Rachel Barton Pine performing with 'Austin Symphony

 A concert can transport you to some other world, a different consciousness or new, disorienting perspective. I don't go to many concerts or live music events now.  So, when I do venture out, things seem strange to me; I slip into a reverie and hallucinate.  

The Austin Symphony Orchestra performed at the Knowlton Auditorium at the Public High School on March 30, 2025. A soloist, Rachel Barton Pine, was featured in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D (Opus 35).  The second part of the concert was comprised of a performance of three relatively short pieces by Ravel.  I'll dispose of my criticism at the outset -- the orchestra botched the Ravel pieces, played them with a disconcerting stutter, herky-jerky as opposed to the limpid legato required by this music.  The strings sounded out of tune and the brass fumbled their notes, spattering them all over the stage.  I thought that the rest of concert was effective and well-played -- indeed, on the Tchaikovsky piece, the orchestra seemed to be punching considerably above their weight.  Impressionism in music is tricky.  Apparent formlessness can degenerate into actual chaos and I think this happened with respect to the Ravel numbers.

The day before the concert, it was warm and humid.  The temperature in mid-afternoon was 79 degrees, unseasonably warm in this climate for the end of March.  But, then, wind and rain intervened and, on the day of the performance, it was bitterly cold with icy water drizzling out of dark, congested skies.  As I walked from the side of the gymnasium parking lot, along the long dour facade of the High School, I realized that I was not dressed for the weather and my forehead was damp as if ice were freezing above my eyebrows and the cold made me shiver and ached in my joints.  The hike to the concert hall on the sidewalk outside the concert hall knocked me into another realm.  

Rachel Barton Pine has red hair and extremely pale skin.  She may be in her mid-forties although she looks younger, like a child prodigy of some sort.  She entered the concert stage on a scooter, driving up to a low platform on which a chair had been set for her.  Something was wrong with the lower half of her body and she had difficulty transferring from the little, black three-wheeled scooter onto the platform.  A young man followed her obediently to her position on the stage and, then, reached forward to hand her violin to her.  The violin was as red as her hair.  (In January 1995, when she was twenty, the violinist was riding a METRA train into Chicago where she was teaching music lessons.  As she exited the train, the strap on her violin case, or, perhaps, some other bag, was caught in the closing door.  The train started away from the platform dragging her along the tracks.  After being pulled over one-hundred feet by the accelerating train, the violinist yanked herself loose but slid under the wheels.  The metal wheel sliced off one of her legs and mangled the other lower extremity and she almost bled to death on the tracks.  In the ensuing lawsuit, METRA rather heartlessly defended by claiming that the musician was responsible for her own injuries because she was carrying an old and famous violin and wasn't willing to relinquish her grip on it.  The defense didn't work -- doors on the car closed without warning and there was no alert to the driver -- and one presumes that she was paid millions of dollars by METRA.  Her injuries were horrible, requiring over 50 surgeries but she persisted in performing on what remained of her legs while standing until 2018, when a joint infection caused her permanent damage requiring that she now remain seated while playing.)  According to the brochure, Pine plays an "ex-Bazzini, ex-Soldat" Joseph Guarnerius del Gesu violin, an instrument made in Cremona, Italy in 1742.  I'm not sure if this was the violin involved in the METRA accident.  The concert program notes that she has the violin "on lifetime loan from an anonymous patron", a detail that haunts my imagination -- I think there is a novel implicit in this arrangement, or a film or play of some sort.  

Barton Pine introduced the Tchaikovsky concerto with verve and enthusiasm.  She spoke of Tchaikovsky's suffering, how he was implored to marry one of his students, something that he obligingly did, although, of course, he was shy, closeted homosexual.  She described how he overcame his depression arising from this disastrous marriage, fled Russia with his boyfriend, and, later, regained his spirits to write the rollicking Finale:  Allegro Vivacissimo, a melody that she described as a drinking song, "vodka music".  She observed that she couldn't relate to his depression since she is a "straight woman" -- but, of course, given the horrific accident and ghastly treatment following that calamity, I suspect that she is more than qualified when it comes to grief and sorrow.  She played with flair, executing spectacular cadenzas and, then, flinging her right arm with the fiddle's bow up in the air in a triumphant gesture.  As an encore, she performed a very slithery, eerie blues piece by the Black British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor.  I was impressed by her curriculum vitae, she regularly performs avant-garde music, commissions works by contemporary composers, admires Death Metal and, in fact, plays that kind of music in a bar band called "Earthen Grave."  There is nothing not to admire about this woman -- her courage and industry seem to be exemplary.

Just before the intermission, the director, Maestro Stephen Ramsey showed a twenty-foot tall slide photograph of Diego Velasquez' Las Meninas (1656) and asked the audience if they could identify the King and Queen shown in the large, and intricate, painting.  (The King and Queen of Spain, Philip IV and Mariana of Austria are visible as shadowy figures in a small mirror in the background of the picture.)  The work is visionary, sometimes called "the theology of painting" (Luca Giordano) with Velazquez looking out at the viewer from a position on the left, half-concealed by the big canvas that presumably will become las Meninas ("the ladies in waiting").  The Infante, Margaret Theresa, probably about six when her portrait was painted also stares out of the image, tiny in a white bell-shaped dress, and every inch a future queen.  A female dwarf with a prognathous jaw glares at us as well and there is another little person, a young man, at her side prodding a big mastiff. The dog is dignified but sleepy; it seems to be dreaming.  Of course, I have known this image all my life and admired it and, so, it was wonderful to see the picture projected above the orchestra all luminous with brass instruments shining in the stage light and the rich, deep hues of the strings, the shapely cellos and the fiddles and covenant ark of the harp.  The concert began to seem like a waking dream.  I have no idea why Maestro Ramsey had the picture projected above the orchestra -- it was a gratuitous gift, I suppose.  Ramsey said something about Ravel and his Pavane for a dead Princess but I never figured out the connection with the Velazquez painting --perhaps, Ramsey was implying that the little girl with her regal bearing was a "dead princess" somehow -- in fact Infante Margarita Theresa died at 21 after seven years of marriage to a Habsberg King and six pregnancies (with four live births); maybe, the painting had something to do with the mutilated princess playing the violin for us.  I don't know.  It was the sort of association that seems obvious in a dream but can't be deciphered when you are awake.

Pavane for a Dead Princess composed in 1899 for solo piano was orchestrated by Ravel in 1910 as a concert version of the piece.  The name of the work in French is Pavane pour une Infante Defunte.  I suppose the word "Infante" triggered the association with the Velazquez painting.  Ravel remarked that the pavane, which is a species of courtly dance music, was paradoxically a sort of elegy for a dead renaissance princess as well.  This is also incomprehensible to me, dream logic of some sort.  

After the concert, the air filled with snow, blown almost horizontally by the cold wind and wet grass turned white in the storm. 

The Party

 The Party is a filmed adaptation of what seems to be a stage play by the British playwright Sally Potter.  (She also directs.)  The piece is handsomely mounted with an all-star cast of British actors, shot in lustrous black and white to resemble the camera-work in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  The famous film of Albee's play, featuring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, is obviously an influence on The Party; the movie resembles Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in that the action takes place in real time in a single location and the characters are upper middle-class academics and, in The Party's case, political activists.  The subject matter is marital discord, adultery, and political strife.  The Party, like Albee's play, is a black comedy with the emotional and physical mayhem played for laughs.  At 71 minutes, Potter's piece is fierce, abbreviated, and cogent -- but it's so compressed that some parts don't make sense and the relationships between the characters seem a bit implausible.  The Party isn't wholly successful, but it's amusing, sardonic, and has a very clever twist at it ending.

Four couples have gathered to celebrate the election of their hostess, Janet, to a position as "shadow minister" of public health in the government.  Janet's husband, Bill, is a professor of some sort and clearly impaired in some mysterious way -- he doesn't speak, watches everyone with wounded eyes, and communicates by playing LPs from his huge collection for the guests. A lesbian couple are in attendance -- the older woman is a famous feminist academic; her partner is younger and pregnant with triplets, already determined to be boys.  Janet's best friend, April, has come to the gathering with her estranged boyfriend, Gottfried, a gentle, dimwitted New Age healer and "life coach."  Finally, Tom is present, however, without his wife, the beautiful Marianne, about whom everyone inquires  -- Marianne will, maybe, show up later, Tom says, for "dessert" or "coffee" at the end of the evening.  Although April supports Janet, she expresses disdain for the political system.  everyone else is, more or less, at odds; this is a dog-eat-dog gathering with all the characters sniping at one another.  Tom is some sort of high-finance shark; he's agitated, half-hysterical, and carrying a pistol.  Repeatedly, he adjourns to the toilet to sniff cocaine.  It appears that he is out-of-sorts because he has come to kill someone, likely Bill.  It turns out that Bill, the elderly demented-seeming professor has been carrying on a two-year plus love affair with Marianne.  This wounds and outrages Janet, the shadow minister, although her indignation is more than a little hypocritical -- while preparing the meal, she has been text messaging and calling a clandestine lover who remains off-screen throughout the film.  Janet punches Bill a couple times.  Then, the coke-addled Tom, made a cuckold by the elderly Bill, lunges at the old man and knocks him down, seemingly killing him.  Gottfried and Tom desperately try to revive the fallen Bill and put on music from Bill's record collection to bring him back to consciousness -- at one point, they play mournful baroque music, causing Gottfried to say:  "Maybe try another."  Bill sort of revives.  Everyone is gathered around him.  Then, the doorbell rings and there's a surprising, "trick" ending.  And, some pastry baked by Janet gets burned beyond recognition.

The short film features a tremendous cast.  Timothy Spall plays the disturbed Bill, a man in shock because he has just been told that he is terminally ill.  Bruno Ganz has the part of the earnest and annoying guru, Gottfried.  He keeps assuring Bill that Western medicine is voodoo and that he will be all right, a claim belied by poor Bill's gaunt and haggard appearance and staring eyes.  Janet professes that she will care for Bill to the bitter end, but, then, lectures him for "queue-jumping" (something that Brits hate) because he consulted with a physician who is not part of the National Health Service, that is, the agency within her portfolio.  It turns out that Bill, as a young man, apparently had a sexual affair with the austere and radical lesbian academic -- this revelation leads to a crisis in the relationship between the older woman and her pregnant spouse.  Cillian Murphy acts the role of agitated and frantic Tom, a "wolf of Wall Street" caricature. All the performers are excellent and there are elements of British farce in the way that the characters ricochet off one another in the claustrophobic townhouse. The show is so compressed and the characters so bitchy that it's hard to for viewers to get their footing.  The film is over before it seems to have begun.  There's nothing great about this picture, but it's beautifully mounted with memorable acting and a highly intelligent script, although events are so calamitous that the movie has a rushed, panic-stricken and desperate aspect to it.  (I thought that this was the great Bruno Ganz' last picture, but the Austrian actor was nothing if not industrious, he made 6 more pictures after the 2017 The Party before dying in 2019.)  

The Hawks and the Sparrows (Uccellacci e Ucellini)

 The Hawks and the Sparrows is an Italian film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and released in 1966.  It's been critically acclaimed and is very highly regarded, although the picture was not a commercial success and, despite the popularity of its star, the clown Toto, managed to lose money on what must have been a very low- budget.  The movie is obscure to non-Italians, and, with the passage of time, probably a bit opaque to modern Italian audiences as well.  The film is an ingenious parable that comments on Italian politics circa 1964 and 1965.  This was a time of revolution and ferment in world cinema.  The film's style invokes the madcap innovations that Richard Lester developed in his British Beatles' movies, an improvisatory frenetic approach to mise-en-scene that represented further evolution of the stylistic characteristics of the French nouvelle vague.  Unfortunately, for American viewers, Lester's rock-and-roll proto-music video approach to narrative is best represented in the USA by the Monkees' Tv show.  (I'm old enough to have watched The Monkees when the show debuted.)  This approach to filmmaking uses shots with characters at a great distance from the camera, interspersed with big intense and expressive close-ups; there's some slow-motion and lots of fast-motion darting to and fro.  People hop over one another and move in stylized, sometimes mechanistic ways -- the "squares" as it were, that is, people not in on the joke, are nerdy, conventional geeks who are unabashed stereotypes -- in Pasolini's movie, the folks not in on the joke are primarily peasants and tradesmen.  Unlike the Lester films (or The Monkees), Pasolini's intent is serious; his humor is scabrous and, more than a little grim -- the high-jinks and shenanigans in which the movie traffics are grotesque, rather than funny.  The Hawks and the Sparrows is most notable for the performance of the comedic actor Toto, a beloved fixture in Italian cinema -- this was Toto's last film.  The old clown appears as a dignified gentleman with big eyes, an extremely expressive face, a bit like Umberto D. in the Visconti film -- he ambles about with a Chaplin shuffle wearing a battered-looking suit.  Although I don't think the movie shows him to his best advantage, he is obviously a very charismatic performer and, when the camera is pointed at him, you can't take your eyes off the screen.

Toto with a young man, described as his son (he's about 25), wander through a desolate wasteland.  Apparently, they are somewhere on the outskirts of Rome in a sector where highways are under construction next to ruined aqueducts two millenia old.  It's not clear where the duo are going.  They are some sort of obscure mission, walking listlessly along country lanes that pass an airport where huge jets are landing, some ruinous churches, and the broken walls of an old monastery.  First, they pause for refreshment at the Las Vegas Bar, a sort of open air tavern where about a dozen young men are frenetically doing the frug and other dances of this sort.  Apparently, they are waiting for a bus.  But when the bus arrives, they are slow in reaching the place where it stops and it just drives away, not picking them up.  A little later, Toto and his son encounter a murder.  A corpse is carried out of a humble-looking apartment in a brutalist tenement in a poor village.  The young man sneaks off to woo a girl.  She's angry at him for paying attention to some other young woman.  Another girl is wearing white wings -- she's been cast as an angel in a play put on by some nuns.  The girl runs away from the importunate boy, but, later, beckons to him from the upper window of a ruined building.  As Toto and son wander down a foggy-looking lane, they encounter a big freeway overpass under construction.  There are ruins all around as well as ruinous-looking construction sites.  On the overpass, a voice asks them where they are going.  This turns out to be a talking crow who accompanies the old man and his son throughout the rest of the movie.  A title tells us that the talking crow is a "radical leftist intellectual" and, therefore, should be disregarded.  The crow decides to tell his companions a story and, then, narrates a riff on the legend of St. Francis preaching to the birds.  On the horizon, a desolate wrecked church and monastery loom over the action.  A haggard St. Francis is preaching to the birds.  When he finishes, he deputizes Toto and his son to be missionaries to the hawks and the sparrows.  Toto finds some hawks nesting the ruined church and kneels before them for one year -- in that time, he takes root in the ground, is frozen and rained upon and entangled with nettles that have grown up around him.  Some goons even attack and beat him.  But Toto succeeds in learning the language of the hawks and can talk to them.  The hawks ask Toto why they were created and the little monk (as he appears in this scene) says that they were made for "love".  The hawks apparently embrace Christianity.  Toto and his son, then, seek out some sparrows.  They can't converse with the sparrows but discover that they can communicate with them by hopping in imitation of the way that the birds hop about.  The sparrows are also told that they were created to love and be loved.  And, so, the little birds are converted.  Unfortunately, the hawks continue to feed on the sparrows and nothing can be done to ameliorate that predation.  St. Francis appears again and endorses a Marxist solution to the dilemma, but everyone agrees this is absurd. 

The film, then, reverts to its present tense -- the desolate wastelands full of construction materials and rubbish, a landscape as imagined by Samuel Becket. Toto has to go to the toilet and, so, he defecates behind some bamboo-bushes in a dump.  The owners of the dump are aggrieved and mount an attack on the hoboes.  (The soundtrack amplifies the gun shots and shouts to rocket fire, mortars and cannons, with bombers zooming by overhead; the episode is a parable as to the causes of war -- similar in its casus belli to a scene in John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King in which one tribe explains its bitter, longstanding enmity with another tribe on the grounds that the enemies urinate in the river upstream of where the other folks do their laundry.)  Apparently, a poor, starving family owes rent to Toto.  He collects ruthlessly.  His poor tenants have been reduced to eating boiled bird's nests after the manner of the Chinese.  The mother pouring some soup into a bowl says:  "The nest is served!"  Toto and son encounter a group of traveling players who are performing a show called "When Rome Ruled the World" complete with a comely martyr tethered to a stake and a man pretending to be a lion.  Everyone dances and, then, the protagonists happen upon a "Convention of Dentists for Dante" presided over by a man wearing a laurel wreath.  This man, or one of the dentists, turns out to be Toto's landlord.  He demands that the clown pay his rent or go to jail.  Two German shepherds attack the hoboes in an echo of the lion's eating the Christians in the theater-piece.  A fat man, also a dentist, it seems, conducts Wagner without an orchestra.  Thousands of people gather to mourn the death of a Communist politician.  Documentary footage shows hundreds of billowing flags and a square where a vast multitude are gathered.  Back on the road, Toto and son walk by a luscious-looking prostitute sitting on a suitcase at the side of the road.  Toto claims to have diarrhea, goes into a cornfield to squat, but, in fact, is wriggling along on his belly concealed by the maize crop back to the prostitute with whom he does business.  A minute later, Toto's son claims to have diarrhea also -- he uses the same ruse to creep through the field to engage the prostitute.  These sex-acts accomplished, Toto announces that he is extremely hungry.  He eyes the crow who has been loyally tagging along on these adventures.  There's a cut and we see a charred area beside the road, some bones and some feathers.  The crow is nowhere to be seen.  

The film is diffuse but eloquent.  Big fish eat little fish -- it's an ancient proverb but true.  All ideological solutions to the ancient human problems of injustice, cruelty, and inequity are, perhaps, worse than the problems themselves.  Pasolini made a famous film about Christ The Gospel According to  St. Matthew and his cinematic imagination always reverts to the enigmatic parables in the New Testament.  The Hawks and the Sparrows was reputedly Pasolini's favorite film and it certainly offers a key of sorts to the director's method of casting his explorations of human folly in terms of parables.  The disreputable lame crow is as good an actor as the humans.  The critter limps along making sardonic comments and the final scene is a real shock.  (Apparently, the crow disliked Toto, possibly because of his huge eyes, and spent the shoot trying to claw and peck at his face.)     

The Residence

The Residence (2025) is an eight-part comedy murder-mystery set in the White House. The show exemplifies the enormous and distressing gap that presently exits between conventional TV narrative and the incredibly sophisticated production techniques by which such narratives are presented.  For the first couple episodes of this series, the viewer will be charmed, intrigued, and fascinated by the intricate (and apparently accurate) scene-setting and characters.  But by the fourth show, the program is treading water and has run out of ideas.  By the eighth episode, the thing has become an endurance test, almost unbelievably tedious and unimaginative.  The program is so bad that it rates as a "bait and switch" -- audiences will be hooked by the show's fast-paced and cleverly managed opening episodes, but beware:  what follows is extremely dull.  However, if you are invested in the story (a conventional whodunnit), you may find yourself in my shoes, watching the thing to its end to learn the identity of the killer even though the show has become almost unendurably protracted and boring.  (A hint:  consider all the characters who are presented as potential suspects and, then, ask yourself if one of these figures seems to be without any redeeming features at all -- that person, of course, unsympathetically represented by the program, will be disclosed as the killer.  I had lost interest in the mystery long before the 8th episode and was scarcely watching the show, although I sat quiescently in the room where the program was playing on my TV.  But my wife, who attends to such things, had figured out the identity of the killer by about the sixth episode and was watching merely to see how the case was made against this suspect.)

For the first six or so episodes, the show is sprightly, with high-tech camera work:  we see the White House through the eyes of a peregrine falcon and tour the grounds and corridors and rooms in the Residence in fast motion to name a couple of these effects. The cast is very large and excellent.  There is fine acting on display and many of the vignettes establishing the eccentric characters involved in the murder mystery are quite compelling. But each of the eight episodes is slightly worse and less interesting than the preceding show and the finale of the series (more than 100 minutes long) is catastrophically dimwitted and dull -- this gargantuan episode in which the detective who has solved the mystery filibusters to all the other characters for about an hour straight is close to unwatchable.  The premise of the show is that the head Usher (that is, the manager of the staff at the White House) is murdered during a State Dinner given for Australian diplomats.  A renowned detective with unerring instincts is summoned to solve the crime.  (This is a Black woman who plays the part of Sherlock Holmes -- like Holmes, she has uncanny powers of observation and ratiocination and is an avid birdwatcher as well.) This character, Detective Cupp, is wonderful for about four hours, but we're tired of watching her antics by the fifth show and her lecturing in the eighth and final episode, a part of the series she has to carry entirely on her own back is too much to bear.  There are plenty of interesting minor characters and the show is long enough to give them all a modicum of attention and something like a backstory.  We have the impression, before the thing goes off the rails, that we're getting a privileged, inside glimpse at how the White House is managed -- this accounts for much of our interest during the first few shows.  (The picture is brightly shot and makes an impression like Knives Out grafted to Julia Louis Dreyfus's comedy Veep.)  At first, the script is ingenious and full of good lines and the cynical, backstabbing characters are interesting enough to keep us involved.  But it just goes on and on and on and, ultimately, the plot is so intricate that you can't recall what has happened in the previous episodes and don't really care either.  The show's structure is based on a similar location-based mystery series, Only Murders in the House -- the program systematically considers each of about eight or nine primary suspects, makes the viewer believe that the suspect under consideration is highly likely to be the killer, but, then, establishes an alibi for that suspect so that the show can put the next character under the microscope, continuing in this fashion until the final episode.  Here is evidence of this show's incompetence:  there's a running joke that everyone wants to see and interact with the Australian movie-star Hugh Jackman who is attending the State Dinner.  Jackman is never really seen and the camerawork ingeniously shows us only parts of his face, his shadow, or his back when he appears on screen.  I kept expecting the final episode to show a full-frontal shot of Jackman at the end, therefore mocking the weird dodges employed to avoid picturing him.  But we don't ever get this pay-off.  It's astonishing to me that no one figured out that an insert of the actual Jackman for just ten seconds or so would have been the pay-off to a gag that runs throughout the whole show.  There are many other missed opportunities as well in The Residence.

Further illustrating the malaise that afflicts many Cable TV shows is the Amanda Seyfried series Long Bright River.  Again the disjunction between impeccable production values and a largely idiotic script is startling.  In this 2025 series, Seyfried plays a Philadelphia cop who stumbles upon femicide-style murders in which prostitutes (sex workers) are being killed by some sort of mad man who injects them with lethal doses of insulin.  The program features documentary style footage of homeless encampments and street people and the imagery is gritty, compelling, and ultra-realistic.  But this is coupled to an absurd plot that invokes just about every cliche that you can imagine -- Seyfried's sister, for instance,is a sex worker who gets kidnapped by the mad killer; the killer, then, stalks Seyfried and her very precocious eight year old son.  (Seyfried has dialogue with the boy about Goethe's Faust; of course, the kid attends some sort of ultra-elite private primary school and the lady detective can't pay tuition on her cop salary.  I told my wife that Seyfried's character should have the boy taken away from her by child protection workers for misrepresenting both the plot of Goethe's Faust and the program of Liszt's Faust Symphony.  Clearly, someone in the writing room was attuned to this problem because the dialogue alludes to the heroine's misunderstanding of these cultural monuments.)  The first episode is excellent and full of clever details and surprising plot twists -- for instance, Seyfried's character is given a middle-aged doofus partner, a man whom she is supposed to mentor but for whom she has contempt.  This is an interesting approach, with both an age and gender reversal in the relationship, and, maybe, it goes somewhere.  I don't know.  It was obvious that the show was just spinning its wheels and killing time by the end of the third episode and so I stopped watching it.  Time is valuable.  I abhor programs that gratuitously waste my time.  

King Lear (Godard - 1987)

 In early1988, I litigated a case against Butcher Boy involving an industrial accident at a meat-packing plant.  Butcher Boy, I think, was a tradename used by Lasar Manufacturing, a company that made meat saws in a suburb of Los Angeles.  I traveled to Century City to take some depositions in a law office in that part of LA.  I was recently divorced and, at loose ends, and wondered if I shouldn't leave Austin, Minnesota where I live for the big city.  And, so, I spent a couple of additional days after the depositions were completed exploring Los Angeles.  At that time, I had never been to California or the West Coast and, so, everything was fresh and new to me.  The city seemed comfortable and, for some reason, the freeways were mostly empty and the weather was mild and pleasant; I recall the scent of eucalyptus in the air around the patio hot tub at the little motel in Brentwood where I stayed.  (I have been to LA several times since that visit and the city has never seemed so welcoming and temperate on later visits.)  One night, I ate in a Mexican restaurant a block off Sunset Boulevard and, then, decided to go to the new movie by Jean-Luc Godard, King Lear.  The picture was showing at a cineplex in a mall in Beverly Hills.  I recall the big, angular mall complex with a cavernous underground parking lot that was almost completely empty.  I found the theater without any difficulty and attended the movie, projected in a small, Spartan screening room that gave the impression of being concealed in the large building at some great height above the ground -- in fact, it was only on the third floor of the complex.  I was alone in the theater until just before the movie began.  Then, some young people, perhaps three or four, entered and seated themselves on the other side of the small room. "Coming attractions" were already underway and, so, the young people -- they seemed to be college students -- were just shadows against the spray of light on the screen.  I had no idea what Godard's film was about.  I didn't even understand the titles, let alone the rest of the picture.  I recall that Molly Ringwald played the part of Cordelia and that Burgess Meredith was acting as Learo (Lee-air-oo), possibly some kind of gangster.  People stood by a lake.  Some shots showed actors rambling around aimlessly in a small, shabby glade of trees under grey skies and there were muddy puddles on the trails.  The soundtrack was a confusing cacophony of lines by Shakespeare, voices whispering off-screen, and bursts of music, either played too fast or too slow (or, as I now know, a Beethoven string quartet played backward.)  I was utterly baffled.  The students left before I could see them, at what they thought was the end of the movie -- in fact, there were a couple more minutes: the picture ends several times and, then, fitfully starts up again.  I waited for the final credits, but there were no credits -- the movie just stopped and I was sitting in the dark and, then, the lights came up on the empty screening room.  

Criterion has just issued a CD version of King Lear.  The disc comes with several informative interviews and an appreciation by Richard Brody.  (There is no actual on-screen commentary -- probably a wise decision since the film is so fantastically intricate that adding another layer of soundtrack would just make the movie confusing to the point of being unintelligible; in any event, Godard layers a sort of ongoing commentary on thefilm's images into his soundtrack and, so, an additional commentary would be weirdly redundant.)  Even with these aids, the picture remains extremely hard to interpret and willfully perverse.  Many of Godard's pictures of this era (1980 to 1990) are hard to understand on first viewing, but became fairly clear on a second screening, and, in fact, lucid and profound when viewed a third time.  I'm not sure that this is the case with King Lear, a movie so overdetermined as to its systems of meaning that parts of it, I think, simply can't be deciphered.  Godard has tried to put everything he knows about moviemaking into this film.  The problem with the picture is not that it spitefully savages (and vandalizes) Shakespeare, but that it is a veritable encyclopedia, crammed with all sorts of riffs and rants on various subjects -- there's stuff about the history of Las Vegas, Jewish mobsters, lectures about cinema and so on.  By the end of the picture, the film has moved so far afield that it has somehow become a movie about Joan of Arc.  Inexplicably, Norman Mailer appears in the first scene with his actress daughter and they have breakfast, with orange juice, on a hotel terrace overlooking Lake Geneva.  It is equally puzzling that Woody Allen is featured in the last scenes, reading a sonnet by Shakespeare and, then, stitching together film footage using a needle and thread on his editing machine.  (This is an odd detail, insisted upon by the film's close-ups and eccentric mise-en-scene that seems to be justified on two grounds:  first, Godard has a tendency toward what might be construed as mild anti-Semitism; Allen is stitching the movie together like a Jewish tailor.  Second, the movie is nominally a post-apocalyptic science fiction film and, perhaps, after the end of the world, all editing machines are defunct so that movies have to be literally sewn together.)  

Godard's King Lear never really progresses beyond the opening scenes in the play -- that is, Shakespeare's depiction of Lear dividing up his kingdom and, then, disinheriting Cordelia because she refuses to be as profuse in her protestations of love and affection as her treacherous siblings, Regan and Goneril.  (In Godard's version, Regan and Goneril deliver their speeches by fax and never appear in the film; Cordelia is motivated to deny Lear's request that his "favorite daughter" shower him with rhetorical love, perhaps, because she has been sexually abused, even deflowered by the old man.)  There is something typically French and insouciant about adapting Lear for the screen but omitting almost the entire play -- Godard stages a bit of the opening four or five pages and, then, a fragmentary speech from the end of the play; the rest is simply ignored.  (I had a friend who had studied in Paris at a prestigious university; when he was required to write an essay at the University of Minnesota on Paradise Lost, he spent forty pages on the typography in the first six lines of Milton's poem and never went beyond that passage, a necessity for him since he despised Milton and hadn't read more than sixty lines of the poem.  Similarly, all commentators agree that Godard didn't like Lear and probably never read the play at all.)

King Lear begins with typical Godard titles, block letters stating that the film is various things, but none of them an adaptation of a play by Shakespeare.  On the soundtrack, we hear a phone call scratchily recorded between Godard and Menachim Golan, the movie entrepreneur who with his partner named Globus, financed the picture for one million dollars.  (The movie, which looks beautiful, is incredibly low-budget -- everything is filmed in the environs of a hotel in Geneva where the performers stayed and near Godard's house; the shoot was about two weeks, with another ten days or so of supplementary footage added.)  Golan complains that the picture is badly behind schedule and likely won't be ready for premiere at the Cannes Film Festival -- Golan kvetches that Godard already has missed the deadlines for Cannes' submission the previous year.  Next, we see Norman Mailer in profile preening about having finished his script.  He and his daughter discuss the adaptation which involves setting the action among mafiosi.  They have breakfast.  For some reason, the short scenes with Mailer and his daughter are shown in a second almost identical take -- I suppose Godard is foregrounding the notion that we are seeing a movie and must remember that everything on-screen is a contrivance.  There is some confusion in the mind of the audience as to whether the young woman with Mailer is his mistress or daughter or both -- Godard exploits this uneasiness in furtherance of an incest theme that is pretty close to the surface in the movie but never explicitly stated.  (Later, we see some spectacularly gory sheets signifying that the young woman has been deflowered although with horror-show gore.)  After Mailer and daughter fly back to the United States, Molly Ringwald appears as Cornelia with Burgess Meredith who seems frail and a little discombobulated as Lear (or Learo).  The false start with Mailer signifies an actual dispute during the making of the movie -- originally Mailer and his daughter were to perform the roles of Lear and Cordelia, but were reluctant to continue when Godard insisted on pursuing the incest angle with regard to the relationship of father and daughter.  A title repetitively shown tells us that the movie is about the conflict between virtue (Cordelia) and power (presumably Lear).  The reference to power with respect to the enfeebled Lear demonstrates that Godard has not real understanding of the play. A young man with an ugly punk-rock haircut is trying to reconstruct Shakespeare's plays from the post-apocalyptic cultural detritus.  This kid is played by Peter Sellars, then, the enfant terrible of avant-garde theater.  Sellars tells us that his name is William Shakespeare, the Fifth and that he is lineally related to the playwright.  He wanders aimlessly around the hotel and the shore of the lake reciting lines from the bard and provides, as it were, the narrative integument as to the actual play here under consideration.  Many of the scenes with Sellars are quite opaque -- for instance, we see him walking through the woods with young people trailing behind him and imitating his shambling gait.  (As it happened, Godard was simultaneously shooting a jeans commercial and had a cast four or five young models, all of them very attractive, who were involved in making the advertisement.  He employs them in King Lear as "sprites" or supernatural spirits.  Accordingly, we see them dancing around in rooms where Cordelia and Lear are emoting or otherwise squatting outside the hotel in the rain.  This intervention in the play, an example of Godard's opportunistic approach to film-making, is utterly confusing -- everything is shot scrupulously realistically, even in a documentary style, very lean and uninflected, and, therefore, there is simply nothing to explain why these model-handsome young folks are capering around.  Unless, someone explains this to you, there is absolutely no clue that Godard has added a crew of sprites, after the manner of Midsummer Night's Dream or The Tempest to the action in Lear.  The presence of these pretty kids darting about enlivens the movie's rather dull pictorial aspect, but it has nothing to do with King Lear or, even, any of the themes adjacent to the Shakespeare play.  

The premise for the film's narrative is that the catastrophe at Chernobyl has somehow destroyed Western culture, although, also, idiosyncratically sparing the expensive hotel with its chambermaids and restaurants.  As in Weekend, which Lear resembles, the problem is that of assembling the canon after the apocalypse.  Godard is averse to histrionic melodrama.  His post-apocalyptic world in Weekend looks like a bucolic road-trip in the country; the post-apocalyptic world in Lear is quite pleasant with good food, drink, and shelter.  Cinema has vanished, but it is being reconstituted by "Professor Pluggy" played by Godard himself.  (Pluggy is the cinema history version of Shakespeare V,  both figures also similar to the people who have memorized books wandering around the woods in Weekend).  Pluggy is a grotesque figure with electrical cords and adapters by the dozen braided into a fright wig.  He's unshaven and smokes a cigar and talks like Samuel Fuller out of the corner of his mouth, his lips ridiculously contorted as he speaks..  Pluggy's English is heavily accented and Godard uses an intentionally rebarbative growl with the effect that half of what he says is completely unintelligible.  Pluggy rants about film and, finally, reinvents cinema.  But this is after several false starts -- in one attempt at reconstituting the movies, he has the audience facing a black void while the walls and sides of the auditorium are lit as if to serve as screens for the images to be projected.  Godard's Professor Pluggy is supposed to be funny but the character is just deeply annoying and Godard is not a particularly good actor -- of course, wearing dreadlocks of film cables, there's not much chance that the character will be taken seriously.  Two-thirds of the way through the movie, Shakespeare the Fifth gets gunned down, apparently by Edgar (played by Leos Carax).  I don't know why Edgar killed poor Shakespeare, but, not to worry, the homicide takes place on Easter Eve and the character is resurrected as church bells sound in a village somewhere.  Professor Pluggy maybe commits suicide -- this is what Brody thinks -- and is shown lying on the ground with his mouth still twisted awry as if to yap out of the corner of his lips.  He also appears in later scenes none the worse for wear.  It's at about this point that Godard tiring of Shakespeare, whom he has barely considered in any event, deviates into sequences involving an essay on the "image" by the surrealist poet, Pierre Reverdy, and readings from Virginia Woolf's The Waves, apparently motivated by shots of water lapping against the shore of Lake Geneva.  And, at this point, Godard reimagines Cordelia as Joan of Arc, prophesying that in "seven years the Americans will be d iven out of France" -- the speech is adapted from Robert Bresson's film about the figure.  At the end of the movie, Cordelia sprawls dead on a boulder; Burgess Meredith broods over the waters of the big lake holding a long gun like a lance.  (Brody remarks that Godard, citing some other filmmaker -- ostensibly D. W. Griffith -- said that all a movie needs is a "gun and a girl.")  The shot of Lear and Cordelia is suitably iconic -- it looks like an image from a Howard Hawks or Budd Boettcher Western.  There are some slow-motion images of a beautiful white horse, an emblem for Joan of Arc apparently.  The movie ends with Woody Allen stitching together a film with needle and thread.  

The narrative scenes are interrupted by shots of famous art works (Gustave Dore and Fra Angelico's angels).  In some scenes, a candle is held close to pictures by Goya, nightmarish images form the House of the Deaf Man where the artist lived in his last years -- I think these pictures have something to do with the question of old age and its indignities, afflictions suffered by Lear, the cinema which is posited to have died of senescence, and the demented Professor Pluggy.  Godard, apparently, identifies with Lear -- he's the king of a realm of cinema that has been sold out to jeans' commercials and American blockbusters.  Godard has the habit of choosing the worst takes for the film -- he shows Molly Ringwald flubbing her lines when she tries to recite some Shakespeare and poor Burgess Meredith, obviously confused, speaking a passage from Hamlet when he can't quite recall the lines from Lear.  

The movie was ridiculed when it was premiered in Cannes in 1987.  The tenor of the questions posed to Godard were basically, why do you make such lousy movies?  Godard had a good rejoinder:  he cites a statement by Picasso that if he were imprisoned and had no access to art materials he would paint with his own shit.  Sellars was translating for the hostile critics, only a few of whom had remained in the theater.  Godard's implication was that the state of film world gave him only shit to work with and so he had to make do with that substance for his pigment.  I am deeply ambivalent about this movie and will have to watch it several times to see if I develop any actual affection for the picture.  It is so dense and perverse as to unwatchable without someone to provide you with guidance as to what you are seeing.  The surface texture of the movie is unremarkable although there are many beautiful shots.  (Godard made the movie with a crew of two, a sound man and a photographer, but the picture is elegantly filmed and composed -- one shot in particular with Molly Ringwald rim lit against the whorl of white and silver hair of Lear's profile is startlingly beautiful.)  The soundtrack is impenetrably dense, adding to the viewer's confusion.  Godard is so obviously intelligent and works with such great intuitive grace that the film is certainly worth studying.  

In an interview, Molly Ringwald observes that Godard was a very demanding director and notwithstanding the low budget, nothing was improvised:  "you had to say the words just like he wanted," she recalls.  Ringwald was 19 when she made the movie and she remarks in the Criterion interview that Godard made her look more beautiful than the version of her that appears in the elaborate made-up, lit, and costumed movies directed by John Hughes, things like Pretty in Pink and 16 Candles.  For the garments in which she appears in the film, Godard simply selected things that she had packed for the trip.  She says that people were always flying back and forth on the Concorde and that, at least, half the budget went to plane tickets.  She didn't accompany the movie to Cannes and only saw it when it was briefly screened in Beverly Hills.  She saw it at the Beverly Center where she says that there was a small screening room in a multiplex in the shopping mall.  She recalls that the theater was either empty or occupied by one or two people.  After those screenings, the movie vanished from sight and hasn't been revived until this recent Blu-Ray issued by Criterion.    

    

Don't Bother to Knock

 Don't Bother to Knock is an intelligent and efficient low-budget thriller, most notable for Marilyn Monroe's performance.  The film was made in 1952 and directed by Roy Baker for 20th Century Fox.  The movie is best described as an unassuming film noir, fairly short and designed, it seems, for showing as the first part of a double feature with a bigger budget, more glamorous movie. The picture is very well-written, plausible, and entertaining.  Monroe plays a naive country girl and she is convincingly innocent and hapless, not a femme fatale but a young woman who needs (and deserves, it seems) protection against the heartless world around her.  The actress isn't playing the part of a sex bomb here and she initially seems to be rather plain and guileless. The film is a study of serious mental illness, disassociative schizophrenia, and Monroe seems helpless and appealing until her madness turns her into a psychopathic criminal.  The action in the movie takes place entirely in a hotel in downtown New York, the McKinley, and this place isn't posh or luxurious -- in fact, the hotel seems rather dingy with a night club displaying murals of Indians on horseback in what seems like Monument Valley, a disgruntled chanteuse and, of course, a cynical bartender. (The night club has clearly seen better days).  The McKinley has permanent residents, including a nosy old woman and her long-suffering husband who observe their neighbors from the window of their suite -- these are characters who seem to have migrated out of one of Hitchcock's lesser pictures and, in fact, the film gives the impression that it is imitating the Master of Suspense.  Elisha Cook, Jr., who seems to have appeared in about half of the movies made between 1940 and 1960 appears as an elevator operator who gets to utter the ancient jest that his profession has its ups and downs. There are no frills in this movie but it's genuinely frightening and, even, has one scene that startles the audience with its brutal implications.  

Nell (Monroe) is brought to a hotel room at the McKinley by the elevator operator to babysit an eight-year old girl.  The girl's father is the avuncular Jim Backus here playing a writer of newspaper or magazine editorials in town to be feted at a testimonial dinner -- he's going to be given some kind of award.  Backus' writer and his wife are upper crust:  the woman owns expensive gowns, perfume and jewelry.  At the bar downstairs, the caddish Jed, a commercial airline pilot, is arguing with his girlfriend, Lesley Lyn, a torch singer in the night club.  Lyn thinks that Jed is unwilling to commit to her and that he lacks an "understanding heart" so she has written him a letter breaking off their relationship.  Jed, as played by Richard Widmark, is entitled, arrogant, and callous. His girlfriend seems justified in ending their affair.  Jed goes upstairs to his hotel room and, looking out the window, sees the fetching Nell in a room across the air shaft.  He flirts with her and, after a phone call, comes to the room where she is supposed to be babysitting.  It's pretty clear to the viewer that something is wrong with Nell.  She's shed her frumpy street clothes and put on a slinky kimono owned the mother of the little girl that she's watching.  And she's put on the wealthy woman's earrings, a diamond wrist band, and her perfume.  Jed can't believe his good fortune and sets out to seduce Nell, an endeavor that really requires next to no effort.  Nell is anxious to have sex with Jed and seems about to hop into bed with him.  She's locked up the little girl in the bedroom in the suite and ignores her tears and pleas to be released.  Jed is very pleased with himself until he begins to perceive that Nell has mistaken him for someone else -- in fact, she's slipped into a fugue state in which she believes Jed is her boyfriend who was lost in the Pacific War.  (Jed is himself a combat veteran).  Nell is completely deranged and a close-up shows us that she has scarred both wrists with suicide attempts.  When Nell's uncle played by Elisha Cook comes to the room, she brains him with a lamp and knocks him out.  Jed is horrified and doesn't know that the little girl is now gagged and tied in the dark bedroom in the suite.  It's clear to him that Nell is completely crazy.  When the little girl's mother comes to the room to check on her daughter, she finds Nell preparing to kill or mangle the child.  The women fight and Nell escapes, shoplifting a razor blade in the store in the hotel and wandering around in a delusional state.  Nell is about to slash her own throat when Jed approaches her (he's gone down to the Club to make another attempt at persuading the singer, Lesley Lyn, not to dump him.)  Jed speaks kindly to Nell and shows an "understanding heart".  Poor Nell is disarmed and taken away to a mental hospital.  Jed has become a better man, more kind, gentle and understanding.  The chanteuse decides to give him another chance.  

Reportedly, Marilyn Monroe modeled Nell's behavior on her own mother's conduct.  (Monroe's mother was a paranoid schizophrenic.)  Monroe is very good and quite frightening, both unpredictable and obsessed with Jed whom she believes to be her dead lover.  There's a scene in which Monroe seems poised to pitch the little girl out an open window on the eighth floor of the hotel that is quite scary and shocking.  When the snoopy old lady sees Monroe putting her hands on the little girl who is leaning out of the window, she screams and the audience in the theater must have screamed as well -- I jumped; it's an early example of a very effective horror-movie "jump scare."  Widmark is good as the cad who turns into a hero.  (The shadow of World War II hovers over everything; today we would say that there's all sorts of PTSD in evidence in the film.)  The bar singer gets to perform a couple of nifty songs for our entertainment.  There are some poetic lines:  Nell says that when she fled Oregon where her parents beat her for showing interest in men, the bus passed trucks on the highway "all lit up like Christmas trees."  The effective, functionally lucid camerawork is by the great Lucien Ballard and there's a wild percussive score by Lionel Newman, sort of like Bernard Herrmann's work for Hitchcock.  The film has a sort of anthropological/archaeological interest, depicting a lost world of lounge singers, shabby hotels, and testimonial dinners.  I thought this was a very good picture.   

Later Roy Baker became known as Roy Ward Baker.  Baker was a British filmmaker who worked on occasion in Hollywood.  My earlier reference to Hitchcock is pertinent.  Baker clearly works in a vein influenced by Hitchcock's films.  His most famous movie is the extremely grim A Night to Remember about the sinking of the Titanic.  Baker worked as a genre director -- he made Westerns, crime pictures, and, at the end of his career, a number of horror movies, some of them reputedly very good.  Baker's last movie was made in about 1980.  He lived until 2010.     

Hard Truths

 There's a poem that I much admire by Bertolt Brecht entitled "The Mask of Evil."  In the poem, Brecht describes a Japanese mask hanging on his wall.  The poet notes that the swollen veins depicted in the demon's forehead demonstrate "wie anstrengend es ist, boes zu sein"  ("how strenuous or exhausting it is to be evil.")  This sentiment informs Mike Leigh's Hard Truths (2025).  I must first identify a "hard truth" about this intellectually challenging movie:  we need to call a spade a spade -- the film's protagonist. Pansy, is "evil"; her bitterness, cruelty, and paranoid suspiciousness have damaged everyone around her and made living with her a sort of hell. It won't do to look away from what is obvious and claim that Pansy is a victim of some kind or misunderstood -- the protagonist, from the first time we see her until the film's last frame, uses her eloquence and high intelligence to systematically vilify and harm everyone in her family as well as random strangers that she encounters.  She is actively wicked and destructive; her panicked grimaces and entire demeanor demonstrate how strenuous it is to be so bad.  Leigh's achievement is to present this character in such a way that she earns a small measure of our respect for her articulate rage, often quite funny (it's possible, I think, to admire Iago for his deviousness and intelligence); further, Leigh even induces in moviegoers a sort of sympathy for the monstrous character that he presents to us so directly and with so little editorial comment.

The milieu in Hard Truths is a middle-class neighborhood, a London suburb that is inhabited by West Indian immigrants, albeit all second or third generation.  Everyone is Black -- there is a single White figure in the movie, a hapless female "sales associate" in a furniture shop whom Pansy viciously berates.  Pansy's husband, Cortly runs a plumbing business with a loquacious cheerful laborer named Virgil.  (It's an odd coincidence but the setting in Hard Truths almost exactly mirrors the situation in Adolescence, another notable British picture -- the family in Adolescence also lives in a comfortable, if crowded-looking London suburb and the father in that show is also a plumber; the only difference is that the people in Hard Truths are Black and those in Adolescence White.)  Pansy and Cortly have one son, Moses, a hulking child-man (he is 25) who spends his time sullenly walking around town or holed-up in his room reading books about airplanes -- obviously, he wants to escape from the hellish family life in which he is the victim of his mother's constant bullying.  If anything, Cortly has it even worse.  By the end of the movie, he's been physically wounded to the point that he can't even move.  Pansy's mother, Pearl has been dead for five years.  Pansy's sister, an ebullient and humorous beautician, has many friends and two successful daughters -- one is a lawyer; the other works in marketing for beauty products company.  Pansy is the elder sister and utterly different from her cheerful, generous sibling whose name is Chantelle.  (There is a charming scene set in Chantelle's hair salon in which the women converse about their lives in a lilting creole patois.)  There's next to no plot.  Pansy wakes in the morning with scream.  Everything frightens her because everything is an enemy.  She hates and fears the "filthy" pigeons that occupy her backyard.  She greets her husband and poor Moses with an uninterrupted rant consisting of insults and assertions that she is a victim.  When she goes to the doctor, she abuses the young female physician.  At the dentist, she bullies the hygienist.  At the grocery store, and in a parking lot, she gets into screaming exchanges with casual strangers.  She is hysterically fearful of birds, plants, and insects.  Pansy has a sharp tongue and her diatribes are often darkly comical, but it's obvious that she has committed soul-murder with respect to the longsuffering Cortly and her hapless son, Moses.  When she refuses to cook supper, Cortly goes out and gets the equivalent of Kentucky Fried Chicken to eat with Moses -- Pansy bellows at him about the smell of the chicken and demands that windows be opened the aerate their home; when a fox finds itself trapped in her backyard, she reacts with rage, acting as if the animal has been dispatched to personally offend and terrify her.  The story is limited to Chantelle asking Pansy to go with her to the cemetery on Mother's Day to visit Pearl's grave.  Chantelle has planned a family meal after the visit to the cemetery.  At the graveyard, the two sisters quarrel and Pansy says that when their father abandoned Pearl, she had to raise Chantelle and, therefore, was deprived of her own life.  (None of her explanations as to why she is so wrathful have even the slightest patina of plausibility).  The family dinner predictably degenerates when Pansy attacks everyone in the room. Someone mentions that Moses purchased a bouquet of flowers for his mother; this comment causes Pansy to laugh uncontrollably, a sort of satanic seizure and, then, burst into inconsolable tears.  (She cries out that she is "so tired" and "so lonely.') When Cortly doesn't respond to a question posed by the kindly Chantelle about his own mother (the poor man seems distracted), Pansy reacts violently and, at home, dumps all of Cortly's possessions in the hall and expels him from the bedroom.  Cruelty is contagious.  Pansy has put Moses' flowers in a vase, touching the cut plants as if they were rotting bones or a serpent.  Cortly sees the flowers in the vase and coldly picks them up and hurls them into the backyard -- this is one of the most chilling moments in the movie, demonstrating the maxim that those to whom cruelty is done become cruel themselves.  Cortly and Virgil are shown lugging a porcelain bathtub down some stairs.  In the process, Cortly hurts his back badly.  We see him in agony at home, scarcely able to move, understanding full well that Pansy will do nothing to help him.  Moses goes for another long walk (thugs often bully him) and, maybe, meets a friendly girl.  The last sequence consists of big close-ups of Cortly and Pansy in an impasse, unable to even speak to one another.  

The film is partly improvised and has very sharp, penetrating dialogue.  Marianne Jean Baptiste plays Pansy -- she worked earlier for Mike Leigh in Secrets and Lies and her performance is relentless and uncompromising.  Of course, we keep expecting to see some trace of kindness or, at least, humanity in Pansy, but this is denied to us.  At no point in the ninety minute movie does she act with even a modicum of human decency.  Of course, the question that the movie poses is a simple, if imponderable one:  why is Pansy like this?  No explanations are offered.  We wonder if she was abused as a child or the victim of racism or some other social forces.  But there is no evidence that any of this explains Pansy's malevolence.  The film is similar to Leigh's great Naked in that no attempt is made to provide a basis for the character's bizarre behavior.  I recall the great quotation from Richard III in Runaway Train:  "No beast so fierce but knows the touch of pity, but I know none and, therefore, am no beast."  Pansy's humanity consists exactly in her obdurate, enduring hatred.  

The film is eloquently, if simply, shot, by Dick Pope, Mike Leigh's longtime cameraman.  There are extraneous aspects to the film that are so underdeveloped that they don't contribute to the picture -- these are vestigial subplots involving Chantelle's two attractive and successful daughters that are intended to be vaguely satirical.  These short sequences are okay but don't add anything to the movie.  In some ways, the picture resembles another masterpiece by Mike Leigh, Life is Sweet about a young woman with an eating disorder (in the context of grotesque efforts by Timothy Spall to start a gourmet restaurant) -- Jim Broadbent appears in that film, another familiar actor in Leigh's work.  Leigh, who is 82, has made fifteen pictures, many of them very great including Topsy-Turvy, one of the best period pictures ever produced.  Hard Truths, further, inverts the situation in Happy-go-Lucky involving a woman who is preternaturally kind and happy. Hard Truths is an important work by a major filmmaker, utterly clear and lucid, but remarkably resistant to interpretation.    

Adolescence

 Adolescence is a four-part limited series broadcast on Netflix in mid-March 2025.  The show is extremely harrowing with many disturbing features; it's the sort of thing you watch with admiration, but, also, watch the time elapsed as each episode progresses, hoping for the thing to end.  The plot is simple and there is not much narrative in the series.  Adolescence explores four aspects of a killing -- a 13 or 14 year old girl has been stabbed to death by a male classmate.  This situation is viewed from several perspectives with each hour-long episode proceeding in real time -- that is, the length of the episode matches the length of time elapsed in that part of the story.  Furthermore, the individual episodes are each filmed in a single continuous shot.  The subject matter is so gripping and the performances so remarkable that most viewers won't really notice the fantastically complex choreography required to keep the camera perpetually moving without edits during the hour dramatized on screen.  It suffices to say that the show can be watched abstractly as a bravura tour de force of camera work.  However, the subject matter is so alarming that most viewers will simply ignore the gratuitous artistry with which this show is made.  The effect of single-shot mise-en-scene is to confine the viewers within the claustrophobic perspective advanced during each episode -- we are immersed in a stream of action from which there is no escape and no diversion.  The show feels claustrophobic and its effects seem inevitable -- the camera defining what we see in a single real-time shot establishes that the tragedy unfolding is somehow predestined and inescapable.  The parameters of the presentation, accordingly, force us into a confrontation with the show's fundamental theme:  what is the cause of the murder?  What were the factors that had to combine to produce this specific, highly distinct tragedy.  The single-shot technique imposes a sort of laser focus on this question --  in most movies, there is off-screen space that is either menacing or a refuge from the narrative.  In Adolescence, the one-shot sequences abolish the notion of other spaces -- we see what it is preordained for us to see and this claustrophobic aspect of the film controls our ideas about why a little boy (the assailant is small and timid-looking) would repeatedly stab a girl in his class.  In essence, the show argues that, given the hellscape in which this narrative is set, there really can be no other outcome -- but the exact causal chain and the weight we are to afford to its links remains highly problematic and questionable.  As in all classic tragedy, the burden of Adolescence was that this killing was somehow inevitable and could not be averted.  And, yet, the characters, it seems, protest this sense of predestination -- they fight against the very constraints of the mise-en-scene in which they are embedded like entomological specimens.

The first episode is a designed as a police procedural.  We see an army of police cars roaring into a suburban neighborhood at dawn.  A dozen heavily armed SWAT team cops bust into a house and haul out a trembling child, Jamie, the 13-year old son of  blue collar parents, Eddie and Amanda Miller.  Jamie is terrified and wets himself when he is yanked out of his bed.  The parents protest in vain.  The platoon of cops takes the child to the station where he is booked and, then, interviewed by a male and female investigator (who also participated in the raid.)  A public defender is appointed for the boy and the child is aggressively interviewed by the investigators.  A girl of about the same age has been stabbed to death, cut seven times by a kitchen knife.  Jamie denies knowing anything about the murder.  However, he (and his father defined legally as "his appropriate adult") are shown a video in which CCTV shows what appears to be Jamie murdering the girl.  Jamie keeps crying out that "it isn't me," but it seems pretty obvious that he is the assailant.  He and his father collapse in griefstricken horror -- Jamie's father is shocked and appalled by what his son has done and, initially, repels his son's embrace, but, of course, loves him still and the two of them are frozen in a huddle of horror and stunned grief as the episode ends.

In the second episode, the male and female investigators go to the school that Jamie attended and where he apparently had some sort of relationship with the victim.  The school is an inferno of inept teachers, vicious bullying kids, and cruelty.  The teachers seem to have last control over the inmates.  The male investigator's work is complicated by the fact that his own son attends this place and is, also, being bullied.  The intricate camera choreography in this part of the film is astonishing -- the moving camera tracks through windows and walls, follows an extended foot chase, and, then, goes airborne for a drone shot that returns the camera to where it first started -- at a memorial shrine for the dead girl about six blocks from the school.  This sequence involves the most difficult problems imaginable with respect to the single-shot process, particularly with respect to marshalling the large forces that appear on screen -- there must be a dozen or so feckless teachers and a couple hundred students (in fact 375 extras the internet tells me).  The extreme delicacy and tact that the film displays is on evidence in the final moments of this section.  The camera comes back to flowers and teddy bears at the site where the girl was killed, but, instead of focusing on the picture of the dead child (which is the image with which the program began) instead shows us the anguish on the face of Jamie's father who is delivering a bouquet of flowers to the shrine -- there's no need to show us the little girl again; we can read the horror of the situation on Eddie's face.

A young woman employed as a psychotherapist interviews Jamie at the so-called Correctional Facility where he is detained awaiting trial.  In the third episode, seven months have now passed since the murder.  The young woman is bright and pretends to be sympathetic to Jamie but, in fact, it seems that she has an ideological agenda -- she is trying to establish that Jamie's crime was the consequence of what we would call "toxic masculinity" and, possibly, the result of indifference or worse by Jamie's father.  Jamie maintains that he didn't commit the crime and defends his father but it's apparent that he harbors a deep and disturbing reservoir of misogynistic hatred and rage.  In the end, the shrink elicits a terrifying outburst from Jamie who tries to intimidate her with threats of violence.  Then, she cooly and brutally withdraws her sympathy from the boy having seen what she came to see (query:  to what extent did she trigger an avoidable outburst by her manipulative questioning?)  After Jamie has threatened her and decried the video of the killing as "fake news", he is hauled away and young woman is nauseated, gagging as she looks at a pickle and cheese sandwich she brought for Jamie in order to win his trust.  The psychological evaluator seems horrified by what she has done just as she is appalled by Jamie's crime.  By this point, we learn that the victim of the stabbing sent Jamie text messsages with emojis that the investigators didn't understand at first.  Jamie apparently asked the girl out on a date.  She turned him down with cruel pictograms suggesting that he was an "incel" -- that is, involuntary celibate too ugly and clumsy to date.  (The girl sent out semi-nude pictures to a boy that she liked that have been circulating at the school; Jamie opportunistically thought that her discomfiture and humiliation would cause her to agree to their date.)  A motif in the show is a slogan 80 - 20, a figure that argues that 80% of women are attracted to only 20% of the population of young men -- this means, in effect, that someone like Jamie has no chance of sexual success.

13 months have passed since the killing.  In the fourth episode, it's Eddie's birthday and his wife and daughter try to cheer him up.  The program shows that, even in the most dire situations, people will revert to their mundane lives.  A therapist has told Eddie and Amanda to regard each day as "a problem to be solved."  But, after a promising start to the day (Eddie and Amanda flirting), things go badly wrong.  A vandal has sprayed the word "NONCE" on Eddie's van -- "Nonce" means "sexual deviant."  Eddie and his family go to a British version of a Home Depot store where Eddie is recognized and a store-clerk, in whispers, offers to support his son by "crowd-funding" his defense -- there is widespread sympathy for Jamie as an "incel" victim of teenage girl bullying, support that seems to appall Eddie.. One of the vandals appears and Eddie violently confronts him, then, pitches a bucket of paint at his beloved van to obscure the insulting words on its side.  On the way home, Jamie telephones to wish his father happy birthday, but, also, says that he is going to plead guilty to the crime to avoid the trial that is imminent.  Back at the house, Eddie and Amanda sit in Jamie's room and discuss whether they are to blame for what happened.  They both assure one another that the murder was not their fault, but that they "made him (Jamie)" and logic doesn't persuade Eddie, at least, that he isn't to blame for the tragedy.  The show ends with Eddie tucking a toy bear into his son's bed and kissing it as he says that he's sorry.

Adolescence asks the viewer to assess why Jamie murdered his victim.  Various hypotheses are advanced but none are really sufficient.  Jamie's school is a nightmare -- an American viewer feels considerable schadenfreude at the show's depiction of British education which seems, if anything, even worse than our schools.  (England has a long, venerable tradition of savage bullying in its public schools.)  The internet and its blandishments have corrupted Jamies' understanding of himself and  others. The murder victim has mocked him with exquisite cruelty.  There are issues of "toxic masculinity" and, even, misogyny in the situation.  Maybe, it was just fate or genetics or some kind of cosmic accident.  Or, perhaps, Jamie's parents are to blame in some respect.  All of these hypotheses are suggested (as well as others), but none of them seem adequate to account for the tragedy, an event so gruesome and bizarre that Jamie refuses to admit that he is the assailant.  Stephen Graham, a well-known British actor, is superb as Eddie Miller; he looks brutish and talks tough but we can see that he's doing his best with his family (in one monologue, he admits that he never wanted children.)  Owen Cooper's performance as Jamie is jaw-dropping -- the kid is small for his age (the actor was 15 when the show was made) and he looks pre-pubescent.  It's impossible to imagine him killing the girl, but, in the third episode, Jamie shows an alarming streak of rage as he tries to manipulate the young woman who is interviewing him.  Cooper makes the murder seem both wholly implausible and, also, totally plausible at the same time.  In the third episode, a continuous shot taking place in a room where the psychologist (Erin Doherty) interview Jamie, I found myself wondering:  if this is kid is so accomplished at age 15 what will he be like when he is thirty?  It's a pitch-perfect, eerily flawless performance.  Philip Barantini directed brilliantly; the series is produced by Stephen Graham and Brad Pitt among others. 

45 Years

 I45 Years is a modest family drama about an elderly couple on the eve of celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary.  Geoff and Katy Mercer live near Norfolk in the U. K.  As they make plans for the celebration -- a DJ has been hired and a hall rented -- Geoff receives a rather macabre letter.  The body of a young woman, apparently well-preserve, has been found at the bottom of a fissure in a Swiss glacier.  Geoff has been contacted because Swiss authorities regard him as the dead woman's "next of kin."  The corpse has lain for fifty years undiscovered in the depths of the mountain glacier until climate change melted the edges of the icefield and exposed the body.  The dead woman is a German girl named Katya who was once Geoff's girlfriend.  In order to avoid problems renting rooms, Katya and Geoff claimed to be married and, in fact, at one point, Geoff tells Katy, his wife, that if the couple had made their way to Italy, as they planned, he would have made her his wife.  

Geoff and Katy are in a rut.  Geoff is feeble and doesn't get around much anymore.  Katy is more active, walking a big German shepherd named Max each morning.  They don't have children and seem not to have any close friends, an impression that the movie creates but that is belied by the party scenes at the end of the film -- it seems that hundreds of people have come to the anniversary party.  The discovery of the corpse of Geoff's fiancee from fifty years earlier exposes rifts in the old couple's marriage.  Geoff becomes obsessed with the dead body and the climactic forces that exposed it.  He even sneaks into town to inquire about buying plane tickets to go to Switzerland to see the corpse.  (He decides his health is too poor for him to make the trip -- five years earlier Geoff and Katy's fortieth anniversary party had to be deferred because a heart attack required that he have bypass surgery.)  Geoff creeps out of the marital bed when he thinks Katy is asleep to look at fading souvenirs from his relationship with the German girl -- he has saved these things in the "loft", a word that here signifies the attic to the couple's house.  Katy climbs into the "loft" herself and discovers a journal as to the hike in the Swiss Alps fifty years earlier.  She looks at some slides on a projector and discovers that it may be that Katya was pregnant when she died.  In a tense conversation, also in bed, Geoff says he would have married Katya if the accident had not occurred.  Things deteriorate between the couple.  Kate feels betrayed by the fact that Geoff never told her that he was dead girl's "next of kin" -- she has been generally aware of the love affair, however, throughout their marriage.  However, Geoff says that he wants to start anew and goes with Kate for her early morning walk with Max.  At the party, huge numbers of people congratulate the couple.  Geoff makes a sentimental speech about his marriage to Kate and breaks down in tears.  The couple dance to the Platters' song "Smoke gets in your Eyes".  Geoff seems happy and grateful for his marriage to Kate.  For her part, Kate looks suspicious, skeptical, and unhappy -- what else hasn't Geoff bothered to tell her about?  As we struggle to interpret the expression on Kate's face, the movie ends.

45 Years directed by Andrew Haigh is made in the very best, most fluent "international art house style."  This means that the mise-en-scene features extremely long shots, long takes, and very few close-ups.  The camera is often placed in a deliberately inexpressive location.  You have to pay close attention to the action and dialogue, much of which is very poetic in character.  Tiny effects are used to create almost subliminal effects.  When a rift develops between Kate and Geoff, the camera angle shifts in a jarring way to a completely different axis of observation, violating the 180 degree rule and creating an effect of discontinuity.  As they speak in bed, Geoff makes the admission that he would have married Katya but for the accident.  Kate is stricken and, when she turns to the light on the bedside table to shut it off, her face is bathed in an eerie, jaundice-colored radiance.  The dialogue is highly literate and ingenious and the scene-setting is excellent.  (The only criticism that I have is that the movie paints the couple as rather isolated -- they seem to have only one couple as close friends -- but, at the end, we see that they are feted by everyone in the small town at an elaborate, crowded affair; this is inconsistent with the isolated, lonely atmosphere that characterizes most of the movie.)  This is the kind of picture in which every detail is carefully configured.  For instance, Kate goes on boat ride over channels in a peat bog; this resonates with previous dialogue about the corpse preserved in the glacier as being like the "Tollund Man", a bog body discovered in Sweden, Geoff recalls -- mistakenly as we learn; Kate's a teacher and has taught a "unit" on the bog bodies to her elementary age students and she notes that the Tollund Man was found in Denmark.  This exchange between the couple illustrates the heightened friction between husband and wife and the eerie motif of a corpse-like figure from the past reaching out with dead and icy hands to harm people in the present.  Geoff is played by Tom Courtenay who acts querulous and feeble -- he tries to have sex with his wife at one point, but fails.  Charlotte Rampling acts the part of the extremely intelligent, but brittle, Kate.  The story about the preserved body found in the glacier derives from Fred Zinneman's last film, Five Days one Summer (1982), in which a woman widowed for fifty years looks upon the frozen corpse of her young husband entombed in a glacier.  This episode, the only thing memorable about the Zinneman film, in turn derives from a famous anecdote by Hebbel (Unverhofftes Wiedersehen), one of the most celebrated short prose pieces in German literature -- the story involves an old woman who confronts the dead body of her husband preserved for forty years in a "vitriol pool" in a mine where he died in an accident.  The story about the discovery of a magically preserved corpse shown to an elderly person who loved the dead person is haunting, suggests all sorts of morbid thoughts, and suggests the possibility of the remote past intruding upon our complacent lives and wreaking havoc on them. (Ernst Bloch said that the tiny anecdote -- it's less than a page long -- is the "most beautiful story in the world."  45 Years is very good if you're in the mood for a somber story of this sort, a tastefully made art film too discrete and reticent to resolve the issues that it raises.  

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

 Before the Devil knows you're Dead (2008) is the last film directed by Sidney Lumet.  Lumet made many famous and critically renowned movies including Twelve Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Serpico, and The Pawnbroker.  The director, who died in 2011, was a thoughtful, conventional, middle-of-the-road and middle-brow defender of liberal values.  He embodied the sensibility of intelligent, urban Jews on the East Coast.  His pictures are prestige vehicles, starring accomplished and expensive actors and equipped with excellent screenplays.  On the evidence of Before the Devil knows you're Dead, Lumet didn't lose his cunning or touch with actors even into his old age.  The movie is a brutal, compelling neo-noir that has the dimensions of Shakespearian tragedy.  It's very good, although it suffers, a little from Lumet's tendency to favor intelligence and caution over passion.  That said, the movie is agile and sprightly and doesn't feel like the work of a man who was in any way diminished by his age at the time of directing the picture -- that is, almost 80.  In fact, the film is mildly experimental.  The opening sequence, a blunt, documentary-style sex scene verges on the pornographic -- at a time, when American cinema was withdrawing from candid portrayals of sex on screen, Lumet rubs your nose in it.  Similarly, the film has a fractured, cubist narrative -- time-shifts as to sequences are delineated by the jarring effect of shots seeming to collide with one another and flickering back and forth with a staccato percussive rhythm until the new scene is established.  The effect is jarring and knocks the viewer out of the film, creating an almost Brechtian feeling of detachment.  I don't think this technique, which I've never seen before, is particularly effective and it 's very distracting.  Nonetheless, I feel that it's admirable that Lumet experiments with this form of transition and with the film's narrative form in general.  It's evidence that the movie is thoroughly imagined and that every aspect of the picture, including transitions is intentional and deliberately conceived.  

Two brothers are in trouble.  Andy, the older brother, is a real estate developer, a heroin addict, and embezzler.  He is married to an attractive wife (Marisa Tomei) who is having an affair involving passionate sex "every Thursday" with the younger brother, Hank.  Hank is played by a disreputable and disheveled-looking Ethan Hawke.  Andy's role is performed by Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Of course, both actors are excellent.  Hank is impecunious, in arrears with respect to his child support, and desperate -- he's also a bit dimwitted and cowardly.  Andy and Hank's father, Charles Hanson (Albert Finney), runs a jewelry business in an unprepossessing suburb in Westchester County.  Andy decides to rob the jewelry business, knowing that it is well-insured.  He recruits Hank to commit the smash-and-grab burglary at a time when he knows that his parents will not be in their "mom and pop" store.  But Hank is afraid to do the deed and, without telling his brother, recruits some muscle for the job.  The robbery goes horribly awry and there's a gunfight.  The hoodlum is killed and Hank and Andy's mother, who was unexpectedly working at time of the heist, gets gunned-down and later dies.  So Hank and Andy have murdered their own mother. From this disastrous outcome, dramatized in the film's second scene, an impressively directed action sequence, things go from bad to worse.  The dead gunman has left a widow.  The widow's brother played by a grim and menacing Michael Shannon blackmails Hank.  Auditors are about to blow the whistle on Andy's embezzlement scheme and the older brother solaces himself by spending hours passed-out in the luxury apartment of a sinister transsexual drug dealer who sulks in a silky kimono.  Things further deteriorate and Andy decides that the only way to get through this calamity is to start murdering witnesses and potential witnesses -- he even shoots another customer of the drug dealer just for a good measure (the poor fat man passed out on the bed reminds Andy of himself.)  Meanwhile, the boys' father figures out that his sons murdered their mother (his wife) and he gets a gun and prepares to hunt them down. (As in all films of this kind, everyone has a sleek little firearm in his desk drawer). Andy has devised this scheme to repair the flagging intimacy in his marriage, due primarily (although he doesn't know it) to his wife's affair with his own brother.  The opening sex scene -- it happens in Rio de Janeiro - establishes Andy's quixotic hope to fix his marriage, an effort thwarted by his own criminality and drug addiction.  Before the movie is over, a lot of people are killed, although the body-count makes sense and doesn't seem gratuitous.  Everyone's life is ruined.  A malign diamond-dealer and fence provides a crucial plot point:  the man looks like a wizened, grizzled cadaver and he speaks the movie's moral:  "The world is an evil place:  some of us make money on that and some get destroyed."  On the evidence presented by the film, this statement seems true.

Lumet's direction is highly intelligible. He wants every scene to make sense and to be properly motivated.  I have rarely seen a film so concerned with graphic lucidity and what the French call vraisemblance -- that is, a plausible representation of reality.  In one scene, Albert Finney's character crashes a car by backing it into a police cruiser -- the bereaved father feels the cops are insufficiently responsive to the murder of his wife.  This crash results in damage to the rear of the character's car, highlighted in one scene in which the old man tinkers with the trunk of the car, thereby showing us the scope of the damage.  In the final scenes, the old man tracks his sons across town and his presence in traffic is clearly and obviously signaled by the misshapen rear of his car.  On all levels, Lumet presents the viewer with clear signs as to how the images are to be interpreted.  This goes so far as a scene in which the camera tracks an attractive (shapely) woman on the other side of the street -- she has nothing to do with the scene, although her motion leads us to the subject of the shot off-screen to the right; the woman's role is simply to direct the eye to where Lumet wants you to look.  There are many examples of this ingenious technique in the movie -- unobtrusively, but effectively, the director shows us how to see and "read" his images.  Although grim to the point of absurdity, Before the Devil knows you're Dead is a very good movie.  (The title refers to an Irish toast or blessing:  "May you be in Heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you're dead.") 

Me and Orson Welles

The life and career of Orson Welles has proved to be a popular subject for feature films.  Tim Robbins made The Cradle will Rock in 1997 about Welles' efforts to produce Marc Blitzstein's musical of the same name, a Brecht-influenced piece of Depression-era agit-prop; that film is set in 1937 when Welles was working with the Leftist Federal Theater, an enterprise that he derides in the first ten minutes of Richard Linklater's excellent Me and Orson Welles (2009).  David Fincher's Mank made for Netflix in 2020 chronicles Welles' work with screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz in preparation for Citizen Kane.  (Mank is a beautifully filmed and acted picture that has the misfortune of being curiously tedious, uninvolving and forgettable -- it's about a squabble over attribution, a topic interesting to some cinephiles but ultimately not really compelling for most audiences.)  There's a thriller called Fade to Black in which Welles is called upon to solve a murder.  In 1975, the made-for-TV movie The Night that Panicked America provides an account of the hysteria that allegedly arose from Welles' radio production of War of the Worlds -- no one seems to think that movie was any good; I watched it but have no recollection of anything in the picture.  The best of this specialized genre is Linklater's wonderfully scripted and elegantly shot Me and Orson Welles, a movie that successfully marries biopic elements (rigorously researched) with romantic comedy in the context of a teenager's "coming of age."  Me and Orson Welles is charming and continuously compelling.   Linklater is possibly America's most consistently excellent and innovative director; he has an acute feel for the material that he shoots, seems neither too adoring nor too cynical about his characters, and possessed an unassuming camera and editing style that can deliver surprisingly profound and beautiful moments.  In a Linklater picture, there's no straining for effect, an aspect of this director's work that is directly contrary to the baroque Sturm und Drang in most of Welles' films -- Linklater's tasteful restraint accordingly serves as an anodyne corrective to Welles' flamboyance.  

Richard Samuels is a 17 year old kid who lives somewhere in New York City.  He's interested in all of the arts, a sort of wise-ass dilettante.  At the outset, we see him daydreaming in a High School literature class where the teacher is droning on about Shakespeare.  Next, Richard meets a girl who is playing piano in a record and music shop -- they talk about Broadway show tunes and art and she confesses to the protagonist that she has completed a short story that she is hoping to sell to The New Yorker -- there is an obvious attraction between Richard and the girl, Gretta Adler but the initial encounter goes nowhere.  In the third scene in Me and Orson Welles, the young man encounters a crowd of people standing at the entrance to a somewhat ruinous theater, the place that Welles will convert to a playhouse for his Mercury Theater Company.  People are bickering about when the show, a production of Julius Caesar, will premiere -- there have been a number of delays and the backers are restive and the actors (most of whom are not paid) are also concerned that the show will tank before it opens.  Welles is trying to cast a small part in the play, Lucius, a servant to Brutus (the part that Welles plays).  Lucius needs to be able to sing and play a ukulele (standing in for a lute); the kid also can play the drums and, after demonstrating an impressive,drumroll is hired on the spot by the flamboyant Welles, a charming, manipulative bully.  For next hour or so, the film dramatizes rehearsals of Julius Caesar that Welles has (with characteristic arrogance) renamed just Caesar.  Welles is having an affair with his leading lady although his wife is very much pregnant.  The director is also involved sexually with an assistant, a sort of publicist and stage manager, named Sonja (with a "j", she says, although pronounced as a "y")  Welles is continuously threatening people, firing and rehiring them, and alternative cajoling and bullying his cast and crew.  There's no doubt, however, that an aura of genius surrounds him.  A British actor named Christian McKay acts the part of Orson Welles and he's extraordinarily persuasive in the role -- he perfectly imitates Welles silky smooth radio-star voice, his hammy persona, and he looks like the man as well.  (He's a bit jowly, stocky, and suggests the Falstaffian character that Welles would later assume in his middle-age.)  It becomes apparent that Welles will do anything to implement his vision of Shakespeare's history play and he isn't above Machiavellian manipulation of his players.  Everyone knows this and, yet, everyone is completely willing to submit to the tyrant's antics -- no one questions Welles genius; nor does the film.  Richard attends a recording session for a radio program in which Welles wildly improvises using material from Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, a book that Welles claim was inspired by his own family in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  There are some minor mishaps on the set at the Mercury Theater, but Welles who is superstitious says that something very bad must happen before the premiere or calamity will befall the first night.  Richard inadvertently sets off a sprinkler system in the Mercury Theater causing a flood.  Welles knows that Richard's negligence caused the catastrophe but Richard, who is a conniving hustler as well, excuses himself by implying that he induced the calamity to avoid the opening night curse.  Sonja, who is scheming to seduce David O. Selznick (Welles' associate apparently, wants to work on Gone with the Wind.)  She likes Richard's ambition and naive innocence and they  go  to an apartment in Greenwich Village that Welles uses for sexual trysts.  There she has sex with Richard who, of course, thinks (mistakenly) that Sonja is his girlfriend  (As far as she's concerned, it's just a fling.). Richard has recently seen Gretta in a museum and she says she has sent her story to Harold Ross at The New Yorker.  Sonja has contacts at the magazine and she promises to use her influence to promote the story as a favor to Richard and "his girlfriend".  A few days later, Sonja repairs to Welles' love nest and spends the night with the director.  This enrages Richard who gets into a physical altercation with Welles (the director grabs him by the throat).  Welles fires Richard but immediately repents -- he  knows the kid is necessary for his theatrical effects in Caesar and so he meets the young man, praises him as a "god-created actor" and "magnificent" and implores him to return to the company.  All sorts of chaos ensues in the last hours before the premiere and a preview matinee goes disastrously wrong.  This is alleged to be how Welles always works, creating a sense of chaos and emergency before opening night.  When the play is performed -- and we see about ten minutes of the show -- the audience is astonished and rises for a standing ovation.  After the triumph, Welles sends Joseph Cotten to fire Richard -- he forgave him for challenging his authority only temporarily to protect the integrity of the show.  Another young man has been hired (also without pay) to take his place.  Richard meets in Gretta in the museum where he has previously seen her idealistically reciting Keats to an actrual"Grecian Urn".  She has successfully sold her story to The New Yorker.  Back in his High School class, Richard, ousted from the theater, impresses everyone by reciting by heart a long speech from Caesar. 

The plot is ingenious and exciting -- it's a well-worn,  if appealing,story: a group of scrappy young people collaborating to put on a show and overcome the odds -- but Linklater's direction is crisp and eloquent and the acting is superb.  There are many small details that advance the story and give it depth. When Richard goes to Welles apartment with Sonja, the camera lingers on the protagonist's face, registering fright and, even, dismay, when it becomes apparent that the young woman intends to have sex with him; he's not seducing her but vice-versa and the intimacy, it seems, is on her terms.  (It's evident that Richard is a virgin notwithstanding his locker room banter with Joseph Cotten and the actor playing Cinna the poet -- Linklater makes the point almost subliminally, with great taste and restraint.)  Welles has no compunction about "improving" Shakespeare and he cuts out big chunks of the play.  From time to time, eliminates the gruesome subplot in which Cinna the poet is mistaken for Cinna the co-conspirator (and assassin of Caesar), but, then, capriciously restores the scene to the play -- as actually performed, the scene has a horrifying intensity and we see audience members gasping as the mob tears Cinna to pieces.  There's a disturbing scene in which the actor playing Antony (George Coularis in the actual Mercury Theater production) suffers from extreme stage-fright and has to be coaxed on stage by Welles whom Richard observes telling the crying thespian that he is a "magnificent god-created actor."  In the final sequence, a bird has flown into the museum and hovers above the Greek antiquities, a gallery in which Richard and Gretta are talking about her short story that will be printed in The New Yorker.  In the last couple shots, the bird is freed from the museum and soars above the elaborate portico of the place.  The camera is aimed down from atop that portico and we see people striding along the steps and front of the museum casting long, spidery shadows -- it's a remarkably beautiful and theatrical effect.  The scenes portraying Welles Caesar are convincingly mounted -- the images look like stills from the stage production that I have seen, a dour, monochrome production set in what looks like a Fascist state in central Europe (all jackboots, leather jackets, and marching thugs.)  Claire Danes is excellent as Sonja with a "j" -- she seems very lively, attractive, and sincere until we grasp that she is ambitious and willing to sleep with anyone to advance her career.  We last see her striding purposefully toward Selznick's car, framed by the walls of a rather squalid-looking alley.  In this scene, and others, the film poses the question of what sort of emotionally manipulative tactics are ethically and morally authorized in the pursuit of high art.  Welles is a genius but he's also a bastard.  In contemporary culture, there has been much dispute about whether movies by Roman Polanski or Woody Allen (and others) should be shunned on the basis of alleged misconduct and abuse committed by the filmmakers.  This is not a trivial question and worthy of serious consideration -- Me and Orson Welles  raises these issues in an entertaining and thought-provoking manner while, at the same time, respecting the exuberant high spirits implicit in show-business.  I recommend this movie.  

(Strangely enough, the movie was made on the Isle of Man (with subsidies from that place); many of the shots are distinctly theatrical and stylized, reflecting the paucity of resources to imitate New York City on the island.  Apparently, street scenes were shot on a single block on the island where there was a decaying theater, the Gaiety -- the rest of New York City was created by illusion and CGI, a big green screen set up at the end of the block.  In fact, the effects are very convincing and those that are stylized effectively contribute to the themes of make-believe and theatricality underlying the action.  Several scenes, simulating the Metropolitan Museum of Art, seem to have been shot at the British Museum, including the images of the facade of that building.)