Parthenope

 The great Italian director, Paolo Sorrentino, works in images and doesn't seem to have mastered the craft of narrative.  This is a minor deficiency -- Fellini was one of world's most famous and finest directors and, at least after La Strada, more or less abandoned coherent narrative.  Sorrentino is a disciple of Fellini and, similarly, uninterested in devising a plot for his films -- instead, he orchestrates moods using lavish, opulent cinematography, operatic characters, and surreal, baffling imagery.  Parthenope (2023) is one of his most characteristic works -- like its leading lady, the film's sheer beauty has been held against it.  Surly critics note the production involvement of Saint Laurent in the movie's credits and accuse the picture of being as empty and glamorous as a perfume ad.  The movie is excellent, but, as with late Fellini, often a matter of taste and, certainly, a test of the viewer's "negative capability", that is, willingness to abide with mystery and enigma.  

Parthenope is a beautiful young woman.  The film bearing her name depicts her life from birth through old age -- the movie ends with her retirement from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Trento where she has become a beloved and influential professor.  She is born in the water of a lagoon, a blue basin near the Palazzo where her wealthy family lives.  Her godfather, the Commandante, names her Parthenope for the sea-nymph who sought to seduce Odysseus with her voice, failed, and, then, drowned herself in the sea.  Her body washed up at the site of Naples and she is regarded as the mythic patron to the city.  (There are images in renaissance emblem books of water from Parthenope's breasts quenching the furious fires of Vesuvius).  Parthenope's supernatural beauty entrances her brother Raimondo as well as the housekeeper's handsome son.  Parthenope, like the young Jesus in the Temple, amazes the doctors at the university with her sagacity and self-assurance.  She adulates Marotto, an aging professor of anthropology and expresses a wish to become a scholar herself.  With her brother, Raimondo, and the maid's son, she goes to the island of Capri where she meets, by amazing coincidence (Sorrentino's plotting is very perfunctory) John Cheever, played by Gary Oldman.  (Parthenope loves Cheever's writing.)  When  she asks Cheever to walk with her, the elderly depressed man says that the won't because he "doesn't want to rob her of a second of her youth."  An oligarch whose helicopter hovers over the beach where she bathes, courts her unsuccessfully -- when she rejects him, he bluntly tells her that she is very stupid.  Ultimately, Parthenope has sex with the maid's gorgeous son; her brother, Raimondo, is heart-broken and his incestuous desire causes him to commit suicide.  During his funeral in Naples, his hearse is met by a hideous-looking VW bus spewing fumes from arthropoid spider-leg nozzles (the bus looks like a centipede) -- this is disinfectant against cholera which has come to Naples.  Parthenope, who excels in her studies in anthropology, drops out of school briefly because a talent agent has told her she could be an actress  (The talent agent, always swathed in veils or steam in her steambath, tries to seduce Parthenope, also unsuccessfully.)   Parthenope is told to visit a woman (stage-)named Greta Cool.  This is a "diva", a famous actress on the order of Sophia Loren.  At a celebration, Cool denounces Naples, which is her home town, as being corrupt, shabby, venal, and wretched.  This leads to Cool's confrontation with a City Father, a sort of gnome or ogre, whom she kicks repeatedly in the shins and, then, tries to bite off his ear.  He knocks off her red wig revealing that Greta Cool suffers from alopecia.  Discussion with Greta Cool leads Parthenope to renounce her ambitions to be an actress.  She tours Naples' teeming slums with a mafia boss who leads her through the mean streets to a pool hall where a pale young man and young woman are forced to copulate in public, some sort of weird ritual featuring the "fusion" of two houses of criminals in the Gomorrha ghetto.  Parthenope is pregnant with the mob boss's child but gets an abortion.  She returns to the long-suffering Professor Marotto to complete the doctoral dissertation -- Marotto tells her to write on the cultural and anthropological aspects of the miracle of San Gennaro.  Parthenope goes to the Cathedral to watch the miracle, which involves the liquefaction on Gennaro's feast-day of a clot of Christ's blood.  The miracle fails but a woman in the congregation spills her menstrual blood on the cathedral floor -- the coming of her period is another sort of miracle.  (The sequence is very redolent of the miraculous apparition of the virgin that causes a riot in a rainstorm in La Dolce Vita.)  Parthenope visits the Bishop of Naples, Teserone in his luxurious apartments.  He decks her naked body with jewels from the Cathedral's treasury and puts his hands on her genitals.  At that moment, the camera retreats from the love scene, through the various spectacular corridors of the palace, to the San Gennaro relic where we hear a faint dripping as if the clot of blood has, at least, partially liquefied.  Professor Marotto retires.  He lives alone with his disabled son.  Marotto's wife has left him and the old man sleeps on a cot  in the room where his son is confined.  Parthenope visits Marotto's home and is ushered into the room where the retarded boy is watching TV.  (He's like a grotesque Italian version of Beavis or Butthead; he crows about the Tv announcer saying the word "asshole.")  The boy is a vast ballon of marble-white flesh, a huge swollen mass the size of house with a tiny smirking face on the front of his globular head.  Parthenope declares that the boy is "beautiful" and strokes his marmoreal flesh.  In a brief epilogue, we see Parthenope, now about seventy, retiring from the anthropology department where two young women declare her influence to have been decisive in their lives.  That night, Parthenope goes outside and sees a huge parade -- the enthusiastic supporters of Naples soccer team are marching in the street under fireworks.  The team has won the Italian equivalent of the world series.  Parthenope is excited herself and says:  "Much time has passed.  But I'm still here.  I defend the City."  (Sorrentino is an avid soccer fan; the movie he directed before this film The Hand of God is a coming-of-age picture keyed to soccer and a controversial goal by Diego Maradona in Mexico City in 1986, the so-called "hand of God" goal.)

The movie is wonderful but, also, somewhat indecipherable.  It many ways it resembles Sorrentino's equally bizarre and enigmatic series made for HBO, The Young Pope (2016)and The Old Pope (2019)-- indeed, some scenes are almost identical including the horror-movie reveal of Stefano, Marotto's deformed and grotesque son.  Many allusions are lost on non-Italian viewers -- for instance, the frog-like Commandante represents Achille Lauro, the Italian right wing political figure and shipping magnate.  The mafia scenes are particularly difficult to interpret and there is a showy student riot complete with slow-motion molotov cocktails exploding -- I don't know what this represents.  There are two leit motifs:  men project onto Parthenope their own ideas and thoughts, often asking her "What are you thinking?"  Everyone wants to know what is going on behind her gorgeous face.  Another more academic aspect of the film is a question that keeps being posed:  What is anthropology?  After various inadequate responses, the question is answered:  "Seeing."  With that statement, Sorrentino aligns anthropology with film-making -- his movies are a form of anthropology.  Of course, Sorrentino's break-out picture is called The Great Beauty and, I think, the rather picaresque narrative in Pathenope is about the destiny of beauty in our world.  Celesta Dalla Porta plays Parthenope and, of course, she is a sight to behold.  

Excited Delirium: Alien: Earth and M, Son of the Century

 This is a true story. When I was in college, I entered a radio contest for free tickets to the Minnesota premiere of Ridley Scott's Alien.  I no longer recall what the contest involved, probably just making a phone call and praising the radio station (it was old KQRS in St. Louis Park), but to my surprise, I won, and found myself with two tickets to the opening night show at the Skyway Theater on Hennepin Avenue.  I had admired Ridley Scott's first feature film, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's short story, "The Duelists".  With my girlfriend, I attended the show with the movie projected to a packed urban audience -- it was an unpleasant experience, too intense, and the picture scared the hell out of me.  Later, I read a review of the movie that said that it was a disappointment, "just a gorilla in a haunted house horror movie."  That description cheered me up and can also be applied to the TV limited series Alien: Earth (2025) broadcast on HULU.  The show is written by Noah Hawley, the author of the very good scripts for the Fargo knock-off series.  Hawley is pretty skilled but Alien: Earth, so far as I can see, is a disappointment although the show has had good reviews and is impressively produced.  Hawley has the difficult task of expanding on a premise that remains, now, fifty years later, still just "a gorilla on a rampage in a haunted house."  He tricks out the show with a complicated plot involving intrigue and competition between two homicidal corporations and devises a good villain (the monsters have long since ceased to be villainous), a smarmy technocrat on the order of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk named "Boy Cavalier".  (Hawley's villain in the most recent Fargo series, played by the Golem-like Jon Hamm was one of the best bad guys in recent memory.)  The corporations are distinguished by their different approaches to AI:  one corp. uses so-called "hybrids", that is human clones in which the consciousnesses of dying people are installed; the other corp. produces "cyborgs" --  that is, half-human and half-machine personages with enhanced strength and intelligence.  These two different types of artificial beings are ostensibly important but don't seem central to the plot, a story about a gang of 'hybrids' confronting the space monsters in the context of some kind of convoluted intrigue involving industrial espionage.  A space ship transporting a menagerie of monstrous critters from deep space crashes into a huge tenement somewhere on earth -- it may be Singapore or Indonesia.  The monsters who come in various forms have escaped on the space ship and massacred the crew.  Of course, the crash into the apartment building allows the critters to escape, although, somehow, they are, more or less, captured and confined in some sort of laboratory, apparently on the island where Boy Cavalier is engaged in his sinister experiments -- in a parody of Peter Pan, Boy Cavalier has inserted the souls of a group of dying children into young adult bodies, a metamorphosis that much confuses the children who find themselves suddenly sexually mature and no longer riddled with cancer.  This experiment is conducted on a lush island that looks a bit like the environs of Jurassic Park.  The leader of the lost boys (and girls) on the island is a comely maiden named "Wendy" in homage to the pastiche of Peter Pan.  Wendy is super-smart.  She figures out how to communicate with the monsters and spends the last part of the series chatting-up the bloodthirsty critters and transforming them into her private army.  Wendy's also equipped with a fully human brother who has to be protected from the machinations of the wicked Boy Cavalier and the onslaughts of the monsters.  The creatures include some centipede-shaped bugs, malign walking stick insects like genus Argosarchus Horridus from New Zealand, ticks that creep into you bodily orifices and suck out all your fluids from the inside, and, of course, the so-called Xenomorph which exists in three instars:  octopoidal face-grabber, chest-burster, and the primate-like, long-tailed adult xenomorph with is sloppy hydraulically-automated jaws and acid blood -- the Xenomorph, of course, is the canonical alien and well-known to audiences from films in the fifty year franchise.  The best monster is a blob with squid-like tentacles and a globular, mucous head in which a half-dozen blood shot eyes are floating.  This beast is very fleet of foot, dances around like a tentacular Fred Astaire, ambushes you, and attaching to the side of your head gouges out one of your eyes -- the parasite, then, inserts its spherical six-eyed head into the bloody vacated socket whereupon all six eyes, then, become one great blood shot orb malignly surveying the world from the head of the person or creature (in one case a goat) who has been so colonized.  The monsters are great, but the special effects seem shaky -- the show doesn't seem to have much confidence in them and stages all the creature sequences the standard dim blue shadows that filmmakers use to conceal sketchy FX.  As in the original movie, there are corridors full of flashing red lights, gusts of steam, dark shadows, and jump-scares.  There's a lot of mayhem on screen but I found it weirdly soothing, soporific even -- I spent half my time ostensibly watching this show asleep, seized by slumbers just as the horrors became most intense.  I suppose this was because I didn't care about of the characters, felt nothing when the monsters reduced them to heaps of gory innards, and, although I detested Boy Cavalier, my distaste for the character was apparently not enough to keep me awake.  In the last episode, Wendy uses her powers to communicate with the monsters to unleash them on the various factotums loyal to Boy Cavalier -- apparently, the money had run out at this late stage because the climactic creature attacks are shown on surveillance camera footage, that is more grey-blue darkness with very little contrast, a very disappointing ending to the show. (It's been renewed and I expect we'll get, at least, another season of this stuff.)  

M - Son of the Century is a baffling biopic of Mussolini.  It's well-acted but seems to be completely pointless and mindnumbingly repetitive.  Mussolini preens and struts and, then, delivers about three extended speeches per episode.  When the Fascist isn't speaking, he's inciting his thugs to beat up and murder socialists in bouts of spectacularly choreographed street-fighting.  Each show features several battles, staged like incidents in World War One -- hordes of blackshirted goons beat socialists (in one case with rigid batons of codfish), gouge out their eyes, or set them on fire.  Mussolini watches theses fracases from afar, then, his libido stirred by all the ultra-violence -- it looks like poorly lit outtakes from A Clockwork Orange -- brutishly paws and fucks his malevolent-looking flapper girlfriend.  Mussolini also has a long-suffering wife, Rachelle, at home -- she has frizzy red hair and he also has sex with her, slaps her around, and, then, has to deal with her attempts to kill him with a revolver that she hides under her pillow.  Mussolini's rival is the poet Gabriel  D'Annunzio who is also a flying ace.  If anything D'Annunzio is farther to the right then Benito.  Mussolini is very prone to speechifying -- he gives speeches in the streets, to crowds of his thugs, and, then, in the Italian parliament.  His speeches are all the same -- in fact, each episode is, more or less, the same.  Mussolini schemes and like an Italian Richard III sucks the viewer into his confidence, declaiming his various Machiavellian strategies.  Between speeches, the Black Shirts beat everyone up and shoot many dead.  Mussolini has sex with his girlfriend, using her so harshly that she seems about half-dead when its time for the Duce to hurry to parliament or a political meeting to give another speech.  This material, which doesn't ever cohere into a plot, is extravagantly filmed -- the style of the movie is like Baz Luhrmann on speed:  it's all elaborate tracking shots, weird camera angles, sweaty close-ups like a Sergio Leone movie, with a soundtrack that is either operatic (Puccini and Wagner are much favored) or techno-rock.  The sets are seething with smoke and fog and gouts of fire (a lot like the corridors in Alien: Earth) and there are rickety scaffoldings everywhere, tenement-like slums, and misty riversides through which horseman ride in columns -- these scenes look like Bertolucci's 1900.  It's all either stylized or staged in elaborately decorated rococo palaces.  This show presents a single relentlessly frenzied libidinal texture that's almost completely featureless:  bouts of gruesome violence, rapes, and orations by Mussolini.  It's completely soporific -- I have never been able to stay awake for a single episode:  I'm always asleep at about 30 minutes into the hour-long shows, awakened by the theme music at the end, or, even, more belatedly by the opera or techno-rock accompanying the next episode.  Once, after I had fallen asleep to my dismay, I forced myself to watch the part of the episode during which I had been asleep.  I wondered if it would be different from what I saw before succumbing to slumber -- it was not:  Mussolini struts around, puffs out his chest, gives a long speech and, then, his thugs beat a score of socialists to death while the hero has sex with his mistress.  The program is spectacularly made, full of startling and wonderful images, and completely without any interest -- so far as I can tell it's just the same thing over and over.  (This is an Italian- British coproduction shot in Italian and directed by the Englishman Joe Wright).

Velasco and Gatsby at 100: MIA

 It's my ambition to spend the waning years of my life looking at art and reading books on art history and  criticism.  Too late, it seems.  My legs hurt now when I amble around art museums and my eyes don't focus well on the pictures -- it seems that I spend most of my time with my eyeglasses in my hand, stooped over to read labels.  Gradually, it seems that my experience of museum art is more about the labels on the wall than the pictures which seem increasingly blurry to me.  I've always favored graphic work, prints and engravings, and, indeed, this may be the only kind of image that I see clearly -- I can push my face up close to the image and, without my glasses, inspect the hachure and bite of the burin as exhibited by the print or engraving.  It would be nice to visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art every month, but I can't seem to make the time and, so, I am at the museum usually at intervals of three months.  I've been going to MIA since I was six and have been there many times and the place is very familiar to me although, on each occasion, I find something new and intriguing.  On October 2, after a brief business meeting in St. Paul, I drove over to the Institute, planning to see just one or two galleries before driving back to Austin.  But, as is always the case, I spent more time than I expected and, even, saw some things worthy of reporting to my readers.  Hence, this note.

The Mexican landscape artist, Jose Maria Velasco, lived from1840 to 1912, dying two years after the first great revolution of a century of revolutions, the Mexican Revolution, began in 1910.  Velasco is well-known, even revered in his home country, but, almost, completely unknown in the United States.  About 20 works are on exhibit at the MIA; these range from small watercolors and studies (rocks, jungle vegetation, and clouds) to heroically sized canvases that are akin in subject matter and photo-realist detail to paintings by the American artists Bierstadt, Moran, and Fredric Erwin Church.  (To my eyes, Velasco is most similar to Church with a little admixture of the visionary strain visible in Thomas Cole.)  The selection of Velasco paintings include a number of perspectives on Mexican snow-capped mountains looming over the Vale of Mexico, a grim-looking apocalyptic waterspout (the picture is very small -- if it were larger, the thing would be overwhelming) and the eruption of a volcano.  There's a startling picture of a feathery silver comet hanging over of one of Mexico's eerie endorheic lakes -- the huge comet is reflected in the dismal water trapped in a desert basin.  (The label treats the painting as a harbinger of Mexican revolution -- the image portrays a celestial apparition about twenty years before the canvas was made at the time of the uprising.  Velasco painted desert scenes with cactus and textile mills occupying the middle distance.  A Cardon tree in Oaxaca looks like a platter held up on a trunk and bristling with sixty saquaro cactuses -- a little fellow is visible at the foot of the surrealistic tree to provide scale.  A small painting of what Velasco calls a "rustic bridge" looks a bit like Menzel, it's a jerry-rigged collection of splintery planks hanging in trees drooping over a pond of murky water; however, the bridge, almost indiscernible in the tattered trees seems to have a pale skeleton tangled up in it -- on closer inspection, the skeleton is just a group of white anthropomorphic roots, although one must query why those roots have suddenly sprouted from the side of the tree about 10 feet above its base.  Velasco's masterpiece is a majestic canvas called "The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isobel", a large-scale work that the artist painted for an exhibition in Vienna and that exists in, at least, three versions, two of which are in the show.  Meticulously painted, the image, when reproduced for a book or Art Institute flyer, seems to be a photograph -- at full size, the canvas covers the wall (it's dimensions are 161 x 228 cm) and reveals its brush strokes.  But, viewed from middle distance, the picture has a photo-realist quality.  In the second iteration of the picture (1875), a woman carrying a baby walks along the stony hillside, two dogs and a small boy dancing in front of her;  the woman imparts a sense of scale to the huge barren landscape spread out below the hill.  In the middle distance, a pale grid with minute buildings marks the cathedral and outbuildings sacred to the Virgin of Guadalupe at the Tepec hill; farther away, a white stain on the valley floor, like an encrustation of salt, represents Mexico City -- the shallow lakes near the city extend to the right across a brown treeless steppe stretching to twin volcanoes on the horizon.  The 1877 version of the scene is brighter; the texture of rocky hills and slopes is more visible.  There are no figures.  A skeletal nopal cactus stands roughly where the woman and dogs were earlier located; to the right, a hawk bearing some creature in its beak skates across a gorge cast into deep shadow.  The bird of prey and the nopal cactus refer to the Aztec origin story; after emerging from caves from far to the north, the Aztec marched across the deserts for generations until they reached the promised land, a valley with a great salty lake filling its basin and an eagle perched on a nopal devouring a serpent.

Gatsby at 100 occupies two small rooms.  The exhibit consists of paintings and objects from the Institute collection accompanied by quotations from Fitzgerald's novel.  There's a first edition of the book with its spooky cover showing two disembodied eyes hovering over the title and a blue, hazy landscape.  I don't think the juxtaposition of art and citations from the book is particularly successful -- the images seem mostly unrelated to the passages from the novel.  But there are some fine things in the exhibit.  A large 1928 lithograph of a very freely drawn nude by Matisse ("Nude, Left Hand over Shoulder") is particularly fine.  A huge photograph showing mostly horizon with two farms at opposite ends of panorama is striking -- 2017 Tei Nguyen.  A lithograph entitled "Minneapolis" (Louis Lozowick, 1925) show the city as square slab towers and great pillars of grain elevators, their columns round as the ranks of a pipe organ.  

Every time I walk the corridors and exhibition spaces of the MIA, I discover new things, little treasures that I haven't seen before.  An eerie late painting by Winslow Homer looks like Robert Motherwell; it's called "Cape Trinity, Soqueney River."  A ribbon of moonlight illumines a huge black bluff overlooking water in which an odd, untethered strip of pale reflection shows.  The label pursues the post hoc fallacy suggesting that the big, abstract black forms prefigure Homer's death in 1910 -- but the canvas was painted in 1904; it's not a premonition of anything but Abstract Expressionism forty-five years later.  In a big room full of architectural models -- usually a place I ignore -- there's a metal ornament marked "Consultation Rooms" designed by Sullivan for the Farmers National Bank in Owatonna.  The "t" letters in the legend are an architect's tee-square -- the thing is green, verdant with ornamentation, a beautiful object.  Upstairs where the American folk paintings are hung, there's a huge canvas that seems to be a copy of Alfred Bierstadt's iconic painting, "The Last of the Buffalo".  This painting is a parody by someone named Keith Monkman made in 2009 and is called the "Death of Adonis".  A blonde cowboy, a bit like a young George Armstrong Custer, is falling backward from his steed.  Another bison hunter lies dead on the ground.  Aphrodite, portrayed as a sort of Vegas showgirl, with red spike heels and a naked ass squats next to the corpse.  Another blonde cowboy ("cowboi"?) is being gored by a big, furious buffalo.  (The image is cartoonish but striking and, particularly interesting, in light of another show in the Institute, a small room full of very strange renaissance prints called "The Weirdening of the Renaissance" -- the title suggests the jocular, cavalier tone on the explanatory labels.  In one of the engravings, a nymph is scrubbing away at Aphrodite's private parts while Adonis, halfway transformed into a stag, struts forward, advancing like a post man carrying a letter or some kind of perverse butler or valet. (In the background of the engraving, poor Adonis, now fully metamorphosed into a stag is being torn apart by his own dogs.)

I was thrilled to find my favorite painting in the whole world on show, the miniature Indian image of "Lovers Watching an Approaching Thunderstorm".  This small image was made between 1780 and 1790 by an anonymous craftsman of so-called Kangra School (workers in Himachal Pradish wherever that may be.)  This picture is something that I would be happy to gaze upon forever, or, until my retina detaches under the pressure of the image, or until my eyesight is destroyed by wet (or dry) macular degeneration.  It is the most wonderful thing and has not been on display for several years and so I am ecstatic to see it again.