Before the Revolution (Prima della Revoluzione)

 Bernardo Bertolucci's Before the Revolution (1964) is a key to the director's later work.  Many of the themes developed in Bertolucci's mature films, including Last Tango in Paris, The Conformist, and 1900 are evident in the director's first feature film.  The movie is heavily influenced by Godard and the French filmmaker's rather cubist style of editing dominates the movie -- sequences are divided up into discontinuous shots, often with disconcerting jump cuts and mismatched edits; the film is not cut to serve its narrative, but, rather, broken into images spliced together in a stuttering, fragmentary montage.  The soundtrack frequently doesn't match the imagery and there are jokey musical cues, that sometimes resemble the Godard-influenced work of Richard Lester in his Beatles films.  The music for Before the Revolution was composed by Ennio Morricone and is well worth attending to.  In fact, musical themes predominate in the movie -- there is a lot of harpsichord on the soundtrack and a penultimate sequence involves a performance of Verdi's opera version of Macbeth.  Much of the film, made in black and white, looks like a jerky, covertly filmed documentary -- there is a cinema verite aspect to the picture's rough edges and, in fact, cinema verite as a film style is mentioned in one sequence.  These elements of the film undercut Bertolucci's rapturous eye for landscape and the epic dimensions of his movie-making -- in his later pictures, as with the spaghetti westerns on which he actually worked (he was an assistant director on Sergio Leone's Once upon a time in the West) everything looks larger-than-life, exaggerated for baroque effects and there's a dreamy, swooning aspect to his mise-en-scene.  The languorous and ecstatic aspects of Bertolucci's mature films are not really visible in Before the Revolution except for a spectacular sequences involving a drowning at a picturesquely barren construction site.  That scene is one of the rare sequences in Before the Revolution in which we can detect Bertolucci's big-budget style -- obvious in films like La Luna, The Last Emperor, The Conformist and the enormous arthouse spaghetti Western qua Marxist pageant of 1900.  It's not so much the imagery in Before the Revolution that prefigures Bertolucci's later themes and obsessions, but the subject matter that comprises the movie.

There's a lot of talk in Before the Revolution, much of it poetic or allusive.  Various literary works are cited.  The film comes with several epigraphs including a citation from Talleyrand which says something to the effect that no one can appreciate the sweetness of life "before the revolution" who did not live in those days.  The idea seems to be that the revolution is best appreciated before it is attempted and before the enterprise devolves into internecine fighting and disenchantment.  Something similar, I think, is suggested about love.  The anticipation of love is better than the rather messy and inevitably disappointing erotic encounter itself.  In this way, eros and revolution are linked, a concern that runs like scarlet thread through the entirety of the film.  The movie is about young people fumbling their way through their first love affairs -- therefore, the subject of the picture is lust, erotic betrayal and disenchantment, these latter qualities also defining the characters' flirtation with Communism.

The movie's narrative eschews standard establishing shots or linear chronology (and there are elisions in which key events are not shown to us) and, so, the summary of events in the movie that I now provide is an approximation or estimate (guess) as to what happens in the picture.  A handsome young man named Fabrizio is flirting with another boy named Agostino.  Agostino, who is a blonde waif, is estranged from his family and may be homosexual.  By contrast, Fabrizio seems, more or less, heterosexual, although, perhaps, a bit bi curious, and, although he espouses Marxist Communism, he lives very happily with his upper middle class bourgeois family in Parma.  Fabrizio wants Agostino to join the Party and meet his friend, a high school teacher named Cesare.  Fabrizio mocks Agostino's family and says his father is a thief.  Agostino, who is riding a bike in circles around his friend, seems hurt and repeatedly crashes the bike, injuring himself in a masochistic display of affection for Fabrizio.  Later, we discover that Agostino has drowned himself at a place where some sort of huge bridge is being built over the Po River swamps; his body has been found in a deep spot in some murky-looking mud flats next to a pier or bridge piling.  (This scene is shot very elliptically.  It begins with clothing on the river bank, then, scenes of naked boys flouncing around in the water, and, then, shows someone trying to load a bike into a small car -- the clothes and the bike belong to the deceased Agostino and people are removing his remains from the scene of his death.)  It isn't clear whether Agostino's death was an accident or suicide.  

At the funeral for Agostino, Fabrizio encounters a beautiful young woman, Gina (played by Adriana Asti).  This woman, strangely enough, is Fabrizio's aunt -- exactly how this relationship is configured was unclear to me.  Gina seems interested in Fabrizio and she goes shopping with him in a slapstick scene like something from a Monkees' TV episode -- its eccentrically filmed for whimsy.  The two meet under Garibaldi's statue in Milan where Gina lives.  (They keep just missing one another in another whimsical sequence that will be either charming or infuriating to viewers depending upon your inclinations.)  Gina comes to visit Fabrizio's family who live in a beautiful villa in Parma.  It's Easter holiday and the two sneak off into a ruinous print shop to have sex.  Almost immediately, Gina feels confined and trapped by the relationship.  She goes shopping for newspapers and buys about twenty of them.  The man who sold the papers to her pursues her down the street -- they have exchanged seductive glances at the news-stand -- and he is about to usher her into a no-tell motel when Fabrizio shows up, understandably miffed at Gina's betrayal.  As with Agostino, Fabrizio desires that Gina join the Communist Party and meet with his mentor and friend, Cesare.  Ultimately, Gina does meet Cesare at a rather tortured encounter in the teacher's book-filled apartment.  It's pretty clear that Gina will likely try to seduce Cesare and have an affair with him and the older man doesn't seem inclined to rebuff her advances.  Gina calls someone in Milan and complains about being confined in Parma in the home of Fabrizio's parents.  (She seems to be talking to a married lover.)  Gina and Fabrizio have a quarrel and, later, we see Cesare carrying Gina's luggage across wet and windy Milan to the train-station where she departs for places unknown.  This sequence is preceded by an open-air scene along the river Po involving a painter, an older man (who also seems to be enamored with Gina), Cesare, and Fabrizio -- the older man bids farewell to the river in a poetic scene which seems to suggest that Nature is being destroyed in the service of modern technology and commerce.   When Fabrizio denounces the older man, apparently one of Gina's lovers, she becomes enraged and repeatedly slaps him across the face. Time lapses after Gina leaves Milan.  Fabrizio attends a  Communist-sponsored May Day festival in Milan but is disappointed by the comrades that he meets.  He realizes that its hard enough to influence one person, probably based on his experience with Gina, let alone the laboring masses of the world.  The sequence ends with a parade, banners, and Cesare with Fabrizio reciting by heart parts of Marx's Communist Manifesto.  Later, Fabrizio attends a performance of Verdi's Macbeth sitting in a posh balcony suite with his new fiancee  and her well-heeled family -- she is a gorgeous but dumb blonde.  Gina shows up at the opera, characteristically late, but makes a grand entrance. She's heard that her nephew is going to marry the blonde.  The two meet in the empty lobby after both of them slip out of their seats. Gina would like to disrupt the engagement just for the sheer hell of it, apparently, but they are both too wary of one another to re-invent their love affair.  In the last scene, Fabrizio marries the blonde.  Gina is in attendance.  She approaches Fabrizio's younger brother, who is a carbon copy of the hero, and showers him with caresses and kisses.  

This is what I think happens in the movie.  I've left out an amusing scene in which Fabrizio, unhappy with Gina's tendency to indulge herself with other men, goes to the cinema and sees Godard's A Woman is a Woman.  After the movie, he has a conversation with a cinephile and they discuss the morality of film style.  The cinephile says that life isn't possible without Rossellini.  There's an ambiguous sexual sub-current to the scene, again suggesting that Fabrizio, if not gay himself, exudes gay vibes sufficient to attract homosexual men and the cinephile seems to be trying to seduce Fabrizio.  This sequence is just a divertimento, a subplot that goes nowhere.  It's similar to a scene that we see later in which Cesare, an anti-Fascist, reads an soliloquy by Captain Ahab to his bemused eight and nine-year old students.  This is a striking sequence but, also, goes nowhere.  There's an overtly anti-clerical scene at the start of the film in which Fabrizio searches through the churches in Milan (or is it Parma?) for his pious girlfriend, someone named Cleia -- he never finds her and the scene seems to be to be designed primarily for provocation; Bertolucci has his hero say some nasty things about Italian Catholicism.

I have said that Before the Revolution is a sort of skeleton key to themes in later Bertolucci films. Fabrizio's ambiguous sexuality invokes similar themes in The Conformist.  The perils associated with sex involving little bourgeois girls reminds us that Marlon Brando, a figure portrayed like Odysseus in Last Tango in Paris is killed on the basis of his entanglement with such a person.  The Communist festival that features rather pathetically in the fourth act of Before the Revolution prefigures the grandiose fantasy May Day celebration that concludes 1900, another film that expands to embrace all of the main themes explored by Bertolucci in his mature films.  The incestuous relationship between aunt and nephew becomes full-blown mother-son incest in La Luna, a movie that also concludes with a  performance of a Verdi opera, in this case The Masked Ball (Un ballo en maschera)  -- Bertolucci's interest in Verdi is further highlighted in 1900 which begins with a village idiot, dressed as Rigoletto, proclaiming that Verdi has died.  The misty waterlogged landscapes of the Po River delta seem sketches based on the last episode in Rossellini's Paisan and point forward to the great march of the workers along the river banks in 1900. Bertolucci's fundamental point in Before the Revolution is that sex and politics are endeavors that involve, inevitably, betrayal and disappointment.  One of his great films, The Last Emperor is an epic in reverse -- it might be called "After the Revolution", a movie about the last emperor of China, relentlessly damaged by both sexual entanglements and the Maoist revolution.  Sex and politics are abiding obsessions in human life but as demonstrated both in Before the Revolution and The Last Emperor, hope is better than consummation and, in fact, wisdom requires resignation, a stoic response to the disenchantment that comes with age.   Although wonderfully assured, Before the Revolution is an apprentice work by a great director -- but, like everything by Bertolucci, it is well worth watching.       

The Signal

 The Signal is a relatively compact, well-scripted science fiction mini-series.  Comprised of four hour-long episodes, there's little filler in the show and the intricate narrative is presented lucidly, mostly through flashbacks.  This is a German TV show, exquisitely made and photographed, but rather melancholy -- in large part, the program is about grief.  It's continuously compelling and, probably, one of the few shows recently produced for Netflix to feature a quotation from Immanuel Kant.  (And that quote is spoken by someone tripping on LSD at a nighttime amusement park.)  The show is sober and alludes to some of the current catastrophes in the world and, ultimately, has an uplifting, inspirational (if muted) ending.  When the Germans ceased to be a world-historical people (as Hegel might say), they became a race of mourners, hapless witnesses to the indignities and tragedies caused by human folly, error, as it were, that this nation of prosperous, well-meaning bystanders are powerless to prevent.  Everything about The Signal is serious and presented in good faith, even the show's various misdirections and concealments necessary to its serpentine plot.  

The Signal's premise is that a message from outer space has been detected.  The message is known to an Indian billionaire, an entrepreneur similar to Elon Musk (although female) who understands that the aliens are on their way to our world and that it is her mission to greet them.  Indeed, the billionaire is concerned that the space visitors will be murdered by trigger-happy governments and their militaries and, so, she has groomed a courageous lady-astronaut to monitor the message from the stars and keep her informed as to where the aliens intend to land.  The lady-astronaut is Paula, a brilliant scientist but mentally unstable.  Paula is married to Sven, an actor whose thankless role involves mostly gazing at his wife with worshipful eyes -- he looks like a large faithful retriever.  Sven and Paula have a daughter, Charlie, who is preternaturally wise and well-read -- this 9 year old child is a girl-astronaut in the making and an expert in all things intergalactic and interplanetary.  (The part is a shameless cliche -- the child scientist whose sense of wonder and bravery saves the day.)  Little Charlie is completely deaf; she has to wear a cochlear implant to hear what is happening around her.  This plot device allows Sven to communicate with Charlie without anyone else understanding their sign language.  The story begins in media res:  the astronauts who are on the International Space Station return to earth in a fiery capsule but there is something strange about their descent -- Paula seems reluctant to deploy the parachute and, perhaps, is intent on causing the death of the space travelers.  Later, the plane transporting Paula and her sidekick, Hamid, back to Germany crashes under mysterious circumstances, killing all 178 souls on board including the heroine and Hamid.  Recordings from the cockpit suggest that Paula overcame the plane's pilots and caused the fatal crash.  In their post-modern house in the woods (it's like a Nordic mix of Frank Lloyd Wright and Eero Saarinen) near the German Alps, Charlie and Sven are besieged by mourners who demand retribution for the plane crash.  Charlie was in contact with her mother while she was on the ISS and she knows the coordinates of the place where the aliens are planning to land.  This information is the MacGuffin that triggers a complicated chase with government agents pursuing Sven and Charlie, grief-stricken mourners attacking them irrationally, and the Indian billionaire also on the trail and, finally, offering them her protection.  After some unanticipated twists and turns in the plot, the space vessel from which the message has emanated returns to earth and Sven with Charlie are present in the Sahara desert to welcome the visitor from Outer Space.

The Signal's plot contains a number of genuine surprises and, so, I won't spoil the story for those who may want to watch this excellent series.  Since these narrative twists account for a large part of the story's appeal and have been carefully designed to be unanticipated, it would be churlish to explain how things develop and conclude in the series.  It suffices for me to note that there are many interesting and compelling features in the show.  The message from outer space is a child's voice intoning "hello...hello...hello...", a spooky signal from beyond the stars.  The scenes on the ISS are brilliantly realized, characters floating as rigid as ironing boards through the cluttered corridors of the space station -- there's literally no up nor down and the ISS sequences are completely credible.  (For instance, people sleep in hanging cocoons to keep from drifting through the rooms and hallways; when someone gets cut, big globules of blood like tiny crimson planets spin and rotate in the air.)  Paula, apparently, is a fan of acid and she seems to have a flashback to a bad trip that she experienced at the amusement park.  The show keeps us uncertain as to whether Paula is just flashing back to her LSD trip or, in fact, suffering a psychotic break.(Here the concept of a "flashback" is both figurative and literal.) The heroine seems unpredictable and, potentially deranged enough to have sabotaged the flight back from the desert where their capsule landed.  The riddle that the show poses is why Paula would have destroyed the plane and committed suicide.  There are some superbly minor characters including a sinister female doomsday prepper who seems to be channeling Peter Lorre in her performance.  The show's message is equally inspiring and mournful -- human potential for altruism and goodness seems unlimited but the horrors of human malice are just as infinite.  

Blood on the Moon

 The Internet recommends this 1948 Western as a source for Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. As usual, this plug is misguided and without merit.  I saw no similarities of any kind between Blood on the Moon and the Scorsese film.  Perhaps, somewhere Scorsese, who knows everything about all films, recommended this movie or remarked upon its peculiar film noir photography, but I didn't detect any allusions to this movie in Killers of the Flower Moon and, indeed, the style of the two pictures is very different.  (I'm puzzled about the Internet misrepresentation:  usually articles placed on the internet mentioning films have some economic motivation -- something is being sold.  But I can't figure out why a writer would encourage people to look up a forgotten 1948 picture except I suppose to promote rentals on Amazon Prime; it cost me $4.99 I think to watch this 88 minute picture.)

Blood on the Moon is directed by Robert Wise, a filmmaker who had worked with Orson Welles (he edited The Magnificent Ambersons) and Val Lewton (Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher.)  As a young director, he was thought to show promise, but didn't progress and, in fact, ended up as a hack albeit one that was very well-paid --  he ended up directing the film version of West Side Story and The Sound of Music.  Wise's movies, after some early low-budget successes, were largely inert Oscar-bait and most of his work is tedious.  This is true of Blood on the Moon as well -- the picture has an excellent cast including Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Mitchum, and Robert Taylor, but it isn't very interesting.  I can't define exactly what is wrong with this movie except to say that it seems overlong at 88 minutes notwithstanding its painfully complicated plot.  Despite gorgeous black-and-white photography and a really wonderful score -- the classic horse opera music is by Roy Webb   -- the film is dull with pointlessly elaborate night camerawork (completely unconvincing) and inexplicable plot twists. The movie's rear-projection work is terrible, almost as bad as Alfred Hitchcock but without master's dreamlike surrealism. 

A drifter, Jim Garry, played with weary nonchalance by Robert Mitchum, has lost his herd of cattle and wanders into a range war in Arizona.  A local cattle baron named Lufton has a contract to sell beef on the hoof to the Ute Indians confined on a reservation.  But Lufton has a rival named Riling (Robert Taylor)  This rancher conspires with a corrupt Indian agent to displace Lufton as beef supplier to the reservation and replace his animals with Riling's herd.  Riling has aligned himself with local small farmers and cattlemen, putting a popularist spin on his efforts to oust Lufton from the lucrative contract with the government.  At first, Garry rejects Lufton's efforts to engage him as a hired gun in the battle with Riling.  Garry has agreed, apparently previous to his appearance in the movie, to assist the villainous Riling.  Garry orchestrates a stampede that scatters Lufton's herd so that the animals can't be delivered in a timely manner to the Utes.  In the course of the stampede, the son of a small rancher named Bardon, played by Walter Brennan in a surprisingly dull performance, gets knocked off his horse and dragged to death.  This casualty opens Garry's eyes to the fact that he is working for the wrong side.  When Riling sends an assassin to murder Lufton and his comely daughter, Amy (Bel Geddes), Garry comes to their defense and switches sides.  This leads to further complications, particularly since Lufton's other attractive daughter, Carol, is having a Romeo-and-Juliet style fling with the evil Riling.  Riling seizes the hero, Garry, and detains him in the high Sierra in a vast, empty, and snowy landscape.  Meanwhile, Riling is planning to deliver his herd of cattle to the Utes and the corrupt Indian agent named Pindalest.  When Garry tries to escape, a renegade Ute knifes him in the belly and he nearly dies.  But he is rescued by Walter Brennan's character, Bardon, and brought to recuperate at his cabin located in a dark forest.  All the bad guys converge on Bardon's cabin and besiege it.  Garry is feverish and half comatose in the cabin, cared for by Amy and the old man.  After a prolonged siege and gun-battle, Garry suddenly recovers his wits and straps on his six-shooters.  He goes out into the forest, flanks the bad guys and guns them down.  Apparently, now, miraculously recovered, he struts across the ranch, proud of having slaughtered the villains.  Amy says that he's now a member of the family, essentially proposing to marry him.  Mitchum's Garry barely reacts, but, now, seems hale and hearty despite having been half-disemboweled ten minutes earlier.  Bardon, seemingly no longer in mourning for his son, decides the celebrate the betrothal by getting out a jug so everyone can get drunk.

The movie is not without its merits.  In the bleak opening scenes, Mitchum's cattle tramp rides through rough country in a rain storm and, when he camps and makes a fire, finds himself almost crushed to death by a stampede -- this is a herd of Riling's cattle coming down off the Sierra.  Mitchum scrambles up a tree to evade the maddened steers and we see the animals thundering by below.  Another stampede in which Mitchum drives Lufton's cattle across the plain causing the animals to scatter is thrillingly filmed and features the gory scene of Bardon's son being dragged to death by his horse. (I suspect this well-orchestrated action sequence was produced by a second-unit director). There are some reasonably good and tense encounters in a saloon and on the dusty main street of a local town.  For some reason, Wise stages most of the action at night, shooting "day for night" footage that is fairly unconvincing.  The final gunbattle in the forest looks like outtakes from Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream -- everything is blurry, velvet leaves, glistening shimmers of moonlight, and out-of-focus filigree of shadow.  It's pretty but the scene's isn't clear and hard to see.  Robert Mitchum's saddle tramp is Robert Mitchum who barely condescends to act at all.  Robert Taylor's Riling is smarmy and has a little pencil moustache like a fifties' car dealer -- he's pretty good but his part, like most of the movie, is underwritten. The women are essentially irrelevant. Bel Geddes looks good shouldering a long gun and she's introduced in the film engaging in an exchange of gunfire with the drifter, John Garry -- it's the sort of lurid meet-cute that would have pleased Sam Fuller, but some reason, this explosive and tawdry scene, doesn't really register.  The landscapes are wonderful -- we get shots of savage-looking mountains shrouded in black snow clouds and the action alternates between the snowy passes through the high country and desolate desert that looks like Monument Valley.  (Much of the movie was filmed in the high country at Sedona Crossing, before that place became a New Age tabernacle.)  I can't really explain why the movie doesn't work, but it's paced wrong and never very compelling. By the way, the movie's title is a  picturesque non sequitur and, in the best Hollywood tradition, has nothing to do with the plot.

Perfect Days

 Perfect Days is a film directed by Wim Wenders based on a script co-written with the Japanese author, Takuma Takasaki.  The picture is a "late work", that is, autumnal, serene and unhurried.  Typical features of these sorts of "late works" are a simplified, somewhat monumental approach to plot and character; figures are archetypal and representative and, often, appear against broadly symbolic landscapes or settings.  Ideas motivating the art work are clearly and openly, even baldly, expressed.  Although the plot is often radically simplified, supporting aspects of the narrative may be intricately detailed.  Works of this kind express paradoxically an urgency as to communicating basic themes and concepts while, at the same time, achieving a sort of abstract detachment -- the artist is working posthumously while he or she is alive.  Everything is of the utmost importance and, yet, also wholly insignificant in light of the larger rhythms of existence which will persist after the creator's death.  In Perfect Days, Wenders carefully chronicles about 12 days in the life of Tokyo man, Hirayama, who is employed as a janitor cleaning public toilets in the city.  Hirayama is played by Koji Yakusha; this actor is extremely charismatic and handsome -- he looks like a droll Japanese version of Clark Gable.  Yakusha's performance, which is almost completely silent, is majestic and the film is unimaginable without his presence in the movie.  Wenders uses the situation -- there's really almost no "story" or plot in any conventional sense -- to reprise themes that have been central to his work for fifty years.  The movie unobtrusively summarizes Wenders' concerns in many of his other films.  Although I hope Wenders is able to continue to make movies for many more years, Perfect Days feels like an envoi or farewell to the movies, both his own works and other pictures that have formed his sensibility.  

Perfect Days is rigorously repetitive.  Each of Hirayama's days are, more or less, identical with every other day -- the picture follows the toilet cleaner's routines which, with a couple exceptions, proceed like clockwork.  Before dawn, generally signified by an impressive high shot of Tokyo under looming clouds open at the horizon to the radiance of the sun just below the  horizon, Hirayama rises.  He lives in a two room apartment and sleeps on a futon on the floor that he carefully folds and puts away each morning as he rises.  (To call Hirayama's apartment "spartan" is an understatement -- it's an empty room with no furniture, just some books and music casettes; he has no furniture, no computer:  when he reads, he has to lie on  his futon with a little lamp next to his bed; the apartment has no kitchen.  When he has a guest, Hirayama has to sleep in a storage closet at the foot of the steps leading up to his place.)  The sound of a man with a broom sweeping the street serves as Hirayama's alarm clock.  When he hears the sound, he rises, brushes his teeth, and, then, buys a can of coffee from a vending machine rather incongruously located in the alley behind the tenement where he resides.  Hirayama wears a one-piece work outfit labeled "The Tokyo Toilet" and he drives a panel-truck to work.  Tokyo has 17 spectacular public toilets, apparently new amenities that Wenders was originally planning to feature in a short film.  These toilets each have completely different appearances and they are radically modern, lithe, perfectly engineered cubicles amidst concrete terraces in various parks and plazas.  Hirayama has a route on which he cleans about six or seven toilets a day.  He is an efficient, meticulous worker and the film delights in showing him performing his duties -- the imagery has some of brusque radiance of Bresson's pictures depicting characters at work.  Hirayama uses a mirror to check the cleanliness of surfaces that are hard to see and he wipes everything down with disinfectant, polishing the high-tech surfaces of the toilet interiors until they gleam. (Patrons encounter Hirayama in the toilets; some of acknowledge him; to others, he is simply invisible -- when they are using the facilities, he stands stoically outside waiting.)  At midday, Hirayama goes to a park with majestic trees.  There he uses an old analog camera to take pictures of the light streaming through the forest canopy after eatng a sandwich.  After work, he goes to a bar and cafe where he is ritually served a drink and some noodles.  After supper, he rides his bicycle around town.  Then, he returns to his apartment where he reads a paperback for awhile before shutting his light off to sleep.  Then, he repeats the same routine the next day.  On his day off, he processes his pictures of light and shadow and, then, sorts them.  The photographs that he retains, he keeps in steel boxes neatly labeled in a closet.  Also on his day off, he does laundry and may go to a bar where he knows the hostess -- at one point, she sings a fantastic version of "House of the Rising Sun", a tune that he plays on his cassettes in the panel truck sometimes when he goes to work.  Wenders punctuates the film with a soundtrack of tunes from the seventies mostly and Hirayama's music mirrors the director's taste -- we hear Lou Reed whose "Perfect Day" is the film's central theme, Nina Simone, Ray Davies, Patti Smith among others.  (It's not clear how or why Hirayama has developed this interest in pop tunes composed in English -- there is only one Japanese song played by Hirayama on the soundtrack.)  Every other day, Hirayama goes to a public bath.  He has no romantic interest in anyone; there isn't even a hint of the erotic in this film.  Wenders shows us a man who is radically insular, taciturn and undemonstrative -- but Hirayama isn't unhappy or, even, alienated.  We perceive him to well-liked, considered as an "intellectual" in the bookstore that he frequents, and completely satisfied with his existence.  The film implies that Hirayama is well-educated, possibly once a world- traveler and that he comes from an elite family -- Hirayama's sister, whom we meet toward the end of the movie, is obviously completely horrified that her brother cleans toilets for a living.  In certain ways, the movie resembles a stripped-down version of Five Easy Pieces -- the riddle that the picture poses is why this obviously accomplished man, clearly highly intelligent and motivated, has decided upon this particular vocation.  

There are many movies, mostly action pictures, that establish their hero as a creature of routine, a man in interior exile as it were, who is suddenly knocked out of his daily habits by some sort of adventure, either romance or an encounter with violent criminals or something on that order.  Wenders nods to this sort of plotting, but, in fact, nothing really happens in the movie -- Hirayama lives in a world in which there are no adventures and nothing really disturbs his routine in the course of the twelve days documented by the movie.  Takashi, his sidekick, quits unexpectedly and on one day, Hirayama has to do the full route of 17 or so toilets alone -- this means he works from day into the late night.  As one might expect, he is angry about this disruption of his carefully patterned life, but, the next day, he has a new assistant, a young woman and everything returns to his quotidian routine.  Toward the end of the movie, Niko, Hirayama's niece, shows up -- the girl has run away from home.  She accompanies Hirayama on his daily duties for a couple days before she is picked up by her mother, Hirayama's wealthy sister.  Takashi is trying without luck to seduce a young woman.  At one point, Hirayama gives him money so he can take the girl on a date.  At the end of the movie, Hirayama sees a man embracing the hostess at the bar that the protagonist frequents on the weekend.  He and the man who is dying of cancer have a couple drinks together under a bridge and they try to solve the question of whether two shadows that intersect form a darker shadow -- they don't.  Then, they play a game of shadow tag.  The next morning, Hirayama drives to work again playing a song by Nina Simone called "Feeling Good."  The camera lingers on Hirayama's face as he drives the panel truck and, in a remarkable sequence, we see him suffused with joy while also appearing to be close to tears -- what is he thinking?  Is he just responding to the song?  But, if so, why these reactions?  Wenders is best when most tactful.  Here he presents us with the visual evidence and leaves us to interpret what the play of emotions on Hirayama's face means.  

The picture alludes in many ways to Wenders' own previous films and other movies that have formed his cinematic imagination.  The curious game of shadow tag at the end harkens all the way back to Wenders' first feature, The Goalkeepers Anxiety at the Penalty Shot, a picture co-written with the famous German avant-garde writer Peter Handke -- in that movie, Wenders focused on the soccer players who were not handling the football, creating a strange, lyrical vision of the game as pure ballet.  This is how the shadow tag looks.  An important line in the film is the tautological expression "Next time is next time", just as "now is now."  These statements remind me of Handke's theater work in which his actors simply recited tautologies:  "The dogs will die like dogs" and "the fish will swim in the sea the like fish swim in the sea."  The old radical strategies of Brechtian alienation effects are here naturalized to the point that what was once disturbing and disorienting now seems gentle, diverting, a distant memory from a distant past.  The blue collar hero in his panel truck reminds us of the movie projector repairmen in Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of Road as released in English theaters).  The soundtrack of seventies tunes is similar to the music in Alice in the Cities and reminds ne of the great scene in Im Lauf der Zeit in which the two melancholy heroes look out into East Germany while someone says "The Yanks have colonized our subconscious" -- referring to American popular music.  The hero reads Faulkner's Wild Palms and short stories by Patricia Highsmith -- also a reference to Wenders' most famous movie, a picture based on Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game, The American Friend.  There are reference to Wenders' masters:  in one scene, Wenders shows us the elevated roads and highway tunnels in Tokyo with moving shots identical to those deployed by Tarkovsky to suggest the space-shot in his film, Solaris.  Many images channel Ozu compositions -- Wenders made a distinguished movie about Ozu, Tokyo-Ga.  In a late scene in which the hero sees a man embracing a woman and, then, in a reticent, noncomittal way, looks in another direction, Wenders holds a mirror to the sequence in The Searchers by John Ford in which the hero played by John Wayne sees a woman in a clandestine embrace with a man and looks away -- it's none of his business, although, perhaps, he is also in love with the woman.  Wenders orchestrates encounters with incidental characters to impressive effect -- we see a homeless man defiantly practicing Tai Chi, a hapless-looking girl eating her lunch on a park bench near Hirayama and other figures that slip in and out of focus as the film proceeds.  Every dawn, when Hirayama comes out of his apartment, he looks up into the sky -- this is important motif in the film:  Hirayama, whose work compels him to look down the dirt left by human beings, nonetheless, is repeatedly portrayed observing the sky over him.  He is interested in trees, buys a book of essays about trees by Aya Koda, and cultivates seedlings in his apartment.  In the park, he takes picture of sunlight penetrating the foliage of majestic trees in that place and, at one point, someone calls the huge TV tower under which Hirayama lives, a symbol for Tokyo (it was central to the imagery in Tokyo-Ga), as the "big tree."  When he dreams each night, Hirayama seems to have visions in black and white of light falling through moving foliage, sometimes superimposed on blurry images of people's face or landscapes.  Wenders, at the end of his career, has come to regard films as shadows, or shadow-painting.  The pictures of light and shadow that grace the film are reminders that those who make movies are painting with shadows.  The shadow-play is an image for film-making.  Watch the credits to the end:  the last frame tells us about a Japanese word Komorebi, a term that means something like the play of light on moving leaves and the shadows that are cast by this light. 

I admire this film.  It's hard for me to determine how much my lifelong affection for Wenders' movies affects my consideration of this picture.  I don't think this film is mawkish or sentimental; in fact, it seems rather tough-minded to me.  The world presents us with many mysteries.  And not all of these mysteries exist to be solved.  You should watch this movie and make your own conclusions.   

Ganushatra (Enemy of the People)

 In 1983, the great Indian director, Satyajit Ray, suffered a near fatal heart attack.  His recovery was long and apparently arduous.  In many of his films, Ray operated the camera, wrote the script, directed, and composed the music as well.  In his prime, he seems to have produced movies the way that birds sing -- that is, apparently effortlessly.  After his heart attack, Ray's physical faculties were much diminished and his doctors ordered him to severely reduce his cinematic exertions.  The result is that Ganushatra, Ray's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People is restrained and somewhat claustrophobic -- the movie is shot indoors, using only a couple of locations, and the camerawork is exceedingly prosaic:  shot and reverse shot with inserted close-ups for emphasis:  we see some reactions to events occurring in the film in big close-ups and there are images of telephones, vials of holy water, and a woman's hand touching her husband's hand when he is under public attack.  The movie is well-acted, but, if the truth is told, a bit of a slog.  Ray has produced a work that is essentially a record of a filmed stage-play -- some of the movie is memorable, but it's a disappointment, not as compelling as it should be.  To some extent, the fault may lie in Ibsen's source material, very freely adapted by Ray -- Ibsen is one of history's preeminent playwrights, but, as is often the case with Shakespeare, his intricately crafted theater works may read better than they play.  That is, stage-productions of Ibsen often pale in comparison with the effect experienced when you read his plays.  

In broad outline, Ray follows Ibsen's Enemy of the People closely although, ultimately, the effect of his film is very different from the ambiguous and radically unresolved theater-piece by the Norwegian writer.  In Ray's film, a kindly and self-sacrificing doctor (Dr. Ashoke Gupta) notes an uptick in cases of hepatitis and jaundice in the provincial city where he practices medicine.  Gupta discovers that the holy water dispensed by a local Hindu shrine is polluted and causes illness.  The doctor wishes to avert a health crisis by writing an article for the local paper, a so-called "liberal" and "progressive" periodical, warning the public as to this danger.  Unfortunately, Gupta's younger brother, a successful politician in town, opposes the doctor's cautionary efforts.  This politician, Nishin, seems to act from a combination of pious and mercantile motives; he says that by definition "holy water" from the shrine can't be impure and, further, the town depends upon revenue earned from pilgrims to the temple -- shutting it down would devastate the town's economy.  Nishin persuades the newspaper, operated by "crusading" journalists (who are, in fact, servile), to kill the story.  Frustrated, Dr. Gupta seeks another way of advising the public as to the clear and present danger presented by the polluted holy water.  A local theater group, a collection of young radicals, offers the physician use of their theater to make his case that the temple should be banned from dispensing its sacred water -- the stuff is doled out to crowds of pilgrims in small doses poured from tiny clay pots: people suck down the water or rub it into their scalps.  Nishin, with the cowardly newspapermen, appears at the lecture, turns the affair into a sort of public meeting at which his allies preside, and Gupta is prevented from making his case.  (The scenes in the theater are performed against a frieze of headless figures woven from sort of bamboo or other fabric; it's a weird backdrop for the speeches presented in that space and seems to have some symbolic significance that eludes me.)  The crowd of pious Hindus challenge Gupta's status -- "Are you even a Hindu?" someone asks -- and shout him down.  The next day mobs assemble at Gupta's house and throw rocks through his windows.  The doctor cowers inside with his wife and adoring daughter, fearful that their home will be overrun by the hostile crowd.  Their landlord arrives and apologetically advises that they will be evicted from the home and Ranin, Dr. Gupta's daugher, announces that she has been fired from her job as a schoolteacher.  (Dr. Gupta says he will start a school in his home where she can teach slum-kids.)  The mob advances and more windows are broken and just when it seems that an attack on Gupta and  his family is imminent, the doctor hears a counter-protest on the street outside.  The cavalry has arrived in the form of a crowd of radical young theater people and, as the film ends, we hear them chanting praise for Dr. Gupta's courage.

In broad outline, Ray's film tracks the much longer and more complex play by Ibsen.  But there are striking deviations from Ibsen's original theater-piece.  In Ganushatra, the doctor is much older than his brother, the politician; this inverts the casting in Ibsen's play in which the protagonist, Dr. Stockmann, is twenty years younger than his brother, the town's mayor, Peter Stockmann.  A devious old man who makes a spectacular appearance at the beginning and end of Ibsen's original (a greedy speculator named Morten Kiil) is entirely absent from Ray's version of the story.  (Ibsen likes down-to-earth details that involve stocks and promissory notes and contested wills; Ray has no interest in commerce of this sort and so Kiil who buys shares in the poisoned spa, with his grandchildren's inheritance, to blackmail Dr. Stockmann is nowhere in evidence in the Indian film.)  Most importantly, Ibsen's conception of Dr. Stockmann as a vainglorious, stubborn man, gleeful in his role as the gadfly subverting the town's economic well-being, doesn't translate at all into Ganushatra.  Ray's conception of Dr. Gupta is simplified and schematic -- the doctor is a kindly, rational man of science who stands in opposition to the religious bigotry embodied by the pious pilgrims (and their institutional supporters).  Ibsen's play is powerful precisely because of its complications and cross-currents.  Everyone in the Norwegian's Enemy of the People acts in their own self-interest and Dr. Stockmann's pride and Schadenfreude hurls him into an otherwise avoidable confrontation with his fellow citizens, a conflict that a more temperate and less vain man could have avoided.  These themes are absent from Ray's much simplified, and, somewhat, cartoonish depiction of the conflict as enlightened science versus benighted religious fervor.  Ibsen's play supports different interpretations of the nature of the fundamental conflict that the work dramatizes:  on one dimension, Ibsen's Enemy of the People is about science and reason in opposition to ignorance, but the play also supports readings in which the conflict is between commerce versus public safety as well as the "democratic" mob versus the elite enlightened individual and, of course, the clash between truth and lies (in the case of both play and movie, the "fake news."  All of these interpretations, and others are valid approaches to Ibsen's play which authorizes many and largely parallel (that is, not mutually exclusive) readings.  By contrast, those who seek to "adapt" Ibsen's work generally end up selecting one of the various meanings embodied by the play and developing their work along those lines exclusively.  (Arthur Miller in his adaptation from 1950 made the play about the 'democratic" mob in conflict with lonely hero who must defend the Truth to the death -- his version of the play was written in the shadow of the McCarthy blacklist )  Ray wants the play to be about the darkness of religious superstition versus scientific enlightenment -- Ray is working in the context of an India desecrated by pollution and mass disaster as exemplifed by the Bhopal catastrophe.  Ray's film, accordingly, is considerably less effective and interesting than Ibsen's play -- at least as it is read and imagined by the reader.  (It may well be a director producing Ibsen's Enemy of the People might have to elect in favor of one of the piece's various meanings in order to produce a coherent version for the stage.)   Ibsen's work ends with the mob outside Dr. Stockmann's  house threatening its inhabitants and more rocks hurled through windows.  Ray pits one mob against another to contrive a happy ending.  The mob of Hindu fundmantalists in Ray's vision is opposed and thwarted by the mob of Leftist theater workers -- in Ray's account, the theater (or cinema) saves the day.    

Feud: Capote and the Swans

 FX's Capote and the Swans is an eight episode TV show (limited series) that is perversely entertaining; although remarkably crafted, with prestigious performers, and brilliantly written the series ultimately falls under the rubric of a "guilty pleasure."  It's scandal sheet stuff, manufactured from Schadenfreude -- gist of the show is that the wealthy, beautiful, and socially elite have feet of clay and that their  upper class world is as rotten with scandal and betrayal (or more so) as any other socio-economic milieu on which you might wish to focus.  There's an element of Nietzschean resenttiment  to the show:  it exposes the foibles of the super-rich and convinces us that these elegant folk who consort with Presidents and royalty are just as  bad as everyone else.  This is a rather primitive point arousing a rather primitive response of titillation, moral condemnation, and, in fact, consistent with the show's broad theme:  Truman Capote betrayed his intimate confidantes by writing salacious accounts of their misdeeds -- in other words, he tried to profit from gossip.  This same interest in gossip underlies our interest in the show --that is, the show embodies what it is about.  As a narrative, there's not much to the story -- everything the program wants to say is on full display in the show's first episode and, thereafter, The Swans, simply repeats itself, or, more interestingly, indulges in essay-like meditations on its themes.  The show isn't a cliffhanger and can't really advance beyond it's premises except for certain quasi-philosophical ruminations on issues of class, race, gender, and privilege.  With these caveats, I have to admit that I found the series compelling, although I'm a little ashamed of my interest.  That said, the people who made this limited series are operating at the top of their game --Gus van Sant directs brilliantly, and the show has an all-star cast of notable female stars including Naomi Watts. Chloe Sevigny, Demi Moore, Calista Flockhart and others.  Tom Holland who plays the squeaky-voiced, bitchy, and doomed protagonist, Truman Capote seems to me pretty much pitch-perfect.  (I recall seeing Capote on the Dick Cavett show and, also other late night TV talks shows -- my dad liked him and always made us watch those programs when Capote was on-air; for a straight kid from Minnesota, Capote was like some sort of apparition from another planet -- you couldn't believe your eyes and ears, but you also couldn't take your eyes off of him and found yourself straining to catch his every word.  He always hinted a levels of depravity that might even astound him -- and he seemed to be the most depraved thing on TV.  I have no idea what my father, a preacher's son from rural Nebraska,  really thought about him -- I assume he admired In Cold Blood and Capote's eccentric contribution to the Bogart movie, Beat the Devil, a movie that he liked.)

There's not much plot to Capote and the Swans.  The show's premise can be explained in a couple of sentences:  a brilliant homosexual writer amuses a group of Manhattan socialites and wins their trust; the writer is an alcoholic and self-destructive and he's suffering from writer's block so he decides to exploit his intimacy with the socialites (the Swans) by writing a tell-all story about their sexual peccadillos.  There is a limit to noblesse oblige and the Swans, who have been harmed by Capote's writing, a short story called La Cote Basque, vow to revenge themselves on the writer.  In a gross over-simplification of actual events, the Swans end up ruining Capote and hastening his demise.  All of this dramatized in the show's first episode and so there's no suspense and no narrative energy after the first  hour -- the last seven hours of the show are, in effect, variations on the themes established in the initial show.  This gives the program a certain Brechtian effect -- it's not suspenseful and we're asked to attend to how things happen as opposed to engaging with any sort of plot.  A summary of the first episode suffices to describe the whole thing:  shifting back and forth in time between 1955 and a few days before Capote's death in 1984, we see how Capote served as "court jester" for a group of wealthy women whom he seems to have both admired and despised.  The women form a hyper-exclusive clique that include Babe Paley, the wife of Bill Paley the head of CBS, Slim (Lady) Keith, Howard Hawk's former wife and a peer of the British Realm, Jackie Kennedy's sister, Lee Radizwell, and Johnny Carson's ex-spouse, Joanna Carson among several others.  These women have already cattily excluded from their coterie another lady alleged to have shot her wealthy husband and evaded justice for that crime.  The women exude money, privilege, and, even, culture -- Babe Paley is an important art collector.  Capote, who has become a drunk, is between projects -- he is famous for In Cold Blood, but he hasn't found anything new to engage his talents.  He's also quarreling with his boyfriend, Jack Dunphy.  At a gay bathhouse, Capote meets a demon -- a man who has a large family but is a sexual addict and is slumming in the steambath.  (This guy is filmed like a monster -- he's large, violent, and has huge ears that stick out from the side of his head in a way that make him look like hideous imitation of Mickey Mouse.)  After a meal with the Swans at the Cote Basque, an encounter in which the women mercilessly mock Capote's erotic obsession with this man, the writer gets very drunk and, because he's out of money, has to go home on the subway with his date.  The monster tells Capote (perhaps as revenge for his mistreatment at the hands of the Swans) that he should write and publish a story about them:  he tells Capote that "answered prayers" cause more tears than those prayers that are "unanswered", giving Capote the title to the book that he tried unsuccessfully to write during the last two decades of his life, a sort of In Cold Blood about the jet-set.  Capote follows this advice, publishes an indiscrete story, a sort of roman c clef in Esquire and the Swans band together to ruin him.  All of this is very juicy stuff:  the woman alleged to have shotgunned her husband to death commits suicide a few days before the story is printed and Capote is blamed for her death.  Babe Paley's husband is a serial philanderer and gets tricked into having sex with "Happy" Rockefeller (Norman Rockefeller's wife) who has vindictively planned the tryst for the period of her maximum menstrual flow -- not a subject usually depicted on prime-time TV.  This results to a gory mess in Babe Paley's bedroom, an outcome designed by Mrs. Rockefeller to humiliate Babe and her ex-lover.  Babe Paley, who adores Truman Capote, and, in fact, seems to love him -- he's a witty, captivating, and cultured alternative to her rather brutish husband -- confides this sordid tale to the writer (who comforts her with caresses and barbiturates washed down with vodka.)  Capote puts this anecdote in La Cote Basque, his short story, and a huge scandal ensues.  The Swans close ranks and determine that they will destroy Capote.  Of course, Capote is already on a downward spiral and will die nine years after the story is published.  Babe Paley has lung cancer and she dies, after painful chemotherapy and radiation treatments, in 1978.  The seven episodes following the first show are simply exercises in working out variations on the themes of self-destructiveness and betrayal dramatized at the very outset of the series.  Two episodes stand out in this context for their stylistic boldness.  The third episodes is a quasi-documentary account of Capote's celebrated "Black and White Ball" in 1966.  The show is shot in the style of the Maysle's brothers (in black and white as well and implies that Capote had a sexual affair with one of the filmmakers).  This is a very innovative episode although it's not successful and, in fact, I think is the dullest installment in the eight show program.  The problem with this highly stylized and brilliantly made episode is that it establishes that by 1966, nine years before the La Cote Basque events that Capote was a ruthless manipulator, that he was keen to set the Swans against one another and that he was profoundly and indecently treacherous -- so, then, why are the Swans so eager to share their most intimate secrets with him and, more pointedly, why are they surprised when he betrays them?  The fifth episode. involving efforts by James Baldwin to dry-out the horribly alcoholic Capote, plays like a sort of My Dinner with Andre -- it's essentially a long debate  (or possibly a dream) between the two men in which Baldwin asserts that the Swans are particularly vicious exemplars of racism and White Privilege and that they deserve the indignities that Capote's prose heaps upon them.  This show doesn't advance the action --- there's no action to advance -but it's fascinating and very compelling.  There's even a slight whiff of horror about the show:  Capote commissions a chef to kill a swan in Central Park which he has butchered and served to him.  (Even the longwinded show about the Black and White Ball features some startling sequences -- for instance, Capote who has a vexed relationship with his mother, hallucinates her presence at the Ball (it's an early instance of the DT's) and dances with her apparition that no one else can see.)  In the sixth episode, Capote dresses his female protegee for a fashion shoot with Richard Avedon.  The theme of the program is that Capote is trapped in the past, obedient to fifties' paradigms of glamor and style.  Working in Palm Springs, he meets a young man with whom he has an affair -- the encounters with the handsome young man, a blue collar HVAC repairman have the sizzle of a low-budget porno movie (handsome handyman with older customer).  The episode mines a vein of pathos intrinsic in the material:  Capote is aging, drunk, no longer beautiful or, even, presentable.  If  you live long enough,  you become a relic and this is the existential crisis developed in this TV essay.  The sixth episode doesn't advance the action with respect to the feud and feels like its superfluous, although rather affecting.  

Both Capote and Babe Paley die on-screen in the seventh installment.  This episode is not exactly a barrel of laughs, a bit mawkish, although undeniably (and, perhaps, inevitably) gripping -- in long form TV, you can't behold the death of characters that you have watched for six hours or more without some emotional reaction; if nothing else, mirror neurons are triggered.  Feud has literally nowhere to go after this episode (both its protagonists are dead) and, so, the coda  the eighth and final show, seems superfluous and misguided.  In this last episode, Capote struggles to remain sober, but mostly without success.  He desires forgiveness and writes a series of anecdotes in which a writer, a thinly veiled version of himself, atones for his past misconduct.  On a granular level, this episode is beautifully written but it's wholly unnecessary and, in fact, exists, more or less, to besmirch Capote's memory -- the anecdotes recounted in the show aren't particularly compelling and the samples of Capote's prose on display seem banal.  The show is out of steam and it has to reprise the hero's death, shown, more or less, in the same shot-by-shot sequence that we watched in the earlier seventh episode.  In this interpretation of events, Capote destroys his manuscript for Unanswered Prayers, the roman a clef on which he labored in the last years of his life.  The author's alarming mother makes another ghostly appearance; her hallucination encourages Truman to drink himself to death.  In a macabre coda to the coda, Sotheby's sells Capote's ashes to the highest bidder for $45,000, an unbelievably crass transaction which I understood actually occurred.    

Feud:  Capote and the Swans is a febrile improvisation on themes fully developed in its first two episodes -- the last six shows simply repeat with decreasing assurance material presented at the outset of the series.  The acting is tremendous and the direction, more or less, flawless.  The problem with the series is its writing.  On a line-by-line, scene-by-scene basis, Feud is brilliantly composed.  But there is no convincing narrative arc and the material, bitchy gossip about socialites, is too thin to support the show's length and complex flashback structure.  In effect, Feud is about a peculiar unrequited love affair between an unhappily married and frigid woman of enormous wealth and a lonely homosexual. Interesting subplots flare up, provide a few minutes of amusement, but, then, sink without a trace -- we would like to see more of the monstrous Jack O'Shea, Truman's boyfriend who urges him to write the fatal story about La Cote Basque -- I don't know if legal problems precluded a more complete development of this character; he appears in the first few shows and, then, simply vanishes.  Similarly, Truman adopts O'Shea's daughter as his protegee and spends a couple of shows squiring her around, introducing her to his influential New York friends -- but she drops out of the show also, appearing, I think, for a moment at the gruesome end of the last episode but this doesn't satisfy our interest in her, or, for that matter, the relationship.  As a last example, Capote gets embroiled in a lawsuit with Gore Vidal which he refuses to settle.  We see his lawyer remonstrating with him.  But this subplot melts away as well and we never learn exactly what happened to resolve this catfight -- a part of the show that suggests a whole other possible series:  Feud:  Capote v. Vidal.  I have the sense that legal exposure may have limited the show's flamboyance in its final episodes.  Nonetheless, I suppose one can recommend this program on its own terms -- the veneer of sophistication and literacy is applied to what is, in effect, a guilty pleasure, that is, a spectacle of mostly prurient and voyeuristic interest, a bit like the Real Housewives of Manhattan but with artistic pretentions.  If the trashy premise of the show is accepted, I think, Feud:  Capote v. the Swans is a success.