Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg (Bayreuth 2017)

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

Pedro Paramo

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

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

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

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

The Housemaid

Midway through Kim Ki-Young's brutal and nightmarish melodrama, The Housemaid (1960) the protagonist, a bland piano and music teacher, Mr. Kim, meets an older man, a mentor figure, for drinks at a bar.  Mr. Kim elliptically suggests that he is entangled in an affair.  The older felllow pooh-poohs his concerns and says that, under the current state of affairs, a well-connected man can evade serious prosecution and pay a fine for his misdeeds that is less than a "traffic ticket."  At first, this seems reassuring.  But consider the implications:  the characters live in a repressive, authoritarian society in which routine instances of adultery are criminalized and in which rumors of sexual misdeeds have catastrophic implications.  Perhaps, this social environment explains some of the horrific events in the movie.  But, it's also true, that all the main characters in The Housemaid seem to be, more or less, insane -- even the children are sadistic monsters.  In some respects, the movie is a Korean film noir, motivated by a sense of growing dread and entrapment.  But the action in the picture is so authentically horrifying that the film achieves a gruesome majesty -- unlike American and French film noir, this movie is not really entertaining; it's too disturbing to be fun, not a hardboiled crime genre piece, but a domestic bourgeois tragedy so venomous as to literally (and figuratively) defy belief.

The movie begins with a man (Mr. Kim) reading to his wife a newspaper account of an extra-marital affair between a family man and his housemaid; Mrs. Kim expresses horror that such things can occur.  Two children are playing a game involving an intricate cat's cradle that they twist and rotate in different directions.  The film cuts from this web of strings to a textile factory staffed entirely by young women.  After their shifts, which seem to be exhausting, the young women adjourn to a meeting room with a wall-hanging that looks like an abstract stained glass window above a piano.  Mr. Kim appears to the delight of the girls, most of whom seem to desire him.  He leads the girls, who live at the factory in spartan dormitories, in a song.  One of the girls has persuaded her dim-witted friend to put a love letter on the piano's keyboard.  (This girl's name is something like Kwak; her friend, who encourages her to leave the note for Mr. Kim, is called Miss Cho.)  The factory bosses learn of this intrigue and poor Miss Kwak is dismissed.  Mr. Cho, undeterred, pursues Mr. Kim by coming to his house and paying him for piano lessons.  Mr. Kim's wife is an ambitious woman, unhappily married to the rather passive and unambitious, music teacher.  She works night and day at a sewing machine and has saved enough money for the family to move from their tiny quarters into an adjacent house that they have built.  At the outset of the movie, the house is a horrible, gloomy labyrinth of  chaotically-stacked construction materials with a high steep stairway that turns out to be the location of just about all of the calamities that will befall the characters in this movie.  (The walls of the new house are textured with intertwined veins of raised stucco, serpentine reliefs that look like the cat's cradle or like a spider web.)  The house is too big for the hard-working Mrs. Kim to manage.  And, so, she urges her husband to hire a maid.  Miss Cho, who is still lurking around as a piano student, introduces a rather ignorant and slatternly girl to the music teacher -- Miss Cho doesn't want anyone competing with her for Mr. Kim's affections -- and makes a deal with the woman that she will pay her one-fifth of her earnings for the referral to this household.  The maid begins work.  This get off to a grim start when the maid uses rat poison to kill some rodents in the kitchen -- the death of the rats is shown in nasty big close-ups. (Later, a pet squirrel identified with the family's daughter will be similarly killed.)  Mr and Mrs. Kim have two children, a six-year old boy who torments his older sister, a girl who seems crippled, possibly, by polio -- the ten-year old girl uses unwieldy crutches to move around.  (We see the boy taunt her into climbing the steps in the new house, an ordeal that is palpably difficult and seems very dangerous; you expect her to plunge down the steps and be badly injured.)  The kids don't like the maid and she returns that distaste with interest -- she seems to despise the children and implies to them  that if they get out of hand, she will kill them with rat poison.  Mrs. Kim wants another child and becomes pregnant.  When Mrs. Kim and the two bickering children go to visit her mother, Mr. Kim is seduced by the maid -- she steps out of her clothing in a lightning storm, her body lit by flashes of fire, and, in a startling scene, forces the music teacher to have sex with her.  She has torn up her clothing and says that if Mr. Kim doesn't sleep with her, she'll accuse him of a rape.  A few scene later, the maid is puking into the kitchen sink suffering from morning sickness -- she's pregnant with Mr. Kim's child.  Mrs. Kim, who is neurasthenic (either confined to her bed or working herself to death at the sewing machine) confronts the maid.  By this time, Mrs. Kim has had her baby.  The two women literally wrestle over the infant when the maid tries to throw the baby onto the floor or out the window.  After an exchange of blows and insults, the maid pitches herself down the fatal steps, intentionally causing a miscarriage.  The maid, then, takes to her bed where no one brings her any food and she seems about to starve to death.  (She is still bleeding from the miscarriage ten or more days later.)   But the housemaid recovers and forces Mr. Kim to teach her to play piano -- without success it should be noted.  On the soundtrack, we hear either wailing jazz or discordant chords pounded out on the piano.  The maid is blackmailing Mrs. Kim who is afraid that the scandal will cost her the house for which she has slaved so desperately.  And the housewife isn't all that enamored of her husband whom she blames for the nightmarish mess.  To humiliate Mrs. Kim, the maid demands that the music teacher sleep with her openly.  When the children protest the abuse of their mother, the housemaid pretends to poison the little boy.  He panics and flees from the upstairs room where the maid has forced him to drink water supposedly infused with rat poison -- it's a ruse; the water isn't really poisoned.  But it doesn't matter, the little boy plunges down the steps, smashing his head on the floor and dying in his mother's arms.  The maid crows that this is simple justice:  she lost her baby; now, Mrs. Kim's son has died.  Mrs. Kim puts rat poison in rice that she serves to the housemaid and her husband.  The rice tastes of sugar -- the maid has substituted sugar for the strychnine to demonstrate that Mrs. Kim is capable of poisoning both her and her own husband.  This leads to more nightmarish recriminations.  People cram big fistfuls of rice down their throats.  Miss Cho is back, importuning the music teacher for more piano lessons.  Crockery gets broken and Mrs. Kim stabs the housemaid, but the wound is merely superficial.  There's another tempest, complete with thunder and lightning.  The maid and Mr. Kim have made a suicide pact.  They both down glasses of water tainted with rat poison.  The maid goes into a coma and Mr. Kim, as he's dying drags the woman down the flight of steps, her skull knocking loudly against each each tread in the stairway.  Then, he collapses.  He crawls into the work room where Mrs. Kim has fallen asleep at the sewing machine.  She opens her eyes just in time to see her husband writhing on the floor as he dies.  Mrs. Kim laments that none of this would have happened if she hadn't wanted the big new house.  Then, in a surprising cut, the picture reverts to the opening scene in which Mr. Kim is reading from the newspaper account about an affair with a maid.  He turns directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and says that men are unable to resist desire.  Laughing, he tells us:  "This is true for all men, even those of you who are shaking your heads right now."

Everything is pitched at a level of insane hysteria.  The house, although posited to be large, is, in fact, so small that the camera has to go outside in the pelting rain to track the movements of people from room to room.  There are disconcerting close-ups, bizarre cuts, and sequences that have a kabuki-like and surreal tone -- a scene in which Mrs. Kim climbs the lethal stair steps, all clad in white and moving deliberately, like an apparition, feels like something from a Japanese ghost movie, perhaps, something on the order of the supernatural scenes in in Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogaturi.  There are no sympathetic characters -- everyone is vicious, cruel, and conniving.  The children aren't idealized -- they're nasty little sadists and snitches.  The "unnerving" aspect of the movie (the adjective is Martin Scorsese's -- he participated in reconstructing the film) is enhanced by the fact that, at least, one reel of the picture has been badly damaged and had to be reconstructed from faded, half-decomposed celluloid in which lights flare and bleed into the surroundings and faces are dim as if submerged in syrupy fluids.  The tight focus on the steps and the small rooms with their narrow beds and the glass-windows on the porch always streaming with rainwater is claustrophobic -- the movie makes you feel as if you're buried alive.  There are weird byways and digressions that I can't exactly interpret -- for instance, the girl who initially passed Miss Cho's mash-note to the music teacher, commits suicide and the film takes us graveside to a mother venomously denouncing both Mr. Kim and Miss Cho.  The music-room at the factory has a gloomy cramped aspect and is always shot from the same angle and the morose girls gathered there sing a lugubrious song (also always the same), said to be a Bohemian folk song. In fact, most of the rooms are shot from a formulaic repetitive perspective so that the film's mise-en-scene is limited, a "cat's-cradle" of repeated, interlocked images.  The film has an unusual "audio jump scare" -- in one of the last shots, the camera dollies back from the corpse of the maid hanging upside down on the bottom four or five steps of the stairway, pulling into the adjacent room where Mrs. Kim is staring down at the body of her husband -- midway through this gruesome traveling shot, the baby shrieks; the sound of baby's cry made me almost jump out of my skin.   

The Menu

 The Menu is an elegant and sophisticated pastiche of mad slasher and torture porn horror films.  It's meaning and significance is obscure to me.  But the film effectively delivers the suspense and gruesome thrills that characterize the genre.  This is something like a cross between Saw or The Hostel (the sinister laboratory of torture) and Halloween, complete with a "final girl", the plucky heroine who ultimately outwits the insane sadist who has murdered everyone else around her.  It's an exploitation movie for "foodies", starring the famous actor (and Shakespearian thespian) Ralph Fiennes as the mad chef who organizes the orgy of slaughter in his ultra upscale restaurant.  It's trash, indeed, trash of a salacious variety, and the plot never really makes any sense at all -- but this is a lurid horror film and, viewed in that light, pretty successful.  

A "foodie" named Tyler and his date, Margot, travel by ferry to an island on which The Hawthorne, an elite, ultra-fashionable and expensive restaurant is located. About 15 other diners are gathered in a sleek, black chrome and ebony room where they are served by an army of waiters.  In an stainless steel kitchen open to view by the patrons, a dozen or so cooks are working like automatons to prepare the five course menu fixe meal.  The cooks labor with their noses close to the dishes that they are preparing, all sorts of ingredients reduced to emulsions or atomized foam with wild flowers tweezered into place as garnish.  The cooks are clad in spotless apparel and act as if they are the members of some kind of cult -- they speak in unison.  Presiding over this eerie kitchen and dining room is the head chef, the famous Julian Slowik, played with campy aplomb (he's a bit Ernest Thesiger in The Bride of Frankenstein) by Ralph Fiennes.  As becomes almost immediately apparent, Slowik is insane and intends to murder all of his arrogant and super-wealthy customers.  Of course, he intends to torture and kill everyone during the course of the baroque five course meal that he is serving to his guests.  Slowik isn't really equipped with any motive for the mayhem that he intends -- he seems to be simply psychotic, although like most movie madmen extremely voluble and well-spoken.  Somehow, Slowik has succumbed to ennui with respect to the restaurant business and, instead of gracefully retiring, intends to murder all those who have enabled his success. The movie traffics in a sort of anarchist "eat the rich" sensibility -- the slaughter of the elites gathered for this prestigious last meal is really just an exercise in wish-fulfillment and envy for the audience; these people have all sorts of money and can afford pleasures denied to the rest of us and, therefore, must be tortured to death.  There's really nothing more intricate about this film and this is its raison d'etre.  

Over the course of the meal, the guests have fingers severed, are mocked by the insane chef, and Slowik's "angel" investor is fitted out with wings and, then, slowly lowered into the sea to be drowned as a spectacle for the diners.  One of Slowik's cult-members, a boy chef commits suicide in the presence of the dinner party.  Slowik, for no good reason, decides to punish himself by forcing one of his girl chefs to stab him in the groin with a kitchen scissors; apparently, he has sexually harassed this woman and apologizes to her by urging her to impale him on the sharp blades.  The men are all rousted from their seats and force to run around the island while the cooks pursue them like wild game -- this is a completely pointless sequence and adds nothing to the movie but confusion -- it's padding to make an 80 minute shocker last for two hours. Tyler's date, Margot played by the delicious Anya Taylor-Joy, figures out that these games can have but one fatal outcome.  She finds a radio and calls for help.  The Coast Guard arrives but the rescuer turns out to be an actor on Slowik's payroll and this episode is merely a sadistic ploy to create hope in the doomed diners before dashing those hopes to pieces.  Margot figures out Slowik's weak point and, cunningly, exploits it -- Slowik is really just appalled by the pretentious "molecular" and deconstructed cuisine that he is serving to the fools gathered in his restaurant; she offers him an alternative, more down-to-earth course and buys some time so that she can escape.  (By this point, her annoying date, Tyler, has hanged himself out of despair at being rejected by his idol, the celebrity chef Julian Slowik.)  Everyone else ends up murdered in a spectacular conflagration.  Out at sea, Margot, whom we learn was really an escort hired by the unfortunate Tyler to attend this "last supper", smokes a cigarette and contemplates the horror! the horror!  

The movie isn't offensive and has a very funny script.  The diners slated for torture and murder all deserve their fates -- they are a group of vicious rogues and well-heeled plutocrats:  a serial adulterer, some high-tech bros with blood all over their hands and questionable tax returns for a good measure, a vicious food critic from an important magazine, a sleazy failed movie star, and a woman who drinks continuously throughout the movie and is introduced to us as Slowik's mother.  When the food critic complains that the emulsion in one of deconstructed dishes (it's bread but without the bread -- just some chemical smears for flavoring the bread that isn't served), Slowik keeps sending her larger and larger bowls of this yellow-orange emulsion until she has a bird-bath sized basin of the stuff on her table.  In general, the vicious, selfish wealthy people gathered for the meal deserve what they get and so the murders are all in good fun.  It's impossible to figure out why Slowik is determined to kill everyone, including himself, and his wait-staff and sous-chefs -- it's some sort of pique over the poor taste and questionable morality of the customers frequenting his cafe and his own status as a celebrity chef for such people.  But, certainly, the revenge is far disproportionate to the cause for the revenge.  

The movie is full of good actors with juicy roles.  There's lots of inside foodie lore on display.  The picture is very handsomely produced with elaborate sets and an enveloping sense of doom and calamity as the movie progresses -- there's no escape from the remote island.  Some of the grotesque scenes and events remind me of James Ensor's macabre culinary paintings -- his "La Cuisiniers Dangereaux -- the Dangerous Chefs" of 1891 in which a plump waiter serves Ensor's head on a platter, the 1896 painting of two skeletons fighting over a pickled herring, or "Comical Repast -- the Banquet of the Starved" with a some hapless bourgeoisie are about to tuck into a meal of insects and decomposing scraps of bone.  The director Mark Mylod is a notable cable TV director -- he has helmed episodes of Game of Thrones, 
Shameless, and 16 episodes of Succession.  Mylod directs lucidly but, as with Succession, all of the witty repartee and the clever casting, adds up to nothing.  It's as tasty and empty as one of Chef Slowik's disassembled ingredients, an atomized froth that is without any real substance.  You know something bad is going to occur and the doom of the restaurant patrons is worked out in lavish detail but you don't know why any of this happening.  It's like the extravagant slanging scenes in Succession where everyone denounces everyone else in the most witty and obscene ways possible; it's posited that everything is at stake due to some complicated financial maneuvering, thus the on-screen hysteria, but you don't know why.  

Pleasure

 Pleasure is a Swedish film produced in the United States in 2021 and directed by Ninja Thyberg. (It appears to have had its American premiere in Austin at the South by Southwest festival in 2023).  The movie blurs the distinction between hard-core pornography and a scripted realistic feature-film drama -- the film is 105 minutes long.  It's interesting on the basis of its sordid subject matter, a documentary-style exploration of the porno industry.  Like many films on this subject, the movie exploits its subject, featuring lots of lush sex scenes shot for erotic titillation while at the same time venturing a critique of the exploitational aspects of the hard-core porn industry.  There's nothing in this movie that isn't, more or less, self-evident:  it  should come as no surprise to most viewers to learn that the performers who make movies of this kind are entangled in a nasty business rife with opportunities for coercion and abuse and, further, that most of the people involved in this kind of work lack much in the way of a  moral compass -- when the porn-actresses aren't being assaulted or cajoled into accepting abuse, they are scheming to betray one another.  It's an open question, I suppose, as to how much the sex workers in the pornography industry differ from actors in show business in general.  In some ways, the plot of the movie is a variant on films like A Star is Born, featuring an ambitious performer who will do anything to further her success in the business -- in broad terms, the narrative could be transposed into mainstream films or, even, a corporate setting without doing much violence to the premise.  What gives Pleasure its buzz, however, is the graphic sex scenes, the blunt and graphic negotiations involving bondage and simulated rape and acrobatic exercises required to implement certain outre intercourse scenes.  The picture is well-made, with carefully composed shots, some long takes in which the women talk about the industry, and opulent sets -- poolside parties, Vegas mansions, and various porn studios.  The central character Linnea (aka Belle Cherry) is a cipher -- she's undeveloped and, with the exception of a long, crepuscular scene in which she talks by phone in a misleading way to her mother, we don't know much about her.  She seems preposterously ambitious and weirdly stupid -- part of the film's premise is that Belle Cherry is a neophyte in the industry:  we learn about the ins and outs of the porn business through her inexperienced eyes.  The film purports to be "sex positive" but, in fact, its a formulaic morality tale -- Belle Cherry succeeds in the industry but at the cost of betraying others, moral compromise, and, in the end, she has become the very thing that is problematic about business:  in the penultimate sex scene, we see, that she has become hardened into a sexual predator herself.  So despite the film's glib nonchalance about graphic sex, the film espouses a highly conventional morality -- Linnea/Belle's immersion in the sewer of the sex industry ends of befouling her both physically and morally:  at the end of the movie, she has chlamydia (or a bad yeast infection); she's, more or less, diseased and has become a a bad person, a "sinner," although the film would shy away from this word, it is, nonetheless, apt  It seems that you can't make a film on this subject without slipping into moral condemnation, indeed, something like "slut-shaming."  This was the case with the much better Boogie Nights and, certainly, seems to be the case with Pleasure.

We first see Linnea shaving her pubic area in preparation for her first performance in a sex scene.  At first, the business seems weirdly genteel.  There is a lot of discussion about consent and limits.  Linnea as Belle Cherry gives her consent on film, holding a valid photo-ID and a current newspaper to verify the date.  The sex scene works out fine:  she's paid $900 and Belle starts looking for other work in the business -- does she have a "Green Card"?  Details of this sort that interest me are ignored.  It quickly becomes apparent that Belle's success in the industry will be dependent upon her signing with a well-connected agent.  A man named Mark Spiegler is reputedly the best agent in the biz and Belle connives to persuade him to work for her.  (Her first few gigs are under the aegis of a Black agent who encourages her to seek out jobs involving rough and abusive sex, bondage, and other fetish subject matter).  Belle encourages who roommates to explore work in the industry.  Her best friend, Joy, is interested but gets into a fight with some male "talent" at a pool party -- she pushes the man into the pool and he angrily calls her names.  Belle does a bondage shoot with a woman director who is extremely careful about protecting the actress from harm -- she is given elaborate instructions as to safe words and how to demonstrate her boundaries even when encumbered with a ball gag in her mouth.  This shoot is also well within Belle's range and she seeks out harder material.  For some reason, she agrees to a rape scene involving two men.  Things slide out of control and, in fact, Belle is actually raped and roughed-up. This scene is disturbing because Belle repeatedly calls for a time-out, the camera is shut-off, and, then, "talent" importunes and sweet-talks her into more abuse -- saying that she's strong and self-confident and will be able to endure the torment that they inflict upon her; Belle is a "good sport" and, so, against her own better instincts, continues with the abusive rape scene.  Afterwards,  she complains to her agent, the Black porn actor, but he turns on her, saying that she contracted for the gig without his knowledge and got what she deserved.  Belle fires her agent, sets up a meeting with Mark Spiegler who seems uninterested in her -- she needs to show him a resume with more rough stuff on it.  Belle, then, embarks on an exercise program of rectal dilatation, using butt-plugs of increasing size, so that she can successfully perform the "holy grail" of interracial anal sex -- that is, "double anal."  After much preparation, she performs this feat to everyone's amazement and surprise -- double anal has never been attempted before, let alone, successfully.  This prodigious act gets her better gigs.  She signs up for a humiliation and abuse scene and encourages her roommate, Joy, to work with her.  But the male actor contracted for the scene has backed-out and Belle with Joy find themselves working with the vicious guy that Joy pushed into the pool a few weeks earlier.  This guy takes the opportunity to aggressively abuse and humiliate Joy.  When Joy later complains, Belle refuses to back her up, disloyally claiming that Joy is hysterical and that there was nothing out of the ordinary about the scene.  (In fact, Belle was well-aware that the male performer was using the gig to abuse Joy.)  Belle and Joy are no longer friends.  Throughout the film, Belle has admired an elegant and successful porn star named Ava.  In fact, she aspires to Ava's success.  Belle is now well-established in the business and gets a chance to work with Ava.  During the shoot, Ava refuses to perform oral sex on Belle saying that she's "all creamy down there" and smells bad to boot, apparently due to a yeast infection.  This causes a change in plans for the sex scene.  Belle gets fitted out with a black dildo strap-on and has sex with Ava.  Something snaps in Belle and she violently rapes Ava, slapping her face and spitting on her.  After the scene, Belle and Ava are riding back to a party in a limousine. Ava is nonchalant and seems none the worse for wear.   Belle says that she wants to get out of the car.   The driver pulls over and Belle gets out.  On this ambiguous note, the film ends.

The movie seems authentic in its portrait of the sex industry.  Many of the performers are actually sex-workers in the trade.  (The loathsome Mark Spiegler, the proprietor of Spiegler Girls, plays himself and there are actors in the movie with names like "Chris Cock", "Cezar", and so on.  Spiegler, a disreputable Jewish guy, is spectacularly unattractive and wears tee-shirts with weird slogans such as "I Hope your Cell-Phone falls down the Toilet.")  The movie is implausible at its heart for several reasons:  first, the leading lady has a completely flat chest -- she would not succeed in the porn industry without breast enhancement but no one suggest this to her.  I suppose its unchivalrous to make this observation but the star is naked on-screen for half the picture -- she has an angelic face and a nice derriere, but her tiny breasts would disqualify her for success in the porn industry at least on the level that she desires.  You can't ignore this sort of stupid casting mistake.  Second, much of the movie's middle act involves Belle's preparations for the "double anal".  The problem is that there is no such thing as a "double anal" -- try to figure out the logistics of such a thing, particularly with the very well-endowed African-American "talent" involved in this picture.  Of course, with some huffing and puffing, double penetration can be achieved -- this is sex with penetration simultaneously in the vagina and rectum.  In fact, what the film seems to show is merely double penetration, arduous in itself, but a staple of group sex scenes in modern porn movies.  (I kept wishing the camera would give us a "money shot" vantage on the "double anal" so that I could see how this act is performed -- but the movie, which starts out with aggressive close-ups of genitalia and penetration becomes increasingly discrete as it proceeds.)  The third problem is that by the time that Belle gets raped, she is already sophisticated  in the business and, certainly, knows that precautions must be taken to avoid this sort of abuse.  Furthermore, she seems weirdly unaware that, the moment her consent is withdrawn, the sex scene will turn into criminal assault -- a rape that could be prosecuted against the male actors and their enablers.  In the sex industry, all sorts of safeguards exist to protect performers from assault or, more crucially, from being thrown in jail for rape.  The Swedish female director, Ninja Thyberg, is adapting a 2013 short subject that she earlier made with the same name.  But the feature-length movie has a curiously archaic view of the sex industry -- it seems to be taking place in a pre-"Me-too" era.  After the charges levied against Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, the sort of things shown in the movie would not occur -- and the abusive "rough" sex scenes would have to be very carefully choreographed and supervised.  We now live in a world in which Shakespeare productions routinely hire "Intimacy Coordinators" and I see no reason why a multi-billion dollar porno industry would not be similarly attuned to avoiding litigation and protecting its human assets.  In a "red carpet" interview with the woman playing Ava in Pleasure, she noted that the movie is very true to life with one exception:  Belle performs the "double anal" scene for free (presumably just too show such a thing can be accomplished).  The actress in the interview at the film's premiere said that, of course, no one ever works for free in the porn industry.       

Der Freischuetz

 On the eve of his wedding, Max, der Freischuetz (The Marksman) is having trouble with his gun.  He hasn't hit anything for a month and, at a target shooting competition in the Bohemian village where he lives, his bullets all go astray.  The townsfolk are unforgiving.  As Max sulks, they mock him.  Do you remember this gesture?  Extend your right index finger and, then, stroke back and forth along its length with the pointer finger of the other hand.  For some reason, this gesture means "Shame on you!", not only here in rural Minnesota, but, also, in the deep and dark German forests at the end of the 30 years war.  Choruses of nubile peasant girls dance about the sullen huntsman gesturing shame upon him and a choir of baritones and basses, strapping foresters, also deride the unfortunate fellow.  Max's beautiful and virtuous betrothed, Agatha, is fearful.  (You don't have to be Dr. Freud to decipher some of this imagery.)  On the morrow, Max will have to shoot true in front of all the town (and the formidable game warden who is also Agathe's father, Kuno) to earn his right to wed Agatha -- and it looks increasingly unlikely that he will hit the mark.  What's a fellow to do?

Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischuetz is an1821opera and a sort of bargain basement, Dollar General parody of Faust. Max hurries away from the convivial gathering to make a deal with the devil, the so-called Black Huntsman, Samiel.  He is encouraged to this desperate measure by Caspar, a rival for the affections of Agatha.  Caspar has previously done business with Samiel in the Wolf's Glen, a nasty ravine full of corpses and slimy serpentine creatures that seems to serve as a sort of garbage dump for the villagers. Caspar gives Max a magic bullet that he has acquired from the Black Huntsman and he uses the cursed ammo to shoot down an inoffensive eagle.  At that same moment, in the village, a picture of one of Agatha's ancestor, a scowling ancient head forester, drops off the wall, striking Annchen, Agatha's frisky gal pal.  (The two women sing duets about the upcoming marriage and Agatha's recent dream, a foreboding vision in which she imagines herself a white dove shot out of the air by Max).  At midnight, with Caspar, Max consults the devil and, later, the revived corpse of his mother. He and Casper laboriously cast seven bullets -- six will unerringly hit their target; the seventh round belongs to the devil.  The two hunters divvy up the ammo and go their separate ways.  Caspar who has three rounds wastes them on a fox; Max, who isn't much brighter, shoots some other critters and ends up with only the devil's bullet to use on the morning of his wedding.

Before the wedding, a garland is delivered to Agatha.  The box turns out to contain a funeral wreath.  Improvising a garland from white roses given to her by a holy hermit, also a resident in the woods, Agatha goes to the target-shooting competition.  Max fires the devil's bullet which seems to strike both Caspar and Agatha -- they fall to the ground in a sort of swoon.  Kuno, Agatha's father and the game warden, denounces Max for having trafficked with the dark forces.  But Agatha seems to have only fainted.  (Caspar is pierced by the devil's bullet and dies.)  As she revives, the Hermit appears as a deus ex machina.  He pronounces forgiveness on the erring Max and, it is agreed, that after a year's probation the hero can wed Agatha. Kuno decides that all of this mischief was caused by the village's tradition of requiring men to target-shoot for their brides -- he decides that the town should modernize and join the rest of the 17th century and, so, abolishes the custom.  There is a final chorus of praise to God and all ends on a happy note.  

The opera is goofy, but appealing, and contains a broad variety of music -- robust choruses, trios and quartets, as well as dramatic and spooky horror movie stuff (for instance, the slithery chromatics that characterize the Wolf's Glen) -- some of the occult themes sound a bit like Mozart's third act music in Don Giovanni and, in general, the opera, containing extended passages of Singspiel and, even, spoken dialogue, is similar to passages in The Magic Flute.  The libretto, the stormy overture, and the exotic subject matter is all exemplary of German romanticism -- the opera has a patriotic, echt-Deutsch aspect, themes that seem derived from the Grimm brother's Maerchen, and lots of boozy beer-hall music -- drinking songs and choruses sung by doughty huntsmen.  The scene in which Caspar and Max forge the magic bullets will return in German opera thirty years later in Wagner's Ring, specifically the forging of Siegfried's sword in Act I of that opera.  (In fact, Wagner's love for Weber's music, particularly the turbulent overture to Der Freischuetz inspired the young man to learn to play the piano and, later, become a composer himself and there are echoes of Weber's music throughout Wagner's works.)  The opera is audience-pleasing and relatively short -- it's about two hours long in the version that I saw.

You can see this opera complete and with subtitles on YouTube in a production designed and performed by the Hamburg Opera and Philharmonic. The show is handsomely shot and edited, but has a peculiar feature -- the opera's overture is played over images of a puppet theater foreshadowing key scenes in the show.  The image is pillar-boxed, that is, tall and narrow and the live-action figures move in a strange skittery way -- a bit like insects or marionettes.  I can't tell if the effect is intentional or some kind of artifact of the motion capture.  Mouths move mechanically as if tugged open and shut by strings and the Wolf's Gorge is filled with twitching animated piles of debris, leaf-monsters and writhing fallen limbs -- the characters seem to interact with shadowy animated figures like stop-motion apparitions in a film by Jan Svankmeyer or the Quay Brothers.  

 

What's Up, Doc?

 What's Up, Doc? is a movie that I've known about for most of my life.  Something about Barbra Streisand once repelled me (I can't recall what it was) and, so, I've avoided this 1972 farce directed by Peter Bogdanovich until my 70th year on this Earth.  (Bogdanovich is dead now as is Streisand's co-star Ryan O'Neill; Streisand herself is 82 and known today, partly, for the so-called Streisand Effect, that is, drawing adverse attention to yourself by foolishly attempting to enforce legal rights and incurring, thereby, a backlash. The march of time is cruel, appalling, and relentless.)  My ill-informed prejudice denied me the pleasure of watching this delightful picture when I was younger, and, perhaps, more susceptible to the movie's arduous slapstick comedy.  But I'm happy to have rectified this critical error in judgement.

What's up, Doc? as the name implies is a cartoonish slapstick comedy.  Although some of the witty chatter sounds a little like Thirties screwball comedy, the heart of the film is invested in scary and chaotic gags, the sort of strenuous antics perfected by people like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.  Bogdanovich is faithful to his source material -- in fact, the movie would play fine as a silent feature with only a few intertitles.  Streisand, of course, is a famous chanteuse, but the movie perversely affords her only two opportunities to perform -- she sings the opening number "You're the Top", a Cole Porter tune, but not on-screen and, then, renders a beautiful version of the piano ballad  from Casablanca, "As Time Goes By".  Streisand has a perfect intonation and a truly gorgeous voice -- I had forgotten how good she is.  But most of the picture involves the heroine in peril, dangling from roof tops or pursued by villains in toboggan-style car chases down the streets of San Francisco.  She's as young and athletic as her co-star and acquits herself in the picture's action scenes with gamine determination and agility. Ryan O'Neill in the Cary Grant part is excellent as well and, of course, prettier than Streisand who is handsome but not exactly beautiful.  

The plot is carefully contrived and nonsensical.  Four identical overnight bags (characterized by a red plaid pattern) are in play.  One bag contains Professor Howard Barton's musical igneous rocks -- the eccentric and mild-mannered professor is promoting the theory that cave-men invented music by rapping out diatonic tunes on stones.  Another bag is full of a king's ransom of jewelry.  A third bag, the prize of competing gangs of spies, contains top-secret government secrets.  The fourth bag, owned by Streisand's character, Judy Maxwell, is full of her underpants and other garments.  Of course, the bags are mistaken for one another, stolen by the various gangsters, jewel thieves, and spies who populate the periphery of the movie and most of the film involves madcap chases to retrieve one suitcase or another from the clutches of the people trying to steal them. The movie takes place largely in the rooms and corridors of the 17th floor of San Francisco's Bristol Hotel, the place where a musicology conference which Howard is attending with his screechy, overbearing fiancee - acted by a painfully plain Madeline Kahn in her ingenue role.  The scenes in the hotel corridor with various villains and protagonists slipping in and out of adjacent rooms play like a bedroom farce by Feydeau or one of the British purveyors of this sort of thing (for instance, Michael Frayn's Noises off), but the movie is surprisingly chaste -- although the dialogue is suggestive in a pre-Code sort of way, there's no sex at all actually shown or, even, implied in the film.  

The plot is too complex to summarize.  Suffice it to say that Howard is sent to a drugstore to get some buffered aspirin -- the comedy is in the adjective "buffered" insisted upon by Howard's bullying fiancee.  Wandering the streets, Streisand's character, Judy Maxwell, a sort of female hobo in a snappy Carnaby Street cap, is famished.  She sees the hunky Howard and falls for him immediately -- so she spends the rest of the movie pursuing him.  Judy is a polymath, a perpetual student, and she knows everything about everything -- of course, she's a perfect match for the shy, studious, if ineffectual, Howard.  The bags get confused with one another and everyone runs around chasing everyone else, the whole thing climaxing in a spectacular slapstick chase parodying the movie Bullitt down the nearly vertical streets of San Francisco.  Bogdanovich is nothing if not hard-working and the loose ends all have to be tied-up in a trial scene that is the movie's one serious defect -- it goes on too long and the harried Judge is a bit over-the-top even by the standards of this film.  The picture has the happy ending that the audience has been foreseeing from the film's first ten minutes and is satisfying in all respects.

What's Up, Doc? is shot in bright, analytical compositions by Laszlo Kovacs, the geometry of the gags is well established and makes the physical comedy work.  You have to see a movie like this in the right mood.  Some of the comic chaos is, to my eye, more than a little nightmarish.  In one scene, the dawn aftermath of a fire and brawl that resulted in much broken glass (and Streisand dangling twenty stories above the street from a hotel window sill), the camera lovingly surveys the ruins and pans over shattered glass, charred furniture, and tangled up debris -- the effect made me almost sick.  Furthermore, some of the physical comedy, if taken too seriously, is quite upsetting.  I know some people who have a horror of Laurel and Hardy for these reasons -- it's too dark, cruel, anarchic, and the destruction is simply too real.  The same can be said about many of the bravura sequences of chaos in this movie -- cars and motorcycles crash, people get flung around violently, huge panes of glass are broken, and hapless workers who are mere bystanders have their handiwork ripped to pieces.  Speeding cars zoom through an intersection, narrowly missing a poor guy on a tall ladder again and again, until, of course, at the very end of the gag, the inevitable occurs.  Ryan O'Neill is so pretty that he's a sort of joke in himself, a cartoon figure. In one scene, an image that launched a million male stripper routines, he parades around bare-chested in his tight white underpants with a little plaid bowtie (the color of the overnight bags) decorating his throat.  At the end of the movie, Streisand says something like "Being in love means never having to say your sorry", the famous line from Love Story also starring O'Neill -- he replies "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard."

The film critic John Simon panned this picture, commenting notoriously on Streisand's appearance, saying that she reminded him of a rat crossed with a white aardvark.  I now understand the animus on display.  One of the music critics plays a fellow called Simon (Kenneth Mars) who speaks in pretentious dialogue with John Simon's infamous Transylvanian accent; the critic is given a whole repertoire of fey and irritating mannerisms.  Obviously, Simon took offense, denounced the picture as without humor, mocked Bogdanovich for attempting to make a picture of this sort since he was (Simon claimed) totally lacking in talent, and threw in a vicious personal attack on Streisand to boot.  But the movie is, in fact, brilliantly made, very skillfully directed, and actually extremely funny -- Bogdanovich got the last laugh.  

There's a hair-raising stunt 2/3rds of the way through the picture.  Streisand is careening downhill on bicycle rigged up to deliver groceries -- it has a big box on the front between the handlebars.  The bike is basically out-of-control and moving at top speed.  O'Neill sprints alongside the bike, catches up to it, and jumps onto the box on the front of the contraption.  You want to applaud O'Neill's courage and athleticism -- the stunt is done in a long take without the use of stunt double.  O'Neill could have been a success in cowboy movies, but, so far as I know, he didn't work in that genre.