Velasco and Gatsby at 100: MIA

 It's my ambition to spend the waning years of my life looking at art and reading books on art history and  criticism.  Too late, it seems.  My legs hurt now when I amble around art museums and my eyes don't focus well on the pictures -- it seems that I spend most of my time with my eyeglasses in my hand, stooped over to read labels.  Gradually, it seems that my experience of museum art is more about the labels on the wall than the pictures which seem increasingly blurry to me.  I've always favored graphic work, prints and engravings, and, indeed, this may be the only kind of image that I see clearly -- I can push my face up close to the image and, without my glasses, inspect the hachure and bite of the burin as exhibited by the print or engraving.  It would be nice to visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art every month, but I can't seem to make the time and, so, I am at the museum usually at intervals of three months.  I've been going to MIA since I was six and have been there many times and the place is very familiar to me although, on each occasion, I find something new and intriguing.  On October 2, after a brief business meeting in St. Paul, I drove over to the Institute, planning to see just one or two galleries before driving back to Austin.  But, as is always the case, I spent more time than I expected and, even, saw some things worthy of reporting to my readers.  Hence, this note.

The Mexican landscape artist, Jose Maria Velasco, lived from1840 to 1912, dying two years after the first great revolution of a century of revolutions, the Mexican Revolution, began in 1910.  Velasco is well-known, even revered in his home country, but, almost, completely unknown in the United States.  About 20 works are on exhibit at the MIA; these range from small watercolors and studies (rocks, jungle vegetation, and clouds) to heroically sized canvases that are akin in subject matter and photo-realist detail to paintings by the American artists Bierstadt, Moran, and Fredric Erwin Church.  (To my eyes, Velasco is most similar to Church with a little admixture of the visionary strain visible in Thomas Cole.)  The selection of Velasco paintings include a number of perspectives on Mexican snow-capped mountains looming over the Vale of Mexico, a grim-looking apocalyptic waterspout (the picture is very small -- if it were larger, the thing would be overwhelming) and the eruption of a volcano.  There's a startling picture of a feathery silver comet hanging over of one of Mexico's eerie endorheic lakes -- the huge comet is reflected in the dismal water trapped in a desert basin.  (The label treats the painting as a harbinger of Mexican revolution -- the image portrays a celestial apparition about twenty years before the canvas was made at the time of the uprising.  Velasco painted desert scenes with cactus and textile mills occupying the middle distance.  A Cardon tree in Oaxaca looks like a platter held up on a trunk and bristling with sixty saquaro cactuses -- a little fellow is visible at the foot of the surrealistic tree to provide scale.  A small painting of what Velasco calls a "rustic bridge" looks a bit like Menzel, it's a jerry-rigged collection of splintery planks hanging in trees drooping over a pond of murky water; however, the bridge, almost indiscernible in the tattered trees seems to have a pale skeleton tangled up in it -- on closer inspection, the skeleton is just a group of white anthropomorphic roots, although one must query why those roots have suddenly sprouted from the side of the tree about 10 feet above its base.  Velasco's masterpiece is a majestic canvas called "The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isobel", a large-scale work that the artist painted for an exhibition in Vienna and that exists in, at least, three versions, two of which are in the show.  Meticulously painted, the image, when reproduced for a book or Art Institute flyer, seems to be a photograph -- at full size, the canvas covers the wall (it's dimensions are 161 x 228 cm) and reveals its brush strokes.  But, viewed from middle distance, the picture has a photo-realist quality.  In the second iteration of the picture (1875), a woman carrying a baby walks along the stony hillside, two dogs and a small boy dancing in front of her;  the woman imparts a sense of scale to the huge barren landscape spread out below the hill.  In the middle distance, a pale grid with minute buildings marks the cathedral and outbuildings sacred to the Virgin of Guadalupe at the Tepec hill; farther away, a white stain on the valley floor, like an encrustation of salt, represents Mexico City -- the shallow lakes near the city extend to the right across a brown treeless steppe stretching to twin volcanoes on the horizon.  The 1877 version of the scene is brighter; the texture of rocky hills and slopes is more visible.  There are no figures.  A skeletal nopal cactus stands roughly where the woman and dogs were earlier located; to the right, a hawk bearing some creature in its beak skates across a gorge cast into deep shadow.  The bird of prey and the nopal cactus refer to the Aztec origin story; after emerging from caves from far to the north, the Aztec marched across the deserts for generations until they reached the promised land, a valley with a great salty lake filling its basin and an eagle perched on a nopal devouring a serpent.

Gatsby at 100 occupies two small rooms.  The exhibit consists of paintings and objects from the Institute collection accompanied by quotations from Fitzgerald's novel.  There's a first edition of the book with its spooky cover showing two disembodied eyes hovering over the title and a blue, hazy landscape.  I don't think the juxtaposition of art and citations from the book is particularly successful -- the images seem mostly unrelated to the passages from the novel.  But there are some fine things in the exhibit.  A large 1928 lithograph of a very freely drawn nude by Matisse ("Nude, Left Hand over Shoulder") is particularly fine.  A huge photograph showing mostly horizon with two farms at opposite ends of panorama is striking -- 2017 Tei Nguyen.  A lithograph entitled "Minneapolis" (Louis Lozowick, 1925) show the city as square slab towers and great pillars of grain elevators, their columns round as the ranks of a pipe organ.  

Every time I walk the corridors and exhibition spaces of the MIA, I discover new things, little treasures that I haven't seen before.  An eerie late painting by Winslow Homer looks like Robert Motherwell; it's called "Cape Trinity, Soqueney River."  A ribbon of moonlight illumines a huge black bluff overlooking water in which an odd, untethered strip of pale reflection shows.  The label pursues the post hoc fallacy suggesting that the big, abstract black forms prefigure Homer's death in 1910 -- but the canvas was painted in 1904; it's not a premonition of anything but Abstract Expressionism forty-five years later.  In a big room full of architectural models -- usually a place I ignore -- there's a metal ornament marked "Consultation Rooms" designed by Sullivan for the Farmers National Bank in Owatonna.  The "t" letters in the legend are an architect's tee-square -- the thing is green, verdant with ornamentation, a beautiful object.  Upstairs where the American folk paintings are hung, there's a huge canvas that seems to be a copy of Alfred Bierstadt's iconic painting, "The Last of the Buffalo".  This painting is a parody by someone named Keith Monkman made in 2009 and is called the "Death of Adonis".  A blonde cowboy, a bit like a young George Armstrong Custer, is falling backward from his steed.  Another bison hunter lies dead on the ground.  Aphrodite, portrayed as a sort of Vegas showgirl, with red spike heels and a naked ass squats next to the corpse.  Another blonde cowboy ("cowboi"?) is being gored by a big, furious buffalo.  (The image is cartoonish but striking and, particularly interesting, in light of another show in the Institute, a small room full of very strange renaissance prints called "The Weirdening of the Renaissance" -- the title suggests the jocular, cavalier tone on the explanatory labels.  In one of the engravings, a nymph is scrubbing away at Aphrodite's private parts while Adonis, halfway transformed into a stag, struts forward, advancing like a post man carrying a letter or some kind of perverse butler or valet. (In the background of the engraving, poor Adonis, now fully metamorphosed into a stag is being torn apart by his own dogs.)

I was thrilled to find my favorite painting in the whole world on show, the miniature Indian image of "Lovers Watching an Approaching Thunderstorm".  This small image was made between 1780 and 1790 by an anonymous craftsman of so-called Kangra School (workers in Himachal Pradish wherever that may be.)  This picture is something that I would be happy to gaze upon forever, or, until my retina detaches under the pressure of the image, or until my eyesight is destroyed by wet (or dry) macular degeneration.  It is the most wonderful thing and has not been on display for several years and so I am ecstatic to see it again.  

Our Man in Havana

 A very dark, absurdist comedy Our Man in Havana is an oblique precursor to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove released five years later in 1964.  Our Man in Havana is shot in high-contrast black and white, alternating between lurid expressionism and documentary realism -- this is exactly the photographic style that Kubrick uses.  Further, the themes of both films are related:  Our Man in Havana is an eerie and prescient precursor to the Cuban missile crisis -- the film's plot involves a supposedly advanced atomic weapon hidden in Cuba's Sierra Madre; of course, Kubrick's movie exploits anxieties about nuclear Armageddon current in the early sixties.  Both films are about the idiocy of the military-industrial complex.  Strangelove is more apocalyptic but both movies posit that our collective existence is dangling by a hair manipulated by forces motivated by deceit, lust, and greed.

Alec Guinness plays Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman eking out a meager living in Havana, a place that has only intermittent electrical power.  Wormold's wife has run away leaving him with a feisty and self-absorbed teenage daughter.  It is very expensive for Wormold to maintain his daughter's life-style -- she is a convent-educated spoiled brat who makes Wormold buy her a horse and, then, join the country club so that she will have a place to ride.  Even worse, she is being courted by Captain Segura, a greasy-looking gendarme with a reputation for torturing people -- he has a villainous moustache and is ferried around in a big limousine by thugs; the part is played, more or less, straight by the great comedian Ernie Kovacs.  Noel Coward dressed in suit and bowler hat comes calling on Wormold and recruits him as an MI 5 agent, a spy serving the British government as "our man in Havana."  Coward seduces Guinness' Wormold in a  toilet at the Country Club and, throughout the movie, spy encounters take place in rest rooms, leading to the suspicion that the cell of informants also comprises a network of homosexuals.  Coward's recruiter gives Wormold some invisible ink and instructs him in a "book code" sending messages by references to pages and letters in Charles Lamb's Stories from Shakespeare.  Wormold proves to be an incompetent agent, although the extra money that he earns makes him sufficiently prosperous to support his daughter's profuse spending.  Under pressure to recruit more operatives, Wormold simply names people in his circle as his associates and claims that they are working for him.  The spymasters in London obligingly send him more money to pay for his country club membership and to reimburse the new agents that Wormold has invented.  Wormold satisfies London's demand for more information by providing elaborate schematic pictures of vacuum cleaners that he represents as large and sinister weapons hidden in the mountains.  London is impressed and sends Wormold an attractive secretary, Beatrice, and a radio operator named Rudy.  When Wormold is supposed to introduce Beatrice and Rudy to his agents, he contrives a plan to keep the non-existent spies off-stage.  But, then, someone starts murdering the people whom he has identified as  agents, even though in fact they are hapless patsies.  In fact, this adversary spy network plots to kill Wormold by poisoning him at a vacuum-cleaner retailer's convention -- Wormold escapes although an unfortunate dachshund eats the poison and expires.  Captain Segura is nosing around and Wormold plays checkers with him using little airplane-sized bottles of whisky and bourbon.  When you take your opponent's checker piece, you have to drink it.  Segura gets blind drunk (he's a better checkers player than Wormold) and Guinness steals his revolver.  He, then, meets the enemy agent who tried to poison him, a fellow who, in fact, seems to be a homosexual, and squires him around Havana's night spots.  At last, he guns down the enemy agent in a very poorly edited and confusing sequence.  The fraud, Wormold, is summoned to London to meet with the big bosses at MI 5.  Realizing that exposing Wormold will make them all look foolish, the spymasters decide to honor the film's hero, admitting him to the Order of the British Empire.  Wormhold gets to canoodle with his attractive secretary and his daughter, now more adult, has outgrown her horse and is ready to cut a swath through London's young men.   

This is all light-weight genial stuff, although there is a subplot with Burl Ives playing a German emigre to Havana that is more serious in tone and, in fact, tragic.  Ives takes the role of Karl Hesselbacher, someone who fled from Germany in 1934, and who works as a doctor in Cuba.  Due to his association with Wormold, he is mercilessly persecuted by both the thugs in power (the film takes place on the eve of Castro's revolution) and, also, by the enemy, presumably Soviet, spy network.  Ives is affecting as the German healer and alchemist -- he's working on some kind of formulae for blue cheese.  At first, the regime (or the enemy spies) smash his laboratory and, then, he's gunned down in an open-air bar to which he and Wormold have often retired to drink daiquiris.   Hesselbacher fancies himself a kind of virtuous soldier -- as he is persecuted, he dons his WWI vintage pickelhaube and the pointed helmet is set on his casket when he is buried.  

Carol Reed stages the night-time scenes with canted camera angles and violently expressionistic shadows and light -- the scenes of Havana at night with its lurid-looking arcades, prostitutes, and flaring streetlights looks like footage from Welles' Touch of Evil.  It is flamboyantly spectacular and, also, of course, similar to Reed's imagery in The Third Man, a picture to which Our Man in Havana seems to have been intended as pendent.  Reed stages nightclub scenes with crowded tapestries of squirming female flesh and many of his interiors are jammed with people, costumes, and weird bric-a-brac to the extent that the imagery often resembles Pabst in The Love of Jeanne Ney or Three-penny Opera.  The street life in Havana is affectionately observed.  Coward's straitlaced British businessman is always flanked by musicians serenading him and there are lottery numbers displayed in the bars, jovial blind men and all sorts of half-naked girls cavorting in front of orchestras playing the habanera.  It's a great-looking movie and very well acted but just a little bit off, as it were; something indefinable is lacking.   The movie was shot in Havana in the months after Castro took power.  Fidel visited the set and reportedly chatted with Alec Guinness. The wide-screen format is beautifully used in an opening sequence in which a brawny stevedore gets eyed by a voluptuous hooker, approaches her, and, she flips him an piece of fruit that she has been eating -- the arc of the fruit extends all the way across the screen to where the stevedore is standing, defining the width of the frame (this shot freezes to let us contemplate the amorous couple and the celluloid distance between them.)  Watch carefully and you will see them strolling the streets in some of the later scenes. 

Sudden Fear

Sudden Fear (1952) is a Joan Crawford vanity picture that manages to be reasonably entertaining, if irritating -- Crawford is featured in almost every shot, frequently in enormous close-up.  The diva acts as if "fit to tear a cat", but she's not really very expressive -- her face is an abstract, mostly immobile wide-eyed mask; as someone once said in another context:  her performance runs the gamut from A to B. The film is extraordinary in some respects -- it's one of the few movies to directly acknowledge and exploit the ghastly appearance of its leading man, Jack Palance.  Palance is a goblin but his bizarre looks are generally taken for granted in other films in which he performs, just part of the equipment of a character actor specializing in heavies (this is the part, for instance, he plays in Shane).  Sudden Fear is a "beauty and the beast" story and Palance's uncanny features are, in fact, thematic to the film.  This is dramatized in the opening sequence in which Crawford, playing the part of an ultra-wealthy heiress and successful Broadway playwright, orders the director of her upcoming romance, in rehearsals, to fire Palance -- "he doesn't look like a romantic leading man," Crawford opines and, indeed, no truer words have ever been spoken.  Palance's character tells Crawford to go to San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor Art Museum to see a portrait of the great lover Casanova -- his point is that Casanova was an unprepossessing man with a large wart on his chin and that great lovers are, often, rather homely and plain-looking.  (Palance isn't just plain-looking; he's as scary as a movie monster).  I characterized this film as "beauty and the beast" but, in fact, it's better described as "the beast and the beast" -- Crawford is strange-looking also with glaring eyes under midnight black eyebrows and a sort of cardboard cut-out figure that is strangely formal and not sexy at all.  Both Crawford and Palance, accordingly, are Hollywood monsters -- it is unchivalrous to note that Crawford was 47 when she ramrodded through this project, an unabashed vanity production.  

Although Joan Crawford and Jack Palance have names in the convoluted plot of Sudden Fear, I can't remember them and, indeed, there's no point to referring to the characters using their sobriquets in the film -- so I'll just retain the usage of calling the stars, in this star vehicle, by their actual names.  After insulting Palance, Joan Crawford leaves Manhattan by train, traveling to her home (actually, at least, two homes) in San Francisco.  Palance turns out to be on the same coast-to-coast train and he courts Crawford, winning her heart during their several days of travel.   The movie is shrewd about concealing Palance's motives -- perhaps, he really loves her or, maybe, this is an elaborate scheme to punish her for firing him from the Broadway show.  In San Francisco, the couple continue their love affair and, in fact, Palance marries the playwright.  But, it turns out that Palance has a hussy on the side, Irene, played by Gloria Graham.  (Graham envisions the role as a sort of pre-pubescent nymphet; she's a sexualized brat.)  Irene and Palance plot to murder Joan Crawford before she can convey her enormous inherited wealth to some kind of non-profit foundation -- she wants to live solely on the proceeds of her plays.  The scheme to murder the playwriting heiress ends up being recorded by a dictation machine in Crawford's mansion and, of course, she hears her husband and his whore conspiring to the kill her.  At this point, the script, never particularly persuasive in the first place, goes off the tracks.  Crawford doesn't flee or report the murder plot to authorities; instead she contrives an elaborate plot of her own to kill Palance and pin the murder on Irene -- we get a fantasy-version of the plot complete with Irene being sentenced to death for the murder of her paramour.  This plan is too complicated to be executed successfully -- it involves carefully forged letters setting up assignations, a written time-table composed in 10 minute increments, Crawford dressing so as to imitate Irene's garb, and all sorts of other tricks and strategems.  At the last moment, Crawford can't bring herself to gun down Palance.  She ends out on the empty, mountainous streets of San Francisco, darting through an elaborate chiaroscuro of expressionistic alleys and lanes with Palance hunting her in a big boat of a car.  This is a spectacular tour-de-force involving glaring lights, dense darkness, canted camera angles, and very deep focus with figures fleeing across the remote background of empty urban landscapes -- all de Chirico's "Mystery and Melancholy of the Street" but with figures playing a deadly cat-and-mouse game in the shadowy arcades and plazas.  

I've called Sudden Fear, a vanity project for Joan Crawford.  There are three set-pieces featuring her emoting in big close-ups.  These sequences are unduly protracted and exist solely to allow Crawford to exhibit her acting chops.  In the first scene, Crawford voicelessly reacts to hearing Palance and Irene plotting to kill her.  Her eyes dilate, she breathes like a creature that is being relentlessly hunted, darting about in confusion, and, at last, simulates nausea (albeit in a very lady-like way) fleeing off-screen to vomit.  In the second protracted sequence, Crawford struggles with herself as to whether she should shoot Palance -- again, she's wide-eyed, anguished, clutching at herself.  The sequence just goes on and on.  At last, in the final shot, Crawford walks toward the camera that tracks with her:  we see her grief and horror become resignation and, then, transformed into something like triumph or, at least, resolute and courageous determination -- it's intended as a showpiece.  The script is overly intricate and profoundly implausible.  There are a number of red herrings or just downright errors in the scenario:  a bottle of poison is introduced into the film but not used and there's a scary winding set of steps without guardrail that lead fifty feet down  from a castle-like villa on the Bay to the stony rocks in the harbor -- but no one gets pitched off the steps.  Palance says that he's never been to San Francisco -- if this is true, how did he know about the picture of Casanova in the museum at the Palace of the Legion of Honor.  Palance's face is one of cinema's great, disturbing icons:  he's like an animate jack-o'-lantern, his taut skin stretched to the breaking point, a caricature of movie-handsome that is, in fact, hideous with a profile that looks like Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street.  Mike Connors, credited as "Touch" Connors, later famous as TV's Mannix, has the thankless role of Irene's escort and ostensible boyfriend -- of course, she's really having sex with the monstrous Palance (Connors' cliche good looks are not as intriguing as  the mug on Palance's monster); the poor guy is perpetually teased by Gloria Graham's perverse Irene but, always, comically rebuffed. 

All We Imagine as Light

 Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light is a deceptively simple film, an example of poetic realism, examining the lives of three women who work at a hospital in Mumbai.  The film has rough edges and, for 2/3rds of its 115 minute length, approximates a documentary --there are many hand-held shots, tracking scenes shot from subway cars, and images of monsoon storms in which the sky turns to a blue flood over the forest of high-rises.  Mumbai is shown in images that emphasize its claustrophobic aspects -- the tiny apartments and crush of people on the streets.  Lovers petting in a park appear against a backdrop of boys playing soccer just beyond a tattered veil of trees.  The subways are crowded to the point of appearing suffocating.  On the soundtrack, voices describe Mumbai as chaotic and lonely, a sort of funnel into which all the villages of south India have poured their people to make this thronging ferment -- everyone in the movie is a stranger and they are homesick for the impoverished rural places from which they have come.  But the last third of the movie, filmed along the Kerala coast, is bucolic and takes a strange turn into something like magical realism.  This part of the movie is integral to its meanings and, although describing the plot twist near the end is a spoiler, I don't know any other way of doing justice to this unique and wonderful film.  So, readers, beware...

Prabha is an efficient, experienced nurse at a teaching hospital in Mumbai.  Her husband, whom she barely knew (it was an arranged marriage) has emigrated to Germany where he works in a factory.  For a time, he called her and sent money home, but, now, has gone silent.  When Prabha calls him in Germany, she gets a woman's voice on the answering machine.  Prabha is isolated, like most of her associates, a refugee from a small, poverty-stricken Malayalam-speaking village somewhere a half day's train ride from the big city.  She repels invitations to go to the movies with her colleagues and rebuffs men who tentatively attempt to encourage her interest in them.  She seems sad and remote.  One day a rice-cooker arrives in the mail, a product of Germany -- during the monsoon, with sheets of water falling outside the window (and through as well since the shutters have blown open) she squats on the floor to embrace the fire-truck red cooker; it's all she has of her husband.  Prabha's roommate is Anu, an attractive nurse probably about fifteen years younger.  Anu is carrying on a forbidden affair with a Muslim boy, Shiaz.  All the other nurses know about this liaison, except perhaps, Prabha, who has turned a blind eye to the matter.  Prabha is trying to help Parvaty, a matronly lady also from the Malalayalam-speaking hinterlands.  Parvaty has lived for 22 years in what is called a chawl -- that is, a one-room apartment with an open balcony in a tenement building.  Mumbai is under construction and huge high-rises are being built everywhere, including on the tract of land where Parvaty's chawl is located.  The landlord intends to evict her without compensation since her papers are not in order and she can't even prove that she exists -- the lease was in the name of here deceased husband.  Prabha finds a lawyer to represent Parvaty in the landlord-tenant dispute but the attorney can't do anything to help her -- she's officially a non-person.  The first two-thirds of the movie documents these women's daily lives -- we see them on the subway, the lovers wandering in a night market or embracing by a soccer field, Prabha training young nurses who turn up their noses at a placenta that the women are studying in class.  The doctor whom Prabha serves tries to flirt with her very, very tentatively -- Prabha is teaching him the local lingua franca, that is, Hindi.  When Prabha discovers that Anu is involved with Shiaz, she insults her as a "slut", but, later, apologizes and makes Anu's favorite dish, fish curry -- Anu is also from a Malayalam village near the coast.  A cat is about to give birth.  The monsoon rains drench the city.  When it is apparent that the lawyer can't help Parvaty, Prabha and the older woman go out and throw stones at a billboard advertising the soon-to-be-built high rise resulting in the destruction of her chawl.  Anu is invited to visit Shiaz's home with his parents in a Muslim neighborhood.  Shiaz' parents are about to leave town for a wedding and the lovers will have the house to themselves.  Meanwhile Anu's mother keeps sending her pictures of possible fiancees.  Anu buys a burqa so she visit Shiaz' Muslim neighborhood.  But, then, he calls to tell  her that the subways are all flooded and that the wedding has been canceled as well.  A religious festival is underway -- earthmovers and tractors tow towering religious floats through the streets and there are fireworks.  This sequence, involving the appearance of something like the gods, marks the transition to the last third of the film that takes place far from the big city along the coastline with its rocks, coastal mountains, and beaches.  Parvaty, who is a cook at the hospital, has found a job cooking at a beach-front hostel in the village where she still has a house.  With Anu, Parvaty and Prabha go to the coast where they take rooms at a resort on a beach. Shiaz has come also and is hiding out somewhere in the environs.  He takes Anu to a sea-cave filled with ancient, eroded carvings of gods and goddesses -- Anu says that the voluptuous goddesses look like Anu.  We see a sheet or blanket spread out in the cave, apparently where Shiaz hopes to have sex with Anu.  In fact, they do have sex but the film is conspicuously vague about the location -- their mostly naked bodies are bathed in light; it is as if they are making love in a great torrent of bright light.  Prabha who has gone off into the brush to relieve herself, sees Shiaz and knows that Anu's lover has also come to the seaside resort.  A man has drowned in the sea.  Prabha runs out onto the beach where she applies CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the man who slowly revives.  There is no hospital anywhere nearby and so the man is taken to a hut where a wizened, tiny old lady lives.  The little old lady thinks that Prabha is the man's wife and she asks her to stay by his bedside as he revives.  The man wakes up but has no recollection of where he is, or how he came to be in the sea.  Prabha feeds him and washes a large wound on his side and, then, recognizes that the man is her husband, somehow, returned from Germany.  (This is the remarkable event that animates the last part of the film.)  She caresses the confused and injured man and, then, in an eerie voice-over accompanied by shots of twilight blue hills fading into mist says that she never wants to see him again.  Parvaty and Anu are sitting on the beach.  Prabha joins them and tells Anu to bring Shiaz to their beach shack.  In a long shot, under a sky resplendent with stars, we see the beach shack lit up, with music, and people dancing.  

The last part of the film is very delicately handled.  The transition from realism to dream-like fantasy is gradual.  At first, there is no electricity in the shack, but, then, miraculously there is power.  The lovers in the cave seem to be making love on the beach in bright daylight.  The strange, eroded gods watch over the young lovers.  The half-drowned man is confused about his identity and we have no way of knowing whether, in fact, he is somehow Prabha's husband who has abandoned her.  (This part of the movie reminds me of Lijo Jose Pellisery's Nanpakal Nerathu Majakkam, a film in which religious pilgrims find themselves stranded in a tiny village when their bus breaks down -- gradually, the pilgrims become disoriented and experience memories of their reincarnations; the little town is almost completely devoid of men who have all gone to Europe or Dubai for work.)  We have seen that Prabha is a kind of ghost herself, estranged from others due to her marriage to a man who has abandoned her.  Her profession is that of a rescuer and, when the nurse resuscitates the man on the beach, she perceives him as her lost husband -- she has rescued him and so, now, can escape from his baleful influence...at least, this is my interpretation of the film's ending.  The drowned man says:  "It will be different this time," but Prabha rejects him -- is this a sign of her growth?  Or just more evidence of her isolation? The pace of growth in Mumbai is irresistible; the city is being transformed into something not recognizable by its generations of immigrants from the poor villages in the area.  Parvaty says "the future is here but I'm not prepared for it."  She remarks that  she feels "scared"; Shiaz is scared by his love for the rather frivolous Anu.  An inhabitant in Mumbai says in Marathi:  This is a city of illusions.  Another woman says in Bengali:  "Even if you live in the gutter, you must not be angry.  This is the spirit of Mumbai."

The film resembles Jean Renoir.  It is very tenderly made and inexplicably moving.  In Malayalam, Shiaz writes on the wall of the cave, among other grafitti:  "Our love is like the endless sea."  And, it is from this endless sea of love, that the drowned man is pulled from the waters.  All We Imagine As Light was awarded the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024.

A Very British Scandal

 A Very British Scandal is a 2018 BBC three-part series based on a non-fiction book about a celebrated political contretemps and criminal trial.  The program is very slightly opaque to American viewers because it involves aspects of the British class-system that are unclear on this side of the pond.  However, the series is so expertly and vigorously directed by Stephen Frears, so robustly and pungently acted by its principals, that the rather exotic subject matter is, at once, fascinating and gripping.  In fact, the show develops a sizeable emotional charge in the viewer -- the whole thing is so childish, unfair, and, ultimately, unreasonable that the audience feels a tangible sense of grief at the outcome.  

The series begins with a couple of MP's, apparently members of the House of Lords, dining on beef tartar and discussing their sexual conquests with Trump-style "grab 'em by the pussy" bonhomie.  The two upper crust gents claim to be bisexual and boast about experiences with both genders; the show's protagonist, a politician named Jeremy Thorpe is, however, homosexual.  Thorpe is played by Hugh Grant who is endlessly resourceful is dramatizing the MP's sense of entitlement, the impunity with which he exploits lower-caste young men, as well as the character's noblesse oblige and his virtues as a politician.  It seems that Thorpe has embarked on a torrid affair with a sweet young thing, Norman, played by Ben Whishaw.  Norman seems to be a bird with a broken wing, a melancholy victim whose demeanor suggests a damsel in distress, someone much in need of rescue.  Thorpe smitten with Norman's haplessness takes him home to his mother's house where he nonchalantly gets out a jar of vaseline, sets it on the nightstand and tells Norman to keep quiet (so as not to affright his mother) and "assume the position."  Unfortunately for Thorpe, he falls in love with Norman, sets him up in a London apartment, and nicknames him "Bunny" is letters that his sends to his boyfriend.  Of course, an unequal relationship of this kind can't persist and so Thorpe discards Bunny.  To his amazement and to the shock of the show's audience, the effeminate and timorous Bunny turns out to have a spine of steel -- he has hidden resources and, when spurned by Thorpe, aggressively seeks revenge, ultimately blackmailing him.  Thorpe brazenly tells his political cronies to have Bunny killed -- it's not clear whether he's serious or just joking but several shady demi-monde figures take the MP at his word and plot to murder Norman.  These co-conspirators are complete morons and comically inept -- they fail at their half-assed attempt to kill Norman.  The police are called upon to investigate and they easily discover evidence implicating Thorpe in the murder plot.  The bulk of the third and last episode is devoted to a spectacular trial in the Old Bailey.  Thorpe has hired a barrister named Carmen as his defense lawyer and there are plenty of fireworks in the best style of the old Rumpole shows -- witty asides, a curmudgeonly and prejudiced Judge, and scathing cross-examination.  Everyone betrays everyone else.  The MP to whom Thorpe confessed  his sexual exploits, Thorpe's best friend, is summoned to court where he give testimony against his former pal.  Norman gives an impressive speech about the travails of being homosexual in England during the era of the laws forbidding sodomy.  Further, people always underestimate the effete Norman -- he massacres Barrister Carmen during cross-examination.  Of course, a conviction of a former MP is unthinkable.  Thorpe is acquitted but his political career lies in ruins.  Throughout the film, Norman has said that he actually loved Thorpe and that his only motive in bringing the affair to light is to force the government to provide him with a National Health card expropriated by an offended former employer.  At the end of the show, we are provided glimpses of the real protagonists involved in these scandalous transactions -- Norman is the only one of the principal protagonists still alive -- and he still hasn't received a viable National Health card.  

The show is extremely witty, well-written, with lots of biting repartee in the manner of G. B. Shaw or Oscar Wilde.  The acting is beyond reproach and the complex plot moves along at a gallop.  Frears doesn't linger on scenes and cuts from place to place with aplomb, keeping the audience at his elbow with titles that tell us where the scene is playing out.  It's all exceedingly lucid, very funny, and, yet, ultimately tragic.  Curiously, in a film that is about male homosexuals, there are many excellent female parts.  Most notably, Thorpe has a plain matronly wife who absolutely refuses to be shocked or, even, judgmental about her husband's sexual exploits -- she notes that she "was raised with Benjamin Britten" and worked as an opera singer:  "I've seen things you can't even imagine," she tells her straitlaced and formal husband.  Her loyalty in the face of the awful scandal enveloping her husband is one of the most touching things in the program.  Norman also has a wife who supports him through thick and thin and the show wends its way to its courtroom climax.  Stephen Frears has always been an excellent director -- I recall his early films including My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie get laid (1987), both very fine pictures involving themes.  This program, available on Amazon, is exquisitely directed and memorably acted.  I recommend it highly.  

Black Bag

 Apparently, Great Britain is infested with top-secret, amoral, nihilistic secret service agencies for whom the end always justifies the means.  In The Lazarus Project, time-traveling agents re-set the world clock every time there is a nuclear holocaust or armaggedon,  Lazarus Project operatives are globe-trotters always in hot pursuit of purloined nuclear weapons.  The Lazarus Project is a cleverly written TV series produced in London; Black Bag, which has a similar premise, is a spy movie also set in the UK.  In Black Bag, the agents are engaged in murder and mayhem to stop a Ukrainian terrorist from planting something called "Severus" in a nuclear power plant.  Severus will bore through the shell of the reactor to set off a cataclysmic chain-reaction, predicted to end the war between Russian and Ukraine but at the cost of 20,000 civilian casualties.  (Severus is a pure example of what Hitchcock called a "MacGuffin" it's the object of intense efforts but nothing more than a plot device with no significance in itself.)  In both The Lazarus Project and Black Bag, the agents who are attractive young men and women have no real outlet for their super-confidential secrets and confessions and all suffer guilt at their misdeeds -- therefore, the characters solace themselves by having incestuous in-house love-affairs.  After all, there is no one else with whom they can share the violence and tragedy of their existences.  

Black Bag (2025, Steven Soderbergh) begins with an elaborate and wholly pointless Steadi-cam shot following the hero, George, a stiff fellow with black hornrimmed glasses, into a club after passing through a labyrinth of corridors to encounter a fellow operative who tells him that there is a mole in the group of agents charged with neutralizing Severus.  George is supposed to ferret out the traitor, a problematic task because his own wife, Katherine, (also a spy) may well be the double-agent.  George stages a dinner party for the members of the Severus team and laces the chana masala with truth serum.  This leads to a noisy, and recriminatory, gathering that plays like something from Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  The couples commence bickering, sexual infidelities are disclosed and ferocious insults exchanged.  George orders the participants to play a game in which they have to announce a resolution, not for themselves but for the person seated to their right.  This leads to more vicious fighting among the various couples until Clarissa, the tech who is expert in surveillance satellites, pins her boyfriend Freddie's hand to the table with a butcher knife.  (Not to worry -- he forgives her.)  An elaborately complex plot follows in which various clues are collected, all of which lead George to the reasonable suspicion that his wife is the Judas.  In this world, when anyone asks a question that is inconvenient to answer, they simply respond with the evasion:  "It's in the black bag."  George, who loves his wife, is met with her denials but, also, the "black bag" evasion.  A satellite is used to gather high-tech evidence and there's an extended scene involving a polygraph test that is confounded by Clarissa "clenching her anal sphincter" -- I have no idea whether this would work, although I assume the screenwriter, the  redoubtable David Koepp, has researched this issue.  (Koepp is a very famous Hollywood writer -- the Jurassic Park films are his scripts as are a number of other Spielberg projects including some of the Indiana Jones pictures.)   After many twists and turns, some aerial bombardment accomplished by a drone in a showy sequence, and several more revelations of sexual misbehavior, George and Katherine order their team to another dinner party, a reprise of the first horror-show in which the identity of the culprit is finally revealed.  Since all evidence points to Katherine, the viewer can be pretty much assured that she is not the mole.  

This is a well-made movie that is always exciting.  The acting is good:  Michael Fassbender plays the mild-mannered George -- he looks like a surrogate for Soderbergh himself.  Cate Blanchett is good as Katherine, a sort of femme fatale.  Much of the script is written in intentionally unintelligible jargon.  This is a  phenomenon that I call the Succession effect.  In the HBO series, Succession many scenes were composed in a rebarbative, nightmare lingo that is spoken so swiftly and confidently that the audience doesn't have time to figure what is actually being said -- you can generally get the tone of the remarks but not their precise meaning.  This is how Koepp has written the script for Black Bag -- people says stuff like "The Sat handover is 3 minutes and 20 seconds just long enough to gather several sigs."  Big chunks of the movie have that tone which the viewer has to interpret as hyper-technical spy-speak for high tech data gathering.  The use of this sort of impenetrable jargon was annoying in Succesion and it's no less annoying (if better justified) here.  The movie is fairly civilized, with intelligent nasty dialogue in the Albee manner, and I thought it was entertaining.  But there's not a lot of there there. 

The Witches of Eastwick

 George Miller's The Witches of Eastwick (1987) is a lavishly produced, operatic comedy starring Jack Nicholson in a menage a quatre with three women played by Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon.  The actresses are not ingenues but exhibited in this picture at the very height of their mature beauty.  The camera wielded by Vilmos Szigmond loves them almost as much, or, even, more, than their devilish gentleman-caller played by Nicholson.  They are filmed with supernatural radiance infusing their tangled locks of hair, posed like pre-Raphaelite Madonnas or Tuscan angels -- sexual love, it seems, makes them shine like icons in candle-lit niches.  Although deeply erotic, the film never really sexualizes its leading ladies -- there is no nudity and they are always dressed, more or less, in a lady-like if glamorous way.  Eros, in this film, is palpable but, also, somewhat abstract, almost Platonic in its manifestation.  At times, the film veers unsteadily into horror but Miller is so accomplished that he manages to juggle the ghastly with the romantic and comical in a way that doesn't rupture the tone of bemused adoration directed at women in the cast -- they are goddesses and not to be besmirched.  (I can understand this film better having seen Miller's most recent, highly feminist-inflected, iterations of the Mad Max movies -- the heroines of The Witches of Eastwick are earlier versions of the indomitable women warriors that we find portrayed in the post-apocalyptic road warrior films.)  Although there are several scenes set in a strait-laced Protestant church in the hamlet of Eastwick, the film is fundamentally and exuberantly pagan --  the picture pits the voracious energy of the masculine Devil against the serene and complacent trinity of the three goddesses, clearly muses for both Miller and his director of photography.  

Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer) has been deserted by her husband who has absconded leaving her with six daughters (whom miraculously all seem to be the same approximate age). Sukie works for a small-town newspaper that mostly retails local gossip.  Janey (Sarandon) is shown in the film on the first day after her divorce --she teaches music at an elementary school and is sexually harassed by the bombastic Principal.  Alexandra (Cher) is a sculptor who makes clay figures of fertility goddesses to sell in the local gift shop catering to tourists to the picturesque sea-side village, located apparently somewhere near Cape Cod.  Alex's husband has died.  At a Fourth of July picnic, the loathsome Principal makes an elaborate and boring speech.  The three women daydream and imagine the oration cut short by a violent thunderstorm -- and, no sooner thought than done.  A storm boils out of sky and sends the crowd scattering with bolts of lightning.  Later, when the women meet for drinks -- a weekly custom, it seems -- they muse that their wishes came true to bring a precipitous end to the Principal's tedious speech.  As they get drunk, the three women talk about their desire for a mysterious stranger to arrive in town, woo them, and bring sexual passion to their presently celibate lives.  Out of the storm, a long black vehicle appears, rushing through the tempest to their town.  Jack Nicholson playing a sinister figure called Daryl Van Horne is riding in the sedan driven by his servant, the uncanny giant Fidel (he looks a bit like Lurch on the old Addams Family shows.)  Van Horne buys the Lenox Mansion, said to be built on a seaside bluff where witches were executed, and fills the place with objets d'art and musical instruments -- the interior of the mansion is an elaborate, opera set with filigree, plaster bas relief and the huge blue lagoon in an enclosed natatorium.  First, Van Horne seduces Cher's character, Alex.  He is unremittingly vulgar, obscene, and lascivious.  Alex tells him that she despises him, thinks he's dressed like a fool (he lolls on a bed in pajamas like Hugh Hefner) and, even, smells bad.  But Van Horne, who describes himself as a "horny little devil", prevails on her and she becomes his lover.  He, next, consoles Janey to improve her musical skills by encouraging her to play with more passion.  Delicately, he parts her thighs to place her cello between them.  As he accompanies her, she plays with such unbridled passion that the cello and its strings ignites and burns up on the floor.  Alex and Janey, who learn that Van Horne has had sex with both of them, go to his mansion to confront him.  They find Sukie lounging around, sitting in a sort of caparisoned tent on the front lawn under the Downton Abbey-like facade of the mansion.  Van Horne summons the women to a game of doubles on his tennis court -- he uses magic to make the ball hover in the air, dart here and there, and fly into the sky where it ruptures a cloud to cause another downpour.  The women come to accept their roles in this Devil's menage -- we see them hovering in the air over the swimming pool, eating cherries out of a great floating bowl, and flying through clouds of pink balloons to the music of Puccini's Nessun dorma.  Meanwhile, another woman, Felicia, the newspaper editor's wife, (played by Veronica Cartwright) senses that deviltry is afoot in Eastwick.  She plays the part of Linda Blair in The Exorcist -- she seems entranced, possessed, spouting admonitory obscenities about the devil and his "whores".  (Characters vomit cherry pits somehow transferred to their gullet from the orgies at Lenox mansion.) The three heroines wish Felicia gone and, once again, this wish is fulfilled -- her husband, the mild-mannered newspaper editor beats her to death with a iron fire poker.  Appalled at what has happened, the three women vow to end their relationship with Van Horne.  Although Van Horne has played the part of the cynical caddish seducer, in fact, he has fallen in love with each member of the trio.  He's miserable that he has been rejected and tries to re-ignite his love affairs with them.  By now, the balance of power has shifted to the three women.  Van Horne tires to coerce them back into bed with him by various devilish tricks and, in fact, tortures Sukie, causing her extreme pain.  Alex and Janey fight back and, ultimately, make a wax voodoo doll representing Van Horne.  Sukie is cured and she joins her sisters at the Lomax mansion for the final showdown with Van Horne.  This is a noisy spectacular affair, involving all sorts of picturesque mayhem.  In the end, the Devil is defeated.  But the women are now all pregnant.  In a short coda, we see them bathing their sons, all of whom are, of course, the spawn of Satan.

The movie is very impressively shot, with fabulous locations, and wonderful action sequences -- parts of the picture are reminiscent of the Road Warrior films with Nicholson wildly crawling over the top of his sedan as its spins out-of-control down a winding seaside highway.  There is a sequence in which Janey's fifth grade band plays Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik with satanic inspiration -- the kids throw aside their music and perform like demonic infant prodigies.  Nicholson is fantastic, strutting around cock-sure with banter of this sort:  "I like a little pussy after lunch".  He wines and dines his prey in an oriental-looking Saracen tent set up on the front lawn of his vast manor.  The characters are always gorging sensuously on exotic fruits, whipped cream, chocolates.  In the last 15 minutes, Nicholson gets to pull out all the stops and reverts to the character he played in The Shining seven years earlier -- he rolls his eyes, grunts, and bellows and runs around like an enraged chimpanzee:  "all I want is my family all together," he laments.  I don't know the extent to which the film adapts and follows John Updike's source novel.  Nicholson gets to howl some spectacularly misogynistic harangues:  "When God makes mistakes, we call it nature.  Woman is a mistake."   Notwithstanding the Devil's misogyny, the power in this film is decidedly female -- it is the women who summon Van Horne; he doesn't call them.  And, when they find him inconvenient and dangerous, they don't hesitate to cast him aside notwithstanding all his wiles.  In the end poor Satan is desperately enamored with three heroines -- and this makes sense, we are also.   

The Way Back

The Australian director, Peter Weir, has not made a movie since The Way Back released in 2010.  I recall that the film was released to lukewarm reviews and failed to make any money.  It's a handsome production with strong performances but the picture is harrowing and unpleasant to watch.  Furthermore, there's a weird aspect to the script -- the movie seems to be a paean to Polish nationalism with a curious reactionary aspect.  Even the villains in the picture go out of their way to praise Polish patriots.  I assume this strange feature originates in the book on which the picture is based Slawomir Rawicz' The Long Walk (1956).  Peter Weir has been an acclaimed filmmaker -- he made The Year of Living Dangerously (with a young Mel Gibson), Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Witness (with Harrison Ford), The Truman Show, and a film version of Master and Commander (based on the Patrick O'Brien historical novel); his pictures have been intelligent fusions of thought-provoking and challenging narratives with star power and popular appeal.  Weir's instincts seem to have deserted him in The Way Back -- there's something impalpably wrong with the movie; it may be that the subject matter is too grim to be entertaining.  

During World War Two, a resistance fighter for the Polish underground is captured by Stalin's thugs.  The man is asked to sign a confession but refuses.  Then, the commissar confronts our protagonist with his wife who has been tortured into informing on him.  The resistance fighter, Janusz, is sent to a labor camp in Siberia, a hundred or so miles north of Lake Baikal.  The labor camp is a hellhole in which the prisoners are beaten, forced to work in subzero temperatures cutting down trees and breaking rocks, and systematically starved.  The Gulag is run from the inside by a group of malign career criminals led by Valka (Colin Ferrell) who plays a homicidal gangster -- he knifes a man to death in order to take his sweater which he, then, gambles away.  The work detail gets caught in a blizzard and a number of the weakened prisoners freeze to death.  Janusz, who is skilled in outdoor survival, saves the company by retreating into a forest (notwithstanding threats by the panicked guards to shoot him) and constructing a wind break.  In retaliation for his resourcefulness, he and his comrades are sent to a mine, visualized as a chaos of explosions, falling rock, and steamy shadowy darkness.  In the mine, Janusz hallucinates the door to a dacha with flowers on the sill that he staggers toward but can't reach.  The situation becomes increasingly dire and, so, Janusz with six other inmates plot their escape and flee from the camp in the snowy darkness -- the blizzard will cover their tracks.  After a desperate chase -- they are pursued by dogs -- the convicts elude the guards but, then, are trapped in the Siberian wilderness.  (Like Trump's "Alligator Alcatraz", geography not walls and guards are the main security measures confining the prisoners to the Gulag camp.)   One of the men has night blindness, wanders off while gathering firewood, and freezes to death.  The men become increasingly weak -- we see them eating bugs and contemplating cannibalism -- but, at last, reach Lake Baikal where there are remote and scattered villages from which they can steal food. Upon reaching the border with Mongolia, the fierce convict, Valka, refuses to leave Mother Russia -- he is a Russian patriot and, in fact, an admirer of Lenin and Stalin.  The escapees have picked up a wan, wraith-like Polish girl wandering in the woods near the great lake -- it's never entirely clear why she is alone in the wilderness and, as it happens, she is also a liar so her explanations must be discounted.  Because Mongolia is also a Communist country (and this film is avowedly anti-Communist), the characters continue to avoid villages and roads, walking cross country until they reach the Gobi desert.  They, then, stagger across the desert for hundreds of miles gradually perishing from thirst and inanition.  The Polish girl dies and others perish as well.  Only four survivors reach Tibet where they are met by some monks who assist them, demanding that they wait for Spring to limp over the Himalayas.  But our heroes are anxious to get back and, so, they hike across the Himalayas in mid-winter, ending up in the terraces where tea is grown in Bhutan.  This is effectively the end of the trek and the film doesn't really explain what happens next.  There's a montage involving the vexed history of countries behind the Iron Curtain progressing from the end of the Second World War through the Fall of Communism.  In the final scene, Vulka, who is now, an old man sees the dacha that he has envisioned for the last forty years, finds a key under a peculiar honeycomb-shaped rock and, then, enters the cottage where he is reunited with his aged wife.  

All of this is filmed with great conviction.  The protagonists starve, are frozen half to death, fall into water and run across fracturing ice; they are swarmed by mosquitos until their eyes are swollen shut and, then, crawl across an infinity of bright, hideous desert -- they drink mud and eat insects and fight with wolves for fragments of a rotting bloody carcass.  Their feet are scabbed, swollen, blistered and the sun burns their faces.  It's mostly horrific and utterly without drama -- it's almost impossible to make a movie about a hike of this sort:  what are you going to show?  people walking doggedly through all sorts of landscapes -- they just walk and walk and walk, quarreling sometimes, and, then, collapsing and dying.  Movies about people perishing of thirst in the desert don't have much appeal.  It's the same problem with the Titanic -- do I really want to see a bunch of people drowning in frigid water?  Parts of the movie are gripping and the landscapes are spectacular, huge vistas with tiny figures limping over the peaks or glaciers or sand dunes.  But the movie seems somewhat pointless.  Ed Harris plays an American prisoner haunted by grief; he is anguished over bringing his family to Russia where he was employed as some kind of engineer and, therefore, blames himself for his son being shot by the Communists.  The film's entire orientation is aggressively pro-Polish and anti-Communist.  A good comparison to this film is Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn about American POWs escaping through the wilderness from a hellish prison camp in the jungle -- somehow, Herzog makes a picture that is febrile, a visionary nightmare from which the viewer feels distanced due to the movie's beauty and feverish alienating intensity -- he aestheticizes starvation and misery.  Weir, who was also one of cinema's notable visionaries (I am thinking of The Last Wave and Picnic at Hanging Rock) can't quite figure out how to make walking interesting -- it's like The Lord of the Rings without the monster spiders, horror-horsemen, and orcs.  I wanted to like this picture because it's an honorable effort, but I can't recommend it.  

(The book on which the movie is based has recently been revealed to be a hoax.  There's no evidence that the protagonist and author actually completed the titular Long Walk  and there are, indeed, certain implausibilities in the story.  Knowledge that this grim trek never really happened is both reassuring but fatal to the movie, which seems completely pointless in the absence of a documentary basis in fact)_

To Live and Die in LA

 The logic of big business popular movies is the logic of advertising and publicity.  If something is successful, then, there must be enhancements, improvements to make it even bigger and better than before. William Friedkin seems trapped in this logic with respect to his film To Live and Die in LA (1985).  Friedkin's assignment, it seems, is to remake The French Connection in Los Angeles and amplify the effects in the former film until the audience is deafened and beat into submission.  Fundamentally, the picture is rooted in 40's and 50's noir, a humble B-picture genre.  Both The French Connection and To Live and Die in LA are variants on the tough, rogue cop picture, films like Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground and just about anything with Sterling Hayden (Crime Wave, The Naked Alibi and others down to Captain McCluskey in The Godfather.)  For better or worse, Friedkin aspires to something like art and kicks everything into high gear.  Characters can't walk down a corridor without the camera breathlessly rushing forward on a collision course with the figure; a simply colloquy at a desk, turns into a swooping 280 degree camera movement and, when someone enters a studio or a multi-room robber's roost, the camera zooms alongside, recording the entire space as if Friedkin had forgotten that he could cut to elide the space between opening the door and the cop's destination -- I guess Friedkin wants to show-off both the proficiency of his director of photography, the great Robbie Mueller, as well as the kinky and lush detail designed by his set decorator.  (Clearly, Friedkin wanted Mueller to replicate the extraordinary twilight effects and night photography in Wenders film noir The American Friend -- many sequences are shot at dawn or sunset, the magic hour and fast motion photography of the sun setting or rising makes the palms tremulous with a sort of wild hysteria -- Mueller loves the palm trees and fast forwards them so they writhe in the red light like souls in Hell.  I attribute to films like To Live and Die in LA, the annoyingly ADHD-style mise-en-scene in many of the films directed by Ridley Scott and his brother, pictures in which the camera is never still, but constantly flitting back and forth, hither and yon...

Friedkin begins the movie with a montage redolent of 40's (or, even, 30's) Hollywood productions showing bad guys corrupting the currency with counterfeit bills.  Some Secret Service guys are on the track of the villains.  One of the cops, a case-hardened veteran, is three days from retirement.  His young partner Rick Chance salutes him for his courage and commitment.  Needless to say, the older guy has tracked the counterfeiter (Willem Dafoe as Masters) to a remote gulch in the Mojave Desert where the villain is printing cash.  In this isolated venue, the senior cop, who is inexplicably working on  his own, is murdered.  Chance vows revenge and is willing to bend the rules to get his man.  The film tracks the talented, if evil, Masters as he frolics with bisexual models and kisses his boyfriend and periodically terrorizes and thrashes various folk whom he encounters.  Chance has a female informant to whom he is casually vicious -- he's also sleeping with her between bouts of bullying. For some reason, this girl, who seems a glamorous type of trailer trash (she works in a topless place as a cashier), is privy to all sorts of top-secret underworld gossip. Chance and his new partner, a straight-arrow named Jon Vulkevich, go undercover and negotiate with Masters.  The mastermind demands $50,000 upfront for some vast amount of counterfeit currency.  Chance can't get the department to advance the funds and, so, acting on a tip from his girlfriend and informant, the two cops stage a robbery of another con who is carrying $50,000 down from San Francisco.  They ambush the con, called in the film "a Chinaman", and shake him down.  The Chinaman gets killed by a sniper and all hell breaks loose as a small army of armed men and souped-up vehicles pursues Chance and his hapless partner.  This sets up the film's prinicipal set piece, a spectacular car chase which begins in a railroad yard full of moving locomotives, progresses through a fruit market where dozens of trucks are making deliveries in an extended alley about 15 feet long; the boys evade the obstacles in their way, drop down onto the empty bed of the LA river channel where they engage in a demolition derby chase for another few miles before evading their pursuers by driving the wrong way against rush hour traffic.  (Friedkin is clearly attempting to outdo himself with respect to the famous car chase in The French Connection, vehicles carooming between pillars of an elevated train.)  There are a few unproductive subplots involving another thug who pretends to turn informant but, then, escapes -- this is a very greasy-looking John Turturro -- and some complications ensue with respect to a crooked lawyer who has pocketed a big chunk of counterfeit dough.  There are raids, counter-raids, some sex scenes with beautiful depraved women, and, ultimately, a fiery climax.  The straight-arrow partner, Vukelvich, has been thoroughly corrupted and, in the last scene, he's calling on his partner's sleazy informant girlfriend to bully her before forcing sex upon the woman.  It's all unsavory and picturesque.  Friedkin films LA as a port city and most of the action takes place near the harbor or among the infernal refineries of City of Industry.  There's no trace of Hollywood in this picture, except that the molls are all registered with the studios and looking for work in the film business.  Friedkin makes LA look like one of the lower circles of Dante's Inferno.  And the picture has a throbbing sound track by the duo Wang Chung, including some songs that were once famous in the 80's.  

Nothing much changes in this genre; the bad guy has a drop-dead gorgeous moll who runs around in the 1985 equivalent of the lingerie these dames wore in the forties and fifties.  Because we are more sexually adventurous today, the bad guy and his girlfriend are bisexual -- in 1985, bisexuality was deemed to be the height of post-modern decadence.  (Today, a film like this would feature glamorous transsexuals.) The rogue cop casually beats everyone up and cheats with respect to evidence and, indeed, ends up engineering a robbery (involving the Chinaman) against fellow law enforcement -- this explains the army of cops who chase them after the poor undercover Asian is gunned down.  Friedkin's players are fantastically attractive -- the young Willem Dafoe is pretty as a Cosmopolitan model.  (In recent films he looks like his haggard face has been set on fire and the blaze put out with a rake -- but, in this movie, Dafoe is more beautiful than the leading lady.) The only person even more gorgeous than Dafoe is William Petersen, the rogue cop.  He's so preternaturally gorgeous that Friedkin saves a luminous close-up of him for the very end of the credits -- stick around to see it.    

The Hunter

 The Hunter (2011) features Willem Dafoe as a laconic mercenary tasked with shooting the last surviving Tasmanian tiger and harvesting its DNA for a shadowy, malign biotech firm.  Dafoe gives a constricted, low-key performance; he channels the sense of disappointment that underlies the movie.  The disappointment is not only thematic to the film, but, also, an aspect of the audience's experience:  in other words, the film is disappointing as a matter of thematic intent, but also disappoints by withholding the pleasures that would be conventional to a film of this sort.  Disappointment is not a bug but a feature of The Hunter.

Operating under the name of Martin David, Dafoe's character travels to a remote part of Tasmania and commences solitary excursions into the outback in pursuit of a single Tasmanian Tiger thought to live in the high, barren mountains.  He follows in the footsteps of another hunter who has vanished, leaving behind a devastated family.  His base-camp is the outpost from which the previous hunter named Jarrah vanished into the wilderness.  In that shack, David finds that there is no electricity, that the water is compromised, and two children are running feral in the neglected compound -- the place is like the Mexican hippie commune imagined by Robert Stone in Dog Soldiers:  there are speakers perched in trees and the branches near the house are decorated with Christmas tree lights.  Unconscious, like Sleeping Beauty, the children's mother, the wife of the missing hunter, is lying comatose in bed, doped into oblivion.  David is shocked by the desuetude in the shack and outbuildings but committed to his mission.  He tries to take a hotel room in the tiny town near the shack but the village is inhabited by malign hillbillies who are aggrieved that environmental activists are suing to shut down the town's only industry, harvesting and processing trees from the dense fern-filled jungle in the foothills to the mountains.  On several occasions. locals threaten David and we expect some sort of violence to erupt with the hero, as a trained mercenary, cracking the skulls of the village tough guys.  But this never happens.  Although there's an undercurrent of violence, no actual fighting occurs.  David is led into the wild by a bushwhacker played by Sam Neill.  Neill's character is avuncular but seems only slightly less hostile than the local hoodlums. With the help of the two children at the compound, David cleans things up, gives their mother, Lucy, a bath, gets the generator working so that the Christmas tree lights can be lit, and seems to rescue the family from their plight.  David is a fan of classical music and he plays arias and choral works from the sound system wired into the trees.  In the remote mountains, he sees tracks from the Thylacine and, perhaps, glimpses it.  He traps Tasmanian devils, guts them, and creates snares for the tiger.  But the beast is too cunning.  The scenes in the mountain meadows are impressive pictorially -- the heights look like the Scottish highlands, all heather and bog with tarns and spiky escarpments of cracked black rock.  On occasion, it rains and, even, snows.  There is a confrontation with hoodlums on the narrow highway and another encounter at a party at the compound where the widow and her children live.  But the menace posed by the locals never comes to fruition -- one side or the other keeps backing down, certainly, a realistic enough scenario but one that disappoints an audience hoping to see Dafoe's character revenge himself (and the widow) on the bad guys.  In fact, the widow says that the bad guys aren't all that bad -- they're just local men who are upset because they are unemployed.  David finds the bones of the widow but doesn't tell her.  His discovers a lair, a rocky den, where the Thylacine lives and seems to be on the verge of trapping the creature.  Sam Neill's character turns out to be in league with the biotech company.  The biotech company has lost faith in David and sends an assassin to kill David and replace him as the tiger's hunter.  This sinister plot goes awry setting up the film's inevitably disappointing and unprepossessing climax.  I won't detail the ending of the picture but will remark that the entire movie is set up to motivate a love affair between David and the young widow.  (We have seen that David has become a sort of surrogate father to the children.)  But the film disappoints -- not only is the love affair thwarted but audience expectations are disappointed in a way that seems almost perversely cruel.

The film, directed by Daniel Nettheim from a renowned novel by Julia Leigh, is always gripping.  The premise is fascinating and the movie is largely shot in the Tasmanian highlands, a remarkable landscape of heather, bogs, and boulders. But the fuse on this film is so slow-burning that it's extinguished before there is any real climax.  The picture has so much integrity that it ends in tragedy that remains undramatized.  In Australia, there is a genre of writing called Tasmanian Gothic -- Leigh's novel is considered an outstanding example of that kind of work.  The picture's ending makes sense conceptually but it doesn't satisfy the audience emotionally -- the whole thing is a sort of muted, intelligent downer.  It's very hard to understand why the movie has to end the way that it does.  Edited into the film are documentary sequences from the thirties showing the last Tasmanian Tiger in captivity.  Those images, reproduced in ghostly, silvery black and white, are profoundly disturbing:  the Tiger is a wolf-like creature with a lean, striped body and an elongated, somewhat reptilian head -- these tigers could open their jaws to an amazing breadth, a gape large enough to devour the whole world..  I think the picture is worth seeing for a number of reasons, not the least Dafoe's intelligent, melancholy performance, but you must watch this movie, if only to see the images of the tiger now thought to be extinct.  

The Gentlemen

 The British action director, Guy Ritchie, was once married to Madonna.  Apparently, their liaison lasted for six or seven years before ending in divorce around 2008.  Ritchie, who seems to exemplify "laddishness" (if that's a word), has a taste for superficial flash; this is not surprising in light of the director's relationship with the pop star -- his films are engineered like an Italian sports car, fast, sleek, and cruel, but without any intelligence beyond the capacity for generating torque and horse-power while clinging to the curves on twisty road.  For the first 15 minutes, a movie like the crime picture The Gentlemen seems like the best entertainment in town, hyper-articulate, expensively staged, featuring an all-star cast involved in brutal shenanigans mostly played for raunchy comedy.  After a half-hour, it all becomes a wee bit too much.  And, at the two hour point, you are begging for the damn thing to come to an end.  The precocious puerile humor, the nihilistic cynicism, and the lavishly (and pointlessly) complex narrative -- an unreliable voice-over, frequent cut-aways to illustrate points, cartoons educating the baffled viewer on various arcane points involving ethnicity and economics, and a general proclivity to not just penetrate but wholly demolish the fourth-wall -- all of these devices become exhausting; although the picture is supposed to be witty, knowing, and funny, the project is ultimately, more or less, humorless.  Ritchie's career illustrates the baleful influence of Quentin Tarantino -- his movies contain all of the twists and turns and learned variations on genre themes that you find in Tarantino but without the American director's commitment to his twisted characters and occasional flashes of brilliance.    

The Gentlemen ( 2019), a convoluted crime picture, sets out to be a cheeky, irreverent, and shocking entertainment.  It succeeds until it doesn't.   The movie features an all-star cast of impressive and charismatic male actors -- "laddishness"(if there is such a word) scarcely tolerates the presence of the female at all; the women's parts are lean to the point of vanishing.  Hugh Grant plays Fletcher, a master manipulator, who, for reasons that I couldn't understand, plays all sides against the middle in the film's elaborate and violent plot -- Fletcher is very talkative and the frame for the film is his erratic and effusive narrative providing both backstory, a chronicle as to the various plot elements in the picture, and, finally, cynical and profane commentary on the story he is narrating.  Mickey is played by Matthew McConnaughy, a cool as a cucumber marijuana farmer who has amassed a vast fortune by cultivating the weed in underground greenhouses and distributing it throughout Europe -- McConnaughy is great in his understated and deadly manner and, probably, the best thing in the movie.  Matthew is a Jewish millionaire who wants to buy Mickey's enterprise "lock, stock, and (smoking) barrel" to quote another of Ritchie's films; Jeremy Strong, a opaque presence (mostly known for Succession) plays the Jewish businessman.  Someone named Hunnam (apparently a well-known actor) plays Raymond, Mickey's hard-nosed and capable factotum.  Finally, Colin Farrell acts the part of an Irish boxing coach called "Coach" in the film who manages a crew of rapper martial arts experts, all of them Black, who appear from time to time to wreak havoc on the other characters.  There are Chinese and Cambodian gangsters and a mob of Russian thugs also thrown in for a good measure.  The picture specializes in a mild form of outrage -- it's casually racist:  ethnic identities are caricatured all in the name of good fun.  For instance, at the film's end, Matthew, the Jewish businessman, is equated to Shylock and, impliedly, forced to hack out a pound of flesh from his body in retribution for some of the mischief that he has created.  These racial and ethnic stereotypes are the equivalent of Tarantino's persistent use of the "N-word" in his movie, offenses that are justified by the picture's ostensible good humor -- indeed, it's "laddishness."  The movie's plot is so intricate and hard to divine that I won't try to summarize what occurs in the film.  The premise is that McConnaughey's blithe and nonchalant character wants to sell his dope empire.  Matthew bids on the empire but, unbeknownst, of course, to Mickey tries to run-down the price on the enterprise by setting rival mobs against one another -- everyone competing, it seems, to raid and trash the marijuana enterprise to reduce its value.  This leads to numerous killings, defenestrations, kidnappings, explosions, fires, and car-crashes.  The Toddlers, Coaches thugs, get into spectacular fights with the Chinese gangsters and Mickey''s henchmen.  After a dozen or so double-crosses, some Russian gangsters who have been lurking around the edges of the action get involved -- this is in the film's last five minutes.  There's more bloodshed and, then, the movie ends happily.   (I left out part of the plot involving a Rupert Murdoch style tabloid press mogul who is so hateful that everyone applauds when one or the other groups of the contending ethnic mobs force him to have carnal knowledge with a large and juicy-looking pig. This figure is played by the ugly and charismatic Eddie Marsan, one of Great Britain's best character actors,)  There's lots of satire, interesting to British audiences but opaque to me, about the so-called "Toffs" -- that is, the depraved royals and aristocrats who infest upper-crust English society.  Everyone speaks in elaborate, poetic jargon that seems cribbed from Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw -- these are very loquacious thugs who natter on in an intensely unnatural, stylized, and elaborate sort of discourse deploying the word "cunt" in every sentence. 

It's too much and, ultimately, I was yearning for this perpetual motion machine of smart-ass speeches and gruesome murder to come to an end.  The movie is ingenious but, ultimately, dispiriting.  The movie was apparently popular and, in fact, spawned a several season TV show of the same name.

Silk Stockings

Ninotchka (1939) is an Ernst Lubitsch comedy about a stern Communist idealogue who happens to be a woman softening and finding love in Paris; the movie, starring Greta Garbo (with Bela Lugosi as one of the Commissars) was a big hit and re-made 18 years, and one World War, later as a musical Silk Stockings.  The 1957 film was the last picture directed Ruben Mamoulian; Cyd Charisse plays the fierce female apparatchik courted in Fred Astaire.  Peter Lorre is one of the three Russian agents seduced by the City of Lights -- Lorre was old when the movie was made and he can't really dance and, so, he performs in the musical numbers by suspending himself between a chair and table and doggedly kicking at the air -- it's unutterably weird and endearing.  The movie was based on a Broadway revival of the film with songs by Cole Porter that are, more or less, clever, melodic, and forgettable -- the exception is a bizarre rock and roll number that Astaire performs near the end of the movie.  The picture is highly regarded, indeed, said to be one of the great movie musicals, but I wasn't attuned to its wave-length:  the dance numbers are suave but not explosive or particularly kinetic, the music is okay, the acting is excellent but the script is a bit schematic -- the story is simple to the point of being boring:  the stern lady commissar melts in the arms of Fred Astaire, here playing the producer of a movie musical himself, and apparels herself in silk lingerie, sipping champagne with her lover.  She comes to conclude that the beautiful is just as important as the useful -- a revelation that changes her life.  After the lovers are separated, she renounces her love and returns to her ideological purity until the plot contrives a basis for her to return to Paris.  Of course, Astaire is waiting for her debonair as ever, singing and dancing in a night club that Peter Lorre and his comrades have established for Russian emigres.  Love prevails and all ends on a merry note.  The technicolor photography is nondescript and the editing mostly invisible -- the film is sleek, well-appointed and craftsmanlike.  Paradoxically, Cyd Charisse is more sexy and has a greater erotic charge as the relentless Marxist fundamentalist -- a more serious movie would hint at some kind of tragic backstory involving famine and war (and we learn she was the commander of a woman's tank brigade).  Once she dissolves into an ingenue in love, the character is less interesting.  Fred Astaire is palpably too old for the role, something that he admitted himself to Mamoulian when he protested being cast in the picture.  The dance scenes are shot in continuous long takes to preserve the illusion that we are watching a Broadway musical from the other side of the proscenium.  The film's style is classical with very few close-ups.  There is a witty song about the three dwarves (this is the group of Russian agents including Lorre) being sent to Siberia.  When Ninotchka arrives in Paris her first priority is to see the sights -- which for her includes the Sewage Treatment Plant; with Astaire as her guide she visits both cafes and foundries.  Paris is represented by the Arc d' Triumph and a couple of sidewalk cafes; most of the action takes place in lavishly appointed hotel rooms.  A lot of the dialogue is cunning and funny.  The composer whom Ninotchka has been dispatched to retrieve -- he's modeled on Stravinsky it seems -- has written an Ode to a Tractor and, when Fred Astaire tempts him with a big salary to write the score for his movie musical, the man worries about taxes.  "You'll make $50,000," Astaire assures him.  Someone asks:  "What will the taxes be?"  "$50,000," the man says. (I think Mamoulian appears in the film as the director of the movie within the movie.) 

Femme Fatale (Film note)

 Femme Fatale

1.

Life is but a dream.

Hollywood has been called the dream factory.   Movies exist at the intersection of private dreams and public, shared fantasies.

In Calderon’s 1636 Spanish baroque play, La Vida es Sueno (“Life is a Dream”), a King, Basilio, is told by an oracle that his infant son, Segismundo, will grow up to kill him and seize the throne.  Basilio imprisons Segismundo, chaining him in a tower.  From time to time, Segismundo’s warden administers powerful sedatives to him, causing the young man to sleep.  He is told that his present state of misery is merely a dream.  He can’t oppose the evils that have befallen him because they are not real, merely the content of his nightmare.  Later, Segismundo is freed from his confinement.  All sorts of mayhem ensues including war, rape, and murder.  At the height of the violence, Segismundo is told that nothing that has happened to him after his escape from the tower is real – it is all just a vivid dream from which he will awake one day to find himself still fettered in the tower.  At the end of the play, there is a battle in which Segismundo captures his father, and, after threatening to kill the King, spares his life.  The playwright, Calderon, tells us that God is constant and rules both waking life and dreams.  Therefore, one should strive to do good whether in our dreams or our actual life – in fact, we are incapable of distinguishing dream from reality; there is no reliable way of determining whether we are awake or dreaming.

The themes explored in Calderon’s Baroque play are: predestination, the labyrinth, the monster in the labyrinth, and our inability to know whether we are awake or dreaming: Are these my authentic memories or have I merely dreamed that these things occurred?

2.

Brian De Palma is the most baroque of the filmmakers who came of age in the nineteen-seventies.  He is part of the generation of directors that include Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola.  Of these filmmakers, De Palma alone has continued to explore the post-modern themes that originally inspired him – late films like Femme Fatale (2002) and Passion (2012) recycle questions of appearance and reality, preordained doom, betrayal and nightmare that animated the director’s early movies, all in the context of a delirious, hallucinatory style derived from the most overheated sequences in Hitchcock’s films. (De Palma’s late style is heavily intertextual, although the allusions in his most recent films are most commonly references to earlier movies made by the director himself – Femme Fatale invokes Body Double, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. The erotic thriller, a film genre, in which reality is dissolved by corrosive, overwhelming lust, has been De Palma’s metier in his best and most personal films from the separated-at-birth Siamese twin siblings in 1972's slasher thriller Sisters through Carrie (1974) with the voyeuristic camera prowling through a steamy locker room full of naked teenage girls and pictures like the cult-classic Body Double (1984 - full of actual porn stars) and Raising Cain (1992) in which John Lithgow plays a cross-dressing sex murderer.  

At the outset, Brian De Palma aspired, by his own admission, to be “the American Godard,” that is the auteur of films that endorsed their own artificiality, that acknowledged their genre conventions, and that were intertextual, comprised of networks of allusions and citations.  Yet, at the same time, De Palma’s master is Alfred Hitchcock.  It is impossible to reconcile the notion of making movies both like Godard and Hitchcock – this unstable compound: Godcock or Hitchard, is an impossible contradiction, an obscure object of desire, the epitome of cognitive dissonance.  De Palma’s schizophrenic moviemaking has led to equally schizophrenic and polarized responses among his critics.  

A brief review of Wikipedia entries as to De Palma’s more scandalous films reveal that critical opinion about these movies is deeply divided.  Generally, only about a third of the critics reviewing his pictures recommend them.  The “Rotten Tomatoes” ratings for his films hover around 25 to 40% favorable.  And, yet, each of these controversial films has its champions.  The most common adjectives applied to his pictures in unfavorable reviews are that they are “nonsensical,” “silly”, and garishly imitative of Hitchcock’s better, more restrained and stylish thrillers.  But several major critics have praised his pictures – most notably, De Palma was heavily promoted by the formidable Pauline Kael during the first half of his career; thereafter, his films were the subject of admiring reviews by Roger Ebert.  Indeed, De Palma’s continued viability as a filmmaker derives in large part from the support of Kael and, later, Ebert – both highly influential critics.  I know of no other American filmmaker who has inspired such a radical split in the critical establishment – writers like Kael and Ebert have enthusiastically praised pictures like Body Double, Femme Fatale, and The Fury, that were also widely denounced as raw, misogynist exploitation by more conservative and mainstream critics.  Femme Fatale like Dressed to Kill were films savagely derided by most reviewers, but, now, considered cult-classics.

De Palma began his career making anarchic comedies in a free style influenced by Godard and Richard Lester’s Beatles films – examples are Hi, Mom! (1969) and Get to know your Rabbit (1972).  His first thriller expressing De Palma’s characteristic themes – sex murder and doppelgaengers, insanity and naked lust – was Sisters (1972) with Margot Kidder playing a dual Jekyll and Hyde role.  This movie was followed by a musical of sorts The Phantom of the Paradise, a remake of The Phantom of the Opera set in the rock-and-roll world of the Fillmore West and, perversely, starring the diminutive pop star Paul Williams.  (The Phantom of the Paradise is very hard to see due to some kind of litigation in which the rights to the picture are entangled – but it’s great, De Palma first full-blown baroque masterpiece.)  De Palma made a trio of movies heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho – these are Obsession (1976), Carrie (1977), a big box-office hit with Sissy Spacek half drowned in swine blood, and The Fury (1978), an over-the-top movie about telekinesis that was much derided in its time, but now seems prescient of many of the X-Men (and other) superhero pictures – The Fury starred Kirk Douglas and John Cassavetes establishing De Palma’s ability to attract important Hollywood stars to his films.  (Pauline Kael’s fan reviews of these pictures also helped to establish his bona fides in the Industry.)  In 1980, De Palma made Dressed to Kill, another sex murderer film starring Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson.  This was followed by De Palma’s most highly regarded psychological thriller, Blow Out, a remake, in some ways of Antonioni’s seminal Blow Up; this 1981 movie stars John Travolta and was a great success with audiences. 

By the early eighties, De Palma was sufficiently bankable for the big studios to hire him as director on expensive prestige projects.  (These projects ultimately proved to be De Palma’s downfall because he was not, by disposition, well-suited to the conservative requirements of pictures of this sort.)  Scarface (1983) with Al Pacino is an example of a big-budget crime film, intended to compete with epic pictures like Coppola’s Godfather trilogy.  After Scarface, De Palma cleansed his palate, as it were, with the deeply personal, obsessive, and delirious Body Double (1984), probably De Palma’s most divisive movie – many feminist-inclined critics denounced the picture as sadistically misogynist.  Notwithstanding those criticisms, De Palma was retained to direct The Untouchables with Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, and a script by playwright David Mamet.  This 1987 film was a box office success that led to De Palma’s being given free rein to produce the nightmarish Viet Nam picture Casualites of War (1989 with Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn).  Casualties of War, involving the rape and murder of a Vietnamese civilian, was too grim to succeed with the public.  Nonetheless, De Palma was greenlit to make his screen adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities, based on the Tom Wolfe bestselling novel.  This film was an unmitigated catastrophe on all levels, the sort of failure that might end a director’s career.  But De Palma returned to his psycho-sexual slasher film roots with Raising Cain (1992), a movie sufficiently successful to return the director to prestige projects, first Carlito’s Way (1993) with Al Pacino, and, then, the inaugural film in the Mission Impossible franchise, a big budget spectacle with Tom Cruise released in 1994.  Mission Impossible represented the apogee of De Palma’s success with large-scale star-driven projects.  His next films were made on limited budgets and were all failures at the box office, these include Snake Eyes (1996 with Nicholas Cage), Femme Fatale, Redacted, another hellish war film about a massacre of civilians in Iraq (2007), Passion (2012) yet another erotic thriller, and, finally Domino (2017), a failed film shot in Denmark that went straight to video.  De Palma is presently 85 and it seems unlikely that he will be able to make another film.

A glance at De Palma’s career reveals the director’s versatility and competence in different modes of movie-making.  De Palma has proven capable of making audience-satisfying big budget pictures like Scarface and Mission Impossible.  He has made a number of smaller budget psychological thrillers with intense erotic sequences – these pictures like Femme Fatale are surrealistically excessive variants on film noir and his most personal and impressive pictures.  But he has also made comedies, a musical (The Phantom of Paradise) and indignant, cruel war films.   

3.

Femme Fatale was released in 2002.  It is unabashedly an “erotic thriller.”  But, by the time of its release, public enthusiasm for the genre had lapsed.  After the year 2000, the market for erotic thrillers was saturated and movies of that type were no longer popular.  The film’s belated appearance as an example of a genre that had waned may explain why it was generally disregarded or derided when first released.  (De Palma followed the film with another erotic thriller in 2012, Passion. That film was even more of an anachronism and didn’t have an American theatrical release – it went straight to video.)

The erotic thriller genre is a subcategory of film noir in which illicit love and sexual fantasy are accompanied by danger.  In essence, the genre is moralistic: the penalty for engaging in forbidden sexual fantasies is, often, blackmail, humiliating disclosure, and death.  The films invoke a “pleasure/danger” principle –indulging in pleasure leads to danger.  

Prototypical pictures in the genre are Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (also 1944)   Both of these archetypes involve a femme fatale who ensnares and destroys a hapless, gullible man.  The genre was revived forty years after these prototypes with Body Heat (1980) and the big budget productions Basic Instinct (1987) and Fatal Attraction (1992).  There was “gold in them thar hills” and literally hundreds of pictures were made recapitulating themes asserting that illicit sex = danger.  (It’s no accident that these movies arose in the wake of the AIDS epidemic.)  Between 1992 and 2000, it’s estimated that more than 700 erotic thrillers were produced, almost all of them direct-to-video.  In 1996, the Wachowsky sisters (then, brothers before their sex-change operations) released Bound, probably the most influential of erotic thrillers featuring lesbian lovers in a BDSM context.  But around 2000, several high profile films invoking tropes of the erotic thriller, Showgirls and Jade failed conspicuously at the box office.  These disappointments were instrumental in bringing the genre to an end.  

4.

Femme Fatale exposes a fundamental disconnect, an incongruity, between means and ends.  De Palma’s film employs sophisticated high-art imagery – cinephiles will note dream imagery involving overflowing water derived from films by Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman; the use of the same actress to play multiple parts hints at how personality may be interchangeable, how characters, under pressure, can fuse together – this is the theme of pictures like Bergman’s Persona.  The elaborate, high-gloss camerawork mirrors work by Alain Resnais and the deployment of split screen imagery channels De Palma’s early work in Blow-Out and Dressed to Kill.  The interface between dream and reality is obsessively detailed, built from a mosaic of small, almost invisible, details: for instance, casual encounters with minor figures in the context of the diamond heist trigger the appearance of those same people in roles in the dream and a poster showing Millais’ pre-Raphaelite painting of Orphelia drowning (marked Deja Vu) appears repeatedly in the dream scenes as well. (The dream effects are similar to sequences in Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and Wild Strawberries).  Locations and set design subtly signify that something is “off”, unreal and stylized in the lengthy dream that comprises most of the picture – these aspects of the film signal an exploration of the difference between appearance and reality that has a labyrinthine intricacy; it’s like Borges’ metaphor of the man who dreams of a butterfly who just might be a butterfly dreaming that it is a man.  Movies are dream-works; this movie has a movie within a movie and the location for the heist, the Cannes Film Festival, establishes a self-referential aspect to Femme Fatale – the movie, like Wenders’ The State of Things or Truffaut’s Day for Night, is about the process of making movies.  All of this exquisite detail, symbolism, and elaborate film technique, however, is in service of amplifying the effects of what is fundamentally a fifties’ style film noir, that is, a B-picture made cheaply to be shown as a the lower-half of double feature.  This is made manifest in the opening sequence in the which the titular femme fatale watches Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck appearing together in one of the signature works of film noir, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944).  The disconnect apparent in Femme Fatale is the use of lavishly extravagant and sophisticated film technique to limn what is essentially trashy, pulp-grade material.    

Standard film noir is disposable, little cheap pictures made to be seen once and, then, forgotten.  But Femme Fatale is so complex that it demands to be seen twice or more – the details can’t be fully grasped until the movie’s plot is revealed and, since the plot is occult (that is, hidden), the viewer is forced to reconsider radically what he or she has seen earlier once the film’s “trick” has been revealed.  The film’s French trailer exploits this aspect of Femme Fatale: the coming attractions trailer ends with the words printed on the screen: “Maybe, you didn’t get it” and, then, “Try again!” thereby suggesting that the movie has to be seen, at least, twice to be understood.  This is highly unusual in the context of expendable, low-budget film noir.

Femme Fatale and most of De Palma’s smaller scale pictures are elaborate puzzles that pose the question as to whether the solution to the riddle is worth the effort required to discover it.  These films embody Pauline Kael’s fundamental thesis that movies are, at heart, vulgar, middle-brow entertainment and pretensions to the contrary, that is pretensions of “art” or “artistic quality” are inimical to popular films.  The art is slathered onto some pretty raw and fundamental stuff about lust, desire, and greed.

5.

De Palma returned to surrealist film noir in 2012 with his picture Passion.  The movie is a French-German co-production produced by a French-speaking Tunisian Said Ben Said.  The budget was low, although the film had sufficient resources to cast Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace as the picture’s dueling bitch goddesses.  In Passion, De Palma amplifies the content of Femme Fatale to its essential reductio ad absurdum: there are no men of any significance in the film which features extended lesbian kissing sequences between the beautiful leading ladies, schematically reduced to a glacial ice-blonde in the Hitchcock mode and a dark-haired temptress.  The tone of the film is wildly uneven oscillating between elaborately choreographed aria-like sequences and low comedy involving bumpkin Berlin cops trying to entrap the murderess.  The film is not a success in many respects but, nonetheless, is an engrossing spectacle to those who know and admire De Palma.  I cite this picture because of an excellent review posted by Peter Sobczinski on Roger Ebert’s website (RogerEbert.com).  Sobczinski follows his mentor’s practice of praising De Palma.  He observes that the movie is best interpreted as a musical composition – images are used musically to create mood and establish an aura of fatality and doom.  Sobczinski notes that you can’t decode musical themes or motifs in non-musical terms.  Therefore, its is futile to attempt to interpret Passion (or any of De Palma’s fully realized erotic thrillers) is literary terms.  We might think of “themes” as being complexes of meaning such as the role of women in society, misogyny, sexual repression versus sexual expression and so on.  But this would be misguided.  De Palma’s work in his personal films isn’t thematic in this sense: the themes in his movies can be specified not in terms of content but as formal devices: the analytical overhead shot, the Steadi-cam tracking up or down steps, a crane shot that suddenly pulls away from a salient detail or that descends into a close-up, close shots that provide details or show eyes glaring into the camera, the swooning camera spinning a circle around protagonists, super-saturated colors, time suddenly slowing as a result of slow motion, and so on – none of these technical devices have literary or subject matter content; rather, they are technical motifs like musical phrases from which De Palma constructs his movies.    

Passion wasn’t theatrically released in the United States.  It went straight to video.

6.

“Row, Row, Row your Boat” is a children’s song, frequently performed as a round or canon.  The lyrics are: “Row, row, row your boat / Gently down the stream / Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily / Life is but a dream.”  I have always wondered about the origins of this haunting song.

Most writers aver that the lyrics are a nursery rhyme, a little poem whose origins can’t be traced.  I’m not so sure about that.  The song was first printed in 1852 in a book of children’s songs.  (Curiously, this book is never exactly identified and the identify of its author not specified.)  The lyrics were printed in the form in which they appear above but the accompanying music is said to be “very different.”  The version of the melody that is current today was written by a pedagogue named Eliphalet Oman Lyte (1842 - 1913).  Lyte was born to Quaker stock in the old village of Bird-in-the-Hand near Lancaster, Pennsylvania – he was a grammar and composition teacher.  The song appears in his book The Franklin Square Song Collection published in New York in 1881.  The tune can be performed as a four-part canon beginning with a soprano voice, followed by alto, tenor, and, at last bass.  When performed in this way, the song encompasses the entire range of human voices and, accordingly, seems to suggest a universal message – all life is a dream.  Some commentators find inspirational and, even, spiritual meaning in the tune – these writers focus on the adverbs “gently” and “merrily.”  Of course, the folk culture of children have developed innumerable profane, violent, or simply silly variants on the lyrics: “Row, row, row, your boat / Gently down the stream / Throw the teacher in the creek / And listen to her scream.”

You can see Ella Fitzgerald with Bing Crosby singing several nursery rhymes as a duet.  They perform “London Bridge is falling down,” “Row, row, row your boat”, “Three Blind Mice,” and “Frere Jacques”.  The YouTube duet dates from 1950 and is worth watching.