I'm breaking-in a new "smart" TV, that is a 50 inch flat-screen connected by WIFI to the internet. This device allows me to stream films (I suppose I should say "content") from Amazon, Netflix, and MUBI. The latter service offers interesting and exotic films from the silent era through today and, for a long time, I have coveted access to some of these picture. In particular, I was fascinated with a 1969 Argentine film, Invasion, directed by Hugo Santiago. The film was written by no less than Jorge Luis Borges with his chum, also an estimable writer, Adolfo Bioy Casares. For $5.99 a month, I can watch this picture and a couple hundred other selections to which new movies are being constantly added.
Because my TV is brand-new, I'm not entirely sure that Invasion is as weird as it appears. I'm not certain that I have contrast adjusted correctly, possibly a problem since the film is shot in startlingly high-contrast black and white. The images on my screen were either too dark to be clearly legible or blindingly bright, sometimes in the same enigmatic frame. Since much of the film takes place at night, featuring shots of brutalist urban wasteland garishly lit at oblique angles, the brilliant light and impenetrable shadow made it difficult to follow the action. The picture's soundtrack is also utterly bizarre. The characters seem to speak in muffled post-dubbed voices, but the Foley work is fantastically aggressive -- every footfall sounds like a rifle shot. When several people are walking on cement, the soundtrack rattles like a high volume machine-gun. Adding to the oddity of this effect is the fact that some scenes feature grinding metal on metal sound cues, weird moans and cries, the sounds of iron cages being locked shut, and, often, monkeys hooting and big cats roaring although the imagery on screen is mostly small shadowy rooms and empty boulevards. Some of these factors can be attributed to poor adjustment of my new TV. But the film's impenetrable mise-en-scene seems intentional: I watched the whole movie thinking that one group of gangsters were the invaders and another mob defenders of the fictional city, a perverse version of Buenos Aires, called Acquilea. But in the last five minutes of the two-hour picture, it became clear to me that I had misconstrued all of the action -- in fact, the men that I thought were invaders were defenders and vice-versa. The curious fact is that, in the scheme of things, it really doesn't matter. Borges and Bioy Casares (and the director Santiago) seem to view the antagonists as fungible -- it doesn't matter whether they are defenders and invaders; their status can be reversed without changing anything in the movie
In the film's opening shots, we see a harbor and some kind of large box being transferred onto a truck. It's dawn, with stark shadows sweeping across the industrial barrens. At a checkpoint, the truck is ambushed, it's operators killed, and the cargo in its inexpressive box, seized by what I will call the black suit gangsters. The black suits, who wear stylishly tailored black clothes with thin dark ties, are led by an old man named Don Porfiro who operates the mob (or army) out of a musty-looking pharmacy. (He has a black cat as a familiar named Senor Wenceslaus -- is this some kind of nightmare allusion to Senor Wences, a Spanish ventriloquist with puppets that scared the hell out of small children on The Ed Sullivan Show.) I assumed that black suit men were the invaders. But, as it turns out -- and I didn't understand this until the very end of the picture -- they are the defenders of the city. Their antagonists are the White Suit gangsters -- these men wear light-colored suits and have pale ties. For the length of the film, the White Suits fight the Black Suits -- there are some protracted gun battles and lots of assassinations. The film presents the point of view of the Black Suits -- the White Suits are, more or less, featureless, although midway a particularly loathsome leader emerges among them to preside over the torture of captured Black Suits. (There's lots of torture and intimations of torture in the film -- the picture was made in 1969 and seems to predict the depredations of the military junta that ruled in Argentina during the so-called 1976 - 1983 Dirty War.)
Two prominent Black Suits are Irene and Herrera. They are romantically linked although their activities are controlled by Porfiro so that they don't know what the other is doing, or, even, that the other is involved in the invasion (or defending against the invasion). Other than the color of their suits, there is no distinction between the opposing forces -- both seem to be equally incumbent in Acquilea and, so, to some extent the invasion comes from within. The key point is that all of the violent activity, which involves car trucks, daring heists, bombings, and intricate shoot-outs, seems to take place behind the scenes. The citizens of Acquilea don't know (or care) about the "invasion"; they seem blithely indifferent to the homicidal fighting between the Black and White suits. (The point seems to be that it doesn't matter which group of vicious thugs controls the city -- the outcome will be the same to the inhabitants.) Borges was fascinated with compasses and compass rose markings on maps. The movie is organized around the four frontiers (or borders) of Acquilea -- the picture flashes titles identifying whether the scene takes place at the Southwest "frontier" or the Northeast and so on. My impression is that the film's action moves counterclockwise around the city, from border to border, ending at a stadium in one of the southeast quadrants of the city. (I probably have the directions reversed just as I didn't figure out who was invading and who defending until the very end of the movie -- but I got the general gist: the film is structured according to the compass. This is made manifest by repeated shots in which Porfiro opens a curtain to show a big, archaic-looking map of Acquilea -- it seems to be a sort of peninsula -- and orders his troops to go to various locations.) The action is unfathomably complex but seems to be focused on the invaders and defenders fighting over the box on the truck which turns out to be a radio transmitter. (This artifact is a Hitchcock "McGuffin" -- it inspires action but is meaningless in its own right.) The idea is that once the radio transmitter is connected to the juice and begins broadcasting this will insure the victory the White Suits or the Black Suits, depending upon who controls transmission. The film follows the activity of several days in which the Black Suits (Irene, her boyfriend, Herrera, Moon, Cachaco, Lebendiger et. al.) are wiped-out -- although Irene and Porfiro survive. Each of the named Black Suits gets a showy demise. One guy is tortured to death in a stark concrete tower that seems to be only partly built -- before he dies he recites what seems to be fatalistic poem by Borges in the style of the Old English epic Beowulf (a touchstone for Borges). Herrera, who is waiting to be tortured to death, is saved by a charwoman who remarks that her motive is to reward him for his gallant good manners. But Herrera survives only to be beaten to death by a mob of forty or more white suits who converge at the soccer stadium where the transmitter has been set up. There are showy but poorly staged shoot-outs, particularly a protracted fight at a mansion that takes place largely in the dark and that features weird imagery of Herrerra practicing with his six shooters -- this scene seems derived from similar episodes in Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (the great swordsman practicing in the woods) and John Sturges The Magnificent Seven. One man is said to fatally attractive to women. Of course, he is lured into his execution by a beautiful women. Before the White Suits gun him down, he nobly tells the girl to go outside so that she will not have to see "something unpleasant." From time to time, the screeching and growling on the sound-track reverts to jaunty sinister-sounding tango-like Milongas. In one scene a group of White Suits are attacked on a jungle island in a sequence that seems somehow related to movies made from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. A bunch of White Suits, who have murdered a few Black Suits and their sympathizers, are trapped in a flaming treehouse and gunned down when they try to escape the fire. One of the Black Suits pauses in his mission to watch an American Western, a film that also depicts a big shoot-out. When the lights comes up and the movie audience departs, the Black Suit doesn't leave -- someone has killed him during the picture show. (The scenes from the American Western are invidious by comparison -- the action is much more crisply and effectively staged in the movie within the movie than in the shadowy, confusingly edited scenes of combat between Black Suits and White Suits.) The fundamental equivalence between the Black Suits and White Suits is demonstrated by the film's ending. After an elaborate montage showing the White Suit invasion -- I can't tell if this is supposed to be funny (fleets of kayaks and rubber boats landing, processions of beat up trucks, an invading air force of what seem to be dilapidated cropdusters) -- Don Porfiro calls together what is left of the Black Suits. The men meet in his shabby pharmacy and Irene, who has survived the fighting, hands out pistols while Porfiro declares: "Now the Resistance begins." The fighting is perpetual, but futile -- a perpetual reoccurrence of the same, an idea that is integral to much of Borges' work: shadow armies fight other shadows over Platonic ideas that no one can see or, even, really imagine. At one point, Herrerra, who Porfiro sends to his death, complains that the people in the city are not worth defending -- they are complacent and don't care who rules them. Don Porfiro makes an enigmatic response: "A city is more than its population."
The movie sounds interesting by description but it's difficult to watch. By design, it's impossible to really distinguish between the antagonistic forces (except by the color of their suits). The movie feature long and pointless montages -- the sequence showing the invasion goes on and on: cars, lorries, cropdusters, canoes, rubber inflatable landing craft; you expect there to be a shot of group of insurgents pushing lawnmowers or riding bicycles. All of the montages are ridiculously extended -- the scenes at the film's outset showing the radio transmitter (we don't know what it is yet) being unloaded and put on a truck, involve about 30 separate shots edited into an Eisenstein-style montage. The locations are almost all brutalist office blocks that seem to be incomplete, unfinished and unfurnished. (In one scene, torturers lead their prisoners up a dizzying flight of steps in an open stair well -- again, the scene of men climbing the steps with amplified, booming footfalls consists of about twenty shots when two or three would suffice.) All integument of narrative, character, and background information has been scrupulously excised from the film -- we watch a series of unmotivated gun battles and murders without any real connecting tissue. The camerawork looks like Orson Welles' style from late movies like The Trial, intense chiaroscuro and deep focus. The story, such as it is, seems contrived from hundreds of other pictures which are briefly referenced -- there are scenes that look like Rivette, for instance Out One, references to American cowboy movies and film noir, sequences that play as if extracted from Kurosawa or John Ford. The dialogue is enigmatic, a combination of Cesar Aira, Kafka, and Borges. I know that Cesar Aira didn't begin his career until twenty years after this movie was produced. But Borges would say that it doesn't matter -- Kafka, Robert Louis Stevenson, the Beowulf poet, and Cesar Aira are Platonic essences, they have always existed and always will be present in our literature and imagination.
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