Rumours

 Zombies attack world leaders at the G7 summit.  This isn't exactly accurate.  In Rumours (2024), the zombies, few and far between, are more of a nuisance to the heads of state.  Off-screen, however, the world has apparently come to an end in a fiery apocalypse:  the Canadian prime minister says that the "sky is on fire and the sea has turned thick and black."  No one answers the phone.  A chat-bot designed to entrap sexual predators is the sole survivor of the disaster and, needless to say, not much help to the desperate politicians.  Broadly speaking, this states the premise of Guy Maddin's film co-directed by Evan Johnson (who, with his brother Galen, also wrote the screenplay).  Rumours is a Dadaist exercise and resists all plausible interpretations. I think it has something to do with conspiracy theories, bureaucracy, and the human impulse to soldier on by turning a blind eye to catastrophe -- but I'm hesitant to ascribe any particular theory of meaning to the film.  The movie is gorgeously produced, but only intermittently interesting and, although it's very funny, the humor is situational, witty, and not laugh-out-loud.  Despite it's absurd narrative, Rumours is reasonably restrained:  it plays things straight once the premise is accepted.  Unlike most of Guy Maddin's other pictures, the film is lusciously shot in color and edited according to classical Hollywood paradigms. The movie relies upon some considerable star power in its principal actors, Cate Blanchett as Hilda (the German chancellor), Alicia Vikander as Celestine, a hapless "unnumerated member of G7" representing, I think, the European Union, Charles Dance who plays the role of the American president, Edison Wolcott (inexplicably speaking in the sort of plummy British accent familiar to audiences from Masterpiece Theater), and the unbelievably handsome, sturdy, and Byronically romantic Roy Dupus representing the Canadian prime minister.  These parts require the actors to intone florid, jargon-laden speeches, much of it gibberish, of course, suitable to the bureaucratic agenda at the Summit.  There is a lot of impressive dialogue, although this also is rather hard to interpret -- intentionally hard, I think.  Madden's films usually are shot on what seems to be distressed film-stock:  his movies typically look like examples of half-rotten, mostly lost celluloid salvaged from the archives of German expressionist and Soviet silent cinema.  Rumours, by contrast, is lensed in beautiful, soft-focus technicolor, set in a lush forest (apparently filmed in Hungary), and features nocturnal landscapes foaming with fog, apocalyptic vistas with columns of cherry-red smoke rising over the placid woods, and pastoral imagery -- the film is set on the grounds of a palace said to be in Saxony with ornamental gardens, a classical gazebo on a point of land, and a big somber lake.  There are many big, expressive close-ups of the film's stars.

The Canadian prime minister, Maxime, seems to have been involved in sexual affairs with several of the female heads of state.  In the first half of the movie, he slips away to have sex on a dewy, flower-covered meadow with the German chancellor.  Melodramatic sub-plots are implied but never really developed.  (The Canadian prime minister is having trouble in bed with his wife -- causing someone to suggest attempting "non-sexual physical affection.")  When the film begins, the G7 meeting is mostly complete.  All that is required is for the members to agree upon a "provisional statement" for general publication.  The seven heads of state adjourn to a tholos, a round gazebo at the edge of a lake for a "working supper."  On the way to the gazebo, the Helga shows the other participants an archaeological site where a bog body has been disinterred from the peat.  The acid in the bog has dissolved the bones in the corpse which is coiled like a broad brown ribbon in the bottom of  the pit.  Someone asks about gender and the archaeologist in the hole remarks that the corpse is wearing "his penis on a string around his neck."  At the gazebo, the politicians gossip and try to write the "provisional statement."  Maxim, the Canadian PM, gets distracted by recalling problems with his wife Heloise and writes down some ideas on that topic.  (He is avoiding contact with a woman named Cardosa, also representing the EU, with whom he had an earlier affair."  There is talk about assuring everyone access to "sleep tanks", whatever those are, and Maxim says that "it's better to burn out than to fade-away", citing Neil Young, a fellow Canadian --  Cardosa says that she approves of the sentiment as being "very rock and roll."  Another minister says that they need to avoid the trap of "procrastination pit stops."  The French president is making progress on his contribution to the "provisional statement" -- he's working with Tatsura, the Japanese leader.  (The heads of state have been assigned groups to work on the statement a bit like a writing exercise in 9th grade).  But the Frenchman's notes blow away.  He pursues them into the woods and, in the darkness, falls into the open grave where the corpse of the bog body is reposing.  The bog body seems to attack him although it's not clear whether this is just his imagination.  He returns shaken to the gazebo.  The attendants serving wine and food have vanished.  It's now night and howling sounds come from the dark forest.  

The dignitaries, led by Helga, decide to walk through the woods to a ferry that will take them across the lake to a nearby highway.  Some sort of crisis has brought the heads of state together at the Summit, but it's now thought that things are worsening and, perhaps, there are protesters or terrorists hiding in the woods.  In the forest, the politicians find a bog body hanging in a tree -- it urinates on them.  More reanimated bog corpses are, apparently, masturbating around a fire -- the ejaculation of their semen causes an explosion.  A giant brain, said to be "the size of a hatchback" is discovered in a clearing.  A woman from the Summit, seemingly another European Union representative, appears to have gone mad -- she's found behind the brain working on her contribution to the provisional statement.  The heads of state think she is speaking an iron-age language but it's just Swedish.  Later, she burns herself alive on the pyre of the enormous pink brain.  The French minister's femurs have dissolved (just like the bones in a bog body) and, at first, he is carried through the woods by the hunky Maxime.  Then, the politicians cart him to the edge of the lake in a wheelbarrow that they find in the ghoul-haunted woods.  The American president succumbs to despair and asks to be left behind.  Fortunately, the rather feckless Italian prime minister,, Antonio, has filled his pockets with salami from the buffet table and he is able to share the meat with the other, increasingly famished, politicians.  After more adventures, the politicians get a call from a seven-year old child who has been left behind at the chateau.  But she turns out to be chat-bot devised by the G7 ministers to entrap pedophile sex traffickers -- there is no real child at all. (This motif relates to the far-right contention that heads of state are all pedophiles, something that Helga seems to begrudgingly admit.) The G7 leaders conclude that the world had ended.  They find some bags of swag that include candies and snacks, mylar space blankets, and other party favors including potassium cyanide pills that they can use to commit suicide.  Despite the increasingly dire situation, Maxime, the Canadian prime minister, finds some scotch tape and puts together a draft of the "provisional statement".  With the other politicians clad in wind-swept cloaks of mylar, he delivers a rousing speech from the terrace of the chateau, reading the 'provisional statement' that he has cobbled together.  It's dawn and the sky is full of sinister columns of smoke.  A couple of twitching bog body zombies listen to his words.  We see the flags of the seven countries go up in flags in shots inserted into Maxime's peroration.  He proclaims that there will be no more "procrastination pit stops," that "there shall be equal access to sleep tanks," that "non-sexual physical affection" shall be the order of the day and that it's "better to burn-out than to fade away."  He concludes his speech by saying:  "I know you're afraid; I'm afraid too.  Death is all around us.  But we will carry ourselves fearlessly into the dreadful inferno that awaits us all."

When the huge brain is discovered midway through the picture, someone asks whether "this is some kind of allegory?"  I don't really think so.  The influence most obvious on this picture is Luis Bunuel's The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel -- both films involve groups of petty bourgeois merchants, politicians, and criminals who persist in their vices and pleasures (a dinner party in both cases) in the face of absurd calamity.  The same theme is apparent in Rumours:  the doomed heads of state steadfastly persevere in producing their "provisional statement" which is ineffectual gibberish as a zombie apocalypse destroys the world around them.  (I sense that the film may be delayed response of some kind to the COVID pandemic).  There is a weird sort of grace, even heroism, in ignoring the end of the world in order to deliver a statement of economic goals to a public that has wholly ceased to exist except for decomposed, gurgling zombie.  Rumours is not really a Guy Maddin film -- it's more restrained, dense with dialogue, and shot like a conventional horror movie (the German chancellor keeps telling people that they have to "stick together" and not wander off into the dark woods.)  Maddin's influence is most evident in the strangely melodramatic dialogue that is delivered without any apparently irony.  There's a shot near the end of the film in which the Italian minister, Antonio, decides to "disguise" the semi-comatose French leader in his wheelbarrow; Antonio puts a few twigs and branches over the man's chest and face.  The image of the Frenchman shot through a flimsy mesh of twigs is something right out of Maddin's first feature, the wonderful Tale of the Gimli Hospital.  (I was happy to see that among the dozen or so production companies involved in Rumours -- most of them German -- the province of Manitoba and its film and music association are prominently mentioned.  Maddin and Johnson, of course, are residents of Winnipeg.  Apparently, some of the scenes were shot in Winnipeg.)

 

The Gunfighter

 Henry King's The Gunfighter (1950) is a sophisticated Western carefully made to undercut and criticize most of the genre's characteristic features.  Shot in the best "invisible" style of Hollywood's classic era, the movie is completely coherent and elegant -- there is so little in the movie to draw attention to camerawork, scenery, and editing that, probably, the most memorable aspect of the mise-en-scene is Gregory Peck's unfortunate moustache.  (The moustache, a bow to period style in whiskers, was slipped in when the producer Daryl Zanuck was abroad -- Zanuck said that he would pay $25,000 of his own money if Peck would remove the moustache, but, alas, the film was in the can by that time.)  King's picture is a film about a gunfighter who is almost never shown firing his weapon.  

In structure, The Gunfighter resembles High Noon (1952), a similarly austere and geometrically precise movie that proceeds, as it were, in real time -- after a brief prologue, the running time of the movie is the duration of the action presented on screen.  The premise of the film is the classical nostos, that is, the return of the hero to his lost home.  This narrative patten is pleasing and originates in prehistory, although it first comes to prominence in Homer's Odyssey.  As in Homer, a warrior returns to an isolated place where his wife is besieged by importunate would-be lovers; there is a recognition scene and a climax in which the lover (singular in The Gunfighter) is disposed-of.  Gregory Peck plays the role of the renowned gunfighter and quick-draw shootist, Jim Ringo, 35 years old, and weary of defending his reputation against upstart challengers seeking fame by forcing the hero into futile duels.  We see him alone in the first scenes and title sequence traversing a variety of Western landscapes (dunes, badlands, prairie).  In a small town, a kid recognizes Ringo, insults him repeatedly, and, then, draws down on him.  Of course, Ringo kills the kid without hesitation or any discernible effort.  (This sequence is very brilliantly conceived.  We never see Ringo draw his gun or fire it.  The camera is focused on the kid who pulls his weapon from its holster only to be immediately drilled by Ringo who is off-screen.  The movie, which posits itself, as a kind of anti-Western eschews any displays of gun-play or virtuosic shooting by its hero -- these are aspects of the gunfighter legend that the movie conspicuously downplays in making its somewhat dour thematic points.)   The dead gunsel has three brothers who predictably pursue Ringo.  But he gets the drop on them, ambushing the somewhat farcical trio of gunmen in the hoodoos at Lone Pine. (Some of these opening scenes seem to have been shot at nearby Death Valley.)  The would-be avengers are stripped of their firearms and have their horses driven off; Ringo spares their lives and tells them to walk back to Santa Fe from which they have come.  Ringo, then, rides  his beautiful horse -- it has a white patch shaped like a lightning bolt on its brow -- to another small village called Cayenne.  The posse, now on foot, surmises that Ringo is headed to this town (villages are few and far between on this desert) and follow him.  Ringo thinks he is three hours ahead of the avengers.  But they secure horses and, in fact, reach Cayenne far before they are expected to appear, thus, triggering the film's climactic showdown.  

The bulk of the movie takes place in Cayenne.  Despite it's name,  the village is a little Anglo-Saxon community that could have been lifted from New England with a big wooden church, a school, and some officious matrons who form a sort of committee for public respectability.  (There's a shot with two sad-looking Indians but, apparently, no Mexicans in this village in the old Southwest.)  The town is the same place that we see, under a different name, in Fred Zinneman's High Noon.  Ringo's estranged wife, a schoolmarm, lives in town with Ringo's 8 1/2 year old son, named after him.  Ringo is urgently seeking a reconciliation with his wife, the schoolteacher.  At first, she refuses to see him.  But he hangs around town, far too long as it turns out, in order to meet with her near the end of the movie.  He tells her, then, that he will return in one year and they will reconcile and go off into some territory where the lethal Jim Ringo is unknown to start their lives together again.  (Ringo has come up with this idea after observing a cowboy, once a wild young man, stopping at the bar for a single drink before he goes to the humble ranch where he lives happily with his wife and children -- this is the model for the existence that Ringo desires for himself.)  Ringo is a model of chivalry, well-spoken, polite, and he doesn't force himself on his estranged spouse who has been resisting other suitors because she still loves him.  The interview between Ringo and his wife is arranged by the sheriff, Mark Strett, a retired outlaw who has (like many of his ilk) reinvented himself as a lawman.  Strett and Ringo were once colleagues in crime and they are affectionate with one another.  (There's a very slight suggestion that if the schoolmarm were to renounce Jim Ringo, her first choice for romantic partner would be the much older Strett.)  There's a kindly saloon girl, a bit faded and one of Ringo's old flames, who also serves as an intermediary between the gunfighter and the schoolteacher.  Karl Malden plays the subservient and fawning bartender at the Palace Bar where Ringo is challenged by a local hothead, Hunt Brondy -- Hunt has been harassing the schoolmarm; Ringo humiliates him in front of his cronies and he creep off the plot his revenge.  Ringo's appearance in Cayenne has created a festival-like atmosphere -- everyone correctly suspects that there are going to be killings and the townsfolk all enthusiastically gather near the bar in hopes of watching the mayhem.  Despite repeated requests that he should leave town, Ringo tarries.  (He thinks his pursuers are on-foot and not mounted.)  All the little boys have fled the school to hang around the Palace Bar, spying on Ringo and hoping to see him shoot someone.  (Jim Ringo, Jr. is among these mischievous scamps.)  There's a touching interview between Ringo and his boy and, then, the three gunmen ride into town to exact their revenge on the killer of their brother.  (There's a subplot involving a grieving father who thinks Ringo shot his son -- in fact, it's a case of mistaken identity -- who tries to  gun down the hero from a sniper's nest near the bar; he fails and gets thrown in jail.)  The final showdown takes place in a completely unexpected manner and, in fact, is decidedly anti-climactic.  In the film's final shot, a lone horseman rides into the sunset, a classic trope in movies of this kind for death.  

The Gunfighter is well-acted with engaging characters.  Despite it's deliberate avoidance of gun battles and duels, the movie is well-paced -- it runs about 85 minutes.  The action is effectively staged and there is good dialogue.  The script compels the viewers to construct almost all of the backstory -- that is, the picture engages the imagination of the audience since it is not particularly explicit about many things:  how did the schoolmarm get involved with the gunfighter, for instance, is an unsolved mystery.  The movie was well-received when first released and has enjoyed a good critical reputation up to the present.  It's quietly radical in almost completely avoiding violence in the context of what seems to be a fairly conventional Western.      

(There was a real bad man named Johnny Ringo who died under unusual circumstances in 1882 near Tombstone, Arizona.  Very little in the film, however, refers to the exploits of the real life Ringo.  One scene in a bar involving a quarrel over whiskey might be derived from a similar incident in Ringo's life.  In case, you are wondering, as I was, the Beatles' drummer Ringo Starr aka Richard Starkey got his first name, not because of this movie, but because of the many rings he was wont to wear on his fingers.  Bob Dylan wrote a long ballad called "Brownsville Girl" based on some scenes in the movie that he claimed he had watched twice and found memorable.  You can hear "Brownsville Girl" on YouTube; the playwright, Sam Shepherd, wrote the lyrics to the song with Dylan.)

Emilia Perez

 Jacques Audiard's Emilia Perez (2024) epitomizes baroque filmmaking.  There has been sea-change during my lifetime from the didactic, argumentative films and TV that predominated in the fifties and sixties and the current sensibility emerging after the year 2000 and, now, it seems, prevalent.  When I was young, television was designed for public edification and, even at its most lurid, preached certain core values of honesty, courage, and steadfastness -- heroes didn't desert their friends and families and they struggled to overcome hardship; even anti-heroes subscribed to certain well-understood codes, although more in the breach than the observance.  Films and TV adapted theater-works of the preceding generation and these shows were oriented around well-defined problems and constructed as forensic debates -- the better side of moral and ethical arguments generally prevailed.  I must confess to feeling (as a youth) a certain discomfort with these didactic works of theater and film; good taste reigned and these shows operated within tight constraints as to what could be shown ot intimated.  Science fiction or fantasy was, generally, frowned-upon as evidencing an unseemly flight away from reality and the important social problems that cinema and plays addressed.  Strictures of realism governed representation.  Nothing could be so lurid or outrageous as to distract from the fundamental teaching premise of these shows.  Every episode of Andy Griffith or, for that matter, The Twilight Zone taught a lesson that could be applied broadly to social and cultural problems.  We are now in the midst of a resurgence of the Baroque.  The more garish and improbable the narrative, the better.  In the classical art of the fifties and sixties, and to some extent after that era, genre distinctions were strictly observed.  A film like Emilia Perez, a mash-up of opera, horror, gangster movies and the sort of melodrama exemplified by Mexican telenovelas would be unthinkable.  (The film is kin to certain works by Pedro Almodovar, although more extreme in its imagery.)  Baroque narrative involves fantastical displays of tyranny, sadism, and passion; characters conceal their true identities and gender is completely fluid -- women will be men and men will be women.  Family relations are obscured resulting in strange tensions and sudden, ghastly revelations.  Characters are prey to the most extravagant desires and obsessions. In Emilia Perez, a cartel leader, Manitas is posited to be like Nero or Caligula, a figure of unlimited power, demented obsessions, and cruelty -- in other words, a Baroque king ruling by some kind of inscrutable divine right. The unruly force of passion banishes the spoken word -- characters communicate their desires and fears by singing at one another.  The pictures advancing the story have the burnished, deep hues -- that is, the high def dimensions -- of a canvas by Caravaggio:  wildly gesticulating and figures grimace at us out of a deep darkness.  The camera renders its subjects as sculptural, hewn from the blackness and defined by the sinewy shadow.  Everything tends toward the turbulent expressionist contortions of a sculptor like Bernini.

A successful female lawyer, Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldana) is professionally thwarted by her boss.  She's dissatisfied and the boss takes credit for her brilliance.  But Manitas, a drug cartel leader, at the height of his powers takes notice of Rita.  He has her kidnapped and brought to his hide-out in the desert (it looks like a quarry or gravel pit) where the drug lord occupies some sort of towering semi-tractor-trailer, a dark cavern full of video screens broadcasting the environs thronged with gun-toting thugs.  The drug lord, who exemplifies Mexican machismo, at its most extreme suffers from severe gender dysmorphia.  He longs to  become a woman.  His wealth is sufficient for him to put Rita on retainer and fly her around the world to seek a surgeon willing to convert the drug lord into a woman.  Rita goes to Thailand and, then, Tel Aviv where she finds a doctor who she persuades to fly to Mexico to perform the surgery.  On the eve of the operation, Manitas bids farewell to his much beloved two children and his wife, played by Selena Gomez.  He sends his family to Lausanne, Switzerland under falsified passports.  Then, he goes under the knife, awaking after intricate surgery as a woman, the eponymous Emilia Perez.  The lawyer is paid a fortune and becomes a wealthy woman; we see that the mobster has given her an "Infinity" VISA card.  

Some years pass.  At a dinner party in London, Rita meets a big, buxom woman whom she gradually recognizes to be Manitas in his female incarnation.  Emilia Perez says that he can't live without his children and commissions the lawyer to bring them back to Mexico City with their mother.  (Manitas faked his death by fire to the horror of wife and children who, of course, are not aware that the drug lord has survived as woman.)  Rita arranges for the children and Manitas' wife to stay at the elaborate mansion of Emilia Perez, a structure overhanging the vast amphitheater of Mexico City.  The wife doesn't recognize her husband in the guise of Emilia and is encouraged to share intimate memories of her marriage to the drug lord with the woman (who pretends to be Manitas's sister -- that is, Aunt Emilia).  One of the children, the little boy remarks that Emilia smells like his papa.  Freed from the obligations of his drug cartel, Manitas as Emilia founds a non-governmental organization dedicated to finding and identifying the bodies of people "disappeared" during the fighting between rival gangs.  This organization is called Lucecitas.  Emilia runs the organization from an office in Mexico City and serves hundreds of grieving widows and families whose children were murdered in the drug wars -- she sits at a desk in a room decorated with a huge painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe.  Emilia embarks on a lesbian love affair with one of the women whose son vanished in the fighting between the adversary gangs.  At the same time, Manitas' wife embarks on a love affair with a man wearing a black cowboy hat, a fellow who turns out to be a Narco himself.  (Emilia persuades his/her wife to confess that she began her affair with this rival Narco when she was married to Manitas.)  The wife elopes with her boyfriend, taking the two children with her to the dismay and rage of Emilia Perez.  Emilia vows revenge but is kidnapped by the Narco and has three of his fingers lopped off to establish the bona fides of the kidnappers -- the Narco demands 30 million dollars.  Rita Castro, the lawyer, recruits nine men with machine guns and they drive out into the desert to confront the Narco and Manitas's former wife.  This sets up the violent climax of the film.  At the end of the movie, Emilia has become revered as a kind of Saint.  A life-size image of her is carried in a parade in front of a Mexican marching band.  The image is placed on a hillside overlooking the megalopolis of Mexico City, a sort of holy figure perched above the ramshackle barrios on the edge of the city.  

The story eschews ordinary expository dialogue.  The action is propelled by elaborate and operatic song-and-dance numbers.  Patients in the throes of sex change surgery are rolled around in Busby Berkeley-style wheel-chair and surgical gurney ballets.  One of Manitas' sons sings a little aria about how Emilia smells like her papa.  There are love duets between Emilia and her girlfriend, Epifanio, the  abused wife of a "disappeared" Narco -- Epifanio is happy the man's bones have been found.  At dinner parties and fundraisers for Lucecitas, the people on-screen sing and dance.  The music is a combination of heart-felt pop tunes and Spanish rap songs.  It's surprisingly effective -- a bit on the order of the score to LaLa Land but with better melodies.  The fact that characters suddenly start singing in the most dire or passionate circumstances makes the picture unpredictable and engenders instability in the imagery.  Remarkably, it all works pretty well -- the songs are well-integrated into the action and the story moves forward briskly.  The emotional dilemmas experienced by the characters are plausible and moving.  In my estimation the movie is very good, much better than one would expect from a summary of its plot.  (Apparently, my enthusiasm for the picture was shared by the Judges at Cannes where the film won some major awards.)  It's all quite spectacular -- the photography is very handsome, often stylized, and there are some breathtaking shots; near the end, the Narco flees a shootout with his moll, Selena Gomez sprawled across the seat and half outside of the car's window; she looks amber and gold, the figure of a martyr by Bernini and her shoulder is tinted red by the taillights of the speeding car illumining the clouds of dust through which they are driving.  In the shoot-out, the gunsmoke forms eddies and seems to flow in reverse back into the building shot to pieces by machine guns.  In Emilia Perez's mansion, "Aunt Emilia" amuses her children by having them play a video game involving skiing -- the kids miss skiing in the Swiss Alps.  When they are done playing, the camera picks out a couple of maids in the house who are trying out the exotic game for themselves.

In general terms, Emilia Perez is not too different from a film noir of the late forties or fifties.  There are sinister secrets and people conceal their true identities.  An argument could be made that the picture bears some resemblance to Jacques Tourneur's similarly Mannerist Out of the Past.  But the imagery is far more extreme, the song and dance numbers persuasive but, of course, utterly discordant with the narrative (which they paradoxically propel) and the final scenes in the film showing Emilia Perez deified, a sort of goddess hanging over the grim slums of Mexico City, are directly Baroque in character.  This movie is interesting and much better than my summary suggests and I recommend it.

Las Carabiniers

 Jean-Luc Godard's Las Carabiniers (1963) is an unpleasant movie.  It's not bad nor is it unintelligent. But the film is so cynical and disheartening that I can't recommend it.  So, you don't need to read the rest of this note.  Look at something else.  

Two slovenly morons (Ulysses and Michelangelo) live on a squalid farm in the middle of nowhere.  The place consists of some ruinous outbuildings, muddy fields of crop stubble, some primitive outdoor plumbing, and a few mangy dogs and chickens.  A jeep arrives and two soldiers with machine guns deliver written messages "from the king" to the farmers. The nation is being mobilized and the two hicks have been conscripted (or, at the very minimum, strongly invited) to join the military.  There's a scuffle between the farmers and the haggard soldiers.  When the fight is settled, the boys go into one of the ramshackle shacks to discuss the situation with their women and the two uniformed soldiers.  War has been declared and the soldiers describe this as a great opportunity to loot and destroy things.  "War will make you rich," the soldiers tell the gape-mouthed farmers, providing a long list of things that the new troops will be able to steal:  the list includes Maseratis, gems, fashionable clothing, "worldly women", and all sorts of other treasures.  The attractive women are intrigued by what seems to be a plausible offer of a better life by virtue of looting and plunder.  Ulysses and Michelangelo sign up.  One of the women asks the men to bring her a bikini.  

For the next forty minutes or so, the film follows the adventures of the soldiers, the titular carabiniers.  They wander around shooting at people and observing executions.  These depredations are reported in letters that they send home to the two women waiting for them on the farm.  We see the girls removing the letters from a post box and reading them.  Hand-written intertitles quote from the letters.  The boys are having a great time murdering people and hauling corpses to mass graves.  In the blandest and most objective terms, the two farmers boast about the hardships they have endured and the massacres in which they have participated.  The two men stumble around poverty-stricken villages and vacant lots, sometimes firing their machine guns.  This imagery is intercut with documentary footage from World War Two, mostly bombs toppling out of planes, battleships firing at sea, mangled corpses strewn around the edges of roads or fallen into the mud, burning buildings, and tanks rolling over grim, grey fields.  (The film is shot in black and white.)  A woman who spouts Marxist slogans gets shot by a firing squad -- they cover her face with a white cloth so as not to have to see her features when she is killed.  There are some low-grade skirmishes.  In one case, one of the farmers acts as a sentry, but gets ambushed.  As  in the early scenes with the soldiers, the adversaries end up rolling around in the mud.  One of the farmers (Ulysses) gets his eye shot out.  He always chomps on a big cigar.  Michelangelo, who seems like a complete moron sleep-walks through all the mayhem.  Godard films the fighting documentary-style and doesn't make any effort dramatize any of the skirmishes, all of which are low-intensity matters with people firing guns off into the distance and amplified fusillades -- there's lots of running to and fro. The soundtrack amplifies the sounds of the explosions and the small arms fire -- the film is noisy, full of racket with an occasional interlude of martial music.  

Michelangelo and Ulysses return home with a battered suitcase full of postcards.  These are the treasures that they have retrieved from the war.  They show the postcards to the women and suggest that these pictures represent loot that they will soon receive -- although it's unclear how you get Notre Dame cathedral or Yellowstone National Part as booty.  The postcards show cars, machines, industrial processes, famous landmarks and figures, an enormous variety of things that the two soldiers claim that they have conquered.  This strand of the movie develops the idea of accepting a representation or image for the thing that is represented.  In one scene, the carabineers commandeer a car, pausing to make a weird joke:  a woman says she's a Mexican to which one of the soldiers says she should be a "Mexican't".  In a town, Michelangelo goes to a theater, called Mexico, where he watches a movie.  The old chestnut about Lumiere's first pictures is reprised:  Michelangelo thinks a train shot arriving in a station is going to run over him and cowers in his seat.  When a "worldly woman" is shown taking a bath, Michelangelo lurks around the screen trying to look over and around the frame to see the woman's nakedness.  Ultimately, his attempts to position himself to see the nude woman results in the screen getting ripped down.  Both of the soldiers proudly announce to their women that the pictures of the loot that they have acquired are just as good as the loot itself.  This is a peculiar theme and I'm not sure what it has to do with movie's dispassionate and critical stance toward the endeavor of warfare.  Is war the result of people accepting images as a real things?  I don't think so and I'm not convinced that the imagery showing the soldiers (and their women) confusing the pictures of things with the things themselves makes any sense thematically.

The two gaunt enlistment soldiers from the opening scene re-appear.  They award the two carabineers with medals of honor.  This is their recompense for all of the murder and mayhem that they have inflicted on others.  The war is over.  The King now declares his soldiers to be murderers and war criminals.  Michelangelo and Ulysses try to flee and end up near ruined ramparts adorned by sprawled corpses.  One of the recruiting officers pushes them into a dark recess in a wrecked building and we hear machine gun fire.  Apparently, both of the men are executed.  They die undramatically off-screen like most of the casualties in this picture.  

The carabineers are clearly Landesknechts -- that is, the old term from the 30 Years War for "mercenaries."  We have no idea what the war is about, but it doesn't matter in any event since all this fighting seems completely pointless and futile. No one is enriched. The film begins with a sort of apology:  there's a Borges' citation about the fact that sometimes time-honored cliches are necessary -- the writer says that there are occasions when you have to say that death is the brother of sleep or that the moon has certain, hackneyed metaphoric qualities.  This quote suggests that the movie isn't subtle, that it's about the horrors of war from the perspective of those engaged in utterly futile mass-murder.  In some respects, the film suggests Mizoguchi's Ugetsu in which two peasants go to war in the hope of enriching themselves by plunder -- the men return to their village and home only to find that the pointless fighting has resulted in the deaths of their families (one of the women, long dead, appears as a ghost).  Godard's film is completely clear, lucid, and the narrative technique is utterly circumstantial -- there is no fragmentation of time or tricky digressive passages:  no one cites Heidegger.  (Godard used to say that his films typically have "a beginning, middle, and end" but only not in that order.)  The picture is self-evident, except for the curious theme about people mistaking pictures for reality -- a reflection, it seems, upon the craft and art of film-making.  In fact, it's so self-evident that Godard uses the Borges' quote as a kind of admission that there's not much to see here.  The movie is obviously brilliant but, in keeping with its dispiriting subject matter, also pointless.  (It's only 80 minutes long.)  We don't care about the hapless carabineers.  And why should we?  At the outset one of the farmers asks if they can upon enlisting "break the arms of children, set people on fire, and destroy villages."  The recruitment officer assures the farmer that all things of this sort will be permitted and encouraged.  And, so, the farmer enthusiastically volunteers for service.

Dido and Aeneas (Arpeggiata - Voktett performance)

 After the election in early November 2024, I found myself unwilling to watch the morning news.  I rise early to walk my dog and find myself sitting in front of the television between about 6:45 and 7:30 a.m.  Seeking refuge from the political news, all of it bad or outrageous in one way or another, I have been watching operas on You-Tube.  Musical theater, in general, is remote from every day politics and any opinions expressed by works in that genre tend to be superficial in the very best sense -- love is vital but destructive; jealousy and envy integral to human life; peasants are merry and like to dance; crowds of people don't form mobs or armies but choruses, something I find comforting.  Oscar Wilde praised the superficial:  "Beauty is the wonder of wonders.  It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.  The true mystery of the world is the visible not the invisible."  If you have a choice between "savage indignation" and music, choose the latter.  It was on the Sopranos, that a character (Uncle Junior) said:  "It's impossible to be pissed-off when you're singing."  For what's it's worth, this is true about listening to music also.  

I found a version of Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas on You-Tube.  The program records a semi-staged version of the 1688 opera filmed at the Herrenhausen theater in Hannover, Germany.  The show is designed and conducted by an Austrian musician Christiana Pluher directing her early music ensemble L'Arpegiatta, this chamber orchestra accompanying singers from a group called Voktett or Voces8, a Hannover choir with soloists.  Dido and Aeneas is commonly considered the first English opera.  I don't know the piece although I have some general familiarity with the story based on Virgil and synopses that I have read of Hector Berlioz Les Troyens.  I presume that the actual opera is essentially static -- that is, a series of numbers designed to elucidate and elaborate on certain emotional states of mind.  Handel, for instance, wrote operas in this form, as did Glueck, of course, and Monteverdi -- in these shows, splendidly accoutered actors spread their arms as if carrying invisible bushel-baskets and sing at the audience while a small baroque chamber orchestra accompanies them; usually, there are gorgeous flats behind the performers who simply declaim their parts -- the flats depict vast palaces or classical landscapes after the manner of Claude Lorrain or, sometimes, desert coasts beside the raging sea.  There's no action to speak of.  The composition  seems intended to delineate sorrow, love, jubilation or triumph, grief and envy and so on -- each emotional state is given an aria or duet floating over a basso continuo and orchestral accompaniment that all sounds very beautiful and, also, more or less, the same; the tunes differ by tempo, varying between dignified laments and sprightly martial marches.  If you are in the right mood for this kind of thing, an opera of this kind can be reasonably interesting and, even, exciting -- I recall with warmth a production of Handel's Giulio Caesar with a piercing counter-tenor voice representing the great general; it was a compelling experience, something into which I entered imaginatively to the extent that I thought I understood the production in a particularly penetrating and essential way, although I can't quite recall what made me so enthusiastic about the opera -- maybe, it was love or an anomaly in my blood sugar or exuberance caused by drinks that I had consumed.

L'Arpeggiatta's adaptation of Dido and Aeneas premiered at Utrecht in 2015.  It was apparently controversial and some people in the audience walked out of the show in dismay.  (Early music fans tend to be opinionated and cultish; some of them prize fidelity to the original score and orchestration above all other values. L'Arpeggiatta plays the piece on original instruments but Christiane Pluher is certainly not afraid to tinker with the libretto and, even, the music comprising the show.)  After an ornate, baroque symphonia as an overture, the opera slips sideways into some very weird and amusing territory.  Several of the numbers in the first half of the ninety minute show were performed to Caribbean rhythms -- the ensemble features a burly guy with a shaved head who plays what seem to be bongos and other percussion instruments that one might expect to hear in a Cuban dance band.  About a fourth of the songs were re-imagined as rhumbas or mambos with percolating, syncopated dance rhythms.  About mid-way through the show, one of the singers appears in the guise of a scary-looking witch with flaming red hair and strange, cat-like eyes.  This woman wears skin-tight leather skirt and vest and slinks around, sexually harassing members of the band -- she strokes the head of a bassoon-player who is aroused and nervously wipes sweat off his brow.  There are apparently witches and sea-nymphs in the Nahum Tate libretto for the work and, so, I suppose some of this may be justified -- although the first number featuring the succubus-witch is a Mexican tune with nothing to do with Purcell, something called La Bruja.  Some of the pieces feature jazz-like melodies, cadenzas and improvisations.  I couldn't tell what was going on -- singers just come and go, performing their piece, and, then, departing backstage.  Pluher's orchestra is on-stage, appearing in this filmed version, in a spectacular baroque hall very long and narrow with florid murals surrounding the audience -- gods and goddesses and warriors in bright armor strutting around like peacocks in a magical honey-colored and painted garden full of emblematic trees and the arcades and facades of renaissance palaces.  (The Herrenhausen castle and gardens are a landmark in Hannover; the place was bombed to rubble in 1943, but has been lovingly restored and, probably, looks better and more impressive than it did when the RAF bombs reduced the place to battered mortar and charred timbers.)  In the last act, some jolly tars stagger around with bottles of rum in their hands.  Aeneas goes off to murder the Etruscans and found Rome. Dido sings an impressive lament, formal and dignified and very grave.  Then, the chorus sings farewell to her and the opera ends.  (My sympathies and, of course, Purcell's as well are with Dido; would the world have been a better place if Aeneas had rejected the call to duty and, seduced by the Queen's embraces, remained in Carthage?)

The show is excellently filmed with many revealing and expressive close-ups.  The band is full of attractive, vivacious performers -- I particularly admired the gorgeous second violin who sways and dances in her seat to the music; the rhumba rhythms, in particular, inspire her to dance.  The singers are also excellent and very handsome -- Dido and Belinda, her sidekick, are very sexy.  (They traipse about in lingerie bra-less if you like that sort of thing.) There's four witches, I think, male and female in one of the later numbers in the show and they slink around casting spells and maledictions and, even, venture into the audience to toy with the people attending the opera.  I suppose there are many versions of this landmark work that are more faithful to the text by Tate and the music by Purcell, but this show is intriguing, erotically appealing, and highly imaginative.  So I recommend that you take a look.  (The comments relating to this version of the opera on my computer are evenly divided between those who praise the show to high heavens and those who are appalled and call it a horror.  One of them notes with dismay that the actual Purcell score starts at about 26 minutes into the production.  This sort of controversy breaths fresh life into a work that is now almost 350 years old and is all to the good so far as I am concerned.)

Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg (Bayreuth 2017)

 Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg is the longest opera in the repertoire.  Depending upon tempi and staging, the show clocks in at about four hours and forty-five minutes of music.  The opera requires an immense chorus, a large orchestra, and, unlike Wagner's other mature works, even indulges in a ballet, therefore requiring a corps of dancers.  Further, the opera's subject matter is a bit rebarbative -- do you really want to spend about five hours in the company of a guild of contentious renaissance musicians led by the redoubtable cobbler and master-singer, Hans Sachs?  Although billed as a comedy, the opera isn't really funny and the action pauses from time to time for elaborate discourses on art, madness, and the authority of German art.  You're not likely to see the Meistersinger staged by any regional opera companies; only the largest venues can afford to produce this show.  I've been able to avoid this opera for most of my life -- in my seventieth year, I decided to watch the Meistersinger in an elaborate (and highly controversial) production presented (and effectively filmed) at the Wagner's Festpielhaus in Bayreuth, German.  It's a venue sacred to Wagner fans, a theater designed and built by Wagner himself and said to be uniquely uncomfortable -- the great man didn't want audience members snoozing during the presentation of his shows and, so, he built the pew-like seats and the fan-shaped auditorium around a very deep, if somewhat narrow stage, expressly to accommodate his repertoire of operas, subjecting viewers to purgatorial conditions as they endured the onslaught of his music.  On opening night 2017, German celebrities gathered; Angela Merkel was in attendance and some versions of the opera show the chancellor on the Bayreuth equivalent of the "red carpet."  

Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg is a vast continent in itself -- it has mountain ranges, great lakes, teeming cities, and its own musical climate.  Wagner's operas, in general, are very loquacious -- there are extended colloquies and dialogue scenes that would not be out of place in an Ibsen play or something by George Bernard Shaw.  Even when the subject matter is supposed to be jovial and light (as in the Meistersinger), the shows are serious, portentous and grave -- they proceed in deadly earnest and invite productions that are "thought-provoking" and sententious.  The Bayreuth 2017 production Die Meistersinger is elaborately staged, presenting a series of "high-concept" interpretations of the Wagner work.  The influence of Hans-Juergen Syberberg is evident in the production.  Syberberg is one of the most famous Wagnerians in the last sixty years and invokes the composer repeatedly in his films, particularly Ludwig- Requiem for a Mad King and Hitler - a Film from Germany.  (Syberberg's movies involve much puppetry, ornate tableaux full of drifting banks of fog, Victorian-era opera sets, and surreal devices dramatizing Wagner's overwhelming, if often malign, influence on German culture -- Hitler's regime is imagined as a perverse outcome of Wagner's nationalistic romanticism; Syberberg stages his film-version of Parsifal in the nooks and crannies of a barn-size death mask of Richard Wagner and made a five-hour documentary about Winifried Wagner, an English woman and Nazi sympathizer married to one of the Master's grandchildren.)  Following Syberberg's lead, the 2017 Bayreuth production insists that the Meistersinger is, at least in part, a representation and reimagining of Wagner's family life and his marriage to Franz Liszt's daughter, Cosima.  The show puts Wagner's anti-Semitism front and center and the opera's last act (more than two hours long) is staged in the courtroom in Nuremberg where the War Crimes Tribunal convened to try military and political figures involved in the Hitler regime.  The political implications of this staging are a bit garbled -- it's not clear whether the show is celebrating anti-Semitism or denouncing it.  There are caricatures in the show that don't merely verge on the offensive -- in fact, they are intended to be offensive and to trigger outrage.  The huge size of the opera and its inordinate length, however, does act to dilute some of the more aggressively confrontational aspects of the production and, of course, the music is splendid in a monotonous sort of way.  

In the broadest terms, Die Meistersinger involves a contest between candidates who seek admission to the Nuremberg guild of professional musicians.  The prize in this contest in not merely entry to the prestigious guild but, also, marriage to the beautiful daughter, Eva, of one of the Meistersinger.  A bold young knight, Walther von Stolzing -- a Junker as he is called -- contends for the prize with an older, more pompous member of the society, a man named Beckmesser.  Beckmesser has been a vexed character in the Wagnerian ouevre -- it's often claimed that the figure, a pompous and pretentious middle-aged man (he serves as the "marker" or judge in singing contests in the first part of th opera) is imagined to be Jewish and given characteristics with anti-Semitic implications  (It should be observed that it's equally often asserted that Beckmesser, an ardent if incompetent lover -- he wishes to win Eva's hand -- is primarily based on comedia dell-arte figures of old men in love with young girls and, also, derived from Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night; like the poor Puritan, Malvolio, Beckmesser is sadistically harassed and bullied throughout the opera, physically beaten, and misused to the point that the audience is almost tempted to sympathize with him.)  Complicating the situation is the fact that the widower Hans Sachs, the leader of the guild and its most acclaimed member, is in love with Eva and, perhaps, desires her as his wife.  In the course of the opera, Sachs will disavow his desire for Eva as inappropriate and unseemly to a man his age.  Invoking the cuckolded King Mark in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, the music from that opera cited in the score, Sachs relinquishes his claims to Eva to the Junker Walther von Stolzing.  Eva, the daughter of a Meistersinger called Pogner, seems quite content in her role as prize in the contest between the men -- she doesn't show a whole lot of agency in the opera and seems to be a good sport about being the laurel awarded the winning Meistersinger.  There's a subplot involving some other young lovers and a scene in which poor Beckmesser is tricked into wooing a woman that he thinks is Eva, but, in fact, is someone else.  This leads to a riot -- the people of Nuremberg are highly excitable -- in which the singer gets a finger broken and his shoulder dislocated; he has to perform the climactic contest in a sling.  The score contains triumphal marches, love arias, fanfares, and church hymns.  Several of the highly stylized songs made by the professional Meistersinger are performed complete with intricate commentary -- the songs have to comply with various rhyme schemes, chord progressions, and other rigorous rules of composition.  (In one of these scenes, Sachs, who is also a shoemaker, beats out of his critique of a song on his cobbler's last.) Somehow, Sachs, who is the main character in the show, tricks Beckmesser into singing verses that have been garbled so as to result in weirdly surrealistic imagery -- "two bosoms" are "fuming" and releasing steam and the young lover ends up hanging himself in a tree.  Wagner has ingeniously contrived the surreal verses to contain puns and homonyms that can be transformed into a conventional love song complete with singing birds, flowering trees, and the perfume of flowers.  Walther von Stolzing wins the prize and Eva's hand in marriage.  Poor, injured Beckmesser loses and just drifts out of sight. At the end, Hans Sachs steps into a pulpit and lectures the audience about the obligations of the German artist to the German Volk -- it's a virulently nationalist harangue, although phrased in noble cadences, invoking continuities in German music that will survive the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire.  Obviously, Wagner is placing his own art firmly within this tradition and defending it to the public.  On this note, the vast opera concludes.  (For part of my viewing of this opera -- it took me four days watching the show every morning from 6:30 to 7:30 am -- I lost the English subtitles and had to watch the piece assisted by German subtitles.  From those subtitles, I understand that the opera is written in short lines of rhyming doggerel.  Apparently, Wagner devised the plot and libretto and the show is not really based on any predecessor work of literature or musical theater.)   

During my lifetime, operas in the classical canon or repertoire are generally staged in ways that impose the director and production designer's ideological sensibilities on the text.  Such stagings constitute a critique or commentary on the work, pretending to find in the music drama themes and motifs that will resonate with modern audiences.  It is very rare to see an opera staged in a manner consistent with the intentions of its composer and librettist --in other words, "straight" stagings of operas are very rare and, when this occurs, it has a high-concept element as well.  An opera staged in accord with the conventions that ruled at the time of its origins is itself an avant-garde gesture, like playing Bach on original instruments.  (This is true of Shakespeare plays as well.)  Part of the fun of attending an opera is seeing the perverse "spin" put on the materials by the director and, often, deriding the folly and pretentiousness of that interpretation.

Bayreuth 2017 begins Die Meistersinger at Wagner's manor near the Festspielhaus, Wahnfried.  It's a family gathering at the Wagner house, a lavishly appointed Biedermeier drawing room with a grand piano and various portraits on the wall, including Duerer's famous painting of himself as Christ.  Franz Liszt is in attendance along with Cosima, his daughter, who is suffering a migraine.  (There are surtitles projected on the scrim in front of the stage telling us about Cosima Wagner's headache and announcing the temperature outside and weather conditions.)  Wagner sails around the room in his black beret and dark smoking jacket. A Jewish conductor named Hermann Levi is in attendance.  When a hymn is sung, everyone drops to their knees, and poor Levi, who hesitates, is bullied into kneeling as well.  (Levi will appear as Beckmesser as the show progresses.)  Five or six little Wagners, all identically dressed in beret and smoking  jacket climb out of the grand piano which seems to open into a cellar below the room.  When a song is judged by the "marker", that judge stands in a box built from famous and familiar portraits of Cosima Wagner and the maestro himself.  Wagner is played by the singer who will act the part of Hans Sachs.  Cosima is played by the young woman who will be cast as Eva.  The point is to devise an equation between Wagner's domestic situation and the later action of the play -- the contention over Eva by the rivals Beckmesser and Walther von Stolzing is imagined to be similar to the way that Wagner won the hand of Cosima Liszt (who was married to one of Wagner's loyal conductors Hans von Buelow at the time of their courtship.)  As critics of this production have pointed out, the similarities between the plot of the opera and Wagner's family drama are badly garbled and really don't make sense.  A courtship scene takes place on a grassy lawn that now occupies the center of the stage between the dark paneled walls of the sitting room.  (These dark paneled walls in deep recession seem to invoke some paintings by Anselm Kiefer on German history -- Kiefer's idea is that the German wood becomes a kind of feasting hall with heavy, wood-grained walls.  Some parts of the opera adopt this notion.)  When Beckmesser tries to woo Eva (he's actually singing to someone else), a huge inflatable Jew with forelocks, black cap, and an immense hooked nose suddenly appears tall as a house at the front of the stage.  Beckmesser's double, another caricatured Jew (who looks like something out of Der Stuermer) appears.  There is a riot in the dark and Beckmesser gets beaten up.  The lengthy last act of the play takes place in a courtroom designed to imitate the trial premises for the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal.  Somehow, the trial of songs between the rivals has become the War Crimes trial complete with white-helmeted guards and a harpist who sits like a court-reporter or stenographer next to the witness box.  The flags of the victorious allies line the back of the courtroom.  This thematic imposition on the opera is also very hard to make sense of.  The contest between singers is very unlike a war crimes trial and, although the comparison between the two proceedings is thought-provoking, the notion really doesn't make sense.  In the final scene in which Sachs preaches to the audience, he stands in the witness docket facing out from the stage.  At one point in the show, pygmy Jews scurry around the stage, figures in black wearing grotesque anti-Semitic masks.  At the curtain call, the diminutive Jews are revealed to be eight or nine-year old children who appear for their applause cradling the horrid masks under their arms.  

I'm told that the singing featured in this production is splendid.  Of course, the music surges and foams like an immense turbulent ocean.    

  

Pedro Paramo

 On her deathbed, Juan Preciado's mother orders him to travel to the village of Comala to seek his father, Pedro Paramo.  "You must make him pay for having neglected us," the dying woman says.  So we are told in voice-over to an image showing Preciado baffled in the midst of a vast stony desert where two faint cartways seem to intersect.  In a heat haze, a muleteer named Abundiz Martinez approaches.  He tells the young man that people who die in Comala and are sent right to Hell have to come back to town to "get their coats" -- Hell is apparently cool compared to this pueblo.  The town appears in the crotch of a mountain like a petrified garden or the bones of an extinct beast.  No one is around and the walled streets an alleys are shattered and empty.  The houses are abandoned.  On the advice of the muleteer (who says he is also Pedro Paramo's son), Juan Preciado goes to a villa owned by an old woman Dona Eduviges.  The house is crammed with dusty, moldering junk -- when people leave town, they put their furniture and knickknacks in storage in Dona Eduviges manor, but no one ever returns for these items.  The old woman makes Juan sleep in an attic room with a pierced roof; he must lay on the floor in the room where a man was hanged.  The ghost calls out at night.  In the street, a mad beggar woman named Dorotea warns Juan that Camalo is a literal ghost town -- everyone he meets is already dead.  (The women all know that Juan's mother has died; she has apparently visited them recently as a  ghost.)  In the morning, light penetrates the wrecked roof of the villa.  A dreamy young man sits in an outhouse where he is reprimanded by his mother -- this is Pedro Paramo as a young man, probably forty years before the events shown in the opening scene with Juan Preciado.  Paramo is in love with a girl named Susana -- she is the daughter of a silver miner.  Pedro flies a kite with her and, then, she leaves town with her father.  Paramo grieves the loss of his childhood sweetheart.  (At various points in the movie, we see her swimming with him in a deep, radiantly blue pothole under a tree; this is an image of the lost idyll of Paramo's childhood, his own "paradise lost" that motivates, apparently, most of the depredations that he commits in his later life.)  We learn in flashbacks -- although the concept isn't really applicable to a movie that insists on the simultaneity of all events -- that Pedro's father was murdered and that his family was threatened with poverty by debts owed to various feudal landowners in the vicinity.  Pedro claws his way out of this poverty by marrying Dolores Preciado (Juan's mother) for her wealth and land, bullying neighbors, and, ultimately, having his adversaries murdered by his thuggish lieutenant, Fulgor. (It's Fulgor and his henchmen who hang the man in the upper room where Juan Preciado tries to sleep when he arrives in town.) Dolores Preciado's honeymoon night is complicated by the fact that she has her period.  So she persuades Dona Eduviges to take her place in Pedro's bed.  (Most of the women in town admire the handsome, rakish caballero Pedro Paramo -- and the women who resist him, he rapes.)  Most of the children in the village are Paramo's sons and daughters.  Time flows forward and backward -- in a series of scenes, we see Pedro Paramo's single acknowledged and legitimate son, himself a seducer and rapist, riding to and from assignations.  He rides into a bank of fog, smashes into a fence and dies with a broken neck.  The local priest, a withered and venomous little man, extorts donations out of the wealthy Paramo for the funeral Mass.   The priest, Tio Rentaria, hates Paramo because the boss murdered his brother and raped his niece.  Preciado keeps encountering Damiana Cisneros, the only female servant at Paramo's huge estate called Media Luna, not seduced or raped by Pedro.  He asks her if she is alive -- she just stares at him enigmatically.  Preciado seems to be sick.  He has chills and a fever.  In a ruined house, he shivers on the floor next to a bed where a naked man and woman make love -- they are brother and sister.  The man departs at dawn and the naked woman invites Preciado into bed with her where she suddenly decomposes into stinking, excremental mud.  The mud floods out into the empty street, a corridor lined by crumbling walls.  Preciado staggers to the church where he looks up and sees a great vortex of naked souls whirling around in a shaft of greenish-blue light above the Church.  Then, he passes out.

This describes the first half of Rodrigo Prieto's 2024 Netflix movie based on the novel by Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo.  Rulfo is undoubtedly the greatest writer to ever have worked as an executive and salesman for the Mexican division of the Goodyear Tire Company.  Pedro Paramo (1955) is generally acclaimed as Mexico's greatest novel and it is an integral part of the identity of modern Mexican intellectuals -- the book, in essence, defines what it means to be Mexican and is regarded as broadly, and acutely, diagnostic of the pathologies that afflict that nation.  The novel is an austerely complex and difficult modernist work, a cubist array of vignettes that are presented in a narrative order that is associative and surrealist, but not chronological.  The initial premise, Juan Preciado's search for his infamous father, is abandoned after a dozen or so pages and the reader must navigate an increasingly disorienting labyrinth populated by dozens of monstrous or damaged characters, each displaying stigmata of his or her encounter with the vicious patron, Pedro Paramo.  At the halfway point in the book, Preciado dies although this doesn't keep him from narrating parts of the second part of the short novel from his grave where his mouth is "stuffed with dirt" and where he rests in a spooning embrace with town's disheveled and mad beggar woman, Dorotea.  

After Juan Preciado's death, the film shows us Paramo's ruthless rise to power in the village and environs.  When his second wife dies (he has sent away Dolores Preciado and her son to Colima), Paramo courts his lost love Susana.  She's insane.  Her father once lowered her into a silver mine full of cadavers in search of coins and the experience has driven her mad.  (There's also a suggestion of incest with her father, an old prospector whom Paramo has had killed in order to force himself upon his daughter.)  The revolution interrupts the morbid occurrences in the village.  Fulgor gets gunned down by the rebels, dying in a showy scene in an irrigation furrow in a field where he is working.  Paramo buys off the rebels who seem both venal and politically confused.  Susana won't sleep with Paramo forcing him to rape one of his servants out of sexual frustration.  Susana torments Paramo by masturbating histrionically in front of him.  Then, she also dies.  The serpentine priest, Father Rentaria, threatens her with gruesome damnation but she defies him.  At her funeral, Father Rentaria rings the church bells incessantly, apparently insane himself at this point, and the town swarms with mourners who turn into merry-makers -- the funeral has become the occasion for a great carnival complete with fireworks.  Paramo regards this as insulting and says he will destroy the town by folding his arms across his chest.  He sits in front of his manor at Media Luna for ten more years and the town withers and dies.  At last, Abundiz Martinez appears, half-crazed to demand that Paramo pay for his wife's burial.  Martinez, the muleteer from the first scene, stabs Paramo's loyal maid, Damiana, to death and, then, repeatedly stabs Paramo, gutting him.  No one can really die in Comala.  Damiana gets up from the pool of blood where she lies and tells Paramo that his lunch is ready for him to eat and she assists him in limping into the manor house for his meal.

The movie is far easier to follow that Rulfo's elliptical and lyrically poetic novel.  This is because subtitles identify, from time to time, who is speaking, reminding you of the identities of the numerous named characters in the story.  Prieto's direction is very lucid and, from moment to moment, the viewer can readily follow the intricate interwoven narratives that comprise the film and the novel.  Prieto is a famous Mexican cameraman who has worked with Alphonso Cuaron (Roma) and Alejandro Inarittu and the movie is impeccably shot -- it looks exactly how one might imagine the scenes in novel to be.  The picture is impeccably cast and acted.  It is extremely grim, positing that modern Mexico is an apparition rising from the ghosts of ten-thousand doomed little villages, places over which vicious feudal lords ruled by a combination of terror, greedy exploitation, and sexual predation.  Machismo drives the men to be rapists and creates a culture of intimidated and subservient obedience in the long-suffering women.  No one acts on principle.  Everything is for sale.  The feudal landlords are not an aristocracy based on merit, but rather a kleptocracy founded on terror and murder.  In Mexico, everyone is a son of the rapacious and emotionally disfigured Pedro Paramo.  The novel seems to be based, at least in part, on predecessor works by Faulkner -- but Rulfo's approach is more poetic and occluded than even difficult Faulkner novels such as Absalom, Absalom and The Sound and the Fury.  (Probably another source of the book is Rulfo's response to Faulkner's Snopes novels including The Hamlet -- but Rulfo, of course, is Catholic or responding to the Catholic sensibility and his novel relies heavily on supernatural events:  in Faulkner, the past is imagined; in Rulfo, the past is present as a ghostly manifestation or "echo coming out of the cracked earth.") The book's prismatic approach to its protagonist also seems related to Welles' Citizen Kane and the concept of the great man who is both cruel and vicious, but also a victim of childhood trauma (in Paramo's case the death of his father and the loss of his childhood sweetheart) that motivates the crimes committed by the hero.  The book is admired to the point of veneration by Latin American writers -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez claimed that he had memorized the entirety of the rather short novel (it's about 200 pages long).  Prieto's adaptation is extremely faithful to the novel.  As I watched the film, various passages from the novel sprang to mind -- and, indeed, those episodes were depicted in the film.  An example of how the film processes Rulfo's novel is near the end of the picture:  we see Susana's funeral with a hearse pulled by horses retreating from Media Luna's manor house; a close shot shows Pedro Paramo as an old man, still handsome but in ruins, sitting on his chair in front of the mansion -- this is the pose in which he has vowed to destroy the village.  Then, the film cuts to a shot of Susana fifty years earlier as a young girl, looking morosely back from a cart on which her father is driving away from the town.  In a single sequence of a half-dozen shots, the movie will slip between events separated by decades -- and, yet, Prieto's film making is so lucid and transparent that the viewer, once acclimated to the movie's approach to its material (which is parallel to Rulfo's novel in the ordering of events) will have no trouble understanding what is happening.  Remarkably, the part of Paramo is played by a Mexican actor named Manuel Garcia Rulfo, Juan Rulfo's grandson.   

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.