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.)

The Snowy Day (Minnesota Opera Company -- February 2025)

 The Snowy Day is an opera by Joel Thompson, an Atlanta composer, with libretto based on a children's picture book published in 1962 and written by Ezra Jack Keats.  The short opera (it is about one hour and nine minutes long) was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera where it was first premiered in December 2021.  The version of the show that I saw on February 15, 2025 has been re-orchestrated -- I'm not sure what this means.  Our politics are so perverse in this historical moment that it's hard not to view this opera as a DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) work, a post George Floyd celebration of "Black joy", and, therefore, somewhat suspect after three weeks of Donald Trump's presidency.  A thing like this flies below the radar, I would guess, but if Trump's administration knew about this opera, I have no doubt that they would take measures to suppress it, or, at least, invent vicious lies about its content. (Critical racial theory? reverse bigotry?)  

After a snowfall, a boy named Peter wakes up to a winter wonderland.  After wolfing down a hasty breakfast, he gets dressed to play outside.  (His preparations, somewhat bizarrely, include having his cheeks glazed with vaseline for warmth and to prevent chaffing in the wind.)  Peter's formidable mother sings an aria about how she sees everything.  Dressed in a red snowsuit with a peculiar and ridiculous red conical cap, Peter goes outside to play in the snow.  A trio of hooligans appear after he has danced about in the snow for a few minutes.  The hooligans taunt him and pitch snowballs at his face.  A Puerto Rican girl named Amy rescues him from the bullies and they go sledding, riding down a long hill.  From the top of the hill, they can see the whole city draped in snow -- the story seems to take place in New York City.  The hooligans reappear but Amy embarrasses them and one of the boys becomes friend with Peter and the girl.  (The leader of the bullies shouts:  "The snow belongs to us!")  Shoveling snow, Peter's father and Amy's father sing a duet together.  Then, the children are called from play and go home.  Peter molds a snowball that he thinks he can preserve in his coat.  He wants the snowy day to last forever.  At home, Peter's mother puts him in a bath.  She and Peter sing some jazz-inflected syllables -- it's scat singing to a jazzy tune.  Later, Peter feels in the pocket of his snowsuit for his snowball, but, of course, it is melted.  That night, Peter has a nightmare in which he sees the bullies tormenting him in red, garish light.  He feels that he is melting himself like his snowball.  In the morning, more snow has fallen.  Again, Peter goes out to play and the opera ends with him "whisper walking" (as he calls it) through the snow.

Peter's part is scored for a high soprano and so the role is played by a woman -- she's round and short and looks a little like the gymnast Simone Biles.  Two of the bullies are white but the rest of the cast is Black or Hispanic (Puerto Rican).  The composer, librettist, and most of the other creative personnel responsible for the opera are also Black.  The set is utilitarian, a boxy interior representing Peter's bedroom decorated in bright primary colors.  The outdoors, where most of the action occurs, are represented by props made from white paper-mache to simulate snow -- there's a bare tree, a snow man (used by the Spanish-speaking Amy to teach Peter the Spanish words for "nose", "eyes", "arms" and "hands -- there's as sort of jovial, friendly Sesame Street vibe to the show.) The music sounds like the score for a traditional Hollywood movie -- it's broadly illustrative, eloquent and tonal, but, mostly, not memorable or distinctive in any way.  The jazzy scat singing is good and there's a duet with Amy that has traces of a Latin American dance-beat.  Often, the music has a late-Romantic timbre with high soprano voices and seems to me to be a bit like Richard Strauss.  There is a spooky group of snow drifts, humped up like  sheeted ghosts, and this prop sometimes moves in an eerie way -- I don't think the effect is intentionally scary; in fact, it's supposed to be whimsical.  The libretto consists of rhythmic verse with internal rhymes -- when Peter takes a fallen limb to the trunk of an old tree, he's said to be "Whack, Whack, Whacking the brittle bark tree."  At the end of the show, little Peter wanders in the snow in front of a scrim and his shadow looks exactly like the peaked, ghostly figure of a Ku Klux Klansman -- I'm always amazed that the people who make operas generally miss implications obvious from their own imagery; it can't be the show's intent to show Pete's silhouette as the shadow of a KKK member.  The opera is designed for children and it's only moderately interesting for adults -- the nightmare scene with the characters stomping around like zombies or Frankenstein's monster seems a sop to adults in the audience.  For some unknown reason, the show's credits include an "Intimacy Director" -- this is ridiculous; there's a stylized bath scene and a moment when three of the characters embrace chastely.  Someone thought it was necessary to have an 'intimacy' coordinator for this stuff?  The opera strains for poetic effect and, on occasion, is poignant (the melted snowball for instance) but it's too busy and filled with action to achieve a truly lyrical effect.  

This is not a Burial, it is a Resurrection

 On a fundamental level, This is not a Burial; it is a Resurrection (Burial/Resurrection) doesn't make much sense.  The story, although simple enough in structure, is complicated with digressions and odd discontinuities -- we can't tell whether the plot encompasses a few days or several months (or, even, years).  There are striking shots that seem radically disconnected from the sequence of events and rupture the mise-en-scene. As a matter of graphic design, the picture is full of pictures that I couldn't decipher -- in particular, there is an image of some sort of small animals, possibly chicks, clustered together in a kind of flattened furry ball -- the shot is held for ten seconds but I had no idea what it depicted.  Scenes are stitched together from about four or five different locations that don't cohere into any plausible landscape.  The story concerns a town several hours remote from an unnamed capitol city -- but the town sometimes consists of one stone hut with a thatched roof; at other times, the town has a big church but no homes.  There are no establishing shots and we don't ever see anything that looks like a town or, even, a village.  There are lots of people around but we don't know where they come from.  The musical score is like the soundtrack of a Godard movie -- there are sudden bursts of florid orchestral music, choirs singing discordantly off-screen, and a wheezing, tapping sound that doesn't seem to be music at all until we find that the noise comes from an old man in a bar playing an instrument that consists, apparently, of a reed and tube -- this is music at its lowest possible level of organization, a twitching pulse that, at first, sounds like a rusty door hinge in duet with a chirping cricket.  Furthermore, the topography contradicts the plot -- Burial/Resurrection concerns the construction of a dam that is projected to flood the village where the story takes place.  But there's no stream running anywhere near the village, no water around at all, and the terrain is a bewildering labyrinth of steep, almost sheer, hillsides, distant mountains and sloping pastures.  Characters sometimes mention villages already under the waters impounded by the dam.  But we don't ever see anything like a reservoir or lake.  The audience expects to see a river with a dam under construction in a gorge of some kind.  Nothing of the kind is ever shown.  You have the sense that the film proceeds according to oneiric logic -- it's as if someone has dreamed that the land is submerged under water and that this is taken to be true and irreversible, except that there is no water ever visible. We are drowned, but not, perhaps, in anything like tangible, quotidian water -- the water and the deluge, it seems, may be purely notional, some kind of metaphor.  Burial/Resurrection is either staggeringly incompetent as a narrative film or indifferent to ordinary logic or, perhaps, intentionally confusing as an esthetic decision.  Certainly, it's an irritating film and one that is needlessly difficult to construe even on the most elemental level of who is doing what to whom.  

A village named Nasarethe (Nazareth) is scheduled for inundation as a result of the construction of a dam somewhere nearby.  This situation is not established until about a half-hour into the two hour film.  The picture commences with an utterly baffling image shot as a colorful speed-blur of a man being (barely) restrained from spearing a horse.  There is no explanation for the image.  We hear a weird, faint noise, a pulsing rasp and faint wheeze like a bag pipe.  The camera tracks through a mostly deserted tavern somewhere -- there's a hapless disco ball, a woman dancing by herself as if in a trance, some men guzzling beer who seem mostly inert, and, in a little alcove, an old man with huge bulging eyes playing some sort of primitive instrument (this accounts for the sound we have heard). Now and then, the old man mutters words, a kind of story, but it's mostly gibberish.  We learn that in Nasarethe, the "dead bury the dead" -- as stated by the man with the single-stringed tube-like instrument in the bar.  An old woman has lost her husband, daughter, and granddaughter -- they are all dead.   Then, the narrator tells us that the old woman's son, who worked in a dangerous mine somewhere, has been killed.  The old woman is named Mantoa and she is the film's protagonist.  She laments the death of her son at a funeral presided over by a morose clergyman, grief-stricken over the death of his own wife.  A choir of five women in ragged garments sings and the women sway a little to the music while mourners walk in a tight circle, stomping their feet next to the corpse covered in a shapeless white shroud.  The old woman goes to the graveyard, a hillside covered with knee-high cairns of pebbles and finds that the place is filthy with trash.  She complains to the village chief, a burly guy in a resplendent dashiki who is wearing a ridiculous-looking pointed hat.  The chief tells her that the village is going to be evacuated due to its imminent inundation by the reservoir waters.  Mantoa protests saying that her husband, daughter, granddaughter, and son are all buried in the graveyard soon to be flooded.  She remarks that the umbilical cords of infants are also buried in the environs and hundreds of placentas.  A little girl accompanies the old woman. (In the film's last shot, she glares at the camera, presumably an image representing the next generation of Africans.)  Mantoa tells the girl that the village is built on the "plain of weeping" --this is a place where people went to bury their dead, passing through the town in the throes of grief.  People who died in wars, industrial accidents, and due to a plague are all buried here.  The old woman tries to hire a grave-digger to dig her own grave -- she's tired of living and wants to die.  The gravedigger refuses -- it's said to be blasphemous and bad luck to dig a grave for someone who is yet living.  The old woman summons everyone in the town by shrieking a kind of keening threnody -- this is how people are called to a funeral.  Everyone gathers and the old woman tells them that they must protest the destruction of the town by the flood caused by the dam.  The pastor praises the town as being sufficient to the needs of its people.  He is half prostrate with grief over the death of his wife  Mantoa leads the villagers to the graveyard where they try to clean up the mess..  An old man who was thrown from a horse is dying.  Mantoa tends to him and carefully shaves his head.  Everyone says that the old man, who seems to be in a coma will recover, but it's pretty obvious that he is moribund.  Mantoa fixes the floor of her one-room stone hut with what seems to be a mixture of dung and mud.  The next night, someone burns down her hut.  We see her sitting on the burnt-out bed, just a mass of charred springs, while sheep gather around her.  (The village economy is based on herding sheep).  The mayor tells the townsfolk that everything changes, even the local gods. There is no way to resist "progress" which requires the destruction of the town. Later, a man plays an accordion while the peasants plow a field and sow seeds in the furrows.  A boy dances with joy at the spring planting.  Then, a shot rings out and he falls over dead.  The man who fell from the horse dies.  Before his funeral, the Chief admits that he burned down Mantoa's hut and also shot the boy -- the town must be evacuated, he says, weeping profusely.  A choir of women sings "Abide with Me" at the funeral of the old man.  From within his house, where a wake is underway, we see through open windows that the village is being evacuated -- people are walking with all their processions past the home and, in fact, some of the dead have been exhumed; they are being carried on stretchers.  Some kind of fight occurs and a man has to be restrained from stabbing a horse with a spear.  (This is the source of the spectacular opening shot.)  From time to time, a crew of men wearing yellow vests and hard-hats are glimpsed in the background.  These men are now chopping down a woods. Everyone in town follows the Chief as the people abandon the village.  But, suddenly, Mantoa turns around, walks against the flow of the sad refugees, and begins to strip off her clothing.  When she is naked, we see her from the rear marching defiantly toward the men who are cutting down the forest.  The screen shows the girl who has accompanied Mantoa and, then, goes black.  The viewer wonders why there isn't any closure as to the scenes with the old hyper-thyroidal man in the bar who is seemingly narrating (albeit elliptically) the story as he sings and plucks at his instrument.  At the very end of the credits, the circle closes with the faint sound of the rasping instrument sounding plaintively as an accompaniment to the screen that is now black.

Apparently, the workmen hacking down the forest is some sort of synecdoche for the destruction of the village under the waters impounded by the dam.  The old woman repeatedly tries to die -- she dresses up in a garment that her husband gave her as a gift and lies down in her bed, but death won't come for her.  (After the fire, we see her gathering buttons and charred fragments of the elaborate dress from the ashes.)  When the grave-digger refuses to dig her grave, she takes a pick-axe and hacks out a hole in the hard earth.  Then, she squats in the trench trying to bury her head under the dirt -- but, of course, this effort at self-interment fails.  The old woman seems to symbolize the town -- the place is ghostly, death-infected, and impoverished, but it can't die.  Mantoa's resistance to "progress" as symbolized by the flood-waters, is quixotic -- the village is so remote, melancholy, and miserable, that's it's not clear to the viewer that it's worth saving.  (The town really exists only for the purpose of proving a way-station for people come to "the plains of weeping" to bury their dead.)  The place is even abandoned by God.  The narrator in the god-forsaken bar says that "the benevolence of God, once a cornerstone (to existence) has now become a stumbling block".

The movie was made in Lesotho, a kingdom in south Africa.  The terrain looks like the uplands in Peru around Cuzco -- it's a sort of barren cold heath; everyone wears stocking caps and mittens and we see their breath at times.  I can't divine to what extent we are supposed to take the events in the film literally or merely as symbols.  The Chief's confession, for instance, that he burned the old woman's house and, then, shot down the dancing boy at the planting festival doesn't elicit any consequences of any sort -- my guess is that his confession is to be taken as an allegory of the complicity of the leaders in the destruction of the small villages of this sort.  Some parts of the movie resist interpretation -- in one scene, a man goes berserk while sheering sheep in a kind of contest.  Why?  What does this mean?  The film is generally reviewed as being a paean to human solidarity and resistance with the old woman viewed as heroic in her defiance to the dam and reservoir.  This is a conventional, hopeful reading that bears no resemblance to what we see in the film.  Mantoa is half-crazed with grief and her final gesture of stripping off her clothes to confront the crew cutting down the trees seems a manifestation of madness as opposed to some form of political demonstration.  The town is a hell-hole and, in fact, all of its citizens seem pretty enthusiastic about vacating the place.  The picture is spectacularly shot with carefully composed long takes emphasizing figures moving in a desolate landscape.  We see all sorts of weather -- thunderstorms, fog, downpours of rain (and there's a discussion of snow in the mountains) -- the sky is full of luminous phenomena.  Mantoa seems to be allegorize the town -- she can't be killed and won't die.  The austere interiors and some of the gloomy scenes shot outdoors remind me of Pedro Costas but with picturesque nature cinematography of the sort featured in a film by Terance Malick. (Dovhenko's influence, particularly Earth, is also evident, particularly in the planting scenes.)  The director is  Lemohang Jeremial Mosese and this 2019 film was made in Lesotho.  Lesotho is a sovereign tribal enclave landlocked and surrounded on all sides by the Republic of South Africa.  The area is very mountainous, containing the highest peaks in the southern part of Africa.  Criterion has picked up this movie for issuance as a Blu-ray and I expect that Mosese will emerge as a very important filmmaker in the future -- assuming he can get funding for additional movies.  Burial/Resurrection is dull, but beautifully made; with a better script, the film would be a classic as opposed to a mere oddity.  Mantoa, with the profile of an old and fierce bulldog (her lower jaw juts out from her withered face) is played by Mary Kuksie Twale -- she died in 2020 but was a fixture of South African TV and films for many years.      

Daisy Kenyon

 I think that most of us are a mystery to ourselves.  Other people seem to pose problems more soluble -- but that is because we simplify their motives and don't have access to their depths.  Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon (1947) dramatizes these propositions.  Although made according to prevailing Hollywood paradigms (the movie was produced by 20th Century Fox), the film is as opaque and inexplicable as a European art film.  I'm uncertain as to whether this is due to incoherent and inattentive screenwriting, an attempt to adapt a novel that is too intricate and interior to be rendered in film, or some species of rebarbative brilliance unanticipated in film noir of the era.  The movie poses a curious riddle -- I don't know that it's particularly good, but it is certainly baffling. 

At a basic level, Daisy Kenyon explores a love-triangle in which, it seems, none of the participants is particularly satisfactory.  (The choice for Daisy is between bad and worse, perhaps, a realistic dilemma.) Daisy is a forty-something woman who works as a graphic designer from her Greenwich Village apartment.  The apartment is her privileged space and she feels free and safe in that place -- she has apparently lived there for seven years when the action of the movie commences.  The film has a curiously contemporary feeling:  Daisy, like many "creatives" in the post-Covid era, works from home; she has a reasonably satisfactory relationship with a man that we would today call her "fuck-buddy".  This man is a prominent corporate litigator named O'Mara.  He's married to his wife, Lucille, and has two teenage daughters with her; both girls revere their father and distrust their mother -- Lucille takes out her frustrations on one of the girls and has, apparently, hit the child so hard on the ear as to draw blood.  The girls call their father by his first-name "Dan".  O'Mara's wife is the daughter of the lawyer's senior partner, a factor that would complicate the situation except that the older lawyer is completely detached and indifferent to the situation.  Seemingly, the relationship with Daisy is well-known to everyone -- for instance, O'Mara's secretaries know all about the affair and comment cynically on it.  Daisy thinks she's satisfied with the liaison with O'Mara and, sometimes, they talk about the lawyer leaving his wife to marry his mistress -- but it's apparent that this will never happen.  

Pete Lapham, a combat veteran from the recent war, enters the scene.  Neither O'Mara nor Daisy are jealous of one another (at least ostensible) and their relationship is what we would call "open" today.  Daisy's friend, Miss Angelus, has set up the date.  Lapham and Daisy go out on the town and encounter O'Mara, Lucille, and his oldest daughter at the Stork Club -- they are entertaining a visiting novelist.  Daisy feels humiliated and she leaves the nightclub with her date.  They spend the night talking and walking in Greenwich Village and, at 3 am, Lapham says he will call Daisy in a couple days so that they can go to a ballgame.  Inexplicably, Lapham says that he "loves" Daisy, shocking her.  Equally inexplicably, Lapham doesn't make the call and Daisy is indignant about being "stood up" by the war-vet (a yacht designer before the conflict).  Pete Lapham seems damaged somehow -- he was twice wounded in the War, returned from service only to have his wife die; he's a widower when the movie introduces him.  Lapham was a tank commander in World War II and obsessively relives the liberation of a French town called Rennes. He remembers that the citizens of Rennes greeted the GIs with open arms and rang the bells incessantly.

O'Mara, who is cynical and selfish, is persuaded by a Washington civil rights lawyer to take up the case of a Nisei Japanese veteran whose property was wrongfully appropriated from him during the War.  He travels to California to litigate the case and is gone for 18 days.  Lapham re-establishes his relationship with Daisy during that time and the two get married -- this all happens while O'Mara is on the west coast.  (O'Mara loses the case and is embittered at his defeat -- he's also been assaulted and physically beaten for his audacity in representing a Japanese-American; these events seem to trigger a mid-life crisis in him.).  Daisy departs from New York and lives in a cottage with Lapham on Cape Cod.  Lapham is having problems with post-traumatic stress disorder and has nightmares in which he hears the ringing of bells at Rennes together with the sound of gunfire and shells bursting.  He seems very high-strung and on the verge of a crack-up.  Daisy has business in the City and returns to her apartment (now sub-let to Miss Angelus).  O'Mara happens to be in town and goes to her place where he tries to have sex with her.  She repels him, but O'Mara proclaims that he intends to win her back and will divorce his wife to marry him.  This comprises the first three-acts of a movie built as five-act structure.  Up to this point, the film has been refreshingly adult, cynical, cleverly written, and very interesting -- the movie is surprisingly nonchalant about the unconventional sexual and romantic relationships of its principals.  But the fourth and fifth act are largely inexplicable to me.  Lucille commences a highly publicized divorce proceeding against O'Mara.  She demands sole custody without visitation of the couple's children -- a demand that the daughters themselves reject.  The case involves fault principles -- to get a divorce in that era, the parties had to prove that one of the spouses was at fault for the collapse of the marriage.  (This entire aspect of the movie will be largely incomprehensible to modern audiences who have never known any system but no-fault divorce on demand.)  A big and scandalous trial ensues - the gist of the proceedings is that Lucille must publicly prove adultery between O'Mara and Daisy.  This makes no sense in that everyone knows of the adulterous relationship and concedes it to have existed.  (The plot would make more sense if O'Mara tried to prove that Lucille condoned the adultery, a defense in the bad old days -- but O'Mara seems too noble to engage in mud-throwing of that sort.)  There's a courtroom confrontation in which Daisy is cross-examined as the correspondent in the divorce.  O'Mara who thinks he loves Daisy can't bear to see her mistreated in this way, withdraws his defenses and agrees to a quickie Vegas divorce, conceding custody of his daughters to their mother.  In the fifth act, Lapham and O'Mara meet with Daisy to decide her fate -- will she remain married to Lapham or will she divorce him and marry O'Mara, who is now free to re-wed?  The men discuss this problem in a civilized way, more or less, treating Daisy as an accessory to the conversation.  The debate moves to Cape Cod where O'Mara presents divorce papers, apparently accepted by Lapham, to Daisy.  She throws the lawyer out and drives away from the cottage in a rage, crashing her car and nearly freezing in a snowstorm.  Daisy makes her way to a place where Lapham and O'Mara are playing cards and casually discussing the situation.  Daisy picks Lapham as the lesser of the two evils and film ends on that unpromising note.  The viewer has the sense that Lapham is half deranged, high-strung and unstable, and likely to murder, or, at least, seriously harm Daisy in the future. 

Daisy is played by the peri-menopausal Joan Crawford who seems to be acting with every fiber of her  being.  She's compulsively watchable.  The emotionally remote, but explosive, Lapham is played by Henry Fonda in a querulous, strangely detached way.  Dana Andrews plays the part of the emotionally effusive corporate lawyer O'Mara -- he calls everyone "sweetheart" or "buttercup" including Lapham and his senior partner (and father-in-law).  The film is designed to posit Lapham as the polar opposite to O'Mara -- the two men couldn't be more different except that they both have a weirdly dismissive laissez faire attitude to Daisy.  The emotional tone of the movie is icy and it's not clear whether the picture is supposed to be bracingly cynical and funny or melodramatic -- in fact, it oscillates between the two moods.  The pictures seems very sophisticated, an adult entertainment that is sharply and effectively written -- that is, until the fourth courtroom act which just seems silly and overwrought.  The climax is intentionally off-putting -- it's pretty hard to construe Daisy's marriage to Lapham as the solution to anything.  

Daisy Kenyon confused audiences in 1947 and remains baffling.  It's now earned a semi-cult status.  I can't tell if it's a bold and brilliant proto-feminist work or just a confusing mess.  Most likely, to some extent, the picture is both.   

Rifkin's Festival

 Rifkin's Festival is a film written and directed by Woody Allen; apparently released in 2020, the picture is just now available on Amazon Prime. Of course, Woody Allen has been maligned for a number of years on the basis of his marriage to his stepdaughter and a variety of other allegations asserting abusive behavior.  These claims have traction in the United States and have created a climate of disapproval so pervasive that Allen can't get financing for his work in this country.  But movies are a transnational enterprise and, apparently, the director is able to secure money in Europe where his films continued to enjoy some modest success. (Allen also remains a magnet for excellent actors -- his pictures, often, have significant star-power despite their modest scope and ambition:  Wally Shawn appears as Rifkin in this picture along with Gina Gershon as the hero's glamorous wife and the European performers in his movies, often French or Spanish actors, are uniformly compelling.) Woody Allen films comprise a genre of their own and, at least to my sensibility, they are always amusing, wry, sometimes quite funny, and worth watching -- just don't hope for some kind of cinematic breakthrough or epiphany.  Allen has become so highly expert at making these late-career films that they seem minimalist, effortlessly contrived, and exceedingly lightweight -- they are, in effect, escapist fare for filmgoers who don't want to see explosions and mayhem on screen.  

Allen's films have always relied upon a simple, if effective, sight gag -- his movies couple unsightly sexually inert men with extremely glamorous romantic partners.  The first shot in Rifkin's Festival exemplifies this gag:  the gorgeous Gina Gershon as Sue walks beside her husband, Rifkin, toward an expensive hotel in San Sebastien. Gershon is beautiful, lavishly dressed, sleek, elegant and sexy; Wally Shawn is a schlub wearing ill-fitting jeans that seem to perpetually threaten to drop to his ankles, an old man with a crooked back and bulging eyes who looks like a frog, some sort of enchanted prince in a Grimm Brothers fairy tale -- he's so ugly and misshapen that he's almost cute, a little troll of a man.  Of course, the audience marvels at this odd couple and they are walking/talking joke.  All of Allen's pictures exploit the contrast between a nondescript or, even, unhandsome male protagonist and one or more lovely women who seem to be sexually interested in him.  In Rifkin's Festival, the protagonist attends a film festival at San Sebastien with his wife, a publicist.  She is providing PR (and sexual favors as well) to a French director named Phillippe, a broodingly handsome man, probably fifteen years younger than her.  Rifkin is a neurotic hypochondriac, always kvetching about things, and he seems to appreciate, on some level, that is wife is having an affair with the pretentious and dull-witted, if gorgeous, director.  When Rifkin suffers from some chest pains, he sees a local physician, also a beautiful woman named Dr. Jo Rojas.  Rifkin flirts with Dr. Rojas and, in order to keep seeing her, pesters the physician with obviously bogus symptoms.  She responds to his flirtation and the two of them spend a day together exploring the lovely countryside around the city, enjoying a picnic on the grass. (I'm always impressed by these elderly actors seating themselve with spry abandon on the grass; if I sat down on the grass it would take a hoist to lift me off the ground.) Returning to Dr. Rojas' home, the couple encounter her irritating and melodramatic boyfriend, a painter.  There's a quarrel and Dr. Rojas is inspired to leave her lover, at least, temporarily.  However, she is not willing to embark on an actual affair with Rifkin.  Sue, the publicist, confesses that she is sleeping with Phillippe.  She and Rifkin's marriage has fallen apart, albeit in the most low-key and civilized way possible.  Rifkin returns to New York City and the movie begins as it began with an analytical high-angle shot of the hero conferring with his shrink.  The film is about mild flirtations in expensive restaurants, strolls along beautiful seashores, and tiny sparks of jealousy that flare infrequently.  Rifkin is a failed novelist -- he's working interminably on a big book --that is supposed to give Joyce and Dostoevsky a run for their money; of course, by definition, the book will never be completed.  Years earlier, Rifkin taught film at the university and the movie refers to the great classics of European cinema in short black and white vignettes presented as Rifkin's fantasies or dreams -- we get amusing parodies of Jules and Jim, Citizen Kane, A Man and a Woman, Breathless, Persona, 8 1/2, The Exterminating Angel, and, at the end, The Seventh Seal.  These tiny episodes are the film's comedic core and the highlights of the movies.  The wonderful cinematography by Vittorio Storaro impressively mimics the black-and-white style in which these films were made.  Andy Warhol once said that all cokes are alike and all cokes are good.  The same can be said of Woody Allen's films made in the last quarter century -- they are mostly indistinguishable from one another, slight affairs and a beautifully made and acted with gorgeous camerawork and good performances but, ultimately, trivial.  Nonetheless, the movies are entertaining -- at least, I like them.

Christoph Walz, playing the figure of Death from The Seventh Seal, confronts Rifkin on the beach.  There is a chess board among the gloomy rocks.  Rifkin whines that his life is empty and meaningless.  Death won't have any of this.  He says:  "Of course, your life is meaningless.  But don't confuse 'empty" with 'meaningless'.  Your life isn't empty.  You've got lots to do."  There's a moral lurking somewhere in this droll exchange, but I don't know precisely what.  

Herr Tartuffe

 F. W. Murnau directed this adaptation of Moliere's 17th century comedy Tartuffe at UFA in 1926  The picture is short, only 70 minutes (an American version is shorter yet, clocking in at a mere hour). Murnau was a prestige director in Berlin and the movie features A-list Weimar-era actors.  Lil Dagover and Werner Krauss, famous for their appearance in Robert Wiene's 1919 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, here play the parts of Elmire and Orgon, a married couple under assault by the monstrous hypocrite Tartuffe.  Emil Jannings is grotesque as the titular character -- he's got a pointed head, the worst haircut ever shown in cinema, and is so spectacularly slovenly and repulsive that you can almost smell him.  The movie preserves only a couple characters from Moliere's play, a badly compromised and incoherent work in any event -- after its premiere at Versailles in 1664, the theater piece was censored and banned from the stage; it was re-written several times, banned again in 1666 and, finally, performed in its present form in 1669.  As a result, the piece is crammed with mis-starts, redundant passages, and, finally, climaxes in the most egregious deux ex machina denouement that I know -- Louis XIV, the Sun King no less, has to swoop into the proceedings to clean up the horrible mess.  Although Tartuffe or The Imposter is one of Moliere's most iconic and frequently performed plays, truth to tell the text is seriously corrupt and, often, doesn't make much sense.  Carl Mayer and Murnau as scenarists preserve only the central situation in the play, eliminate almost all the characters, and turn the show into a melodramatic vehicle in which Elmire redeems her husband from Tartuffe's clutches by seducing the monster.  If this scenario seems familiar, it is because Herr Tartuffe is essentially a remake of Murnau's much more famous Dracula film, Nosferatu, a picture currently much in the news due to Robert Eggers elaborate recent re-make.  Tartuffe is hideous and a monster in his own right and like Count Orlok (Dracula) in the horror film, he has Orgon, the master of the house, in his thrall, apparently hypnotized to do his bidding.  Tartuffe paces around with Orgon (Werner Krauss) following him like an obedient puppy.  He prowls Orgon's palace casting immense misshapen shadows on it walls and gloats satanically in an impressive scene in which he swills wine and prepares to bed Elmire -- she is offering herself to the creature to demonstrate to her husband that the ostensibly pious Tartuffe is, in fact, a lecherous criminal (in fact, he's branded with a number on his shoulder, a somewhat eerie effect when one considers the Nazi use of tattoos fifteen years later to identify their concentration camp inmates.)  Janning chews the scenery impressively and Murnau, not one for subtle effects, rubs your nose in the villain's swinish behavior -- the camera is making love to Jannings just as the villain imposes himself in close-up on the leading lady.  Moliere's comedy, although a misfire on many levels, is intended as critique of hypocritical religious fanaticism and features truly Christian characters who denounce Tartuffe as an imposter when it comes to piety; the play wholly unequivocal and unambiguous about the title figure's villainy --  in a petition to the King, Moliere defends the play by noting that it doesn't attack religion per se, but merely religious hypocrisy and that the playwright has labored to make it as clear as possible that Tartuffe's wickedness is obvious to everyone except the benighted Orgon who has fallen under the creature's malign influence.  If anything, Murnau makes Tartuffe even more spectacularly wicked than the character in the play.  The film is, in effect, a horror movie, obedient to the rules of that genre -- elements of witty social satire in the original work, of course, can't be translated into a silent film so what remains, as if by default, is the monstrous aspects of the situation.

Since Tartuffe (Moliere's source work) has been stripped to its situation, the movie doesn't have much in the way of a complex or, even, well-developed plot.  This deficit is repaired by adding a frame story to the film.  A nasty, middle-aged housekeeper plots to acquire the estate of an old man whom she is systematically poisoning.  The housekeeper is as monstrous in her own way as Jannings' Tartuffe; she's got a big belly and morose, saturnine features that seem overlarge for her lumpy head.  Murnau is a cruel director, often showing his characters in the most unflattering light, and the old man is a pathetic, feeble, whining miser -- he is thoroughly unsympathetic and callously indifferent to his grandson, an actor who actually loves him.  When the actor is mistreated by the housekeeper and expelled from the premises, with the collusion of the old man (a Greis as the German credits inform us), the grandson contrives an elaborate plot to unmask the slow poisoner and elder abuse perpetrator.  He disguises himself and arrives by wagon as a traveling promoter of films shown in a sort of traveling cinema.  The movie that he happens to show for the wicked maid and the old man is Herr Tartuffe --obviously intended as a commentary on the housemaid's exploitation of her master and the misgovernance in the household.  (This elaborate frame-story begs more questions that it answers:  did the actor somehow produce the Tartuffe film?  how did he get access to the print of the movie and the projection device used to show the movie in one of the old man's chambers in his gloomy house?)  The film is deliberately stylized and theatrical.  It features some exterior shots that are obviously painted flats -- again, not a defect, but an indication that the movie within the movie is intended to be theatrical and, therefore, not realistic.  The characters in the play live in an elaborate three-story palace designed like a spectacular Weimar era stage set -- the Moliere play had been staged successfully by Max Reinhardt in Berlin in  1922 and the mise-en-scene apparently refers to that production.   A miniature carriage is shown trotting up the entry drive to the palace; the carriage is obviously a mechanical toy, an uncanny effect that resonates with the fast-motion carriage sequences in Nosferatu.  Sometimes, we see the little palace, toylike under a sky full of painted stars.  Elmire arrives after being absent for several days to find her husband entranced and enchanted by the malevolent Tartuffe.  With the connivance of a wily servant, Elmire plots to induce Tartuffe to seduce her so that she can provide (as Moliere says) "ocular proof" of the religious fanatic's infamy.  The scenes involving Elmire and Tartuffe are bawdy and overtly sexual.  

Murnau's direction and pacing is impeccable.  His camera placement is intentionally jarring -- the lens always seems too close to the hideous figures on-screen and we are invited to luxuriate in their grotesquerie. (At times, you want to recoil from the images and back away from them.)  Carefully contrived inserts drive the action forward - a close-up of the poison bottle or a pair of the old man's slippers.  There's something inexplicably wrong with actor-hero in the frame story -- he's extremely gay in both senses of the word.  (Murnau was homosexual.)  Murnau was versatile and could work in many styles -- the film lacks the gritty, documentary style realism in Nosferatu and, for that matter, Murnau's last movie Tabu.  It's not a huge special effects spectacle like Faust and doesn't feature the virtuosic camera movement in The Last Laugh or the Hollywood picture Sunrise.  But this is an impressive movie in its own right, important, I think, for preserving on-screen specimens of extravagant expressionistic acting -- people swoon and there are fake ecstasies, fits of rage and lust, and wild tempestuous emotions on display.  The huge set with three levels of balcony and dozens of doors  inset in white walls seems emblematic of the plight of the characters -- its a lavish, Piranesi-style prison with twisting baroque stairways in a garish schnoerkelig (sinous twisting and turning stair banisters) art nouveau style.  And it shows a unique approach to Moliere, transforming the French playwright's brittle society comedies into a horror show, a scary and menacing "creature feature."    

Dahomey

 Dahomey is an interesting documentary directed by Mati Diop and premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2024.  The film concerns the repatriation of 27 royal artifacts looted by the French from the African kingdom of Benin around 1894.  Until 2022, the objects were displayed at the Musee du Quai Branq (Jacques Chirac) in Paris.  At that time, the stolen art objects were transported to modern Benin and, then, put on display at a museum in the ancient royal city of Abomey.  Diop, an important African director, composes her documentary, really more in the nature of a film essay in six parts, the total picture about 70 minutes long:  we see the artifacts being carefully boxed and shipped from Paris, their arrival in Benin amidst a great patriotic celebration, an animated debate among university students about the significance of the repatriation, and images of people admiring the objects in the Abomey Museum.  A sixth part of the film represents the perspective of one of the objects, a life-size statue of King Gezo (ruler until 1858) portraying the chieftain as an attribute of the Voudon god of metal, Gu -- the figure is studded with iron blades signifying war, an attribute of Gu in the Voudon pantheon.  A Haitian poet gives voice to the deified king's thoughts and narrates the story of the statue's return from its point-of-view.  This fantasy perspective is questionable -- first the deified King doesn't have much of any interest to say (he seems a bit dim-witted) and speaks in a highly abstract and poetic way about darkness and the landscapes of Benin (he describes the shore of the Atlantic as the "wounds of the Atlantic").  The statue's voice is a basso profundo, heavily distorted with a garnish of hiss -- it's about what you'd expect an African royal statue to sound like and, inadvertently, suggests that it would be better if the wood and metal fetish didn't try to talk:  he has nothing useful or intelligent to say.  The film ends with a fantasy of the idol wandering around the modern streets of Benin, inspecting his kingdom -- the city alternately vibrant with cafes and very poor with homeless people sleeping on the streets and distant prospects along urban streets that seem blurring into tiny villages in the African countryside.  Diop's imagery of foliage (lush with nightblooming flowers against the velvet darkness), patrolling soldiers, and huge jets of water shot onto palace lawns is very beautiful in a gloomy and sinister way.  

The film provides little in the way of information.  Negotiations leading up to the repatriation of the stolen artifacts are not discussed.  The political situation in Benin is not explained.  There are some hints that not everyone is happy with the repatriation:  some students during the debate scene complain that the leader of Benin, Patrice Talon, capitulated to the French by requiring return of only 27 objects of the 7000 taken from Benin in 1894 as war booty.  The film is lyric and not polemical -- it is suggestive as opposed to being explanatory.  There are a couple very short art-historical sequences explaining the significance of the repatriated objects but this is cursory.  The debate among the students has to do with claims that the patrimony of Benin was stolen and that the people must cast off the colonialist legacy.  People complain about their Eurocentric education (in fluent, eloquent French).  One of the students says that she is afraid of the artifacts, presumably because of their entanglement with Vodoun; someone else says that after attending Christian religious services, 95% of the people then make sacrifices to the Vodoun gods.  There are other speeches but they are inconsequential.  How any of  this applies to anything more than repatriation isn't really specified and the students don't have anything very interesting to say -- they are like the deity (he calls himself 27):  he's mildly talkative but doesn't have much to say.  The meaning of the film is carried by the images -- the antiseptic corridors in the basement of the French museum, the way in which the deified kings (one represents a lion and another is shaped like a "shark-man") are shackled and swaddled before plunged into the darkness of their shipping crates, the sound of drills sealing the boxes.  The festivities on the Benin streets where huge crowds greet the return of the objects are colorful and moving.  In the middle of the film, there's a night sequence in which King Gezo meditates on the gardens around the sea-side museum, the Palais de Marina, big fountains of water from lawn sprinklers jetting up into the air where solitary guards are pacing the perimeter of the property.  A procession of very elderly tribal dignitaries appears, old people who have to be half-carried to the halls where the artifacts are displayed in brand-new cases.  We don't know who these people are or why they carry their various scepters and canes or the significance of their elaborate raiment. There are some questions raised about one of the king's posthumous brass and bronze monument, a so-called Asen (or funerary offering) -- how did the king manage to complete this thing before he was dead?  In one shot, we are given a tour of a throne and learn that the economy of the kingdom was based on the slave trade -- on a higher level the king is carved under a parasol amidst him harem, but the seraglio is supported by enslaved prisoners.  (This was a brutish imperialist and expansionist regime itself we are told.) The imagery, consisting largely of vacant spaces, crowds of people peering into glass cases, and technicians with clipboards taking stock of the condition of the artifacts is elusive in meaning and dreamlike.  The film has a brilliant symphonic score that adds to the picture's poetic resonance.  There's an inevitable sadness in the picture -- now that these objects have come home, then what?  Of course, most of Benin is indifferent to the spectacle at the Marina Palace -- in the film's last couple minutes we catch a glimpse of the lives of people who aren't paying much attention (if any) to the festivities that are the subject of the film.  The movie is modest, unassuming, and very thought-provoking, but the thoughts are invested in things -- flowers, tile floors, gesturing wood and metal idols, the wild sea breaking against the shore beside the museum, the beggars sprawled across the sidewalks, the choruses of dancing girls performing for the gods that have returned from Paris.  

The questions posed by repatriation of looted objects are interesting and, now, au courant in the world of museums and the curatorial profession.  When I was in Hamburg, I saw intricate bronzes of jaw-dropping splendor also from Benin, although I think from the late medieval kingdom.  The Germans knew that these were ill-gotten artifacts, advertising the fact with apologetic labels in the dark display spaces where the bronzes were on show.  Other labels apologized for presenting the bronzes as staged theatrically in darkness with piercing beams of light cutting through the gloom -- the curators said that this was intended to "other" the exhibits and make them appear uncanny or spooky.  The apologies were ludicrous -- these bronzes are intrinsically uncanny and spooky, utterly alien, and strangely beautiful according to canons that have nothing to do with Greek antiquity or Roman esthetics..  The things were like the enormous Olmec head shown in a early moment in the film, a monumental spherical sculpture behind glass in the elegant facade of the Paris museum, remote and unsettling. I wonder when the descendants of the Olmecs will come for their head. There is a vigorous dispute in Hamburg about repatriating the Benin bronzes.  Mati Diop's dream-like film is not a proposition and doesn't take an explicit side -- poetry is indifferent and not on anyone's side.

Dahomey is the name of the Kingdom of Benin in the 19th century.        

Conclave

 Conclave (2024) is a mildly entertaining movie about the political machinations involved in the selection of the Pope.  The picture is very shallow, probably by necessity -- I assume that actual proceedings in the College of Cardinals would be so revolting and offensive as to be unbearable and an affront, I suppose, to millions of Roman Catholics.  Conclave shows these negotiations as something akin to the wheeling and dealing in the old TV show about the presidency, The West Wing.  The  West Wing was comfortably, even cozily, liberal and quick to temper its mild cynicism with all the conventional pieties and sentimental idealism associated with American democracy -- it wasn't a horror show like Veep for instance.  Similarly, Conclave takes the middle road; it's sweetly reasonable with opposing positions that are not so extreme that they can't be compromised.  There's no sense that anything of importance is really at stake.  After all, the movie, presumably, is made by people who don't believe in God, let alone the authority of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, directed by a liberal German Edgar Berger,, and, generally. promoted for secular audiences. The script could have been written by Aaron Sorkin -- there are lots of colloquies while people are walking about the Vatican, some speeches expressing opposing policies in schematic form, and, at last, a happy ending in which all turns out for the best.  (Conclave has a silly plot twist in its last ten minutes that is extraneous to the movie, poorly motivated, and, in fact, questionable on all sorts of grounds.)  I can recommend Conclave so long as viewers don't expect too much out of it.  

The old Pope has unexpectedly died. There are rumors about his last acts which may have involved disciplining one of the more ambitious cardinals and his appointment of a new member of the Colleg of Cardinals, in this case a Mexican cardinal who serves as the Bishop of Kabul -- the priests express wonder at the notion that there are even Catholics in Afghanistan.  Implausibly, the identity of this new cardinal has been concealed out of fear for his safety.  The conclave is divided between liberal and right-wing conservatives led by a man named Tedesco who, apparently, wants to return to the good old days of the Tridentine Mass.  The film leaves no doubt as to the sympathies of the moviemakers (and the audience).  There are 108 cardinals voting with a majority of 72 required to elect the new Pope.  With the exception of a few short scenes showing buses transporting the priests (and a contingent of nuns) to the Vatican, the entire action takes place in the Sistine Chapel where balloting takes place, a refectory with kitchens, and a grim, prison-like dormitory where the priests stay in small cheerless rooms that are ill-lit, look uncomfortable, and don't even have TV sets.  (I don't know about you but I sure don't want a Pope who doesn't watch at least a couple hours of TV a night.)  The scene-setting is effective and, for a time, the movie entertains by simply showing us things that most of us have never seen -- that is, the secret corridors and chambers at the Vatican and the protocols involving the vote in the Sistine Chapel.  (The Chapel is portrayed as a gloomy, cold chamber with dim, stupid-looking pictures vaguely visible on its walls.  The only color and light in the movie is provided by the brilliant scarlet robes of the cardinals.)  The movie traffics in every kind of cliche and stereotype:  a Polish priest is always drunk (too much vodka); a bumpkin Bishop from Nigeria is affable and outgoing but gets sidelined by a sex scandal.  There is a dour nun who represents the fact that half the Catholic Church, of course, is comprised of women.  But true to form, the nun's part is completely underwritten and her motivations are entirely opaque -- she scowls and gives one short speech, but, otherwise, the screenwriters don't give this character much to do.  (This is a shame because the part is played by Isabella Rossellini).  The priests are sequestered and can't leave Vatican City.  On the soundtrack, we hear some remote explosions and, at one point, a blast from a bomb set by Islamic terrorists (are there any other kinds?) blows in some windows in the Sistine Chapel.  This attack causes the right-wing Tedesco to overplay his hand, declaring war on Islam.  Inexplicably, Tedesco's Muslim-hating speech causes the right-thinking cardinals to back a liberal dark-horse candidate.  This is wishful thinking of a particular egregious West Wing sort -- if you make a heart-felt speech people will change their minds.  But, of course, this sort of thing happens only in movies and on TV.  The picture has a good cast:   Ralph Fiennes is gloomy and tormented as Lawrence a priest who has lost his faith, not in God, but in the Mother Church -- his role is to manage the unruly cardinals and impel them toward consensus.  John Lithgow, convincingly smarmy, plays an ambitious cardinal who is not above bribing members of the College of Cardinals.  Stanley Tucci takes the role of the voice of common sense and sound liberal principles -- it's a thankless part but well acted.  The film's final plot twist seems a gesture of desperation -- not much of interest has happened in the movie and something needs to be done to gin-up a big ending.  But this plot twist is ill-advised and not even anatomically plausible and adds nothing to the picture.  Conclave is a prestigious picture, well made in all respects, but it's cautiously written, anxious to not offend, and, so, seems to have offended just about everybody anyway.  There's nothing even remotely profound about the picture and, in some ways, for instance, it's treatment of women (they are cooks or spoilers or victims of sexual violence) embodies exactly the things that the movie condemns.  Nothing is more conservative, ultimately, than mild-mannered, complacent liberalism.