High Sierra

 In Raoul Walsh's  High Sierra, Roy Earle has his back against the wall.  But it's not just any wall -- instead, he's cornered by the tallest peak in the United States as it existed in 1941, the year the film was produced, Mount Whitney, a great white escarpment of granite crowned by jagged pinnacles like the jaw of some huge beast.  Earle, played by Humphrey Bogart, never had a chance -- the narrative deck is stacked against him.  But Walsh doesn't make his protagonist's doom thematic or, least of all, atmospheric -- the picture doesn't have the dense, gathering darkness of later film noir.  Instead of darkness, Walsh's film insists that there is a dual aspect to everything -- the mountain wilderness shown lavishly in the picture's first frames is both an emblem for escape and freedom and a vast cul-de-sac, a tower of bare rock that signifies "no exit here".  High Sierra is so vigorously directed, so swift on its feet (the movie is edited with lightning rapidity) that it's only on reflection that the pattern of dualities, hope and gloom, fate and freedom, becomes apparent.  

I have probably written elsewhere on High Sierra and so this comment is, perhaps, superfluous.  I know that I have previously remarked on Colorado Territory, Walsh's near simultaneous re-make of High Sierra as a Western.  Apparently, the subject was close to Walsh and had personal resonance to him -- in the film, he restages the accident that cost him his eye, a mishap involving a jack-rabbit startling a driver and provoking an accident in the remote desert.  The figure of the desperado, a bandit pardoned from a sentence of life in prison only to be immediately trapped in the coils of a doomed robbery, must have had some kind of resonance to Walsh.  In other, more conventional, narratives, Roy Earle would be yearning to go straight and there's a tiny bit of this flavor when the criminal encounters the love interest (or interests) in the film.  But the movie is cheerfully corrupt to the bone:  a vicious ex-cop, probably a police commissioner, has purchased Earle's pardon from the prison in Indiana where he is doing time, in other to coerce him into masterminding a robbery -- the plan is to steal diamonds and cash from a posh mountain resort in the Sierra Nevada.  The movie immediately assumes that the governor of Indiana is for sale and that Earle, a man of his word if a criminal, will execute the plan. Earle is presented as a craftsmanlike robber, a thoroughly professional crook who is forced to babysit two inept and violent thugs (one of them is even called "Baby") and their moll, Marie (played by Ida Lupino).  The fence is a crook called "Big Mac" who is dying of some kind of heart ailment -- "Big Mac" drinks whiskey notwithstanding his sleazy gangland doctor's advice to abstain:  "People say I'm just rushin' to death," the dying criminal says, "But you're rushin' to death too.  So is everyone one."  (The line is a curious echo of the epigraph to a nearly contemporary horror film,  1943's The Seventh Victim, produced by Val Lewton -- the movie begins with a quote from John Donne:  "I run to death and death meets me as fast and all my pleasures are like yesterday.")  Big Mac and Roy and, for that matter, the doctor lament the fact that they are alone professional in a world of unmannerly and reckless baby-thugs.  Saddled with an incompetent gang, Earle's robbery goes awry.  The two childish crooks are killed in a fiery crash after Earle has shot a security guard.  Earle goes on the lam with the Marie (who is packing an intolerably cute little dog with her) but they have to separate.  The inside confederate (played by a very young Cornel Wilde) sings like a bird and the dragnet tightens around Earle.  He flees to the foot of Mount Whitney -- there's a hair-raising car chase up the serpentine dirt road that leads toward the peak.  Earle isn't about to go back to prison.  He blasts away at his pursuers with a tommy-gun and clambers up to an inaccessible ledge under the huge mountain.  As Marie begs him to surrender (and the dog gets loose to run up to Earle), a sniper gains a cliff-top above Earle and shoots him down.  And, then, he falls and falls and falls.  Marie says that Earle's finally "crashed-out" which means to escape to freedom.  The mountains and the wilderness don't care one way or the other.

This sort of movie is as far as can be imagined from today's popular super-hero and comic book pictures.  High Sierra is grounded in failure, not triumph or success.  Battles are fought to be lost.  And the movie was made for adults -- the picture celebrates the notion that people can hold two mutually opposing ideas in their imagination at once.  Mount Whitney, the "pride of the Sierras" is both a spectacular and vast landscape suggesting the freedom of the American West and another, larger prison.  Big Mac dies of heart failure "with a half million dollars in jewels on his bed next to him."  The duality of things is expressed in the film's genre subplot.  After the jack-rabbit almost drives his cars off the road, Earle becomes friends with a family in the other vehicle, Ohio farmers who have lost the home-place and are making for the Golden West.  A teenage girl in that family is lovely, cheerful, and has a club-foot.  Earle falls in love with her after the "meet cute" in the desert and, later, after she's involved in another car crash in LA.  (Cars are instruments of fatality in this film.)  Earle finances an operation to cure her club foot -- it's supervised by the gangland doctor and there's an element of "illegality" about the procedure (as if the doc is arranging for an abortion.)  Once the girl's foot is fixed, however, she doesn't care for Earle, who is after all much older than her -- in fact, and this is shocking to the audience, the girl takes up drinking and dancing when she's spry enough to trip the light fantastic and becomes a kind of hardened floozy.  (And her boyfriend Lon is a singularly despicable character, a smudge of a man with a pencil-thin moustache who's not much younger than Earle.)  Rejected by the girl, Earle courts the moll of one of the bad boys, Marie, a former dime-a-dance girl from San Francisco. She's enthusiastic about him (apparently entirely forgetting her abusive boyfriend who died in the fiery crash), but as soon as we see them together, Marie begins to bicker with Earle.  There's no safe harbor in sight. (Marie tells Earle she had an abusive father and fled from him, "crashing out" of her family, to use gangland parlance -- there's some notion that she may be seeking surrogate for her father in the much older Earle.) The film's many ambiguities are summed up in the figure of Pard, a small grey-white mongrel.  The dog's been trained by an African-American flunky at the tourist camp in the mountains -- the flunky's role is in the vein of a Stepin Fetchit part and shockingly racist.  The Black flunky tells Earle that the dog is a harbinger of doom -- the critter is hexed and everyone who owns the pooch ends up dead, foreshadowing what will happen in the film.  But the dog is also an emblem of domesticity between Roy and Marie and, further, serves the function of providing cute comic relief in the picture.  Walsh proposes that the charismatic little dog with his appealing tricks is also an agent of doom (and this is literal:  the dog serves to identify Marie to the authorities who are hunting the couple.)  Everything in the film is carefully plotted and developed:  in an early scene, the Black factotum at the resort says he'll drain the water from Earle's radiator in his car "cuz it gets mighty cold up here after dark."  At the end of the movie, Earle spends a night lightly clad on the heights of the mountain -- a journalist provides a florid narration of the man-hunt and says that the vast cliff in a "tower of ice" in the night. (John Huston wrote the script with the author of the source novel, W. R. Burnett.)

There's a haunting detail toward the end of the movie.  Walsh uses a montage of maps and speeding vehicles to show how the police are setting up roadblocks in the Owens Valley to surround the fugitive.  The montage is very fast -- in general, the film's editing is extremely swift and uses scarcely visible snippets of film.  One map features at its center the word "Manzanar".  In the year after the movie wa released, Manzanar would become the site of a large and barren Japanese interment camp.  (When I visited the ghostly ruins there, I read the story of a Japanese-American student who was held in the concentration camp -- the student yearned to escape into the high sierra just like Roy Earle.  Mount Whitney is the camp's backdrop.  After the war, the Nisei student was freed, left the camp, and died of exposure trying to climb Mount Whitney.  The Japanese were put at Manzanar precisely because the landscape is a sort of immense prison.)  Of course, all of this was in the future when the movie was released and so the brief shot of the map that reads Manzanar has a curious, and bleak, sort of innocence.   

Black Crab

 Russia's invasion of Ukraine casts faint and slightly nauseating light on Andrew Berg's Black Crab, a 2022 Swedish war film, apparently made for Netflix.  The movie begins at a train station where refugees plead for passage on a spectacularly squalid-looking troop train.  (The soldiers are riding in cattle cars with dead troops wrapped up in plastic and stacked like cordwood against the side of the car.)  A modern-looking European city, shot in monochrome blue-green, seems to be perpetually on fire.  One shot shows an apartment block with a round hole shot right through it.  Lines of weary refugees trudge across the gloomy landscape while pillars of smoke rise on the horizon.  Traffic jams with cars full of refugees are shot up by masked gunmen.  Women and children are mowed down.  Of course, the movie was shot and edited before Putin launched his "special military exercise" in Ukraine, but much of the scene-setting seems weirdly prescient and is, in fact, more persuasive and frightening than the film's rather formulaic plot:  a squad of hard-bitten soldiers with special talents is sent on a highly consequential suicide mission.  (The movie involves six special forces  operatives entrusted with the mission -- it's the "dirty half-dozen.)  Black Crab  ("Svarte Krabbe" the Swedish name is fun to type) is fairly exciting, gruesome, and scary although it collapses in its unnecessary last 15 minutes.  

The film's premise is that some kind of war has wracked Sweden for several years.  The unnamed "enemy" is winning, about to overrun the last outpost of the Swedish army hunkered down at a place called Odo Island.  Six ultra-tough soldiers are ordered to skate 100 kilometers across the frozen archipelago to Odo Island to deliver a whatzit -- in this case, the cargo is two capsules of biological agent, some sort of virulent, world-destroying virus.  (I have no idea why the exotic mode of using ice-skaters on a frozen sea is employed for this mission -- why not use a helicopter or some other more efficient and swift mode of transport.)  The heroine, Edh (played by Noomi Rapace) is a tough-as-nails woman warrior; she's been told that her daughter, kidnapped several years previous by the enemy, has been found in a refugee camp and is waiting for her on the island -- this is supposed to motivate her to feats of heroism.  (And this also motivates the film to provide several uninformative and predictable flashbacks during the operation on the ice.)  The squad skates at night and, of course, there are all sorts of perils to navigate -- the ice is unpredictable and, sometimes, fractures drowning the soldiers in the frigid sea.  There are a number of fire fights and the squad is chased by helicopters that fire machine gun rounds into the fragile ice.  When the squad takes refuge on an island where a serene older couple is living, there is another shoot-out when the old man tries to machine-gun the soldiers.  One-by-one the six squad members are killed.  Predictably, the sortie across the ice ends with Edh chasing the other last survivor -- he means to destroy the noxious weapon of mass destruction.  But Edh, desperate to complete the mission, shoots him down and, then, struggling through a white void, encounters four men on horseback -- the horsemen of the apocalypse? -- before swooning on the ice.  (If horses can cross the frozen archipelago, why weren't they deployed to transport the viral gizmo?)  Edh wakes up in a subterranean fortress where the Swedish army's elite forces are hiding.  She now realizes that she's been deceived -- her daughter is nowhere in evidence.  This leads her (and the other survivor -- the guy she shot on the ice; apparently, she just winged him) to set out on a mission to destroy the viral weapon.  This final sequence seems to be from another movie and involves lavish underground sets, glowing laboratories full of masked technicians, and armies of bad guys who are a bit like the storm troopers in a Star Wars movie.  The ending doesn't work and is substantially different in tone and staging than the earlier, much more effective parts of the film.

The best part of the movie is the midnight skate across the frozen sea.  This sequence is gripping and a bit like a Western -- the frozen sea is pictorially similar to the desert and the lurking enemy are the Apaches that periodically attack the cavalry skating across the icy wasteland.  The movie looks nice, but it's all phony.  Obviously, none of the principal players know how to ice-skate.  So the film shows them in close-up with unconvincing rear-projection as they are supposedly skating to Odo.  Thus, the movie has to alternate from close-ups with mismatched rear projection to extremely long shots in which the identity of the skaters is concealed.  In a couple of scenes the heroes have to attack targets on small rocky islands -- somehow, they go from skating to running up steep snowy slopes without changing from their skates to combat boots.  (There are innumerable mistakes of this sort in the film.)  Some of the bivouacs on the ice involve sets that are obviously in a studio -- it's like John Ford showing lines of horsemen crossing Monument Valley only to cut to a scene around a campfire with obviously potted plants and a little heap of sand on the floor to simulate the desert and shot with unconvincing lighting to boot.  On a technical level, the picture looks good but it's clearly made cheaply.  The scenes with the refugees are shot with about a dozen extras and the apocalyptic imagery coming out of Poland and Lviv now puts this footage to shame.  But the picture is single-minded (until it goes off course) and the shots on the ice are atmospheric and, even, when the movie devolves into Ice Station Zebra sequences with fake snow and bad lighting, the movie remains intriguing -- all of the bad sets and worse lighting just reminds me of films made fifty years ago that were exciting to a teenage boy.  

The Lost Daughter

 The Lost Daughter is an estimable drama based on a book of the same title by the mysterious Elena Ferrante.  (How many books has this person -- or persons -- written?  It seems that about every week there is a new Netflix adaptation of one of her works.) The movie is well-acted and has a highly literate script but it doesn't work -- in fact, the film is a lugubrious slog.  It's hard to figure out exactly what is wrong with this movie -- or, indeed, if there's anything wrong at all.  The picture is so uncompromising that it's not really entertainment -- the viewer cringes and mourns but there's no pleasure to be had notwithstanding the top-notch cast and expensive production values.  Maggie Gyllenhaal directed the picture, not too skillfully I'm afraid.  My perspective on this film is a dissenting opinion -- a lot of critics have high regard for this picture.

Leda is on summer holiday, a "working vacation" to a Greek island.  She is 48 and alone, a highly regarded translator -- English into Italian.  She plans to work on an Italian edition of Yeats and the Irish writer's "Leda and the Swan" is a touchstone for the picture, the subject of frequent allusions.  Leda (Olivia Coleman) has the beach to herself at first -- she lazes in the warm sea-water, flirts with Lyle (Ed Harris), a local handy-man and factotum for the other more disreputable guests at the resort, and works on the beach.  She seems a bit disoriented, perhaps, suffering from some insidious disease -- she doesn't know enough to keep out of the sun; the hunky cabana boy, Will, has to move her sun-shade to keep her from getting too badly sunburned.  After a few days involving some disconcerting discoveries -- the nice fresh fruit display in her rooms is all rotted on its underside and a gigantic cicada ends up sharing a pillow with her -- things take a turn for the worse when a large American family, apparently with Greek connections, shows up to share the beach with her.  These people are noisy, vulgar, foul-mouthed, rude and combative.  Lyle warns her that they are "bad people", apparently, American gangsters of the old school from New Jersey or Philadelphia.  (Every year they come to the Greek island to conduct some shady business while the family with its showy gangster molls sunbathes on the beach -- they rent a large conspicuous pink villa.)  Leda despises the family and, even, defies them when they ask her to move somewhere else on the beach.  One of the women, Callisto, admires her nerve and tries to make peace with the bristly, equally rude if more outwardly polite, Leda.  When asked where she lives, Leda always says "Cambridge, it's near Boston", apparently, unwilling to admit that she, apparently, teaches at Harvard -- although, in a finely tuned bit of observation, Leda makes sure that everyone knows her pedigree, after all, what does "Cambridge near Boston" mean otherwise?  (Perhaps, she has to explain the location of her Cambridge since she speaks with a British accent -- "her people" as the gangster women would say, come from Leeds in the U.K. )  Leda observes a bratty little girl among the gangsters, someone named Elena.  This child induces in Leda a series of flashbacks that ultimately come to dominate the film's second half.  Through these flashbacks, we see the young Leda, played brilliantly by the Irish actress Jessie Buckley.  Young Leda is a mother struggling to succeed in the Acadame with two little girls, Bianca and Martha.  The girls are extremely spoiled and nasty -- they punch their mother when she is trying to nap, comb her hair roughly, and are constantly demanding her attention.  (All of the children in this film are portrayed in refreshingly realistic terms -- they are all monsters from the Id, incredibly needy and vicious when their pressing desires are thwarted.  This observation doesn't apply only to the little kids -- everyone in this movie, including Leda, is selfish, narcissistic, and vehemently demanding.  It's rare to find a film in which every single character is not just annoying, but, in fact, deplorable.)  As we come to learn, Leda, constantly irritated by her daughters' importuning, embarked on an extra-marital affair, left her handsome but indolent post-doctoral degree husband, and, then, in  turn was abandoned by her lover, a bearded lit-crit "god" as she calls him.  The lover, we discover, was put-off by Leda's apparent lack of interest in her children -- she admits that she despises talking to them by telephone, something that appalls her manipulative, if sentimental, boyfriend.  As is the custom with pictures about "unnatural mothers," The Lost Daughter, although ostensibly a feminist picture, makes poor Leda pay a high price for her deficits in maternal feeling.  This may be one reason that I dislike the picture -- clearly, the movie pays lip-service to the notion that it's perfectly valid for a brainy career woman to desire that she not be saddled with whining, bratty children (these kids even interrupt their poor mom while she trying to masturbate), but, nonetheless, the movie features a plot in which Leda punished for her neglect, even to the point of being stabbed in the womb and, then, bleeding to death on a Greek beach -- so much for the feminist notion that women should have the right to choose to what degree they will be good role models as mothers.  Leda mourns the fact that she has neglected her own daughters and begins to project her own anxieties and guilt about motherhood on the gangster family, particularly a young mother named Nina, a protypical, gorgeous Jersey girl, with a daughter, Elena.  When Elena goes missing on the beach, Leda finds her hiding in the woods -- apparently attempting to boss around her mother through this  manipulative stratagem.  Leda returns the child to the gruesome bosom of her gangster family, but, for reasons that are completely opaque, keeps the little girl's much-beloved doll and, indeed, hides it in her villa.  The child, Elena, is so viciously spoiled that she, then, torments her mother by refusing to sleep without the doll.  The gangsters search high and low for the doll but can't find it -- this is because Leda has secreted the nasty toy in her rooms, although now and then, she yanks it out of the cupboard to cradle it in her arms and between her maternal breasts.  Nina's criminal husband is on the mainland transacting some kind of shady business.  Nina, who is angry at her loutish husband, embarks on an affair with Will, the handsome Irish cabana boy.  The affair is witnessed by Leda and Nina's embraces with Will trigger in Leda another series of explicit flashbacks about the collapse of her marriage (her husband couldn't maintain an erection long enough to satisfy her), her affair with the lit-crit god (she meets him at a conference called Translation and the Art of Failure), and, then, some painful recollections of her thwarted relationship with her own little monsters, Bianca and Martha, and her lover's dismay at her disinterest in her children.  There a number of scenes in which the gangsters threaten Leda or interfere with her quiet enjoyment of the island's amenities -- for instance, the gangster boys, of whom there are about a half-dozen, bust into a showing of a movie at the island's cinema (Titania -- the movie abounds in classical references) and provoke a scene with Leda.  Ed Harris who cooks an octopus for Leda tries to spark up a relationship with her -- but she's too weird by this time, and too lost in memories of her misbegotten relationship with her ex-husband and her daughters.  (Leda keeps stumbling, falling, drifting pale-faced into near faints -- in one strange scene, she pauses on the sidewalk and squats; it looks like she's suddenly succumbed to a bout of severe diarrhea.)  Leda shows the unfaithful Nina how to keep her hat on using a long, vicious-looking hat pin.  The hat pin, of course, is like Chekhov's gun -- it's poised to go off in the last act.  Nina asks Leda to lend her villa as location for trysts with Will.  For some unknown reason, Leda confesses to Nina that she has hidden Elena's doll and surrenders it to the enraged young mother.  "I'm an unnatural mother," Leda says, as if this explains anything (it doesn't).  Nina, then, stabs poor Leda right in the uterus with the eight-inch long hat pin.  Leda drives away, crashes her car, and, then, staggers onto the beach.  She survives the night and, although seemingly bleeding to death, talks to her daughter Bianca, who is now 25, about peeling an orange in one long spiral slice "like a snake."

Everything is impeccably acted although the movie is shot in a very irritating and counter-productive style.  Gyllenhaal has her camera poised about 6 inches from her characters who are often out of focus and shot from vantages that conceal or obscure what they are doing -- the purpose for this idiosyncratic style is clear enough:  we are shown that Leda is "too close" to her own sorrow and grief to be able to understand it; she's locked into herself to the extent that she can't reliably perceive herself and her own motives.  Olivia Coleman is fantastic in an unrewarding role -- she's completely rebarbative, angry, and spiteful, what we would call a raging "Karen" in our current parlance.  (This is the kind of freakishly uncompromising performance that wins women Oscar nominations, if not, I think Oscars.)  If anything, Jessie Buckley, as the young Leda is even better -- she has a nasty smirk and always seems about on the verge of murdering her bratty kids, who, I think, richly deserve this fate.  The film has some showy Gothic flourishes -- at one point, a worm comes out of the nose of the ugly little doll that Leda has stolen from Elena.  And, in fact, I kept hoping that the doll would prove to be more than purely symbolic (I guess it's supposed to represent Leda's thwarted maternal instincts) -- that is, that the doll would be full of cocaine or something on that order.  (No such luck.)  The film's deep structure is full of the doom and gloom of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice:  an aging academic vacations in the Mediterranean, confronts her secret desires and sorrows, and ends up enmeshed in a relationship (that isn't really a relationship but more an obsession) that can only end in death.  This sort of allusion is reasonable in context:  after all, Leda is a professor of comparative literature.  The film is a sort of pious fraud -- it purports to be feminist, but, in fact, has a plot arc with which D. W. Griffith or for that matter his female contemporary, Lois Weber, would have been completely comfortable:  a brilliant, talented woman ruthlessly abandons her children to pursue a doomed love affair and pays a terrible price for her sins.  It's a plot that most men might even endorse -- and, indeed, there's plenty of current surmise that Elena Ferrante, the other of the source novel, is, indeed, a man.  

  

Last Night in Soho

Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho (2021) is a strangely impressive horror picture.  The film has good actors, excellent camerawork and production values, and an intriguing premise.  It's too ambitious, perhaps, striving to exceed the limitations of its humble genre in a slightly unseemly way -- but this is consistent with its good cast and clever writing.  You don't want to waste some excellent plot twists and some fine acting on something run-of-the-mill and so there's a bit too much movie here -- the film runs about twenty minutes too long and everything in the picture occurs about three times, attenuating the suspense and thrills.   Nonetheless the picture is successful, memorable, and very cleverly exploits two aspects of slippage or ambiguity, turning what might be genre defects into plot points with symbolic significance.  First, the movie plays on the notion that all wide-eyed ingenues look alike -- it's hard to distinguish between the two baby-faced debutants in the movie and the picture makes use of this confusion in a clever way.  (The idea of the disposable or fungible scream-queen is here in play.)  Second, the movie makes good use of the fact that as people age, they cease to look like themselves -- something that is particularly prevalent in the movie industry where image is everything.  Age, ultimately, is a sort of horror-show in this picture.  The film involves a young contemporary girl caught in fantasies of London's swinging sixties -- and, so, Wright casts actors, now elderly, who were iconic in that era:  Rita Tushingham famous for her role in 1961's A Taste of Honey, Terence Stamp (The Collector 1965), and Diana Rigg, famous for many reasons but not the least for her performances as latex and leather-clad Emma Peel in 51 episodes of the  The Avengers in the mid-sixties.  (Last Night in Soho is dedicated to Diana Rigg and was her last performance.)  This high-powered acting contributes to the film's overall effect and, further, provides a living link as it were to Carnaby Street and the sixties.  In short, the movie is quite a bit better than it should be and represents a considerable advance in Edgar Wright's body of work.  

A wide-eyed naif, Ellie, travels from provincial Cornwall to London.  Ellie is enamoured with the style, music, and fashions of the sixties -- perhaps, because her deceased mother wished to become a fashion designer in London.  (Ellie's mother was schizophrenic and committed suicide, overcome by the dazzle and corruption of the big city.)  Enrolled in school for fashion designers, Ellie is bullied by a clique of mean girls, one of whom who predicts that "she will slit her throat by Christmas".  An outsider at her school, Ellie can't get along with her dorm-mates, all of them casually depraved, and, so, she rents a room in the home of an elderly woman played by Diana Rigg.  The room is bathed in white light in the day but full of hot pink flashing neon from signs outside at night.  In her dreams, the lonely and homesick Ellie imagines herself as an elegant glamor girl, someone named Alexandra.  Alexandra, also new to the city, is living in London at the time of the debut of Thunderball, the Sean Connery James Bond vehicle released in 1965.  She meets a handsome young man who squires her around the Soho night clubs and cabarets.  The young man is a bit sinister but the naive girl imagines him as sophisticated, kind, and gallant.  The boy kisses her and, when Ellie awakes from her dream, she bears the mark of his kiss, a hickey, on her neck.  More erotic dreams follow, somehow induced by the room where she sleeps.  The gallant young man turns out to be a vicious pimp and, soon, she is working as a prostitute.  These dream sequences are lavishly filmed, channeling the energy and verve of the swinging sixties in brilliant technicolor images -- of course, the soundtrack is vibrant with sixties pop music, including, notably, Petulia Clark's anthem "Downtown."  In these sequences, Ellie appears as a double to Alexandra -- when Alexandra looks in the mirror, she sees Ellie; similarly, in waking life, Ellie sees Alexandra when she gazes in the mirror.  It seems clear that Ellie is losing her grip on reality.  Her dreams become increasingly vivid and awful --she sees herself sleeping with a legion of faceless men -- this is literal:  Wright blurs the men's faces so that the look like they awful specters that we see fighting or vomiting or having sex in Francis Bacon's paintings.  When Ellie brings a suitor home to her room, she has visions of Alexandra being slashed to death in her bloody bed and her would-be sexual encounter ends horribly.  (The young man, helpful and kind, feels like cannon-fodder -- the poor bastard that the crazy girl murders thinking that he is raping her.  Plot points of this kind refer directly to Roman Polanski's horror picture Repulsion, constructed around a similar narrative.)  Increasingly, disoriented Ellie thinks that Alexandra, whom she now views as separate from her and not a Doppelgaenger, was an abused prostitute murdered in the bedroom where she sleeps.  By this time, Ellie is working at a pub and is harassed there by a seedy older man (Terence Stamp).  Ellie begins to suspect that the old gent is the vicious pimp who killed Alexandra.  She informs the police and begins researching crimes in the sixties in Soho, hundreds, it seems, including about a dozen Johns who went missing in the area.  She begins to threaten others at school and her mental state deteriorates -- dozens of disfigured-looking men, grey shadows that lurk all around, are stalking her.  At this point, there are two very clever plot twists that it would be unfair to reveal -- suffice it so say that these surprises are brilliantly engineered:  the viewer doesn't see them coming, but once disclosed, these twists make perfect sense and, indeed, might have even been surmised in advance if the viewer were properly attentive to all the clues embedded in the story.  The film ends with a spectacular sequence:  a Wagnerian homage to Brian de Palma channeled through Polanski -- in a burning house, the heroine must contend with a mad slasher while slipping in and out of hallucinations, her rescuer stabbed and bleeding to death on the floor at the foot of the fiery flight of stairs.  This operatic climax is derivative but  wonderfully staged:  Hitchcock's Psycho in a house on fire with an endless flight of stairs that keeps morphing into a massive sinister and gleaming movie set, a bit like the celestial staircase in Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death with a legion of hideous spooks thrusting their arms through walls and floor and ceiling to drag the heroine down to hell with them . It's a tremendous climax to the film although wildly overwrought after the manner of Brian de Palma -- and this brings the movie to a satisfying ending.  There's a brief coda, a supposedly happy ending, that is, however, tinged with a little bit of nightmare.

Parts of the plot make no sense and the film is repetitious in some respects.  But it gives Diana Rigg a last chance to rage on-screen and the script is intelligent and very ingeniously wrought.  The horror elements of the movie are well-staged, although derivative.  The first thirty minutes showing Ellie bullied and harassed by mean girls in her dorm are heart-breaking and the sequences showing stylish London in 1965 slowly slipping into a lurid nightmare are very exciting and compelling.  At first, we think that Alexandra, who looks uncannily like Ellie (although much more glamorous and depraved)  is purely a figment of the heroine's imagination.   But as the film develops, we learn that Alexandra is a different character -- not merely a disassociated fragment of Ellie's pathological imagination.  However, it wasn't until looking at the closing credits that I realized that Ellie and Alexandra, although posited as mirror images of one another, were played by different actresses.  The film suggests that the dark underbelly of the swinging sixties was vicious misogyny and exploitation -- something that may well be true of any era so self-consciously stylish and fashion-obsessed. This theme is suggested by a sequence in which Alexandra performs an erotic dance as a marionette on a string.  Both of the female actresses are ethereally beautiful with huge eyes, alternately innocent and debauched.  (The parts are played by Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy.)  There's a lot to admire in this film and, unlike most of its genre, Last Night in Soho not something you are likely to forget an hour or two later.   

 

Drive my Car

 Drive my Car (2021) is an excellent Japanese film that advances the questionable proposition that the best cures for melancholy are epic road trips and Chekhov.  Psychotherapy, I suppose might be palliative, but nothing beats 36 hours straight in a car and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.  The film was directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and is based, although only tangentially, on several stories in Haruki Murakami'sMen without Women, an anthology that intentionally invokes Hemingway's volume of the same name.  Two stories in particular "Drive my Car" and "Scheherazade" seem to have have inspired the three-hour movie, although only in the sense of providing a very basic framework for the plot.  In truth, the movie is most influenced by Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and the first episode in Wong Kar Wei's omnibus film, Chungking Express, a story about a girl in love with a policeman who sneaks into his apartment and leaves little tokens of her affection while, also, cleaning the place.  Hamaguchi's film is brilliantly acted, directed with great aplomb, and sufficiently mysterious, particularly about male-female relationships, to be good fodder for coffee-shop or barroom chat after the picture.  The movie is parsimonious about its distribution of information to the viewer -- key plot points are only established near the end of the 180 minute film; this is effective and not annoying:  the viewer's sense that he or she doesn't know the whole story, even after the last frame, creates intrigue and, even, some mild suspense -- we learn what is happening only after we have seen the event unfold on screen.  A paradigm sequence is illustrative, showing how Hamaguchi works to defer the audience's understanding of a scene, a structural device that animates the whole film:  at a dinner party, the hero, Mr. Kufuku, praises the young woman who has been assigned to drive him about Hiroshima where he is working to direct Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.  The young woman, who is a hard case, is embarrassed and she slips away from the dinner table to do something on the floor.  Her movement is baffling and we wonder what she is doing. No one at the table is surprised, it seems, and this is, also, puzzling.  Then, the camera moves slightly and we see that she is playing with a dog on the floor, the pet of the couple who have invited Mr. Kufuku to dinner.  This is peculiar way of staging the scene but an important effect -- at the end of movie, in the film's enigmatic last couple minutes, we see the young woman chauffeur still driving Kufuku's red Saab 900, leaving a Mega Mart with some groceries; there is a dog in the car with her and, of course, we wonder if this isn't the dog shown at the dinner party.  When Hamaguchi defers revealing information to the viewer, or, even, conceals plot points, these elements of the story are, perhaps, the most important narrative features in the film.

Questions abound in the long preamble to the titles, about 40 minutes by my estimate.  Kufuku is a prominent actor and theater-director.  (We see him performing in Waiting for Godot -- the plays in this picture are presented in a peculiar format by multi-lingual casts, including one woman who uses sign language; titles are projected over the stage.)  Kufuku is married to Oto, a beautiful woman who works as a TV producer.  For some reason, she objects when Kufuku introduces her as his wife.  The couple's marriage has been stressed by the death of their four-year old daughter -- this is presented as a current and devastating source of grief, although later we learn that the couple has been married for 23 years and the little girl dead for 19 years of that period.  When Kufuku is supposed to attend a theater festival in Vladivostock, his flight is delayed for a day and, when he comes home to his apartment, he finds his wife making love to her protegee, a beautiful young man named Koshi who is TV star and celebrity.  Here is where questions multiply:  the scene is staged so that we don't know if Oto is aware that Kufuku is watching the couple and we can't see her male partner, but conclude (correctly I think) that it is the handsome young Koshi.  Kufuku leaves quietly, calls his wife later from the airport and claims that he is in Vladivostock, when in fact he's still in Tokyo.  Oto shows no sign of guilt or remorse and, also, remains very devoted it seems to her husband. Oto has a habit of telling Kufuku stories after they have had sex (this is "Scheherazarade"  element of the plot); Oto can't ever recall the stories that she tells but Kufuku remembers them, writes them down, and Oto, then, adapts them into TV shows.  Oto's story in the first scene in the film involves a teenage girl obsessed with a boy in her school; the girl breaks into the boy's apartment when the family is gone, enters his room, and leaves love-tokens including an unused tampon.  Kufuku gets in a crash with his red car and, in the hospital, learns that he has glaucoma in his left eye and may be losing his vision.  Oto elaborates her story saying that the girl has begun to masturbate in the bedroom of the boy with whom she is obsessed -- perhaps, someone is watching her.  She recalls that in a previous life she was a lamprey attached to a stone in a stream, immobile among moving sea weed.  Kufuku interprets the story as being about him observing Oto having sex with Koshi.  (Late in the film, we learn that Oto's enlargement of the story includes stabbing to death an interloper who was watching the girl masturbate -- she stabs the man, at first, in the left eye with her pen.)  Oto says that she has something important to tell Kufuku.  Kufuki, apparently, thinks that she is going to declare that their marriage is over and, although we learn this only at the end of the movie, drives aimlessly around town, fearful of his wife's announcement to him.  When he returns to their apartment, he finds Oto dead on the floor, the victim of a cerebral hemorrhage.  Then, we see him driving to Hiroshima where he has been hired to direct a multi-lingual production of Uncle Vanya.  Only at this point, does the film provide titles and the names of its actors and producers -- it seems that we have already watched a rather complicated movie and, yet, the film is only beginning.

Very much later, we learn that two years has lapsed since the death of Oto.  In Hiroshima, the managers of the theater festival require that Mr. Kufuku be chauffeured to and from his rehearsals of the Chekhov play.  Kufuku is accustomed to learning his lines while commuting -- Oto, before her death, provided a tape-recorded reading of the play with spaces left for Mr. Kufuku to speak his lines.  This is how he learns his parts.  Kufuku resists someone else driving his beloved, carefully maintained, red Saab 900, perhaps, a symbol for his marriage to Oto. Furthermore, the driver seems a little appalling to him -- a young woman who is very tough cookie indeed.  The next ninety minutes of the movie involve Kufuku casting and directed the Chekhov play -- the lines of Uncle Vanya begin to assume significance as a commentary on the plight of the characters.  Remarkably, Koshi, Oto's lover, has fallen on hard times, apparently accused of having sex with a minor and, more or less, "cancelled" to use current parlance.  Kufuku casts him as Vanya, a surprising decision, since it was expected that the director would play this part himself -- Kufuku seems to be masochistically allowing Koshi to take his place. (Kufuku is impressed with Koshi's audition in which he violently seduces a woman.)  Kufuku casts a mute young actress in the role of Sonya -- the woman acts using Korean sign-language and it's worth noting that she provides one of the greatest performances of that part that I have ever seen.  Koshi declares that he loved Oto.  The play slowly progresses and, then, there's a disaster -- Koshi who is belligerent and aggressive (he's like a young Sean Penn) beats to death a man who has taken his taken his picture with his cell-phone.  Koshi is arrested. The production of the Chekhov play is in doubt.  Mr. Kufuku, uncertain as to what to do, goes on a road-trip.  He has his chauffeur, Misaki, drive him to her village a great distance away in Hokkaido.  Misaki had a difficult relationship with her brutal mother, a night club hostess who died in a land slide -- Misaki, after crawling out of the ruins of the house, didn't call for help and, so, may have left her mother to die in the wreckage.  Misaki and Kufuku survey the ruins of the house, a nest of wreckage in a hilly snow-covered landscape and they exchange confidences.  Misaki, implicitly commenting on the enigmatic structure of the film, says that Kufuku has overthought his relationship with Oto.  Misaki says that Oto desired other men while loving Kufuku and that's all there is to say about her infidelities.  Kufuku and Misaki return to Hiroshima and we see the final moments of Uncle Vanya in which Sonya delivers her famous monologue with her arms protectively wrapped around Kufuku playing Vanya.  There is a little coda that is hard to interpret but that seems optimistic, a sort of muted happy ending.  

The movie is similar to some of Rivette's pictures in that it primarily involves the production of a play that provides parallels and commentary to the relationships between the characters.  Rivette explored this theme in Va Savoir and L'amour fou.  The interplay between the Chekhov text and the film's action is very intricate and compelling -- there is plenty of food for thought in teasing out the relationships between the company of actors and the text they are rehearsing.  Further, the movie is visually compelling -- the climactic road-trip is physically exhausting to the viewers as well as to the characters; when Misuki gets out of the car, she staggers with that ataxic gait that people show who have been driving for too many hours.  The trip to Hokkaido is literally into the center of the earth, involving long, formidable tunnels cut through mountains.  The picture has a host of minor characters who are all brilliantly delineated and memorable.  Hamaguchi is a cinephile and the picture echoes innumerable other films, including It Happened One Night, a primordial road movie, and several of Wim Wenders' pictures including Paris, Texas and Alice in the Cities.  There are clever montages, fascinating sequences involving play rehearsal, and dramatic dialogues that are daringly extended across many minutes.  The film is a bit repetitive in its long central sequence involving production of the Chekhov play and I'm a little skeptical about narratives that follow the model of Tennessee Williams' plays, that is, each character reveals in turn a secret sorrow -- but Drive my Car does this just about as well as it can be done and I recommend the film highly.