearby and, later, when the merchant's wife is tired of his visits, the mute, limping woman simply glares at Zama.  Not a word is spoken.  Zama's love affair goes nowhere -- it's too hot to make love anyway.  In the opening scene, Zama, who has the hunted look of a harried fugitive, spies on some naked women bathing in mud -- one of them chases him and Zama turns on her, slapping her ferociously.  (In the novel, this initiates a long passage in which the naked woman's husband demands reparations from him -- Martel doesn't film any of the consequences of the odd encounter.)  The nasty fat little governor decides that the insolent Ventura Prieto must be deported and sends him back to Spain, to the town of Lerma, exactly the place where Zama yearns to be sent.  Zama presides over inconsequential trials.  A savage bandit, Vicuna Porto, is supposedly ravaging the country -- one soldier claims to have killed him however and wears the dead brigand's ears on a string.  (The fat little governor takes the ears and wears them on his chest himself in several scenes).  Later, we learn that Zama has taken a common-law Indian wife and has had a son who can neither walk nor talk.  Zama has been assigned a secretary named Fernandez who is writing a book.  (He has plenty of time to write because no one really has anything to do in this backwater).  There is concern that Fernandez book will impeach the governor and, so, the secretary is also sent away -- possibly back to Spain.  Zama, who is in debt, has to leave his rooms (sometimes invaded by mysterious burglars) and live in a sort of haunted hovel -- he is beset by eerie black women who harangue him.  Some years pass and Zama looks older and more gaunt and he has grown a beard.  He is dispatched to hunt down Vicuna Porto.  The tiny column of soldiers advances into a huge swamp.  They meet wild Indians wearing terrifying birdlike masks.  A huge column of blind people, punished for their crimes by having their eyes put out, wanders across the Pampas and, indeed, walks right through Zama's bivouac.  The blind people seem oddly purposeful and the scene may simply be the dramatization of a dream.  One of the blind women kneads Zama like dough.  A soldier comes to Zama's hammock and announces that he is, in fact, Vicuna Porto -- he's been marching at Zama's side throughout the whole trek.  The Indians invite the Spaniards to a celebration but it turns into some sort of battle with red-painted warriors riding on supernaturally fast horses and entangling the men with their bolos.  The Indians paint the Spaniards red, kill some of them, and leave the rest, including Zama and Vicuna Porto, to march without horses through an endless wet savannah.  On the banks of the river, Porto tortures some of the remaining men, demanding to know where the precious "cocoanuts" are hidden ("cocoanut" is the name for amethyst encrusted geodes, pretty enough but as Zama points out, 'worthless.")  Zama doesn't know where the cocoanuts are located:  he says to Porto:  "I do for you what no one would do for me.  I deny you all hope."  Enraged, Porto cuts off Zama's hands.  In the final scene, Zama lies feverish and dying in a canoe paddled by a small boy through a vividly green, algae-covered swamp -- the slack-tuned Hawaiian guitars play us out to the end.

Martel's direction is impeccable:  she captures the book's mood, eliminating the incredibly tedious love affairs in which nothing ever happens in the middle portion of the novel.  We see all sorts of strange things -- a gunshot thunders on the soundtrack and the camera pans to show a man standing over a horse with a smoking pistol in his hand -- but, in this world, nothing ever is accomplished:  the horse neighs and tries to stand up apparently unwounded, or, at least, very much alive.  There are peculiar camera angles -- we can't make out the relationship of people and animals.  In one scene, a horse seems to stand on a low balcony behind a group of aristocrats.  In another scene, a furry llama wanders around the governor's rooms.  When the Indians attack, they rise out of the grass, appearing from nowhere, dropping from the sky, their motions blinding fast.  A sick man is carried in a chair strapped to a slave's back.   When he dies, the man is put in a basement room and huge clouds of salt are sifted down onto his corpse.  Zama is visually extraordinary -- it's fully accomplished although god knows what a viewer who has not read the novel will make of the thing.  On the other hand, the novel was not entirely clear either and, in fact, was a bit more enigmatic than the movie in some ways -- Martel actually clarifies some aspects of the book.  The defects in the movie are the defects in the book -- here is the problem:   you make a book or a movie about deadly ennui and frustration at your own risk. 

The Good Person of Szechuan

It's hard to see plays by Bertolt Brecht.  There are several reasons for this.  First, Brecht wrote for a large repertory company that could cast as many as 25 or 30 speaking roles.  Current theater groups don't have access to the personnel resources that most of Brecht's plays demand.  Second, Brecht's politics were despicable and this colors American appreciation of his work.  Third, Brecht's plays often seem defended by rebarbative hedges of theory about Epic Theater and the Verfremdungseffekt; this theory, which is carefully worked out and expressed  by the playwright with Teutonic earnestness, tends to obscure the very real pleasures that Brecht offers in his plays -- one tends to imagine his theater performed by unattractive, sweaty proles smelling of body odor and prone to harangue the audience.  But, of course, Brecht survives in spite of the ideological and theoretical armor in which his plays are clad.  It is not well appreciated in English-speaking countries that Brecht was one of Germany's greatest poets, a mournful and witty writer who is often on par with Heine.  Furthermore, Brecht's plays are intricately designed and generally very compelling.  In other words, he writes good plays in spite of himself. 

Ten Thousand Things Theater, a Minneapolis based company, has taken to heart some of Brecht's political admonitions (probably with more sincerity than the notoriously slippery playwright) and makes plays for people who would not otherwise attend the theater.  The Company achieves its audiences by taking the theater to the people.  Ten  Thousand Things (TTT) has presented plays in homeless shelters, prisons, churches, and other non-theatrical venues.  The production of The Good Person of Szechuan that I saw on Wednesday, April 25, 2018 was presented in cafeteria of Rochester Community and Technical College; TTT's show on the 26th of April will be in a Church basement.  When I went to see The Good Person, of course, I found my way to the elaborate proscenium theater in the student center.  But I was then told to go to the cafeteria upstairs where I found a hollow square of chairs and some stanchions supporting cardboard arches to signify doors or thresholds.  Props were arranged along a couple of cafeteria tables.  The show was presented by 9 actors, all but two of them playing as many as four roles.  The need to double, triple, and quadruple parts could create some confusion in a production of The Good Person since a central plot point involves a character forced to play two roles as part of the drama itself. (Any confusion that this might engender was explained by the director in a helpful introductory remark.)  TTT believes theater must be accessible to all -- accordingly, tickets cost precisely zero.  (I donated 20 dollars, probably not enough in light of the show's excellence, as an offering for my attendance with Jack -- at the end of the show, the audience is encouraged to stuff money in bucket although there is no pressure of any kind supporting this request.)  Of course, since the show is presented "in the round", in a college cafeteria, there are no lighting effects and no scenery, the actors demonstrate their versatility and proficiency as quick change artists.  In the climactic trial scene, involving all the characters, some of the parts are represented by dummies and puppets and people change hats and coats with lightning speed in front of the audience almost quickly enough to simulate dialogue with themselves.  (There is an aspect of this play reminiscent of the British theater version of Hitchcock's 39 Steps in which all characters are played, to comic effect, by two actors -- in The Good Person, men play women and vice-versa and, at times, the doubling or quadrupling of parts is exploited for humor.) 

The Good Person of Szechuan is an excellent introduction to Brecht.  The story concerns a poor, but goodhearted prostitute, who becomes unexpectedly prosperous.  Three Gods, called The Enlightened Ones, are searching the earth for a virtuous person.  The only good person that they can find is the prostitute, Shen Te.  (The action takes place in a mythical version of China where ancient gods brush elbows with modern pilots and tobacco factories.)  When Shen Te, lets the Gods stay in her humble shack for the night (they are exceedingly uncomfortable there) they reward her by giving the young woman one-thousand silver dollars.  Shen Te uses the money to buy a tobacco store.  Immediately, she is besieged by various spongers and parasites, as well as collateral cousins and distant relatives who want loans from her.  She is counseled to be more businesslike and tougher.  Shen Te is too passive to drive hard bargains and so she invents an aggressive, brutal masculine persona -- this is her alleged cousin, the rough and tough Shui Ta. When she needs to refuse a loan or dishonor a claim, she dresses as a man and appears as Shui Ta.  Complications ensue when she falls in love with a ne'er-do-well mail pilot and dips into her savings to finance his career -- the pilot gets her pregnant and, promptly, plans to dump her and fly to another city with his ill-gotten gains.  (He confesses this to the manly and cynical Shui Ta, who is, of course, her alter-ego and, then, confronts the pilot in her yielding female persona.)  The plot demonstrates that in a profit-oriented Capitalist society love is just another commodity -- this is similar to Fassbinder's assertion that love is really about power and domination.  The pilot ends up working as a foreman in Shen Te's tobacco factory where he turns out to be a fearsome taskmasker.  There are further complications involving a fat old man who loves Shen Te and offers to be her "sugar daddy."  Ultimately, Shen Te becomes marginal -- the kindly, loving prostitute is shoved to the sidelines by the cruel and avaricious Shui Ta.  Shui Ta is accused of murdering Shen Te which results in a trial and revelation of Shen Te's ruse -- she exposes herself as pregnant.  The three Gods preside over the trial and they announce that Shen Te is the only virtuous person on earth (and that she is only half-virtuous).  Shen Te complains that the Gods have made the world so that it is impossible to survive in the jungle of greed and betrayal and remain virtuous.  The God's have nothing to say to this indictment and ride away on clouds singing "goodbye" and "toodle-oo" to the anguished Shen Te.  The play is very clever, filled with songs (performed by a musician who uses percussion and an accordion to accompany the action) and it is uncompromisingly cynical and unsentimental -- Brecht's poor people are just as self-interested and avaricious as his elites:  everyone steals from everyone else, and Brecht, who was himself notoriously crooked, takes obvious delight in the scams and chicanery.  The play establishes that business is inimical to virtue -- but we need business in order to survive.  (Curiously, the plot of this play seems to have been adapted by Fassbinder in his famous film Fox and his Friends, a movie about a hapless male hustler who wins the lottery and is ultimately destroyed by his own success and by the demands placed upon him false friends.)

The acting is broad and beyond reproach.  The characters are all vividly portrayed and very funny.  Brecht didn't much believe in psychology and the show demonstrates his disdain for "character" -- Brecht's view is that your social function establishes your character which is basically the degree to which you are allowed by fiscal circumstances to conceal the crimes by which you survive.  The poor have to display their criminality more than the wealthy -- but, everyone, without exception, is a criminal.  When an actor suddenly changes voice and posture and becomes someone else simply because he or she has put on a new, floppy hat, this transformation is integral to Brecht's views about human identity.  I thought the production was excellent and, in fact, will seek out future shows by this excellent company.  (If you are reading this note on April 26, you can see this show in Rochester at the First Unitarian Universalist Church on Thursday, April 26, 2018 -- I highly recommend your attendance.)

Loveless

I haven't done divorce work for 25 years, but the acrid stench of that sort of litigation returned to haunt me as I viewed Andrey Zvyagintsev's 2017 film, Loveless.  When a marriage resulting in a child (or children) is dissolved, almost always one or the other parent files an affidavit to this effect:  While she (or he) spends her nights drinking and doing drugs and having wild sex, the children are completely neglected.  There is an element of brutal magical thinking that invests divorces involving children:  the happiness of the divorced parent is at the expense of the abandoned child.  This is particularly true in sexual matters.  Every orgasm inflicts any injury on the child.  After having sex with her partner, a mother involved in divorce imagines that she will scramble out of her lover's bed to discover that her child needs her, that her child is horribly sick or injured or has been kidnaped by a stranger.  This sort of destructive fantasy is common, afflicting men as well as women, and Loveless embodies this theme in a particularly cruel and relentless way.

A St. Petersburg couple, Boris and Zhenya are getting divorced.  As often happens, the two despise one another and have turned their small apartment into a battlefield.  Boris has a younger girlfriend, blonde and seemingly childlike and he has impregnated her.  Zhenya, who runs an upscale beauty salon, is involved with an oligarch, a 47-year-old man who looks like a larger, less rodent-faced Vladimir Putin and who wears polo shirts (Zvyagintsev is not a subtle film maker.)  The film's casting is brilliant:  Boris is feckless and gives the impression that he is always somewhat confused.  Zhenya has hard mask-like features; she is beautiful and inscrutable and totally self-absorbed.  The Oligarch exudes an air of very subtle menace:  he is generally extremely charming but has an aura of someone capable of any kind of savagery.  Boris' heavily pregnant girlfriend is a little blonde who uses her baby-girl demeanor to ensnare her prey -- while shopping for baby clothes, the girl's mother tells us that "all men are children and have to be told what to do."  During one particularly vicious argument, Boris and Zhenya loudly debate what to do with Alyosha, their 12 year old boy.  Boris doesn't want custody of the boy and he's obviously an inconvenience to Zhenya, interfering with her exciting new life with the Oligarch.  She says that she will simply pack the boy off to a boarding school and, then, he can enlist in the military.  The problem is that neither parent wants the child around.  In fact, Zhenya recalls bitterly that she married Boris because he got her pregnant and that she should have aborted the child and ended the relationship -- "do you think it will be any different with your new girlfriend who you've got pregnant?" she cries.  We see Alyosha hiding in the bathroom, wracked with sobbing.  He crawls into bed in his little room still weeping inconsolably.

The film's next section consists of two extended sex scenes.  Boris goes home to his girlfriend's apartment -- her mother is absent -- and has sex with the little blonde.  Zvyagintsev films these scenes in darkened rooms with monochrome autumn landscapes pressing in at the windows and the imagery is quite explicit.  The little blonde's heavily pregnant silhouette looms against the snowy, grey vistas and the dim, airless rooms.  After a meal at an expensive restaurant, Zhenya goes to the Oligarch's apartment and has sex with him -- his apartment is a dark labyrinth of floating mirrors and glass walls opening out onto wintry woods.  The light is vaguely greenish.  With both couples, the sex is better than satisfactory -- it's  inventive and great with mutual and simultaneous orgasms.  Zhenya stands naked at glass window, cooling herself after all this lovemaking -- she looks like a fin-de-siècle vampire with absinthe-colored highlights under her throat and between her breasts.  Her boyfriend comes up behind her and initiates more sex.  Later, we see her at her home slipping between the sheets in her own bed, luxuriating in the chance to simply sleep in the cool bed -- but, before, she closes her eyes, she checks her cell-phone and smiles because her boyfriend has apparently sent her a tender or erotic message.  What she does not do is look in Alyosha's bedroom to see if her son is okay.  Later, she gets a call from school -- Alyosha as been missing now for two days.  Where is he?  Who was minding the child during all of this sex?

The rest of the film involves the search for the missing boy.  The police are useless and so a local search and rescue club is deployed to hunt through the woods and the river bottoms for the missing boy.  Boris and Zhenya are forced together to travel to see her mother, the boy's grandmother in a suburb of Moscow.  Boris calls the woman "Stalin in skirts" and she is a nightmarish monster -- the visit to her deteriorates into a horrible fight between mother and daughter.  On the way back to St. Petersburg, Boris and Zhenya quarrel so violently that he throws her out of his car on particularly desolate stretch of barren steppe.  In an American film, the missing boy would be an occasion for the divorcing couple to renew their bonds or, at least, declare a truce -- not so in Zvyagintsev's unsparing and relentless film.  The last time we see the couple together, Zhenya lunges at Boris, beats and claws him, and leaves him bloody and sobbing on the floor of a squalid morgue where they have come to view a badly mutilated corpse.

Zvyagintsev on the evidence of this film and his prior works, The Return, Elena, and Leviathan, is unsparing moralist.  The film is packed with little allegorical or symbolic details.  At the expensive restaurant, the hostess gives the camera her phone number signifying her sexual availability -- it's a tiny, surreal detail.  The trackers looking for Alyosha search through  decomposing Communist era buildings -- they have a sort of Stalinist Art  Deco style and are half-flooded:  conference halls and a ballroom and ruinous natatorium with scaling paint on the walls.  The search through these buildings, of course, invokes Tarkovsky, particularly the scenes in Nostalghia in which the hero has to walk the length of a drained swimming pool in a ruin somewhere.  (And the cellar of the rotting structure is half-flooded -- one of Tarkovsky's nightmare landscapes of collapsing architecture and pools of murky water.)  Images of the search parties in bright orange vests marching through the colorless grey and brown forests are beautifully composed and there is one breathtaking shot of a huge radar facility, the decrepit dish  half-covered in mildew, with silvery birch trees in the foreground -- as in an Antonioni film, we have seen this installation through the windows of the family's apartment.  On the radio, a voice warns us that according to the Mayan calendar the end of the world is approaching but that this is disinformation intended to add "to the seasonal melancholy as Winter is approaching and inspire people to desperate acts such as crime and suicide."  Zvyagintsev is a master film maker on all levels and he inspires his rather dim-witted and heavily judgmental parable with an implacable sense of dread and horror.  In bed, the pregnant blonde bites into an apple like Eve in the Garden of Eden.  Zhenya looks indifferent, glamorously beautiful, and somehow sinister and serpentine.  Boris works for some sort of religious organization, possibly as a fundraiser --  at his offices we see an image of a Russian Orthodox church that is literally plated with gold leaf.  His boss nicknamed "Beardy" requires that all workers be married and have children -- this is a mandate, so-called Orthodox fundamentalism.  Boris wonders if he can substitute one family for another without Beardy knowing the difference.  A police captain investigating Alyosha's disappearance speaks in an absurdly deep basso profundo voice, a tone that the film has to engineer as a special effect -- it's the harsh, critical voice of God Himself.  In one astonishing scene, volunteers are posting pictures of the missing boy on lamp posts on a snowy hillside road.  We see them put up a poster on a light post and, then, walk away out of frame -- a pedestrian enters the image and hustles by the poster without looking at it and, then, goes on a path into adjacent woods where it is absolutely ink-black and, therefore, vanishes:  we hear the volunteers tearing tape to put up another poster that, perhaps, no one will take the time to read.  When  the camera lingers on the prosaic scene of a schoolteacher erasing a chalk board, the image has a powerful symbolic effect. 

To Western eyes, there is a flaw in Zvyagintsev's masterpiece.  In a late scene, the Oligarch watches TV and hears people, ethnic Russians in the Ukraine, describing war crimes visited upon them.  Within the terms of the allegory posited by Zvyagintsev, the dissolution of the Soviet Union has dispossessed the ethnic Russians in the Ukraine, making them hapless children that no one wants to acknowledge.  In effect, the director suggests that the ethnic Russians in the Ukraine are like Alyosha, made orphans by their parents' indifference (in the Ukrainian case, ignored by Mother Russia).  The extension of this alarming paradigm to the international situation seems forced and unnecessary and, even, wrong-headed if you think Ukraine deserves the right to determine its own fate.   

Visages Villages (Faces Places)

Visages Villages is a cheerful, if realistically elegiac, documentary directed jointly by JR, a street artist, and the great French filmmaker, Agnes Varda.  The movie celebrates Homo Ludens, the human capacity for play that motivates all art no matter how earnest or, even, tragic.  Indeed, the film begins with playful montage that is one of its best sequences.  Varda who is 89 travels in different circles than JR, a brash young man  and Parisian equivalent to Banksy who wears dark glasses perpetually as if in homage to Jean-Luc Godard, a figure who assumes some importance as the film proceeds.  The movie shows little vignettes about how JR didn't meet Varda in a café or hitchhiking or walking in the country; in each vignette, we see the two artists as they momentarily occupy the same frame before departing in their own different directions.  Instead, Varda goes to JR's office where people are peering into computer screens and answering phones and there they hatch the plan of traveling the French countryside, going from village to village plastering available walls with huge photographs of the people in the town -- Varda is interesting in faces, hands, and feet; JR likes provocation of working on a monumental scale in public places... and so the odd couple set forth in JR's van, a portable film-developing lab, to make poster art, some of it enormous, that can plastered onto barns and watertowers and shipping containers to create vast black-and-white murals. 

The movie is more profound than it seem.  On the surface, the documentary is an avuncular study of rural France equipped with a quirky, highly intelligent narration and featuring whimsical encounters with eccentric men and women.  But it has a tone of sadness that grows more pronounced as the movie proceeds.  The film is also a mediation about seeing and being seen, the gaze and images that replicate or direct the gaze.  Varda and JR put images of miners on old brick miners' cottages in a pit town in northern France:  a miner's daughter, who will not move away from the crumbling cottages where she was born, shows a complex mixture of sorrow and joy when she sees her image, tall as a church on the side of her house.  Next we see a farmer -- his image gets plastered on his barn.  There is an interlude in a chemical factory where groups of workers are documented by huge images posted in the workplace -- for a good measure, Varda and JR decorate a water tower at the acid factory with whale-sized herrings and flounders.  The film shows us a couple of operations where goat cheese is produced -- one of them industrial and the other artisanal.  (This is a debate about whether to cauterize the horns off goats.)  A ghost town is decorated and Varda interviews a sort of aging hippie who lives in an eccentric grotto overlooking the village, concrete arches and tunnels all decorated with bottle-caps.  At Le Havre, the wives of dock workers are turned into sixty-foot tall totems plastered on the sides of stacked storage containers -- the women themselves sit inside the containers like the beating hearts of the colossi, or they flap their wings as if to fly. The mood darkens a little at the grave of Henri Cartier Bresson -- it's a tiny cemetery, a very wild and unkempt place.  JR asks Varda if she is afraid of death -- "No," she says.  In fact, she welcomes death.  "Why?" he questions.  "Because that'll be that," Agnes Varda says.  She's a tiny figure with bangs and a dome of hair that is white at the top and henna red around the edges.  On a beach where a German bunker built in World War Two has toppled from the chalk cliffs down into the tidal basin, Varda and JR plaster a huge image of a young man that she knew in the 50's, someone now long dead onto the fallen monument -- the young man's image covers the whole rough side of the bunker tilted up like a  pointed and monumental pyramid and half-sunk in the sand.  The next day the tide, which rises 2.6 meters on this beach has eroded away the picture -- the bunker looks like it did before the poster was glued to it.  Agnes and JR sit in folding chairs on the beach in a cold, wet wind that erases their footprints in the sand and blasts the camera. We learn that Varda is losing her eyesight and can barely see at all.  The images that she and JR strew about the landscape are art-works that she can't really appreciate any more -- they are just monochrome blurs to her.  A disturbing close-up of a needle being pressed into her open eye is intercut with the famous shot in Un Chien Andalou of an eye being slit by the razor blade.  "Compared to that razor-blade in Andalusian Dog, an injection is easy," Varda says. 

Of course, we know that Varda embodies the great age of French cinema between 1958 and May 1968, the New Wave -- with Godard, she is one of the last of directors that changed the history of cinema in that decade.  She pleads with JR, who is twice her size and who always wear a felt hat like Beuys above hisdark glasses to show her his eyes.  To encourage him, she screens a little film she made for Godard showing the great director as a young man with his radiant movie star wife, Anna Karenina.  Godard takes off his trademark sunglasses and shows us his eyes which are surprisingly large and soft-looking, the eyes of a Baroque saint or a cow-eyed Virgin Mary.  JR refuses.  She and the young man go to Godard's house but it's locked up and the great man declines to grant them an interview -- instead, he has written on his window a few gnomic phrases which refers to an afternoon forty years ago with Varda and her husband Jacques Demy (also a great director), Godard and his mistress.  Varda is hurt and angry and calls Godard a rat.  She starts crying.  JR says:  "Maybe he was just trying to render our movie more problematic."  "No, no," Varda says.  "He's a rat."  JR and the old woman sit on the edge of Lake Geneva and the young finally takes off his black-tinted sunglasses to show her his eyes.  We see him remove the glasses from with camera shooting over his shoulder, an image that is a homage to Godard by revealing everything but what we want to see.  Then, we are shown her point of view image of JR's face.  Her eyes can't focus any more and we see JR's face badly blurred, with black incommunicative eye-sockets, the empty dark eye-sockets of a skeleton.  JR says that he had never recognized that her eyes were so light colored.  And so the film ends with a close-up of the old woman's face.

Isle of the Dogs

Isle of the Dogs (2018) is a stop-action animated feature by Wes Anderson.  The auteur's peculiarly "precious" style, a mixture of laconic whimsy and Gothic melodrama, staged in symmetrically designed tableaux, is emphatically evident in this production.  Critics have noted that Wes Anderson's style and odd thematic concerns are most purely expressed in his animated features -- The Fabulous Mr. Fox had the same quality.  Using actual live-action actors tends to slightly dilute Anderson's fantastically controlled décor and mise-en-scene:  after all a real person might stutter or burp or be very slightly asymmetrical -- elements of accidental reality (or "chaos" as Anderson probably would imagine) have a habit of intruding when you are working with flesh and blood people.  No such threat exists in the densely designed, artificial world of Isle of Dogs with its weirdly stoic animatronic puppets   Anderson uses his standard repertoire of actors (Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Jeff Goldblum, etc.) augmented with Francis McDormand and a cadre of Japanese stars to provide the voices of his characters -- the dogs speak in English (their barks have been translated a title advises) and the Japanese characters speak Japanese that is, often, left untranslated.  Although the film has a strong Japanese element, and seems redolent of Japanese anime, the movie was made in the United States and at the Berlin Babelsberg studios.  The picture contains parodies of Japanese films, a Kabuki play, Sumo wrestling, and, in several themes, we are treated to the foreboding Seven Samurai theme played as a mambo -- Prokofiev's Lt. Kije Suite is also featured on the soundtrack.

The film's plot is ridiculous:  in Megacity, Japan, a corrupt politician banishes all dogs to an island to which refuse is hauled.  (The evil politician, a sort of strong man like Donald Trump, is a member of Kobayashi clan, admirers of cats from time immemorial -- an ancient ancestor was beheaded due to a dog and, therefore, the Kobayashi's have always traditionally hated canines.)  The pretext for banning the dogs to the nasty island of garbage mountains is that the animals have developed a flu that can be transmitted to humans.  This is true but the flu is manmade.  A scientist and his female sidekick (mouthed by Yoko Ono) discover an antigen to the dog flu but the scientist is murdered to suppress his cure.  A 12-year old boy flying a cute little airplane crashes on the island -- the "little pilot" is seeking his loyal hound "Spot" who was exiled to the island three years earlier.  The "little pilot" meets a group of renegade dogs, organizes them into his posse, and, then, ultimately travels to mainland Japan to confront the Kobayashi's and save the canines trapped on the island.  The story involves much hiking around the picturesque dunes of garbage on the island, a sea voyage, dangerous rides on conveyors through trash compactors and incinerators, and much amusing byplay among the dogs.  A wild dog, or a stray, emerge as a hero and gets the girl-dog in the end:  when the feral dog admits that he still bites sometimes -- he has 'de-handed' someone at the outset of the story (Anderson likes amputations) --the female says:  "That's okay, I don't like tame animals." 

The movie is very witty, brilliantly designed with eye-popping graphics.  For some reason, it is hard to make the puppets move in planes that recede or that are thrust diagonally away from the camera.  This means that characters tends to move in two dimensions, that is simply right-to-left across decorated backgrounds.  There are many close-ups -- Anderson's mania for symmetry is such that if a dog is shown in close up on the right side of the image, the next shot will show another dog in close-up on the left side of the image, thus balancing the imagery although using two shots as opposed to one to accomplish this.  Background figures, scrupulously presented, often don't move at all.  Motion itself is highly stylized, not exactly jerky, but rather robotic.  Most shots involving framing devices to create Anderson's trademark tableaux effects.  The effect is hieroglyphic -- we seem to be watching stop-action puppets moving like figures in an Egyptian bas relief or painted frieze.  Although the imagery is stylized and stilted, the action is often violent or disgusting -- the neglected dogs have sores and open wounds on their bodies; sometimes, they vomit.  Dog and other fights are shown by a cloud with parts of bodies emerging and, then, swallowed up again in the whirlwind of opaque dust.  Most of the sequences have a somewhat flattened aspect and this comports well with the flat affect of the dogs and their dialogue -- Anderson's movies usually have precise and mannered dialogue rendered somewhat robotically and that is the case here.  The style is remarkable from beginning to end.    The effect on the viewer is that you feel like you are watching the greatest film ever made for about twenty minutes, then, you have sense of increasing entrapment which is not necessarily wholly pleasurable.  The film is so mannered that it seems sometimes a bit airless and claustrophobic.

The movie is excellent,  quite exciting throughout and emotionally satisfying.  It's an advance, I think, on The Fabulous Mr. Fox.  I have reservations about the film but those are inextricably linked to my reservations about Wes Anderson's films in general.  Attending a Wes Anderson film is like having a fantastically precocious 14 year old on the autism spectrum explaining the world to you -- interesting but, often, irritating as well.

The Lion Hunters

In a  chorus in Antigone, Sophocles celebrates human cunning and craft, man's ability to tame horses and send sailboats careening over the deep seas.  Jean Rouch's astonishing The Lion Hunters, an ethnographic film released in1965, embodies a similar theme:  the complexity of human transactions with the wild.   Rouch was a great, instinctive filmmaker who was later hailed as one of the great inspirations of the French Nouvelle Vague.  His films don't erase cultural differences, but bluntly expose to us the sheer strangeness of other ways of being human.  People and their societies are, to use a German word, fragwuerdig -- that is, worthy (and necessarily) to be questioned.  A good anthropological film and, indeed, a good documentary in general shows you something you have never seen before and, perhaps, never imagined and, then, I think, raises more questions than it answers.  The Lion Hunters meets and exceeds these criterion -- indeed, during much of the film, the viewer is shaking his or her head and asking:  Why are they doing these things?

Framed as a sort of griot, that is, an African legend told to the community, Rouch's film follows the fortunes of four or five professional lion-hunters, members of the Songhay tribe that lives in villages between Mali and Niger.  The lion-hunters are somehow engaged -- the nature of the transaction is unclear -- by nomads who wander in a vast, thorn-bush studded chaparral.  The nomads have negotiated a truce with the lions that live in that place -- when a lion approaches their cattle, they drive it off with sticks and stones and, as Rouch tells us, a lion repelled in that way "will never attack a man."  The nomads seem to admire the lions that they believe to be the genius loci of their savannah home -- the lions cull the sick cows from their herds and their children can't sleep until they hear the oddly reassuring roar of the lion in the bush.  But, periodically, a lion will go rogue and start attacking healthy cattle or threatening humans.  When this occurs, the nomads don't simply shoot the animal or trap or poison it.  Instead, they retain the services of the Songhay villager lion hunter's guild.  These men bring a sort of complex (and gratuitous) technology to the hunt -- they make special bows and arrows, brew a deadly poison (made from water drawn by a woman noteworthy for her jealously), carefully imbue their arrow points (which we have seen them making) with this woman-poison, and, then, consult soothsayers about the hunt.  Although people with guns are obviously available, the lion has to be confronted, harangued, and, then, shot with these poisoned arrow.  Rouch's film tracks the technologies, many of the linguistic (incantations and speeches that must be made to lions and other prey), involved in the hunt and, then, shows the hunt itself.  The actual hunt stretches over several years and culminates in the killing of a lioness.   The biggest, most dangerous, and cunning lion, called "the American", eludes the hunters and remains on the prowl. 

The portrayal of real death in film is always disturbing and the last half of the picture is sometimes not easy to watch -- a variety of animals are crippled by carefully concealed steel traps and, then, slaughtered.  This is gory and the viewer sympathizes with the maimed animals vainly trying to escape their fate.  A villager who intrudes on the hunt gets mauled by a lioness -- oddly enough, this is less disturbing than the imagery of dying animals.  The beasts are killed with elaborate rituals and the hunters beg for their forgiveness and the chief hazard seems supernatural -- the angry ghosts of the dead beasts can apparently wreak havoc on the hunters.  When a young lion is trapped and killed, the apprentice hunter is told to kill the animal with the understanding that the man who kills a lion is "very likely to have his son die."  The film is full of curious portents and prophecies.  In the final scenes, after the big lioness has been killed, the hunters re-enact the successful adventure for the villagers -- one man crawls stealthily, shrouded in a cloak, imitating the lion; another man shoots an arrow into the dust near him causing the man pretending to be the lion to go into seizures.  An old woman chants a song about the lion-hunt and the children look on wide-eyed as the narrator tells us that this is, perhaps, the last traditional lion hunt that will take place in this area -- the rituals and incantations are being forgotten and there are, of course, easier ways to get rid of the big cats.  There is an elegiac, even nostalgic, tone to the film.  (In some ways, it reminds me of Sweetwater, the recent documentary about cowboys driving herds of sheep over the rugged Bear Tooth mountains on the northwest border of  Wyoming with Montana.  At the end of the film, a title tells us that we have witnessed the last such drive -- in the future, the sheep will not be herded over the high mountain pass by men on horseback).  Most noteworthy is the notion that the lion hunter's trade must be undertaken outside of the outside of the village for it requires traffic in "wicked things."  Notwithstanding this reservation, the "wicked" hunters revel in the knowledge that they are celebrated in song, legendary heroes of their people and guardians of its culture. 

The Phenix City Story

Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story progresses from documentary-style objectivity to white-hot frenzy.  It's hard to imagine a film made in such disjunctive registers:  the movie begins with TV interviews soberly staged on the hot steps of a county Court House and ends with stark mayhem, filmed in high-contrast black and white, savage beatings rim-lit as if with acetylene torch or arc welding equipment.  Although the movie is pretty brutal throughout most of its 100 minutes, hyper-violence tips the balance about half-way when a police dispatcher callously says:  "Someone just threw a dead nigger kid on John Patterson's front lawn."  From that point to the film's penultimate shot -- the last image embodies law and order -- The Phenix City Story is a ferocious study in savagery, still shocking today and, probably, almost unwatchable in 1955 when this little B-movie was released.

Apparently based on actual events, The Phenix City Story concerns a crusade against vice in the titular city, a small Alabama burg just across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus, Georgia.  Phenix City is a GI strip servicing the troops on leave from Fort Benning, located a few miles away in Georgia.  Presumably, Fort Benning and Columbus, Georgia are in a dry county -- accordingly, the vice necessarily associated with a large military base was conveniently located in Phenix City, just across the river (and the border) from Georgia.  As portrayed in the film, Phenix City consists primarily of 14th Street, a row a honky-tonks, greasy spoon cafes, and brothels, all harboring gambling dens in their backrooms.  (The film shows that the gambling is all conspicuously crooked, designed by fleece the naïve GIs out of their pay-checks.)  Vice in Phenix City is integral to its economy and represents a time-honored tradition:  shaving dice and rigging slot machines has been going on for "a hundred years" as alleged by the film's narrator.  The picture has a startling opening.  A smarmy-TV broadcaster conducts man-on-the-street interviews, the camera filming him in unflattering close-up.  The interviewer talks to a couple of people who are obviously not actors, shoving them here and there for the camera as if they were puppets or domestic cattle.  The people talk about a murder trial and their hope that corruption in the City will be stamped out.  This opening sequence is fairly long and shot documentary style on courthouse steps with people coming and going in the background -- the rubes that are interviewed are inarticulate and blink nervously in the bright sunlight.  The film, then, shows a montage of newspapers and magazines and, then, eases into the action.  Albert Patterson is a prominent local attorney.  The leader of the crime syndicate visits with him and solicits his services as counsel for the villains.  (The film proper begins with a compelling sequence in a honky-tonk introducing some of the characters and featuring a half-naked torch singer singing "The Phenix City Blues."  A patron accuses the house of cheating, gets beaten half to death by the club's enforcer, and, then, is hauled off by the crooked cops, presumably to be killed and tossed in the river.)  Patterson is looking forward to return of his son from military service in Germany and has hired a man to paint his son's name on the office door:  Patterson & Patterson.  He refuses the mob boss' offer, but also says that he will maintain scrupulous neutrality -- Patterson is old, tired, and has a bum leg and he doesn't want to get into a bloody fight with the syndicate.  Several town fathers have allied themselves into a reform party.  The mob's henchmen lure the men into a parking lot behind The Poppy Club, a saloon qua casino owned by the most menacing of the villains, and beat them badly.  John Patterson, Albert's son intervenes and is badly beaten himself.  An African-American swamper in the bar, Zeke Ward, knocks down one of the thugs and saves Patterson from serious injury.  The attack on his son forces Albert Patterson's hand -- he agrees to run for Attorney General of the State of Alabama.  The syndicate fights back by killing Zeke Ward's four-year old daughter and pitching her corpse onto Patterson's front lawn where his kids are playing.  This leads to the callous dispatch call and triggers a cycle of violence that leaves several people dead.  Patterson tries to indict the bad guys at a coroner's inquiry into once of the deaths, makes a compelling case, but is defeated by the fear of the jurors who refuse to return a verdict in his favor.  This causes the senior Patterson to run for State Attorney General. Albert Patterson wins the election but is gunned down before he can take office -- he's shot point-blank in the face in a horrific scene.  John Patterson's informant at the Poppy Club. the young woman who's suitor was beat to death early in the film, has overheard the bad guys smirking about killing the new Attorney General.  She tells John Patterson and, then, hides in the Negro part of town at Zeke Ward's place.  The bad guys converge on Zeke Ward's place and are beating and torturning the people there when Patterson shows up, resulting in some more savage fisticuffs.  The mob is poised to march on 14th Street and prepared to slaughter the Syndicate members and burn up the brothels and gambling hells.  But Patterson restrains them, just as he has earlier been restrained by Zeke Ward when he is about to kill the most evil of the mobsters with his bare hands.  The rule of law is paramount.   The National  Guard is called into town and the bad guys are defeated once again at the ballot box.  John Patterson takes office as Attorney General and vows to clean-up the city and the movie ends by looping back, at least by spoken reference, to the murder trials announced in the documentary style opening scene.

Karlson's film resembles in many ways Fritz Lang's similarly plotted The Big Heat.  But Lang's movie was elegant, punctuated with shocking violence (Lee Marvin scalding Gloria Graham with hot coffee), and tightly melodramatic.  The Phenix City Story, although vehemently right-wing, somehow feels like Brecht -- the protagonists are embodiments of social values and movements and they interact in a series of lacerating short scenes. Romance is purely perfunctory and the film is structured around a series of bloody fistfights and beatings.  There's no fat on the film and some sequences are shot like a documentary made in Hell.  The scene in which the dead child is callously flung onto Patterson's lawn, dropped among his own children, results in horrific and convincing hysteria -- Patterson's small children and his wife are crazy with fear.  Scenes involving violence at polling places show drunks being dragged in to vote, righteous folks beaten bloody, women raped, their mouths and noses sluicing blood, cars overturned and bombs exploding -- some of this lensed as Soviet-style montage, other sequences seemingly covertly filmed in Phenix City itself:  we see staggering drunks and people leaning against utility poles to keep from falling and exterior stairways to crumbling three-story houses decorated with whores, people fighting aimlessly in back alleys and everywhere a pervasive sense of squalor.  This is a film so ripe with corruption that you can almost smell it.  I had seen this movie earlier in Chicago when it was revived as part of a film noir series at the Gene Siskel Theater -- I recalled the movie as having something to do with the Ku Klux Klan.  Obvously, I misremembered the film but it is a salient point that the person to whom the most terrible wrong has been done, Zeke Ward (who has lost his daughter to the murderers and whose wife is beaten half to death by mob enforcers) intervenes to keep John Patterson from betraying his father's principles and taking the law into his own hands.  This notion of the sacrificial Negro, almost supernaturally virtuous, is central to the film's design.        

The Walking Dead

Michael Curtiz made The Walking Dead for Warner Bros. in 1936.  It's a compact and tightly woven parable about conscience and quite unsettling.  The film derives in many respects from Frankenstein, but is far more ambiguous and peculiar.  Four or five mobsters own a city somewhere.  The scene is set schematically and the characters are all types.  We see a hammer gaveling a court to order:  a corrupt politician is sentenced to five years in prison although the Judge is warned that, if he executes justice, his own life will be in jeopardy.  A young couple work for a mad scientist -- he seems to wish to thwart their plans for marriage.  The politician is sent to jail and the cronies of the convicted man, all of them mobsters with their smarmy lawyer, hire "Trigger" Smith to murder the presiding Judge.  The gangsters plan to pin the crime on a hapless felon just released from the pen, John Elman, played by Boris Karloff.  The young couple accidentally observe the gangsters dumping the Judge's body in Elman's car.  But they don't want to get involved and don't contact the authorities.  Elman was previously sentenced by the deceased judge and he's the obvious suspect for the murder.  A trial ensues that the young couple attend, but in which they don't testify and don't come forth due to cowardice.  Elman is condemned to death.  The young man and woman, now, realize that they are culpable for Elman's conviction and try to intervene -- but, it's too late and Elman is electrocuted.  His body is immediately committed to the care of the mad scientist who, somehow, revives him.  (The resurrection scene is an elaborate fantasia on themes earlier developed in Universal's Frankenstein -- there are canted shots, bolts of Tesla-coil electricity, and many alchemical vessels bubbling over with sinister potions.)  The resurrected Karloff seems to know all about the scheme that resulted in him being framed for the Judge's murder.  He visits each of the bad guys, a walking corpse and the embodiment of an avenging conscience.  The bad guys, of course, are terrified and react with panic -- in each case, the villain is, more or less, accidentally killed when he flees Karloff.  There's a final confrontation in a rainswept cemetery -- Karloff is fatally shot and the head mobster with his henchman, fleeing the graveyard, crashes his sleek black sedan into an utility pole, triggering his own electrocution.  Karloff dies a second time just as he is about to reveal what he learned about the afterlife when he was killed in the electric chair a few days before.   This elaborate plot, involving four or five flamboyantly staged killings, spectacular lab scenes, two trials, several musical concerts (Elman was a concert pianist) is crammed in 65 minutes.  Curtiz' craft is so sure and his hand so steady that the film doesn't seem rushed, and is completely lucid even though the plot of exceedingly convoluted.  Karloff is not really a monster -- he is just a sad, lumbering, uncouth figure with piercing and pathetic eyes.  Death has tutored him in what he otherwise would not know -- the identities of the men responsible for his death and he visits them implacably, begging to know:  Why did you kill me?  The curious aspect of the film, and a feature that makes the movie profoundly unsettling is that there are no innocent characters anywhere in sight.  The young couple, who are the nominal heroes of the movie, are cowardly, self-interested, and just as responsible for Elman's death as the bad guys -- after all, their testimony, which they knowingly withheld, could have saved him.  At the climax of the movie, the mad scientist, who looks like a little Louis Pasteur, proposes to literally vivisect Karloff's character to study what is in his brain and this scientist becomes obsessed with learning the secrets of the afterlife.  The young man and woman act in concert with the District Attorney -- but didn't the DA  use the full power of the law to prosecute the hapless and innocent Elman.  Karloff shuffles through the movie bandy-legged, as if the victim of childhood rickets, and he is a totally destroyed figure even before framed -- he's impoverished, seems to be starving, can't find a job, and is entirely friendless.  The film is quickly cut and edited and a masterpiece of frenzied, if fully legible, narrative -- it's all shadows, dark cars careening through thunderstorms, and sinister cells of men conspiring against one another.  The film is also exceedingly inventive and scenes in which the staggering, pathetic Karloff appears out of the darkness to harass his persecutors are genuinely frightening:  a man runs terrified through a dark house, the storm wind gusts through a window and displaces the curtains -- there's a flash of lightning and, in a mirror, we catch a subliminal glimpse of Karloff standing in a corner of the room.  This is powerful stuff and effectively presented. 

Nayak (The Hero)

Nayak (1966) is an important film directed by the great Satyajit Ray.  Produced in Bengali, the characters actually speak in English about a third of the time -- although subtitles are necessary to decipher what is said.  The picture features impressive performances by two mainstays of Bengali cinema, Uttam Kumar, a Bollywood matinee idol, and the radiant Sharmita Tagore.  Although the picture is tightly constrained --it takes place almost entirely on a crowded train -- Ray's scenario is far-ranging, often very funny, and explores the relationship between life, truth, and the cinema. 

Arindam Mukherjee (Kumar) is a movie star who must travel from Calcutta to New Delhi -- he's procrastinated and so has to take the train, a trip that seems to last about 24 hours.   The movie is overtly modeled on Fellini's 1964 8 1/2 -- in fact as commentators note, Kumar wears dark glasses and look more than a little like Marcello Mastrioanni.  (A deeper, more subterranean, source for the film is Bergman's Wild Strawberries.)  On the train, the hero (Nayak) encounters a number of people.  This encounters trigger reveries and nightmares -- he rummages among his memories and we see flashbacks relating to key moments in his life.  A young woman, Miss Sangupta (Sharmita Tagore), who edits a magazine for "modern women", also takes the opportunity (their enforced proximity) to interview the hero -- he becomes increasingly candid with her and, in fact, confesses sins that might damage his public reputation.  At the end of the film, Miss Sangupta tears up her interview notes, resolving not to publish anything about the hero.  She departs the train to relative obscurity; Mukherjee leaves surrounded by the Press and adoring fans.  Encyclopedic in its scope, the film offers a cross-section of Indian society, politics, and the arts in 1966, deploying a number of subplots to make its points. 

Mukherjee has been in the press two days before his trip, implicated in brawl in a bar.  We don't know exactly what happened but there is a sense that the hero is suffering some kind of emotional crisis.  At his home, we see him surrounded by taciturn servants and babbling sycophants, incapable of communicating in any meaningful way with him.  On the train, he is lodged in a sleeper car with an extended family -- the little girl, who clearly adores him, is feverish:  in the course of the film, Mukherjee seems to heal her.  The men all studiously ignore Mukherjee but the women on the train are openly fans and they press him for autographs.  His fame is such that when the train stops at a station, the window in the diner car where he is meeting with Miss Sangupta is thronged with skinny, ragged and poor-looking men who tap at the glass like half-crazed zombies.  Miss Sangupta, who is riding in the less comfortable "chair car" -- that is, without the beds in the sleeper -- is bold:  she wears horn-rim glasses and is thoroughly modern and she accosts the movie star, pretending not to be impressed by him.  (She's like Debbie Reynolds with Gene Kelly during their first encounter in Singin' in the Rain.)  The hero is intrigued by her and agrees to be interviewed.  In the course of the interview, and the hero's dreams and reveries, we learn that Mukherjee began his career as a politically engaged performer in village plays.  He feels that he has compromised his principles by abandoning this humble format for political discourse by becoming a matinee idol.  (In one dream, he sees his old theater director covered with ash and physically crumbling:  one important scene takes place at the ghat or cremation pyre of this man who was his mentor.  In another dream, he imagines himself literally drowning in cash.)  In flashbacks, we see him seducing a young married woman who wants to be in films and refusing to speak at a place where a group of hapless industrial workers have been on strike for 24 days -- in fact, he literally flees this political confrontation.  There are several intriguing subplots:  an advertising man tries to prostitute his younger wife to secure an important client and, later, a fat guru hires the advertising man's agency to publicize his transcendental mediation ashram.  Echoing Fellini, we see a beautiful small girl twice who seems to represent the hero's lost innocence.  As the film proceeds, the hero becomes increasingly dismayed at the compromises that he has made and recalling times when he betrayed his earlier idealistic principles.  He gets flamboyantly drunk and stands at an open door on the train watching the gleaming tracks parallel to the train criss-crossing -- it seems as if he is contemplating suicide.  Then, Miss Sangupta appears, without her glasses, spectacularly beautiful and merciful, "cow-eyed" like a Goddess.  (Sharmita Tagore acted first with Ray when she was 13 in the Apu trilogy; she is one of those transcendentally gifted actresses who can appear completely normal and, even, homely in some scenes, the very embodiment of the modern woman, and, then, imbued with a sort of divine radiance -- one recalls that she is probably most famous for Ray's Devi, playing the village girl who is destroyed when the villagers perceive her to be a reincarnation of the goddess Devi.  Miss Sangupta shows mercy to the hero and, perhaps, saves him.  In the final sequence, she departs the train filmed in grainy 16 mm or, even, 8 mm film stock, the camera handheld and very unsteady as it follows her walking through the vast anonymous crowds in the New Delhi train station; after cutting from her, the camera, then, moves into a glossy 35 milimeter close-up of the movie star, a shot professionally made and rock-steady -- people put flowers around his neck and he is thronged by reporters. 

There are many things in this move and a summary does not do the film justice.  Several viewings will probably be required to "tease out" the relationship between the parts -- there is a scarf-shrouded old critic, for instance, who denounces actors as corrupt (the last film he saw was in 1942 How Green was my Valley).  Curiously, this exponent of the aesthetics of old India always speaks in English.  One sequence, a memory of a film shoot, contrasts different acting styles and there are political subcurrents that I don't pretend to understand.  The film is welded together impressively and the viewer can perceive cunning parallels between the different kinds of moral, ethical and business compromises that the characters make.  Uttam Kumar is particularly effective as the tormented movie star -- he was a major figure in Bollywood and has a saturnine presence a bit like Steve McQueen.  Criterion has restored the film beautifully and it is highly recommended.   

Paterno

At first there seems to be a lot going on in Barry Levinson's HBO film, Paterno (2018).  Football players crack heads together while Penn State administrators huddle in dank tunnels fearful of indictments coming their way; the superannuated Joe Paterno is slid into another tunnel, this enclosure an MRI and seems to hallucinate images from his past and a plucky girl reporter points out the infamous pedophile, Jerry Sandusky, in a bar and mutters that everyone ignored her story about his misdeeds published three years earlier.  But indictments are issued, then, concealed, then, disclosed again and a media feeding frenzy ensues.  Paterno, played by Al Pacino, is 84 and he seems remote from the hulabaloo -- he insists that the story doesn't affect him and that he must prepare for next Saturday's game with Nebraska's Big Red.  A week passes.  The scandal can't be contained and Paterno is fired from his position as coach for the Penn State football team, a job that he has held for forty years or more.  The students riot in his support and a lonely tormented victim of Sandusky's rapes is bullied and beaten on campus.  Paterno and members of his family inexplicably quote Virgil in Latin -- I presume Paterno may have taught Latin at some point in his long career.  After some more sound and fury, the film peters out inconclusively, its makers apparently profoundly uncertain as to what they were trying to accomplish with this film.  This is a shame because Pacino is good and the supporting players are all impeccably realistic -- conflicted by the claims and uncertain as to how to react.  But the people who made the movie didn't know what it was about and so the picture has no dramatic arc -- it literally goes nowhere. 

At the outset, the model for the movie seems to be journalism, beleaguered reporters struggle to investigate and make a public a scandalous story.  The film is percussively edited and the administrative powers at Penn State are sinister in their efforts to suppress the story.  So for a  half hour or so, the film resembles Spotlight, the Oscar-winning movie about reporters uncovering sexual abuse by priests in the Boston diocese.  The film slips into melodrama with an ill-conceived subplot (never really developed) about one of the hapless victims.  Then, Levinson and Pacino take a stab at King Lear -- Pacino sometimes seems doddering and there is a willful quality about his denial of responsibility.  (When he learned about Sandusky raping a kid in the Penn State shower-room, he reported the charge to his bosses and did nothing more.)   He can't keep his mind focused on the real issues and keeps slipping into non sequiturs.  However, he is surrounded by a loyal and decent family (his sons and their wives express reasonable regard for the suffering of the victims) and they struggle to sort out the situation notwithstanding the old man's increasingly unavailing claims that he has done nothing wrong.  Clearly, the script has been whittled down from something much larger -- for instance, there is a subplot about documents in a file that is abruptly curtailed and simply confusing:  you expect the shoe to drop that the documents have been either hidden or destroyed or destroyed while someone else kept copies of them revealing the spoliation of these materials.  But nothing happens with this subplot -- after some close-ups of the documents and some portentous shots in poorly lit offices, this sequence just fades away.  By the film's climax, Paterno's firing from Penn State, the movie has completely lost its way.  When my Labrador retriever goes outside in the morning to defecate, she prances in ever more agitated and tightening circles before doing her business.  The film shows a wordless, agitated Joe Paterno twisting and turning in some sort of poorly defined, but urgent, agony.  In general, the movie has been witty, with lots of rat-a-tat-tat dialogue influenced by writers like Aaron Sorkin -- people are always telling us what they think and what they think others should think.  But at the film's climax, Paterno just whirls around and around like my dog -- words elude him and the sequence elongates over several minutes; it's a huge embarrassment and signals that the people that wrote this movie didn't really understand what it was about or how it should be ended.  The movie concludes with a scene in which it is breathlessly revealed that Paterno knew about Jerry Sandusky's depredations as early as 1976 -- but this doesn't really register with the viewer: you're apt to shrug and say "So what?"  And the big reveal that Paterno allowed his own kids to swim in a  hotel pool with the loathsome Sandusky is a cheap shot -- Sandusky raped his victims in the dark corners of deserted locker rooms; he didn't molest anyone in a public pool, particularly with their parents present.  So who cares whether Sandusky swam with Paterno's teenage kids?  Is the film expressing some sort of weird taboo, that it is "unclean" to be in the same water with a pedophile?  It's too bad that the movie completely collapses in its last half-hour -- up to that point, the show was brisk, witty, with a lot of intense dialogue expressing all sorts of interesting positions.  But the movie doesn't know what to make of Paterno's complicity and, so, devolves into empty mannerism.

This Mortal Storm

Frank Borzage's This Mortal Storm (1940) observes a peculiar convention:  set entirely in the Bavarian Alps, the film's sympathetic characters speak plainly with American Midwest accents, but the film's Nazi's snarl and smirk and their diction is made sinister by their heavy and obtrusive German accents.  (In this film, a Gestapo officer actually mutters:  "Ve haf vays of may-kink young girls talk!")  But, of course, all the characters both good and bad are Germans and, indeed, some of them are members of the same family.  The most remarkable thing about this curious approach to the way people speak in the film is that it isn't immediately obvious that this unnatural convention is in place.  I didn't exactly notice that the bad Germans spoke in accent and the good ones sounded like Indiana Hoosiers until sitting down to write this note.  Perhaps, this is a testament to the film's excellence -- uniformly gripping throughout its 88 minute length, Borzage's film is a powerful and disquieting experience, excellently acted, and, indeed, (sadly) relevant to our political plight today (April 2018).

Set in 1933, the film involves what we would call "a blended family" today.  Kindly Professor Roth teaches physiology at an university in a picturesque Bavarian town. Prof. Roth has just turned 60, an achievement that he is too humble to announce to the world but too vain to treat as inconsequential -- he is covertly (or not so covertly) very satisfied with himself.  (Roth is played by Frank Norton, the actor who played the "great and powerful Oz" in the 1939 film about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.)  Roth's wife has two sons, one of the played by a very young Robert Stack -- these boys seem to be about 20 -- as well a beautiful daughter, Freya, who is the oldest of these siblings (Freya may be Roth's daughter by an unnamed first wife -- her exact status is unclear.)  Professor Roth and his wife also have one younger son who may be ten or twelve.  The film begins on Roth's birthday.  He goes to his class where he is surprised and gratified to find himself lionized -- the students sing Gaudeamus Igitur in his honor and give him a little trophy, a statue of Siegfried, it seems, brandishing a sword.  But all is not well.  At a family dinner with birthday cake that evening, servants announce that the radio has just reported that Hitler has become Chancellor of the Reich.  Roth who says that he is "non-Aryan" is concerned, but doesn't think that the political developments in Berlin will affect him far away in the Bavarian Alps.  In fact, the announcement results in a violent quarrel at the dinner table -- Roth's two step-sons are members of the Nazi party and they strongly endorse Hitler.  Freya is opposed to Hitler and the little boy doesn't know what to think.  Freya's pompous and condescending fiancée, played by Robert Young (later TV's Marcus Welby) is a Nazi as well and he joins the two stepsons in hailing Hitler as Germany's salvation.  Things quickly deteriorate.  There is street-fighting and non-Aryans, as they are called in this movie, are beaten up.  A veterinarian, Martin (played by Jimmy Stewart) is a close friend of the family.  He stands up against the thugs and gets thrashed himself.  Freya (Margaret Sullavan) denounces her fiancée and breaks off the relationship, confessing that she loves the veterinarian, and enemy of Fascism, Jimmy Stewart's noble Martin.  In his classroom, Nazi goons demand that Professor Roth distinguish between pure German blood and nasty non-Aryan blood -- when he refuses to support this dubious proposition, Roth loses his job and, in fact, ends up in a concentration camp.  Jimmy Stewart's Martin has to save a "non-Aryan" threatened with death and he takes him on skis over a dangerous pass in the mountains to Innsbruck, reputedly a haven against Nazi aggression.  Freya pleads with her ex-fiancée for the release of the weak and elderly Prof. Roth.  The Nazi storm trooper won't help her except to set up a last meeting between Roth and his wife. In the next scene, Roth is reported dead and the rest of the family decides to flee Germany.  At the Austrian border, Freya is detained because she is carrying her deceased father's manuscript, his book about blood physiology.  Trapped in Germany, she despairs.  But Martin, learning of her plight, crosses the border surreptitiously and, with the Gestapo closing in, the two lovers escape on skis into the mountains.  On the border, a German patrol headed by Freya's ex-fiancée, tracks down the lovers and shoots Freya.  She bleeds to death before Martin can get her to the nearest town -- the film ends with someone reciting a poem that I didn't know over an image of footprints filling up with snow in the storm. 

Borzage's film is crammed with incidents.  Maria Ouspenskaya, as Martin's mother, whispers portentously and a teenage maid in the veterinarian's household (who secretly loves the gentle Jimmy Stewart) is tortured.  Books are burned and there are barroom fights and rallies with Nazis singing patriotic songs.  The script effectively dramatizes chaos within one family -- the Professor's sons who have claimed undying love for their stepfather in the opening scenes denouncing him openly to the authorities as the film progresses.  The acting is uniformly excellent -- the clash of emotions on Robert Taylor's face when Freya pleads with him and, then, later when he stands atop a slick of Freya's blood in the snowfield is extraordinary.  Taylor plays a man who is not really bad -- he just wants to get along with others, but this leads him into all sorts of evil.  Although the film is a melodrama, it's consistently understated -- the scene in which Roth's wife, soon to be his widow, meets the old man in a darkened cell is heartbreaking particularly because nothing is overplayed:  the old professor, obviously much worn down, appears from darkness and, then, vanishes again into a dark corridor, the last time we see him alive.  Margaret Sullavan as the heroine takes a little "getting used to" -- she's not really conventionally pretty:  she has a squashed-looking Slavic face with sleepy-looking wounded eyes a bit like Shelley Winters.  However, as the film progresses she becomes warmer and her heroism in attempting to cross the brutal Alpine pass is touching -- of course, she dies melodramatically, expressing her love for Martin as he carries  her in his arms through a Teutonic forest, but it's melodrama in a good cause and not really offensive.  The camerawork wavers between Expressionist chiaroscuro and sophisticated large-scale scenes in the lecture hall or at the family dinner-table or in crowded taverns.  There are several very impressive downhill skiing scenes that are exuberant and persuasive except for the inserts that, of course, are ill-advised -- people shown in profile with scarves blowing in a fictional wind as a fictional landscape is rear-projected behind them.  The Alpine scenes with the patrols playing cat-and-mouse with the refugees are thrilling and reminiscent of the last five minutes of Renoir's great The Grand Illusion.  Of course, the savage irony is that escape to Innsbruck is meaningless -- the Nazis will be there soon enough.  (The German - Austrian Anschluss was March 1938). It's interesting to see that many of the interior shots are made from a low angle and feature looming, grim-looking ceilings boxing in the characters -- indeed, the film is very frightening:  the scenes at the border on the train will induce a queasy feeling in even the most hardened viewer. 

It's a false equivalence and I don't mean this note to sound a hysterical alarum, but... there's too much similarity between our politics at this moment in the United States and the situation shown in the film for me to fail to note certain, shall we say, family resemblances...   At this moment, the truth is suborned to perjury and lies are told with exuberant abandon and there's a vicious strong man in power that a sizeable percentage of the population will support whatever he does.  Watching this film, one feels exhausted and intimidated and, more than a little bit, scared.  Of course, the vile Donald Trump is no Hitler but there's something about this present feverish delirium, this nightmare that doesn't ever exactly break, that makes me recommend this film to you.  Note how quickly, a happy family is destroyed by internal political dissension and observe, also, how swiftly a crowd of smiling admirers becomes a brutal mob.  This enervating atmosphere of hatred in our country is really becoming too much too bear. 

The King of Jazz

The King of Jazz is a very early Technicolor movie musical from 1930.  The picture was directed by a Broadway stage director, Paul Murray Anderson, and, reportedly, budgeted at 1.5 million dollars -- an enormous fortune in Depression-era money.  Recently released on Criterion in a luminous reconstruction, the film now runs about 98 minutes (original screen time was 105 minutes) and it is almost indescribably weird.  The picture reminds us that the past is a strange country, indeed, and, in some respects, more trackless than the jungles of the Amazon basin.  The wayfarer ventures into such territory at his or her own risk.

Essentially, the movie is a film of a Broadway revue.  Because of technology limitations, the camera doesn't move.  However, the director had access to a crane and there are a number of showy overhead shots, images of flailing legs and arms arranged florally that undoubtedly influenced Busby Berkeley.  There is no plot and the picture proceeds on the basis of a hand turning pages of a scrapbook -- each scrapbook page announces the next skit or number.  The common thread linking sections is Paul Whiteman and his jazz band.  Whiteman was a classically trained musician who rose to enormous fame in the twenties with his brand of symphonic "jazz".  Although largely forgotten today, Whiteman was an influential figure -- Bix Beiderbecke played for him and he commissioned Gershwin to write "Rhapsody in Blue" for his band's performance in 1924 (Ferde Grofe did the orchestration -- Grofe was also once famous for his symphonic suites, most notably "the Grand Canyon Suite.")  The film is designed to provide just about every species of American popular music from up-tempo jazz dance tunes to ballads and big orchestral numbers including a reprise of Gershwin's "Rhapsody" -- it turns out to be a rhapsody in grey and silver-teal because the film's resplendent, but limited, two-color Technicolor process couldn't reproduce blues.  What makes the film so ineffably strange is that it is a kind of zombie -- the heart and soul of American popular music is African-American:  the Blues, Dixieland jazz, and spirituals.  Whiteman, although he hired African-Americans as composers and arrangers, didn't have any Black musicians in his band -- the logistical problems of touring a mixed-race band in segregated America were simply too challenging.  Accordingly, the picture affords the peculiar spectacle of a thorough-going review of American pop music, but without any authentic blues, jazz, or spirituals -- the effect is to render the film curiously soul-less and heart-less:  there's a big hole where the film's authentic American spirit should be found.  Popular music, of course, defines itself as counter-cultural -- it opposes the staid traditions of the opera and marching band and the symphonic  hall.  Authentic American pop is always counter-cultural because it derives from Black music -- that is, music produced by a group of people who have been traditionally excluded and treated as outsiders by the dominant White culture.  But there is another kind of pop, less authentic perhaps, but equally pervasive -- this is youth pop and much of the film seems to be in thrall to this influence.  Grown people talk in iddy-biddy baby voices and much of humor is profoundly unsophisticated and childish. (Children also occupy a position outside of the cultural mainstream.)  The film's default mode seems to be bizarre infantilism.  There are all sorts of examples of this peculiarly juvenile and puerile aesthetic and it's my contention that this sort of thing is what you get in pop music if you extract the real suffering and authentic roots implicit in Afro-American jazz, blues and other musical forms.  Whiteman himself is a big pale cartoon figure -- he looks very much like Oliver Hardy and seems to be babyish himself.  A woman that likes him talks baby-talk to him ("I want to do things for you" -- this number also features a bizarre sadomasochistic couple, female dominant, in which the woman repeatedly slaps and beats her male counterpart.)  Several of musicians use baby-talk and there is an extended vaudeville number consisting of card tricks and weird banter that is so strange that it has to be seen to be believed.  The film commences with an animated cartoon of Whiteman threatened with death in darkest Africa -- itself a childish notion, although, like everything else, in the film, extremely amusing.  One man dances with an adult-sized rag doll, another astonishing sequence, and there are all sorts of contortionist and gymnastic dance scenes.  A "rubber-legs" dancer performs, leading viewers to wonder exactly how the performer achieved the boneless gyrations in his lower extremities.  Parts of the show resemble Laugh-In -- that is, there are short, often ingenious, black-out skits, none more than a minute or so in length.  Bing Crosby appears as one of the Rhythm Boys and sings a couple of songs, some of them with inscrutable lyrics.  (Crosby had to perform on day work-release from jail; he was imprisoned in jail as a result of a drunk-driving crash on Sunset Boulevard.)  There is a Rockettes number in which all the dancers remain seated -- another number begins with them kicking their legs in their air with each girl flat on her back.  There are proto-country-and-western songs and, even, a strange climax in which Paul Whiteman, the King of Jazz, dances with delirious proficiency (although it turns out that the dance is actually performed by a very similar-looking double -- this is revealed when the real Whiteman peels off the pencil-thin moustache of his double.)  The film is gorgeous -- people's faces glow like ripe peaches:  in one hallucinatory scene, two pale girls with black-bobbed hair, coiffeurs such as that sported by Louise Brooks, sing with their heads lolling on a kind of mirrored floor -- they seem to be decapitated.  The final number is called "Melting Pot" and it shows whole platoons of ethnic musicians from Germany and Ireland and Scotland; there are even a couple hundred people from Bohemia playing accordions.  But there is no trace of any African-Americans in the film with one exception -- a number called "On a Park Bench" shows various couples canoodling on stylized outdoor park benches:  the scene ends with a shot of Whiteman holding a little Black-girl on his lap -- she's a pick-a-ninny of the sort featured in the old Minstrel Shows with a huge infectious grin.  The credits name her as "Snowdrop." 

Jesus Christ Superstar

On Easter 2018, NBC broadcast live (and with many, many commercial interruptions), the cantata Jesus Christ Superstar with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The show was written in 1970, but isn't long in the tooth -- in fact, it revives with a lot of its sound and fury intact.  This production featured John Legend as Jesus and Alice Cooper in the relatively minor role of King Herod -- these were the headliners.  In fact, the cantata focuses on Judas, played with muscular aplomb by the charismatic Brandon Victor Dixon, who gets both the first and last words on the proceedings.  Judas provides commentary on the somewhat opaque actions of Jesus, facilitates the crucifixion, and expresses the doubts that the viewers, if not too blinkered by blind faith, should harbor.  In this conception, Judas is resurrected, not Jesus Christ. 

The broadcast sets the action against a vast colonnaded wall, something like the weathered and decrepit façade of the Roman coliseum.  The walls are painted with badly faded and spalling frescos -- they look like murals by Mantegna and Giotto.  During the opening number, a guy with a hose attached to a pressurized canister of red paint shoots the letters J-E-S-U-S onto the wall as graffiti.  Christ and the apostles are dressed more or less as might you remember them from Sunday School.  Caiaphas and other representations of the Jewish establishment wear Darth Vadar black and scuttle about like malevolent black beetles. Mary Magdalene is the only female role -- she lounges about dressed like a renaissance Virgin.  Herod wears gold lame and cavorts flamboyantly after the manner of a Las Vegas lounge singer.  It's fairly impressive:  the music alternates between a sort of narcotized complacency and total frenzy.  Lloyd Weber and Rice are good with complacency:  highlights in the cantata in that mode include "Everything's Alright". "I don't know how to love  him," (the showstopper ballad for Mary Magdalene) and the Hosanna song.  Screaming guitars and repeated, percussive licks enact the frenzied part of the score -- this is the febrile, jarring music that leads up to, and is effectively resolved, by the triumphant theme song, "Superstar."  This production featured a lot of dancing, the less said about that aspect of the show the better.  There was a huge chorus but they didn't have much to do other than slap one another on the back, hug, or engage in dry-humping after running to and fro across the huge set.  Both Judas and Jesus, periodically, have to sing in a very high, falsetto register -- as the show progressed their high notes became increasingly strained, raw, and unpleasant.  You can only shout at the top of your lungs for so long.  Alice Cooper's appearance taunting Jesus with the pastiche song "Try and See" was a highlight -- but's it's short and Cooper, obviously a favorite with the audience, isn't on stage long enough to make a strong impression.  The live audience spent much of the production up on their feet howling loudly -- this gives an impression of the "superstar" aspect of the show; the audience is part of the show, ginning up enthusiasm for the (putatively) sacred Superstar who is, in effect, nothing more than a media phenomenon, a plaything of the mob.  The continuous shrieking, however, was painful to my ears and made it hard to decipher many of the witty lyrics.  As the show stretched into plus two-hours -- due to the incessant commercial interruptions -- there were some longuers.  However, the cantata redeems itself with some mighty and Wagnerian excess during its last few minutes, ending more or less on a soft note with a final string quartet that fiddles the show out to its agnostic ending.  (In the closing credits, we can see Andrew Lloyd Webber glimpsed briefly as a kind of gargoyle on the huge scaffolding against the Coliseum façade.)