I was born, but....

Released in 1932, Yasujiro Ozu's I was born but... is a silent film, ostensibly about children living in the Tokyo suburbs.  During the year that it premiered I was born but... was listed as Japan's best film by the  influential Kinema Junpo film magazine.  The feature was something like Ozu's 24th movie, almost all of which have been lost.  It's presently regarded as Ozu's first masterpiece, although filmed in an exuberant style that is quite different from his famous post-war family dramas.  Ozu obviously liked the picture because he remade it years later.  Ozu is such a strong filmmaker that we can't be sure it was his first masterpiece -- there may have been one or more silent features that preceded this picture that are masterworks.  Today, no one knows.  

The movie's plot is inconsequential:  two brothers move with their family to the suburbs.  They are bullied by a gang of neighbor kids.  At first, they are afraid to attend school for fear of being humiliated and beaten up there.  So they play hooky and grade their calligraphy exercises to pretend that they have earned "E's" -- that is, for "Excellence."  They are found-out and ordered to attend school --in fact, their father a salaryman employed by a corporation walks them to school.  At their father's workplace, rows of men scribble notes on pads of paper, answer phones, and yawn repeatedly.  The work is dull but, apparently, well-paid.  The big boss is eccentric, an amateur 16 mm. filmmaker who is constantly perusing rolls of celluloid with a bottle of scotch on his desk.  Sometimes, the big boss gives the father a ride home in his stately black sedan.  The boys who were previously bullied have now become bullies themselves and one of the kids they order around is the boss's son; he wears a black suit on which dust and dirt show when he pushed down on the ground.  One evening, the boss's son invites the boys over to his home for a family movie night.  The boss is screening some of his home movies.  In one of them, the boy's father is featured making funny faces and grotesque gestures.  Everyone laughs uproariously except the two boys.  They are ashamed of their father.  That night, the boys throw books around and make a mess, ostentatiously denouncing their father as a "weakling" and a "failure".  After rather mildly spanking the elder boy, the old man retreats to the kitchen where he sits morosely, hunched over and smoking a cigarette tucked in the side of his mouth while drinking booze.  The tempest concluded the boys fall asleep.  The next morning, the boys decide to mount a hunger-strike but their mother makes rice balls, apparently something of a delicacy and the boys are tempted, succumb to temptation, and, finally, eat alongside their father.  The two boys continue to mistreat the boss's son but, in the end, they become friendly with him and there is a rapprochement between the kids.  In closing shots, we see the three boys with a arms around each other's shoulders walking along a dismal, unfinished suburban lane.  The conflict between the boys and their father is very slight and readily resolved -- it's a mild crisis and, in hands less skillful than Ozu, the picture would simply blow away in the slightest breeze.  Ozu gives the picture gravitas by his consummate framing, camera placement, and lateral tracking motions executed by his camera.  

A principal character in the movie is the suburban location where the movie is shot.  I know this setting from two separate sources.  First, the vacant lots, half-finished construction sites, muddy lanes, and bungalows lined up on treeless avenues are all familiar to me from old Laurel and Hardy two-reelers -- many of those movies are filmed in cheerless housing tracts obviously under construction in which there are crews of pugnacious laborers, half-built houses, and empty barren places full of debris and deep puddles of water.  I also know this environment from my own childhood.  When I was in elementary school, the neighborhood where I lived was under construction, a wonderful playground with big vacant lots, empty fields running down to new tracts of small houses being built, mud-pits, and houses being framed and, nearby, a major construction site where big earthmovers and paving crews were building the freeway through the northern suburbs, the belt-line four-lane 694 through New Brighton.  Our toys were stolen two-by-fours, shingles, buckets of nails and we spent hours digging in house-high mounds of dirt thrown up around muddy basement excavations where concrete blocks were precariously stacked on white cement footings.  There were fascinating bugs, small ponds in the fields, millions of frogs and salamanders and lots of dogs roaming around.  In those days, families were big, and, as in Ozu's movie, mobs of kids roamed the construction sites and the fields alternately fighting with one another and forming alliances.  In Ozu's movie, the Tokyo suburbs are an uncanny wasteland through which electric street cars hustle back and forth on railroad tracks guarded by wooden gates.  Utility poles are prominent in Ozu's compositions, forming long perspectives along muddy lanes.  (In an early shot, we see the utility poles with one of them leaning against another, an image for the two boys but, also, education to the eye -- we are being shown that we should look closely at the patterns and alignments the poles make.) In several scenes, we see houses under construction in the background and people ride through shots on bicycles.  The street cars pose an ever-present hazard -- they seem to run right through the backyard of the small house where the protagonists live. Ozu equates the monotony of salary-man work with the regimentation at school by using matching tracking shots along columns of bored office workers and school boys.  The children have odd quirks.  The two boys carry their lunch, wrapped in white paper, atop their hats.  The kids are always placing things on each other's heads.  Bullies threaten by menacingly raising a fist in the air.  The adults are distracted and absent and there is a complete absence of little girls in the movie:  this is a world dominated by gangs of eight and ten-year old boys.  (In fact, there are very few women in the movie, just the boy's mother and one or two secretaries at the office.)  The boys raid sparrow nests, crack the eggs, and slurp up their contents raw, thinking that this will give them strength.  This means that ladders are always precariously leaning against houses where birds have made their nests in the gutters.  Dogs are tied in the backyard, right next to the train tracks.  When a bully demands subservience, he twists his fingers into a talismanic sign and his victim must immediately lie down in the dirt and, then, remain there until he is allowed to rise, this signal provided by recondite hand gestures that look a bit like a devout Catholic crossing himself.  The kids are middle class, but their parents live in straitened circumstances --  on pay day, the wives are happy and the boys tell the beer deliveryman, who totes bottles of beer on his bike, that their mother will have the money to buy six bottles, thereby, earning the thanks of the delivery man who, then, intimidates one of the bullies threatening them.  The movie is very slight, but probably one of the best pictures ever made about childhood and, despite its trivial content, very engaging.  

Experiment Perilous

 The villain in Jacques Tourneur's 1944 Experiment Perilous is born a murderer, at least so he says as an explanation for his perfidy.  Nick Bederaux's mother died in childbirth and, shortly thereafter, his father committed suicide by leaping off a ship, the Queen of Brazil.  In the course of Tourneur's period melodrama (the action takes place in New York City in 1903), Bederaux kills a few more people less circuitously, tries to gaslight his wife into madness, and, ultimately, gets burned beyond recognition.  The story is either silly or psychologically profound -- I'm not sure which.  Bederaux has married the most beautiful woman in the world only to expose her to various seducers whom he, then, knocks off.  It seems that his desire is more for homicide than the charms of his wife and that she exists primarily as bait so that the villain can kill people and claim, however speciously, that his murders are justified.  Of course, Bederaux's unfortunate wife is blamed for the killings and, indeed, casts the blame on herself as her husband schemes to drive her mad.  Something must have been in the air in 1944 -- the year in which Experiment Perilous was made was also the year in which Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman was produced.  Both pictures involve evil men scheming to drive an innocent and naive woman insane.  Gaslight was more popular, based I suppose on Ingrid Bergman's star power, and eclipsed Tourneur's subtle, interesting, and ultimately unsuccessful movie.

A physician named Dr. Huntington Bailey (if you end up writing a story with a character with this name, then, you should know that you are Gay) is riding alone on a train during a torrential rainstorm.  Black, slimy looking torrents of water pour down off a hillside and flood over the train tracks.  Lightning flashes and, when the train crosses a small trestle, the wood beams bend and sag as if made of limp noodles.  A small "birdlike woman" is terrified, and, also, perhaps flirtatious.  She strikes up a friendship with Dr. Huntington Bailey (hereafter "HB") gripping his arm as the thunder roars.  The lady has been in a sanitarium and she doesn't seem wholly sane. The woman mentions her brother, Nick Bederaux and his supernaturally beautiful wife, Allida, played by Hedy Lamarr.  She says that Allida seems to be mentally ill and has mysterious admirers who send her daisies all the time.  HB is intrigued because he is a psychiatrist and he agrees to visit the little old lady at her family home, described to be weird and unhappy, on the upcoming weekend.  But a few hours later, HB receives the word that his interlocutor on the train has suddenly died, seemingly from a heart attack.  A friend, nonetheless, encourages HB to visit the family house, a palatial Manhattan brownstone with, at least, three stories connected by lavish stairways.  At the party, he meets Bederaux and Allida, who, indeed, exudes some sort of seductive miasma that enchants and entrances all the men around her.  It turns out that HB has ended up with the deceased lady's briefcase containing a biography of Bederaux and a diary.  HB reads these documents, a device that the film uses to motivate several flashbacks to set up the film's lurid climax.  From these flashbacks, we learn that Bederaux has killed one of his wife's previous suitors and seems to be terrorizing their small son -- we hear him telling the child tales of evil witches implying that the boy's mother is guilty of sorcery.  Of course, HB falls in love with Allida and plans to rescue her from her evil husband. Bederaux ambushes HB when he comes to extract Allida from the 'house of  horrors' and, holding him at gunpoint, harangues the hero, exposes his monomaniacal madness and his plot to kill both Allida and their son.  HB attacks Bederaux and the two men fight with fists on a narrow, gloomy spiral staircase, a secret passage connecting Allida's bedroom with the lover level of the brownstone.  Bederaux has turned on the gas and lit a cheery fire in a hearth in order to blow everything to smithereens.  He fails and HB gets the girl.  We see him at the end of the movie on a flowering heath with the little boy and his somewhat spooky-looking mother,

There's nothing special about the plot which seems to me pedestrian.  But the great (if uneven) director Jacques Tourneur made this film and it is filled with little details and bits of business that engage the eye and inspire interest.  (The film comes after Tourneur's famous stint as the director of Val Lewton horror films such as Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie; the movie precedes Tourneur's two greatest movies, the brilliant Western Canyon Passage and the iconic film noir with Robert Mitchum Out of the Past).  In a department store scene, HB ignores his beautiful mistress as if hypnotized by Allida -- on a suspended wire, a little cage carrying messages passes over the top of the image.  The opening scenes of the water pouring as if from a broken dam all over the tracks have a surrealistic edge.  Throughout the movie, snow falls in every exterior shot and the picture gives off a palpable chill -- the snow covers sidewalks and characters climb steps frosted in the stuff and a sinister character who stalks the hero stands outside, under a street light, visible against a white pattern of wheel tracks in the fresh fallen snow.  At the center of the villain's brownstone, there is a big corridor lined with fish tanks inset in the wall -- of course, at the film's climax the tanks explode releasing a flood of water that rhymes with the flood eroding the railroad tracks at the beginning of the movie.  The hero first sees Allida as a painting in an eerie museum filled with ghostly white statues -- the painting has huge staring eyes; it's obvious that this scene influenced Hitchcock's Vertigo in the sequence in which James Stewart goes to the museum and sees a hypnotic image of the dead, beautiful Carlotta who is haunting (it seems) Kim Novak.  One of the less important characters is a Bohemian artist and he has sculpted a huge, glaring head of a woman with hair comprised of writhing serpents.  The interiors are lavish with forests of Victorian bric-a-brac, busts of gods and ancient heroes, Greek goddesses on pedestals, books in abundance, ancient portraits, dense thickets of stuff --  the set dressing is exuberant and grotesque.  The three male characters are all twenty years older that the beautiful Allida and they all have a similar clipped way of talking, clenched lips, and pencil thin moustaches -- you can't tell them apart, a joke emphasized by an elderly myopic lady who mistakes the hero for the villain, or is it vice-versa.  There are innumerable punctum in the compositions and always something to see and admire, although the script is a bit pallid at times.  

"Experiment Perilous" comes from the Latin translation of words by Hippocrates:  Ars longa, Vita brevis, Occasio praeceps, experimentum periculum, iudicium difficile -- that is, Art is long, Life is short, the occasion pressing and experiment perilous:  judgment is difficult.  Hedy Lamarr acts only with her immense searchlight eyes; she murmurs in monotone and her masklike face is mostly immobile.  Although she moves around in the movie, in retrospect I can't recall any images of her in motion -- she seems frozen in place, a victim of the film's plot and her own beauty.  She's less animated than the Greek goddess hurled off her plinth by the explosion at the end of the picture.  

Resurrection

 The Chinese director, Bi Gan, is an important cultural asset for the Communist regime and he seems to have been given an unlimited budget to produce his newest film Resurrection (2025).  Bi Gan is a favorite at film festivals, won a special prize at Cannes last year, and he is indisputably a very interesting and talented film maker.  His two previous pictures are famous for intricate long single takes -- these are Kali Blues and Long Days Journey into Night.  The technical audacity on display in his movies is impressive and, even, daunting and Resurrection, the director's biggest and most complex film has been generally acclaimed as an instant classic.  It got the Criterion treatment within nine months of its release.  I saw the picture on the Criterion disc, a beautiful transfer but one that is woefully short on extras which would have been greatly appreciated in light of the movie's very elliptical and confusing narrative and its constellation of movie allusions and local references, none of which I have been able to convincingly decipher.  The question, I suppose, is whether this long movie (159 minutes) deserves the acclaim with which it seems to have been, more or less, universally greeted.  Unfortunately, I found the movie cold, lifeless, and, more or less, impossible to understand.  It's certainly gorgeous and packed full of spectacular images but there is something forced about the whole project.  Bi Gan doesn't seem to have any compelling narrative to tell and so he sutures together four or five (depending on how you count) unrelated sequences, and tries to persuade us that the separate plots comprise a whole,  The director is doing more or less what is expected of him -- the picture concludes with an incredibly complicated 39 minute long take (just as he ended Kali Blues, I think the best of his movies, and A Long Day's Journey into Night).  Clearly, inspiration has flagged, even failed and so Bi Gan uses brute force to construct the movie, contriving an unconvincing frame story that makes no sense -- and, then, squandering his energy on spectacular if lifeless camerawork and effects.  You should see the movie to admire the technical craft but, ultimately, I don't think that the picture coheres, nor does it seem particularly persuasive to me on any level.

The reputation of the movie, which precedes it in cinephile circles, is that Bi Gan recapitulates the history of movies in the frame story and the four episodes that comprise the bulk of the picture.  But this isn't really true.  Critics claim that each episode is shot in a different style.  If this is true, I was unable to perceive any particular distinction between the movie techniques used in the different narratives.  To the contrary, everything is bombastic, overdone, using complicated camera movements (mostly elaborate wall-penetrating tracking shots to the right), crane shots and vertically organized imagery peering down into round depressions and concavities -- often, the imagery is organized around certain crater-like amphitheaters into which the camera peers.  Bi Gan moves the camera on all axes -- that is, he tracks horizontally and cranes up and down as well.  This is spectacular but exhausting -- the style is mostly rehashed Tarkovsky with a hint of Ridley Scott's Bladerunner thrown in for a good measure.  Bi Gan mimics some old movie techniques in the frame story and the first narrative, but, after that, each sequence is shot in a way that we come to identify as Bi Gan's exuberant and rhetorically dense "house style."  

The frame to this four part anthology makes no sense.  In the future, humanity has achieved immortality at the cost of suppressing all dreams.  Dreams, it is said, are like candles -- if never lit the vehicle will survive forever.  Dreaming is, perhaps, forbidden and suppressed, although this isn't made clear because the movie is wholly apolitical, I suppose, a requirement of the CCP.  People who still dream are called "Delirients" and they are regarded as monstrous.  In some way, Delirents are equated to movies (or moviemakers) -- a movie is a kind of waking dream, apparently, conceived by the hideous "monster" delirient who motivates the frame story and bookends the four narratives.

In the frame prologue, we see a movie theater exposed behind burning celluloid.  The theater is at the turn of the 20th century and the crowd has turned to glare behind them, in the direction opposite to the screen, at some sort of disturbance.  The people in the theater flee, possibly because a monster is looking at them.  But a young woman sets up a camera and aims it right at the hypothetical lens that is our point of view.  There's a brothel, filmed in a peculiar shot aimed down into a round space where a white peacock luxuriates among the whores and their customers.  A giant hand twice enters the frame to rearrange the set which, otherwise, seems, more or less, realistically portrayed.  We learn that this is an opium den in which a dreaming Delirient is kept in a kind of oubliette or subterranean cell.  Sometimes, he is fed with showers of rose petals.  A woman staggers through a Caligari-like set, all jagged angles and doorways cut through cardboard walls one after another -- each flat is lit with a different deeply saturated color.  The woman frees the monster and leads him into a meadow where there is a garden hose.  The monster is pale with ears that seem to be melted down, scars all over the dome of his white head, and a nose like Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera.  The woman reprises the oldest gag in cinema, the trick where you crimp a hose and, then, allow the water to suddenly flow, flooding into the face of the gardener manipulating the hose. (This imitates Lumiere's one minute Arroseur arose. "The tables turned.") This is too much for the poor monster and he curls up to die on a tapestry of green grass and flowers.  

The first story is some sort of impenetrable film noir shot, however, in the lush overrripe style of the French romantic realists -- there are railroad tracks leading toward a gloomy horizon and the sets are all damp and gloomy with drifting mist.  A guy is hung by his heels and savagely whipped.  There are interrogations and threats of harm all relating to a mysterious suitcase.  (This part of the movie seems influenced by Peter Greenaway's three movies about the suitcases of Tulse Luper and there is a Greenaway sort of brutal relentlessness about the imagery). Ultimately, the treasure in the suitcase turns out to be a theremin.  Why? There is no way of knowing.  With the theremin revealed the sequence ends with the fedora and trench-coat clad hero vanishing just as he entered, sleeping in a railroad car hurrying over a desolate plain.  I wasn't able to decipher this story and can't tell you what it is supposed to mean.  In fact, the plot is jumbled, involves someone poking out his eardrums for obscure reasons, and, possibly, committing suicide.  The narrative mess is probably intentional, with flashbacks using identical Chinese actors, but it's pretty clear to me that Bi Gan had no idea himself what he was trying to accomplish here.  

The next episode is said to take place 20 years later, perhaps in the 1950's.  I interpret the story as involving, perhaps, the Korean War, but this is speculative.  A group of soldiers (I think -- although they don't seem armed) are deposited by truck at a steep hill with thick brush covered in hoar-frost.  They make their way to the top of the hill where there is a large ruined temple. (The situation reminds me of Fuller's The Steel Helmet in which American troops are trapped in a Korean temple but in Bi Gan's movie its not even clear that scene involves soldiers -- maybe, they are just looters.)  Snow falls and rain.  The men take Buddha statues from the temple and one of the guys pisses on one of the crudely carved figures.  (These statues have the capacity to blow up suddenly, exploding into stone fragments.)  A man is left behind for some reason.  The fellow has a toothache and employs a folk remedy -- he tastes two stones from one of the spontaneously blown apart Buddha statues; the one that tastes most bitter, he uses to knock out the aching tooth.  A figure wearing a tee-shirt and smoking a cigarette that never diminishes in size appears.  He is some kind of Bodhisattva of "bitterness", a lesser deity I think.  He talks with the the soldier and, after a while, the two men are marking the snow with wooden sticks spelling out the Chinese ideograms for bitter and sweet.  There is an iris effect in this sequence, matching some earlier iris imagery -- a trough of water covered in green scum is disturbed to create a circular aperture that, then, the floating algae closes; the image seems to suggest the "movieness" of the movie, foregrounding its repertoire of cinematic effects.  The soldier says that his father was bit by a "strange dog" and dying, so the man helped him along by feeding him toxic potatoes that had sprouted.  A black dog of the kind seen in Tarkovsky movies appears in the ruined temple and, then, vanishes.

After an interlude showing melting candle wax (the imagery of the candles may derive from the Mexican movie Macario in which each lit candle represents a life) we meet another of Bi Gan's drifters, a con man who is riding on a heap of garbage in a truck bed.  This drifter picks up a package of money (that may be counterfeit) wrapped in a flyer that is soliciting people with supernatural powers.  (This scene occurs in the public toilet at a bus station, another of Bi Gan's deep amphitheater-shaped spaces, the place ringed with greasy-spoon (greasy chopstick?) restaurants.  The drifter meets a small child who asks him some riddles.  It is revealed that the boy's father has vanished.  But before leaving, he wrote on a bank note this riddle which the boy can't solve:  "What is it that once let go, can never be got back?"  The plot of this tale is like a Chinese version of the Peter Bogdanovich picture Paper Moon.  (The little boy turns out to be a little girl -- apparently Chinese urchins are completely androgynous.)  The drifter and the child run a con-game involving the child guessing the face of cards held up before her.  The trick is done with coded gestues.  Ultimately, the scam gets them entangled with a Chinese mobster.  The mobster blindfolds the girl but she still guesses correctly.  The gangster, then, burns a card to ashes.  The little girl sniffs the card;s ashes and figures out what it is.  That night, the con-man and girl check into a hotel.  The con-man finds a bill in his wallet with the riddle written on it.  The child thinks that if the riddle is solved, her father will return.  The con-man sneaks out in the middle of the night, goes to the silent and empty bus terminal and buys a ticket for "the farthest place away."  Back at the gangster's swimming pool, the gangster opens a mysterious suitcase containing a lie detector machine and administers the test to the child.  The story is mildly interesting but literally goes nowhere.  In the last scene, we see the con-man riding on a heap of garbage being hauled somewhere. 

The last sequence is shot in deeply saturated colors, at night, mostly blue and blood-red.  The story takes place among waterfront dives in an old harbor somewhere, a warren of alleys and crumbling buildings uphill from the port.  This narrative is set in 1999, on New Year's Eve.  A punk kid named Apollo is standing by the water when some thugs on motorcycles grab a guy off the street and hang him from a streetlamp or balcony -- his legs thrashing around in the background accompany the scene in which Apollo is warned by a mysterious girl about the "raincoat gang"; significantly, the girl appears in profile as a figure smoking a cigarette, a shadow cast on the girder of some big harbor apparatus used to hoist cargo out of holds.  The girl and Apollo hurry through the streets of the redlight district, interacting briefly with various criminals and whores.  The girl wants to stay up all night and see the dawn.  Finally, they end up in Karaoke Bar where a gangster named Mr. Lua croons pop songs while his minions beat the hell out of Apollo.  It turns out that the girl is Lua's mistress and that both she and her boss are...wait for it!...vampires.  Somehow, Apollo survives the beating.  He and the vampire girl run through the streets, now empty in the cold grey light just before dawn.  They return to the weird iron scaffolding where they met and climb down to a boat, said to be red, that has come at seven a.m. as foretold by Apollo.  Apollo and the girl steer the boat out into the harbor and point it East to where the sun is rising.  The girl tears open Apollo's throat with her fangs, presumably transforming him into a vampire also.  As the sun rises, the two characters slip out of the frame, killed, it seems, by the dawn's early light.  There's an epilogue in which the dead Apollo is taken on a gurney to a movie set where the woman turns him into the monster who died in the prologue -- she carefully peels off the blood and wounds stuck to Apollo and substitutes the grotesque mask and make-up of the Deliriant monster.  Under a starry sky, we see a ruined building, something like a chapel.  The building turns into a damaged movie theater.  Figures with bodies of light gather to watch a movie and, on the screen, the words "THE END" and "By Bi Gan" are projected.  Then, the audience of light beings, one by one blink out, and the theater collapses into even more hopeless ruin and, with this image, which looks like a cheesy version of the cathedral and the log house at the end of Tarkovsky's Nostalghia the picture ends.  The final story in the port and harbor-front dives is shot as one continuous, unbroken take, moving through hundreds of yards of alleys and streets, piercing through walls, and dropping in and out of buildings, climbing up from the water-front and all the time encountering changing weather (it drizzles, rains as a downpour, and snows) then, dropping down again and, ultimately, going over water, sea-borne toward the rising sun -- the shot is majestic, but the story is unimposing and trite.  There's some voice-over at the end about the Delirient experiencing 100 years of dreams, apparently the whole history of cinema in the two hours during which he dies.  I suppose one could imagine some sort of meaning to this film, but it would be false -- the movie is built up from visual leit motifs  and such imagery, although, perhaps, poetic, doesn't cohere into any sort of thesis or argument about dreams or movies or human progress and destiny.

I don't like disapproving of this picture, but I think it's technically impeccably and brilliant, but, like some of Salvador Dali's paintings, prepared with genius from the elbow down -- there's no real thought behind the picture and it is intellectually slovenly.   

DTF St. Louis

DTF St. Louis is a seven program mini-series premiered on HBO in late February and early March.  Despite some raucous aspects, the show is a surprisingly tender account of a friendship between two men and their loneliness. Justin Bateman plays Clark Forrest, a St, Louis TV weatherman; he's a successful man whose smiling face is emblazoned on billboards around the city. David Harbour has the role of Floyd Smirnitch, a heavy-set teddy-bear who supports his family (only marginally) by gigs in which he translates the spoken, or sung, word into American Sign Language (ASL).  Smirnitch's wife, Carol Love-Smirnitch brings a child into the family from a previous marriage and is employed as some sort of technician at Purina.  Carol, played by Linda Cardinelli, is attractive, knows it, and isn't ashamed to display her charms at backyard parties and get-togethers -- she was raised in dire poverty and is dissatisfied with her husband's meager income and the lower middle-class constraints on her life.  Floyd is hired to translate storm warnings into ASL at the TV station and the two men bond during a frightening tornado and flood.  The weatherman is obviously more well-to-do than his hapless friend and Clark Forrest assumes the role of benefactor to Floyd.  In the course of their friendship, Clark initiates a love affair with Carol, Floyd's unhappy wife.  At an apparent assignation or trysting location (it's a municipal swimming pool with a bathhouse attached), Smirnitch is found dead.   Suspicion falls on Clark Forrest with a big city police detective and the local suburban cop arresting the weatherman for murder.  The motive for the killing is said to be Forrest's involvement with Smirnitch's wife -- and the evidence shows that Carol recently acquired a sizeable insurance policy on the life of her husband.  Video imagery shows Clark Forrest (apparently) cruising around the bathhouse at five a.m. on a recumbent bike, an odd-looking piece of gear that is an identifying feature throughout the show.  Everything points to Clark colluding with Carol to murder Floyd.  This is all established in the first episode, with six to follow.  The rest of the episodes slowly, but irrevocably establish that the truth about the homicide is far stranger with much kinkier and perverse elements at work.  Everyone in the program is dissembling, not out of iniquity, but because they are ashamed of their deviant qualities, their failure to live up to the norms of the St. Louis suburbs.  As one character, a sad gay man says:  "From across the street everyone is normal."  But, as the show establishes, this normality is merely a facade, concealing all sorts of unsavory secrets.  "DTF" stands for "Down to Fuck" and it's a sex-dating app, apparently like Tinder or Grindr.  The show functions simultaneously as a gripping detective story and, also, as a probing portrait of middle-aged men suffering from loneliness and alienation -- a mid-life crisis, as it is sometimes, described. 

At a backyard party, Forrest encourages Floyd to venture into the netherworld of internet dating by accessing DTF St. Louis on his cell-phone.  Floyd was previously handsome enough to be featured as a centerfold in Playgirl magazine but he's gained a lot of weight and is self-conscious about his appearance.  His personal ad on DTF garners a response only from a lonely gay man who runs a roller-rink.  At a breakfast meeting, the date asks Floyd to kiss him.  Floyd isn't naturally homosexual but he indulges the man out of sympathy -- he doesn't want to appear to be rejecting him.  Meanwhile, Clark Forrest is entertaining himself with a torrid affair with Floyd's wife, encounters conducted at a local motel.  He and Carol exchange fantasies and act them out in the motel in some cringe-worthy scenes.  Floyd gets nowhere with his on-line dating and feels even more rejected and unhappy.  Without much difficulty, he figures out that Clark is sleeping with his wife -- this is not something that upsets him.  In fact, Floyd is so generous and kind that he wishes his wife well with Clark knowing that she is sexually unfulfilled.  Floyd is impotent because his penis was injured in some mysterious event and now bent with Peyronie's disease.  Although Clark and Carol are sexually engaged, Clark really loves Floyd although his affection is not exactly homosexual -- instead, he admires Floyd's generosity and kindness and wants to help him; he tells the cops that he would not have killed Floyd because his friend is "wonderful."  This leads to Clark making loans to Floyd and, even, buying him life insurance at Carol's behest, a transaction that suggests that Carol and Clark are conspiring to murder Floyd and make his death look like a heart attack.  All of this narrative and many other plot points as well are conveyed in a complex but fluent structure consisting of flashbacks generated by the criminal investigation that is underway after Floyd's death.  A staid and conservative big city detective is partnered with a very intelligent and feisty Black woman police officer employed by the small suburb where Floyd's body is found.  The Black woman is "porn positive" and says that she and her husband use the stuff to enhance their marriage.  Of course, pornography and the underworld of gay swingers and wife-swappers is literally unthinkable to the White middle-aged detective, but with the Black cop playing tour guide (Virgil to his Dante), the two ultimately solve the mystery.   

The show is brilliantly acted and genuinely moving.  It's very elegantly packaged -- the narrative seems hyper-realistic but, in fact, the show is highly stylized.  For instance, the scenes involving Clark's confinement in jail are always shot in an ultra-brutalist concrete enclosure.  Clark sits shrinking, shoved up against raw concrete walls as he is interrogated.  When the investigating cops meet to discuss the case, they always confer in an old downtown barroom with an ominous black metal ceiling that the camera angle shows in every establishing shot. It seems to be twilight always, a crepuscular suburban landscape with the waning sun shining through autumnal trees.  The series ends in a satisfactory way that I won't disclose in this note.  It suffices to say that the love between the two men, which begins in cameraderie ends by spiraling out-of-control, a development suggested by Clark's ever more desperate attempts to overcome Floyd's sexual dysfunction, an endeavor that has led to Floyd watching the sexual encounters between his wife and her lover from a closet inside the motel room and tactics that are even more perverse.  The material sounds exploitative and, I suppose, it is -- but human desire is unpredictable and perverse and, in fact, the impulse to help and, even, rescue is even more complex and perversely unpredictable.  There are uncomfortable truths in this series about unhappiness and unfulfillment concealed by DTF St. Louis' rather conventional murder mystery premise.   

Edgar (Puccini)

 Giacomo Puccini, more or less, disavowed his second opera, Edgar, premiered at La Scala in 1889.  He expressed embarrassment about the it and, certainly, regarded it as a failure --  notwithstanding heroic efforts to reform and revise the thing.  (Originally, four Acts, Puccini stripped down the libretto to a three-act opera that can be performed in ninety minutes.)  There's nothing wrong with the opera musically -- it's lushly orchestrated, full of effective if forgettable tunes, and sounds a bit like Verdi staged as a Wagnerian Musikdrama.  The vocal parts are soaring and impressive.  The problem with the show lies in its text; most operas have stupid stories but Edgar is egregiously, irrefragably dumb.  The problems with the libretto, written by a prolific 19th century scribe, Ferdinando Fontana, raise interesting questions about 19th century prejudices and conventions -- in fact, the opera could be staged to refute all of its principle thematic points and cries out, I think, for strategies subverting the libretto.  By accident, as it were, the show is fascinating because, to modern eyes, it seems to controvert its own avowed ethics.  Unfortunately, the opera isn't really staged by the Minnesota Opera Company (I saw the show on April 19, 2026); the piece as presented as a concert -- that is, the large orchestra occupied the deep stage and the conductor stands at the middle of the musical forces.  There's a populous chorus behind the orchestra standing on some risers and the five performers sing from music stands under the proscenium.  Some effort was made to costume the singers.  Fidelia, the heroine, is clad in flower white and carries a sprig of blossoms in her hands; the vamp, Tigrana, wears a serpentine, tight, scarlet dress -- the opera is very schematic.  After the first act of the show, a week before, the tenor playing the lead role, Edgar, became sick and had to excuse himself from further performances -- his understudy took over for the second two acts.  But, alas, the understudy himself succumbed to illness and had to bow out.  At the show that I saw, some rotund local tenor had been press-ganged into singing the difficult and arduous part.  (The guy did a great job, although when he came out for his bow, he jocularly whisked imaginary sweat of his brow, an endearing gesture.)  Edgar is almost never performed -- it hasn't been staged in the United States for fifty years.  Regional opera companies develop crowd-pleasing shows and, then, rent the sets and costumes to other companies; similarly, the singers develop a repertoire of familiar parts that they can perform without extensive rehearsals -- this is the economic basis for the same core group of operas being performed year-after-year.  But Edgar doesn't afford these opportunities -- no one is going to be staging this work soon and so sets and costumes can't be recycled to Portland or Des Moines or Omaha.  Similarly, a singer who has learned the libretto and music by heart for a stage performance isn't going to get another opportunity to perform this work in his or her lifetime.  Yet regional opera companies don't have big budgets for rehearsal except for with newly commissioned works or for festivals and, therefore, it doesn't make sense to invest the resources necessary for a fully staged performance.  In this context, one must also be mindful that arts like opera, except on the major stages, are chronically underfunded and, worse so, in the era of Trump.  I expect that opera companies will increasingly turn to the expedient of performing works as concert pieces. This doesn't necessarily impair the effectiveness of the performance.  One of the most memorable experiences of my concert-going life was a performance of Wagner's Das Rheingold presented with the orchestra on stage and the singers arrayed like performers at an oratorio -- this was with the Minnesota Orchestra about 1987.  (Wagner is so expensive to stage and the music so effective that you can readily present his works, particularly the relatively short Rheingold in this format.) 

Here is the plot of Edgar, a variation on the time-honored theme of the Mother and the Whore.  Edgar, a medieval knight, has a simpering girlfriend Fidelia.  Unfortunately, a vamp, Tigrana, sets her sights on Edgar and seduces him away from his virtuous betrothed.  Tigrana is sexy, venal, and likes to stage orgies -- in other words, she's a fun date.  Fidelia's brother, incongruously named Frank (this is supposed to be 14th century Flanders), also likes Tigrana.  When Tigrana appears, the two boys, both of whom have a history with the vamp, fight and Edgar wounds Frank.  (In this production, the two doughty knights threaten one another with blades that look like letter-openers).  Frank staggers off-stage in the arms of his father, Gualtiero.  Edgar decamps with the sultry Tigrana.  (During this Act, the chorus acts the part of judgemental and prudish villagers on their way to church as signified by deep organ tones in the music; the chorus keeps shouting at Tigrana to "Get out!" and she responds with the Italian equivalent of "Fuck you!")  In the second act, Edgar is debilitated by his vigorous participation in Tigrana's orgies-- as often with male lovers, ambition exceeds capability.  Poor Edgar wants to escape the insatiable Tigrana and, so, he joins the Marines or some other military unit.  Frank, as it happens has now become a soldier -- in classic soldier male behavior, the boys renounce their female companionship, embrace, and depart the stage as boon comrades.  In the Third Act, we learn that Edgar has been killed in action.  His body is borne back to town in a suit of armor. Everyone sings Edgar's praises as a patriot and hero and Fidelia sings an aria bidding him farewell that was sufficiently effective to be performed as a valedictory piece at Puccini's own obsequies.  Dissenting from the universal praise at the funeral, a contrarian monk sings that Edgar was really a scoundrel, engaged in orgies and theft, and, even, murdered innocent passers-by in the forest to cut their purses.  Tigrana shows up late, in fact, too late to impress the mourners with her sorrow.  The Monk and Frank begin to tempt Tigrana with a precious jewel and necklace.  They ask her to join in the monk's denunciation of Edgar and, indeed, accuse him of treason.  Without too much hesitation, Tigrana concedes the point -- after all, she knows her boyfriend engaged in orgies (she orchestrated them) and knows he betrayed Fidelia; the rest is not that far afield.  After accusing Edgar of high crimes and misdemeanors (including treason), the Monk reveals that he's really Edgar in disguise, that the battered armor is empty, and that the whole funeral was just an elaborate scheme to reveal Tigrana as the greedy, scheming bitch that she is.  Fidelia rushes to the arms of her betrothed.  Tigrana stabs her with what looks like a letter-opener and the opera ends thunderously as the whore is hauled off to be hanged, apparently by Gualtiero, who is apparently her foster-father.  

Among the numerous problems with this ending, the chief is that the most sympathetic and interesting character in the play is Tigrana.  Fidelia, the ostensible heroine, is a complete cipher, wholly lacking in any charisma.  And Tigrana has reasons for the way she behaves:  she is the daughter abandoned in town by "roving nomads" -- my guess is that the libretto says "gypsies" but that this word is now so politically incorrect it can't be uttered.  She has been raised by Gualitiero who is her foster father, but, apparently, not sufficiently affectionate to protect her from being sentenced to death in the last moments of the opera.  Her half-brother, Frank, has apparently been sexually abusing her -- although the libretto suggests, blaming the victim, that Frank is the subject of Tigrana's sexual voracity.  Insulted and injured, Tigrana is a freedom-fighter for the oppressed, using as a weapon the only tool she has -- that is her sexuality.  In the final scene, she is revealed to be venal and disloyal to Edgar -- but the knight is supposed to be dead and, after all, what duties does an ex-girlfriend (who has been abandoned) owe to her dead lover.  In fact, I am completely aligned with her when she trades a denunciation of a "dead hero" for gems that can presumably lift her out of the squalid milieu in which the whole village as the chorus has told her "raus!"  Of course, gypsies are bad in 19th century Europe (and, still, the victims of astonishing discrimination today) and so my interpretation of the opera is perverse.  For me, Edgar has the same flavor as Verdi's La Traviata, an opera so reliant on late 19th century gender roles and sexual mores as to be unwatchable except for the music.  Yet, I suspect that with ingenious staging and a subversive eye on the subject matter, the opera could be revived as a sort of backhanded attack on sexism and discrimination.  

The Testament of Ann Lee

 The Testament of Ann Lee is about 70% conventional bio-pic: the picture traces the life of Ann Lee, the visionary founder of the Shakers.  About a third of the movie is comprised of Shaker tunes, simple, melodies with devotional words that either sung or chanted or, in some cases, rhythmically grunted.  These songs are choreographed as modern dance sequences in which the performers stamp their feet and beat on their chests with both hands to create percussive accompaniment to their dancing.  The dance scenes, sometimes involving dancers hurling themselves across dark forests or charging into lush meadows, involve massed forces and are, at least, initially, thrilling.  (The movie is too long and includes too many choreography scenes which become repetitive.)  This rather dour, and morose, movie about a religious cult is, in fact, a musical -- music is integral to the film's meaning and represents a way to visualize the religious devotion of the sect.  The sound track's score is also alive with droning noises, slithery skittering tremolos on violin, and other avant-garde techniques -- the score is like a lavishly orchestrated and late romantic illustration of a book on entomology.  It's unearthly and, often, strangely beautiful in an inhuman manner.  Paradoxically, the best dance number in the movie is the last which is the least flamboyant -- this dance scene represents the Shaker's characteristic ritual movements:  they plod around in slow circles, sex-segregated:  sometimes the ranks of men shuffle forward with their upraised hands twitching in prayer while the women keep time by stomping their feet.  An overhead shot shows us the groups of dancers rotating slowly on the Meeting House floor -- the shuffling and the stomping gives the movement something of the aspect of ceremonial dancing at an Indian pow-wow.  The expressive leaping around in the earlier dance scenes, often punctuated by people yelping and screaming and gibbering in tongues, is choreographed to "mean something" and, therefore, ultimately less effective than the sober dancing, ecstatic but determined, the motions of people who will be dancing for hours, in the film's last scenes.  You feel that you are looking into a real Shaker worship service, while the other dances, mostly, strike the viewer as slightly ridiculous variations on typical expressionist modern dance.

Conventional bio-pics are predictable and, unfortunately, tend toward dullness.   Except for the dancing, The Testament of Ann Lee, which is scrupulously realistic and historical, is sober, respectful, and slightly tedious..  The chief interest in the film is the dramatization of events that will not be familiar to most people, episodes in the life of a religious visionary who founded a proto-feminist cult.  Mona Fastvold directed the film written by her and her husband, Brady Corbett -- the two of them wrote The Brutalist and two other renowned art-house films, also featuring remarkable, through-composed scores.  Fastvold cleaves to the known facts about Mother Ann as the members of her sect called her.  True to form the movie commences with Ann Lee's birth and childhood and ends with the burial of her body, apparently at a commune that she founded, at Nisakyuna, New York.  The movie is beautifully shot in muted, almost monochromatic colors -- there are landscapes that have the slightly blurred and grubby look of Constable paintings and interiors are bathed in subdued Vermeer lighting.  The exteriors are often wintry and sere with bare trees standing in windy, snow-covered forests.  Fastvold is committed to making the movie beautiful in its dark, grim way and this is apparent in very early scenes that show Ann as a little girl working in a textile mill in Manchester, England.  The mill is objectively horrific, a place with toxic drifting fibers and the children wrestle with big hurtful looms and wear masks against the pollutants in the air.   But Fastvold's imagery of the mill and child workers is very elegant, a symphony in soft whites and greys.  

Ann's father is a blacksmith.  When Ann is about nine,she wakes up one night to see her father ramming himself into her rather listless, bored-looking mother.  This horrifies Ann and, at supper with her seven siblings, she declares her father is a villain for mistreating her mother in that way.  This earns Ann a beating to which her mother only very mildly objects.  As a teenager, Ann joins a sect of Methodist who have developed a theory that God is bisexual and that the Jesus' second-coming will occur in ther person of a woman.  These people celebrate by ecstatic dancing while they make gobbling noises and call out for forgiveness -- they are called the Shaking Quakers. At this time, Ann marries another blacksmith.  This guy has the habit of whipping her with bundles of  twigs while engaging in coitus a tergo.  Ann is unenthusiastic about these conjugal relations and, in fact, considers them devilish.  Four times she is pregnant and four times the child dies before it is a year old. (We see bloody birth scenes and the new-born rejecting Ann's breast.)  This misery drives Ann half-insane and further into the arms of the religious sect to which she now belongs. There's some half-hearted persecutions  by the authorities associated with the Church of England and Ann is thrown in jail where she nearly dies of inanition.  (In jail, she practices levitation but without much success).  Released from jail, Ann is carried to an infirmary where she remains very ill.  It's at this infirmary that she conceives, with her patrons the "Shaking Quakers", the idea of fleeing Britain for America.  There's a tumultuous sea journey with the sailors taunting the Shakers until a tempest in which Mother Ann's prayers seem to save the ship.  On board, the Shakers dance and sing "All is concert / All is Summer / While to Heaven we are going."  In New York, the small band of Shakers -- there are about ten of them -- see a slave auction which Mother Ann denounces, crying "Shame!  Shame!"  The American scenes are a reprise of the Book of Acts in the Gospel and will be received by viewers, more or less, in accord with their responses to that part of the Bible.  I am an admirer of Acts and believe it to be an early example of the epic form in literature applied to the Gospel -- but the Acts is repetitive and triumphalist as is The Testament. A young man and woman are caught in flagrante, making out in a privy apparently and they are banished from the group.  (Mother Ann says that their love is a 'beautiful thing' but not to be tolerated in the celibate sect of the Shakers.)  Later, Ann's husband gives her an ultimatum -- have sex with me or I will abandon you.  Ann is unrelenting -- at least, the blacksmith husband finally gets the blow job for which he has been importuning Ann for years, paying a prostitute for her services before departing from the movie.  One of the Saints, using his twitching index finger as a dowsing stick finds a prophesied meadow along the Hudson in Upstate New York where the Shaker colony of Nisakyuna is founded.  (There are shapely montages of the Shaker's working wood on the lathe and planing timber to make their famous chairs and meeting houses.)  "Do your work as you would live for a thousand years," Mother Ann says, "and, also, as if you would die tomorrow."  There's more dancing intercut with shots of austere, modernist-looking interiors of the men and women's dormitories and the meeting houses.  Ann is threatened both by the British and the Americans -- the Americans doubt her group's commitment to the Revolutionary War that is ongoing.  After another imprisonment, Ann Lee is released by Governor Clinton.  She goes on a long tour of New England and founds six new colonies.  Near the end, a mob of armed men attack the Shakers at night, burn their buildings, and savagely thrash Mother Ann -- the men are tied-up over a fallen log and whipped into unconsciousness. (The men strip Mother Ann and expose her genitals to determine if she is true woman or a eunuch.)  It's not clear to me who these persecuting brutes are affliliated with.  The War ends and Mother Lee, much debilitated by travel and hardship, declines, becomes forgetful and dies at age 48.  The women wash her corpse while the Shaker's dance and, then, she is buried.  In the last shot, we see the Meeting House with an image of the Tree of Life stenciled on the end-wall, a male and female Shaker is silhouette looking at one another  but silent and motionless.  The shot has the prim elegance of late 18th century American folk art.    

The film has a Shaker-like simplicity and directness:  there's nothing fancy about it.  A noteworthy aspect is the portrayal of Mother Ann by Amanda Seyfried, a bold and courageous performance but monotonous.  There is a voice-over narrated by a woman who has a cast in one eye -- she tells the story in simple language, keeping us moored as to time and place.   Of course, the Shaker's insistence on celibacy doomed them.  There were two surviving Shakers in 2025, both elderly and living at Sabbathday Lake in Maine.  A 57-year old woman from an Episcopal Convent joined them in that year, bringing their number up to three.  You retain the movie in your mind and I now believe it is better than it first appears.  

The Secret Agent (2025)

 The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonco Filho) is a very big movie.  It digresses, sprawls, and zigzags through time with abrupt flashbacks and flashforwards -- the narrative doesn't proceed diachronically, but rather begins in media res and, at the end, projects itself forward into the present.  The film has a large cast of characters interacting with one another, spans many years, and explores in a leisurely process a number of themes, not all of them consistent with the picture's principal plot points.  The tone of the movie also varies from grotesque comedy to neo-realist austerity with surrealist episodes tossed in for a good measure.  The Secret Agent doesn't aspire to be a movie but an entire world, a portrait of Brazil in the mid- and late seventies -- it is, to borrow a phrase from Henry James, a "loose and baggy monster."  Some movies are so ambitious as to dwarf most films -- two recent examples come to mind: Brady Corbett's The Brutalist and Yorgos Lanthimos' version of Frankenstein, Poor Things (for that matter Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein also has this character).  By contrast, some movies that are supposed to be very big seem small, even claustrophobic -- I'm thinking of the Dune films by Denis Villeneuve which are shot in the dark and largely involve dynastic bickering with characters whispering to one another in dim cloistered rooms.  For better or worse, there's more in The Secret Agent than I can comfortably describe and the film is more varied than my account will make it seem -- it's simply more diffuse and difficult to assimiliate than most other movies.  Furthermore, the picture assumes a knowledge of Brazilian history which I don't possess.

The movie starts with a paradigm sequence.  A man, seemingly named Marcelo, is driving a bright yellow VW beetle through an arid landscape.  He stops for gas, noting a decomposing corpse lying by the station, under a flimsy panel of cardboard.  (It's the result of a robbery that went awry.)  The older men in this movie are frequently shirtless or have their shirts wide open over their bellies -- it is very hot and humid in Brazil.  A middle-aged fat attendant, wearing an open Hawaiian shirt, pumps gas for Marcelo and tells him about the corpse and how it has been rotting in the sun, harried by feral dogs, for the last week.  Some half-naked girls in a car drive up, sniff at the corpse, and make a rapid exit, music blasting in their vehicle -- they are drunk and celebrating the carnival.  Two sinister highway cops show up.  They take no interest in the body which the dogs are sniffing around.  Instead, they harass Marcelo, apparently, wanting to put the bite on him for a bribe.  Marcelo says he doesn't have any money and the corrupt cops have to be satisfied with a half-pack of cigarettes, the only bribe Marcelo can make.  Marcelo drives to Pernambuco, a northern Brazilian city in the vicinity of Sao Paulo.  There he finds a dwarfish old woman, Dona Sebastiana, who is related to him somehow and a group of eccentric neighbors, including some Angolans and a robust, lusty lady dentist (with whom Marcelo has an affair.)  Although it takes a while for us to understand this, Marcelo's wife, Fatima, has died.  Marcelo has left his child with Fatima with his in-laws:  the grandfather is the projectionist at the Cinema de Luz in the city.  Marcelo is some kind of academic, but seems to be on the run.  And, in fact, most of the people around him in Pernambuco are fugitives of one kind or another -- the Angolans are fleeing persecution in Angola, a number of the other people in the circle are also on the lam from a corrupt and vicious government in Brasilia. (People say that the government has got itself up to "mischief.")  After its prologue at the gas station, the film is divided into three novelistic sections:  "A Boy's Nightmare," "Identification Institute", and "Blood Transfusion."

In "A Boy's Nightmare", we learn that Marcelo's son is afraid to go to the movie Jaws, playing in revival at the movie theater where his grandfather works.  His fear is based, in part, on a macabre discovery -- a big shark caught off the beach has been dissected and found to contain a partially digested human leg.  Fernando, the little boy, has made a picture of the nightmare creature with the leg sticking out of its toothy maw.  The shark is clearly symbolic, probably representing the predatory aspects of Brazilian politics in 1977.  Marcelo goes to work at the "Identification  Institute" where he is researching his family history -- he wants to know about his mother who died when he was young.  (She is said to have been a "slave" of a wealthy family whose son, Marcelo's father, got her pregnant).  Meanwhile in Brasilia, a plutocrat named Ghirotti hires two menacing assassins to travel to Pernambuco to kill Marcelo (this is confusing to some degree because Marcelo is the hero's nom de guerre; his real name is Armando).  The killers are a scary-looking Corporal discharged from the armed forces and his stepson and protege, the steely eyed murderer, Bobbi -- he is the Corporal's stepson and, it is rumored, that the Corporal killed his mother.  The assassins fly to Pernambuco where it is Carnival season with the streets flooded with merry-makers.  Already 91 people have died inthe Carnival and, perhaps, more will end up dead before the party concludes.  There are three strange digressions which I didn't fully understand.  A German tailor impresses the local hoodlums with his scars from World War II.  We think he's a Nazi but, in fact, the man is a Belgian Jew and refugee.  (The German seems to thinks it expedient to let people think he's a bad-ass Nazi -- the part is played by the redoubtable Udo Kier who seems to have been fantastically active in the last year of his life; he also has a major role in this year's season of the Navajo detective series, Dark Winds).  A wealthy woman has not watched the child of her servant properly --this has resulted in the three-year old girl being run over and killed.  The servant calls for justice and a big meeting with lawyers is set up for the Identification Institute (which bizarrely the cops claim to be the Police Station.)  Media gets involved in the story and there's a fracas of screaming and crying women at the Identification archives.  (I couldn't figure out this digression.)  Finally, some crooks go to the morgue, pick-up the shark-gnawed leg (because they are afraid it will be identified) and substitute, apparently another leg -- things are so chaotic in Brazil that apparently dismembered legs are  just lying around.  The real dismembered leg is insulted by this treatment and, somehow, rises from the dead, hopping vigorously around a public park full of people fucking in threesomes (seemingly Brazilian parks get very lively after dark);  the leg chases the lovers around kicking them in the ass with great and alarming force.  (Again, I didn't fully understand this sequence, but expect it may have something to do with Brazil's exuberant tabloid culture -- the adventures of the "Hairy Leg" are front page news and sell-out extra editions of the papers.)  

In the second part of the film, Identification Institute, we learn why the vicious Mr. Ghirotti has commissioned the hit on Marcelo (Armando).  Ghirotti is from the South and feels all Brazilians in the north part of the country are indolent slackers.  Ghirotti, an industrialist, goes to the University of Pernambuco where Armando (as I will call him henceforth) is running an industrial engineering department with about 12 colleagues.  Ghirotti meets with Armando and says that he will use his contacts in Brasilia, the Capitol, to shut down the department unless Armando gives him rights to the patent on a leather-tanning machine that he has invented.  With his half-wit and sadistic son, Ghirotti insults Armando's wife who is lower middle class -- after all her father is a movie projectionist, although a righteous and hardworking man.  They are at a cafe and Fatima, Armando's wife, is incensed and returns the insult to Ghirotti.  The plutocrat is not used to this sort of treatment particularly from a despised northern Brazilian wench whose father is lower middle-class.  And, so, he apparently decides to have Armando, whose wife has now died from pneumonia, killed.  Bobbi and the corporal hook up with the local gendarmes who are all totally and cheerfully corrupt. They drive around town drunk and plotting violent mischief.   In the film's last section, "Blood Transfusion", the assassination plot comes to a head.  The two killers are slothful themselves and they hire a local stevedore, whom Bobbi, the corporal's step son, calls "an animal" to his face to murder Armando.  The attack goes awry and two of the local cops are gunned down by the murderous stevedore.  Bobbi goes in pursuit of Armando but finds the assassin hiding in a barber shop; he has left a blood trail from being shot in the leg.  Bobbi heedlessly barges into the barbershop and is killed by the stevedore.  (The stevedore says something like "who's the animal now.")  At a final party, the group of exiles and refugees plans to leave Pernambuco -- Armando is going to pick up his son, Fernando, at the movie theater; the various refugees from government violence plot to leave the country and the Angolans are immigrating to Sweden.  The matriarch who leads this group, Dona Sebastiana, talks about fleeing Brazil in the thirties to live in Paris where she had a French lover.  The party ends with a round of toasts and it seems that all will be well although the murderous Corporal is still at large.  Two young women are studying the story, listening to recordings of statements made by Armando in 1974 and 1976-78.  For some reason, the young women are transcribing the recordings.  One of them, Flavia, gets the recordings of Armando's statements -- she regards Armando as a sort of hero and freedom fighter.  (We have seen a newspaper on micro-fiche showing a gruesome picture of Armando gunned down on the streets of Penambuco.)  Gradually, we understand that this part of the movie is a kind of epilogue and takes place in the present.  Flavia goes to a hospital where she donates blood.  The doctor supervising the operation is Fernando, Marcelo/Armando's son now middle-aged and distinguished.  Flavia talks with Fernando about his father's story.  Fernando tells Flavia that after he went to see the movie Jaws with his grandfather all of his nightmares about predatory sharks ended.  (The suggestion is that film, by confronting our fears, can heal us from historical trauma.)  Fernando drew pictures of his lost mother, lost father, and himself  riding bravely on the back of a Great White Shark.  The doctor doesn't seem to think that dwelling on the past is of much use.  The last shot shows a brightly lit convenience store with pop music blaring from it.  (Throughout the movie, pop songs have been an index of time and the period in which the movie is set -- for instance, we hear a pop song by the group Chicago setting the story in the mid-seventies.)  

I like enigma.  There are many aspects of this film that I can't quite explain.  (For instance, a shot of Udo Kier in the street celebration ecstatically dancing with the rest of the crowd, many of whom wear masks and Indian headdresses.)  These mysteries endear the movie to me and, despite some dull passages-- there is a long intensely detailed discussion at the University of Pernambuco about Ghirotti's denial of funding to the department -- the movie is surprising, moving, and mostly a treat to watch.  The camerawork makes the heat and sun palpable and the violent scenes are graphic and impressive.  The movie is long, 2 and 1/2 hours, but it is worth your time.