Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell

A Japan Air plane is cruising through a sky the color of a bucket of blood.  The jet is a kind of ship of fools -- in First Class, the passengers include a loathsome and corrupt politician (Mr. Mano), a sycophantic government contractor who is bribing Mano with both cash and access to his sluttish wife, a blonde American war widow whose husband died in Vietnam, a cynical psychiatrist and a impetuous, athletic youth as well as a few surly businessmen, and  a bland, mustachioed terrorist.  Birds keep thudding into the windows in the First Class cabin, bursting into bloody fans of feathers and gore.  The two pilots in the cockpit remark to the comely stewardess that the "skies have an unusual appearance" -- this is an understatement since the heavens seem to be hemorrhaging blood. Ground control announces that there is "probably" a bomb on the jet.  The steward starts searching through people's bags and finds one mysterious piece of unclaimed luggage that seems to contain a powerful acid.  The acid gets spilled, a gun is brandished, and, then, in the cockpit, the pilots are confronted by a glowing flying saucer, a sort of Peter Max colored psychedelic pumpkin with rings like Saturn.  Things aren't going well on this routine flight to Osaka and, next thing, we know the plane is skidding wildly through a sort of rocky badlands, shooting fire from its sides and careening violently through the stony wilderness before coming to a stop -- everyone is either dead or unconscious.  And this series of events is simply the film's prelude, the sequence preceding the garish titles that tell us that we are watching Goke, Body Snatcher form Hell.  

Goke is the second of four surreal horror films produced by Shochiku Films in the mid-sixties.  This picture is wildly ambitious -- a critique on civilization and its discontents with a rabble-rousing anti-Vietnam war message, atrocity footage tinted blood-red as well so that we don't miss the implications of the corpses, napalmed children, and mushroom clouds.  The picture's reach certainly outstretches its grasp and the movie is ridiculously cheap, with weird and utterly unconvincing special effects.  It must be said, however, that the director of this film (Hajime Soto) considered himself an artist and he develops his themes with histrionic and shrill assurance.  Furthermore, the bargain basement special effects epitomized by the model plane dangling mid-air in front of a mural of swollen and hepatic clouds have a curious poetic beauty -- it's all artifice, contrived delirium that is not without its lyrical effects:  one part of the big gravel pit where the plane has crashed has the curious property of raining oblong boulders the size of suitcases and filing cabinets down on those who venture into this terrain.  The camera is set directly under the avalanche of boulders which fall to the right and left or to the top and bottom of the lens.  The space ship is hidden in another corner of the canyon -- as you approach it, the gourd-shaped UFO girdled by orange rings begins to throb.  People drawn as if by mesmeric force into the flying saucer suffer a most peculiar injury:  their forehead splits wide open from nose to brow, admitting into their skulls a shapeless silver blob, an animate mass of quicksilver apparently invested with alien intelligence.  Instantaneously, the forehead, then, heals although disfigured by an engorged vulva where the blob-monster has penetrated the head.  People with this vaginal gash in the middle of their face become vampires who attack the survivors from the plane to exsanguinate them -- a feat that can be accomplished by some vigorous blood-sucking from the jugular and carotid arteries in about 25 seconds.  Sometimes, the exsanguinated corpses become hideous mummies with an eyeball in one leathery socket so as to better contrast with the opposing denucleated socket.  Some of these mummy-corpses are made of heaps of earth shaped like bodies -- when the skin wrapping these dirt corpses is flayed off the wind just blows the anthropoid soil away.  When one of the vampires gets lit on fire, the director doesn't have enough money to stage a full stunt body-burn scene -- instead, he just superimposes yellow flames over shots of the vulva-faced villains shrieking in pain.  These sorts of effects are metonyms -- the bare minimum to induce in the viewer a corresponding sense for what was intended by the film-maker but beyond his fiscal reach.  This kind of movie turns the audience into a co-director; we oblige the film's inadequacies by completing the effect in our imagination -- we fill in the rest of the effect, substituting in our reverie the whole for the unimpressive part displayed on screen.  There is something to be said for engaging the viewer's attention in this way.

Once the jet crashes, the survivors wake up to discover that they are beset by body-snatching alien vampires.  Instead of working cooperatively to defend themselves, the crash survivors swill whisky and bicker about the War in  Vietnam and man's inhumanity to man -- the psychiatrist helpfully tells the survivors that they will descend to a level "worse than beasts".  There's no water left -- at least, after the American war widow uses the last couple gulps to wash her face.  People keep wandering off to be eaten by the vampires.  Sometimes, the vampires can be killed (by fire or boulders plunging off the sides of the gravel pit); other times, it seems the vampires are invulnerable -- the rules keep shifting according the plot's vagaries.  In the end, the crash survivors are all murdered by one another or bled dry by the vampires.  One of the women stands atop a high ledge and announces in a sepulchral voice that she is inhabited by the spirit of the invading Gokemidore aliens who have come to Earth to destroy the warlike and primitive humans.  In the end, only the comely nurse and the ship's pilot are left alive.  After spending 80 minutes in the gravel pit, it finally occurs to them to climb over the rim of the excavation to see where the plane has crash-landed.  In fact, they are only a stone's throw away from a toll-highway.  But it's too late.  The Gokemidore have drained everyone of their blood and the corpses are stacked up like firewood along the roadway and near the toll-booths.  "Why did this have to happen?" the wounded pilot asks.  The film replies by showing another montage of carbonized corpses, war footage from Hiroshima it seems, and, then, big mushroom clouds all tinted bright red -- presumably mankind deserves this awful fate.  To underline the point, the film draws back from the island of Japan in the glittering seas of the East Pacific -- the camera tracks into Outer Space and, suddenly, we see hordes of orange psychedelic pumpkins (like something from the Beatles Yellow Submarine) pouring out of interstellar space to attack the blue orb of our Earth.   

The Living Skeleton

In the mid-sixties, Shochiku, the Japanese film company that had been Yasujiro's Ozu's  home studio, produced a number of horror films.  The Living Skeleton (1968), directed by Koki Matsano, is an example of  Shochiku's movies in this genre.  It's lively enough, a nasty exploitation film with an interesting anti-Christian theme, but so remarkably incoherent as to be fundamentally unwatchable.  As is the case with most Japanese genre films, the movie is lovingly shot, utilizing leading edge film techniques -- images in the movie resemble Antonioni, particularly films such as Zabriskie Point and Blow-up.  The camera-work is evocative and the editing has a savage, propulsive energy, but you can't ever quite figure out what is going on.  Criterion has released several Shochiku horror films on its label -- on my Tv, at least as broadcast by Turner Classic Movies, much of the movie was so dark that the images were illegible, adding to my not inconsiderable confusion. 

The Living Skeleton belongs to the "everything but the kitchen-sink" style of genre film-making.  If a scene or a plot device worked in a horror movie somewhere in the world, the producers of The Living Skeleton throw it into the mix.  We have a ghost ship, a spectacular massacre with machine guns blasting away directly at the camera lens, apparitions, a deadly ghost-girl, a mummy, vampire bats and a bunch of people reduced to carbonized pulp by "algiform sulfate", a powerful acid to say the least.  The movie hovers between a detective thriller, a revenge drama, and a monster movie mixing all elements together in a chaotic melange.  A group of robbers steals gold bullion off a ship and slaughters all of its passengers -- this is sequence is shot in a series of lurid close-ups punctuated by guns firing point-blank at the audience.  A doctor is (apparently) slain with his wife, Yoriko.  Three years later, Yoriko's twin sister, Saeko, is living with strange, if seemingly gentle, Catholic priest on a promontory in Yokohama harbor.  Saeko has a feckless boyfriend named Machizuki and a dog that looks like Lassie called Johnny.  The scenes with the Catholic priest focus on a funeral with the crucifix hovering in the gloom over the proceedings -- there is something uncanny and scary about Catholicism, at least, as presented in this picture.  The ghost ship on which the massacre took place appears on the dark and stormy sea.  Saeko goes to the ship with her boyfriend where she seems to encounter the figure of her dead sister.  The murderers responsible for the bullion heist begin to die horribly, one by one.  Before they die, each of them sees the pallid corpse of Yoriko looming before them.  One of the gangsters has half of his face melted away by a previous encounter with acid and so he makes a ghastly appearance.  The other bad guys are all grotesques of the kind you might encounter in an old Dick Tracy cartoon -- dipsomaniacs and leering goons.  The killings are accompanied by vampire bat attacks and there are a bunch of skeletons linked together by chains under water in the bay that periodically make appearances.  After lots of misdirection, the film reveals that the doctor married to Yoriko, both thought to be killed in the massacre, has survived and, somehow, embalmed his dead wife -- despite being embalmed (or a "mummy" as the film claims) she's surprisingly energetic and, at one point, grabs a hold of one of the bad guys.  The mad doctor has been experimenting with the dangerously corrosive "algiform sulfate" -- at some point, someone declares:  "it's a powerful chemical", an understatement if there ever was one.  The characters all converge on the scary ghost-ship where the mad doctor and his mummified wife are located.  The kindly Catholic priest peels off his skin to reveal that he's the horribly disfigured gangster -- no longer Saeko's benefactor, he tries to kill her.  And, it turns out that Saeko is completely insane and has been butchering the bad guys involved in her sister's death.  ("Saeko" is pronounced "Psycho", get it?)  At the climax, the surviving bad guys experience unfortunate encounters with the "algiform sulfate" and end up reduced gooey to black gunk.  This is much deserved -- the evil bastards killed Johnny, the friendly collie.  The film is cleverly made, although my plot summary makes its seem far more coherent than it actually is -- with respect to several of the garish murders, I still don't know who exactly killed the bad guys or, even, how the murders were accomplished..  The picture is too gruesome to be fun; too confusing to be gripping or suspenseful -- there's no suspense when you can't figure out who is being killed or why -- and not bad enough to be perversely entertaining.   

Cabin in the Sky

Cabin in the Sky (1943) is Vincente Minnelli's first film, based on an all-Black musical popular on Broadway during World War II.  The film depicts a mysterious world that is part raucously urban and part southern pastoral -- this fantasy-land is devoid of White people.  To our contemporary eyes, the picture is marred because it assumes that the problems of Black folk are eschatological and religious -- not political in other words.  In a world without White people, there can be no racism.  In fact, the problem for Black people in this country has always been White people and, therefore, the film's never-never land presents us with a setting and context that is magical -- in many ways, the film is more like The Wizard of Oz (to which Minnelli makes a direct reference) than something like Intruder in the Dust produced a few years later in 1949.  Although the premises of Cabin in the Sky can be criticized, the execution of the film is pretty much flawless -- the picture is an excellent movie-musical crammed with remarkable song-and-dance numbers and memorable for some extraordinary performances.

A ne'er-do-well, Little Joe, is married to a virtuous woman, Petunia.  Petunia entices her husband to attend Church; she's concerned for his salvation.  Little Joe sneaks out of the service, gets into a dice game with a crooked thug, Domino Johsnon, and ends up shot.  He is brought home to his grieving wife, delirious and badly wounded.  Little Joe dies, but Petunia's "powerful praying", causes God to allow him a period of six months to achieve redemption after he is brought back to life.  Little Joe's spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.  Lucifer Jr. and his minions (dressed in resplendent uniforms like Marcus Garvey militants) decide to tempt Little Joe with money, since filthy luchre is the source of all evil.  Little Joe wins the Irish Sweepstakes and is paid $50,000 in cash.  He wastes his money on booze and gambling and takes up with a wicked woman, Georgia Brown.  At last, Petunia decides to go down to the local juke joint to retrieve Little Joe.  There Petunia, who shows a surprising aptitude for sin, bests Georgia Brown and flirts with the gambler and fancy man, Domino, who gunned down her husband.  At this point, all the main characters are in danger of perdition.  But a tornado sweeps across the plains and destroys the juke joint with the result that both Little Joe and Petunia are killed.  They are called to account and their ledgers read aloud -- Petunia is destined for the pearly gates but Little Joe is damned.  Petunia refuses to go to heaven without her man and God relents, reluctantly allowing Little Joe into heaven -- like Faust, he is redeemed by the ewig Weibliche ('the "eternal feminine" principle of mercy as opposed to justice).  Little Joe gets winded climbing the stairway to heaven and, suddenly, awakens -- his fever broke, and like Dorothy returned to Kansas, he realizes that it was all a dream.  The story is enlivened by fantastic songs including "Taking a Chance on Love" and "Happiness is a thing called Joe".  The cast is superlative.   Ethel Water plays Petunia; Lena Horne is the bad girl, Georgia Brown.  Eddie "Rochester" Anderson is Little Joe -- not only does he perform effectively with his trademark gravelly voice, he also dances well and, even, sings.  Louis Armstrong is mostly wasted as a "The  Trumpeter," one of Lucifer Jr.'s henchmen -- nonetheless, he delivers his lines as if playing cornet; each short speech is phrased as an improvised verbal riff, something akin to scat singing but more articulate.

At the film's climax, all the characters converge on Jim Henry's juke joint where the Duke Ellington orchestra is playing.  The cool and elegant Lena Horne as Georgia Brown hitches up her satin skirt to show the boys her "accessories" and, then, is challenged by Ethel Waters, entering the saloon in a spangly outfit that makes her look like the Queen of Sheba.  Georgia Brown sneers:  "You ain't got what I got!" wiggling a little in the direction of Ethel Waters.  Petunia responds by disdainfully replying:  "I got everything you got, honey, and lot's more of it too" -- something that is indisputably true.  (In some shots, Waters seems to be about twice the size of Little Joe -- she's the queen, regal in all dimensions.)  The film approaches something like cinematic heaven in these bar sequences:  Lena Horne wears a white satub gown matching Duke Ellington's vanilla ice cream suit and the bar-crowd is all jitterbugging energetically when the Fancy Man, Domino Johnson, makes his entrance -- he dances a bit and, then, struts up the steps with the camera on a crane ascending with him, a spectacular movement that ends with a big close-up of the grinning pimp with top hat and cane.  (He has just sung the tune:  "That's why they call me Shine!" about his "hair that's curly/And teeth that's pearly" as well as his fine ebony complexion.)  When Ethel Waters dances, she's fantastically agile despite her size -- she can kick her toes up way above her head to tap against her upraised hand.  She ends up dancing with Domino to little Joe's bug-eyed dismay as a big twister sweeps across the prairie, the same serpentine and murderous cyclone that stalked Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. 

The Thirties were a golden age for films of this sort.  Green Pastures, also starring Rex Ingram, was a big hit in 1936, a sympathetic reframing of several Old  Testament stories featuring an all-black cast.  (It's very good as well.)  Different ethnic minorities began to develop their own cinemas -- the Thirties was also the era of the great Yiddish films including Edgar Ulmer's Green Fields (1937), Yiddle and his Fiddle (1936) and Tevye (also 1937).  This sort of diversity was strangled by the patriotic show of unity required by World War II.  I saw Cabin in the Sky on The Essentials, the show hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and Ava DuVernay, the African American director of Selma among other films.  Ava DuVernay wondered what became of all of the fantastically energetic performers who we see sashaying into the saloon at the climax of the film -- her melancholy rhetorical question is racially inflected, a variant of Clive James' remark that "Bojangles didn't get to become Fred Astaire."   This is not necessarily a racial question:  When I see a film like 42nd Street or Singin' in the Rain, I similarly wonder about the chorus line:  what happened to all of these beautiful and talented dancers?  Where are they now? 

Wonderstruck

Wonderstruck (2017) is a highly inventive film, lovingly detailed and directed with the utmost intelligence and precision.  But it's also an example of the truism that the sum of the parts doesn't always equal an excellent or successful whole -- something seems subtly wrong with this movie despite the skill with which it has been made.  The picture is ultimately too implausible to make much sense as a realistic depiction of events; and, yet, the film is also too rooted in realistic detail to succeed as a fantasy.  Rather, Wonderstruck seems trapped somehow by its own excellence -- the more exquisitely detailed and realistic the settings and furnishings of the film, the more the picture's implausibility grates on the viewer.  We're left with a wonderful spectacle that doesn't cohere on any level, a cornucopia of images that can't quite be assimilated to any meaning. 

Based on a book by Brian Selznick, Todd Haynes, the director, positions the movie as made for children, or, at least, young adults.  In this regard, the movie seems similar to Hugo, Scorsese's film for young people -- a movie that also was better in parts than whole.  The film's rhythm is peculiar and slightly rebarbative from the start:  two parallel stories are intercut,   The cutting between the stories relies on visual rhymes -- for instance, a boy has a telescope and yearns to visit outer space; fifty years earlier, a girl tears pictures of movie stars from a magazine.  The girl takes a ferry to Manhattan; we see the boy arrive at the 42nd Street Terminal on a bus, and so on.  The story set in 1927 is filmed in beautiful black and white and staged like a silent movie -- one can see clear influences from Murnau's Sunrise and King Vidor's The Crowd in these sequences.  The parallel story is set in 1977, shot by the great Ed Lachmann in warm, honey-colored hues, although the setting is the incredibly filthy and crowded streets around Times Square, a grimy terrain populated by rats and all sorts of menacing hoodlums, pimps and whores.  The two stories are designed to coalesce into a single narrative, achieved in the film's final twenty minutes -- a denouement that requires so much narrative crammed into so few minutes as to seem exceedingly rushed and, even, contrived.  The parallel stories are so densely intercut (each narrative involving a child running away from home to Manhattan) that neither plot ever really seems to advance in a satisfactory way -- the intercutting seems to truncate both stories into odd, beautifully shot fragments too short to really secure our emotional investment. 

The film's governing metaphor is a collector's Cabinet of Wonders -- indeed, the boy's 1977 flight to Manhattan is based upon his discovery of a book with that title bearing two traces of his absent father:  an inscription and a book mark advertising a used book emporium on 72nd Street called Kincaid's.  The actual Cabinet of Wonders was an exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in 1927, an ornate room filled with weird skeletal specimens, meteors, gems, and other curiosities.  Midway through the boy discovers that the Cabinet, dusty and decrepit, is hidden in a storeroom at the Museum.  This is the first of several discoveries, most of them crammed into the movie's last few minutes, that are supposed to unify the two narratives and draw them into a single plot -- that is, the boy's discovery of his true heritage.  In keeping with the theme of a Cabinet of Wonders, the movie is filled with all sorts of extraordinary things:  there is a beautifully simulated silent movie called "The Daughter of the Storm" including a startling image of a house blown apart by the wind; we tour the collections of the Museum of Natural History and see remarkable dioramas full of stuffed predators and prey; the recreation of the squalid but vibrant Times Square milieu is as good as Taxi Driver (which could shoot that terrain as it actually existed) -- in fact, the recreation of 70's New York is better than anything you can see in movies dating from that period:  somehow, it seems more authentic and more real than the real thing.  There are meteorites and meteor showers, a historic power-outage, sequences that show the viewer how to sign in  ASL (American Sign Language) -- both of the heroes are deaf --and, finally, we see a vast scale model of New York with all its boroughs (this is the panorama at the Queens Museum on the site of the 1964 Worlds' Fair); the characters carefully stride along rivers, daintily stepping over the great bridges that lead to Manhattan.  The set decoration is marvelous -- a recreation of used book store circa 1977 is so distinct and perfect that you can almost smell the decaying books, the dust, the aroma of the tea that the proprietor is sipping:  in the background, you can pick out Gravity's Rainbow in the original paperback edition, the Dover book of Hogarth's engravings with Lichtenberg's surreal detailed commentaries, a record of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde set like a totem among the shelves.

The film's plot is too complex to be summarized.  It suffices to say that an orphan seeks his father by running away from Gunflint, Minnesota.  The boy has been recently deafened by a lightning strike that surged through the telephone he was holding to his ear -- this seems improbable to me.  Gunflint, Minnesota looks like Detroit with a big ornate bus station.  It's obvious that the people who made this movie had no idea what Northern Minnesota is like and didn't care either about truthfulness with regard to that aspect of this film -- this seems disappointing and a missed opportunity since Northern Minnesota along the Gunflint Trail is certainly remarkable enough in itself.  Thus, we don't get any contrast between rural (northern) Minnesota and the City -- something that would, in fact, improve the film substantially, although I suppose that in the places where this picture was shown, most audiences wouldn't care that the depiction of the North Star State is so palpably false.  Intercut with boy's adventures is the story of deaf girl living in 1927 who flees her tyrannical father for Manhattan where she seeks out her movie star mother, Lillian Mayhew (played by Julianne Moore).  The girl's parents are divorced and neither of them seems to care much for her.  Ultimately, the girl finds her way to the Natural History Museum where she meets her brother, employed there as a diorama-maker.  The boy in the modern story also finds his way to the Natural History Museum where he meets a playmate, a young African-American kid.  The two boys hide in the museum after hours where a sort of idyll occurs -- this sequence is strangely dull, indeed, so bafflingly boring that  you struggle to keep your eyes open.  The fact is that the idyll is, indeed, nothing more than a hiatus in the action.  After the romp in the museum, the boy finds his way to Kincaid's Bookstore.  There he meets an old woman (also played by Julianne Moore) who is deaf and dumb.  Needless, to say this woman is the boy's grandmother and the protagonist of the 1927 story.  The woman takes the boy to the New York City panorama in Queens and there writes out, at length, her autobiography which is read over drone shots taken of the remarkable 160 foot long scale model of the city.  At this point, Haynes seems to channel his earlier self -- the flamboyantly gay and rebellious director who first made his mark with Superstar -- The Story of Karen Carpenter, a forty-minute film staged entirely with Barbie dolls.  Haynes uses miniatures to depict the events narrated by the deaf and dumb woman -- in fact, her grandson is reading aloud from the notes that she has written on her pad of paper.  The miniatures are little figures with the faces of the characters embedded in tiny figures with heads shaped like hand-mirrors (the effect is a little trashy -- in a good way, like an assemblage by Edward Kienholz.)  This brings us to the film's climax, involving the 1977 summer power outage, the darkened Manhattan skyline, and a falling star streaking across the constellations now visible in the gloom above the shadowy city. 

There's simply too much in this movie:  we have a repressed memory, a nightmare involving pursuing wolves that must be explicated, a meteor at the end of the movie and a great meteorite in the museum, the power-outage, the menacing "mean streets" of Manhattan that turn out to be warm and hospitable, the incredible costumes depicting how people dressed in the seventies, the silent movie pastiches in the black and white story from 1927, dissertations on museums and curating, on American Sign Language, and on the silent film as an art form related to the silent world of the two characters making their way to the ultimate encounter at the film's end.  It's all exhausting and you expect some sort of catharsis, but the movie is so complex that when you should be feeling emotions, you are actually distracted by trying to figure out the wildly improbable plot.  That said, shot by shot and scene by scene the film is dauntingly brilliant -- and it has a fantastic sound track, music by Carter Burwell, funk tunes from the seventies, Eno and Fripp's ambient music, David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and the disco version of Thus Spake Zarathustra.   

The Daughter of Mr. Jekyll

Edgar Ulmer's curious directorial career tests the so-called Auteur theory in film criticism.  Ulmer was a tough Jew from Berlin who migrated to Hollywood after participating in one of the signature works of the Weimar Republic, Menschen am Sontag (1928), a slice of life film that chronicles with wit and humility, the events of a single Sunday in the big city -- the movie is a semi-documentary, one of those works that seems far ahead of its time in its cinema verite account of casual love affairs and friendship among young people living in Berlin:  it's an unassuming movie that will always seem fresh, new and innovative, if, ultimately, inconsequential.  (In fairness, I should note that the movie also involved Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder -- with Ulmer, immigrants to Hollywood.)  In Tinsel-town, lightning seems to have struck twice for Ulmer -- Detour (1945) with Ann Savage is regarded as one of the best of all noir films;  working with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, Ulmer's The Black Cat  (1934) is wholly original, a spectral masterpiece that shows what the director could do with good actors and a decent budget.-- as incoherent as a dream, the film resonates on too many levels to count.  The existence of these three films, as well as some lesser movies that are stylish but not memorable (1947's Carnegie Hall is an example) have led critics the scour the rest of Ulmer's films seeking traces of the genius that he showed in his greatest pictures.  Often, an enterprising critic will cry out:  Ecce! and identify some supposed vestige of brilliance in the poverty-row trash assigned to Ulmer.and that represents the bulk of his work.  Unfortunately, I'm skeptical about critics that detect grandeur in Ulmer's more disreputable work -- in my estimation, a lot of this sort of analysis is just wishful thinking.  Film is intrinsically powerful and, if only by accident, most films will contain a few shots or sequences that induce reverie of a powerful sort or that seem strangely poetic. (During the end of her career at the New Yorker, I recall Pauline Kael writing whole reviews praising a single shot in a film that was otherwise deplorable or, on one occasion, if I recall correctly, lauding a sequence that wasn't exactly in the movie but could be imagined from the raw material on screen).

A test case for these observations is Ulmer's The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957) a picture made on such a microbudget as to inadvertently surreal -- different spaces in the film are shot in ways so discordant as to seem extracted from several wholly different movies.  The film juxtaposes four places filmed in different styles and with mismatched film stock.  First, we see a toy mansion, obviously a miniature, approached by a toy car (probably yanked on a string) shot in such dense fog as to blur the image (and conceal the deficiencies in the model).  The effect is so awful that one wonders why Ulmer bothered to contrive these scenes -- why not just start the movie with a rap on the door and the characters being ushered into the film's second space, a hard-edged, linear, and geometric group of well-lit interiors that are supposed to be Gothic but that are so bright and filled with knick-knacks as to be entirely without atmosphere or menace. (The set looks like what you might find in a Val Lewton horror film, although much less atmospherically lit.) These interiors, which feature an elaborate kitchen, a bedroom that can be locked from outside, and various comfortable-looking, wood-paneled sitting rooms.  Sculptures and tchotschkes are clearly visible, including a life-size bust of William Shakespeare that seems intended as some kind of derisive comment on the poorly written script.  Everything is in clear focus in the house and, therefore, not the least bit sinister.  The house contains an expressionistic mad scientist's laboratory -- a hidden room behind the obligatory rotating book-case:  this place is filled with alembics, beakers, and tubes of chemicals:  someone lamely observes "Why it seems to be a kind of chemistry laboratory!"  Indeed.  Finally, outside there is a little cardboard mausoleum with a grim-looking barred gate that descends into a sort of cistern where there are caskets containing the mortal remains of the Jekyll family -- this mausoleum is a geometric chimera, that is filmed like steps leading down into a subway that is brightly lit (how? this is unclear) in its sepulchral bowels.  Now and them, people read legends from the tombs, but the paper-mache tomb is so cheaply made that the camera never tilts to show us the graves or the caskets resting in the niches of the mausoleum.  The exteriors showing the toy mansion segue into what may be real exterior shots -- although the images are so congested with fog and drifting mist and so completely out of focus that it is hard to tell what we are seeing:  Ulmer shoots these blurry landscapes day-for-night and with such completely washed-out and low-contrast film that we can't see anything but a tree (or a panning shot of a grove of trees), what looks like a clay river-bank that someone slides down, or the cardboard mausoleum drowned in the drifting mist.  It's hard to know whether the exteriors, often featuring double and triple exposures, are supposed to be poetic or just confusing, that is sleight-of-hand to conceal the film's desperate poverty of means.  There are a couple of showy and reasonably effective dream sequences, one low-grade if genuine shock when a mirror distorts a pretty woman's face momentarily into something hideous, and curious images of a tiny dim moon (in one case two moons inexplicably rolling through the sky in tandem).  There's next to no action:  blood on fingers and forearms stands in for mayhem and a girl with a hickey on her neck is said to have had "her throat torn out."  Some of the film seems like a home-movie, a kind of riff on Maya Deren's "Meshes of the Afternoon" -- we see figures in profile as inert as insects simply brooding over the action (or lack of action). 

The 71 minute film is a bit like a Scooby-Doo version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Scream-queen Gloria Talbot (features as sharp as a hypodermic needle) comes home to her ancestral manor where her guardian, Mr. Loomes, played by Arthur Shields, promises to deed over the estate to her.  Talbot is accompanied by a dull-witted, if stolidly handsome beaux (John Agar) who spends half the movie ambling about in what seem to be garishly striped pajama tops.  Loomes shows the young woman her father's laboratory, outlining the story from Robert Louis Stevenson, and, then, suggests that she is genetically predisposed to become a female version of Mr. Hyde -- an account that misses the whole science fiction point of the author's story, that is, the potion that is instrumental in facilitating the change from kindly Dr. Jekyll to the sexually perverse and brutish, Mr. Hyde.  Ulmer understands that half-clad women are a special effect that he can achieve on his next-to-nothing budget and he gets the heroine down to her tight corset and slip as soon as possible.  (Another comely blonde is brought into the picture so that she can take off her outer clothing and, then, be murdered in her bra and panties.)  In fact, Loomes, who is a classical werewolf (the full moon turns him into a lycanthrope), is "gaslighting" the young woman, hoping that she will be blamed for his depredations.  The plot makes sense according to the twisted logic of horror films, but the execution of the narrative is problematic: the acting is mostly wooden; when the heroine starts shrieking, which occurs three or four times, her screams seem out-of-proportion to any actual horror or menace that we see -- the picture, in fact, seems at times to be exploration of female hysteria:  confronted by the prospect of wedded bliss with her hunky, but dull, fiancee, Miss Jekyll seems all too willing to cancel her honeymoon, converting her sexual desire into murderous hysteria that strikes down other young woman much like herself -- her bizarre understanding of the family madness as genetic, as opposed to the potion prepared by her father, seems to confirm her ambivalence toward the marriage proposal made by Agar's character:  she uses the so-called genetic taint as a pretext for canceling the marriage.  The only way to escape this doom is to employ an obviously phallic stake to impale the mad man -- the stake-phallus is wielded by a Lurch-like butler who seems a sinister double of the heroine's fiancee. 

The movie has a completely bizarre and non-sequitur book-end opening and closing.  The werewolf in a fog of mist turns to the audience and cackles in a strangely high-pitched voice, essentially threatening the people in the audience with his demonic appearance when, after all, he is supposed to be dead.  This kind of disruption of the Fourth  Wall was common in low-budget films of the 40's and fifties.  In the Bowery Brothers picture, Feudin' Fools (1952), Huntz Hall (as "Sach") aims a shot gun at the fleeing Leo Gorcey ("Mahoney"):  he fires the gun and, then, turns to the camera to say:  "I hit him in... whereupon the words "The End" appear on screen. 

A Special Day

Ettore Scola's 1977 A Special Day is designed like a diagram or a proof:  on the day Hitler travels to Rome to consummate the alliance between Fascist Germany and Fascist Italy, a harried housewife has a brief affair with a lonely, doomed homosexual.  As the relationship between the housewife and the gay man advances during the day, the soundtrack harasses them (and the audience) with bombastic exhortations and descriptions of the budding romance between Hitler and Mussolini.  At the end of the day, the housewife's large family returns enthusiastic about the parades, speeches, and marching armies.  Two secret police escort the homosexual into exile (or possibly worse), apparently taking him to the harbor to embark for exile in Sardinia.  Fascism, as has been often remarked, is sexually titillating -- the woman's husband vows to use the night of this special day to beget a seventh child whom he plans to name Adolfo.  Italian opera dramatizes the concerns of ordinary people by creating librettos involving gods and goddesses.  In this operatic film, Scola dramatizes his political and sexual themes by having them enacted by Marcello Mastrioanni and Sophia Loren, two deities of Italian (and at that time world) cinema.  Some critics have railed against this casting, declaring the principals too glamorous for their down-trodden characters -- but both actors are exceptionally good and, in fact, the rather schematic aspects of the narrative are immeasurably enhanced by the star-power on display.  Antonietta (the housewife) and Gabriele (the gay broadcaster) have a larger-than-life operatic dimension in this film -- and this is appropriate given the fact that Scola imagines these characters as representative, surrogates for great masses of people and broad political themes.

The film commences with newsreels showing Hitler and Mussolini's conclave.  The newsreels are tinted a brownish sepia color and the images are sped up slightly to produce the effect of a silent movie -- something occurring in the distant past.  When watching these opening scenes, one wonders how Scola will manage the transition to technicolor.  Remarkably enough, he doesn't:  the whole film is shot in a dull beige color:  you can see hints of color in flesh tones and the wan yellow of some of the lights in the apartment building where the action is staged but the only hues that are allowed to stand independent of this drab, sepia color-scheme are the Nazi flags -- the big red banners stand out against the grey-brown vistas like pools of fresh blood.  The film's camerawork, despite its monochrome, its remarkably handsome:  there are long takes, including a bravura introduction to Loren's character that tracks her around the apartment as she rouses her sleeping family, manages their preparations for the day, and provides them with breakfast and coffee.  (This sequence also serves to establish the apartment in which most of the action takes place -- in this film, the handsome apartment building with its spacious suites of rooms is as central a character as the two protagonists:  the big structure has a powerful presences with tower-like and rounded glass stairwells, an interior courtyard through which the characters can observe one another, and a roof where laundry is hung that seems to be lavishly tiled with Majorca ceramic.  The structure seems modernist -- it has a sort of Bauhaus-vibe -- but also regal with a weird little plaza at its front, sunken and shaped like a hippodrome.)

As is the case with many excellent films, it's not entirely clear what point Scola wishes to make with the conflation of the political and personal themes that drive the film.  Sophia Loren's housewife is not apolitical -- in fact, she is a rabid (if superficial) Fascist:  she keeps a scrapbook in which she saves adoring pictures of il Duce and inscribes political slogans under these images.  One of those slogans declares that women can not be geniuses and should not aspire to excellence in thought or the arts -- something that Antonietta declares that she believes.  Another motto that she has written in her book is that:  "A man must be a husband, a father, and a soldier to be a man."  Gabriele ruefully observes that this edict means that he is excluded from manliness.  (Antonietta has also used buttons to make a mosaic depicting Mussolini displayed prominently in her apartment.)  Gabriele seems apolitical -- I didn't discern any indications that he is a Communist or a member of the resistance.  Rather, he seems excluded from the political life of the community and is cast as an outsider due to his sexual orientation.  The politics of World War Two have been problematic in Italy -- the film may be implicitly anti-Fascist, but it recognizes that most of the Italian people were supporters of Mussolini and enthusiastic about the pact between Berlin and Rome.  The film suggests that sex is an apolitical force, powerful but always trumped by politics -- this is the theme of Lina Wertmueller's film Love and Anarchy that has some of the same themes as A Special Day and, in fact, employs a similar mise-en-scene (the young anarchist who has come to Rome to kill Mussolini spends his last day in a brothel where almost all the action takes place.)  In general, the film is humanist -- it steers away from the politics of Fascism and focuses instead on those people excluded from the movement:  a housewife with six children (a 7th qualifies you for a "large family bonus") is merely a machine for producing soldiers -- she has no political agency; similarly, a homosexual (compelled to pay the "Bachelor tax") is also without any meaningful identity in a nation that requires all men to be husbands, fathers, and soldiers.  The film doesn't offer any panacea -- sex changes nothing, a remark that is explicitly made by Gabriele after his brief interlude with Antonietta.  Sophia Loren disguises her famous figure in a frumpy house-coat that makes her seem pregnant or fat:  appearing without any make-up, she is still beautiful although believable in the role of the Neapolitan mama.  Mastrioanni is altogether too gorgeous for his role but, as I have earlier remarked, this is appropriate to the film's operatic nature.  (One of Scola's films, 1983's The Passion of Love, affords the basis for Sondheim's Passion; I'm surprised that A Special Day hasn't been made into a opera.)

John Vernon, an all-purpose villain, is good as Antonietta's loutish husband -- he expects her to be a faithful baby-making machine while he enjoys an affair with a local schoolteacher.  The sound track is exorbitant with Wagner and national anthems:  at the end, we hear the Horst Wessel song bellowed by a male chorus while a piano plays variations on the melody that become increasing divergent and, even, discordant with the song's main theme -- but, in the end, the piano is reined-in and wistfully doubles the song in the keyboard's upper register.  At the end of the film, Fascism has prevailed.  But, of course, we know that this will be not for long.

Joker

Joker is an oddity, an American art-house movie peddled to mass market audiences.  Ostensibly, it's a prequel to Batman movies featuring the villainous super-criminal, the Joker.  But the film is wholly unlike the jolly mayhem cheerfully featured in most super-hero movies -- there are no action sequences with cape-clad crusaders hurling bad guys through skyscrapers or into elevated trains (with no apparent injury to the fellow hurled in this way).  Rather, the violence seems adapted from the horrific slaughter at the end of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, a movie that the film closely resembles and cites repeatedly.  There's very little fighting in Joker -- the violent scenes involve groups of men stomping on prone victims, riots on the streets in which mobs of men dressed as clowns over turn over cars, maul cops, and throw Molotov cocktails, a Scorsese-like shooting in a subway, and a murder using scissors that is filmed like a sequence in a horror film.  In fact, the movie is generally shot like a horror film -- it features many cramped interiors and, even, the city streets are hedged about with towering piles of bagged garbage (the action takes place during a garbage strike):  everything is jammed together in moldering rooms where you can almost smell the rot and the mildew on the walls. A few exterior shots, mostly showing trains running toward the battered, broken-tooth profile of the city skyline have the nightmarish aspect of the opening scenes in The Shining -- everything is utterly ominous, squalid, filthy.  Most of the shots are underlit and crammed with junk, lit with a quasi-Rembrandt sickly yellow glow.  Not content to hem in the claustrophobic shots from the sides, the director Todd Phillips, features some scenes in which lit rooms are compressed under coffin-like lids of construction above them.  The entire movie is a sort of pressure-cooker; the camera moving ominously as it prowls through the film's junk-heap.  About half of the picture is shot in extreme close-up.  The film's second to last shot is a long close-up of the face of its anti-hero, the Joker (aka Arthur Fleck). 

The movie is already famous for Joaquin Phoenix's performance, although it is not quite as original as some critics think.  In fact, Phoenix, playing Joker, used his hawk-like cartoonish features and mop of dirty-looking hair to similar effect in Paul Thomas Anderson's  The Master.  Phoenix has a weird-looking, scrawny body -- he seems to have a joint at about this third thoracic vertebrae that lets him bend his back into a kind of convex hump located a foot below his shoulder blades.  In some scenes, he seems to be carrying a fleshy carapace on his back, his rounded spine simulating a turtle's shell or the hunched back of a cockroach.  Phoenix can make himself look very disfigured and gaunt -- in one scene, he sucks in his gut and creates a gaping cavity hollowed-out under his rib cage.  This is all unsettling, although Phoenix used these same effects in the Anderson film to depict a monstrous subaltern, a sort of deranged Caliban in alliance in with the sophisticated and silver-haired grace of his boss, The Master (impersonating L. Ron Hubbard) as played by Philip Hoffman.  Phoenix's star-turn is the main reason to see the film.  It is otherwise highly derivative of pictures by Martin Scorsese, both Taxi Driver, as earlier noted, and, even more directly, The King of Comedy.  In fact, Robert de Niro who was brilliant in both of these movies (these are iconic performances from the late seventies and early eighties) appears in Joker to cement the connection between his films for Scorsese and this picture.  De Niro plays a late night talk show host, a character brash and cruel and very similar to the part played by Jerry Lewis with weird, callous indifference in the King of Comedy.  In Joker, the poor abused Arthur Fleck (who will become the insane super-criminal)  longs to appear on the late night TV talk show with his idol played by Robert de Niro, the show's host.  Similarly, Rupert Pupkin (played by de Niro) in The King of Comedy  similarly longed to appear on the Tonight show, imagined as hosted by Jerry Lewis -- this longing turns to insane rage when Pupkin abducts the late-night talk show host.  Joker is less witty and more brutally direct -- appearing on the Late Night show hosted by de Niro, he tells inane jokes, smirks at the audience in his Joker make-up, and, then, puts a bullet through the brain of his host. 

Joker is a pathography, that is, the story of a person with severe and disabling mental illness. Arthur Fleck lives with his mother who is completely insane in a filthy, gloomy apartment in a crumbling building.  He works at HaHa's, a dismal business that supplies "clowns" for events.  While advertising in clown mufti on the garbage-heaped mean streets of Gotham City, Fleck is assaulted by some juvenile delinquents and stomped badly in an alley.  A fellow clown, someone always mocking Fleck, gives him a gun.  Fleck is so clueless that he lets the gun drop out of the garments while performing a show for child cancer-victims at the local cancer ward.  HaHa's fires him and Fleck decides to investigate his mother's claim that he is the son of the local mayor and political bigwig,  Thomas Wayne.  Late at night, there's an altercation in a subway car and Fleck massacres three Wall Street guys -- they are portrayed as bullies who get what they deserve.  The City is divided about the killings -- some people decry the massacre but others take to wearing clown masks and rioting in the street.  The city is on the verge of a complete anarchy: the nerds and losers (people others call "jokers") have taken to wearing masks and burning cop cars while looting.  Fleck goes to see Thomas Wayne and meets the young Bruce Wayne (who will later be the Batman) in an eerie and disturbing scene.  Afterwards, he goes to Arkham Hospital to look at his mother's medical records, he discovers that he was tortured by his mother and her boyfriend when he was a little boy and that she chained him to a radiator in the  filthy apartment.  It's also clear that her claim that Arthur is the son of Thomas Wayne is delusional.  The police are closing in on  Fleck for the subway killings.  When the cops interview Fleck's mother, she has a stroke.  Now completely deranged, Fleck gets invited to appear on the Late Night Talk Show with his hero Murray Franklin (played by de Niro).  The host has seen a tape of Fleck performing a mirthless show at a local comedy club and invites Fleck on TV in order to make fun of him.  Fleck shoots the host in the face during the TV show and flees through the chaos of the city in which clown riots are everywhere occurring.  The cops catch him after some violent scenes of fighting in the streets and he ends up in an asylum.  Of course, this narrative is meant to be the backstory (or origin narrative) of the Joker. 

The film is made with the utmost conviction and buoyed into art by the extraordinary performance by Joaquin Phoenix as the insane and horribly mistreated Arthur Fleck.  The picture is rife with baroque and monstrous scenes -- we see Fleck for instance washing the back of his nude and elderly mother who sits in a dirty-looking porcelain bathtub.  When Fleck goes to Arkham Hospital, he rides stoically in an elevator in which a mad man is writhing with seizures, shackled to a gurney.  After putting on his Joker costume, Fleck descends a flight of stairs tightly confined between tenements doing a grandiose sort of dance.   Phoenix acts with his whole body -- his forehead is a corrugated mass of wrinkles, he stoops and squats and shuffles around like a demented crab.  He celebrates murders with baroque gestures, muttering to himself, and holding out his arms like an actor in an early 18th century opera.  There's not much to the movie's plot and most of the other characters are woefully underwritten.  Fleck has a girlfirend with a child (the woman seems almost normal among all the grotesques in the film) and they go out on several dates -- the girlfriend is like the Cybil Shepherd character, the political operator, in Taxi Driver.  The script can't figure out the attraction between the couple and the actress playing this part gets almost no lines.  Furthermore, the script doesn't know what to do with the relationship -- there's an implication that Joker kills both her and her little girl, although we don't see this mayhem on screen.  The picture is like a train wreck -- you want to look away from all the misery and horror, but it's so compelling that you just keep peeking through your fingers.  It's not a pleasant experience and the young audience at the screening that I attended seemed restless and completely baffled.  But the film is certainly art of a particular (if punishing)  kind and, although I didn't really like watching it, I have to admit that I'm glad I saw the picture and, indeed, am haunted by some parts of the movie.   

Loro

Loro is Paolo Sorrentino's film depicting the waning years of Sylvio Berlusconi, a media mogul on the order of Rupert Murdoch (or for that matter Donald Trump) who dominated Italian politics for several decades.  The movie seems set in a perpetual, hallucinatory present and so it's hard to measure the passage of time in the film -- however, it appears to me that, at least, five to ten years are chronicled.  The movie can be divided into three broad episodes, although it is visually and thematically exceptionally complex.  In many respects, the film seems similar to Sorrentino's astonishing The Great Beauty -- a powerful, intelligent man succumbs to the blandishments of his own charisma, the perpetual orgiastic parties and sexual temptations, and, at last, discovers that he has not accomplished those things to which he aspired.  The Great Beauty is more refined and melancholy -- the hero in that film is an intellectual, the author of one slim, but much-praised book.  As the film progresses, he discerns that the very beauty that he has sought to celebrate in his art has, perhaps, distracted him achieving the excellence to which he once aspired. "The Great Beauty" is, probably, the splendors of baroque Rome and not merely sexual temptation, although there is plenty of that, as well, in Sorrentino's earlier film -- therefore, the waste of the protagonist's life seems more tragic:  one beautiful thing has displaced another thing that was, perhaps, even more beautiful if it had been achieved.  Berlusconi was a clown and a womanizer on a colossal scale; therefore his failure, if it can be so described, is more squalid and less resonant.  Although Loro is a spectacular film, wildly inventive visually and pictorially stunning to the point of visual surfeit, the stakes are a lot lower -- men are often destroyed by womanizing and Berlusconi's lust, although dramatized with surrealistic (that is Fellini-esque exuberance) seems somehow less consequential than the fate that befalls the hero of The Great Beauty.  Furthermore, I think it's valid to ask why Sorrentino has essentially made two films about the same subject -- that is, the distractions of beauty (or the flesh) that lead a powerful and charismatic man to ultimately conclude that he has wasted his life.  It's a rich enough theme, but Sorrentino, to my eye, exhausted the subject in The Great Beauty and Loro, although a feast for the eyes, is less affecting and, ultimately, adds little to the director's exploration of this subject.

I noted that the film can be divided into three broad sections:  the first involves a glorified pimp, the handsome but reptilian Sergio Morra who connives to worm his way into Berlusconi's inner circle. This portion of the film proceeds by indirection -- Berlusconi does not appear in the movie until about a half-hour has lapsed and the first part of the film depicts Morra, disdained by his virtuous hard-working father, essentially procuring show-girls to barter to Berlusconi for favors.  In the next lengthy episode, we see Sylvio out of power on the island of Sardinia, conniving for a return to office -- he seduces six senators to become political allies ultimately and, at last, Morra is able to host a party for Berlusconi involving dozens of beautiful young women offered as bait to the 70-year old politician.  (The scheme fails because Berlusconi is losing his sexual appetite and the 20 year old girl that he tries to seduce rebuffs him in a humiliating way.  After the second part of the film, Morra, who is the protagonist in the first hour, more or less, simply drops out of the movie -- we see him in a single shot near the end of the movie, apparently ruined, watching TV with his righteous father.)  In the last third of the movie Berlusconi returns to Rome in triumph, forms a government, but, then, suffers a calamitous collapse of his marriage to the long-suffering and beautiful, Veronica (she is twenty years younger than Berlusconi).   The politician recognizes his mortality and the film ends with a bravura sequence at the site of village destroyed by an earthquake -- in a long steadi-cam shot invoking La Dolce Vita, the broken figure of Christ is lifted by crane out of a ruined church and reverently set on a red velvet bier; the movie ends with the sound of the sea as the camera patrols the ranks of firefighters and rescue workers involved in salvaging the wood-carved  Christ from the smashed church.  They all look benumbed. 

The film is quite long (about 2 and 1/2 hours) and sumptuously produced.  Aspects of the movie were opaque to me:  an opening scene involving a sheep that wanders into Berlusconi's villa in Sardinia and, then, apparently freezes to death in the blast of air-conditioning in the house baffled me completely although the sequence is brilliantly shot.  The film's first image, the sheep staring into the camera, represents, I suppose, the "flock" of Italians who succumbed to Berlusconi's charm.  But the cross-cutting between the animal and the air conditioning vents was confusing to me -- why would Berlusconi have his house air-conditioned to 1 degree centigrade?  Some sequences are fantastically brilliant:  as a posse of fashion-models and show-girls walks with Sergio Morra to one of his parties, a rat scuttles across the street.  The garbage truck driver tries to avoid squashing the rat, loses control of his truck which crashes spectacularly through the railing overlooking the Roman forum, falling among the ancient columns and arcades.  The truck explodes and a huge cloud of garbage is flung into the air where its motion is slowed into a pirouette of empty wine bottles and brightly colored wrapping paper.  Suddenly, this debris turns into multi-colored pills and tablets which fall like rain onto a pool-party at Morra's Sardinian villa opposite Berlusconi's estate.  The pills are Ecstasy apparently and the several score of party-goers, all scantily clad and with beautiful bodies, strip off the rest of their clothing and dance together in a lascivious and frenzied way -- ultimately everyone is exhausted and collapses to the deck of the pool and we see those few party-goers still capable of standing watching with obsessive melancholy as a sole sailboat cruises the sunset-lit bays and coves of the island.  There are many stand-out sequences of this sort, but, in the end, the film's moral thesis is that all this Dionysian partying is essentially meaningless, bereft of value and ethically bankrupt.  The problem in a film decrying this sort of excess is the same problem that haunts most war films -- movies are always anti-war but can't avoid the sneaky pictorial glamour of the subject:  explosions and vast columns of men marching under military banners are a spectacular subject for the camera; so similarly, dozens of almost naked women with idealized bodies gyrating on a stage under throbbing laser light is a thing wonderful to behold:  it's pretty hard for us to remember that we are supposed to be disapproving of these spectacles, particularly when Sorrentino choreographs the action to pounding rock and roll.  Tonio Servillo, Sorrentino's surrogate, is, as always, wonderful.  When we first see him, he is caparisoned (for some unknown reason) like a harem girl and, behind the veil, his face is garishly painted -- he's supposed to look like a whore.  (His wife is disgusted by the display).  Servillo's performance is sometimes suave and unctuous, on other occasions buffoonish -- obviously Berlusconi is a brilliant man but his career seems based on absurdly lascivious parties in which he plays the clown.  On his premises, he has a volcano that he can program to erupt -- it's about 15 feet high -- and, also, a carousel.  Both of these props are heavily symbolic and deployed as emblems for paralysis (when the carousel is stopped) and for Berlusconi's besieged sexual capacities.  The film's last half-hour involves a bravura sequence showing an earthquake ravaging a small town at night, L'Aquilo, the movie tells us, and, then, a really savage war of words between the old man and his wife -- she denounces him as a clown and chauvinist pig.  But Berlusconi very shrewdly keeps asking her why she has stayed with him so many years -- in the end, she confesses that it is "because I still love you."  The scene in which the aging politician is rejected by a 20-year old girl is painful to watch -- the girl is in a coral pink room where Berlusconi hopes to seduce her.  Outside the party continues with beautiful show-girls dancing naked on a stage.  Berlusconi has his sights set on the one girl who feels herself duty-bound to reject his advances.  It's this scene that sets the "dying fall" melancholy characterizes the ending of the movie.  There are several odd scenes that I didn't understand -- Berlusconi seems to interview himself as a younger man; I presume we are seeing Berlusconi's younger brother but this episode was puzzling to me.  It's hard to say exactly what the film is about.  The movie doesn't emphasize Berlusconi's politics -- all we know is that he is anti-communist -- presumably because Italians would know all about this aspect of the protagonist's life.  We don't know what Berlusconi stands for other than particularly garish and scenic forms of sexual exploitation.  In a broader sense, aspects of the movie suggest Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.  If he is nothing else, Berlusconi is imagined to be the consummate salesman.  In one static, but gripping scene, the politician calls a woman whom he has picked out of the phone book at random -- he cajoles her into buying an apartment from him (I think the politician began selling real estate).  When he closes the deal, something that he later acknowledges to be purely imaginary, he says:  "I can sell you anything because I know how it all comes out.  I know the script of life."  This scene rhymes with a sequence much later in the movie in which Berlusconi has built "seismic-free" apartment buildings for the people of the town ravaged by the earthquake.  He gives an old woman a pair of dentures -- she lost her teeth fleeing her collapsing home.  Then, he announces to her (as he did to the woman on the phone) the living room will be about 24 feet long, "long enough for me to stretch out my 5 foot six inch frame about five times."  The point is that he establishes the measure  and scale of the world over which he rules.  The nasty little pimp, Sergio Morra, is simply a smaller, less grandiose, version than his master, the big boss Sylvio Berlusconi. 

Lodge 49

One of the problems afflicting this current Golden Age of Television is that there are so many networks producing so much new work that it is impossible to find some of the things that you want to watch.  In the old days, TV Guide told readers what was on television on all three networks and where to find it.  But with the proliferation of streaming services, on-demand, and four or five-hundred channels, the slim periodical, something you would pick up in the check-out line at the grocery store, would have to be the size of a telephone book.  (And who uses telephone books nowadays.)  The inevitable outcome is that programs that you would like to watch get lost in the scrum and, if you remember to watch them, they can't be found.  The general assumption today is that anything you want to watch can be found somewhere on TV or on-line -- but this assumption is untrue.  After reading glowing reviews of the Thomas Pynchon-inspired Lodge 49, I periodically searched for the show on Netflix or On-Demand -- but I could never find the program listed anywhere on the on-screen guides on my TV and, so, I wasn't able to watch the program.  (No doubt someone better-versed in computers or TV could find the nook or cranny where the show was secreted -- but I never found that location.)  A couple days ago, I saw a review of the second season of Lodge 49 on-line.  To my surprise, and annoyance, the show has been screening since August and will air its last episode on October 14 on AMC.  Fortunately, past episodes from Series 2 are available on my TV in the"on-demand" feature and I have been able to watch four episodes of the show.  The way programs are archived in "On Demand" is inscrutable and it's not clear to me that the show's programs will remain posted in that place long enough for me to watch the ten episodes -- I hope the programs will remain available for, at least, another week, but who knows?

Lodge 49 on the evidence of the four episodes that I have watched is a rambling, low-key entertainment that is brilliantly written, with excellent acting, and a diffuse, if interesting, narrative arc.  On first viewing, the second series seems an arcane variation on the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski with an ex-surfer, shaggy-looking pool maintenance man named "Dud" standing in for "the Dude".  The influence of the Coen brothers on popular entertainment can not be overestimated -- traces of their work is everywhere now in the "edgy" crime shows and family melodramas on TV:  HBO has been mining the Coen brothers catalog this year with The Righteous Gemstones about a family of TV evangelists and, similarly, Showtime's How to be a God in Southern Florida (about pyramid-selling schemes) would be unthinkable without the Coens having shown the way, so to speak, for these kinds of serio-comic, wise-ass "shaggy dog" TV series.  After a couple episodes of Lodge 49, however, it becomes clear that the show is considerably stranger and more Pynchonesque than the standard Coen brothers knock-off.  After all, the characters in Lodge 49 discourse, at length, about alchemy and Carl Jung -- one of the protagonists is engaged in the magnum opus, that is, using the "philosophical egg" to transmute base metals into gold.  As it turns out, the "gold" here may be bitcoin and the "golden scrolls" that some of the characters are seeking may be an algorithm unlocking the computer programs that control the cryptocurrency.  The plot lines are complex with multiple narrative trajectories:  Dud's father owned a pool maintenance business in Long Beach, California where the show is set.  He has died and his business been destroyed.  Dud tries to revive the family business with his sister Liz.  Liz goes to work as a manager at a sinister restaurant called "High Steaks" -- really more of a cult that a steakhouse.  Ernie, a sad-eyed old African-American man, works at plumbing supply company -- he's a "road man", that is traveling salesman, who has been forced into a desk job.  (His manically optimistic boss is an old man who is taking a poetry class on-line and prone to quoting Yeats and Keats.)  El Confidante is  Mexican-American con man (played wonderfully by Cheech Marin) who believes that the Lodge's missing scrolls have been hidden in Mexico in the village of Comala.  (Comala is the literal "ghost-town" in Juan Rulfo's cult novel Pedro Paramo --the show is rife with hundreds of allusions to esoterica:  Lodge 49 itself derives from Thomas Pynchon's short and paranoid novel The Crying of Lot 49.)  There are side-plots about the magnum opus and scenes that I don't understand, seemingly set in England, in which a blindfolded woman recites poetry -- the woman is a journalist and, in the third episode, speaks a heartbreaking aria about her  hopes as a young woman and how she feels now about that other self as she faces her death.  The show is filled with weird coincidences and strange encounters.  In the opening of the second series two, Liz meets a homeless man on a beach, gives him three dollars, and, then, has to take the money back since she remembers she has nothing in her purse and no way to get home from the beach by bus without some money.  The scene is indelibly acted, contains a violent chase sequence, and, ultimately, appears to go nowhere, although I question whether any shot in this labyrinthine program isn't somehow connected with something (or everything) else -- after all, the characters belong a lodge that calls its members "Lynx" (that is, "links");  here everything is hyperlinked.

The connective tissue in the show is a secret society, the moribund Lodge 49 to which the major characters belong.  The lodge consists of s decrepit meeting room, a hidden library, and a bar where most of the action takes place. Secret tunnels infiltrate the lodge -- people sometimes emerge from underground. The lodge seems to be haunted by a former Grand Master or Lodge leader, Larry and has a juke-box with strange and old songs on it.  (In one scene, the characters use lemons to buy drinks since they have no other money -- this sequence is later referenced as emblematic of all currency; you define something as having value and, then, use it as mode of exchange as in bitcoin or other crypto-currencies.)  The show sometimes breaks into odd musical interludes, music serving as a kind of reverie or seizure as in David Lynch's movies.  The dialogue is all hyperlinked -- densely allusive and referential:  as an example, at one point a young woman, who is pretending to be a "law provider" (for some reason, the word "lawyer" is off-limits) says she met a boyfriend in a "Esoterica chatroom" on the "Voynich Manuscript."  Dialogue constantly cites literature, mostly Nietzsche and Cervantes -- one subtext is the "impossible dream", presumably the magnum opus, and Ernie is imagined to be Don Quixote to Dud's Sancho Panza.  Paul Giamati is a producer and he appears from time time, playing an author like Robert Ludlam or Robert Patterson, the creator of innumerable violent spy fantasy-novels that the characters all seem to be reading or listening to on the audio-books.  He's an enigmatic presence that flits through the program; his role never exactly becoming clear although, it appears, that he is increasingly important in the latter episodes of series two. 

As the program develops, it seems apparent that the series tracks, at least, three different cults -- there is a high end restaurant called High Steaks owned by a woman who seems to have drifted in the culinary arts from the milieu of self-help TED talks, all breathless and narcissistic enthusiasm; Ernie works at plumbing supply company where the men talk in code and are (mostly) collegial -- another sort of lodge.  Of course, the titular Lodge 49 with its hidden rooms, weird emblematic images, and legendary founder is the secret society that seems the model on which the others are erected.  Several other organizations have a similar structure -- there is a pyramid scheme business that peddles skin-care products comprised of "fire and water" and a military aerospace contract Orbus that also has a shadowy presence in some of the episodes. The Lodge may have had something with Orbus' military-industrial contracting.  (A pawn shop in the strip mall where Dud has his pool service business serves as the repository of plot developments that have a deus ex machina element -- the tight-lipped owner of the pawnshop with his silent Hispanic helper provide banking services for the characters, float people loans when money is needed, and seem to be a surrogate for the divine:  the pawn shop owner serves as lawyer and judge with respect to some of the disputes shown in the show.)  . 

After watching seven episodes, I can report that the series alternates between melodramatic, almost self-indulgent narratives about family trauma, lost love, broken relationships, and other sorts of misery -- these backstory narratives drive the characters and account for their peculiar neediness and their compensatory eccentricities.  This sort of material is not generally to my liking -- it's over-simplified in that it draws a straight causal connection between things that may be correlated in some way but are not necessarily induced by the trauma (or memory of trauma) represented.  In Lodge 49,  this sentimental or melodramatic stuff -- generally displayed in the form of long emotional dialogues or people proclaiming to one another how they will change their lives -- is well done, but a little repetitive and dull.  The visionary stuff, by comparison, is always interesting if overly motivated by the adjacent melodrama.  Episode six involving complicated flashbacks to the fifties, several odd sequences in what appears to be a huge soundstage that is redolent of Synecdoche, New York, and a whole series of dreamlike scenes involving burrowing, infected wounds, breaking through walls, and falling  is an impressive accomplishment - visions nested in visions.  A little bit of this visionary and hallucinatory material goes a long way and the show is probably wise to interpolate melodrama with the more remarkable and bizarre subject matter.  Too long, like most mini-series, the show is nonetheless well worth watching and I am crossing my fingers that I will somehow be able to see all ten episodes.   

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Assembly Hall

More and more, it seems that museum curators are determined to make the experience of visiting their collections onerous to patrons.  Objects are displayed to make political or ideological points and wall labels admonish, hector, and shame.  A little of this is fine, I suppose, but a relentless campaign of ideological purification directed at the hapless museum-goer detracts from the experience and diminishes the aesthetic pleasures of beauty, color, composition and profundity of observation that great works provide.   When a Titian nude is considered primarily as the exemplification of something called the"male gaze" and the wall label exposes some of us (half of us) as either voyeurs or nascent rapists, something, I suspect, has gone badly wrong.  I am not so naive as to suggest that art isn't often inflected by politics, nor am I necessarily opposed to some degree of pedagogy in the presentation of the paintings and other objects held by museums -- in fact, just about every tactic for hanging art, including the time-honored concept of illustrating mainstreams in art or the historic progression of styles or national schools or themes, is implicitly didactic.  The mere fact that works from the Baroque or Rococo periods are generally segregated from medieval or Victorian paintings and displayed in consecutive galleries illustrates a thesis about history and sensibility.  But today, there is a tendency toward neo-Stalinism in some galleries -- art works are supposed to be instruments for re-education of those strolling the museum.  Aggressively labeled and thrust in the viewer's face as political arguments, the idea seems to be to use art to purge viewers of their fascist, racist, bourgeois, capitalist, unimaginative Republican or conservative ideas.  There are many things wrong with this approach to art, particularly when it overwhelms other ways of viewing paintings and art objects.  First, this ideological perspective ignores the fact that "art" as a word derives from the notion of doing something particularly well, that is, a particular kind of grace (artfulness) in the craftsmanship of the painting or object.  In German, Art or Kunst is related to the notion of Koennen that is capability, acquired skill, something that has to be learned through a long and arduous apprenticeship.  Once, this notion of art is lost, there is nothing left but politics and, heaven knows, we have enough of that today.  Second, most patrons in most art museums are well-educated and tend toward Leftist politics - the right-wingers are hunting or attending football games; therefore, there is an element of preaching to the choir.  Third, art as Arthur Danto argued is always the embodiment of an idea -- but explicit political ideas are, in successful art, distinctly secondary to other qualities manifested in the work.  When we politicize art, we elevate one incidental aspect of its content over other more important features in the object.  The Politically Correct always assert that they want to have a "conversation" -- but this "conversation" if it happens generally tends to be a megaphone aimed at the wincing ears of the inadequately enlightened with no possibility for response tolerated by the broadcaster.

The Walker Art Center's elevation of political and identity politics themes in its galleries has always been problematic,  (The infection has also reached the Minneapolis Institute of Art as witness the recent exhibition of art objects made by Native American women, almost all of them inferior to the less self-conscious and seemingly apolitical work displayed in the adjacent more anthropological galleries.)  Sometimes, however, an art object that is ostensibly political in nature and content achieves a baffling density and, in fact, against its own will threatens to become art under the old-fashioned definition, -- that is, an enigmatic object that strains to embody an idea that can't quite be expressed in any other form.  Witness Theaster Gates' Assembly Hall.  This work is a four-room installation, a suite of galleries rather tastefully color-coordinated in beiges and browns with soft lighting and a mysterious ambience.  The viewer enters a room where old slides from 1950's art history classes are projected one after another -- I watched a half dozen of them and the slides seemed to be primarily black and white pictures of Sumerian figurines, rock art, tablets with bas relief images on them, Benin bronze sculptures, nondescript objects retrieved from various archaeological digs.  Along a shelf, magazines were bound in uniform red and yellow volumes -- I had the impression that the bound volumes contained back issues of Chicago-based magazines catering to African-American readers:  Jet, I think, and Ebony.  From this gallery, one enters a so-called reading room, lit like a library with some tables, comfortable-looking couches and chairs.  Some people were sitting in the reading room when I viewed the installation -- no one was reading; the people were resting their feet and chatting in low voices.  Beyond that room, there was a third gallery containing about 8 or so glass cases.  In these cases were displayed commercial art, menus and boxes and other packaging, ephemera decorated with gruesomely offensive images of Black people:  little Sambos, Aunt Jemimas, minstrel-figure with flat noses and inflated lips playing banjos or gobbling water-melon, picaninnies with their frizzy halos of nappy hair, Pullman porters grinning as they poured coffee -- not just packaging showing these kinds of caricatures, but, also, toys:  grinning simian-like barefoot boys and black raggedy-Anns with stereotyped figures.  These objects are part of a collection amassed by a wealthy African-American collector in Chicago and they are certainly remarkable enough.  But how are we supposed to react to these artifacts -- with shame? with detachment? with a sneaky kind of affection? (I believe this same collection was featured in the ending titles to Spike Lee's excellent Bamboozled -- shown in counterpoint to elegant jazz, the objects seem forlorn, orphaned, fetishes that once had some kind of power now reduced to ghostly apparitions, empty gestures flapping against the wind of history.  Until minstrel shows and minstrel culture is somehow recuperated -- I mean things like the works of Stephen Foster -- American art is much diminished.   But I don't know how such things can be reclaimed and rehabilitated.  In the last room, narrow and running the length of the others chambers in the suite, pottery and other vessels made by Theaster Gates, who is apparently a well-established craftsman in ceramics, are displayed -- these are elegantly simple vases and crockery, Japanese in influence, glazed in earth colors and set along crowded shelves.  In the foreground, if I recall properly, there were some of the tools of the potter's trade displayed on other shelves against the opposing wall.  A wall label tells us that Gates thinks it important that the cultural context from which an object derives be understood to be part of the art.  So what does this enigmatic assembly demonstrate to us?  I'm baffled.  It may be that Gates is expressing the notion that he (and his viewers) are vessels and that these vessels originate in the context of other cultures exhibited in the form of anthropological "magic lantern" slides and intense cultural racism.  My son had the interesting notion that "racism is baked into the clay" of America -- hence the pots and plates are made, in some respect, out of this milieu of racism.  The elegantly simple ceramics were made by an African-American man -- someone who was influenced by a dryly didactic approach to the cultural productions of other peoples, someone who read Jet and Ebony in the context of systemic racism as illustrated by the nasty ephemera in the glass cases.  But what does it mean that these racist images are now displayed in a museum behind glass -- does this illustrate the irrelevance of these images, their transformation from commodity into icon, or the exact opposite (that is, the museum displayspromotes the importance and vitality of the images)? 

Reading about the installation doesn't solve the problem.  Gates calls his interventions "resurrections", that is, giving life to past cultural forms that have been abandoned or simply lost along the way.  He calls the slides, apparently from the collection of the Field Museum in Chicago "magic lantern slides."  A note characterizes the racist ephemera as from the collection of a wealthy African-American collector -- it is called "negrobilia".  The bound volumes do, in fact, contact publications from Johnson Publishing, a major African-American enterprise in  Chicago and the publisher of Jet and Ebony magazines.  But knowing these things doesn't really help.  There's an anxiety about the show -- none of the objects on display would be worth our time if not coupled with the other things in the installation.  The ceramics are too bland and tasteful; the racist imagery interesting from a historical perspective but no longer relevant; the "magic lantern" slides aren't really very interesting either -- its the collage of these things that is supposed to carry the meaning.  But what meaning?

Elektra

Richard Strauss begins his Elektra with a slashing lunge, a three-note figure that critics call the Agamemnon motif -- in fact, I think the motif signifies not the King, but the axe-blow that killed him in his bath.  Febrile and lurid, Elektra begins in a state of frenzy that only accelerates and deepens during its 100 minute running time.  If the opera were any longer, it would be unendurable or, perhaps, hilarious.  At an hour and forty minutes, the work seems proportioned just right, a staggering sprint toward its inevitably gory finale.

There's very little narrative in Hoffmanstahl's libretto written as the Germans say frei nach Aischylos., although the Viennese poet intensifies his diction to the breaking point and imparts a rococo sheen to the gruesome imagery of vultures, rotting corpses, and pustulent wounds ornamenting the text. Elektra, the daughter of the murdered Agamemnon, broods and rages -- she is a kind of wild animal obsessed with revenge.  Indeed, her very presence at the threshold of the Mycenean royal court is both an outrage and a kind of savage retribution inflicted upon her mother Clytemnestra.  With her lover Aegisth, Clytemnestra has killed Agamemnon in his bath and, then, sent Elektra's infant brother into the country, paying a shepherd to strangle the child, who by the vicious axioms of Bronze Age morality is obligated to avenge his father.  Needless to say, the shepherd doesn't kill the child and Orestes grows to adulthood, waiting for the moment to murder those responsible for his father's death, foremost his own mother.  (Of course, Clytemnestra was understandably indignant that Agamemnon butchered their daughter Iphigenia as an offering to the gods to insure safe passage over the whale-road to Troy.)  The maids describe Elektra's ferocity, then, she sings a long aria reminding us of her murderous project.  Her little sister, Chrysothemis, desires a Weibschicksal ("a woman's destiny'") -- that is, she wants to marry, have children, and nurture them.  But Elektra will have none of this -- she is consumed solely by her desire to avenge her father.  Word arrives that Orestes has been trampled to death by his own horses.  With Orestes ostensibly unable to murder King Aegisth and his consort, Clytemnestra, Elektra demands that Chrysothemis, who is said to be strong and lithe, a sinewy virgin, help her with consummating the slaughter.  Chrysothemis protests and, at the last minute, Orestes appears -- the rumor of his death was only a ruse to let him approach the fortress-palace.without being detected.  At first, Elektra doesn't recognize him , but soon enough they are mutually rejoicing in the orgiastic anticipation of the massacre.  Orestes enters the palace and kills everyone. Elektra who has vowed to dance for the gods when the slaughter is accomplished, gravely lifts her knees high and stomps around the stage.   Curtain.

Strauss ornaments this feral story with wildly cinematic, mostly atonal music -- the violins scream like fiddles in a Bernard Hermann score and there are concussive bangs and thumps, sometimes propulsive rhythms that anticipate Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.    The music cleaves so closely and literally to the mayhem on stage that there is nothing memorable -- the arias involve huge intervals that seem to rack the voices of the sopranos singing them.  Until the opera's last ten minutes, the singing is all pitched very high, shrieking coloratura sopranos, often singing difficult sounding duets -- this is mostly the byplay between Elektra and  Chrysothemis, although there are also notably sinister interludes in which the deranged Elektra taunts her half-deranged and terrified mother.  Everything approximates a tremendous and complex howl.   There are three emotional registers in the opera -- outraged shrieks in which something unspeakable is said, while the interlocutor looks on in frozen horror, a sort of ferocious ecstasy, and, lastly, cajoling and wheedling usually sexually inflected.  Strauss orchestrates the opera for 109 instruments.  The Minnesota Opera Company, performing on-stage (since they would not fit in the pit) reduces these musical forces by about 20, but the orchestra was still large enough to include not one but two harps.  

I saw the production on opening night, October 5, 2019 at the Ordway Theater.  The conceit of this staging is that we are in Berlin in 1927 and a German director is filming Elektra as a silent movie.  Before the opera began, we see stagehands looking vaguely like extras in Berlinalexanderplatz milling around, smoking cigarettes, meeting with costumed extras, and tinkering with cameras.  The show begins with a silent movie projected above four huge doors bearing bronze bosses, set near the front of the thrust stage -- this stage is built over the pit.  The movie, very effectively, shows the backstory because, of course, a 21st century audience can not be counted upon to know much about the Trojan War or the House of Atreus.   The silent film is marvelous, somehow interpolating the modern actors into scenes showing huge crowds in ancient forums.  At times, the vividness of the acting in the silent film, the ultra-expressionist close-ups staged against intense inky darkness, gives the opera the ambience of a Guy Madden film -- something that I thought admirable.  As the opera progresses it becomes clear that the huge although mobile doors are backdrops so that the actresses can be filmed in real time against them, their digital images projected on a trapezoid screen that is periodically dropped down from above.  This is a complex staging technique interposing real live performances cinematically magnified and simultaneously projected with intricate shots that show the actresses performing in the elaborately constructed movie-fortress or wandering through arcades thronged with people.  To my eye, the synthesis of film and live performance was slightly distracting but, certainly, more or less flawlessly executed.  The orchestra sprawled across most of the stage with an narrow aisle through which appearances from behind a backdrop at the rear of the stage could be executed.  The backdrop was an elaborate abstract pattern, vaguely Celtic, like something that you might see on a Irish shield or in the Book of Kells.  At times, images were projected against that writhing, vaguely gold-colored wall.  There were various Brechtian provocations -- that is, disruptions to the fourth wall.  At one point, the menacing actor playing Orestes retreats to the side of the thrust stage where he smokes a cigarette during one of Elektra's blaring arias.  (This reminded me of the scenes in Bergman's Zauberfloete in which we see the protagonists playing chess backstage or studying the score of Wagner's Parsifal.0  

As in all Grand Opera, the line between ridiculous and sublime is exceedingly narrow.  All of the female leads were very heavy, buxom women -- Strauss wrote this opera in a Wagnerian mode that sometimes declines into bombast.  At one point, Elektra is inveigling her sister Chrysothemis to murder Clytemnestra.  Elektra sings "Du windest dich durch jeden Spalt, du hebst dich durch's Fenster!" -- these words were projected as "You can wiggle through the cracks and climb through the window!"  Of course, the notion of this very large woman"wiggling through cracks" struck someone in the audience as hilarious and during a gap in Strauss' wall of sound, we heard a woman cackling when these lines were proclaimed on the surtitles.  Aegisth is portrayed as an old queen himself -- he comes out smirking like Quentin Crisp with one eyebrow quizzically elevated -- this was also funny and even I laughed out loud.  (I think this effect was intended.)  Clytemnesta's Vertraute (her confidants) writhed like snakes around the huge queen who inevitably reminded me of Shelley Winters -- the Vertraute made sinister gestures and danced in a salacious way around the fat Queen and the image was undeniably strange, even frightening, a gesture toward the composer's earlier Salome.  Strauss' opera is so extreme that when the diction suddenly reverts to something recognizably quotidian, the audience experience a brief shock -- this can also seem risible.  At one point, Elektra laments that she is like a "garment devoured by moths" - it's a good image, but sufficiently day-to-day to seem out of place.  At another moment, some factotum says that he will saddle a steed or a donkey or "if needs be, a cow."  It's a lame attempt at humor that seems a refreshing respite from the agonizing Sturm und Drang but the line seems imported from some other opera.

At the performance that I attended, Elektra was performed by a German soprano, Sabine Hogrefe (an unfortunate name because the leading lady was a tiny bit porcine.)   She was actually outsung by the larger, more vibrant Chrysothemis (Marcy Stonikas).  The presence of the vast orchestra on-stage was problematic in several scenes, particularly the first confrontation between Clytemnestra (wearing an elaborate gold headdress with radiating rays) and the disheveled Elektra.  It took Clytemnestra, in  tandem with her unctuous Vertraute, a long time to get through the orchestra and reach the thrust stage.  On some occasions, the screeching in the orchestra overwhelmed the screeching on-stage.  But, all in all, the show was a spectacle not readily forgotten. 

   

Identification of a Woman

Michelangelo Antonioni's Identification of a Woman is a late work, made when the director was about 70 years old.  As is the case with many autumnal works, the film is nakedly confessional -- Antonioni exposes aspects of his personality that may be better off concealed.  The picture's self-indulgence crystallizes features implicit in his earlier, far better films and, I think, casts a disturbing light on his apparent misogyny -- in L'Avventura, Antonioni posits that one woman may be substituted for another, at least as far as their relationship with pampered and handsome upper-class Italian men is concerned.  L'Avventura poses this proposition as a metaphysical axiom -- our lives are as often more driven by absences, by what we think we have lost or misplaced, than by those who are present to us.  Identification of a Woman recasts these ideas in explicitly sexual terms that also seem autobiographical in an embarrassing way.  The embarrassment arises in the sense that Antonioni seems strangely indifferent to,  or even indulgent with respect to, the flaws in his narcissistic protagonist.

Nicolo Farra is a film maker at a loss for ideas for his next picture.  (The situation is similar to the much greater 8 1/2 -- even down the science fiction themes.  Fellini's sexism is so extreme that it goes over-the-top into a weirdly ingratiating surreal spectacle -- the director is actually shown taking a whip to tame the various tiger-like women competing for him.  Antonioni is more refined and, therefore, oddly more reprehensible.  Fellini admires all sorts of women, all shapes, sizes, and ages, and, although he views them as exotic beasts there is nonetheless a sense of genuine affection in his films.  By contrast, Antonioni seems obsessed with a particular type of insolent teenager, slim-bodied, elegant, and mostly impassive --and,, one can not ignore the age differential, a disturbing aspect of Identification).  Farra has just been divorced and needs a new woman in his life.  He exploits his sister, a gynecologist, to seduce one of her patients, a hard-faced little tart (who is also some kind of aristocrat) named Maria Victoria or Mavi.  Mavi has apparently just had an abortion, presumably accomplished by Farra's sister, and, in fact, isn't supposed to have sex.  Be that as it may, Farra and Mavi are shown in bed in several explicit scenes that, apparently, offended people in 1982 when the movie was released -- a typical episode of Lena Dunham's Girls has far more sex displayed in more clinical and equally explicit imagery.  Mavi takes Farra to a party where various nobility parade around, people who all seem shell-shocked at their own ill-deserved wealth.  Farra has been threatened by a rather feckless thug to stay away from Mavi.  Who is Mavi's protector?  It's a mystery that the film poses but never bothers to solve.  Since Farra isn't deterred by the thug and since the bad guy doesn't even threaten any more than disrupting the movie-makers "peace of mind", this entire sub-plot goes nowhere and, in effect, seems just a bow toward those critics who expect an Antonioni film to be lavish with inexplicable enigma.  Farra and Mavi don't really get along too well -- he calls her a "shark".  When the thug starts tailing them, they flee into the country.  Along the way, fog drowns he highway and they are becalmed in an ocean of suffocating pinkish mist -- this leads to another big fight, triggered by Farra's absurd decision to leave Mavi in the car parked on the highway (and, therefore, exposed to other traffic blundering around).  The last thing you want to do in fog of this sort is get out of your car and stroll around on the highway -- but that's what these Italians do.  Escaping the highly allegorical fog, the couple reach a highly allegorical villa in the country -- the place is collapsing into a Roman ruin built on the same site.  There's a jump-scare when an owl flies out of the ruins and the couple continue quarreling with Mavi echoing Claudia's demand from L'Avventura -- "tell me that you love me."  Farra can't utter the words and so the couple breaks up.  In a nasty interlude, Farra tries to hustle a teenage girl watching swimmers.  Ostensibly, he is casting for his movie, seeking the "perfect face", but he has no plot, no funding, a co-writer who is skeptical about the whole  project and, so, his machinations among the fairer sex seem really just be a dating and seduction scheme.  The teenage girl, another of the film's "shark-like" females with hard, masculine features, says that when she and her girlfriend where abandoned by boyfriends who went to watch a boxing match, they engaged in mutual masturbation.  This is idiotic -- no teenage girl in the history of the world has ever done something like this -- or, if she did, wouldn't blurt this out to a male stranger thirty years older than her.  Furthermore, it's an unsettling insight in Antonioni's own fantasy world.  Farra then meets his ex-wife who is skeptical about his new project.  (After all, the face that Farra is seeking is imaged on his wall by a glossy picture of Louise Brooks -- good luck finding someone who looks like her!)  Farra,then, meets a comely actress and dancer who obligingly hops into bed with him.  There's some more explicit sex, hot for 1982 -- this girl is supposed to be the opposite of Mavi, Farra's previous girlfriend whom he is, more or less, stalking.  But this effect is destroyed by Antonioni casting almost the exact same physical and facial type as Mavi for this role -- Antonioni likes a certain type of actress and he obsessively casts women who look, more or less, alike for roles that are supposed to be totally different.  The new girlfriend also has a hard, mask-like face, a lithe boyish body, and she inexplicably talks dirty from time to time as well -- she's aroused by riding her pony and admits the same to Farra.  (All of this is utterly implausible.)  Ida is so accommodating that she helps Farra find Mavi's new address.  He stalks her there.  By this time, Mavi' has figured-out that Farra is useless in all respects and, very rationally, wants nothing to do with him -- although the sadness of eschewing Farra's embraces does cause her to tear-up.  Farra takes Ida to the "open lagoon", a void of pinkish sea and pinkish sky somewhere near Venice.  It's the highly allegorical and symbolic equivalent of the fog in which Mavi and Farra got lost and had their first big squabble.  Back at the hotel, Ida confesses that she is pregnant and that the child is, apparently, not Farra's.  Farra, then, predictably dumps her, coldly and efficiently.  He goes back to  his bachelor pad and starts scripting a movie about astronauts flying into the sun.  Needless to say, the sun is portrayed as a sort of reddish womb.  Apparently, staring too long at a certain kind of woman causes blindness -- or, at least, burns the observer.  And that's how the film ends. 

The picture isn't badly made and has some nice landscapes.  The acting is okay in a nihilistic sort of way.  The film's greatest flaw, other than its foolish concept, is Farra -- the actor is handsome but stiff and it's somewhat inexplicable that all of these beautiful woman would desire him.  Of course, he's supposed to represent Antonioni, although twenty years younger, and I suppose the message of the picture is that all women lust after the Byronic handsome loner.  It's possible, I suppose, to read the film as some kind of ironic commentary and satire on a certain kind of Italian man -- but the film seems too unaware, too unself-conscious as to its own subject matter for that interpretation to be valid.  Antonioni edited the picture and it may be worth watching for the numerous cuts that are intended to disorient the viewer -- the film is a textbook example of ways to edit a movie to create a sense of alienation.  Often, the cuts seem to make no sense, but I think they are all consciously contrived to be worrisome to the viewer -- like Farra lost in the fog or afloat on the "open lagoon", we don't know exactly where we are or why we have come to this pass.