The Forbidden Room

David Bordwell in his excellent book on cinema narrative defines some art films as "parametric."  By this, Bordwell means that the film-maker has imposed certain constraints on his narrative that may be arbitrary and, even, rebarbative.  The constraints channel the content of the film in certain ways and may limit the picture's expressiveness.  Such parameters impose upon the film restrictions that the subject matter works against, or, indeed, must overcome -- the director limits his or her means of expression, ordinarily to foreground aspects of film grammar that we might not otherwise notice.  Ozu will almost always shoot his films with a stationary camera located at the perspective of an observer on a tatami mat; if possible, late Bresson customarily shoots people approaching or leaving an encounter by showing their feet and ankles striding across the ground.  In Notre Musique, Jean-Luc Godard criticizes the standard Hollywood technique of organizing dialogue scenes on a shot -- reverse shot basis:  Godard uses every possible technique to stage dialogue scenes in that film except the shot-reverse shot parlance customary to classical narrative film. 

Guy Maddin's new film The Forbidden Room (co-directed with Evan Johnson) is an example of a movie built around a peculiar parameter:  the film's content is entirely based on lost films, movies that no longer exist except in single still photographs or in archival footage so severely deteriorated as to be unwatchable.  Maddin imagines what these lost movies might have been like and, then, intercuts them into a rigorously symmetrical structure.  In his commentary, Maddin describes the structure as a series of concentric rings or a doll with smaller dolls nested within.  The exterior elements of the film -- that is, its opening and closing sequences involve the imagined reconstruction of a lost film called "How to Take a Bath".  These sequences feature a bawdy narrative written by the poet John Ashbery -- Ashbury's lines are spoken by an elderly Canadian actor (Louis Negin, the disgusted "scoutmaster" in "Sissy Boy Slap Party") wearing a bathrobe alarmingly flared open to reveal his hairy torso and a nasty scar associating with the excision of the man's appendix.  The actor wears hornrimmed glasses similar to images that I have seen of Ashbery and, probably, imitates the poet's manner.  Sunk in the murky waters of the bathtub, there is a submarine.  Inside the submarine, four men are melodramatically awaiting their death by either asphyxiation or explosion -- a slab of some kind of plastic explosive is melting and has become dangerously volatile.  (Maddin revels in images of things rotting or melting in puddles of fetid fluid.)  Apparently, the slightest tremor might set off a blast.  The four trapped submariners are joined by a lumberjack, one of Saplingjacks, a group of Canadian outdoorsmen.   As the doomed sailors, progress through the submarine, opening one locked hatch after another, the lost lumberjack explains that he has come from another narrative -- the story of the Saplingjacks' effort to rescue a girl captured by a group of brigands, the Red Wolves, and held in a cave replete with papier-mâché stalactites.  Writhing on a bed of sleeping bandits, the nearly naked girl dreams that she is lost in a jungle.  She encounters a debauched Filipino night club inhabited by a tropical vampire, the Aswang -- a creature that turns its victims into horrible-looking, deformed bananas.  In the night club, a lounge singer performs a song about a man obsessed with buttocks.  The lounge singer is visualized as a writhing mess of decomposed film -- we see hands and shoulders extruding sometimes from the flicker of the rot eating the film where the man performs.  The tale of the fetishist is acted by the redoubtable Udo Kier.  Kier has parts of his brain removed in a vain attempt to excise his paraphilia.  (In the end, Kier has had his whole cerebellum cut and looks like a paralyzed zombie -- nonetheless, with his last strength he reaches out to grasp at a woman's ass.)  A volcano appears in the background -- a cone into which natives throw sacrifices.  The volcano, about chest-high, belches fire and spills lurid red magma all over everything and a squid-thief, his face bearded with the tentacles of the cephalopod in his jaws, is bonked by a boulder spit out by the lurid peak -- the man falls down dead or unconscious.  Next we see the Baron Pappenheim, lonely in his apartment located in a windmill.  Pappenheim has suffered some kind of loss and is seeking a "Gardener Boy" -- this part of the picture has some of characteristics of a German homo-erotic Kammerspiel from the late 'twenties.  (It resembles slightly Dreyer's Michael.)  A motorcyclist passes the windmill, a structure that sits alone in a garishly colored, expressionistic moor.  A woman is riding on the motorcycle -- she has an accident and breaks all her bones.  An x -ray of her fractured pelvis splits open like a cavern to reveal a group of "skeleton women" who murder a man by forcing him to wear a poisoned leotard.  On the Berlin-Bogota railroad a doctor who has charge of a crazy man (he is gnawing on the bars in his cage) tries to seduce a beautiful woman.  She produces her inner child, a waif that she promptly guns down with a pistol.  By this point, we have reached the center of the film and it, then, reverts to the various episodes continuing their narration in reverse order:  the skeleton women have an orgy while the man in the poisoned leotard dies, Baron Pappenheim nurses a sickly "gardener boy" who seems to be older than he is, the natives offer more sacrifices to the volcano, the Filipino night club continues to offer bizarre entertainment to its habitués, and the kidnapped woman wakes up and is rescued by the Saplingjack hero with his four companions.  In the submarine, the heroes venture into the "forbidden room" where they discover the Captain.  As the men begin to hallucinate due to lack of oxygen, one of them feverishly pages through The Book of Climaxes.  A violent series of climaxes ensues:  lovers embrace, animals attack, planes crash and trains fall off bridge trestles, two Zeppelins smash into one another above the clouds, two mountain-climbers falling off a precipice, wrestle with one another, pull out pistols as they are plummeting to their deaths and engage in a vertical gunfight, a lonely woman commits suicide by walking out into a turbulent sea.  We learn how to take a bath again and the film ends. 

Maddin's movies have always had an appearance unlike anything else in modern cinema and this picture is particularly spectacular:  every possible kind of film stock is used, including ancient Technicolor that has a peculiar burnished and musty looking bronze tint; much of the film is shot in a grisly-looking black and white (often tinted) and the surface of film is scabrous with nicks and flaws -- much of the movie looks as if it were aged like kim chee by being buried for several years in the earth.  The pictures are distorted by Evan Johnson -- his role seems to be to distress the film and devise distortions to afflict the images -- there are double and triple exposures, leering faces superimposed over roiling magma; an image of  Lake Winnipeg has been distorted to look like one of Turner's lost canvases -- all boiling waves and a luminous, sinister mist.  Landscapes are clearly interior to a studio and shot with obviously fake boulders and trees -- many of the images are viewed through house-plants with lenses smeared with semen or vaginal fluid to create a sweaty, ecstatic blur, faces bleeding into one another and images rotting so that they flicker around their edges as if the figures depicted were embedded in decomposing halos of white light.  Some of the people shown are just cardboard cut-outs; others seems to be hypnotized or asleep.  There are curiously incandescent orgies where women fantastically beautiful in the manner of depraved silent film heroines writhe and wriggle atop heaps of half-naked bodies -- the film's standard shot shows someone ranting, a diatribe voiced by a disembodied face or head that seems weirdly bloated and, then, a cut to an androgynous figure squirming in some kind of quasi-orgasmic ecstasy.  There are rotund oratorical intertitles and much of the film is silent - when people speak their voices sound from a void that bears no spatial connection to what we are seeing on the screen.  Sometimes, we hear snippets of poorly recorded Wagner, ancient recordings on wax gramophones, and fragments of Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht.  Of course, the film is too much, too long, too fragmentary, too weirdly ornate, too contrived, too dull, too fascinating, too much of everything and, in the end, a kind of exhaustion afflicts the viewer -- you can't assimilate what you are seeing and there is no thematic continuity, just a series of fetishistic and perverse obsessions.  It's not Maddin's dream nor is it the dream of any of his characters, all of them covered with beads of sweat and grimacing hysterically at the camera -- the film is conceived as kind of dream of cinema itself and it is both remarkable and a complete, and alarming dead end, a sort of reductio ad absurdam  or ne plus ultra of the notion of film as oneiric spectacle.

Maddin's recent films occupy an uneasy terrain between performance/installation art and the cinema.  In this way, his movies are similar to the cinematic events contrived by Peter Greenaway and Apichatpong Weerasthul.  Viewed innocently, The Forbidden Room is a huge, baffling collage in which certain organizing principles are faintly visible but an artifact that makes no real sense.  In fact, the film was shot in public at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Museum of Art in Montreal -- the set was open and some of the supernumeraries are, apparently, people who came to the museum to watch the movie being made -- in Paris, the production of the film was call "Spiritismes," in Montreal, "Hauntings."  Accordingly, the process of shooting the picture, itself, was on display as a kind of installation in the French and Canadian museums.  Furthermore, Maddin improvised the film using a curious protocol -- each morning of the production he staged and filmed a séance inviting the spirits of the photoplays of some 42 lost films to appear and advise him on his project.  Then, after the séance, Maddin (who asserts he doesn't believe in spirits or ghosts) shot footage in which he imaginatively seeks to reconstruct films that have otherwise vanished -- movies known from one or two reviews, or a few frames of poorly preserved footage, or still photographs.  For instance, "Seeking Gardener Boy" was a Danish Kammerspiel; "Skeleton Women" was a Chinese silent horror movie, How to take a Bath refers to "How to Undress for your Husband", a lost sex-ploitation film made by Dwain Esper in 1937, and the jungle-cabaret scenes resurrect a lost Filipino production, a box-office hit in 1919 in Manilla.  The sexually inflected orgy scenes always refer to Jack Smith's legendary Flaming Creatures a film seminal in more than one way and that can't be shown for a variety of obscure reasons, thus a picture that is lost for all practical purposes.  In the center of the movie, it's "soft, squishy heart" as the director says, there is a repeated image of the British actress Charlotte Rampling --a closeup that throbs like a bloated, beating heart.  Like the repeated shots of Lillian Gish as the mother of humanity rocking her cradle ("out of the cradle endlessly rocking") in Griffith's Intolerance, this image anchors the film.  But anchors it in what?  Ultimately, this picture, like most of Maddin's films, exists on the frontier between installation art in a museum and a film that you might watch in a movie theater -- it's too narrative, perhaps, for the more abstract genre of museum installation art and, yet, much too complex and confusing to be reasonably understood as narrative movie.  This picture is not to most people's taste but anyone concerned about cinema as an art should watch this film -- and, not only watch it, but study it closely.   

Don Juan

John Barrymore, acting as Don Juan in the 1926 film of that name, is a prick.  By this I mean, the actor is needle-thin, a spiky syringe of a man in tight trousers that emphasize his dancer's buttocks.  Barrymore is like an embodied stiletto, deadly as a dagger thrust in the darkness.  (In fact, the film's prologue shows Don Juan's father mortally pierced by courtesan wearing an improbably décolleté gown from which she fishes a thumb-length but deadly lancet.)  The other edged or cutting instrument in the film is Barrymore's famous profile -- whenever possible the actor rotates into a position so that the camera can scrutinize his delicately aquiline and intricately serrated silhouette.  The movie is opulently produced. No one passes through a door that is not an arched entrance high as a house.  There are elaborately detailed Moorish piazzas with cloister-walk colonnades, numerous lofty balconies to which the hero can climb or from which he may swan-dive to evade jealous husbands.  One of the pleasures of silent films of this era is that the intertitles describe the upcoming location, generally in bursts of imagistic poetry or fin de siècle epigrams vaguely like those written by Oscar Wilde, and, while we are reading that text, we can enjoy the delicious anticipation of wondering at the appearance of the next set promised by the title:  for instance, the title promises us that we will next see Don Juan confined in a "slimy cell in the Castello San Angelo below the level of the River Tiber" -- a fearsome-looking prison with the Tiber river pouring by at eye-level, just as we imagined but, of course, always better.  The movie's plot bears no resemblance to either the poem by Lord Byron or Pushkin's verse narrative or Mozart's opera.  Rather, the story involves Don Juan's entanglement in a feud between the Borgia family and their aristocratic enemies -- a quarrel that results in a maiden being coerced into nuptials with a brutal and lecherous Borgia henchman.  Don Juan rescues the girl (Mary Astor), swooning as her detestable husband ravishes her.  An extended duel follows fought from room to room and level to level of the villain's vast palazzo -- this reminds us that films have never improved on the sword fights climaxing silent films:  the whole episode is shot with a tracking point-of-view camera interspersed with long and medium distance images, all of them packed with balletic action.  When Barrymore's sword deflects his opponent's saber and hurls it  into a wall (where it is embedded quivering), the hero pitches away his own blade and plunges headfirst down a long flight of marble steps to engage the bad guy in hand to hand combat, an exhilarating, pointless battle executed for the sheer hell of it.  Later, the girl is picturesquely tortured on the rack, her body neatly stretched into a lascivious arc by a vicious executioner.  Barrymore disposes of the hooded executioner, dons his costume, and spends a minute or two torturing the girl for our benefit (and ostensibly to persuade observing villains that he is the real McCoy).  During this scene, Barrymore leers like Dr. Jekyll suddenly transformed to Mr. Hyde and one senses that he is getting all too much entertainment out of inflicting pain on creamy white flesh of the terrorized heroine.  At the climax, Barrymore seizes the girl in his arms, dives out of a window, catching hold a convenient vine, caroms off the wall with real and frighteningly visceral force, the woman half-knocked senseless it seems, as he descends post-haste a cataract of ivy on the ancient turret.  Then, throwing the girl across the pommel of his horse, he flees through the night-time terrain of the San Bernadino Mountains, a dozen of the grand inquisitor's men in hot pursuit.  After a spectacular chase, Don Juan chivalrously deposits the heroine in a hollow tree and turns on his pursuers, a bit like John Wayne in True Grit -- whirling his poignard around his head, he cuts down the dozen men, leaving them dead in the dark meadow.  All of this is filmed with the utmost conviction and spatial logic and the scenes of Don Juan on horseback, shot from only a few feet away, must be managed by rear-projection but are done so skillfully that we have the illusion that we are on horseback as well plunged into the midst the violence.  The movie is crammed with horses charging through narrow medieval alleys by torchlight, ballets between satyrs and nymphs performed for the benefit of decadent royalty (in this dance scene the mostly nude female dancers throw themselves with wild abandon from balconies to be caught by the burly fawns), over-the-top mad scenes, and gorgeous women, somehow managing to appear both pristine, even Madonna-like in their virginal innocence and truly alarming in the insinuations of depravity that they suggest.  In his bedroom, Don Juan has one of Michelangelo's incomplete marble slaves, a figure seeming to melt into a sort of orgasm,  and, in his high-ceilinged banquet hall, there is a conversation nook the size of King Arthur's table equipped with a couple of effete-looking gentlemen and a half-dozen ladies of enormous beauty but dubious respectability.  The movie reminds us that the great action heroes of the silent era had a graceful athleticism and elegance that film has completely forgotten -- for worse (not better) modern action heroes are modeled of the stolid, granite immobility of John Wayne and the heavy-set, automaton violence of Arnold Scwartzeneggar's killer robot.  The last action hero to embody the virtues of casual strength, gymnastic ability, and elegant ferocity that we behold in actors like the young John Barrymore and Douglas Fairbanks was Burt Lancaster.    

Paris Belongs to Us

Shot over three years beginning in 1957, Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us wasn't released until 1961.  Accordingly, Rivette's film has the curious distinction of being the earliest film produced in the French "New Wave" and, yet, a picture belatedly released after Godard's Breathless and Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player.  Critics are prone to speculate that film history would be different if Rivette's rebarbative and profoundly idiosyncratic movie had reached theaters first.  This sort of conjecture is meaningless.  Rivette's films are both ultra-cerebral and anti-sensuous; they don't have any of the jocular, jazzy, improvisatory elements that pleased audiences attending early Truffaut and Godard pictures.  Those two film makers annotated American B-movies, producing a kind of transfigured pop art.  Rivette's sources are minor Shakespeare plays, obscure philosophical treatises that involve a kind of hermetic riddling that is more akin to Georges Perec than low-budget gun and girl pictures made by Monogram Studios.   Rivette is a minority taste, one so refined that I'm not sure that I share it. (I repeatedly fell asleep while watching Paris Belongs to Us and had to rewatch key portions of the film that I had missed while slumbering).  If Paris Belongs to Us had secured pride of place in the French nouvelle vague, it would have been ignored -- Rivette's specialized subject, paranoid conspiracy theorists, and his austere, classical style can't be effectively imitated and his work has had little influence on other filmmakers.

Paris Belongs to Us is remarkably self-assured, crisply and effectively shot and edited -- the acting is theatrical and stylized but, also, plausible and competent:  the players are, after all, acting the part of aesthetes and theater-folk.  The film begins in media res -- a woman mysteriously reciting Shakespeare's Tempest goes to a next door apartment when another young woman is melodramatically mourning someone's death.  It's unclear whether the dead man is Pierre, the brother of the Shakespeare-citing heroine, Anne, or someone else.  In the next scene, at a boulevard café, Anne meets her brother Pierre and they discuss the death of a musician named Juan.  No one knows whether Juan was murdered or committed suicide -- it is clear that the musical score that he wrote for an avant-garde production of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Pericles has gone missing.  At a party, the actors working on Pericles lament the death of Juan and one man, an American "political refugee" named Philip Kaufman (he's fled McCarthy's Black List) claims that a conspiracy is afoot and that people are being killed or "disappeared" in the service of this plot.   The objectives of the conspirators are not specified but, in general terms, they seem to be apocalyptic.  It is uncertain, however, whether Kaufman is suffering from alcohol-induced fantasies, is mad, or, in fact, telling the truth.  Kaufman and Juan both had a relationship with a woman named Terry who also believes that a conspiracy is lurking, some sort of omnipresent plot to destroy the world.  Anne searches for Juan's lost score -- it's the film's MacGuffin to use an analogy to Hitchcock's movies.  (And Rivette was a great admirer of Hitchcock, frequently writing about the Master in his columns for Cahiers du Cinema; in many respects, Paris Belongs to Us most resembles an exceptionally abstract and bloodless Hitchcock thriller.)  The movie is very long and most of the encounters that Anna has with others are enigmatic and inconsequential.  Eventually, the production of Pericles that the characters are mounting under the direction of a man named Gerard is invited to perform a thirty night run at a huge and prestigious theater.  During the transfer of the play to the big, commercial theater, the production is coopted by another director and Gerard is forced off his own show.  (There's almost some comedy in this part of the film -- the actors ham it up outrageously for the Parisian version of Broadway and the new producer suggests bringing in a pirate ship manned by dwarfs each less than "one meter tall.")  In Paris Belongs to Us, people keep finding suicide notes and Anne learns that Gerard is going to kill himself -- someone sends her a note that if Anne doesn't call Gerard before midnight, he will commit suicide.  (She gets the note fifteen minutes late.)  In a remarkable sequence, Anne dashes around Paris looking for Gerard -- she hustles here and there in a taxi through empty streets at dawn, an early morning hour that seems endlessly and surrealistically protracted.  At last, she finds Gerard with a woman with whom he has spent the night.  Anne is a little miffed because it seems that she may once have been Gerard's lover.  She goes to a film club and watches (with the other players in Pericles) the Babel sequence from Lang's Metropolis, everyone laughing in a weird way at the spectacle on the screen.  Terry calls her and says that Gerard has, in fact, killed himself.  Anne goes to see Gerard's corpse; Kaufman is there and continues to rant about the conspiracy that is murdering members of their group.  The principals adjourn to a country house outside of Paris where we learn that Terry has killed Pierre, claiming that Pierre conspired to derail the production of Pericles and deprive Gerard of his control over the show.  Anne watches some white birds in flight over a lake and there is an inserted shot of Notre Dame and the Ile de la Cite -- it's not quite clear where the ending takes place.  In the final half-hour, Juan's death is blamed on Falangist assassins and Terry denies the existence of the cult of conspirators -- Terry carries cyanide tablets and, perhaps, people are dying from simple despair and ennui.   Rivette's narrative is an engine for producing contradictions -- every proposition asserted by a character is simultaneously denied.  The films opening epigraph is from the poet Charles Peguy -- "Paris belongs to no one."  Gerard, the director of Pericles, is shown as a magisterial figure brooding over the whole city of Paris from the roof of a grand theater -- but he turns out to have no power at all notwithstanding his impressive status in that image.  Terry says that it was folly to believe that killing one person in 1945 would bring an end to the conspiracy that afflicts the world -- presumably referring to Hitler and suggesting that the conspirators are some kind of crypto-Nazis; but, in the next breath, she says that a conspiracy that has lasted for "thirty years" is not easily unmasked -- since the film's opening title tells us that the movie begins in "June 1957" this would mean that the conspiratorial plot was first hatched in 1927 -- is that the year of Lang's Metropolis?  Obviously, there is not one conspiracy but either none or many.  Anne protests that Pericles is inconsistent and incoherent but contains some great passages -- it is either by Shakespeare or not by Shakespeare.  In the end, Terry, who has asserted the primacy of the conspiracy, claims that there is no conspiracy at all.  At one point, someone mocks Juan's soundtrack for the play as atonal beeps and squeaks and random bits of percussion -- this seems to be the soundtrack we hear to the film and, during the movie's long middle portion, the audience wants to call out to Anne:  "we know where Juan's soundtrack went; it was appropriated to be the soundtrack of this film that we are watching."  But once we draw this conclusion, it is refuted -- Terry has the tape and plays it near the end of the movie.  At various points in the film, the movie resembles Val Lewton's sinister The Seventh Victim -- in Lewton's picture, a coterie of strangely conservative and dull Greenwich Village devil worshipers are killing renegade members of their group.  In Paris Belongs to Us, there are eerie overtones suggesting that actors and crew working on Pericles are, in fact, the true cult -- people in the group seem to communicate by secret gestures and there is a sense in which the intensely motivated, if a bit dimwitted, theater folks would be willing to kill to protect their endeavor.  In one memorable scene, Anne interviews a cadaverous actor who speaks to her in sepulchral tones while his child-like mistress, "my ward" he calls her, prowls the apartment barefoot -- what exactly is going on with these people?  Certainly, anyone who has attended the rehearsals of a close-knit group of actors and crew staging a show realize that there is a distinctly cult-like aspect to this kind of endeavor.  Rivette shoots the film in tight spaces, tiny cluttered apartments full of posted images and books that seem to be clues -- although clues to what we can't quite tell.  Everyone shows enigmatic half-smiles to the camera or nervously looks away when certain things are said.  Time either dilates or compresses -- Anne's dawn hunt for Gerard seems to take a whole day during which the time never advances one minute.  People are always knocking at closed doors, finding mysterious notes -- in one scene, we hear whistles and are told that the police are sweeping an apartment building for conspirators but we never see any police presence.  Gerard's body is just left lying in a bed.  As the film progresses, the grey streets and narrow corridors seem to be claustrophobically closing down -- then, the movie opens into a landscape:  a lake, some people at a fire like figures in a Brueghel painting burning something, an anguished grouping of actors, then, a flock of birds flying away.  As in some of Pynchon's works, there is, of course, a savage, deadly, and merciless conspiracy -- and there is no conspiracy at all.  The world is full of vicious meaning; the existentialists were wrong -- reality isn't meaningless or absurd but, rather, a great book of hieroglyphs for us to read; it's all text, but, unfortunately, text in a language that we can't read.   

Wind across the Everglades

A peculiar psychodrama with Jungian overtones, Nicholas Ray's Wind Across the Everglades (1958) is a fascinating, botched melodrama.  Shot in intensely saturated and moody Technicolor, the movie's interiors and natural settings have a feverish quality, a bit like imagery in one of Douglas Sirk's more garish films -- some of the outdoor shots have a curiously overlit and claustrophobic character:  it's nature as a series of small, shadowy chambers where men are pressed together in barracks-like confinement.  Ostensibly, the story concerns a young teacher (Christopher Plummer) pressganged into becoming an Audubon warden for the Everglades.  The warden's mission is to protect "plume birds" (mostly large alien-looking herons) from the depredations of poachers, embodied by a gang of swamp-rats led by Cottonmouth, a massive, sadistic brigand played by Burl Ives in a spectacular, scenery-chewing performance.  Cottonmouth is the patriarch of his rag-tag mob that is a kind of "primal horde", and the huge red-bearded pirate keeps a venomous snake in his pocket, or caresses it on his lap, as his fearsome pet.  Ray was raised in Lacrosse under the "scourge of alcoholism" -- his father was a violent drunk -- and the film portrays Cottonmouth as the ultimate paternal tyrant:  the all-male community of swamp-rats, always shown tromping through knee-deep mud, has vaguely homosexual features:  the men bunk together, generally in pairs comprised of a burly, older brute and pretty young boy.  For entertainment, Cottonmouth makes the men fight with one another, taking bets on the outcome -- when one of his "boys" is beaten in a gladiatorial battle, Cottonmouth bellows at the battered and exhausted man (a tiny jockey who fights with a riding crop) until he rises from the filthy mud, only to collapse again.  Then, Cottonmouth tenderly lifts the muddy boy out of the muck and carries him in his arms to his own shack.  Although the film nods toward heterosexual romance -- there's a brothel in the town of Miami and the hero has a girlfriend, the picture's primary emphasis is same sex, man-on-man aggression:  the weird commune of plume poachers and, ultimately, the duel between Plummer's game warden and Cottonmouth.  The protracted encounter between Chistropher Plummer and Burl Ives comprising the last third of the film is the main event -- it's a nightmare father and son bitchfest, involving competitive drinking, various kinds of ordeals and tests of strength, and can end only with the death of one of the protagonists.  Although Cottonmouth repeatedly has the game warden in his power, he hesitates to kill him -- Cottonmouth's motivations are obscure until the relationship is interpreted as a sort of Abraham-Isaac gig:  Burl Ives is the pater familius to his boys in the swamp as well as to the hapless game warden who keeps falling into his clutches.  Cottonmouth embodies the evil, but life-affirming and hedonistic father:  he chews on "swamp cabbage" to keep his belly free from parasites, gnaws on melons and roast alligator and generally attests to the "sweetness of living" -- he's like Zorba the Greek stranded in the marsh and surrounded by gay boys.  Although we see the figure initially as a terrifying tyrant, Cottonmouth becomes more sympathetic as the film progresses and, indeed, in the final ordeal sequence, his patriarchal cruelty seems to mold Plummer "into a man."  The script is by Budd Schulberg and its too, too busy, with many flights of unmotivated poetry  -- Cottonmouth is not only an Old Testament patriarch, brigand, and gang-leader, but, also, an embodiment of the savagery of nature:  in some sense, he's supposed to represent the cruelty and indifference of the mighty Everglades themselves.  Ray was a master of small, but pointed details -- although the plot outline is sketchy, and some scenes start with promise, seem to develop, but, then, go nowhere, the director keeps things lively with local color.  A one-armed Seminole Indian, like a spectral Charon, leads the game warden through the darkness of the night-time Everglades.  There is a poison tree like something out of William Blake:  "you don't carve your name on that tree," someone says, "it carves its name on you."  The madam at the Miami whorehouse where Plummer's characters looks but doesn't touch requires that her girls maintain six inches between their torsos and her customers while dancing -- she scans her brothel through a lorgnette.  When Plummer gets drunk in the whorehouse, he moves his fingers as if to mimic the Black blues singer at the piano.  There's a lyric interlude midway in the film, a sequence that looks like Peckinpah at his most mild and poetic:  it's the 4th of July and, at Miami, the lovers go to the beach and, on a flag-bearing sailing barge, the whores cruise by saluting (and embarrassing) their customers, and Plummer, with his best girl, retreats from the sun under a ramshackle bandshell.  While a tuba player performs overhead, he and the girl embrace.  Plummer says something like:  "You're bold and fine -- it's a devastating combination," she replies:  "I like devastated men."  This snippet of dialogue exemplifies what's wrong with Schulberg's script:  it's clogged with trite aphorisms and failed poetry.  Much of the film is a mess.  The impressive wild-life photography doesn't generally match the rest of the film and, in truth its incongruous to see soul-baring father-son confrontations, staged in the best fifties method-acting style, cut together with panoramas of sky and water infused with Maxfield Parrish light mingled with Mutual of Omaha "Wild Kingdom" animal sequences.  But the film belongs to Burl Ives and he, certainly, puts on a show.  At one point, he demands that his swamp rats smile -- the camera obligingly pans over the rogue's gallery containing such notables as the novelist Mackinlay Kantor, the clown Emmett Kelly, and a very young, squint-eyed Peter Falk; they all contort their lips into a sinister grimace.  "Eat and be et," Cottonmouth declares as his credo.  And when a viper seizes him in the film's final scenes, Cottonmouth, who seems now to be a combination of Falstaff and King Lear, howls to the snake:  "Bite deep, brother, bite deep!"       

The Driver

The Driver is a suspense film so minimalist that it verges on pure abstraction.  Walter Hill directed the picture in 1978 and it seems to derive, in part, from some of Jean-Pierre Melville's late crime films, laconic exercises in which almost all of the emotion is submerged beneath a surface that is nihilistically hip:  it is cool to the point of iciness.  (It is worth noting that Drive made in 2011 by Nicholas Winding Refn reprises many of the principal themes and stylistic characteristics of Hill's film -- including casting a vapid pretty-boy, Ryan Gosling, in the role of the titular get-away driver, a part played by the equally pretty and formidably blank Ryan O'Neal in the earlier picture.  In the credits of both films, the main players are designated by their roles as opposed to by their names:  both Gosling and O'Neal play "the Driver.")   Hill is good with violence -- the shootings are always picturesque with unanticipated details:  for instance, O'Neal's driver guns down a bad guy who is taunting him about not carrying a weapon by shooting his concealed pistol through a car window that is half-rolled down on the open door behind which the hero stands -- this creates a photogenic spray of  greenish windshield glass that adorns the asphalt between the two protagonists, a feature on which the camera dwells.  As one might expect, the climax consists of a protracted car chase through the night-time streets of downtown LA ending rather anticlimactically in an enormous deserted warehouse, a brightly lit maze of stacked barrels and burlap bags where the two vehicles play a sinister cat and mouse game with one another.  The car chase is effectively staged and, certainly, thrilling enough in its way -- much better than the baroque action in the Fast and Furious series of films, vehicular battles that are far more spectacular but, also, completely implausible and in defiance of all the laws of physics and gravity.  By contrast, Hill's big car chase generally seems realistic, although the careening vehicles shoot through a few too many red lights without calamity for credibility.  Hill mixes up the shots comprising the sequence -- we get nice pictures from within the cockpits of the cars, good overhead shots, and gripping video-game-style POV sequences shot from immediately behind the vehicles.  The cars glide through densely saturated pools of neon light and their chrome and windows are resplendent with menacing reflections.  A problem with the sequence are the unfortunate shots of the occupants of the two cars -- during a car chase, there is nothing for the driver to do but stare ahead stoically as he tugs and twists the steering wheel.  Ryan O'Neal has Isabelle Adjani trapped with him in his vehicle, a snazzy little rooster-red pickup truck -- and she is very beautiful, opaque, and, also, has nothing to do but glare at the highway ahead of her as O'Neal puts the truck through its paces.  Sometimes, we see the car that O'Neal is chasing -- nothing's more cheerful or expressive in that vehicle:  the two scum-bags just stare ahead fixedly at the road, everyone seeming to be weirdly hypnotized and, almost, somnambulant:  it's a strange disconnect -- the faster the cars go, the more eerily impassive their drivers.  There's nothing to say about the plot -- it's just a contrivance on which to string the action sequences and killings.  The movie is fantastically stylized:  Hill seems to be obsessed with brilliant reds and every possible variety of green.  A bank robbery is notable for the fact that the bank is decorated with a brilliantly red carpet.  The streets of LA glower with different types of green, some of the hues vaguely nauseating.  A train station features Pullman porters in brilliant red costumes -- Hill's more interesting in the colors than the rather perfunctory and sadistic plot.  Once you notice the pattern, it becomes almost absurd -- just about every shot is color-coded to key on a startlingly bright scarlet offset by nasty, indescribable neon greens. 

Tosca (Minnesota Opera -- March 19, 2016)

The Minnesota Opera Company's new mounting of Tosca, Giacomo Puccini's iconic 1900 opera, is spectacularly effective.  As everyone knows, the eponymous character, Floria Tosca, is herself a flamboyant opera singer.  She loves a painter named Cavaradossi, the show's tenor whom we first meet painting an image of Mary Magdalen that is a composite of his temperamental girlfriend and a local courtesan, Attavanti.  A political prisoner, Angelotti, takes refuge in the church, pursued by the sinister and sadistic, Baron Scarpia.  Scarpia, who lusts after Tosca, takes advantage of the situation to impose himself on the diva -- he arrests the painter and tortures him in order to compel Tosca to submit to his embraces.  She seems to comply but instead stabs Scarpia to death, shrieking the famous line:  "This is Tosca's kiss" as she plunges the dagger into the Baron's heart.  This doesn't avail either Tosca or Cavaradossi -- he's shot by a firing squad and Tosca commits suicide by hurling herself off the ramparts of the prison, the Castello San' Angelo in Rome.  The opera has all the features that attract people to the form:  there are majestic love duets, hugely impressive (if wholly gratuitous) choral numbers, and soliloquy-style arias of heartbreaking beauty.  The characters are vivid, larger than life, torrentially passionate and each vested with a sort of intense tragic dignity.  Cavaradossi, a freedom fighter, is fiercely defiant; Tosca's love is an incandescent kind of rage; Scarpia's sadism is freely expressed, a pure Nietzschean will-to-power -- he desires to seize, to conquer, and, then, to cast away and destroy that which pleases him.  The second act of the opera, surely one of the most savage scenes of sexual harassment ever devised, is particularly suspenseful and, even, terrifying -- Scarpia seizes Tosca and, in this production, tries to rape her on his table set with brandy decanters and candelabra; in a cellar beneath the banqueting hall, Cavaradossi is being tortured by having his head crushed in a spiked vise -- the scene has been obsessively replayed in some of its aspects in Scorsese gangster movies, most particularly in Casino.  And there is a certain horrific profundity in the action:  Tosca, like all victims of torture, cries out that she has never done anything to inspire Scarpia's sadism and, then, she sings a moving aria accusing God of having forsaken her -- all her beauty, her virtue, her good deeds done in secret, all her love for Cavaradossi and her piety are meaningless when trapped in the embrace of the deadly, nihilistic Scarpia.  It's a chilling moment and, as I grow older, Puccini's peculiar mixture of Roman sadism and lush voluptuous romanticism exerts an ever-more powerful hold on my imagination -- I can't quite shrug off these operas like I did twenty years ago.  Like most great operas, described in terms of its plot, the show seems ridiculous -- but, in fact, Tosca achieves great emotional force, primarily through the oceanic tides of its music, and the simplicity of its plot. 

In Act One, the Minnesota opera production features a vast halo of beaten gold, a hollow diadem the size of a flying saucer that is suspended half upright in the center of the stage.  In the center of the halo, there is an alabaster bust of the Virgin Mary tilted on its side so that the Holy Mother seems to have a kind of crooked, leering expression on her lips.  This huge emblem occupies most of the stage, flanked on one side by Cavaradossi's scaffolding and, on the other side, by ebony columns bound with gold rings at their bases.  Overhead, there is a projection of a basilica that becomes a Tiepolo style tromp l'oeil ceiling, a cascade of falling putti and saints at the climax of Act One, an ecclesiastical procession with bishops and cardinals, hordes of altar boys and members of haute bourgeoisie, gilded crosses borne by monks, everyone singing a sacred Te Deum while Scarpia vows to seize and rape Tosca -- the priests and ecclesiastical officials march up and down in a vortex on thesteps surrounding the huge halo and Madonna and great hanging hooks slowly raise the halo into a semi-erect position as the cavalcade passes.  The set director understands that in opera you just need picturesque places for the singers to stand (no one really needs to move except to get into positions) and so the sets are designed with huge symbolic figures at their center, most of the space occupied by these metaphoric images, with balconies and dais on which the singers can be displayed as they perform.  The third act has a similarly majestic set -- a vast house-high image of St. Michael carved apparently from marble and foreshortened with his head twisted like a deadly viper as he raises an immense razor-sharp sword toward a sky full of stars.  Under St. Michael, who hangs like a judgment in mid-air, there is a tall prison wall, an ugly escarpment made of naked, splintery looking wood ramparts knit together with metal hardware -- this is prison wall on which Caravadossi is shot by the fire squad and the platform from which Tosca launches herself in the last 30 seconds before the curtain falls.  The image of the avenging St. Michael seems puzzling at first, but it responds to a very real aspect of the opera:  in the end, the play is mostly about the duel of wills between the great diva and the great sadist Scarpia.  Caravadossi, as the lover-boy, has slipped irrevocably to the edges of the action -- his death is, more or less, comical:  he thinks the firing squad aiming its rifles at his breast has loaded their guns with "blanks" but, of course, very real bullets pierce his heart.  More central, it seems, is the combat between Scarpia and Tosca:  her kiss, administered with a dagger kills Scarpia, and, when she hurls herself off the ramparts of the prison, her final imprecation is a demand that she meet Scarpia again under the Throne of God -- it's jarring that her final desire is not for her lover but her torturer.  In a twisted way, it seems that Tosca and Scarpia are the real, doomed lovers in the opera.  Thus, the image of St. Michael suggests the aura of nemesis that hangs over the libretto -- the show is really about Beauty and the Beast, that is, Tosca and Scarpia, the real protagonists of the opera and the figures that convince the audience of the fundamental equation that underlies all grand opera:  passion is death. 

Rams

Rams (2015) is a fierce and laconic parable made in Iceland and directed by Grimur Hakanarson.  The film's title names both of its subjects:  the husbandry of sheep in a remote valley in northern Iceland and the conflict between two brothers, huge bearded men who look like the animals they tend and who have not spoken to one another in forty years.  The picture has a peculiar appeal and, when I saw the movie in  Edina, the theater was half full, a surprisingly large audience for a film on this daunting subject matter.  But, of course, domestic animals have played an enormous part in human evolution and, in my view, most people experience, albeit unconsciously, a gaping absence in their lives once occupied by the care and husbandry of the beasts that have been our constant companions for, at least, 15,000 years.  As children learn the noises that domestic animals make -- the bark of the dog and the crow of the chicken, the pigs oink and the cow's moo -- their brains are educated in a particular way that makes intuitive sense even though today most urban children may never see any of those animals in their ancient economy with human beings:  animals, and the domestic ones in particular, are "good to think with" to use Claude Levi-Strauss' phrase.  Furthermore, there is something about the shape of domestic animals, the cow's comforting bulk, the rooster's strut, the strangely vehement curiosity of piglets or the dog's wagging tail, that calms the mind -- I think most people simply like the way that domestic animals look, their appearance stirs immemorial feelings of well-being and prosperity.  Accordingly, the big, statuesque sheep that are central to Rams, their stubborn balkiness, the hard, marmoreal heads of the rams and the profuse curtains of dirty wool falling from their flanks, the sounds that they make, and the way that the animals flock together or, even, jump up to mount one another's shoulders as they pass through a tight sheepfold -- these images, and their associated sounds, have an intrinsic relationship to what it means to be human; they stir in us inarticulate and primordial emotions, particularly when we see the sheep posed against the picturesque and spectacularly barren highlands of the Icelandic moors -- this is the ancient territory of the shepherd, a primordial aspect of the human soul. 

Rams takes place in a valley that is the home of an ancient stock of sheep, the Bolstadur flock.  The valley is a place where people have the heads of famous rams mounted over their hearths and where the local livestock association meetings begin with the recitation of elaborately rhymed poems about the sheep as the "saviors of the people."  The film begins with a competition in which the two brothers participate -- this year, Gummi's sheep lose to Kiddi's animals, a loss measured, as one character notes, by a few ounces of additional muscle mass in the shoulder's of Kiddi's ram.  An obscure quarrel has divided the two brothers who live side-by-side, their individual pastures marked by carefully maintained wire fences -- as it happens, Gummi is the older brother and, apparently, the entire tract of the valley that they both occupy is titled in his name.  The two men look like (respectively) thinner and fatter versions of Santa Claus -- they are bachelors:  Gummi remarks that Kiddi once was interested in women but scared them all away; Gummi doesn't seem to have developed the taste for human females at all.  The brothers communicate by writing notes to one another delivered by a kind of black border collie, an alarmingly alert and useful animal that is a familiar to the two men and seems owned in common.  Gummi notices that there is something wrong with Kiddi's prize animals.  It turns out that the animals have scrapie, a prion disease, the highly infectious spongiform encephalopathy that afflicts sheep.  The government decrees that all the animals in the valley have to be slaughtered to keep the deadly disease from spreading.  Kiddi reacts explosively -- he uses his shot gun to blast out Gummi's windows for spreading the news of the infection.  Gummi is more cunning.  He selects the best of the ewes from his flock, hides them in the basement with his own prize ram, Graupur, and, then, weeping kills the rest of his sheep (147 of them) with his own pistol.  The people in the valley don't know what to do -- indeed, an important theme of the movie is no one can survive the endless Icelandic winter without the vital distraction of caring for their livestock and, without the sheep, the people have nothing to do:  many of them abandon the valley and Kiddi drinks himself into oblivion -- twice he has to be saved from hypothermia when he falls down in the snow outdoors dead drunk.  The brothers' mutual hatred has enforced upon them a weird kind of intimacy.  When a government employee figures out that Gummi is harboring a dozen ewes and a ram in his cellar, the ancient feud ends instantly -- the two men must cooperate to save the last of the famous Bolstadur sheep.  They drive the animals into the frozen highlands, riding on an ATV with Gummi's arms wrapped around Kiddi in a  tight embrace.  The men encounter a savage blizzard and the film ends enigmatically in a shallow icy grave, a kind of womb in the ice into which the two brothers, both of them naked as newborns, have retreated.  The film is uncompromising and its ending, probably the only way that the movie could have concluded, will probably appall and upset most people.  The reason for the brother's deadly feud is never explained and the film is stark with images of vast treeless landscapes, barren barnyards, obsessively neat and hygienic interiors almost devoid of any sign of human habitation (the brothers' essentially identical farmsteads), and dark, gloomy sheepfolds.  There are few close-ups and parts of the film are intentionally edited to confuse us -- when we see Gummi cutting up wood, the film lingers on his craftsmanlike gestures but we have no idea what he is doing.  (Only later do we learn that he has built sheep pens in his basement).  The director is as taciturn as his principal characters -- we don't know what or how his character's think and their motivations are stripped down to primal impulses, mostly the need to protect the ancestral sheep.  This is a minor movie but one that is intensely felt and, therefore, a picture that I predict will be memorable to those who see it.  Certainly, as I think about the film, it has a peculiar resonance in my imagination.