The Housemaid

Midway through Kim Ki-Young's brutal and nightmarish melodrama, The Housemaid (1960) the protagonist, a bland piano and music teacher, Mr. Kim, meets an older man, a mentor figure, for drinks at a bar.  Mr. Kim elliptically suggests that he is entangled in an affair.  The older felllow pooh-poohs his concerns and says that, under the current state of affairs, a well-connected man can evade serious prosecution and pay a fine for his misdeeds that is less than a "traffic ticket."  At first, this seems reassuring.  But consider the implications:  the characters live in a repressive, authoritarian society in which routine instances of adultery are criminalized and in which rumors of sexual misdeeds have catastrophic implications.  Perhaps, this social environment explains some of the horrific events in the movie.  But, it's also true, that all the main characters in The Housemaid seem to be, more or less, insane -- even the children are sadistic monsters.  In some respects, the movie is a Korean film noir, motivated by a sense of growing dread and entrapment.  But the action in the picture is so authentically horrifying that the film achieves a gruesome majesty -- unlike American and French film noir, this movie is not really entertaining; it's too disturbing to be fun, not a hardboiled crime genre piece, but a domestic bourgeois tragedy so venomous as to literally (and figuratively) defy belief.

The movie begins with a man (Mr. Kim) reading to his wife a newspaper account of an extra-marital affair between a family man and his housemaid; Mrs. Kim expresses horror that such things can occur.  Two children are playing a game involving an intricate cat's cradle that they twist and rotate in different directions.  The film cuts from this web of strings to a textile factory staffed entirely by young women.  After their shifts, which seem to be exhausting, the young women adjourn to a meeting room with a wall-hanging that looks like an abstract stained glass window above a piano.  Mr. Kim appears to the delight of the girls, most of whom seem to desire him.  He leads the girls, who live at the factory in spartan dormitories, in a song.  One of the girls has persuaded her dim-witted friend to put a love letter on the piano's keyboard.  (This girl's name is something like Kwak; her friend, who encourages her to leave the note for Mr. Kim, is called Miss Cho.)  The factory bosses learn of this intrigue and poor Miss Kwak is dismissed.  Mr. Cho, undeterred, pursues Mr. Kim by coming to his house and paying him for piano lessons.  Mr. Kim's wife is an ambitious woman, unhappily married to the rather passive and unambitious, music teacher.  She works night and day at a sewing machine and has saved enough money for the family to move from their tiny quarters into an adjacent house that they have built.  At the outset of the movie, the house is a horrible, gloomy labyrinth of  chaotically-stacked construction materials with a high steep stairway that turns out to be the location of just about all of the calamities that will befall the characters in this movie.  (The walls of the new house are textured with intertwined veins of raised stucco, serpentine reliefs that look like the cat's cradle or like a spider web.)  The house is too big for the hard-working Mrs. Kim to manage.  And, so, she urges her husband to hire a maid.  Miss Cho, who is still lurking around as a piano student, introduces a rather ignorant and slatternly girl to the music teacher -- Miss Cho doesn't want anyone competing with her for Mr. Kim's affections -- and makes a deal with the woman that she will pay her one-fifth of her earnings for the referral to this household.  The maid begins work.  This get off to a grim start when the maid uses rat poison to kill some rodents in the kitchen -- the death of the rats is shown in nasty big close-ups. (Later, a pet squirrel identified with the family's daughter will be similarly killed.)  Mr and Mrs. Kim have two children, a six-year old boy who torments his older sister, a girl who seems crippled, possibly, by polio -- the ten-year old girl uses unwieldy crutches to move around.  (We see the boy taunt her into climbing the steps in the new house, an ordeal that is palpably difficult and seems very dangerous; you expect her to plunge down the steps and be badly injured.)  The kids don't like the maid and she returns that distaste with interest -- she seems to despise the children and implies to them  that if they get out of hand, she will kill them with rat poison.  Mrs. Kim wants another child and becomes pregnant.  When Mrs. Kim and the two bickering children go to visit her mother, Mr. Kim is seduced by the maid -- she steps out of her clothing in a lightning storm, her body lit by flashes of fire, and, in a startling scene, forces the music teacher to have sex with her.  She has torn up her clothing and says that if Mr. Kim doesn't sleep with her, she'll accuse him of a rape.  A few scene later, the maid is puking into the kitchen sink suffering from morning sickness -- she's pregnant with Mr. Kim's child.  Mrs. Kim, who is neurasthenic (either confined to her bed or working herself to death at the sewing machine) confronts the maid.  By this time, Mrs. Kim has had her baby.  The two women literally wrestle over the infant when the maid tries to throw the baby onto the floor or out the window.  After an exchange of blows and insults, the maid pitches herself down the fatal steps, intentionally causing a miscarriage.  The maid, then, takes to her bed where no one brings her any food and she seems about to starve to death.  (She is still bleeding from the miscarriage ten or more days later.)   But the housemaid recovers and forces Mr. Kim to teach her to play piano -- without success it should be noted.  On the soundtrack, we hear either wailing jazz or discordant chords pounded out on the piano.  The maid is blackmailing Mrs. Kim who is afraid that the scandal will cost her the house for which she has slaved so desperately.  And the housewife isn't all that enamored of her husband whom she blames for the nightmarish mess.  To humiliate Mrs. Kim, the maid demands that the music teacher sleep with her openly.  When the children protest the abuse of their mother, the housemaid pretends to poison the little boy.  He panics and flees from the upstairs room where the maid has forced him to drink water supposedly infused with rat poison -- it's a ruse; the water isn't really poisoned.  But it doesn't matter, the little boy plunges down the steps, smashing his head on the floor and dying in his mother's arms.  The maid crows that this is simple justice:  she lost her baby; now, Mrs. Kim's son has died.  Mrs. Kim puts rat poison in rice that she serves to the housemaid and her husband.  The rice tastes of sugar -- the maid has substituted sugar for the strychnine to demonstrate that Mrs. Kim is capable of poisoning both her and her own husband.  This leads to more nightmarish recriminations.  People cram big fistfuls of rice down their throats.  Miss Cho is back, importuning the music teacher for more piano lessons.  Crockery gets broken and Mrs. Kim stabs the housemaid, but the wound is merely superficial.  There's another tempest, complete with thunder and lightning.  The maid and Mr. Kim have made a suicide pact.  They both down glasses of water tainted with rat poison.  The maid goes into a coma and Mr. Kim, as he's dying drags the woman down the flight of steps, her skull knocking loudly against each each tread in the stairway.  Then, he collapses.  He crawls into the work room where Mrs. Kim has fallen asleep at the sewing machine.  She opens her eyes just in time to see her husband writhing on the floor as he dies.  Mrs. Kim laments that none of this would have happened if she hadn't wanted the big new house.  Then, in a surprising cut, the picture reverts to the opening scene in which Mr. Kim is reading from the newspaper account about an affair with a maid.  He turns directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and says that men are unable to resist desire.  Laughing, he tells us:  "This is true for all men, even those of you who are shaking your heads right now."

Everything is pitched at a level of insane hysteria.  The house, although posited to be large, is, in fact, so small that the camera has to go outside in the pelting rain to track the movements of people from room to room.  There are disconcerting close-ups, bizarre cuts, and sequences that have a kabuki-like and surreal tone -- a scene in which Mrs. Kim climbs the lethal stair steps, all clad in white and moving deliberately, like an apparition, feels like something from a Japanese ghost movie, perhaps, something on the order of the supernatural scenes in in Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogaturi.  There are no sympathetic characters -- everyone is vicious, cruel, and conniving.  The children aren't idealized -- they're nasty little sadists and snitches.  The "unnerving" aspect of the movie (the adjective is Martin Scorsese's -- he participated in reconstructing the film) is enhanced by the fact that, at least, one reel of the picture has been badly damaged and had to be reconstructed from faded, half-decomposed celluloid in which lights flare and bleed into the surroundings and faces are dim as if submerged in syrupy fluids.  The tight focus on the steps and the small rooms with their narrow beds and the glass-windows on the porch always streaming with rainwater is claustrophobic -- the movie makes you feel as if you're buried alive.  There are weird byways and digressions that I can't exactly interpret -- for instance, the girl who initially passed Miss Cho's mash-note to the music teacher, commits suicide and the film takes us graveside to a mother venomously denouncing both Mr. Kim and Miss Cho.  The music-room at the factory has a gloomy cramped aspect and is always shot from the same angle and the morose girls gathered there sing a lugubrious song (also always the same), said to be a Bohemian folk song. In fact, most of the rooms are shot from a formulaic repetitive perspective so that the film's mise-en-scene is limited, a "cat's-cradle" of repeated, interlocked images.  The film has an unusual "audio jump scare" -- in one of the last shots, the camera dollies back from the corpse of the maid hanging upside down on the bottom four or five steps of the stairway, pulling into the adjacent room where Mrs. Kim is staring down at the body of her husband -- midway through this gruesome traveling shot, the baby shrieks; the sound of baby's cry made me almost jump out of my skin.   

The Menu

 The Menu is an elegant and sophisticated pastiche of mad slasher and torture porn horror films.  It's meaning and significance is obscure to me.  But the film effectively delivers the suspense and gruesome thrills that characterize the genre.  This is something like a cross between Saw or The Hostel (the sinister laboratory of torture) and Halloween, complete with a "final girl", the plucky heroine who ultimately outwits the insane sadist who has murdered everyone else around her.  It's an exploitation movie for "foodies", starring the famous actor (and Shakespearian thespian) Ralph Fiennes as the mad chef who organizes the orgy of slaughter in his ultra upscale restaurant.  It's trash, indeed, trash of a salacious variety, and the plot never really makes any sense at all -- but this is a lurid horror film and, viewed in that light, pretty successful.  

A "foodie" named Tyler and his date, Margot, travel by ferry to an island on which The Hawthorne, an elite, ultra-fashionable and expensive restaurant is located. About 15 other diners are gathered in a sleek, black chrome and ebony room where they are served by an army of waiters.  In an stainless steel kitchen open to view by the patrons, a dozen or so cooks are working like automatons to prepare the five course menu fixe meal.  The cooks labor with their noses close to the dishes that they are preparing, all sorts of ingredients reduced to emulsions or atomized foam with wild flowers tweezered into place as garnish.  The cooks are clad in spotless apparel and act as if they are the members of some kind of cult -- they speak in unison.  Presiding over this eerie kitchen and dining room is the head chef, the famous Julian Slowik, played with campy aplomb (he's a bit Ernest Thesiger in The Bride of Frankenstein) by Ralph Fiennes.  As becomes almost immediately apparent, Slowik is insane and intends to murder all of his arrogant and super-wealthy customers.  Of course, he intends to torture and kill everyone during the course of the baroque five course meal that he is serving to his guests.  Slowik isn't really equipped with any motive for the mayhem that he intends -- he seems to be simply psychotic, although like most movie madmen extremely voluble and well-spoken.  Somehow, Slowik has succumbed to ennui with respect to the restaurant business and, instead of gracefully retiring, intends to murder all those who have enabled his success. The movie traffics in a sort of anarchist "eat the rich" sensibility -- the slaughter of the elites gathered for this prestigious last meal is really just an exercise in wish-fulfillment and envy for the audience; these people have all sorts of money and can afford pleasures denied to the rest of us and, therefore, must be tortured to death.  There's really nothing more intricate about this film and this is its raison d'etre.  

Over the course of the meal, the guests have fingers severed, are mocked by the insane chef, and Slowik's "angel" investor is fitted out with wings and, then, slowly lowered into the sea to be drowned as a spectacle for the diners.  One of Slowik's cult-members, a boy chef commits suicide in the presence of the dinner party.  Slowik, for no good reason, decides to punish himself by forcing one of his girl chefs to stab him in the groin with a kitchen scissors; apparently, he has sexually harassed this woman and apologizes to her by urging her to impale him on the sharp blades.  The men are all rousted from their seats and force to run around the island while the cooks pursue them like wild game -- this is a completely pointless sequence and adds nothing to the movie but confusion -- it's padding to make an 80 minute shocker last for two hours. Tyler's date, Margot played by the delicious Anya Taylor-Joy, figures out that these games can have but one fatal outcome.  She finds a radio and calls for help.  The Coast Guard arrives but the rescuer turns out to be an actor on Slowik's payroll and this episode is merely a sadistic ploy to create hope in the doomed diners before dashing those hopes to pieces.  Margot figures out Slowik's weak point and, cunningly, exploits it -- Slowik is really just appalled by the pretentious "molecular" and deconstructed cuisine that he is serving to the fools gathered in his restaurant; she offers him an alternative, more down-to-earth course and buys some time so that she can escape.  (By this point, her annoying date, Tyler, has hanged himself out of despair at being rejected by his idol, the celebrity chef Julian Slowik.)  Everyone else ends up murdered in a spectacular conflagration.  Out at sea, Margot, whom we learn was really an escort hired by the unfortunate Tyler to attend this "last supper", smokes a cigarette and contemplates the horror! the horror!  

The movie isn't offensive and has a very funny script.  The diners slated for torture and murder all deserve their fates -- they are a group of vicious rogues and well-heeled plutocrats:  a serial adulterer, some high-tech bros with blood all over their hands and questionable tax returns for a good measure, a vicious food critic from an important magazine, a sleazy failed movie star, and a woman who drinks continuously throughout the movie and is introduced to us as Slowik's mother.  When the food critic complains that the emulsion in one of deconstructed dishes (it's bread but without the bread -- just some chemical smears for flavoring the bread that isn't served), Slowik keeps sending her larger and larger bowls of this yellow-orange emulsion until she has a bird-bath sized basin of the stuff on her table.  In general, the vicious, selfish wealthy people gathered for the meal deserve what they get and so the murders are all in good fun.  It's impossible to figure out why Slowik is determined to kill everyone, including himself, and his wait-staff and sous-chefs -- it's some sort of pique over the poor taste and questionable morality of the customers frequenting his cafe and his own status as a celebrity chef for such people.  But, certainly, the revenge is far disproportionate to the cause for the revenge.  

The movie is full of good actors with juicy roles.  There's lots of inside foodie lore on display.  The picture is very handsomely produced with elaborate sets and an enveloping sense of doom and calamity as the movie progresses -- there's no escape from the remote island.  Some of the grotesque scenes and events remind me of James Ensor's macabre culinary paintings -- his "La Cuisiniers Dangereaux -- the Dangerous Chefs" of 1891 in which a plump waiter serves Ensor's head on a platter, the 1896 painting of two skeletons fighting over a pickled herring, or "Comical Repast -- the Banquet of the Starved" with a some hapless bourgeoisie are about to tuck into a meal of insects and decomposing scraps of bone.  The director Mark Mylod is a notable cable TV director -- he has helmed episodes of Game of Thrones, 
Shameless, and 16 episodes of Succession.  Mylod directs lucidly but, as with Succession, all of the witty repartee and the clever casting, adds up to nothing.  It's as tasty and empty as one of Chef Slowik's disassembled ingredients, an atomized froth that is without any real substance.  You know something bad is going to occur and the doom of the restaurant patrons is worked out in lavish detail but you don't know why any of this happening.  It's like the extravagant slanging scenes in Succession where everyone denounces everyone else in the most witty and obscene ways possible; it's posited that everything is at stake due to some complicated financial maneuvering, thus the on-screen hysteria, but you don't know why.  

Pleasure

 Pleasure is a Swedish film produced in the United States in 2021 and directed by Ninja Thyberg. (It appears to have had its American premiere in Austin at the South by Southwest festival in 2023).  The movie blurs the distinction between hard-core pornography and a scripted realistic feature-film drama -- the film is 105 minutes long.  It's interesting on the basis of its sordid subject matter, a documentary-style exploration of the porno industry.  Like many films on this subject, the movie exploits its subject, featuring lots of lush sex scenes shot for erotic titillation while at the same time venturing a critique of the exploitational aspects of the hard-core porn industry.  There's nothing in this movie that isn't, more or less, self-evident:  it  should come as no surprise to most viewers to learn that the performers who make movies of this kind are entangled in a nasty business rife with opportunities for coercion and abuse and, further, that most of the people involved in this kind of work lack much in the way of a  moral compass -- when the porn-actresses aren't being assaulted or cajoled into accepting abuse, they are scheming to betray one another.  It's an open question, I suppose, as to how much the sex workers in the pornography industry differ from actors in show business in general.  In some ways, the plot of the movie is a variant on films like A Star is Born, featuring an ambitious performer who will do anything to further her success in the business -- in broad terms, the narrative could be transposed into mainstream films or, even, a corporate setting without doing much violence to the premise.  What gives Pleasure its buzz, however, is the graphic sex scenes, the blunt and graphic negotiations involving bondage and simulated rape and acrobatic exercises required to implement certain outre intercourse scenes.  The picture is well-made, with carefully composed shots, some long takes in which the women talk about the industry, and opulent sets -- poolside parties, Vegas mansions, and various porn studios.  The central character Linnea (aka Belle Cherry) is a cipher -- she's undeveloped and, with the exception of a long, crepuscular scene in which she talks by phone in a misleading way to her mother, we don't know much about her.  She seems preposterously ambitious and weirdly stupid -- part of the film's premise is that Belle Cherry is a neophyte in the industry:  we learn about the ins and outs of the porn business through her inexperienced eyes.  The film purports to be "sex positive" but, in fact, its a formulaic morality tale -- Belle Cherry succeeds in the industry but at the cost of betraying others, moral compromise, and, in the end, she has become the very thing that is problematic about business:  in the penultimate sex scene, we see, that she has become hardened into a sexual predator herself.  So despite the film's glib nonchalance about graphic sex, the film espouses a highly conventional morality -- Linnea/Belle's immersion in the sewer of the sex industry ends of befouling her both physically and morally:  at the end of the movie, she has chlamydia (or a bad yeast infection); she's, more or less, diseased and has become a a bad person, a "sinner," although the film would shy away from this word, it is, nonetheless, apt  It seems that you can't make a film on this subject without slipping into moral condemnation, indeed, something like "slut-shaming."  This was the case with the much better Boogie Nights and, certainly, seems to be the case with Pleasure.

We first see Linnea shaving her pubic area in preparation for her first performance in a sex scene.  At first, the business seems weirdly genteel.  There is a lot of discussion about consent and limits.  Linnea as Belle Cherry gives her consent on film, holding a valid photo-ID and a current newspaper to verify the date.  The sex scene works out fine:  she's paid $900 and Belle starts looking for other work in the business -- does she have a "Green Card"?  Details of this sort that interest me are ignored.  It quickly becomes apparent that Belle's success in the industry will be dependent upon her signing with a well-connected agent.  A man named Mark Spiegler is reputedly the best agent in the biz and Belle connives to persuade him to work for her.  (Her first few gigs are under the aegis of a Black agent who encourages her to seek out jobs involving rough and abusive sex, bondage, and other fetish subject matter).  Belle encourages who roommates to explore work in the industry.  Her best friend, Joy, is interested but gets into a fight with some male "talent" at a pool party -- she pushes the man into the pool and he angrily calls her names.  Belle does a bondage shoot with a woman director who is extremely careful about protecting the actress from harm -- she is given elaborate instructions as to safe words and how to demonstrate her boundaries even when encumbered with a ball gag in her mouth.  This shoot is also well within Belle's range and she seeks out harder material.  For some reason, she agrees to a rape scene involving two men.  Things slide out of control and, in fact, Belle is actually raped and roughed-up. This scene is disturbing because Belle repeatedly calls for a time-out, the camera is shut-off, and, then, "talent" importunes and sweet-talks her into more abuse -- saying that she's strong and self-confident and will be able to endure the torment that they inflict upon her; Belle is a "good sport" and, so, against her own better instincts, continues with the abusive rape scene.  Afterwards,  she complains to her agent, the Black porn actor, but he turns on her, saying that she contracted for the gig without his knowledge and got what she deserved.  Belle fires her agent, sets up a meeting with Mark Spiegler who seems uninterested in her -- she needs to show him a resume with more rough stuff on it.  Belle, then, embarks on an exercise program of rectal dilatation, using butt-plugs of increasing size, so that she can successfully perform the "holy grail" of interracial anal sex -- that is, "double anal."  After much preparation, she performs this feat to everyone's amazement and surprise -- double anal has never been attempted before, let alone, successfully.  This prodigious act gets her better gigs.  She signs up for a humiliation and abuse scene and encourages her roommate, Joy, to work with her.  But the male actor contracted for the scene has backed-out and Belle with Joy find themselves working with the vicious guy that Joy pushed into the pool a few weeks earlier.  This guy takes the opportunity to aggressively abuse and humiliate Joy.  When Joy later complains, Belle refuses to back her up, disloyally claiming that Joy is hysterical and that there was nothing out of the ordinary about the scene.  (In fact, Belle was well-aware that the male performer was using the gig to abuse Joy.)  Belle and Joy are no longer friends.  Throughout the film, Belle has admired an elegant and successful porn star named Ava.  In fact, she aspires to Ava's success.  Belle is now well-established in the business and gets a chance to work with Ava.  During the shoot, Ava refuses to perform oral sex on Belle saying that she's "all creamy down there" and smells bad to boot, apparently due to a yeast infection.  This causes a change in plans for the sex scene.  Belle gets fitted out with a black dildo strap-on and has sex with Ava.  Something snaps in Belle and she violently rapes Ava, slapping her face and spitting on her.  After the scene, Belle and Ava are riding back to a party in a limousine. Ava is nonchalant and seems none the worse for wear.   Belle says that she wants to get out of the car.   The driver pulls over and Belle gets out.  On this ambiguous note, the film ends.

The movie seems authentic in its portrait of the sex industry.  Many of the performers are actually sex-workers in the trade.  (The loathsome Mark Spiegler, the proprietor of Spiegler Girls, plays himself and there are actors in the movie with names like "Chris Cock", "Cezar", and so on.  Spiegler, a disreputable Jewish guy, is spectacularly unattractive and wears tee-shirts with weird slogans such as "I Hope your Cell-Phone falls down the Toilet.")  The movie is implausible at its heart for several reasons:  first, the leading lady has a completely flat chest -- she would not succeed in the porn industry without breast enhancement but no one suggest this to her.  I suppose its unchivalrous to make this observation but the star is naked on-screen for half the picture -- she has an angelic face and a nice derriere, but her tiny breasts would disqualify her for success in the porn industry at least on the level that she desires.  You can't ignore this sort of stupid casting mistake.  Second, much of the movie's middle act involves Belle's preparations for the "double anal".  The problem is that there is no such thing as a "double anal" -- try to figure out the logistics of such a thing, particularly with the very well-endowed African-American "talent" involved in this picture.  Of course, with some huffing and puffing, double penetration can be achieved -- this is sex with penetration simultaneously in the vagina and rectum.  In fact, what the film seems to show is merely double penetration, arduous in itself, but a staple of group sex scenes in modern porn movies.  (I kept wishing the camera would give us a "money shot" vantage on the "double anal" so that I could see how this act is performed -- but the movie, which starts out with aggressive close-ups of genitalia and penetration becomes increasingly discrete as it proceeds.)  The third problem is that by the time that Belle gets raped, she is already sophisticated  in the business and, certainly, knows that precautions must be taken to avoid this sort of abuse.  Furthermore, she seems weirdly unaware that, the moment her consent is withdrawn, the sex scene will turn into criminal assault -- a rape that could be prosecuted against the male actors and their enablers.  In the sex industry, all sorts of safeguards exist to protect performers from assault or, more crucially, from being thrown in jail for rape.  The Swedish female director, Ninja Thyberg, is adapting a 2013 short subject that she earlier made with the same name.  But the feature-length movie has a curiously archaic view of the sex industry -- it seems to be taking place in a pre-"Me-too" era.  After the charges levied against Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, the sort of things shown in the movie would not occur -- and the abusive "rough" sex scenes would have to be very carefully choreographed and supervised.  We now live in a world in which Shakespeare productions routinely hire "Intimacy Coordinators" and I see no reason why a multi-billion dollar porno industry would not be similarly attuned to avoiding litigation and protecting its human assets.  In a "red carpet" interview with the woman playing Ava in Pleasure, she noted that the movie is very true to life with one exception:  Belle performs the "double anal" scene for free (presumably just too show such a thing can be accomplished).  The actress in the interview at the film's premiere said that, of course, no one ever works for free in the porn industry.       

Der Freischuetz

 On the eve of his wedding, Max, der Freischuetz (The Marksman) is having trouble with his gun.  He hasn't hit anything for a month and, at a target shooting competition in the Bohemian village where he lives, his bullets all go astray.  The townsfolk are unforgiving.  As Max sulks, they mock him.  Do you remember this gesture?  Extend your right index finger and, then, stroke back and forth along its length with the pointer finger of the other hand.  For some reason, this gesture means "Shame on you!", not only here in rural Minnesota, but, also, in the deep and dark German forests at the end of the 30 years war.  Choruses of nubile peasant girls dance about the sullen huntsman gesturing shame upon him and a choir of baritones and basses, strapping foresters, also deride the unfortunate fellow.  Max's beautiful and virtuous betrothed, Agatha, is fearful.  (You don't have to be Dr. Freud to decipher some of this imagery.)  On the morrow, Max will have to shoot true in front of all the town (and the formidable game warden who is also Agathe's father, Kuno) to earn his right to wed Agatha -- and it looks increasingly unlikely that he will hit the mark.  What's a fellow to do?

Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischuetz is an1821opera and a sort of bargain basement, Dollar General parody of Faust. Max hurries away from the convivial gathering to make a deal with the devil, the so-called Black Huntsman, Samiel.  He is encouraged to this desperate measure by Caspar, a rival for the affections of Agatha.  Caspar has previously done business with Samiel in the Wolf's Glen, a nasty ravine full of corpses and slimy serpentine creatures that seems to serve as a sort of garbage dump for the villagers. Caspar gives Max a magic bullet that he has acquired from the Black Huntsman and he uses the cursed ammo to shoot down an inoffensive eagle.  At that same moment, in the village, a picture of one of Agatha's ancestor, a scowling ancient head forester, drops off the wall, striking Annchen, Agatha's frisky gal pal.  (The two women sing duets about the upcoming marriage and Agatha's recent dream, a foreboding vision in which she imagines herself a white dove shot out of the air by Max).  At midnight, with Caspar, Max consults the devil and, later, the revived corpse of his mother. He and Casper laboriously cast seven bullets -- six will unerringly hit their target; the seventh round belongs to the devil.  The two hunters divvy up the ammo and go their separate ways.  Caspar who has three rounds wastes them on a fox; Max, who isn't much brighter, shoots some other critters and ends up with only the devil's bullet to use on the morning of his wedding.

Before the wedding, a garland is delivered to Agatha.  The box turns out to contain a funeral wreath.  Improvising a garland from white roses given to her by a holy hermit, also a resident in the woods, Agatha goes to the target-shooting competition.  Max fires the devil's bullet which seems to strike both Caspar and Agatha -- they fall to the ground in a sort of swoon.  Kuno, Agatha's father and the game warden, denounces Max for having trafficked with the dark forces.  But Agatha seems to have only fainted.  (Caspar is pierced by the devil's bullet and dies.)  As she revives, the Hermit appears as a deus ex machina.  He pronounces forgiveness on the erring Max and, it is agreed, that after a year's probation the hero can wed Agatha. Kuno decides that all of this mischief was caused by the village's tradition of requiring men to target-shoot for their brides -- he decides that the town should modernize and join the rest of the 17th century and, so, abolishes the custom.  There is a final chorus of praise to God and all ends on a happy note.  

The opera is goofy, but appealing, and contains a broad variety of music -- robust choruses, trios and quartets, as well as dramatic and spooky horror movie stuff (for instance, the slithery chromatics that characterize the Wolf's Glen) -- some of the occult themes sound a bit like Mozart's third act music in Don Giovanni and, in general, the opera, containing extended passages of Singspiel and, even, spoken dialogue, is similar to passages in The Magic Flute.  The libretto, the stormy overture, and the exotic subject matter is all exemplary of German romanticism -- the opera has a patriotic, echt-Deutsch aspect, themes that seem derived from the Grimm brother's Maerchen, and lots of boozy beer-hall music -- drinking songs and choruses sung by doughty huntsmen.  The scene in which Caspar and Max forge the magic bullets will return in German opera thirty years later in Wagner's Ring, specifically the forging of Siegfried's sword in Act I of that opera.  (In fact, Wagner's love for Weber's music, particularly the turbulent overture to Der Freischuetz inspired the young man to learn to play the piano and, later, become a composer himself and there are echoes of Weber's music throughout Wagner's works.)  The opera is audience-pleasing and relatively short -- it's about two hours long in the version that I saw.

You can see this opera complete and with subtitles on YouTube in a production designed and performed by the Hamburg Opera and Philharmonic. The show is handsomely shot and edited, but has a peculiar feature -- the opera's overture is played over images of a puppet theater foreshadowing key scenes in the show.  The image is pillar-boxed, that is, tall and narrow and the live-action figures move in a strange skittery way -- a bit like insects or marionettes.  I can't tell if the effect is intentional or some kind of artifact of the motion capture.  Mouths move mechanically as if tugged open and shut by strings and the Wolf's Gorge is filled with twitching animated piles of debris, leaf-monsters and writhing fallen limbs -- the characters seem to interact with shadowy animated figures like stop-motion apparitions in a film by Jan Svankmeyer or the Quay Brothers.  

 

What's Up, Doc?

 What's Up, Doc? is a movie that I've known about for most of my life.  Something about Barbra Streisand once repelled me (I can't recall what it was) and, so, I've avoided this 1972 farce directed by Peter Bogdanovich until my 70th year on this Earth.  (Bogdanovich is dead now as is Streisand's co-star Ryan O'Neill; Streisand herself is 82 and known today, partly, for the so-called Streisand Effect, that is, drawing adverse attention to yourself by foolishly attempting to enforce legal rights and incurring, thereby, a backlash. The march of time is cruel, appalling, and relentless.)  My ill-informed prejudice denied me the pleasure of watching this delightful picture when I was younger, and, perhaps, more susceptible to the movie's arduous slapstick comedy.  But I'm happy to have rectified this critical error in judgement.

What's up, Doc? as the name implies is a cartoonish slapstick comedy.  Although some of the witty chatter sounds a little like Thirties screwball comedy, the heart of the film is invested in scary and chaotic gags, the sort of strenuous antics perfected by people like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.  Bogdanovich is faithful to his source material -- in fact, the movie would play fine as a silent feature with only a few intertitles.  Streisand, of course, is a famous chanteuse, but the movie perversely affords her only two opportunities to perform -- she sings the opening number "You're the Top", a Cole Porter tune, but not on-screen and, then, renders a beautiful version of the piano ballad  from Casablanca, "As Time Goes By".  Streisand has a perfect intonation and a truly gorgeous voice -- I had forgotten how good she is.  But most of the picture involves the heroine in peril, dangling from roof tops or pursued by villains in toboggan-style car chases down the streets of San Francisco.  She's as young and athletic as her co-star and acquits herself in the picture's action scenes with gamine determination and agility. Ryan O'Neill in the Cary Grant part is excellent as well and, of course, prettier than Streisand who is handsome but not exactly beautiful.  

The plot is carefully contrived and nonsensical.  Four identical overnight bags (characterized by a red plaid pattern) are in play.  One bag contains Professor Howard Barton's musical igneous rocks -- the eccentric and mild-mannered professor is promoting the theory that cave-men invented music by rapping out diatonic tunes on stones.  Another bag is full of a king's ransom of jewelry.  A third bag, the prize of competing gangs of spies, contains top-secret government secrets.  The fourth bag, owned by Streisand's character, Judy Maxwell, is full of her underpants and other garments.  Of course, the bags are mistaken for one another, stolen by the various gangsters, jewel thieves, and spies who populate the periphery of the movie and most of the film involves madcap chases to retrieve one suitcase or another from the clutches of the people trying to steal them. The movie takes place largely in the rooms and corridors of the 17th floor of San Francisco's Bristol Hotel, the place where a musicology conference which Howard is attending with his screechy, overbearing fiancee - acted by a painfully plain Madeline Kahn in her ingenue role.  The scenes in the hotel corridor with various villains and protagonists slipping in and out of adjacent rooms play like a bedroom farce by Feydeau or one of the British purveyors of this sort of thing (for instance, Michael Frayn's Noises off), but the movie is surprisingly chaste -- although the dialogue is suggestive in a pre-Code sort of way, there's no sex at all actually shown or, even, implied in the film.  

The plot is too complex to summarize.  Suffice it to say that Howard is sent to a drugstore to get some buffered aspirin -- the comedy is in the adjective "buffered" insisted upon by Howard's bullying fiancee.  Wandering the streets, Streisand's character, Judy Maxwell, a sort of female hobo in a snappy Carnaby Street cap, is famished.  She sees the hunky Howard and falls for him immediately -- so she spends the rest of the movie pursuing him.  Judy is a polymath, a perpetual student, and she knows everything about everything -- of course, she's a perfect match for the shy, studious, if ineffectual, Howard.  The bags get confused with one another and everyone runs around chasing everyone else, the whole thing climaxing in a spectacular slapstick chase parodying the movie Bullitt down the nearly vertical streets of San Francisco.  Bogdanovich is nothing if not hard-working and the loose ends all have to be tied-up in a trial scene that is the movie's one serious defect -- it goes on too long and the harried Judge is a bit over-the-top even by the standards of this film.  The picture has the happy ending that the audience has been foreseeing from the film's first ten minutes and is satisfying in all respects.

What's Up, Doc? is shot in bright, analytical compositions by Laszlo Kovacs, the geometry of the gags is well established and makes the physical comedy work.  You have to see a movie like this in the right mood.  Some of the comic chaos is, to my eye, more than a little nightmarish.  In one scene, the dawn aftermath of a fire and brawl that resulted in much broken glass (and Streisand dangling twenty stories above the street from a hotel window sill), the camera lovingly surveys the ruins and pans over shattered glass, charred furniture, and tangled up debris -- the effect made me almost sick.  Furthermore, some of the physical comedy, if taken too seriously, is quite upsetting.  I know some people who have a horror of Laurel and Hardy for these reasons -- it's too dark, cruel, anarchic, and the destruction is simply too real.  The same can be said about many of the bravura sequences of chaos in this movie -- cars and motorcycles crash, people get flung around violently, huge panes of glass are broken, and hapless workers who are mere bystanders have their handiwork ripped to pieces.  Speeding cars zoom through an intersection, narrowly missing a poor guy on a tall ladder again and again, until, of course, at the very end of the gag, the inevitable occurs.  Ryan O'Neill is so pretty that he's a sort of joke in himself, a cartoon figure. In one scene, an image that launched a million male stripper routines, he parades around bare-chested in his tight white underpants with a little plaid bowtie (the color of the overnight bags) decorating his throat.  At the end of the movie, Streisand says something like "Being in love means never having to say your sorry", the famous line from Love Story also starring O'Neill -- he replies "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard."

The film critic John Simon panned this picture, commenting notoriously on Streisand's appearance, saying that she reminded him of a rat crossed with a white aardvark.  I now understand the animus on display.  One of the music critics plays a fellow called Simon (Kenneth Mars) who speaks in pretentious dialogue with John Simon's infamous Transylvanian accent; the critic is given a whole repertoire of fey and irritating mannerisms.  Obviously, Simon took offense, denounced the picture as without humor, mocked Bogdanovich for attempting to make a picture of this sort since he was (Simon claimed) totally lacking in talent, and threw in a vicious personal attack on Streisand to boot.  But the movie is, in fact, brilliantly made, very skillfully directed, and actually extremely funny -- Bogdanovich got the last laugh.  

There's a hair-raising stunt 2/3rds of the way through the picture.  Streisand is careening downhill on bicycle rigged up to deliver groceries -- it has a big box on the front between the handlebars.  The bike is basically out-of-control and moving at top speed.  O'Neill sprints alongside the bike, catches up to it, and jumps onto the box on the front of the contraption.  You want to applaud O'Neill's courage and athleticism -- the stunt is done in a long take without the use of stunt double.  O'Neill could have been a success in cowboy movies, but, so far as I know, he didn't work in that genre.

Made in England: the Films of Powell and Pressburger

 Made in England:  The Films of Powell and Pressburger is a BBC documentary featuring Martin Scorsese as "presenter."  The picture is essentially an anthology of highlights from Powell and Pressburger movies produced in England between the late thirties and about 1960 -- there are also a couple of notes on some movies made by the two men outside of their famous collaboration.  These pictures are so extraordinary and visually opulent that it is a pleasure to revisit them and Martin Scorsese's ardent commentary is often acute and interesting, casting light on his own films which are also excerpted in the documentary.  There is more about Scorsese's life and cinephilia in the picture than there is biographical information about Powell and Pressburger -- we are provided almost no information about their lives, marriages, children and things of that sort.  The movie's director (David Hinton) keeps the film steadfastly focused on the movies under consideration.  Scorsese is shot facing the camera in a full-frontal portrait, appearing in somewhat gloomy-looking screening room.  It's a cliche that demonstrates that this movie about supremely imaginative filmmakers is itself singularly unimaginative and, rather, plodding in its approach to the material.  The picture slogs through the Powell and Pressburger repertoire in chronological fashion, showing classic and memorable sequences from their films with Scorsese's comments interpolated.  There is no voice-over and Scorsese, although eloquent isn't particularly penetrating in his remarks nor is he profound. Clearly, these movies mean so much to the director that he regards their merits, and their technical achievements, as self-explanatory -- the Powell and Pressburger films are monuments and, therefore, accorded monumental status.  The film is a delight because of the clips from the movies, presented fully restored and in glorious black and white as well as technicolor, but it feels longer than its 136 minutes. 

Scorsese first saw these movies in disfigured versions in black-and-white (and cropped) on television.  But he was able to intuit their poetic qualities.  The curious imprimatur on these films:  productions of Powell & Pressburger with neither man given precedence is explained in some short interview clips from the film's subjects:  Pressburger who was Hungarian and Jewish wrote the pictures and devised the structure of the films; the two men collaborated on the dialogue; Powell directed photography, set direction, and editing.  Clearly, some sort of alchemy was at work because the whole is greater than the parts:  Powell seems a shy, reticent, and plain-spoken English country squire, a hail fellow with vibrantly ruddy cheeks. (In the sixties, when he had fallen out of favor, he was living in poverty in a cottage in Kent and spending a lot of time in his "Caravan" -- that is, a mobile camper wagon.)  Pressburger looks like an accountant gone to seed --he wears horn-rimmed glasses and unkempt hair and he speaks with an accent that makes him sound like Bela Lugosi.  Powell's style is intensely visual -- part of the peculiar aura cast by these movies is that the mise-en-scene is essentially that used in silent pictures:  the story is told visually in a collage of intricately edited shots, montage that looks like it could have been devised by Pabst or, even, Griffith or Abel Gance; this footage is punctuated with enormous close-ups of faces (often looming, short reaction shots) that are both beautiful and grotesque -- characters wear too much make-up, their eyes are unnaturally huge, and they are surrealistically expressive.  There is a certain "look" to a Powell and Pressburger film, I think, arising from the juxtaposition of shots of natural locations or sets, generally both beautiful and somewhat stylized, and the glaring eyes like high-beam headlights of the characters in the movies.  (Powell served his apprenticeship with Rex Ingram working in big French studios in Nice and his ultra-expressive way of staging movies clearly derives from lessons he learned on those silent film sets).  Scorsese links his use of color in Mean Streets with P & P's The Red Shoes; he traces some sequences in Raging Bull back to an elaborate scene setting up a duel of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943); Scorsese did the commentary on the Criterion disk of that picture.  Scorsese says that P & P's eccentric loners and uncompromising artists influenced his creation of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle (he points to the obsessed Lermontov in The Red Shoes).  Scorsese, whose greatest pictures are, arguably, his highly staged and lyrically edited music documentaries (for instance The Last Waltz) has great admiration for Powell's "composed film" sequences -- for instance, a climactic scene in Black Narcissus in which two women fight on the edge of an abyss (the one woman has red swollen eyes like a vampire or zombie) fused with a soaring score.  This technique of editing film to music reaches its climax in the wild and grotesque phantasmagoria in Tales of Hoffmann.  Scorsese seems to regard P & P's WW2 pictures as profoundly moral, seeking a meaning in the chaos of the war while endorsing British common sense and values.  After those films (Colonel Blimp, 49th Parallel, A Canterbury Tale, and A Matter of Life and Death), the two men seem to have lost their way and the differences in their orientations toward film became more and more divergent -- Pressburger wanted to move in the direction of realism and seems to have endorsed stories that now seem to be proto-New Wave; Powell's imagination became more exuberant, surreal, and fantastical, culminating in the wildly lurid and intensely operatic The Red Shoes and, then, of course, his adaptation of an actual opera in surrealistically inventive and sinister Tales of Hoffmann.  It was this latter movie that wrecked the men's partnership.  The film's producer, Alexander Korda wanted to shorten the picture by radically cutting the last tale -- Powell protested but Pressburger implied that he agreed with the critique.  After that dispute, the pair made a couple of additional movies but they are said to be bland and stolid:  O Rosalinda, Ill Met by Moonlight, and The Battle of the River Plate.  After parting, Powell made one final transgressive masterpiece on his own, Peeping Tom, an alarming meta-film about the dangers of voyeurism and sadism in the movies, and, then, after another couple of cheaply made final pictures, more or less went silent.  By this point, P & P, largely forgotten in their native Britain, were ripe for reevaluation -- Powell, in particular, had been so viciously maligned by critic for Peeping Tom, that his career was in ruins in the U.K.  American directors like Brian de Palma, Scorsese, of course, and Francis Ford Coppola presided over a revival of their films and Powell actually married Scorsese's editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.  Scorsese was a close friend to Powell for more than 15 years and says that he talked to him daily.  Scorsese emotionally tells us that Powell's support helped him through hard times, particularly after he made The King of Comedy, a departure from the director's previous very expressionistic films that was initially baffling to many critics.  

The documentary is a tribute and Scorsese is passionate and eloquent.  To some extent, the movie ignores some P & P's extreme eccentricity -- consider for instance, the subplot involving an assailant fetishist hacking off women's hair in A Canterbury Tale, or the elaborate debate about American versus English culture in A Matter of Life and Death or, for that matter, the strange pastoral idyll in that film with a naked shepherd playing a panpipe to his animals as the bedraggled David Niven staggers across the meadow; Colonel Blimp ends with a very peculiar and digressive coda about subterranean water in bombed-out London.  Every major P & P production contains some sequences that doesn't exactly fit, something discordant and even eerie -- at least, as far as I am concerned, the documentary give short shrift to this aspect of these men's work. 

It's best for viewers, particularly those who don't know P & P, to take note of the film's cited in picture and seek out these movies.  I know that I will try to find an opportunity to see a Powell and Pressburger film that I didn't know about, The Small Back Room (1949), an example of a hyper-realist post-war picture that seems to be a combination of the The Best Years of our Lives and a film noir.  If this film, encourages you to watch Powell and Pressburger's great pictures, it will have served its purpose, whatever it's limitations.

I am not a Monster: the Lois Riess murders

 Erin Lee Carr is a Minnesota girl who is an internationally recognized documentarian.  Carr specializes in ultra-lurid crime stories -- the names of some of her films are illustrative:  Thought Crimes:  the Case of the Cannibal Cop, I love you, now die!,Mommy Dead and Dearest, The Ringleader:  the Case of the Bling Ring.  She has also made documentaries about Brittney Spears' lawsuit against her father and the sexual abuse inflicted on the little girls on the Olympic Gymnastics Team.  She is reportedly working on a scripted film about the notorious killer-lawyer Alex Murdaugh.  Ms. Carr has written a memoir about her relationship with her father and her own drug addiction.  She was an editor for Vice both in print and on-screen and worked in production on Lena Dunham's Girls.  In short, Carr has her finger on the Zeitgeist and has proven to be a swift, efficient, and effective purveyor of tabloid crime stories.  Her most recent production -- and she is incredibly prolific -- is I am not a Monster:  the Lois Riess Murders.  This is a well-edited, if prosaic and unimaginative, documentary about a grandmother who committed two murders in 2018.  The show's novelty for me is that Lois Riess was a well-known figure in the small town of Blooming Prairie, Minnesota -- a village of about 2000 people located 17 miles from Austin, my home.  My excellent paralegal has lived in Blooming Prairie for 35 years and, so, she is personally acquainted with several of the people interviewed in Carr's 2024 HBO Max documentary.  Of course, I have represented people from Blooming Prairie, tried cases with clients from that place, and have driven through the town hundreds of times.  Once I even went swimming in the town's idiosyncratic public pool, a gravel pit amidst nice residential homes with a small beach and deep, cold water.  

I am not a Monster, of course, demonstrates the opposite of the proposition espoused by the title. Without much doubt, Lois Riess is a monster, a stone-cold psychopath, and egregious, self-serving liar.  Like many people of her kind, she overestimates her ability to talk her way out of trouble and, so, Carr, filming her where she is presently domiciled for life (the Shakopee Women's Prison), gives her plenty of rope with which to hang herself and, of course, Riess obliges.  (She is the kind of person who wants sympathy because she is a widow -- but, of course, she is widow because she killed her husband.)  Carr's documentary consists of nicely filmed but unimpressive interviews, generally conducted in someone's kitchen or living room or (weirdly) in empty taverns.  There's no narration although some titles orient the viewer to events.  Carr works by letting her interview subjects speak their piece, typically without much interruption, and, then, editing their words into meaningful 20 or 30 second snippets.  This is state of the art documentary film-making -- there are lots of ominous drone shots with the camera gliding over the nondescript grain elevators and commercial downtown of Blooming Prairie.  Cars drive down empty snowy highways and we see deer running through the forests, really just shelter belts, somewhere in southern Minnesota -- the influence of the Coen Brothers Fargo is pretty much everywhere evident.  The story is gruesome and sensational:  Lois Riess was a hard-partying woman whose husband operated a waxworm bait farm -- the place grew waxworms, a kind of plump, succulent larva, to be sold nationally and apparently was very profitable.  Everyone knew Riess and her husband, David, as a fun couple, heavy drinkers and habitues of the local restaurants and taverns in town.  (Blooming Prairie has a modest demi-monde of hedonistic businessmen and their blonde attractive wives.)  When Riess didn't show up at a fishing competition, people were alarmed.  The cops discovered that the man was dead, decomposing on the floor of his bathroom in his ranch-rambler adjacent to the worm farm.  Lois Riess had shot him and, then, stayed in the house for ten or 12 days before making a somewhat inept escape in the couple's expensive SUV, a Cadillac Escalade.  For the first half-hour of the show, Carr lets Riess give her account of the couple's secret life -- despite all appearances to the contrary, they were unhappily married and David was supposedly abusive.  While he was inflicting psychological abuse on Lois, she used her gun to shoot him repeatedly.  When the stench in the house became significant, she put towels under the closed bathroom door, opened a window despite sub -zero temperatures, and ran the toilet's fan to expel the smell.  Lois, then, drove to Fort Myers, Florida where she picked up a nice blonde woman in the bar, sharing stories with her about being a widow and victim of abuse.  The blonde woman was about Lois' size and age and had the same color hair.  Lois shot this woman to death, stole her credit cards and money, and, apparently, decided she would cross the border into Mexico after driving to Brownsville, Texas.  But Lois enjoyed drinking at bars and, on South Padre Island, picked up another lonely middle-aged widow, seemingly planning to kill her as well.  (For some reason, she didn't follow through with this third victim.)  By this time, the FBI was in hot pursuit and they captured Lois a few days later while she was nonchalantly having drinks at the bar at one of the local seafood places.  Lois was extradited to Florida, a death penalty state. To avoid capital punishment, she pled guilty and was, then, returned to Minnesota where she is serving a life sentence in Shakopee, a Minneapolis suburb.  

Lois is initially plausible in her rather baroque attempt to impose the blame for Dave's murder on her unfortunate husband  But the film shows us that she is at heart a psychopath, a compulsive gambler who seems to have stolen from everyone who ever trusted her.  (She stole over $55,000 from a mentally disabled sister that she was supposed to be assisting as her conservator and seems to have gambled away hundreds of thousands of dollars.)  It quickly becomes apparent that you can tell when Lois is lying because her lips are moving.  She cries and talks about "black-outs" and abuse but has no justification for the murder of her doppelgaenger in Fort Myers.  Various local people, both in Florida and Texas as well as Blooming Prairie, talk about their encounters with Lois.  With the exception of two "talking heads" no one show much sympathy for the murderous woman.  One of the sympathetic witnesses is Lois niece who appears willing to give her aunt the benefit of the doubt; an old friend cautiously suggests that Dave, despite appearances, was a mean bastard himself.  A gambling addiction counselor stinks up the show with various pop psychology excuses that are irritating and morally corrupt -- it doesn't help that this woman is filmed in what seems to be a closed bar.  

The show is of no redeeming social value.  It's garish, simple-minded, but fascinating.  And it's fair in its own sub-literate, exploitative manner -- Carr lets you make up your own mind and doesn't tip her hand.  But after three hours, it's pretty obvious what is going on.  A reasonable criticism of the show is that it's too long -- it has a grim coda featuring the suicides and deaths of Riess' family members.  The material is worth about two hours, but the show. I must concede, is as interesting as a  bad wreck on the highway and you can't really look away.    

Hacks

 Hacks is sit-com in three consecutive seasons.  It premiered in May 2021 on HBO Max and has been renewed for a fourth season at the conclusion of its third series in 2023.  The program is very entertaining, sharply written, and has excellent actors.  In essence, Hacks is an "odd-couple" buddy comedy featuring Jean Smart (Deborah Vance)as a 70-something comedian struggling to re-invent herself with new routines and jokes with the assistance of an earnest young writer Ava played by Hannah Einbinder (the actress is the daughter of SNL's Larraine Newman).  Ava is about 25, politically correct, and bisexual (primarily lesbian although she hooks up with men from time to time.)  She acts as the foil to Deborah Vance, a fantastically wealthy show biz personality, who had been performing to sold-out crowds at the Palmetto Casino for the previous thirty years -- her show has become a bit archaic and rote and the boss at the Casino has decided to replace her.  This triggers a crisis in Deborah Vance who reaches out to Ava whom she has employed as a joke-writer and general factotum for new material.  The show is about the strained relationship between the two women (Deborah Vance is monstrously selfish and Ava more than a little irritating with respect to her virtue signaling) and how their work relationship matures into something like mutual respect and friendship.  Since the show's narrative trajectory is from sarcastic acrimony and hearty dislike to affection, the program can't really reach its sentimental climax, always implied by the dialogue, without destroying itself.  Therefore, like many sit-coms the show has a perpetuum mobile aspect -- it has to regenerate itself by showing the women's attitudes toward one another evolving into close friendship, but, then, throwing a wrench into the works, contriving new reasons for them to be at odds and dislike one another.  At the end of each season, there is a touching scene of friendship and, then, some sort of clash between boss and her paid-servant and writer that casts their affection into doubt and threatens to make them irreconcilable enemies again.  For instance, at the end of the third series, all plot complications have been resolved into a happy ending -- Vance gets her network late-night show, seems about to reconcile with her estranged sister, and has anointed Ava as the head writer for the program.  But Vance, then, betrays Ava (out of paranoia about the late night gig succeeding) and Ava fights back, blackmailing her boss with the threat to expose an embarrassing sexual impropriety.  This is parallel to an earlier season in which Ava drunkenly exposes some of Vance's peccadillos, seems about to get fired, but stays on the famous comedian's payroll albeit subject to lawsuit for violating her Non-Disclosure Agreement.  (Vance enjoys suing people and seems to be casually vicious.)  This plot complication is resolved when Vance dismisses the lawsuit but, then, fires Ava, saying that she wants to encourage her to "write her own material" and be successful in her own right.  Of course, the firing must be only temporary, otherwise the show would implode.  The money-maker situation has to be preserved at all costs although this gives the show a sort of herky-jerky aspect.

At its heart, Hacks is not so much different than the old Mary Tyler Moore Show if the focus of that program were primarily on the boss figure, that is, Lou Grant who, if I recall correctly, later got his own show.   A successful sit-com requires excellent supporting actors (think anchorman Ted Baxter, for instance, on Mary Tyler Moore or Carl Reiner, Morey Amsterdam, and Ann Marie on the old Dick Van Dyke show) and Hacks has an abundance of funny, quirky, and interesting second-bananas:  there's a lonely gay personal assistant, Deborah's agent and fat side-kick, Kayla, the casino owner, Marty who is, a cynical old Vegas hand, as well as several other amusing sycophants who work for Deborah and, often, travel with her.  There's quite a bit of soft-core gay sex to distinguish the Cable show from network TV and the jokes are often quite raunchy, but the program has its heart in the right place and, ultimately, is just as didactic and sentimental as Mary Tyler Moore -- the show affirms the value of personal growth:  Deborah has to re-imagine her act and extricate herself from various personal traumas in her background; Ava's arrogance and know-it-all preaching to the indifferent Deborah has to be tamed and she must learn both a measure of humility but also self-confidence as to her own abilities.  Deborah's dirty jokes and ethnic slurs must be re-evaluated and, ultimately, she has to apologize for some of her more hurtful schtick. The conflict between overweening ambition and relationships sacrificed to this ambition must achieve a proper balance and so on.  The show's premise is that the flamboyant, cruel and witty Deborah Vance must learn life-lessons from the "woke", hip Ava and, of course, vice-versa.  In this respect, the show isn't all that different from an old Andy Griffith episode -- it's just got a lot dirtier dialogue (one of Ava's would-be girlfriends wants to piss on her; Ava figures out the woman is a Republican and says she won't be pissed-on except by progressive Democrats) and more sex -- I don't recall Barney Fife getting it on with Floyd the Barber, although this always seemed a possibility to me.  

The series, somewhat like Curb Your Enthusiasm, provides a glimpse into the lives of ultra-rich celebrities.  Deborah Vance has several homes, but spends most of her time at a lavish French chateau somewhere in the foothills near Vegas.  (At Christmas, she has snow machines blast artificial and chemically toxic "snow" all around the premises.)  She jets around in a private plane and hobnobs with other arrogant and entitled show business types.  She's not merely a stand-up comic but has a fantastically successful home shopping network line of apparel and other accessories.  Hacks asserts that Deborah was badly damaged when she was allowed to host a network late-night show or, at least, it's pilot thirty years earlier but, then, lost the gig when gossip asserted that she had burned down her ex-husband's house in a fit of pique.  Vance's sister betrayed her with her husband, destroying her family and creating infamy about the comedian which caused the networks to cancel her program.  (Vance, gamely, capitalized on the scandal with a series of lurid jokes about torching her husband's place.)  The estrangement between Vance and her sister, now lasting forty years, is also a source of conflict on the show, antagonism that seems always perpetually about to resolve, although the program requires that acrimony persist in order to keep regenerating its plot.  

Despite her sadism and selfishness, Deborah Vance is portrayed as a survivor, a woman who has made it  big in an avowedly sexist milieu.  Hacks has a number of shrewd things to say about how women who don't comply with gender stereotypes are treated in the show business and society in general.  This critique, I think, may account for the many Emmy awards that the show has won, including an Emmy for best actress for Jean Smart.  These awards are justified.  The show is generally very good, funny, and entertaining.  If it occasionally brings a tear to your eye, this is just gravy.   

The Outfit

 The Outfit is a crime revenge picture released in 1973 and directed by John Flynn.  It's an example of solid genre filmmaking, entertaining and without any pretense -- or, for that matter, ambition.  The movie has an interesting cast:  Robert Duvall plays Earl Macklin, an ex-convict who wreaks havoc on the titular "outfit" -- that is an organized criminal enterprise -- that has betrayed him and murdered his brother; Karen Black is Bett, Duvall's girlfriend, who has been also complicit in the hero's betrayal; Robert Ryan, looking a bit haggard and weary, plays the kingpin gangster, a guy named Art.  His main squeeze is the beautiful Joanna Cassidy, appearing in an underwritten part.  The chubby Joe Don Baker plays the part of Macklin's loyal buddy, Cody.  The film's ingredients are excellent -- the story is based on a novel by Richard Stark (the pseudonym for Donald Westlake) and adapted for the screen by an uncredited Walter Hill; the movie is full of wonderful character actors -- for instance, Elisha Cooke, a fixture of film noir from the fifties through 1973 and later, plays a barkeeper and many of the heavies will be familiar to viewers of my age who watched Network TV (there was no other kind at that time) during the late sixties and early seventies.  The most notable and praiseworthy aspect of this project are the pungent locations -- the film is set in various cafes and diners in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and you can almost smell these places; the gangster's villa is both suitably decadent but also decomposing -- at least, the outside and tennis court seem to be rotting.  Half of the movie takes place in squalid little motel rooms, also lovingly shown, and there are plenty of roadhouses and titty bars, also shot with compelling documentary fidelity.  It's a bleak landscape and the roads are always deserted and the mountains sit piled-up over everything like heaps of unwashed clothing. Dogs are always good in movies and this picture features a  loyal German shepherd, a pack of sinister, aristocratic-looking Dobermans, and an implausibly fierce yellow Lab. 

The premise of the picture is that three crooks, the two Macklin brothers and Cody, have robbed a bank in Wichita which turns out to be operated by the Mob.  Earl is thrown in the clink for a 2 1/2 year bid.  The Mob sends "sluggers", an euphemism for professional assassins to kill Cody and Earl's brother.  A thug dressed as a priest guns down Earl's brother in his backyard, much to the dismay of the man's German shepherd.  Cody narrowly escapes.  When Earl is released from jail, his erstwhile girlfriend takes him to a motor-court where several assassins try to kill him.  Her excuse for this betrayal (she earlier fingered him for the robbery as well) is that she has been tortured; a cruel hoodlum named Menner has scarred her arm with cigarette burns and threatened to cut-up her face..  With the girl in tow, Earl plots revenge.  He makes a frontal assault on a poker game involving several of the bad guys including Menner whose finger he shoots off --  "this will teach you not to use a girl as an ashtray," he says.  Earl then teams up with his buddy, and fellow bank robber, Cody to repel attacks by the aggrieved gangsters.  Earl has said that he is owed $250,000 for his trials and tribulations.  With Cody, he manages to steal that money, leading to further violent encounters with the mobsters.  The action scenes in this movie are brilliantly choreographed and extremely exciting -- there are gun battles in office buildings and on a mountain road, a spectacular fight in a sleazy supper club, and Earl's final assault on the big Boss' tightly guarded mansion.  The action is not meretricious and Earl takes care not to kill anyone he doesn't have to -- although the body count is fairly high by the end of the movie.  

The movie has excellent dialogue: after beating up a thug who has tried to kill him, Earl says: "Die someplace else."  In the preliminaries to the fight in the supper club, Earl tells a cook with a cleaver to butt out:  "I don't talk to guys wearing aprons."  After shooting up the big boss, his girlfriend says:  "Damn you, why'd you have to kill him" to which Earl replies:  "He owed me money."  

The Outfit's treatment of women will likely distress some.  Earl beats up Bett, abuse that she seems to accept with equanimity and, even, thinks that she deserves.  (This doesn't adversely affect their love affair which involves pillow-fights and lots of teasing.)  Art's moll doesn't do much but loll around in her lingerie; she also receives a tennis lesson and looks very fetching in her white shorts.  And, there's a startling scene set at a hillbilly's auto salvage yard -- the place defended by the snarling lab.  The hillbilly is an ugly brute but he has a gorgeous and seductive wife.  She tries to seduce Cody right under her husband's nose and, then, when he rejects her blandishments, accuses him of rape.  This leads to a big fight which the wicked woman observes with amusement, now having substituted a black turtleneck with a big crucifix for her earlier skin-tight togs.  This stuff was retrograde even by 1973 standards and, although amusing, is a little appalling in 2024.

I think this picture is very good in its an unassuming way.  This is the kind of story that couldn't be told on 1973 mainstream TV -- too much violence and implied sex -- and, so, a picture of this sort had a function in the then-existing media ecosphere:  it was adult entertainment, seriously intended, supplemental to a dozen TV shows with similar content but less explicit.  I know that Cable streaming services have tried to produce equivalent vehicles -- that is, crime shows that are pretty lurid but with good actors and well-written scripts.  However, I think cable streaming has been far less successful in this endeavor than MGM in 1973 in this little film.   

        

Civil War

 In Andrew Garland's Civil War, combat looks very picturesque.  The movie espouses the sensibility of the  combat photographer, a superficial aesthetic in which children's bicycles are juxtaposed with burning tanks, and soldiers crouch under fire amidst Christmas decorations.  The better shots are frozen as black and white images, time stopping so we can inspect in details images showing anguished faces and deadly violence.  A final spectacular fire-fight occurs in the streets around the White House; tracer bullets outline the Washington Monument and rocket-propelled grenades burst in the portico of the temple dedicated to Abraham Lincoln; the final gun-battle takes place in the West Wing of the White House.  The actions sequences are well-choreographed and gaudy.  The movie itself, although reasonably entertaining and scary, is pointless.  The viewer keeps expecting the picture to address its premise -- that is, a Civil War in which the so-called Western Federation (California and Texas) have joined the Southern States (Florida et. al.) to besiege the federal power in Washington.  The film isn't interested in how this war has arisen, or its ideology and politics (meaningless to those caught up in the slaughter) and, so, the issue of "civil" as opposed to some other type of war isn't really developed.  (In what possible world do Californian and Texas form an alliance against the Federal Government?)  The picture could be set in any war zone in the world.  In fact, the basic premise of the movie was perfected in Roger Spottiswoode's Under Fire (1983), a movie featuring photojournalists cynically capturing gruesome images of the Nicaraguan Civil War; Under Fire is more conventionally plotted, has a love triangle between Joanna Cassidy and her suitors played by Nick Nolte and Gene Hackman, and, also, makes points about how photographs of a conflict can become instrumental in the hands of the belligerents.  None of this kind of detail exists in Civil War which contents itself with showing the fighting as picturesquely as possible.  Under Fire also uses the technique of stopping the action to view it through still photographs taken by the movie's protagonists, a way to make the violence even more remote and artistic-looking.  Under Fire addresses the morality of the dispassionate camera eye in combat or directed toward other forms of human suffering; Civil War is mostly oblivious to such concerns.  Furthermore, there's a weird sort of anachronism about the movie.  The photojournalists use conventional cameras with telephoto lenses and creep around on their hands and knees with bullets whizzing over their heads.  Recently, it seems to me that everyone is carrying a cell-phone and pictures of brutal events are a dime-a-dozen; you don't need a fast-speed Leica and a contract with Reuters or Magnum to peddle "up close and personal" pictures of mayhem.  Conflicts shed pictures of this sort like snow falling from a cloud in a blizzard.  

Four journalists set off for Washington D.C. hoping to interview the President of the Federal Government.  It seems generally accepted that the Federals are losing the war and that Washington will soon fall to the Western Federation.  The reporters want to get an interview with the doomed President before he is executed and, although the older print journalist, a man named Sammy, predicts that like Mussolini or Ceasescu, or Gaddafi, the politician probably won't be able to say anything coherent when they reach him.  A young girl -- she claims to be 23 but looks about 16 -- wants to tag along with the experienced reporter; she is particularly enamored with the embittered and badly traumatized Lee, a gaunt-looking female war photographer who is modeled after Lee Miller, the first woman cameraman to enter Buchenwald during World War Two.  Lee has seen too much killing, apparently in the Iraq and Africa (or possibly Haiti) and is a burnt-out case.  She's taciturn and doesn't want the little girl loitering with the more experienced correspondents.  The movie is, more or less, about the relationship between the young girl, Jessie, and the much older and hardened photographer, Lee.  But the parts are under-written and there's not much dialogue in this movie and so, for the most part, the relationship between the two women is enigmatic, more a matter of suggestion than dramatizations.

The film has a classic structure, the journey through many perils to an objective -- in this case the embattled White House in DC.  There is a driver, also a tough war correspondent, Sammy, the morose, fat, and elderly print journalist, Jessie, the green newbie, and the hard case, Lee.  The four have various adventures lurking around combat scenes and photographing the violence.  At first, Jessie is terrified, throws up during the firefights, and, when she isn't cowering, is reckless and nearly gets herself killed.  But, she develops into a seasoned war correspondent, somewhat implausibly in the three day trip (the four reach Washington via Pittsburgh, West Virginia and Charlottesville.  In the movie's final scenes, she has the hardened thousand-yard stare that we see in Lee's haggard features.  (Lee is played by Kirsten Dunst in the sort of performance that critics call "brave" because she doesn't wear make-up and is permitted to look her actual age -- she must be in her early fifties.) There is really nothing in the movie but disillusion, laconic warnings, and showy violence.  The defining scene is a sequence in which a sort of red neck wearing bright scarlet sunglasses terrorizes Jessie and another journalist while a irregular troops unload a dump truck full of battered corpses into a mass grave.  (One of the corpses has its leg flung over the edge of the truck bed and gets caught so that the body doesn't fall into the pit.)  Jessie ends up flailing around in the mass grave where the bodies are suppurating under a glaze of lime.  In the final battle, Lee seems to have a nervous breakdown -- she screams and howls during the assault on the White House, but, in the final minutes, sacrifices her life to save Jessie.  This is pretty standard stuff.  Of course, the President is gunned down.  As predicted by Sammy, who is now also dead, the poor politician doesn't have anything much to say except "Don't kill me!" before he's shot to death.  In the final shot, captured as an image by Jessie, we see the dead President lying like a trophy in a big game hunt on the floor of the White House, while grinning soldiers give thuimbs-up signs to the camera.  

There's no real point to the movie which is parade of horrors.  It's more akin to a zombie film, in which the walking dead hunt down the living against a sordid backdrop of check-cashing places, ruined fast food emporiums, and shot-up car washes.  It's gripping in a very primitive way, but irresponsible, I think.  How are some people going to interpret the scenes involving the battle at the White House, the mortars blowing up the residential wing, the corpses lying on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial?

 

Evil does not Exist

Japanese director Ryuchi Hamguichi makes critically acclaimed movies in the international art-house style.  His pictures tend to be very long (for instance, 2021's Drive my car clocking in at three hours) and win awards at festivals.  Evil Does Not Exist (2023) is shorter than his other films, less than two hours long, and intentionally unimpressive.  It's a bleak parable about the commercial exploitation of nature, really just an anecdote with a contrived ending.  The movie is interesting but there is nothing particularly special about it -- perhaps, the film's dour low-key tone is its whole point, but it makes the picture a hard-sell; I'm not sure I would recommend it.  The movie is made to provoke arguments about its enigmatic ending.  But there's not enough heat in this frosty movie to make those arguments particularly robust.  

It's Spring in a mountainous area of Japan, apparently within driving distance of Tokyo.  Some people live in a village of scattered metal cabins with slant roofs -- it looks like a colony of Norwegian or Swedish modernist cottages in a murky, greyish forest.  A man named Tatumi chops and splits wood, patrols the forest looking for ginseng and wild wasabi, and carries water from a unprepossessing stream back to his van for use in a local restaurant.  The water is used for soups with udon and soba noodles and the cafe owner (who is from Tokyo) says that it has a particular efficacy in the food that she prepares,  Tatumi has an eight-year old daughter named Hana who likes to roam the woods looking for fallen pheasant feathers.  Displayed on the walls of Tatumi's house are pictures of him with the child and a woman.  But the woman never appears in the movie and we assume that she had died -- however, the film is elliptical and it is merely an assumption that Tatumi is a widow; maybe, his wife moved away or divorced him.  We don't know.  Tatumi and Hana, while collecting water for the noodle place, find the skeleton of a deer in the forest.  Tatumi tells his daughter that the deer was gut-shot by hunters and died because of its wound.  Sometimes, we hear distant shots -- it's hunting season in these woods.  Hana gives a pheasant feather to an older man, the village's chief, a fellow named Sagura.  Everyone in the hamlet seems related to one another.

A bland-looking mostly silent woman and a slightly older man make a presentation to the villagers on behalf of some sort of talent agency and theatrical group called Playmode.  The company is planning to build a campground, really a sort of luxury hotel, in the forests for "glamping" -- this means "glamor camping."  The place will have comfortable tents, many BBQ pits, and a number of other amenities.  The presentation doesn't go well -- the villagers, including Tatumi, are suspicious.  The plans for the glamping facility are obviously defective -- the sewage system is too small to the number of units.  The BBQ pits will pose a risk of fire in dry weather -- "this place is dry and windy," a woman tells the presenters.  There are a number of other objections which the PR people can't address.  A young man with dyed blonde hair says that Playmode is in a hurry to build because of "subsidies" that will expire.  He gets so angry that he lunges out of his seat, only to be restrained by Tatumi.  The meeting is inconclusive and the villagers remain hostile to the project.  But the chief (or mayor), Sagura seems willing to make a deal -- it just has to be a better deal.  The PR team (the bland woman and the man) return to Tokyo where the boss tells them to get the deal done -- they are told to coopt Tatumi by offering him a job as caretaker for the property.  In fact, there are tax credits or subsidies about to lapse and Playmode is in a hurry to get the Glamping enterprise up and running -- the blonde punk was right.

The woman and man motor back to the village.  They both express dissatisfaction with their lives in Tokyo.  The woman has tried on-line dating with no success.  The man wants to get married and move away from the city.  The couple go Tatumi's house where he is splitting firewood.  (The man whose name is Mayuzimi tries to split logs with limited success but, when he is successful, he is very enthused and muses about moving to the woods to live with the villagers.)  The PR team and Tatumi eat at the noodle place and discuss the project -- the campground is going to be built along a deer path in the woods; deer, Tatumi tells them, are docile until they are pushed into a corner, but will, then, fight fiercely.  The eight-year old Hana is roaming in the woods, lured along the trails by a bird that she is following.  Later, she doesn't return and the villages organize a search party to find her.  Tatumi with  Mayuzimi finds the girl in the twilight -- she is staring at a wounded deer.  (Spoilers here follow.)  It's clear that the child is in danger due to her close proximity to the luxuriantly antlered and dying deer.  But instead of rescuing Hana, Tatumi decides to strangle the inoffensive Mayuzimi.  He throttles the poor guy into unconsciousness.   By the time, he has completed his assault, the deer has apparently gored Hana -- it's vanished and she's lying on the frosty ground with blood coming out her ear.  Tatumi picks up the girl and carries her back to the village.  Mayuzimi revives for a moment and staggers across the icy field but collapses again.  

The ending is intended as a riddle.  But it's an irritating riddle:  Tatumi's obtuse decision to assault Mayuzimi results in his daughter being badly injured, maybe, even killed.  It's obvious that Tatumi identifies with the beleagured deer -- although the animals are mostly passive, they will fight when cornered.  Tatumi apparently thinks that the Glamping proposal has cornered the villagers and triggered there "fight or flight" response.  But Tatumi may also be a malcontent and, even, mentally ill.  When he comes upon the skeletal remains of the deer, he says with confidence that it was "gut-shot" and died for that reason -- but objectively there's no way that he could reach that conclusion on the evidence of the skull and scattered bones.  Presumably Tatumi is projecting hs own anxiety about the Glamping project onto the dead deer.  In fact, the villagers, although opposed to the project, generally keep an open mind about it and seem willing, even anxious, to make a deal.  Clearly, the "chief" or mayor wants the project, which will be economically beneficial to the area, to be implemented.  The mayor says that people living "upstream" must not act irresponsibly to allow their sewage and garbage to pollute the places where people downstream live -- this the ethic by which he lives.  These concerns are embodied in a scene in which the blonde-haired punk, searching for Hana, runs down a slope next to a concrete trench full of water careening over many box-like steps as the creek descends.  It's a somewhat surreal image of water flowing through a rationalized, cube-like concrete trench. 

The film's photography is gloomy (it looks cold and dim) and the landscapes aren't impressive.  The villagers live in nondescript woods split apart by snowy meadows.  The mountain peaks are far away, dusted with snow.  Most of the scenery consists of brush and groves of trees.  The creek that supplies water for the cafe is a just a moist seep in the woods leaking a foot-wide stream down hill.  The people living in this area fancy themselves pioneers -- the woods were first opened up for settlement during the housing shortage after World War II.  But there's no privation and the people have nice-looking cottages and a reasonably well-equipped modern school  Now and then, we see hawks and a couple deer.  The movie goes out of its way to avoid turning the PR team into villains.  The woman and man are polite, listen carefully to the villagers, and, in fact, poor Mayuzimi is murdered when he has decided that he's going to move to the woods and join the villagers --he's sick and tired of the megalopolis.  Hamaguichi directs according the international art house paradigm style -- sequences are filmed in single shots that last three or four minutes (you will see lots of wood being split in this movie); the camera tracks morosely through the woods and there are, at least, four instances of the camera shooting upward into the grey (or moonlit) sky as the camera moves over the forest floor -- ghostly looking twigs and branches make a web overhead.  There are four shots (at least) taken from the back of a moving vehicle looking away from the direction of motion.  Camera set ups are held until people walk out of the frame and, then, the empty shot may linger for another ten seconds.  There are relatively few close-ups and many shots are deliberately inexpressive -- people talk with their backs to the camera or are filmed from great distances that obscure their features as they speak.  The sound design derives from some of Godard's pictures -- changes of scene are signaled by jarring sound cues; music abruptly stops when the film cuts away to another scene and the soundtrack is vivid with the sound of chain saws, cars and trucks starting, the thud of an axe splitting wood, the sounds of birds and flowing water. Most of the compositions feature bluish-grey monochrome highlighted here and there by splashes of bright red -- the paradigm for this is a scene in the woman from Tokyo cuts her finger on a thorn and we see the razor-sharp thorn dripping blood; the wounded deer has a red gouge in its side.  A red ball sits in the lead-colored school yard.  Hamaguichi labors to make nature look as gloomy and uninviting as his urban landscapes.-- it's just patches of snow and a jumble of barren-looking trees and brush.  

The Lady in the Van

 The Lady in the Van is a 2015 film directed by Nicholas Hytner adapting a memoir by the celebrated British playwright, Alan Bennett.  The story, said to be mostly true, concerns a homeless woman who parked the van in which she was dwelling outside of Bennett's flat in Camden Village, a part of London.  The woman told Bennett that she intended to stay near his driveway for three months -- in fact, she lived by his home, in three different iterations of the van, for 15 years up to the date of her death in 1989.  Bennett first wrote an essay about the experience that he, later, expanded into a short book.  Then, he devised a monologue on the subject that was premiered in 1990 and, then, performed on BBC radio as a play in 1999.  The lady in the van, named Mary or Margaret Shepherd was played by Maggie Smith, the celebrated British actress who died on September 27, 2024 at the age of 89.  Smith was famous for her performances in the BBC show Downton Abbey as well as work she did in the Harry Potter films among many other iconic roles.  Smith looks terrible in the movie; her face is gray and she seems emaciated, traipsing about in shapeless filthy clothing.  The script begins with a oratorical cadenza about her bad odor -- she is said to smell like "the inside of an ear" and many other worse things.  A couple shots show excrement attributed to the character and she is said to defecate in a plastic bags that surround her reeking, noisome van.  At one point, Bennett, who is a character in the movie, reproaches himself for paying so much attention to Ms. Shepherd's shit -- a cynical version of himself says that this is because he is "caring" for the elderly female vagrant.  "Caring is all about shit," Bennett tells us.  Smith's performance is uncompromising, the kind of work for which elderly actors are acclaimed for being "brave", and Smith isn't afraid to appear in the worst possible light in this film.  Of course, as a young woman, she was one of Britain's greatest beauties and, so, the film is dispiriting in some respects -- but she imparts a fierce dignity to a character that most of us would turn away from in disgust if we met her on the street.  

The Lady in the Van is highly literate and intelligent.  The script is well-crafted and effective.  The subject matter is slender, however, and the story is tricked-out with some distressing twists and turns; to pad the material into a feature-length movie, Bennett turns the story into an account of his personal struggles as a closeted homosexual man, a lonely and isolated writer, and a devoted son caring for his own mother (who is suffering from senile dementia) in a plot that is posited as parallel to the story about Margaret (or Mary) Shepherd.  Writers, Bennet notes, are in dialogue with themselves -- they talk to themselves and, indeed, what is written on the page is the product of an interior conversation.  Bennett dramatizes this concept by dividing his character into two persons, both, more or less, identical although one is more formally dressed than the other.  Bennett says that one of the versions of himself is the person who has to live his life; the other version is Bennett as writer, an unscrupulous fellow who will use Ms. Shepherd's poverty and mental illness as fodder for his writing.  (The conceit is a little like several pictures involving Truman Capote including the TV show, The Swans and the film Capote.)  The double Bennett's allow the playwright to dramatize his reactions to the vagrant and provide brittle, witty and aphoristic dialogue about the woman -- it's a pretty clever concept and, for the most part, works well.  Mary Shepherd is on the lam -- she believes that she killed a bicyclist in a hit-and-run accident twenty years earlier.  A corrupt cop blackmails her -- this part of the movie seems weirdly obtuse:  is the cop supposed to be a villain and, if so, why is he portrayed so warmly (by the great Jim Broadbent)?  As the film progresses, Bennett provides further information about the homeless woman -- she turns out to have been once an accomplished pianist (she performed at the Proms), a former nun, and an ambulance driver in "blacked-out Kensington during the war."  The people in Camden Village, a very upscale neighborhood (the widow of Ralph Vaughn Williams, the great composer, lives there) are surprisingly accommodating to her and, throughout the movie, everyone behaves with British civility and equanimity.  The only villains in the picture are members of the Catholic Church -- apparently, Shepherd liked playing the piano more than praying when she was a novice nun and, as a result, her vow of obedience included a promise to never play the piano again.  (Toward the very end of the movie, just before her death, Shepherd pays some Chopin on a piano in a care center.)  Bennett contrives the film to depict his clashes with the obdurate, bullying and filthy Shepherd in the context of his own mother's decline -- his mother becomes comatose as the film progresses.  Ultimately, when Shepherd dies, her evil spirit hovering over Bennett is exorcized.  The gay man ends up with a loving partner and the movie has a happy ending the celebrates Alan Bennett becoming well-adjusted at the end of his own life. (Bennett, I should note, is still alive and, often, publishes diary entries in The London Review of Books).  This material is obviously deeply significant to Bennett as witness his extensive engagement with the subject but it's not immediate apparent as to what the movie is supposed to mean.  We see Bennett apparently hiring "rent-boys" throughout the movie -- Shepherd, to whom the concept of homosexuality seems alien, accuses the handsome young men of being "communists."  At the end of the film, Bennett has integrated himself into one figure; he no longer bickers with himself and, in fact, doesn't need to because he has a romantic partner living with him.  

The movie features an excellent cast of BBC character actors.  The picture is effectively filmed.  The whole show is conceived as a struggle against the sentiment that is inherent in the film's conception -- a wacky, eccentric homeless lady teaches a Gay man how to live with bravery and stand in  his own Truth.  To avoid the picture descending into bathos, Bennett and Hytner engineer several gruesome and jarring shocks -- there's a big close-up of human feces stuck on a garbage can and the scene in which Mary Shepherd accidentally kills the bicyclist is gory, with a big gout of blood disfiguring the front of the van.  Clearly Bennett loves this material so much that he can't let go of it -- the movie has three or four endings one after another, including Ms. Shepherd's ascent into heaven, and, in the last scene, we see the real Bennett participating with the movie crew in making the picture.  It's a charming, beautifully written, and inconsequential movie.