Dragged across Concrete

 Dragged across Concrete is prescient 2018 neo-noir directed by S. Craig Zahler and starring Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn.  The film is controversial and has been accused of racism.  Certainly, it has some politically incorrect dialogue in the movie's first half hour, apparently a deliberate provocation, but, of course, it's unclear whether the attitudes expressed in the script are endorsed by the film or, ultimately, refuted by them.   It's tricky to ascribe political ideology to a movie based on a character's dialogue; after all the allegedly offensive dialogue could be satiric or implicitly critical of the character uttering the words.  In this case, I would guess that the director and his cast probably intended the politically incorrect material as a prefatory statement of principles -- I base this view on the casting of Mel Gibson in the film, clearly a provocation in its own right, and on Zahler's previous film, Bone Tomahawk, a horror-Western in which Zahler invents a tribe of troglodyte cannibal savages to play the part ordinarily inhabited by Apaches or the Sioux in old movies -- that is, the role of the implacable, stoic, and murderous savage, a part that current ideology has exiled into zombie and red-neck killer movies.  When watching Bone Tomahawk a few years ago, I dutifully ticked-off the standard Western imagery usually investing Native American warriors but, now, displaced onto murderous, torturing cannibals of some unknown cultural provenance.  Obviously Zahler wanted to make a standard Western but felt hamstrung by politically correct attitudes about Native Americans.  In Dragged across Concrete, Zahler resurrects hoary law-and-order tropes in which hardnosed but virtuous cops are hampered in the performance of their appointed duties by the liberal media and the courts.  This is Magnum Force and Dirty Harry stuff, although I can attest to the accuracy of the sentiments on display in the film, perspectives that have been expressed to me with some vehemence by actual sworn officers of the law.  This is a sense of victimhood, an idea that "politicians" don't support the cops, an idea that niceties of Civil Rights law ultimately serve the bad guys and subvert the police whose methods may be esthetically unpleasant but whose hearts are in the right place.  That said, the film's provocations are swiftly absorbed into what turns out to be a standard, if very effectively, presented noir heist film.  

Dragged across Concrete begins with a narrative strategy that characterizes the entire movie.  We start in media res (with a sex scene) -- a character is introduced by subtle clues as to his or her motives and personality, but we are not given any information as to how this character fits into the film's broader plot.  Repeatedly, Zahler brings a new figure into the movie but without establishing that character's role in the narrative as a whole. Gradually, however, we see how the different characters interact within the scope of the film's narrative arc.  An exemplary figure is a young woman whom we meet at the mid-point of the movie -- the woman is a new mother and doesn't want to leave her baby in her apartment with her stay-at-home partner and the child's father.  There is a lengthy sequence in which the young mother hesitates to go to work, refuses to get on the bus to the Bank where she is employed, and has a long dialogue scene with the baby's father in which he persuades her to board the bus and go to her job.  (Unfortunately, the Bank where she works will be robbed in the next fifteen minutes and the young woman ends up shot to pieces on the bank's floor.)  The film is very long, about two hours and thirty minutes although it's plot is pretty spare and rather abstract -- there are not a lot of incidents in the film; rather, sequences are drawn out to what seems inordinate length although the dialogue is so sharp and bizarre and the scenes so well-imagined that the picture never becomes tedious.  The narrative strategy is clearly inefficient, intentionally so, and complicates our perception of the characters -- and this increases the film's length.

An ex-con struggles to establish himself on the outsidew.  His mother is working as a hooker and this threatens the ex-con's little brother, who, in the manner of gangster films in the thirties, is crippled.  Two thuggish cops played by Gibson and Vaughn stake-out a Hispanic drug dealer.  They arrest the man, slamming him down on an exterior walkway at his apartment and pinning him to the ground with a boot on the man's skull and the back of his neck.  A neighbor films the bust on a cell-phone and both cops are called on the carpet by the Commissioner, played by Don Johnson.  (These scenes are wince-inducing, particularly in light of the right-wing dialogue surrounding them.  But, it must be remembered that the movie was made two years before the George Floyd incident which the picture seems to presage.)  The cops are put on a six-week suspension without pay for police brutality.  (Where is the Federation of Law Enforcement Union?)  The scene with Commissioner Calvert is the part of the film that has garnered the most post-racial reckoning criticism -- it's got some stagey dialogue about the liberal media and the cowardly politicians and judges.  This suspension without pay triggers the heist plot.  Left to their own devices, Gibson's character -- he's called Brett Ridgman -- and his partner, Tony Lurasetti (Vaughn), plan to rob some robbers who are plotting a bank heist.  Ridgman needs the money because his teenage daughter is being bullied by some Black thugs and the cop fears that she will be raped.  He tells his wife he's going to find some money so they can move out of their increasingly dangerous neighborhood.  (His wife, like the ex-con's little brother, is conspicuously disabled -- she's a tough ex-cop with multiple sclerosis.) Tony needs some quick cash so he can persuade his girlfriend to marry him -- she's a little suspicious, justly so, about his illiberal tendencies as a cop; that is, as the script informs us a tendency to employ "cast iron" methods in policing the streets.  (We've seen Tony with Ridgman behave with appalling violence in arresting the Hispanic drug dealer and mercilessly rousting his half-naked deaf girlfriend -- Tony says he can't understand her quite articulate speech because it sounds "like a dolphin or something.")  It turns out some very cruel and murderous criminals, clad head to to toe in black with gas masks and goggles, are on a crime spree murdering people prolifically throughout the city named Bulwark in this movie.  (I think it's actually Vancouver.)  The bad guys use a security van to raid a Bank, killing everyone there.  Ridgman won't call in the bank robbery because he wants to rob the robbers.  The rogue cops chase the bad guys to a remote location amidst an urban wasteland of some sort -- it's desert with abandoned warehouses, dead rats, refrigerators in ditches, and, at the end of the bad road, an antique service station decaying in the dark desolation.  There follows an extremely violent and protracted siege in which the rogue cops attack the villains and vice-versa -- this siege lasts about a quarter of the movie and is extremely well-choreographed and plausible. This battle pits the cops against about six villains who have taken a hostage -- there are also two getaway drivers who were not involved in the murders in the Bank.  (They are supposed to be sympathetic and include the ex-con with the crippled brother whom we saw in the first scenes in the movie.)   Further description would involve serious spoilers -- there is one shocking act of violence in the film's brutal climax that is completely unexpected and disturbing.  Ultimately, almost all of the principals are killed and, on that note, the movie ends.

The movie is very peculiar.  It has strange "soul" songs, all apparently written by Zahler, the director, and they are either terrible or great, I suppose, depending on your perspective (I thought the music was uniquely awful).  Most notably, the film's dialogue is composed in pseudo-Shakespearian verse -- everyone speaks like they are in Shakespeare adaptation of a Mickey Spillane novel.  Sleeping is said to "processing air."  Something is "bad like lasagna in a can."  Getting killed is "being punctuated".  The bad guys intone this motto:  "Do not prioritize money over having a heartbeat."  There are innumerable examples of this sort of diction in the film -- and, again, you will either enjoy the Elizabethan turns of phrase or despise them as pretentious idiocy.  (I liked the dialogue.)  This sort of fruity overripe way of talking reaches a climax in the scene where the young mother returns to the Bank workplace after her three month maternity leave -- the great Fred Melamed plays the Bank's director and he speaks with majestic turns of phrase that resemble a Jewish John Gielgud.  (It's tiny part, Melamed gets killed about two minutes after his impressive appearance, but represents Zahler's overwrought diction at its most outrageous.)  I recognize the influence -- Zahler is trying to stylize his dialogue like words spoken hardboiled fiction by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and it plays like Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep speaking like Macbeth.  The movie is brilliantly acted -- Mel Gibson is particularly good as the sixty year old cop who recognizes that his life is a failure and, so, tempted to end his career with one big score.   (The supposition that cops are poor is ridiculous; every cop I've ever known is very prosperous, supplementing their basic salary with vast amounts of time-and-a-half overtime and well-compensated moonlighting work as security at concerts, bouncing at bars, and so on.)  Zahler is very gifted with respect to staging violence -- the siege of the armored car is a kind of masterpiece, impeccably designed and topographically and relentlessly logical as well as horrifying.  The film is unafraid to use very long takes, sometimes two or three minutes, and there are only a few close-ups; action is mostly filmed in the middle distance.  My chief reservation about the film is its inordinate length -- the plot would be worth about 80 minutes in a fifties' film noir but this picture is twice that length.  Stake-outs and car chases are drawn out to Wagnerian proportions -- mostly it seems to make time for Zahler's exorbitant and showy dialogue.  I liked the movie and recommend it with reservations -- it's great but very long and sordid.  The movie features a cameo by the wonderful Udo Kier, who, of course, plays a degenerate; I always like to see the ineffably rancid Udo Kier strut his stuff in movies.    

At the MIA (Eternal Offerings Chinese Ritual Bronzes)

 At the Minneapolis Institute of Art, about 150 Chinese ritual bronzes are on display, presented in a highly theatrical show that may be seen until May 21, 2023.  The bronzes are selected from the museum's collection, apparently very extensive with respect to these kinds of things, and exhibited with no explanatory material in seven rooms (the so-called Target Galleries).  I'm ambivalent about the show -- it's uncompromising and asks that viewers respond to the enigmatic, even somewhat menacing-looking, bronzes without the benefit of any intermediary explanation.  Although the exhibition spaces are brilliantly configured and dramatically lit, I would have appreciated more art-historical information about the objects on display.  However, it is also fair to observe that the MIA show doesn't hector you with politically correct wall-labels, doesn't encourage you to scrutinize the bronzes for signs of oppression or exploitation of the enslaved or impoverished, and declines to advise you how to think about the objects in the show.  In many museums, extensive labeling is used to virtue-signal and persuade as to how you are supposed to react to the artifact on display.  To its credit, the MIA show is precisely the opposite in its effect:  the viewer is left with nothing but questions and the emotional valence associated with bronzes is left to the viewer's own idiosyncratic response.

As far as I can determine the Chinese bronzes are all about 3000 years old.  They are mostly urns, with vaguely basket- or bucket-shaped vessels supported by tripodal (or four) legs.  Some of the vessels have zoomorphic handles or extensions -- chimeric animals or dragons protruding from the urns.  The surface of the urns is intricately incised with floral and abstract patterns and the bronzes have greenish-grey patina that makes them very handsome.  (This is a show involving things that you yearn to touch -- the urns have a cold, jade-like quality and I imagine that they would present fascinating surfaces to the hand and fingers.)  In addition to the urns, there are serving vessels for royal banquets, lance and sword blades, figurines such as horses, birds, and oxen carts.  In one room, large trapezoid-shaped bells, also intricately figured, are on display.  There are no labels explaining what the objects were used for; nothing tells us anything about the sometimes grotesque (in the original Italian sense of the word) etchings on the bronzes.  We aren't told anything about their provenance or age or iconography.  

The first room in the display cites Chinese classical poems -- normally, the introductory room at shows of this sort provides detailed information as to the content of the exhibit and its significance.  (Sometimes, there is even a movie that provides information as the show's themes.)  In this show, the poems are opaque and not easily interpreted -- they describe an ideal polity with an intricate relationship between the Mandates of Heaven and the Earth.  Another introductory chamber displays translucent, bone-colored castings from some of the urns dangling overhead between two dark-colored mirrors -- looking up or down, you see an moonlit abyss, both bottomless and topless, in which the pale castings rotate like planets. (These objects in intact form will be presented in the show's final room)  This first room opens into a space in which the collection's iconic owl vessel (it was used for wine) stands perched on a pedestal that is dramatically lit with a scrim behind sliced into man-sized panels roiling with an abstract (and animate) projection of calligraphy displaying the Yellow River.  In other rooms, urns seem to have pale columns of incense rising from them, projecting on another scrim that leads up to an oculus above where blue skies with moving clouds are visible.  Percussive sounds, mostly high bells, twitter in the darkness.  The gallery space is disorienting with mirrors everywhere reflecting the bronzes so that they seem to multiply and appear on all sides,  hovering in the air.  It's very dramatic and invites the viewer to look carefully at each object -- usually in exhibitions of this sort, viewers tend to glance at the artifact, read the label and, then, move on; generally, you spend more time reading the wall label than looking at the object to which it refers.  Here, there's no label to read and so your entire attention is focused on the bronzes.  It's fascinating, but there's a sense that the objects themselves are so similar in character and so lacking in charisma that they have to be displayed against stormy moving backgrounds, scrim-projections, and lit like silent movie heroines.  The viewer's reactions are foremost, however, I think that this must be respected.

You emerge from the show, more than a little disoriented, into a gallery with Native American artifacts.  Of course, these objects are all politically fraught and the gallery-goer is admonished that many of the objects must be viewed in light of the genocide committed against native peoples, genocide in which the collectors and viewers, of course, are complicit.  One label in particular denounces James J. Hill, who acquired some of the artifacts, as a mass-murderer, or, at least, as an enabler of mass-murder.  Upstairs in a gallery leading to the Impressionist galleries, there are four or six Corots, all of them once owned by James J. Hill -- these are silvery grey paintings of enormous delicacy, (it's moonlight in the bright of day), with eerie white highlights like seeds or bleached leaves demonstrating the motion of the air.  Are we supposed to regard these timeless works of art as significant in part due to being once owned by the Empire Builder as Hill was called? -- or are we to imagine some note of reproach in the labels in light of the denunciations in the texts in the Native American gallery?  It's an interesting inconsistency which plays out against the interior screen of the viewer's imagination.  

Also on display is a good collection of German woodcuts culminating in Duerer's works.  There are some openly homo-erotic pictures in one of the photography galleries -- this isn't a good exhibit for couples on dates because the male nudes will make men feel insecure, and, probably, inadequate.  In the gallery devoted to academic and classical European painting at the time of the early Impressionists, there's a huge new acquisition, probably 8 by 16 feet made by someone named Joaquin Sorollo y Bastida -- the big canvas seems uninteresting to me:  it's mostly a life-size picador's horse, viewed from behind (what was the Academic obsession with horse's asses about?) with a several diva-like matadors getting attired before entering the ring.  The subject matter, bull-fighting, is abhorrent and the picture's photo-realism is tiresome.  I took another look at the Kunin paintings, a large gift to the Institute containing many interesting images.  Kunin was socially conscious and collected aggressively erotic nudes as well as paintings with social significance (strikebreakers dressed lie Imperial troopers in Star Wars and a Madonna of the coal mines for instance), and many fine portraits -- the collection includes two Ivan Albright canvases, faces not as decomposed as in other painting by this artist, some fine Alice Neel pictures, a good Andrew Wyeth canvas, and an alarmingly severe and scary picture of an shaved John Brown glaring down at a black Bible overflowing with incomprehensible script (it's by Horace Pippin).  The museum is large enough to always provide me with fresh surprises.  This viewing I was surprised at the number of interesting painting by John Singer Sargent -- at least four or five including a fine image of a child's birthday party with a monumental matronly figure and her faceless husband, all black suit and trousers, standing by the birthday cake in a richly appointed room.  (The picture always deludes me into thinking it is by Degas).  A small but wonderful exhibition called "The Art of Literacy in Early Modern Japan" contains a number of fascinating and whimsical images, capriccios as it were, printed in books or impressed onto wall-hangings.  Some of the screens are shockingly bare, just a calligraphic figure at  bottom of a hanging that is otherwise a glowing void.  There are some books printed with Hokusai images and a comical tableaux called "Frog Writing Context" which accurately describes the content of the image.  A very strange and remarkable wall-hanging is entitled as "A Meeting of Japan, China, and the West".  In this late 17th century work, a Chinese sage sits across a table from a Japanese man who has a white snake twisted in a bizarre way around his wrist.  A Dutchman stares into an anatomy book, scrutinizing a skeleton printed there.  Above these figures, a pagoda is enveloped in bright red flame.  The Westerners have brought a hose-truck on wheels to the blaze and are spraying it with water.  The Chinese look on in philosophical dismay.  Japanese sumo wrestlers have lugged huge wooden tubs of water to the conflagration but don't seem to know what to do with them.  

Luther, the Fallen Sun

 Luther, The Fallen Sun is a BBC production of a highly literate and complex stage-play revolving upon Martin Luther's relationship with fellow reformer, Melancthon, a film that explores the theological imagination in the context of 16th century politics.  I'm just kidding:  Luther, in fact, is a spin-off from a popular BBC crime series starring Idris Alba as the titular DCI (Detective Chief Inspector).  The film is efficiently entertaining -- it's jampacked with scary, gruesome imagery and sets off at a gallop and never pauses to take a breath.  I watched the gory thriller through to its end after two hours and two minutes of non-stop mayhem (the film lists at 2 hours and seven minutes, but the last five are titles showing that the picture was shot in London and Iceland with second-unit footage involving a vehicle sinking to the bottom of icy lake apparently filmed in Brussels where there is some kind of giant tank of green-blue water.)  The movie zooms forward at a breakneck pace to keep you from thinking about the plot.  The story is completely implausible, designed to deliver murders and mutilation at a rate of about 10 - 15 casualties an hour.  Indeed, the narrative is so stupid that it's an insult to the viewers.  In many ways, the film exemplifies what is wrong with big Netflix productions intended to garner a sizeable international audience -- everything is designed to compel your attention and if this require a half-dozen scenes of torture or mutilation, then, this is what the movie delivers.  I felt vaguely ashamed of the time I spent watching the movie.  (I could have spent the two hours reading Mrs. Dalloway.)

The unfortunate thing about Luther is that there's the kernel of a scary dystopian movie buried beneath the layers of lurid gore --  so it's a missed opportunity. The film's premise is that everyone has done something that is criminal and concealed that act.  But we are surrounded by the prying eyes and ears of electronic devices, apparatus to which we confess our sins and secret shame (such as watching Luther instead of reading Mrs. Dalloway) and that these devices catalog our offenses and report them to sinister forces engaged in perpetual surveillance.  There is a Black Mirror aspect to the film in which our humble computers and Alexa systems conspire with vicious international criminals to gather Kompromat on each and every one of us.  In Baltic countries that you can't even find on a map, hundreds of agents study our confessions and amass evidence of our crimes so that an evil criminal mastermind, the 21st century equivalent of Dr. Mabuse, can blackmail us.  Mabuse forced his victims into complicity with his criminal enterprises by hypnosis; the bad guy in Luther, played by the inimitably weird-looking Andy Serkis (Gollum in The Lord of the Rings series) compels his victims into murder and suicide by threatening to post screen shots of their on-line indiscretions to their mothers and children and business associates. (I write this note a couple days after the US congress members grilled Tik Tok executives, asserting with a blithe lack of evidence that the app on our cell-phones is retailing our dance routines and cute pet footage to the Chinese Communists.)  There is something witty and paranoically compelling about the notion that our digital servants, such things as porno websites, ring-camera surveillance systems, and baby monitors, are collecting evidence of our crimes and broadcasting that information to sinister criminal enterprises -- apparently consisting of hundreds of agents, goons, sadists, all in thrall to a mastermind criminal managing his torturous enterprise from a veritable Fortress of Solitude, a white mansion full of horrors located on top of a glacier located beyond a tunnel-like access road through 12 foot snow drifts at the North Pole (or, at least, close to it.)  There's an icy lake, an abyss that has no bottom, where the bad guy stores the cadavers of his victims, thawing them out from time to time and arranging them as mannequins at his baroque crime scenes.  This is all idiotic but it touches on something that is genuinely frightening -- our on-line signature convicts of all sorts of crimes and everyone can be blackmailed.  When the bad guy frames Luther, thought to be a righteous copper, he is immediately (and, apparently, justly) convicted of his crimes -- no one disputes the validity of the conviction.  If the truth about us were to be known, all of us would be convicted -- as Shakespeare says none shall " 'scape whipping."  

The villain lures a kid away from his night janitorial job, abducts him using a fake accident and one of his innumerable frozen cadavers, and, then, tortures the kid to death in some namelessly gruesome way.  (The bad guy records the death throes of his victims and uses those sounds to terrorize his foes.)  Luther promises the mother of the deceased lad that she will catch the killer.  But the murderer exposes Luther's crimes and he goes to jail.  In prison, fellow prisoners torment the copper until he stages a big, brutal riot to secures transfer from the gaol (as they say in the UK) and his later escape.  On the lam, Luther hunts down the villain -- this is a Hitchcock double-chase, with the cops chasing Luther who is chasing the mad serial killer.  (The villain is a "City Trader" whatever that means -- he's got limitless resources and seems to own all of Estonia.  He's a nasty guy:  he's burned his wife beyond all recognition but keeps her alive in a state of ghastly disfigurement so that he can torment her.  Of course, like all villains of this sort, he's prone to haranguing and, of course, leaves a trail of clues that will, in the end, result in his demise.)  Luther closes in on the bad guy after various adventures and corners him in Piccadilly Circus.  But the villain has about eight people blackmailed into hurling themselves off adjacent buildings, resulting in mass chaos, car crashes, and confusion in which he makes his escape.  The investigation is spearheaded by a feisty Black woman, DCI, Raynes.  When we see Raynes' teenage daughter, the shape of the second half of the film is instantly obvious:  the villains kidnaps the girl and somehow imprisons her in his Fortress of Solitude in northern Norway, obviously within the Arctic Circle.  Luther and Raynes pursue the bad guy to his HQ where the villain has imprisoned about eighty people, planning to torture them to death in a so-called "Red Room" spectacle -- apparently, internet sadists have paid to watch the bad guy and his Estonian henchmen kill these people in gruesome ways according to on-line specifications submitted by subscribers.  The moronic villain decides to murder both Rayne and Luther whom he has captured as an entracte before the main event.. With an audience of about 200 online gawkers, the villain harangues the two coppers and, then, ridiculously enough decides to give them lethal weapons with which they are supposed to torture each other to death for the amusement of the internet lurkers.  Raynes and Luther aren't gagged and so they can lecture the villain on his perfidy and terrorize his torture-subscribers who all depart the room -- this is picturesquely, if idiotically, shown by red video lights on cameras going out one by one.  Of course, Luther uses the weapon with which he's supposed to draw and quarter Raynes to kill a couple henchmen and escape.  The torture room floods with kerosene for a fiery denouement.  But it's not just fire but ice.  The villain flees in a snow-machine, battles Luther while the vehicle careens wildly over the fissured glacier -- why it keeps plowing forward during the big fist-fight and duel in the machine remains inexplicable to me.  The snow-machine crashes through the ice and sinks into an apparently bottomless lake.  Fortunately, there's a helicopter full of police scuba divers (why?) who rescue Luther.  The villain drowns.  When the kerosene is ignited in the torture room, the plucky copper, DCI Raynes and her daughter turn out to have access to fire hoses (the villain has tortured his victims by spraying them with fire hoses) and so the flames are extinguished.  It's a happy ending, with DCI Luther's crimes forgiven, if you can forget the thirty or so gruesome killings that led to the climax.  

From my summary of the action, you may think that I've made the movie seem more ridiculous than it is.  In fact, the film is much more idiotic than my capsule account suggests.  Luther is constantly getting beaten and abused and stabbed, hosed down and set afire -- he gets battered in the prison riot (broken ribs), his nose is broken and he gets stabbed in the side, a wound he treats with super-glue; at the villain's Fortress of Solitude, he gets stabbed again, beaten up, and, then, wrestles with the bad guy in an eye-gouging fight in the out-of-control snow vehicle -- then, he's drowned full fathom five before the scuba divers appear at the last minute to rescue him.  Idris Elba's Luther is likeable enough.  Apparently, someone thought that movie should be rated PG notwithstanding it's torture porn aspects.  Although all sorts of  perversion is implied, there's no sex, no nudity, and I don't think the word "fuck" is used except maybe once or twice.  

Do yourself a favor, read Mrs. Dalloway instead; the novel is also set in London with some scenes in Piccadilly Circus. If you want to read To the Lighthouse, that's okay with me too.

Love on the Ground

 The cinema of Jacques Rivette is an acquired taste that I have yet to acquire. As with Cezanne and Cy Twombly, I have studied much to appreciate Rivette's work, but, alas, mostly in vain.  Rivette's movies, at least the ones with which I am familiar, combine whimsy, fey protagonists, and impenetrably complex narratives -- it's a combination of giddy playfulness and Euclidean mathematical rigor, incommensurate qualities that don't exactly fuse.  Further, Rivette's range is weirdly limited -- although he made all kinds of movies, including quasi-epic historical pictures (his diptych on Joan of Arc), Rivette's signature films are all alike:  someone is directing a play, the actors begin to assume the characters that they are playing, and distinctions between theater and reality blur.  Sometimes, the play assumes the form of a ghostly reenactment as in Celine and Julie go Boating (which channels Henry James); in other films, the play is classical as in Out:1 (Aeschylus and Racine), L'Amour Fou Racine's Andromache) or a brittle farce as in Va Savoir (a comedy by Pirandello).  In Rivette's most famous picture (due I think to its extensive nudity), La Belle Noiseuse the art work being created is a painting and the film shows the artist and his naked model engaged in endless rehearsals as to gesture and pose.  Rivette's iconic films are claustrophobic, exploiting idiosyncratic sets that enclose the theatrical action.  In these films, Rivette explores the consequences of play-acting or collaborative art and obsessively, I think, stages the same (or closely similar) scenarios over and over again.  Love on the Ground from 1984, for better or worse, is founded in Rivette's themes as to the interplay between theater and reality and is so typical of these motifs as to seem almost self-parody.  I should also observe that Rivette's pictures on this subject tend to be very long (Out 1 is thirteen hours long) -- duration becomes thematic in itself; the character's immersion in the theatrical process is so lengthy and spell-binding that outside reality gradually fades into something dream-like and inaccessible.  

In Love on the Ground, an arrogant, overweening writer stages a play  in a seemingly abandoned mansion somewhere in Paris.  As in many of Rivette's works, the setting, a weird combination of a Palladian manor with op-art interiors, is overwhelming and, probably, the most vivid aspect of the movie.  The manor possesses a great rotunda with the signs of zodiac inscribed in a circular mosaic band on the floor.  Huge classical pillars dominate the facade and there are mighty columns in the rotunda painted midnight blue and flecked with gold highlights.  In the rooms radiating from the rotunda, the walls are painted with odd geometric grids, vine-like splashes of red, or strange shades of light blue and dense camouflage-mottled green.  In the garden, there is a circular folly, classically Greek in form, on which a winged cupid stands on a pedestal.  There are peculiar martyrdoms depicted in terra cotta in niches in the mansion.  Huge stairways sweep up to galleries overlooking the zodiacal floor of the rotunda.  When one of heroines tries to make love to the cupid figure in the garden, it falls and is revealed to be a fragile plaster cast that shatters into a dozen pieces -- the girl buries the fragments but, later, a replacement cupid is again set on the pedestal.  There's a subway station nearby and the densely wooded and palatial grounds seem to be surrounded by the city.  There is a distinctly Sadean aspect to the company of actors and theatrical types who retreat to the secluded mansion, where they live together and end up in various sexual configurations, while rehearsing the play.  

The premise is that the author has staged one of his plays in someone's apartment.  The play is a bedroom farce involving the hero shuttling between two mistresses who have inexpediently appeared at his flat.  In the end, the charade collapses; the  hero gets drunk and introduces the two women who discover that they work together and resolve to be friends upon abandoning their loutish lover.  The  farce isn't funny nor is it particularly witty.  A silent group of about a dozen viewers stands in open doors and looks down corridors to survey the action.  The author, Clement Roquemaure, is impressed by the actors in the play and hires them to work for one week rehearsing his new work.  This play will be presented in the manor house secluded in the garden.  The two female actors are Charlotte (Geraldine Chaplin) and Emily (Jane Birkin) -- the reference seems to be to the Bronte sisters.  (There is a completely useless commentary on the film's DVD by Richard Pena -- he seems unaware of the importance that the Bronte sisters had in French Nouvelle Vague pictures:  they are alluded to in Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and in Godard's Weekend.)  The girls are like Celine and Julie in Rivette's famous film of that name:  they are boyish hoydens, athletic with dancers' figures -- they might as well be called Huck and Tom.  These slender androgynous women seem to be the physical type that obsesses Rivette -- variants appear in all of his pictures; for Rivette, the ideal woman isn't particularly womanly but rather an antic, boy-girl prankster.  (In Love on the Ground, the playwright's previous lover, Eleonore, is more curvaceous, even voluptuous, and the film heaps special scorn on her.)  Charlotte and Emily are assigned color-coded bedrooms in the mansion -- Charlotte has a floral red room with splashes and tendrils of scarlet on the walls; Emily is given a lush green room.  

The play rehearsed at length in Love on the Ground is a variation on the bedroom farce that we saw fragmentarily performed in the apartment.  This time, two men compete for the affections of a single woman.  The handsome actor from the farce, Silvano, plays the lover who presently possesses the beautiful Barbara -- Charlotte has this role having deigned to compete for it by improvising a letter ostensibly to her love; Emily is not willing to compete against her friend, but it doesn't matter --she's given a "pants" role:  she plays Pierre, Barbara's previous lover, who suddenly appears at the place where Charlotte and her boyfriend are living together.  So far as we can determine, the play is pretentious and idiotic.  Six people are assembled for the week of rehearsals leading to the performance of the show for a small audience who is led on a tour of the mansion by Roquemaure -- this takes place on Saturday; that is, one week after the show in the apartment.  The film uses intertitles to establish the passage of time and is divided into seven parts, one for each day.  The six persons involved in rehearsing the play are the male actor, Silvano, from the farce, a rather shadowy character, a cipher who seems to be a drunk and gambler -- although, he's very handsome the man seems sexually inert.  Emily plays Pierre, Barbara's previous lover with whom she embarks on a new affair; Barbara is played by Charlotte.  Roquemaure has a butler named Virgil who prepares type-scripts of the play and, on the side, is translating Hamlet into Finnish. Virgil says he is invisible -- he walks on "pussy-foot" and claims to have written all the best parts of Roquemaure's inconsequential plays.  Paul is a magician.  He's also involved in collaborating on the play's script.  Paul, as we come to learn, is the model for Pierre. The play seems to be about Paul and Roquemaure's rivalry for the same beautiful woman, someone named Beatrice.  The extravagant red-headed Eleonore is apparently Roquemaure's former lover (and probably has been sexually involved with Paul as well).  She exists to quarrel with Roquemaure, to denounce his pretensions, and be humiliated by him, particularly as she is present, by implication, in the scenario that the group is rehearsing.  Curiously, the six main parts are mostly played by foeigners -- Silvano's role is played by an Argentine actor; Jane Birkin is English and Geraldine Chaplin is American -- she claims to be raised in her father's house in Carmel, California (presumably Charlie Chaplin's place) and Philadelphia.  Virgil is played by a Hungarian actor named Laszlo Szabo.  

The movie runs about two hours and fifty minutes and consists of a series of love affairs rather vigorously executed across the slender scope of six days.  Charlotte becomes Roquemaure's lover; Emily makes love to Paul, the magician.  Charlotte develops a passion for Paul and the two woman fight over him -- "like dogs," Charlotte says.  Emily gets flung to the floor and her head is cut.  (She has had premonition of this incident occurring -- from, time to time, both women see visions that turn out to correlate to events in the future.  The house has magical qualities -- it induces trances, strange episodes of somnambulance, and has a room that is either full of jungle animals or the surging sea.)  If I recall correctly, the women exchange lovers -- Emily is now with Roquemaure and Charlotte sleeps with Paul.  Then, it seems that Emily has sex with Virgil.  This is quite a lot of copulation to fit into six days. As in Jane Eyre, there's a mad woman in the attic.  Her footfalls are heard from time-to-time.  This is the beautiful Beatrice who was previously Paul's assistant in his magic show but who seems to also have been involved sexually with Roquemaure.  She appears at the end of the movie to disrupt Roquemaure's play with a little dose of reality since she is apparently the original of Barbara in the skit.  (The audience decries the stupidity and self-indulgence of Roquemaure's play and believe that it is degrading to poor Eleonore who seems to humiliated by being excised from the scenario entirely -- the spectators mostly walk out.)  Beatrice probably appears as a vagrant beggar in a subway scene in the middle of the movie in which she accosts Emily although this isn't clear to me.  She wears a vibrant red dress at the movie's end when she busts up the play.  In the subway, she wears a bright red stocking cap.  The play is a failure although it provides a framework on which to display the love affairs between the two girls and all the men in the movie (except Silvano who seems more interested in drinking and playing cards than making love.)  There is a prominent subtext involving Shakespeare's Othello; Charlotte played the role of Desdemona in that play in a college production and themes of sexual jealousy and infidelity from the Shakespeare work echo throughout the film, although reprised in a lighter, more inconsequential vein.  

The movie is handsomely shot and beautifully made.  But it's silly and repetitious and feels redundant.  And it's very tedious:  of course, art imitates life and vice-versa.  And, of course, actors can be seduced into blurring the boundaries between the real and imagined.  So what?

The Philadelphia Story

 The Philadelphia Story shot in the summer of 1940 and released in 1941 is an elegiac romantic comedy directed by George Cukor.  The movie's signature line is characteristic:  someone says that "the prettiest sight in this pretty world is watching the privileged enjoy their privileges"   Viewed in the light of World War Two looming on the horizon, the picture assumes a melancholy aspect -- it has something of the character of a dying fall.  The frivolous pursuit of pleasure on which the movie focuses, pleasure for its own sake, will be subsumed by more solemn endeavors, wartime austerity, and a censorious, even morbid post-war sensibility.  On the same night that I watched The Philadelphia Story, I also caught the last hour of Pillow Talk with Rock Hudson and Doris Day -- twenty years later, the wealthy sophisticates live in Manhattan and the theme of the film is sexual harassment, even, rape in its most noxious forms (the hero has a boudoir with a pop-up bed, a hi-fi set to seduction music, and, most notably, a door that locks when a button is pressed to prevent the lothario's victims from fleeing his presence.  Pillow Talk is clever, very erotic, and profoundly cynical -- it luxuriates in bad taste.  By contrast, The Philadelphia Story is nimble, witty, and, at its climax, a handsome young suitor avoids taking advantage of the drunk heroine, but is too gentlemanly to even reveal, except under duress, that he has preserved the woman's honor.  Before the bombing and the concentration camps, the world was a much different place.  Today, Philadelphia Story would probably feature a murder and suicide and some form of outre sexual perversion; things are not as blithe as they were in the summer of 1940.

Katherine Hepburn at her most beautiful plays Tracy Lord, an heiress who has divorced her first husband, the playboy and yacht builder, C.K. Haven Dexter (Cary Grant).  She is engaged to be married to a stiff, self-made man, Kittredge whose rectitude (and self-righteousness) represents every quality that her first husband didn't have.  A media mogul who runs a gossip magazine sends a staff writer (Jimmy Stewart) and his girl Friday, a photographer, Elizabeth Imbrie, to cover the upcoming garden-party nuptials.  Tracy's mother is estranged from her husband -- apparently, her husband's brother, Uncle Willy, is on the premises to imitate his absent brother who is living with a dancer in New York City.  Uncle Willy is randy and pinches women on the buttocks.  His brother, Mrs. Lord's actual husband, returns to the manor for the wedding.  He is also estranged from Tracy whom he regards as prudish, priggish, and judgmental.  She is heartless, her father tells her in one important scene, a sort of bronze statue.  Tracy's ex-husband who is much beloved by Dinah, Tracy's kid sister, and her mother, is sniffing around the estate; he obviously disapproves of Tracy's proposed marriage to Kittridge and, perhaps, hopes to intervene in some way.  Obviously, Tracy retains tender feelings for C.K., mostly relating to their courtship and honeymoon -- she recalls sailing with CK on his yacht, "The True Love" and there are many references to swimming in the manor's pool together late at night after carousing.  (Everyone in this movie drinks from dawn to dusk; no one is really sober in any of the scenes.)  C.K. delivers a toy yacht to Tracy and we see it plaintively floating in the swimming pool.  CK's presence arouses Tracy's amorous feelings and she persuades herself that she is in love with staff writer for the gossip magazine.  On the eve of the wedding, she and the writer get gloriously drunk together.  And they go for a swim in the moonlight in the fateful pool.  (Dinah watches and we are given to believe that she sees Tracy and Macauley (Mike), the writer played by Jimmy Stewart having sex by the pool.)  CK who is hovering around punches Mike in the jaw.  But everyone is too drunk to remember what happened during the enchanted night, a lengthy scene that comprises about a third of the movie.  In the morning, the principals are all horribly hungover.  Kittridge learns that Tracy has had sex with Mike; she can't deny the accusation because she has no idea what happened the night before, having acted, apparently, in a blacked-out state.  The well-heeled crowd gathers for the wedding.  Kittridge calls off the wedding and pompously stalks away.  Mike, who is in love with Tracy, tells her that he didn't take advantage of her the preceding evening because she was "drunk and some things simply aren't done."  He proposes to Tracy but she turns him down.  (Tracy recognizes that Elizabeth Imbrie, the loyal photographer, loves Mike and should be his mate.)  To save face, CK offers to re-marry Tracy.  She accepts his proposal and, as they walk down the aisle with Mike who is serving as Best Man (and with Elizabeth as Matron of Honor), the media mogul crashes the party and takes a picture of the wedding company, all of them staring like deer caught in the headlights of the camera.

The film possesses a velvety radiance and Katherine Hepburn is a lithe arrow-bolt of the purest silver.  She literally glows and, of course, everyone, including the camera, is wildly in love with her.  Tracy is like Diana or Artemis, improbably chaste and, of course, gracefully athletic -- we see her dive like a moonbeam into the pool and she has perfect posture and, when poor Kittridge struggles to mount his horse, she climbs astride her animal with no effort at all and rides with supernatural grace.  Hepburn's acting is overwrought by modern standards.  She perfected the role on the Broadway stage (she literally had the play commissioned for her) and she is very theatrical; her performance is like that of silent movie diva, very large, stylized, and abundantly "busy" -- she's always acting, rolling her eyes, sneering, or smiling with false graciousness but her beauty is so transcendent that you can forgive her excesses and, of course, she's always charming, an example of noblesse oblige.  Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart are wonderful; Ruth Hussey won an Oscar (as did Katherine Hepburn) for her performance as the gossip rag photographer, always the side-kick and maid of honor, but never the bride.  I detected more than a faint whiff of French existentialism in the movie -- it is most closed allied, I think, with autumnal masterpieces like Carne's The Children of Paradise made around the same time.  In several of the scenes, particularly the dialogue between Tracy and her father, there is a lyrical emphasis on liberation, being freed from societal roles, that is, becoming as opposed to being and some of chatter sounds like Sartre.  And, at the climax of the film, Tracy descends from her pedestal, giving up being an icon for simply acting "human".  All of this is realized in fantastically witty and elegant dialogue.  The movie glows like moonlight on still water.  

La Ceremonie

On Melinda's birthday, people assemble for a party for the 17 year old girl in Claude Chabrol's 1995 La Ceremonie.  The party-goers are bourgeois French living in a provincial city.  A silent and impassive maid named Sophie has made hors d'ouevres and pours glasses of wine for the guests.  One of them, by appearances a High School teacher, recites an aphorism that seems misplaced:  he quotes Nietzsche to the effect that the most loathsome thing about people who regard themselves as good is not their secret sins and failings, implying, I think, that it is the pretense of goodness that inspires loathing.  The quotation seems inexact and pretentious, in effect, a non sequitur.  But the reference to Nietzsche flags a key theme in La Ceremonie:  this is Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment, that is, the hatred that slaves bear for their masters -- the lambs, Nietzsche says, abhor birds of prey and define them as evil (and, by extension, elevate their own docile qualities of fearful gentleness to a virtue.)  La Ceremonie  is a savage study in ressentiment; it's both alarming and uncompromising, seemingly artless but, in fact, a carefully designed movie more akin to a horror film than social satire or a crime movie.  

A retired model who is now running an art gallery, Catherine Lantier (Jaqueline Bisset) interviews a curiously disengaged and reticent young woman for the position of domestic maid at her home in the country.  Catherine is kind, generous, and casually, if subtly, condescending.  Sophie take the position and moves to the family's opulent country home.  Sophie is impassive and inexpressive; she seems impossibly stoic and silent.  As it turns out, she is completely illiterate and carefully concealing this fact from her employers.  The Lantier family treat Sophie well, offer to teach her to drive, and buy new glasses for her -- she doesn't need glasses, in fact, but merely uses an assertion that she has poor vision as an excuse for not reading written material proffered to her.  She has no family, no history (it seems), and few, if any, pleasures.  Her only pastime is watching TV -- the Lantiers have a satellite dish that offers many stations, but Sophie seems content to watch garden-variety soap operas.  The local postal clerk, Jeanne, is much more vivid, aggressive, and overtly hostile.  She befriends Sophie and spends time at the Lantier place watching TV with her.  Jeanne harbors a deep hatred for those who might be construed as socially superior to her -- she particularly despises the Lantiers and, in fact, opens their mail, reads it, and, then, delivers this correspondence that has been obviously opened and, then, carelessly resealed.  Jeanne has insinuated herself into the good graces of the local Catholic Church and works weekends sorting clothing donated to the poor, using this activity to denounce wealthy parishioners for their stinginess. In fact, in one alarming scene, Jeanne and Sophie turn the collection of castoff clothing and toys into a sort of carnival of vituperation with respect to the hapless donors. Their misdeeds are reported to the priest who expels them from the clothing drive.  (The priest is a poster-child for handwringing and pompously hypocritical piety.)  The malign Jeanne fans Sophie's distaste and resentment for the Lantier family.  George, the father, is a factory owner and a great music-lover; Catherine Lantier is his second wife (Jeanne says that the first Mrs. Lantier committed suicide).  Between the couple, there is a son, Gilles, and daughter, Melinda.  Chabrol portrays these people as somewhat dimwitted, but they seem to be reasonably virtuous and not as villainous as Jeanne, the malicious postal clerk, asserts them to be -- she calls Mrs. Lantier a whore, implies that she entertains men sexually in her art gallery, and accuses George of all sorts of perfidy.  And, of course, she knows all about the family because she is reading their mail.  Ultimately, George forbids Sophie from inviting Jeanne over to their mansion.  Jeanne is offended and encourages Sophie to further misdeeds, although, in truth, she doesn't really need much urging to begin to neglect her duties and behave with insolence to the family members.  When Sophie learns that Melinda is pregnant she tries to blackmail the teenage girl by threatening to expose her to her father.  In fact, George is close to Melinda and sympathetic and the girl immediately complains about Sophie's extortion to him  George fires Sophie who, then, goes to Jeanne to plot revenge.  The two women decide to go back to the Lantier household and confront George and Catherine about their mistreatment of Sophie.  All four family members are watching Mozart's Don Giovanni and, apparently, recording the TV production while the two young women go on a rampage in Sophie's room and, then, trash the master bedroom.  George is an avid hunter and the girls decide to threaten the Lantier family members with his loaded shotguns.  The consequences, of course, are horrific.  

Chabrol has explored this sinister territory before in other crime films and some of themes are well explored in French cinema -- for instance, Henri Clouzot's 1943 Le Corbeau, set in a provincial town involved crimes arising from the distribution of anonymous poison-pen letters in the village (the film is also an Occupation drama).  In La Ceremonie, George remarks that Sophie, now known to be illiterate, reads nothing, while Jeanne, the postal clerk, reads everything -- and, therefore, is in a position to act in an extortionate manner with the family.  The film seems singularly crude and without guile in its presentation -- the opening shots involving the job interview with Sophie hustling across a sunny over-exposed street to meet with Catherine in a nondescript cafe look like outtakes from someone's home movies.  The photography and editing are completely unobtrusive and the movie has the ugly look of a situation comedy.  There are several peculiar scenes -- in one very long shot, we hear dialogue dramatizing the family's disenchantment with the mostly mute, and inexpressive, Sophie:  the image simply shows us a doorway leading to spiral stair and an empty foyer -- there are no actors visible and the dialogue, seemingly involving several different days and occasions, is spoken by the actors off-screen.  The sequence is deliberately inexpressive, dull, and de-dramatized.  When Sophie listens on a telephone extension to Melinda's conversation with her boyfriend about her suspicion that she is pregnant, we see some curious flashes of amber light in the dim rooms, fragments of radiance that don't seem to have a natural explanation.  Late in the film, when Sophie and Jeanne are approaching the living room with loaded shotguns, we're giving a very ominous point-of-view shot showing the back of Catherine Lantier as she watches the opera on TV.  We expect Sophie and Jeanne to enter the room and brandish their guns at the family members, thereby, motivating the sinister perspective on the unsuspecting family members.  But, Chabrol makes things even more disquieting by having Catherine walk to the window to look out onto the home's formal garden, a perspective on topiary and gravel urns that seems to rhyme with the stylized imagery on TV in the film production of Don Giovanni.  When the young women appear with their shotguns, their entrance is entirely more disconcerting.  Curious details enhance the mood of foreboding -- in the kitchen and pantry where the young women are loading the shotguns, there's a big picture of a hunting larder with a dead hare hanging head down and some murdered birds heaped up on the floor.  

The film plays a bit like In Cold Blood refracted through Jean Genet's nightmare play, The Maids.  Jeanne has apparently murdered her own child in a  particularly ghastly away although as she petulantly says:  "They couldn't prove a thing about me."  She detests the Lantier parents because they support their daughter when the teenager confesses to them that she is pregnant -- "who was there to hold my hand or dry my tears when I needed an abortion?" Jeanne rhetorically asks. Further, it seems that Sophie may have killed her own brother.  Sophie is child-like, simple, and inert; it's obvious that the more malicious and aggressive Jeanne is manipulating her to rage and violence.  (The byplay is like the emotional interaction between Perry Smith and Dick Hickock in the film In Cold Blood.)  But once Sophie is moved to violence, she becomes a monstrous force that can't be controlled.  The film is based on a novel by the Mozart of crime fiction, the late Ruth Rendell, made a peer of the realm (the book is called A Judgement set in Stone) and, although the picture is very deliberately paced, it is compelling and, even, frightening.  The movie's primary appeal lies in the acting by its two principals, the incommunicative and repressed, Sophie played by Sandrine Bonnaire and wildly aggressive and brutal Jeanne (Isabel Huppert).  Both women provide a master-class in acting, particularly in Jeanne's monologue in which she confesses to killing her four-year old daughter, a speech that is particularly fearsome because of the apparent lack of emotion with which it is delivered.  Sophie's anguish and rage at not being able to read, the secret sorrow that motivates her violence, is also powerfully realized.  The Lantier family members are dull, smug, and pleasant enough -- but the film isn't about them and they play only an incidental role in the drama transpiring between the two young women. The film is very disturbing, but can be recommended as a penetrating study in a certain form of psychopathic folie a deux.  (La Ceremonie refers to the formal protocol that precedes an execution by guillotine under French law.) 

The Last of Us

Like everyone else in the cable-connected world, I dutifully tuned-in to The Last of Us, a limited series zombie movie on HBO.  The show is well-made with excellent acting, but it's also very sentimental in an unpleasant cloying manner and highly predictable -- whenever there's a pause in the grisly suspense, for instance, some off-hand and jocular patter between the characters, you can be assured that a monster is lurking nearby to attack or that a bomb will go off to punctuate the scene with with an overwrought explosion.  The formulaic path that zombie pictures utilize is so well-trodden as to be fundamentally inescapable and, certainly, in the show's last episodes, in particular, there's nothing new at all -- it's basically point-and-shoot gore with interludes of soppy emotion.   Furthermore, all plausibility goes out the window even within the conventions of the genre in the final few shows.  A glaring example is an extended massacre scene in which the hero murders dozens of adversaries using his rifle, a machine gun lifted from a corpse and, then, his trusty side-arm:  the good guy is invulnerable and his adversaries fire a thousand rounds without scathing him although all of his shots are dead-eye accurate and, at last, penetrating to the operating  room where his side-kick is about to have to her brain surgically harvested, the doctors seem to be surprised that the hero is at the their doorstep -- were they deaf, somehow, to the thunderous fusillade required to get the protagonist to them?  Similarly, in the penultimate episode, the heroine kills a bunch of cannibals and sets their cult-headquarters on fire -- the bad guys here are visualized as Latter-Day Saint cultists and Menschenfressers; the scriptwriters don't know what to do with the other thirty or so cult-members and, so, they remain conveniently off-screen during the mayhem, apparently oblivious to the enormous fiery conflagration.  Examples of this sort of lazy scriptwriting, gaps in narrative logic that wouldn't have been allowed in a Universal or RKO horror movie in the thirties or forties, can be multiplied but to what end?  It's a zombie picture and, by definition, idiotic.  

The premise seems copped from Guillermo del Toro's 2009 vampire series The Strain, also a show with a pseudo-scientific biological basis for the ravening monsters. Some sort of fungus spreads like a plague infecting human beings and turning them into hideous, mushroom-headed zombies.  Most of the zombies just lounge around waiting for someone to walk by so that they can rouse themselves from their vegetative stupor and eat that person.  Some of the zombies, however, are more predatory and run around with their rains exposed like so much caulifower or broccolini -- these are so-called "clickers" that hunt like bats by sonar (needless to say they make a clicking sound).  The movie is based on a Nintendo game and, so, as one can imagine, it's not too well thought out.  A lot of folks just turn into harmless morel slime.  However, a few of the zombies grow to impressive size, are buff with mushroom muscles, and seem to marshal armies of other fungus folk -- these are like the impressively malign "end-bosses" in old first-person shooters like Doom or Duke-Nuke-em, the towering spawn of hell who fight you in the last stages of these sorts of games.  The physiology, instinctual apparatus, and habits of the zombies are never convincingly established so that the scriptwriter can make the poor creatures do whatever he or she wants according to the exigencies of the narrative.  The zombies figure in the plot as nuisances, somewhat like marauding bears or lions.  The real villains are other humans who have degenerated after twenty years of battling the fungus-people into feral groups of raiders, sex cultists, and fanatical terrorists.  The government has established exclusion zones with walls to keep the the zombies out, but these havens are run by fascist paramilitaries who are under constant attack by the Fireflies, a group of insurgents who are constantly blowing things up for no good reason at all.  In the havens everything is grey, ruinous, with concentration-camp-like prisons.  The open terrain is full of cannibal outlaws and zombies who can apparently live forever except when they decompose into mildew.  Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is a teenage girl who is immune to the fungal virus.  The Fireflies think that she carries the secret to immunity against the fungus.  So the Fireflies (I think) need to protect the girl and send her West, possibly to Denver, where there is a hospital where she can be studied.  (The trek is pointless and I couldn't figure out its motivation other than as a narrative vehicle to get the principals into the scenic Canadian Rockies where half of the action takes place.)  Joe, a weary terrorist, is persuaded  by his girlfriend, to escort the girl on their journey across the country -- the show stars in an exclusion zone in Boston.  Joe (Pedro Pascal) is a cynical hard case, a bit like Shane or a hundred other heroes in old Westerns -- he's seen too much killing and just wants to take his ease and, of course, his perception of humankind's virtues has been pretty much degraded by all the mayhem in which he's participated  Shortly after Joe and his girlfriend with Ellie in tow venture out of the walls of the exclusion zone the girlfriend gets offed -- I think a zombie eats her.  Joe resents being saddled with the foul-mouthed teenage girl but he feels the need to continue the venture that was plotted by his deceased girlfriend and, of course, gradually bonds with the young woman to the point that, in the last episode, he is willing to go to hell and back to rescue her, murdering legions of hapless enemies along the way.  The first half of the series features gritty urban combat; the second half of the show is a large-scale Western filmed in snowy wilderness with protagonists riding horses across the open range.  It's all reasonably exciting in a mindless way and there is a lot of speechifying -- in the last half of the show, in particular, bad guys tend to engage in harangues on  Nietzschean themes, with the effect that the good guys generally have opportunities to recover from their wounds, escape from detention, and slaughter the villains who have  lost their advantages due to their penchant for excessive oratory.  

The zombie film is pretty much exhausted in terms of its thematic impact although The Last of Us exploits the COVID crisis for some of its imagery and features an elaborate flashback structure.  The action taking place in 2023 continuously reverts to 2002 when the fungal infection caused the apocalypse to occur, more or less, overnight.  The show innovates by indulging in several gay-themed subplots.  In the second (and longest) episode, two gay men make a life for themselves in a fortified compound surviving in happy marital bliss for twenty years before opting out of the monster-haunted world by way of a suicide pact.  This episode, very moving and well done, has nothing to do with the rest of the show but it establishes the HBO series' bona fides with respect to high seriousness (purportedly) and politically correct virtue-signaling.  Later, in the film there's a Lesbian recapitulation of these themes when Ellie falls in love with a comely girl, tours a ruinous mall with her,  the whole thing ending in an utterly predictable way when a zombie eats Ellie's girlfriend and turns her into one of the fungus-people.  These love affairs are depicted with copious, if effective, emotion and are intended to show that the series is something more and better than a point-and-shoot bloodbath.  The show's other innovation is the peculiar appearance of its leading lady; Bella Ramsey is not conventionally attractive and it's probably not gallant to remark that she is, in fact, ugly and strange-looking -- her impassive pale face with its little eyes and flat nose is a special effect in itself.  In the end, Joe and Ellie finally reach their destination.  Joe gets his side pierced, a bit like Jesus Christ, by a dagger-like broken bottle.  While Joe is in a coma, Ellie gets captured by cannibals but slaughters most of them, including the vicious preacher who is the patriarch of the cult.  (Just as homosexuals can be reliably predicted to be kindly, virtuous, and loving in this show, Christian fundamentalists, in an equally predictable way, are portrayed as Bible-banging rapist-cannibals -- this is a typical Hollywood response to conservatives  of any kind.)  Somehow Joe recovers from death's door, delivering Ellie to the hospital where, of course, the evil medical professionals decide to harvest her brain.  (She's got immunity we learn because her mother was bit by zombie while literally giving birth and this somehow has provided Ellie with her imperviousness to the fungus -- possibly via breast milk or the umbilicus.)  Joe, then, kills everyone in sight, rendering the entire trek across the country completely pointless and ineffectual.  He and Ellie make their way to a commune where Joe's brother lives in a spectacular valley in the High Country and, so, on this positive note, the series ends -- although, of course, only temporarily.  Presumably, the program will be back in a year or two for a second season.