Kon Ichikawa's 1962 color film, Being Two Isn't Easy, seems like a sliver protruding from a genre to which American viewers have little access. The movie, apparently improvised, seems to reflect norms in family dramas well-understood by the Japanese -- I wonder if it is as shapeless and strangely inconsequential when viewed within the setting of other genre films which it resembles. I was baffled by the picture and puzzled by the fact that it seems to be a picture without a plot. (A sort of narrative emerges in the last twenty minutes of the short 88 minute movie, but, in general, the film is self-effacing to the point of being almost invisible.) Too dire for comedy, the film is also too whimsical to count as tragedy, although it has sad elements. The movie isn't really funny, but it's also not exactly serious either. It's certainly not melodramatic -- the film makes its points with such subtlety that they are scarcely apparent. The best characterization that I can provide is that Being Two Isn't Easy is a highly realistic account of a few months in the life of a baby who reaches what we would call his first birthday at the end of the film -- in Japan, you are one when you are born, counting your first nine-months in the womb as your first year; hence, the titular two-year old is, by our way of counting, a one year old infant.
Ichikawa's movie begins with a light show of blurred colors and the narration of the baby who speaks in a high-pitched squeaky voice, but, nonetheless, in a witty and precocious manner. The infant, a boy named Taro, tells us that he really couldn't see too well when he was born, although later he could focus on a woman's face, a lady that he now knows to be his mother. The film chronicles a few episodes in Taro's life, seen, more or less, from the baby's point of view. The infant comments on these episodes. The child's commentary is childish and not memorable at all. I believe a similar device was used in Look Who's Talking, a film about a baby in which the narration was spoken by John Travolta -- but in that case, the gag was about the contrast between the world-wise, wise-guy narrative and the innocent-looking baby. At first, the micro-narratives involving the infant don't really coalesce: a little girl falls out of a window but is caught by a mailman (this is the subject of surreally calm remarks by a woman who appears for a scene and, then, disappears from the movie.) The baby is vaccinated against childhood infectious diseases and, then, when he is thought to be suffering from chicken pox, is lugged around Tokyo by his formidable grandmother -- the old woman is doctor-shopping for someone who will give the baby "an injection", the only kind of treatment that grandma thinks effective with respect to small children. Taro's father, a feckless salary-man, says he doesn't want another child, notwithstanding his wife's desire to get pregnant again. Taro's mother, the beautiful and gentle Chiyo, helps her own sister give her baby a bath -- both women sweat profusely and comment on how exhausting it is to care for small children. Another sister, a woman with 8 children, comes to see Chiyo, talks about her life which consists of nothing but pregnancy and child birth and tries to borrow 5000 yen. Then, the family moves into the home where Goro's widowed mother lives. At first, the two women distrust one another and seem to be enemies but they gradually bond over their view that Goro is pretty much useless as a husband and father. Goro leaves a plastic dry-cleaning bag in the corridor and the baby puts it over his head and suffocates to the point of passing out. Chiyo revives the baby and Goro's mother, the infant's grandma, coldly tells Goro that he should commit suicide in recompense for his negligence. The old woman is not warm at all, but rather very fierce. She opines that there are too many people in Japan and that most of them don't deserve to live, heaping scorn upon a young man mentioned in the newspaper who has crashed his motorcycle into a utility pole and died. "So his mother took care of him and raised him up so that he could die that way?" the old woman says disdainfully. (Before she speaks, these words we get a baffling insert of people on motorcycles roaring through the darkness -- the shot isn't explained until we see Goro's mother reading the newspaper -- this kind of editing is characteristic of the French "New Wave" and the way in which the movie is shot seems derived the French films by Truffaut, Godard, and Rivette of that era.) The next day, the old lady reaches for a ball of thread and collapses dead. Goro is traveling. When he comes home, Chiyo tells him about his mother's comment about there being too many people in Japan: "Well, she practiced what she preached," Goro says drily. That night, a ball of thread rolls mysteriously through the house and wakes up Chiyo. She talks to her husband wondering where the old woman has gone -- is she in some kind of heaven or just extinguished. It's Taro's birthday and there is a full yellow moon. Taro sees his grandmother looking down at him from the moon. The number of candles on his cake (two) gets confused with the number of candles that would be on his grandmother's (death) day cake, a great fiery multitude. Goro decides that maybe he would be okay with his Chiyo trying to have another baby. Taro tells us that once he was a baby, but "now (he) is a big boy and one day will be a man."
There is a tiny plot about Goro growing up himself, something not accomplished until his own mother dies and he reluctantly consents to Chiyo having another baby. The film seems to suggest that the events involving his son have made him into a better man or, even, have helped him to achieve something like "manhood" as that concept is constructed by the Japanese. There is some eerie conversation about where people have been before they are born and where they go after they die -- the notion is that the child, perhaps, recalls something by his own pre-existence. But, if Taro knows where he was before he came into existence, he doesn't say anything to illuminate this subject. In fact, the whole device of having the baby able to narrate events involving his life revolves upon this plot point: the characters wonder what is like not to exist and the baby, who presumably didn't exist within his own recent memory, could maybe enlighten us on this point, but he doesn't. There is some poetic imagery involving the moon -- the baby sees a yellow banana moon (a crescent moon) which morphs in the infant's imagination into a little canoe in the sea. (Ichikawa was a great admirer of Disney and began his career in animation and there is a little cartoon sequence in the film showing the canoe-banana-moon riding the waves and, then, swamped.) Ichikawa is most known in this country for his harrowing war films, Fires on the Plain (involving Japanese soldiers reduced to cannibalism to survive) and The Burmese Harp ( a film about a Buddhist monk who devotes himself to gathering the bones of dead soldiers in the jungle's southeast Asia and burying them.) It's hard to be Two couldn't be more radically different from the war films (or the sex movies) that made Ichikawa famous. The movie is very slight and completely convincing from the standpoint of realism -- in fact, in some ways, the movie feels like a documentary. The script is by Natto Woda, Ichikawa's wife, and I presume that it is autobiographical.
Thursday, October 18, 2018
Monday, October 15, 2018
La Rondine (Minnesota Opera -- October 13, 2018)
La Rondine ("The Swallow") is an opera by Puccini premiered in 1917 and rarely performed since that date. It's puzzling combination of full-throateed Italian opera lyricism combined with a modernist, almost Proustian, sensibility. Aspects of the narrative can be viewed as either audaciously profound or completely idiotic. But, in any event, La Rondine, first and foremost, is about the power of memory and regret. The show invokes Grand Opera tropes but dares to imagine a narrative that demonstrates that all the arias are lies, every grand proclamation of undying passion is fraudulent. (Puccini demonstrated this with half the arias in Madame Butterfly -- Pinkerton's seduction of the heroine is based on callous self-interest and deceit.) In La Rondine, Puccini goes farther -- everyone imagines themselves to be more heroic and more passionate than they are in fact: the big dramatic moments are instances of the characters deluding themselves.
The first of the opera's three acts is a work of genius. The quality of the opera declines after that act, skirting melodrama and bathos, but, I think, narrowly avoiding those qualities. In Act One, nothing really happens. We see brittle salon conversation between middle-aged women and their pudgy consorts. Magda, a kept woman, is disenchanted with her burly, stupidly costumed patron -- the fat man wears red pantaloons. He has given her a house but she longs for something more ardent and dangerous. A poet maudit, Prunier, sings a song about a girl's dreams, playing on the piano. This song awakens in Magda a desire for erotic adventure. She recalls when she fled the care of her elderly aunt, met a boy in a bar, and drank a beer with him -- this inconsequential encounter is central to the opera: Magda wonders what would have happened if she had continued the relationship with the young man. On cue, another young man, a boy from the provinces arrives. He is enamored with Paris and its opportunities and sings a paean to the City of Light (particularly touching in light of the fact that Puccini wrote this opera when Italy was at war with France.) Everyone suggests that the boy go to cabaret called Bulliers for his first night in the big city. The hyper-aesthete Prunier, who seems to cultivate wealthy haute bourgeois widows (he's a bit like Rilke) is secretly carrying on an affair with the saucy maid. He arranges to meet her at Bulliers later in the evening and Magda dresses like a grisette, so that she can also go to that cabaret incognito. This Act is an exquisite combination of polite and dull salon banter and exquisite arias that are represented as wavering somewhere between overt expression and the world of suppressed desires and fantasies. The gently morose shadow of Der Rosenkavalier is cast over this glittering world of romantic melancholy and erotic regret -- the music is both sad and beautiful. And the plot is bold, content to linger on scarcely acknowledged amorous fantasies and yearning desire as opposed to acts and deeds.
In the second act, the libretto adopts a convention familiar to audiences from Shakespeare but quite incomprehensible to modern viewers -- the idea is that if you go abroad in clothing different from your accustomed garments, you become invisible or wholly strange to even those who know you best. (Because of the show's modernist impulses, there's some sense that the characters may recognize one another, but are simply play-acting at not knowing one another -- thereby, adding to the erotic frisson -- it may be like an older married couple pretending to be strangers to pick each other up in a bar.) This act is set at Bulliers and features a loud chorus, much dancing, and a charged erotic encounter between Magda and Ruggero, the young man to whom she was just introduced at her salon a couple hours earlier. Magda seduces Ruggero and, in an uncanny touch, asks him to re-enact the erotic rendezvous involving the young man and the beer that he bought for her fifteen or twenty years earlier. Prunier and the maid cavort and, when Magda's patron appears, she ends the relationship with him.
The last act enters the realm of an opera that I despise, La Traviata, but is so weird that I'm willing to give Puccini's enigmatic work the benefit of the doubt. We see Magda and Ruggero in bed together, enjoying an expensive luxury hotel in Nice. They can't pay the bills and it's pretty certain that the idyll is going to come to screeching halt. Unbeknownst to Magda, who is not really looking for commitment, Ruggero has written to his parents announcing that he intends to marry his girlfriend. He portrays her as completely virtuous and immaculate. (He seems not to have figured-out her previous existence as the mistress of the fat financier.) Ruggero's mother writes and says that "love is sanctified by motherhood", looking forward aggressively to the grandchildren that she is going to enjoy as a result of the marriage that she has now blessed. This is too much for Magda -- the maternity stuff is a bridge too far for her. She utters words no one wants to hear from his girlfriend: "I'm speaking to you as your mother would", herself forbidding the marriage. It's clear that she's going to return to her rich patron; at least, he can pay the bills. Prunier who has tried to turn his inamorata, the maid, into a cabaret singer is disenchanted -- the girl can't perform and, further, has been traumatized by the men at the tavern whistling at her. They have an angry spat and break up and she asks for her job back with Magda. However, once the maid dons her little French maid's outfit, her desire for her old clandestine relationship with the poet is aroused and the two of them make an assignation for that evening at 10 pm when she is off work. (Again, it's the garment that defines the character.) The outcome for Ruggero is less happy. After a duet in which the two lovers shriek their regrets at one another over huge blasts of orchestral sound, he wander stage-right, meets an ensign, who hands him a WW I carbine, and, then, the rear projection shows a nasty battlefield with oozing mud, shell-holes, and a thick undergrowth of barbed wire. Throughout the opera, we have seen a silent middle-aged woman in an elaborate hat who appears from time to time to scrutinize the action. This is supposed to be Magda ten years hence, suffering the pangs of regret. As the elder Magda moons around the rear of the stage, the rear projection shows us Ruggero's battlefield grave on which she deposits a bouquet of flowers as the curtain falls. (I assume that the business with the middle-aged lady is a directorial interpolation -- it's obvious but effective.)
The opera contains much ravishing music. But the music is defeated by the cynical libretto -- the claims of eternal passion are just empty rhetoric, at least as far as Magda goes (Ruggero is callow and, maybe, believes his own protestation of love.) But society defeats the lovers. Inadvertently, perhaps, this dynamic is reflected in the music: the lovers have to hit daunting high notes fortissimo to overcome the suavely beautiful orchestral accompaniment. Often they seem to be screeching over the wall of sound produced by the orchestra -- they can't quite be heard over the ambient noise and are overcome musically just as the libretto shows them overcome by the society in which they live. Ultimately, they revert to what they were before they found one another -- Ruggero is just a naïve boy from the provinces who becomes cannon-fodder; Magda returns to her role as courtesan. What makes this opera intriguing is its radical first act -- a forty minute composition that suggests that everything important in this show will occur as a result of erotic fantasy and regret. Erotic fantasy is the currency of grand opera but La Rondine posits that is simply not enough. Eschewing poetry for simple, unalloyed lust, Prunier and his little maid cynically show us the way that love plays out in the real world. (Prunier gets to sing a passage in falsetto, another astonishing aspect of this opera -- he sounds a little like Prince.)
The first of the opera's three acts is a work of genius. The quality of the opera declines after that act, skirting melodrama and bathos, but, I think, narrowly avoiding those qualities. In Act One, nothing really happens. We see brittle salon conversation between middle-aged women and their pudgy consorts. Magda, a kept woman, is disenchanted with her burly, stupidly costumed patron -- the fat man wears red pantaloons. He has given her a house but she longs for something more ardent and dangerous. A poet maudit, Prunier, sings a song about a girl's dreams, playing on the piano. This song awakens in Magda a desire for erotic adventure. She recalls when she fled the care of her elderly aunt, met a boy in a bar, and drank a beer with him -- this inconsequential encounter is central to the opera: Magda wonders what would have happened if she had continued the relationship with the young man. On cue, another young man, a boy from the provinces arrives. He is enamored with Paris and its opportunities and sings a paean to the City of Light (particularly touching in light of the fact that Puccini wrote this opera when Italy was at war with France.) Everyone suggests that the boy go to cabaret called Bulliers for his first night in the big city. The hyper-aesthete Prunier, who seems to cultivate wealthy haute bourgeois widows (he's a bit like Rilke) is secretly carrying on an affair with the saucy maid. He arranges to meet her at Bulliers later in the evening and Magda dresses like a grisette, so that she can also go to that cabaret incognito. This Act is an exquisite combination of polite and dull salon banter and exquisite arias that are represented as wavering somewhere between overt expression and the world of suppressed desires and fantasies. The gently morose shadow of Der Rosenkavalier is cast over this glittering world of romantic melancholy and erotic regret -- the music is both sad and beautiful. And the plot is bold, content to linger on scarcely acknowledged amorous fantasies and yearning desire as opposed to acts and deeds.
In the second act, the libretto adopts a convention familiar to audiences from Shakespeare but quite incomprehensible to modern viewers -- the idea is that if you go abroad in clothing different from your accustomed garments, you become invisible or wholly strange to even those who know you best. (Because of the show's modernist impulses, there's some sense that the characters may recognize one another, but are simply play-acting at not knowing one another -- thereby, adding to the erotic frisson -- it may be like an older married couple pretending to be strangers to pick each other up in a bar.) This act is set at Bulliers and features a loud chorus, much dancing, and a charged erotic encounter between Magda and Ruggero, the young man to whom she was just introduced at her salon a couple hours earlier. Magda seduces Ruggero and, in an uncanny touch, asks him to re-enact the erotic rendezvous involving the young man and the beer that he bought for her fifteen or twenty years earlier. Prunier and the maid cavort and, when Magda's patron appears, she ends the relationship with him.
The last act enters the realm of an opera that I despise, La Traviata, but is so weird that I'm willing to give Puccini's enigmatic work the benefit of the doubt. We see Magda and Ruggero in bed together, enjoying an expensive luxury hotel in Nice. They can't pay the bills and it's pretty certain that the idyll is going to come to screeching halt. Unbeknownst to Magda, who is not really looking for commitment, Ruggero has written to his parents announcing that he intends to marry his girlfriend. He portrays her as completely virtuous and immaculate. (He seems not to have figured-out her previous existence as the mistress of the fat financier.) Ruggero's mother writes and says that "love is sanctified by motherhood", looking forward aggressively to the grandchildren that she is going to enjoy as a result of the marriage that she has now blessed. This is too much for Magda -- the maternity stuff is a bridge too far for her. She utters words no one wants to hear from his girlfriend: "I'm speaking to you as your mother would", herself forbidding the marriage. It's clear that she's going to return to her rich patron; at least, he can pay the bills. Prunier who has tried to turn his inamorata, the maid, into a cabaret singer is disenchanted -- the girl can't perform and, further, has been traumatized by the men at the tavern whistling at her. They have an angry spat and break up and she asks for her job back with Magda. However, once the maid dons her little French maid's outfit, her desire for her old clandestine relationship with the poet is aroused and the two of them make an assignation for that evening at 10 pm when she is off work. (Again, it's the garment that defines the character.) The outcome for Ruggero is less happy. After a duet in which the two lovers shriek their regrets at one another over huge blasts of orchestral sound, he wander stage-right, meets an ensign, who hands him a WW I carbine, and, then, the rear projection shows a nasty battlefield with oozing mud, shell-holes, and a thick undergrowth of barbed wire. Throughout the opera, we have seen a silent middle-aged woman in an elaborate hat who appears from time to time to scrutinize the action. This is supposed to be Magda ten years hence, suffering the pangs of regret. As the elder Magda moons around the rear of the stage, the rear projection shows us Ruggero's battlefield grave on which she deposits a bouquet of flowers as the curtain falls. (I assume that the business with the middle-aged lady is a directorial interpolation -- it's obvious but effective.)
The opera contains much ravishing music. But the music is defeated by the cynical libretto -- the claims of eternal passion are just empty rhetoric, at least as far as Magda goes (Ruggero is callow and, maybe, believes his own protestation of love.) But society defeats the lovers. Inadvertently, perhaps, this dynamic is reflected in the music: the lovers have to hit daunting high notes fortissimo to overcome the suavely beautiful orchestral accompaniment. Often they seem to be screeching over the wall of sound produced by the orchestra -- they can't quite be heard over the ambient noise and are overcome musically just as the libretto shows them overcome by the society in which they live. Ultimately, they revert to what they were before they found one another -- Ruggero is just a naïve boy from the provinces who becomes cannon-fodder; Magda returns to her role as courtesan. What makes this opera intriguing is its radical first act -- a forty minute composition that suggests that everything important in this show will occur as a result of erotic fantasy and regret. Erotic fantasy is the currency of grand opera but La Rondine posits that is simply not enough. Eschewing poetry for simple, unalloyed lust, Prunier and his little maid cynically show us the way that love plays out in the real world. (Prunier gets to sing a passage in falsetto, another astonishing aspect of this opera -- he sounds a little like Prince.)
Sunday, October 14, 2018
Free Solo
Although the common viewer will find the documentary Free Solo (2018) very frightening, there are only a handful of viewers in the whole world who can appreciate just how terrifying the images caught on film really are -- these are professional rock climbers approaching the caliber of the movie's protagonist Alex Honnoldt. Honnoldt sets out to climb the 3000 foot rock face of El Capitan in the Yosemite Valley "free solo". This means that he makes the ascent without ropes using only his hands and feet and a little pouch of chalk to keep his fingers from getting slick with sweat. Of course, any error whatsoever in his attack on the enormous, sheer (and, even, overhanging) rock face will result in his gruesome death. At certain moments in the film recording this ascent, the world class rock climbers employing telescopes to watch Honnoldt's climb are overcome with horror and turn away from the lens, unable to bear what they are seeing -- with a sick look, the expert rock climber closes his eyes and paces nervously back and forth, too frightened to look through the eyepiece. I suspect that only rock climbers of very high achievement can appreciate this film -- it's a little watching someone perform one of Beethoven's late piano sonatas: clearly, the task is herculean, but only another world-class pianist can understand the true agony required to accomplish the performance. The sequence that most terrifies the experts is something called "The Boulder Problem", a pitch about 600 feet above the Yosemite valley. Honnoldt has to cross grip the sheer granite wall, shifting one hand over another to catch at grips too small for the camera to show them. (He has found these grips by polishing the rock face with a toothbrush and, then, inspecting it at six inches range.) All the while, his right foot is en pointe, like a ballet dancer, toes jammed against the vertical rock and seemingly gripping by friction alone. From this exposed position, Honnoldt has to execute a "karate kick" -- that is kicking with his left leg as far as he can reach to wedge his foot against a tiny prism of rock about the height of his ear. I've made a couple inconsequential rock climbs, both in Interstate Park near the Dalles of the St. Croix River and watching this maneuver made me feel dizzy -- I can only imagine the nausea felt by the other professional rock climbers when Honnoldt "solves" the "boulder problem" in this way. (Our anxiety is enhanced by the fact that we have seen Honnoldt practicing on this part of the wall while suspended in a rope harness and seen him fall time and time again.)
Free Solo documents Honnoldt's two year effort to scale El Capitan. He spends hundreds of hours practicing on the rock wall and, then, attempting the free climb in the Fall of 2016, becomes frightened and "bails" as he says. He returns the next Spring, practices for another six weeks, or so and, then, undertakes the climb in early June 2017. The ascent is documented by an experienced team of rock climbers tied-off at various stages of the climb. Their presence becomes one of the dilemmas that the film documents. Will Honnoldt take unnecessary chances because he is being filmed? Are they contributing to his danger? In fact, members of film crew agonize, that they may be, in effect, aiding him to commit suicide. (The film is directed for National Georgraphic by Elizabeth Chai-Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, a Mankato native, both of whom directed the splendid Meru, another mountaineering documentary released several years ago.) Another strand in the picture is Honnoldt's odd, off-putting affect -- there is, to be blunt, something wrong with him. (In one attempt to discover what this might be, an MRI of his brain is undertaken: not surprisingly, the study shows that Honnoldt displays little activity in his amygdala, the fear center in the brain: scary images that would elicit a electrical storm in the amygdala in others seem to have no effect on him at all.) Honnoldt was raised by a mother who taught French and spoke to her children only in that language. His father, it is said, suffered from something that might now be defined as Asperger's syndrome and seems to have been a difficult person -- the film is reticent about him (he is deceased) and Honnoldt describes his childhood as unhappy and lonely. As a result he feels a desire to accomplish perfection and, thus, devote himself to the deadly and completely solitary sport of free solo rock climbing -- an endeavor that has no grand old men: without exception, they are all dead, killed in falls.. Complicating the film is the fact that Honnoldt has acquired a girlfriend, a little blonde woman who is, seemingly, completely sane and (as the cliché would have it) "cute as a bug." Of course, Honnoldt's derring-do inspired their relationship at the outset but once she sees first-hand that her boyfriend is launched on an apparently suicidal quest to climb El Capitan free solo she begins to have serious reservations about his commitment to her. She's right to express these feelings -- Honnoldt says without equivocation that he prefers the thrill of free solo climbing to anything that his girlfriend can provide to him. Scenes with the girlfriend are funny and cringe-worthy -- in one episode, they shop for a house in Las Vegas because it's close "to some really big walls" that Honnoldt can climb. He's been living out of his van, so-called "dirt bagging," for nine years, and says, when she starts talking about carpet colors and furniture, that he doesn't care about any of this and, in fact, won't need a bed because he can simply sleep on the carpeted floor. She later confronts him and calls him an asshole. Similar, tension occurs when they go shopping for a refrigerator -- despite the fact that his climbing and endorsements have made him prosperous ("I would guess I make as much as a moderately successful dentist" he tells some students at a high school forum, Honnoldt is fantastically cheap.) As if passively hoping to deter him, his girlfriend is instrumental in two falls -- one of which causes thoracic compression fractures and the other which results in a badly sprained ankle. These mishaps cause Honnoldt to reconsider the relationship with his girlfriend -- perhaps, she is, after all, a jinx.
What lifts this film above the mere documentation of an extraordinary and terrifying feat of determination is the care with which the filmmakers detail the relationship between Honnoldt and girlfriend as well as the others in his life, most of whom try to persuade him to not make the climb. Although he expects to die, Honnoldt finally attempts the ascent and this sequence is tremendously gripping, shot from mid-air perches and using drones to bring the viewer to within a few feet of the climber's rock face choreography. It's astonishing and truly frightening. When the climb is completed, Honnoldt seems very happy for about a half-hour, Then, we see him brooding. What's next? I am reminded of the ineffable lines from Mike Leigh's great film about Gilbert and Sullivan, Topsy-Turvy (1999) -- after the success of The Mikado, Gilbert says: "There's something inherently disappointing about success."
Free Solo documents Honnoldt's two year effort to scale El Capitan. He spends hundreds of hours practicing on the rock wall and, then, attempting the free climb in the Fall of 2016, becomes frightened and "bails" as he says. He returns the next Spring, practices for another six weeks, or so and, then, undertakes the climb in early June 2017. The ascent is documented by an experienced team of rock climbers tied-off at various stages of the climb. Their presence becomes one of the dilemmas that the film documents. Will Honnoldt take unnecessary chances because he is being filmed? Are they contributing to his danger? In fact, members of film crew agonize, that they may be, in effect, aiding him to commit suicide. (The film is directed for National Georgraphic by Elizabeth Chai-Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, a Mankato native, both of whom directed the splendid Meru, another mountaineering documentary released several years ago.) Another strand in the picture is Honnoldt's odd, off-putting affect -- there is, to be blunt, something wrong with him. (In one attempt to discover what this might be, an MRI of his brain is undertaken: not surprisingly, the study shows that Honnoldt displays little activity in his amygdala, the fear center in the brain: scary images that would elicit a electrical storm in the amygdala in others seem to have no effect on him at all.) Honnoldt was raised by a mother who taught French and spoke to her children only in that language. His father, it is said, suffered from something that might now be defined as Asperger's syndrome and seems to have been a difficult person -- the film is reticent about him (he is deceased) and Honnoldt describes his childhood as unhappy and lonely. As a result he feels a desire to accomplish perfection and, thus, devote himself to the deadly and completely solitary sport of free solo rock climbing -- an endeavor that has no grand old men: without exception, they are all dead, killed in falls.. Complicating the film is the fact that Honnoldt has acquired a girlfriend, a little blonde woman who is, seemingly, completely sane and (as the cliché would have it) "cute as a bug." Of course, Honnoldt's derring-do inspired their relationship at the outset but once she sees first-hand that her boyfriend is launched on an apparently suicidal quest to climb El Capitan free solo she begins to have serious reservations about his commitment to her. She's right to express these feelings -- Honnoldt says without equivocation that he prefers the thrill of free solo climbing to anything that his girlfriend can provide to him. Scenes with the girlfriend are funny and cringe-worthy -- in one episode, they shop for a house in Las Vegas because it's close "to some really big walls" that Honnoldt can climb. He's been living out of his van, so-called "dirt bagging," for nine years, and says, when she starts talking about carpet colors and furniture, that he doesn't care about any of this and, in fact, won't need a bed because he can simply sleep on the carpeted floor. She later confronts him and calls him an asshole. Similar, tension occurs when they go shopping for a refrigerator -- despite the fact that his climbing and endorsements have made him prosperous ("I would guess I make as much as a moderately successful dentist" he tells some students at a high school forum, Honnoldt is fantastically cheap.) As if passively hoping to deter him, his girlfriend is instrumental in two falls -- one of which causes thoracic compression fractures and the other which results in a badly sprained ankle. These mishaps cause Honnoldt to reconsider the relationship with his girlfriend -- perhaps, she is, after all, a jinx.
What lifts this film above the mere documentation of an extraordinary and terrifying feat of determination is the care with which the filmmakers detail the relationship between Honnoldt and girlfriend as well as the others in his life, most of whom try to persuade him to not make the climb. Although he expects to die, Honnoldt finally attempts the ascent and this sequence is tremendously gripping, shot from mid-air perches and using drones to bring the viewer to within a few feet of the climber's rock face choreography. It's astonishing and truly frightening. When the climb is completed, Honnoldt seems very happy for about a half-hour, Then, we see him brooding. What's next? I am reminded of the ineffable lines from Mike Leigh's great film about Gilbert and Sullivan, Topsy-Turvy (1999) -- after the success of The Mikado, Gilbert says: "There's something inherently disappointing about success."
Dragon Inn
King Hu's 1967 Dragon Inn inspired a revolution in Chinese wuxiau (swordplay) melodrama. The film retains interest today although it is, certainly, not a great work notwithstanding the full Criterion presentation on a recent Blue-Ray DVD. You will like this film to a greater or lesser degree to the extent that you are interested in intricately choreographed combat with swords, daggers, and arrows staged in various locations and involving different martial arts corps de ballet. Dragon Inn has no appreciable plot, no narrative twists, and no real suspense -- characters snarl and make quips about each other, but they don't come with any sort of appreciable back-story. We don't know what, if anything, is at stake. The objective of all the combat could be epochal -- the salvation of the Imperial Chinese State -- or it could be a rivalry between competing schools of calligraphy. It doesn't really matter so long as the complex duels are expertly staged. In many respects, Dragon Inn is almost avant-garde in its eschewal of anything like a conventional plot, motivation, or characters. The picture shows how an extremely pure form of genre picture can overlap quite unintentionally with the avant-garde. In some ways, the movie resembles Wim Wenders great modern-dance epic, his film about Pina Bausch -- in both cases, different ensembles of performers, distinctive but, nonetheless, ciphers, perform motions intended to define the limitations of their bodies, the velocity and, conversely, the slowness with which they can move, their ability to maintain balance while engaged in frenetic gestural motion, all the while exploring the parameters of the space in which they are deployed. Dragon Inn ultimately is a film of staggering abstraction -- it can't be enjoyed as a story, but rather must be approached as a series of variations on a theme: a person with a sword again and again decimating 4 to 12 opponents in combat.
A powerful, blonde-haired eunuch has seized control of the Ming Dynasty. He executes one of his ministers and sends the official's two children, a boy and a girl, into exile. When the eunuch sends assassins to murder the young refugees, a mysterious group of swordsmen (and a woman warrior) intervene to slaughter the murderers and save the minister's children. At a border outpost in north China, an unprepossessing tavern stands in a desert of stone cobbles. This is Dragon Gate Inn, a adobe brick building that looks like something imported from a Sam Peckinpah movie. The Eastern Depot, a nasty group of killers converges on the Inn where the executed minister's children are hiding. A series of swordfights ensues. When the protectors of the children prevail, having wiped out about a 120 members of the Eastern Depot death squad, the chief eunuch himself appears borne on a palanquin to the sound of barbaric horns. The swordfighters protecting the children march up a mountain, apparently planning to cross into Tartar country. On the winding mountain pass road, more fighting occurs between the heroes defending the children and the eunuch who is himself a lethal swordsman. After an epic ten minute battle, the surviving heroes kill the eunuch although they are all badly wounded in the struggle. The film ends with a single valedictory shot -- some figures filmed from behind walking forward toward other warriors next to limpid lagoon. We can't see who these people are and the scene remains wholly enigmatic, a elegiac dying fall to all the mayhem.
Dragon Inn exhibits the intricate cross-fertilization between American Westerns and Asian action films. The starkly utilitarian tavern in the middle of nowhere, chili pepper ristras drying on the porch offering the only accent of color, is a staple of American westerns from Howard Hawks to Tarantino (who borrows extensively from this movie). The quirky denizens of the inn are similar to the loners who assemble for action in films like Rio Bravo and John Ford's Westerns. There are long set pieces in which the lone swordsman demonstrates his prowess -- he pitches a bowl of soup across the room so that it lands in front of the bad guy without spilling a drop; on one occasion, he catches a dagger hurled at him between his chop sticks and seems to swill poisoned wine without any effect. (The good guys are always plucking arrows out of the air with their bare hands. When they get slightly cut, they express outrage, amazed it seems that they could even be touched by an adversary's weapon.) The Eastern Depot villains are bad hombres, none of them distinguished by much in the way of character or, even, identifying features (they wear black) -- after all, they all "strut and fret" their brief time on the stage only to be exterminated by the heroes. The bad guys are so vicious that they hack a half-dozen hapless porters to death in recompense for them merely asking for a "gratuity" for hauling the villains' luggage (most;y chests full of swords) across the desert of cobbles and its adjacent canyons. The brother swordsman (part of the sibling duo) makes an insouciant entrances similar to Mifune's appearance in Yojimbo strolling across the wasteland with a sneer and an emerald green bumbershoot slung over his shoulder (the umbrella conceals his sword). It takes half the film's 111 minute running time to define the group of heroes, the counterforce to the eunuch's henchmen -- ultimately, there are five of them lead by Mister Wu, the proprietor of the inn, and formerly a general in the imperial army. One curiosity of the film is that the heroes relentlessly taunt the blonde-haired eunuch about his castration. This is a little disingenuous because two of the swordsmen defending the official's children are eunuchs themselves -- they confess that they were hauled away to the "castration parlor" for defying the villain. The chief Eunuch has something wrong with him (at one point it is said to be "asthma") and he reels and staggers between intricately balletic swordfights in which he is surrounded by all of the good guys. The good guys have all of the advantages and, so, in the end, the viewer is conflicted - you feel more than a little sneaking admiration for the grit of blonde, snarling eunuch: he fights to the last and, when his head is cut off, you get the sense that he would keep up the battle even beheaded if only this were possible. The final battle epitomizes the film: in the first stage, hordes of henchmen are cut down; this is followed by hand-to-hand duels between expert swordsmen, and, at last, we reach what is called in video gaming the "boss stage" -- this is when the surviving good guys square off against the biggest and baddest of the villains. In Dragon Inn, this fight is spectacularly picturesque, staged in high mountains gilded by the sun with the valleys overflowing with mist. It's like a Chinese scroll unrolled before our eyes and leading from landscape highlight to highlight, each scenic vista accompanying by a spectacular sword fight.
There's nothing to the movie, but it's abstract premise. It reminds me of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 -- what if a film were made that suppressed everything but the fighting sequences? On the Criterion disk, there is a short but indispensable video essay on the movie's editing and the way action is staged -- you will miss much of what makes Dragon Inn remarkable if you don't watch this extra. In fact, I recommend that you watch this segment before the movie itself. It will help you better appreciate what you are seeing.
A powerful, blonde-haired eunuch has seized control of the Ming Dynasty. He executes one of his ministers and sends the official's two children, a boy and a girl, into exile. When the eunuch sends assassins to murder the young refugees, a mysterious group of swordsmen (and a woman warrior) intervene to slaughter the murderers and save the minister's children. At a border outpost in north China, an unprepossessing tavern stands in a desert of stone cobbles. This is Dragon Gate Inn, a adobe brick building that looks like something imported from a Sam Peckinpah movie. The Eastern Depot, a nasty group of killers converges on the Inn where the executed minister's children are hiding. A series of swordfights ensues. When the protectors of the children prevail, having wiped out about a 120 members of the Eastern Depot death squad, the chief eunuch himself appears borne on a palanquin to the sound of barbaric horns. The swordfighters protecting the children march up a mountain, apparently planning to cross into Tartar country. On the winding mountain pass road, more fighting occurs between the heroes defending the children and the eunuch who is himself a lethal swordsman. After an epic ten minute battle, the surviving heroes kill the eunuch although they are all badly wounded in the struggle. The film ends with a single valedictory shot -- some figures filmed from behind walking forward toward other warriors next to limpid lagoon. We can't see who these people are and the scene remains wholly enigmatic, a elegiac dying fall to all the mayhem.
Dragon Inn exhibits the intricate cross-fertilization between American Westerns and Asian action films. The starkly utilitarian tavern in the middle of nowhere, chili pepper ristras drying on the porch offering the only accent of color, is a staple of American westerns from Howard Hawks to Tarantino (who borrows extensively from this movie). The quirky denizens of the inn are similar to the loners who assemble for action in films like Rio Bravo and John Ford's Westerns. There are long set pieces in which the lone swordsman demonstrates his prowess -- he pitches a bowl of soup across the room so that it lands in front of the bad guy without spilling a drop; on one occasion, he catches a dagger hurled at him between his chop sticks and seems to swill poisoned wine without any effect. (The good guys are always plucking arrows out of the air with their bare hands. When they get slightly cut, they express outrage, amazed it seems that they could even be touched by an adversary's weapon.) The Eastern Depot villains are bad hombres, none of them distinguished by much in the way of character or, even, identifying features (they wear black) -- after all, they all "strut and fret" their brief time on the stage only to be exterminated by the heroes. The bad guys are so vicious that they hack a half-dozen hapless porters to death in recompense for them merely asking for a "gratuity" for hauling the villains' luggage (most;y chests full of swords) across the desert of cobbles and its adjacent canyons. The brother swordsman (part of the sibling duo) makes an insouciant entrances similar to Mifune's appearance in Yojimbo strolling across the wasteland with a sneer and an emerald green bumbershoot slung over his shoulder (the umbrella conceals his sword). It takes half the film's 111 minute running time to define the group of heroes, the counterforce to the eunuch's henchmen -- ultimately, there are five of them lead by Mister Wu, the proprietor of the inn, and formerly a general in the imperial army. One curiosity of the film is that the heroes relentlessly taunt the blonde-haired eunuch about his castration. This is a little disingenuous because two of the swordsmen defending the official's children are eunuchs themselves -- they confess that they were hauled away to the "castration parlor" for defying the villain. The chief Eunuch has something wrong with him (at one point it is said to be "asthma") and he reels and staggers between intricately balletic swordfights in which he is surrounded by all of the good guys. The good guys have all of the advantages and, so, in the end, the viewer is conflicted - you feel more than a little sneaking admiration for the grit of blonde, snarling eunuch: he fights to the last and, when his head is cut off, you get the sense that he would keep up the battle even beheaded if only this were possible. The final battle epitomizes the film: in the first stage, hordes of henchmen are cut down; this is followed by hand-to-hand duels between expert swordsmen, and, at last, we reach what is called in video gaming the "boss stage" -- this is when the surviving good guys square off against the biggest and baddest of the villains. In Dragon Inn, this fight is spectacularly picturesque, staged in high mountains gilded by the sun with the valleys overflowing with mist. It's like a Chinese scroll unrolled before our eyes and leading from landscape highlight to highlight, each scenic vista accompanying by a spectacular sword fight.
There's nothing to the movie, but it's abstract premise. It reminds me of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 -- what if a film were made that suppressed everything but the fighting sequences? On the Criterion disk, there is a short but indispensable video essay on the movie's editing and the way action is staged -- you will miss much of what makes Dragon Inn remarkable if you don't watch this extra. In fact, I recommend that you watch this segment before the movie itself. It will help you better appreciate what you are seeing.
Friday, October 12, 2018
The Look of Silence
A companion documentary to the director, Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012), The Look of Silence, also a documentary about mass murder in Indonesia, is less flamboyant, shorter, but equally harrowing. The 2014 movie is also disheartening and leaves the viewer with unresolved emotions -- most of us expect that the world will turn out to be a just place. (Martin Luther King: "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.") Oppenheimer's films offer a nightmarish alternative to King's optimism: what if the must awful injustice not only evades retribution but, ultimately, is rewarded, praised and a source of great power and wealth? This scenario seems to have occurred in Indonesia and Oppenheimer's films are alarming because they unflinchingly document a nation where the most vicious and sadistic cruelty prevailed and, indeed, catapulted its practitioners into positions of power and eminence -- in Indonesia, the bad guys won and, in fact, are still winning.
The back story to The Look of Silence is simple enough. In 1965, probably at the urging of the American CIA, the Indonesian army decided to solve its problem with Communist insurgents by simply massacring everyone who could be considered a menace to the military junta. To avoid the appearance of state-sponsored mass murder, the army deputized local death squads to carry out the slaughter. These death squads acted with great enthusiasm, committing horrifying acts of violence. Apparently, more than a million people were murdered, many of them simply poor farmers or other dispossessed people caught up in the lethal purge. The anonymous protagonist of The Look of Silence is a small-town optometrist who seems to make house-calls. The optometrist is 44 and, during his house-calls, questions local people who were members of the militia death squads about their murderous activities -- when he does this, breaching a code of silence that seems ubiquitous in Indonesia, he is met with weird justifications, denials, threats, and, most often, the titular "look of silence", a blank uneasy stare in which the killer's face and lips contort but no words are spoken. Much of the film is unnerving, consisting of long moments of complete silence in which the protagonist simply looks at the killer (or members of the killer's family) with an impassive, expressionless, indeed, almost reptilian stare. It is this same bland, and impenetrable, stare that we have seen on the optometrist's face as he watches footage shot by Oppenheimer of the elderly mass murderers joking and congratulating one another on their savagery forty years earlier. (About a quarter of the film shows the optometrist alone in a featureless room, a kind of abstract purgatory, watching TV interviews that "Josh," as his Indonesian informants call the director, has shot. Indonesians seem to have a propensity for acting things out -- this was obvious in the garish song and dance numbers in The Act of Killing, a film that covers the same terrain, and many of the old death squad murderers enjoy pantomiming how they hacked off heads or slit bellies; one old fellow has his sidekick squat down so he can mime how he cut off Ramli's penis -- Ramli is the protagonist's brother who was literally hacked to pieces in 1965, two years before the optometrist was born. This jolly old butcher has written a book illustrated with sketches of how he chopped up Ramli. With his wife and a sidekick, the old killer displays the book and gives jocular details about how, for years, no one would eat the fish hauled from the Snake River, the site of the worst massacres, since the creatures had been feasting on human flesh. Near the end of the movie, the optometrist confronts the death squad leader's wife and sons. They claim to have no knowledge of any of the killings. The wife goes so far as to assert that her husband never wrote any memoir about the killings, certainly not an illustrated book. When the optometrist shows her lap-top computer footage of Oppenheimer's interview with her husband in which he proudly displays the book and its gory pictures in her presence, she becomes befuddled and leaves the room. Of course, the images show her standing next to her husband giggling about his memoir. Her son's threaten the optometrist and one of them squawks: "You are no longer our friend, Josh!" The old murderer has died unrepenitent.
Oppenheimer is a poetic filmmaker despite his horrendous subject matter. The movie is shot in beautiful, restrained color -- mostly huge close-ups and landscapes with the sound track tremulous with the amplified sounds of insects. The film is structured around three strands of imagery that annotate the horrific story. First, we see tiny spherical beans, jumping and skittering on the surface of a plate or a piece of wood. These are encapsulated butterflies struggling to merge from their bean-like cocoons -- at least, this is how the strange skittering and twitching seeds are explained. The optometrist's father is said to be 103 years old and he haunts the film like a ghoulish, dwarflike specter. We see his wife ladling water over the tiny naked and emaciated homunculus as he shivers and trembles. The old man is like Tithonus -- he's so ancient that he doesn't exactly seem human. He's also senile, claiming in a child-like voice that he's only 17 -- he sings a little risqué ditty about a girl, pop music from his boyhood. When questioned about his son, Ramli, the old man simply denies that he ever had a son. The old man suggests that an implacable doom is befalling all of the murderers -- it's simply the ravages of old age. The old villains that we meet in the film all seem to be dying, they have one foot in the grave. In some fundamental way, the film is about death -- the young victims who died so horribly are, at least, spared the indignity of old age that afflicts murderers and survivors alike. Human revenge has failed but, nonetheless, the worst of the murderers are now suffering -- the injustice is that they are suffering the common fate of all of us who live to be old. (In one terrible scene, the shriveled old man is lost in his own house and shrieks that someone should rescue him -- his grief and sorrow seem analogous to the numb disbelief that some of the killers experience when confronted about their murders: how can this be happening to me in my own home?) The final strand of the picture involves the protagonist's family life -- he has an elderly mother who prays for the everlasting damnation of her son's killers and implacably wishes for revenge. (She no longer sleeps with her superannuated husband because "he smells of pee.") The hero also has a small daughter and we see him playing with her and reading to her from a book. These images suggest that life goes on despite the terrible things that happened in 1965. And this aspect of the film shows how easy the day to day concerns of our lives will erode our ability to retain in our imagination, horrific things that we know happened but that we wish didn''t oppress us any longer. Overriding these separate narrative strands is the film's central metaphor -- often, the optometrist conducts interviews while his subjects are wearing apparatus that allows the hero to correct their vision with different lenses. In a real sense, the protagonist is working so that people in his part of Indonesia will be able to see better -- that is appreciate what happened in 1965. He is trying to open people's eyes. In this respect, the protagonist, with his fixed, unflinching gaze, resembles a camera -- he seems almost completely inert, a pair of watching eyes and the film's fixation with optical devices enhances the impression that the optometrist is a surrogate for the camera itself, recording impassively and, without comment, the images that it receives. Part of enigma in the film is the hero -- we don't know his motive and can't understand exactly what he is trying to accomplish. And, if he is baffling to the audience, he is a complete mystery to the Indonesians who each and every one (including a death squad victim who escaped) seem to regard it best to not re-open the terrible wounds left by the mass killings in 1965.
The movie is filled with disconcerting images. One old man who led death squads says that the Americans should have given prizes to him and his compadres -- perhaps, a plane flight to the USA or, at the very least, a cruise. A member of parliament who ordered thousands of deaths says menacingly: "Of course, I was right -- this is shown by the fact that the families of those I killed all voted for me." A 1965 newsreel narrated by a NBC newscaster suggests that the Communists wanted to be murdered and, in fact, even politely scheduled appointments for their slaughter -- a sentiment echoed by several of the old murderers shown in the film. (Students in an elementary school are told that the Communists gouged out people's eyes and, then, pleaded to be punished by death -- the notion of injury to the eyes is fundamental to the film and the optometrist's central role in the picture. The most shocking moment in the film is when the daughter of a killer says that she wants to make peace with the optometrist and have him as a member of her family. The optometrist hugs her and says that he is now a member of her family. She, then, asks the optometrist to embrace her senile father and forgive him for killing the hero's brother. To everyone's surprise, the optometrist does embrace the delusional old man showing almost supernatural grace by making this gesture of forgiveness.. In this film, two old men claim to have kept their sanity in the midst of the slaughter by drinking human blood --"it's sweet and salty" one of them tells the camera. Drinking human blood was a remedy for the horror of killing so many people and, in an odd way, these old murderers are more sympathetic than the urbane politicians and land developers who profited from the slaughter. At least, these two men recognized that they had transgressed beyond the bounds of the human and that their only means of remaining sane was to engage in this overtly supernatural ritual. Both of these old men cut the interview short -- it's time for them to go the Mosque for their evening prayers.
The back story to The Look of Silence is simple enough. In 1965, probably at the urging of the American CIA, the Indonesian army decided to solve its problem with Communist insurgents by simply massacring everyone who could be considered a menace to the military junta. To avoid the appearance of state-sponsored mass murder, the army deputized local death squads to carry out the slaughter. These death squads acted with great enthusiasm, committing horrifying acts of violence. Apparently, more than a million people were murdered, many of them simply poor farmers or other dispossessed people caught up in the lethal purge. The anonymous protagonist of The Look of Silence is a small-town optometrist who seems to make house-calls. The optometrist is 44 and, during his house-calls, questions local people who were members of the militia death squads about their murderous activities -- when he does this, breaching a code of silence that seems ubiquitous in Indonesia, he is met with weird justifications, denials, threats, and, most often, the titular "look of silence", a blank uneasy stare in which the killer's face and lips contort but no words are spoken. Much of the film is unnerving, consisting of long moments of complete silence in which the protagonist simply looks at the killer (or members of the killer's family) with an impassive, expressionless, indeed, almost reptilian stare. It is this same bland, and impenetrable, stare that we have seen on the optometrist's face as he watches footage shot by Oppenheimer of the elderly mass murderers joking and congratulating one another on their savagery forty years earlier. (About a quarter of the film shows the optometrist alone in a featureless room, a kind of abstract purgatory, watching TV interviews that "Josh," as his Indonesian informants call the director, has shot. Indonesians seem to have a propensity for acting things out -- this was obvious in the garish song and dance numbers in The Act of Killing, a film that covers the same terrain, and many of the old death squad murderers enjoy pantomiming how they hacked off heads or slit bellies; one old fellow has his sidekick squat down so he can mime how he cut off Ramli's penis -- Ramli is the protagonist's brother who was literally hacked to pieces in 1965, two years before the optometrist was born. This jolly old butcher has written a book illustrated with sketches of how he chopped up Ramli. With his wife and a sidekick, the old killer displays the book and gives jocular details about how, for years, no one would eat the fish hauled from the Snake River, the site of the worst massacres, since the creatures had been feasting on human flesh. Near the end of the movie, the optometrist confronts the death squad leader's wife and sons. They claim to have no knowledge of any of the killings. The wife goes so far as to assert that her husband never wrote any memoir about the killings, certainly not an illustrated book. When the optometrist shows her lap-top computer footage of Oppenheimer's interview with her husband in which he proudly displays the book and its gory pictures in her presence, she becomes befuddled and leaves the room. Of course, the images show her standing next to her husband giggling about his memoir. Her son's threaten the optometrist and one of them squawks: "You are no longer our friend, Josh!" The old murderer has died unrepenitent.
Oppenheimer is a poetic filmmaker despite his horrendous subject matter. The movie is shot in beautiful, restrained color -- mostly huge close-ups and landscapes with the sound track tremulous with the amplified sounds of insects. The film is structured around three strands of imagery that annotate the horrific story. First, we see tiny spherical beans, jumping and skittering on the surface of a plate or a piece of wood. These are encapsulated butterflies struggling to merge from their bean-like cocoons -- at least, this is how the strange skittering and twitching seeds are explained. The optometrist's father is said to be 103 years old and he haunts the film like a ghoulish, dwarflike specter. We see his wife ladling water over the tiny naked and emaciated homunculus as he shivers and trembles. The old man is like Tithonus -- he's so ancient that he doesn't exactly seem human. He's also senile, claiming in a child-like voice that he's only 17 -- he sings a little risqué ditty about a girl, pop music from his boyhood. When questioned about his son, Ramli, the old man simply denies that he ever had a son. The old man suggests that an implacable doom is befalling all of the murderers -- it's simply the ravages of old age. The old villains that we meet in the film all seem to be dying, they have one foot in the grave. In some fundamental way, the film is about death -- the young victims who died so horribly are, at least, spared the indignity of old age that afflicts murderers and survivors alike. Human revenge has failed but, nonetheless, the worst of the murderers are now suffering -- the injustice is that they are suffering the common fate of all of us who live to be old. (In one terrible scene, the shriveled old man is lost in his own house and shrieks that someone should rescue him -- his grief and sorrow seem analogous to the numb disbelief that some of the killers experience when confronted about their murders: how can this be happening to me in my own home?) The final strand of the picture involves the protagonist's family life -- he has an elderly mother who prays for the everlasting damnation of her son's killers and implacably wishes for revenge. (She no longer sleeps with her superannuated husband because "he smells of pee.") The hero also has a small daughter and we see him playing with her and reading to her from a book. These images suggest that life goes on despite the terrible things that happened in 1965. And this aspect of the film shows how easy the day to day concerns of our lives will erode our ability to retain in our imagination, horrific things that we know happened but that we wish didn''t oppress us any longer. Overriding these separate narrative strands is the film's central metaphor -- often, the optometrist conducts interviews while his subjects are wearing apparatus that allows the hero to correct their vision with different lenses. In a real sense, the protagonist is working so that people in his part of Indonesia will be able to see better -- that is appreciate what happened in 1965. He is trying to open people's eyes. In this respect, the protagonist, with his fixed, unflinching gaze, resembles a camera -- he seems almost completely inert, a pair of watching eyes and the film's fixation with optical devices enhances the impression that the optometrist is a surrogate for the camera itself, recording impassively and, without comment, the images that it receives. Part of enigma in the film is the hero -- we don't know his motive and can't understand exactly what he is trying to accomplish. And, if he is baffling to the audience, he is a complete mystery to the Indonesians who each and every one (including a death squad victim who escaped) seem to regard it best to not re-open the terrible wounds left by the mass killings in 1965.
The movie is filled with disconcerting images. One old man who led death squads says that the Americans should have given prizes to him and his compadres -- perhaps, a plane flight to the USA or, at the very least, a cruise. A member of parliament who ordered thousands of deaths says menacingly: "Of course, I was right -- this is shown by the fact that the families of those I killed all voted for me." A 1965 newsreel narrated by a NBC newscaster suggests that the Communists wanted to be murdered and, in fact, even politely scheduled appointments for their slaughter -- a sentiment echoed by several of the old murderers shown in the film. (Students in an elementary school are told that the Communists gouged out people's eyes and, then, pleaded to be punished by death -- the notion of injury to the eyes is fundamental to the film and the optometrist's central role in the picture. The most shocking moment in the film is when the daughter of a killer says that she wants to make peace with the optometrist and have him as a member of her family. The optometrist hugs her and says that he is now a member of her family. She, then, asks the optometrist to embrace her senile father and forgive him for killing the hero's brother. To everyone's surprise, the optometrist does embrace the delusional old man showing almost supernatural grace by making this gesture of forgiveness.. In this film, two old men claim to have kept their sanity in the midst of the slaughter by drinking human blood --"it's sweet and salty" one of them tells the camera. Drinking human blood was a remedy for the horror of killing so many people and, in an odd way, these old murderers are more sympathetic than the urbane politicians and land developers who profited from the slaughter. At least, these two men recognized that they had transgressed beyond the bounds of the human and that their only means of remaining sane was to engage in this overtly supernatural ritual. Both of these old men cut the interview short -- it's time for them to go the Mosque for their evening prayers.
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Sunset Song
Sunset Song (2015) is one of those worthy, well-meaning, and earnest films that you put on your queue and, then, avoid watching for years. The film was directed by one of cinema's pre-eminent poet-directors (Terence Davies) and has excellent acting and production values. Crammed full of rapes, beatings, and gory childbirths, the picture is certainly not boring -- but I must admit that I found it peculiarly offensive. Although Davies is probably world-cinema's most poetic and sensitive director, Sunset Song is stupidly and explicitly brutal and strangely literal-minded -- it is maudlin and bathetic, the opposite of poetic. In this regard, Sunset Song presages the awful devolution of Davies' poetic gifts obvious in his totally banal and offensive A Quiet Passion, a 2016 period film about Emily Dickinson that subjects the poor writer to a whole barrage of terrible illnesses and seizures -- in the end, Emily Dickinson is, in effect, reduced to paroxysms of convulsion; her verse scanted by the gruesome depiction of her last illness. She's not a poet but a collection of garish, hideous symptoms.
Sunset Song is based upon a famous novel by a Scottish writer, Lee Grassic Gibbon, published in 1932. (The book is highly celebrated in Scotland where it achieved status as Scotland's best-loved novel in 2016 -- possibly as a result of publicity arises from this film.) The book is a "coming of age" novel involving a young woman named Chris Guthrie (played in the movie by the remarkably beautiful English super-model Agyness Deyn). Chris suffers all sorts of horrors but ends up affirming her life in the Scottish highlands. The highlands scenery, paradoxically shot in New Zealand, is a major thematic element in the film -- we see golden fields of wheat, deep green valleys, and turbulent skies full of storm clouds; sometimes, the fields and old stone walls are picturesquely draped in snow. In this beautiful terrain, the Guthrie family lives, terrorized by their savage patriarch, John Guthrie. (Peter Mullen who was indelible as the vicious, if henpecked, hillbilly criminal in Ozark plays John Guthrie uttering impenetrable and unintelligible Scottish curses into his beard and beating everyone in sight.) After raping Guthrie rapes his long-suffering wife, she suffers through difficult childbirth (portrayed mostly by bloody forearms and horrific shrieks) and has twins. When John rapes her again, and she ends up pregnant once more (she's about 50 years old), she takes matters into her own hands by poisoning herself and the two babies. Some of this was a little unclear to me because the characters speak in Scottish and, without subtitles, there is no way of understanding what they are saying -- "sighing and moaning/ or ilk green loaning/ the flowers of the forest/ are a wede away": even with the subtitles engaged, some of the dialogue and diction, particularly in the songs is hard to decipher. Guthrie's violent treatment of his son drives him away. Guthrie then has a stroke and we are treated to about five minutes of the vicious old man writhing in the mud -- strokes, paralysis, and awful seizures now seem to be Terence Davies' stock-in-trade (he showed such things in similarly tasteless and awful detail in A Quiet Passion). Old Guthrie still has a lot of juice in him and tries to rape Chris, although he has hemiparesis and can't accomplish much beyond wriggling around on his belly on the floor. He dies and we get another lengthy open casket scene -- Davies' likes these sequences also. Chris falls in love with a local lad and, for about 20 minutes, the film relaxes from its somber and morose tone and becomes a charming pastoral bucolic -- the scenes leading up to, and around, the wedding are the best in the movie because they are the most musical and least dire. (Many of Davies' most magnificent earlier movies are, in effect, musicals, most notably his greatest picture The Long Day Closes released in 1992, an affectionate tribute to movie musicals that sustained Davies' during his own difficult childhood.) Just when things seem to be looking up for Chris, her husband gets denounced for not enlisting to fight in World War One. Shamed, he signs up. When he returns from France, he has implausibly become an even more brutish rapist and misogynist than dead John Guthrie. Chris has to threaten him with a knife. Later, we learn that he has deserted and been shot as a coward in France. It's not enough to Davies to have someone report this -- he, then, violates all of the norms of his movie, except for his sadistic desire to film in long sequences different types of human misery, and cuts away to France where we see Chris' husband shot by a firing squad. (Up to this point, the film has cleaved religiously to Chris' point-of-view, but this goes by the wayside when Davies' gets a chance to stage an execution.) We're supposed to mourn the poor fellow but he behaved so horribly to our heroine, raping her in another of Davies' tasteless displays of cruelty, that we don't give a damn about his fate -- in fact, the audience is puzzled by the heroine's moping around after the brute has been shot: one expects she would pleased to have him out of her life. The movie ends in a puzzling way with a long penultimate shot tracking over a vile-looking field of mud, debris, and bomb craters -- apparently a battlefield in France -- and, then, ending with shots of some standing stones (apparently significant in the novel but just picturesque window-dressing in Davies' film) and the heroine who declares "you can do without day if you have a quiet lamp lit in your heart."
Davies' is drawn to images of physical suffering either in childbirth or terrible illness or the results of cruelty inflicted by one character on another. This is ultimately both disturbing and tedious. He is the opposite of elliptical -- if something awful is going to happen, he puts the camera in the room and licks his lips as he records the misery. An example of the degradation in Davies' style is a gorgeous sequence involving parishioners marching through golden wheat fields to their church -- on the soundtrack we hear the Orpheus Choir of Glasgow singing a wonderfully beautiful hymn that begins "All the April evenings, April airs were all abroad". The camera tracks in a stately motion through the church recording a sermon by the preacher in which he demands all the men in the parish enlist to fight the German Kaiser and that anyone who hesitates is a "pro-German coward." Maybe, pastors preached this way in Scotland in 1916, but the scene is over-the-top, "laid on with a trowel" as they say, images and words that seem out-of-character for the otherwise reticent farming folk. (Davies shot a similar bravura tracking sequence in a church in The Long Day Closes that is one of the masterpieces in world cinema and much more accomplished than his work in this film.) Davies' makes his points with such literal-minded excessiveness that the whole thing seems embarrassing, simple-minded, and, even, unrealistic.
Sunset Song is based upon a famous novel by a Scottish writer, Lee Grassic Gibbon, published in 1932. (The book is highly celebrated in Scotland where it achieved status as Scotland's best-loved novel in 2016 -- possibly as a result of publicity arises from this film.) The book is a "coming of age" novel involving a young woman named Chris Guthrie (played in the movie by the remarkably beautiful English super-model Agyness Deyn). Chris suffers all sorts of horrors but ends up affirming her life in the Scottish highlands. The highlands scenery, paradoxically shot in New Zealand, is a major thematic element in the film -- we see golden fields of wheat, deep green valleys, and turbulent skies full of storm clouds; sometimes, the fields and old stone walls are picturesquely draped in snow. In this beautiful terrain, the Guthrie family lives, terrorized by their savage patriarch, John Guthrie. (Peter Mullen who was indelible as the vicious, if henpecked, hillbilly criminal in Ozark plays John Guthrie uttering impenetrable and unintelligible Scottish curses into his beard and beating everyone in sight.) After raping Guthrie rapes his long-suffering wife, she suffers through difficult childbirth (portrayed mostly by bloody forearms and horrific shrieks) and has twins. When John rapes her again, and she ends up pregnant once more (she's about 50 years old), she takes matters into her own hands by poisoning herself and the two babies. Some of this was a little unclear to me because the characters speak in Scottish and, without subtitles, there is no way of understanding what they are saying -- "sighing and moaning/ or ilk green loaning/ the flowers of the forest/ are a wede away": even with the subtitles engaged, some of the dialogue and diction, particularly in the songs is hard to decipher. Guthrie's violent treatment of his son drives him away. Guthrie then has a stroke and we are treated to about five minutes of the vicious old man writhing in the mud -- strokes, paralysis, and awful seizures now seem to be Terence Davies' stock-in-trade (he showed such things in similarly tasteless and awful detail in A Quiet Passion). Old Guthrie still has a lot of juice in him and tries to rape Chris, although he has hemiparesis and can't accomplish much beyond wriggling around on his belly on the floor. He dies and we get another lengthy open casket scene -- Davies' likes these sequences also. Chris falls in love with a local lad and, for about 20 minutes, the film relaxes from its somber and morose tone and becomes a charming pastoral bucolic -- the scenes leading up to, and around, the wedding are the best in the movie because they are the most musical and least dire. (Many of Davies' most magnificent earlier movies are, in effect, musicals, most notably his greatest picture The Long Day Closes released in 1992, an affectionate tribute to movie musicals that sustained Davies' during his own difficult childhood.) Just when things seem to be looking up for Chris, her husband gets denounced for not enlisting to fight in World War One. Shamed, he signs up. When he returns from France, he has implausibly become an even more brutish rapist and misogynist than dead John Guthrie. Chris has to threaten him with a knife. Later, we learn that he has deserted and been shot as a coward in France. It's not enough to Davies to have someone report this -- he, then, violates all of the norms of his movie, except for his sadistic desire to film in long sequences different types of human misery, and cuts away to France where we see Chris' husband shot by a firing squad. (Up to this point, the film has cleaved religiously to Chris' point-of-view, but this goes by the wayside when Davies' gets a chance to stage an execution.) We're supposed to mourn the poor fellow but he behaved so horribly to our heroine, raping her in another of Davies' tasteless displays of cruelty, that we don't give a damn about his fate -- in fact, the audience is puzzled by the heroine's moping around after the brute has been shot: one expects she would pleased to have him out of her life. The movie ends in a puzzling way with a long penultimate shot tracking over a vile-looking field of mud, debris, and bomb craters -- apparently a battlefield in France -- and, then, ending with shots of some standing stones (apparently significant in the novel but just picturesque window-dressing in Davies' film) and the heroine who declares "you can do without day if you have a quiet lamp lit in your heart."
Davies' is drawn to images of physical suffering either in childbirth or terrible illness or the results of cruelty inflicted by one character on another. This is ultimately both disturbing and tedious. He is the opposite of elliptical -- if something awful is going to happen, he puts the camera in the room and licks his lips as he records the misery. An example of the degradation in Davies' style is a gorgeous sequence involving parishioners marching through golden wheat fields to their church -- on the soundtrack we hear the Orpheus Choir of Glasgow singing a wonderfully beautiful hymn that begins "All the April evenings, April airs were all abroad". The camera tracks in a stately motion through the church recording a sermon by the preacher in which he demands all the men in the parish enlist to fight the German Kaiser and that anyone who hesitates is a "pro-German coward." Maybe, pastors preached this way in Scotland in 1916, but the scene is over-the-top, "laid on with a trowel" as they say, images and words that seem out-of-character for the otherwise reticent farming folk. (Davies shot a similar bravura tracking sequence in a church in The Long Day Closes that is one of the masterpieces in world cinema and much more accomplished than his work in this film.) Davies' makes his points with such literal-minded excessiveness that the whole thing seems embarrassing, simple-minded, and, even, unrealistic.
Monday, October 8, 2018
The Mummy's Hand
The Mummy's Hand (Christy Cabanne, 1940) is an inferior Universal Horror film, cheaply made and poorly acted. In general, the mummy pictures produced after the eccentric and spectacularly shot 1936 inaugural effort, Karl Freund's The Mummy (with Boris Karloff) are inept and, in fact, tend toward the risible. In real life, Egyptian mummies are frail, leathery artifacts so convincingly moribund that it is simply impossible to imagine them revived, let alone, stalking about killing people. Since mummies themselves, although repulsive, are not particularly frightening, these films exploit other sources of horror -- ultimately, mummy monsters represent our fear of confinement and paralysis: someone is always buried alive in these pictures with a ghastly close-up of staring terror-struck eyes bulging as gauze is implacably wrapped around the immobilized but still animate face of the victim, generally a lustful high-priest, about to be interred living in a grandiose sarcophagus in some dismal torch-lit granite tomb. The rules of engagement with mummies are not well understood -- shooting won't harm an undead Egyptian but they can be burnt and, in fact, the hundreds of yards of gauze wrapping enclosing the undead corpse serves as an effective tinder. With black staring eyes and a withered round anal aperture for mouth, mummies also, I think, embody some primordial fears about being burned, or about the appearance of burn victims. The monstrous mummy looks like the victim of fire or some other kind of disastrous surgical procedure and seems horrible in that regard -- but this horror is founded upon repulsion, aversion, and, even, a kind of pity. To become a mummy, one must suffer quite extraordinarily and the compensation of eternal life isn't much fun if you have to spend eternity limping around like a person who has suffered hemiparesis as a result of a stroke -- mummies have one bad arm crimped up close to the torso and a leg with severe foot-drop that they haul behind themselves as they stalk forward. Mummies have to corner their victims -- a toddler could outrun one of these creatures. After Freund's version, the series went downhill fast, due, in part, to sheer and arrogant laziness on the part of the screenwriters, and the second installment in the franchise is already terrible.
A lustful priest enamored with the princess Ananka gets himself mummified alive. (Later, when he's discovered someone touches him and says: Why it's as if he's alive?" The other actor's rejoinder is classic: "What marvelous embalming!" -- exactly how you can be both alive and embalmed is left to the audience's imagination). An American soldier-of-fortune with his buddy, a reject from the Bowery Boys, discovers an artifact that points the way to the tomb. The tomb, which looks like a Mayan Temple, complete with an obviously Mayan bas relief on its top, is guarded by a sinister fez-wearing high priest who is also conveniently the chief Egyptologist at the Cairo Museum. To reach the tomb, you have to ride a camel shown in close-up trudging through sand only to arrive at... a hillside obviously located in California.) An American magician and con-man with a lissome, beautiful daughter joins the expedition to loot the tomb of Princess Ananka. A highly Semitic-looking beggar (he looks like Fagin from Oliver Twist) first seen in the bazaar in Cairo lurks around the edges of the action conspiring with the Shriner High Priest to unleash his unfortunate precursor, Kharis, the undead mummy on the looters. Kharis strangles the chief archaeologist, a crime that doesn't really bother anyone at all and something that all the characters seem to forget as soon as the dastardly deed is accomplished. People get into a high dudgeon, however, when the mummy snatches the girl. She's wearing slinky white silk lingerie like a 'roaring twenties' gun moll and reclines gracefully in the embrace of the mummy who drags her to the tomb where the fez-wearing High Priest decides to make her into another animate corpse so that he can be her consort for all eternity. (This will leave for Kharis without a mate, but he's readily controlled -- cut off his tea made from broiled tanna leaves and he will go back to sleep for another couple eons.) There's a fist fight between the burly looter and the poor mummy gets lit on fire after absorbing a dozen or so revolver shots to the torso. The final scenes take place in an underground temple with huge statues of jackals posing above what seems to be a vast Mormon-style baptismal font. There are about four good shots in the 67 minute movie -- a jackal howls at the sky in which the moon glows swathed in cloud, the mummy looks in on the negligee-wearing girl, shocking her into a dead faint -- he has a quizzical look on his face with deep black puppy-dog eyes and an anal pucker for a mouth and seems so sad and helpless that, for a moment, at least, you're rooting for the monster. There's a good scene of an ancient Egyptian burial, ebony slaves killed by spears so no one can locate the sepulchral chamber, and, at last, an impressive overhead crane shot of the underground tomb with the twenty-foot tall Anubis-headed gods and a black basin big enough to hold a dozen bathers or a half-dozen LDS confirmands at their baptism. The rest of the film is garbage and so bad that you inevitably sense that the movie is mocking itself -- one archaeologist is famous for unearthing "Inca tombs in Mexico" and the Americans have no motive except looting and desecration. In fact, they deserve the mummy's somewhat inefficient revenge.
(I tuned in two hours later and found that by The Mummy's Curse, released in 1946, production values had further declined. Here the mummy is stalking about a backlot that is supposed to represent a Louisiana bayou -- apparently, left over from some other film. The mummy's tomb no longer bears any semblance to an archaeological site -- it has now become a ruined monastery which looks like nothing other than one crumbling wall with a prison cell door built into it. Long shots of the monastery are obviously matte shots painted on the glass lens and the set is a hulking outline that doesn't even seem to have an interior. The mummy stumbles into a tent, pulls out the lissome fainting woman in white lingerie (this effect remains unaltered) but, as the walking corpse exits the tent, he knocks it down much to the consternation of the other sleepers who flail around comically under the canvas. An amusing African-American with popping eyes runs around in a distracted way -- his name is Goobie and he summons the armed white men who put an end to the mummy, this time yanking down the one crumbling wall comprising the film's single set to bury the poor undead High Priest in a noisy avalanche of Styrofoam bricks and rubble. In the six years between the movies, the budget has gone from low to non-existent.)
A lustful priest enamored with the princess Ananka gets himself mummified alive. (Later, when he's discovered someone touches him and says: Why it's as if he's alive?" The other actor's rejoinder is classic: "What marvelous embalming!" -- exactly how you can be both alive and embalmed is left to the audience's imagination). An American soldier-of-fortune with his buddy, a reject from the Bowery Boys, discovers an artifact that points the way to the tomb. The tomb, which looks like a Mayan Temple, complete with an obviously Mayan bas relief on its top, is guarded by a sinister fez-wearing high priest who is also conveniently the chief Egyptologist at the Cairo Museum. To reach the tomb, you have to ride a camel shown in close-up trudging through sand only to arrive at... a hillside obviously located in California.) An American magician and con-man with a lissome, beautiful daughter joins the expedition to loot the tomb of Princess Ananka. A highly Semitic-looking beggar (he looks like Fagin from Oliver Twist) first seen in the bazaar in Cairo lurks around the edges of the action conspiring with the Shriner High Priest to unleash his unfortunate precursor, Kharis, the undead mummy on the looters. Kharis strangles the chief archaeologist, a crime that doesn't really bother anyone at all and something that all the characters seem to forget as soon as the dastardly deed is accomplished. People get into a high dudgeon, however, when the mummy snatches the girl. She's wearing slinky white silk lingerie like a 'roaring twenties' gun moll and reclines gracefully in the embrace of the mummy who drags her to the tomb where the fez-wearing High Priest decides to make her into another animate corpse so that he can be her consort for all eternity. (This will leave for Kharis without a mate, but he's readily controlled -- cut off his tea made from broiled tanna leaves and he will go back to sleep for another couple eons.) There's a fist fight between the burly looter and the poor mummy gets lit on fire after absorbing a dozen or so revolver shots to the torso. The final scenes take place in an underground temple with huge statues of jackals posing above what seems to be a vast Mormon-style baptismal font. There are about four good shots in the 67 minute movie -- a jackal howls at the sky in which the moon glows swathed in cloud, the mummy looks in on the negligee-wearing girl, shocking her into a dead faint -- he has a quizzical look on his face with deep black puppy-dog eyes and an anal pucker for a mouth and seems so sad and helpless that, for a moment, at least, you're rooting for the monster. There's a good scene of an ancient Egyptian burial, ebony slaves killed by spears so no one can locate the sepulchral chamber, and, at last, an impressive overhead crane shot of the underground tomb with the twenty-foot tall Anubis-headed gods and a black basin big enough to hold a dozen bathers or a half-dozen LDS confirmands at their baptism. The rest of the film is garbage and so bad that you inevitably sense that the movie is mocking itself -- one archaeologist is famous for unearthing "Inca tombs in Mexico" and the Americans have no motive except looting and desecration. In fact, they deserve the mummy's somewhat inefficient revenge.
(I tuned in two hours later and found that by The Mummy's Curse, released in 1946, production values had further declined. Here the mummy is stalking about a backlot that is supposed to represent a Louisiana bayou -- apparently, left over from some other film. The mummy's tomb no longer bears any semblance to an archaeological site -- it has now become a ruined monastery which looks like nothing other than one crumbling wall with a prison cell door built into it. Long shots of the monastery are obviously matte shots painted on the glass lens and the set is a hulking outline that doesn't even seem to have an interior. The mummy stumbles into a tent, pulls out the lissome fainting woman in white lingerie (this effect remains unaltered) but, as the walking corpse exits the tent, he knocks it down much to the consternation of the other sleepers who flail around comically under the canvas. An amusing African-American with popping eyes runs around in a distracted way -- his name is Goobie and he summons the armed white men who put an end to the mummy, this time yanking down the one crumbling wall comprising the film's single set to bury the poor undead High Priest in a noisy avalanche of Styrofoam bricks and rubble. In the six years between the movies, the budget has gone from low to non-existent.)
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