Celine and Julie go Boating

 Highly acclaimed (particularly by David Thomson), Jacques Rivette's 1974 Celine and Julie go Boating has been well-nigh impossible to watch for 40 years.  I know that I saw the picture when I was in college and was completely baffled by it.  I must have been living near campus when the picture was shown at the University Film Society because I would surely have missed the late bus back to Eden Prairie if travel back to my parent's home had been required.  The movie clocks in at 193 minutes and, almost certainly, I would have been late to the downtown bus connections necessary to transport me back to the remote suburb where I lived during most of the time I attended college.  In those days, long movies always made be nervous because late-night connections between the 16 bus (campus to Hennepin Avenue) and the 12 bus out to the far west suburbs (as Eden Prairie was considered in the mid-seventies) were tenuous -- if I arrived downtown after 12:15, I might be stranded with the pimps and whores, the deranged Vietnam vets and drunks on Hennepin.  Adding to my anxiety was the fact that films shown at the U Film Society were almost never screened on time, often subject to technical delays and would only be shown after the audience had viewed several "coming attractions" notes scribbled in black magic marker on plastic roasting under an opaque projector in the projection booth.  These notes were often illegible, with bizarre phrasing and weird spelling errors, and the subject of much hilarity in the audience -- except for me: every minute lost trying to decipher Al Milgrom's handwriting on the slide was a minute that might cause me to miss my transfer in downtown Minneapolis.  (Al Milgrom was for many, many years -- probably almost 60 -- the proprietor of the University Film Society; he knew people like Jean-Luc Godard and Werner Herzog by first name.) 

Rivette was the most disciplined, rigorous and austere of the French Nouvelle Vague directors.  Andre Tarkovsky wrote a book about cinema called Sculpting in Time and this poetic description applies to Rivette's movies.  Several of his films are enormously long -- Out 1 is more than 13 hours long; his most famous picture La Belle Noiseuse  also runs for more than three hours -- it's about the same length as Celine and Julie go Boating.  Rivette's movie about Joan of Arc was also very long and released as two full feature-length pictures.  Celine and Julie is daunting because it, often, seems a bit like a home-movie -- some of the performances are amateurish and improvised and the location camera-work is sometimes sketchy almost most of the film is very handsome, pretty in an Impressionistic style that seems to come naturally to French directors. (The film looked grainy and washed-out when I saw it 45 years ago -- this is because the picture was shot on 16mm blown up to 35mm format.  The Criterion transfer, however, is ravishing).  Rivette's highly abstract and cerebral mise-en-scene is enlivened by the performances of his two leading ladies.  The director is obviously in love with them and his camera reflects his adoration.  If the film were shorter, Celine and Julie would probably be Rivette's most accessible and engaging picture since, if nothing else, spectators will be charmed by the actresses featured in the movie.  But Rivette also indulges his stars and lets them mug for the camera -- Celine in particular exploits her huge eyes and waifish features in a way that some viewers might find distasteful.  I like the actress in this picture -- she's is a French version of a very young Sissy Spacek -- but her performance is often over-the-top and too whimsically saccharine to be acceptable to viewers more hard-nosed than this writer.  Juliet Berto, who plays Celine, channels Charlie Chaplin somehow fused with Audrey Hepburn:  she's like a sexualized "little Tramp".  A little of this goes a long way and the movie is three hours and 13 minutes long.  Dominique Labourier as Julie, a hoydenish redhead, is less irritating -- but she is also encouraged to overact in a number of scenes.  Since Celine and Julie are on-screen for the entirety of the film, a viewer's tolerance for their quirky acting in this film is a prerequisite for admiring the picture.  The film, sometimes, implies a lesbian relationship between the two women but, in fact, their behavior in the film, although often highly seductive, is really pre-sexual.  They act like little girls on an adventure, a bit like the female characters in Lynch's Blue Velvet (particularly Laura Dern), Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive.  In many ways, the movie seems to have had a  decisive impact on David Lynch -- it's obvious that his films bear the imprint of Celine and Julie  particular with respect to some the bizarre musical numbers in the picture and Nancy Drew mystery elements integral to the film's plot.  In effect, Celine and Julie are two Girl Scouts who work together (and have a good time) solving a strange mystery.

Julie, a librarian is aestivating in one of those eerie, empty and wind-swept public parks somewhere in Paris.  She is reading a book about magic and inscribes a sort of pentagram in the sand under her park bench.  The breeze stirs the trees in a mysterious way and, then, we see Celine, a kind of phantom apparition, all feathers and boas, darting across the park. (She seems a spirit like Ariel from Shakespeare's Tempest summoned by the pentagram and flitting through the square.  Intrigued Julie chases Celine when she drops her sunglasses in the pink sand and, like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, the apparition draws her down a rabbit-hole, in this case, a kind of chutes and ladders pursuit through Paris -- this scene is set in Montmartre and Rivette's Paris is equipped with all sorts of ladder-like steps and deep wooded declivities.  The pursuit is scrupulously observed but unnatural -- for instance, when Celine rides a funicular up to the summit of Sacre Couer in Montmartre, Julie keeps pace effortlessly running alongside the ascending car.  I've climbed some of those steps in Montmartre and it would be very, very difficult to run quickly enough to keep pace with the tram climbing the hillside -- particularly in the sweltering heat that the film depicts.  The two women don't speak with one another until 26 minutes have elapsed.  In the meantime, we have learned that Celine states her profession to be "magician" and that Julie is a librarian in very typically French library -- patrons are encouraged to smoke so long as they do so discretely.  Celine encounters Julie, at last, at her apartment and, at about the half hour mark, the plot, as it were, begins to develop albeit very deliberately.

Julie and Celine complete one another's sentences and seem to be able to anticipate each other's thoughts.  The film suggests that they are two aspects of a single sensibility and they are shown to be linked in innumerable ways.  (When Celine can't appear at a cabaret where she does magic tricks, Julie takes over for her -- both women are astonishingly incompetent as performers:  Celine's magic tricks are risible and Julie's singing is off-key and arhythmic.)  In one scene, Celine meets Julie's boyfriend (wearing an implausible red wig) and the man, thinking she is his beloved, proposes to her complete with a chivalric bend of the knee and ring -- Celine tells him to go and "masturbate in the roses", blithely giving the ring to some other girl sitting in the public square. (Julie doesn't seem to care; and when Celine's boyfriend calls, she imitates the other woman and breaks up with him, encouraging the suitor to "masturbate in the daisies.") Rivette is at pains to show that Celine is a liar or, more charitably, a fabulist -- he stages two long sequences in which the young woman spins elaborate and ridiculous lies.  However, Julie seems to take at face value, Celine's account that she has fled from a mysterious household where there is a child, two women, and a domineering man -- and that these people are now pursuing her.  While Celine is cavorting with Julie's boyfriend, Julie goes to the mysterious house, an ivy-clad gothic heap of brick at the center of a secret garden.  Coming from that place some time later, Julie is amnesiac -- she can't recall what happened to her when she was in the house and, during Celine's cabaret show -- the magician dressed like an emaciated Marlene Dietrich with a top hat and fishnet stockings up to her crotch -- Julie has flashbacks to strange and sinister events taking place in the dwelling in the suburbs.  Gradually, we come to understand that the house contains personages involved in a melodramatic narrative that has a texture completely different from the rather happenstance and quotidian events involving Julie and Celine:  a man has made a vow to his dying wife that he will never betray her with another woman at least while their child Madlyn is alive; but he is living with his dead wife's seductive sister, Camille, and his own sister who appears to harbor incestuous desires for him; Madlyn is sickly and under the care of a nurse named Angele -- the nurse is alternately played by Celine or Julie who appear in that role in the ghostly mise-en-scene in the gloomy house.  This melodrama embedded within the film has the character of one of Celine's elaborate fabrications, but is also derived from certain memories that Julie retains from her childhood -- in other words, the gothic tale seems to be a  joint creation by the two women, a sort of folie a deux.  The girls set about to investigate this melodrama and, after each adventure in the haunted house (they take  turns going there), they return with more details as to the narrative unfolding in that place -- the girls also return with a red bloody handprint on their shoulders after escapade, something like the letter "M" marked on the back of Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang's movie.  Access to events in the house is secured by an aid to memory,, like the madeleine in Proust -- in this case, it's a magical lifesaver (or "sweet" candy) that the women find tucked under the tongue after their exhausting excursions.  The story in the house is odd on many levels -- it is said to be taking place in New England and involves a trunk of clothes that the dead woman has left in the attic and that is off-limits until Camille opens it and dresses like deceased in order to seduce the man.  Apparently, someone murders the little girl to free the widower from his vow of chastity.  (The story in the house is apparently based on an 1896 novel by Henry James The Other House.)  The actors within the story are like sleepwalkers trapped in an endless time-loop --events in the house  recur over and over again, the only variant being the identity of the taciturn nurse who is sometimes Julie and sometimes Celine.  Ultimately, the heroines decide to take action to save the child in the home who keeps getting murdered.  The film's middle ninety minutes involve Celine and Julie slowly piecing  together the story underway in the haunted house.  In the film's last forty minutes, they both go to the home and interrupt the story underway there.  The dreamwalking actors in the ghost story are filmed from odd, indeterminate angles in this part of the movie and their faces are covered with white and grey paste like actors in a Kabuki play.  They seem to wind down like mechanical automatons as Julie and Celine mug with them and try to disrupt their sleepwalking-- although the figures trapped in the gruesome story don't notice the two girls; the women are literally invaders from another narrative and can't be seen by the dying actors in the house.  There are some amusing effects in the last episode in the house -- one of the girls misses her cue as Angele, the silent nurse, because she's been using the toilet.  Celine puts a paper crown on the melancholy male figure -- he continues to recite his lines without noticing the crown on his head.  When the figures in the story engage in a sort Totentanz, a macabre waltz, Julie and Celine put a tango record on the player and dance manically alongside the robotic characters in the embedded story.  At last, the girls flee the house with the little girl in tow and go boating.  The scenes with the rowboat are filmed in gorgeous, luminous light and, as Julie rows upstream with Celine and Madlyn whom they have rescued at their prow, they see the man and the two women from the  haunted house, standing like figures in a tableaux as the current carries them in their boat downstream.  The film's last scene explains the movie's enigmatic opening title "Usually it begins like this --"  We see Celine now aestivating in the sultry park.  When she looks up from the book that she is reading, Celine sees Julie fleeing through the park; Julie drops something and Celine begins to pursue her.  In other words, just as the figures in the haunted house were trapped in a tragic narrative, Celine and Julie are embedded in a time-loop that is more whimsical, but, nonetheless, a narrative from which they can not escape -- that narrative, of course, is the movie we have been watching.  

The surface texture of the movie is dense with allusions and thematic motifs.  Julie is a red head; she makes a bloody Mary for Celine who has a bloody, scuffed knee -- the blonde woman in the haunted house cuts her hand on a champagne flute and Julie tends to that wound (as does Celine alternatively); Julie keeps a red hand effigy in her apartment; the book of magic that she reads has a bright red cover...and so on.  Locked trunks, symbolic of repressed memories, are repeatedly opened -- they are full of extravagant numbers of dolls.  The movie is full of dolls and marionettes and puppets, suggesting, it seems, that the characters are all puppets in the hands of the narrator (and film director).  There are innumerable references to other movies -- Rivette was a film critic before he became a director and we can see the entire history of cinema in various aspects of the picture, from Feuillade's silent serials (the film is subtitled "Phantom Ladies over Paris") through Hitchcock to the Czech new wave director Vera Chytilova whose film Daisies is decisive as to the appearance and staging of scenes with the two heroines.  At times, the girls stare at the camera while recalling events in the haunted house; it's as if they are fixedly watching a movie.  On all levels, the film is fascinating but its extreme length, part of the movie's curious immersive appeal, really can't be justified.  I have a bus to catch somewhere and this movie is taking too much of my time.  As with many of Rivette's films, the mood of mystery, sinister conspiracy, and magical arcana suggest that something extraordinary is about to occur -- but Rivette doesn't really deliver on that promise.  The movie is remarkable but, also, a bit tedious and the final pay-off doesn't seem commensurate to all of the work required of the viewer.  That said, most critics regard Celine and Julie go Boating as sublime and, viewed in a certain light, those opinions seem plausible to me -- I just don't wholly share them.

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin

In the middle of Werner Herzog's  2019 Nomad:  In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, the film director is shown conversing with a climbing guide in Patagonia.  Behind the two men, there is a vast, ominous landscape of cloudy peaks and grim glaciers.  Next to Herzog, the writer Bruce Chatwin's rucksack rests on a stone.  The guide starts to talk about Herzog's adventures, particularly the difficulties arising from shooting in the Cerro del Torre for the director's Scream of Stone.  Herzog interrupts the man and says that he is not the protagonist of this film and that they should speak instead about Chatwin.  It's a signature moment for the documentary, ostensibly about Chatwin, but, of course, also a portrait of Herzog and his particular obsessions.  Herzog regards himself as Chatwin's spiritual twin and, ultimately, documenting aspects of his life becomes an account of the director's own adventures.  This seems self-indulgent (and all of Herzog's films can be accused of this vice), but, in practice, the film succeeds -- it is probably Herzog's most tender film and, perhaps, his most revealing.  

Nomad arises out of a commission by the BBC to produce a film commemorating the 30th anniversary of Chatwin's death.  Although there is copious visual material depicting Chatwin, Herzog almost never shows the writer in the documentary -- the portrait is made from Chatwin's prose which is frequently read aloud as counterpoint to the often astonishing images comprising the movie.  All of Herzog's trademark subjects are on display:  the film is about landscape as a manifestation of the soul, the virtues of exploring the world on foot, and the fact that most treks end in mystery:  the more you explore, the more that you realize that the world confronts us with a series of insoluble mysteries.  Herzog eschews a chronological or biographical approach to Chatwin's life.  Instead, he organizes the material into seven sections that are each, themselves, examples of ecstatic essay-film.  The approach is fundamentally fractal -- any part of the film will ultimately yield the whole of the picture.  Chatwin died at 49, an early victim of AIDS.  Because he had denied that he was fundamentally homosexual, the nature of his malady was concealed at the time of his final illness.  Herzog claims to have been present in the hours preceding Chatwin's death.  Chatwin's appearance was horrifying -- Herzog includes a tiny film clip of Chatwin's last BBC interview to persuade us of that fact (we see a skull with glaring eyes talking).  Herzog showed Chatwin a documentary that he had just completed -- Herdsmen of the Sun.  Curiously, this documentary is Herzog's most sexually ambiguous film -- it shows nomadic tribesmen preening and singing for the camera:  the men are heavily made-up with white painted faces and they grimace and gurn for the camera, popping out their eyes and displaying their teeth.  The bizarre performance is intended to impress a group of rather dour, dark-clad women, all of them entirely nondescript.  Herzog scores the men's exhibition to the music of the world's last castrato singing something like "Ave Maria" around the turn of the century.  It's an altogether alarming film and Herzog says that Chatwin faded in and out of delirium while watching it.  How much of this true is uncertain,  Chatwin was a notorious fabulist and so is Herzog. 

Much of the movie is about nomads and tribal people rapidly vanishing from the world.  Herzog films aboriginal communities in Australia -- his subject is ostensibly Chatwin's The Song Lines about "dream tracks" comprising the relationship between the indigenous people and their landscape.  In the course of this part of the film, Herzog butts up against the fact that many of the tribal traditions, chants, and artifacts that interested Chatwin are forbidden to outsiders.  The aboriginal informants can't exactly explain how the Song Lines are embedded in their consciousness (which is also the landscape) and old men reciting ancestral poems pause and fall silent -- Herzog isn't certain whether this is because the singer has forgotten the words or is concealing them from the camera.  (Chatwin was influenced by an Australian anthropologist who originally collected many of the songs, Ted Strehlow -- some of the film is shot in Hermanntown, an aboriginal settlement where Strehlow's father was a Lutheran minister:  we see local folks singing in a Lutheran choir, apparently, to Herzog's dismay.  Herzog blurs the cover of Strehlow's book because it is said to depict a magic talisman never to be shown to outsiders or the non-initiate.)   Australia is one of three focal points in the film:  the other two are Patagonia (the subject of Chatwin's most famous book) and Wales where Herzog stages interviews with Chatwin's widow, Elizabeth, in "the bare ruined choirs" of an ancient and abandoned abbey.  (Several "talking head" type interviews with Nicholas Shakespeare were filmed at the Bodleian library, the place possessing Chatwin's archives -- Shakespeare is Chatwin's biographer and a good interview subject.  Herzog was given Chatwin's rucksack when the writer died and he is overcome with emotion as he caresses the rugged old backpack next to him.)  The film begins in Patagonia exploring the cave where giant sloths once lived --Chatwin's motivation for his trip to Patagonia was to visit the place where a family artifact, a mummified patch of giant sloth fur and bones, was found by his grandfather.  Herzog is matter-of-fact about the tourists crowding the cave.  (Since Chatwin's book was published, the remote cave has become a well-known tourist destination.)  He is similarly matter-of-fact about the New Age folks at Avebury literally hugging dolmen, chanting, and using dowsing rods to trace ley lines in the landscape.  Herzog doesn't seem to have contempt for these New Age pilgrims and, in fact, the theme of the ley lines charged with energy crisscrossing the land intrigues him and finds a visual correlate in beautiful aerial images made by drones indefatigably surveying the terrain below and coursing forward straight as an arrow toward the horizon. Chatwin visited Herzog when he was filming Cobra Verde in Ghana -- the movie is a free adaptation of Chatwin's novel The Viceroy of Ouidah -- and this provides an excuse for the director to showcase some spectacular footage from that film, particularly a battle shot with 800 naked Amazons and the appearance of a king carried on a sedan, the man garbed in daisy-yellow robes.  (The king carried on his sedan correlates to Chatwin's weakness at the time and Herzog's promise to have him hauled around the film location on "hammocks" borne by porters -- Chatwin had rallied and this turned out to be unnecessary.)  The film is also notable for fantastic and disturbing pictures of tribal people at Tierra del Fuego, taken at the end of the 19th century.  The images show naked men, covered in bizarre paint, sometimes wearing weird geometrically shaped hats that cover their faces.  In one photograph, naked men are sprawled across a dismal-looking meadow -- Herzog says that "we know only one thing:  that they are not dead.  Perhaps, they are somehow performing death."  Again, the remarkable images conclude in mystery -- the tribal people shown in the pictures are extinct and we have no idea as to the meaning of the elaborate rituals shown in the photographs.  These scenes rhyme with footage of a rock shelter in Australia where there are hundreds, if not thousands, of handprints on the stone walls.  Again, we have no idea what the prints mean.  Herzog defamiliarizes the images, saying that the longer we look, the stranger they seem and, at last, the viewer experiences a sort of febrile and visionary sense that the rock face is somehow porous and that the marks signify spirits trying to wriggle out of the stone or, in the alternative, traces of shamanistic practititioners who were attempting to enter into the rock itself. There is an alarming sequence showing a man climbing without rope or equipment, ascending over an impossible-looking overhang.  (This is part of Scream of Stone).  The film's mysterious final shot, a slow march up an ancient lane, seemingly in Wales, is particularly memorable and lovely.  The movie's remarkable images are wonderfully enhanced by the soundtrack -- choral music that seems in equal part immeasurably antique and modern, voices mingling and rising like some kind of rapt combination of Arvo Part and Byzantine chorale.  

Herzog's diary about his trek overland from Munich to Paris Going on Ice is a draft for the sort of prose that Chatwin successfully accomplished in his travel book In Patagonia -- in fact, Herzog's book is less entertaining, perhaps (after all it depicts waste-lands in Europe) but just as well written.  And there's no reason to doubt that Herzog is, in many ways, close spiritual kin to Chatwin.  Herzog is more ebullient and he comments, at some length, about Chatwin's weird shrieks when he laughed -- there was something, Herzog maintains, inevitably death-haunted and, even, lonely and anxious about the Englishman (who nevertheless seduced everyone he met and was always the center of attention.)  Herzog neglects the other side of Chatwin's character.  Two of Chatwin's novels are about people who never moved anywhere at all, people who were sedentary all their lives -- these are the books Utz and On the Black Mountain.  Chatwin had been Sotheby's youngest shareholder, and he was intrigued by the antithesis of nomadic wandering -- that is, remaining in one place to conserve artifacts or a collection that one has amassed.  (In Utz, the protagonist is a collector Dresden Meissen china and will not leave Communist Czechoslovakia because he is unwilling to abandon his precious porcelain; in On the Black Mountain, two men, twins, spend their whole life in a cottage under a dark mountain, sharing the same bed if I recall correctly.)  Chatwin was interested in artifacts, objets d'art and understood that these things could bind us -- even fetter us -- to one place.  Herzog's idiosyncratic portrait of Chatwin neglects this aspect of the writer and The Songlines, probably Chatwin's most accomplished book, can be read as a kind of nomadic wandering that is, nonetheless, so rooted in place that it, paradoxically, doesn't advance at all.  But, as I have noted at the outset, Herzog's film is as much a self-portrait as it is an attempt to represent Bruce Chatwin and, as always, the director ends up with a remarkable palimpsest, an image in which his own features are continuously blurring into images of Chatwin.

 

Bacurau

 Bacurau, a village in the Brazilian outback, is a very strange place.  When you come home from the big city (apparently Sao Paulo), the local schoolmaster, Mr. Plinio, slips a psychedelic pod under your tongue;  The town is full of ghosts and flying saucers and its not on official maps.  There's a sinister-looking museum on Main Street that's locked-up for very good reasons and the towns folk have "deactivated" their local Catholic Church -- at funerals they sing weird ominously pagan songs.  There's a troubadour with guitar who composes bawdy songs to taunt tourists.  And the village is feuding with local government official, Mayor Tony Junior, who brings books in dump-trucks for the town's public library -- he just has them dumped out in front of the building -- but who has also, apparently, cut off water to the town to punish it for its rebellious spirit.  And there's nine or so bad hombres hiding out in a strangely lit mansion (florescent tubes everywhere) on the outskirt of town.  This group of hired assassins, Forestaires, as they are called in the credits, is led by the whacko Michael -- played in memorably weird fashion by the ineluctably depraved and louche Udo Kier.  (I last saw Udo Kier hanging out in his underpants in the brothel in Fassbinder's Lola made in 1971 -- the dude was the Platonic essence of depravity, then, and he's even more nasty 48 years later.)  The film named for the town, Bacurau (which means predatory night-flying hawk) is even stranger.  This 2019 picture plays like a combination of El Topo, Jodorowsky's LSD Western and Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai -- one scene in which an elderly woman limps forward to administer retribution to a bad guy is stolen shot-for-shot from the Japanese film. Bacurau is action-packed and exceptionally entertaining.  It has its weaknesses, particularly from a narrative perspective, but the movie plows forward so aggressively that it leaves naysayers lost in its wake.

Bacurau is located in Pernambuco province in the Sertaos ("backlands") of Brazil's northeast.  (This is  the part of Brazil that periodically spawns messianic uprisings -- the rebellion of the murderous Counselor and, later, the apocalyptic insurrection at Canoes that Euclides da Cunha chronicled in the nation's national epic, Os Sertaos ("Rebellion in the Backlands), later adapted by Mario Vargas Llosa in his huge novel The Rebellion of the End of Time.  The movie is worth seeing for the incredible landscapes of the Brazilian sertaos, a sort of scrub desert blistered by huge rock outcroppings.)  In classic Hollywood style, we are introduced to the bizarre village and its equally bizarre denizens through the eyes of a new visitor.  Teresa has been living in Sao Paolo for several years, but she returns to the village to attend the funeral of her great grand-mother, Carmelita.  Carmelita is the town's matriarch and she is mourned at a funeral that slips into very strange chanting and dancing shortly after Teresa arrives.  With a psychedelic pod under her tongue, Teresa sees life-giving water pouring out of the old woman's casket.  The local grandee, Mayor Tony Junior, has shut off the water to the town.  (Teresa arrives in a Agua Potivel truck.)  However, a local guerilla, Lunga, has apparently seized the dam controlling the water -- he seems to be holding the water hostage for his own purposes.  An UFO hovers over everything, apparently intended to discomfit the "superstitious" locals -- however, they immediately recognize the UFO as merely a drone.  The real trouble in the village begins when someone jams the cell-phone signal.  Then, a bunch of loose horses thunder through town at midnight.  When two villagers ride out to the Ranch, they find everyone, including women and children, murdered there.  A couple of peculiar tourists from Rio are jetting around the neighborhood on motorbikes wearing garish biker outfits.  The tourists kill the villagers who have come to reconnoiter the massacre on the ranch.  When the tourists return to their gang, it's apparent that the town is besieged by nine or ten wholly psychopathic villains under the fey leadership of Udo Kier as Michael.  (The bad guys are so bad that they kill their own -- gunning down the motorcyclists for no good reason.)  The townsfolk don't take this lying down.  (In fact, the film lacks suspense because it's obviously that the inhabitants of Bacurau are far crazier and more innately homicidal then the bad guys -- Teresa's new boyfriend in town is renowned hit man named Payote (pronounced "Pay-cooch").  In fact, everyone in town enjoys watching a you-tube video featuring Payote's assassinations - it's called "Payote ten greatest hits" and consists of surveillance footages of the man shooting people).  If Payote is a dangerous customer, the berserker guerilla Lunga is even worse -- he favors cutting people into pieces with his machete.  The gang of assassins wanders into this buzz saw and are predictably slaughtered without doing any damage themselves.  It's implied that some of them are cooked in a stew and served to their compatriots, an apparent reference to another classic Brazilian film How Tasty was my Little Frenchman.  When the villains break into the local museum they find that it's full of archaic and scary-looking weapons as well as lots of pictures of mutilated corpses and heaps of human heads -- apparently, this is a place like Canoes in Os Sertaos where there has been, as they say, a long history of violence.  It turns out that Mayor Tony  Junior (rather implausibly) is behind the ill-fated assault on the town.  He makes the mistake of coming into town with a truck full of caskets -- the idea, I suppose, is to box up the dead villagers and bury them.  The villagers confront him, acknowledge that they under the influence of "powerful psychotropic drugs", and, then, capture him.  Mayor Tony knows that he's in for a bad time when he sees the heap of human heads that is all that remains of  his paid gunmen.  

The movie is peculiar on all levels.  The townsfolk are prone to strange martial dances which seem to be (like Elvis) based on kung fu fighting with one another.  Nominally, a science fiction picture (set in the near future), the film is best interpreted as a Western -- even though it begins with a showy prelude with satellites zipping around in outer space.  The picture is ostensibly uplifting in that the towns people are a racially and ethnically diverse group who all work together to massacre the bad hombres.  The violence is over-the-top including a scene in which a couple of villains (they are also diverse consisting of male and female psychopaths -- one couple copulate enthusiastically next to the corpse of one of their victims, gesturing all the time to the flying saucer that is filming them.) are slaughtered by a fat old man and an equally fat old woman who are completely naked.  The town's doctor Domingas (the Brazilian movie star Sonia Braga, now looking old and decrepit) is a lesbian drunk -- she has a young Black girl as a lover.  The mercenaries are spectacularly evil -- although amusingly Michael is enraged when someone calls him a Nazi -- and deserve what they get.  But they are so ludicrously outmatched by the truly fearsome villagers that there's no suspense at all in the final bloodbath.  The movie is brilliantly made -- it's directors Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornellas have a real feeling for this kind of genre movie.  The picture alternates between close-ups and extreme long shots featuring the terrifying landscape and the action is brilliantly filmed.  An opening sequence in which the water truck carrying Teresa passes a wreck on the highway -- a truck carrying caskets has been smashed to pieces and their bloody corpse lying on the right-of-way is a brilliantly staged homage to the Coffin Joe horror films made in Brazil beginning in the mid-sixties and the director's (in a short interview that is on the CD) speak reverently about those movies.)     

Meeting Gorbachev

 Americans remember Gorbachev primarily as an avuncular Russian leader mostly famous for an odd liver-colored birthmark on his upper brow.  The Soviet premier is revered in Europe, indeed, honored in Germany to the point of idolatry -- he is credited with establishing the conditions for the reunification of Germany, something that no one predicted and that most (for instance Guenter Grass) opposed.  (I recall attending a lecture from a German Fulbright scholar at the local Community College.  In that lecture, the professor quoted Malraux about loving Germany so much that he was happy that there were two of them.  The professor said that, not merely institutions, but, even, language now divided East Germany from the Bundesrepublik and that it was unimaginable that the two countries could ever be reunited -- this lecture was delivered about five months before the Fall of the Berlin Wall.)  It is said that only a Cold Warrior like Richard Nixon could go to China.  Similarly, it seems that only an exemplary Communist like Mikhail Gorbachev could have presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  At one point, in his 2018 documentary, Meeting Gorbachev, Werner Herzog confesses that he "loves" the elderly Soviet premiere -- the film (jointly directed by Herzog and Andre Singer) begins with Herzog delivering a package of sugar-free Swiss chocolates to the man that Herzog familiarly refers to as Mikhail Sergeievich.  Everything that Herzog does is larger than life and the chocolates are about the size of planetary globes sealed in a box under a big chocolate plaque that reads "President Mikhail orbachev" -- the "G" was displaced in shipping. (The chocolates had to be sugar-free because the old man suffers from diabetes).

Meeting Gorbachev is epic in scope.  Herzog interviews many luminaries of the period during which the Soviet empire collapsed.  He has George Schultz on-screen, Lech Walesa, a former premiere of Hungary, James Baker and the like.  The documentary ranges from eccentric sequences (for instance, an interview with a frumpy secretary in the Kremlin typing out the order that dissolved the Soviet federation) to typical diplomatic "talking heads."  (Herzog seems to have interviewed a German diplomat and Gorbachev; the other interviews may be conducted by Andres Singer -- but we don't see him.  Herzog gets top billing with Mikhail Sergeievich.)  Characteristic to a Herzog film, there are peculiar digressions and asides.  Herzog is particularly impressed by Soviet mortuary customs -- there are long sequences involving processions in which waxen embalmed corpses are marched through wintry streets while funeral dirges play.  He notes that when Brezhnev awarded Gorbachev some sort of Soviet award, the leader was senile and couldn't recall what it was that he was honoring Gorbachev for --  Gorbachev has to tell him, mouthing the word "canal" so that he moribund old man can complete the award.  In another sequence, Herzog comments on the dramaturgy of Gorbachev's issuance of his order dissolving the Federation.  Gorbachev won't oblige the cameras who want to stage the signing for maximum effect.  There are plenty of oddities that will satisfy Herzog's legions of fans:  we get to see Soviet students at Moscow U "jitterbugging" to show the decadence of America:  it's a great sequence because the dancers obviously love the music but have to parody it --they keep dropping their female partners.  A hapless Austrian newscaster explains to her viewers how to keep slugs out of gardens (attract and kill them with beer) before casually remarking that the borders with Hungary are open.  The Hungarian premier notes that he had men cut down the barbed wire border in an exploratory manner to see if the Soviets would protest.  They didn't and so he had to erect 200 meters of the faux barbed wire border, already removed, to be able to hack it down on TV.  We see Norwegian tourists in Reykjavik at the Hofdi House reenacting Reagan's famous handshake with Gorbachev.  The documentary begins with hope and, even, suggests that there was a brief Pax Gorbachev around the time that the Berlin Wall fell (surprisingly undramatically shown in the film).  But the forces of evil, as Herzog would present the situation, are back on the rise.  Near the end of the film, we see a pallid and obsequious Vladimir Putin paying his respects at the casket of Gorbachev's wife, Raisa (another waxy embalmed corpse with Gorbachev kneeling red-eyed and smitten by the casket).  Gorbachev's later years, after the death of his glamorous wife ("it was as if my life was taken away," he says of her passing) are depicted as eerily becalmed.  We see him greeting an elderly aunt who is completely blind and can't see him.  In another long sequence, he wanders around what looks to be a half-abandoned farmyard, looking into bins, while an old cat stalks him.  (Only Herzog would dare to insert so much stillness and seemingly empty footage into the film to dramatize that nothing much has happened in Gorbachev's life since the death of his wife, many years ago in 2002.)   Gorbachev, unfortunately, is not a particularly vibrant interview subject.  He seems to be responding to Herzog's questions, phrased in English, through simultaneous translation through an ear-bed.  (Sometimes, he taps at his ear.)  There are disconcerting pauses, which Herzog honors, although they seem to make everyone a little uneasy.  Gorbachev is not a big man -- indeed, among Soviet premiers he was relatively lithe.  He's one of those old men who put on weight and seem to become more massive as they age.  He sits like boulder across the Herzog and speaks very slowly and deliberately -- just when you think he's done with his declaration, and a long silence intervenes, he starts talking again.  There's a funny scene in which Gorbachev comments on the coup d'etat attempted when he was vacationing in Crimea on the Black Sea.  Gorbachev says that he dealt too leniently with the conspirators and that he blames himself for not doing more to save the Federation -- instead of letting the breakaway republics leave the Union, he thinks he should have reformed the Union to keep them part of the Soviet Empire.  In any event, Gorbachev mentions that "(he) should have sent the conspirators off somewhere", obviously meaning Siberia.  At the end of the film, Gorbachev says that his grave (presumably he'll be interred in the Kremlin wall) should be marked "We Tried."  (It's like the quip about a statue of Marx and Engels in Berlin -- people said that the monument should be labeled:  "At least, we tried.  Sorry about that.  We'll get it right next time.") Gorbachev tries to recite a poem by Lermontov, almost gets to the end, but, then, can't recall the last lines.  A final epigraph supplies those lines for us.

It astonishing what we don't know about recent European history.  Much of the film is a primer on that subject and, therefore, worth seeing.  It's lucid, moving, and full of interesting footage.  Of course, the film is constrained by its subject and doesn't reach the ecstatic heights that we associate with Herzog's most visionary films.  The film suggests a thesis about Herzog.  The director, who is now 77, spent much of his youth wandering around forbidden zones in Africa and South America -- he was almost murdered in Africa.  I suspect that this wanderlust arose in part from growing up in a country in which half of the nation was concealed behind a closed border and a forbidden zone itself.  

The Investigation

 I find it hard to account for my interest in the HBO limited series The Investigation.  I have loyally watched the first five episodes of the six show series and am looking forward to the so-called "finale."  "Finale" is the wrong word to use for the last episode of a show that is so wholly restrained, discrete, and unapproachable.  The Investigation is scrupulously minimalist -- probably a necessity since the crime that is under investigation is so horrific.  Almost nothing happens in the program -- there is no melodrama, no flashes of intuition, no real suspense.  Most crime documentaries that air on Cable contain far more events and drama than The Investigation.  The show is exquisitely made and some of its images linger in the mind long after the episode has ended, but the program's appeal is so subtle that I can't exactly identify it.

The Investigation is a Danish series; the actors in the show are uniformly excellent but unfamiliar to American viewers.  The central figure in the program is Jens Moeller, the detective assigned to solve a homicide involving a female journalist named Kim Wall.  (Wall is a Swede and the action takes place on the Danish coast at a nondescript city built along an icy-looking harbor -- Swedish authorities appear from time to time and the criminal investigation involves radar data and maritime assistance provided by Sweden).  Moeller is a grey-looking bureaucrat, an exemplar of the best that the administrative state can offer.  He is exceptionally conscientious and dutiful.  Moeller has big inquisitive eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses -- he is the opposite of glamorous.  He has a sympathetic wife whom he rarely sees due to the rigors of the investigation.  His adult daughter is pregnant but Moeller is so wrapped-up in the investigation that he neglects her.  In one scene in the fourth episode, he tries to establish contact with her after she has rebuffed his phone calls -- he left a dinner that was planned to celebrate the pregnancy due to an unexpected development in the case and she can't forgive him for his dereliction of his paternal duties.  Moeller rings the doorbell at an apartment filmed with dour documentary austerity -- there's a security door and the young woman answers it wearing a sort of blanket wrapped around her hips.  She doesn't let him in.  There's a brief exchange, scrupulously under-dramatized and the young woman departs up the steps, turning off the foyer light -- the viewer has been trained by the show to notice small details and so  the light coming on before the woman appears and, then, being turned-off registers.  The way the woman has wrapped  her hips and belly in the blanket is also a curious, indelible detail.  Nothing much happens in the scene (father and daughter remain unreconciled) but the sequence is strangely indelible.  This is true of other images in the film:  we see Moeller shooting skeet at a wintry-looking range, alone against a background of cold twilight underbrush.  Sometimes, he walks his two shaggy dogs.  So far, the showiest scene in the show depicts Moeller from behind walking away from the camera.  Perhaps, Danish offices conserve energy by using photo-sensors to shut-off lights.  As Moeller walks down a long corridor, the lights behind him flip off after he has passed and, at last, we are staring into a dimly lit metal-colored shaft in which there is no one at all.  (This is a visualization of the abyss mentioned in the last episode.)  A home-made submarine hangs above a wharf, a big ugly metal contraption that has the force of doom.  A shot lasting ninety seconds shows a dog sitting on the prow of a boat.  The dog looks very bored and, even, depressed -- in this show, even the animals are depressed.  Then, the dog starts to whimper, stands up and barks excitedly.  It's a cadaver dog and it has scented corpse in the water.  There's no sex or romance of any kind shown in the film.  Most of the series takes place in small, brightly lit conference rooms and offices.  Many shots, however, show the sea where men in orange vests are searching the shallows at the harbor.  Out in the deep water, there are always purplish thunderstorms on the horizon, dark bruised-looking columns of rain pouring into the cold sea.  There are no confrontations; everyone is scrupulously polite and professional.  The Danish police take professional pride in playing by their constitutional rules.  The filmmaker obviously despises the murderer and we never see him.  Most shows of this sort would feature strenuous interrogations of the suspect (in American shows, these would be rife with threats of violence and lurid depictions of prison sodomy).  In Denmark, nothing like this is allowed.  Indeed, the suspect is permitted to change his story without prejudice, apparently, as much as he wants.  Accordingly, the murderer with his counsel keeps asking for additional interviews to amend his statement -- and, under Danish law, apparently these must be granted.  The identity of the killer is never in question.  The movie is entirely procedural.  In order to establish proof, the investigators have to systematically eliminate all other causes for the young victim's death.  And this is the substance of the show, the slow, meticulous assembly of facts that will lead to no conclusion except that the suspect intentionally murdered his victim.  

The Investigation's radical minimalism may be measured by the fact that four of the six episodes involve retrieving fragments of the victim's dismembered corpse.  The show is literally about assembling a body that has been cut to pieces.  Mercifully, we never see the corpse.  In one shot, we see a sketch diagram of the torso pulled out of the sound but the camera glides quickly over this schematic image.  This reticence seems related to the fact that the case involves a celebrated real-life crime and the movie was made with the participation of the victim's parents -- in fact, the credits reveal that one of the dogs featured in the show (a sheep dog that we see padding along the aging parents of the deceased on the Swedish beach) was actually the dead journalist's pet.  As is often said, the imagination is often more vivid than what a film actually shows us -- and here the entire movie is bathed in crepuscular even dream-like sepulchral light.  The show seems to be a kind of mortuary made from almost abstract images.  

In The Investigation's last episode, the inquiry founders.  It seems evident that the investigation team can not hope for conviction on any offense more serious than manslaughter.  Then, Maibritt, Moeller's much younger female associate, works night and day to review file materials.  It is characteristic of the show that the breakthrough doesn't involve a confession or, even, the discovery of any new evidence -- the homicide is solved by Maibritt focusing on evidence that was previously overlooked.  She calls Moeller at dawn with news of her discovery.  He comes to the conference room where she has been working and learns what she has been found.  This sequence, underplayed to the point of vanishing, is the film's climax.  Maibritt looks up expectantly at Moeller who has agreed with her analysis -- he is off-screen.  She looks worried that he will embrace her and there is a faint flicker of unease on her face, but he simply taps her, almost imperceptibly, on the shoulder (she flinches slightly) and they exit to confirm their findings with the irascible forensic pathologist.  Maibritt is unwilling to give up on the investigation because she is personally appalled by the sadistic squalor of the crime:  "This is no perfect crime," she says, "it's clumsy and disgusting." At the end, the prosecuting attorney talks to Moeller before he goes out to brief the press.  Moeller says that he has investigated 134 homicides -- there are about "fifty homicides a year in Denmark", Moeller remarks.  The prosecuting attorney says that "the more civilized we become, the more we desire to look into the abyss."  Moeller's wife has said that at night "the world is black and white -- the colors are still there; we just can't see them."  Moeller looks most distressed when his daughter puts his tiny infant grandson in his arms -- he doesn't seem to know what to do.  The villain, whom we never see, is convicted of murder and, because he has killed a journalist (and acted opportunistically to lure her onto his submarine -- playing upon her journalistic curiosity and instincts) his sentence is "aggravated".  The dead journalist's mother is shown lecturing to a group of teenage students -- "you must turn away from the dark and embrace the light" she says.  Moeller's team takes down the pictures and maps of the sea and their radar charts in the conference room where half of the action has taken place.  The dead journalist's father keeps diving in the sound, hoping to find his daughter's lost cell-phone.  The Investigation is rigorously moral and ethically scrupulous -- it keeps faith with its subject and exudes an icy aura of serene horror.  I can't quite identify the show's appeal but it certainly fascinated me and the endless scenes of people walking with their back to us down long corridors in bureaucratic buildings has an effect like Bresson's repeated shots of people's feet as they walk. It's a transcendental style of movie-making. The show is carefully constructed and, within its glacial parameters, an inspiring work of art.

 

Two Mules for Sister Sara

My grandmother from Nebraska had just returned from a trip to what she called "old Mexico."  At that time, she owned a big RV and, with a caravan of other retirees, she and her husband drove the rig down to Mexico City.  This was in 1968 or 1969.  A few years later, she came to visit her daughter (my mother) in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.  The huge white RV was parked outside the house on the roadside.  My grandmother and her husband drank "high balls" in the late afternoon.  She regaled us with tales of her adventures in "old Mexico" with the RV caravan.  In Mexico City, she had heard rumors of the government crack-down on protesters and that there had been some kind of massacre.  My grandmother approved of law and order and didn't think that the massacre was necessarily a bad thing.  In fact, she implied that a little of that kind of law and order in the USA might be beneficial.  One night during her visit, a Clint Eastwood movie called Two Mules for Sister Sara was on TV.  I recall watching the movie with my Nebraska grandmother and her second husband in the living room.  She remarked on the beautiful landscapes featured in the movie and said that the people in Mexico were very warm and friendly.  I was probably about 14 and thought the movie was fabulous.  Whenever I recall my grandmother, now long dead, I think about her trip to Mexico in the giant gas-guzzling RV and Two Mules for Sister Sara.  What I recall about the movie is what a 14-year old boy would remember:  the nun turned out to be a prostitute and there was a spectacular battle at the end of the movie, not a gunfight but a real all-out combat sequence.  

The movie has been showing in rotation on STARZ and so I decided to take a look at the 1970 Western.  The movie is handsomely produced and efficiently directed by Don Siegel -- he would later make Clint Eastwood even more famous in his Dirty Harry, acclaimed (sort of ) by Pauline Kael as a "Fascist masterpiece."  Shirley MacLaine plays the prostitute disguised as a nun.  The movie is beautifully shot by the great Mexican D. P. Gabriel Figueroa.  The movie has a startling score by Ennio Morricone.  The musical theme associated with Eastwood's mercenary "Mr. Hogan" as the nun calls him is a trotting tune that simulates the gait of a horse over which we hear a syncopated braying sound -- the mule crying out "hee-haw" over and over again:  the tune is up-tempo, sizzles with percussion, and has synthesizer ornamentation; Sister Sara gets a sweet-sounding ecclesiastical chant sung by high women's voices, an aerial sort of cantus that suggests a choir of angels.  The film's principal appeal for me today resides in its wonderful footage of Tlaycapan, most particularly the enormous and ancient mission churches in the province of Morelos, huge masonry walls and big bell-towers overlooking desert and bosque with craggy volcanic formations scattered around the landscape.  

Unfortunately, the movie is pretty routine.  It's not dull -- in fact, the film follows the pattern of "one damned thing" after another.  It's action-packed but on reflection the plot doesn't make sense.  Budd Boettcher, an accomplished Western director himself wrote the story.  But the screenwriter, Albert Maltz, apparently, vandalized Boettcher;s concept -- in his scenario, the woman was not a nun but an aristocratic Mexican woman (who turns out to be prostitute); this would have been more plausible than what we see on-screen.  Shirley MacLaine, who is about as White as you can get, is charming as the nun, but the notion that she is a holy sister isn't plausible from the outset and, therefore, much of her behavior seems arbitrary and makes no sense.  (The film was originally planned to star Eastwood and a Mexican actress -- it's a co-production with a Mexican film studio, but the bosses thought the picture would be more "bankable" with MacLaine and, in fact, she gets top billing -- something that seems to have irritated Eastwood.)  The production was vexed by all sorts of problems including serious cases of Montezuma's Revenge that prolonged the shooting schedule.  Boettcher bullied Siegel about the changes to his story and Siegel supposedly said:  "Every morning I'm happy about this film because I know the check is in the mail"; Boettcher, who lived in Mexico, said: "Every morning I'm happy because I can look myself in the mirror without being ashamed."  

So what's it all about?  Hogan is a deadly loner of the kind Eastwood perfected in his spaghetti Westerns.  Here he's a venal mercenary who has been retained by Juaristas, rebels who are fighting the French soldiers serving under Maximilian.  Sister Sara is a prostitute working undercover in the disguise of a nun, enlisted in the guerilla war on the Juarista side.  Hogan rescues her from rape by three nasty gringos (whom he speedily guns down).  Then, there are various adventures involving pursuing French cavalry and a rattlesnake.  After some erotic byplay between the two leads -- they obviously desire one another but can't act on their inclinations -- Hogan gets shot with an arrow through the shoulder by some Yaqui Indians.  (Sister Sara drives them off with her big shiny crucifix.)  The closest thing to sex in the movie, until an obligatory last minute scene, is a very prolonged episode in which Sister Sara extracts the arrow from Hogan's shoulder --a gory scene involving lots of penetration, cauterization with gunpowder, and the use of booze as an anesthetic; it's obviously a highly perverse surrogate for sex and prolonged voluptuously.  After this sequence, the film sets up the big battle at its climax involving hundreds of guerillas equally matched with battalions of French troops.  Siegel is influenced by Peckinpah and the Italians like Corbucci and Leone -- the big battle is very bloody with lots of fiery deaths, some of them involving long drops off Mission tower parapets, arms getting hacked off and machetes splitting skulls. The battle is tricked-out with lots of dynamite hurled like a baseball, a pinata full of explosives, and elaborate sequences of hand-to-hand combat.  It's fairly exciting but the outcome is a foregone conclusion and, in fact, the pyrotechnics go on for too long.  Aspects of the film can't be explained.  After the three rapists are killed, Sister Sara buries them in graves constructed of elaborate mounds of rock.  This work would take about three days and would be a brutal endeavor under the Mexican sun.  In the movie, the nun buries the bad hombres while Eastwood eats a platter of beans left by the dead gringos.  There's no reason that Sister Sara would bury these guys and, if she's just trying to establish her bona fides as a nun, this seems like the worst possible way to demonstrate her religious credibility.  In any event, burying the bad guys would be illogical even if she were a nun, but, of course, she's just a prostitute in disguise.  The final sex scene is embarrassing.  Shirley MacLaine is taking one of those peek-a-boo bubble baths featured in Westerns that conceal all the interesting bits.  Eastwood, lusting to see her, uses the strongbox captured in the battle to batter down the door -- another curious substitute for sex.  Then, he hops in the bath with her in his full Western regalia, boots, chaps, vest and all -- somehow, the clothing gets disarranged and, after Sister Sara coyly asks Hogan to remove his hat, Eastwood apparently penetrates her (how? he's fully dressed).  She whoops enthusiastically. 

To Sleep with Anger

 When I first saw To Sleep with Anger (1990), I didn't understand the film.  Nothing much seemed to happen in the movie and I couldn't quite get a handle on the lead character, Harry (Danny Glover), an avuncular if sinister figure who invades the household of an African-American family, apparently living in a middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles.  Charles Burnett, the director of the groundbreaking Killer of Sheep, wrote and directed the picture and, somehow, it seemed a little blurred to me -- nonetheless, I recalled the movie as being very mysterious and gripping and, in particular, an image of a little neighbor boy practicing trumpet  from a room with an open window to the dismay of neighbors stayed with me.  I remembered that the metaphor of the child practicing was somehow integral to the film, but had forgotten how.  The film was rebroadcast recently, offered on Turner Classic Movies for Black History Month and so I had an opportunity to revisit the movie.  It's excellent and, in fact, very clear -- I wonder if my recollection that the movie was hard to understand reflects what I felt at the time or is just an artifact of old age and fading memory.  If anything, Burnett makes his meanings almost too explicit.

Gideon, a stern and righteous man, is the patriarch of an African-American family.  His wife, Susie, works as a midwife and teaches Lamaze method classes in her living room.  Gideon and Susie have two sons, the hardworking and virtuous, Junior, and the self-indulgent Ba-bro -- the name comes from "Baby Brother", the nickname for Samuel, the younger son.  Both sons are married and have children of their own.  Ba-Bro has never been good enough for his demanding father and, with his realtor wife, may be neglecting his own small son -- the young woman is an up-to-date Yuppie professional and she doesn't have much time for her little boy; the child is mostly tended by his father, Baby Brother, or by the grandparents.  It's not wholly clear when the film is taking place -- it has a sort of timeless ambience.  The characters behave as if they are living in the fifties -- the family gathers every Sunday after Church at Gideon and Susie's home; Ba-bro doesn't go to church, which he regards as tedious, and his wife, who is estranged from her in-laws, usually sits outside in their car during the family meals.  Gideon and Susie keep chickens in a coop in the backyard and have an elaborate vegetable garden; they emigrated to the big city from the Deep South and have retained country ways.  In fact, Gideon is superstitious -- when the film begins he has lost his "Toby"(that is, his good luck charm inherited from his grandmother,  Big Mama who was born in slavery.)  At the outset of the film, the scene is carefully set:  we see the boy next door practicing, the garden and chickens, the situation of the family, and shots of weirdly discomfited pigeons flying around the neighborhood.  Everything is completely quotidian but slightly ominous.  When Gideon recounts that he has misplaced his Toby, a broom shifts inexplicably and knocks over a jar full of marbles that roll all over the floor.  Then, there is a knock at the door and we meet Harry.

Harry grew up with Gideon in the old South and he has come by bus from Detroit.  He is a courtly southern gentleman who, also, turns out to be the Devil or one the Devil's emissaries.  The pigeons flee from him and Junior's wife who is pregnant feels the baby giving her a strong kick when she first meets Harry.  At this point, the movie becomes an extremely easy-going, but effective supernatural thriller -- it's a cross between something like The Exorcist and Hitchcock's 1943 Shadow of a Doubt in which the kindly, soft-spoken Joseph Cotton plays a serial killer who has insinuated himself into a family in a small town.  As is typical of devilish agents, the adults, at first, are unable to detect the sinister aspect in their old friend -- immediately, however, a child touches Harry with a broom, apparently, a method for "sweeping away" evil.  The chickens and pigeons recognize the devilish interloper and are distressed and the produce in the garden wilts, sunflowers rotting atop their stems.  While the family is in Church, Harry rummages around among their bills, old letters, and medications.  He summons his cronies to the family house for an old-fashioned fish-fry and a crowd of disreputable-looking old men appear, "resurrected" one of the women says.  There's "corn likker" with "a fight in every bottle" and Harry tells the grandkids that he killed a man in as brawl in a blackened room -- all the while, he is fiddling with a big, sleek switchblade.  The film proceeds schematically, contrasting the folks at church with the gathering darkness at Gideon's home -- we see a child being baptized, for instance, while Harry is playing with his knife.  Something goes wrong with Gideon and he collapses.  Harry now seems to be in complete control of the situation.  With his elderly reprobates, he drinks corn likker in a room with a tapestry of dogs playing cards on the wall, the old gangsters messing around with guns and gambling.  Harry has seduced Ba-bro and wants him to leave his wife.  He says he can get Ba-bro another woman:  "You wouldn't drive without a spare tire.  With two mules, you can plow a lot more."  Back at the home, Gideon seems to be in coma.  There's a thunderstorm and rain is coming through the roof and puddling in his bed.  When Junior tries to get Ba-bro to help him move the bed, there's a fight and one of Harry's switchblades gets drawn.  Susie seizes the knife blade, gets cut badly, but stops the affray.  The next morning, Gideon seems better and, when Harry goes into the kitchen, the jar of marbles falls onto the floor again -- he trips and slumping to the floor and dies of a heart-attack.  The ambulance comes but can't take the body because Harry is already dead.  The corpse lies on the kitchen floor for a day, waiting for the coroner to take the body away.  People gather with the body lying only a few feet away and, even, eat fried chicken.  The preacher from the church falls asleep and snores loudly.  Gideon, now much better, tries to tell a joke about a "colored man" in heaven, but Susie won't allow it -- "I don't want to hear no jokes about colored people in Hell," she says.  "Well, it could be White folks," Gideon says.  Susie says she doesn't want to hear jokes about anyone in Hell.  The neighbor's sneer and ask:  "Do you still got a dead man lying in your kitchen?"  It's pretty clear that the corpse isn't going anywhere soon.  Everyone goes down the street for a picnic leaving the dead man alone under a table-cloth on the floor.  The animals have calmed down; the garden is flowering; the little boy practicing his trumpet still sounds terrible but when he hits a high note, the music becomes smooth, beautiful, suave -- this brings us to the closing credits.

I assume that the film is made for Black audiences who would understand the specific meaning of the various arcane references to the occult.  Harry says, for instance, that you "don't wanna be at a country intersection at night without your toby."  Harry seems to embody a sort of genteel countryfied charm -- but he's got a wide range of references:  at one point, he cites Pushkin,  The picture establishes clearly the distinction between the sanctified behavior of the church-going people and the wickedness of the Blues-singing, juke-joint habitues who gather around Harry.  Occupying the middle-ground is a flashy Black woman with platinum-blonde hair who was once a good-time girl but has now been saved.  At Harry's fish-fry, one old reprobate sings the old blues song "Se Se Rider"; the blonde woman responds by singing a hymn.  In some respects. the film's schematic structure and its obviously Manichean view of Good in mortal battle with Evil is similar to the morality expressed in old all-Black musicals such as Cabin in the Sky -- a good woman defends her erring man against the blandishments of Satan.  But the film is visually sophisticated and there are odd complications:  it is the Preacher who reads scripture telling his flock that Jesus has come to set fathers against sons and brothers against brothers -- in fact, exactly the project that Harry seems determined to accomplish.  A curious scene in which Harry leads Ba-Bro down a stony river bed has an odd lyrical and surreal quality:  at first, we see the two men gingerly stepping from stone to stone in the creek; but, in the next shot, they are wandering in a gorge full of boulders as big as tombstones.  It's as if Harry's malignancy has blighted the landscape around him -- this theme is further dramatized in the garden gone to weed, the frenzied pigeons, and the chickens running loose among the wilting vegetables  Evil is infectious:  when Suzie complains about Harry, one of the women tells her in a matter-of-fact way that she should poison him.  (We may recall that the great Blues man, Robert Johnson, died of poison in his moonshine.).  In one of his poems, Brecht comments on a Kabuki mask of a demon noting that the creature's taut features and frown show how hard it is to be evil.  Similarly, Harry's badness is a matter of practice -- he notes that he is working to perfect his wickedness.  The metaphor of the little boy playing the trumpet has the same meaning but applied to virtue:  goodness is a practice also -- you have to work at it.  The final scenes in the film, also  surrealist in force, with the folks eating fried chicken over Harry's corpse sprawled in the kitchen have an eerie charge.  The movie is every bit as good as I remembered it -- even, now, much clearer, more lucid, and more meaningful than I recalled.