Fools in the Mountains

Fools in the Mountains, more euphoniously called Fjols til Fjells in Norwegian, is a 1957 farce directed by Edith Carlmar.  The movie is unknown outside of Norway, but much beloved in that country -- apparently, the picture is shown on Norwegian TV each Christmas as a family favorite.  It's a modest little farce, good-spirited and fast-paced.  Much of the humor relies upon complicated patterns of alliteration in the Norwegian dialogue and there is evidently a lot of risque, verbal humor that doesn't translate at all in the subtitles.  Clearly, there is a lot of witty word-play invisible to non-Norwegian-speaking audiences and, probably, for this reason, no one has seen the movie in the United States -- it was recently broadcast as part of the TCM series Women Make Films, apparently the American premiere of the film.

The film is set in a resort hotel in the Norwegian mountains.  The place, catering to upscale skiing enthusiasts, is run by a pompous, high-strung manager named Poppe.  (This is the Basil Fawlty role, played to grotesque perfection by the Norwegian comedian, Leif Juster.)  Poppe is some kind of weird chimera, half Ichabod Crane and half Max von Sydow -- he seems prematurely old with a gaunt scarecrow-like appearance, very tall and skinny with a long saturnine nose.  Poppe's hotel called Hrumhei (pronounced with throat-clearing elan) is part of a chain of resorts owned by the Oslo tycoon, Mr. Granberg.  Concerned at the profitability of the Hrumhei resort, Granberg dispatches his very cute 21 year-old daughter to the property where she poses as a bell-hop, Rudy.  The resort is astir with news that a Norwegian matinee idol, Teddy Winter, intends to spend several nights in the place.  As it happens, an hour before Winter checks-in, an orinthologist (an owl fancier) who looks exactly like Teddy Winter appears and is treated with ostentatious courtesy and acclaim by Poppe and his staff (and other guests).  The alleged Winter is put in the best suite in the house, the bridal suite.  An hour later, the real Winter appears and is checked-into another adjacent room.  The real Winter is planning a romantic tryst with Eva Sommer, another movie star.  One of Winter's pasts conquests, a model named Mona is also staying in the ski resort and she tries to seduce Winter (in the form of both men).  The plot is enlivened by a saucy maid, Lalla, and a quack doctor named Dr. Gray, who apparently prescribes alcohol for all ailments.  Poppe keeps seeing the two Winters although always separately, assists one of them only to be castigated as presumptuous by the other.  The confusion between the movie star and the owl fancier involves all sorts of erotic byplay based on mistaken identity.  The poor owl fancier gets roundly slapped by both Eva Sommer and Mona for his flirtations -- of course, these amorous infractions were committed by the movie star.  Poppe becomes hysterical and seems to have a nervous breakdown after much prancing about and spastic mugging, in the manner of an elongated Jerry Lewis.  There's even some comic scenes outside involving Poppe's hapless attempt at downhill skiing -- this is pure physical comedy, not very effective, but interesting for its glimpses at the vestigial state of  1957 Norwegian ski-resorts (for instance, there is no ski-lift and people are ferried up to a ridge by snowmobile).  The film ends on a somewhat incongruous and disturbing note:  the beautiful Rudy (she looks like Debbie Reynolds) falls in love with the much older and very strange Poppe.  They embrace.  Rudy has figured out the mistaken identities involving Winters the actor and the bird-fancier.  Mr. Granberg has come to the hotel and everything is sorted out:  the owl-lover ends up with Mona and Teddy Winters plans to marry Eva Sommer.  

This sort of elaborately contrived plot was old in the time of Plautus.  It's clever but rather tedious and, without the clever word-play adorning the script, most audiences will find nothing particularly new or exciting in this material.  The merry roundelay of mistaken identities involves many chaotic bedroom scenes with the characters moving rapidly from room to room -- the bird-fancier expelled from Mona's room after an erotic misunderstanding ends up sleeping in the bathtub and, of course, the water gets turned on so that he is soaked.  Poppe strips down in front of the horrified Rudy who flees to the maid Lalla's room.  (Rudy is obviously female and it takes a willing suspension of disbelief to accept the fact that all the characters think that she is a perky young man.)  This kind of smirking and salacious sex comedy is familiar to English-speaking audiences through Woody Allen's Don't Drink the Water and the English comedy No Sex Please, We're British -- both shows popular with community theaters in the hinterland.  These farces, in turn, were influenced by Georges Feydeau's A Flea in her Ear and L'Hotel du Libre Exchange, both of which feature lovers trying to connect in shady hotels.  (The latter farce was popular in a 1956 British version starring Alec Guinness called Hotel Paradiso).  Of course, the best example of this genre is John Cleese's sublime Fawlty Towers.  Cleese, who is also inordinately tall, and with peculiar features, plays Basil Fawlty in a manner that is very similar to some Leif Juster's antics in the Norwegian film.  The scenes with the beanpole Poppe flanked by the tiny, dimpled Rudy as his lieutenant are sweet enough to almost, but not completely, justify the climactic clinch between the two mismatched characters.  

  

Topsy Turvy

In Mike Leigh's 1999 Topsy Turvy, operetta composers Gilbert and Sullivan are at odds. Their long and successful collaboration has soured.  While researching The Mikado, Gilbert meets a Japanese princess living in exile in London.  Gilbert, a married man who is an irascible sort, falls in love with the girl, but, as a good Victorian husband, he represses his tender feelings.  The princess is courted by the rakish and decadent Arthur Sullivan,  Sullivan's interest in the young woman leads to violent quarrels between the two partners, fistfights, and puts the completion of The Mikado in question.  Sensing that her presence has sown discord between the two great artists, the Japanese girl, who now loves them both, returns to Japan where she commits hari kari.  Heart-broken, the two men return to their collaboration and produce several gorgeous songs dedicated the memory of their lost love.  -- This is not the plot of Leigh's film, but represents the way that Hollywood scriptwriters would have designed a story about the composition of The Mikado. Conventional biopics get most of the facts wrong while enhancing the credibility of their storytelling with exquisitely realized details as to the High Victorian milieu.  Watching Leigh's Topsy Turvy, one has the sense that the movie exists, not for its plot (which is negligible) but to present the audience with a wealth of carefully researched documentary details about Victorian operetta and the lives of its two most outstanding practitioners, the librettist, W.S. Gilbert and his composer, Arthur Sullivan.  This is a peculiar, materialist approach to film making, more like a lush version of Straub and Huillet's Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach or a scrupulously Marxist film on the order of Peter Watkin's documentary-style  Edvard Munch than like a conventional Hollywood biopic.  In his commentary on Topsy Turvy, Leigh says without embarrassment that the film is "the most carefully researched movie ever made" and apologizes at length for the only "howler" that made its way into the finished picture -- a derisive statement about someone going "to Oslo to see Mr. Ibsen"; in 1885, Oslo was called Kristiana.  The question that the picture poses is whether its wealth of fanatically researched period detail suffocates the picture or enhances the extraordinary character studies that are at its heart.  In some respects, the film's refusal to supply a conventional plot and its sprawling documentary detail are baffling -- Leigh doesn't reach the principal theme in the film, the collaborative effort that produced The Mikado, until one hour and nine minutes have elapsed in a movie that runs two hours and forty minutes.  Furthermore, the film is relentlessly claustrophobic -- it is entirely shot inside voluptuously accoutered Victorian rooms with colorful sequences replicating operetta performances in a lavishly reconstructed 19th century theater, D'Oyly Carte's Savoy Theater.  Only a single brief shot purports to show an exterior and, late in the film, when Gilbert flees the theater and encounters a mad-woman in an alleyway, the imagery has a nightmarish subterranean quality.  An example of the film's peculiar approach to its material is when D'Oyly Carte travels to Paris where Sullivan is hiding out to avoid working on Gilbert's libretto.  Leigh has recreated a Parisian restaurant of the era down to the tiniest detail.  In the commentary, he advises that he recruited French expatriates to populate his Parisian restaurant -- this are people in the background who don't speak in the scene.  The waiter is an actual French waiter.  We expect the scene to be about D'Oyly Carte pleading with Sullivan to return to London to write music for Gilbert's libretto.  But, instead, Carte pitches an investment scheme to Sullivan, describes that investment, his new proposed Savoy Hotel with particular emphasis on its seventy in-room bathrooms (a detail that astounds Sullivan) and, then, has the composer sign a contract about the hotel venture using a brand-new innovation, "the reservoir pen" (or "fountain pen").  In the end, the scene turns out to be about the detailed reconstruction of an 1880's Parisian restaurant, the notion of putting private baths in hotel rooms, and the invention of the fountain pen.  The sequence doesn't contribute in any substantive way to the film's meager narrative and seems wholly unnecessary -- there's no follow-up to anything discussed in the sequence.  And, yet, the scene is intrinsically fascinating, beautiful designed and shot, hyper-realistic, and, even, intriguing in an abstract,  historical sort of way -- and this is the enigma that the movie presents, it doesn't feel long despite lasting almost three hours, and the viewer remains interested in the proceedings, even immensely interested, although nothing much seems to be going on and despite the absence of any discernible narrative.  (The film is similar in perspective and documentation to Leigh's later Mr. Turner about the great landscape painter J. M. W. Turner, although that film is very much made in the plein air.)

The general premise of Topsy Turvy is that the collaboration between Gilbert and Sullivan has reached an impasse.  Reviews of the two men's most recent effort, Princess Ida, are respectful and favorable, but suggest that the partners' work has grown stale and that they are merely repeating themselves.  D'Oyly Carte has them under a contract and demands a new work.  Sullivan, who is a sort of Victorian rake, decamps to Paris where he enjoys an evening in a brothel -- the sexual aspects of Leigh's film are as carefully researched as the details relating to Victorian medicine and knick-knacks.  Sullivan has a languorous American mistress but seems to have fragile health -- he spends a good part of the movie sick and in-bed.  Gilbert has composed a new libretto involving Sicilian brigands but it's just a retread of earlier plots that he has devised.  The two men meet (they are together on screen for only a few minutes) and discuss the libretto while chewing on lumps of sugar.  Sullivan desires to write a serious opera or a symphony and is not interested in Gilbert's libretto.  A heat wave has emptied out the theaters and ended the run of Princess Ida.  Carte, who needs something to show, revives an earlier Gilbert and Sullivan hit, The Sorcerer, and Leigh shows us an extended excerpt of that production, primarily, it seems, to highlight the director's research as to Victorian lighting effects and stagecraft.  Just when it seems that the collaboration is at an end, Gilbert's wife takes him to an exhibition in which a "authentic" Japanese village is recreated, complete with Japanese people performing like apes in a cage.  Gilbert is fascinated, buys a samurai sword, and, then, when the sword that he has lovingly hung on the wall of his den falls to the ground, imagines The Mikado.  From this point forward, the film alternates between spectacularly staged sequences from the operetta and scenes showing the two men rehearsing the actors and musicians.  The last hour of the movie which depicts how The Mikado was produced is remarkably engaging -- we are privy to all sorts of fascinating information about the business and technology of late 19th century theater. A tiny plot even emerges in last twenty minutes or so -- Gilbert doesn't like the Lord High Executioner's song, the famous melody about the "punishment fitting the crime."  And,so, he eliminates the number from the production.  The great Timothy Spall plays the actor, Richard Temple, who, in turn, is assigned the role of the Lord High Executioner.  He bursts into tears when his showcase number is cut from the show.  The chorus, however, protests the excision of the piece to Gilbert, running the risk that he will fire and blacklist them.  Gilbert seems moved by the chorus' determination to save the number, primarily, it seems, out of their sympathy for the actor playing the role.  And, so, he allows the song to remain in The Mikado -- it is, of course, now regarded as one of the highlights of the show.  The opening night is a great success.  The film ends with a dying fall, focusing on three of the women at the edges of the action -- Gilbert's wife longs for a child and tries to seduce her husband into bed with her, but he's distracted, full of self-loathing and melancholy, and rebuffs her.  This scene involves Gilbert telling his wife:  "There's something intrinsically disappointing about success", a strange notion that, nonetheless, is both central to the film and an important commentary on art in general.  (I have recalled this line for more than 20 years after seeing the picture at the Uptown Theater when it was first released.)  We see Sullivan in bed with his mistress, neurasthenic, and dreading the exertions of the next score that he will have to write with Gilbert -- success has insured that he will now be yoked to Gilbert for the next ten years.  Using euphemisms, Gilbert's mistress sadly tells him that "demon has returned", meaning that she is pregnant -- there's no debate about what this means; Gilbert says that he will arrange for things, but the woman says that she has "already taken care of the arrangements."  Finally, an actress who seems to be an alcoholic sits with her colleague in her dressing room -- she's not supposed to be drinking or smoking, but she does both.  The woman with her has some kind of injury to her leg and it isn't getting any better -- there are distinct limitations to Victorian medical science.  The movie ends with a melancholy, if beautiful, scene from The Mikado, the alcoholic actress singing the aria "The moon and I".  This conclusion exemplifies the peculiarities in the film -- the alcoholic actress is not an important character although we know a few things about her:  she is a widow, has a little boy named Winston, and, probably, will not re-marry because most eligible men of that era don't want as a wife a woman who has already had a child.  The woman seems very sad and her final aria is exact to the tone of loss and melancholy that the film's ending embodies -- but there isn't any plot or narrative rationale for the picture ending with images of this minor, if indelible, character.  The sequence exists for its expressive tone -- not for any plot significance that it might have.  

Leigh improvises scenes in his films with his collaborators, a repertoire company of actors with whom he customarily works.  Accordingly, the notion of collaboration and how people work together to make theater is crucial to him and the subject of the film seems dear to his heart.  The acting in superb.  Allan Corduner's performance as Sullivan is pitch-perfect, a strange mixture of libertine and sentimentalist, and Jim Broadbent is beyond reproach as the curmudgeonly and pessimistic Gilbert.  All of the characters, down to the very slightest (for instance, Shrimp, the stage-boy) are brilliantly realized.  There is a startling scene about an hour after the film's start in which a very old man has a kind of seizure, screaming at imaginary horrors -- the old man is Gilbert's father and the sequence is astonishing.  But it has no outcome and seems unrelated to anything else in the movie, although Leigh in his commentary assures us that this event actually occurred.  Leigh goes so far as to consult with medical doctors to diagnose the ailments of the characters in the movie -- one actress, he notes, seems to suffer from "varicosity" in the veins of her leg.  If the picture has an overarching theme, it can be summarized in an anecdote sometimes said to apply to the great clown, Grimaldi, or sometimes told about Pagliacci.  A man goes to a doctor and says that he is terribly depressed and suffering great and crippling melancholy.  The doctor tells the man that he should go to the theater and see the great clown, Grimaldi, performing.  "This man will make you laugh," the doctors assures his patient, "and forget all of your troubles at least while you are watching him".  The patient, then, cries out:  "But doctor, I am Grimaldi."  The operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan have inspired millions of people and made them happy.  But, like all other human endeavors, they are rooted in human discontent and unhappiness.  

  

Aventurera (Adventuress)

 Aventurera (Adventuress) is a superheated melodrama from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema -- the film was made by Albert Gout in 1950 and features the Havana-born Ninon Servilla, the erotic icon of the so-called Rumbera films -- stylized crime pictures in the mode of American film noir featuring elaborate Afro-Cuban dance sequences. The plot is a feverish contrivance designed to fling  bigger-than-life characters into one another with maximum violence -- the film is like some kind of atom-smasher, ramping up the force of the particles in motion until they explode all over the screen.  The camera-work and direction are pedestrian but efficiently utilitarian -- what counts in Aventurera is the force of personalities in conflict and the delirious narrative.  The film is Shakespearian in its complicated plot -- it's not particularly poetic or profound in any way, but the narrative is like the source material for one of Shakespeare's plays, a frenzied melange of impersonations and transposed identities.   

The narrative in Aventurera can't be described without revealing surprises in the plot.  So the reader is duly advised that SPOILERS follow.  Elena is a upper class girl living with her parents in Chihuaha.  (The film briskly establishes location by a title and a shot of the city's cathedral.)  A suave zoot-suiter named Lucio is sniffing around, apparently in hopes of seducing the ingenue.  In the first of the film's many reversals of fortune, Elena comes home to find her very proper and matronly mother in the arms of another man.  Her mother absconds with her lover and Elena's father promptly commits suicide.  Elena moves to Juarez where she is sexually harassed by a series of employers, quits those jobs and ends up on the street.  The smarmy Lucio appears and offers her dinner at a night club.  (The girl has been starving.)  Lucio gets the girl drunk and sells her to the Madame who runs a high-class brothel in the suite of rooms above the night club floor.  (The Madame has a little window with louvers that she can open to survey activities on the dance floor below.)  The Madame, a imperious middle-aged woman who wears very decollete blouses with huge flouncy black skirts, drugs Elena and peddles her to an older man who rapes her.  Elena is outraged and threatens the Madame, Rosaura.  To deter her from future disobedience of this kind, Rosaura summons her enforcer, the gimpy Rengo, who draws a switchblade and threatens to slash her face.  This terrifies Elena and she remains obedient to the evil Rosaura.  

As it turns out, Elena is a fantastic dancer.  We see her perform several times on the stage of Rosaura's night club.  During these sequences, the stage expands into a vast set, larger than the entire interior of the night club, with elaborate colonnades and Moorish minarets.  In the first production number, Elena wears a harem-girl outfit and performs an elaborately choreographed belly dance with an army of dancing girls and bare-chested slaves.  In a second production number, "Zig-Zig-Zig", Elena does a spectacular Rumba wearing an enormous headdress made from two huge bejeweled pineapples.  While she dances, the pineapples split open to reveal bundles of bananas and the fringe of her skirt above her bare hips is also made from bananas that wobble and shake as she performs.  In this number, Elena actually sings the famous Chiquita banana song.  Lucio who is still sniffing around meets with the heroine. Elena is recruited  into a jewelry robbey in which Lucio shoots it out with the cops. Elena gets away when Lucio is apprehended and, later, sent to the "Prison Islands" for twenty years.  Fed up with Rosaura's imperious demands, Elena tries to leave the brothel qua night club and is again threatened by Rengo -- in one scene, Rengo actually drags Elena up the steps into the whore house by her hair.  Some other thugs intervene and Rengo is about to be killed by those gangsters when Elena intervenes inexplicably to save him.  By this point, Elena is seeing a law student from a wealthy family in Guadalajara.  She elopes with the law student to his home, a palatial mansion planning to marry him.  Here is the film's second shocking plot development:  it turns out that Elena's fiancee is the son of Rosaura.  Rosaura has been leading a double-life -- she is a society matron in Guadalajara but also running the brothel and night club in Juarez.  (She pretends that she spends half the year in the United States.)  Rosaura is a widow and in order to support her two sons, Mario and Ricardo, she has been moonlighting as the madam of the Juarez brothel.  Elena now sees that she can take revenge on Rosaura for turning her into a prostitute.  She tells Rosaura that she will marry her son "and shame him every day.  And, then, when (she) is bored with him, (she) will leave him all alone."  Indeed, at the betrothal party, Elena dances the rumba, wiggling her ass in such a way that all members of the Guadalajara polite society flee the house in horror.  Elena, then, proposes that she will honeymoon with Mario in Juarez.  This terrifies Rosaura who pleads with her to leave.  (Just for giggles, Elena is also trying to seduce Mario's brother, Ricardo, to heap further shame on the family.) Meanwhile, Elena has demanded that her lawyer-husband, Mario, take action to free Lucio, her former lover and the gangster who shot it out with the cops, from prison.  This is apparently accomplished by wining and dining the Judge assigned the case -- the legal system is assumed to be wholly corrupt.

The action moves to Juarez.  Elena dances in Rosaura's club under her married name -- part of her campaign to humiliate her mother-in-law.  Various thugs are sent to kill Rosaura, but she evades their efforts with the help of Rengo, the gimpy brothel-enforcer who has now become her loyal bodyguard.  (Rengo who is hideous-looking little fellow has fallen in love with Elena and worships her.)  Elena's mother is dying and the daughter goes to her bedside, but only to refuse to forgive her for her adultery.  Lucio ultimately comes to blackmail Elena -- it's completely impenetrable as to why she had Mario get him released from prison.  (Presumably, this is part of her revenge scheme).  Elena tries to dissuade Lucio from his blackmail scheme.  She now realizes that she is really in love with Mario who has proved his mettle by continuing to love her notwithstanding the vehement objections of Rosaura.  By this time, Elena has revealed that Rosaura is running the night club and whore house.  Choosing Elena over his domineering and cruel mother, with whom the film now seems to sympathize, Mario swears his love to Elena.  Lucio fights with Mario.  Just as he's about to kill Mario, Lucio is stabbed in the back by Rengo.  Rengo a broken man, mourns as he watches Mario and Elena walking down the rainy neon-lit street in Juarez toward what is suggested, at least, to be a happy ending.  I've left out several subplots and various characters whose motivation I didn't exactly understand, but the reader will get the gist of things.

The film is full of musical numbers that comment on the action.  At the climax, Elena tries to bribe Lucio to leave her alone -- she strips off all of her jewelry and shoves it in Lucio's big paw:  when a Mexican heroine starts divesting herself of her jewelry, the audience knows that she is sincere and desperate.  While Elena tries to bribe the scoundrel, Lucio, a man and woman croon on stage the ballad of the "Adventuress" who must exchange herself for "diamonds to pay for her crimes."  When Elena dances, she jumps around frantically like Josephine Baker and it seems that she could knock down walls with the thrusts of her hips.  The movie is intricately plotted but the story doesn't really matter -- it's just a device for wringing the maximum of emotion from the feral revenge plot.  The movie is memorable. It was wildly and disproportionately praised by the French including Truffaut, and the vulpine Ninon Sevilla was an icon of the French New Wave.  Sevilla is one of those actresses who seems plain at first, even nondescript, but when she turns up the heat the screen melts with her presence.  

  

Araya

 The Araya peninsula is a desert peninsula jutting into the Caribbean Ocean in northeast Venezuela.  The peninsula curves around a great sun-baked lagoon where people have been harvesting salt for 450 years.  Araya is a documentary made in 1959 by a woman named Margot Benaceraff.  Benceraff, a Venezuelan herself, made only one other film but she is revered in her home country and, indeed, apparently, a well-known figure in Latin American cinema.  Benaceraff claimed she made the film Araya with a single collaborator, her cameraman.  This seems unlikely and the presence of several very elaborate moving camera shots in the documentary suggest that she had several people in her crew -- one sequence appears to involve a moving crane shot although Benaceraff claims that she happened to find an abandoned crane at one location and was, somehow, able to use it to make the scene.  (This seems implausible to me.)  Several sequences involve her camera gliding over the waters of the salt-lagoon, sometimes executing intricate maneuvers, and it would seem to me that these shots, probably made from a floating flat-bottomed barge of some sort, must have required the assistance of a half-dozen grips.  These controversies are immaterial to the finished documentary -- it is extremely beautiful and, further, adorned with a stark, highly poetic narrative as well as an elaborate through-composed soundtrack consisting of avant-garde music.  The film is highly accomplished and polished to a high sheen and it is certainly a wonderful feat of something akin to magical realism.

The Araya peninsula is barren and hostile to life.  But people eke out a living on the shore of the sea working incessantly to extract salt from the shallow lagoon.  The men hack the salt off the bed of the lagoon, fill up small barges with the stuff, and, then, drag it ashore.  The salt is then packed in bags, weighed carefully (the woman at the scales has "eyes as dry and glittering" as the salt), and, then, hauled up onto huge prisms of white -- these are the so-called salt pyramids and they seem to be about 60 feet high, great alabaster piles of the stuff heaped in mastaba-shaped bunkers.  Ships come periodically and the salt is scooped from the pyramids, presumably using power equipment, and, then, hauled away.    But the work is ceaseless and no sooner is one salt pyramid loaded onto the ships then another is built. The workers in the village, also called Araya, seem to labor around the clock -- there's no end of salt to be cut and the market for the stuff is seemingly infinite.  About 18 miles from the salt lagoon, there's open sea and a long beach where a fishing village stands.  The fisherman also fish around the clock using huge nets that we see them lovingly mending. The fishermen pull fish from the sea which are, then, hauled fresh down to the salt lagoon.  There the salineros eat the fish  fresh or preserve them in -- you guessed it ! salt.  It's a closed loop.  The salineros can't eat without the fisherman.  The fisherman can't support themselves without being paid for their fish at the salt lagoon.  The film is constructed as documenting the events of a single work day -- it begins at dawn with turbulent thunderclouds gathering over the stark mountains around the lagoon; the day ends long after midnight with the fishers plying the open sea in their boats and the night shift of the salt miners pushing ashore barges piled up with salt.  During the intervening hours, we see a woman making primitive pots (she doesn't have a potter's wheel) and, then, firing the pots from bone-dry brush cut from a little thicket, the peninsula's only source of wood.   A water truck arrives around 11:00 pm and the village's oldest woman supervises the distribution of water to the various households -- some bristly atavistic-looking pigs wallow in the mud near the truck.  A little girl collects coral and sea shells and, then, goes with her grandmother to decorate a grave.  We see carrion birds eating dead fish at the sea shore and huge flocks of prehistoric-looking herons with vast gaping throats.  Some children fly kites and a boy and girl walking on a desolate-looking beach exchange glances if not words.  The women all lug around huge pots which they carry on their heads.  Even when they aren't carrying pots, the women wear little pillow-shaped bags on their heads -- they support the pots on this head gear.  Fish are salted and eaten.  The salt workers take a short siesta in the heat of the day -- apparently, the area is scalding hot.  Everyone lives in neat, but very humble mud huts.  In one unintentionally amusing scene, the women of the households carry some slabs of salt home on their head for personal use -- needless to say, all food prepared here is very liberally seasoned with salt.  The men are paid 50 cents per sack of salt hauled onto the pyramids.  (It looks like hellish work -- everyone has ulcers on their feet and calves where the salt is corroding their skin.)  The landscape is like the moon, totally barren and burnt into submission by the raging sun.  The huge piles of salt have a kind of unearthly grandeur.  The film starts with an account of how the place was founded and protected from pirates by a great fortress -- originally, the salt mining was just  a side enterprise; the real value in the place was pearls for which people could dive in the shallow brine of the lagoon.  The fortress has fallen down now.  At the end of the movie, we see salt-mining done with huge machines -- does modern technology mean the end of this strange primitive economy?

The film continuously sacrifices information for visual splendor.  (For instance, it's clear that ships come almost daily to dredge up the salt in the lagoon-side pyramids -- but we don't see this machine-operation because it would contradict the movie-maker's presentation of the salt-mining as pre-industrial, an ancient kind of work done exclusively by hand.)  The villagers, who are sometimes named, are picturesque ciphers -- they live in a world without agency or culture or, even, much in the way of language.  Indeed, they are presented as ahistorical beings, beasts of burdens, who can scarcely even talk -- the young lovers cast modest looks at each other but don't dare to speak.  Although we see a couple of long shots of a church, we have no idea what they believe or how they worship.  The intensely poetic narration talks about the men repeating over and over again "ancient gestures"-- some of this is very beautiful, particularly a kind of dance that the men perform as they whirl flails down into the crystalline slabs and boulders of salt to crush it into particulate form.  Everything is subordinate to the the majestic and awful beauty of the images of the salt lagoons, the gleaming white pyramids of salt, the turbulent sea where the fishermen ply their trade, the columns of women bearing huge pots and jugs on their heads as they walk through the infernal-looking wasteland.  Ultimately, the movie seems airless, claustrophobic -- the salineros and the fishermen and their women are just picturesque mannequins, people who are wholly devoid of any kind of autonomy or authority over their own lives. I'm sure that Banacerraf was a good Marxist, but the movies that are closest in aesthetic to Ayala are the documentaries of Leni Riefenstahl, particularly her studies of the Nuba in Africa.  Benaceraff has succeeding in estheticizing the most dire and brutal poverty.  There's something a bit pernicious about this immaculately beautiful film.

The Erl King

Except for archivists and film restoration specialists, no one has seen Marie Louise Iribe's The Erl King for sixty years.  The 1929 French film was broadcast by Turner Classic Movies as part of its Women Make Film series.  It is not likely to be seen again.  The movie dramatizes Goethe's ballad using a post-synchronized (dubbed) soundtrack that largely consists of an orchestral and quasi-operatic version of Schubert's Lieder setting of the poem -- no one is really much interested in the source material today:  I suppose a few High School and College German classes study the Goethe poem but it has no broad audience appeal and the Schubert Lieder, although great works of art, have always been a passion limited to only an elite.  (The orchestral and operatic version of the brilliant percussive Schubert song featured in the movie is cloying and misrepresents the wild punk-rock energy of the piano and bass voice version that the composer penned.)  The movie is too long to be programmed with other pieces -- it clocks in around 45 minutes.  The primitive horror effects are laughable today and the camerawork is often amateurish -- the camera is frequently positioned too far from the action or the special effects are too tiny and murky to be successfully viewed.  As a horror film, the movie is too artistic and refined to scare anyone.  As an art film, the picture is too lurid and grim and, insufficiently, artistic to impress anyone.  The viewer has the sense of looking into the contents of long-sealed vault that is about to be sealed again.

Some of the imagery in the film is effective.  Under a sky full of towering turbulent thunderheads, a morose-looking middle-aged man rides across a barren moor.  He is cradling his small son in his arms.  His horse is limping in a eerie way and, then, suddenly trips and falls forward.  The man picks up his son, who seems to be unconscious and, by the mare's shank (walking), hikes to a fortified farmstead.  The little boy is sick and needs medical attention.  Despite warnings by the people in the lonely farm with its great stone walls, the father borrows a horse and sets off across wetlands toward the forest intervening between the ancient grange and the town.  Before leaving the farm, a maid sings to the little boy some verses from the Goethe poem, as translated into French, and the child is frightened.  On the sodden and swampy heath, a sinister frog eyes the travelers.  The frog turns into a sort of miniature goblin, a little bit like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.  The frog produces strange mists and the landscape becomes dark with swirling fog.  In the forest, the Erl King, a sort of giant wearing chain mail, appears is misty superimpositions over the dark woods.  He turns a beetle and spider into woodland sylphs wearing diaphanous classical gowns.  The Erl King lives in a crowded neighborhood -- there's a big burly river god (seemingly derived from Bernini's fountain in Rome), a mounted figure who plays drums on horseback to summon the lightning and thunder, and, ultimately, a skeleton riding a horse as well, pale horse pale rider.  The way through the woods, visualized as huge murky colonnades of trees, is beset by hazards -- the Erl King unleashes a flood to bar a river-crossing and, then, the figure with the timpani drums on horseback causes an avalanche, a few stray rocks rolling down a talus field--, undoubtedly, the most puny and ineffectual avalanche in film history.  The little boy points to the fairy figures, but his father can't see them.  Ultimately, the Erl King wrestles with the child and inflicts a mortal wound.  The father reaches town, another antique place that is eerily deserted.  Carrying the boy in his arms, he enters a rude Romanesque church, as gloomy as a cave, with primitive sculpted figures standing in the tympanum above the door.  In the shadowy, indistinct church, the father sets the little boy's body on the floor in front of the altar.  I assume the ending is supposed to be ambiguous -- perhaps, by the grace of God, the child will be healed.  

The film is mostly silent although with a lush, and misguided operatic-sounding score.  People's voices ring in a hollow void.  The landscapes are very atmospheric, a combination of muck and heather with dark tarns in the reeds; the forest is a nightmarish space of topless trees eccentrically lit from below.  There are baroque images such as the river god slumbering in the sedge and the flood washing over a drowned river nymph.  It's pretty but, also, tedious and doesn't add up to much.  Iribe shows some talent and a few of the shots are faintly memorable and, perhaps, she would have done great things in later films -- this movie has some of the flair and eccentricity of a student picture, a avant-garde short feature on which the director cut her teeth.  But she didn't live.  The Erl King came for her as well -- she died at age 40 in 1934.   

Lovecraft Country and The Vow (both on HBO)

 Lovecraft Country is an edgy horror show, just concluded on HBO after 9 or ten episodes.  The Vow, on which I have earlier written, is a documentary about a human potential cult, a congeries of TED talks gone berserk, that has also ended after nine episodes.  Both shows demonstrate different ways to fail in the extended series format.  And, both, fail in ways that are quite profoundly irritating -- the show's don't just vanish into TV's standard abyss of insignificance; rather, both programs demonstrate a very healthy self-regard and project an aura of importance.  You walk away from both of these programs dismayed at the time that you have wasted watching them.  TV is mostly escapist entertainment and if a program is amusing, it doesn't have be be artistic or profound -- it just needs to distract you from the Covid-19 and the infernal politics of the day for a half hour or so.  But these shows, trumpeting their "woke" and timely significance, are something worse than failures -- they are failures with a nasty, inauthentic, and mean-spirited edge.

Lovecraft Country starts out as a witty and grotesque mash-up of racial satire and horror, much-influenced by the films of Jordan Peele (Get Out and Us) -- in fact, Peele is one of the show's producers.  The premise is that an African-American Korean war veteran has returned traumatized to Chicago, a town festering with overt racism.  It's the mid-fifties and the hero's uncle (I think -- the show is full of collateral relatives that I couldn't quite place, a situation also complicated by disputed paternity) has vanished.  This man produces a "green book" -- that is, a volume that advises Black people as to where they can safely travel in the United States.  The war veteran tracks the missing man to Ardham, Massachusetts where he encounters a group of viciously racist cops.  The cops are tormenting the African-American heroes when a group of slavering porcine monsters devour the bad guys.  The fleeing heroes enter a strange Moorish mansion that looks something like a Masonic Temple incongruously set in the middle of the New England woods.  The temple is populated by a group of bone-white witches and warlocks who speak the language of Adam (it sounds like Yiddish) and who are engaged in some kind of cosmically evil scheme.  The show works out the consequences of this situation for ten episodes, each show weaker and more desperate for the viewer's attention than the last.  Ultimately, the series degrades into gory nonsense involving people mouthing spells to summon all sorts of horrors but to no clear effect since the last episodes, in particular, are completely incoherent.  By the end of the show, the viewer has forgotten how the characters are related to one another (or lost interest in figuring out their intricate lineage) and, further, since anything is possible -- there's lots of time travel and adventures in alternative universes -- nothing is interesting or, even, suspenseful.  It's just one ridiculous thing after another.  Periodically, the show touches on racial issues, always in the least interesting and most exploitative way possible:  poor Emmet Till is buried, the Black neighborhood in Tulsa is destroyed once more, and the noble characters all suffer the slings and arrows of White racism, usually in vulgar over-produced sequences that are so melodramatically over-the-top that the audience is de-sensitized to this oppression and comes to expect it as a predictable plot devise.  Every White cop leers and uses racial slurs.  White plutocrats keep tortured African-American slaves in closets or perform horrible medical experiments on them.  Lovecraft Country in keeping with Peele's use of punning titles is a place where African-Americans live in perpetual terror of a vast, grandiose system of cosmic oppression -- America is "Lovecraft Country", that is, a place where the monsters have seized power and wield their influence to murder, maim, and torture inoffensive Black folk.  (The show is not  content to parody White oppression of African-Americans -- we also get a poor oppressed Korean girl, some homosexuals who are victimized by everyone, some women who are subjugated by men, and, even, a Native-American princess who has been mummified but comes to life to kick ass and suffer racist indignities all over again).  The show is spectacularly violent -- heads get crushed in big close-up, people are burned alive, Black faces get grafted onto White bodies, monsters with tentacles slice people into gobbets of quivering flesh, and so on.  Some of the special effects are extremely effective and there are levels of mayhem and gruesome mutilation in this show that I haven't seen before.  But the plots are increasingly chaotic and the trials and tribulations of the characters so absurd -- a number of the protagonists seem to die in gory ways about every episode and, then, come back to life -- that you watch the thing with increasing dismay and, ultimately, indifference.  The show panders to its audience in such extreme ways that it devolves into nothing but a sophisticated form of Blaxploitation.  When an episode shows heroic Black women warriors carving a Confederate Army of men in grey (charging under the stars and bars battle-flag) into raw meat such as you might find on the floor of particularly insanitary abattoir, the combination of brutal wish fulfillment, computer-generated special effects, and idiotic plotting becomes close to unbearable.  American history is full of  barbaric episodes, but the show's approach to this barbarism is often just to erase it -- the Black heroes kill an army of Confederates and, thus, cancel out the Civil War and slavery as well, I suppose.  The answer to racism isn't protest or the vote or even targeted terrorism-- it's just killing White folks by using silly incantations and sorcery.  White guilt kept me watching the show -- it's designed in such a way that it dares you to turn it off:  shut off the TV, or switch to another channel and, thereby, prove once and for all that you are a racist.  Several effects are startling and once seen, can't be unseen -- the comely Korean lass is a "nine-tail fox"; this means that, while having sexual congress, she extrudes tentacular furry tails from all nine of her orifices (you have seven in your head:  two nostrils, mouth, two eyes, and two ears) which wrap around victims and tear them to pieces.  Several of the whiter than White Caucasians conceal under their pale skin, black people who appear when the characters writhe in seizures or orgasm, their skin unseaming and unzipping like a gory meat coat -- this is very impressive effect, but, of course, the fourth or fifth time that this happens and a naked black body wriggles out of a heap of pale pork chops, you start to lose interest.    

The Vow is an endless documentary about a NXIVM, a human potential seminar run by a smarmy little bastard called Keith Ranieri.  Ranieri figured out a way to seduce his followers into organizing a harem of sex slaves, branded in their pubic area with his initials. The villain is a dumpy little man with a bad haircut and a soft-spoken manner that represents the loathsomely manipulative Socratic method exaggerated into utter madness.  He gets his followers to doubt everything but his charisma, an appeal that is noticeably lacking on-screen -- indeed, the source of Ranieri's Svengali-like influence, particularly on beautiful, if child-like Hollywood actresses is inexplicable, at least on the evidence presented in the film.  The man is a former Amway-salesman and his pitch is a combination of Charley Manson and pyramid-scheme recruiter.  The riddle that the show presents is  how so many people could have fallen for such a transparently manipulative con-man.  The show is irritating in that the directors, anxious to dilate material good for a freakish Sixty Minutes episode, or, at most, an hour or two, expand the documentary into a nine or ten hours and, then, don't bring the show to any satisfying conclusion.  Instead, to the viewer's horror, The Vow threatens, at least, another ten hours of self-serving and hyper-narcissistic self-justification by all of its characters, not the least Ranieri who now suggests that he'll participate in the show as well to "make it a better" and more profound documentary -- of course, he'll have to participate from his prison cell but this seems feasible in light of the fact that the cult-leader and his apostles seem to have filmed literally every move they made over a period of ten years.  What's nightmarish about the film is the craven dishonorable betrayal that every frame exhibits.  These people are all pretty with good figures and photogenic faces and they seem to have swarmed around every camera at every gathering involving Ranieri or any one else associated with the cult.  The result is a nauseating glut of imagery, millions of hours of stuff apparently.  Ranieri's moronic self-serving rants and harangues have all been preserved as if his words were the stuff of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.  Everything has been filmed, even arguments among the apostles and, of course, all of this culminates in pornographic collateral that Ranieri collected on film and video as a means of extortion and intimidation like a demented latter-day Andy Warhol.  (Sadly, we don't ever get to see any of the juicy stuff.)  The documentary is female in perspective -- it luxuriates in sentimental nostalgia about the good old days before Ranieri started demanding that his concubines brand one another with a cauterizing iron; there are layers and layers of soporific analysis of "relationships" and enormous tracts of futile navel-gazing.  The victims of Ranieri, of course, enthusiastically leaped into this Hell and seem to have voluptuously (and masochistically) savored the various torments that Ranieri inflicted on them.  Indicative of the film's rampant narcissism is Mark, a South African filmmaker, who is the very picture of preening self-regard.  Mark says this:  "No one joins a cult.  People join a good thing.  None of us thought we were joining a cult; we thought we were going to save the world."  This justification, which every Nazi could have echoed, is shown several times.  However, the last time the quote is used, we get (as Paul Harvey used to say) "the rest of the picture."  We hear the words again but this time with an appendix, as it were -- the rest of the utterance not previously revealed to us.  Mark's lines are played again but, then, he adds:  "But I should have known years ago, when I had my wife, whom I love, sleeping in a dog bed next to our bed -- she was doing what we called "penance" -- that things had gotten out of control."  Indeed.  The show fawns on the rich and powerful:  Catherine Oxbridge who is some kind of minor Hollywood actress but actual royalty -- her mother is the Princess of Rumania -- says at one point that she should call her cousin "Charles" to get him to help in the crusade to retrieve her daughter, India Oxbridge, from the clutches of the cult.  The producer asks:  "Charles?  Who is Charles?"  It turns out that she is referring to Prince Charles of Great Britain.  Catherine Oxbridge, who is fascinating in an offputting snobbish way, is the most interesting person in the film and she gets lots and lots of coverage as to her efforts to rehabilitate her daughter who is a branded sex slave of Ranieri.  To save the village, sometimes, you have to destroy it and Oxbridge ends up accusing India of sex trafficking to get the FBI interested in busting the whole nest of cult members.  The show seems to be leading up to the perp-walk of Ranieri and his subsequent trial and imprisonment -- this is the only reason any sane person would watch the last five episodes which recount in tedious and inscrutably repetitious detail Ranieri's various depredations.  But the show is all tease.  It ends with Ranieri arrested, off-camera, and the promise (or threat) that there will follow another nine or ten more hours of stuff.  In order, the expand the show to its gargantuan length every single episode is, in effect, fractal in that it duplicates every other episode in the series -- we see Ranieri playing volleyball, his way of  bonding with his disciples, various of his lectures and harangues, pretty girls falling for him, and other cult members scheming to betray him; each episode ends with the revelation that Ranieri's handmaidens are branding one another with his initials.  This material, breathlessly presented, occurs over and over creating an effect of strange and dismaying paralysis -- nothing moves forward, the show is resolutely non-linear, things just keep repeating.  It's as if the screenwriters decided their material, really quite thin, should be given a fully Proustian work-up:  memories trigger memories and locations summon back old and remote recollections and, throughout this all, we subjected to hours of Ranieri's philosophy -- sometimes shrewd in a puerile sort of way, but mostly just self-serving abuse spewed out on his willing followers.  After awhile, I began to suspect that The Vow has a hidden agenda -- we get so much of Ranieri's preaching that we start to believe the nonsense that he is promoting.  After listening to him for a few hours, you start to consider whether your own marriage might not be improved by making your wife sleep in a dog bed as penance for her infractions.  

Toni

 When I was 21, a friend at the University of Minnesota took a class about the films of Renoir.  I used to come to the class in which I was not enrolled and sit in the back of the room to watch the movies that were screened.  One of those pictures involved migrant workers and a murder.  I remember that there were sequences in the film that seemed to me almost unbearably direct and unmediated.  It was as if the screen were showing the truth without anything intervening.  I experienced something while watching that film that I find incommunicable -- the feeling of being in the presence of actual reality, as if the screen and the means of projection were to dissolve without residue and leave nothing but raw reality revealed by sound and images.  I have looked for that film for forty-five years but haven't been able to find it -- I think the movie was Renoir's 1935 Toni, a box-office failure when it was released and a picture overshadowed by a string of undisputed masterpieces that Renoir made in late thirties.  This movie can be seen now in a crystal-clear Criterion Blu-Ray and it's this version of the picture that I review in this note.

Toni looks remarkable.  It is shot entirely on location with semi-professional actors and there are, indeed, sequences in the movie that have astringent radiance of the greatest documentaries.  The movie uses natural light and long takes, tracking from point to point in the landscape or across rooms.  Editing is unobtrusive, although there are some overlapping sound effects that are startling.  As the film exists today, it is weirdly disjointed, particularly in its second half.  When the picture failed at the box office in Paris, Renoir and his producer cut the film from 112 minutes to the 88 minute version now extant.  This was probably a catastrophe -- Renoir concedes that he cut out the best scene in the film, an extended shot in which a corpse is wheeled away from a murder scene concealed under laundry while men walking to work joke with the attractive laundress.  Once you know that this scene is missing, you feel the void left in the movie by its absence -- the picture's climax comes too quickly and doesn't make any sense as now presented.  Audiences in 1935 thought the scene, which must have played like Hitchcock, too macabre and were, apparently, disturbed -- critics praised the picture highly.  Unfortunately, the last quarter of the film is now a mess and the movie isn't very good:  it's ending is a cliche although, perhaps, one that Toni invented, but it is annoying nonetheless to see the film collapse into a heap of commonplaces and stereotypes in its final reel.

Probably as timely now as it was when first made, Toni begins with a group of immigrant workers disembarking from a train in Martigues, a small industrial city 45 miles from Marseilles.  The industry in the town is never really established although we see in the background of some shots a complex of factories and a big smokestack.  The protagonists of the film don't work, however,in factories -- they seem to be agricultural laborers and employees of a big quarry that periodically dynamites the hillside creating dangerous avalanches of pale rock.  It isn't clear what the quarry is making -- is it aggregate? or building stones? and some aspects of the film are quite obscure, even obtuse.  Before the workers disembark, we see some laborers on a huge railroad trestle (that turns out to be integral to the action) grousing about the new arrivals "taking food of (their) mouths" -- but it turns out that these laborers are also immigrants to the south of France having arrived only three years earlier.  (The Great War killed so many French men that workers have to be imported to labor in the vineyards and factories.) Toni, an Italian immigrant, finds lodging at a boarding house in town -- we see the owner of the place, Marie, reluctantly letting him stay there.  In the next shot, Toni is in bed with Marie and has been living with her for a year.  In fact, the narrative has boldly omitted their courtship and the development of their relationship -- this is one of those male-female bonds that is both profound and deadly:  Maris and Toni don't get along, but she can't live without him, and they fight perpetually and violently.  Toni is in love with Josefa, a beautiful Spanish woman, who works as a laundress.  Josefa seduces Toni in a erotic scene involving a sting to her back by a wasp -- Toni removes the stinger and sucks the venom from the wound.  But Josefa is fickle and she ends up marrying the foreman at the quarry, a nasty baby-faced lout from Paris named Albert.  Albert is a bully and he carries a revolver in his belt.  Out of desperation, Toni marries Marie but they remain desperately unhappy.  When Toni begins to court the unhappy Josefa again, Marie throws him out and, after a final bitter quarrel, tries to drown herself.  (The scenes involving the failed suicide attempt are incredibly powerful and exquisitely filmed -- I think what I recall from the movie is the image of Toni standing forlorn in the water of a big Mediterranean lagoon as men in a rowboat bring the unconscious Marie back to the stony beach.  This sequence has a palpable and unmediated force.)  Toni joins a group of charcoal burners living rough on the top of a bluff overlooking the sea.  Josefa, who now has a two-year old child with Albert, schemes to leave her husband.  She has taken a lover, Gabi, a man who owns a vineyard and is apparently Albert's cousin.  When Albert, who is partners in the vineyard with Gabi, cheats his cousin out of the proceeds of the crop, Josefa plans to steal the money from him and flee with her lover to South America.  (Josefa is a bad judge of men -- Gabi is just about as awful as her husband, Albert.)  Albert catches wind of the plot, beats Josefa with his belt, but, then, negligently drops his pistol.  Josefa picks up the gun and kills her abusive husband,  Gabi shows up, doesn't like the situation, and takes all the money, which he claims to be the fruit of his labors, and flees, leaving Josefa with the corpse.  Toni appears and finds the dead man on the floor.  He tells Josefa to put the dead body on her laundry cart under soiled linen and push the corpse into the woods where he will arrange Albert's cadaver to make it seem that he has killed himself.  While in the course of this activity, squeezing the gun into Albert's dead hand, a local gendarme appears and arrests Toni.  However, Toni makes his escape and flees, ultimately running to his death across the huge railway trestle that featured in the opening shots.  Josefa doesn't want Toni to be convicted of the killing she has committed and so she surrenders to the authorities to save Toni.  But it's to no avail.  A local landowner with a shotgun kills Toni just as he finishes his mad dash across the railroad trestle.  As he dies, we see train pull into the station below disgorging yet another swarm of migrant laborers.  Earlier in the film, Renoir presents the movie's politics, which are mostly concealed by the story:  a worker is asked where he comes from and says,:  "Wherever I work is my home.  Workers have no nation but their work."

The film isn't very good.  The ending in the present (and only) cut is botched.  Although the movie has luxuriated in brilliantly evocative natural lighting, the climactic murder scenes in Josefa and Albert's home are shot in glaring white light -- it's not clear where this light is coming from, particularly since the outside is gloomy with early morning shadows and mist.  The gendarme who shows up without motivation (in the present version) is almost comically a deus ex machina. The ending with another group of immigrants coming to replace the first is so predictable that it is irritating. Marie, who is one of the most interesting characters in the film, simply drops out of the movie when she expels Toni from her home -- she might as well have drowned for all her impact on the last third of the picture from which is almost entirely absent.  The level of incompetence in casting is really staggering:  Toni looks just like Gabi and is very similar in appearance to Albert -- the only way I could tell the characters apart was on the basis of their hats:  Albert wears a fedora, Gabi has a dark beret, while Toni has a checkered beret.  Even worse, Josefa and Marie are carbon copies of one another -- we simply can't tell them apart except by context.  Probably, the characters are readily distinguishable if your speak and understand French:  Albert is Parisian, Gabi is from the south of France, and Toni is an Italian; similarly, Marie is French and Josefa is from Spain.  I assume the characters were all given distinctive accents and that this would help the viewer tell them apart.  But if you are reading subtitles, the film is extremely confusing.  The locations are brilliant and several of the scenes are very memorable but the movie isn't successful in itself.  Film historians note that the picture shot on location with a semi-professional cast is a precursor to Italian neo-realism -- this is undoubted true, but doesn't redeem to film in itself.  

Veronika Voss

 Here is the premise:  everyone is suffering some kind of unspecified pain.  This pain is inextricably entangled with human existence in West Germany in 1955.  People combat this pain with morphine, sex, and morbid nostalgia.  But, in the end, the pain prevails.  Fassbinder's Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (literally:  "The Yearning of Veronika Voss", although Sehnsucht also conveys the notion of drug addiction) rests on the idea that life is unbearable without some distracting analgesia -- in this case, sex and opiates.  Fassbinder's prodigious cinematic output leaks into his life.  The doomed heroine of his film, the aging movie star Veronika Voss, dies of an overdose of sleeping pills.  A year later, Fassbinder himself was dead, the victim of a drug overdose; he was 37 years old.  Veronika Voss, one of Fassbinder's finest films, is his penultimate work, followed by the gay fantasy of Querelle, a movie based on a novel by Jean Genet that is generally accounted to be a failure, and, indeed, so self-indulgent that it is difficult to watch.  

Veronika Voss is part of a sequence of films styled the "the BRD trilogy" -- BRD stands Bundes  Republik Deutschland (West Germany).  Although the film was made after Lola, it fits into the chronological sequence of the movies in the middle -- that is sandwiched between the epic Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola.  A title announces that it is 1955, that is the year after Maria Braun's villa was blown to pieces in the preceding movie.  In Maria Braun, a doctor supplies health certificates to prostitutes and makes angels of their unwanted children -- we see him, presumably, preparing some kind of shot for Maria Braun, but instead injecting himself; he's a morphine addict.  Metamorphosed into a domineering and icy female Nervenartzt (Neurologist or "nerve doctor"), this physician is the controlling presence in Veronika Voss and, indeed, a loathsome, conventional villain.  Veronika Voss is a parody of a Hollywood melodrama made in the Fifties and it has a murderous arch-villain, a caricature of evil, presiding over the sordid events that the film shows.  Fassbinder's greatest strength was his versatility -- almost all of his movies look different from one another and are directed in wildly different styles:  some of his films are naturalistic, others have an aspect of allegory, many are flamboyantly stylized.  Veronika Voss is shot in high-contrast black-and-white in a narrow Academy-ratio format -- the picture is nakedly expressionistic, with intense shadow, dream-like settings and decor, and catatonic, zombie-like acting all undergirded by a bizarre soundtrack featuring, of all things, Johnny Horton's country-western ballad "The Battle of New Orleans".  In some scenes, light flares so aggressively as to imprison the actors in a sort of gilded, radiant cage.  In a journalist office, right out of The Front Page, ink-stained wretches type out copy under a huge, stuffed alligator suspended from the ceiling.  The evil neurologist's office is stark white, a stainless inferno.  Veronika Voss' villa is a ghostly series of interlocking chambers filled with antiques and furniture draped in sheets.  Although the picture is intensely stylized, it is never tedious and the decor doesn't overwhelm the actors so much as it reflects their inner states -- in fact, in some ways, Veronika Voss is a more accomplished film than the elaborate and, sometimes, dull Marriage of Maria Braun.  That said, The Marriage of Maria Braun, primarily because of Hanna Schygulla's performance, is the greater and more profound movie.  Veronika Voss is, in effect, a genre work, a tawdry if effective psycho-drama, that looks like some of Samuel Fuller's more extreme films.

Veronika Voss is an aging movie star, reputed to have slept with Joseph Goebbels.  We meet her at a retrospective screening of one of her old movies; Fassbinder is sitting behind her watching the screen with unblinking, owlish intensity.  After the movie, Veronika Voss walks through a birch woods, a materialization of the landscape of German fairy tales.  It's raining hard and she stops to sob.  A burly sportswriter encounters her in the woods -- he doesn't know who she is:  "I don't go to the movies much," the sportswriter says.  He shelters her under his umbrella and the next day meets her for cocktails at a fantastically upscale bar and restaurant. Voss has no money and she orders the sportswriter to buy her a brooch.  Smitten by her exotic, if fading, beauty, the sportswriter, Robert Krohn, gives her 300 marks.  She buys the brooch, shows it to him, and, then, departs, apparently for another pressing appointment.  (We see her return the brooch to get the 300 marks back in her pocket.)  Voss' appointment is with the sinister neurologist who shoots her up with morphine and, then, lets her sleep it off in the ice-white chambers of the clinic.  The neurologist is vampire, pure and simple, one of the daughters of Dracula -- she has a witch's familiar, a middle-aged woman who could be her twin (and may be her lover) and an American GI who hangs around the clinic (he's in just about every shot staged there) and seems to be peddling dope on an unseen, and unnamed, American military base.  Presumably as a concession to the Black GI, the radio is playing constantly, an unending rotation of American country-and-western hits.  The neurologist's modus operandi is to get her patients addicted to morphine and, then, force them to sign away their houses and other assets in exchange for their "medications" -- that is, fixes of morphine.  The only other clients that we see are an elderly couple, concentration camp survivors, who own a shadowy antique store -- they are as fragile as the vases that they sell and end up committing suicide together.  One of themes in the film is memory and the agony of recalling the past.  This theme is reflected in song "Memories are made of this" -- we hear the song played in a Dean Martin version on the radio and, later, sung by Veronika Voss at her "farewell party", a bizarre gathering that seems partly real and partly hallucinated:  everyone in the movie has been invited to this party, including minor characters that Veronika Voss can't possibly know, and the soiree takes place in a sort of dark grotto pierced here and there by beams of light that shine onto sinister groupings of actors, all of them conspiring to destroy the Third Reich movie star.  

Robert Krohn, the sportswriter, has a plucky girlfriend who loves him, but, nonetheless, masochistically supports his fatal relationship with Veronika Voss.  She realizes that she can't compete with the damaged allure of the faded movie star and, so, she cedes her rights in her man to Voss -- this is a disturbing aspect of the plot.  Veronika Voss at this stage in her life is one of those women who desperately demands that she be rescued and the hefty, matter-of-fact sportswriter (who also writes surrealist poetry) falls into her trap.  His quest to save Veronika from the evil cabal manipulating her turns out to self-destructive and destructive of others also -- the vampires are not about to be exposed and they murder Krohn's girlfriend when she secures evidence against them.  As it turns out, everyone is involved in the conspiracy -- the film contains a dizzying amount of paranoia:  the drug enforcement officer that Krohn contacts to report on the neurologist's criminal conduct is part of the cabal -- in a classic Hollywood trope, this oily fellow calls the neurologist immediately after Krohn leaves his office, warning her that he is coming to get her.  By this time, Veronika is imprisoned in the glacial chambers of the neurologist's office where "The Battle of New Orleans" seems to play on loop.  The Black GI sings "I owe my soul to the company store", an obvious reference to the exploitation profiting the neurologist.  When Krohn bursts into the clinic to rescue Veronika, the cops are called and, then, Voss appears, like an apparition to say that she is "just fine" and that she doesn't really know Krohn -- that he's a kind of a stalker.  The cops believe her, smitten by her star-power, and Krohn is gently led away.  He goes to a bar and gets drunk with Voss' former screenwriter, another shadowy figure played by Armin Mueller-Stahl -- the character was once Voss' husband.  Sunset Boulevard established indelibly many of the concepts in which Veronika Voss traffics -- for instance, the damaged ex-husband lurking around the star, a thankless role similar to the part played by Erich von Stroheim as Gloria Swanson's butler and ex-husband in the Hollywood picture.  Sunset Boulevard was released in 1950 and you want to shout at Krohn:  "Didn't you see that picture!  Run!  Run like hell!~" when Voss begins to entangle him in her web of dependency, ruined vanity, and nightmarish addiction.  

There are many wonderful things in the movie.  The scintillant lighting is exotic and beautiful -- the brilliant haze of camera flare signifies flashbacks into a more glamorous past.  One scene in which a director is forced to make take after take because Veronika can't remember her lines or can't cry on cue is particularly impressive -- the camera  on a dolly glides forward slowly like the force of an oppressive destiny.  (Veronika ends up having a seizure.)  The film captures the panic of drug addiction and it is eerily effective.  I recall seeing this movie in a theater in 1983, a big cold room in Uptown, and the impression of grisly doom that the film conveys has remained with me all my life.  I recall the theater as being chilly but, perhaps, the icy cold was coming off the screen. 

The Aspern Papers

Henry James is the most reticent and elliptical of writers -- his art suggests and implies.  Reduced to a bald statement, James' perfumed fogs of words simply seem silly.  Julien Landeis' version of James novella, The Aspern Papers treats its rather recondite subject in a direct, declarative manner, that is, exposing all implications, and, literally, denuding the book's characters -- it's a perverse approach to this material that results in a ghastly mess on-screen.  Curiously, Landeis and screenwriter Jean Pavans ignore the actual suspense that James carefully built into his tale and visual cues that the writer embedded in the text are also simply ignored.  

The novella chronicles in a relatively straight-forward chronological manner the campaign mounted by a smarmy editor to extract from an old woman love letters from a famous Romantic poet.  The writer is imaginary -- Jeffrey Aspern, but James' constructs this character, who haunts the story with a sort of eerie glowing absence, from elements of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley.  (James' Aspern is an American who died as expatriate in Italy -- this is an odd detail and suggests that the author identifies with his fictional poet and, perhaps, poses the tale as a cautionary "No Trespassing" sign as to his own biography.)  The literary critic and editor is smug with a dishonest wheedling courtesy and he takes up lodging as an "inmate" of the old lady's decaying Venetian palazzo.  A duel of wills transpires between the critic and the frail elderly woman; despite her age (someone says she "must be 150 years old), the poet's old flame turns out to be a formidable adversary.  Concerned for the well-being of her hapless, spinster niece, the old woman nudges the critic into a relationship with the younger woman.  Her plan seems to be to trade the ancient love letters for a marriage vow between the critic and her niece, the forlorn Miss Tina whose forlorn life was, at least, partially, blighted by the arrogant, stubborn, and sadistic old lady.  The critic, tiring of the chess game with the ferocious old woman, simply tries to steal the letters.  The old lady confronts him with a wild denunciation and, then, expires.  Miss Tina proposes marriage to the critic offering as her dowry the love letters.  The critic, who fancies himself an amoral freebooter, is disgusted by the proposition and flees.  But his desire for the love letters overcomes him and he returns to the moldering mansion, fully intending to propose to the old maid.  It's too late:   he finds that the niece has something of her aunt's savage ferocity -- the niece has destroyed the love letters burning them, as she says, "one by one."  James' artistry resides in this paradox:  he makes the rather slight tale, based on a mere after-dinner anecdote, suspenseful; but the suspense pivots around an artifact of passion spent 60 years earlier, a sort of heroic romance that the critic and Miss Tina are wholly incapable of -- James' suspenseful tale is about wan vampires competing for written traces of emotions that they can't feel.  The trick is that we are led to care about an objective that James despises -- that is, the possession of letters enacting a grand romance irrelevant to his pale, neurasthenic Victorian readers.  

For some reason, this slight plot with its unsettling denouement has inspired several adaptations.  In 1988, Dominick Argento composed an opera on the subject.  A film noir called The Lost Moment (1948) also dramatizes the story.  There have been several other film versions, culminating in the Landeis film, cast with prestigious actors and shot with full Merchant-Ivory production values:  the filmmakers can't resist turning the squalid and decaying manor where the two women live into a sumptuous palace with forty-foot high ceilings and vivid frescos over gorgeous pietra dura floors; the impoverished women wear spectacularly sumptuous garments, and the director stages flamboyant bisexual threesomes, flashbacks shot in amber Italian light and featuring huge close-ups of thrusting loins.  (All of this falsifies James' novella in conspicuous ways and rips up the motivation that the author implanted in the tale -- why would the women even consider allowing the critic into their apartments if they were not almost wholly impecunious? but in a Merchant-Ivory film shot in the grand manner there is no room for any depiction of actual poverty.)  The story, in itself, is too slender to support a ninety minute movie and so Landeis has to trick out the material with flashbacks to the poet and his male and female lovers -- we see him washed up on the beach in a picturesque landscape and, then, his funeral pyre.  There are ridiculous scenes of the two Romantic poets cavorting naked with the beautiful Juliana between them -- it's all overlit, looks like an MTV video, and features lots of lascivious finger-sucking.  Toward the end of the film, Landeis despairs and introduces a subplot wholly foreign to the material -- it seems to be a variation on James' crepuscular ghost story "The Jolly Corner" in which the Aspern Papers' critic (James didn't name him -- here he's call Morton Vint) spawns a doppelganger and, then, roams about the alleyways of Venice like Dr. Jekyll committing all sorts of brutish mayhem -- I have no idea what this is supposed to mean and these scenes are shot so incompetently that the audience can't tell what's happening.  Juliana is given a baby who, then, dies and Landeis, who seems to have completely misunderstood the novel, actually shows Miss Tina destroying the letters while the film labors mightily to stage the love story embodied in that correspondence.  

The curious feature of this film is that the director ignores visual imagery that James, who is not ordinarily interested in the mere realism of things and places, carefully inserted into the story.  Just before the end of the novella, the protagonist sees the statue of the brutal condottieri Bartolommeo Colleoni -- this is intended as an ironic contrast between the paltry crimes committed by the narrator and the heroic mayhem arising from fiery, grandiose passions that characterized the Italian renaissance.  There's no trace of this in the movie.  The director makes hash of the climax -- for the story to sing, there has to be suspense as to whether Tina has destroyed the letters:  James saves this revelation for the penultimate paragraph in 70 page story.  Landeis just shows the woman burning the letters in a spectacular vulgar and misguided scene (intercut with lurid soft-core pornography) -- this wrecks the ending and Tina's quietly chilling and intensely cruel statement that she burned the letters "one by one."  In fact, Landeis suddenly shifts gears and implies that it's all for the best -- Tina is now liberated from the dead hand of the past and can go about her business as a free woman; suddenly,  the film takes on the feminist implications of something like A Doll's House.  James sees Tina as a pawn caught between the wiles of the editor and the cruelly manipulative old lady.  Landeis promotes her to heroine in the last ten minutes of the film and makes the movie about her liberation.  It's an interesting idea, but developed too late in the film to save the thing and, of course, completely alien to James' novella.  

I don't think the film is worth watching.  But the performances by Vanessa Redgrave as the old woman and Joely Richardson (Redgrave's actual daughter) are extraordinarily fine.  Redgrave in particular stands out and gets to deliver the most pungent dialogue -- it's extracted verbatim from the book.  Joely Richardson is far too attractive to embody the aging spinster, but someone has stuck a long fake proboscis on her face to make her seem plain and she is also does a superb job with her part.  (Again, all the best lines come from James.)  The film's most obvious defect is the smug performance by the Irish actor Jonathon Rhy Meyers -- he's terrible and miscast to boot.  (I don't know why a man with gorgeous matinee idol features who seems to be about 25 is playing the part of the middle-aged pedant in this film.)  Rhys Meyers speaks with the standard honking accent that English and Irish actors use to imitate Americans -- his articulation rings false in every single syllable.  Even more bizarre is the director's interpretation of the role of Mrs. Prest.  This woman, in James' book, is the hero's advisor and confidante and she hatches the scheme by which the editor-critic becomes an "inmate" in the old woman's household.  Landeis obviously fears that the audience will lose interest in the film and so he depicts Mrs. Prest as a glamorous goth Lesbian who trots around in equestrian dominatrix gear -- she has a princess in tow who seems equally depraved and two ingenues who apparently lust after the critic.  It's absurd to the point of being actually funny.  

I don't know for whom this movie was made.  If you don't know James' book, you won't have any interest in the proceedings at all.  If you've read the book and know James, you will despise the film.  I think the movie may have been produced for people who vaguely recall that they read the novella in college or those who would like to claim acquaintance with novella but would rather not read it.  

    

Beau Travail

 A group of soldiers in the French Legion train in a terrifying desert.  They perform calisthenics that take on a ritual and choreographic aspect.  Although the subject of Beau Travail, Claire Denis' remarkably intelligent and inventive 2000 film, is preparation for war and the lives of soldier-males, the picture is, in effect, about the education of a dancer -- Denis Lavant plays the protagonist and, as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the dance-like exercises, the quick marches through the horrific desert, the stretching and limbering up on the alkaline flats in which the men writhe and contort themselves in the dust like synchronized swimmers are, somehow, ends in themselves.  The movies's principal character either shoots himself or expires in an ecstasy of dance or both -- the men are training either for suicide or some kind of choreographic transfiguration.  

Beau Travail occurs in Djibouti, a tiny country on the horn of Africa, about which you know nothing.  The place was formerly called French Somaliland and it is bordered by Somalia proper on the north and Eritrea (formerly part of Ethiopia) on the west and south.  For some reason, the French maintain a Foreign Legion post on the shores of a vast salt lake.  (Apparently, this is Lake Assal.)  The post is an extraordinary location -- the huts and shacks stand on unprotected headlands where an oven-like wind booms day and night, stirring up white caps in the bright green and turquoise waters of the lake.  At the post, there are some barracks in which workers involved in the hellish activity of extracting salt from crystalline flats surrounding the agitated water once lived.  Several cinder cones poke up from the waters and there are huge, stone mountain overlooking the enormous crater (it's a rift valley) where the lake is located.  Nearby, there's a city built from white cement blocks where beautiful young girls dance robotically, as if entranced, to disco music in clubs that cater to the French servicemen.  Events in Djibouti are intercut with shots of the protagonist, drill sergeant Galoup, living in Marseilles after the occurrence of the African story.  Galoup is utterly alone in the big French city and we seem him engaged in strange activities, particularly standing in a tree and maniacally hacking off its branches.  He seems to be writing some kind of memoir.  

At the Foreign Legion post, Galoup serves his commander Bruno Forestier.  Bruno is a burnt-out case -- he no longer cares about his command and spends his time listlessly chewing qat in the city.  Life at the legion post consists of endless exercises, marching, cooking food, and ceaselessly ironing uniforms so that their seams are precisely even.  The men go into town periodically to dance with the girls in the disco.  Galoup is keeping a woman in town, a very great beauty, but he thinks that she despises him.  (Near the end of the film, we see him misinterpreting her words to a friend -- in fact, she likes him a lot.)  A new recruit appears at the Post -- this is Sentain.  Sentain turns out to be the ideal soldier and, even, rescues a man from a helicopter crash in the lake.  For some inexplicable reason, Galoup despises Sentain.  The attentive viewer will grasp that the situation is parallel to the plot of Melville's Billy Budd -- Sentain plays the role of the handsome sailor (or soldier) Billy who is hated by his officer, Claggart.  "Starry" Vere, the commander of the ship, The Rights of Man, here is represented by the ineffectual and drug-addicted Forestier.  Beau Travail deviates substantially from Melville's short novel -- the novel seems merely to be the inspiration for the premise that Galoup inexplicably hates Sentain and wants to destroy him.  Critics regard Billy Budd as encoded with homosexual imagery -- Beau Travail makes a few gestures in this direction (for instance Galoup looking on with horror as Sentain cradles the wounded helicopter crewman in his arms) but Denis' film can't be reduced to an allegory of about a self-hating Gay man confronting his demons (and desire) with respect to the beautiful young sailor.  In fact, Denis' Galoup is clearly heterosexual and has a beautiful girl friend.  (One of Denis' themes in many of her movies is how young men will abandon sex with their women to engage in more "masculine" activities, mostly associated with war -- this is integral to her later film White Material)  When one of the legionnaires sneaks off base to attend religious services (he's a Muslim and we're told its Ramadan), the soldier is punished for deserting his post.  Galoup makes the man dig a hole in the desert soil until his hands are bloody and he's delirious from thirst.  When Sentain tries to give the soldier a canteen of water, there's a confrontation with Galoup and Sentain apparently punches him -- this part of the film is edited in a dream-like fashion and its not totally clear what is real and what is imagined.  Galoup seizes this event as a way to consummate his revenge -- he drives Sentain far out into the desert and leaves him to walk back to the post, but with a compass that has  been sabotaged.  Sentain staggers to the edge of the salt lake where he collapses in a gypsum-white field of salt and, apparently, dies.  Forestier knows what Galoup has done, strips him of his authority, and sends the man back to France where he is court-martialed and, then, ends of living alone in Marseille.  A couple of closing shots show that Sentain has been rescued and will presumably survive -- he's riding in a bus, semi-comatose, but cared for by a woman who pours water into his mouth.  In Marseille, Galoup makes his bed military style and, then, lies down with a gun cradled on his belly.  We see a vein in his bicep throbbing.  In the film's remarkable final sequence, Denis dances ecstatically in the empty discotheque in Djibouti, leaping and hurling himself around to the sound of "The Rhythm of the Night."  in front of a fractured wall of mirrors.  (Denis Lavant's performance as Galoup is extraordinary -- he's a little man with an ugly face, sort of like a toad-like Humphrey Bogart, but Lavant has a fantastic physical presence and he dances like Gene Kelley.)

This account of the plot of Beau Travail creates a false impression of the film because the movie's major elements are non-narrative.  Denis' camera lingers on the beautiful soldiers who are mostly bare-chested, laboring in the hot desert sun.  She shows them engaged in weird rituals in which they hug one another and, then, butt chests, or in which they form a tight circle about their commander rhythmically swaying forward and backward.  The calisthenic exercise scenes, which become increasingly balletic, are scored to disco music or Benjamin Britten's surging male choruses from his opera version of Billy Budd.  In one scene, the soldiers fast march across the volcanic wasteland to Neil Young's song  "Safeway Cart".  The otherworldly landscape creates the impression that Denis is recording the strange ceremonies of a hitherto unknown tribe.  We sense the deep attraction that these sorts of exercises exert on the character of Galoup -- this is his life and there is nothing that he would rather be doing than leading his men in war games in the nightmarish desert.  When these group activities, this perverse camaraderie taken from him he has nothing at all.  In Melville's Billy Budd, the perverse hatred that Claggart feels for the hero is viewed as perverse and inexplicable -- we don't know why Claggart acts as he does.  Denis' film is even more uncompromising -- she even removes the repressed  homosexual motivation that Melville intimates in Claggart's envy and terror; Galoup has as his girlfriend the prettiest woman in the city.  Beau Travail is a remarkable film that creates its own aura of inexplicable mystery, an uncanny aspect to the movie that emphasized by the robotic dancing of the girls in the bar, the bizarre sound track, the military exercises that morph into modern dance, and, of course, the dream landscape of the vast toxic lake and the cinder desert.  Ultimately, the film is indeterminate -- we know, more or less, what happened, but not why.   

The Juniper Tree

In the Icelandic landscapes that loom large in Nietzchka Keene's The Juniper Tree, there are no bushes, no shrubs, and only a single tree -- and that tree is magical, grown from a dead child's finger.  Although Iceland may have been wooded before it was settled in the 9th century, its forests were cut down and the island was without woods for a thousand years; there are some trees in a cemetery at Rekyavik  (I've walked among them) and a little grove on a hilltop overlooking town, but these were planted in the last century.  The terrain is meadow, bare rock mountains, and ice-cap.  So, the notion of a tree growing in Iceland, particularly a juniper, is incongruous -- the story is an adaptation of a Grimm's fairy tale and, in fact, the titular tree seems particularly uncanny in the context of stony wastelands shown in the film.  

Nietzchka Keene was a film and video artist associated with University of Wisconsin in Madison.  (She was apparently friends with Lorrie Moore, the famous short-story writer, who taught for a time on that campus)  She died at a relatively young age, a victim of pancreatic cancer, after making three feature films (the first, The Juniper Tree was released in 1990).  If The Juniper Tree is representative (and it seems to be), her films are resolutely non-commercial -- she uses stark black and white with very long takes.  She doesn't have the budget to move the camera, although her esthetic would probably prohibit any kind of showy photography even if the budget were available.  The Juniper Tree is mostly silent: people whisper incantations and sing ancient keening folk songs.  Keene isn't interested in conventional narrative and the film elides over important events and seems muddled with respect to its presentation of space and time -- this is consistent with the movie's rough-hewn primitivist sensibility.  The Juniper Tree is mostly known today because of the startling performance that it boasts from the 12 year old Bjork Gudmundsdottir.  It's probably wrong to say that Bjork performs, like the rest of the small cast she is simply posed against the brutal-looking sub-Arctic terrain, but there is something unearthly about her appearance.  The film didn't make much of an impression in 1990 when it was premiered at South by Southwest and played Sundance.  In some ways, it was significantly ahead of its time -- recent movies like The Lighthouse and The Witch by Robert Eggers and some of Kelly Reichardt's minimalist films (particularly Meeks' Cutoff) embody the esthetic exemplified by The Juniper Tree; these pictures involve small isolated groups of people exposed to the elements and facing uncanny aspects of the landscape -- the pictures are adventures in hermit-paranoia.  (I note that Eggers' new film also will feature Bjork.)  Movies of this sort are a matter of taste -- I thought The Juniper Tree was very slow-paced and that the narrative was unnecessarily confusing, but the picture's stark and uncompromising sensibility gradually persuaded me that the movie was worth watching.  

Two girls wander around a particularly desolate part of south Iceland.  Their mother has been stoned first, and, then, burned as a witch.  The oldest girl, who seems to be about 25, thinks of herself as a witch as well and believes that she is capable of magic.  There is a consequence for this kind of credulity -- in a remarkable early shot, we see a corpse sunk in an icy-looking tarn on the heath, an image of a Scandinavian "bog body" with bound hands and a toque, someone who has been killed on  suspicion of witchcraft.  The people are nominally Christians but it's pretty obvious that their Christian beliefs are not even skin-deep.  The witch seduces a man whose wife has recently died.  The man, Johan, has a little boy named Jonas.  Jonas who is about ten is the same approximate age as Margit, the younger sister.  The Grimm brothers collected ancient folk stories and these often feature the motif of the evil stepmother.  In folk tale inventories, the plot type of the narrative of this sort of story is often labeled "My mother killed me; my father ate me" and this is an accurate short-hand description of the last half hour of the ninety minute movie.  The older sister uses some kind of fertility magic and becomes pregnant.  Her husband's son, Jonas, dislikes her and spends his afternoons decorating his mother's grave in a particularly desolate lava field near where the family lives as virtual troglodytes in peat-roofed shacks  dug into a stony hillside.  The elder sister tries various kinds of enchantments and, perhaps, even attempts to bewitch the little boy.  But, as we gradually grasp, the older girl is just a poseur -- it's the 12 year old Margit who has the real supernatural powers.  The weird landscape is haunted by the ghost of Margit's dead mother; she leads her daughter through ghostly geyser fields and behind the veil of falling water (at the famous Seljandfoss about two hours drive along the south coast from Rekyavik).  The mother can't speak -- Margit says the dead are silent. Several times, she bares her breast to show a black void --when Margit sticks her hand into the black void, the image dissolves into shots of sea-birds and the stony moors of the Icelandic highlands.  Somehow, she bears within herself a nightmarish emptiness which is expressed by the forbidding landscape as well.  The eldest daughter, married to the widower, is pregnant and says she will bear the man a son.  But, she seems to think she has to get rid of the little boy, her husband's heir by his first wife.  She lures the little kid up to a mountain top and taunts him to fly away like a bird.  The little boy thinks that his mother, who may also have been a witch, has enchanted him so that he can fly.  The child plunges off the cliff and dies.  The wicked stepmother than cuts off his finger and sews his mouth shut and, then, sinks the corpse in a icy -looking lagoon.  (Why does she sew his mouth shut?  We have already learned that, in witch lore, the "dead can't speak.")  Back at home, the evil stepmother serves her family a mutton stew flavored with the little kid's finger.  Margit fishes out the boiled finger and takes it to the grave of the little boy's mother.  She plants the finger and it germinates (in the matter of a single day) into a juniper tree.  The evil stepmother, having accomplished her inscrutable revenge, rides away on a little Icelandic pony.  The next day, the father also leaves the farmstead, riding his pony in pursuit of her.  The murdered boy is reincarnated as a shaggy, sinister-looking raven and this bird of ill omen sits in the juniper tree with Margit leaning against its trunk next to the grave.  

The film is equipped with an epigraph from T. S. Eliot that doesn't add anything to the story -- it's about bones strewn under a juniper tree.  There are several startling shots -- the little boy's corpse under water with fish nibbling at his lips sewn shut and a dead lamb that floats in the icy water of a frightening-looking glacial river.  Embedded in the story is another folk tale about a swan maiden married to a mortal man who gives birth to a tiny boy all covered in feathers -- the story is pretty much a non sequitur but it contributes to the bleak, eerie mood.  The film is picturesque in a stark and unrelenting way, but it doesn't really tell us that much about human nature -- I can't avoid the sense that the movie is sort of irrelevant to most of what concerns us.