Wife of a Spy

 Wife of a Spy (2020) is strangely listless Japanese film, caught between melodrama and thriller and not persuasive with regard to either genre.  The picture has been compared with Hitchcock, primarily I think because the plot involves a woman married to a ruthless spy, the situation in his 1941 film Suspicion.  The comparison is invidious to the Japanese film.  Hitchcock's films of this sort (Notorious has a similar structure) rely upon real magnetism between the stars -- these pictures carry an erotic charge.  Oddly, Wife of a Spy features a married couple who purport to love one another but who seem desperately mismatched and lacking any on-screen chemistry at all.  This is curious because the director Kinoshita Kurosawa apprenticed making soft-core porno films and, therefore, should be well-qualified to insert erotic energy into this film.  But something goes wrong and the picture is very cold and abstract.  This is by design -- there's no question that Kurosawa is a gifted filmmaker; therefore, it seems that he has intentionally opted for an abstract, schematic, and stylized approach to this material.  The film's characteristics that I deem problematic are, in fact, purposeful alienation effects -- I just don't know why they are used in this picture.

Yusaku is a businessman in Kobe, plying the import-export trade in silk.  He has a large firm, seems to be wealthy, and has a trophy wife, the submisive Satoko.  As we gradually discover, Yusaku is using his business travel as an opportunity to conduct espionage.  He opposes the militarism of Japan in 1940 and, in fact, is scheming to procure evidence that will encourage the United States to intervene in wars then pending in Manchuria and southeast Asia.  For some reason, Yusaku is an amateur film-maker and he is  producing a picture starring his wife -- in the film within the film (one of two in the picture), she appears in a domino mask stealthily unlocking a safe and, then, as she tries to escape is gunned down by her husband who also stars in the movie.  (The film is highly self-reflexive, a movie about making and viewing movies -- this characteristic is evident in a scene in which someone discusses Mizoguchi and, then, Nikkatsu studios; Wife of a Spy is produced by Nikkatsu.)  When Satoko discovers that her husband is a spy and, therefore, traitor to the war effort, she is initially appalled.  But when she learns the stakes involved (the Japs are making bubonic plague in Manchuria and plan to unleash this baccillus as a weapon), she converts to  her husband's apparent idealism and, in fact, voluntarily becomes a martyr to the cause.  The MacGuffin in the film is a notebook full of medical diagrams and equations that documents the Japanese experiments with plague on prisoners of war in Manchuria.  There is also a film on a reel marked Pathe 9/5 that shows experiments with bubonic plague on POWs.  Yusaku is under suspicion by a childhood friend, Taiji, who has become a "squad leader" of Gestapo-like secret police.  In one scene, it is suggested that Satoko, who is miffed at her husband's frequent "business" travel (he's actually spying), likes Taiji and, perhaps, even attempts to seduce him.  But nothing comes of the encounter.  Fumio, an employee of the silk import firm, is also a spy.  He announces that he is quitting the firm to write a novel and takes up residence at  an Inn on the seashore.  In fact, he's translating into English the evidence of the biological warfare that the Japanese are developing.  A woman that he has brought back from Manchuria (she is apparently a witness to the war crimes in Manchuria) turns up dead, floating in the sea.  There's suspicion that Fumio murdered her.  But, more likely, she was killed by the Secret Police.  In any event, Fumio is apprehended by secret police under the supervision of Taiji who has the man tortured -- they tear out his finger- and toe-nails.  Yusaku recognizes that he must escape Japan and get to the United States.  By this time, Satoku is his enthusiastic partner in espionage -- she has discovered Yusaku's evidence of Manchurian war crimes, locked in her husband's safe at the import-export office.  (The scene in which she breaks into the safe recapitulates the home move involving her doing the same thing.)  Yusaku says he will meet her in San Francisco, telling her to stowaway on a ship headed for America.  He will travel separately -- and we see his ship, a little skiff, vanishing into the fog.  Satoko is locked in a crate in the hold of the ship.  But the Secret Police are on her trail and she is arrested with the canister of film showing the war crimes.  At the oddly ornate secret police headquarters, Taiji, who had a crush on her, now coldly punches her in the face.  The film is screened and, of course, it's the home movie and not the images of the war crimes.  There's a brief, highly stylized coda:  it's 1945 and Satoko has been locked away in a psych ward in Kobe.  She is considered particularly crazy because she hopes that the Japanese will lose the war, something incomprehensible to her fellow lunatics.  "They think I'm crazy because I'm the only sane one in this country," Satoko says, or words to that effect.  During a bombing raid, the asylum is destroyed and Satoku wanders out into a landscape of flames and some fallen brick arches -- this is supposed to represent the damage inflicted on the city during the air raid.  Satoko has been told that Yusaku was killed when the ship on which he was sailing  was sunk by a Japanese torpedo.  But a title tells us that the death certificate seems to have been forged and that Satoko traveled to San Francisco in 1946; it's implied that she meets Yusaku there.

Satoku's spying and, later, subversion seems masochistic.  (This is in accord with Kurosawa's resume which involves productions of so-called Pink or SM films.)  She's devoted to the callous and manipulative Yusaku like a dog is devoted to its master.  The home-made movie showing Satoku breaking into the safe is scored with a crooning love song that includes the words "This painful love is a one-way street."  The picture is mostly monochromatic, filmed in subtle shades of beige and khaki green.  MUBI is so negligent in the way that it presents its movies that I can't tell if the picture is shot out-of-focus or the transfer used by MUBI is poor and badly executed.  (Reviews indicate that the picture is very low budget and shot on some kind of digital camcorder with, possibly, poor focus and picture quality -- but not all of the move seems to be out-of-focus and so I suspect that this effect is an artifact of the haphazard way that MUBI streams its films -- the picture also buffered and had the weird effect of retaining the last subtitle on the screen, sometimes for a minutes at a time, before a new title appeared upon new dialogue occurring -- in some scenes, there was dialogue but no subtitles at all.  There really is no excuse for the way these movies are mutilated in their showing.)  The movie is unpleasant and not suspenseful.  It's interesting thematically -- the manipulative spy, Yusaku, is willing to mistreat his adoring wife  in order to accomplish his espionage objectives.  Clearly, he is no better than his adversaries in determining that the end justifies the means.  There's a scene in which the married couple go for a ride in the woods.  The movie uses horrible rear-projection as a homage, I think, to Hitchcock who's films are full of completely unpersuasive, if dream-like, rear projection sequences.  The movie is replete with imagery suggesting films and film-making -- when a co-conspirator knocks holes in the crate where Satoku is hiding the light streams through the penetrations like the ray of a movie projector shining in the darkness.  

Juke: Passages from the Films of Spencer Williams

Thom Andersen, a film historian and documentarian, produced Juke: Passages from the Films of Spencer Williams in 2015 as a commission from the Museum of Modern Art.  Andersen's magnum opus is, probably, his three-hour film collating and analyzing footage in Hollywood movies exploiting locations in Los Angeles -- this film is called Los Angeles Plays Itself and is wonderful, engaging, but abstract to the point that I can't recall many details.  Backgrounds are background and, although the film is revealing, I don't recall what it reveals.  (Early in his career, Andersen married the avant-garde to the public TV documentarian in his film Eadward Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, made in 1975 and a template for many later documentary films by others, most of them made for PBS.  Spencer Williams was an African-American director who made very low budget films for a company called SACK.  The pictures were shot in rural Texas and, apparently, involve lurid stories involving crime and redemption.  The movies were made between 1940 and 1949 -- apparently nine pictures.  Williams appears in many of the movies.  He was a large fat man who could play grotesquely stereotyped parts as well as comedy -- in one short sequence, he seems to impersonate Oliver Hardy, using pretentious diction as her berates an imbecile side-kick:  it's funny and disturbing at the same time.  Williams made his films as "Race Movies" for Black audiences and the pictures were probably shown in segregated theaters in the South -- in one shot, we see a movie theater in which everyone, including the usher, is Black.  Despite making films for exclusively Black audiences, Williams didn't hesitate to use aggressively caricatured African-American "types" in this movies --  stuff, offensive today, that  seems to be even more retrograde than the roles featuring Stepin Fetchit made in the decade before William's work as well as around the same time.

If you want to know about Williams and the weird sociology of his pictures, you will need to look at Wikipedia or some other source.  Andersen's concerns are not historical but aesthetic.  He wants to demonstrate that this is some kernel of truth concealed in William's idiotic scenarios and grainy, half-invisible pictures.  I'm not convinced, but some of the footage is mildly interesting as examples of what Manny Farber, the famous film critic, called "Termite Art" -- this sort of film is not intended as art but exploitation of  one kind or another; however, it inadvertently discloses around its margins truths and reality inaccessible to more prestigious, better disciplined and "artistic" films.  It's in this light that Andersen interprets Williams ' work.  (It's another question as to whether Andersen is, in effect, patronizing Williams by not taking his films on their own tawdry terms -- that is, as dramas about morality, crime, temptation, and redemption.  Thom Andersen, who can no doubt cite Walter Benjamin and Adorno with the best of them, doesn't engage with the films or their thematic purposes -- he treats them as artifacts, bits of "primitive" art that we have to re-arrange and isolate into fragments in order to understand (or, more likely, in order to find these things bearable).  After some explanatory titles, the film starts with congregations wailing gospel tunes while the camera jerkily tours neighborhoods that are obviously very poor and desolate.  The singing is not Gospel Brunch caliber -- instead, the congregations morosely chant the lyrics in a manner that is almost atonal.  We see some shabby genteel interiors.  A woman walks through a door.  Then, there's an insert of a suave hustler, a man talking on the phone who says "Okay, Judas, do your stuff!"  (Is this supposed to be God?)  There's a shot of a nondescript field with some folks sitting in a pickup truck; some of them may be playing banjos..  A man dressed in devil's costume prances around and, then, hops on the pick-up truck which lurches away.  This is followed by scenes in a primitive-looking Juke joint where some obviously non-professional dancers, skinny people with raw, angular faces, are dancing.  (Andersen slows their dancing to slow motion.) There are shots of trains that look like stock footage and, then, a funeral in which we see, by superimposition, a woman's soul rising out of her casket and ascending some over-exposed bleached white steps to Heaven.  A man named Jim, possibly the murderer of the woman, says that his conscience is  tormenting him.  He runs desperately through a series of mismatched rural landscapes.  There are more people dancing in a Juke Joint to tinny music.  One of the women is extremely emaciated and looks like a Black version of Popeye's girlfriend, Olive Oyl.  She has bony knees and elbows.  A sign stuck in a field has two arrows:  one points to Zion and the other to Hell.  A woman goes into a sort of tent in which Spencer, wearing a turban, looks into a crystal ball to read her fortune. "You don't wanna know the truth," he says.  "You've done something bad."  There's a fight, possibly the most incompetently staged in film history.  (The punches sound like hiccups as they land.)  Williams stands against the wall chortling at the violence.  When someone pulls a knife he crushes the man's hand under his shoe and takes away the weapon.  A woman gets shot.  A man dances like a turtle on his back.  Men play conga drums and the final scenes seem to be set in some over-exposed out of focus heaven where white columns and gates hang over the actors dressed in white garments that look like choir robes.  "This is the end," we hear, "the unjust have been struck down.  The Righteous have been treated with contempt."

The little 20 minutes film is showing on MUBI.  The images are of poor quality and the sound is hard to decipher.  There's no commentary by Andersen except a couple of  brief titles.  I looked at some of the viewer's notes posted to the movie.  Many of the people who watched the film apparently didn't really see it -- or watched it through some sort of prism of political correctness.  Several people noted that Williams was a great director unjustly forgotten because of his race.  And these commentators say that they will have to hunt down his films and watch them.  But the movies are self-evidently terrible in every respect -- Andersen isn't trying to rejuvenate the reputation of  Spencer Williams, a reputation that he never had in the first place.  Rather he seems to see the film's as accidentally revealing things about the way that Southern Blacks viewed themselves in the forties, something either deeply depressing or ecstatic depending upon your point of view.       

(Williams was born in Louisiana in 1893.  Interestingly, he studied at the University of Minnesota and served in World War I.  He appeared in several silent films including Steamboat Bill, made by Buster Keaton.  He also supervised casting of African-American parts for several studios.  SACK studios was located in San Antonio.  He is most famous for playing the role of Amos in Amos and Andy.  Apparently, he was a gregarious fellow who was always seen with his trademark cigar.  He died in 1969 -- periodically critics try to re-evaluate him as a film maker but, generally, come to the same conclusion:  objectively considered his films are abysmal.)

Don't Look Up

 Don't Look Up  (2021)is a brute-force satire produced by Netflix.  It's a prestige movie, populated with the likes of Leonardo di Caprio, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, and Jennifer Hudson.  Even the great Mark Rylance performs, impersonating a man-child Silicon Valley technocrat who is touted as the world's third wealthiest man and, apparently, modeled on the loathsome Elon Musk. The movie is long and elaborate, almost two and half hours, and it contains a variety of things, all of it intended as a savage Swiftian satire on Donald Trump and his followers.  The problem with this kind of film is that it is preaching to the choir,  Hollywood liberals satirizing conservatives for the benefit of other liberals -- and, of course, Donald Trump and his allies are, more or less, beyond satire:  their antics are already ironic in a sour post-modern way and much of what these folks say and do is already a kind of joke.  You can't satirize the "cry lib" provocations of Trump and his acolytes -- this conduct is already exaggerated and stylized beyond any rational politics or social commentary.  Ultimately, this very hard-working movie becomes less a commentary on our divided politics than yet another symptom diagnostic of the acidulous state of division prevailing in this country.

The film involves a young woman, a doctoral candidate named Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Hudson) who discovers one night a new comet.  The comet, which is named after her is on a collision course with Earth and, due to the asteroid's size, impact with be an "extinction event."  Kate confirms these dire mathematics with her mentor, Dr. Mindy, a astronomer from the University of Michigan.  (It's a joke in the movie that no one pays any attention to anything said by a graduate or instructor from Michigan until the same facts are confirmed and re-stated by a Harvard or Yale or Princeton grad.)  Kate and Dr. Mindy are whisked to the White House where the President, distracted by the implosion of her Supreme Court candidate's nomination by a sex-scandal is managing that crisis and quite willing to ignore the fact that the world is about to be snuffed out by a "meteor the size of Mount Everest."  Miffed at being ignored at the White House, Dr. Mindy and Kate get themselves booked on a morning talk show called "The Daily Rip", a sort of sex and gossip emporium that bears some resemblance, I suppose, to Fox and Friends or other TV programs of that ilk.  On the show, Kate gets hysterical and is disrespected by the hosts, particularly Brie, the attractive and fantastically self-absorbed female talk show presenter.  Dr. Mindy, because he is Leonardo di Caprio, is viewed as wonderfully telegenic and Brie and her Black co-host, a burly and humorous guy, like him; he's a ratings plus and, ultimately, Brie even has an affair with the astronomer.  (The casting requires us to regard di Caprio as spectacularly handsome and appealing to women, although, in fact, he's rather feckless and a hypochondriac -- put bluntly, di Caprio is no longer the handsome kid who starred in the Titanic a quarter century ago and it takes some suspension of disbelief to view him as the script wants us to.)  At first, the White House dismisses as hysteria the claim that the comet is going to smash into Chile and destroy the world.  In fact, the NASA chief, a woman who is major campaign donor to President Orlean and a former anesthesiologist denounces Dr Mindy and Kate's warnings as "fake new" and bad science.  However, when some Harvard and Yale astronomers confirm that the asteroid is, indeed, a planet killer, the White House takes note and, in fact, appoints Dr. Mindy to the commission tasked with saving the world.  Kate is regarded as too emotional and unreliable for a role in the government's mission and she is arrested by the FBI (for  second time) and simply "taken off the grid" -- she has to sign a non-disclosure agreement and ends up back in Michigan.  Meanwhile, the President (Meryl Streep) has organized a huge launch of space ships to take down the asteroid.  This mission is led by a crazy military hero, Benedict Drask played by Ron Perlman.  The mission is aborted suddenly.  The space ships turn back and parachute into the sea off Cape Canaveral.  The reason for the mission's retreat is that the autistic man-child and Silicon Valley mogul has discovered that the asteroid is made of rare-earths that he needs for his cell-phone empire.  This man, Peter Isherwell, takes over the mission and devises a flotilla of space craft that look like Transformers designed to land on the asteroid, blow it apart and, then, steer the fragments into the Pacific Ocean where they can be mined for their rare minerals.  Meanwhile, Kate is hanging out with some nihilistic skate boarders led by Timothee Chalamet; he  becomes her lover.  Dr. Mindy is engaged in a love affair with the beautiful and shallow Brie, the talk show host of "The Daily Rip".  Mindy's wife confronts him and throws his various pill boxes at him -- he's taking about a dozen different meds for his various psychosomatic ailments.  Isherwell's scheme, which is insane, fails.  The asteroid slams into Earth and everyone dies except for a tiny cadre of survivors who are blasted into outer space on one of Isherwell's space craft.  23,000 years later the space ship lands on another earth but it's inhabited by carnivorous monsters who eat all of the naked astronauts as they emerge from their cryogenically induced sleep.  In the final scene, we see Jonah Hill, the President's son and chief factotum, emerge from the smoking rubble on Earth.  He takes a couple selfies and, then, invites people to subscribe to his podcast hashtag @lastmanonearth.  But he is the last man, indeed, and subscribers are few and far between.

The film's general structure is cribbed from Dr. Strangelove.  There are the same motifs of wild-eyed lunatic generals, a military hero like Captain King Kong in Kubrick's film, here Benedict Drask who we last see blasting away at the asteroid with his machine gun as it falls to earth.  (We have earlier seen Drask at the head of the armada of space ships on the aborted mission -- he's singing some of kind of hillbilly patriotic song.)  The role of the sinister if avuncular Strangelove is played by Mark Rylance as the weirdly disengaged and soft-spoken Isherwell.  And there is the same motif of the privileged few escaping the holocaust.  It's apparent that the meteor speeding toward Earth is a surrogate for both global warming and COVID.  Right-wing news media claim the comet is a Liberal hoax or, even, some kind of Jewish space satellite.  Everything becomes politicized to the extent that many conservatives refuse to look up where the evidence of impending doom is emblazoned across the sky.  Meanwhile, the Left promotes benefit concerts, including a  huge show by Ariana Grande, called "Just Look Up" -- the show features Grande's pop tune to that effect.  Finally, at one of the Right Wing rallies someone does look up to see the night sky livid with the enormous fiery comet.  The people at the rally are horrified that they have been lied-to and begin throwing bottles at Jonah Hill, President Orlean's son and political advisor; hit by a bottle, he flees the podium muttering "the fuckin' hillbillies' hit my face and cut my eye."  (This is a deviation from reality -- the true believers on the Trump side are quite willing to be martyred before they will acknowledge that COVID, for instance, is real and a threat -- they go to their graves proudly proclaiming that the very disease that is killing them isn't real at all.)   Like most satire, the film doesn't have the courage of its convictions, and turns maudlin in the last twenty minutes as the world ends, not a flaw in the Kubrick film on which this picture is rather transparently based.  Dr. Mindy abandons the shallow and vicious Brie and returns to his family in Lansing, Michigan.  Kate is there with her skate-boarder boyfriend and the obligatory Black scientist hero.  Everyone makes small talk as the world ends.  There's an alarming shot near the end:  the comet has ripped into earth and killed everyone but we see an intact block of apartment buildings, delicately coated with snow.  It looks like part of the Earth has somehow been spared -- but, then, we see that the buildings are standing on an amputated chunk of the earth that is whirling through space with Louis Vuitton bags, half-incinerated cows, and the mutilated torso of a blue whale.  Just before the comet strikes, Dr. Mindy pronounces the film's effective, if simple-minded, theme:  "We really did have everything when you think about it" -- these words pronounced as tsunamis of fire whirl through the atmosphere.

The film is too angry to be funny and it's oddly (and disconcertingly) accurate about science denial on the Right.  The movie is also quite disturbing -- it's painful to see the world end and the final sequences are spectacular and horrific, footage that belongs in an entirely different kind of movie. (The ending of Dr. Strangelove with its black and white government films of nuclear blasts scored to "We'll Meet Again" is exemplary for how this sort of material can be tactfully handled in a way that is disturbing, but bearable.)  In fact, some aspects of the movie's last half-hour are a bit like Lars von Trier's depressing masterpiece Melancholia in which the moon smashes into the Earth with predictably dire consequences. 

Every card-carrying Liberal in Hollywood, apparently, wanted to be part of his movie.  Cate Blanchett plays Brie and the movie is packed with big-name bankable stars of all kinds.  (It's a little bit like Its a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World cast with a Who's who of mid-sixties comedians.)  The film directed by Adam McKay feels like "virtue signaling" in some respects although, in fact, the pathology that the picture depicts is depressingly accurate and true to life.  The fact that everything is now politicized is shown in awful and persuasive detail in the film.  But everything is colossal, too big for comfort, and film is too awful in some respects to be amusing.  It's an okay picture but strangely forgettable given its grandiose themes.  The best thing in the movie is a final scene the Brie and her  jovial Black co-host.  He says:  "What should we do? Fuck? Pray?" Brie says:  "No, no let's just get drunk and talk shit about people."  This dialogue occurs as the sky is literally falling.  

The Divas of Taquerabt

When The Divas of Taquerabt, a short documentary by Karim Moussaoui, ended, I immediately streamed the film again.  (It's on MUBI.)  Haunting and dreamlike, the little movie is completely mysterious.  The images in the film are very strange, but not in a showy or surrealistic way -- it's the mood, the ambience, the weirdly designed camera positions that create this effect:  there are no establishing shots and nothing exotic -- it's like we're seeing a grainy video of the content of a very peculiar dream, oddly familiar but inexplicable.

The movie begins with a strange-looking woman removing a book from the upper-shelf of a rather rudimentary book case.  The woman seems to be in her early fifties and has very dark skin under her eyes -- she looks like she's bruised or a racoon.  An off-screen voice asks her about an opera house built in Algiers with the assistance of the Chinese.  The opera house was constructed in 2016 but has not yet been used for a performance.  The man off-screen asks the woman "What opera would look like in this place?"  (What place? Is there no tradition of musical theater in Algiers?)  She mentions a work unfamiliar to me (La Nouba) and remarks that the programs in the opera house have been more a matter of "installations" than opera.  Then, she names a place and says that she was driven from the airport to a cave where women were singing.  This was in the early 90's.  The man asks if she thinks that these women (or their successors) are still singing.  "Why not?" she replies.  All of this is shot from about five feet from the oddly spectral woman.  We never see the interlocutor.  We don't know for sure what, if anything, the book has to do with the dialogue.  The woman is looking for a quotation, apparently, but why and what sort of quotation is never established.  The movie, then, cuts to very grainy images overexposed showing four or five men with sound equipment walking in the desert.  The desert is a blur and the shot is jittery taken from close to the men who walk away from the camera.  Next we see a man dressed in the turban and gowns of a Berber.  The man is working with a primitive hoe in a mysterious-looking flooded field.  The field is divided into little squares outlined in eight inch high embankments of wet sand.  When the man cuts through an embankment water floods the tiny patchwork field.  We see the man irrigate several patches of nondescript low-lying foliage in this curious garden.  The man is asked if women sing in caves.  (Again, it's the off-screen male interlocutor.)  The man doesn't know anything about this but thinks it may have been a concert staged for tourists.  The genre is described as Ahelli.  "I'm a fan of Ahelli," the farmer says, but remarks that he has never heard of women singing in caves.  Next, we see a man driving a Land Rover, filmed from very close.  He says Ahelli  songs are about "life, love, religion."  He recalls that a man with a Land Rover came once and collected the songs, possibly recording them. The driver says that the women, who were supposed to sing, "are not available today."  The men with the sound equipment stand shivering (it must be cold) in a totally barren desert.  Again the camera is very close to the men, not figures in a landscape because the landscape is merely implied -- again it's like the setting of a dream in which it doesn't really matter where things are taking place because characters and plot and scenery are all inside the dreamer's head.  A couple men are shown tightly compressed by door frames in some kind of structure, possibly a caravansarai.  One of the men says that he's exhausted with "driving through nothing at all."  His cell-phone rings.  In the next shot, the crew is in some sort of underground location, a big grey roomy subterranean space, possibly something like a salt mine although who knows?  Women are seated in an alcove eighty feet away, lit by flames and singing.  The film ends with a five minute montage of fairly short shots showing the women from various angles.  We have no idea why they are singing, what they are singing about, or what they are doing in this strange, gloomy cave?  A rhythm is pounded out by a woman striking a two stones on a sort of flat metate.  The women wear shawls and some of them have elaborate jewelry, bangles and big dangling necklaces.  They all have their eyes shut.  The music has a call-and-response flavor, a single voice performing the melody against a background of rhythmically chanting voices.  The women clap their hands in time with the music.  Some of the singers, in fact, are obviously old men.  When the song is finished, the matron who has been leading the performance starts another song.  The movie cuts to black.  

The film is very fascinating, a bit like a documentary by Jean Rouch but without any commentary or explanatory material at all.  The picture is made with the sponsorship of the Opera de Paris in was first screened in 2020 as part of a festival of short films commissioned by that institution.  The picture to which the film obviously refers is Werner Herzog's unsettling Herdsmen of the Sun, about Tuareg singing contests conducted by young men in elaborate make-up.  But this film is more pure, less about the performance and more about the difficulty of finding this music, buried, as it is, far underground.  Herzog imposes a European context on his spectacle -- he films the Tuareg men, swaying and dancing, but with music on the soundtrack of the last Castrato in Italy singing a sentimental aria from a long forgotten opera.  Here there is no implicit commentary of that kind.  The aura of mystery surrounding the images and performance, which is remarkable, remains impenetrable.  

Some internet research reveals that an allusion to La Nouba in the film's first sequence refers to a documentary movie made by an Algerian feminist and radical Assie Djebar (who is also mentioned).  Djebar was born in 1936 and died in 2005.  A "Nouba" is a five part song cycle performed by women in the Algerian desert.  The woman in the first part of the film says that opera in Algiers would have to be based on something like La Nouba, the documentary showing women singers, according to Djebar, people repressed and made voiceless by colonialism.  The off-screen male interlocutor has said that he doesn't exactly understand why the Chinese built an opera house in Algiers -- "it's not as if we're going to produce ten operas a year," he says.  "Timimoun" where the women singing in the cave are said to be located is a sparsely populated desert territory in central Algeria.  The people who live in this area are of mixed Sudanese, Berber, and Arabic origin.  They speak a language called Gourara (sometimes spelled "Gurara").  A "Taquerabt" is apparently a three-part performance of Ahelli music.  The performance customarily begins with a group sing-a-long that may feature as many as 100 people chanting and moving in a shuffling circle around the central singer who calls out the lyrics.  (Sometimes, a flute is played.)  The second part of the performance, which is customary at religious and civic festivals, is performed from late at night to dawn by more accomplished professional singers.  At dawn, the best and most experienced singers perform.  Apparently, this singing and chanting lasts for eight to twelve hours.  UNESCO is attempting to protect this performance-style as one of the "intangible treasures of cultural heritage" but the Gourara language is dying out.  The people associated with this tradition are oasis farmers called the Zanete.  The man described as collecting these songs is apparently Mouloud Mammeri, a controversial anti-government figure who died in a car crash.  The State opposed his public funeral but more than 200,000 people attended.  The filmmaker Karim Massaoui was born in 1976.  He is Algerian and has made one feature film and several shorts.  The Divas of Taquerabt is 15 minutes and 30 seconds long.  It's highly recommended.  

  

A Night at the Opera

 Sergei Loznitsa's A Night at the Opera is a 20 minute documentary produced under the auspices of the Opera de Paris.  It is part of a series of short films commissioned by the cultural institution and first shown in 2020.  Loznitsa is a great filmmaker -- his monumental and appalling State Funeral about Stalin's obsequies is unforgettable.  Loznitsa is a materialist film maker, at least when it comes to documentaries.  (He has made two dramatized feature films which I have not seen).  Loznitsa accumulates footage, edits it together without overt commentary, and lets the images and montage communicate the meaning of the material presented.  This technique makes his films susceptible to very different interpretations..  One picture that he directed, Austerlitz, showing tourists strolling the grounds of a German concentration camp exemplifies the ambiguity in his method.  One can interpret the film as evidence of callow disregard for human tragedy, as a portrait of how masses of people move through a landscape, as evidence of the limitations of memory or, even, as a joyous assertion of people's ability to entertain themselves despite the horror of history -- all of these meanings are demonstrably present in the film.

Ordinarily, Loznitsa works with duration and, often, makes his points by the sheer length, and tedium in some cases, of his material.  (State Funeral is about three hours long and hammers home its points by a sheer, mind-numbing accumulation of footage.)  A Night at the Opera is much more spritely, briskly edited to provide an abstract, as it were, of what it was like to observe people at an opera in the late fifties and early sixties.  With one startling exception, the footage is all newsreel material, black and white.  We see crowds gathered outside the Palais Garnier Opera house in a glistening film noir night.  Celebrities arrive to the music of Mozart's Magic Flute overture and ceremonial procession music from Aida.  We glimpse DeGaulle, Brigitte Bardot, Grace Kelly, Stravinsky and others.  These luminaries are shown in repeated shots decorously ascending the great steps into the auditorium.  Then, we watch them take their seats.  The Marseillaise is sung and the curtain open.  Maria Callas appears singing an aria by Rossini in recital -- the actual performance shown is not  from a staged opera and we have the sense that this gala, perhaps, is a fundraiser of some sort.  (In fact, the film compiles images from probably a dozen events.)  Callas' is filmed in a close-shot.  Of course, she's famously plain but her singing is hypnotic -- it seems effortless and weirdly unmediated:  for some reason, we have the sense that she is not singing but being sung, that is, that the music is flowing through her and animating her features as it passes from her.  The performance is astonishing and, probably, the main reason the film exists.  After Callas' aria, the movie indulges in a single color shot -- a great chandelier virtually quivering with light against a painted rococo ceiling.  The film ends with fireworks that are shown in black-and-white.

The movie is light and vaguely comical -- certainly, there is an intentional allusion of the Marx Brothers comedy of the same name.  There isn't much substance to the film but I think it's well worth watching.  

I lost my Body

 Jeremy Clapin's French language animated film, I Lost my Body (2020) is a puzzling movie that straddles several genres.  Apparently intended as a kind of fantastic allegory, the movie is too realistic in texture and detail to be conventionally surrealistic.  Rather, the movie suggests a sort of ill-designed parable, a Kafkaesque fable that is too improbable to be taken seriously, but that doesn't ever venture into really delirious or expressionistically adventurous territory.  The tone of the film is also uncertain -- the plot has a certain pervasive sadness and pathos, but the movie is a little too icy and indeterminate to maintain that mood. There's a love story that's too unresolved and abstract to be effective -- romance, as it were, without romance.  And, aspects of the short picture (it's 80 minutes long) exploit well-established horror film devices -- but, although a bit gruesome, the cartoon isn't particularly frightening.  It's hard to know what to make of this picture and, unfortunately, I think the movie is a little too slight, even, I dare say, twee, to encourage the viewer to spend much time trying to work out its mysteries.  In effect, the film is like its twin heroes, Nafouel with his missing hand and Nafouel's hand with a missing body -- there's something severed, amputated, missing from the story.  

There are three strands to the plot, all intertwined and presented with flashbacks and flashforwards.  The peculiar intricacy of the narrative suggests, I think, that the film maker is not entirely comfortable presenting events in chronological order and without mystifying shifts in time sequence and tone.  If the film were presented as a continuous narrative, I think the story's implausibility would overcome its dramatic interest -- we'd get bogged down with stuff that makes no sense or that we don't understand and would dismiss the film outright.  The dizzying shifts in chronology, sometimes signaled by changes in color (the remote past is shown in black and white) conceal problems with the plot.  

In the first strand of the film, an amputated hand escapes from a refrigerator where it is being cooled with a bucket of eyeballs.  The hand escapes its chilly prison and, then, sets off on an odyssey to rejoin the body from which it has been severed.  In this narrative, the hand darts around like a spider (or The Beast with Five Fingers in Robert Florey's 1947 horror move -- itself derived from The Hands of Orloc made by Robert Wiene in 1924 and Karl Freund's 1935 Mad Love, both films infused with German expressionism.).  The hand fights rats, gets half-drowned in an icy river, nearly is run over by traffic, is attacked by ants and flies, and, finally, wafts it's way over the city of Paris (I think), borne aloft by an umbrella.  At last, the hand finds its owner but the reunion is disappointing and amounts to nothing.  In the end, the amputated hand sits atop a ruinous warehouse building surveying the city.  But the term "surveying" and the bucket of eyeballs in the fridge embody a serious problem -- the hand has no eyes and can't see.  Therefore, how does it navigate all of the exciting perils that it encounters?  This seems like a trivial objection, but it's an important one.  Fantasy has to establish rules and play according to them -- here there are no rules governing the hand's adventures and, therefore, although these parts of the movie are thrillingly animated, we don't really have much emotional investment in them because the hand's peregrinations are simply too weird and mysterious:  why has the hand been stored in a refrigerator with eyeballs?  why doesn't the hand decompose?  how does it find it's way through the world?  And, when the hand is reunited with its owner, why isn't more made of this encounter?  (The hero is asleep and doesn't even know that his hand has come back to pay him a visit).  The film cunningly focuses on hands in all of its three strands and, at one point, a man says that the hand is what shapes matter into useful form. And, indeed, there's a shot of the hand rearing up over the city like a tarantula above graffiti that says "I am" -- is the hand supposed to be some sort of divinity?  It's impossible to tell. Certainly, animation has a "hand-made quality' and, I suppose, that the image of cunning, disembodied hand has something to do with the way in which the movie was made.  But again none of this is clear.

The second component to the film is the backstory of the hero Nauofel. We see him as a little boy with his parents.  His mother and father are gracious and kind.  There is discussion about how to catch a fly in your fist -- you have to aim where you think the fly will go when you sweep your hand toward it.  Apparently, the hero's family lives in Algeria.  On the way to a party there's an accident and Nauofel's parents are both killed.  Somehow, the child is sent to France where he seems to have been abandoned at about the age of 15.  This part of the film moves inexorably toward the climax of the car crash, caused, in part, by an aggressive fly.

The majority of the film involves Nauofel's adventures in Paris.  We find him working as an inept pizza delivery boy.  After his bicycle gets smashed up in a crash with a car, he delivers a pizza to a feisty girl who lives on the 35th floor of an apartment building.  He never sees the girl during the failed delivery but she seems to flirt with him and Nauofel decides to track her down.  The girl, Gabrielle, works at a library.  Naoufel, afraid to introduce himself as the voice on the other side of the intercom when he delivered the squashed pizza, meets the girl in the library.  He watches her, but is afraid to speak.  Later, he discovers that Gabrielle has an uncle who runs a decrepit word-working shop.  Nauofel finagles his way into the uncle's shop as an apprentice.  Of course, the shop is full of jig- and circular saws that cause the attentive viewer to shiver with dismay.  The girl has told Nauofel that she has a fantasy of living in a cozy igloo atop her apartment building.  Nauofel becomes friends with the girl and, in fact, builds a wooden igloo on top of an abandoned warehouse.  He invites Gabrielle to this hideaway and announces to her that he is the pizza delivery man with whom she flirted over the intercom.  Far from being pleased by this revelation, Gabrielle is appalled -- she interprets Nauofel's awkward overtures as "stalking" and angrily denounces him.  Nauofel goes to a party, gets drunk and fights with his roommate.  The next day, upset with losing Gabrielle, he takes some alka-seltzer and tries to catch a pesky fly while operating a circular saw.  We know the outcome.  After a brief hospitalization, Nauofel decides to take a literal "leap of faith" -- he climbs up on the abandoned warehouse and jumps onto an adjacent construction derrick.  Gabrielle has been looking for him, but she has missed him at his customary haunts -- he has given up his little room above the wood-working shop.  Having succeeded in his daring leap, the one-handed Nauofel sits on the crane (query? how is he going to get back to the top of the warehouse?)  Snow falls and he lays down, possibly to rest or, maybe, to die in the gently falling flakes  By this point, his poor errant hand is out of the movie.  I think the hand watches his leap, but, then, what?

I suppose the film is supposed to be about "amputation".  The idea of being alienated, cut off from one's home language and homeland is possibly thematic to the film.  Many of the characters seem rather truncated and detached and, probably, the movie suggests that the condition of modern city dwellers is to exist as "amputated" beings.  Certainly, Nafouel has been untimely severed from his kind artistic parents and the warm sunny palm trees in his native North Africa.  (For some unknown reason, the film makers represent Algeria, if that is Nafouel's home, in black and white -- it would seem to me more logical to show North Africa in color.  But this is merely one of the many peculiar and baffling decisions that characterize this odd picture.) 

As a side-note, the hero says that he admires Sergio Leone's movie The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly particularly Lee van Cleef's character.  If I recall properly, this character is a gunfighter so fast on the draw that he can catch a fly in mid-air in his fist.  

The Hand of God (E Stato la Mano di Deo)

 In the elaborate opening shot of Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God, the camera flies over a blue expanse of water.  After a few seconds, we see a bay with hills studded with villas and apartments.  Three power boats are blasting over the ocean, shot like arrows or cannon-balls at the harbor.  (We are seeing Naples.) As the camera glides over the fast-moving boats, we hear them bouncing on the waves -- with each bounce the boats make a sort of coughing or huffing sound as they plow through the water, leaping up and down like dolphin.  The shot continues to the harbor and, then, tracks along an sea-side road where we seen antique automobile, a big hearse-like conveyance from the 1920's driving between the city and the Mediterranean.  About a half-hour later, we see similar speed boats bouncing over the waves near where a family is sunbathing on their skiff.  Someone says that the boats are cigarette smugglers pursued by the local coast guard.  Again, we hear the sound of the vessels rhythmically sluicing over the waves.  Much later in the film, the movie's protagonist, Fabietto, is talking to drunk gangster.  The gangster, who has taken an avuncular interest in the teenager says:  "Do you know what sound a boat going at 200 kilometers makes?"  Fabietto doesn't know.  "Toof!  Toof!  Toof!" the hoodlum tells him.  Toward the end of the movie, we see another group of speed boats jetting across the Neapolitan harbor.  And, indeed, we recognize that they do make a sound exactly as described by the gangster.  In the film, the racing speedboats symbolize youth accelerating into manhood -- the sound "toof! toof! toof!"signifies something like an uncontrolled and reckless motion that propels the young man forward into the unknown adventures of his adulthood.  The speedboats and their sound are objective correlatives that embody the desires that drive young people into becoming themselves.  Fabietto visits a relative who is in jail.  Fabietto has become an orphan by the "hand of God".  The prisoner pities him -- at least, his parents can  come and visit him in jail.  Fabietto tells the young man, apparently, a cousin, that speedboats shooting across the water at 200 km an hour make the sound "toof! toof! toof!"  

I have presented this example to demonstrate the poetic qualities of Sorrentino's The Hand of God (2021 - Netflix Original).  Sorrentino is one of the best filmmakers working today.  The Hand of God has not been particularly well-received because it is deemed self-indulgent.  This is a meaningless objection.  Film-making at the highest level is often enormously self-indulgent -- millions of dollars spend on realizing someone's personal fantasies or recollections.  The question for a critic is whether the self-indulgence on display is artistically developed and given form by the director/screenwriter.  Sorrentino, who is often quite obscure (there are many portions of his HBO series The Young Pope and its sequel The New Pope that are completely baffling) has here framed his memoir into a lyrical format -- this means that images and motifs re-occur and, at each iteration, deepen in meaning.  "Toof!" is the perfect expression of how Neapolitan speedboats sound as they breast the waves -- this is the right word for this experience.  And the reiteration of this motif comes to shape our understanding of the film's subject matter.  There are non-narrative ways of making sense and Sorrentino deploys them with great subtlety and vigor in this autobiographical picture.  The film will not please some people because it is baroque with symbols and idiosyncratic personal mythology.  But I think The Hand of God is very good and deserves close study.

The Hand of God references a famous soccer shot by Diego Maradona -- while playing for Argentina in the World Cup, Maradona made a goal by fisting the ball into the end-zone net.  The refs didn't see the fist and awarded the goal to Argentina.  (Argentina went on to win the game against an English team by another goal scored by Maradona.)  In the film, the genteel Communist Scisa family members interpret the "hand of God" as "political" -- the revenge of the Argentines against the British imperialists who defeated them at the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands. As the film progresses, the "Hand of God" takes on a more sinister aspect -- referring to an Act of God that kills both of the hero's parents. Fabietto is at a soccer game watching his idol, Maradona, who has been hired to play for Naples, when carbon monoxide gas kills his parents -- thus, he was spared by the Hand of God.  The divine Hand is evident in the flamboyant opening sequence in the film:  Patrizia, a gorgeous schizophrenic, is picked up by San Gennaro, riding as a passenger in the elaborate and expensive antique car first seen in the opening shot.  She is escorted into a ruinous villa with a huge ornate chandelier fallen unceremoniously on its side in the ballroom -- this is an extraordinary image.  In the ballroom, San Gennaro grabs Patrizi's ass and she meets the "little monk", a spectral figure hidden in rust-red robes.  San Gennaro tells Patrizia that she is no longer sterile and can have a child with her husband, Franco.  Patrizia goes home to her lavish apartment where Franco beats her and accuses her of being a whore.  She locks herself in the bedroom and calls her sister, Maria (Fabietto's mother).  Mounted on Fabietto's motorscooter, Maria, Fabietto's father, Saverno, and the teenage boy ride to her rescue.  After the fight, Franco makes love to Patrizia and, as the Saint as promised, she gets pregnant.  But a week later, there's another fight and Patrizia has a miscarriage.  (We learn this latter detail at the end of the movie when Patrizia, fearing suicide, has had herself committed to an asylum.)  In this sequence, the hand of God is literally represented by San Gennaro clutching Patrizia's buttocks.  At the end of the movie, as Fabietto leaves Naples for Rome, he sees the "little monk" at a deserted railroad station.  The little monk removes his cowl and we see that he's cherubic tow-headed boy who cheerfully waves to Fabietto, symbolically, I suppose, blessing his exodus from Naples to Rome where the hero hopes to become a film maker.  (These scenes are redolent of Fellini's great masterpiece about coming of age, I Vittelloni (a touchstone for The Hand of God, Of course the film also channels Amarcord).  

The Hand of God divides into two parts.  Most of the imagery in the second half is a development or reiteration of things we have seen in the first half of the movie.  In the first part of the film, Sorrentino introduces us to the various members of the Scisa clan -- there is a menacing grandmother who eats like a pig and glowers at everyone, various uncles and cousins, Patrizia who is drop-dead gorgeous but crazy, and a Baroness who lives upstairs, the wife of a famous deceased gynecologist who periodically appears at family gatherings -- she is summoned by pounding on the floor of her apartment with a broom.  One of Fabietto's aunts, a fat woman with huge legs, has a new boyfriend, a former Venetian Police Inspector who fancies himself a ladies' man and talks through an electronic voice-box since he has apparently lost his larynx to cancer.  While the family is boating near Capri, the police commissioner gabs in his electronic voice to such an extent that Patrizia, who has terrified everyone by sunbathing stark nude at the prow of the little yacht, asks to see his "voice thing", opens it, removes the battery and to the chagrin of the former cop throws the battery into the sea.  (As an illustration of the film's poetic structure, this scene is recapitulated 70 minutes later when Fabietto on his way out of town sees Patrizia looking down at him from her asylum window (she is "(his) muse" as he has said); Patrizia throws something out the window.  It turns out to be a battery that Fabietto who has isolated himself with Walkman after his parent's death, uses for his own device.  The Scisa family is very close, but Saverno has a wandering eye and engages in affairs.  This causes Maria to sob  and shriek uncontrollably and Fabietto's divided loyalties are such that he has a sort of seizure due to his mother's grief.  Fabietto's brother, Marchino, auditions at a casting call for Fellini.  Fellini won't hire the young man because his "features are too common."  A movie is shot in Naples featuring a figure hanging over the cavernous interior of a sort of Baroque shopping arcade -- this image will come back in the film's final minutes as a symbol for the hero's life in suspension before he leaves Naples for Rome.  Saverno tells his son to have sex with someone -- she can be "a dog" his father says -- just to get that issue resolved so that he can embark on normal relations with women.  In the second half of the film, Fabietto is summoned to Baroness' spooky apartment to catch a bat.  He fails at this task but then the old woman seduces him -- following his now-dead father's advicedFabietto makes love to the elderly woman and says he will see her again.  "No," she says sternly.  "From now on, you will make love to girls your own age."  The film pivots around the shocking deaths of Maria and Saverno.  After his parents are killed, Fabietto makes love to the Baroness, visits Patrizia in the asylum, has a brief friendship with a gangster and, then, encounters a wildly self-aggrandizing filmmaker who tells Fabietto to say in Naples and make movies about the city, the most beautiful place in the world.  This advice is given to Fabietto is a sea-side grotto with elaborate vaults -- a sort of 17th century bathing pavilion.  The outspoken director swims out to sea, paddling straight along a path of radiance made by the rising sun.  (This scene mirrors a sequence earlier in which the smuggler takes Fabietto by speed boat to Capri to go dancing -- but the island is completely deserted and,so, the two men go swimming in the blue grotto where the gangster announces that he will be Fabietto's lifelong friend.  But, a couple minutes later, when Fabietto calls him, the gangster is taking a bath with his voluptuous girlfriend ladling water on his back and he won't take his young protegees call (probably fortunately).

In some ways, the picture is archetypally Italian after the manner of Fellini at his most carnivalesque.  The settings are lavish and spectacular. (At one point, the hero spends part of his vacation on Stromboli where the volcano is erupting in full spate.)  The people are memorable=y weird-looking, grotesque or grotesquely beautiful.  The  film is recondite with Catholic imagery.  A passionate female saint peers down on the bed where Fabietto is having sex with the Baroness.  Throughout the picture, the scholarly Fabietto tags scenes with phrases from Dante's poetry, dialogue that puzzles everyone.  But when his parents die, the malign Signora, his grandmother who is feared and hated by all, speaks several lines from The Inferno to the hero -- she, perhaps, alone understands him.  (We have earlier seen all the Aunts and Uncles beating her savagely after one of her vicious outbursts -- it's shocking and over-the-top and, of course, signifies that much of the film's imagery is as perceived and remembered by the sensitive and artist Fabietto -- in other words what we see is seen through his eyes.)  It's an excellent movie and, probably, a key in some respects to other films by Sorrentino and I recommend it highly.  The movie is also worthwhile for the most impressive display of hula hoop artistry ever filmed.

Malmkrog

 Malmkrog is a film-provocation by the Rumanian director Cristi Puiu.  In effect, the movie is a dramatized essay about war and religion, designed to be as rebarbative as possible.  The movie, which doesn't move, is like a pile of dirt shoveled into the corner of an gallery and labeled art:  it's motionless, inert, and irritating, although the work raises serious questions about the nature of artistic form and meaning.  I'm happy that such works exist, but, normally, accord them a mere glance and move on to something more interesting  Malmkrog, which, perhaps, not surprisingly, won Puiu the Best Director award at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival imposes itself on the viewer for three hours and twenty minutes and, therefore, represents an investment of time far beyond a mere glance.  The movie is self-consciously designed to be difficult on every possible level and, therefore, can be acclaimed as having a unique, if relentless, integrity or, perhaps, perversity.  Puiu is an exponent of "slow cinema"; his films develop through long sequence shots, sometimes five or ten minutes in duration, often staged so as to be intentionally inexpressive.  Some of the director's more accessible films have achieved some degree of international acclaim, most notably The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005).  Austere as a theorem by Euclid, Malmkrog involves (mostly) five floridly dressed people standing in chilly-looking rooms and making speeches to one another; sometimes, the speeches slip into a sort of icy,  hostile stichomythia -- short assertive and barbed exchanges.  The characters don't behave like people, but rather are mouthpieces for certain points of view involving religion and conflict.  Mostly, their declamations are delivered from statuesque standing positions.  There are no close-ups and, often the speakers are either off-screen or turned away from the camera which rarely moves.  The late Victorian rooms in which the (in)action is staged, seem naturally lit with windows over-exposed with wan mid-Winter sunlight and the corners of the premises slipping into grey shadow.  In one hour-long sequence, there are huge murals on facing walls, 17th century Dutch engravings showing a densely populous harvest of wheat opposed by a big picture of the Biblical flood.  Servants soundlessly glide through the scenes.  In some cases, the pictorial composition is designed in depth -- we look through a receding series of doorways into ever more remote rooms where, sometimes, a figure flickers in the pale lightless light. (This effect is like Dutch mannerist paintings.)  The action takes place in a chalet in the hills in Transylvania.  (I notice reviewers like to observe that the film happens in Transylvania, although as far as I can see, the action could be taking place anywhere in Europe around the first decade of the 20th century.)  Mostly, the disputants speak French.  There is something decadent about the isolated setting, the lush drawing rooms, and the gorgeously dressed speakers -- it's like Pasolini's Salo but without the orgies.  Some writers say that the film's compositions are beautiful -- this is inaccurate; Puiu renounces any type of overt beauty as distracting to the point of the film.  In any event, non-French speaking audiences can't really admire the film's appearance because the viewers are too preoccupied with reading the torrent of subtitles at the bottom of the screen.  The film is a literal transcription of debate presented by dialogue in an obscure Russian book by an enemy of Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov;s War, Progress, and the End of History:  Three Conversations including a Short Story about the Anti-Christ.  Solovyov (1853 - 1900) was a close friend of Dostoevsky, so close, indeed, that it is surmised that he served as a model for one of the brothers Karamazov.  Uncompromisingly and ascetic, he died a homeless pauper.  

To the extent that Malmkrog has a plot, it is entirely discursive.  Therefore, to understand the film, we need to summarize it's arguments.  There is a brief prelude, as it were, a shot of a snowy forest under grey skies where we see a dark-clad figure that moves erratically, a bit like a mirage.  Someone calls the figure from off-screen, naming the distant person as Zoya.  The figure runs toward the right and the camera pans to show a pale, pinkish manor house set on a hill overlooking a far-off ice-covered lake and wooded hills  Then, a flock of sheep, probably several hundred, appear from the left and swarm around the house.  I don't know if the sheep are intended as a reference to Bunuel or signify the unthinking conformity of most people or are merely a visual frisson.  (In Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel guests inexplicably trapped at a post-opera soiree are visited by a flock of sheep;in interviews, Puiu admits the debt to Bunuel.)  In the manor house, a dignified older lady is telling a man an anecdote about two religious hermits who traveled to Alexandria where they apparently succumbed to the temptations of the flesh.  The woman says that one of the hermits flagellated himself continuously and couldn't escape his oppressive sense of guilt, so much so that believing himself lost (we surmise) he returned to Alexandria's flesh-pots.  The lady is about to tell us about the other hermit but is interrupted.  A general who has been a  house-guest is leaving -- he has a three day trip to some place, a motif that echoes the three days in which the hermits brooded about their sins committed in Alexandria.  

The shot changes to a drawing room and a middle-aged woman enters, announcing as a thesis that the "Christ-loving Russian army" had advanced onto the field.  The provocative epithet for an army leads to a protracted debate that lasts about one hour.  The essence of the debate is whether an army, that is, an instrument of organized violence, can be "Christ-loving". This part of the film is labeled by intertitle Ingrida after the Russian general's wife who leads the conversation and has posed the preliminary question to what seems to be a debating circle of five people, three women and two men.  Initially, a young man named Eduoard disputes that Christians can participate in military, organized violence.  He makes all the familiar arguments, probably based on Tolstoy's pacifism.  (I'm not sure of what exactly he says because I fell asleep for about fifteen minutes during this dialogue.)  The General's wife, Ingrida, wishes to clinch her arguments with an example from real life -- she reads for the group a letter received from her husband about a campaign in the Balkans or possibly Armenia.  A group of murderous tribesmen, called the Bashi-Bazouks raid a village, murder everyone, and torture people to death.  A baby is slow-roasted until the child's eyes melt; the child's mother is tied-up so she has to watch her child's agonizing death -- this is merely one of a series of atrocities that the letter recites.  The Russian cavalry with a phalanx of Cossacks pursues the Bashi-Bazouks on their way to massacre the inhabitants of another village.  The  Bashi-Bazouks are attacked with cannon and cavalry and, despite pleading for mercy, are slaughtered to the last man.  This is done in the name of Christ.  The Cossacks have to be kept away from the corpses which they will loot.  Ingrida compares the violent, rapacious Cossacks to the "good thief" whom Christ blessed on the Cross.  Olga, a young woman, argues that the Cossacks are just as bad as the Bashi-Bazouks, the same sort of cruel brigands.  Ingrida says that only a fool would fail to make a distinction between looting and roasting babies alive.  Olga persists in saying Christ would have pardoned the Bashi-Bazouks (Bashi-Bazouks are Ottoman mercenary irregulars, infamous for their atrocities -- the name means "Damaged Heads" or, something, like "Crazies.')  Ingrida now has an ally in the other man (Nikolai).  He says that Christ himself couldn't (or wouldn't) use his power to stop Judas or the High Priest.  This sets up Ingrida's contention that there is "no middle way" -- one either fights to oppose evil or allows evil to triumph.  Compromise with evil is not possible.  Bells toll in the distance, reminding us that this debate takes place on Christmas Eve.  Soon dinner will be served.  Olga faints at the one hour mark and has to be put to bed.

In fact, Puiu engages in a misdirection:  extended shots of a maid making a bed don't have anything to do with Olga's syncope.  Rather, it turns out that the chalet harbors an elderly, possibly demented, Count, the lord of the household who is bedridden, hemorrhaging, and, apparently, dying.  Later, in an interlude designated as II ("Istvan"), we see the old man being bathed, dressed, and carried from this bed that the servant has made to some other place in the house.  Olga is absent from the discussions since there is a report that the "Count is bleeding" -- she is probably the old man's daughter or, perhaps, grand-daughter.  (And her faint may be due to stress that she is experiencing because of the old man's illness.)  Puiu represses establishing information and we don't know the identity of Istvan.  In the next section, III ("Eduoard"), an offhand remark informs us that Istvan is the major domo, the foreman of the brigade of servants associated with the country house.  In part II, a table is set and the company, now augmented by a sixth person (who is this?) sits at a long table in the dining room.  The composition is afflicted by the so-called "Last Supper problem" -- that is, how to depict people sitting around a table:  Puiu doesn't solve the problem -- he just has two of his disputants with their backs turned to the camera in the ten minute take that follows. The shot has deep focus, extending from the table into remote rooms.  At one point, a little girl appears and runs toward the table only to be stopped by a woman who is pursuing her -- she is, perhaps, the child's governess and there is a brief physical struggle.  In this long and inexpressive shot, one of the men tells the story of a man named Miklos who committed suicide because he was excessively polite -- he answered all letters and painstakingly reviewed all books and essays sent to him and was able to bear the burden of his own etiquette only by drinking excessively.  (The women, in particular, find this idiotic.)  When no longer able to drink, poor Miklos took his own life.  The speaker connects the obligation to be polite to personal hygiene -- that is, daily bathing.  Then, the topic turns to Miklos' friend, Umberto, a monk and a kind of holy fool.  Umberto gave Miklos precepts as to how he should live -- sin 539 times a day, don't repent, abide in God's mercy, and enjoy life, reasonable advice that Miklos obviously didn't accept.  The speaker (I couldn't identify him) is about to tell an elaborate anecdote, too long, he admits for the circumstances, but, then, voices are heard outside singing a chorale -- it is, after all, Advent.  The six people at the dinner table go outside but the camera doesn't follow them as the singing becomes louder.  The rest of part II involves elaborate, if completely opaque, byplay among the servants.  Istvan, the boss, berates a serving girl about some tea and, then, orders her to calla butler named Jancsos.  The boss makes Jancsos drink the tea -- we suspect it's been poisoned or someone has spit or urinated in it.  After Jancsos drinks down the cup of liquid, Istvan hits him twice in the face and says that next time  he will be fired.  He says the same thing to the cowering serving girl.  The servants remove the place-settings at the table and take away the linen.  The guests retire out of sight to a drawing room where someone speaking in English praises the benefits of tea.  (The servants mostly speak German.)  We see the old Count being dressed and bathed.

Section III ("Eduoard") is shot with conventional Hollywood mise-en-scene.  The sequence involves a long monologue about the Slavs and Russia's role as a buffer for Europe against Asia.  (The Russians are said to have a "deposit" or "sediment" of the Asiatic in their souls.)  Eduoard asserts that soon all the world will be European -- even the Tibetans will be "European Tibetans".  This will usher in a world of perpetual peace and prosperity.  European values must prevail, the speaker says, and he asserts that barbarism is succumbing to European civilization.  The camera cuts between speakers and auditors and, sometimes, there is a standard shot-reverse shot approach to the dialogue.  The speakers are shot in Plan Americain compositions and so they are readily visible and their features clearly available to the lens.  The discussion begins with a topic line:  "can the Turks be brought into Europe?"  As is the case, the conversation is diverted onto a variety of subjects including the Boer War -- the speaker sides with the British against the Boers who are inadequate representatives  (he thinks) of European values -- and the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  All religions are said to have been welcomed and endorsed at the Chicago exposition.  The women generally voice opinions in favor of diversity; Eduoard's burden is that, under the leadership of Slavic Russia, all the world will become a European utopia.  But there are some sinister portents.  On several occasions, we hear a primitive gramophone playing nearby, a sound of tinny, recorded music that the guests can't interpret and that seems uncanny to them.  After an extended burst of this offstage sound, we hear loud voices, a quarrel and shouting.  The guests rise from the table and run into the adjacent room where chefs in their white aprons and toques are dashing about.  Pistol shots ring out and there is gunpowder smoke in the air.  The guests are shot and fall to the carpet in this apparent insurrection.  The screen fades to black and, then, we see an austere wintry landscape, cold and cheerless, without any light at all, monochrome with a lone figure as in the opening shot, clad in black and vibrating in a kind of Brownian motion in the remote distance.  We see other figures appear as two couples in the frozen garden, these people shown in an extreme long shot.  The dead guests seem to  have been resurrected in this frigid landscape.  It's legitimate to wonder exactly where this action is taking place -- are the guests in some sort of Hell or Purgatory?  Are they all dead?   Have they been dead from the beginning.  

A title tells us that the next section is IV ("Nikolai").  We see the dying count hefted on men's shoulders and carried like some kind of moribund emperor through the chalet's rooms.  Nikolai, who is developing symptoms of obsession, argues with Olga that progress is illusory.  After 1800 years, Christianity has not developed sufficiently to save Judas Iscariot from damnation. Nikolai says that evil is active and a real presence in the world, not merely an absence of the good.  During this section, we hear remote atonal singing, listless and off-key.  Ingrida, the General's wife, says that the only progress in 1800 years is that the caliber of shells capable of being fired by artillery has increased.  The curious aspect of these discussions is that Olga is not present -- nonetheless, Nikolai purports to speak for her and, then, refutes the arguments he makes on her behalf.  There is some talk about the Anti-Christ and, when it is announced that dinner is served, one of the company remarks that those who have "turned the other cheek" as required by Gospel have always been murdered.  

Section V is entitled "Olga". This sequence is shot fairly conventionally with shot and reverse shot film grammar.  The five debaters are now seated at a table and they are served four or five courses by silent servants while the discussion continues.  In this part of the film, Nikolai is the main speaker, now addressing Olga directly.  She seems completely indifferent to Nikolai's attacks and gazes at him blandly -- either she is supremely confident or brainless.  Her responses to Nikolai's increasingly agitated monologues are short and, often, non sequitur.  The film implies that there is something going on between Olga and Nikolai that underwrites the frantic vehemence of Nikolai's ripostes.  (Perhaps, they have been lovers; or, perhaps, Olga has rejected an erotic invitation made by him.)   Nikolai, whom we have thought to be an unbeliever, seems determined that someone show him that he is wrong -- it is as if he is making desperate arguments about evil in the world in the hope that Olga will refute what he says.  The discussion revolves around a parable reported in three of the Gospels involving a faithless steward who has been given authority over the Master's vineyard.  The steward kills emissaries of the Master sent to check on the vineyard, including, at last, the Master's own son.  Olga says that the parable is obviously about the rejection of Jesus by the Jews to whom he had been sent.  Olga says the parable doesn't prove much of anything and argues that the core of the Gospel is in the Sermon on the Mount.  She asserts that where people behave kindly toward one another and live in peace, the Kingdom of Heaven has been established on Earth.  But Nikolai is anxious to show that earthly life is a nightmare over which Evil presides.  He says that Evil always prevails and announces a strictly Manichean view of existence -- Evil is co-equal with Good and, for this reason, the world is a battlefield.  And since all men die, and death is evil, the power of wickedness prevails in human existence.  Olga says that men should do good in accord with their consciences. But Nikolai says that conscience may also be evil or the dictates of an evil Master.  Ivan the Terrible did good but was evil himself.  Therefore, an Evil Master can encourage Good in the world.  This argument seems to actually frighten the five disputants into silence, although they have also finished eating their desserts.

The company adjourns to a drawing room where the characters stand like statues on plinths, located about seven feet from each other.  (I question whether this sort of staging suggests that this extended sequence shot was made during COVID and the scene was designed to keep the speakers apart from one another.)  This section is called "Madelein" -- which turns out to be the name of the feisty dark-haired woman who responds sometimes cynically to the arguments of the others but, who like Eduoard, doesn't really take sides.  Again, Nikolai is the primary interlocutor.  He announces that Evil is defeated only by the Resurrection.  Further, he reveals that he is staunch believer in a personal resurrection.  This is the answer for him as the prevalence of death and evil in the world.  Curiously, Olga, who is a rationalist, doesn't believe in a personal resurrection -- she denounces the idea as wishful thinking and myth.  At this point, it seems that Olga and Nikolai have changed places with respect to their arguments-- Nikolai is a believer and Olga seems to be a skeptic.  Nikolai says that he has in his room a 30 page story about the Anti-Christ written by a monk named Pansophius.  (The others remark that Nicolai's room is full of wonders like Ali Baba's cave.)  Nikolai departs to get the manuscript that he proposes to read.  He walks toward the camera and disappears off-screen.  The others discuss the fact that since the 1870's, the light has faded from the world.  They means this literally:  the light cast by the sun has changed and there is less clarity in what can be seen and the world seems dimmer and less radiant.  Olga is not involved in this final colloquy and is not within the frame.  Someone says that the world is no longer limpid and that the Devil's tail, a kind of pollution, casts its shadow over everything.  With this observation, the screen goes black and the film ends.  

I viewed the movie is three sittings and found it tolerable and even interesting.  But it's too long for its pay-off which is negligible and, therefore, the movie will not be to most tastes.  In interviews, Puiu has said that the film is crammed with small details that rupture continuity or that are otherwise meaningful but that it would take "three viewings" to notice most of these things.  Very few people are going to watch this movie three times -- most will not get past the first hour or so.  Puiu notes that a framed picture shows the great mathematician Euler and that another picture on the wall shows "The Seven Bridges of Koenigsberg".  The mathematical conundrum posed by the seven bridges of Koenigsberg was devised by Euler -- but Puiu doesn't explain what this topological puzzle has to do with the theological and political arguments posed by the film. (The riddle is whether there is a path over the seven bridges that doesn't require any bridge to be crossed twice --- this  turns out to be surprisingly profound and complex problem in topology.)  Puiu also notes that the story of the Anti-Christ which is part of Solyvyov's source material is about thirty pages and mostly comprised of prophecies that history has proven to be correct -- at least so the director maintains.  But he says that instead of filming Nikolai reading the story, he simply depicts it in the revolution that occurs at the end of Section III.  In the source material, the lady that Puiu calls Madelein is simply denominated "the Lady".  Puiu says that he has named her after Proust's madeleine.  But, again, he doesn't explain why Proust is relevant in any way to the movie.  Puiu says in interviews that he was a product of materialist Marxist- Leninist education and that he was raised to find ridiculous the piety of his grandparents.  But when the Communist regime collapsed Puiu discovered that the only people who had persistently and heroically opposed tyranny in Romania were the Christians many of whom were tortured and killed for their opposition.  This fact drove Puiu to read the Russian novel or treatise.  And he has read the book many times thereafter, professing a certain obsession with it.  The picture looks realistic on the surface, but it's obviously not documentary in any respect and the events portrayed could not occur in reality -- no one could be so continuously eloquent and listeners would not be so patient as shown in the film.  The people in the movie behave as if enchanted and the chalet is a domain of fantasy, an idealized setting where ideas of the sort raised by the film can be endlessly, if fruitlessly, debated.  The movie begins with an anecdote promised but not told and ends with Nikolai venturing off-screen to find a manuscript that we will not see him read. (/And, in between, someone promises an anecdote that is never stated.)  The film seems to suggest that debate on the subjects of  religious and political violence, good and evil, and the meaning of death are by definition interminable and can not be brought to any conclusion.  Nikolai"s argument that Evil is only defeated if we are personally resurrected seems dramatized when everyone is shot and, then, appears unscathed as if the violent insurrection never occurred in the first place.  But it's unclear what sort of resurrection is intended here since the intervening shots are icy and geometric and look like out-takes from Last Year at Marienbad.  And the fact that somewhere in the house, the old Count is bleeding to death doesn't exactly provide solace to the viewer.  

I've watched the movie so that you don't have to.  Probably, this is the sort of indeterminate film in which every viewer extracts his or her own, necessarily incomplete, meaning.  

Succession

 I came late to HBO's Succession, a melodrama about a dysfunctional family of multi-billionaire siblings scheming against one another with respect to the titular transfer of control over a multi-media empire from their elderly father Logan to the second generation.  (It's rumored that the series is based on conniving heirs to Rupert Murdoch and his sinister enterprises, including Fox News.)  The premise of the show seems influenced old family TV melodramas like Dallas, although there's a post-modern infusion of snark that makes the series also seem somewhat similar to insult-comedies like Veep.  The program is in its fourth iteration and has just aired its "finale", which is not so much an ending as a to-be-continued tease.  I didn't watch the first two seasons of Succession and picked up the show mid-stream in its third series. The show has engaging actors and is well-performed and some of the situations are quite compelling -- it is sufficiently entertaining for me to enjoy watching each episode, programs that I air in the old way, waiting until Sunday evening at 8:00 pm for my weekly appointment with the show.  Succession is highly regarded critically and has many things to recommend it.  Furthermore, it's well-written (if highly repetitious) on a line-by-line basis.  But, in general, the show is very sloppy, haphazardly plotted, ridiculous, and not nearly as smart as it pretends to be:  the series is shallow, as befits a comedy-drama about a scheming dynasty of oligarchs and haplessly cynical.  When I first began watching the show, I understood the characters and their motivations, but couldn't grasp the plot -- I couldn't figure why events were occurring and what they meant.  I just assumed that this was because I had entered the action in media res and didn't know the backstory.  But this feeling of arriving late to the party has persisted now through 15 episodes and I have to conclude that my sense of discomfiture arises from the poorly designed and wholly arbitrary plot.  The reason that the show doesn't make much sense in its longer narrative arcs is that the narrative isn't well designed and information that the viewer should possess is simply never supplied.  This isn't a modernist bow toward ambiguity and indeterminacy, but, rather, simple incompetence -- the writers don't bother to provide sufficient establishing information for the convoluted narrative involving corporate governances, stock options, proxy fights and mergers and acquisitions.  In fact, the show has contempt for its audience in this regard -- it's as if the writers have concluded that the viewers are too dim-witted to be able to understand the legal machinations on offer and so explicative information is simply not provided.  In fact, the audience is spared this sort of information because presumably the writers don't understand these subjects either.

In the Fourth Series, Kendall, the eldest of three full-blood siblings -- they have an older half-brother from another mother who is a politician -- has turned against the family enterprise, a wide-ranging empire of businesses that includes a cruise lines.  Apparently, although this is never fully explained, the family is somehow complicit with sexual harassment of cruise-line staff and, indeed, may have condoned a murder.  Kendall cooperates with the Department of Justice and provides evidence as to the business enterprises wrongdoing.  This is in the context of longstanding feud between the mentally unstable Kendall and his father, Logan, the vicious and ruthless patriarch of the clan who keeps teasing his retirement from the business but refuses to make his exit.  (The overarching plot of the series is that Logan forms tentative alliances with each of his three children with his second wife -- Kendall, Shiv, and Roman.  Then, he pits the kids against themselves by promoting one of them as a favor and implying that this child will take over the business.  The strategy operates on the principle of "divide and conquer" and keeps the ambitious, emotionally damaged siblings fighting among themselves so that they are unable to oust their father from his throne.)  The family panics about Kendall's revelations and schemes to sacrifice a couple of superfluous kin to the feds -- Shiv's husband, Tom, who is handsome doofus, is offered to the prosecutors with the idea that he will be sent to jail to divert the authorities from making claims against the others.  (This cynical scheme expands to implicate Greg, a cousin, who is also a doofus and fall-guy -- if need be the family will send him to jail as well.)  The federal prosecution, after serving as the motivation for about four episodes, simply fizzles out.  The scriptwriters have the ultimate deus ex machina on hand -- Logan is a kingmaker and his right-wing media empire, a surrogate for Fox, controls the White House and can, apparently, demand favors at will.  But this deus ex machina basically means that no prosecutions will ever succeed and no wrongdoing can be punished -- thereby, rendering weirdly inert and nugatory acres of narrative.  Kendall is bipolar apparentlynd sponsors a lavish utterly over-the-top birthday party for himself.  He's planning to sing and guests enter the gala through a pink tube that is supposed to represent his mother's birth canal; there's a bower-like corridor where people walk past flunkeys hiding in the faux foliage to compliment the passers-by.  The party doesn't buy Kendall happiness; his father sends an insulting card and Kendall has a nervous breakdown.  Previously, Logan has toyed with the possibility of a merger with another oligarch, a guy with a huge mansion on an island near Cape Cod.   Before the falling out with Kendall, Logan helicoptered to the island, engaged in some negotiations -- these sorts of oligarchs basically just insult one another; this is imagined by the scriptwriters to be their style of negotiation.  Logan, whose health is failing, collapses during a long walk in the dunes, seemingly engineered by the equally nasty oligarch to put stress on the elderly patriarch. (He is, of course, too tough to acknowledge his physical limitations -- various characters assert that the old man, well into his eighties, is having sex with his twenty-year old assistant and even plotting to have a child with her.)   When the deal with the Cape Cod billionaire collapses, Logan and Roman, who is now the old man's favorite, explore a deal with a Silicon Valley internet mogul, amusingly played by the ultra laconic Alexanders Skarsgaard.  This tycoon lives on Lake Como or some place in the Alps.  After some contentious discussions, again basically just exchanges of profane insults, the internet tycoon rebuffs Logan and Roman's advance.  Films about the ultra-wealthy always feature set-pieces in which a family gathering exposes tensions in the clan and works out plot points.  (The progenitor of this narrative device is the big ballroom sequence in Visconti's The Leopard.)  All the characters arrive at a lavish estate in Tuscany for the wedding of Logan's second wife, now in her early seventies, to a nursing home magnate from London.  Kendall, who is ostracized, has a breakdown and, ambiguously, attempts suicide.  Logan, who has been favoring Roman, cuts him off cold when it is revealed that this son has been sending "dick pics" to one of the company's highest ranking female executives -- also a co-conspirator with Roman in previous efforts to unseat the old man.  When it becomes known that Logan is conspiring to sell the empire to the Internet tycoon, and, about to cut the kids out of the succession, finally, the three siblings form an alliance (they have been sniping at one another previously) to oust the old man.  They are convinced that if they form a united front they can seize the company.  They are sure that this can be accomplished and hurry by limousine to Logan's Tuscan mansion to confront him.  But Logan works some obscure maneuver, something involving proxy votes or something with his ex-wife who is getting married a few pictureseque miles away, and the kids are thwarted again.  (Thereby, setting up Season Five in which the same events will, no doubt, be reiterated -- that is, a palace coup planned by the siblngs but than repelled by the wily Logan.)  

None of this is presented in a way that makes any sense.  The siblings are convinced that they can oust Logan until, suddenly, there's a phone call or a text message and the whole putsch falls apart in the course of 30 seconds of frantic dialogue.  The device for thwarting the siblings is never adequately explained or foreshadowed in the slightest.  Stated impolitely, the script writers have just pulled this out of their ass to keep the narrative balls juggled by the plot in the air.  We have no idea what happened or why. (It seems to have something to do with equity in the family's business held by Logan's ex-wife who has just been married when the palace putsch is attempted.  Similarly, Kendall has a spectacular breakdown, squatting in the dust and crying that he has killed a kid.  We have no idea what he is talking about although the characters seem fully informed.  Succession is an example of Tv that doesn't stand on its own -- the show has an official podcast that presumably explains to disgruntled viewers exactly what happened in this week's episode.  The show has a very interesting cast, but the players are, mostly, one-trick ponies -- the siblings petulantly quarrel and make demands on their father which he rebuffs with cruel and obscene retorts.  The siblings, then, mimic that they are wounded by their father's selfishness, but, nonetheless, continue to scramble to seek his favor.  The show's similarity to Veep is that everyone is wholly self-absorbed, egotistical, and that the dialogue is clogged with ornate insults and continuous profanity -- some of this stuff is witty, but it becomes wearying in the long-run.  There's lots of magnificent stuff in the series, spectacular manor houses and heli-pads, drone shots over exotic resorts and grand mansions in Italy and the Alps and the Croatian Riviera.  The lawyers' offices and posh conference rooms all are accurately observed and everything has the specious warrant of veracity as to the way people dress and how they arrange their houses and offices suites.  But the subject matter is thin to the point of vanishing -- none of the characters has any substance beyond what we observe as to their contentious relationship with the old man.   Everything reduces ultimately to a competition for the favor of a vicious lout a bit like Donald Trump, although infinitely richer and more clever.  Brian Cox snarls effectively as the patriarch, but, he seems rather frail (something the TV show can't conceal) and his bark seems far worse than his capability to bite.  Nonetheless, the show has fantastic production values and is compelling, even though the plot is pure "situation comedy" -- that is, just the same thing over and over again.  And the theme music is weirdly compelling, a sort of forlorn lurching waltz that can be restyled like the plot into a seemingly infinite series of variations, but also, sounds the same.  

Los Huercos ("The Bones")

 Los Huercos is a short film directed by Christobal Leon and Joaquin Cocina.  The picture seems to be a co-production between the streaming service MUBI and an art museum in Santiago, Chile.  The little movie is a gem, very disconcerting and macabre.  The film has several layers of meaning:  on the surface, the picture is a whimsically gruesome stop-action animation involving a scary-looking doll-like necromancer and the corpses with which she traffics.  However, the film also embodies a complex political allegory.

The movie is shot in sepia-tone, rather grimy-looking black and white. (It has a suitably strange soundtrack, a plaintive violin sounding over an array of sinister clicks and high-voltage hums.) A title claims that this is the world's first animated film, discovered in 2005 in the Santiago museum archives and, then, restored by Leon and Cocina.  The film is said to date to 1900.  (This is all fraudulent).  The picture reminds me of a Quay Brothers production, although rather more clear and approachable; the picture also has affinities with Jan Svankmayer's surrealist films made in Czechoslavakia.  The film-makers note that their inspiration is a Lithuanian entomologist, Ladislaw Starovich, who worked at a museum where he planned to make films showing living insects.  The hot lights killed the insects and, so, supposedly Starovich animated the bugs by using tiny wires and shot them in motion using stop-action.  (Whether this is true or just another hoax perpetrated by the directs in unclear to me.)

The film begins with an image of a cameo of pale woman with a rather ghostly appearance.  We are informed that this is Constanza Nordenflicht, a necromancer who dug up the bones of two men named Jaime Guzman and Diego Portales.  She is said to  have resurrected these dead men and played with the cadavers.  The movie shows a wall with rotting wallpaper that peels away into a heap of shavings at the foot of a wall that is pierced through the boards to reveal a tiny curtained stage.  Constanza is behind the curtain -- she's a doll-like figure, manipulated like a marionette by strings attached to her limbs.  Constanza makes some occult gestures and summons up a heap of dirt from which disconnected bones crawl -- they writhe like earthworms.  The dirt is animate and moves around lifting objects up onto a dais.  Constanza makes gestures that cause the bones to wiggle and dance.  She cumulates the bones to try to make skeletons but the remains can't be properly reassembled.  Then, she puts the two skulls and the rest of the bones in a wicker basket and walks through a landscape of spidery wilted trees to schematic church (a chair disassembles to form a steeple, cross, and a doorway to the chapel).  In the chapel, Constanza crosses herself, lights a fire, and sets the bones on fire.  This action puts meat on the bones:  we see severed limbs, torsos that appear to have been dissected and split apart, and the decapitated heads of a man wearing glasses and a younger handsome fellow.  Both of these heads are very distinctly dead, inert, seemingly partly decomposed, with lesions on them, and dull, vacant eyes.  Constanza, then, uses her magic to try to reassemble the bodies -- mostly she gets this all wrong, creating monstrous assemblies of hacked-up meat.  Finally, she gets the corpses in some semblance of human form and, then, conjures clothing for them.  We watch the action now through an iris cut-out in the shape of a heart.  Constanza caresses the young man with the lesion on his cheek.  She seems to be joined to him in a service presided over by the other corpse with glasses.  (He has a cross sprouting incongruously out of his occiput.)  Constanza may be married to the young man's cadaver.  She has a marriage license which is ripped in two.  Then, she writes her name in reverse, causing the letters to vanish with the penstrokes.  The young man, Diego Portales also "unwrites" his signature.  The marriage licenses is burned and, after waving goodbye, Constanza simply vanishes in a poof of smoke.  The two inanimate corpses remain.  They become covered with something white, possibly dust as time passes.  The film ends with a title about a "white marriage of a white groom to a white bride by a white priest who entrusted them to the white."  This seems to be a surrealist poem printed on the screen in archaic font.  On the face of things, the film seems to be about a woman who conjures up corpses, plays with them, and, even, marries one before vanishing -- the film could be interpreted as an essay on the nature of moving pictures which contrive the illusion of motion from individual still frames, all severed from one another.  Films are like Frankenstein's monster, inanimate matter stuck together in a montage that makes the corpse seem to move.

But there's a political allegory at work here.  Diego Portales was the architect of Chile's first constitution, an oligarch who limited the franchise to wealthy property-holding men in the late 1830's.  He was assassinated and became a national martyr and a hero to the Right.  Augusto Pinochet said that Portales patriotic spirit had fused Chile into a modern nation.  Jaime Guzman was a Catholic constitutional lawyer, a close advisor to Pinochet, who was assassinated outside of the Catholic University in Santiago in 1991.  This explains why Guzman sometimes grows a cross out of his head and why he seems to preside over the wedding between Constanza and Portales.  (Portales' wife and children died and, although he didn't marry again, his mistress was Constanza Nordenflicht -- presumable the cameo in the movie is actually an image of her.)  The woman seems to be an apparition signifying Chile, a country in which right-wing forces are continuously resurrected to oppress the people.  (The movie was conceived in 2019 during the struggle to adopt a new Constitution in Chile, a political enterprise that resulted in much right-wing violence -- this is called the Estallido Social.  These protests, originally initiated when the cost of subway fare increased in Santiago, become violent:  churches were fire-bombed and there were massive demonstrations attacked by the police.  These demonstrations were in support of Chile's new constitution.. Interestingly, Portales' bones, thought to be lost, were found during renovations of the Santiago Metropolitan Cathedral and forensically identified in 2005.  (Ladislaw Starowicz was a real filmmaker and, apparently, a pioneer in surrealist stop-action movies; Terry Gilliam thinks his Mascot is one of the ten greatest animated films.  I will have to learn more about him.)