Shame

 Conventional war movies celebrate courage and glory.  But, as Ingmar Bergman demonstrates in Shame (1968), war is probably best imagined as cruelty that induces, not courage, but cowardice and, indeed, behavior so motivated by craven fear as to be shameful.  Hollywood films about war imply that heroism is the norm in combat.  But this is a screen concealing an experience that is mostly without heroism, the operation of cowardice that compromises all human values, dissolving them into rancid self-interest.  Soldiers are only incidental to Bergman's vision of warfare in Shame -- the victims of conflict, of course, are not the warriors but the civilians caught between opposing fields of fire.  Shame is literally an anti-war picture -- it's not about soldiers but civilians and demonstrates in an icy clinical manner that war erodes all relationships between people.  As we have come to learn, war isn't about battles but refugees.  (It's also worth noting that Sweden's compromised situation in World War II is implicit in the questions that the movie poses:  if we were really subjected to a terrifying occupation or alliance with evil what would be really willing to do to survive?)

A married couple, Jan and Eva have fled to an island, perhaps, to avoid the ravages of war on the mainland.  They aren't particularly happy and Eva nourishes a sour contempt for her feckless husband.  An invasion of the island is rumored.  The place's lanes are clogged with tanks and trucks towing howitzers.  Jan and Eva own an old station wagon that is as much a character in the film as the protagonists; the vehicle refuses to start reliably, often in the most perilous of situations.  At least, Jan should be able to fix the car, Eva says, but he's too inept to succeed even as a shade-tree mechanic.  At the village near the ferry, Jan and Eva go to an antique store to buy a bottle of wine from a friend who runs the place.  (The resourceful Eva has procured a fish from an angler casting his line into a little creek flowing into the sea; Jan, watching his beautiful young wife haggling for the fish is suddenly smitten with love for her -- probably, because she can find food and seems undiminished by the war.)  The man at the antique shop, Frederik, is terrified; despite his "bad foot", he has been conscripted.  He shows the couple a Meissen music box, a beautiful fragile object depicting a man and woman in courtly dress dancing -- it's like a vision from The Magic Flute.  Jan and Eva return to their farm where they have a green house and seem to be growing berries and tomatoes.  For Bergman, a picnic outside is a classic locus amoenus, that is, a place of delight.  Eva is luminous in the summer light.  (She's played by Liv Ullmann in the very prime of her beauty.)  The couple slip down to the grass to make love.  But the next shot signals a radical and sordid change of mood:  we see Jan emerging from the privy and, then, jets zoom overhead dropping incendiary bombs,  phosphorous, it seems, that ignites the forests and burns the meadows.  A paratrooper strangles to death, hung from a tree.  Soldiers emerge from the woods and threaten Eva.  She's filmed stuttering to the camera, asked to say a few words about the war by the invading troops.  The island's defenders emerge from the shadows and there's a fire fight.  Eva and Jan flee at dawn, driving through shattered villages full of corpses.  When Eva sees a dead child, she's dumbstruck and decides that she's glad that they have no children.  

In the village, the local guard round up all the civilians, herding them into a school building incongruously decorated by children's pictures posted on the walls.  There's some haphazard torture, a man dies, and another man has his shoulder dislocated.  Jan is interrogated for collaborating with the invaders.  Her voice has been dubbed to make a propaganda film in which she seems to be congratulating the enemy on attacking the island.  Another collaborator is dragged out to a post to be executed.  But the town's commissar, Jacobi, pardons the man, sentencing him to a life of hard labor. ((Another camera crew has appeared to film Jacobi's clemency -- in the modern world, war and film are inextricably connected). Devastated by the experience, Jan and Eva return to their farm.  Jacobi calls on them daily and seems to be sleeping with Eva in exchange for providing the couple with liquor and cigarettes and, even, musical scores and other gifts -- for instance, he gives Eva his mother's wedding ring.  (Remember -- Eva and Jan played side-by-side in the Philharmonic orchestra before the war; in the opening scene, Jan awakes and says he dreamed that it was pre-war and that he and Eva were playing the largo from a Bach concerto together.)  Jan is complicit in the relationship between Eva and the sinister Jacobi, a man who is inconsistently tender and, then, cruel and demanding, In this film, Bergman has divided himself between two surrogates -- the ineffectual, but, then, murderous artist, Jan, and the brutal, demanding Jacobi.  In fact, Jan and Eva seem to be conspiring to murder Jacobi.  Everyone has been drinking too much.  Indeed, Eva notes that she's been drunk pretty much constantly.  Jacobi takes Eva aside.  He knows that the partisans are planning to kill him and he's afraid, not of death, but torture.  Jacobi gives Eva his life-savings; perhaps, he's planning suicide.  Then, the partisans attack the farm and Jacobi tries to buy them off by promising to pay the money that he's given to Eva to the guerillas.  But Jan has found the money and hidden it.  When Eva tells Jan to give up the money, he disingenuously says that he doesn't know where it is located (in fact, it's in the back pocket of his jeans). The partisans destroy the farm house and outbuildings and slaughter the animals.  Then, they hand Jan a gun and gesture that he should execute Jacobi.  Jan botches the murder, wounding Jacobi who crawls around in the mud before Jan shoots him four or five more times, failing to deliver the coup de grace.  (A partisan has to machine-gun him.)  With their house destroyed (as well as the Jan's violin, a wonderful instrument carved by an Italian who had fought Napoleon in Russia), the couple flee on foot to the coast.  Along the way, they encounter a terrified boy who has deserted.  Jan discovers that a fisherman has agreed to row refugees from the island to some place of safety -- possibly another country across the sea.  Jan, who was earlier unable to wring a chicken's neck, remorselessly kills the boy for his boots and, then, the couple stagger through a devastated, charred landscape to the coast where the boat is waiting.  The last few minutes of the film take place on the open boat where the refugees are starving and freezing to death.  One of the men commits suicide by slipping off the boat into the icy water.  The vessel gets entrapped in a flotilla of corpses, dead soldiers bobbing on the still waters.  This is a famous scene and suitably nightmarish -- the stench of the dead men nauseates the people on the boat and the men desperately try to push the corpses away from the vessel.  But the masses of dead bodies seems to be drawn to the boat like a magnet.  In the final scene, Jan and Eva are lying exhausted and, apparently, near death in the hull of the boat.  Jan (played by Max von Sydow) looks particularly cadaverous, like a 19th century painting of Lazarus just resurrected from his grave.  Eva says that she dreamed that they were in the city and that it was a beautiful day and that she was picking roses.  Then, a plane dropped bombs and the roses were all set afire but this didn't matter to Eva because the flowers were beautiful as they burned.

The film is a grim masterpiece, brilliant with many small, but penetrating details.  There's a brusque doctor who works for the torturers who quips at the dead and dying' for him, it's just a job.  Jan tries to kill a chicken for a meal but can't bring himself to wring the animal's neck -- he has to shoot the bird, something that he can't accomplish notwithstanding firing the gun at  close range.  In one harrowing scene, Jan and Eva are digging in muck, possibly harvesting potatoes -- they begin to shriek at one another, each accusing the other of being a "suck-up" to the authorities (in this case Jacobi with whom Eva is having sex).  There's a wheel barrow on which the couple slump in a desperate embrace.  Later, when Jacobi is riddled with bullets, his body is dragged away on that same wheel barrow.  Battles take place place off-screen as horrifying flashes of light and clouds of smoke billowing up over the wastelands of the stony beaches.  Made in 1968, Bergman's film was interpreted as being about Vietnam, that is, the plight of people caught between the opposing sides in a Civil War.  Certainly, the film's bleak vision and the isolating environs of the island -- it's Bergman's refuge, Faro -- sugges that there is literally no escape from circumstances that brutalize the characters.  The happy and glowing young wife becomes a prostitute.  The inept cowardly Jan turns into a feral murderer.  In the middle of the movie, Eva says that she feels like a character in someone else's dream and that she knows that the dreamer will feel a terrible sense of shame when he wakes up and remembers what his imagination has devised for him to dream.  Bergman tilts the table toward nihilism by cheating a little -- no one seems to know what the war is about.  (This seems false to my experience -- the problem with war is that everyone seems to know, or thinks they know, exactly what the fighting is for; people are sure of their motives and it's only later that they realize to their horror that it was all for nothing.)  The film is austere and doesn't feel like a typical Bergman movie -- there are no themes as to memory or the solace of art and romantic love.  The movie is part of a tetralogy of films shot on Faro Island and featuring Liv Ullmann who was, then, Bergman's lover -- these pictures are Persona, The Hour of the Wolf, Shame, and The Passion of Anna.  Persona and The Hour of the Wolf are despairing films about characters who are lost within the labyrinths of their own imaginations and dreams and who fail to find anything solid or grounding in their lives -- the boundaries between dream and reality are fatally blurred.  Shame seems almost documentary -- it's shot by the brilliant Sven Nykquist in chilly black and white with much jittery handheld camera or long, extended sequence shots.  But the documentary effect is an illusion or misdirection -- the nightmarish, Goya-influenced imagery, in fact, signals that we are trapped inside of Bergman's dream; there's no mingling of reality and dream in this film because it is all a terrible nightmare from beginning to end.  At the end of the picture, Eva says that someone has spoken in her dream but she can't recall what was said -- it seems she is referencing her own earlier comment, uttered in the middle of the film, that she is trapped in someone else's dream and the dreamer will be ashamed when he awakens.  Furthermore, there's a characteristically Nordic equation between the austere frigid landscapes and the plight experienced by the characters.  Liv Ullmann in an interview conducted in 2018 describes Bergman as being literally half-crazed when he made Shame, on the verge of a breakdown.  The ostensibly happily married musicians begin the film unhappy -- their happy marriage is purely notional.  Eva wants children.  The self-centered Jan abhors the idea.  Even at the outset of the movie the two are bickering and Eva despises Jan's weakness -- he often squats in the corner of their farmhouse weeping inconsolably.  Eva blames Jan for not being able to conceive children.  She recalls bitterly a time when they were separated and Jan had love affairs, most notably with an "opera singer" who may have had some kind of venereal disease -- all of this subject matter is broached before the jets spew fire all over the landscape.  Ullman in her memories of the film falsifies it.  She says that the couple was happy before the war ruined their lives.  But this is clearly untrue.  In fact, Bergman's bleak vision is that the conflict between Jan and Eva is just another manifestation of human tendencies toward cruelty and selfishness, the essence of the war around them.  In fact, I would argue that Shame is part of the dream landscape in the earlier films because the war is a pathetic fallacy, that is a vision of their marital conflict writ large and in characters of betrayal, smoke, fire, and rubble.  

Diamantino

Diamantino (2019) is a noteworthy example of a genre that is without honor, a genre maudit, as it were:  the picture is a putative cult movie, manufactured not by popular acclaim or inadvertently by incompetence or on the basis of ambition vastly incongruent to means, the three ways in which movies with "cult" following seem to arise, but rather on the basis of cold, deliberate calculation. The writer-director of this film, Gabriel Abrantis, seems to have conceived the movie to check about every box in the repertoire of cult film:  like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Diamantino features outrageous gay-inflected content, involves transgender or transexual characters and, yet, remains coy about the sexuality of its principal characters.  Like movies by Ed Wood, the picture has a complicated and elaborate plot that requires effects entirely beyond the picture's actual paltry budget -- Diamantino is shot on Super 16 mm; the picture quality is only marginal at best and the movie's special effects are bargain basement quality. (The generally distressed appearance of the film stock suggests Guy Maddin, reputedly an admirer of this picture.)  The acting is campy -- no one seems remotely plausible, not necessarily a bad thing because the story is so remarkably contrived that the mise-en-scene requires caricature of the broadest sort.  And, like most movies, conceived to attract a cult following, the picture backfires badly.  It's painful to watch a film so aggressively downwardly mobile -- the picture's badness isn't original, but plotted as an achievement in reverse.  And, yet, the movie is too self-conscious  to achieve the charm of the sort of naive folly that catapults a picture into cult status.  Further, like many intentionally campy productions, transgression (for instance in films featuring characters in drag) can sour into misanthropy or, more precisely, misogyny.  The female characters in Diamantino are particularly loathsome -- a monstrous lady-scientist in a wheelchair modeled after Bond villains and Dr. Strangelove and two spectacularly "butch" dominatrix-style twin sisters who look like figures from the old Robert Plant video "Addicted to Love".   What might be ironic, and amusing to one sort of hipster may come off as simply cruel and excessive to other viewers.

Diamantino, a hunk of beefcake, is a soccer star who plays most of the film topless.  He's weirdly asexual and childishly innocent.  Perhaps, the greatest soccer player in the world, he triumphs by imagining the football field as a great arena in which giant Pekinese puppies romp in clouds of bright pink fog -- these puppies are his totemic animals and they guide him to greatness in his sport  All is going well for the gorgeous Diamantino until the evening before the World Cup final game -- he plays for Portugal and represents the nation's sporting honor.  While sunbathing on his yacht with his old kindly father and vicious sisters, Diamantino is surveilled by a Lesbian pair of tax revenue investigators who pilot a drone overhead.  (Portuguese "inland revenue" or the IRS, as it were, believes Diamantino is concealing his vast wealth in illegal offshore investments --  in fact, the simpleton soccer player knows nothing about money and it's his greedy sisters who have schemed to evade Portugal's taxes.) Diamantino's yacht, with the drone hovering overhead, comes upon a raft full of half-crazed African immigrants; one of them is a mother who has lost a child, drowned during the crossing.  Diamantino is disturbed by the plight of the refugees and vows that he will adopt one of them.  On the day of the World Cup final game, Diamantino's sisters abuse the soccer player's kindly father, causing him to die.  Somehow, the death of his father befuddles Diamantino (even though he knows about this only telepathically) and his giant Pekinese puppy helpers vanish.  He misses an easy penalty shot and Portugal loses the World Cup.  Diamantino, now a persona non grata, and mourning his father retreats to his enormous chalet, a vast rococo palace with floating balloon T. Rex dinosaurs and allegorical murals painted on the ceilings.  A nun who looks like Sally Field in the TV show "The Flying Nun" brings Diamantino a handsome young man -- this is supposed to be a refugee from Africa that Diamantino has sought to adopt as his own son.  In fact, the teenager is Ayesha, one of the revenue officers, dressed as a boy and given the name Rahim.  (The nun is Ayesha's lesbian lover, the other IRS officer who has been spying on the soccer star).  Although Ayesha is obviously a beautiful young woman, Diamantino takes her for a young man -- he's too sexually innocent to be disturbed when he begins to develop romantic feelngs for him/her.  (There's an unsavory aspect of pedophilia and exploitation to the plot -- is it okay for Diamantino with his melting puppy dog eyes and beautiful abs and naked chest to desire the boy that he is supposed to be helping and who has been entrusted to him as his "son.")  Ayesha/Rahmin is, of course, trying to gather evidence of tax evasion committed by soccer star.

Meanwhile a mad scientist, the bland female Dr. Strangelove, has conceived of a plan to clone the disgraced Diamantino and create an entire team of identical soccer stars   The mad scientist plot develops into a satire on Trumpism -- winning the World Cup for Portugal will "make Portugal Great Again" and the Ministry of Propaganda, financing the plot to clone Diamantino operates vans labeled "Portugal is Not a Small Country", presumably some sort of demented political slogan..  For some reason, this cloning process requires that Diamantino be administered hormones that cause him to sprout shapely female breasts.  Cloning will require a great expenditure of Diamantino's vital stuff, so much of an infusion of his genetic material that the poor fellow will sicken and die.  Just as Dr. Lamborghini, the mad scientist, is about to clone the hero into extinction, Ayesha/Rahmin races to his rescue -- she's now in love with him. (Apparently, Ayesha has been cured of being a Lesbian and, now, has become robustly heterosexual although her object of desire, of course,  has the breasts of a porn-star.)  Diamantino is killed in the fracas.  As he dies, he has a vision of the puppies in their frothy pinkish clouds ascending straight up to heaven.  Heaven turns out to be a spectacular sunset beach where the spirit of Diamantino, complete with his impressive bosom, darts about wholly naked --also sometimes cavorting on a celestial soccer field before a million fans -- before settling down to embrace the gorgeous Ayesha who is a now (more or less) heterosexual.

The film's co-director Daniel Schmidt is apparently a famous footballer himself, although there's nothing convincing about the soccer scenes which are perfunctory at best.  The movie features Wagnerian music on the soundtrack, another "over-the-top" feature in the film, but there are spritely pop tunes and, also, a love aria from Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell.  (Diamantino Matamouras, the hero, is said to be modeled on Rolando Cristiana, a great Portuguese soccer player, sometimes acclaimed to be the best in the world.)  

Diamantino is pretty bad stuff and not as "liberated" as the directors imagine.  In fact, the film is avidly anti-Lesbian, although maybe pro-male homosexual.  The picture is nasty on all accounts and, even as a "shaggy dog" story straining all canons of credibility, it is unintentionally retrograde.  Nice breasts and a cute girlfriend with an equally nice bosom seems to be Diamantino's reward for the idiotic virtue that he so steadfastly displays.  Although the film is full of crude, if impressive, effects -- for instance, the enormous puppies, big as semi-trucks, flouncing around in their pink clouds in the soccer stadium -- there's really much less here than meets the eye.  It's candy-colored whimsy, but not particularly compelling.  

    

The Damned

 In HBO's acclaimed, and highly popular, series Succession, there is an ambitious, if obtuse, heir to the family fortune named Roman.  A former drug addict, Ken schemes to seize power from his father, a baroque tyrant named Logan.  Two of his siblings are allied with Logan and, one of them, Roman, I think, mocks Ken for his "silly little walk" -- a sort of constipated strut accomplished with a rigidly upright torso, robotically moving arms, and small, hen-like steps.  Luchino Visconti's grandiose The Damned is a German version of Succession -- or, more properly stated, is a source for the HBO show even, though, perhaps, no one associated the TV program has ever actually seen the 1969 Italian movie:  of course, you have DNA from people that you've never met.  At the turgid climax of The Damned (actually called Goetterdaemmerung in its European version), Helmut Berger, who was then Visconti's boyfriend, struts around in an SS uniform, a beautiful blonde beast resplendent in his black togs -- but he walks with tiny prissy steps and his military bearing is bogus and you can't help giggling at his pretensions.  Unfortunately, giggles are few and far between in Visconti's long, leaden movie and, mostly unintentional.  

In theory, The Damned  sounds like it could be good, tawdry fun.  But the movie's pacing is funereal and its politics, particularly those of the sexual kind, are so muddled that it's impossible to tell what is meant by some of the film's more lurid sequences.  The film's subject is internecine squabbling, literally murderous, between family members aspiring to power in a family business, Gusseisen (that is "poured metal"), an enormous foundry that occupies a grim, grey industrial site the size of a small city.  With a few exceptions, the action takes place in a colossal palace that is all interior -- I can't recall any shots of the exterior of this vast manse, a place with corridors as long as a soccer pitch and enormous great rooms with marble fireplaces and somber furniture that looks weightier than a luxury sedan.  Obviously, Visconti is channeling family history from Krupp dynasty, the firm that supplied iron for armaments to the Nazis -- there's apparent anxiety about the source for the story (the Krupps were still very much around in 1969) and, so, the film comes with a prefatory title that any resemblance to the living or dead is purely coincidental.  Really?

Visconti is famous for long party or celebration sequences in which all characters can be gathered to interact with one another while wearing gorgeous gowns and perambulating through spectacular and palatial sets.  The Damned begins with such a scene:  it's the birthday party of Joachim, the patriarch of the Von Essenbeck family.  At dinner, members of the family discuss the rise of National Socialism and, indeed, the festivities are interrupted with news that the Reichstag is on fire -- the film takes place over the course of a year that seems to be very, very long, that is, between February 1933 and July 1934.  The oldest son, Constantine, is a Nazi sympathizer -- he's also a thuggish brute.  His son Gunther seems more genteel but feckless.  Herbert is a liberal and, in  the course, of the evening, he resigns his position in the family firm gets accused of murdering his own father-in-law, and has to flee with Nazi assassins on his heels.  Sophie, presumably  Joachim's youngest child, is a widow.  But she has an ambitious boyfriend, Aschenbach (played by Dirk Bogarde) who is scheming to become president of the firm.  Sophie's son, Martin is the villain of the piece, a weird conglomeration of just about every imaginable sexual perversion.  During the long opening sequence (it follows a showy prelude in which molten iron spews fire in all directions), Joachim's granddaughters recite a celebratory poem; one son performs a somber cello solo, and Martin, who is a homosexual cross-dresser, imitates Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel singing a cabaret song about needing a richtiger  (real) man while dressed in a black garter belt and tight-fitting corset-like bodice.  (Needless to say, the old patriarch doesn't exactly warm to this performance.)  The festivities end with Martin attempting to molest one of the granddaughters under a table (it turns out that he's a pedophile as well as transvestite), the old man gunned down in his bedroom, and Herbert on the run, accused of killing Joachim -  in fact, the patriarch was shot by Aschenbach.  This is all sounds fun on paper, but it's not executed in an appealing way -- the mise-en-scene is tedious, the camera placements are obvious, and every shot drags out its interminable and weary way; sometimes, Visconti uses zoom shots into close-ups, a device that within the enormous, echoing void of this movie seems somehow cheap and meretricious, as if the film technique of Taiwanese kung fu picture has found its way into this moribund Teutonic gloom.  Things go from bad to worse.  Martin rapes a child who lives in the apartment next door to his glamorous fashion-model mistress's digs-- the tenement seems to have plush apartments next to squalid low-rent rooms in the same building.  Martin's sexuality makes no sense at all -- first, he seems to be a flamboyant queer, then, we find that he's a child molester, and, ostensibly, heterosexual as well.  By the end of the movie, he's shooting morphine and bedding his own mother.  It's with good reason that the other characters regard him with dismay.  The child that Martin is raping, a toddler Jewess that Visconti sexualizes in an alarming way, hangs herself.  The virtuous Herbert has an  equally virtuous wife played by Charlotte Rampling -- at this point in her career, Rampling used her exotic beauty to specialize in playing depraved women, but here she is cast against type.  Of course, she ends up in a concentration camp at the behest of Constantine, her brother or brother-in-law (I'm not sure which).  Constantine, who is also bisexual, attends a weekend with Roehm's SA boys -- this involves lots of skinny dipping, Bavarian dancing complete with lederhosen-clad lads slapping their thighs as they hop about in circles,, and, then, a spectacular homosexual orgy.  At dawn, when the boys are all tuckered-out, the SS appear and machine-gun everyone, spilling, as the appalled Pasolini wrote in a critical open-letter to Visconti, "liters of red dye".  This massacre, the so-called "Night of the Long Knives" turns out to be orchestrated by Martin, now resplendent is his SS uniform wit the ambitious Aschenbach..  (These two villains have contrived to have poor Herbert and his wife sent to Dachau.)  With Constantine riddled with machine bullets and out of the picture, the line of succession runs through Aschenbach so long as he can become nobility, a von Essenbeck by marriage.  Therefore, he arranges to marry his mistress, Sophie.  But, on the eve of her wedding, Sophie ends up in bed with her own son, Martin who is half-crazed with morphine.  A weird sex scene ensues with Martin burying his head in mom's lap while she peers in the dark with a comatose expression on her face -- there's lots of foot caressing adding to Martin's impressive repertoire of perversions.  A zombie wedding follows in which Sophie, her face painted Kabuki-white, is wed by Aschenbach, understandably distraught since it's apparent that these nuptials with his narcotized bride will end up with his death -- it is, as they say, a "blood wedding."  A group of depraved folks invited to the wedding get half-naked and lounge around the great room in the mansion necking in a desultory way -- it's like an outtake from a Fassbinder film.  No one is having much fun, including Martin's mistress who dances with her handsome SS boyfriend and pervert.  Martin supplies his mom and stepdad, Aschenbach, with cyanide capsules which they obligingly take, ending up in a macabre tableaux as grotesque mannequin-like corpses.  The "blood wedding" at the end of film is symmetrical with the birthday party with its murderous climax at the start of the movie.  And the picture ends with fountains of molten metal poured out of vast black cauldrons.

This all sounds campy, ridiculous, and amusing,  But it's not.  Visconti takes a bit too much pleasure in staging incest, child molestation, and, of course, the spectacular, if ridiculous-looking, massacre, at the end of the film.  By the evidence of the movie, Visconti was a self-hating homosexual.  He luxuriates in the blood bath at the Bavarian resort -- his SA men wear garter belts and hose, have baby oil on their handsome chests, moon around in the dark, gazing up into the sky and drunkenly singing the Horst Wessel Lied.  The movie is probably worth watching for the bravura slaughter of the SA men -- but Visconti seems totally confused:  is the massacre a good thing or a bad thing. Similarly, the film puts back the cause of homosexual liberation by a generation -- the queer protagonist, Martin, is also a child molester, drug addict, a mother-fucker in the literal sense, and an enthusiastic Nazi.  The Damned was a famous movie in its time, on which the US movie industry bestowed an X rating -- it would be considered soft R today.  The film is handsomely made and well-acted within the limitations of its rather operatic genre -- it's like Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind, full of strange garish lighting effects and melodramatic perversion but without the fun. 

 

In Search of Famine (MUBI and its discontents)

 Showing on the screening service MUBI, In Search of Famine is a 1980 film by the celebrated Marxist and Bengali director, Mrinal Sen.  The movie is undoubtedly excellent and, certainly, seemed to me to be remarkably interesting and intelligent -- but MUBI streams the film in a format that proved to be unwatchable.  Indeed, the movie was so traduced by the way it was presented that I am considering canceling my MUBI service.  There's no point in showing movies of this sort if they are going to be systematically disfigured and, therefore, disrespected, in the way they are presented.

So far as I can tell, In Search of Famine involves a contemporary (late 70's) film crew shooting a movie about the great Bengal famine of 1943, a politically induced calamity that murdered five million people.  The movie crew are urban westernized artists from Calcutta, as it was then called.  They roar into a remote Bengali village in a rented bus, wander around a huge, deserted temple (it looks a little Angkor Wat) and, then, take up residence in a decaying local palace  This where the town's ruling family once lived -- the grandee is now paralyzed and dying alone in the abandoned palace.  The townsfolk, many of whom are very scrawny, cynically observe that they will look fine on the screen as famine victims.  Everyone in town gathers to watch the movie makers at work -- there's a big peanut gallery of women and children and peasants who sit just off-screen while the gas generators rumble and the director (he looks like an Indian version of Stanley Kubrick) films the action.  When he shouts "cut!", the local kids imitate him and scamper about maniacally crying "cut! cut! cut!."  In the middle of the night, there is the ghostly sound of a woman wailing.  It turns out that the local prince, the old paralyzed landowner, has died.  The leading lady walks off the set, possible because she is upset by the death of the old man.  A local girl is recruited to play the part of a young woman forced into prostitution to save her husband and family -- this seems to represent a deviation from the original shooting script. (The production of the film within the film seems to be a jaundiced commentary on Satjiyat Ray's Distant Thunder, a harrowing movie about the 1943 famine that was an international art house hit and that involves the plot element of a young woman prostituting herself to save her family.)  The Bengali film makers are casually cynical.  They play a game of "Guess the Famine" -- showing  horrific pictures of skeletal people and dying children and challenging each other to identify which famine these pictures show.  Apparently, India has had a number of famines, even as recently as 1959.  The last image is particularly horrific -- a skeletal man whose ribs and sternum are perfectly visible under his grey stretched skin.  But this turns out to be an carved stone image of Lord Buddha as a starving man.  The point seems to be that the starvation of the poor has always been a part of Indian culture.  

After about an hour, I abandoned the movie.  This was notwithstanding my interest in Mrinal Sen and the film itself, probably a magnificent achievement.  The picture is accompanied by very pale, blurry subtitles.  The subtitles bleed into the whites and other light colors in the movie and can't be read without heroic effort -- it's eyes-fatiguing labor to read those titles and, after forty minutes, I gave up on that enterprise.  Therefore, I had little or no idea what was going on from shot to shot.  The picture has lots and lots of dialogue and without the Brechtian interplay between the director, the peasants, and the actors, the film is impossible to comprehend.  Furthermore, MUBI streaming films have a disconcerting characteristic of suddenly freezing, only for a second or two, but at increasingly frequent intervals -- this must be some kind of perverse artifact of the digital streaming process, but it makes watching these films, even if you can read the subtitles, a real pain in the ass.  In Sen's movie, this freeze-up or freeze fame effect occurred with alarming frequency until the movie began to simply black out and finally ceased streaming entirely.  By touching any key on the remote, I could resuscitate the movie, but only to have the film begin to stutter and pause again and again once the picture was revived.  This is intolerable and, if the problem continues, I will cancel the service.  There's no point in watching movies that are poorly curated, presented with innumerable pauses and black-outs, and, then, provided with wholly illegible subtitles.  (The subtitle problem seems to me to be subtly racist --would a film by Bergman or Fellini or Kurosawa be presented with blurred, unintelligible subtitles?  I think not.)  

Movies by Sen, reputed to be a great master of Indian film making, are almost impossible to see. Years ago, I tried to screen for a movie club, Sen's Calcutta 1971.  The movie's first sequence, involving a family in a hovel penetrated by the rain and tormented by ceiling leaks, was immensely memorable, frightening, and compelling -- the family has to leave their shack and go to some kind of public shelter that also leaks like a sieve full of hundreds of other people all crammed miserably together.  This was the film's initial vignette -- I think it had five parts.  But the movie was so poorly preserved as to be impossible to watch and the subtitles were also just a vaporous blur, impossible to read.  In general, Bollywood (and Indian independent films) seem regarded as of negligible significance and, even, the Indians seem wholly uninterested in conserving these films.  A movie made in Bengali in 1980 looks worse on screen than something directed by D.W. Griffith in 1915 -- it's shocking and deplorable.

Blue

 Blue, premiered in 2018, is a short film, about 12 minutes long, directed by the celebrated Thai film maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.  The movies seems to have been produced under the creative auspices of the Paris Opera, possibly a part of a short film festival that the cultural institution sponsors,  Blue is interesting, but too obscure, perhaps, to be compelling.  In a green-blue forest, possibly a jungle, a woman reclines under a cover on a pale bed.  The woman can't sleep.  Reviews of the film describe her as insomniac, although this is projecting more information into the movie than it actually exhibits.  From time to time, the woman opens her eyes or rolls over under her covers.  Somewhere proximate to the woman, in an imaginary space, it seems, there are some colorful theatrical backdrops.  These stylized paintings show landscapes --  in one of them, a yellow-brick path leads along an inlet between hoary-looking mountains, improbably rugged after the model of Chinese calligraphy.  The sun is setting over the sea.  Another back-drop shows a similarly yellowish path directed toward an ornate shrine in the center of the landscape.  Both images are obviously the product of the same faux-naif artist, and pictures are mounted on some sort of  canvas that can be ratcheted-up and down, a process that involves a loud clicking sound that is the most charming thing in the movie.  A couple of bright sparks show on the woman's blanket and these grow to become a large fiery blaze.  In a couple of shots, the blaze seems to be burning on the canvas flats as well.  The blaze burns without consuming anything and produces neither ash nor soot nor smoke -- the effect seems to be achieved by some kind of "front projection", that is, showing the fire reflected on a transparent plane immediately in front of the lens.  The fire gets bigger and the sizzle of flames becomes louder than the ambient jungle insect noises.  The fire continues for about eight minutes without the woman seeming aware of it -- then, the film ends.

The bed, the sleeping woman, and the operatic-looking scenery on the canvas screens comprise a triad that suggests something about how each of us creates our own imaginary world around us while we dream (or when we create art).  But the fire is hard to interpret because the woman doesn't seem aware that her bed is burning.  And I don't know what the title "Blue" means.  Probably, the film is best understood as a collage between three elements, all of which are independent of one another except in the mind of the film-maker:  there is fire superimposed on images, but not really burning anywhere except pictorially; we see a sleeper incongruously resting on a bed in the open jungle (probably representing the untamed aspects of the imagination); and there are artifacts that suggest culture, even high operatic culture, in the backdrops that are ratcheted up and down in the film and that seem to occupy yet another plane of existence.  The elements that intersect in the film,  probably, signify a collective "imaginary" -- that is, a map of an imaginary world.  But this is all speculation and surmise.  

FSTL Documentary (Four Seasons Total Landscaping)

 MSNBC, the Left-Liberal cable news network, is screening a short, minimalist documentary called Four Seasons Total Landscaping.  With commercials, the picture, directed by Christopher Stoudt, is about forty minutes long.  The film focuses, primarily, on the aftermath to the infamous press conference held by Rudy Giuliani on November 7, 2020 at a family run landscaping company locatee between a crematorium and porno place in East Philadelphia.  During the press conference, Giuliani proclaimed that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.  His timing was bad -- it was also announced during his wild-eyed and maniacal presentation that the Networks had "called" the election for Biden.  This was whispered to Giuliani which prompted a spectacular display of sarcasm in which the former New York Mayor and Trump factotum raised his arms in supplication to the Gods of TV news networks, mocking the heavens, it seemed, for their insolence in declaring the President the loser in the election.  Giuliani's performance was demented and rendered even more surreal by the baffling mise-en-scene -- a garage door plastered with Trump posters in a grimy and, decidedly, low-rent part of town.  The media speculated that Trump's staff had made some kind of spectacular mistake, somehow confusing Four Seasons Total Landscaping's parking lot with a tony ballroom at the expensive Four Seasons Hotel downtown.  The show's tease, as it were, is that the documentary purports to reveal how the press conference came to be located in a moribund industrial neighborhood, hosted by an unknown family-run enterprise.

The politics of the film are a bit inscrutable.  This is, perhaps, intrinsic to the enigmatic quality of the events depicted.  Four Seasons Total Landscaping is a business run by an Italian matriarch, Maria Saviro.  (Apparently, her husband works in some other enterprise.)  Saviro's operation was small, hand-to-mouth, and, even, possibly failing at the time that Fame plucked the business out of obscurity.  The movie shows that the mother, Maria, was, apparently,  planning to retire and leave the enterprise to her burly and handsome son, Mike.  Mike's lieutenant was a man named Sean Middleton, one of the architects of the business' sudden efflorescence as a purveyor of on-line memes and high-camp merchandise such as sardonically embossed tee-shirts -- for instance, "Lawn and Order" imprinted on one shirt and another stenciled "Make America Rake Again."  In the post-show discussion with a MSNBC host, Sean Middleton, portrayed as Michael Saviro's closest friend, is mysteriously absent and one can only conclude that some sort of squalid dispute has arisen resulting in bad blood between the former best buddies.  (Mrs. Saviro, who seems to change hair colors frequently, appears in the post-show conversation as a a vibrant youngish-looking sixty year old woman with strawberry blonde locks; her original hair color was probably black as witness one picture showing her as a young woman, a sultry-looking Mediterranean siren with ebony hair, looking, for all intents and purposes, like the moll of a successful gangster -- a notion that leads to unsavory speculation as to her husband's unnamed trade.)  The viewer suspects that the family were probably Trump supporters, although of the increasingly rare sane variety, but, then, cashed in on the ignominy of the FSTL press conference when they discovered that their bread was buttered by mockery and not fidelity to the lost cause.  The show's brief trajectory is clear enough:  Trump staff contact the failing business and set up a press conference at their garage, possibly because animus between pro- and anti-Trump protesters downtown made holding the event there too dangerous and too susceptible to being overrun by enemies who outnumbered the President's supporters in the central city.  Giuliani with entourage (arriving in two big and sleek black SUVs) appeared at the Saviro business.  Giuliani is an avuncular fellow and he obligingly posed with family members and was filmed seated at Mrs. Saviro's desk behind a plaque that read "Boss Lady."  Giuliani then performed his operatic denunciation of the election (and the Networks).  After the event, which is scarcely shown, the business was deluged by "haters" -- presumably, progressives who despised FSTL for hosting the noxious presser.  The business received thousands of emails threatening FSTL and its members with all sorts of mayhem, including incendiary destruction of the business' humble garage and warehouse.  Michael and Sean shrewdly discerned that there was a business opportunity in the furor and began posting amusing memes on the Internet and, then, selling all sorts of tee-shirts. People began to make pilgrimages to the unprepossessing facility and one group of admirers even ate their Thanksgiving dinner in front of the shop.  The business began to thrive on the sale of curios and funny tee-shirts.  Millions of dollars were made and Maria Saviro even got to appear in a big budget TV commercial aired at the Super Bowl.  Trump proved the axiom that there is no such thing as bad publicity.  The FSTL story confirms this proof -- somehow, the little company transformed a sea of rage and indignation in a warm swamp of lemonade-flavored love:  "the outpouring of love," someone remarks was "overwhelming."  The show has a happy ending.  Michael is now running the business and the enterprise has, indeed, morphed into a sort of event center.  Presumably, the business will host weddings and develop a catering service as well.  

The show doesn't really satisfy its "tease".  It remains unclear why Trump (or Giuliani) chose the FSTL parking lot for his weird press conference.  The explanations offered by the documentary are that the Trump organization wanted to exploit Giuliani but keep him on the sidelines -- hence, he was exiled, as it were, to the grungy east Philly location.  Trump's campaign was out of money and FSTL didn't charge anything for use of their site.  A press conference downtown would have been disrupted by protesters and the landscaping business was easy access on and off I95, possibly the definitive reason.  Finally, Trump's PR people were probably in on the joke -- choosing the location for its ironic, "meta" qualities; some of Trump's staff were undoubtedly quite willing to satirize their own activities and this campy sensibility seems on display on the choice of FSTL as a location for Giuliani's over-the-top performance.  The film ultimately raises far more questions than it answers:  what was the politics of the Saviro family? how was the place really selected (were they campaign donors)? what happened to Sean Middleton? how exactly was the pivot made away from being accused of treason to becoming a humorous, much-beloved punch line to a joke about Trump and his supporters?  The phenomenon that the show documents is increasingly familiar if a little sinister:  someone becomes instantly famous for an internet post, the butt of a million jokes, and either thrives or is destroyed by the sudden explosion of world-wide interest.  A Japanese woman allows her toy poodle to defecate on a Tokyo subway and is hounded to suicide by millions of Internet trolls; a Mexican girl of humble background invites people to her quinceanera in a naive and amusingly primitive on-line video:  millions of people threaten to attend and people post memes of the Pope blessing her at a special mass convened in her honor.  Andy Warhol observed that everyone would one day have their fifteen minutes of fame and proved the point by promoting two-bit hustlers, drug addicts, and hangers-on to the specious glamor of "Super Stars."  Fame and glory are available to everyone.  This is evident at all levels in our society:  people posting on TikTok become stars with millions of followers; the disreputable host of a disreputable TV reality show rises to become President of the United States.      

Sexmission

 Sexmission is a 1982 Polish Science Fiction film.  For several reasons, I would like to claim that this movie is an unheralded "cult" classic, a riotous and campy comedy along the lines of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (a movie that I don't much like myself but that others have acclaimed.  Alas, the film is a clunky, low-budget enterprise with lots of tits and ass but not much else to engage the imagination.  Further, as the film proceeds, it develops into a sub-literate and tedious political allegory, apparently scoring fatuous points against the collapsing and equally fatuous Polish Communist party.  It would also be fun to say that the movie is so bad that it's good.  But this would also be untrue. The movie is bad enough, and not really mean-spirited (some of its character have a goofy Slavic charm).  But the film is too self-aware, too intentional in its wrongness -- unintentional wrongness can have a certain naive charm as witness some of the films by Ed Wood; but this picture is designed to be bad in certain specific ways and there's nothing worse than high culture masquerading as inept low vulgarity:  the high cultural pretension remains while the contrived vulgarity is affected and false.

Sexmission involves an experiment in hibernation gone wrong. (It's plot is similar in outline to Woody Allen's Sleeper).  Two dimwitted and hapless "cosmonaut" types volunteer to be frozen for three years -- these being Polish military, they stash away some vodka and cigarettes for their awakening.  The experiment is conducted by a sinister-looking scientist in a wheel chair, a bit on the order of Dr. Strangelove.  He's previously frozen a chimp who appears at a press conference to grope the buxom lady newscaster..  The two cosmonauts wake up from their slumber not three years later, but in the year 2084,  They are imprisoned in a sterile suite by a group of women who periodically remove their tops and strut around half-naked.  As we come to learn, all men are extinct and these two anabiosis explorers (anabiosis = hibernation) find themselves the center of much interest and distrust by the gynocracy.  Ultimately, the dominatrix rulers of this terrible regiment of women decide to "naturalize" the heroes by castrating them.  (These elements of the plot seem derived from Planet of the Apes.)  The heroes escape from their cell with the help of comely blonde scientist who is, as you might say, "curious" about the attributes of the protagonists.  (The women all pop pills at intervals to quash their sexual instincts; they reproduce by in vitro or test-tube technology.)  A long and witless chase ensues through what looks like an east Silesian salt mine.  It turns out that the women's colony is far underground.  At last, after various adventures and perils, the two men find a silo with a periscope that shows the surface of the planet ravaged by fire and radiation.  This is the outcome of the war in which the sinister scientist in the wheelchair launched the "M-Bomb" and wiped out all the men on earth.  The heroes and the comely blonde scientist climb up a ladder to the hellish inferno on the surface.  But this turns out to simulated.  In fact, beyond the backdrop scanned by the periscope, there's a nice Polish forest with a villa and gardens.  The men go there to have sex with the girls -- the blonde having been joined by an attractive brunette guard who has followed them tot he surface.  The commissar from underground, a burly-looking middle-aged woman, turns out to be living "high on the hog" in this villa, profiting from the fraud perpetrated on the women underground.  (By this point, the film has devolved into a surly commentary on the Socialist regime in Poland -- the infernal surface an allegory for the State media's portrayal of the Western Democracies.)  The Commissar turns out to be a man disguised as a woman and, so, in fact, the gynocracy turns out to be just another iteration of the patriarchy.  The cosmonauts have seeded the in vitro cells with male chromosomes and to the dismay of the subterranean race of women, the new crop of babies are all male.  The movie ends with a big close-up of a male infant's penis -- so much for women's liberation.

The film is shot in ultra-cheesy, late seventies style -- huge camera flares disfigure the images (and are used to conceal the bargain basement sets).  The action scenes are staged like Three Stooges routine.  The cast of women routinely strip naked for no reason at all other than to get lots of nudity on screen.  The acting is cartoonish although the chubby little cosmonaut is winsome -- I think he later starred in a series of well-known art films by Krystof Kieslowski..)  There are some good gags in the film's first 15 minutes which promises a lot -- but the film can't sustain the energy.  The last funny shot occurs when the cosmonauts wake up, light their cigarettes, and, then, are attacked by a half-dozen women spraying fire extinguishers at them; they are drenched in white foam.  After that image, the film is just a slog though increasingly idiotic scenes until its end.  Midway, the film loses the courage of its comedic convictions and turns into political and social satire.  At points, the moviemakers don't know whether they're serious about this stuff or mocking it -- for instance, there are some shots of a hyper-modern geriatric rest home featuring an old woman who has nostalgia for the good old days.  This part of the movie seems sentimentally serious.  

I had hoped that the movie would be good, or, at least, amusingly bad.  My friend, Rick Herreid, apparently acquired the movie just before he was unexpectedly struck down by a fatal heart attack.  He was apparently planning to screen the movie at an annual event that we call the Afton Film Festival.  This is an all-male gathering at a cabin on the beautiful banks of the St. Croix River in Afton, Minnesota.  At the so-called Film Festival, participants drink and watch films that "their wives would not let them watch at home" -- that is, Westerns, horror movies, soft-core porn, and the like.  Rick didn't get to show Sexmission because of his death just before the Film Festival was to convene in 2019.  Later, his wife Karen found the movie, still wrapped in plastic and unopened, among Rick's things. And, so, we screened the movie at Afton on November 6, 2021 in honor of our departed friend.  The movie was a bust, but, of course, redeemed in some respect by fond memories of Rick, a person who was exemplary in all respects. 

About Endlessness

 From it's first shot, Roy Andersson's About Endlessness (2019) suffocates viewers in its uniquely melancholy decor and fantastically studied compositions.  Andersson's icy, vacant style somehow contrives to have his tableaux seem empty even when the image swarms with people.  His mise-en-scene makes Wes Anderson's twee symmetry and diagrammatic lighting seem haphazard and careless by contrast.  The degree of tyrannical control exercised by the director is astounding and, I suppose, ultimately confounds the viewer.  Andersson's films have a distinctive appearance, based, I think, on the dead-pan aesthetic of top-of-the-line European advertising -- it's unsophisticated for a product or service to make a direct appeal to consumers; therefore, austere staging and enigmatic characters suggest, albeit only faintly, certain needs and desires that the thing advertised can assuage.  Andersson's peculiar style is all about suggesting obliquely (or sometimes with shattering immediacy) that human beings desire comforts that can never be satisfied:  in one respect, About Endlessness, revolves around a constellation of needs that can't exactly be even defined.  His airless compositions, pinning figures in diorama-like settings that are, at once, totally realistic and completely stylized, are maps to the endlessness of desires and urges that can't even be clearly articulated and that devolve into sterile ecstasies of anxiety and despair.  About Endlessness completes a tetralogy of films beginning with Songs from Second Floor, You the Living, and A Pigeon sat on a branch reflecting on Existence, movies with similar texture and subject matter made between 2000 and 2014.  All of these movies are designed as a procession of sequence shots, one incident per scene, shot tableaux style (using the ancient fixed camera and theatrical staging of early silent films such as those by Jacques Feuilliade) -- in most cases the sequence shots don't form a narrative with adjacent material.  The movies cut from scene to scene by an associative logic with each sequence making its point and, then, ending in a black-out.  (The effect is eerie and reminds me of the disquiet I felt watching Ernie Kovacs' skits on TV when I was a little boy -- Kovacs scared the hell out of me:  as with Andersson's films, there was a lonely, confined aspect to his comedy that was more grim than funny.)  Andersson's pictures are only vaguely thematic.  They don't cohere into any particular message or theme.  Components of the films match their titles, but, generally, we have the sense that the movies consist of wry ideas that Andersson thought amusing or significant strung together without any real continuity.  On Endlessness seems more cruel and grim than his earlier films -- it has far fewer gags and some sequences tilt toward an almost unbearable sorrow.

The scenes are all shot in a studio -- even his large exterior shots, seem to be manipulated to give the effect that we are gazing into a monochrome terrarium.  The color scheme in On Endlessness is astonishing uniform:  all shots are composed in tones of slate grey, pale blues with an icy aspect, various shades of brown and beige.  Skies when we see them are universally overcast and underlit.  There are shadows, no highlights, and no scintillation in any of the images.  A shocking flare of blood on a woman's chest in an anecdote about honor-killing (seemingly committed by staid Swedes) is the brightest thing in the movie.  With one discreet exception, Andersson's camera never moves and remains fixed.  Sets are constructed with meticulous, miniaturist and obsessive detail, but don't ever seem overcrowded.  Andersson has many different ways to stage motion in his claustrophobic sets -- people enter or leave and we see action through open doors and mirrors.  With a few exceptions his locations are cheerless bars (uniformly lit like specimens under a microscope), cold-looking apartments, city streets that tunnel through interminable, identical blocks of stone buildings, mostly unfurnished offices and waiting rooms.  In one scene staged in a church, Andersson focuses on a utilitarian sacristy in the foreground with a glimpse of a sanctuary behind where some people are kneeling -- churches normally are lavish settings but Andersson films this location to avoid indulging in any spectacle. The characters have the greenish chalky pallor of slightly decomposed corpses -- most of Andersson's figures are zombie-like old men and woman. Ultimately every scene looks like glimpse into some sort of prison cell.  

The film commences with an oddly foreshortened view of a couple embracing in the midst of a sea of fog. Then, we see a man and woman, both turned from the camera looking from a park bench on a hilltop over a valley filled with grim-looking identical apartments.  After the preliminary shot, most, but not all scenes, are introduced with a voice-over in which a woman says "I saw a man who..." or "a couple" or, in one scene, "an army".  The voice-over sometimes announces things about the figures on screen that we couldn't discern from the scene itself.  For instance, one shot shows a woman in what seems to be a business office looking out a window:  "I saw a woman incapable of shame..." the voice-over tells us.  But the woman, who is dressed professionally, barely moves and for the 40 seconds of the shot never turns to face us -- she's staring out a window.  We see an elderly waiter pouring red wine all over a white table-cloth in a posh if empty, restaurant.  His customer barely glances up at him.  A man emerging at the top of stairs in a Stockholm courtyard (he's carrying bags of groceries) stops to address the camera -- the man says that he has seen an old schoolmate that he once "seriously harmed" who has refused to speak with him.  The schoolmate, then, trudges up the same steps and rushes by the man without acknowledging his increasingly desperate cries.  The voice-over utters a non sequitur:  "I saw a man who had bought groceries to make an elaborate dinner for his wife..." Toward the end of the film, this disconsolate character appears again, at home with his wife in an adjacent room:  he addresses us with a monologue about how this fellow who refuses to respond to his greetings has probably had a far better life that him/  Something is boiling furiously in a pot -- possibly the rage and resentment of the speaker.  His wife responds that this is nonsense:  after all, they've been to Niagara Falls, the Eiffel Tower, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  A man dreams that he is being forced to carry an immense heavy cross, scourged mercilessly as he staggers up a city street.  A crowd cries "Crucify him!"  In one of the film's few instances of continuity, the character awakes in bed, recounting his dream to his wife.  This man is a pastor of some sort.  He goes to see a therapist, a hulking old man who says he can help him but that it will cost a lot of money.  The therapist makes an appointment for a week in advance. Later, we see the priest at his church in the sacristy, guzzling communion wine before going into the next room to administer the sacraments. The priest says that he has lost his faith.  In another later sequence, the priest appears at his therapist's office crying that he has lost his faith.  But he's come too late and the therapist and his chubby receptionist literally throw him out of the office -- they have a bus to catch.  No one can help anyone else.  A man with a bad tooth goes to dentist but refuses anesthesia (he's afraid of needles).  Every time the dentist starts drilling, the man wails piteously.  Finally, the dentist gets up and stomps out of the office.  The nurse says that "the doctor is having a bad day."  In the next shot, we see the dentist drinking morosely in a bar while snow falls outside, a single Christmas ornament glinting mournfully in the window.  We hear "Silent Night" and a man says that "it's all fantastic" although he's ignored by the others in the tavern.  A legless man plays mandolin in a subway station.  The music leaks outdoors where a grandmother is obsessively taking photographs of her son's small baby.  A man and his little daughter are going to a birthday party but they are caught in a terrible downpour.  A train arrives at a desolate open station where a woman and little girl are waiting.  People get off the train including the little girl's father whom she joyfully greets -- but the scene is not about that family; an attractive young woman gets off the train with her suitcase.  No one is waiting for her. She sits down sadly.  Then, we hear steps and a man comes running across the train platform.  Obviously, he's late.  '"Yoo-hoo," he says to the woman who gets up to leave with him, obviously miffed, and unwilling to say a word.  Most of the scenes are gloomy, even despairing but there are a couple of less mournful scenes, most notably three girls who walk by a cafe where music is playing on a jukebox.  (It's Benny Andersson's jaunty Ror vig mig mu, an Abba-styled tune.)  The girls dance and, when the song ends, the isolates in the cafe all clap for them.  Much of the film is quite dire:  A prisoner is tied to a post apparently awaiting a firing squad while he begs and the sea roars behind him.  At a fish market, a man slaps a woman repeatedly and, then, gets thrown to the ground by the other zombie-like customers.  When they let him up, he tries to strangle the woman, all the while saying that he loves her while she replies:  "Yes, I know."  In a bunker collapsing under shells and bombardment three Nazi generals stare comatosely at the plaster falling from the ceiling (one of the men may already be dead).  Hitler enters and the still conscious generals listlessly salute him "Sieg Heil!"  There's an honor killing with a father cradling  his daughter whom he has just knifed to death while neighboring tenants in the apartment building look on numbly.  An enormous army marches across the steppes toward a Siberian prison camp -- these scene which goes on for a long time probably imparts the title to the film.  A man embracing a woman like figures in Chagall painting float over a bombed-out city -- it's probably Dresden. Periodically, we hear an aria by Bellini from Norma but, in a bizarre turn, the credits tell us that the opera sequence was recorded when Marilyn Horne appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.  An earnest young man tells his girlfriend about thermodynamics and says that we are just "energy" -- but neither of them move at all and they day outside looks grim and lightless.  A man's car has failed on a little lane on an endless brown moor.  Try as he might, he can't get the car to start.  

Most of the film is inconsequential, although the elaborate sets and careful camera angles create the impression of a great, granitic significance in each scene.  On Endlessness feels like a series of unhappy jokes with the punch-lines omitted.  The movie is fascinating but very mournful.  Roy Andersson is now 78 and this may be his last film -- ultimately, he is remaking the works of Ingmar Bergman although as a series of repressed, cruel vignettes.  Bergman had lost his faith, but, at least, he believed in narrative.  Andersson has lost that belief.