Days and Nights in the Forest

 Four bachelors in their late twenties or early thirties make a weekend trip to an impoverished rural area about 300 miles from where they live in Kolkata (Calcutta).  The plan is to relax in a rustic cabin, putting civilization (as they call it) and the disappointments and pressures of their careers on pause during their sojourn in nature.  This is a time-honored premise, both in horror films (for instance, Deliverance) and comedic buddy movies (Sideways to name an example).  In Satyajit Ray's 1970 film, nothing much happens.  There's a modicum of horror but, remarkably, the self-absorbed protagonists of Days and Nights in the Forest aren't even aware of it -- they end their adventure in nature the same way that they began it:  arrogant, selfish, and, more or less, pleased with themselves.  There are no lessons learned.  From minute to minute, the film records mundane encounters without suspense or drama and the movie's observation is so disciplined and unobtrusive that there's no sense of anything momentous occurring. Yet, the film is extraordinarily dense and complex -- accounting for its effects and interpreting their meaning is a task that far surpasses the space available in this note.  Any reasonably thorough assessment of this 116 minutes movie would take far longer to read than the time required to watch the film from beginning to end.  This is the measure of a masterpiece in film history -- the movies to which we return time and time again are so complex in their emotional effects, so difficult to exactly describe, and so precise in their diagnostic observations that they are, in effect, impossible to account for -- any raw description of the plot and its meaning inevitably falsifies the nuances of what we have seen.  In Days and Nights in the Forest, the nuances are, ultimately, what matters.  

We catch up with our four heroes as they are bickering at a gas station and casually bullying the pump attendants.  The men speak Bengali and they are planning a trip to the wilds of Palumbo, a tribal reserve, it seems, a day's ride from Calcutta.  There's nothing heroic about this quartet and so I will describe them as protagonists, aware, I admit, that there is no antagonist in the film -- the conflicts that we see exposed involve inadequacies and lack of self-knowledge and self-confidence in the four men themselves.  Ashim is an up-and-coming salaryman, a go-getter in the corporation where he works.  Sanjoy is unemployed, also formerly employed in some corporate enterprise.  Sanjoy and Ashim were once partners in a literary enterprise -- they edited a college literary magazine together and pride themselves on "never publishing anything bad."  These endeavors, however, are now long behind them.  In the car driven by the leader of the group, Ashim, Sanjoy reads a description of the rural area in the forest to which they are driving -- it seems to be a sort of 19th century travel memoir and describes the tribal women as "dark as ebony" and mostly naked, an account that interests the other men.  Hari, who is very sleepy and depressed, is a cricket player who has been dumped by his stylish girlfriend.  Ashim and Sanjoy advise him to take her in hand and beat her up -- they are only half joking.  (A flashback, one of two in the movie, shows Hari's girlfriend dressed in European haute couture rejecting him -- he tries to make her stay with him in the simplest way possible, that is, by grabbing her wrist and holding her in his apartment.  She pushes him away and departs, presumably, forever.)  The fourth man is a short rolypoly figure that the other three patronize and treat as their jester -- this fellow, Shekhar, is along to make amusing cynical remarks and lubricate with humor the hard edges existing between the other three men.

The foursome is excited to see the "forest".  In fact, it's a miserable, barren scrub brush of withered trees with some distant dark hills (the film is shot in beautiful black and white) and what seems to be a dried-up lake bed stretching away from the sun-scorched sticks and branches of the embattled trees toward the remote mountains.  (It is apparently the dry season in this place and the trees are all denuded and seem to be the stark remnants of a forest destroyed by fire.)  For some reason, that I didn't understand, the four men stop short of their ultimate destination and pulling up at an impoverished village pay one of the young men lounging around -- unemployment seems to be pretty much 100% in this neck of the woods -- to take them to a forest bungalow.  This is a nice cabin located behind a checkpoint that says that the bungalows are not be used without the permission of the agency that manages the forest.  (It seems to be similar to a cabin that you can rent in a State or National Park in the United States.)  The foursome are so entitled that they don't think rules apply to them and, so, they simply appropriate the bungalow bribing the watchman for their use of the cabin.  (The watchman, whose wife is gravely ill, fears being fired over his agreement to let the four men use the government cabin without reservations.)  As they bribe the watchman, one of the men says cynically something like "Thank heavens for corruption!")  Later a stuttering forest ranger appears in a jeep and tries to get the men to move from the bungalow where they are squatting.  They ignore him.  At last, the game warden himself appears, again threatening the men with expulsion, but he's also "workable" and can be corrupted, although his price is a bit higher.  On the first night at the cabin, the men walk over to a nearby village where the townsfolk, including their somewhat disreputable women, are all getting drunk.  The tourists drink the local firewater and get very drunk themselves.  Hari, upset about the loss of his girlfriend, is fascinated by one of the "dusky village maidens" who, in fact, turns out to be a prostitute.  (The part is played in "brownface" with make-up that causes the woman to look a bit like a player in a 19th century American minstrel show.)  The next day the men are very hungover.  Some of the village women with whom they were flirting, including Duli, the girl in "brownface", come to the bungalow and ask for employment.  (The girls mention that they sometimes earn a living dancing at various small-town "smokers" in the vicinity.)  The watchman, who is trying to perform his job, drives away the girls, observing that they are "bad women."  An ambiguous shot makes it look like Duli has stolen Hari's wallet.  On the dusty road, Shekhar sees two stylish women strolling with parasols, one of them wearing "a sari, and the other slacks."  This intrigues the men who walk over to an adjacent Dacha where there's an old man and his grandson and the two women enjoying their holiday retreat in the blasted forest.  The women are Aparna, the cultured old man's daughter, and Jaya, the old man's daughter-in-law.  The women are interested in Ashim and Sanjoy and play badminton with them.  They make a date for the next morning and the women promise to serve them breakfast with eggs (a running joke is that the men want eggs but no eggs seem to be found anywhere in the desperately poor vicinity) at 8:30 am.  The four go to dinner in the village and start drinking the local brew.  Once again, they get very drunk and can barely walk.  On the road in the darkness, they perform a "twist" dance from America much to the amusement of the women who observe them from their big car -- they are coming back from visiting relatives in a nearby town.  The next morning the men are embarrassed when they oversleep and miss the promised breakfast although Jaya and Aparna send them the meal in a canister, apologizing themselves for making the boys get up so early for their omelets.  Hari is missing his wallet and thinks that a local boy whom they employ as a go-fer has stolen it from the bungalow.  Hari attacks the kid and beats him up.  In the afternoon, the four men go to see the women again and set up a picnic on the sun-baked grass overlooking the flats of the desiccated lake.  (Periodically, we see processions of men walking around on some sort of religious errands -- the upper-class Hindus in the bungalow just ignore these small, forlorn parades.)  It turns out that Hari lost his wallet playing badminton with the girls and they are happy to return it to him.  It's obvious now that Aparna and Jaya are flirting with the two salarymen and hoping to ensnare them.  Hari, the best-looking of the group, is uninterested in the women -- he's got his sights set on Duli, the tribal girl.  At the picnic, the men and woman play a memory game; Aparna, who is uncanny in some respects, obviously lets Ashim win -- this seems to be part of her seduction strategy.  The six characters, then, depart for a local fair in a nearby village where Jaya wants to buy some tribal jewelry.  The couples (Ashim and Aparna as well as Sanjoy and Jaya) ride on a primitive Ferris wheel and Jaya buys some bracelets and necklaces. Shekhar, who turns out to be a gambling degenerate, plays some variant on roulette with the locals.  Hari sneaks off into the woods where he has arranged a tryst with the prostitute Duli.  This sets up the film's last act which involves thwarted attempts at lovemaking between the two couples, Aparna and Ashim and Jaya and Sanjoy.  (Aparna's mother was burned up somehow and recounts a story of how Aparns fainted when she saw fire burning on a distant mountain; Jaya's husband, Aparna's brother and the old man's son, has committed suicide three years earlier.) After their night of unrequited (or requited) love as the case may be, the Calcutta bachelor tourists return to the big city.  Just before they leave, they receive a package of about a dozen hard-boiled eggs.  

This bare summary of the plot doesn't suggest the film's richness and density of imagery.  The grandfather sings a long song, apparently a hymn to Krishna -- I don't know what this is supposed to mean other than to signify that "love is in the air", but this is one of many touches that establish the palpable, breathing and vivid "lifeworld" that the movie presents.  The men draw water from a deep well dug on the premises -- their bathing at the well, shaving, and pouring water from the well is a visual leit-motif that informs the movie, an encounter of an urban Indian middle-class with its tribal and village forebears.  One of the women meditates, apparently while listening to Joan Baez and the Beatles Rubber Soul, in a sort of tower that looks like a deer stand.  One of the other leit-motifs in the movie is conversation about how the animals have ceased to come into this part of the forest in recent years.  The film is not without minor lapses --- a repeated shot of tribal women doing some sort of dance is intercut as punctuation with the love scenes in the last part of the movie; this seems very slightly patronizing and possibly gratuitous, although Ray is a very clear and lucid filmmaker and he uses the images instead of fade-outs to crosscut the villagers with the love affairs occurring nearby between the tourists.  The movie, probably, has many poignant things to say about India in the seventies, a period of great and near disastrous turbulence (riots in the streets and the rebellion of the Naxalite Maoists).  I'm not able to comment with any degree of credibility on these issues.  More accessibly to American viewers, the film is an important commentary on male privilege, female desire, and the politics of gender and sex, not only in India but in the West as well.  The rather uncanny Aparna, obviously the most intelligent figure in the movie, acknowledges to Ashim that she has intended to "crush his self-confidence a bit", a peculiar remark but one that is plausible in light of Ashim's arrogance.  There is a great deal of sadness in the movie but it is repressed, and kept out of sight.  Modern India seems grounded in a past that to use Faulkner's phrase "isn't even past" at all.  Similarly, modern sex and gender roles are ruled from apparitions from the grave of past and historical relations between the sexes.  This is a movie that seems on its face so inconsequential that it takes a while to grasp the implications and ongoing vitality of the things that we have seen.  It has much of the gravitas of Chekhov, a light touch that bears a heavy weight of significance.  

Ali G: Who iz I?

 Sasha Baron Cohen's new picture, Ali G: Who iz I? has a narrative of sorts aided and abetted by various dupes that the director cons into appearing in the film.  The movie is intermittently very funny but, like all Cohen's pictures, the story of the film's making and the elaborate pranks that are played on his hapless victims is probably more interesting than anything on-screen.  Cohen's movies posit that the embarrassing (and, in this case, probably criminal) behavior that he cons his participants into displaying for the camera is a form of revelation -- Cohen is merely midwifing into existence vicious traits that are latent in his marks.  However, there is a sour taste of condescension to many of the more outrageous sequences -- it's not a crime or, even, vice to be extremely stupid and Cohen launches his pranks with cosmopolitan sophistication using all the resources of movie magic at his disposal against some very dim bulbs indeed.  The gags in which he entangles his unwitting protagonists are exceptionally complicated and, indeed, expensive -- they rely on carefully selected confederates, long and elaborate quasi-military training sessions that invest his dupes in the action, prosthetics and movie-grade special effects.  In the face of these highly engineered resources invested in what are essentially mean-spirited practical jokes, his moronic interlocutors have little or no ability to resist the deception practiced against them -- often, the movie feels like the highly sophisticated London comedian "punching down" on poor fools who are the worst kinds of fools, that is people who don't know that they are idiots.

The film's narrative involves Ali G, fallen on hard times, with no money and his baronial mansion repossessed.  (For the uninitiated, Ali G is a caricature of a certain kind of Londoner who will be unknown to most Americans -- Ali G is a white hipster who speaks in a bizarre sort of quasi-Jamaican patois, dresses in elaborate Afro-futurist garb, and fancies himself a multicultural nomad with sufficient self-esteem to confidently interview Nobel physicists, politicians like Newt Gingrich and other Republicans, and cultural figures.  He has the temerity to ask the astronaut "Buzz" Aldrin for an opinion as to whether man "will ever walk on the sun.") Al G's longtime girlfriend, who is equally dim, is heavily pregnant and the plot, as it were, involves his agonized conflict between pursuing his career as a hip-hop pundit and interviewer or retiring to England to be a good father to his prospective progeny.  Ali G is on hiatus from his show at HBO, a 20 year lay-off as it happens, but is scheming to get back in the good graces of the Cable company so that he can return to the air.  He believes HBO has sent him a fax offering him 3.2 million dollars to do another program and so with "Me Julie" as he calls his girlfriend, he flies to Hollywood to return to show business.  But it turns out that the fax from HBO, discovered when Ali has to pawn his old fax machine (when it's plugged in, the thing spits out a letter from HBO) was sent in 2004 and the offer is no longer valid.  This proves highly embarrassing to Ali who has invited his agent and about 10 sycophants to an expensive banquet (over $12,000 not including tip).  Ali's "Me Julie" has bought a Brentwood Mansion for thirty million dollars but, alas, Ali has no money to pay for the dwelling.  Like Peter Sellers, Sasha Baron Cohen performs several different roles in his movies.  In this film, he goes about disguised as a vengeful ultra-woke Liberal, who insults a conference of Black participants in Oakland by railing against Ali G for having "appropriated wrongfully" Black culture.  He tells the people at the conference, who roll their eyes and walk out on him, that Ali G is an imposter and that they are insufficiently incensed about Ali's depredations.  A question arises as to whether Ali G has any African blood in him at all.  This leads to a subplot in which Ali has anal sex with the liberal who is using his rectum as a depository for DNA that he will use to show that Ali is English (or Scottish as it happens) but not Black at all.  Meanwhile, Cohen as a vicious Israeli spy ("not a member of Mossad" he repeatedly says) recruits a group of right-wing morons to kidnap Ali's "Me Julie".  The claim is that Ali is a terrorist so sexually active that he has 140,000 children, an army waiting to be activated as a Fifth Column in southern California.  If Ali and Julie's baby is born on American soil, it will be a birth right citizen, thus naturalizing (somehow) the other 140,000 nascent terrorists who are all members of the same family.  The not-Mossad spy and his recruits load Julie into a panel truck and drive her to the border with Mexico.  She, then, gives birth in a graphic and disgusting scene, sufficiently gruesome to persuade the Right Wing Republicans, that they have a real terrorist baby in their clutches.  Believing that the animatronic baby is real, they load the kid onto a drone and, then, literally drop what they believe is a living infant, about sixty feet out of sky into Mexico.  The leftist woke professor appears and there's a shoot-out.  The not-Mossad Israeli agent provocateur has equipped the Republican dupes with bulging fake buttocks that shoot bullets out of the anus.  The buttock gun is armed by using a prosthetic penis to pump pressure into the air gun rectum.  This means that in the shoot-out the Republican marks are vigorously pumping their penises to generate sufficient force to fire projectiles out of their prosthetic anus muzzles.  Ali has been working on a Cable show produced by a malign South American called "Free Speech".  On that show, Ali as host supervises a game show in which contestants pick up mannequins (men, women and infants) and hurl them into a mock-up of a concentration camp shower facility in which the spigots pump out Zyklon B.  Ali's contestants who enthusiastically load the shower-execution chambers include some other right-wing figures including George Santos.  In the end after the baby is rescued and the buttock-gun shoot out results in the death of the liberal professor, Ali decides that it is best that he remain with Me Julie in England and try to be a better man by serving as a responsible father to his new infant.  It's a sentimental and heart-warming ending for the movie.

This sort of thing is a matter of taste.  It's amusing to see right-wing bigots exposed as Hitler-adoring Fascists, but the pranks are so incredibly complicated and far-fetched that it's hard to know whether the dupes are really participating or just humoring Ali G who seems to be insane.  (George Santos, for instance, is obviously in on the joke.)  I'm always a wee bit suspicious of comedy that plays so explicitly upon the viewer's biases and prejudices -- although most comedy has some element of this sort of derision and comedy, as it is often, said is not pretty picture but really a carnival of cruelty.  There are moments of comic genius in the film and it is sometimes very funny, but there's a element of cruelty to the pranks which is troubling.  At the end of the movie, one of the dupes of the "woke" professor character kindly consoles Al G who is weeping when his heritage is exposed to him.  "There's nothing wrong with being a 'proud Scottish man'," the man says.  

Slow West

 Slow West (2015) is a Western made by first-time Scottish director, John MacLean.  It's a surprisingly conventional genre picture with elements influenced by Jim Jarmusch experimental Western, Dead Man.  The film has a well-staged action sequences and a clear narrative arc.  The movie is mostly silent with action articulating the story -- as a result, there are some features of the narrative that were not clear to me.  The acting partakes in the "strong and silent" style of 1950's Westerns -- indeed, the movie could be a picture made by Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher around 1960.  The picture was shot in New Zealand, the landscapes "down under" standing in for Colorado.  A vast arid and brown valley under a range of glacier-capped peaks is familiar to viewers who have seen Jane Campion's Power of the Dog.  Lush green forests and curious hoodoo rock formations of pale chalk standing above a verdant ravine are featured in the movie.  There is not a single moment when the viewer is convinced that the movie was shot in Colorado -- every single landscape screams New Zealand although it's hard for me to identify exactly why this should be so.  (It may be a residual effect of seeing these landscapes and forests in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.)

A taciturn youth Jay sleeps outside with his gun cradled in his arms.  He has come to the American West to search for a girl that he loves named Rose.  (We see some inconsequential flashbacks of Rose and Jay in Scotland; it seems that Rose (or her father) may have accidentally killed a man in Scotland and decamped to Colorado to avoid the consequences.)  Jay runs into a bounty hunter named Silas who is involved in the massacre of some Indians.  Jay and Silas travel together to a remote 19th century convenience store that happens to be robbed when they are shopping for provisions.  Two desperate Swedish immigrants, a man and woman, are the robbers and they get themselves killed in the lonely C-store -- their deaths leave orphaned a ten year old girl and her blonde six-year old brother.  Jay and Silas continue their trek, callously abandoning the helpless children. Silas has torn a poster from the C-store's message board offering a $2000 bounty for bringing to justice, dead or alive, Rose and her father.  Silas decides to use Jay to guide him to the fugitives, presumably so he can kill them and collect the bounty.  A man named Payne leads a gang of about eight mounted bad hombres who are also bounty hunters -- they may have been the desperadoes who massacred the Indians in the opening scenes.  And to complete the picture, there is a guy named Hawk who has an elaborate sniper-rifle in a funereal black case also hunting for Rose and her Pa.  Jay and Silas have various low-key adventures including getting stuck in a flash flood in which a mountain creek overruns its banks and nearly drowns them.  Jay separates from Silas, mistrusting the bounty hunter's motives.  He runs into a German named Werner who is, in fact, a parody version of a younger Werner Herzog. Werner sneaks off in the night with Jay's gun and horse.  Unfortunately for Werner, Silas is lurking nearby and the bounty hunter appears in the next scene leading an extra horse and with Jay's firearms.  It turns out that Pa and Rose are living in a shack with about 20 miles of empty space on all sides of it -- the shack is ridiculously isolated in a field of tall grass with oddly shaped tassels.  Hawk laboriously sets up his sniper rifle to gun down Pa and Rose from a distance of a quarter mile.  (I don't why he just doesn't sneak up to their house and kill them, but, by genre convention, he has to make use of his spectacular firearm.)  At the shack, Pa and Rose are living under the protection of Kotari, a handsome Noble Savage straight out of Fenimore Cooper -- we see him bringing two rabbits that he has killed for supper to the shack where the fugitives are living.  Hawk guns down Pa at long-range but, then, is shot from behind by members of Payne's gang.  Jay has been tied-up for some obscure reason by Silas -- possibly to prevent him from stopping Silas in his efforts to kill or apprehend for bounty the two fugitives.  (Plot summaries say that Silas ties-up Jay to protect him -- this seems implausible and unsupported by the film.)  Payne's group besieges the hut in which Kotari and Rose make a last stand, defending themselves with flaming arrows, long-guns, and revolvers.  The bad hombres are mostly killed but Silas gets badly wounded and is hors de combat.  Kotari, before he's gunned down, lights the nearby grassfields on fire with his flaming arrows.  After a pitched battle, the last of bounty hunters is shot by the badly hurt Silas who has switched sides and is now helping the good guys.  Rose guns down poor Jay when he darts into the shack to save her -- she thinks he's one of the bounty hunters.  The camera tours the casualties some of them burned up in the fire.  In the last scene, Silas is living in domestic bliss with Rose and the two Swedish children who were adopted by Payne's murderous gang but are now living with the ex-bounty hunter and his wife, Rose.  

The set-piece involving the siege of shack is excellently staged and, in general, MacLean shows skill with action scenes and violence -- a prerequisite for a director of Westerns.  The movie has lots of portentous, muted dialogue and, at times, the film's portrait of the West as a place full of eccentric isolates, loners and half-mute immigrants and inscrutable Indians, reminded me of Jarmusch's Western. (A source for this vision of the West pre-dating Jarmusch is Kurosawa's very strange and ineffable Dersu Uzula, another Western set in Siberia.) The landscapes are spectacular and MacLean lenses them beautifully with tiny figures scattered across a vast wilderness.  The movie is the length of an old Hollywood B-movie Western (like those of Boetticher and Mann) --it's about one hour and 23 minutes long.  I liked the picture but not as much as most of the critics who were greatly impressed by the film and lauded it as wonderfully innovative -- it's good, but not that good, and will seem innovative only to people not familiar with Hollywood's lower budget Westerns made in the fifties and sixties, pictures like Mann's Bend of the River or Boetticher's The Tall T.   That said, there's nothing wrong with Mann and Boettcher's Westerns which are satisfying in their own right and, so, nothing wrong with Slow West.

Marie Antoinette

 Sofia Coppola's 2016 Marie Antoinette, notwithstanding its gorgeous regalia, period settings, and stunning tableaux (called typical "Hollywood sauce" by Le Figaro) is, in fact, a high-concept variant on the bio-pic, as rigorous and strict in its ideology as a play by Brecht.  Fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette lives in a Vienna palace longer than a football-field.  She has been married-off to the Dauphin of France, a feckless chap who, later, becomes the equally hapless Louis XVI.  The notion is that this royal marriage will cement the relationship of alliance between the two Catholic powers, France and Austria.  Marie conveyed by carriage, with a couple of ladies-in-waiting to the French border, where she is unloaded, stripped naked, and, then, clad in French finery -- no one in France wants the future Queen to be seen wearing an Austrian gown.  At Versailles, she is expeditiously married to the Dauphin, a eccentric young man whose only passion seems to be the study of the history of keys and key-making.  The Dauphin rides out with his hounds and an entourage of 30 huntsmen every morning and, except for some stilted dinners, has nothing to do with his bride.  At night, he is sexually indifferent to the young woman and, for her part, she seems pretty unenthusiastic about the prospect of producing heirs for the Kingdom of France.  Years pass and no child is born to the couple.  At last, Marie's brother comes to Court and explains to the King (Louis the 15th having died of smallpox) that having sex is like inserting your key into a lock.  This does the trick with the King and he conceives four children with Marie Antoinette, including two sons who are heirs to the throne.  Marie has an affair with a handsome Swedish officer named Fersen.  But he returns to his martial duties. (The affair is wholly inconsequential and the liaison goes nowhere.)  Louis XVI has been persuaded to support the American rebels to spite France's ancestral enemy, Britain.  These expenses bankrupt the realm and lead to unrest.  Marie Antoinette, who has spent lavishly on gambling and shoes, is blamed for the country's economic woes and is labeled "Madame Deficit."  There's an uprising and angry rebels surround the palace.  Marie with her children are spirited out of the palace at Versaille.  The last shot shows the wreckage of her bedroom at Versaille after her flight at dawn.  Mercifully, the film doesn't show us anything of the fate that later befell Marie or the ravages of the French Revolution.

Kirsten Dunst is very good as the child-bride and, later, Queen of France.  She has unassuming habits and would rather play with her lap dogs and children at the pastoral Petit Trianon built for her by the King.  She chattily says "hello" to everyone at the Royal Court (something that is not done) and applauds enthusiastically at the opera, also a breach of etiquette.  Her social trajectory is plotted by her applause at operas -- the first time she does this everyone is aghast but, gradually, courtesy requires that the entire audience join her in her applause.  Later, when she applauds spontaneously, near the end of the movie, she has fallen prey to the intrigues at the court and no one at all, follows her example.

The film is odd and static.  For 2/3ds of the movie, Marie doesn't have sex with the Dauphin and, later, the King.  (The King is played with remote indifference by Jason Schwartzman, an example of the film's eccentric casting.  Schwartzman's part is underwritten to the point of non-existence, but this is intentional, part of the film's design. Other people in the movie are SNL's Molly Shannon, Rip Torn, Marianne Faithfull and Steve Coogan.)  Most of the movie is about people demanding that Marie copulate with her husband and this not being accomplished.  Once, the King figures out what is required of him to do his duty, he performs in an acceptable manner and, in fact, sires four children, one of whom dies.  But by the time, an heir is born, the film's plan requires that the jig be up for the royals and the movie accelerates rapidly toward its ending.  For the languorous first 2/3rds of the movie, the film shows us various aspects of royal intrigue, including rivalry between the disreputable Madame DuBarry, the old King's mistress and the relatively innocent, if also catty, Marie.  (DuBarry is played by the horror actress Asia Argento and she is suitably venal and cruel.)  Nothing much happens for most of the movie -- the high point is a party after which Marie and some of her cohorts stay awake to greet the dawn, a lyrical sequence that is referenced, at least visually, by the concluding scenes in the film when Marie with the King and her children flee Versailles, also in the cold, indifferent light of dawn.  The viewer, at first, waits anxiously for something to happen.  But nothing happens at all and, as I watched this movie, after the midpoint, I was rooting for Coppola and company to maintain their weird integrity and eschew any kind of dramatic conflict, political intrigue, or other staples of the standard bio-pic -- and, true to her rather austere version of the narrative, Coppola sticks to her premises.  The ending of the movie is underplayed and as inconsequential as everything that preceded it.  Marie's entire life is lived inside of a bubble of aristocratic and royal privilege -- we are never given so much as a glance at what life is like outside of the gilded halls and mirrored corridors of Versailles (and before the palace in Vienna).  Marie literally has no contact with anyone but servants, sycophantic court ladies, other royals, and her children.  The makes the scenes of her pretending to be a milkmaid at Petit Trianon and petting her goats and sheep particularly pathetic.  The cataclysm that sweeps her away seems to have no real motive and there is no sense of politics or political reality (beyond court intrigue) in the movie.  The disaster that will sweep Marie away is unseen, unexpected, and leaves her baffled.  

The movie is luminously shot with a palette that suggests Watteau.  The soundtrack is as eccentric as the casting -- the music is upbeat pop tunes from the eighties, songs by New Order, The Cure, Siouxsie and Banshees and others, including Bow Wow Wow's cut of "I want Candy" and a transcendentally weird version of "Fools rush in (where angels fear to tread)".  The movie features lots of shots of royal bling, closeups of jewels (huge emeralds and sapphires and diamonds), thousands of high-fashion shoes, and every possible variety of lusciously textured gown and lingerie.  Food is filmed in mouthwatering close-ups, mostly elaborate pastries and macaroons with other treats engineered with complicated culinary art.  But despite all the lavish attention paid to costumes, enormous wigs and hairdos, jewelry, and lavish banquets, the film's splendor conceals an iron fist.  Coppola, in her way, is just as rigorous as Roberto Rossellini in his The Taking of Power of Louis XIV -- the movie is about how power is exercised at a royal court and how the accoutrements of royal power isolate and imprison those who must live by them.  Marie never meets a peasant -- hell, she never even meets a financier or representative of the bourgeois class; she is completely isolated from anything approaching real life and doomed accordingly.

Marie Antoinette is demanding.  It's scrupulous plotting of its non-plot and its non-narrative is boring and claustrophobic. But boredom is the point of the film and I think the picture has been largely misunderstood.  In the opening shot, we see Marie sprawled like a candied confection (she is pale as vanilla) on a chaise lounge; with her fingers she picks at a four-or-five-layer cake next to where she reclines.  This is the image of Marie Antoinette that has come down to us through history.  The film doesn't really deny the reality of this image but, rather, explains how luxury and noble privilege can be a prison every bit as confining as the Bastille.

An Evening of Bharatnatyam (Ragamala Dance)

 These are ignorant notes on an art form that I don't understand.  Here, I describe the performance that I witnessed on October 24, 2026 at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Minnesota (as distinguished from the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas where the comedian Janeann Garafalo was performing last night).  Beyond description, there isn't much I can say.  Description has its merits -- we would all profit from an intelligent alien life form describing our appearance and behavior and folkways to us.  Sometimes, looking at things from the stance of the outsider is helpful, although, of course, problematic.  It's bracing to encounter something wholly new and, perhaps, this encounter frees one from the burden of critical responsibility, an aspect of writing that is always daunting.  I don't have to worry about doing justice to this dance performance because I grasp so little of it.

The Ragamala company, as it appeared in Austin, consists of six dancers.  They performed eight pieces each between 6 and ten minutes long. The form of dance derives from practice in south India. The first four pieces, perhaps, were dedicated to the Hindu deity, Krishna.  The last three pieces consisted of a three-movement suite honoring Shiva.  On the basis of old movies, I came to the program expecting the dance to consist of sinuous, serpentine movements, the choreography of a King Cobra advancing on its prey (cf. Fritz Lang's The Tiger of Eschnapur), in other words, an undulant practice, perhaps, like belly-dancing.  In fact, the dance is rigidly hieratic with the torsos of the dancers forming the core of rectilinear gestures and movements.  In effect, this dance seems to animate a square or rectangle with all gestures oriented toward defining the outer edges of the imaginary cubic form occupied by the dancer.  Hands and arms extend rigorously at right angles from the body, the hands often hyper-extended at right angles to define the square or cube in which the motion occurs.  Another rectilinear movement is a squat in which the legs form an implied square base to the body -- you can't really see the legs clearly except for the calves, wrapped in tinkling bell anklets, and the feet that stomp emphatically on the stage; otherwise the motion of hips and groin is covered by a sort of silk apron that the dancers wear. (The dancers wore identical but differently colored costumes consisting of a harem-style blouse and harem pants with a fan-like apron extending below the waist; on their heads, the dancers seemed to have skullcaps that were themselves crowned by white diadems.) To me the dancing seemed archaic, suggestive of the motions implied by the rectilinear forms of moving figures inscribed on the walls of Egyptian temples.  An apophatic description may be best -- that is, a description on the basis of what the choreography was not like:  this is certainly not a form of folk dance, the motions are too robotic and rigidly defined for folk dance; indeed, the dancers move with a martial precision -- they walk with their backs absolutely rigid, shoulders thrown back, with a military bearing as if on parade.  There is no resemblance to classical ballet -- the ensemble in Ragamala moves mostly in unison, although sometimes a soloist is featured in the foreground of a group of four dancers.  There are no lifts, no leaps, and no carries; the dancers never touch one another at all -- thus, there is none of the drooping and falling and catching motions that you might see in modern dance like that of Pina Bausch.  There is nothing erotic about the dance, even though the subject might, in fact, be eros -- an friend of Indian background said that one of the dances portrayed the Gopis (or milkmaids) vying to seduce Lord Krishna.  Everything is intensely dignified, de-eroticized and expressive only within a limited repertoire of motions and gestures.  (At times, the most expressive aspect of the dance was the eyes of the dancers, sweeping back and forth but without turning their heads which remained rigidly immobile.)  The effect is courtly -- this seems to be a refined form of dance developed for some kind of royal court and, sometimes, the movements reminded me of baroque dances that I have seen in operas staged in period style.  The de-eroticized bodies move in a declamatory fashion as if they are pronouncing certain decrees or geometric axioms/.  There is no shimmying, wiggling of hips or backside, or anything burlesque about any aspect of this dance.  It is highly dignified in form and gesture.  The only time there is any variation from the right-angle moves of the dancers is when a diagonal is inscribed by hands in the air, a sort of choreographed Pythagorean theorem.  

Evidently, this form of dance represents a living tradition.  The second half of the show featured "Sacred Earth", a dance choreographed when two practitioners (both named Ramaswamy) were in residence with the company in 2012.  Sacred Earth begins with a devotional solo that seems supplicatory to Shiva.  In the second piece, daily activities are depicted in stylized dance movements -- these include gestures that signify planting and picking rice as well as other quotidian activities.  At one point, rather thrilling, I thought, a dancer representing a deer gallops across the stage, an exception to the rule that dancers generally don't leap or lunge.  The elements are represented by various hand motions, a fluttering gesture that signifies air and water, including a Tai Chih-like figure as if the dancer were unscrolling some length of parchment or silk (this means "Ganges").  Fire is a bird-like fluttering in front of the chest.  Hindus imagine the world configured by five elements, not the classical four identified in the West -- the fifth element is "ether" marked by an appropriately "etherial" gesture of the hands waving over the head.  The last dance seemed to be a hymnic blessing to Lord Shiva including an actual sung or chanted section that is a prayer.  In this dance, the performers sometimes replicated famous images of Shiva dancing with his many arms extended as a halo or mandorla about his body, his foot crushing the dwarf of the material world, and the other leg bent at the knee and extended to the side.  The music in general was highly percussive with repetitive plaintive singing above a seismic drone.  In the final suite of "Sacred Earth", the vocal part featured singing of a kind that I have never heard before -- that is, the singer vocalizing "d" sounds, but triple tonguing them so that the staccato enunciations are like rapid-fire clicks, a precise replication of the very fast d-d-d-d-drumming accompanying the piece.

I'm glad that I saw this show.  It was relatively short and quite literally entrancing.  You walk out into the night with a feeling that your senses have been revivified, made active, and receptive. This is what performing arts, at their best, can accomplish.    

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

 The hype surrounding Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, Jane Schoenbrun) is justified.  The movie is thought-provoking and entertaining.  It's a thesis film, that is, a declaration of theoretical principles. None of this is occult -- the movie announces itself as an application of "queer theory" to a disreputable genre of film, that is, the "sleepaway camp" slasher movie.  In these pictures, a group of good-looking and horny teens are stalked by a mad killer at an isolated summer camp.  While engaging in sex, or the prelude to sex, the lecherous kids are slaughtered.  In the end, a final girl, often one who is chaste and has not participated in the erotic free-for-all, confronts the monstrous serial murderer.  After a gory battle, the final girl survives, although the monster, representing forces in the Id that are immortal and inextinguishable, limps away to fight another day -- thus, authorizing an indefinite number of sequels if the specific formula is successful at the box-office.  

Teenage Sex is overtly didactic.  In effect, it's a lecture in theory with gruesome illustrations, a sort of slasher-movie slide lecture.  Blood spurts in geysers that are 30 feet high, heads literally role, and people are hacked and impaled to the point that the camera lens is so splashed with gore that the images are reduced to Mark Rothko-style fields of red.  Here are the propositions that all this mayhem declares:  (1) Monsters are created when sexuality is repressed; (2) Repressed sexuality erupts into violence and lurid carnage (blood spurts volcanically out of bisected bodies and severed necks); (3) Movies, specifically horror films exploit sexual repression by showing us the "return of the repressed"; (4) Murder in slasher-movies involving "nubile" (the word is used in the film) teenagers, represents a fear of being sexually penetrated; (5) Geysers of blood signify sexual release or orgasm; (6) The visual dynamic of films of this genre involve voyeurism, peeping at bodies through occluded fields of vision (generally supported by heavy breathing on the soundtracks); (7) Horror movies are about "desire and fluids" -- this is stated directly by a main character in the film played by Gillian Anderson; (8) The dynamic of pleasure involves both seeing covertly and desiring to be seen; expressed in other words, sexual pleasure requires that one desire to penetrate the beloved as well as wish to be penetrated; (9) In sexual intercourse, the distinction between subject and object is blurred and becomes irrelevant; (10) One achieves orgasm by inducing the state of mind that one is both active (an agent) and passive (a submissive victim) in the act of love.  -- Much of this is questionable but it makes sense in the context of the movie.  In summary, the film's theoretical underpinnings sound a bit dry -- however, the movie is moist, even wet to the pont of gushing.  If we trace the way that gender is customarily expressed in our culture, the male principle is thought to be active and opposed to the passive female.  Teenage Sex dramatizes the proposition that orgasm can't be attained without the bisexual principle of being, at once, active and passive, that is, predator and prey at the same time or, even more radically, one that imagines that he or she is raping by being raped.  

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a feted lesbian or bisexual filmmaker. She is obviously a surrogate for the director Janet Schoenbrun whose previous well-reviewed movies involve psycho-sexual elements.  The formative experience in Kris' sexual life was watching the first of the series of Camp Miasma movies (it is a "franchise" boasting no fewer than eight pictures) when she was eight or nine.  Playing the DVD in the middle of the night, the little girl is fascinated by the look in the eyes of the final girl when she climaxes just before her boyfriend, who is atop her, is impaled.  Kris wants to produce the re-boot of the Camp Miasma movies consistent with "Queer Movie Theory" and, further, intends to cast the "final girl" who is now a 60 year old woman in the picture.  She goes to upstate Washington, near the Canadian border, where she locates the actress, now a recluse living "off the grid" in the deep mountain forest.  The "final girl," Billy has grown into Gillian Anderson who is stately, beautiful, and sinister; she speaks with a heavy southern accent a bit like the detective in the "Knifes Out" pictures.  Billy is living in the location and compound of Camp Tivoli, a sleepaway camp that was used as the set for Camp Miasma in the first film.  After the success of the first movie, Billy has retired and not been seen on screen for thirty years.  (At the time of the movie, she says that she was 24 playing 17.)  Billy is described as eccentric and mysterious, like the figure played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.  Kris drives to the camp, gets her SUV stuck in the snow, and hikes the rest of the way to the compound where Billy is living alone, but with a "cinema" next to her cabin.  Anderson as Billy makes a grand entrance just at the moment when Kris says to herself "this is where I expect a jump-scare" -- she is dressed like a femme fatale in a fifties' noir wearing an extravagant broad-brimmed hat.  The camp is filmed as a movie set with fake snow and mountainous landscape obviously painted on flats around the buildings.  Kris importunes Billy to agree to appear in the re-boot.  Billy resists but there is a sexual charge about their encounter which involves eating Kentucky Fried Chicken (filmed in lavish sexulaized close-ups like the famous eating scene in Tom Jones) and smoking a big marijuana spliff.  Gradually, a romance blossoms between the two women.  Kris admits that she can't achieve orgasm and that she feels remote from her own body.  The two women go into the "cinema" or screening shack to watch the old movie.  In the middle of the screening, the power goes out.  Candles are lit and there is a tentative sexual encounter that is aborted when Kris can't respond to Billy's caresses.  

The killer in the Miasma series of films is called "Little Death", of course, the French euphemism for orgasm.  "Little Death" is a burlesque figure.  He's a scrawny guy who runs around with his face hidden behind a metal ventilator duct, a reference, I think, to the voyeuristic aspect of teenage slasher movies -- someone is always peeping at the teenagers through underbrush or hiding in the HVAC vents. Little Death comes out of the center of the lake next to the camp.  He is immortal and rises from the water like the Lady of the Lake in John Boorman's Excalibur wielding a long razor-sharp spear.  The spear seems to have magical properties -- if it touches you, your flesh explodes into geysers of blood.  The sex between the women has a activated Little Death.  It turns out that the lake has a hole in its bottom and Little Death lives in marginally furnished room, naked and with some moldering furniture and a big flat screen TV -- it's a set smuggled in from Twin Peaks.  The hole in the lake, which is portrayed as a ray of light extending up through the turbid water, is said to be the place where movies come from.  Little Death emerges from the lake and slaughters Kris' vulgar and condescending producers who have appeared for a one minute cameo at the camp before being dissolved into explosions of gore.  Kris' girlfriend and her bisexual partner, Thor, also both comical figures, have made the trip as well from LA to the camp and are wiped out after another 20 seconds.  (These scenes, and much of the snowy ambience of the film, are related to Kubrick's The Shining, particularly the scene where a man with clairvoyant abilities travels with great difficulty to the Overlook Hotel and, then, is axed out of the picture in less than a minute of screen-time.  Teenage Sex's structure also harkens to the Kubrick horror movie -- the episodes are labeled "Monday," "Tuesday" and so on.)  The murders excite the two women and they have sex amidst rose petals and candles.  Little Death appears and impales Billy. Billy vomits about six gallons of blood all over Kris who, finally, achieves a full-blown orgasm in this arduous manner.  The next morning both women wake up, none the worse for wear but covered from head to toe with dried gore.  They go into town and buy some candies and chips to fuel their ardent sexual affair.  Some children are playing with squirt guns and none of the townspeople seem to notice that both women are painted red from head to toe.. Little Death is gone for the moment, but, of course, will arise from his underwater lair again.  In one scene, Kris says that it's her fantasy to be the "final girl" half-naked and fleeing Little Death with her "tits bouncing" as she runs.  We get to see Kris running in slow motion with her breasts flopping up and down, wearing panties and a transparent tee-shirt just before the sex scene with Billy.  In that scene, Kris confesses that she wants to be the victim of penetration by Little Death, a desire that the film fulfills -- although without fatal consequence, since as Billy says, "it's all play."

The movie is a wonky mash-up of teenage slasher movies, Kubrick, and David Lynch with elements of David Cronenberg as well -- for instance, Little Death plays DVDS in his lair by pushing them into a vaginal-shaped slit, a bit like the belly DVD player in Videodrome.  Some of the music and the Pacific Northwest setting invoke both Lynch's Twin Peaks and his Blue Velvet which as a similar psycho-sexual and sado-masochistic theme.  The film is something to behold and driven by the fiercely committed performances of Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder.  It's often very funny and I recommend it without reservation.  

My Sad Dead

 My Sad Dead, a 2026 supernatural mini-series shot in Buenos Aires, is an excellent illustration of something that streaming services do very well. A program of this sort, made cheaply but with great panache, allows the director to experiment with material that might not be viable as a feature film.  Another example of this sort of mini-series are the three seasons of Paolo Sorrentino's The Young Pope, an extraordinary program that, in terms of its length and sophistication, would not be possible in any other form.  Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie's remarkable The Curse, similarly, is an innovative program that probably couldn't have been made except for streaming or cable TV.  It's my contention that if Alejandro Innaritu's Digger had been released on cable or streaming, the show would have been greeted with rapturous acclaim and accorded universal plaudits.  As it is, the stench of commercial failure around Digger taints the air in the theater and puts both the Mexican master-director and poor Tom Cruise in a bad odor.  My Sad Dead, directed and written by the great Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain, is an example of a production that would not be commercially viable in movie theaters despite the show's manifest excellence -- the risk of failure, however, doesn't hover this four-part mini-series, about 200 minutes long, since Netflix has paid for the film and doesn't require an exorbitant box-office to make the venture profitable.  

Ema is a capable but disgraced doctor working in a large and chaotic Buenos Aires hospital.  She's rumored to have triaged viable COVID patients by diverting resources from the dying to those with a chance of living. (Ema seems harried and has a prickly personality; she is like the great character actress Thelma Ritter from Pickup on Sixth Street. From her earliest childhood, Ema has, to use the parlance of The Sixth Sense, seen dead people.  The dead wail and howl and moan in this movie, a sonic backdrop like the unsettling sounds that we hear in The Zone of Interest.  Mostly the dead are inconsolable, but Ema, in her own way (as with her COVID patients) tries to help those who can be reached -- she gently guides them to places that they can haunt without being overly intrusive and, in fact, helpful to the living. In the opening scene, we see Ema's elderly mother Susanna dying in agony.  It's a family trait that Ema and Susanna and her daughter, Cora, can't tolerate morphine.  The horrible pain afflicting Ema's mother has caused her to scream to the point that she has destroyed her vocal cords -- and then, she screams without vocal cords.  Death doesn't help much.  She still sits around Ema's house morosely, moaning and weeping in a high-pitched, child's voice.  

Emas's daughter, Cora, is a photographer.  She is involved in filming some kind of a music video (she is taking still shots) in a very bad neighborhood a few blocks from where Ema lives.  The neighborhood is what we would call in the States, "the projects" and it's rife with hip hop and crime.  Into this milieu comes Tomas and Lila with their enormously fat daughter Julie.  Lila is Ema's sister who lives in Portland, Oregon and she's practical, self-absorbed, and doesn't see dead people.  Julie, who is huge and bloated, is about 24 and wears a red football jersey with the letter 12 on it, marked "Namath."  Julie is miserable and mentally ill.  She has been hospitalized many times without any real benefit as to her schizophrenia.  Julie is a nuisance because she has noisy sex nightly for hours at a time with apparitions that she calls her "friends".  It's not clear whether these apparitions are purely imaginary or, perhaps, the ghosts of the dead, because, like Ema, she can see her "triste muertos" ("the sad dead").  There's a big hexagonal shaped water-tower built above the block of condominiums where Ema lives.  After attending a neighborhood meeting of some kind with Julie, Ema mentions something to the obese girl about the water tower.  So, in a driving rainstorm, Julie climbs up onto the top of building, hoists herself up a ladder, and, then, hurls her body face-first into the murky reservoir in the tower.  Some criminals gun down three pretty girls who are shopping for clothing with money given them by Cora for posing for pictures for her.  (In a way, Cora is indirectly responsible for the death of the girls -- in this film, everyone is sort of indirectly responsible for everyone else's misery.)  We, then, see the enormous Julie having vigorous sex with three or four apparitions, who may include the girls shot down for the money Cora gave them.  (This remarkable sequence occurs before Julie drowns herself in the water tower.)

No one knows where Julie has gone.  Ultimately Lila and Tomas return to Portland.  Ema wanders the streets, shot in languorous long tracking scenes, looking in a desultory way for Julie.  The streets are filled with choruses of howling dead; the sound track quivers with dolorous strings and wailing ghosts.  Cora can now see the dead a little bit and she chats with her taciturn dead grandmother.  In an alley, she goes to the place where her lover died from a heroin overdose and sits with her head on the ghost's lap.  Up in the water tower, Julie is rotting -- skin flakes off her face and feet and fills the reservoir with lacy bits of decomposing flesh.  The corpse-juice in the water, apparently, affects anyone who drinks it and slowly more and more people can see ghosts.  Ema figures out that Julie is rotting in the water tower, verifies that she is floating there, now sentient as a ghost.  Lila and Tomas return to look for Julie.  Ema reports that there is a corpse rotting in the communities' water, but this being Buenos Aires, no one really does anything for several weeks.  Tomas sings John Denver's song "Country Roads" in the shower.  Later, in a bravura tour-de-force, the camera tracks in circles as a crowd of ambulances, fire trucks and emergency workers convene on the water tower to hoist Julies' rotting body out of the reservoir -- these images are scored to John Denver's pop song. (A similar sequence occurs in the fourth episode scored to a perky pop tune by Shakira.) There's no resolution to any of the subplots, many of which I haven't mentioned.  Julie reappears as a ghost and continues to have sex with her "friends" whom she thought had abandoned her -- hence, the suicide in the water tower.  Susanna, Ema's old mother, seems reconciled to being dead and her pain has lessened -- she now sits placidly at the dinner table with Ema and Cora who has moved in with them.  After a particularly vigorous bout of group sex, Julie also sits at the dinner table, smiling shyly and contentedly, as she watches the two living women eat their supper.  Larrain provides a shot of elephantine Julie completely nude, facing the camera like some sort of prehistoric fertility goddess.   It's unclear whether the final scene at the dinner table is a vision of Hell or a glimpse of some sort of perverse heaven.

The tone of the film is assured, morbid, and elliptical.  The picture is shot on overexposed film so that everything is pale, ghostlike, and seems bleached-out.  Larrain blurs the faces of the dead so that with their open screaming mouths they look like paintings by Francis Bacon -- particularly the artist's "Screaming Pope (after Velasquez)".  In longer shots, the dead are everywhere, sitting half-naked on park benches or staggering down hospital or bureaucratic corridors.  The movie has many shots that simply track Ema as she wanders about the mean streets -- there are as many moving shots of this kind as there are images of Jimmy Stewart driving his car in Vertigo, a movie that has some of the same ambience of My Sad Dead.  The film has something to do with grief, particularly the grief of those mourning the "disappeared" like Julie.  Julie's corpse taints the whole community and, briefly, causes everyone to see horrifying visions and apparitions.  But, at the end, things seem to have returned to some sort of macabre normality.  This is a remarkable movie, very bold with respect to its slow pace and unattractive, if realistic, bodies and faces.  Pablo Larrain is a great filmmaker and, although I don't exactly understand, My Sad Dead, I admire it greatly.