Melo

 When he was ten or eleven, Alain Resnais longed to see Henri Bernstein's play, Melo, then all the rage in Paris.  His parents wouldn't take him to the show deeming the play's subject unsuitable for the boy -- it's about adultery among professional musicians.  His parents, themselves, attended and brought home a program over which the boy pored over.  A facsimile of the program appears in the title sequence of Resnais' 1988 film adapting the play to the screen.  A hand turns the pages introducing us the actors in the work and the characters they play.  The cover of the 1929 program bears a sleek art deco design.

Like many of his peers in the French "New Wave", Resnais brought an experimental sensibility to film-making -- he was an innovator and pioneer with respect to the technique that he brought to cinema.  In his early career, Resnais also stretched the boundaries of narrative, working with Alain Robbe-Grillet on his first feature film Last Year at Marienbad and experimenting with fractured, even dream-like mise-en-scene in his later films.  In Melo, and similar films adapting theater works, Resnais seems to be exploring a form of cinema that is self-consciously archaic -- the experiment underway in Melo seems to be an inquiry as to how far film can go in simulating the effects of the classical theater while remaining cinematic.  With a couple of exceptions, Resnais eschew montage in Melo and rarely moves the camera.  Effects changing the audience's focus on events, ordinarily achieved by editing, are achieved by subtle manipulation of light within theatrically staged scenes -- some shots embody as many as 10 to 11 different light cues to guide the viewer's eye through the sequence. Throughout the film, the sets are elaborate but obviously theatrical, painted flats, a night sky with a big silvery moon and twinkling stars stretched on canvas between generic courtyard walls and porches.  The acting style is histrionic and highly expressive.  The play itself is an effective, but antique, museum-piece, not the sort of material that you would expect Resnais to revive (although I think the film is tribute to the director's desire to see this play as a little boy).  Bernstein's play, although well-written and captivating in its own terms, certainly isn't innovative in any way either in form or subject matter or, even, style -- a kind of elevated discourse that reminds me of classic French theater, for instance, Racine or, even, Moliere.  Resnais' taste as a director is perfectly suited to the material -- the movie is a highly refined meditation on the theatrical, also an aspect of the piece's subject matter.  Romaine, the heroine, is always acting, always performing -- and, of course, adultery requires much deceit and strategy, also, I would maintain, a form of acting or performance art.  Illusions are created and sustained by lies or obsession until they are no longer viable -- at that point, tragedy ensues.  Pauses between acts are signified by a shot of a rather baroque curtain drawn across the stage:  the curtain never parts -- it's as much of a set as the other sets in the film.  The question that the closed curtain poses is simple:  what is going on back there?  This is the same question framed by the beautiful faces, particularly of Sabina Azema who plays the film's femme fatale -- what is going on behind that lovely facade?

Two men, Pierre and Marcel, are old friends.  They are both professional violinists.  Marcel is handsome and world-weary -- he is an internationally acclaimed soloist.  Pierre is the first violinist in a regional orchestra -- compared to his friend, he's not a great success.  But Pierre has been fortunate in love -- he is married to the seductive and beautiful Romaine, who plays piano.  Romaine is charming and flirtatious,  After Marcel tells an elaborate story of the collapse of a love affair in Havana (it's an eight minute monologue shot in a single take I believe), Romaine sets out to seduce her husband's friend.  When Pierre -- Romaine calls him "Pierrot", perhaps, an allusion to the morose and lovelorn character of that name in the commedia dell 'arte (recall the melancholy figure in Watteau's great painting) -- goes to the front door to speak with Christiane, Romaine's cousin who likes Pierre, Romaine makes an assignation with Marcel.  Romaine invites Marcel to play a duet with her at his house on the following day.  Uncertain as to Romaine's intent, Marcel invites Pierrot to his house as well.  Romaine, then, says that she isn't interested any more in the rendezvous but reminds Marcel to "keep his solemn promise" to her -- namely, that they will play Brahms' Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major together. The next day, Romaine comes alone to Marcel' elaborately furnished art deco apartment where they play together.  Throughout the film, duet-playing between and man and woman stands as an emblem for sexual intercourse.  At first, Marcel resists Romaine's flirtatious invitation and nobly asserts that he owes a duty to his friend, Pierre.  But, of course, he ends up in bed with Romaine and, in this way, their affair begins.  

It's unclear to what extent, Pierre is aware of the affair.  At one point, he encounters the couple at a rather lavishly appointed night club -- it's all velvet darkness and mirrors.  Pierre is very drunk and behaves in an amiable, if somewhat bemused manner -- he doesn't seem jealous and, perhaps, we are to think that he doesn't understand what he is seeing.  At least, outwardly, his marriage to Romaine is the very paragon of a warm and loving relationship -- although we learn that Pierre would like to have children but something is restraining the couple for fulfilling that wish.  When Marcel has to go on tour for a month, Romaine is distraught and, even, begins trembling uncontrollably as if having a sort of seizure. And as if by some sort of occult infection,Pierre also becomes very ill, sick to the point that he seems about to die. Marcel returns to Paris and Romaine leaves the dying man's bedside to hasten to Marcel's apartment. Christiane, who seems to be in love with Pierre, nurses the sick man and a doctor is called.  Romaine sits in a bar by the Seine writing a final letter to Pierre.  Then, she goes outside in the movie's only exterior shot, walks along the river lit with bright globes of radiance in the otherwise inky darkness, and, descending some stone steps, vanishes.  In the next scene, several years have passed.  Pierre, who has survived his onslaught of illness, is  now married to Christiane by whom he has a child. Pierre goes to Marcel's apartment and shares with him, Romaine's final letter -- it's full of endearments, apologies,, and baby-talk.  Pierre has found a rose-petal pressed between pages in a notebook and, since Marcel is associated with long-stem red roses, now understands that his friend has cuckolded him.  The two men reconcile, playing a violin duet together. 

At the center of the movie is the character of Romaine, who exudes a sort of hysterical sexuality. Although built of steel, she contrives to seem weak and dependent so that men can rescue her.  She's both girlish and mysterious -- at one point, she turns somersaults for desperately ill Pierre to amuse him, but then literally runs away to her lover, Marcel.  The film embodies a kind of typically gallic stance:  it is like Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Sentimental Education, both swooningly and ecstatically romantic while, at the same time, maintaining a sort of jaundiced and ironic perspective on all the swooning and ecstasy.  The film's speeches are all florid and precisely observed declamations in which the speaker exposes his or her debilitating passion while remaining sufficiently cool about the emotion to be able to carefully delineate its features and characteristics.  Resnais uses his camera to optimize the viewer's own emotional response to this material.  His direction is miracle of tact, reserve, decorum, and lavish passion. The film displays the utmost in emotion strictly constrained by the limitations of the theatrical experience.       

Hedda

 Hedda is a 2025 film adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.  The film is reasonably entertaining but tone-deaf to Ibsen's particular ambience of entrapment and anxiety.  The movie compresses Ibsen's script into a debauched all night party with about forty celebrants reveling in a huge Downton Abbey-like mansion complete with a hedge maze for convenient and discrete copulation.  Hedda's party is like something thrown by Jay Gatsby -- it has a wild, lavish aspect with formally dressed young people (and their elders as well) misbehaving in vast baronial halls or on the dark manicured lawns of the mansion or carousing in the aforementioned hedge-maze.  This is vastly different from the milieu characteristic of Ibsen's famous later plays -- in Ibsen, the characters might pretend to be rich but they aren't; everyone is impecunious, in debt, living off the diminishing profits of some half-forgotten and neglected sawmill somewhere in the north near the Arctic Circle.  The parties are generally squalid affairs in which cracks and bleeding fissures open in the landscape of shabby genteel aunts and widows and alcoholic young men.  By contrast, Hedda shows us handsome, self-assured aristocrats, performing for one another at a lavish feast with a dozen servants in evidence -- there's even an upstairs-downstairs aspect to the manor house.  At one point, a servant in the kitchen comments on the debauchery upstairs.  

Hedda Gabler is one of Ibsen's most diabolical and charismatic villains, a lethal narcissist bent on destruction for its own sake.  She flirts with a vicious judge who later tries to blackmail her  (she has blithely taken a shot at the judge with her revolver at the start of the play).  Hedda resurrects a dead sexual relationship with a brilliant, but fragile, alcoholic, snatches his manuscript that everyone proclaims as brilliant and burns the sole copy of the book.  (She claims to do this to support her sexually inert and dimwitted professorial husband -- he won't make tenure if he has to compete with the genius alcoholic.  She get the alcoholic to drink, destroying his sobriety, and, then, when he realizes that he has lost his book, she gives him her pistol so he can shoot himself.  After the alcoholic, Lovborg, is dead, the weapon falls into the hands of the corrupt Judge Brack.  Brack decides to coerce Hedda into sex with him -- if she will become his mistress again, he'll withhold the scandalous evidence that Hedda's gun was the instrument that killed the man. Hedda is not willing to be compelled by any man to do anything and, so, she escapes the trap by killing herself.  Hedda's feckless husband with Lovborg's mistress sets out to reconstruct the lost book, utterly ignoring poor Hedda -- an insult that is another basis for her killing herself.  Ibsen makes this all jump off the page, propelling the plot through a series of misdeeds by Hedda, ranging from the catty and trivial to the murderous.  The movie, more or less, follows this plot but makes a couple adjustments beyond the pretentiously lavish setting in the vast medieval-looking manor.  

Lovborg, the brilliant alcoholic and former lover is played by a woman.  This imparts a lesbian angle to the story.  It also mutes the competition between Lovborg and George Tesman, Hedda's hapless husband -- in the play, he is an authority on something like 14th century Flemish furniture, and portrayed as a weak, pedantic academic.  Lovborg's brilliant book and his second writing in the form of the manuscript that Hedda ultimately burns to ashes seems to sufficiently qualify her for the tenured professorship job that is necessary for George Tesman to survive.  Everyone agrees that Lovborg, if she is really rehabilitated from her alcoholism is a far superior candidate for employment at the University than Tesman. Hedda is a portrayed as a Black woman providing a racial component to the character's discomfiture and debilitating boredom -- her opportunities are severely limited by her race.  But this isn't consistent with the decision to make the libertine, Judge Brack, also a Black man.  If racial discrimination is operative in this environment (posited to be United States in the nineteen fifties) then how is it that Brack has such wealth and power.  The action takes place from dusk to dawn at the glittering party that Hedda hosts.  This gives the movie a unity of time and action that Ibsen doesn't insist upon in his source.  Lovborg wears a ludicrous costume; she's dressed like a milkmaid in the black halter; her breasts occupy separate white bags between the various straps and suspension apparatus holding up her peasant blouse. At times, her nipples are clearly visible through the white breast-bags.  It's garb that makes the actress look more naked and exposed that if she were, in fact, nude.  I don't think anyone would voluntary dress like this -- it's a vulgar and exhibitionistic display.

The movie is pretty good and most audiences will enjoy this steamy melodrama.  But there's nothing particularly distinctive about the picture.  Ibsen manages to make his Hedda a monstrous criminal but, also, a sort of feminist insurgent -- although we are appalled by the things she does (she threatens to light a female rival's hair on fire), we also admire her for her spunk, spirit, and bloodymindedness.  The film achieves the same general effect and, so, on its own terms seems successful.  

Nouvelle Vague

Richard Linklater is a very versatile director with astonishing range.  Most of his pictures have a nervous edge, exhibiting an anxiety that they will tip over into something frankly experimental or avant-garde.  The Texas-based filmmaker wants to please the public and has produced audience-pleasing popular films -- for instance, School of Rock.  But many of his pictures are so conceptual that they feel a bit abstract and dry:  theorems rather than movies -- this was my impression of Boyhood, for instance, a movie so true to life that it was shot over many years so that the actors could age naturally and without make-up or effects.  Even films by Linklater that are popular in design, for instance, Dazed and Confused, are often so strangely aimless that they feel like cinema verite or like movies made by a slacker Renoir. Nouvelle Vague is an example of a Linklater film that is so parametric -- that is, circumscribed by rules imposed on the movie -- that it feels like the working-out of a particularly abstract and schematic problem.  Shot in black-and-white, the movie feels like a documentary and many sequences have the effect of presenting reality in an austere, strangely inconclusive manner -- the style of a documentary without voice-over or, even, a perceptible point of view and that asks the audience to draw its own conclusions from the material presented.  The film's allegiance to the actual facts of events that it dramatizes is obsessive -- actors are cast so that they closely resemble the people actually involved in the material chronicled.  Nouvelle Vague is about Jean Luc Godard directing his first feature film, the iconic "New Wave" movie, Breathless (A bout souffle), released in 1959.  Raoul Coutard shot the movie for Godard and, as an example of Linklater's fidelity to the facts, the actor cast to play the cameraman looks remarkably like him -- you can check this on Wikipedia.  In fact, all the performers look very much like their counterparts in reality -- the actor playing Godard, always wearing sunglasses, is the "spitting image" of the young director.  Similarly, the guy who plays Belmondo has the same goofy face with cartoonishly thick lips; Zoey Deutch who impersonates Jean Seberg also looks remarkably similar to the Iowa-born actress.  Linklater introduces each person with a major role in the making of Breathless -- generally, he has the person stand motionlessly before the camera while a name is superimposed on the image.  Linklater's precision in calling out the names of those involved in the 1959 production extends to make-up artists, the film's editors, and other personnel, including a rogue's gallery for French hustlers involved in wrangling the money necessary for the low-budget feature.  Linklater names (and provides portraits of) those contributing to the picture even though they have no real role in his chronicle as to the film's making.

In summary, Godard with colleagues is writing criticism at Cahiers du Cinema.   His colleague, Francois Truffaut, has just released The 400 Blows to considerable fame. Godard is jealous and wants to make a feature film himself -- hitherto, he has made some animal documentaries and an industrial movie.  He steals money from the till at Cahiers and drives to Cannes to attend the screening of The 400 Blows.  Back in Paris, he peddles a script he has written -- this is the film that would turn out to be A Woman is a Woman.  No one is interested in his script but he has also written a cheap, little film noir with Truffaut.  Truffaut is now famous as a result of The 400 Blows and, therefore, bankable; similarly, Claude Chabrol, also a Cahiers critic, has released a New Wave film, also a hit with audiences, and he agrees to serve as adviser on the movie that will be a free adaptation of the crime script written by Truffaut.  A producer named Beauregarde (they call him "Beau - Beau") puts up some money and establishes a 20 day shooting schedule.  Linklater's film then shows Godard assembling his cast and crew and shooting the movie -- each day is marked by a title on the screen, that "Day One", "Day Two", and so on. Godard wants his actors to improvise and won't tell them their lines until the morning that their scenes will be shot.  (Seberg has just worked with the highly dictatorial Otto Preminger and she's horrified and uncomfortable with Godard's minimalist direction.)  Godard works casually, often calling a stop to production after only afew set-ups and, sometimes, not working at all.  Beau-Beau is afraid that his money will be lost and he and Godard get into a slapstick physical scuffle.  Despite the shambolic aspect of Godard's location-shooting, he is very much in control of the production and, in fact, finishes the movie on time and, apparently, within its budget.  Seberg, who is on the brink of an affair with Belmondo, departs from France to make a Hollywood movie, relieved to escape from the production.  (She despises Godard.)  Linklater's movie ends with Godard directing the police confrontation and shooting with which the movie begins -- this footage requires only Godard to direct and Belmondo with a couple of extras.  Godard sets Belmondo running across a huge field and neglects to yell "cut" so the actor just keeps running.  The movie is finished and screened for its crew and cast; some people are baffled by the film's raw quality, the jump cuts, and intentionally ugly mise-en-scene; others are proud dthat they have worked on what they think is a masterpiece.  Here the movie ends -- there's no payoff as to the film being acclaimed by audiences and critics although a title tells us that the world regarded the movie as the most pure form of the French New Wave, its most characteristic picture, and one of the most influential films in the cinema history. But none of this is dramatized.

The peculiarity of Linklater's picture is best measured but what is not in the movie.  There are no explicit backstage romances and, in fact, the implied attraction between Belmondo and Seberg is merely a hint.  (Seberg has her bossy husband with her to supervise her career activities.)  The film's production is without any real crises.  Everything goes according to Godard's sketchy but, apparently, adequate plans.  There is no backstory about any of the characters -- they are defined by their role in the making of the movie.  There's no suspense and no drama.  Godard is a complete enigma -- he seems to have no private life at all.  We see him steal some money from the Cahiers' cash drawer but the act has no consequences.  He gives some self-mythologizing interviews but it's seems evident that he's just making up the incidents from his past.  He eats, breathes and sweats cinema and his dialogue consists almost entirely of enigmatic aphorisms about film. We don't know where he lives or whether he has a girlfriend -- we never see his eyes; they are always hidden by dark glasses even when he attends movie screenings.  There is no conflict on the set -- people do what Godard tells them to do and, other than the Keystone Kops scuffle with Beau-Beau, everyone gets along professionally.  Seberg's loathing for Godard is expressed to her husband but no one else.  Godard proclaims that everything about a film should be astonishing and unexpected -- but Linklater's movie is very orderly and lucid; it's predictable to the point of perversity.  Linklater doesn't direct in the style of early Godard:  there are no sudden bursts of unmotivated music, no weird punning titles, very few jump cuts or sequences that are either way too short or way too long.  The sound track is diegetic, consisting of rather smarmy pop and rock and roll tunes played in bars or on the set.  Godard doesn't fear failure but is supremely confident that he will be able to complete the movie on-time.  The great puzzle about this movie, a very interesting film if you know Breathless and Godard, is why it was made in the first place.  I don't see that it adds anything to Breathless nor does it help us to better understand Godard.  I liked the movie because I'm interested in Godard.  I think that if you don't share my interest, you will be baffled by this picture.  Linklater puts in reel markers, although, of course, contemporary films so far as I know aren't projected in reels but somehow displayed digitally -- about every twenty minutes, a mark will flash on the screen signaling that the projectionist should get ready to change the reel -- this is a homage to the way movies were projected in the early 1960's and, of course, before.  I don't know the intent of this film and it haunts me that I can't account for why the picture should even exist.  

Black Rabbit

 Black Rabbit is a cathedral of heroic manly acting, it's an epic of quivering, fist-fighting masculine histrionics.  The two combatants in this eight episode agon on Netflix are Jason Bateman (Vince in the show) and Jude Law playing his younger brother, Jake.  The two principals howl abuse at one another, embrace, wrestle, butt heads, and emote to the point that the audiences is exhausted and, in fact, yearns to see one or the other rubbed out by the complex narrative involving loan sharking, gambling, sexual harassment, and every variety of greed, lust, and betrayal.  The mini-series -- it has eight episodes -- is at pains to show that the two brothers are in love with one another, have an impregnable bond, although each hates, despises, and loathes the other.  Law and Bateman chew up the scenery, foreheads furrowed and jaws set in virile defiance and rage.  In one particularly egregious scene, the two men find themselves stripped to their underpants and, nonetheless, engage in titanic name-calling and mutual denunciation -- it's turgid and ridiculous but, I suppose, if you have a hankering for this kind of thing its pretty good; the actors do a fine job but there's just too much of it.  In fact, the show is overlong by three hour-long episodes, all bloated with backstory and flashbacks and repetitive, melodramatic battles between Vince and Jake, but it's actually compelling, quite interesting, and, despite my reservations about the project (On the Waterfront with not one but two bellowing Marlon Brandos) good enough to sustain attention for eight hours.  It's a wildly ambitious mini-series and full of so much material that a lot of the stuff thrown up at the wall sticks and coheres into an exciting story.  

Apparently, the show is based on real-life scandals afflicting a trendy restaurant in NYC, the Spotted Pig, a sexual harassment venue featuring a so-called "rape room" and a celebrity chef, Mario Batali.  Jake is successfully running a popular restaurant on Water Street under the majestic arch of the Brooklyn Bridge.  This place called "The Black Rabbit" has a celebrity chef who is famous for her 50 dollar hamburgers, strange-looking victuals that seem to have a marrow bone stuck through the meat -- how do they apply the bun?  Unfortunately, a evil painter (no doubt based on some NYC celebrity artist) is raping the comely blonde waitresses in the bar, knocking them out with date-rape drugs and taking advantage of the poor girls.  (The painter has a vicious fixer who covers up all of his misdeeds.)  When one of the girls, Anna, is raped, she doesn't show up for work and Jake, who is seemingly unaware of the bad stuff happening in his establishment, fires her.  This leads to a complex series of developments that begin to unravel "the Black Rabbit".  Adding to the chaos is the sudden reappearance of the ne'er-do-well Vince, Jake's older brother, who is a degenerate gambler and petty, small-time criminal.  Vince as once a partner in the Black Rabbit and is bitter about being bought out and expelled from the lucrative venture.  There are various other partners, including a wealthy professional athlete and possibly also a rapper, named Wes.  Vince gets in trouble with a cruel loan shark, Mancuso, and, when he can't pay off the loan, Mancuso's son, Junior, with a beefy henchman, corners Vince in an elevator and cuts off his pinky finger as punishment for not timely paying his debt.  Ultimately, Vince and Jake burn down their deceased mother's house for insurance money but this cash is all lost by Vince who gambles it away.  For some reason, a famous jewelry producer decides to advertise a million dollars worth of gems, necklaces, diamond-encrusted wrist watches at the Black Rabbit.  Vince still looking for money ends up putting on a disguise and, with an accomplice, robbing his own brother's business.  Needless to say, the heist turns into a gunbattle in which several of the main characters are either killed or wounded.  Mancuso still wants his money and so he chases both Vince and Jake relentlessly for the last two episodes -- this sequence is like the breathless and lethal games of  tag that occupy almost all of One Battle After Another, and this sort of thing, if done well (and it's done well in Black Rabbit) is very exciting.  There are all sorts of baroque details:  the main gangster is a mute, who can't talk and communicates through sign language; there are parallel plots involving fathers and sons and, even, an unmistakable intimation that the loan shark is one of the boys' father himself.  There are flashy molls, car chases, dire threats, blackmail, attempted and successful murders, and a man killed by a child dropping a bowling ball on his head.  This is one of those shows that is so self-important, it can't bring itself to just end -- it has a long coda scored to a famous hit ("We'll make Manhattan an island of joy") from many years ago and lots of luminous imagery of the plot's survivors now doing well by doing good. 

The show is very strangely photographed. Every single shot uses focus to concentrate the viewer's attention on the part of the image significant to the story.  To accomplish this effect, characters often appear behind veils of blurry foreground objects.  In some shots, two-thirds or, even, three-fourths of the image is occluded by blurry obstructions in the foreground.  In other shots, both foreground and background are left unfocused so that only a sliver of space in the middle distance is clear.  The effect is subliminal -- although I noticed it after about 15 minutes. The entire picture uses this style of photography which is somewhat akin to the old iris effects in silent movies.  I don't like this way of making a picture because it fetters the viewer's eye and seems to me to be manipulative and coercive -- I want the visual freedom to roam with my eyes across the background and foreground as well.  Black Rabbit  has about four directors distributed among its episodes including Jason Bateman and Laura Linney -- but every single scene in the picture, no matter the director, is framed with big swaths of the image intentionally blurred.  The visual style of the series is dire and gloomy, handheld treks through steam baths and chaotic kitchens, labyrinths of skyscrapers filmed by drones silently whirring over the urban landscape -- it's mostly dark and the shots layered with blur around a sandwich slice of focus enforce an effect of monotonous claustrophobia on the viewer.  The series is interesting but overwrought and seriously flawed.

Cosi Fan Tutte

 After two world wars had soured western civilization, Mozart's opera buffa Cosi Fan Tutte was revived.  Before the middle of the 20th century, the opera was regarded as too indecent and immoral to be comfortably performed.  Certainly, the Cosi Fan Tutte's corrosive cynicism and misogyny poses problems even today.  For this reason, the Minnesota Opera Company's recent production of the show cheats a bit with respect to the ending, the conclusion to the work that is generally regarded as unsatisfactory and, even, so cheerfully amoral as to make modern audiences uncomfortable.  In the Minnesota Opera adaptation, the audience is invited to vote at the end of Act I, selecting one of three outcomes:  the two couples resume their relations as depicted in the first scene or the two couples switch partners or the two couples, realizing their amorous sport has irrevocably damaged their relationships, decide to part and go their separate ways.  (Mozart, it should be noted, is an advocate for forgiveness in amorous affairs -- he has the men and women forgive one another their transgressions and restores them to the status quo at the outset of the libretto.  Of course, Mozart and DaPonte's capricious and sexually promiscuous bagatelle is scored to some of the most beautiful music that the composer ever wrote and the texture of the opera is incredibly lush, voluptuous, and eerily logical.

Cosi Fan Tutte's plot is quite simple and, as I've suggested, worked out like a mathematical theorem.  The story turns on the ancient and implausible "test of love" premise -- this is a plot in which a man or several men perversely decide to test the faithfulness of their lovers.  This is always a bad idea.  The men generally discover that, as far as the women, are concerned one lover is as good as another -- love partners, at least, among the young and uncommitted are, more or less, completely fungible.  The plot can take a tragic turn if the jealous men, humiliated by the outcome of the trial of love, decide to murder or beat the women, or end of killing each other.  At minimum, the trial of love results in a disenchantment of the concept of romantic love -- despite sighs and pledges of devotion for eternity, human beings are fallible and, inevitably, they follow their desires to the disadvantage of their plighted troth.  

In the Minnesota Opera's show, two sisters, Fiodilige ("F") and Dorabella ("D") are said to be from Faribault and engaged respectivly to two dimwitted lovers Guglielmo ("G") and Ferrando ("F"), identified as coming from Anoka.  A philosopher says that women are all unfaithful and that he will propose a trial of their fidelity that will result in decisive proof of this proposition within one day.  (In this production's imagining, the women are corporate executive types who seem to be running some kind of PR firm.  The men are avid gamers and slackers, it seems.) The philosopher, Don Alfonso, tells the girls that their boyfriends, who are soldiers, have been deployed over seas.  After much sonorous lamenting, Male F and G depart, only to reappear a minute later as bearded rascals who look like the members of the band ZZ Top.  (Mozart described the men as being in disguise as bearded Albanians -- that seems a bit racist and politically incorrect for 2025 and so the boys in disguise are not provided with any ethnic identity.  The men lay siege to the women who remain steadfastly faithful.  Male F and G, then, up the ante, pretending to swallow arsenic in their despondency.  Despina, the women's office manager (she's a saucy maid in DaPonte's libretto), appears in disguise as a quack doctor and uses a static electricity magnet to shock the men, who are pretending to be comatose, into consciousness.  This is all very funny and, after a chorus, Act One ends with Don Alfonso's wager still outstanding:  the girls have proved their virtue and their lovers feel vindicated.

(Any vote on the plot taken at the opera's half-time would be based on inconclusive evidence:  for the first half of the three house opera, the women are true to their vows.)  

In the second half of the show, Male F easily woos and wins Fiodiligi -- Male F gloats over the ease with which he seduced G's girlfriend, attributing this to his erotic superiority.  In fact Despina, the office manager, has been cajoling the girls into commencing an "innocent" flirtation with the two hirsute lads. D holds out longer, but there's a full moon and the park is full of courting lovers and ultimately she succumbs to G's courting.  Despina, pretending to be a notary and squawking like a chicken, appears and draws up marriage contracts for Male F to wed F and G to wed D.  In other words, the couples have blithely switched romantic partners.  D sings several arias about her loneliness and withstands G's efforts to woo her, but, ultimately, consents to his blandishments.  At this point, the hairy-faced G  and male F shed their disguises and return from the fictional wars where they were supposedly deployed.  Mozart has Don Alfonso counsel forgiveness, Despina is silenced, and the couples revert to their original formation (F with G, D with male F).

The opera is blithe,funny, and tuneful.  The staging is a bit limp.  There are two thresholds on wheels on stage that look like nothing other than metal detectors at an airport.  People keeping passing through these two doorways, taking care to move through them, because there are notional walls enclosing the thresholds -- it's an irritating set and distracting to see the performers walk along strange pathways to always use the metal detector entries.  There are no sets to speak of other some office furniture of a particularly bland type.  Large blue and green colorfields close off the stage and the scenery and costumes have some of the whimsical brightly colored aspects of the sets famously used at Glyndebourne.  The lighting was clear and, also, largely bright.  The seduction of Dorabella is staged against a pale purplish night sky in which a big moon is projected.  I thought the singing was, by and large, serviceable, but, certainly, not on par with the performers appearing in the Summer Festival in Des Moines.

The audience, apparently, voted to vindicate the two women who are much put upon in this opera by their deceitful lovers.  At the end of the show, the women slap their lovers on the face and depart, apparently, rejecting their boyfriends and their grotesque trial of love that has led to all of this confusion.  This is, in keeping, with modern criticism that sides with the women against the men who mount this absurd and dangerous game.  Mozart has written the last scene with a number of reversals to that, it seems, that any of the three endings that the situation presages could be plausibly staged.  (I didn't vote because I couldn't find the amenity to cast my ballot; I  wonder how the other shows turned out.)  In other period performances of this show, the libretto seems exceptionally confusing and hard to follow.  In this production, the two lovers look very different -- one is tall and lanky, the other is short, stocky, and fat.   Therefore, it's easy to keep to lovers apart in your mind.  Likewise, the women are color-coded with respect to their garments and accessories and so we can distinguish between.them. Despite its length, the show was continuously amusing.  My daughter Angelica was enthralled by the whole thing and applauded enthusiastically.

The Lowdown

 The Lowdown is an eight-part neo-noir series set in Tulsa and produced by Ethan Hawke.  Hawke plays the show's protagonist, a scruffy investigative journalist named Lee Raybon.  Raybon fancies himself a "Truthstorian"-- that is, a sort of muckraking historian committed to uncovering the uncomfortable truths about Tulsa and its environs.  He writes for a life-style periodical, a bit like the granddaddy of all such 'zines, The Village Voice.  At one time, these sorts of publications supported a diverse population of columnists, muckraking journalists, city-hall reporters, and sex advice writers.  The Lowdown is dated in that these periodicals have all gone the way of the dinosaurs, rendered extinct by the internet -- even the redoubtable Village Voice is a mere shadow of its former self.  Accordingly, the program requires an initial suspension of disbelief -- the series' politics and milieu make The Lowdown feel like its set in the late seventies or early eighties, but, in fact, I think, it's supposed to be contemporary.  The show's somewhat archaic (and obsolete) ambience is considerably heightened by its soundtrack, featuring slightly sinister tunes by J.J. Cale as well as some country-western songs by David Alan Coe and the like.  The series has a hip, outlaw perspective -- it's full of references to Faulkner, Tulsa's own Joe Brainard (a famous gay painter and writer), Larry Clarke (who made Kids in Tulsa), and the pulp crime writer, Jim Thompson.  It's the kind of show rife with allusions that flatters the viewer by making him or her feel like a hipster "in the know" as to the local "home-cooking" that the program presents.  The faded disreputable neighborhoods in Tulsa, under the shadow of the downtown skyscrapers built by oil companies, are vividly rendered and the program has a funky improvised feeling.  One of the producers, Sterling Harjo, is known for another show set in Oklahoma, Reservation Dogs, and the cast is enlivened by a number of Native American actors, some of whom are very funny -- the late Graham Greene, a renowned Indian actor, has a small cameo in one of the episodes.  There are a number of effective Black character actors in the show -- in fact, Lee Raybon,  the hero, has a black sidekick and aspects of series invoke the buddy comedies on the seventies and eighties as well.  

The plot is predictable and many of the shows genre conventions are completely stereotypical.  The crusading "Truthstorian" comes equipped with an attractive and sassy ex-wife and perky, feisty teenage daughter.  (The girl helps her father solve the crime or explicate the corrupt situation that the program shows us.)  There is a big Black man with an eyepatch who seems to be hosting a perpetual smoky barbecue party with backroom where deals get done.  Kyle McLaughlin is excellent as a seemingly corrupt politician who is running for governor of the State and entangled with a network of White supremacists and skin-head Nazis.  The politician's brother, a gay cowboy, has been found dead.  Raybon knows the man slightly -- he once came into Raybon's used bookstore and, in a dreamlike scene, states the show's premise:  "There is only one plot:  Things aren't what they seem." citing Jim Thompson, the crime writer.  Investigating the gay cowboy's death, Raybon stumbles into a complicated conspiracy which has to do with eliminating the cowboy (the bad guys have staged his death as a suicide) so as to implement a real estate transaction involving land stolen from the Osage Indians.  (Raybon who is quick with allusions describes the plot as being like Chinatown,)  Raybon encounters various crooked corporate executives and religious fanatics -- the episodes are full of memorable eccentric characters.  About every two shows, the bad guys warn Raybon to stop snooping around and give him a beating to impress the point on him.  But Raybon is indefatigable and ultimately publishes an essay uncovering the plot.  There are some refreshingly unexpected twists in the last episode which imparts to the whole thing a mood of low-key, comic ebullience -- there are some violent scenes and one gruesome sequence in which a man is tarred and feathered (sustaining terrible burns) but the show doesn't get too dire and the tone remains reasonably light-hearted.  The ending features a wedding and one of the main characters, shown to be a villain, weepily performing the song "Luckenbach, Texas" in a Tulsa dive bar -- the woman can't sing but performs the entire song.  

The show is shaggy and digresses frequently.  The digressions which have boozy, blurry, dream quality and are the best things in the show.  The program treats us to extended sequences in which people just get drunk and converse without moving the plot forward at all; there's an extended seduction in which the characters slowly get drunk enough to fall into bed together.  These idiosyncratic parts of The Lowdown are where the show really shines -- it's unhurried, charming, and atmospheric; watching these scenes the viewer feels enveloped in a haze of cannabis smoke or half-drunk on good bourbon.  The progam's glory is its cast:  Jeanne Tripplehorn plays the adulterous wife of the poor dead cowboy (a part played effectively by the soft-spoken Tim Blake Nelson); Tracy Letts, who is the palest of all pale faces, plays a corporate assassin and Peter Dinklage appears in one show as a berserker used book shop owner who was previously in business with Raybon.  There are many Native American actors who are very funny.  In the last episode, some key scenes are shot in the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa with its weird melange of solomonic, twisted columns and Spanish Mission style colonnades.  The wedding at the end takes place in the Philbrook's impressive ornamental gardens.  (The Philbrook Museum is located in the mansion once owned by the Philips Petroleum mogul, Wade Philips.)

The Low Down is an excellent series and I recommend it enthusiastically.  

Certain Women

 Certain Women (2016) is an omnibus film based on three-stories about Montana people written by Maile Meloy.  On the evidence of the movie, Meloy seems to be a rather disconsolate writer, specializing in stories that are heavily influenced by the disaffected and minimalist work of Raymond Carver.  In prose of this sort, a character is brought to the brink of some recognition by interactions with others -- the text acknowledges the recognition that, nonetheless, doesn't really change anything for protagonist.  Life is too subtle and too complex for tales or short stories and so these are works in which the notion of a story is, in effect, refuted -- something happens and it is significant, but it has no actual effect other than, perhaps, to make a sad or troubled character even more sad and troubled.  I've confirmed this impression by reading several stories by Meloy available on the internet, including one called "Travis, B." which is the source for the third of the stories adapted by Kelly Reichardt in her movie.  People collide with other people; happiness proves to be an illusion:  sadder but wiser, the characters soldier on.  Reichardt's chilly, dispassionate approach to this material is lucid, wonderfully acted and staged, and, ultimately, as inconsequential as the stories themselves.  I like Reichardt's approach to filmmaking, very classical and pure and superbly observed.  But Certain Women may be a little too unresolved for many moviegoers looking for something more passionate or dramatic.  

A train crosses a snowy treeless prairie under a brooding range of cliffs.  In Livingston, Montana (although we have to surmise the location), a lawyer named Laura Wells is in bed with her scruffy boyfriend.  (He turns out to be the unfaithful husband of the woman featured in the second vignette.)  It's frighteningly cold outside -- dogs are getting their tongues and snouts frozen to their water bowls.  Laura (played by Laura Dern) is having trouble with a client.  The middle-aged man suffered a brain injury in a workplace accident.  He has apparently elected his remedy by settling his injury claims with the work comp carrier.  But he has ongoing problems, headaches and double vision and emotional lability, for which he hasn't been compensated.  The man (named Fuller) desperately wants to sue his employer but is precluded from making this claim by Montana's statutory law.  Fuller won't accept the opinion of Laura that he can't proceed on the basis of the doctrine of worker's compensation exclusivity.  She sets the man and his estranged wife up with a well-known personal injury lawyer in Billings, Montana. That lawyer confirms Laura's opinion.  On the way back to Livingston, the disappointed client begins talking about murdering people.  That night, he takes a man hostage at the clinic and won't release him.  He keeps asking for Laura and, so, she obliges the police by agreeing to parlay with the aggrieved client and the Big Man, his hostage, who is a Samoan who claims to be royalty.  The mercurial client releases the Big Man and persuades Laura to help him escape from the cops who have surrounded the business.  But Laura betrays him to the police and he is handcuffed and hauled away.

Without missing a beat Reichardt next shows us a young woman jogging in a snowy woods.  Some construction stakes have been set in the frozen meadow.  The young woman (Gina played by Michelle Phillips) is living with her husband Ryan (Laura's boyfriend) in a sort of semi-permanent tent at the edge of meadow.  The couple, who have a sullen teenage daughter, are planning to build a house in the woods.  They go to the home of an old man named Albert who has lived in a house since 1966 next to a big heap of sandstone, the ruins of a pioneer schoolhouse.  Albert seems slightly demented but he agrees to give them the sandstone blocks to use in the construction of their home.  Later, Gina goes to Albert's house where men are loading the shattered sandstone slabs onto a truck.  Albert looks out from the picture window of his house, seemingly confused by what is happening on his property.  We see him in long shot and can't exactly make out his face and expression.  When Gina waves to him, he doesn't respond.  He has, for some reason, protected the heap of stones for more than 50 years and, it appears, that losing that pile of rock has somehow shattered him as well.

An Indian woman feeds horses on a ranch.  She is alone and taciturn.  A little dog runs alongside her as she does her chores.  One night, she happens on a meeting at the public school where a group of a half-dozen teachers are waiting for a teacher to lecture them on "school law."  A  young woman named Beth (Kristen Stuart) conducts the hour-long course.  She has driven all the way to Belfry, Montana from Livingston, a trip that takes her four hours coming and four hours going back home.  The class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the drive, through mountains and snowtorm, is horrendous. After the class, the ranch hand talks to the teacher and they go to a truck stop to eat.  The teacher drives off to her other job at a law firm in Livingston.  Three times the class meets, these scenes punctuated by images of Jamie, the Indian ranchhand feeding horses.  On the third night, Jamie rides her horse to the class and, after the lesson, she offers Beth a ride on the animal to the cafe at the truck stop.  Jamie may be in love with Beth but she's too shy to reveal her feelings.   On the fourth night, Beth doesn't appear.  A man teaches the class announcing that the drive was too "arduous" for Beth -- Beth apparently thought the class was in Belgrade, a place much closer to Livingston then Belfry.   Jamie is alarmed that she will never see Beth again.  She drives to Livingston, reaching town late at night.  She can't find Beth and so sleeps in her pickup.  The next morning, she makes inquiries about Beth and is treated rudely.  However, she finds where Beth works and meets the woman in the parking lot. (We glimpse Laura Wells arriving at work at this law firm.)  Jamie says that she drove to Livingston because she couldn't stand the thought of not seeing Beth again.  Beth is literally speechless but, certainly, not interested in pursuing a relationship with Jamie.  Jamie says that she has to feed the horses at the ranch and drives away in her pickup truck. Exhausted, she falls asleep and the truck leaves the road, rolling to a stop in a snowy field.  

There is a short coda that shows Laura Wells with her brain-damaged client visiting at the prison where he is confined.  He asks her to write to him and says that the letter can be short and circumstantial -- "not a tome," he says.  Gina is hosting a football game view party in her tent at the site where her house will be built.  She looks at the pile of sandstone rock.  Jamie is alone with the little dog feeding horses. 

The story involving Jamie and Beth is extremely moving.  This effect is largely due to the presence of the great actress Lily Gladstone playing the part of the Indian woman and ranchhand.  (Gladstone was in Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon and she is a radiant actress that seems hypnotize the camera -- you can't take your eyes off her.)  The Montana landscapes are intensely realistic, expanses of grey and brown woods in fields dusted by snow with blue and white mountains jumbled together on the horizon.  It's not showy or spectacular, but, rather, a kind of indefinable beauty that resides in the empty, cold terrain.  There's not much going on in these stories and this, of course, makes you attend to them all the more closely -- because nothing seems to be happening we attend to tiny gestures, hesitations in phrasing, the implications of futile, inconsequential conversation.  The film exudes the "mind of Winter" as it was phrased by Wallace Stevens -- it iscold, rational, logical, each tale a sort of icy theorem.  

(In "Travis, B" published in the New Yorker, Reichardt has made the lonely male protagonist, his gait marred by polio, an American Indian woman.  Heterosexual encounters become homosexual in the film.  This transposition, for some reason, gives the story an even greater poignancy.)

They all Laughed

 There must be something wrong with me.  Most people praise Peter Bogdanovich's They all Laughed, a romantic comedy from 1981 as blithe, charming, and witty with a faint strain of sweet melancholy.  Bogdanovich, also, admired the film; he regarded it as his best and most fully accomplished work.  But I'm unable to join this chorus of admiration.  The film is so weightless and without consequence that I struggled to remain attentive to its complicated plot,   The picture involves a trio of private dicks tailing two beautiful women on suspicion of adultery.  However, in Bogdanovich's fantasy, all beautiful women are, more or less, instantly available for sex.  Therefore, in the context of New York, around 1980, detectives would not be required.  Rather, every woman between the ages of 18 and 60 would simply be presumed to be sexually promiscuous.  A jealous husband wouldn't have to go to the expense of hiring a private eye -- the promiscuity is open, apparent, publicly obvious and every husband is similarly guilty. In Bogdanovich's romantic fantasy, everyone is always doing it with everyone else and, even, small children are aware of their parent's infidelity and, even, complicit with it.  My critique of the film's plausibility betrays an unpleasant strain of voyeuristic puritanism in me; indignation at the idea that sexuality is wholly liberated except not for me or those in my circle.  Perhaps, this is the basis for my inability to see the merit in They all Laughed.

For the film's first ten minutes, we have no real idea what is going on.  There are gaggles of beautiful women and several men seem to be stalking them; the men signal to one another on Manhattan's busy streets and tail the girls hoping not to be seen.  The three detectives are played by Ben Gazzara (John Russo), John Ritter as the clumsy, naive Charles, bespectacled and obviously intended as a surrogate for Bogdanovich, and a man named Blaine Novak playing Arthur Brodsky.  Brodsky is a "head", always smoking pot, and he has an enormous frizzy mane of hair, wears shades, and affects the role of a pot-head -- he speaks in weird jargon referring to the women that they are tailing as "pre-bop", "post-bop", and "ex-bop", meaning looking for a sex, post-coital, and divorced.  All three men work at the Odyssey Detective Agency, a business run by an aging, angry Greek boss (who is cheating on his wife with the comely secretary) -- there's a Howard Hawks' aspect to the detective agency: it's like a version of the newspaper offices in His Girl Friday.  The women that the private dicks are tailing are played by Audrey Hepburn who looks melancholy and a bit withered in this role -- it must be one of her last parts -- and Dorothy Stratten, the former Playboy Playmate of the year, who is radiantly beautiful and funny.  (The rape and murder of Stratten by her pimp-boyfriend, the subject of Bob Fosse's Star 80, hangs heavily over the film which is dedicated to her memory; the 20-year old girl was killed before the film was released imparting a ghoulish aura to what would otherwise be an idyllic, lush, and funny performance.  This aura scuttled the whole picture which was not timely released.  Bogdanovich, for whom the film was literally a labor of love -- he was Dorothy Stratten's boyfriend -- retrieved the film from the studios, tried to market it himself, and failed horribly, resulting in the movie being cast into the shadows as a loser, the sort of film all righteous Hollywood producers abhor.  In a 2006 commentary on the film in which Wes Anderson interviews Bogdanovich, the older man says that he wanted to play the part of Charles, John Ritter's role, but 'was too old for Stratten' -- the irony is that Bogdanovich was involved in a torrid affair with Stratten during the making of the film.)  In the course of the movie, Ben Gazzara's divorced tom-cat falls in love with Audrey Hepburn's character --  but the relationship is doomed; she is a very wealthy socialite with a teenage son and she returns to her husband. John Ritter falls in love with Dorothy Stratten and she seems to separate from her boyfriend, a figure who is really only glimpsed in one scene as a bearish presence at the townhouse where the young woman lives.  Christy, a country-western singer at City Limits, is one of John Russo's girlfriends; when Gazzara's character abandons her to pursue Audrey Hepburn, Christy tries to seduce Charles (Ritter).  She almost succeeds but, after a night, dancing to hillbilly music at City Limits, Christy falls in love with Dorothy Stratten's boyfriend, a hirsute guy that, I think, people call "the gaucho" -- we have seen "the gaucho" courting Dorothy Stratten's character at the Algonquin Hotel.  There is a wedding at the end of the film; the romantic roundelay has produced two, more or less, committed couples at least for the moment:  Stratten with Ritter and Christy with the Gaucho.  The hippie doper has a group of, more or less, persistent and aggressive girlfriends -- every woman that he meets seems to fall into bed with him but, then, suffers pangs of homicidal jealousy.  John Russo (Ben Gazzara) has to let Audrey Hepburn depart on a Sikorsky helicopter with her oligarch husband -- the helicopter leaves from the Battery heliport.  He solaces himself with a gorgeous cab driver with whom he has earlier had casual relations.  They depart Manhattan for New Jersey with a plan to get drunk in the suburbs. (Patti Hansen who plays the sexy lady cab driver married Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones in 1983 and gave up modeling and acting.)

The film is well-made with atmospheric shots of New York City in 1980.  The World Trade Center towers over downtown Manhattan.  The film must have been made during a craze for roller skating.  The characters skate along the sidewalks and spin in circles on huge roller-skating rink that looks like a discotheque. (cf. Boogie Nights).  The women are all fantastically beautiful and sexy.  The dialogue is clever and there is a fabulous sound track comprised of country-western tunes (Bogdanovich had learned to love the music while shooting The Last Picture Show), Frank Sinatra singing Gershwin tunes, and little bit of classical music.  It's all graceful, balletic, and utterly shallow.  In principle I should like this movie, but I don't for some reason.  I suppose this is a defect in my sensibility.