Body and Soul

 Body and Soul is a boxing movie that is the template for later films in this genre including Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull.  James Wong Howe's camerawork establishes the paradigm for filming the mixture of frenzy and choreographic art that characterizes prize-fighting.  He puts the camera right in the ring and the fighters land their lefts and rights on the audience's nose.  Boxers sweat gallons and gush blood from their brows and cheeks and lips.  In Howe's black and white, the fights have a documentary style fury, but are punctuated by big close-ups and aerial shots of the action.  Clearly, Howe's camerawork was influential on Scorsese and the gory fight scenes in Raging Bull merely heighten and stylize the ferocious action in Body and Soul.  The movie's plot is sentimental, harkening back to silent films in its use of archetypal caricatures (the long-suffering and noble mother, the virginal good girl versus the seductive harlot, the champ and the gangster) and the film's melodramatic conflicts are simplified into parables -- but this retro material, a throw-back to an earlier style of movie-making is yanked into the post-war era by the picture's ultra-cynical script and hardboiled film noir dialogue.  Sport is essentially a kind of drama with highly abstract and simplified contours:  someone must win and someone must lose and the progression of time and violent injury intrinsic to any sport (most particularly boxing), in the end, converts every champ into a loser.  As they say if the ending is happy, it's not the ending -- and this is manifest in the apparently "happy ending" in Body and Soul which last exactly 10 seconds before a title warns us that this is the end.  

Characteristic of post-war noir, the film begins in media res and has an elaborate flashback structure.  The Champ, Charley Davis, (John Garfield in one of his signature roles) is suffering night terrors.  He calls out the name of a man, Ben, who is apparently dead.  Sweat beads the Champ's brow.  He's out in the country where he has been training for a big fight against an up-and-comer who is challenging him for the championship.  The Champ is in the clutches of a silky, ice-cold gangster named Roberts who has demanded that he take a fall to deliver on insider bets that the mobster and his cronies have made.  The Champ is favored two-to-one in the bout and knows that he can defeat his young opponent.  But past compromises and moral lapses have put him in the hands of the unscrupulous mobster and his factotum, an oily fat man Quinn (played by William Conrad).  Before his hands are taped, the Champ lies back and falls asleep again in the dressing room.  And, then, he apparently dreams the flashback that comprises three-quarters of the movie.  

We see the Champ at a banquet or smoker of some kind put on by a smarmy wardheeler.  The politician has brought a beauty queen in a swimming suit to stand in front of a mob of gawking men, a rudimentary form of entertainment but, apparently, effective.  The Champ courts the beauty queen whose name is Peg (Lilli Palmer) -- she turns out to be a nice girl who is an aspiring artist.  She lives with a woman-sculptor who smokes with a decadent-looking cigarette holder and coldly appraises the Champ, admiring his physique and qualities as a potential sexual partner.  Charley has won an amateur boxing tourney and is being courted by some sketchy gamblers and crooks.  He has a true-blue friend, Shorty, who acts as his agent even though he's out of his depth with the corrupt and parasitic crooks who want to cash-in on the Champ's success.  The Champ goes to his father, a Jewish candy-shop owner (a type later exploited in West Side Story) and says he wants to be a prize-fighter.  Mom disapproves, but Dad opens his cash register and when Mom isn't looking slips Charley at ten to buy his boxing gear.  It's a bad neighborhood and, when gangster shoot up a speakeasy next door, they throw a bomb that destroys the candy shop and the kindly old Jewish owner as well.  Charley woos Peg, the nice girl, and brings her home to his steely, if virtuous mother -- mother, Anna, is played by a brilliant character actress, Anne Revere,  and her glacial mixture of virtue but loving concern for her son is fully the equal of the wickedness of the gangsters that entrap Charley.  The bad guys take over representing Charley although poor Shorty isn't aware that he's been cut out of the transaction -- Charley keeps paying him but half of his income goes to the crooked promoter and gangland cronies.  Peg becomes disenchanted with Charley's greed and his betrayal of the loyal Shorty and she tells the Champ that they can't get married until he straightens up -- but the Champ wants his reward for enduring the beatings that he takes in the ring:  he's a great fighter but like Jake LaMotta takes a lot punches.  For three or four years, the Champ courts the bad girl, his mistress, Alice who is a night-club chanteuse and a gold digger.  Poor Peg, apparently, remains true to her love for Charley, even though he's now walking on the wild side.

The gangsters set up a fight between Charley and Ben, a colored boxer who has a brain clot in his brain.  If he gets hit wrong, he runs the risk of dying.  Charley, who is unaware of his opponent's injury, bashes the hell out of Ben and, almost, kills him.  When Ben gets out of the hospital, Charley, who is a good guy notwithstanding the corrupting influence of his handlers, hires the Black fighter to be his trainer for the big match with the rising star.  (Ben is walleyed, one of his eyes looking out into space, apparently the result of his brain injury.)  Ben figures out that Charley is being groomed to take a fall and begs the Champ not to betray himself by fixing the outcome of the big championship fight.  Ben gets so exercised by his strong feelings that the Champ should fight the kid fair and square that he falls down, hits his head, and, then, scrambling to his feet flails around as if he's in a boxing match himself.  Then, he drops dead.  The Champ is paralyzed by grief but, when threatened by the bad guys, agrees to fight and throw the boxing match to the challenger.  This brings us to the film's present with the Champ waking up on the trainer's table, getting his knuckles and fists bound, and, then, going out to do battle with the challenger for the championship.  Everyone in the Champ's lower class neighborhood has bet on their local hero.  They want to see a Jewish boxer win to vindicate them after the horrors of the concentration camps.  Peg is in the blood-thirsty crowd and Alice, the lounge singer, who has demanded that the Champ throw the match.  The Champ has taken $60,000 laboriously accumulated from his fighting and extracted it from Peg's bank account (she's acting as the custodian of his money) to invest in a bet against himself.  This means that if he wins the fight, he will lose his entire nest-egg, money that he was planning to spend on his wedding to Peg -- the two of them have now reconciled.  Charley can't bring himself to throw the fight in an obvious way and spends fourteen rounds getting pummeled into a bloody mess by the challenger -- most of the time, he just hangs onto the kid while the up-and-coming boxer pounds him to a pulp.  And, now, it's the fifteenth round and the Champ is half-dead from the beating that he's endured.  So he rises from his corner to face the challenger as the bloodthirsty crowd howls and the flashbulbs ignite like bombs and blood is pouring from his face...

The movie is brilliantly made, savagely and efficiently paced,, and wonderfully acted.  The situation is trite but compelling.  Robert Rossen directed this picture based on a script by Abe Polonsky who would direct the famous noir, Force of Evil ,with Garfield (aka Jacob Garfinkel) in the following year.  Rossen fell into disrepute with HUAC, John Garfield died after refusing to "name names" at 39 in 1952, and Abe Polonsky was blacklisted for twenty years, not returning to movies until the 1969 Western with Robert Redford, Tell them that Willy Boy is Here.  Body and Soul is strangely familiar and, as I watched, I felt a strong sense of deja vu -- the picture contains every fight movie ever made.  

Notes on the Afton Film Festival (Rampart, Arkansas, Sisu, The Hunt, Obsession, No Sleep until Madison, Zardoz, Gun Crazy)

 Dave Herreid hosts a gathering at his home on the St. Croix river near Afton, Minnesota.  Participants bring DVD copies of films to screen one after another from Friday evening until Sunday morning.  The movies are characteristically action and horror films but there is wide variety of pictures on offer.  There's excellent food prepared on the premises and good conversation.  If you want, you can drink all day and night.  The setting is idyllic, at the base of a bluff overlooking the St. Croix with the mighty river coursing by a stone's throw from the house.  The river is vast and powerful, lined by steep hills, and, in the autumn, with leaves falling and brush bleeding red and gold colors all over the landscape, the view from the river is spectacular enough to distract you from the mayhem on screen -- it's more technicolor than technicolor with the deep blue of the St. Croix background to friezes and tapestries of colored leaves.  

Here are the movies that I saw on Friday evening (November 6) and Saturday (November 7):

Rampart is a morose cop movie starring Woody Harrelson as a nasty self-pitying policeman fighting a brutality charge that seems well-founded.  It's an effectively filmed movie with characters framed in traps of foreground obstructions, vivid and sizzling scenes of night-time LA, and pungent tough dialogue.  The movie isn't very good, an uneven mixture of European Art Film and Hollywood cop action.  The dialogue is mostly written by James Ellroy, the famous crime novelist, but it's not particularly persuasive.  The movie invokes Abe Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant with regard to the self-destructive protagonist, but there's really no conflict.  The movie is set up for Woody Harrelson's character to get his comeuppance in a satisfying way -- but this would conflict with Ellroy's hard Right politics -- and so the movie ends as a sort limp compromise:  Harrelson isn't happy and his prospects are miserable, but he's not destroyed either.  Rampart was made in 2011 and directed by Oren Moverman.     .

Arkansas is about drug-dealing in the titular State, with forays into Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.  The movie has an excellent cast, good locations, and a witty script.  But it's predictable and, for some reason that I can't quite identify, seems weirdly abstract and lackluster.  Perhaps, this deficiency arises from the fact that the characters are not interesting (with one exception) and, therefore, we aren't emotionally invested in their rather squalid fates.  The picture opens with an epigraph from Charles Portis (quoting Dog of the South); Portis is an acquired taste, an Arkansas novelist who wrote True Grit, and about five other excellent books.  Portis is very funny although his humor is bone-dry and acerbic and just one twist away from tragedy.  Arkansas hopes to mimic his style, but lacks the bizarre and obsessive characters, generally entangled with secret societies, that animate Portis' books -- so the imitation doesn't work very well.  The picture follows the misadventures of two low-grade drug-dealers played by Liam Hemsworth (the handsome if dimwitted crook) and his odd couple partner played by the plump, cherubic-looking Clark Duke.  The couple go to work for an eccentric park ranger played by John Malkovich who moonlights running his part of the drug-dealing franchise.  Malkovich's character works for the enigmatic "Frog" and a woman simply called "Her."  Malkovich's performance is the best thing in the movie; the actor uses a heavy "moonbeams and magnolias" accent and flits around in an impressively weird way -- he's the only thing in the movie that seems to be channeling Charles Portis and is the kind of character that the writer celebrates in his books.  But Malkovich's park ranger is assassinated in the movie's first 15 minutes and, with his absence, the wind goes out of the picture's sails.  What remains is a convoluted plot, heavy on brutal killings, including a guy disabled by having his eyes gouged out.  Vince Vaughn is good in the Jon Hamm role -- that is, the handsome movie-star idol head of the operation called the "Frogman,"  he's smarmy, self-confident, and treacherous.  The picture doesn't seem to properly exploit its fine cast and vivid location filming and goes nowhere.  The film had the misfortune of being released during COVID and has vanished without a trace.  It's a 2020 movie directed by the actor Clark Duke.

The Hunt is a variant on The Most Dangerous Game, a reliable narrative that combines horror and action:  a villain or a coterie of villains conspire to kidnap and, then, hunt humans for their entertainment.  Usually, the human prey, at great disadvantage are massacred except for one plucky character who puts paid to the evil plot.  The Hunt is genuinely funny with some laugh-out-loud moments and reasonably exciting as an action film.  The plot twist in this movie, which is also political satire, is that the villains are radical liberals, far left of Hilary Clinton, who spew obnoxious "woke" rhetoric while conspiring to slaughter "deplorables" -- that is, hapless hillbilly types who cling to their "religion and guns."  The Left vs. Right aspect of the movie gives it a buzz and elevates what would just be an ordinary portmanteau of gruesome killings into something approximating political satire.  The film is also pleasantly surprising (at least for the first hour) in that the high profile actors are all blown to bits (pink mist) in the opening scenes in the movie.  Becky Gilpin is good as the shapely hillbilly avenger.  She manages to kill all the bad guys, who are perpetually bickering about their diets and sympathy for Native Americans and other minorities.  The picture ends with a lengthy and gory cat fight between Gilpin and the last survivor among the murderous radical Democrats.  There are a number of good gags:  at one point, a liberal couple have poisoned food in the gas station with convenience store that they are pretending to operate as "Ma and Pa" of "Ma and Pa's Gas and Sundries."  The husband gets thirsty and downs a soda from the store inventory:  "Stop!" Ma shriek, "That's poison!"  "You poisoned the soda pop?" the man says incredulously.  "No," Ma says self-righteously, "it's got 40 grams of sugar in it."  In another amusing scene, a leftist girl warrior is wounded.  The heroine points her gun at her.  "You're not gonna say that I should spare you because you're a girl?" the heroine asks.  The wounded woman takes a beat, considers, and, then, applies her political principles to the question.  "No," she says with predictable consequences.  This entertaining movie was released in 2020, drowned in the Covid tsunami, and was directed by Craig Zobel.       .

Sisu is a Finnish war movie that is primarily an excuse to stage a series of ultra-violent killings.  The movie takes place in Lappland during 1944 when German troops (here simply called "the Nazis") are trying to flee the country, retreating through scorched earth that they have created by burning towns and wrecking infra-structure.  The word Sisu is said to be untranslatable --in Finnish, it means something like an "indomitable" and "implacable" zeal to keep fighting even in the face of overwhelming obstacles.  The hero is lone horseman who has already killed over 300 Russians in the Winter War.  He rides the tundra like a cowboy riding the range and film's landscapes are spectacular, vast expanses of open terrain completely treeless and blotched with acres of glowing orange and yellow lichens.  The hero has a dog which, unfortunately, doesn't make it to the last reel. (Correction:  I missed a shot at the end showing the dog very much alive and riding happily in the side-car of the hero's motorcycle; David Ward, who was one of the Afton participants, reminded me of this image.) Like Rambo in Vietnam, the indestructible protagonist slaughters untold numbers of Nazis, killing them with arrows and knives and machine gun fire, dropping them out of planes, squashing them like bugs under the treads of tanks, etc.  A group of eight women who are being hauled over the tundra in an armored personnel carrier (and being raped periodically by the Nazis -- so it is implied) are armed with machine guns by the lone avenger and slaughter the Germans who have been abusing them.  Throughout the picture, the hero is bashed, torn open repeatedly, shot and stabbed, and gets his face smashed to pulp.  But nothing stops this guy.  At one point, when he has been nearly disembowled, the hero cauterizes the wound with a blow torch and, then, none the worse for wear continues to massacre Nazis.  The movie is silly and has no suspense at all.  After all, Superman wins all his battles.  Further, the movie lacks a German antagonist worthy of this Finnish ultra-warrior.  He's able to kill the Germans with absurd ease and there's never a sense that, despite his dozen or so wounds, he is ever in any real danger.  The movie uses evidence of real German atrocities, corpse dangling from utility poles, burned villages, and systematic rape, as the basis for its interminable series of killings.  This seems questionable to me and, therefore, it's hard to justify the picture in any reasonable terms -- it's brutish and meretricious to boot.  

Obsession is the best and most assured of the films that I saw at Afton.  The picture is a horror movie based, more or less, on a plot akin to Jacob's "The Monkey's Paw" -- that is, a cautionary parable about being cautious as to what you wish for.  A callow but likeable young man works at a music store.  There are two attractive female co-workers, one of them hoping to get into a college to study music (she ends up getting accepted to Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.)  The young man is enamored with the other girl, Ricky.  When she loses her necklace down a drain, the hero goes into a New Age store and buys not only a replacement necklace but also a wish-granting twig -- if you snap the twig and make a wish, it will be granted.  (The novelty item costs a reasonable $6.99.)  The young man makes a wish that his co-worker Ricky "will love him more than anyone else in the world."  The wish is granted and the young man quickly finds himself in bed with the beautiful, but, now palpably insane Ricky.  She is so psychotically devoted to him that when he goes to work, she stands in one place by the door, waiting like a faithful puppy -- periodically, she smashes a broken mug into her face until she is cut and bloody and, when the protagonist comes home, he finds her gory, standing in a puddle of her own urine and excrement since she was unable to leave her post where she was maintaining a vigil as to his return.  Ricky is possessive.  When her boyfriend meets the other co-worker, who has just learned the happy news that she has been admitted to Luther College, Ricky smashes through the windows in the car where the two are innocently talking and, then, slams the girl's head into the steering column until she is dead, her face crushed into a scum of blood and tissue, and her eyes popped out of her head.  Ricky, then, takes the corpse and arranges it into a tableau in the scary haunted-house where the boyfriend lives (it was his grandmother's house):  The body is displayed naked with its legs splayed wide open and the pudding of its face cocked back over its shoulders.  Needless to say, the situation isn't good.  There's no way to reverse the curse without someone dying.  And, the manufacturer of the bliss-bestowing twig isn't helpful.  When the hero calls to make a warranty claim, the company representative, a drawling stoner with a southern accent, says that he's sorry that the young man is unhappy but that it's no bed of roses for Ricky either, treating the phone-caller to a series of panicked shrieks by the entrapped woman.  The movie is very grim and effective.  It is brilliantly paced for a film of this sort.  Nothing unusual happens for the first twenty minutes and Ricky's desperate efforts to snare and bed the reluctant hero (who now regrets his wish) takes another half hour with the girl offering herself in a cringe-worthy manner.  The actual extreme imagery and horror doesn't begin until the movie is mostly complete and near its ending.  This is a thought-provoking and depressing, if very frightening, horror movie and it's certainly memorable.  The picture was made by first-time director Curry Baker and released in 2025.

No Sleep until Madison is a very likeable road picture, made on a low budget in Wisconsin with very good acting -- the cast of unknown actors (or unknown in 2002 when the movie was released) are extremely accomplished; one of the participants at the Festival, a man who is an actor himself told me that the players were probably professional theater people mostly from Chicago, a hypothesis that I think is reliable and likely true.  The film's premise is that a rather pathetic High School teacher and hockey enthusiast annually attends the play-off game for the State High School championship in Madison, Wisconsin.  For a week, he, and his buddies, attend games in the tournament leading up to the championship's final contest.  This requires the teacher (played very well by the stand-up comedian Jim  Gaffigan) and friends to travel around Wisconsin in a battered, and mechanically compromised van owned by a dry-cleaning company in Lake Mills, a small town near Madison.  Its winter and the weather is questionable and the High School teacher has retained a kid from his classes to record the expedition on video-tape -- this is Dave. (Dave's video footage is cut into the action and provides a sort of counterpoint to the narration.)  There are four other men, all about the same age, participating in the road trip -- one is a low-level corporate executive in a family company, another is an exuberant party animal, a bit like John Belush, suffering from gout; one guy's wife is struggling with a new-born infant at home and there is another man who can sing in beautiful, if completely made-up, French.  One by one, the characters accompanying Jim Gaffigan's hockey-obsessed, control-freak leader drop out of the excursion.  The Belushi-like guy with gout gets slammed in the head with a ball when the troop is playing broom-ball on a frozen lake -- he's concussed and has to be hospitalized.  The others are summoned off the road by family obligations and Dave gives up on the video chronicle. The van is being trailed by a mysterious black pick-up truck and, by the film's end, Gaffigan's character is trapped in the crashed vehicle with a badly bruised leg that immobilizes and the winter cold slowly freezing to death.  Have no fear, all will be well in the end.  The film has a sweet, naive spirit but is cynical enough about it's characters' serious foibles to be persuasive as well.  The road trip plot is effective and well-managed and the writing is very sharp.  The characters are all suffering from a sort of mid-life crisis or malaise, although they are only in their early thirties -- responsibilities have caught up with them and mutilated their hopes for the future.  The tone of the picture if comedy mixed with melancholy --it's "bitter-sweet" if that term is permissible.  The Wisconsin milieu is sharply observed and the excellent ensemble of players keeps everything light, nimble, but, also, sufficiently nostalgic for the movie's situations to have a "dying fall."  This is a very good movie but one that you may have trouble finding.  The film's title is emblazoned on a tee-shirt meaning no one will sleep and, instead, stay up all night partying:  but the printer who silk-screens the shirts ends up writing "NO SHEEP UNTIL MADISON.  This appealing movie was directed by ? -- I didn't write the name thinking I could get  the information off the Internet.  Alas, the movie is not on Wikipedia and doesn't appear in any way in Gaffigan's own wiki page.    

Zardoz (1974) is a bloviating, bloated mess of a movie directed by John Boorman.  It has some remarkable scenes and imagery that I have remembered for many years -- I saw the picture on the Big Screen in Hopkins when it was released -- I was in my second year of college then.  Over the years, my memory has sifted from my recollections the long, dull, and laughably pretentious dialogue scenes, the implausible plot, and the idiotic performances of the principals, including the nearly nude Sean Connery who runs around in a loin-cloth for the whole movie.  (The picture is so bad that it even makes Charlotte Rampling look stupid and unprepossessing.)  Boorman is good with locations and set direction and the movie has people traipsing around in loose harem girl costumes, both male and female, in a manor-house above a chilly tarn in northern mountains in Britain.  Some of the effects are very good.  But it's too much and Boorman who wrote the dialogue extends all of the colloquies beyond any reasonable measure, his camera lingering as if each word was a mystical gem of wisdom.  (The movie it most resembles is Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail except it's not nearly as funny.)  The plot involves a ravaged world in the far future in which elites live in structures called "vortices" protected by force-fields.  In an odd way, the movie rhymes neatly with the film The Hunt.  As it happens, the liberal, psychedelically infused communities in the vortices have engaged savage warriors like Sean Connery's "Zed" to massacre the "deplorables" -- primitive savages who are gunned down by horsemen armed with automatic weapons.  The warriors are supplied by guns by a floating head or styrofoam mask that vomits firearms and ammo to the death squads who have been taught to worship the blimp-sized aeronautical conveyance said to be the god, "Zardoz."  The head proclaims as its oracle:  the gun is good, because it kills and eliminates brutes; the penis is bad because it leads to more reproduction.  The elites in the vortex manor are sexually impotent; they don't need to reproduce because they all have eternal life and can't be killed.  If torn asunder, they are simply reincarnated -- there's a frieze of people waiting to be reborn displayed like trophies under cellophane on the walls to the bubble where the elites gather to make their decision.  When Sean Connery turns up at the vortex manor house, he creates a stir because his penis still works and his erection (in an unintentionally risible scene) stirs the women, and some of the men, in the commune into a frenzy.  Boorman has a great visionary imagination and there are some spectacular sequences in the movie (it's mostly scored to Beethoven's Sixth and Seventh symphonies), but there is less here than meets the eye.  Boorman's best films, with the exception of his autobiographical movie Hope and Glory are adaptations of novels written by someone else -- I am thinking of Deliverance, Point Blank and his over-the-top film version of Malory, Excaliber.  (In some ways, the failed Zardoz seems to be a sketch for some of the effects and material in Excalibur.)  The picture, which I remembered with warmth, is unintentionally funny and unendurably dull.    

Gun Crazy directed in 1950 is a cheap film noir that is pretty good and very inventive, but, also, I should observe, not as good as it is reputed to be.  A boy, played by Russ Tamblyn is obsessed with guns and we see him stealing a pistol in the opening scene, a bravura set piece involving a broken shop window, reflections in the shattered glass, and a gun sliding across a rain-slick street to land at the foot of a dour sheriff.  There's a juvenile hearing and the lad is sent to Reform School.  Eight years later, he shows up in town, still obsessed with guns and shooting.  At a lurid, rinky-dink carnival, he outshoots a lady marksman dressed like Annie Oakley.  The lady is the "possession" (so he thinks) of a belligerent, conman who runs the target-shooting show.  The protagonist, who is "gun-crazy", liberates the lady sharpshooter and together they go on a crime spree.  The woman is aggressive, a vicious Lady Macbeth and she has no compunction about murdering people.  The doomed lovers end up in the High Sierra with the dragnet closing in on them.  They die together on a small islet in a swamp under the snow-capped crest of the range.  The movie is efficiently made and runs like finely built clock, but it's a little bit dull and the acting is mediocre to the point of being forgettable.  The movie has a reputation for brilliance but I think this is overblown.  It's a tough, cynical, serviceable noir.  But that's it. No less, no more. 

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.