Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Caesar Must Die!
About ten years ago, inmates at a maximum security prison in Rome staged a full-dress version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The production was elaborately mounted, with barbaric-looking costumes, togas, and impressive lighting effects. A large audience attended the production and responded enthusiastically with a standing ovation -- in a haunting sequence, shown twice in the film, the actors shed their costumes and are shown, one by one, being locked in their small cells. Caesar must die! (2011) is a record of auditions, rehearsals, and some moments from the actual stage production -- the film, directed by the Taviani brothers, seems to be partly documentary with some sequences obviously, although effectively, staged. The Taviani brothers have shown an inclination toward silent movies: their film about Italian craftsmen working on Griffith's Intolerance, Good Morning Babylon (1987) -- is a noteworthy example. Their grave and ennobling approach to the prisoners performing Julius Caesar may seem primitive to some audiences: they eschew any sort of rapid cutting and their use of montage is schematic: they tend to repeat the same scene over and over again, simply showing different actors going through their paces. (In the thematically central sequence in which the prisoners are locked back in their cells, we see each man ushered into his cell by a guard, the shots all identically staged with the same camera position, lighting, duration, and action -- the repetition heightens the effect of imprisonment.) Characters are introduced by medium shots with the figure facing the camera and speaking to it. Titles are copiously used to provide information, creating a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, and the staging tends toward carefully lit tableaux. The direction strives for maximum clarity within the shot and there is little analytical cutting or fragmentation of scenes into close-shots for effect. Scenes involving rehearsals, staged at various locations throughout the prison, are shot in black and white. The conceit is that the actual theater can not be used for rehearsals and the cast must make due with what is available to them -- in fact, the Taviani's stage most of the play in sequence at various locations in the prison that most effectively promote (and amplify) the meaning of the scenes that we see. The two famous orations by Brutus and Antony are delivered in a small prison courtyard with the inmates reacting to these speeches gathered behind cage-like windows in the barren walls of the prison yard. (Some of these sequences look a bit like Peter Brooks' famous imagery in Marat/Sade, a film clearly influential on the Taviani's approach to this movie.) Conspiracy scenes take place in narrow corridors and periodically the directors cut to a long shot of the grim-looking prison to remind us where the action is taking place. Many of the more intimate scenes are filmed as rehearsals, in the cells, with the actors ostensibly trying to memorize their lines and cell-mates periodically commenting or interrupting them. The film is remarkably ingenious in conveying the essence of the Shakespearian play with limited resources and, under the guise, that we are watching rehearsals -- indeed, in some of the most effective scenes the actors read their lines from the script. From time to time, the players get into fights and there are some chilling sequences in which the convicts try to intimidate one another or react so intensely to the material that they are performing that actual violence seems imminent. Shakespeare's majestic language smooths out the rough edges in Plutarch's stories. in his biographies, Plutarch's noble Romans always behave like Mafia capos and, of course, here many of the actors are, in fact, serving long terms for organized crime activities -- these guys aren't playing Mafiosi, they are real mobsters. The film is short -- only 77 minutes long and, of course, aspects of the play that involve Portia and Calpurnia can't be staged: there are no women in the jail and the Taviani's don't go so far as to require the convicts to perform in drag. (We see one actor lovingly stroking a seat in the auditorium and musing "Maybe a woman will sit here.") The acting is uniformly excellent, on the level with the very finest acting at the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Guthrie Theater. Shakespeare in translation and subtitled always seems muted -- the music of the language is lost. However, there is a certain frisson to seeing actual Romans (or Sicilians) performing Shakespeare -- the men often profess that they have a more profound understanding of the play because of their backgrounds. One man cries out: "This Shakespeare, he must have known the street where I grew up." Another man, an impressive fellow who plays Caesar, is shown reading De bello Gallica and marveling at Caesar's genius. The film's high concept is utterly true to Shakespeare's play -- the conspirators plot and kill in the name of freedom, but history reminds us that their actions only inspire the rise of the cold and authoritarian Octavian -- they have killed one aspirant to the throne only to assure that another more ruthless emperor will seize power. This theme creates enormous resonance in the images of the actors being locked up in their cells after the success of the play. Nothing, ultimately, was accomplished -- liberty was lost any way. And, indeed, the film suggests a level of tragedy that exceeds Shakespeare's play -- one of the actors ruefully says (it's the films last line): "Now that I have experienced art, I truly know that this room is a cell" -- in other words, art doesn't liberate anyone: it just makes us more keenly aware of our imprisonment.
Saturday, October 27, 2018
First Man
I was fourteen in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. On the day after watching the televised moon-walk, I recall riding my bicycle as fast as I could around all the familiar streets in my neighborhood. (I have one visual memory of bright sunlight and cresting a hill on my bike and, ahead of me, the neighborhood was spread out along the steep slopes where our residential streets overlooked an old, abandoned gravel pit.) I felt a wild, electric exhilaration. If I had thought about growing old and the unknown years ahead of me, I would have thought that a dramatization of the moon-landing made as a movie in the year 2018 would most likely have been filmed on location, near one of the thriving moon-bases in the Sea of Tranquility. Of course, we all turned away from outer space and, I think, there is a trace of that failure of nerve or imagination or whatever you want to call it in Damien Chazelle's epic about the first moon-shot, First Man (2018).
First Man demonstrates how a powerful and heroic subject can triumph over a willfully perverse approach to that material. Despite myself, I found First Man terrifically moving and, although, of course, I knew the story, not only gripping but occasionally suspenseful. Ryan Gosling plays the part of Neil Armstrong, delivering a performance that is hermetically locked-in and understated to the point of almost vanishing -- apparently, Gosling's self-contained and laconic acting is an accurate account of what Armstrong was like, but, from the outset, the film feels a little crippled by the hero's emotional incapacity; the astronaut is a complete cipher -- except for one scene in which he weeps briefly over his little daughter's death, Armstrong never gets angry, shows no fear, and earnestly avoids saying anything that could be construed as witty or, even, meaningful. Despite it's epic subject, the film is intentionally ugly -- at least, half the shots are filmed with a handheld camera: everything looks wobbly and improvised. There are far too many close-ups particularly since the astronauts are, more or less, inexpressive, particularly the hero. Furthermore, almost all of the terrestrial sequences are dimly lit -- everything is bathed in shadow. We see fragments of faces and the interiors of suburban homes feature little pools of light where people huddle in the Rembrandt-brown gloom. (As Dolly Parton famously observed, it takes a lot of money to look this cheap -- the low-key darkness in many scenes is the result of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of very high-tech and carefully manipulated lighting.) The film is written like a documentary -- we see Armstrong piloting an X-15 into outer space and, almost, burning up when he re-enters the atmosphere. His daughter dies in a series of tasteful, oblique, and moving scenes. Then, he is selected for the space program, trained to be an astronaut, and, shot into space, on a mission to dock his two-man capsule with a floating space station, the Aegina. This mission almost results in his death -- the capsule goes into a barrel-roll and both astronauts almost pass out before somehow the problem is corrected. (There is a lot of jargon uttered on radio transmissions and innumerable shots of instrument panels displaying God knows what -- the film makes very little effort to explain any of the technical issues at stake in the space travel scenes.) There is a calamity when, during a test, three astronauts are burned to death in a sealed space capsule (it's an electrical fire). Chief among the dead is Gus Grissom who was one of Armstrong's closest friends. We get glimpses of anti-war protests and TV shots of Vietnam. Kurt Vonnegut says that he thinks that the money devoted to the space program should be used to make New York City more livable while the bespectacled Arthur C. Clarke looks on bemused. Armstrong is almost killed when a lunar landing simulator crashes. Then, he is shot into space with the abrasive Buzz Aldrin. He and Aldrin land on the moon, walk about a little bit, and, then, return to earth. In the last scene, which is silent, Armstrong and his wife look at one another through a glass window -- he is in quarantine for fear that he will bring moon-germs to earth. They gesture at one another but don't know what to say -- the scene is desperately sad: Armstrong is shown to be a prisoner of his own majestic and impenetrable reserve -- he is like someone serving hard time in jail and can't be reached, even by his longsuffering wife. It's a curiously depressive ending and, in keeping with the anti-triumphal rendering of the moon landing itself. While walking on the moon, Armstrong recalls family outings with his daughter who died when she was a mere toddler. We see verdant landscapes full of sun and green shadow and these images are intercut with the barren, abstract desolation of the moon -- the moon is a vast expanse of grey dust, a kind of awful, lonely void that seems to epitomize Armstrong's eerie imperturbability and his frightening aloofness. The sweet, wet, green, muddy world, shown in impressionistic landscapes, is where everything that matters to us is to be found. There's nothing in outer space but the risk of a lonely and terrible death and a great emptiness. The moon is shown to be a horrible place and, by his direction, Chazelle suggests that the terrible void of the moon is, somehow, akin to the darkness of the grave that has stolen away Armstrong's little daughter and frozen his emotions. Why didn't we return to the moon? Because, the film suggests, there was nothing there but a kind of nihilistic, awful loneliness. I have many reservations about this film and am critical of the showy nonchalance (all the jerky camera movements and unnecessary close-ups) with which the movie is made -- this nonchalance is all completely contrived. I assume a production like this was story-boarded to within an inch of its life. But the film's grandiose subject and its awesome images of space travel overcome the film's questionable mise-en-scene. (There's one scene that rings completely false -- Armstrong is packing and doesn't want to see his boys before he leaves because he's afraid he may not be coming back. A man of Armstrong's generation would never have packed his own bags -- that's what wives were for. And his wife, irritated at him, uses a profanity in great currency today but which would never have been uttered by a prim housewife in 1969). Chazelle's earlier film with Gosling, LaLa Land was a movie musical that was also borderline nihilistic in its weird tone of despair and regret. Curiously, First Man and LaLa Land share a deep melancholy that seems quite at odds with their subjects. But both films are estimable projects and First Man is very exciting from beginning to end.
First Man demonstrates how a powerful and heroic subject can triumph over a willfully perverse approach to that material. Despite myself, I found First Man terrifically moving and, although, of course, I knew the story, not only gripping but occasionally suspenseful. Ryan Gosling plays the part of Neil Armstrong, delivering a performance that is hermetically locked-in and understated to the point of almost vanishing -- apparently, Gosling's self-contained and laconic acting is an accurate account of what Armstrong was like, but, from the outset, the film feels a little crippled by the hero's emotional incapacity; the astronaut is a complete cipher -- except for one scene in which he weeps briefly over his little daughter's death, Armstrong never gets angry, shows no fear, and earnestly avoids saying anything that could be construed as witty or, even, meaningful. Despite it's epic subject, the film is intentionally ugly -- at least, half the shots are filmed with a handheld camera: everything looks wobbly and improvised. There are far too many close-ups particularly since the astronauts are, more or less, inexpressive, particularly the hero. Furthermore, almost all of the terrestrial sequences are dimly lit -- everything is bathed in shadow. We see fragments of faces and the interiors of suburban homes feature little pools of light where people huddle in the Rembrandt-brown gloom. (As Dolly Parton famously observed, it takes a lot of money to look this cheap -- the low-key darkness in many scenes is the result of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of very high-tech and carefully manipulated lighting.) The film is written like a documentary -- we see Armstrong piloting an X-15 into outer space and, almost, burning up when he re-enters the atmosphere. His daughter dies in a series of tasteful, oblique, and moving scenes. Then, he is selected for the space program, trained to be an astronaut, and, shot into space, on a mission to dock his two-man capsule with a floating space station, the Aegina. This mission almost results in his death -- the capsule goes into a barrel-roll and both astronauts almost pass out before somehow the problem is corrected. (There is a lot of jargon uttered on radio transmissions and innumerable shots of instrument panels displaying God knows what -- the film makes very little effort to explain any of the technical issues at stake in the space travel scenes.) There is a calamity when, during a test, three astronauts are burned to death in a sealed space capsule (it's an electrical fire). Chief among the dead is Gus Grissom who was one of Armstrong's closest friends. We get glimpses of anti-war protests and TV shots of Vietnam. Kurt Vonnegut says that he thinks that the money devoted to the space program should be used to make New York City more livable while the bespectacled Arthur C. Clarke looks on bemused. Armstrong is almost killed when a lunar landing simulator crashes. Then, he is shot into space with the abrasive Buzz Aldrin. He and Aldrin land on the moon, walk about a little bit, and, then, return to earth. In the last scene, which is silent, Armstrong and his wife look at one another through a glass window -- he is in quarantine for fear that he will bring moon-germs to earth. They gesture at one another but don't know what to say -- the scene is desperately sad: Armstrong is shown to be a prisoner of his own majestic and impenetrable reserve -- he is like someone serving hard time in jail and can't be reached, even by his longsuffering wife. It's a curiously depressive ending and, in keeping with the anti-triumphal rendering of the moon landing itself. While walking on the moon, Armstrong recalls family outings with his daughter who died when she was a mere toddler. We see verdant landscapes full of sun and green shadow and these images are intercut with the barren, abstract desolation of the moon -- the moon is a vast expanse of grey dust, a kind of awful, lonely void that seems to epitomize Armstrong's eerie imperturbability and his frightening aloofness. The sweet, wet, green, muddy world, shown in impressionistic landscapes, is where everything that matters to us is to be found. There's nothing in outer space but the risk of a lonely and terrible death and a great emptiness. The moon is shown to be a horrible place and, by his direction, Chazelle suggests that the terrible void of the moon is, somehow, akin to the darkness of the grave that has stolen away Armstrong's little daughter and frozen his emotions. Why didn't we return to the moon? Because, the film suggests, there was nothing there but a kind of nihilistic, awful loneliness. I have many reservations about this film and am critical of the showy nonchalance (all the jerky camera movements and unnecessary close-ups) with which the movie is made -- this nonchalance is all completely contrived. I assume a production like this was story-boarded to within an inch of its life. But the film's grandiose subject and its awesome images of space travel overcome the film's questionable mise-en-scene. (There's one scene that rings completely false -- Armstrong is packing and doesn't want to see his boys before he leaves because he's afraid he may not be coming back. A man of Armstrong's generation would never have packed his own bags -- that's what wives were for. And his wife, irritated at him, uses a profanity in great currency today but which would never have been uttered by a prim housewife in 1969). Chazelle's earlier film with Gosling, LaLa Land was a movie musical that was also borderline nihilistic in its weird tone of despair and regret. Curiously, First Man and LaLa Land share a deep melancholy that seems quite at odds with their subjects. But both films are estimable projects and First Man is very exciting from beginning to end.
Sunday, October 21, 2018
Hold the Dark
In the 19th century, novelists built plots around character and social interaction -- a conventional novel showed men and women demonstrating character traits against the backdrop of a well-defined social milieu. Characters in literature had children and parents, siblings, friends, associates, bosses, servants, and enemies. Actions were embedded in society and represented alternative approaches to dealing with roles assigned by that society. Around 1900, some novels, although ostensibly realistic, featured set-pieces, that is, episodes that stood just a little to the side of social norms and that were intended to symbolize or dramatize otherwise abstract issues and, also, provide a modicum of excitement and, even, commercially viable, thrills. These novels are precursors to the movies. The greatest book that is a precursor to the early movies is Frank Norris' The Octopus -- in that novel, Norris devises shoot-outs and train chases as well as a climactic banquet intercut with poor people starving on the street to illustrate the philosophical and historical propositions that his book advances. The plot becomes a framework from which to suspend picturesque confrontations, elaborate depictions of parties and social events (the "rabbit drive" and Annixter's barn-raising party), and scenes of violence. The plot is still primary and the dramatic incidents illustrating the narrative remain secondary. But, as time, advances, films, in particular, seem to develop in the direction of preferring the bravura set-piece episodes to the narrative itself. Apocalypse Now is an excellent example -- there is a plot and, by recent standards, it is reasonably well-developed but what people recall about the movie is elaborate visual arias: the helicopter attack or the bridge under attack illumined with psychedelic Christmas tree lights. Jeremy Saulnier's Hold the Dark (Netflix 2018) is an example of a film that is, in effect, post-narrative. There seems to be a plot, but, in fact, upon any kind of logical analysis, there is no story at all -- there are situations, highly choreographed episodes of ultra-violence, stunning landscapes, and an overall atmosphere of utter despair, but no narrative emerges from anything. Indeed, the film is resolutely anti-narrative -- it doesn't provide any motivations sufficient for the carnage that we display. In Hold the Dark, we get all the mayhem and violence but without any backstory that would make what we see meaningful. I have no idea what this impressive, but ultimately futile, film is supposed to be about.
In one typically enigmatic sequence, a grieving mother, driven to distraction because wolves have seized her child, tells the protagonist, Ronald Kor (Jeremy Wright) that "the sky is strange." At the end of the movie, after about sixty homicides, the same woman stands over the severely wounded Kor and says: "Do you see what I meant when I said the 'the sky is strange'?" Is this some sort of taunt? Obviously, the bloodied Kor has no idea what she means and neither does the viewer. "The sky is strange" -- how? in what respect? why? is this a fantasy or some kind of meteorological observation or a metaphor that we can't decipher? The film doesn't explicate and we don't know. And this is characteristic of the whole enterprise.
Kor is a wolf researcher who seems to have written a book about spending time with a wolf pack. (We don't know anything about the book except that it exists -- the grieving mother asserts that Kor killed a wolf once. But we know nothing about this either.) Medora Sloane, the mother of the missing child, scribbles a letter to the writer, a civilized, unassuming man, asking him to come to Keelut, a tiny Alaskan town where three children have been seized (supposedly) by wolves. Kor is estranged from his daughter (why?) and she works in Anchorage (why?). He decides to visit her and this becomes, it seems, his rationale for going to Keelut. Later in the film, there is some gibberish about Kor being required as a "witness" -- but the film doesn't establish what Kor is supposed to be "witnessing" or why it is important to have someone see the horrors that he beholds. And, if a witness is needed, how come the villagers so assiduously work to eliminate all others who could attest to their bizarre behavior.
Keelut is in the back of the beyond, a sinister assemblage of shacks in the middle of a huge forest over which great snow-capped mountains loom. (It's actually the Canadian Rockies around Banff). Most of the people seem to be Native-Americans and, possibly, witches or shape-shifters, "skin-walkers." In the town, everyone speaks in portentous whispers and most of what they say is totally enigmatic -- like malevolent fortunes in a Chinese fortune cookie. Just as we are getting used to the bad vibes in Keelut, Saulnier cuts away to some more horrific stuff: people being blown apart and burned to death in Fallujah where Vernon Sloane, Medora's husband, is blithely killing folks with a huge, high caliber machine-gun mounted on a tank or hum-vee. There's a totally gratuitous rape scene in which Vernon knifes another soldier, possibly a GI although we don't know for sure, and, then, helpfully leaves the blade with the victim so she can torture the disabled bad guy. It turns out that the little boy missing in Keelut is in the basement, apparently strangled by his completely depressed mother. (She greets Kor, her alleged savior, with a barrage of whispered insults, then, takes a bath muttering various bizarre and unsettling incantations -- wearing a Yupik mask, she then comes naked (except for the wooden mask) to bed and hops in with Kor, a fellow who seems so terminally morose that this just adds to his despair.) Vernon Sloane, badly wounded in Fallujah (Saulnier likes neck wounds that rhythmically spurt black blood) returns to Alaska. For some reason, he starts murdering everyone. He kills a couple cops and the coroner and steals his son's corpse which he hides in a small wooden box buried in a snow bank. One of the guys that he shoots in the face is killed, apparently, because he speculated that Medora has been suffering from "post-partum that can go on for years." In this film, if you try to figure out an explanation for what is happening, someone is liable to reward you with a bullet in the mouth. The cops hunt for Sloane. They go to Keelut where one of Sloane's buddies, an Indian named something like Cheeon, unveils a huge machine gun, similar to the weapon used by Sloane in Fallujah, and shoots to pieces about a dozen cops. The machine gun battle which is completely unmotivated goes on for about ten minutes -- it's very loud and bloody. Sloane goes to an abandoned mine where he gratuitously kills another man, then, locates an old friend to remove some buckshot in his shoulder -- an old lady at the mine wearing pop-bottle bottom glasses has shot him. After the buckshot is removed, Sloane rewards his buddy by donning a Yupik wooden mask of a wolf and killing that man. With the sheriff, poor Kor flies to a remote canyon where there is a hot spring in a cave. ("You can get really clean there," Medora has told him.) Vernon Sloane is lurking around in his wolf mask and he systematically hunts down the sheriff and Kor. Kor gets badly wounded but is left alive to witness the encounter between Vernon and his wife, the murderous Medora. Medora yanks off Sloane's homicide face, the wolf mask, and they apparently reconcile. Kor crawls through the snow while, in the penultimate scene, we see Medora and Vernon tramping through the snow pulling the little boy's pine casket behind them. Kor's daughter sees him in the hospital and, on this note, the film ends.
Simply put, there is no motivation for anything that we see in the movie. We have no idea why Medora killed her son. We can make various surmises but none of them are confirmed by the film's anti-narrative. (Did she want to get Vernon back from the war by the expedient of making his little boy vanish? Who knows?) There is absolutely no justification for Vernon's killing spree other than the fact that he is wearing a wolf-mask. No explanation is given for the showy machine gun battle with the dozen casualties in Keeluk. At one point, wolves are seen tearing apart a cub -- they are "savaging" the cub because resources are scarce. But what this has to do with the rest of the plot (or anti-plot) is unclear. Where are Vernon and Medora going at the end of the film? Why are they dragging the casket behind them? Is the white-haired Indian woman who cares for the wounded Kor at the film's ending a wolf? If so, why? Are other characters supposed to be wolves? Why is Kor estranged from his daughter? At one point, a sinister-looking Native witch woman notes that Keelut has been cursed from the start -- the "influenza" killed many of the people living there 70 years earlier and the corpses were put in "snow igloos", but wolves came and tore the corpses apart so that "there was nothing to bury." But what is this story supposed to mean? It's all darkness, doom and gloom, but we have no idea why people are doing the gruesome things we see. In a laudatory article in Film Comment, the reviewer praises the film's relentlessly depressive tone. But the reviewer entirely ignores whole sequences in the movie, apparently unable to figure them out -- for instance, the utterly pointless sequence where Vernon goes to an abandoned mine, confronts the spectral people there, and kills one of them. What is that sequence supposed to mean? The reviewer praises the machine gun fight as state-of-the-art violence, but he doesn't explain what the movie is supposed to be about or, even, if it is about anything at all. Saulnier is certainly immensely talented when it comes to violence and creating an atmosphere of lurking horror (although he borrows from other filmmakers -- some of the scenes of Kor coming to Keelut are cribbed from Kubrick's The Shining minus the "Dies Irae" music which wouldn't be out of place in this venture). But he's too lazy to figure out what the spectacular set-pieces that he orchestrates are supposed to mean. The film isn't only baffling, it's meanings are intentionally obfuscated -- but to what effect? Why?
In one typically enigmatic sequence, a grieving mother, driven to distraction because wolves have seized her child, tells the protagonist, Ronald Kor (Jeremy Wright) that "the sky is strange." At the end of the movie, after about sixty homicides, the same woman stands over the severely wounded Kor and says: "Do you see what I meant when I said the 'the sky is strange'?" Is this some sort of taunt? Obviously, the bloodied Kor has no idea what she means and neither does the viewer. "The sky is strange" -- how? in what respect? why? is this a fantasy or some kind of meteorological observation or a metaphor that we can't decipher? The film doesn't explicate and we don't know. And this is characteristic of the whole enterprise.
Kor is a wolf researcher who seems to have written a book about spending time with a wolf pack. (We don't know anything about the book except that it exists -- the grieving mother asserts that Kor killed a wolf once. But we know nothing about this either.) Medora Sloane, the mother of the missing child, scribbles a letter to the writer, a civilized, unassuming man, asking him to come to Keelut, a tiny Alaskan town where three children have been seized (supposedly) by wolves. Kor is estranged from his daughter (why?) and she works in Anchorage (why?). He decides to visit her and this becomes, it seems, his rationale for going to Keelut. Later in the film, there is some gibberish about Kor being required as a "witness" -- but the film doesn't establish what Kor is supposed to be "witnessing" or why it is important to have someone see the horrors that he beholds. And, if a witness is needed, how come the villagers so assiduously work to eliminate all others who could attest to their bizarre behavior.
Keelut is in the back of the beyond, a sinister assemblage of shacks in the middle of a huge forest over which great snow-capped mountains loom. (It's actually the Canadian Rockies around Banff). Most of the people seem to be Native-Americans and, possibly, witches or shape-shifters, "skin-walkers." In the town, everyone speaks in portentous whispers and most of what they say is totally enigmatic -- like malevolent fortunes in a Chinese fortune cookie. Just as we are getting used to the bad vibes in Keelut, Saulnier cuts away to some more horrific stuff: people being blown apart and burned to death in Fallujah where Vernon Sloane, Medora's husband, is blithely killing folks with a huge, high caliber machine-gun mounted on a tank or hum-vee. There's a totally gratuitous rape scene in which Vernon knifes another soldier, possibly a GI although we don't know for sure, and, then, helpfully leaves the blade with the victim so she can torture the disabled bad guy. It turns out that the little boy missing in Keelut is in the basement, apparently strangled by his completely depressed mother. (She greets Kor, her alleged savior, with a barrage of whispered insults, then, takes a bath muttering various bizarre and unsettling incantations -- wearing a Yupik mask, she then comes naked (except for the wooden mask) to bed and hops in with Kor, a fellow who seems so terminally morose that this just adds to his despair.) Vernon Sloane, badly wounded in Fallujah (Saulnier likes neck wounds that rhythmically spurt black blood) returns to Alaska. For some reason, he starts murdering everyone. He kills a couple cops and the coroner and steals his son's corpse which he hides in a small wooden box buried in a snow bank. One of the guys that he shoots in the face is killed, apparently, because he speculated that Medora has been suffering from "post-partum that can go on for years." In this film, if you try to figure out an explanation for what is happening, someone is liable to reward you with a bullet in the mouth. The cops hunt for Sloane. They go to Keelut where one of Sloane's buddies, an Indian named something like Cheeon, unveils a huge machine gun, similar to the weapon used by Sloane in Fallujah, and shoots to pieces about a dozen cops. The machine gun battle which is completely unmotivated goes on for about ten minutes -- it's very loud and bloody. Sloane goes to an abandoned mine where he gratuitously kills another man, then, locates an old friend to remove some buckshot in his shoulder -- an old lady at the mine wearing pop-bottle bottom glasses has shot him. After the buckshot is removed, Sloane rewards his buddy by donning a Yupik wooden mask of a wolf and killing that man. With the sheriff, poor Kor flies to a remote canyon where there is a hot spring in a cave. ("You can get really clean there," Medora has told him.) Vernon Sloane is lurking around in his wolf mask and he systematically hunts down the sheriff and Kor. Kor gets badly wounded but is left alive to witness the encounter between Vernon and his wife, the murderous Medora. Medora yanks off Sloane's homicide face, the wolf mask, and they apparently reconcile. Kor crawls through the snow while, in the penultimate scene, we see Medora and Vernon tramping through the snow pulling the little boy's pine casket behind them. Kor's daughter sees him in the hospital and, on this note, the film ends.
Simply put, there is no motivation for anything that we see in the movie. We have no idea why Medora killed her son. We can make various surmises but none of them are confirmed by the film's anti-narrative. (Did she want to get Vernon back from the war by the expedient of making his little boy vanish? Who knows?) There is absolutely no justification for Vernon's killing spree other than the fact that he is wearing a wolf-mask. No explanation is given for the showy machine gun battle with the dozen casualties in Keeluk. At one point, wolves are seen tearing apart a cub -- they are "savaging" the cub because resources are scarce. But what this has to do with the rest of the plot (or anti-plot) is unclear. Where are Vernon and Medora going at the end of the film? Why are they dragging the casket behind them? Is the white-haired Indian woman who cares for the wounded Kor at the film's ending a wolf? If so, why? Are other characters supposed to be wolves? Why is Kor estranged from his daughter? At one point, a sinister-looking Native witch woman notes that Keelut has been cursed from the start -- the "influenza" killed many of the people living there 70 years earlier and the corpses were put in "snow igloos", but wolves came and tore the corpses apart so that "there was nothing to bury." But what is this story supposed to mean? It's all darkness, doom and gloom, but we have no idea why people are doing the gruesome things we see. In a laudatory article in Film Comment, the reviewer praises the film's relentlessly depressive tone. But the reviewer entirely ignores whole sequences in the movie, apparently unable to figure them out -- for instance, the utterly pointless sequence where Vernon goes to an abandoned mine, confronts the spectral people there, and kills one of them. What is that sequence supposed to mean? The reviewer praises the machine gun fight as state-of-the-art violence, but he doesn't explain what the movie is supposed to be about or, even, if it is about anything at all. Saulnier is certainly immensely talented when it comes to violence and creating an atmosphere of lurking horror (although he borrows from other filmmakers -- some of the scenes of Kor coming to Keelut are cribbed from Kubrick's The Shining minus the "Dies Irae" music which wouldn't be out of place in this venture). But he's too lazy to figure out what the spectacular set-pieces that he orchestrates are supposed to mean. The film isn't only baffling, it's meanings are intentionally obfuscated -- but to what effect? Why?
Saturday, October 20, 2018
The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez
Robert Young's Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1981 - 1983) is a film that is much better than it looks. In fact, the picture is a masterpiece but, because of its rebarbative Modernist structure, the movie is very hard to appreciate. The greatest films are both beautiful and profound. The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez is profound but, intentionally, eschews beauty -- it's Brechtian and invites thought, but never draws you into an uncritical identification with its characters or with its ostensible genre, the chase Western. I misunderstood most of the film on first viewing -- that's another difficulty with the movie: the revelation of a plot point that motivates much of the movie is withheld until the film's last twenty minutes. With that "reveal" in mind, the viewer really needs to see the movie a second time. This was impossible in theaters and, so, the movie failed in that venue. It has taken re-issue of the film by Criterion for viewers to fully appreciate the complex narrative strategy and symbolism that the picture only gradually, and, as it were under duress, reveals.
In simplest analysis, the film's story can be told in a few words: A Mexican-American, Cortez, shoots a sheriff and is pursued by armies of Texas Rangers; the lone horseman is finally captured and put on trial for murder -- he is convicted, but, later, the conviction is reversed and there are more trials, many years of imprisonment, and, then, Cortez is pardoned. Two-thirds of the film is devoted to the chase; the last third of the film reveals motivations and argues the facts in the trial scenes. (The structure, as has been often noted, is a bit like The Man who shot Liberty Valence -- a climactic trial reveals what the rest of the film means.) The theme of the movie is revealed late in the film. All of the bloody mayhem shown by the film is the result of the mistranslation of a single Spanish word -- therefore, the film is about communication and misunderstanding. In an opening sequence, we see Gregorio Cortez on horseback riding through the scrub with a posse chasing him -- the sequence is shot perversely in the darkness: the sun isn't just setting, but it has already set and the edges of the images are rimmed in red with tomato-colored flares on the lenses. The scene looks strange and isn't even remotely exciting because we can barely see what is happening. But this is thematic -- the movie is metaphorically about the darkness of misunderstanding and, so, the images of people chasing each other in the night, that is, unable to see one another clearly, is crucial to the movie's symbolism. The problem is that we don't know this until we have seen the whole film. Another sequence will suffice to illustrate the interpretive problems the movie presents: a Texas Ranger, the man leading the hunt, is talking on a primitive telephone (the film is set in 1901 in West Texas). The scene goes on and on with the Ranger shouting into the phone and unable to make himself understood. The viewer gets irritated -- what is the point of a scene illustrating the deficiencies of turn-of-the-20th century telephones? But, later, we learn that the whole film turns on a miscommunication -- the old "telephone" game played between languages. With one startling exception, the movie withholds from the viewer the standard pleasures of a Western -- there seem to be too many close-ups and the camera is often placed in a position that is uncommunicative. The gunfights are chaotic affairs with people swinging their guns as they shoot like clubs, seemingly forgetting that the weapon is a firearm, and everyone is killed at close-range in brawls that don't make any sense. The film shows little sense of topography -- although with one great exception. When Cortez is trapped in a box canyon, he simply escapes off-screen -- we don't know how he accomplishes this act: this sort of derring-do is not what interests the film-maker and, so, he blithely avoids staging what would be an exciting sequence in most movies. As a Spanish-speaking peasant, Cortez is invisible unless a posse is chasing him -- he waters his horse at a Hill Country pond while other cowboys simply ignore him. In one surprising scene, Cortez goes into a café and eats lunch while the place is crowded with Texas Rangers who have just been chasing him -- they don't know what he looks like and Mexicans literally "can't be seen" unless they are criminals. There is a annoyingly long sequence in which Cortez eats with a cowhand who has been riding fences for two months. The Anglo cow-hand is desperately lonely and talks to Cortez for what purports to be hours, knowing full well that Cortez has no idea what he is saying -- this is also thematic, although the viewer doesn't know it when the scene actually plays. In the chase scenes, the pursuing posse usually seem so close to Cortez that it is unimaginable that they would not catch him -- the viewer first curses the director ("this man doesn't even know how to stage a horse chase") but, then, grasps, at last, that the horse chases aren't the point of the movie: they are just punctuation. And, as I will note below, when he wants a horse chase to excite the viewer, Young stages one of the greatest episodes of this kind in the history of the Western. The trial scenes are under-dramatized, basically forums for the kind of florid oratory that lawyers favored 120 years ago -- they are realistic but not exciting or suspenseful. Young's point is that Cortez story is instantly converted into something other than the bare facts -- it becomes a springboard for Ciceronian rhetoric in the court room, it sells newspaper as journalism, and, most importantly, it becomes the basis of a border ballad, a corrido that is still sung today and that we see performed in a makeshift theater where Mexicans are raising money for Cortez' defense. Facts are never just the facts -- they are politicized, sensationalized, and, ultimately, turned into mythology.
In the supplemental material on the disc, Edward James Olmos, the Chicano star who was instrumental in getting this picture produced, repeatedly says that the movie is the movie was stated to be "the most authentic historical picture ever produced" by the American Historical Society. But every narrative strategy in the film cuts against this perception -- in fact, the film feels hyper-modern, cubist, a bit like Rossellini's late didactic films or Antonioni's Blow Up. Lens flares are ubiquitous, always reminding the viewer that there is a camera between us and what the film shows. The movie has a complicated structure of flashbacks, sometimes, the same scene shown from two different perspectives, and the narrative is not chronological but choppy with cuts back and forth between different time-frames. The editing is confusing -- this seems to me to be an unintentional defect and, on first watching the film, my main note to myself was that I couldn't understand the obstructive nature of the editing. The soundtrack is Vangelis-style techno-pop that seems jarring, particularly since the movie is ostensibly based on a folk ballad. Camera set-ups are intentionally uncommunicative. Often the film looks ugly -- it was shot on 16 mm in natural light and scenes are either too dark or too bright. (The movie was made for what we would call PBS today, shown 17 times on TV, and, then, basically shelved after it failed with test audiences at the box office; the picture was also financed by Redford's Sundance Institute, one of the first movies to be sponsored by that organization, and, paid for, in part, as well, by La Raza. One of the places where the film was shot was Chama, New Mexico, the site of a Gregorio Cortez-style manhunt that almost erupted into Civil War between the Anglos and the Latinos in the late sixties -- that manhunt also arose from the shooting of a sheriff and his deputy at a courthouse. It's not clear to me what happened when scenes were shot at Chama, only a decade after the big gunfights in that area -- whatever occurred Olmos and the others choose not to talk about this.) A commitment to shooting on actual locations requires the filmmakers to make perverse choices in the jail and trial scenes -- it's too dark in many of these shots and the space makes no sense: there seems to be a gallows in the jail (and there was in fact) but the camera angles don't ever really show you the environment presumably because it was too tight to put a camera anywhere to survey the scene. Most radically, the Spanish in the movie is not translated -- we don't see an interpreter until the film is almost over. Young doesn't give us any subtitles and, so, when the characters speak in Spanish we can only guess what they are saying -- again, this is powerfully thematic since the film's theme is miscommunication across the language barrier. But one can imagine the confusion that the film caused when it was first shown -- it seems that the first and most enthusiastic audiences to embrace the film were bilingual Chicanos who saw the movie in theaters at free screenings hosted by La Raza when the picture was first completed.) In another riff on the theme of miscommunication, Young stages a scene with the victorious Texas Rangers drinking toasts to their capture of Cortez -- he uses Altman style overlapping dialogue, so densely mixed that we can't really hear what any of the men are saying -- it's just a mumble of syllables, a modernist device for making even English, the majority audience's home tongue, seem incomprehensible. Some parts of the movie just don't make sense: we see Cortez gazing down at the Rio Grande and know that he is within a few hundred yards of escaping into Mexico. But in the next scene he is huddled in tiny shack at the bottom of a deep hollow and surrounded by Texas Rangers -- he is captured without a shot being fired, a deliberate and audience-unfriendly anti-climax. (For my taste, Olmos is too pathetic in some scenes -- he has big Bill Keane eyes and looks like a wounded bird and he is always kissing or hugging his horse in an endearing way: these latter gestures, however, are also realistic; everyone agrees that Cortez is a consummate horseman and, in fact, his skill with these animals is what keeps him ahead of the armies of Texas Rangers chasing him.)
In short, the film's apparent deficiencies, except, I think, the bad editing, are all thematic. In one scene, a herd of Texas Rangers chases Cortez to a high ridge. From atop the ridge, Cortez can see a train steaming forward and the entire shimmering plain blocked by skirmish lines of riders charging uphill toward him. Cortez drives his horse down the steep hill, riding right at the approaching horsemen -- then, he turns sharply and rides along the front of their approaching column while the air puffs and smokes with pistol and rifle shots. The men on the train start shooting at Cortez and his galloping horse as well. Cortez outruns the train locomotive in a welter of Soviet-style montage (the horse's legs rhythmically intercut with the train engineers shoveling coal into the locomotive's fiery maw) and, then, crossing the tracks, speeds under a high railroad trestle, galloping through the shadows cast by the engine and its cars as the train crosses the bridge. This is one of the most thrilling and brilliantly choreographed action sequences ever filmed and shows what Young could do if action for action's sake interested him.
In simplest analysis, the film's story can be told in a few words: A Mexican-American, Cortez, shoots a sheriff and is pursued by armies of Texas Rangers; the lone horseman is finally captured and put on trial for murder -- he is convicted, but, later, the conviction is reversed and there are more trials, many years of imprisonment, and, then, Cortez is pardoned. Two-thirds of the film is devoted to the chase; the last third of the film reveals motivations and argues the facts in the trial scenes. (The structure, as has been often noted, is a bit like The Man who shot Liberty Valence -- a climactic trial reveals what the rest of the film means.) The theme of the movie is revealed late in the film. All of the bloody mayhem shown by the film is the result of the mistranslation of a single Spanish word -- therefore, the film is about communication and misunderstanding. In an opening sequence, we see Gregorio Cortez on horseback riding through the scrub with a posse chasing him -- the sequence is shot perversely in the darkness: the sun isn't just setting, but it has already set and the edges of the images are rimmed in red with tomato-colored flares on the lenses. The scene looks strange and isn't even remotely exciting because we can barely see what is happening. But this is thematic -- the movie is metaphorically about the darkness of misunderstanding and, so, the images of people chasing each other in the night, that is, unable to see one another clearly, is crucial to the movie's symbolism. The problem is that we don't know this until we have seen the whole film. Another sequence will suffice to illustrate the interpretive problems the movie presents: a Texas Ranger, the man leading the hunt, is talking on a primitive telephone (the film is set in 1901 in West Texas). The scene goes on and on with the Ranger shouting into the phone and unable to make himself understood. The viewer gets irritated -- what is the point of a scene illustrating the deficiencies of turn-of-the-20th century telephones? But, later, we learn that the whole film turns on a miscommunication -- the old "telephone" game played between languages. With one startling exception, the movie withholds from the viewer the standard pleasures of a Western -- there seem to be too many close-ups and the camera is often placed in a position that is uncommunicative. The gunfights are chaotic affairs with people swinging their guns as they shoot like clubs, seemingly forgetting that the weapon is a firearm, and everyone is killed at close-range in brawls that don't make any sense. The film shows little sense of topography -- although with one great exception. When Cortez is trapped in a box canyon, he simply escapes off-screen -- we don't know how he accomplishes this act: this sort of derring-do is not what interests the film-maker and, so, he blithely avoids staging what would be an exciting sequence in most movies. As a Spanish-speaking peasant, Cortez is invisible unless a posse is chasing him -- he waters his horse at a Hill Country pond while other cowboys simply ignore him. In one surprising scene, Cortez goes into a café and eats lunch while the place is crowded with Texas Rangers who have just been chasing him -- they don't know what he looks like and Mexicans literally "can't be seen" unless they are criminals. There is a annoyingly long sequence in which Cortez eats with a cowhand who has been riding fences for two months. The Anglo cow-hand is desperately lonely and talks to Cortez for what purports to be hours, knowing full well that Cortez has no idea what he is saying -- this is also thematic, although the viewer doesn't know it when the scene actually plays. In the chase scenes, the pursuing posse usually seem so close to Cortez that it is unimaginable that they would not catch him -- the viewer first curses the director ("this man doesn't even know how to stage a horse chase") but, then, grasps, at last, that the horse chases aren't the point of the movie: they are just punctuation. And, as I will note below, when he wants a horse chase to excite the viewer, Young stages one of the greatest episodes of this kind in the history of the Western. The trial scenes are under-dramatized, basically forums for the kind of florid oratory that lawyers favored 120 years ago -- they are realistic but not exciting or suspenseful. Young's point is that Cortez story is instantly converted into something other than the bare facts -- it becomes a springboard for Ciceronian rhetoric in the court room, it sells newspaper as journalism, and, most importantly, it becomes the basis of a border ballad, a corrido that is still sung today and that we see performed in a makeshift theater where Mexicans are raising money for Cortez' defense. Facts are never just the facts -- they are politicized, sensationalized, and, ultimately, turned into mythology.
In the supplemental material on the disc, Edward James Olmos, the Chicano star who was instrumental in getting this picture produced, repeatedly says that the movie is the movie was stated to be "the most authentic historical picture ever produced" by the American Historical Society. But every narrative strategy in the film cuts against this perception -- in fact, the film feels hyper-modern, cubist, a bit like Rossellini's late didactic films or Antonioni's Blow Up. Lens flares are ubiquitous, always reminding the viewer that there is a camera between us and what the film shows. The movie has a complicated structure of flashbacks, sometimes, the same scene shown from two different perspectives, and the narrative is not chronological but choppy with cuts back and forth between different time-frames. The editing is confusing -- this seems to me to be an unintentional defect and, on first watching the film, my main note to myself was that I couldn't understand the obstructive nature of the editing. The soundtrack is Vangelis-style techno-pop that seems jarring, particularly since the movie is ostensibly based on a folk ballad. Camera set-ups are intentionally uncommunicative. Often the film looks ugly -- it was shot on 16 mm in natural light and scenes are either too dark or too bright. (The movie was made for what we would call PBS today, shown 17 times on TV, and, then, basically shelved after it failed with test audiences at the box office; the picture was also financed by Redford's Sundance Institute, one of the first movies to be sponsored by that organization, and, paid for, in part, as well, by La Raza. One of the places where the film was shot was Chama, New Mexico, the site of a Gregorio Cortez-style manhunt that almost erupted into Civil War between the Anglos and the Latinos in the late sixties -- that manhunt also arose from the shooting of a sheriff and his deputy at a courthouse. It's not clear to me what happened when scenes were shot at Chama, only a decade after the big gunfights in that area -- whatever occurred Olmos and the others choose not to talk about this.) A commitment to shooting on actual locations requires the filmmakers to make perverse choices in the jail and trial scenes -- it's too dark in many of these shots and the space makes no sense: there seems to be a gallows in the jail (and there was in fact) but the camera angles don't ever really show you the environment presumably because it was too tight to put a camera anywhere to survey the scene. Most radically, the Spanish in the movie is not translated -- we don't see an interpreter until the film is almost over. Young doesn't give us any subtitles and, so, when the characters speak in Spanish we can only guess what they are saying -- again, this is powerfully thematic since the film's theme is miscommunication across the language barrier. But one can imagine the confusion that the film caused when it was first shown -- it seems that the first and most enthusiastic audiences to embrace the film were bilingual Chicanos who saw the movie in theaters at free screenings hosted by La Raza when the picture was first completed.) In another riff on the theme of miscommunication, Young stages a scene with the victorious Texas Rangers drinking toasts to their capture of Cortez -- he uses Altman style overlapping dialogue, so densely mixed that we can't really hear what any of the men are saying -- it's just a mumble of syllables, a modernist device for making even English, the majority audience's home tongue, seem incomprehensible. Some parts of the movie just don't make sense: we see Cortez gazing down at the Rio Grande and know that he is within a few hundred yards of escaping into Mexico. But in the next scene he is huddled in tiny shack at the bottom of a deep hollow and surrounded by Texas Rangers -- he is captured without a shot being fired, a deliberate and audience-unfriendly anti-climax. (For my taste, Olmos is too pathetic in some scenes -- he has big Bill Keane eyes and looks like a wounded bird and he is always kissing or hugging his horse in an endearing way: these latter gestures, however, are also realistic; everyone agrees that Cortez is a consummate horseman and, in fact, his skill with these animals is what keeps him ahead of the armies of Texas Rangers chasing him.)
In short, the film's apparent deficiencies, except, I think, the bad editing, are all thematic. In one scene, a herd of Texas Rangers chases Cortez to a high ridge. From atop the ridge, Cortez can see a train steaming forward and the entire shimmering plain blocked by skirmish lines of riders charging uphill toward him. Cortez drives his horse down the steep hill, riding right at the approaching horsemen -- then, he turns sharply and rides along the front of their approaching column while the air puffs and smokes with pistol and rifle shots. The men on the train start shooting at Cortez and his galloping horse as well. Cortez outruns the train locomotive in a welter of Soviet-style montage (the horse's legs rhythmically intercut with the train engineers shoveling coal into the locomotive's fiery maw) and, then, crossing the tracks, speeds under a high railroad trestle, galloping through the shadows cast by the engine and its cars as the train crosses the bridge. This is one of the most thrilling and brilliantly choreographed action sequences ever filmed and shows what Young could do if action for action's sake interested him.
Friday, October 19, 2018
Wind River
Wind River (2017) begins strong, a glimpse of people and a place that we might not otherwise know -- the Arapaho on the Wind River reservation, an enclave of poverty and hopelessness occupying one of the most spectacular wilderness areas on earth. The plot is familiar to the point of cliché -- a lonely, divorced game warden discovers a woman's corpse in the remote mountains near Lander. The dead woman, actually an 18 year old girl, was a friend of his daughter who was, herself, murdered a couple of years previously. The game warden (Jeremy Renner) is a man who specializes in using a high-powered rifle to kill "predators" -- literally, in this film, wolves and mountain lions, but, of course, later, human beings who fit that description. Since the killing occurred on Federal land, the Indian Reservation, the FBI is called. The Bureau sends a winsome, naïve young woman to lead the investigation -- Agent Banner played by Elizabeth Olson. Banner forges an unlikely alliance with the embittered and despairing game warden to solve the mystery involving the dead girl and bring the predatory perpetrators to justice. This is all very, very standard stuff but enlivened by the location shooting on the reservation, the Wyoming landscapes, and the periodic snowstorms and blizzards -- it's a very cold movie and the acting is uniformly excellent. (Curiously, the film's premise -- a dead girl found near a small and rural Western community -- is the same as that of Twin Peaks and, in fact, there are resemblances that go beyond the bare premise: there's some suggestion that the bored teenage girls in the remote town are willing to take unreasonable risks with older men.)
But it's ultimately pretty hard to correct for stupid, and, unfortunately, the movie takes a bad turn after about thirty minutes. It turns out that the bad guys are security guards protecting an oil-drilling rig. The oil drilling rig is in the exact middle of nowhere and, so, it's a little puzzling that a half-dozen heavily armed dudes (some of them with machine guns) have to be stationed there in trailer houses to protect the place. (Protect it against whom?) The film devolves into a standard revenge drama involving big, spectacular Tarantino-style stand-offs between the FBI agent, the local Sheriff's department, the Indian police, and the well-armed security guards. These are the kind of shoot-outs in which everyone has to be killed two or three times, at least, for maximum violence -- everyone gets shot repeatedly. In a bizarre turn of events, the hero has decided to not attend the slaughter-fest at the oil rig -- instead, he's opted to track a mountain lioness to her lair. Of course, her lair is located a few thousand feet from the OK corral-style shootout at the oil rig and, so, he can come to the rescue with his hunting rifle and deliver the coup de grace to a couple bad guys who just refuse to stay dead. Poor Agent Banner has been shot at close-range with a shot-gun blast to the chest. As she's bleeding to death, the hero procures her permission to leave her weltering in gore and go off on a solo punitive man-hunt against the worst of the bad guys. Instead of helping the wounded FBI agent, the hero spends his time torturing to death the chief bad guy, a massive undertaking since it involves capturing the guy, mutilating him, and, then, driving by snowmobile up to the snowfields under Gannett Peak, Wyoming's highest mountain for the final torture-murder. (The measure of merit in this idiotic film is one's ability to run barefoot through snow and ice in subzero temperatures -- the chief bad guy fails this test while the poor dead girl whose discovery triggers the film's mystery story ran for "six miles" until her lungs froze and she died of "frozen alveoli." -- I have my doubts about this medical condition which seems to me to be invented for the movie.) Of course, it turns out that the lady FBI agent was wearing a bullet-proof vest and she will pull through. There's some gibberish spoken about grieving and the movie, which has regaled us with a wholly gratuitous and brutal rape scene, ends on a pious note, advising by title that no one keeps track of native women who go missing and that there is an epidemic of their disappearances. The picture is vulgar and nasty -- there's no reason to stage the rape, but, I suppose, we need motivation to cheer on the hero's torture and murder of the bad guy. The hero has taken care to get the FBI agent's consent to this torture-murder and so, I suppose, all is supposed to be well, but, in fact, it's a reprehensible climax to a movie deadened by gross stupidity during its last hour.
Normally, in a film like this, a connection would be forged between the death of the hero's daughter (she was half-Indian and presumably killed by Caucasian bad actors in a place called Pinedale) and the death of the girl that prompts the detective narrative in this film. But no connection is made -- the point being that native women are, I suppose, just randomly killed and no one cares about their slaughter. This meretricious nonsense was financed in part by the Tunica - Biloxi Tribe in Louisiana.
But it's ultimately pretty hard to correct for stupid, and, unfortunately, the movie takes a bad turn after about thirty minutes. It turns out that the bad guys are security guards protecting an oil-drilling rig. The oil drilling rig is in the exact middle of nowhere and, so, it's a little puzzling that a half-dozen heavily armed dudes (some of them with machine guns) have to be stationed there in trailer houses to protect the place. (Protect it against whom?) The film devolves into a standard revenge drama involving big, spectacular Tarantino-style stand-offs between the FBI agent, the local Sheriff's department, the Indian police, and the well-armed security guards. These are the kind of shoot-outs in which everyone has to be killed two or three times, at least, for maximum violence -- everyone gets shot repeatedly. In a bizarre turn of events, the hero has decided to not attend the slaughter-fest at the oil rig -- instead, he's opted to track a mountain lioness to her lair. Of course, her lair is located a few thousand feet from the OK corral-style shootout at the oil rig and, so, he can come to the rescue with his hunting rifle and deliver the coup de grace to a couple bad guys who just refuse to stay dead. Poor Agent Banner has been shot at close-range with a shot-gun blast to the chest. As she's bleeding to death, the hero procures her permission to leave her weltering in gore and go off on a solo punitive man-hunt against the worst of the bad guys. Instead of helping the wounded FBI agent, the hero spends his time torturing to death the chief bad guy, a massive undertaking since it involves capturing the guy, mutilating him, and, then, driving by snowmobile up to the snowfields under Gannett Peak, Wyoming's highest mountain for the final torture-murder. (The measure of merit in this idiotic film is one's ability to run barefoot through snow and ice in subzero temperatures -- the chief bad guy fails this test while the poor dead girl whose discovery triggers the film's mystery story ran for "six miles" until her lungs froze and she died of "frozen alveoli." -- I have my doubts about this medical condition which seems to me to be invented for the movie.) Of course, it turns out that the lady FBI agent was wearing a bullet-proof vest and she will pull through. There's some gibberish spoken about grieving and the movie, which has regaled us with a wholly gratuitous and brutal rape scene, ends on a pious note, advising by title that no one keeps track of native women who go missing and that there is an epidemic of their disappearances. The picture is vulgar and nasty -- there's no reason to stage the rape, but, I suppose, we need motivation to cheer on the hero's torture and murder of the bad guy. The hero has taken care to get the FBI agent's consent to this torture-murder and so, I suppose, all is supposed to be well, but, in fact, it's a reprehensible climax to a movie deadened by gross stupidity during its last hour.
Normally, in a film like this, a connection would be forged between the death of the hero's daughter (she was half-Indian and presumably killed by Caucasian bad actors in a place called Pinedale) and the death of the girl that prompts the detective narrative in this film. But no connection is made -- the point being that native women are, I suppose, just randomly killed and no one cares about their slaughter. This meretricious nonsense was financed in part by the Tunica - Biloxi Tribe in Louisiana.
Thursday, October 18, 2018
Being Two Isn't Easy
Kon Ichikawa's 1962 color film, Being Two Isn't Easy, seems like a sliver protruding from a genre to which American viewers have little access. The movie, apparently improvised, seems to reflect norms in family dramas well-understood by the Japanese -- I wonder if it is as shapeless and strangely inconsequential when viewed within the setting of other genre films which it resembles. I was baffled by the picture and puzzled by the fact that it seems to be a picture without a plot. (A sort of narrative emerges in the last twenty minutes of the short 88 minute movie, but, in general, the film is self-effacing to the point of being almost invisible.) Too dire for comedy, the film is also too whimsical to count as tragedy, although it has sad elements. The movie isn't really funny, but it's also not exactly serious either. It's certainly not melodramatic -- the film makes its points with such subtlety that they are scarcely apparent. The best characterization that I can provide is that Being Two Isn't Easy is a highly realistic account of a few months in the life of a baby who reaches what we would call his first birthday at the end of the film -- in Japan, you are one when you are born, counting your first nine-months in the womb as your first year; hence, the titular two-year old is, by our way of counting, a one year old infant.
Ichikawa's movie begins with a light show of blurred colors and the narration of the baby who speaks in a high-pitched squeaky voice, but, nonetheless, in a witty and precocious manner. The infant, a boy named Taro, tells us that he really couldn't see too well when he was born, although later he could focus on a woman's face, a lady that he now knows to be his mother. The film chronicles a few episodes in Taro's life, seen, more or less, from the baby's point of view. The infant comments on these episodes. The child's commentary is childish and not memorable at all. I believe a similar device was used in Look Who's Talking, a film about a baby in which the narration was spoken by John Travolta -- but in that case, the gag was about the contrast between the world-wise, wise-guy narrative and the innocent-looking baby. At first, the micro-narratives involving the infant don't really coalesce: a little girl falls out of a window but is caught by a mailman (this is the subject of surreally calm remarks by a woman who appears for a scene and, then, disappears from the movie.) The baby is vaccinated against childhood infectious diseases and, then, when he is thought to be suffering from chicken pox, is lugged around Tokyo by his formidable grandmother -- the old woman is doctor-shopping for someone who will give the baby "an injection", the only kind of treatment that grandma thinks effective with respect to small children. Taro's father, a feckless salary-man, says he doesn't want another child, notwithstanding his wife's desire to get pregnant again. Taro's mother, the beautiful and gentle Chiyo, helps her own sister give her baby a bath -- both women sweat profusely and comment on how exhausting it is to care for small children. Another sister, a woman with 8 children, comes to see Chiyo, talks about her life which consists of nothing but pregnancy and child birth and tries to borrow 5000 yen. Then, the family moves into the home where Goro's widowed mother lives. At first, the two women distrust one another and seem to be enemies but they gradually bond over their view that Goro is pretty much useless as a husband and father. Goro leaves a plastic dry-cleaning bag in the corridor and the baby puts it over his head and suffocates to the point of passing out. Chiyo revives the baby and Goro's mother, the infant's grandma, coldly tells Goro that he should commit suicide in recompense for his negligence. The old woman is not warm at all, but rather very fierce. She opines that there are too many people in Japan and that most of them don't deserve to live, heaping scorn upon a young man mentioned in the newspaper who has crashed his motorcycle into a utility pole and died. "So his mother took care of him and raised him up so that he could die that way?" the old woman says disdainfully. (Before she speaks, these words we get a baffling insert of people on motorcycles roaring through the darkness -- the shot isn't explained until we see Goro's mother reading the newspaper -- this kind of editing is characteristic of the French "New Wave" and the way in which the movie is shot seems derived the French films by Truffaut, Godard, and Rivette of that era.) The next day, the old lady reaches for a ball of thread and collapses dead. Goro is traveling. When he comes home, Chiyo tells him about his mother's comment about there being too many people in Japan: "Well, she practiced what she preached," Goro says drily. That night, a ball of thread rolls mysteriously through the house and wakes up Chiyo. She talks to her husband wondering where the old woman has gone -- is she in some kind of heaven or just extinguished. It's Taro's birthday and there is a full yellow moon. Taro sees his grandmother looking down at him from the moon. The number of candles on his cake (two) gets confused with the number of candles that would be on his grandmother's (death) day cake, a great fiery multitude. Goro decides that maybe he would be okay with his Chiyo trying to have another baby. Taro tells us that once he was a baby, but "now (he) is a big boy and one day will be a man."
There is a tiny plot about Goro growing up himself, something not accomplished until his own mother dies and he reluctantly consents to Chiyo having another baby. The film seems to suggest that the events involving his son have made him into a better man or, even, have helped him to achieve something like "manhood" as that concept is constructed by the Japanese. There is some eerie conversation about where people have been before they are born and where they go after they die -- the notion is that the child, perhaps, recalls something by his own pre-existence. But, if Taro knows where he was before he came into existence, he doesn't say anything to illuminate this subject. In fact, the whole device of having the baby able to narrate events involving his life revolves upon this plot point: the characters wonder what is like not to exist and the baby, who presumably didn't exist within his own recent memory, could maybe enlighten us on this point, but he doesn't. There is some poetic imagery involving the moon -- the baby sees a yellow banana moon (a crescent moon) which morphs in the infant's imagination into a little canoe in the sea. (Ichikawa was a great admirer of Disney and began his career in animation and there is a little cartoon sequence in the film showing the canoe-banana-moon riding the waves and, then, swamped.) Ichikawa is most known in this country for his harrowing war films, Fires on the Plain (involving Japanese soldiers reduced to cannibalism to survive) and The Burmese Harp ( a film about a Buddhist monk who devotes himself to gathering the bones of dead soldiers in the jungle's southeast Asia and burying them.) It's hard to be Two couldn't be more radically different from the war films (or the sex movies) that made Ichikawa famous. The movie is very slight and completely convincing from the standpoint of realism -- in fact, in some ways, the movie feels like a documentary. The script is by Natto Woda, Ichikawa's wife, and I presume that it is autobiographical.
Ichikawa's movie begins with a light show of blurred colors and the narration of the baby who speaks in a high-pitched squeaky voice, but, nonetheless, in a witty and precocious manner. The infant, a boy named Taro, tells us that he really couldn't see too well when he was born, although later he could focus on a woman's face, a lady that he now knows to be his mother. The film chronicles a few episodes in Taro's life, seen, more or less, from the baby's point of view. The infant comments on these episodes. The child's commentary is childish and not memorable at all. I believe a similar device was used in Look Who's Talking, a film about a baby in which the narration was spoken by John Travolta -- but in that case, the gag was about the contrast between the world-wise, wise-guy narrative and the innocent-looking baby. At first, the micro-narratives involving the infant don't really coalesce: a little girl falls out of a window but is caught by a mailman (this is the subject of surreally calm remarks by a woman who appears for a scene and, then, disappears from the movie.) The baby is vaccinated against childhood infectious diseases and, then, when he is thought to be suffering from chicken pox, is lugged around Tokyo by his formidable grandmother -- the old woman is doctor-shopping for someone who will give the baby "an injection", the only kind of treatment that grandma thinks effective with respect to small children. Taro's father, a feckless salary-man, says he doesn't want another child, notwithstanding his wife's desire to get pregnant again. Taro's mother, the beautiful and gentle Chiyo, helps her own sister give her baby a bath -- both women sweat profusely and comment on how exhausting it is to care for small children. Another sister, a woman with 8 children, comes to see Chiyo, talks about her life which consists of nothing but pregnancy and child birth and tries to borrow 5000 yen. Then, the family moves into the home where Goro's widowed mother lives. At first, the two women distrust one another and seem to be enemies but they gradually bond over their view that Goro is pretty much useless as a husband and father. Goro leaves a plastic dry-cleaning bag in the corridor and the baby puts it over his head and suffocates to the point of passing out. Chiyo revives the baby and Goro's mother, the infant's grandma, coldly tells Goro that he should commit suicide in recompense for his negligence. The old woman is not warm at all, but rather very fierce. She opines that there are too many people in Japan and that most of them don't deserve to live, heaping scorn upon a young man mentioned in the newspaper who has crashed his motorcycle into a utility pole and died. "So his mother took care of him and raised him up so that he could die that way?" the old woman says disdainfully. (Before she speaks, these words we get a baffling insert of people on motorcycles roaring through the darkness -- the shot isn't explained until we see Goro's mother reading the newspaper -- this kind of editing is characteristic of the French "New Wave" and the way in which the movie is shot seems derived the French films by Truffaut, Godard, and Rivette of that era.) The next day, the old lady reaches for a ball of thread and collapses dead. Goro is traveling. When he comes home, Chiyo tells him about his mother's comment about there being too many people in Japan: "Well, she practiced what she preached," Goro says drily. That night, a ball of thread rolls mysteriously through the house and wakes up Chiyo. She talks to her husband wondering where the old woman has gone -- is she in some kind of heaven or just extinguished. It's Taro's birthday and there is a full yellow moon. Taro sees his grandmother looking down at him from the moon. The number of candles on his cake (two) gets confused with the number of candles that would be on his grandmother's (death) day cake, a great fiery multitude. Goro decides that maybe he would be okay with his Chiyo trying to have another baby. Taro tells us that once he was a baby, but "now (he) is a big boy and one day will be a man."
There is a tiny plot about Goro growing up himself, something not accomplished until his own mother dies and he reluctantly consents to Chiyo having another baby. The film seems to suggest that the events involving his son have made him into a better man or, even, have helped him to achieve something like "manhood" as that concept is constructed by the Japanese. There is some eerie conversation about where people have been before they are born and where they go after they die -- the notion is that the child, perhaps, recalls something by his own pre-existence. But, if Taro knows where he was before he came into existence, he doesn't say anything to illuminate this subject. In fact, the whole device of having the baby able to narrate events involving his life revolves upon this plot point: the characters wonder what is like not to exist and the baby, who presumably didn't exist within his own recent memory, could maybe enlighten us on this point, but he doesn't. There is some poetic imagery involving the moon -- the baby sees a yellow banana moon (a crescent moon) which morphs in the infant's imagination into a little canoe in the sea. (Ichikawa was a great admirer of Disney and began his career in animation and there is a little cartoon sequence in the film showing the canoe-banana-moon riding the waves and, then, swamped.) Ichikawa is most known in this country for his harrowing war films, Fires on the Plain (involving Japanese soldiers reduced to cannibalism to survive) and The Burmese Harp ( a film about a Buddhist monk who devotes himself to gathering the bones of dead soldiers in the jungle's southeast Asia and burying them.) It's hard to be Two couldn't be more radically different from the war films (or the sex movies) that made Ichikawa famous. The movie is very slight and completely convincing from the standpoint of realism -- in fact, in some ways, the movie feels like a documentary. The script is by Natto Woda, Ichikawa's wife, and I presume that it is autobiographical.
Monday, October 15, 2018
La Rondine (Minnesota Opera -- October 13, 2018)
La Rondine ("The Swallow") is an opera by Puccini premiered in 1917 and rarely performed since that date. It's puzzling combination of full-throateed Italian opera lyricism combined with a modernist, almost Proustian, sensibility. Aspects of the narrative can be viewed as either audaciously profound or completely idiotic. But, in any event, La Rondine, first and foremost, is about the power of memory and regret. The show invokes Grand Opera tropes but dares to imagine a narrative that demonstrates that all the arias are lies, every grand proclamation of undying passion is fraudulent. (Puccini demonstrated this with half the arias in Madame Butterfly -- Pinkerton's seduction of the heroine is based on callous self-interest and deceit.) In La Rondine, Puccini goes farther -- everyone imagines themselves to be more heroic and more passionate than they are in fact: the big dramatic moments are instances of the characters deluding themselves.
The first of the opera's three acts is a work of genius. The quality of the opera declines after that act, skirting melodrama and bathos, but, I think, narrowly avoiding those qualities. In Act One, nothing really happens. We see brittle salon conversation between middle-aged women and their pudgy consorts. Magda, a kept woman, is disenchanted with her burly, stupidly costumed patron -- the fat man wears red pantaloons. He has given her a house but she longs for something more ardent and dangerous. A poet maudit, Prunier, sings a song about a girl's dreams, playing on the piano. This song awakens in Magda a desire for erotic adventure. She recalls when she fled the care of her elderly aunt, met a boy in a bar, and drank a beer with him -- this inconsequential encounter is central to the opera: Magda wonders what would have happened if she had continued the relationship with the young man. On cue, another young man, a boy from the provinces arrives. He is enamored with Paris and its opportunities and sings a paean to the City of Light (particularly touching in light of the fact that Puccini wrote this opera when Italy was at war with France.) Everyone suggests that the boy go to cabaret called Bulliers for his first night in the big city. The hyper-aesthete Prunier, who seems to cultivate wealthy haute bourgeois widows (he's a bit like Rilke) is secretly carrying on an affair with the saucy maid. He arranges to meet her at Bulliers later in the evening and Magda dresses like a grisette, so that she can also go to that cabaret incognito. This Act is an exquisite combination of polite and dull salon banter and exquisite arias that are represented as wavering somewhere between overt expression and the world of suppressed desires and fantasies. The gently morose shadow of Der Rosenkavalier is cast over this glittering world of romantic melancholy and erotic regret -- the music is both sad and beautiful. And the plot is bold, content to linger on scarcely acknowledged amorous fantasies and yearning desire as opposed to acts and deeds.
In the second act, the libretto adopts a convention familiar to audiences from Shakespeare but quite incomprehensible to modern viewers -- the idea is that if you go abroad in clothing different from your accustomed garments, you become invisible or wholly strange to even those who know you best. (Because of the show's modernist impulses, there's some sense that the characters may recognize one another, but are simply play-acting at not knowing one another -- thereby, adding to the erotic frisson -- it may be like an older married couple pretending to be strangers to pick each other up in a bar.) This act is set at Bulliers and features a loud chorus, much dancing, and a charged erotic encounter between Magda and Ruggero, the young man to whom she was just introduced at her salon a couple hours earlier. Magda seduces Ruggero and, in an uncanny touch, asks him to re-enact the erotic rendezvous involving the young man and the beer that he bought for her fifteen or twenty years earlier. Prunier and the maid cavort and, when Magda's patron appears, she ends the relationship with him.
The last act enters the realm of an opera that I despise, La Traviata, but is so weird that I'm willing to give Puccini's enigmatic work the benefit of the doubt. We see Magda and Ruggero in bed together, enjoying an expensive luxury hotel in Nice. They can't pay the bills and it's pretty certain that the idyll is going to come to screeching halt. Unbeknownst to Magda, who is not really looking for commitment, Ruggero has written to his parents announcing that he intends to marry his girlfriend. He portrays her as completely virtuous and immaculate. (He seems not to have figured-out her previous existence as the mistress of the fat financier.) Ruggero's mother writes and says that "love is sanctified by motherhood", looking forward aggressively to the grandchildren that she is going to enjoy as a result of the marriage that she has now blessed. This is too much for Magda -- the maternity stuff is a bridge too far for her. She utters words no one wants to hear from his girlfriend: "I'm speaking to you as your mother would", herself forbidding the marriage. It's clear that she's going to return to her rich patron; at least, he can pay the bills. Prunier who has tried to turn his inamorata, the maid, into a cabaret singer is disenchanted -- the girl can't perform and, further, has been traumatized by the men at the tavern whistling at her. They have an angry spat and break up and she asks for her job back with Magda. However, once the maid dons her little French maid's outfit, her desire for her old clandestine relationship with the poet is aroused and the two of them make an assignation for that evening at 10 pm when she is off work. (Again, it's the garment that defines the character.) The outcome for Ruggero is less happy. After a duet in which the two lovers shriek their regrets at one another over huge blasts of orchestral sound, he wander stage-right, meets an ensign, who hands him a WW I carbine, and, then, the rear projection shows a nasty battlefield with oozing mud, shell-holes, and a thick undergrowth of barbed wire. Throughout the opera, we have seen a silent middle-aged woman in an elaborate hat who appears from time to time to scrutinize the action. This is supposed to be Magda ten years hence, suffering the pangs of regret. As the elder Magda moons around the rear of the stage, the rear projection shows us Ruggero's battlefield grave on which she deposits a bouquet of flowers as the curtain falls. (I assume that the business with the middle-aged lady is a directorial interpolation -- it's obvious but effective.)
The opera contains much ravishing music. But the music is defeated by the cynical libretto -- the claims of eternal passion are just empty rhetoric, at least as far as Magda goes (Ruggero is callow and, maybe, believes his own protestation of love.) But society defeats the lovers. Inadvertently, perhaps, this dynamic is reflected in the music: the lovers have to hit daunting high notes fortissimo to overcome the suavely beautiful orchestral accompaniment. Often they seem to be screeching over the wall of sound produced by the orchestra -- they can't quite be heard over the ambient noise and are overcome musically just as the libretto shows them overcome by the society in which they live. Ultimately, they revert to what they were before they found one another -- Ruggero is just a naïve boy from the provinces who becomes cannon-fodder; Magda returns to her role as courtesan. What makes this opera intriguing is its radical first act -- a forty minute composition that suggests that everything important in this show will occur as a result of erotic fantasy and regret. Erotic fantasy is the currency of grand opera but La Rondine posits that is simply not enough. Eschewing poetry for simple, unalloyed lust, Prunier and his little maid cynically show us the way that love plays out in the real world. (Prunier gets to sing a passage in falsetto, another astonishing aspect of this opera -- he sounds a little like Prince.)
The first of the opera's three acts is a work of genius. The quality of the opera declines after that act, skirting melodrama and bathos, but, I think, narrowly avoiding those qualities. In Act One, nothing really happens. We see brittle salon conversation between middle-aged women and their pudgy consorts. Magda, a kept woman, is disenchanted with her burly, stupidly costumed patron -- the fat man wears red pantaloons. He has given her a house but she longs for something more ardent and dangerous. A poet maudit, Prunier, sings a song about a girl's dreams, playing on the piano. This song awakens in Magda a desire for erotic adventure. She recalls when she fled the care of her elderly aunt, met a boy in a bar, and drank a beer with him -- this inconsequential encounter is central to the opera: Magda wonders what would have happened if she had continued the relationship with the young man. On cue, another young man, a boy from the provinces arrives. He is enamored with Paris and its opportunities and sings a paean to the City of Light (particularly touching in light of the fact that Puccini wrote this opera when Italy was at war with France.) Everyone suggests that the boy go to cabaret called Bulliers for his first night in the big city. The hyper-aesthete Prunier, who seems to cultivate wealthy haute bourgeois widows (he's a bit like Rilke) is secretly carrying on an affair with the saucy maid. He arranges to meet her at Bulliers later in the evening and Magda dresses like a grisette, so that she can also go to that cabaret incognito. This Act is an exquisite combination of polite and dull salon banter and exquisite arias that are represented as wavering somewhere between overt expression and the world of suppressed desires and fantasies. The gently morose shadow of Der Rosenkavalier is cast over this glittering world of romantic melancholy and erotic regret -- the music is both sad and beautiful. And the plot is bold, content to linger on scarcely acknowledged amorous fantasies and yearning desire as opposed to acts and deeds.
In the second act, the libretto adopts a convention familiar to audiences from Shakespeare but quite incomprehensible to modern viewers -- the idea is that if you go abroad in clothing different from your accustomed garments, you become invisible or wholly strange to even those who know you best. (Because of the show's modernist impulses, there's some sense that the characters may recognize one another, but are simply play-acting at not knowing one another -- thereby, adding to the erotic frisson -- it may be like an older married couple pretending to be strangers to pick each other up in a bar.) This act is set at Bulliers and features a loud chorus, much dancing, and a charged erotic encounter between Magda and Ruggero, the young man to whom she was just introduced at her salon a couple hours earlier. Magda seduces Ruggero and, in an uncanny touch, asks him to re-enact the erotic rendezvous involving the young man and the beer that he bought for her fifteen or twenty years earlier. Prunier and the maid cavort and, when Magda's patron appears, she ends the relationship with him.
The last act enters the realm of an opera that I despise, La Traviata, but is so weird that I'm willing to give Puccini's enigmatic work the benefit of the doubt. We see Magda and Ruggero in bed together, enjoying an expensive luxury hotel in Nice. They can't pay the bills and it's pretty certain that the idyll is going to come to screeching halt. Unbeknownst to Magda, who is not really looking for commitment, Ruggero has written to his parents announcing that he intends to marry his girlfriend. He portrays her as completely virtuous and immaculate. (He seems not to have figured-out her previous existence as the mistress of the fat financier.) Ruggero's mother writes and says that "love is sanctified by motherhood", looking forward aggressively to the grandchildren that she is going to enjoy as a result of the marriage that she has now blessed. This is too much for Magda -- the maternity stuff is a bridge too far for her. She utters words no one wants to hear from his girlfriend: "I'm speaking to you as your mother would", herself forbidding the marriage. It's clear that she's going to return to her rich patron; at least, he can pay the bills. Prunier who has tried to turn his inamorata, the maid, into a cabaret singer is disenchanted -- the girl can't perform and, further, has been traumatized by the men at the tavern whistling at her. They have an angry spat and break up and she asks for her job back with Magda. However, once the maid dons her little French maid's outfit, her desire for her old clandestine relationship with the poet is aroused and the two of them make an assignation for that evening at 10 pm when she is off work. (Again, it's the garment that defines the character.) The outcome for Ruggero is less happy. After a duet in which the two lovers shriek their regrets at one another over huge blasts of orchestral sound, he wander stage-right, meets an ensign, who hands him a WW I carbine, and, then, the rear projection shows a nasty battlefield with oozing mud, shell-holes, and a thick undergrowth of barbed wire. Throughout the opera, we have seen a silent middle-aged woman in an elaborate hat who appears from time to time to scrutinize the action. This is supposed to be Magda ten years hence, suffering the pangs of regret. As the elder Magda moons around the rear of the stage, the rear projection shows us Ruggero's battlefield grave on which she deposits a bouquet of flowers as the curtain falls. (I assume that the business with the middle-aged lady is a directorial interpolation -- it's obvious but effective.)
The opera contains much ravishing music. But the music is defeated by the cynical libretto -- the claims of eternal passion are just empty rhetoric, at least as far as Magda goes (Ruggero is callow and, maybe, believes his own protestation of love.) But society defeats the lovers. Inadvertently, perhaps, this dynamic is reflected in the music: the lovers have to hit daunting high notes fortissimo to overcome the suavely beautiful orchestral accompaniment. Often they seem to be screeching over the wall of sound produced by the orchestra -- they can't quite be heard over the ambient noise and are overcome musically just as the libretto shows them overcome by the society in which they live. Ultimately, they revert to what they were before they found one another -- Ruggero is just a naïve boy from the provinces who becomes cannon-fodder; Magda returns to her role as courtesan. What makes this opera intriguing is its radical first act -- a forty minute composition that suggests that everything important in this show will occur as a result of erotic fantasy and regret. Erotic fantasy is the currency of grand opera but La Rondine posits that is simply not enough. Eschewing poetry for simple, unalloyed lust, Prunier and his little maid cynically show us the way that love plays out in the real world. (Prunier gets to sing a passage in falsetto, another astonishing aspect of this opera -- he sounds a little like Prince.)
Sunday, October 14, 2018
Free Solo
Although the common viewer will find the documentary Free Solo (2018) very frightening, there are only a handful of viewers in the whole world who can appreciate just how terrifying the images caught on film really are -- these are professional rock climbers approaching the caliber of the movie's protagonist Alex Honnoldt. Honnoldt sets out to climb the 3000 foot rock face of El Capitan in the Yosemite Valley "free solo". This means that he makes the ascent without ropes using only his hands and feet and a little pouch of chalk to keep his fingers from getting slick with sweat. Of course, any error whatsoever in his attack on the enormous, sheer (and, even, overhanging) rock face will result in his gruesome death. At certain moments in the film recording this ascent, the world class rock climbers employing telescopes to watch Honnoldt's climb are overcome with horror and turn away from the lens, unable to bear what they are seeing -- with a sick look, the expert rock climber closes his eyes and paces nervously back and forth, too frightened to look through the eyepiece. I suspect that only rock climbers of very high achievement can appreciate this film -- it's a little watching someone perform one of Beethoven's late piano sonatas: clearly, the task is herculean, but only another world-class pianist can understand the true agony required to accomplish the performance. The sequence that most terrifies the experts is something called "The Boulder Problem", a pitch about 600 feet above the Yosemite valley. Honnoldt has to cross grip the sheer granite wall, shifting one hand over another to catch at grips too small for the camera to show them. (He has found these grips by polishing the rock face with a toothbrush and, then, inspecting it at six inches range.) All the while, his right foot is en pointe, like a ballet dancer, toes jammed against the vertical rock and seemingly gripping by friction alone. From this exposed position, Honnoldt has to execute a "karate kick" -- that is kicking with his left leg as far as he can reach to wedge his foot against a tiny prism of rock about the height of his ear. I've made a couple inconsequential rock climbs, both in Interstate Park near the Dalles of the St. Croix River and watching this maneuver made me feel dizzy -- I can only imagine the nausea felt by the other professional rock climbers when Honnoldt "solves" the "boulder problem" in this way. (Our anxiety is enhanced by the fact that we have seen Honnoldt practicing on this part of the wall while suspended in a rope harness and seen him fall time and time again.)
Free Solo documents Honnoldt's two year effort to scale El Capitan. He spends hundreds of hours practicing on the rock wall and, then, attempting the free climb in the Fall of 2016, becomes frightened and "bails" as he says. He returns the next Spring, practices for another six weeks, or so and, then, undertakes the climb in early June 2017. The ascent is documented by an experienced team of rock climbers tied-off at various stages of the climb. Their presence becomes one of the dilemmas that the film documents. Will Honnoldt take unnecessary chances because he is being filmed? Are they contributing to his danger? In fact, members of film crew agonize, that they may be, in effect, aiding him to commit suicide. (The film is directed for National Georgraphic by Elizabeth Chai-Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, a Mankato native, both of whom directed the splendid Meru, another mountaineering documentary released several years ago.) Another strand in the picture is Honnoldt's odd, off-putting affect -- there is, to be blunt, something wrong with him. (In one attempt to discover what this might be, an MRI of his brain is undertaken: not surprisingly, the study shows that Honnoldt displays little activity in his amygdala, the fear center in the brain: scary images that would elicit a electrical storm in the amygdala in others seem to have no effect on him at all.) Honnoldt was raised by a mother who taught French and spoke to her children only in that language. His father, it is said, suffered from something that might now be defined as Asperger's syndrome and seems to have been a difficult person -- the film is reticent about him (he is deceased) and Honnoldt describes his childhood as unhappy and lonely. As a result he feels a desire to accomplish perfection and, thus, devote himself to the deadly and completely solitary sport of free solo rock climbing -- an endeavor that has no grand old men: without exception, they are all dead, killed in falls.. Complicating the film is the fact that Honnoldt has acquired a girlfriend, a little blonde woman who is, seemingly, completely sane and (as the cliché would have it) "cute as a bug." Of course, Honnoldt's derring-do inspired their relationship at the outset but once she sees first-hand that her boyfriend is launched on an apparently suicidal quest to climb El Capitan free solo she begins to have serious reservations about his commitment to her. She's right to express these feelings -- Honnoldt says without equivocation that he prefers the thrill of free solo climbing to anything that his girlfriend can provide to him. Scenes with the girlfriend are funny and cringe-worthy -- in one episode, they shop for a house in Las Vegas because it's close "to some really big walls" that Honnoldt can climb. He's been living out of his van, so-called "dirt bagging," for nine years, and says, when she starts talking about carpet colors and furniture, that he doesn't care about any of this and, in fact, won't need a bed because he can simply sleep on the carpeted floor. She later confronts him and calls him an asshole. Similar, tension occurs when they go shopping for a refrigerator -- despite the fact that his climbing and endorsements have made him prosperous ("I would guess I make as much as a moderately successful dentist" he tells some students at a high school forum, Honnoldt is fantastically cheap.) As if passively hoping to deter him, his girlfriend is instrumental in two falls -- one of which causes thoracic compression fractures and the other which results in a badly sprained ankle. These mishaps cause Honnoldt to reconsider the relationship with his girlfriend -- perhaps, she is, after all, a jinx.
What lifts this film above the mere documentation of an extraordinary and terrifying feat of determination is the care with which the filmmakers detail the relationship between Honnoldt and girlfriend as well as the others in his life, most of whom try to persuade him to not make the climb. Although he expects to die, Honnoldt finally attempts the ascent and this sequence is tremendously gripping, shot from mid-air perches and using drones to bring the viewer to within a few feet of the climber's rock face choreography. It's astonishing and truly frightening. When the climb is completed, Honnoldt seems very happy for about a half-hour, Then, we see him brooding. What's next? I am reminded of the ineffable lines from Mike Leigh's great film about Gilbert and Sullivan, Topsy-Turvy (1999) -- after the success of The Mikado, Gilbert says: "There's something inherently disappointing about success."
Free Solo documents Honnoldt's two year effort to scale El Capitan. He spends hundreds of hours practicing on the rock wall and, then, attempting the free climb in the Fall of 2016, becomes frightened and "bails" as he says. He returns the next Spring, practices for another six weeks, or so and, then, undertakes the climb in early June 2017. The ascent is documented by an experienced team of rock climbers tied-off at various stages of the climb. Their presence becomes one of the dilemmas that the film documents. Will Honnoldt take unnecessary chances because he is being filmed? Are they contributing to his danger? In fact, members of film crew agonize, that they may be, in effect, aiding him to commit suicide. (The film is directed for National Georgraphic by Elizabeth Chai-Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, a Mankato native, both of whom directed the splendid Meru, another mountaineering documentary released several years ago.) Another strand in the picture is Honnoldt's odd, off-putting affect -- there is, to be blunt, something wrong with him. (In one attempt to discover what this might be, an MRI of his brain is undertaken: not surprisingly, the study shows that Honnoldt displays little activity in his amygdala, the fear center in the brain: scary images that would elicit a electrical storm in the amygdala in others seem to have no effect on him at all.) Honnoldt was raised by a mother who taught French and spoke to her children only in that language. His father, it is said, suffered from something that might now be defined as Asperger's syndrome and seems to have been a difficult person -- the film is reticent about him (he is deceased) and Honnoldt describes his childhood as unhappy and lonely. As a result he feels a desire to accomplish perfection and, thus, devote himself to the deadly and completely solitary sport of free solo rock climbing -- an endeavor that has no grand old men: without exception, they are all dead, killed in falls.. Complicating the film is the fact that Honnoldt has acquired a girlfriend, a little blonde woman who is, seemingly, completely sane and (as the cliché would have it) "cute as a bug." Of course, Honnoldt's derring-do inspired their relationship at the outset but once she sees first-hand that her boyfriend is launched on an apparently suicidal quest to climb El Capitan free solo she begins to have serious reservations about his commitment to her. She's right to express these feelings -- Honnoldt says without equivocation that he prefers the thrill of free solo climbing to anything that his girlfriend can provide to him. Scenes with the girlfriend are funny and cringe-worthy -- in one episode, they shop for a house in Las Vegas because it's close "to some really big walls" that Honnoldt can climb. He's been living out of his van, so-called "dirt bagging," for nine years, and says, when she starts talking about carpet colors and furniture, that he doesn't care about any of this and, in fact, won't need a bed because he can simply sleep on the carpeted floor. She later confronts him and calls him an asshole. Similar, tension occurs when they go shopping for a refrigerator -- despite the fact that his climbing and endorsements have made him prosperous ("I would guess I make as much as a moderately successful dentist" he tells some students at a high school forum, Honnoldt is fantastically cheap.) As if passively hoping to deter him, his girlfriend is instrumental in two falls -- one of which causes thoracic compression fractures and the other which results in a badly sprained ankle. These mishaps cause Honnoldt to reconsider the relationship with his girlfriend -- perhaps, she is, after all, a jinx.
What lifts this film above the mere documentation of an extraordinary and terrifying feat of determination is the care with which the filmmakers detail the relationship between Honnoldt and girlfriend as well as the others in his life, most of whom try to persuade him to not make the climb. Although he expects to die, Honnoldt finally attempts the ascent and this sequence is tremendously gripping, shot from mid-air perches and using drones to bring the viewer to within a few feet of the climber's rock face choreography. It's astonishing and truly frightening. When the climb is completed, Honnoldt seems very happy for about a half-hour, Then, we see him brooding. What's next? I am reminded of the ineffable lines from Mike Leigh's great film about Gilbert and Sullivan, Topsy-Turvy (1999) -- after the success of The Mikado, Gilbert says: "There's something inherently disappointing about success."
Dragon Inn
King Hu's 1967 Dragon Inn inspired a revolution in Chinese wuxiau (swordplay) melodrama. The film retains interest today although it is, certainly, not a great work notwithstanding the full Criterion presentation on a recent Blue-Ray DVD. You will like this film to a greater or lesser degree to the extent that you are interested in intricately choreographed combat with swords, daggers, and arrows staged in various locations and involving different martial arts corps de ballet. Dragon Inn has no appreciable plot, no narrative twists, and no real suspense -- characters snarl and make quips about each other, but they don't come with any sort of appreciable back-story. We don't know what, if anything, is at stake. The objective of all the combat could be epochal -- the salvation of the Imperial Chinese State -- or it could be a rivalry between competing schools of calligraphy. It doesn't really matter so long as the complex duels are expertly staged. In many respects, Dragon Inn is almost avant-garde in its eschewal of anything like a conventional plot, motivation, or characters. The picture shows how an extremely pure form of genre picture can overlap quite unintentionally with the avant-garde. In some ways, the movie resembles Wim Wenders great modern-dance epic, his film about Pina Bausch -- in both cases, different ensembles of performers, distinctive but, nonetheless, ciphers, perform motions intended to define the limitations of their bodies, the velocity and, conversely, the slowness with which they can move, their ability to maintain balance while engaged in frenetic gestural motion, all the while exploring the parameters of the space in which they are deployed. Dragon Inn ultimately is a film of staggering abstraction -- it can't be enjoyed as a story, but rather must be approached as a series of variations on a theme: a person with a sword again and again decimating 4 to 12 opponents in combat.
A powerful, blonde-haired eunuch has seized control of the Ming Dynasty. He executes one of his ministers and sends the official's two children, a boy and a girl, into exile. When the eunuch sends assassins to murder the young refugees, a mysterious group of swordsmen (and a woman warrior) intervene to slaughter the murderers and save the minister's children. At a border outpost in north China, an unprepossessing tavern stands in a desert of stone cobbles. This is Dragon Gate Inn, a adobe brick building that looks like something imported from a Sam Peckinpah movie. The Eastern Depot, a nasty group of killers converges on the Inn where the executed minister's children are hiding. A series of swordfights ensues. When the protectors of the children prevail, having wiped out about a 120 members of the Eastern Depot death squad, the chief eunuch himself appears borne on a palanquin to the sound of barbaric horns. The swordfighters protecting the children march up a mountain, apparently planning to cross into Tartar country. On the winding mountain pass road, more fighting occurs between the heroes defending the children and the eunuch who is himself a lethal swordsman. After an epic ten minute battle, the surviving heroes kill the eunuch although they are all badly wounded in the struggle. The film ends with a single valedictory shot -- some figures filmed from behind walking forward toward other warriors next to limpid lagoon. We can't see who these people are and the scene remains wholly enigmatic, a elegiac dying fall to all the mayhem.
Dragon Inn exhibits the intricate cross-fertilization between American Westerns and Asian action films. The starkly utilitarian tavern in the middle of nowhere, chili pepper ristras drying on the porch offering the only accent of color, is a staple of American westerns from Howard Hawks to Tarantino (who borrows extensively from this movie). The quirky denizens of the inn are similar to the loners who assemble for action in films like Rio Bravo and John Ford's Westerns. There are long set pieces in which the lone swordsman demonstrates his prowess -- he pitches a bowl of soup across the room so that it lands in front of the bad guy without spilling a drop; on one occasion, he catches a dagger hurled at him between his chop sticks and seems to swill poisoned wine without any effect. (The good guys are always plucking arrows out of the air with their bare hands. When they get slightly cut, they express outrage, amazed it seems that they could even be touched by an adversary's weapon.) The Eastern Depot villains are bad hombres, none of them distinguished by much in the way of character or, even, identifying features (they wear black) -- after all, they all "strut and fret" their brief time on the stage only to be exterminated by the heroes. The bad guys are so vicious that they hack a half-dozen hapless porters to death in recompense for them merely asking for a "gratuity" for hauling the villains' luggage (most;y chests full of swords) across the desert of cobbles and its adjacent canyons. The brother swordsman (part of the sibling duo) makes an insouciant entrances similar to Mifune's appearance in Yojimbo strolling across the wasteland with a sneer and an emerald green bumbershoot slung over his shoulder (the umbrella conceals his sword). It takes half the film's 111 minute running time to define the group of heroes, the counterforce to the eunuch's henchmen -- ultimately, there are five of them lead by Mister Wu, the proprietor of the inn, and formerly a general in the imperial army. One curiosity of the film is that the heroes relentlessly taunt the blonde-haired eunuch about his castration. This is a little disingenuous because two of the swordsmen defending the official's children are eunuchs themselves -- they confess that they were hauled away to the "castration parlor" for defying the villain. The chief Eunuch has something wrong with him (at one point it is said to be "asthma") and he reels and staggers between intricately balletic swordfights in which he is surrounded by all of the good guys. The good guys have all of the advantages and, so, in the end, the viewer is conflicted - you feel more than a little sneaking admiration for the grit of blonde, snarling eunuch: he fights to the last and, when his head is cut off, you get the sense that he would keep up the battle even beheaded if only this were possible. The final battle epitomizes the film: in the first stage, hordes of henchmen are cut down; this is followed by hand-to-hand duels between expert swordsmen, and, at last, we reach what is called in video gaming the "boss stage" -- this is when the surviving good guys square off against the biggest and baddest of the villains. In Dragon Inn, this fight is spectacularly picturesque, staged in high mountains gilded by the sun with the valleys overflowing with mist. It's like a Chinese scroll unrolled before our eyes and leading from landscape highlight to highlight, each scenic vista accompanying by a spectacular sword fight.
There's nothing to the movie, but it's abstract premise. It reminds me of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 -- what if a film were made that suppressed everything but the fighting sequences? On the Criterion disk, there is a short but indispensable video essay on the movie's editing and the way action is staged -- you will miss much of what makes Dragon Inn remarkable if you don't watch this extra. In fact, I recommend that you watch this segment before the movie itself. It will help you better appreciate what you are seeing.
A powerful, blonde-haired eunuch has seized control of the Ming Dynasty. He executes one of his ministers and sends the official's two children, a boy and a girl, into exile. When the eunuch sends assassins to murder the young refugees, a mysterious group of swordsmen (and a woman warrior) intervene to slaughter the murderers and save the minister's children. At a border outpost in north China, an unprepossessing tavern stands in a desert of stone cobbles. This is Dragon Gate Inn, a adobe brick building that looks like something imported from a Sam Peckinpah movie. The Eastern Depot, a nasty group of killers converges on the Inn where the executed minister's children are hiding. A series of swordfights ensues. When the protectors of the children prevail, having wiped out about a 120 members of the Eastern Depot death squad, the chief eunuch himself appears borne on a palanquin to the sound of barbaric horns. The swordfighters protecting the children march up a mountain, apparently planning to cross into Tartar country. On the winding mountain pass road, more fighting occurs between the heroes defending the children and the eunuch who is himself a lethal swordsman. After an epic ten minute battle, the surviving heroes kill the eunuch although they are all badly wounded in the struggle. The film ends with a single valedictory shot -- some figures filmed from behind walking forward toward other warriors next to limpid lagoon. We can't see who these people are and the scene remains wholly enigmatic, a elegiac dying fall to all the mayhem.
Dragon Inn exhibits the intricate cross-fertilization between American Westerns and Asian action films. The starkly utilitarian tavern in the middle of nowhere, chili pepper ristras drying on the porch offering the only accent of color, is a staple of American westerns from Howard Hawks to Tarantino (who borrows extensively from this movie). The quirky denizens of the inn are similar to the loners who assemble for action in films like Rio Bravo and John Ford's Westerns. There are long set pieces in which the lone swordsman demonstrates his prowess -- he pitches a bowl of soup across the room so that it lands in front of the bad guy without spilling a drop; on one occasion, he catches a dagger hurled at him between his chop sticks and seems to swill poisoned wine without any effect. (The good guys are always plucking arrows out of the air with their bare hands. When they get slightly cut, they express outrage, amazed it seems that they could even be touched by an adversary's weapon.) The Eastern Depot villains are bad hombres, none of them distinguished by much in the way of character or, even, identifying features (they wear black) -- after all, they all "strut and fret" their brief time on the stage only to be exterminated by the heroes. The bad guys are so vicious that they hack a half-dozen hapless porters to death in recompense for them merely asking for a "gratuity" for hauling the villains' luggage (most;y chests full of swords) across the desert of cobbles and its adjacent canyons. The brother swordsman (part of the sibling duo) makes an insouciant entrances similar to Mifune's appearance in Yojimbo strolling across the wasteland with a sneer and an emerald green bumbershoot slung over his shoulder (the umbrella conceals his sword). It takes half the film's 111 minute running time to define the group of heroes, the counterforce to the eunuch's henchmen -- ultimately, there are five of them lead by Mister Wu, the proprietor of the inn, and formerly a general in the imperial army. One curiosity of the film is that the heroes relentlessly taunt the blonde-haired eunuch about his castration. This is a little disingenuous because two of the swordsmen defending the official's children are eunuchs themselves -- they confess that they were hauled away to the "castration parlor" for defying the villain. The chief Eunuch has something wrong with him (at one point it is said to be "asthma") and he reels and staggers between intricately balletic swordfights in which he is surrounded by all of the good guys. The good guys have all of the advantages and, so, in the end, the viewer is conflicted - you feel more than a little sneaking admiration for the grit of blonde, snarling eunuch: he fights to the last and, when his head is cut off, you get the sense that he would keep up the battle even beheaded if only this were possible. The final battle epitomizes the film: in the first stage, hordes of henchmen are cut down; this is followed by hand-to-hand duels between expert swordsmen, and, at last, we reach what is called in video gaming the "boss stage" -- this is when the surviving good guys square off against the biggest and baddest of the villains. In Dragon Inn, this fight is spectacularly picturesque, staged in high mountains gilded by the sun with the valleys overflowing with mist. It's like a Chinese scroll unrolled before our eyes and leading from landscape highlight to highlight, each scenic vista accompanying by a spectacular sword fight.
There's nothing to the movie, but it's abstract premise. It reminds me of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 -- what if a film were made that suppressed everything but the fighting sequences? On the Criterion disk, there is a short but indispensable video essay on the movie's editing and the way action is staged -- you will miss much of what makes Dragon Inn remarkable if you don't watch this extra. In fact, I recommend that you watch this segment before the movie itself. It will help you better appreciate what you are seeing.
Friday, October 12, 2018
The Look of Silence
A companion documentary to the director, Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012), The Look of Silence, also a documentary about mass murder in Indonesia, is less flamboyant, shorter, but equally harrowing. The 2014 movie is also disheartening and leaves the viewer with unresolved emotions -- most of us expect that the world will turn out to be a just place. (Martin Luther King: "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.") Oppenheimer's films offer a nightmarish alternative to King's optimism: what if the must awful injustice not only evades retribution but, ultimately, is rewarded, praised and a source of great power and wealth? This scenario seems to have occurred in Indonesia and Oppenheimer's films are alarming because they unflinchingly document a nation where the most vicious and sadistic cruelty prevailed and, indeed, catapulted its practitioners into positions of power and eminence -- in Indonesia, the bad guys won and, in fact, are still winning.
The back story to The Look of Silence is simple enough. In 1965, probably at the urging of the American CIA, the Indonesian army decided to solve its problem with Communist insurgents by simply massacring everyone who could be considered a menace to the military junta. To avoid the appearance of state-sponsored mass murder, the army deputized local death squads to carry out the slaughter. These death squads acted with great enthusiasm, committing horrifying acts of violence. Apparently, more than a million people were murdered, many of them simply poor farmers or other dispossessed people caught up in the lethal purge. The anonymous protagonist of The Look of Silence is a small-town optometrist who seems to make house-calls. The optometrist is 44 and, during his house-calls, questions local people who were members of the militia death squads about their murderous activities -- when he does this, breaching a code of silence that seems ubiquitous in Indonesia, he is met with weird justifications, denials, threats, and, most often, the titular "look of silence", a blank uneasy stare in which the killer's face and lips contort but no words are spoken. Much of the film is unnerving, consisting of long moments of complete silence in which the protagonist simply looks at the killer (or members of the killer's family) with an impassive, expressionless, indeed, almost reptilian stare. It is this same bland, and impenetrable, stare that we have seen on the optometrist's face as he watches footage shot by Oppenheimer of the elderly mass murderers joking and congratulating one another on their savagery forty years earlier. (About a quarter of the film shows the optometrist alone in a featureless room, a kind of abstract purgatory, watching TV interviews that "Josh," as his Indonesian informants call the director, has shot. Indonesians seem to have a propensity for acting things out -- this was obvious in the garish song and dance numbers in The Act of Killing, a film that covers the same terrain, and many of the old death squad murderers enjoy pantomiming how they hacked off heads or slit bellies; one old fellow has his sidekick squat down so he can mime how he cut off Ramli's penis -- Ramli is the protagonist's brother who was literally hacked to pieces in 1965, two years before the optometrist was born. This jolly old butcher has written a book illustrated with sketches of how he chopped up Ramli. With his wife and a sidekick, the old killer displays the book and gives jocular details about how, for years, no one would eat the fish hauled from the Snake River, the site of the worst massacres, since the creatures had been feasting on human flesh. Near the end of the movie, the optometrist confronts the death squad leader's wife and sons. They claim to have no knowledge of any of the killings. The wife goes so far as to assert that her husband never wrote any memoir about the killings, certainly not an illustrated book. When the optometrist shows her lap-top computer footage of Oppenheimer's interview with her husband in which he proudly displays the book and its gory pictures in her presence, she becomes befuddled and leaves the room. Of course, the images show her standing next to her husband giggling about his memoir. Her son's threaten the optometrist and one of them squawks: "You are no longer our friend, Josh!" The old murderer has died unrepenitent.
Oppenheimer is a poetic filmmaker despite his horrendous subject matter. The movie is shot in beautiful, restrained color -- mostly huge close-ups and landscapes with the sound track tremulous with the amplified sounds of insects. The film is structured around three strands of imagery that annotate the horrific story. First, we see tiny spherical beans, jumping and skittering on the surface of a plate or a piece of wood. These are encapsulated butterflies struggling to merge from their bean-like cocoons -- at least, this is how the strange skittering and twitching seeds are explained. The optometrist's father is said to be 103 years old and he haunts the film like a ghoulish, dwarflike specter. We see his wife ladling water over the tiny naked and emaciated homunculus as he shivers and trembles. The old man is like Tithonus -- he's so ancient that he doesn't exactly seem human. He's also senile, claiming in a child-like voice that he's only 17 -- he sings a little risqué ditty about a girl, pop music from his boyhood. When questioned about his son, Ramli, the old man simply denies that he ever had a son. The old man suggests that an implacable doom is befalling all of the murderers -- it's simply the ravages of old age. The old villains that we meet in the film all seem to be dying, they have one foot in the grave. In some fundamental way, the film is about death -- the young victims who died so horribly are, at least, spared the indignity of old age that afflicts murderers and survivors alike. Human revenge has failed but, nonetheless, the worst of the murderers are now suffering -- the injustice is that they are suffering the common fate of all of us who live to be old. (In one terrible scene, the shriveled old man is lost in his own house and shrieks that someone should rescue him -- his grief and sorrow seem analogous to the numb disbelief that some of the killers experience when confronted about their murders: how can this be happening to me in my own home?) The final strand of the picture involves the protagonist's family life -- he has an elderly mother who prays for the everlasting damnation of her son's killers and implacably wishes for revenge. (She no longer sleeps with her superannuated husband because "he smells of pee.") The hero also has a small daughter and we see him playing with her and reading to her from a book. These images suggest that life goes on despite the terrible things that happened in 1965. And this aspect of the film shows how easy the day to day concerns of our lives will erode our ability to retain in our imagination, horrific things that we know happened but that we wish didn''t oppress us any longer. Overriding these separate narrative strands is the film's central metaphor -- often, the optometrist conducts interviews while his subjects are wearing apparatus that allows the hero to correct their vision with different lenses. In a real sense, the protagonist is working so that people in his part of Indonesia will be able to see better -- that is appreciate what happened in 1965. He is trying to open people's eyes. In this respect, the protagonist, with his fixed, unflinching gaze, resembles a camera -- he seems almost completely inert, a pair of watching eyes and the film's fixation with optical devices enhances the impression that the optometrist is a surrogate for the camera itself, recording impassively and, without comment, the images that it receives. Part of enigma in the film is the hero -- we don't know his motive and can't understand exactly what he is trying to accomplish. And, if he is baffling to the audience, he is a complete mystery to the Indonesians who each and every one (including a death squad victim who escaped) seem to regard it best to not re-open the terrible wounds left by the mass killings in 1965.
The movie is filled with disconcerting images. One old man who led death squads says that the Americans should have given prizes to him and his compadres -- perhaps, a plane flight to the USA or, at the very least, a cruise. A member of parliament who ordered thousands of deaths says menacingly: "Of course, I was right -- this is shown by the fact that the families of those I killed all voted for me." A 1965 newsreel narrated by a NBC newscaster suggests that the Communists wanted to be murdered and, in fact, even politely scheduled appointments for their slaughter -- a sentiment echoed by several of the old murderers shown in the film. (Students in an elementary school are told that the Communists gouged out people's eyes and, then, pleaded to be punished by death -- the notion of injury to the eyes is fundamental to the film and the optometrist's central role in the picture. The most shocking moment in the film is when the daughter of a killer says that she wants to make peace with the optometrist and have him as a member of her family. The optometrist hugs her and says that he is now a member of her family. She, then, asks the optometrist to embrace her senile father and forgive him for killing the hero's brother. To everyone's surprise, the optometrist does embrace the delusional old man showing almost supernatural grace by making this gesture of forgiveness.. In this film, two old men claim to have kept their sanity in the midst of the slaughter by drinking human blood --"it's sweet and salty" one of them tells the camera. Drinking human blood was a remedy for the horror of killing so many people and, in an odd way, these old murderers are more sympathetic than the urbane politicians and land developers who profited from the slaughter. At least, these two men recognized that they had transgressed beyond the bounds of the human and that their only means of remaining sane was to engage in this overtly supernatural ritual. Both of these old men cut the interview short -- it's time for them to go the Mosque for their evening prayers.
The back story to The Look of Silence is simple enough. In 1965, probably at the urging of the American CIA, the Indonesian army decided to solve its problem with Communist insurgents by simply massacring everyone who could be considered a menace to the military junta. To avoid the appearance of state-sponsored mass murder, the army deputized local death squads to carry out the slaughter. These death squads acted with great enthusiasm, committing horrifying acts of violence. Apparently, more than a million people were murdered, many of them simply poor farmers or other dispossessed people caught up in the lethal purge. The anonymous protagonist of The Look of Silence is a small-town optometrist who seems to make house-calls. The optometrist is 44 and, during his house-calls, questions local people who were members of the militia death squads about their murderous activities -- when he does this, breaching a code of silence that seems ubiquitous in Indonesia, he is met with weird justifications, denials, threats, and, most often, the titular "look of silence", a blank uneasy stare in which the killer's face and lips contort but no words are spoken. Much of the film is unnerving, consisting of long moments of complete silence in which the protagonist simply looks at the killer (or members of the killer's family) with an impassive, expressionless, indeed, almost reptilian stare. It is this same bland, and impenetrable, stare that we have seen on the optometrist's face as he watches footage shot by Oppenheimer of the elderly mass murderers joking and congratulating one another on their savagery forty years earlier. (About a quarter of the film shows the optometrist alone in a featureless room, a kind of abstract purgatory, watching TV interviews that "Josh," as his Indonesian informants call the director, has shot. Indonesians seem to have a propensity for acting things out -- this was obvious in the garish song and dance numbers in The Act of Killing, a film that covers the same terrain, and many of the old death squad murderers enjoy pantomiming how they hacked off heads or slit bellies; one old fellow has his sidekick squat down so he can mime how he cut off Ramli's penis -- Ramli is the protagonist's brother who was literally hacked to pieces in 1965, two years before the optometrist was born. This jolly old butcher has written a book illustrated with sketches of how he chopped up Ramli. With his wife and a sidekick, the old killer displays the book and gives jocular details about how, for years, no one would eat the fish hauled from the Snake River, the site of the worst massacres, since the creatures had been feasting on human flesh. Near the end of the movie, the optometrist confronts the death squad leader's wife and sons. They claim to have no knowledge of any of the killings. The wife goes so far as to assert that her husband never wrote any memoir about the killings, certainly not an illustrated book. When the optometrist shows her lap-top computer footage of Oppenheimer's interview with her husband in which he proudly displays the book and its gory pictures in her presence, she becomes befuddled and leaves the room. Of course, the images show her standing next to her husband giggling about his memoir. Her son's threaten the optometrist and one of them squawks: "You are no longer our friend, Josh!" The old murderer has died unrepenitent.
Oppenheimer is a poetic filmmaker despite his horrendous subject matter. The movie is shot in beautiful, restrained color -- mostly huge close-ups and landscapes with the sound track tremulous with the amplified sounds of insects. The film is structured around three strands of imagery that annotate the horrific story. First, we see tiny spherical beans, jumping and skittering on the surface of a plate or a piece of wood. These are encapsulated butterflies struggling to merge from their bean-like cocoons -- at least, this is how the strange skittering and twitching seeds are explained. The optometrist's father is said to be 103 years old and he haunts the film like a ghoulish, dwarflike specter. We see his wife ladling water over the tiny naked and emaciated homunculus as he shivers and trembles. The old man is like Tithonus -- he's so ancient that he doesn't exactly seem human. He's also senile, claiming in a child-like voice that he's only 17 -- he sings a little risqué ditty about a girl, pop music from his boyhood. When questioned about his son, Ramli, the old man simply denies that he ever had a son. The old man suggests that an implacable doom is befalling all of the murderers -- it's simply the ravages of old age. The old villains that we meet in the film all seem to be dying, they have one foot in the grave. In some fundamental way, the film is about death -- the young victims who died so horribly are, at least, spared the indignity of old age that afflicts murderers and survivors alike. Human revenge has failed but, nonetheless, the worst of the murderers are now suffering -- the injustice is that they are suffering the common fate of all of us who live to be old. (In one terrible scene, the shriveled old man is lost in his own house and shrieks that someone should rescue him -- his grief and sorrow seem analogous to the numb disbelief that some of the killers experience when confronted about their murders: how can this be happening to me in my own home?) The final strand of the picture involves the protagonist's family life -- he has an elderly mother who prays for the everlasting damnation of her son's killers and implacably wishes for revenge. (She no longer sleeps with her superannuated husband because "he smells of pee.") The hero also has a small daughter and we see him playing with her and reading to her from a book. These images suggest that life goes on despite the terrible things that happened in 1965. And this aspect of the film shows how easy the day to day concerns of our lives will erode our ability to retain in our imagination, horrific things that we know happened but that we wish didn''t oppress us any longer. Overriding these separate narrative strands is the film's central metaphor -- often, the optometrist conducts interviews while his subjects are wearing apparatus that allows the hero to correct their vision with different lenses. In a real sense, the protagonist is working so that people in his part of Indonesia will be able to see better -- that is appreciate what happened in 1965. He is trying to open people's eyes. In this respect, the protagonist, with his fixed, unflinching gaze, resembles a camera -- he seems almost completely inert, a pair of watching eyes and the film's fixation with optical devices enhances the impression that the optometrist is a surrogate for the camera itself, recording impassively and, without comment, the images that it receives. Part of enigma in the film is the hero -- we don't know his motive and can't understand exactly what he is trying to accomplish. And, if he is baffling to the audience, he is a complete mystery to the Indonesians who each and every one (including a death squad victim who escaped) seem to regard it best to not re-open the terrible wounds left by the mass killings in 1965.
The movie is filled with disconcerting images. One old man who led death squads says that the Americans should have given prizes to him and his compadres -- perhaps, a plane flight to the USA or, at the very least, a cruise. A member of parliament who ordered thousands of deaths says menacingly: "Of course, I was right -- this is shown by the fact that the families of those I killed all voted for me." A 1965 newsreel narrated by a NBC newscaster suggests that the Communists wanted to be murdered and, in fact, even politely scheduled appointments for their slaughter -- a sentiment echoed by several of the old murderers shown in the film. (Students in an elementary school are told that the Communists gouged out people's eyes and, then, pleaded to be punished by death -- the notion of injury to the eyes is fundamental to the film and the optometrist's central role in the picture. The most shocking moment in the film is when the daughter of a killer says that she wants to make peace with the optometrist and have him as a member of her family. The optometrist hugs her and says that he is now a member of her family. She, then, asks the optometrist to embrace her senile father and forgive him for killing the hero's brother. To everyone's surprise, the optometrist does embrace the delusional old man showing almost supernatural grace by making this gesture of forgiveness.. In this film, two old men claim to have kept their sanity in the midst of the slaughter by drinking human blood --"it's sweet and salty" one of them tells the camera. Drinking human blood was a remedy for the horror of killing so many people and, in an odd way, these old murderers are more sympathetic than the urbane politicians and land developers who profited from the slaughter. At least, these two men recognized that they had transgressed beyond the bounds of the human and that their only means of remaining sane was to engage in this overtly supernatural ritual. Both of these old men cut the interview short -- it's time for them to go the Mosque for their evening prayers.
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Sunset Song
Sunset Song (2015) is one of those worthy, well-meaning, and earnest films that you put on your queue and, then, avoid watching for years. The film was directed by one of cinema's pre-eminent poet-directors (Terence Davies) and has excellent acting and production values. Crammed full of rapes, beatings, and gory childbirths, the picture is certainly not boring -- but I must admit that I found it peculiarly offensive. Although Davies is probably world-cinema's most poetic and sensitive director, Sunset Song is stupidly and explicitly brutal and strangely literal-minded -- it is maudlin and bathetic, the opposite of poetic. In this regard, Sunset Song presages the awful devolution of Davies' poetic gifts obvious in his totally banal and offensive A Quiet Passion, a 2016 period film about Emily Dickinson that subjects the poor writer to a whole barrage of terrible illnesses and seizures -- in the end, Emily Dickinson is, in effect, reduced to paroxysms of convulsion; her verse scanted by the gruesome depiction of her last illness. She's not a poet but a collection of garish, hideous symptoms.
Sunset Song is based upon a famous novel by a Scottish writer, Lee Grassic Gibbon, published in 1932. (The book is highly celebrated in Scotland where it achieved status as Scotland's best-loved novel in 2016 -- possibly as a result of publicity arises from this film.) The book is a "coming of age" novel involving a young woman named Chris Guthrie (played in the movie by the remarkably beautiful English super-model Agyness Deyn). Chris suffers all sorts of horrors but ends up affirming her life in the Scottish highlands. The highlands scenery, paradoxically shot in New Zealand, is a major thematic element in the film -- we see golden fields of wheat, deep green valleys, and turbulent skies full of storm clouds; sometimes, the fields and old stone walls are picturesquely draped in snow. In this beautiful terrain, the Guthrie family lives, terrorized by their savage patriarch, John Guthrie. (Peter Mullen who was indelible as the vicious, if henpecked, hillbilly criminal in Ozark plays John Guthrie uttering impenetrable and unintelligible Scottish curses into his beard and beating everyone in sight.) After raping Guthrie rapes his long-suffering wife, she suffers through difficult childbirth (portrayed mostly by bloody forearms and horrific shrieks) and has twins. When John rapes her again, and she ends up pregnant once more (she's about 50 years old), she takes matters into her own hands by poisoning herself and the two babies. Some of this was a little unclear to me because the characters speak in Scottish and, without subtitles, there is no way of understanding what they are saying -- "sighing and moaning/ or ilk green loaning/ the flowers of the forest/ are a wede away": even with the subtitles engaged, some of the dialogue and diction, particularly in the songs is hard to decipher. Guthrie's violent treatment of his son drives him away. Guthrie then has a stroke and we are treated to about five minutes of the vicious old man writhing in the mud -- strokes, paralysis, and awful seizures now seem to be Terence Davies' stock-in-trade (he showed such things in similarly tasteless and awful detail in A Quiet Passion). Old Guthrie still has a lot of juice in him and tries to rape Chris, although he has hemiparesis and can't accomplish much beyond wriggling around on his belly on the floor. He dies and we get another lengthy open casket scene -- Davies' likes these sequences also. Chris falls in love with a local lad and, for about 20 minutes, the film relaxes from its somber and morose tone and becomes a charming pastoral bucolic -- the scenes leading up to, and around, the wedding are the best in the movie because they are the most musical and least dire. (Many of Davies' most magnificent earlier movies are, in effect, musicals, most notably his greatest picture The Long Day Closes released in 1992, an affectionate tribute to movie musicals that sustained Davies' during his own difficult childhood.) Just when things seem to be looking up for Chris, her husband gets denounced for not enlisting to fight in World War One. Shamed, he signs up. When he returns from France, he has implausibly become an even more brutish rapist and misogynist than dead John Guthrie. Chris has to threaten him with a knife. Later, we learn that he has deserted and been shot as a coward in France. It's not enough to Davies to have someone report this -- he, then, violates all of the norms of his movie, except for his sadistic desire to film in long sequences different types of human misery, and cuts away to France where we see Chris' husband shot by a firing squad. (Up to this point, the film has cleaved religiously to Chris' point-of-view, but this goes by the wayside when Davies' gets a chance to stage an execution.) We're supposed to mourn the poor fellow but he behaved so horribly to our heroine, raping her in another of Davies' tasteless displays of cruelty, that we don't give a damn about his fate -- in fact, the audience is puzzled by the heroine's moping around after the brute has been shot: one expects she would pleased to have him out of her life. The movie ends in a puzzling way with a long penultimate shot tracking over a vile-looking field of mud, debris, and bomb craters -- apparently a battlefield in France -- and, then, ending with shots of some standing stones (apparently significant in the novel but just picturesque window-dressing in Davies' film) and the heroine who declares "you can do without day if you have a quiet lamp lit in your heart."
Davies' is drawn to images of physical suffering either in childbirth or terrible illness or the results of cruelty inflicted by one character on another. This is ultimately both disturbing and tedious. He is the opposite of elliptical -- if something awful is going to happen, he puts the camera in the room and licks his lips as he records the misery. An example of the degradation in Davies' style is a gorgeous sequence involving parishioners marching through golden wheat fields to their church -- on the soundtrack we hear the Orpheus Choir of Glasgow singing a wonderfully beautiful hymn that begins "All the April evenings, April airs were all abroad". The camera tracks in a stately motion through the church recording a sermon by the preacher in which he demands all the men in the parish enlist to fight the German Kaiser and that anyone who hesitates is a "pro-German coward." Maybe, pastors preached this way in Scotland in 1916, but the scene is over-the-top, "laid on with a trowel" as they say, images and words that seem out-of-character for the otherwise reticent farming folk. (Davies shot a similar bravura tracking sequence in a church in The Long Day Closes that is one of the masterpieces in world cinema and much more accomplished than his work in this film.) Davies' makes his points with such literal-minded excessiveness that the whole thing seems embarrassing, simple-minded, and, even, unrealistic.
Sunset Song is based upon a famous novel by a Scottish writer, Lee Grassic Gibbon, published in 1932. (The book is highly celebrated in Scotland where it achieved status as Scotland's best-loved novel in 2016 -- possibly as a result of publicity arises from this film.) The book is a "coming of age" novel involving a young woman named Chris Guthrie (played in the movie by the remarkably beautiful English super-model Agyness Deyn). Chris suffers all sorts of horrors but ends up affirming her life in the Scottish highlands. The highlands scenery, paradoxically shot in New Zealand, is a major thematic element in the film -- we see golden fields of wheat, deep green valleys, and turbulent skies full of storm clouds; sometimes, the fields and old stone walls are picturesquely draped in snow. In this beautiful terrain, the Guthrie family lives, terrorized by their savage patriarch, John Guthrie. (Peter Mullen who was indelible as the vicious, if henpecked, hillbilly criminal in Ozark plays John Guthrie uttering impenetrable and unintelligible Scottish curses into his beard and beating everyone in sight.) After raping Guthrie rapes his long-suffering wife, she suffers through difficult childbirth (portrayed mostly by bloody forearms and horrific shrieks) and has twins. When John rapes her again, and she ends up pregnant once more (she's about 50 years old), she takes matters into her own hands by poisoning herself and the two babies. Some of this was a little unclear to me because the characters speak in Scottish and, without subtitles, there is no way of understanding what they are saying -- "sighing and moaning/ or ilk green loaning/ the flowers of the forest/ are a wede away": even with the subtitles engaged, some of the dialogue and diction, particularly in the songs is hard to decipher. Guthrie's violent treatment of his son drives him away. Guthrie then has a stroke and we are treated to about five minutes of the vicious old man writhing in the mud -- strokes, paralysis, and awful seizures now seem to be Terence Davies' stock-in-trade (he showed such things in similarly tasteless and awful detail in A Quiet Passion). Old Guthrie still has a lot of juice in him and tries to rape Chris, although he has hemiparesis and can't accomplish much beyond wriggling around on his belly on the floor. He dies and we get another lengthy open casket scene -- Davies' likes these sequences also. Chris falls in love with a local lad and, for about 20 minutes, the film relaxes from its somber and morose tone and becomes a charming pastoral bucolic -- the scenes leading up to, and around, the wedding are the best in the movie because they are the most musical and least dire. (Many of Davies' most magnificent earlier movies are, in effect, musicals, most notably his greatest picture The Long Day Closes released in 1992, an affectionate tribute to movie musicals that sustained Davies' during his own difficult childhood.) Just when things seem to be looking up for Chris, her husband gets denounced for not enlisting to fight in World War One. Shamed, he signs up. When he returns from France, he has implausibly become an even more brutish rapist and misogynist than dead John Guthrie. Chris has to threaten him with a knife. Later, we learn that he has deserted and been shot as a coward in France. It's not enough to Davies to have someone report this -- he, then, violates all of the norms of his movie, except for his sadistic desire to film in long sequences different types of human misery, and cuts away to France where we see Chris' husband shot by a firing squad. (Up to this point, the film has cleaved religiously to Chris' point-of-view, but this goes by the wayside when Davies' gets a chance to stage an execution.) We're supposed to mourn the poor fellow but he behaved so horribly to our heroine, raping her in another of Davies' tasteless displays of cruelty, that we don't give a damn about his fate -- in fact, the audience is puzzled by the heroine's moping around after the brute has been shot: one expects she would pleased to have him out of her life. The movie ends in a puzzling way with a long penultimate shot tracking over a vile-looking field of mud, debris, and bomb craters -- apparently a battlefield in France -- and, then, ending with shots of some standing stones (apparently significant in the novel but just picturesque window-dressing in Davies' film) and the heroine who declares "you can do without day if you have a quiet lamp lit in your heart."
Davies' is drawn to images of physical suffering either in childbirth or terrible illness or the results of cruelty inflicted by one character on another. This is ultimately both disturbing and tedious. He is the opposite of elliptical -- if something awful is going to happen, he puts the camera in the room and licks his lips as he records the misery. An example of the degradation in Davies' style is a gorgeous sequence involving parishioners marching through golden wheat fields to their church -- on the soundtrack we hear the Orpheus Choir of Glasgow singing a wonderfully beautiful hymn that begins "All the April evenings, April airs were all abroad". The camera tracks in a stately motion through the church recording a sermon by the preacher in which he demands all the men in the parish enlist to fight the German Kaiser and that anyone who hesitates is a "pro-German coward." Maybe, pastors preached this way in Scotland in 1916, but the scene is over-the-top, "laid on with a trowel" as they say, images and words that seem out-of-character for the otherwise reticent farming folk. (Davies shot a similar bravura tracking sequence in a church in The Long Day Closes that is one of the masterpieces in world cinema and much more accomplished than his work in this film.) Davies' makes his points with such literal-minded excessiveness that the whole thing seems embarrassing, simple-minded, and, even, unrealistic.
Monday, October 8, 2018
The Mummy's Hand
The Mummy's Hand (Christy Cabanne, 1940) is an inferior Universal Horror film, cheaply made and poorly acted. In general, the mummy pictures produced after the eccentric and spectacularly shot 1936 inaugural effort, Karl Freund's The Mummy (with Boris Karloff) are inept and, in fact, tend toward the risible. In real life, Egyptian mummies are frail, leathery artifacts so convincingly moribund that it is simply impossible to imagine them revived, let alone, stalking about killing people. Since mummies themselves, although repulsive, are not particularly frightening, these films exploit other sources of horror -- ultimately, mummy monsters represent our fear of confinement and paralysis: someone is always buried alive in these pictures with a ghastly close-up of staring terror-struck eyes bulging as gauze is implacably wrapped around the immobilized but still animate face of the victim, generally a lustful high-priest, about to be interred living in a grandiose sarcophagus in some dismal torch-lit granite tomb. The rules of engagement with mummies are not well understood -- shooting won't harm an undead Egyptian but they can be burnt and, in fact, the hundreds of yards of gauze wrapping enclosing the undead corpse serves as an effective tinder. With black staring eyes and a withered round anal aperture for mouth, mummies also, I think, embody some primordial fears about being burned, or about the appearance of burn victims. The monstrous mummy looks like the victim of fire or some other kind of disastrous surgical procedure and seems horrible in that regard -- but this horror is founded upon repulsion, aversion, and, even, a kind of pity. To become a mummy, one must suffer quite extraordinarily and the compensation of eternal life isn't much fun if you have to spend eternity limping around like a person who has suffered hemiparesis as a result of a stroke -- mummies have one bad arm crimped up close to the torso and a leg with severe foot-drop that they haul behind themselves as they stalk forward. Mummies have to corner their victims -- a toddler could outrun one of these creatures. After Freund's version, the series went downhill fast, due, in part, to sheer and arrogant laziness on the part of the screenwriters, and the second installment in the franchise is already terrible.
A lustful priest enamored with the princess Ananka gets himself mummified alive. (Later, when he's discovered someone touches him and says: Why it's as if he's alive?" The other actor's rejoinder is classic: "What marvelous embalming!" -- exactly how you can be both alive and embalmed is left to the audience's imagination). An American soldier-of-fortune with his buddy, a reject from the Bowery Boys, discovers an artifact that points the way to the tomb. The tomb, which looks like a Mayan Temple, complete with an obviously Mayan bas relief on its top, is guarded by a sinister fez-wearing high priest who is also conveniently the chief Egyptologist at the Cairo Museum. To reach the tomb, you have to ride a camel shown in close-up trudging through sand only to arrive at... a hillside obviously located in California.) An American magician and con-man with a lissome, beautiful daughter joins the expedition to loot the tomb of Princess Ananka. A highly Semitic-looking beggar (he looks like Fagin from Oliver Twist) first seen in the bazaar in Cairo lurks around the edges of the action conspiring with the Shriner High Priest to unleash his unfortunate precursor, Kharis, the undead mummy on the looters. Kharis strangles the chief archaeologist, a crime that doesn't really bother anyone at all and something that all the characters seem to forget as soon as the dastardly deed is accomplished. People get into a high dudgeon, however, when the mummy snatches the girl. She's wearing slinky white silk lingerie like a 'roaring twenties' gun moll and reclines gracefully in the embrace of the mummy who drags her to the tomb where the fez-wearing High Priest decides to make her into another animate corpse so that he can be her consort for all eternity. (This will leave for Kharis without a mate, but he's readily controlled -- cut off his tea made from broiled tanna leaves and he will go back to sleep for another couple eons.) There's a fist fight between the burly looter and the poor mummy gets lit on fire after absorbing a dozen or so revolver shots to the torso. The final scenes take place in an underground temple with huge statues of jackals posing above what seems to be a vast Mormon-style baptismal font. There are about four good shots in the 67 minute movie -- a jackal howls at the sky in which the moon glows swathed in cloud, the mummy looks in on the negligee-wearing girl, shocking her into a dead faint -- he has a quizzical look on his face with deep black puppy-dog eyes and an anal pucker for a mouth and seems so sad and helpless that, for a moment, at least, you're rooting for the monster. There's a good scene of an ancient Egyptian burial, ebony slaves killed by spears so no one can locate the sepulchral chamber, and, at last, an impressive overhead crane shot of the underground tomb with the twenty-foot tall Anubis-headed gods and a black basin big enough to hold a dozen bathers or a half-dozen LDS confirmands at their baptism. The rest of the film is garbage and so bad that you inevitably sense that the movie is mocking itself -- one archaeologist is famous for unearthing "Inca tombs in Mexico" and the Americans have no motive except looting and desecration. In fact, they deserve the mummy's somewhat inefficient revenge.
(I tuned in two hours later and found that by The Mummy's Curse, released in 1946, production values had further declined. Here the mummy is stalking about a backlot that is supposed to represent a Louisiana bayou -- apparently, left over from some other film. The mummy's tomb no longer bears any semblance to an archaeological site -- it has now become a ruined monastery which looks like nothing other than one crumbling wall with a prison cell door built into it. Long shots of the monastery are obviously matte shots painted on the glass lens and the set is a hulking outline that doesn't even seem to have an interior. The mummy stumbles into a tent, pulls out the lissome fainting woman in white lingerie (this effect remains unaltered) but, as the walking corpse exits the tent, he knocks it down much to the consternation of the other sleepers who flail around comically under the canvas. An amusing African-American with popping eyes runs around in a distracted way -- his name is Goobie and he summons the armed white men who put an end to the mummy, this time yanking down the one crumbling wall comprising the film's single set to bury the poor undead High Priest in a noisy avalanche of Styrofoam bricks and rubble. In the six years between the movies, the budget has gone from low to non-existent.)
A lustful priest enamored with the princess Ananka gets himself mummified alive. (Later, when he's discovered someone touches him and says: Why it's as if he's alive?" The other actor's rejoinder is classic: "What marvelous embalming!" -- exactly how you can be both alive and embalmed is left to the audience's imagination). An American soldier-of-fortune with his buddy, a reject from the Bowery Boys, discovers an artifact that points the way to the tomb. The tomb, which looks like a Mayan Temple, complete with an obviously Mayan bas relief on its top, is guarded by a sinister fez-wearing high priest who is also conveniently the chief Egyptologist at the Cairo Museum. To reach the tomb, you have to ride a camel shown in close-up trudging through sand only to arrive at... a hillside obviously located in California.) An American magician and con-man with a lissome, beautiful daughter joins the expedition to loot the tomb of Princess Ananka. A highly Semitic-looking beggar (he looks like Fagin from Oliver Twist) first seen in the bazaar in Cairo lurks around the edges of the action conspiring with the Shriner High Priest to unleash his unfortunate precursor, Kharis, the undead mummy on the looters. Kharis strangles the chief archaeologist, a crime that doesn't really bother anyone at all and something that all the characters seem to forget as soon as the dastardly deed is accomplished. People get into a high dudgeon, however, when the mummy snatches the girl. She's wearing slinky white silk lingerie like a 'roaring twenties' gun moll and reclines gracefully in the embrace of the mummy who drags her to the tomb where the fez-wearing High Priest decides to make her into another animate corpse so that he can be her consort for all eternity. (This will leave for Kharis without a mate, but he's readily controlled -- cut off his tea made from broiled tanna leaves and he will go back to sleep for another couple eons.) There's a fist fight between the burly looter and the poor mummy gets lit on fire after absorbing a dozen or so revolver shots to the torso. The final scenes take place in an underground temple with huge statues of jackals posing above what seems to be a vast Mormon-style baptismal font. There are about four good shots in the 67 minute movie -- a jackal howls at the sky in which the moon glows swathed in cloud, the mummy looks in on the negligee-wearing girl, shocking her into a dead faint -- he has a quizzical look on his face with deep black puppy-dog eyes and an anal pucker for a mouth and seems so sad and helpless that, for a moment, at least, you're rooting for the monster. There's a good scene of an ancient Egyptian burial, ebony slaves killed by spears so no one can locate the sepulchral chamber, and, at last, an impressive overhead crane shot of the underground tomb with the twenty-foot tall Anubis-headed gods and a black basin big enough to hold a dozen bathers or a half-dozen LDS confirmands at their baptism. The rest of the film is garbage and so bad that you inevitably sense that the movie is mocking itself -- one archaeologist is famous for unearthing "Inca tombs in Mexico" and the Americans have no motive except looting and desecration. In fact, they deserve the mummy's somewhat inefficient revenge.
(I tuned in two hours later and found that by The Mummy's Curse, released in 1946, production values had further declined. Here the mummy is stalking about a backlot that is supposed to represent a Louisiana bayou -- apparently, left over from some other film. The mummy's tomb no longer bears any semblance to an archaeological site -- it has now become a ruined monastery which looks like nothing other than one crumbling wall with a prison cell door built into it. Long shots of the monastery are obviously matte shots painted on the glass lens and the set is a hulking outline that doesn't even seem to have an interior. The mummy stumbles into a tent, pulls out the lissome fainting woman in white lingerie (this effect remains unaltered) but, as the walking corpse exits the tent, he knocks it down much to the consternation of the other sleepers who flail around comically under the canvas. An amusing African-American with popping eyes runs around in a distracted way -- his name is Goobie and he summons the armed white men who put an end to the mummy, this time yanking down the one crumbling wall comprising the film's single set to bury the poor undead High Priest in a noisy avalanche of Styrofoam bricks and rubble. In the six years between the movies, the budget has gone from low to non-existent.)
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