Grand Theft Hamlet

 Years ago, when I was addicted to playing the computer game, Doom, I read about people who had mastered play to the extent that they could "do a Gandhi".  This meant darting through the digital labyrinths infested with fire demons and goblins without killing a single adversary.  Apparently, if you were skilled enough, you  could defeat the murderous purpose of the game -- it was a first-person shooter -- and run through all levels without ever firing your weapon.  There are apparently idiosyncratic and ingenious ways to approach digital gaming not self-evident to the casual player.  Grand Theft Hamlet (2024), a 90 minute movie entirely filmed within the atmospheric landscapes of "Grand Theft Auto", a famous video game, represents an extreme (and, apparently, very difficult) appropriation of the grungy, hard-boiled characters and brilliantly sleazy locations featured in game.  Two players decide to stage an abbreviated, but, nonetheless, substantial version of Shakespeare's Hamlet using the game and its avatar-characters as their platform.  It's a gimmick and, most likely, the virtuosic aspects of this endeavor were lost on me -- I've never played the game.  But the movie is mildly entertaining and has some emotionally effective moments.  

Two actors, Sam and Mark, are out-of-work -- the theaters are shuttered due to the Covid pandemic.  To pass the time, they are obsessively playing Grand Theft Auto ("GTA" as it often called in the movie).  GTA is a multi-player game in which characters, inhabiting exotic avatars -- space aliens, knights in armor, big-breasted hookers -- interact, mostly violently by kicking each other to death or gunning other players down.  After crashing some cars and running from police chasing them with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, Sam and Mark come upon a sylvan glen where there is a big amphitheater -- they take advantage of the setting by trying out some soliloquies from Shakespeare (mostly from Macbeth) before getting clubbed to death by other players.  This inspires Sam and Mark to recruit players to play roles in Hamlet which they intend to stage entirely on locations, and with characters in GTA.  The first third of the film involves recruiting players to perform in the show.  This turns out to be very difficult -- as someone says the Venn diagram showing the intersection between enthusiasts of GTA, a violent, amoral, nihilistic game, and Shakespeare is a vanishingly slender sliver.  Nonetheless, after lots of bloody confrontations (the pavements and floors in the game are always puddled with blood), Mark and Sam doing manage to put together a cast willing to perform the play -- some of the actors are a bit unreliable, including a figure who appears as a strutting naked alien with bare buttocks and who has the tendency to either vanish unpredictably or kill everyone else on location.  The second and longest part of the film shows rehearsals staged at various locations with the landscapes and sordid interiors presented by the game.  In the last ten minutes, we see excerpts of the play as actually presented.  There is a short epilogue in which the characters say goodbye to one another by engaging in a shoot-out blood bath that leaves everyone gory and "wasted" as the game describes it. (Revived, they go to a bar to dance the night away.)  During the closing credits, we see the actual players at an awards  ceremony at the Royal Theater on Drury Lane where Mark, Sam, and Pinny Grylls (Sam's wife and one of the directors of the show) are given a prize for their successful Shakespearian adaptation.  This is the only glimpse we get of live people and its unassuming, apparently shot on a cell-phone. Needless to say, the rather mousy actors and actresses bear no resemblance to their heroic, square-jawed counterparts in the game, big muscular brutes who stalk around, moving back and forth in a seemingly random way, and women with big breasts toting machine guns and machete knives.  

The rehearsals are afflicted by many set-backs.  In some respects, the film has the logic and character of an old Mickey Rooney / Judy Garland comedy -- a bunch of enthusiastic kids get together to put on a show.  At first, random interlopers obstruct their rehearsals by killing everyone.  During casting, trolls show up, infiltrate the production, but, then, refuse to speak, undermine the show, and, of course, once again murder everyone in sight.  There's one guy, named Dipo (everyone uses pseudonyms in the game) who claims to be half-Finn and half-Tunisian, who is very talented actor.  But, midway through the film, the Covid lock-down ends and he gets a job -- he can no longer play Hamlet but is now relegated to a minor role.  Pinny, who is directing the show (from her tough gangster moll persona) and Sam have marital problems.  Sam is obsessively scouting locations in the game and not spending enough time with his wife and kids.  They fight but make-up.  The actual production of Hamlet at the end also poses some problems.  The appearance of the Ghost (Hamlet's murdered father) is staged for some reason on huge airship, a big blimp, and people keep falling off of it.  During the show, the blimp crashes and everyone dies, of course, only to be brought to life.  The audience has to be ferried by speed boat to a floating casino where some of the action is staged.  During the ride over the waves, Horatio gets knocked into the water and drowns.  The action zips all over the apparently enormous cityscape of Los Santos, a stand-in for LA, and the "to be or not to be soliloquy" is tried out in various settings, including a spectacularly seedy dive-bar full of morose, depressed drunks and hookers and a small embattled rock in the middle of a raging sea.  (In general, the landscapes in GTA are incredible, immensely detailed, and, often, beautiful lit -- some of the vacant lots and dumping grounds around Los Santos have a dewy luminous presence that reminds me of paintings by George Innes.  The characters have to be in perpetual motion, but most of it is completely pointless, pacing back and forth or circling one another, and all of the figures have dead, inert eyes.  Their lips move randomly but don't match the words that they are speaking.  Helicopters hover overhead and, sometimes, characters jet around in planes.  From time to time, there are motor vehicle crashes.  Of course, it is all staggeringly violent:  characters burst into flames and are incinerated, others are vaporized by rocket-propelled grenades, run over by cars, riddled with machine gun bullets by the cops and people randomly bludgeon one another, hack each other apart, or fall from immense heights exploding into moist clumps of blood when they land on the ground.  Someone says that the mayhem is perfectly appropriate for Shakespeare -- 'it's a mix of unearthly beauty and savage murder.'  I don't exactly get the point of this movie, an amusement devised during co-vid and, apparently, representing an enormous expenditure of time.  I thought the picture was reasonably compelling and the landscapes incredibly impressive.  My wife couldn't stand more than ten minutes.     

The Rehearsal

 Nathan Fielder is a Canadian comedian who practices a highly conceptual form of "cringe" comedy -- this is a genre developed, I think, from an unsettling aspect of "stand-up".  Some stand-up comics specialize in insulting their audiences -- this aspect of verbal combat between comedians and hecklers evolved into the work of stand-ups comics like Don Rickles and, also, the institution of the celebrity "Roast" in which a bench of comics mock some famous person (and, then, in a turn-around are mocked themselves.)  Comedy isn't pretty.  Ridicule and insult can turn nasty quickly and the "cringe-factor" (that is, discomfort arising when the comedian has seemingly gone too far or become too personal or objectionable in his or her mockery) has always been an implicit aspect of the art.  Fielder exploits the "cringe-factor" associated with his peculiar appearance and dead-eyed, seemingly autistic indifference, to ordinary human interactions -- his work is cringe-worthy because apparently tone-deaf to the sensibilities of those with whom he interacts.  All comedians approach their art from the stance of an outsider, someone who is uniquely positioned to see the grotesque and absurd in human behavior that otherwise goes unnoticed (or, at minimum, unspoken).  Oliver Sacks, also an outsider, homosexual and drug-addicted, once wrote a book called An Anthropologist from Mars, Seven Paradoxical Tales (seven case-histories of neuro-divergent people).  Fielder's persona seems to be similar -- he's an alien, radically disconnected, it seems, from the norms of human interactions, obsessive, and with a bizarre affect:  he's robotic, like some kind of machine pretending to be human.  Fielder's physiognomy is peculiar:  he has a square-head with big wet eyes and large, swollen and reddish lips -- his appearance is a weird combination of mannequin handsome and the clownish.  His features are cartoonish, inexpressive -- he emits an aspect of slightly bemused and baffled anxiety.

Fielder's magnum opus to date is the second season of the HBO show, The Rehearsal (six episodes varying from 35 to 58 minutes in length).  The show is highly cerebral but strangely affecting -- Fielder's awkward and baffled deportment is an external representation of what most of us feel from time to time:  we don't fit in, we're misunderstood, we can't quite read the emotions of those around us.  He embodies certain Kafkaesque anxieties that everyone has experienced but that may be difficult to express in words.  I'm casting around for meaningful analogies because Fielder's The Rehearsal is essentially indescribable, unlike anything else on TV and creates an emotional aura that is distinct, and, even, oddly moving but hard to identify.  There may be some aspect of Wittgenstein's late philosophical investigations in The Rehearsal -- this is comedy so removed from social norms that it seques into philosophical inquiry.  The premise for The Rehearsal was established in a prior HBO series bearing that name -- Fielder maintains that casual and, even, important human interactions can be improved, even perfected if they are rehearsed in advance.  If you want to ask out a girl, you should first prepare a script to that effect and, then, rehearse it with someone representing the target of your affection.  The simulation that you are rehearsing should replicate the conditions in which the act or encounter will occur to the greatest extent possible.  Therefore, Fielder devises huge sets, including entire bars and, in the second season, an immense soundstage representing an airport down to the smallest possible detail.  For Fielder, rehearsal equals simulation and, in the astonishing finale to the second season, a flight simulator is used to train the comedian to pilot an actual Boeing 737 with more than 150 people (paid actors) on the airplane for a scary two-hour flight.

Fielder starts with an inquiry about cockpit communication in commercial passenger planes under emergency conditions.  It's Fielder's thesis, based on review of cockpit transcripts documenting dialogue between pilots and their first officers (co-pilots), that power relationships inhibit the first officers from criticizing the pilot in command of the plane; the co-pilot is authorized to provide input and, even, take the controls to stave off a disaster -- but, as it happens, the first officers tend to defer to the pilot to the extent that avoidable catastrophes occur.  Therefore, Fielder proposes to devise strategies that will empower the subordinate co-pilots to engage more proactively with the jet pilots.  Fielder has engaged an old fellow who is a retired FAA official and student of plane crashes, and with this guy as his advisor aims to make reforms in legislation and training so as to empower the first officers to correct errors that they witness their pilots making.  This premise sounds both abstract and bureaucratically dry, but Fielder rapidly expands the scope of his inquiry into experiments of the most bizarre and disquieting kind.  He decides to train co-pilots with respect to "difficult conversations" by having them audition contestants for an American Idol sort of competition, here called Wings of Song.  Fielder knows that 90% of the contestants will be turned aside at the audition phase and he wants his co-pilots, his test subjects, to be comfortable with hurting people's feelings.  (During this experiment, he discovers a woman co-pilot who universally liked by the people that she auditions; Fielder tries to discover her particular quality that makes her so good at delivering bad news to people.  Then, he sends her aloft, flying with an aggressive male pilot who makes weird and suggestive banter with her as they are zoom through the skies).  Determining that Sully Sullenberger is the perfect pilot (he successfully landed his disabled plane on the East River after a bird-strike) Fielder acquires his autobiography, excerpts key passages, and, then, tries to replicate those experiences -- this requires Fielder to shave off his body hair, be diapered as an infant, and interact with surrealistically huge figures representing Sullenberger's parents -- he breast feeds from a huge mock-up of Sullenberger's mother.  In this section, Fielder concludes that Sullenberger's favorite song is a tune by the band Evanescence and notes that there is a 23 second period of silence when the pilot shut off his radio while descending to land on the East River.  Fielder hypothesizes that Sullenberger was either listening to the chorus from that song or, perhaps, singing it to give himself courage -- the chorus to the tune turns out to be 23 seconds long.  Fielder experiments with "pack psychology" -- that is, emboldening one co-pilot to kiss a woman that he likes by having him "hunt with a pack", that is, travel everywhere with 12 people who all mimic his every expression and gesture.  Fielder is told that his notion that all human actions should be carefully rehearsed before being attempted is a method of helping autistic people navigate through a world that they have difficulty decoding.  (Fielder is administered a test as to decoding mood from visual signals and fails dramatically, suggesting that he is autistic himself.)  A group of autistic people use his mock-up of the airport to rehearse traveling through that environment where they are otherwise apt to experience sensory overload.  Fielder meets with a congressman assigned to an oversight committee involving aviation -- this is cringe comedy of the most explicit type.  The congressman is a conventional civic booster and glad-handing politician who can't wait to get away from the earnest and baffling Fielder who argues to him that encouraging co-pilots to kiss their dates has something to do with aviation safety.  In the final hour, we learn that Fielder has been taking pilot lessons.  After months of not making progress, Fielder has, in fact, learned to fly and, indeed, has a commercial license and is instrument-rated.  He applies for a license to fly large-scale passenger planes and recruits actors to ride on his maiden-journey from San Bernadino an hour west to the Nevada border and, then, back again to original airport.  (The actors are all willing to fly on the 737 although they are told that Fielder has never flown a plane like this before; upon learning that no one has turned down this gig, one man mutters "Actors!")  The camera follows Fielder as he acquires a 737 and provides his actors with their lines:  he is such a control freak that everything they say on board is scripted, included responses to the beverage service.  Fielder is able to fly the plane, although he has only 300 hours time in the air because it is not carrying paying passengers, but rather actors who have been paid themselves to take the flight.  Cringe comedy involves the audience's fear and discomfort that something humiliating or embarrassing might occur as a result of the comedian's insults or other interactions with the public.  Fielder ups the ante -- the viewer's fear here is that he will crash the airplane and cause almost two-hundred deaths.  With an obliging co-pilot, the 737 takes off.  As it turns out, the scariest things that occur during the flight are close encounters with another aircraft carrying HBO cameras and tracking along the 737.  Fielder has been agonizing over whether he should consult with a physician to determine whether he is, in fact, autistic.  In fact, he goes to a clinic and has an MRI that is said to be able to detect whether the subject of the study suffers from autism.  But the results aren't available before his inaugural flight and so he answers "no" to the FAA health survey question about mental illness and unusual neurological conditions. After successfully landing the aircraft, Fielder embarks on a second career flying empty 737 to various locations all around the globe -- we see him landing the big planes at night and in fog.  He watches The Wings of Song competition.  The winning contestant sings the song by Evanescence that Sullenberger may have listened to or hummed himself when he was landing his plane on the East River. Fielder gets a text message that the study results from his MRI are available.  But he deletes the message.  He says that only the best and brightest and most skilled (and normal) people are allowed to fly big passenger jets.  He flies big passenger jets and, ergo, there can't be anything wrong with him.  (This scene correlates to an earlier episode in which he asks a girl whom he has rejected as a Wings of Song contestant to rate him as a judge.  She writes down a number that we can't see. Fielder looks at the scrap of folded paper that seems to show "6" but, then, turns it over to give himself a "9".)  

Fielder was instrumental in scripting and filming The Curse, an extraordinary Showtime series.  In the final episode of The Curse, gravity somehow gets reversed with respect to Fielder's character.  As his wife is giving birth, he falls upward, desperately trying to remain earthbound, but, in the end, hurled into the icy cold of outer space.  In other words, Fielder's character is inadvertently flying and, indeed, ascends to his death.  It's hard not to see various tensions and themes linking this visionary sequence in the Showtime series with the flying scenes in The Rehearsal.  

After Hours

 After Hours is a reminder of Martin Scorsese's brilliance at the prime of his career.  The 1985 black comedy was made at a point when Scorsese's star was in decline -- his The King of Comedy, in fact a masterpiece, had been roundly panned and had lost money; even worse, his pet project, The Last Temptation of Christ on which he had worked for more than a year with every expectation of the film being greenlighted was suddenly cast into limbo.  At this nadir in his career, Scorsese returned to New York, rented a loft in Tribeca, and, with After Hours, reinvented himself as a lean, mean, and thrifty guerilla filmmaker.  The picture was shot entirely at night -- even the inside scenes were shot in the Soho area of lower Manhattan after dark.  The film is extraordinary, memorable from its first shot to last image.  Scorsese's directing is impeccable -- he squeezes every sequence for maximum expressivity but doesn't overwhelm the viewer with his magisterial technique. The camera effects, the whip pans and fast tracking motions, the jarring close-ups and German expressionist lighting -- all of these bravura techniques are intrinsic to the narration and, in fact, are embedded in a film that a features a number of long takes that are conventionally shot but, also, characterized by breathtaking razor sharp dialogue.  The film is as expressive as a music video but doesn't give the effect of being overwrought or frenetic -- the action has a hysterical edge, the entire picture is surreal nightmare of anxiety, but, paradoxically, one has the sense of a serene, classically composed intelligence directing the action. (This is embodied in a shot of Scorsese in punk rock bar directing a spotlight at people writhing on the dance floor.)

Griffin Dunne with Amy Robinson discovered an extraordinary script written by Joseph Minion.  They pitched the script as a low budget production to Tim Burton.  Scorsese had read the script and admired it but was busy working on the aborted Last Temptation of Christ.  When the production of that film was cancelled, Scorsese storyboarded the script (it didn't have a convincing ending) and began shooting the picture with a cast that included Rosanne Arquette, Catherine O'Hara, Terry Garr, and Verna Bloom as the various crazy women that Dunne playing the role of Paul Hackett encounters during his nightmare sojourn in Soho.  Hackett is a computer nerd working at an uptown business behind a huge gilded gate in an elaborate skyscraper facade.  While reading a dog-eared copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, he meets a seductive girl, clad all in white, who quotes parts of Miller's prose back to him.  He gets the girl's phone number and, a few hours later, calls her back.  She invites him to apartment in Soho, actually located in one of the circles of Dante's Inferno.  During a frightening cab ride to Soho, Hackett loses his money for the night -- a twenty dollar bill that keeps showing up as his hellish adventures progress.  (The film is an artifact of its era -- there are no cell-phones and, surprisingly, Hackett has no credit cards -- these are dream-like aspects of the plot which will involve Hackett's increasingly terrifying and desperate misadventures; critics were wrong to deride the film's logic -- the picture has the uncanny and utterly persuasive logic of a nightmare.)  Hackett has some neuroses -- he had a bad experience as a child once when he was put in a burn unit (after appendix surgery) and he is hapless with respect to dealing with women; he responds to emergencies by running away.  It turns out that Roseanna Arquette's character, Marcy, has suffered some kind of burns and her behavior is eccentric and puzzling -- she transmits mixed messages.  (She dramatically tells Paul that she was raped by her ex-boyfriend while tied to a bed for six hours, but, then, notes that the whole thing was rather boring and that she slept through much of it.)   Paul smokes some dope with her and becomes paranoid, fleeing the loft apartment that she shares with a roommate apparently involved in BDSM.  (Paul compliments the roommate on her body and she says:  "Yeah, good body."  Not too many scars.)  Things go from bad to worse -- there's a suicide likely caused by the hero's "rudeness" as one character puts it, Paul gets assaulted in a punk bar, Berlin, where the staff tries to shave his head -- "Mohawk him!" they scream -- and, ultimately, is hunted by a murderous mob of vigilantes who think he has been robbing their apartments.  (In fact, the apartments are being systematically looted by Cheech and Chong.)  The film has always been controversial for its portrayal of the women that Paul encounters:  these women are half-crazed, desperate, eerily seductive and threatening -- they are like the women that we find in Kafka's Trial and The Castle:  uncanny figures who cling to the hero as if he were their last hope in a world of cruel loneliness.  (In one scene, the characters reprise dialogue from Kafka's parable "Before the Law").  The film has the savage and headlong narrative of a farce, but, instead of lust driving the action, the machinery of the intricate plot is driven by despair, suicide, and pathological neediness of the women that Paul encounters -- all of them are willing to debase themselves for a man's attention, hence the sadomasochistic components of the story and all of them expect to be abandoned, rejected, and humiliated.  Teri Garr plays a perky blonde embalmed in sixties' Carnaby-street style and mores -- she rewards Paul for returning to his apartment by giving him an artwork, a plaster-cast bagel, (Paul's quest for this sort of art is what drew him to Soho in the first place.).  Catherine O'Hara is an ice-cream truck driver, similarly perky but, also, as it turns out, homicidal.  And Verna Bloom is memorable as Paul's last resort, a sheltering maternal figure who happens to be a kind of vampire and completely psychotic.  The film begins and ends with Mozart and Scorsese's camera accelerating like a race car around the corners and edges of an office full of computers and workers -- despite its grotesque content, the movie has the clear contours of a classical sonata. 

Diversions: North of North, The Righteous Gemstones (last season), and The Last of Us

 Armies of creative people work overtime creating content for cable TV.  There is a surfeit of entertainment.  It seems that half of the world, including those who have been historically marginalized, are making TV.  These are several Cable TV shows that I have faithfully watched -- I'm not sure that I would recommend all of them, but these programs were, at least interesting enough, for me to follow them through 6 to 13 episodes.  They are not disturbing, experimental work like Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal, a series that I will recommend in another post.  In fact, each of these series follows conventions that are prevalent in several different genres that still play a prominent role in broadcast and cable TV.

North of North (8 half-hour episodes, premiering January 2025) is an Inuit version of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.  Anna Lambe plays the Mary Tyler Moore role, an attractive single woman who, after a scandalous break-up with a local hero, the great hunter, Ting, reinvents herself -- "she's gonna make it on her own."  Lambe is an engaging and winsome actress and she carries the show --"she can turn the world on with her smile / she can make a nothing day turn out worthwhile."  The lyrics for the Mary Tyler Moore show assert "that love is all around, no need to fake it / you can have the town why don't you take it?" and these lines generally express the content of North of North.  After breaking up with the town's local hero, Siaja has various romantic adventures, some that end in bed.  But she is unable to break all ties with the aggressive and selfish Ting since she has a child with him and he is a good father.  Forced to fend for herself, Siaja gets a job in the community development office, a place run by a White woman in the show's largely indigenous population -- the show takes place in a fictional village, Ice Cove, on Prince Wales Island (in fact, an entirely unpopulated wasteland near the North Pole).  The director of Community Development is played by Mary Lynn Rajskub, the actor who portrayed the IT specialist and support for Kiefer Sutherland's murderous secret service operative in 24.  Rajskub has the Ted Baxter role,,playing the part of a self-absorbed, pompous, and obtuse bureaucrat.  She's very good and, in fact, North of North understands that successful sit-coms require a strong supporting cast.  In North of North, Siaja, the lead character, is given a cute, feisty daughter, and a profane, sexually active mother, Neevee.  Neevee is unashamedly a "skank" and refers to herself as an "Eskimo" -- a term that is apparently offensive and a Canadian version of the "N-word."  Neevee is effective as a rather fearsome, former alcoholic.  Ting is good as the town's best seal-hunter.  Siaja's father, with whom she almost commits incest --he's been absent from her life since her birth -- is a White Canadian from Ottawa, also played by a handsome and engaging actor.  There's an obligatory homosexual with a female sidekick, a Maori guy who for some reason is running the local indigenous radio station.  Many local people play Inuit elders and community leaders -- there are some old men who don't speak English but play chess, a guy who runs the local dump and other figures whose main role is to impart a sense of authenticity to the proceedings.  Most of the episodes are light and didactic -- there's an ongoing rivalry between Ice Cove and another Arctic village, various misadventures at work, and an episode in which Ting crashes his snowmobile and has to be rescued.  All turns out for the best and people are gently chastised for their foibles. Problems with alcohol in the Inuit community are glimpsed and intimated but not made part of the show's foreground.  There are some raucous parties scored to Inuit rap and rock-and-roll.  The show's principal appeal, other than Anna Lambe's charming portrayal of Siaja (she wears spectacular fur-lined and quill-work coats and shawls) is its fascinating and authentic representation of the Arctic.  The sun never sets in the Summer which remains, however, snowy and the landscapes are spectacular.  The show was filmed at Iquilt (formerly Frobisher Bay) the capital of Nunavut (once called Labrador).  I suppose this evinces racism on my part but the homes in which the characters live are surprisingly large and elegant --I guess I thought the people would be living in igloos. The program is a production of the APTN (Aboriginal Peoples TV Network and CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Company).  "Inuit" is the collective word to describe the people who appear in the show; individual members of the group are called "Inuk" (plural "Inuit"). You can watch this show on Netflix and I think it is pretty amusing.   

The Righteous Gemstones (four seasons on HBO) belongs to a genre largely perfected by its principal Danny McBride and his director/writer Jody Hill.  This is the southern raunchy red neck comedy, a dirtier version of series like The Dukes of Hazard. In these shows, a pompous, vulgar blowhard protagonist, played by Danny McBride, interacts with other whacky characters in a setting defined by some institution important in southern life.  (In Eastbound and Down, McBride played a major league baseball pitcher marooned in the minor leagues in Florida; Vice Principals featured McBride playing a school vice-principal with his sidekick and rival, a role acted by the very funny and indelible Walton Goggins -- Goggins is also in The Righteous Gemstones.)   These shows play out like extremely obscene and warped versions of The Andy Griffith Show -- they feature bumpkins and fools who all talk like vicious New Jersey gangsters but who also (no surprise here) turn out to have hearts of gold.  Gemstones involves a Mega-Church in some benighted part of the South, run for profit by the Gemstone family -- the patriarch of the clan is played by John Goodman who has become frighteningly lean and haggard in appearance.  The Gemstone siblings include a foul-mouthed woman (married to a milquetoast husband who can't satisfy her), McBride's spectacularly vulgar preacher who is the heir to his father's multi-million dollar empire, and an another brother who is a closeted homosexual -- he comes out and gets married to his body-builder boyfriend in the finale of the Fourth Series, which is also the end of the show as a whole.  Everyone curses incessantly and the plots often take alarmingly dark twists and turns.  In the last and fourth series, the Gemstone siblings object to their father's relationship with his deceased wife's best friend -- there's lots of obscene speculation about sexual activity and a few fairly explicit oral sex scenes.  The girlfriend has an estranged husband who runs an alligator farm -- this guy captures his ex-wife's boyfriends, tortures and sodomizes them, and, then, pitches his poor victims to the alligators.  In the last episode, there's a gory mass shooting.  The program is colorful, but repetitive.  Goggins is good as an unsavory relative, Baby Billy, who is shooting a series about Jesus as an adolescent called Teenus.  The show isn't particularly funny and mostly relies about potty-mouth humor and offensive imagery.  Of course, like all big budget TV, the program's makers leaven the nihilistic material with traces of piety and, in fact, most of the characters are secretly compassionate and virtuous.  Ultimately, the Bible-Bangers are tolerant.  The homosexual son comes out on TV and, nonetheless, is elected "God's Number one Christ-following man."  After the mass shooting in the final episode, the three siblings although badly wounded pray over dying gunman and the scene is meant to be taken seriously.  The great mystery of this show is why anyone would patronize the garish, lewd spectacles that are presented as worship at the family's mega-church.  The show generally stands for the proposition that the faithful are complete idiots, ignorant, and readily duped.  I don't think that this is exactly fair and the show leaves a sour taste in the mouth.  Are mainstream Christians in the South really as utterly stupid as the worshipers are depicted to be in The Righteous Gemstones? I watched all episodes of this show because it is like observing a gruesome traffic accident or a train wreck.  But I don't really like the show and McBride's blustery, obscene style of comedy is mildly offensive to me.  (There's a sinister and funny capuchin monkey in the fourth series called "Dr. Watson.")

An even worse time-waster is The Last of Us (second series), also on HBO.  This show features lots of brutal torture:  people get beat to death with golf clubs and crowbars, one guy gets his hand roasted by a pewter pot that has been heated over a gas flame; there are many gory disembowelments, hangings, and other lurid murders. The premise of the show is that deadly mushrooms have turned most of the population into brainless, cabbage-headed zombies who chase down the unfortunate survivors of the fungal plague, bite them and, so, add, by contagion, to the legion of the undead.  The show is based on a well-received and, apparently, equally brutish computer/video game produced by an enterprise called "Naughty Dog."  As far as I can see, this program is just a pretentious and overproduced variant of Night of the Living Dead and its innumerable progeny, most particularly The Walking Dead on AMC.  Zombies attack the survivors who are divided into fractious cults that all kill and mutilate and torture one another.  Periodically, the show pauses for a reflective episode -- last year, there was a moving hour devoted to a homosexual couple living on a ranch surrounded by electric fences and all sorts of traps and snares intended to mete out spectacular demises to the attacking zombies.  In the current season, there's a lesbian love affair between two teenage girls; the show is forced into elaborate flashbacks when some inscrutable bad guys torture to death the leading man, played by the handsome Pedro Pascal.  Pascal is a legitimate movie star and when he gets a broken golf club jammed into his brain stem, a lot of the wind goes out of the show.  Accordingly, the show runners have to slow down the action with some sentimental flashbacks showing the hero (now deceased) acting as a kindly father-figure to the teenage murderess who has become the program's leading character by default -- everyone else having been killed or left far behind by her perambulations through the desolate, zombie-infested Pacific Northwest.  For better or worse, this is a quality show with expensive production values and good special effects.  The cast is excellent and they emote and orate as if starring in a production of Hamlet or King Lear.  There are a number of bravura action scenes, many of them spectacularly choreographed.  In one particularly memorable sequence, a thousand zombies attack a fort at Jackson Hole in the snow.  The teenage heroine, the strangely autistic-seeming Ellie, is trapped outside the fort.  The zombies hurl themselves against a cyclone fence which collapses against the fort's wall and Ellie has to escape the clawing, ravening monsters by crawling for a hundred feet in the cramped space between the fallen fence swarming with monsters and the wall -- it's surprisingly scary and exciting, a pure bit of cinema comprised of orchestrated motion and camera movement.  In fact, the show specializes in scenes in which hideous monsters who look a bit like the vegetal Thing from the old movie (and Kurt Russell reboot) attack the show's principals in cramped or confined spaces resulting in desperate displays of violence.  At its heart, the show is a sort of apocalyptic Western -- there are huge mountain panoramas and lots of horseback riding.  When I was growing up, the Apaches or Sioux played the part that the hordes of zombies now play -- that is, the horrible, uncivilized and barbaric "others" who can be killed by the hundreds but still line up picturesquely to be slaughtered by the forces of righteousness.  No one  sheds a tear over the thirty or forty undead who get lit on fire or blasted into oblivion each episode in this kind of show -- the bad guys are without culture and infinitely disposable.  The Last of Us is hyper-violent garbage but has its affecting moments  In one episode, the fort's psychoanalyst gets bit by a zombie and knows he is doomed -- Ellie thinks that they have enough time to tie the man up and haul him back to bid farewell to his wife before he turns into a rabid carrot or carnivorous brussel-sprout.  Joel, the hero played by Pedro Pascal, promises to implement this plan and sends Ellie back to retrieve their ponies, incongruously tied at the top of about a thousand-foot sheer cliff.  (It would take her hours to ascend this cliff if the show's eccentric topography were realistically intended.)  While Ellis is conveniently off-screen, Joel blows off the shrink's head.  Ellie is very upset with him and vows to never speak to Joel again.  All of this is presented with the utmost conviction and features actors performing in this garbage so effectively that you might well shed a tear at some of their antics.  (Catherine O'Hare, who seems to be everywhere on tube at this time, gets to display her chops in an elaborate and painful grief sequence -- she's the poor dead psychologist's wife.)  The finale, which is terrible, involves more torture, murder, a C-section threatened to be performed without anesthesia and the like.  A number of the main characters have travelled the 880 miles from Jackson Hole to Seattle to pursue Elly who is pursuing Abby who tortured Joel to death midway through the series.  None of this makes any sense at all.  In a world imagined to be rife with daily, if not hourly, murders and mayhem, it seems weird that everyone is so catastrophically focused on Joel's death, and, ultimately, it becomes clear to the viewers that this event (which effectively excludes the matinee idol, Pedro Pascal from all prospective action) has to be revenged for a simple reason:  Pedro Pascal is a major movie star and his killing guts the show and, so, there must be retribution for the slaughter of this movie star; in the nihilistic scheme of things, Pedro Pascal' character is neither more, nor less, consequential in terms of the plot than anyone else is this show, but Pascal is famous enough to be invited to host Saturday Night Live and so his death must have earth-shaking consequences.  Ellie's quest for vengeance, carried on at the expense of everything else in the show, terminates when she is unceremoniously gunned-down, resulting a black screen that is redolent of the famous ending (or non-ending) of The Sopranos.  After ten seconds of darkness, things brighten up and we see the girl Ellie was trying to torture to death.  She walks into a sports arena and a title reads:  Seattle Day One.  Like a midden heap or garbage dump, it seems that you can just keep adding trash to this ridiculous thing -- I presume "Day One" suggests another season, featuring Abby as the principal protagonist.    HBO has a hit with this show and milks it for everything its' worth -- there are sixteen episodes in this year's series, each of them an hour long plus associated podcasts and links to the video/computer game by Naughty Dog.    

The Brutalist

 Here is The Brutalist is a nutshell:  A visionary artist who is a stranger in a strange land attracts a powerful and wealthy patron.  The patron commissions the artist's magnum opus.  After a number of setbacks and quarrels with the patron, the great work is almost completed.  But the plutocratic patron betrays the artist in an unforgiveable way.  The patron, whose role is merely instrumental as far as history is concerned, vanishes into the work.  Many years later, the artist is celebrated and it is revealed that trauma lies at the center of his work.  This plot is the same, more or less, as The Agony of the Ecstasy with Charleton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as the patron, Pope Julius II.  Brady Corbett's version of this archetypal story runs for three hours and 20 minutes -- some of the film is obtuse and unnecessary but, in large part, the length of the movie seems justified.  This is primarily because the picture's individual sequences are shapely and abbreviated -- there is no bloat or distention in the mise-en-scene; the movie trips along in a sprightly and agile fashion and, in fact, feels shorter than its run time.  Brady Corbett, the film's director, is probably the most interesting American movie-maker active today -- his two previous feature films, The Childhood of the Leader and Vox Lux, don't look or sound like any other current pictures.  These pictures are extremely ambitious and their reach often exceeds their grasp; there are weird blurry spots in these pictures and, ultimately, they don't exactly cohere -- but these films are thought-provoking and approach their subject matter (fascism and mass shooting respectively) from wholly unexpected angles.  As I have suggested The Brutalist, in many ways, is a more conventional bio-pic -- but it is also peculiar and creates its own peculiar atmospheric fog:  we're never exactly sure what is happening and outcomes of particular scenes and of the movie as a whole are always unexpected.  The picture creates a strong and lingering impression, a  residue of uncertainty and idiosyncrasy that haunts the viewer long after the movie is over.

A good example of the film's unusual approach to its material is the opening section, about 12 minutes entitled "Overture".  A young woman in an institutional uniform is harshly interrogated by an unseen questioner -- the interrogation is conducted in Hungarian with subtitles but we can't really tell what is being said:  it has something to do with being punished for someone else's offenses.  Then, the image is dark and we see a man roughly roused.  A handheld camera, poised too close to the man (Adrian Brody as Laszlo Toth), tracks him as he climbs upward, moving through blurry masses of shabbily dressed people into the light.  (We later conclude that he is climbing out of the steerage of a ship.)  In the blinding light, someone points upward.  Then, we see the Statue of Liberty upside down, hanging from the void:  the camera tilts several times but never manages to get the monument right-side-up.  (The effect is like the scene of the Statue of Liberty in Kafka's Amerika or Der Verschollener in which the monument is visualized bearing a sword and not a torch -- the image is recognizable but subtly distorted, off-balance, rendered strange.)  We see a crowd of displaced persons in a hall, probably Ellis Island, being offered a 25 dollar travel voucher.  On a dark street, a prostitute beckons.  Inside the whore house, Toth is with a girl who is kneeling in front of him, groping at his pants.  In the background, someone from the ship is having sex with a naked girl.  In a voice-over, we hear a woman, later revealed to be Toth's wife, Erzebet ("Elizabeth") reading a letter to the protagonist, something about a niece named Zsofia, probably the girl referenced in the opening interrogation scene.  The movie announces that it is shot in Vistavision and the images have a dense, granular and rough texture -- in fact, they are brutalist, like the surface of raw prestressed concrete.  The camera placement is always expressive and not narrative -- the images are too close to show location or the orientation of persons to their background.  We can always "read" the images and, generally, understand what they mean, but there are curious disjunctions, obscurities, and the soundtrack (Toth's wife reading a letter while her husband is engaged in an unsatisfactory encounter with a prostitute) often cuts against the grain of the pictures.

The second part of the film, about an hour and 20 minutes is called "The Enigma of Arrival" --  it is titled 1947 to 1953.  Toth takes a bus to Philadelphia where he is offered lodging with his cousin, a Hungarian Jew who has reinvented himself as a furniture dealer ("Miller and Sons" is the name of his business although the man's real name is Mahler.)  Miller has acquired a blonde Catholic wife and has become a Roman Catholic.  Toth works for him designing modernist chairs and living in a storeroom where sleeps on a cot.  It is implied that Toth has a love affair with the blonde wife -- although this is only intimated.  (We see the wife and Miller dancing to the Broadway tune "Buttons and Bows" and, then, Miller encouraging Toth to dance with the woman -- in the next scene, Toth is urinating into a sink with the woman watching and commenting that his aim isn't too good, suggesting some level of intimacy with her.)  On the street, Toth stands in line for a soup kitchen behind a Black man and his small son -- it's not obvious why Toth is frequenting the Salvation Army and the scene remains unexplained, although the Black man and his boy introduced in the sequence will be important characters throughout the film.  A customer, the callow son of a plutocrat named Harrison Van Buren wants to surprise his father by remodeling the mansion's library -- the father collects first editions.  Toth does a brilliant job remodeling the property and shows that he is a sophisticated businessman as well -- he ups the fee by 100% and gets away with it.  But a glass cupola gets broken and, when the plutocrat returns to the mansion with his ailing mother, he encounters a "Negro poking around the property" -- this is the Black guy from the soup line who is helping Toth.  Van Buren isn't amused by the surprise and becomes enraged.  He throws Toth off his enormous estate and refuses to pay for his services.  (The estate in Doylestown features a small covered bridge over a little creek bed, a wholly incongruous feature on the huge property, a mansion that looks like a vast French chateau, and an imposing bluff overlooking the city where Toth will later build his magnum opus.)  Toth is stranded.  He has to sleep at the Salvation Army since he has been booted out of the furniture business primarily because of the debacle with Van Buren but, also, for "making a pass" at Miller's wife.  The Black man has found Toth a job working on an enormous hoist suspended over the river at Philadelphia, a giant intimidating structure where the men work a hundred feet above the ground.  Later, while Toth is shoveling coal, Harrison Van Buren appears.  He takes Toth to lunch and apologizes for pitching a fit and not paying him for the library renovation.  In fact, the library renovation is now famous, featured in LOOK magazine.  Van Buren has done some research and learned that Toth was once a famous architect in Europe; he studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau and has designed a number of well-known modernist structures.  Van Buren excuses his bad behavior by claiming that his mother was dying and that he was grief-stricken when he was surprised by the library renovation.  He invites Toth to his palatial mansion where the plutocrat's lawyer (he represents the vice-president of the United States) offers to assist with immigration proceedings necessary to bring Toth's wife Elizabeth and his niece Zsofia to America -- "they were forcibly separated" Toth explains.  (The lawyer is a Jew with a Shiksa trophy wife -- there is a subtle aura of anti-Semitism associated with the Protestant Van Buren clan.)  Van Buren gets drunk and, although its cold outside, leads everyone from the house, across the grounds and over the little covered bridge, and, then, up to the top of the big bluff.  There, Van Buren announces that he will engage Toth to build an enormous structure -- a library, chapel, gymnasium, and lecture hall/theater -- a cultural center dedicated the memory of his late mother.  Toth agrees to the commission and begins to draw plans.  He devises a system of clerestory windows that will convey light into the massive structure and cast a radiant cross onto a block of Carrera marble that will serve as the altar in the building's central chapel.   A building contractor named Woodrow is engaged -- he dislikes the brutish concrete design for the complex of buildings planned for the crest of the big bluff, already decorated now by towering construction cranes.  A  scene in an underground cavern of a Jazz club, all frenetic beebop and sweaty close-ups establishes that Toth, with his Black sidekick, have become junkies -- he shoots up with heroin.  (It's implied, I think, that Toth is self-medicating with heroin for trauma caused by his experiences in a concentration camp.)  A still photograph of Toth's wedding with Zsofia in attendance, the party standing under Hebrew letters at the portico of a synagogue signals the film's intermission.

The second half of the movie is more conventional and less interesting, although it never really lags.  Toth's wife and Zsofia are brought to Pennsylvania.  Elizabeth is in a wheelchair, suffering from osteoporosis as a consequence of "famine" during the war.  Zsofia has huge eyes like some kind of nocturnal creature and seems so badly traumatized that she can't speak.  There are various setbacks and difficulties with the building project.  Toth is sexually inert. Elizabeth has to masturbate him while claiming that she was with him in spirit when he had sex with other women.  To increase their profits, Harrison Van Buren has contracted with transport and supply companies run by his son.  We see freight cars being loaded with heavy construction materials, the spring undercarriages of the cars flexing.  A very remote high shot, shows the train moving forward slowly behind a cloud of steam.  Suddenly, the steam flares with fire -- there's been a catastrophic rail accident caused by the negligence of Van Buren's son who has cut corners to save costs.  The project is compromised because of casualties and some of its features have to be cut or reduced in scope.  Toth insists on a maze of small chambers in the enormous building but with fifty foot high ceilings with skylights.  This makes no sense to the contractor and there are violent quarrels -- Toth accuses the contractor of making everything ugly.  Van Buren and Toth get into a fight and, then, Toth attacks the contractor Woodrow.  He is fired and goes to New York where he works as a draftsman in an architectural office that seems somehow affiliated with the United Nations.  (Elizabeth with Van Buren's assistance has got a job as a writer for a Manhattan newspaper.) Van Buren again repents of his rage and re-hires Toth to complete the project, now a complex of huge concrete walls and towers atop the bluff at Doylestown.  The two men go to Carrera to select a marble block for the chapel's altar.  (Toth has carefully packed his kit with syringe, tourniquet, and heroin.)  There's a wild party in some colossal underground gallery at the Italian quarry and Toth shoots up.  While he is semi-comatose in one of the marble tunnels, Van Buren snuggles up to him, calls the architect a "lady of the night" and, then, sodomizes him.  The next morning both Van Buren and Toth act as if nothing has happened.  Elizabeth has terrible pain at night and requires medication. Zsofia is pregnant and with her husband emigrates to Israel. One night Elizabeth runs out of medication and screams in agony -- she's out of pain pills.  Toth panics and injects her with heroin.  She wants to go to the toilet and so he seats her there.  But she has a seizure and Toth has to carry her to the hospital in Doylestown.  While they were both high, Toth has confessed to Elizabeth that he was raped by Van Buren.  She now can walk a little with a walker.  She drags herself to the mansion and accuses Van Buren of rape.  Elizabeth is thrown out of the house but Van Buren flees as well, seemingly vanishing into the colossal corridors and huge pantheon-like spaces of the monument on the bluff.  At dawn, the sun rises and casts a cross-shaped flare of light onto the altar of pure ice-white Carrera marble  There's a brief Epilogue set in 1980 at the Venice Biennial.  Toth has designed many prestigious projects, mostly churches and synagogues.  He's now demented apparently and confined to a wheelchair, a mere shadow of his former self.  Zsofia gives a speech at the Biennial revealing that the floor plan at the Doylestown monument to Van Buren's mother consisted of small rooms, the size of the barracks at Buchenwald where Toth was confined but with lofty ceilings penetrated by skylights, signifying freedom. The subterranean tunnels linking the parts of the complex were recollections of Toth's fantasy that secret galleries underground might connect Buchenwald to Dachau where Zsofia and Elizabeth were confined.  With this revelation the movie ends.

The scenes in Venice are brightly lit and staged like conventional post-cards or vacation travelogue -- the images seem to be digital or video in character.  The rest of the film is darkly lit and the photographic stock seems slightly distressed.  Camera placement and angles are generally odd and idiosyncratic.  There are many low-angle shots of the camera racing foward over the concrete highway, images depicting the motion between Doylestown and Philadelphia (or between Philly and New York City.)  The huge complex on the hill variously looks like a grain elevator with twin towers, a bleak cathedral or a prison -- and partakes of all those qualities.  Interior shots show colossal passageways and huge dim vaults.  The base of the structure seems to be an underground lake with the building above supported on vegetal-shaped sprouts of concrete -- the form of this huge space is like Johnson and Johnson Building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Racine Wisconsin.  In general, the architecture of the monumental complex at Doylestown looks a bit like Louis Kahn's government buildings for Bangladesh or the raw concrete walls and towers designed by Marcel Breuer, for instance at the Benedictine Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota.  The quarries at Carrera are vast, glacial, an entire mountain terraced and cut into blocks with abysmal galleries chopped into the depths below.  Adrian Brody's acting as Toth is beyond reproach as are the performances of Felicity Jones as Elizabeth and Guy Pearce as the plutocrat Van Buren.  The central conceit is that American wealth and power conspires to screw emigrant artists -- this topic is literally materialized in the rape scene involving Toth and Van Buren.  The patron of the arts treats his artist as a disposable commodity, as a prostitute. American power is tangled up with implacable racism and anti-Semitism.  Although these themes are simplistic, the film's presentation is very complex, often obtuse, with fake documentary sequences about Pennsylvania and the United Nations and news broadcasts about the founding of Israel.  The Brutalist is well worth seeing and will probably induce different reactions in different viewers.  The picture is not dull and seems well-paced and stands also as an allegory about the production of films in this country and internationally.      

No Home Movie

 When I was a boy, international film critics picked Battleship Potemkin as the greatest movie ever made.  This ranking was affirmed year after year in censuses tabulating critics' lists as to the ten best pictures ever made and reflected, of course, the hard left, even communist inclinations, typical of cineaste's in the forties, fifties, and, even, early sixties.  Potemkin slipped into second place or lower when critical tastes changed -- for a decade or so, Citizen Kane was awarded the palm.  Citizen Kane, a movie that, unlike Eisenstein's Potemkin, everyone had seen, then, yielded to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, also a Hollywood picture that everyone knows and admires.  Then, suddenly, a few years ago (2022), the world's critics were polled again and concluded that the greatest film of all time was Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) -- I'm pretty sure that almost no one has seen Jeanne Dielman.  The Sight and Sound anointing of Jeanne Dielman, of course, signifies what the Trump regime would style a DEI pick, "token" feminism some might say.  But there's no doubt that Akerman is a formidable artist and her films, even if inaccessible on many different levels are a force to reckon with.

No Home Movie is Akerman's last picture.  The film premiered at Locarno in the summer of 2015.  It was widely derided and many people in the audience walked out of the screening.  (In 2015, Akerman was well-known as a challenging feminist filmmaker, but had not yet been accorded the honor of having directed the greatest film of all time.)  The movie was screened at the New York Film Festival on October 7, 2015 -- one day after Chantal Akerman's death was reported in the Paris Monde.  It's impossible to watch the movie without Akerman's suicide casting a grim shadow over the picture.  But the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy probably should be resisted -- Akerman was hospitalized for depression a few weeks before she killed herself and, of course, there's no evidence that she was seriously ill or suicidal during the period of time in which she accumulated the 40 hours of footage from which the movie's final cut was made, filming with digital devices that seems to have taken place over several years and on several different continents.  Writers who are familiar with Akerman's work (and I don't count myself among that number) regard No Home Movie as a daunting, very difficult film, but one that is intensely rewarding and an important late masterpiece.  I think that it's possible for a movie to be simultaneously a great and challenging work as well as a picture that is so eccentric, so intimate, and so rebarbative that you would have trouble recommending the picture to most people -- the picture is haunting, but it is also fantastically tedious and off-putting.  I am glad No Home Movie exists and happy that I watched it, indeed, several times,  But I'm not sure that I would screen the movie at a film festival or, even, for a film study group.  People are likely to react with such vehement scorn that debates and quarrels would undoubtedly ensue and feelings might get hurt.

No Home Movie starts with four minute long shot of a slender fragile-looking tree battered by a strong, howling wind.  The shot is framed in a random way and we can see a sliver of murky, dusty desert in the background. Then, there is another very long shot of a chubby man sunbathing with his back to the camera in a park where dogs are romping.  (The anonymous guy is the only man in a film in which all other figures are women.)  Next, we see an equally long (in time) shot of an enclosed back yard with a crippled-looking lawn chair half collapsed on the grass.  This is evidently the backyard of an expensively appointed manor in which an old woman, Natalia Akerman, lives.  Natalia is Chantal Akerman's mother and the 115 minute film is an elliptical chronicle of her death.  (Although the film doesn't tell us anything about Natalia's death, I am aware that she died in April 2014.)  The movie consists largely of still interiors, empty frames of the kind featured in Ozu movies -- mostly half-open doors, shadowy thresholds, images of unmade beds and kitchen counters.  The camera placement is haphazard:  sometimes the old woman ambles into the frame; sometimes, we see Chantal Akerman or her sister Sylvain padding about, often barefooted.  In many shots, no one ever appears although we can hear footsteps off-screen or voices or someone fumbling with furniture or clothing or cooking utensils.  Akerman films some dialogue between herself and her mother, generally choosing an angle that is so unintrusive as to render the shot almost illegible -- people mutter things to one another with their backs to the camera and we can't tell who is speaking.  The old woman says that she has fallen and dislocated her shoulder; she has a persistent cough.  There is a conversation with the director in which her mother recalls how she and her husband were persecuted because they were Polish Jews during the Second World War.  The discussions are casual, circumstantial, heavily coded with family references that the viewer can't decipher.  There's some conversation about how Chantal was a picky eater as a little girl.  In one long discussion, mother and daughter debate how best to cook potatoes -- whether to peel them or leave the skin on (it contains all the vitamins the old woman says.)  Chantal ruefully observes that, although she's a lousy cook, she knows how to prepare potatoes.  The film leaves the impression that Chantal Akerman is always traveling, more or less, living out of a suitcase.  She apparently Skypes or Zoom calls her mother daily.  We see her filming her mother on the laptop screen when Chantal says that she is in Oklahoma.  The director's relationship to her mother is obviously very close -- Chantal calls her mother "mommy" and is always signing off with "hugs and kisses."  There is some conversation about Jewish ritual -- the old lady is irritated about someone who was "too orthodox" and kept a kosher kitchen.  An infant must be eight days old because he is going for his bris.  Chantal says that she is feeling "good which is rare for (her)."  Neither Chantal nor her mother are willing to hang up or conclude their Skype call and they keep talking about "having to go" but the conversation just continues on and on.  Akerman slowly moves her digital device -- it's probably something like a cell-phone camera -- closer and closer to the screen.  The old woman's eyes on the lap-top become a huge blur, dark craters moving dimly on the pixilated computer screen.  Then, abruptly, we see an utterly empty desert; the camera in a moving car is shooting the landscape which rushes by with disorienting speed .  These landscape shots in which we sometimes glimpse other vehicles off the road on barren hillsides or far away palm trees continue for about five minutes -- gulches, dry washes, tracks leading into the desert.  Next, we see foul-looking murky water with waves rippling across the edge of what seems to be a flooded beach -- there is an ominous shadow cast on the sandy bottom of the seashore, under the slimy, scummy water:  this is either someone standing motionlessly on the edge of the water or the shadow of Chantal who is filming with the camera pointed down at the submerged sand.  This shadow announces the visual motif that will dominate the second half of the picture.  The bourgeois house now is filmed like a labyrinth in a horror movie -- there are mysterious moving shadows at the edge of the frame.  We see more unmade beds, empty rooms, dark thresholds -- sometimes, the curtains are parted a little and we get a glimpse of the street outside the house, a busy thoroughfare where cars are making left-hand turns in traffic.  There's another meal scene, also shot from behind the old woman and completely uncommunicative.  Sylvain, Chantal's younger sister is eating with the old woman.   The old lady is having trouble swallowing, chokes a few times, and complains that Chantal makes her anxious.  (She says she doesn't like to be filmed.)  In a dark and gloomy room, the women prepare to go for a short walk with the old woman -- there are Filipino housemaids and nurses around, chubby, smiling and solicitous middle-aged women.  The old woman debates whether anyone needs to bring their purse but, of course,"we must have money with us."  The old woman is resting in recliner, head back, breathing stentorously.  Chantal and Sylvain try to keep her awake so she can "tell them stories" but the old woman keeps falling asleep.  These shots are taken from a discrete distance and we can't really see Chantal's mother -- she is just a shadow among shadows.  Gradually, she seems to be vanishing into the dark rooms and dim corridors.  The old woman now is immobile -- we don't see her get up from the recliner.  There's some discussion that Chantal is in Venice and Sylvain and the old woman talk about accompanying Chantal to the film festival there -- it seems that they attended two years earlier and "dressed her (Chantal) to the nines" in a "tuxedo" for an event.  One of the Filipino women is interviewed by Chantal.  Chantal talks about how her mother fled Poland where the people were very "harsh"; the SS came and took both mother and father to a concentration camp, Auschwitz, back in Poland. "Oh the Jews," the Filipino woman exclaims.  She maintains a completely cheerful expression, an enigmatic half-smile throughout the whole conversation -- it's obvious that she has no idea what Chantal is talking about and, I think, the woman's bemused and kindly expression and her complete incomprehension as to the horrors that she is being told is, perhaps, the best and most rational response to such a story.  "She was in a concentration camp," Chantal says, "and that's why she is the way she is."  There is a cut to the desert, this time the terrain rocketing past much more quickly than before -- we really can't see anything but canyons full of yellowish light and grey mountains.  There is a long still shot of a wadi in the absolutely desolate desert -- it reads like an image from the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and has a mortuary aspect.  We see a level field with the wind moving in the grass.  Sitting in her small room in her mother's house, Chantal is pulling on her shoes.  She has her big suitcase packed.  She glances at the window where the curtain is partly open and, then, pulls the curtain shut.  The film concludes with a minute long shot of living room in the house, expensive and tasteful art in the middle of the frame with some candelabra on a marble mantle -- a portrait of bourgeois European civilization, two shadowy alcoves into which some wan light is leaking to the right and left of the painting and the marble.  It's an image of comfort, luxury, justice, and death.  

The desert scenes and the bush in the windstorm were shot in Israel.  It is the Promised Land, but also the terrain of death.  (I know this from commentary on the movie -- there's no sign as to the location of these shots in the picture itself.)  The old woman is gone and Chantal is leaving her mother's home which is now "No Home" for her.  This is not a home movie, but, instead, a film about having "no home" or having a home defined by the shadowy, murky gloom that surrounds death, that is, a "no" home or home to the ultimate negation which is mortality.  With its perfect reticence, its dignified tact, its grimly nondescript  interiors and murmured conversations about memories from a half-century earlier, No Home Movie manages to achieve considerable power.  About half of the movie really can't be clearly apprehended -- it's off to the side, out of focus, or merely a sound off-screen.  This is life lived under the shadow of the great mystery, death.  Whether the film's emotional payoff, which is delicate, haunting, and melancholy, makes up for the picture's difficulties is a critical assessment that each viewer will have to make for him or herself.     

  

Untouched (Sombra Verde)

 Roberto Gavaldon's 1954 Sombra Verde begins like a science fiction film.  A jungle root can be used to make cortisone, a substance that the film touts as a miracle cure.  We see banner headlines announcing that this tropical root will change the face of medicine and usher in a new era.  In a laboratory, white-coated scientists are laboring over their potions.  A handsome young man, Federico, is dispatched to the jungle near Vera Cruz to scout the forests for this precious root.  (None of this makes any sense:  what is Federico supposed to be looking for?  Why is he sent into the perilous rain forest alone?)  With dizzying rapidity, the scene shifts to a picturesque old city, Papantla, so-called "the vanilla city" where the Corpus Christi festival is underway.  Indigenous campesinos are dancing in the streets and voladors whirl around an enormous pole, flying upside-down in a spectacle that is part Hollywood via Mexico and part National Geographic.  The best jungle guide in town is at the peak of the Totonoc volador pole.  When he descends to the throngs in the streets, Federico tries to hire him.  But the man says he has duties to his community and is integral to the Corpus Christi festivities.  No amount of money will entice him to guide Federico through the jungle. Pedro, Federico's porter who is carrying his luggage, offers to guide the scientist and, within six minutes of the title sequence, the two men with their pack horses are hacking their way through the forest primeval.  

Sombra Verde was released in a dubbed, expurgated version in the US.  The film stars Ricardo Montalban who spends most of his time in the film shirtless, displaying his impressive torso.  At 87 minutes long, the movie chugs forward efficiently and it is, in fact, very entertaining and, even, powerful -- the script is literate and intelligent and the acting has the iconic quality of big budget pictures of the era; it's all over-emphatic, lucid, and larger-than-life.  Released as Untouched in the US,  and promoted by an advertising  campaign that focused on the leading lady's breasts, the movie divides into two parts.  In the first half of the movie, the hero treks through the jungle, nearly perishing in the green hell.  The second half of the film invokes Shakespeare's The Tempest -- it's a torrid melodrama with lushly erotic sequences.  Both parts of the movie are effective and one of the pleasures of this sort of picture are its occasional lapses into idiocy -- for instance, in one scene, we are shown an orangutan doing gymnastics in a tree: how did an orangutan make its way from Borneo into the jungles in Vera Cruz?  Very quickly, Federico and his incompetent guide, Pedro, get lost in the woods.  The two men distrust one another.  When Pedro lunges at Federico with his machete, the scientist draws his gun only to learn (to his embarrassment) that the guide was defending him against a venomous snake.  Federico becomes fixated on morbid thoughts.  Pedro tells him that these thoughts, whispering to a man to remain in the jungle, are the so-called "green shadow" from which one must free one's self as if from the allure of a femme fatale.  A deadly adder bites Pedro and he dies, pleading with Federico to give him a Christian burial.  Federico tries to dig into the stony soil of the jungle but fails to make much of a hole so he puts poor Pedro head-down over his horse and continues his desperate march through the forest.  Vultures attack and Federico has to fend them off, using up his ammunition by shooting at the menacing black birds.  Despairing, Federico gives himself up as lost and doomed.  Then, he hears dogs barking, follows the sound, and encounters an idyllic landscape of gushing water, cascades, and a thundering waterfall.  As he crosses a suspension bridge to an inhabited island, a man appears, imperious with flashing eyes.  The man (this is Ignacio the proprietor of this tropical paradise) slashes the rope from which the bridge hangs and Federico, dead Pedro, and the two horses are plunged into the swift white water and, after struggles, borne over the brink of the 160 foot waterfall.  (This is a disturbing sequence because it appears that the two horses were really pitched into the river and, apparently, die in the fall over the waterfall cliff.)  The jungle trek scenes are impressive, filmed on location with a camera moving inexorably through the vines and undergrowth.  There's an excellent storm scene with lightning strikes and trees blazing like torches in the downpour.  

The second half of the film takes place at El Paraiso,("paradise"), Don Ignacio's isolated hacienda surrounded by columns of cascading water and near a huge lake with a pulpit-like rock formation on its banks.  Federico has a broken leg which Ignacio and his servant Maxim mend with primitive splints and traction.  Ignacio's beautiful daughter, stipulated to be about 15 or 16, is child of nature and is immediately attracted to the hunky Federico.  Without any preliminary flirting, she announced that she wants Federico to be her man.  (The girl named Yascara is played by Ariadne Welker, then 23, and, later, a fixture in Mexican horror films as a "scream queen"; she also worked with Bunuel as well in that director's excellent The Crime of Archibold Cruz).  Unfortunately, Federico is married; his wife, who doesn't appear in the film, is "civilized" and the opposite of the impulsive and sexually aggressive jungle girl. Yascara intends to have her way with Federico.  She courts him on the edge of the lake, squatting in the rocky pulpit with her thighs suggestively spread, and, later dives into the water, emerging with her sheer blouse completely transparent.  (The producers of the film, the Calderon brothers, later embarked on a course of so-called "nudie" films featuring topless actresses; Sombra Verde is sometimes considered the first of those kinds of movies.)  Although Federico tries to resist Yascara's allure, he fails.  She embraces him while holding a wounded bird and, in the throes of passion, crushes the little animal in her fist.  When Federico is back on his feet and plans to depart from El Paraiso, Yascara takes a machete and kills the two horses that would have carried him away.  (The vicious Kristi Noem's autobiography has a chapter called "A Bad Day to Be a Goat" in which she boasts about killing a pet dog and a goat -- Sombra Verde could be subtitled a "a bad day to be a horse, snake, or bird".)  She threatens suicide if he leaves her.  Things are far from perfect in paradise; we learn that Don Ignacio's wife, Irene, had a love affair with an oil engineer and pilot -- this resulted in Ignacio killing her while his servant Maxim hacked the paramour to death.  Some mounted policemen appear and indicate that Federico's wife has made her way to Papantla and is waiting there for her husband.  Federico departs with the police setting up a spectacular romantic climax -- Yascara emotes with the waterfalls in the background; Federico emotes and smolders with a tableaux of mountains over his shoulder; there are huge yearning close-ups and a voice-over repeats earlier dialogue that emphasizes the importance of freedom and making a decision on the basis of free will -- "return to the city, but when you find that you can't live there, come back to El Paraiso to your true love."  Yascara is poised on the brink of the huge falls and ready to jump.  If she plunges to her death, this isn't shown at the end of the movie.

Sombra Verde is salacious nonsense, but it's an exceptionally beautiful film, gorgeously shot by Alex Phillips, a Canadian-born cameraman.  The plot is simple and mythic in form but the movie is very well-written and gripping.  The location shooting is superb -- the scenes in Papantla are wonderful and brilliantly exploit the colonial architecture in the city; there's some great footage of the Pyramid of the Niches located at Taijin.  The jungle is a brooding, palpable presence in the movie.  The second-half of the film is suffused with sex -- we see Yascara, for instance, hand-pollinating vanilla blossoms; she explains that plants are male and female as well.  Ariadne Welker looks like an Italian movie star -- she said that the only Mexican blood in her came by "transfusion" (both of her parents were expatriate Europeans -- and she is clad in simple, stylish white clothing; she looks fresh and cool as if she has just come from a tennis court on which she didn't exert herself that much.  The scene in which her breasts are visible, certainly, makes its point forcefully enough.  The movie is very good and the DVD comes with some excellent extras including an informative commentary track.  It's a Powerhouse UK DVD.

The Barber of Seville (ossia l'inutile precauzione)

 Rossini's opera The Barber of Seville (or the Useless Precaution) is so familiar that viewers may not notice how strange it is.  The story is about a middle-aged miser scheming to marry his beautiful ward in order to control her sizeable dowry.  Of course, the young woman, Rosina, dislikes the much older man who has, in effect, imprisoned her.  But the miser, Dr. Bartolo, has a rival and the opera details how the young lovers scheme to defeat the old man's designs on Rosina.  Of course, the titular "barber of Seville" is Figaro, a charming picaro, who acts as a factotum on behalf of the illicit lovers, exercising his ingenuity and access to all the characters -- he shaves men, cuts hair, sells wigs, does a little therapeutic bloodletting and administers enemas (he's a bit like Warren Beatty in Shampoo) -- to bring Rosina and her boyfriend together and, indeed, unite them in marriage. (Since this is a comedy, in fact, a close relative to the Italian commedia dell' arte farces, the lovers outwit the old man, humiliate him, and the curtain falls on a lusty wedding chorus.  So far this plot outline seems pretty conventional -- the passion and ardor of the young lovers, with the conniving of Figaro, defeat the old man's venal intentions:  love overcomes age and money.  But this is a mischaracterization of the story:  the male romantic protagonist is not all that much younger than Dr. Bartolo, the middle-aged miser.  And, furthermore, this man, Count Almaviva, is rich and powerful, a sort of Midas-figure who lubricates the plot by liberally distributing purses of gold and silver -- financial gain is Figaro's apparent motivation for assisting Rosina and Almaviva in their liaison.  Furthermore, Almaviva is posited as immensely powerful; at key points in the story, he demonstrates his noble credentials to the local military commander who blanches with fear and, immediately, does the Count's bidding.  So, of course, the story's premise makes no real sense.  Almaviva could simply buy Rosina from the old miser or, even, use his military connections to peremptorily seize her.  This is not a case of penniless young lovers triumphing against societal forces prohibiting their relationship.  Rather, this is the case of a young and handsome oligarch acting as a sort of gangster in affairs of the heart -- on the basis of his money and power, Almaviva makes people "offers that they can't refuse."  The elderly miser doesn't have a chance against the influence and wealth of the Count.  Furthermore, Almaviva's power really renders the intrigues engineered by Figaro completely gratuitous; Almaviva actually doesn't need Figaro's contrivances to succeed in winning Rosina.  The plot posits that the rich and powerful Almaviva doesn't want to win Rosina on the basis of these attributes. In fact, he wants Rosina to love him for himself and, therefore, at the outset impersonates a  indigent student named Lindoro.  But the various playful disguises adopted by Almaviva can't conceal from the spectator that at every key juncture in the story, the hero just buys his way out of trouble or bends the local military officials to his will.  (The libretto is based on a play by Beaumarchais usually described as foreshadowing the upheavel against the ancien regime that was the French Revolution -- this may be the case, but I don't see any traces of revolutionary ideology in the Barber of Seville; if anything, the story is conservative, even reactionary.  Rossini's opera premiered in 1815.)

The Minnesota opera here revives a 1995 production of The Barber of Seville.  I saw the show on May 10, 2025 and recall seeing it 1995 as well -- it is, in fact, quite memorable.  The opera is conventionally staged with lavish, if traditional, scenery -- flats depicting  Seville's streets and a courtyard in front of Rosina's balcony and some ornate baroque-era palace interiors.   The actors are dressed in the style of the late 18th century and there is no attempt to gussy up the production with modernist gestures or high concept.  The story takes place in the 1780's in Seville and features performers dressed in period costume, garments that look a little like variations of the things that people wear in Goya's court portraits.  Everything is presented in a direct, clear style -- comedy is usually well-lit and lucid so that the gags and situational humor can be appreciated.  You don't expect Rembrandt-lighting or dialectical montage in an episode of Friends or Mary Tyler Moore.  The music is wonderful, many extended passages not at all inferior to Mozart (whose operatic style Rossini, more or less, imitates).  The overture is full of achingly beautiful melodies and, even, presents a certain plaintive aspect -- but none of that superb music is in the opera proper; Rossini simply recycled tunes from earlier work to cobble together the famous overture.  There are several rapid-fire machine-gun clip patter songs that require virtuosic delivery -- and these comic highlights were expertly performed.  Figaro makes a great appearance, his name sounding several times offstage, and, then, sauntering into the middle of the action, smirking as he pushes a cart with wigs posed on featureless heads and the tools of his trade on-board.  Self-assured and ingenious, Figaro engineers the two disguises in which Almaviva infiltrates the miser's household.  In the first disguise, Almaviva impersonates a very drunk soldier billeted in the household.  The man carries a big white bundle between his legs, a phallic appendage that he can jerk up into an erection as required.  In the second disguise, Almaviva sneaks into Bartolo's palace dressed as a prudish, ecclesiastical music teacher -- he wears a sort of black scroll rolled up at the edges on his head and sings through his nose with a nasal braying.  Rossini contrives to summon all his forces on stage for the finales of both the first and second and last act.  A chorus of opera buffa soldiers with plumed hats appears in each finale.  As the soldier's sing, they make the scarlet plumes on their hats twitch rhythmically like floppy metronomes. The show features an elderly servant in red livery who moves in slow, slow motion -- it's a Monty Python effect.  There's also a spunky maid who is continuously inhaling snuff (supplied by Figaro) to cause her to sneeze explosively.  The phrase "the useless precaution" is repeated at several key points in the story and, when Almaviva courts Rosina in the guise of the music teacher, she sings an aria under his direction with that name -- it's like the self-reflexive musical numbers in the last act of Don Giovanni.  Comedy tends to be self-referential and violates the fourth wall -- there's lots of hamming it up for the audience. From time to time, Bartolo's discomfiture is signaled by whirling psychedelic lights -- Almaviva's exploits, as contrived by Figaro, create an almost eerie febrile aspect to some scenes.  There's even a ballet interlude in which dancers with umbrellas weather a thunderstorm presented through elaborate program music and projected images of clouds, rain, and, then, glorious sunshine.  

For modern viewers, the opera seems too long.  You have to be in the right mood for this sort of tomfoolery.  But, in general, I thought that the performance was pretty much flawless and Rossini's "perpetual motion" rhythms and gallops are always engaging.  The show's got a pulse and its infectious.    

  

Miracle in Milan

 Released in 1951, Vittorio De Sica's Miracle in Milan depicts an urban landscape that is ruinous and still in the shadow of the second world war.  The film exploits a vein of whimsy and sentiment that will not be to everyone's taste.  Indeed, I found the movie too saccharine with some scenes that made me cringe a bit -- the sentiment is over-the-top and, therefore, seems forced.  But the picture's heart is in the right place and it is extraordinarily imaginative.  The set design and location work is indelible.  Ned Mann, an American, was hired to manage the film's many special effects -- the results are serviceable but unconvincing. In tone and with respect to its "magic realism", a concept that the picture prefigures,  Miracle in Milan resembles some of the similarly lavish movies made in Britian by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, most particularly A Matter of Life and Death. Pressburger and Powell are in better control of their poetic special effects (they work in the studio whereas De Sica seems committed to filming on location) and the camera tricks seem merely perfunctory in De Sica's film.  Miracle in Milan is a particular favorite with Isabella Rossellini, sufficient endorsement, I think, for anyone.  It's notoriously hard to portray goodness and happiness on film -- the medium thrives on violence and discontent.  De Sica makes an effort at devising a movie about contemporary affairs that isn't cynical and that espouses a faith in the virtue of the common man -- he's not wholly successful, but the effort is worth commending and the picture deserves to be seen for its beautiful and startling photography. 

Toto, the film's hero, is a young man who materializes mysteriously as a wailing infant in a cabbage patch.  (The film self-consciously invokes fairy tales and folk proverbs -- the title sequence shows us the names of the performers emblazoned across a detail from Brueghel's painting embodying northern European proverbs.)  A kindly old woman raises him.  She is very gentle.  When she finds Toto boiling some substance so that the pot has drained foam all over the floor of their small cottage, she sets up toy trees and little animals next to the greasy spill and pretends that it is a river.  When he is eleven, the old woman dies.  Toto walks behind the hearse drawn by a tired-looking dray horse.  The hearse traverses a ghastly-looking urban wasteland of vacant lots, foggy lanes leading into the mist whirling around garbage heaps.  As they trudge to the cemetery, an escaped prisoner joins Toto's dogged march behind the hearse and escapes in that way -- it's a scene that seems redolent of Chaplin.  Toto is deposited in an orphanage.  Seven or eight years later, he's released, now a chubby boy with short arms and legs and a square-cut blocky head and shoulders.  (Toto played by Francesco Golisano is charismatic, but ugly -- he looks like a member of the lumpenproletariat and doesn't have the features of a leading man.  He was selected for his ordinary, everyman appearance, worked in about eight or nine films all in the course of two years and was retired from the film industry by 1952.)  Emerging from the orphanage, Toto is very polite and friendly.  He says "good morning" to everyone he meets, earning the inevitable scornful response that the morning isn't "good" and only a moron would characterize it that way.  At a street accident where a crowd is gathered, Toto puts down his valise and it is taken by a thief.  Toto chases the man and confronts him; the poor guy is desperate and Toto lets him keep the briefcase. It's cold with snow falling and Toto with the thief goes to a dismal vacant lot next to the railroad tracks.  The two men spend the night in a casket-like shack, just a cardboard box.  Other slumdwellers are living in the shadow of the railroad tracks in wretched tubes and tents of cardboard and scrap metal.  When the sun rises, a few beams descend onto the muddy plain and the slumdwellers run as quick as they can to the places outlined by the sunlight to enjoy a moment of warmth.  The homeless encampment is utterly squalid and the ruins look like the aftermath of some sort of terrible battle.  A great gale sweeps over the swampy wasteland and tears the slumdweller's huts apart.  But Toto is a kind of leader and he encourages the slum dwellers to erect larger, more elaborate squatter's huts on the muddy plain.  Ultimately, a small village is constructed on the site complete with named streets, plazas and a central square decorated by a disfigured sculpture of a ballerina.  A couple of rich men come and one of them sells the premises to the other, a tycoon named Mommi.  Mommi doesn't know what to do with the shantytown and so he leaves it alone.  Unfortunately, when the slumdwellers are erecting a maypole, it hits water, creating big geysers that decorate the grey skies and fog over the village.  The water is laden with oil and, sometimes, bursts into flame.  Of course, the oil field discovered beside the railroad tracks elicits the attention of Mommi.  Mommi decides to expel the squatters so he can exploit the oil under the village.  Led by the gentle, but stubborn, Toto, the villagers resist.  A  deputation goes to Mommi's fascist-style offices (it's full of bellicose life-size statues) and pleads with the mogul to leave the shantytown in peace.  But this petition fails and platoons of Keystone Kop-style gendarmes and national guardsmen are sent to expel the shantytown residents from the site.  At this point, the titular "miracle" or "miracles" ensue -- the spirit of Toto's kindly mother floats down from the sky.  She gives Toto a white dove that grants wishes.  There are two scrawny angels in leotards who look very gay -- they are like something out of Cocteau's Orpheus films.  The angels play the role of periodically withdrawing the magical dove from the shanty town dwellers.  A series of slapstick skirmishes ensues -- when Mommi orders his goons to attack, they start singing opera arias and can't advance.  When firehoses are deployed against the squatters, a thousand impermeable umbrellas materialize.  The villagers discover that the dove will grant their wishes as well and the slumdwellers ask for fur coats, millions of dollars, and luxuries like chandeliers -- one tiny little man (he's four feet tall) asks to be made larger.  The villagers begin competing for useless frills and the angels appear to snatch away the magical dove.  Mommi's thugs attack again and this time load all the slumdwellers into paddy wagons, driving them downtown to the bleak square next to the hulking porcupine of the Milan Cathedral.  Toto's girlfriend, Edvige, grabs a dove from a chicken coop and gives it to Toto -- he wishes on the little bird, although it's not the bliss-bestowing fowl.  The paddy wagons burst apart and the squatters seize the brooms of workers sweeping the square, levitating into the air and, then, flying over the cathedral toward the sun while singing a chorus about the brotherhood of man.  

The movie plays like Bertolt Brecht refracted through Grimm's fairy tales, particularly Philip Runge's extravagant "The Fisherman and his Wife", a story about the pitfalls of having all your wishes, even the most frivolous, granted.  The slumdwellers have vivid faces and make a menacing mob.  The shantytown is one of moviedom's most pungent and enthralling sets -- it's constructed of cardboard and corrugated metal all fused together and the premises, consisting of quixotic towers and ramparts, is decorated by big flares of oil bursting in clear jets out of the ground.  There are innumerable tiny details and neorealist touches.  A Black GI pining for an Italian woman asks the dove to be made white.  No sooner is this accomplished than the man's girlfriend appears -- she has asked to be made Black.  The film loops back to its beginning with a final title:  the slumdwellers are building a world in which the salutation "Good Morning" will mean that the morning is truly good.  De Sica's longtime screenwriter Cesare Zavattini constructed the story -- Zavattini was a Communist and, of course, the political aspects of the story represent a sort of benign "folk-communism."  The grim landscapes and bleak vistas of Milan are depicted with fantastic conviction so that the quixotic and whimsical aspects of the plot are in a continuous dialogue with gritty neo-realist photography.  The picture doesn't entirely work but its optimism doesn't seem opportunistic -- it arises from a struggle with gruesome circumstances that the film depicts with authority.   

Girl will be Girls

 "Coming of age" is a description often applied to movies, memoirs, and works of fiction.  The term is a euphemism for a depiction of someone's first sexual encounter or first extended love affair.  Generally, films and literature of this kind imply that the protagonist's first sexual encounter or love affair is a life-changing event imparting a sort of wisdom or new perspective to the hero.  Shuchi Talati's Girls will be Girls (a wretched name) fits squarely within the "coming of age" genre.  The film, released in 2024, is a candid, fairly graphic picture about a sixteen-year-old girl's sexual encounter with a slightly older boy.  The picture is well-made and features excellent performances.  It is also somewhat disturbing.  Although one would expect "coming of age" to be a universal phenomenon, the movie, set at an expensive private high school (what used to be called a College Prep school) in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains is specific to aspects of Indian culture that I found disorienting.  I confess that I'm not sure that I understand the film completely.  Adding to my bemusement are reviews of the picture that suggest that it's a sort of comedy -- in fact, the picture isn't funny at all and its tone is melancholy and enigmatic.  In an opening scene, we see the students at the private school marshalled on a terrace that seems to be suspended hundreds of feet over some kind of mountain gorge -- humid shadowy peaks, ragged with forests and veiled in clouds, lurk in the background.  It's a peculiar setting and reminds me inescapably of the convent in the Himalayan mountains in Pressburger and Powell's Black Narcissus with its immense and abysmal chasm opening up underfoot at the very threshold of the nuns' chapel and dormitories.  The exotic elements aren't foregrounded in Girls will be Girls but they lurk around the edges of the film's narrative.  "Coming of Age" denotes loss of innocence and, even, defloration, and there is inevitably something sad about this topic -- paradise lost is our pre-sexual childhood from which are forcibly expelled by coitus.  The sense of sex as a loss of innocence is captured powerfully in a scene in which the 16-year old heroine masturbates.  Mira, the protagonist, sometimes looks like a child in the movie; in other scenes, she is filmed  to emphasize the womanly contours of her body -- in some shots, we see a petulant little girl with a voluptuous body.  In the masturbation scene, Mira turns her body away from the camera so that the image's emphasis is on her broad hips and buttocks.  When she has satisfied herself, we see that she is clutching a stuffed animal, possibly a teddy bear.  

Mira is the top girl at the school.  She's the number one student in her form and has been appointed as Prefect, that is, a student leader entrusted with keys to the dormitories and the obligation to supervise (and even discipline) other pupils.  In the first scene, she leads the students in a pledge of allegiance to the school and to "our age-old Indian culture."  The education is rigorous.  This is an elite Indian prep school and the students are mercilessly bullied to achieve academic excellence.  Mira is complicit with powers that control the school.  A tall handsome student recently enrolled in the school expresses interest in Mira.  At a meeting of the "Astronomy Club" that the boy has founded -- he is the son of a diplomat to Hong Kong -- Mira flirts with him.  The young man, Srinvas, responds -- he's 18 and has had some sexual experience.  He and Mira engage in furtive meetings that progress from kissing to mutual masturbation to full penetrative sex.  The relationship is complicated by Mira's mother, Anila.  The first time we see Anila, it's obvious that she embodies pure carnal lust -- although it's all bottled up in her voluptuous figure and dark eyes..  Anila is unhappily married and she intervenes aggressively in Mira's relationship with Srinvas, overtly flirting with the handsome young man and, ultimately, protecting her daughter's virginity (unsuccessfully as it turns out) by sharing a bed with Srinvas during sleepovers.  This aspect of the movie, portrayed in a curious matter-of-fact and circumstantial fashion, is alarming -- nothing happens between Mira's boyfriend and Anila so far as we can see, but there's no doubt that Srinvas is impressed by smoldering sexuality of the older woman and, certainly, enjoys sharing a bed with her.  (In one scene, Mira wants Srinvas to wake up so they can study together -- Srinvas refuses to get out of Anila's bed.)  Of course, the sexual relationship distracts Mira from her studies and her school work suffers.  The movie features a peculiar climax.  The other students detect a change in Mira and begin to bully her.  (She has rejected the "proposal" of another boy, a kid with the suggestive name of Hardick.)  A sort of festival involving role reversals occurs -- the teachers either are absent or treated as students; the students assume the role of teachers.  It's called "Teacher's Day."  During this revelry, the kids refuse to recite the school pledge and openly disobey Mira's commands.  Then, in a frightening sequence, a mob of about 20 boys chases Mira, apparently to gang-rape her.  She narrowly escapes, locking herself in a room high in the residential school.  Anila comes to rescue her on a motor bike, a sort of scooter.  Mira is disenchanted with Srinvas who seems to be master manipulator and seducer.  She reconciles with her mother and, in the last scene, we see her anointing her mother's head with oil.  Srinvas tells Mira that every person has a key, referring to the little keys entrusted to Mira as prefect, but also to the key to a person's psychology.  Anila's key is that she wants to be liked for her cooking; Mira's key is that she detests bullshit.  It is implied by the film that Srinvas' key is that he is an unapologetic egoist, interested only in his own pleasure.  

There are some interesting things in this film -- the performance by Preeti Panigrahi as Mira is formidable, moving, and memorable.  Srinvas is first portrayed as a sort of gawky, teenage boy, a science nerd longing for a girlfriend, but, as the film progresses, his character emerges as predatory, manipulative, self-serving -- he is, like his father, a kind of diplomat.  Anila is like a bonfire of lust and you can't take your eyes off her.  Parts of the film are either incoherent or arise in the context of Indian customs that I couldn't understand.  "Teacher's day" which involves elaborate ritual "draping" of saris on the female students is inexplicable.  Mira lives at the residential school but, also, at her mother's home nearby, a sort of mansion.  We don't find out until the climax that Mira's mother is close enough to ride to her rescue on the little motor scooter that has to labor up the switchbacks to eyrie of the school.  The relationship between Mira and her father (and the relationship between Anila and her husband) is vague and hard to grasp.  The father is a complete cipher.  The attack of the boys at the film's climax seems overwrought and unrealistic, a gross overreaction to Mira's imperious dismissal of Hardick.  This sequence reads as some sort of feminist allegory of the price that girl's pay for their sexuality.  I don't have any explanation why a feral mob of twenty or more lads would suddenly pursue the most popular and important girl in the school.  It's certainly not clear when the story is supposed to be taking place.  There are no computers and Mira carries a clunky, walkie-talkie sort of cell phone -- although it's important that she has the cell-phone during the attack on her.  

The film is completely deracinated. Almost all the dialogue is in heavily accented, musical Indian-English but sometimes the characters speak phrases or commands in Hindi.  As a nod to Bollywood, there are two song-and-dance numbers featuring sinuous, serpentine dancing by the two female leads -- however, since the general texture of the movie is realistic, these scenes utilize diegetic sound:  someone turns on a radio or CD player to generate the dance rhythms and singing to which the characters dance.  (I find the dance scenes in Indian movies both silly and incredibly interesting.)  I counted, at least, 26 producing companies for this film, including the Uttarakhand Film Council, BFI, German TV, and the New York State and Brooklyn film authorities.  My guess is that the director, although born in India, lives in either Hollywood or New York.  The film's premiere was a SxSW in Austin, Texas.