Rain

Astounding and a revelation: “Rain” is a film adaptation of a novel by Somerset Maugham directed by Lewis Milestone and released in 1932. The film features Joan Crawford as a prostitute, Sadie Thompson, and Walter Huston as a missionary who attempts to convert her. Guy Kibbe plays Trader Joe and the film, set in Pago Pago, is a famous example of early sound-era kitsch...except that the damned thing is completely contrary to everything that the viewer expects, subtle, challenging, and, ultimately, disturbing. Clearly, “Rain” is intended as a rejoinder to Von Sternberg’s “The Blue Angel” and, in fact, a dream double-feature would screen these two films, both equally great, I think, back-to-back. In “The Blue Angel”, Lola Lola seduces and, then, humiliates an exemplar of haute bourgeois society, poor Professor Unrat, played by Emil Jannings. In “Rain,” Walter Huston as a relentlessly righteous missionary seems to humiliate and chasten Sadie Thompson, bending her to his will. In the German film, “The Blue Angel” the narrative is a critique of bourgeois values; in “Rain”, by contrast, the prostitutes seems to succumb to the preaching of the missionary and agrees to repent and accept penitentiary imprisonment as evidence of her atonement. The question animating any analysis of these two films is this: what does the director, the film-maker, think about his alluring prostitute heroine? In “The Blue Angel,” Von Sternberg sides with the whore against polite society -- although Jannings’ professor is destroyed, he is, at least, liberated by his destruction, he dies but the cage in which he is confined is also wrecked. In “Rain,” the situation is more complex, and, dare I say, more profound: the prostitute seems to accede to the will of the missionary -- she can not evade his ministrations and humbles herself to his preaching. And, yet, the movie’s ambiguity is remarkable and can not be resolved -- has the prostitute really been converted or is she merely feigning obedience to the will of God? And doesn’t the denouement, shocking even in 2014, suggest that the prostitute, like Lola Lola wins the day? The fundamental question is this: whose will is the stronger -- the whore or the missionary? a theme articulated by Trader Joe who reads Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” each night before going to bed. The complexity of this film is enhanced by imagery of Joan Crawford, draped in skin-tight black garments and back-lit -- she looks like Aimee Semple MacPherson and has the same decadent erotic frisson, the same seductive appeal -- the most powerfully sexual women at the end of the Jazz Era (and the film laments prohibition) are like Mary Magdalene, former sinners turned into saints, or vice-versa. In many scenes, Joan Crawford’s Sadie wears an ill-fitting plaid garment, much too tight across her lower belly and hips -- this is a pre-Code film and imagery of this kind would not reappear in Hollywood until the mid-sixties. The fact that Crawford’s gowns don’t really fit and, indeed, are unflattering to her rather mannish physique is intentional -- she isn’t comfortable in her whore’s garments and they don't, in fact, fit her very well, a point that is thematic to the film. Milestone, who directed “All Quiet on the Western Front” a couple years before, seems to have been the Scorsese of the early thirties -- his camera movements are delirious (he favors 360 degree tracking shots) and violent whip-pans. In an early sequence, the camera whips to the right at high speed, cutting from men marching in that direction to natives carrying a canoe on their shoulders and moving to the left. The effect is disorienting, but establishes a sense of spatial expressionism that is integral to the film: we can’t really figure out where we are -- four other whip-pans in fast succession, all snapping to to the right, establish the major characters. At the melodramatic climax of the film, the camera focuses on Walter Huston’s face, suddenly contorted with an odd asymmetrical leer, and, then, the camera whips to the left -- a sinister turn, one might say -- signifying the sudden and calamitous resolution of the film. Throughout the movie, rain pours down and many scenes are almost inaudible because of the rush and roar of falling water. The rain gushes out of penis-shaped downspouts and the downpour is a symbolic backdrop to the super-heated confrontations between the characters. This film is incredibly subversive -- it rouses strong feelings about vice, virtue, and hypocrisy and seems to endorse Hollywood norms as to morality, a position that is surprising: lip-service paid by Bablyon go Jerusalem -- after all, there is nothing more fundamentally subversive in Hollywood than a film that endorses Christian morality -- and, yet, in fact, the movie takes a completely unanticipated and surprising turn. This is the kind of film that we would watch in University film studies classes had it been made in Berlin in the twenties or France in the thirties. Unjustly neglected, I think, “Rain” is one of the greatest films of the thirties.

Inside Llewen Davis

Ostensibly about the Greenwich Village folk music scene in 1961, the Coen brothers film, "Inside Llewen Davis," is about something more fundamental, mysterious, and enigmatic. The movie explores two closely interrelated and baffling questions: How is it that some people are destined to bad luck? and, conversely, why does fortune inexplicably favor one man and not another? Claude Levi-Strauss famously said that some subjects are "good to think with". The Coen brothers portrait of Llewen Davis, a bad man with a sweet voice, is "good to think with" -- watching it,we are forced to consider a great and awful subject, the workings of providence in human affairs. Davis is a folk singer, talented enough but unable to make a living. When we first meet him, we have the sense that something inexplicable and terrible has happened to him. A ghostly figure assails him in the alley behind the coffee shop where he has been performing and knocks him down -- the attacker is shrouded in the darkest shadow: he looks a bit like Baron Samedhi, the voodoo loa, trickster, an emissary of death and the dark powers. We don't know exactly why Davis is assaulted, but the way that the scene is staged suggests that he richly deserves the injury inflicted upon him. Later, we learn that Davis is one-half of a folk singing duo that has released an unsuccessful record and that his partner has killed himself. The film's purpose is to raise questions, not answer them -- it remains ambiguous throughout the movie as to whether Davis' rage and dysfunctional egotism is a traumatic reaction to his partner's death, whether the man's suicide simply functions as an excuse for Davis' misconduct, or whether, in fact, the anti-hero's feckless and irresponsible behavior has induced his partner to hurl himself from the George Washington Bridge. We can't decide and the film's ambiguity on this and other points is part of its uncanny richness. Certainly, Davis is a wretched fellow and deserves to be punished: he is the kind of man who will try to cadge money for a girl friend's abortion from the woman's husband. But the film's stark progression of calamities befalling Davis doesn't appear to proceed necessarily from anything that the hero does or fails to do -- rather, Davis is cursed simply because of who he is. And the Coen brothers relentless (one might say Talmudic) study of this theme, the curse that has befallen Davis, engenders the film's phantasmagoric and allegorical features. Critics misunderstand this movie if they assess "Inside Llewen Davis" according to the canons of ordinary realistic narrative film making. In fact, the film demands to be understood in light of ancient classical archetypes refracted through the sensibility of Franz Kafka. Some writers have denounced the film on the basis that nothing significant happens in it. This is to misunderstand the film's genre -- the picture is an allegory of a kind of stagnant damnation in which literally nothing can occur. Davis is trapped in a time-loop; the movie ends exactly where it begins with a reprise of the scene with the mysterious assailant in the alleyway. Davis' bad luck is that he is a seaman who can't ever get to the sea; a merchant sailor without a boat; a man who can't escape the bad luck that has trapped him without resources and made him homeless. Everything in the picture is designed to make the Kafkaesque point that Davis is imprisoned by his bad luck and his entire milieu is a form of solitary confinement -- we see this expressed in the ramshackle squalor of the office of Davis' agent, a kind of Jewish purgatory with yellow caricature pictures of the old, miserly man on the wall and giant heaps of moldering paper on the desk. The apartments in the Village are comically tiny and their hallways converge to nightmarish points where doors on opposing walls that face one another like the set decorations in an expressionistic film like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." A trip to Chicago lands Davis in a club called "The Gate of Horn", a real Chicago folk venue and, also, a reference to the source of true dreams derived from the Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid. (The Coen's delight in references to their previous musical, "O Brother Where Art Thou," a film that was claimed to be a free adaptation of "Homer's Odyssey" -- "Inside Llewen Davis" features a cat called "Ulysses" and John Goodman reprising his role as the malevolent Tiresias figure, a prophet who pronounces his malediction on the doomed Davis. Unlike Homer's Odysseus who couldn't get home from his voyages on the wine-dark sea, poor Davis can't even escape the city -- he's an Odysseus who never even reaches the harbor.) Indeed, the concept of "old music" ("musica antica")-- deployed for a laugh during a nightmarish dinner party -- is symbolically central to the film: folk music is an inauthentic form of nostalgia for a past that never existed. Davis' failure to escape his environment, his peculiar doom is reflected in the music that he plays -- songs that are neither old nor new, songs that can't progress, music that is trapped, somehow, in a rut. There is something subtly wrong about the folk songs in the film -- they are somehow trapped and willfully, even, perversely, antiquarian, further, evidence of the peculiar paralysis that afflicts Davis. Even the film's astounding color design reflects the tone of paralysis and stagnation established by the film's non-narrative narrative: the entire movie is designed in monochrome, wintry greys, snow white, cold brown -- it's like an entire movie defined by the color scheme in the picture on the cover of Bob Dylan's second, and most famous, album, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" -- a image that the film duplicates with scary accuracy in several shots. Contrapuntal to Davis' misfortune, the Coen brothers stage a curious subplot -- "Felix" (the fortunate) cat. This aspect of the film is cited extensively in trailers promoting the movie, creating anxiety in me that the otherwise acerbic Coens' had succumbed to cat-video kitsch. Fortunately, my worst fears on this point are not realized by the film. The cat (or cats) are filmed in a way that emphasizes feline agility and indifference -- there are several close-ups of the animal glaring at the camera in an unnerving way. Like Little Blackie in "True Grit," the cat seems strangely autonomous and occult. In a film about bad luck, about being "snake-bitten," the episodes involving the cat are staged in a way to suggest that the animal is a messenger from the gods, a creature with nine-lives that will always finds its way home -- a contrast to Davis' dismal situation: he seems to have barely one life, he is lost with no direction home and, indeed, unlike the cat, ultimately homeless. (The scene in which Davis confronts a film poster for Disney's "The Incredible Journey" triggers powerful and emotional recollections in a person my age -- an allusion that I would suspect that younger viewers don't recognize and can't decipher. This sort of hermeticism is integral to the Coen brother mise-en-scene: another example is a reference to Al Milgram, the doyenne of the University of Minnesota Film Society when I attended college in the early and mid-seventies: Adam Driver plays a cowboy folk-singer with the stage-name Al Cooper. Cooper is revealed to be Arthur Milgram, although like Bob Dylan he plans on permanently changing his name -- hence, we have "Al" (Cooper) Milgram," a secret and self-indulgent allusion that delights me but that means nothing to just about everyone else attending the film.) The cat that finds its way home and Bob Dylan, who makes an appearance in the film's penultimate sequence, implicate the film's second, and equally, troubling question: why are some fortune? Why do some people have good luck? Bob Dylan's singing completely lacks the suave finesse of the other folk singers shown in the film. So why is it that he will become famous and wealthy and beloved beyond all measure while others equally talented, perhaps, will labor forever in the vineyards without any recompense at all? The Coen brothers answer is no answer at all -- we don't know why some succeed and others fail. It has everything to do with luck and luck is inscrutable. Llewen Davis' misfortune is so thoroughgoing and complete as to seem majestic. It's like the miseries inflicted on Job. With respect to this theme, "Inside Llewen Davis" (the title, by the way is a complete misnomer -- we never get inside him at all) bookends the Coen brothers' other film on the subject of theodicy, "A Serious Man." The protagonist of "A Serious Man," the beleagured physicist, also involved with cats -- he lectures on Schoedinger's cat in his quantum mechanics class -- is a mysteriously good, humble and virtuous man. But he's as unlucky as Llewen Davis and everything goes wrong for him -- he is beset by woes that seem to emanate from the indecipherable will of God and that have nothing to do with his ethics. "Inside Llewen Davis" reverses this formula -- it shows a bad and immoral man, surrounded by (some) mysteriously kind and virtuous people, afflicted with all sorts of misfortunes. (One of the pleasures of the Coen brothers' mature films is their willingness to portray simple virtue -- the scene in which the benevolent and kindly Gorfeins' welcome Davis into their home, feed him and offer him a place to sleep, after he has lost their cat, deceived them, and caused a horrific scene at an earlier dinner party, is surprisingly very moving: this aspect of the film has Biblical feeling, complete with imagery of a menorah prominently displayed in the background of many of the shots.) Taken together, "A Serious Man" and "Inside Llewen Davis" constitute a meditation on the role of luck in human affairs, a sort of modernist study of the Book of Job. Neither your virtue nor your sin will avail you against bad fortune: the curse that John Goodman's junkie, chauffered through the snowy wastelands by the wholly enigmatic Johnny Five, pronounces upon Llewen Davis is both prospective and retroactive: it takes away his future and his past happiness. The film proceeds in a greyish fog of ambiguity: in one sequence, Llewen Davis visits his elderly father who seems to be wholly demented and uncommunicative. Davis strums his guitar and sings for the old man and, momentarily, the glazed and indifferent look in the demented patient's eyes relaxes -- for a second, the man seems to come alive, an extraordinarily subtle and powerful effect achieved entirely through an indescribable, slight change in the way that the actor moves his head and focuses his gaze. We seem to see the Orphic effect of music: art brings the dead to life. But, then, Davis becomes agitated, rushes from the room, and tells the attendants that the old man "needs cleaning up." Is the momentary change in the old sailor a sign that he is hearing the music or just the effect of a messy bowel movement? The film's lacerating ambiguity requires that we consider both possibilities.

Diary of a Country Priest

Critics speak of Robert Bresson's 1950 "Diary of a Country Priest" in reverent stained glass tones. There is often a hushed quality about this criticism, as if the writer were hesitant to discuss what should be ineffable. In fact, "Diary of a Country Priest" is reasonably entertaining and not significantly different in appearance, at least, from conventional Hollywood and European films of its time. The picture is not ponderous or austere in its design. In fact, if anything, the movie is a bit too expansive, contains too many confrontations and subplots and is briskly, if elliptically constructed -- the movie proceeds by way of short, disconnected tableaux-like scenes, generally concluding with a fade to black. If anything, too much material is crammed into a film that seems slightly too short for its ambitions. The result is that the movie seems to stutter slightly -- it is episodic and a little rushed: one calamity proceeding quickly after another in a procession of, more or less, unbroken misery for the doomed country priest. (Bresson's initial cut of this very literal adaptation of Bernanos' novel was more than three hours long and the highly condensed and efficient narrative style exhibited in the 115 minute final cut, an approach to cinema that characterizes all the director's later works, here seems almost accidental, a consequence of ruthless pruning required by the studio before the film was commercially released.) An unnamed young priest appears at a hamlet called Ambricourt where, immediately, all of his parishoners despise and taunt him. The young man seems a little unearthly with a huge and pale spherical head surmounting a stick-like body -- the poor fellow, mysteriously ill with "stomach trouble," looks something like a waxen lollipop. (Pacing about the barren countryside in his jet-black soutaine he looks uncanny, like the figure of Death in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal".) At first, the priest's congregation bullies him and the priest appears to be weak and tentative; he seeks counsel from a wiser and older priest, the Priest of Torcy, who provides a kind of running commentary on his young colleague's travails. The old priest warns the young man against seeking to be liked and says that the maintaining order and discipline in the parish is imperative: every night, the darkness, the Priest of Torcy says, undoes the works of the day. At first, we dislike the callous and rather inquisitorial Priest of Torcy, but as the film develops we grasp that his common-sense and worldly approach to the ministry contrasts starkly with the protagonist's unworldly sanctity - and not always to the benefit of the young priest whose relentless self-doubt and suffering becomes, on occasion, annoying and masochistic. Bresson's genius is allowing both perspectives to exist simulataneously: the young priest is too good for the world and his ministry seems to result in an unbroken succession of misfortunes -- and, yet, at the same time, the hero is undoubtedly some sort of saint, convincingly holy and intensely passionate about his faith. (There is no point in heaping additional praise upon Claude Laydu whose performance as the priest of Ambricourt is beyond reproach, miraculous in itself.) Everyone misunderstands the young man and, in fact, even the film's viewers may have some doubts about him: the young man subsists entirely on old bread boiled in wine and, although at first this seems to be evidence of his holiness, some of the characters, including the Priest of Torcy, think that he is also an alcoholic, the son of alcoholic parents, we learn, and born, as his older colleague, says "pickled in the stuff." (In a characteristically French touch, the Priest of Torcy suggests that the young man would do much better if he were to drink a higher quality wine.) As he wanders through the desolate country, collapsing in the mud, his congregation attributes these misadventures to drunkenness. At the film's midpoint, the country priest achieves a great spiritual victory, converting a woman who has fallen away from her faith because of her baby son's death. The scene involving the confrontation between the priest and this woman, an embittered countess, possesses a remarkable, and thrilling, power -- it is a duel to death between the priest and his quarry, the wounded woman, and one of the most exciting sequences ever committed to film. But the priest's success in this mortal combat with the countess seems to result in her death and he is, then, immediately blamed for engaging in "spiritual blackmail" and imagined to be complicit in the woman's demise. And, indeed, it is both true that the priest saved the woman's soul, accepting the film's theological framework, and brought her peace, while, also, mercilessly bullying her and engaging in questionable tactics to restore her to faith. This is emblematic for the entire film: no good deed committed by the priest goes unpunished and he is continuously misunderstood on all levels by just about everyone he encounters. Further, although there is tangible evidence that the priest might adduce as to his merit -- actual testimonials in writing from people he has helped -- the priest is unwilling to use this ammunition against his well-situated and relentless foes. The film's dialogue is extraordinarily profound -- the priest and those that he opposes continuously say the most startling and brilliant and emotionally moving things to one another. Ultimately, the poor fellow departs his parish, is diagnosed with stomach cancer, a medical conclusion that the audience, particularly those who have seen Kurosawa's "Ikiru" produced in the same year, has long seen looming, and dies. Very late in the film, Bresson (following Bernanos) introduces a dissolute and possibly drug-addicted ex-seminarian and his compassionate mistress into the plot -- this development attenuates some of the force of the film and it seems a bit odd that the priest dies alone and miserable in a squalid apartment far from his equally wretched country parish. Here fideltity to the novel seems to me to slightly weaken the film. Bresson's title is pedantically and literally developed: the movie is not so much about events narrated "in" the diary of the country priest, but, in fact, about the diary itself: in the opening shot, we see the priest begin writing in the diary, and about every three or four minutes, the film dissolves between episodes into another shot of the young man writing in his journal. When the dying priest can no longer hold his diary in his hands and drops the pages to the floor, the film ends. The priest's diary entries are recited on the soundtrack while we see him writing and, then, the events described in the journal are also dramatized pictorially -- hence, we see the priest's story acted-out before us, while at the same time, the narrative is both intoned and simultaneously shown to be written in ink on paper by way of large close-ups of the priest's pen inscribing words in his diary. This curious tripling of the narration (voice-over, written text, and picture) gives the movie its odd sacramental quality -- events have an eerie weight because they are shown, spoken, and written: this pleonastic quality to the film has the effect of giving the picture a massive, impenetrable gravity. The acting is superb and Bresson's camera placement is quietly effective, typically close shots of the priest against a blurred and indistinct background. The script is so highly literate that it would be a pleasure to quote pages and pages of the dialogue: Sin, someone says, is blessed if it teaches us shame; a foreign legionaire tells the doomed priest that he could be his friend if they were in the service together because good combat soldiers are like good priests -- for them, it is "all or nothing." The film is a masterpiece and not as daunting as many of its admirers suggest.

Berberian Sound Studios

The UK National Lottery and something called “The Low Budget Film Funding Project” are the corporate producers of "Berberian Sound Studio,” a 2013 film starring Toby Jones and directed by Peter Strickland. Conceived as a horror film and shot according to the conventions of the genre, “Berberian Sound Studio” is, in fact, a art-house picture, a morose and, ultimately, pretentious exercise in anomie. The situation is this: a milquetoast little Englishman travels to Italy to provide his expertise in sound-engineering on a torture-porn movie in post-production. The Englishman doesn’t speak the language and the Berberian Sound Studio where he works is dowdy in the extreme, a Kafkaesque labyrinth filled with antique analog (reel-to-reel) equipment. The film that the Englishman works dubbing is called “The Equestrian Vortex” and from the evidence of the title sequence that we are shown and the dialogue (mostly imprecations and shrieks) that we hear, the movie seems to be a cross between “Mark of the Devil” and Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” -- something about horribly tortured witches returning from the dead to wreak vengeance on their inquisitors or their progeny. The first half of the film is by far the best: the mousy little Englishman is nonplussed by the gory and erotically charged imagery that he has to dub. At first, he does his best simulating the sounds of bodies being hurled onto pavement, knifings, people boiled in oil, and a red-hot poker thrust up someone’s vagina. But, after a while, the poor bloke loses his mind and enters into the film that he is dubbing -- except in a post-modern and recursive plot development, the movie that he finds himself trapped inside is, in fact, the movie that we are watching, not the horror film, but the movie about the movie being dubbed. There are some effective moments -- the awful torture sequences in the film are cleverly simulated by imagery of watermelons being hacked apart and cabbage heads repeatedly knifed and the floor of the studio becomes a ghastly stew of rotting fruit and vegetables (close-up images of the putrefying sound props stand in for the pictures on screen that we only imagine.) The director of the film is a nasty Casanova and he mistreats one of the women hired to dub the film. LIke the witches in the picture in post-production, the woman wreaks vengeance on the studio, ripping the tape soundtrack to pieces. By this point, the film has advanced into David Lynch territory -- the hapless Englishmen seems to be sleeping in gloomy chambers that are an anteroom to the studio and the line between what is real and imagined becomes hopelessly confused. A new actress in the studio mouths words from letters that the hero, Gilderoy, has received from his mother and there is the obligatory shot in a film of this kind of celluloid caught in the projector and burning up. The second half of the film is clever, and frightening in parts, but doesn’t go anywhere. The plot can’t advance and, when new actresses are hired by the pussy-hound director and, then, seduced everything seems to simply repeat albeit with the frisson that we are now watching a film of the first-half of the film that we have just seen. Toby Jones’ performance is muted and annoying, one minor chord after another cued to a perpetual scowl of worry and loneliness. The Italians are broad caricatures and, after an hour, we feel like the main character, trapped in a sub-par version of David Lynch-land, prisoners of a weak parody of “Mulholland Drive” and, perhaps, Francis Coppola’s melancholy “The Conversation.”

Leviathan

By my estimate, less than 10% of "Leviathan" is scaled to human proportion or human perspective. The movie is about ninety minutes long. We first glimpse a man, clad in brilliant orange cover-alls about five minutes into the film -- but the camera angle is severely canted and the man's activities are inscrutable and, indeed, the distortion in the image is so extreme that we can't tell if its midnight or dawn: pitch-black water erupting into a phosphorescent wake surges underneath some kind of grim-looking scaffolding and there are sea-gulls occasionly flung out of the torrent like soot or ash and a vast fibrous, pulpy tentacle twists and turns while the soundtrack roars like a waterfall; periodically, purplish and red bubbles, like clots of blood emerge from the inky darkness and, sometimes, we see a distant horizon turned on its side showing a faint radiance of pinkish-blue sky. The colors are all over-saturated and bleed into one another and you literally can't tell up from down. Long passages in the movies resemble Stan Brakhage's experimental films: blobs of intense color trembling against ribbons of light, a pictorial field always splashed with globular drops of water and frayed into darkness at its edges. At one point, we see a pinkish-grey landscape, porous with gravel depressions and, then, boulder-shaped protrusions on which a greenish-moss seems to be growing: it turns out that we are viewing parts of the body and face of the captain of the New Bedford fishing vessel on which the documentary was filmed. From this angle, the man looks like a sad-eyed walrus, scarcely human at all. Later, we see the torso of a man taking a shower, but the image is filmed through a red shower-curtain, blurred by the water pouring over the man and so it looks like he is bathing in blood. Actual blood gushes from the side ventricles on the fishing craft and the high-def video camera is placed on the surface of the water to participate in the high-velocity, wind-blur of the gore pouring off the ship. Many shots are filmed under water -- they give the impression that the vessel is racing through the turbulent black seas like a motor-boat, almost hydro-foiling, a savage mill-race of bubbles and star-shaped debris (fractured shells and fish-bones and actual star-fish) whirling past the lens. Vast flocks of sea-gulls whirl around the boat but the perspective from which they are filmed is so bizarre that the birds read as fragments of a black jig-saw puzzle inexplicably spinning in circles, the birds' feet and rumps sometimes crashing through the vortex of spinning water when the camera is yanked beneath the seas. Many of the images can't be deciphered at all -- you have the sense, inaccurate I'm sure, that the footage was printed color-reversed, upside-down, and, then, projected backward. The film is intensely beautiful, a symphony of water hurling in all directions, and we get a powerful sense of the boat heaving on heavy seas -- in one sequence, the camera is placed ankle-high in a steel chamber full of dead fish and the incarnadine water in which the battered, blubbery fish float sloshes back and forth as the camera rocks to and fro with it. The movie is startling but not revelatory -- we have no sense for what the men are doing or how their fishing tasks are performed. The key to the film is a long static sequence in which the walrus-faced captain stares at the camera -- actually he's watching TV -- and repeatedly falls asleep. The sea-captain is watching "The Most Dangerous Catch," a reality TV show about crab fishermen in the Bering Sea, and once a very popular show. "The Most Dangerous Catch" is the opposite of "Leviathan," a scripted narrative documentary that shows us exactly what the fisherman are doing, establishing novelistic motives and characters for its burly, foul-mouthed seamen. Clearly, the film makers who produced "Leviathan" did not want to compete with reality TV and so their film is impressionistic, a welter of fantastically kinetic and beautiful images that really don't communicate much of anything at all. From the way the movie is made, one perceives commercial fishing to involve fantastically swift vessels roaring at impossible speeds through turbulent seas -- is this what it is like to be on a commercial fishing vessel? Is it really complete and abstract chaos? The film creates powerful impressions but I have the sense that they are distorted and don't represent anything but an abstract sense of speed, pouring water, and vast, sinister machinery. Whenever I have been on a vessel crossing a large body of water, my visual field has been defined by the horizon, the place where sea meets sky -- I don't think the horizon is visible in any of the shots in this film except for a few seconds in the opening sequence. The film is by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Parvele of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab and the "auteurs" of "Sweetwater," (2009) a brilliant documentary about a last sheep-drive over the Bearpaw Mountains on the Wyoming and Montana border.

Troubadors (on American Masters)

When I was a young man, every woman that I met had a copy of Carole King's LP album "Tapestry" sitting on the floor next to her bed. The record was like Tampax or a brassiere -- some kind of attribute of femininity that seemed to have nothing to do with music. (I can't recall ever hearing anyone play that record.) Once upon a time, billions of Carole King records must have existed -- you can still find bins full of them -- and the American Masters documentary, "Troubadors," about Carole King and James Taylor has the merit of providing some information, albeit limited, about Ms. King. I had always wondered about her: who as she and where did she come from and, most of all, what happened to her? The documentary provides some information, but like most "American Masters" programs about subjects still alive, the project seems to have been thoroughly sanitized by its hero and heroine, libel and defamation lawyers have carefully scoured from the film anything really interesting, and, it seems, that Taylor and King have had the final edit on this hagiographic and authorized version of their lives. The movie, like the previous Jimi Hendrix documentary, contains some excellent concert footage and it is undeniably pleasant and nostalgic in a creepy sort of way to hear those old songs performed again -- much of this music was a soundtrack to my youth. But you don't really learn much of anything. Taylor, in particular, is uncommunicative -- from the film, you would never know that he suffered a severe motorcycle accident (broke both his hands and feet), has been treated for Depression with thorazine, and has two children by Carly Simon. Carole King is provided a more comprehensive biography but there are also curious gaps in the record: we learn that she worked for Tin Pan Alley in the Brill Building (presumably with Lou Reed) when she was sixteen, was a child bride at 18, and, after her incredible success, with "Tapestry" moved to Idaho. She is an attractive and gregarious figure in the film -- but her life story ends when she moved to Idaho, now thirty years ago, and re-commences only for a triumphal tour with James Taylor around 2007. There are lots of pictures of her but pictures, of course, don't tell the whole story -- or, really, even part of it. The documentary is constructed around a place called Doug Weston's "The Troubador," a gritty bar on Santa Monica boulevard that, apparently, fostered every major comedy act and musician originating in LA. Weston seems to have been a manic-depressive and there is some fascinating footage showing his antics, but here the libel lawyers have been hard at work, scrubbing the film of anything scandalous or interesting -- Weston always seems to be on the verge of cracking-up and the film implies he flamed out in the early seventies, so it's a surpose when a closing title tells us that he died in 1999. At the fringes of the film, we see figures like Joni Mitchell, Steve Martin, and Jackson Browne who are more interesting than Taylor and King. Most of the film plays like a promo for reissue of "Tapestry" and some of "Sweet Baby James'" albums. And the picture is curiously obtuse in some ways. We see some brief footage of Robert Christgau ranting about the moral and artistic bankruptcy of West Coast pop stars like James Taylor and Carole King. Christgau mentions Lester Bangs' famous essay "James Taylor Marked for Death" and the movie shows a momentary shot of Bangs, fat and wormy-looking, the very archetype of a basement-dweller in his mom's house. Someone defends James Taylor saying: "Who ever heard of Lester Bangs? He's forgotten now while the whole world loves James Taylor's music." Well, this is a half-truth: in my house, a copy of Lester Bang's essays and music reviews was read so many times that it fell apart and, now, exists only in forlorn fragments. Then, some LA session man adds insult to injury by saying: "Lester Bangs 'marked' James for death. He should have tried it. James could have taken Lester Bangs any day." This is the best moment of the documentary, invoking a knock-down-drag-out fight between the girlish and effete James Taylor and the fat Nyquil-addict Lester Bangs.

Piano Tuner

Kira Muratova's 2004 "Piano Tuner" confirms my suspicion that this Ukrainian director is the most innovative and baffling film maker alive. Notice: I don't say that she is the best director in the world, nor do I claim that she makes the most entertaining or profound or intelligent films. My claim is simply that her pictures seem to me to be utterly unique, the product of an idiosyncratic sensibility unlike anyone else. "Piano Tuner" aka "Tuner" is a "sting" picture -- that is, the movie belongs to the genre of films about con-men laying the foundation for, and, then, implementing some form of cunning criminal fraud. Saying that the 158 minute "Piano Tuner," is a "sting" picture, however, is like saying "Crime and Punishment" is a detective novel. The movie is huge, fantastically loquacious, and utterly perverse. Two women, Lyuba and Anna Sergeteeva occupy an apartment crammed with expensive knick-knacks and musical instruments. Anna is a handsome widow in her early sixties. (But she may be a drug addict; one of Lyuba's functions is to administer injections into her hip.) Anna has a mewling, whining little Pekinese, Mikki, with bug eyes that she carries everywhere with her. Lyuba is about ten years younger, a plump and love-starved woman who posts personal ads in the newspapers to meet men. Most heist films feature a group of attractive grifters scheming to separate some much less attractive and ruthless criminals from their ill-gotten gains. In "Piano Tuner," these two nice and sympathetic older women are the target of the grift and, certainly, the viewer can't see anything about them, other than their generosity and exuberance, that justifies the confidence men (in this case a man and woman) selecting them as victims. The grifters are a piano tuner, a fellow with exceptionally mobile and expressive features, and his consort, a mysterious blonde woman who seems to have some sort of mythic and allegorical status. The tuner and the blonde live in a bizarre storage attic accessed by a vertical ladder rising about the top of a vertiginous elliptical stairway in a strange stark white silo-shaped building. The flat has no running water and seems to be scorching hot -- fans run all the time and the decor is wicker cages that diffract the sunlight into moire patterns (the film is beautifully shot in black and white), mannequins -- we see something like looks like a squat voodoo-doll version of Lyuba -- chess boards, and other arcane objects. In one scene, the blonde woman appears as the figure of death wielding a great scythe. In other images, she sits among rocks on a sea-shore like a stranded mermaid or stares with unsettling candor at the camera. The piano tuner develops an elaborate strategy to convince the women that they have won a lottery prize -- apparently, Russian banks encourage deposits and saving by offering lotteries based upon the numbers on Certificate of Deposit accounts (at least this is how I construe the framework for the "sting" plot.) The "sting" requires printing a fake page in a Russian Yellow Pages phone directory, retaining other criminals to answer the phone and pretend to be bankers and a variety of other complicated and recondite maneuvers. At the end of the movie, after the women have been deprived of their savings, we see them riding a street car crammed with Muratova's trade-mark zanies. The older woman forgives the piano tuner his perfidy, noting that grifter claimed that his father was an alcoholic and that the con-man told them he had suffered a difficult life. Then, she makes an interesting observation: "They could have just robbed us and avoided all of this plotting." And, of course, that is completely true -- the con man piano tuner ingratiated himself with the elderly ladies to the extent that they would have simply given him the money had he asked and, certainly, he had complete access to their apartment and a summer-house crammed with valuables. This remark puts into question the entire complicated plot of the movie. The sting or con is so immensely complex, so hypertrophic and over-developed that it suggests that the grift is some sort of performance art, some kind of exercise for its own sake. The grift exists to place the women in contact with the piano tuner and his sinister mistress. The ultimate outcome of the machinations seems unimportant; rather, the film is about the construction of a bizarre phantasmagoric narrative, a dream-like novelistic accretion of peculiar details that is completely excessive to any plot necessity. My son, Jack, with whom I watched the film, unlocked its theme, I think, with an astute observation: in one scene, the piano tuner is playing a piano and grimacing (as well as winking) grotesquely toward the camera. I wondered: is he performing these elaborate grimaces for Mikki, the pekinese? Jack answered that he interpreted the character as looking directly into the camera and inviting us to understand that the entire performance was for the film audience and that the movie was, itself, a con -- that, in fact, all art is a species of fraud, the perpetuation of a lie, not necessarily for an ulterior motive, but for its own sake. I think this interpretation makes sense of many aspects of the film: someone coments that piano players are always embarrassing because of the masturbatory grimaces that they produce to dramatize the music they are producing. Muratova populates her images with Brueghel-like grotesques and she seems to have one rule that she applies to directing her extras -- make faces and contort your body into weird postures to try to distract the viewer from the principal action in the foreground. Every minor character in the film seems engaged in acting-out some private, intensely melodramatic opera scene -- everyone dances and prances around, gesticulates wildly, and hams it up for the camera; there is a distinct amateur film, Super 8 feel about some of the scenes. When the grifter goes to buy cups for a musical soiree that the elderly ladies are going to host, the sales lady, who has an immense mouth like a frog, scowls and gurns at the camera as if trying to make the most grotesque faces possible. Everyone, it seems, is acting, posturing, scheming to perpetuate some form of fraud. Lyuba meets two men, one of whom she marries on a whim. Both steal her money. In the case of the man she marries, we see her setting out the old gent's slippers in their sleeper-car on a train during their honeymoon. Outside the window, a mob of people are crowding around the train waving stuffed animals like the banners of the revolution. Lyuba's elderly husband says that he wants to buy her a stuffed hippopotamus, departs, and, then, apparently, absconds with her money. The grifters, inexplicably, hunt the husband down and, in a film projection booth, threaten him with a gun to retrieve Lyuba's cash -- presumably so that they can steal it themselves. The sinister femme fatalle proclaims: "film is the most important art -- Lenin said that", reaffirming, I think the theme that art itself is a form of confidence game. Some of this can be interpreted but other aspects of the movie seem impenetrable to me -- possibly because Muratove is "freely adapting" several short stories (as per the credits) that don't really fit together. The tuner's girlfriend prattles on and on about a female pope and seems blood-thirsty. She talks about the "hand of God" and wants to avenge fetuses killed by abortion -- she accuses the elderly woman who has no children of having "at least thirty abortions." And she says that she has had three abortions in the last couple years herself just with her current boyfriend, the tuner. In one scene, we see a fat woman digging in a garbage can. We can't figure out where she is located or how she relates to the story. Ultimately, the film produces a reverse-angle, and we observe that the fat woman is being watched by the sinister blonde. The blonde invites the fat woman to sit at her table at an expensive cafe and pours her glass after glass of wine. the fat woman proudly shows the blonde "green stripes" in her blouse, but, of course, we can't see those colors since the film is shot in black-and-white. But the blonde can't see those colors either -- she says: "So on top of all your problems, you're color-blind too." In another scene, Lyuba leans forward to light her husband's cigarette. She hands him the thin, elegant-looking lighter but the husband mistakes it for a cell-phone. He puts it to his ear. "No dear," Lyuba says, "it's a cigarette-lighter." But, as she lights his cigarette, the damned thing repeatedly rings like a phone. In the climax in the bank, an elderly banker, like a cross between Walter Brennan and Andy Devine, whines in a high-pitched voice. On the wall of the bank, there is a big poster that says "No Dogs" with a picture of Mikki under that legend. The old curmudgeon whines and squeals with indignation, screwing up his face into a cartoon caricature while next to him a sleazy, if handsome, young man with lacquered black hair -- he looks like a 30's tango instructor -- looks on impassively. Then, suddenly, the film cuts to a pair of beautiful, Asiatic-looking twins. The elderly woman, who have been defrauded, are thrown out of the bank. As they leave, another set of dowdy middle-aged twins walks into the place. All of this is astounding and incomprehensible. Groping for comparisons, I initially wrote that Muratova's film, with its bizarre players, characters draped in feathers and fur, two homosexuals wearing matching Marilyn Monroe tee-shirts and camping-it-up for the camera, its operatic mise-en-scene, and torrents of semi-hysterical dialogue, its dislocated camera syntax (you can never tell where you are or why), its odd and distracting musical cues, all of these factors, I wrote reminded me a of a Werner Schroeter film. But I decided not to use that comparison. I have never scene a Werner Schroeter film, but only imagined them. You can't get DVDs of Schroeter's pictures in the United States and his movies have never played commercially in any theater.