Johan Renck's Chernobyl, a six part mini-series on HBO is now at its half-life -- three episodes broadcast and three to go. The program has an intelligent script, brilliant acting, and subject matter so compelling that it would fascinate if presented with stick figures animated against a featureless grey background. In fact, the series is presented with elaborate location sequences (it's shot in Moscow and Lithuania), chaotic crowd scenes and the most horrific special effects that I have ever seen. It's altogether persuasive, mostly disheartening, but shot through with sequences displaying almost unimaginable valor. In effect, the film is a combat movie, similar in some ways to Ishiru Honda's first, and best, Godzilla movie (Godzilla, King of the Monsters! Japan 1954, USA 1956 ) -- a group of brilliant and courageous scientists marshal forces to battle a terrifying radioactive beast, the melting Chernobyl power plant portrayed as a huge throne-like inferno pumping monstrous columns of radioactive smoke into the air. At night, the ruptured core blasts a column of ionized atoms, a death ray of neutrons, like searchlight beam into the air. As heedless school children play in playgrounds, birds murdered by the radiation drop out of the air to twitch dying on the sidewalks.
Clearly, there might be a tendency to overdramatize the calamity at Chernobyl and hype the catastrophe will ominous signs and portents. Renck adopts the opposite strategy -- his film is forensically clinical: he shows the nuclear accident as it appeared to those experiencing the explosion and melt-down in real time. No one knows what is happening; everyone initially downplays the level of danger and bureaucrats work overtime to cover-up the calamity. The film moves relentlessly along two parallel tracks -- first, there is the explosion, fire, and attempts at remediation; second, we witness the investigation of the causes of the explosion, moving toward a step-by-step reconstruction of what occurred to trigger the crisis. After a brief, suitably depressing prologue in which one of the principals commits suicide, apparently several years after the melt-down, the series begins in the middle of the action, with alarms sounding at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and hapless workers struggling to ascertain what is happening. The blast itself is de-dramatized: we see a single flash from within the apartment of one of the firefighters who will be dispatched to the reactor with predictably deadly (and horrifying) effects. The firefighter's pregnant wife, a robust-looking Slavic girl, bids him farewell -- in the background, through a window at the end of the domestic corridor, we see a momentary flash in the distance and, then, an eerie beam of ionized atoms forming a column over the plant. The firefighters rush to the scene and find graphite shards -- a sign that the core has exploded, suffusing the site with deadly radiation. People who touch the graphite immediately experience terrifying burns -- the skin on their hands sloughs off. Some of the dying workers on the scene have purplish and black burns and the firefighters all experience effects that leave them with faces and torsos looking strangely sunburned. The local Communist party insists that all is well and, when an old apparatchik gives a patriotic speech, apparently attempting to tamp down the radiation with cant, everyone applauds. At the Kremlin, Gorbachev is persuaded that all will be well until the film's hero, a nuclear scientist, indicates that accounts from the scene convince him that the core has been blown open and is spewing radiation into the air. Party officials denounce the scientist (played with morose desperation by the great Jared Harris) saying that radiation detectors at the scene don't read higher than 309 roentgens -- the dose of radiation you would get in a chest x-ray. The scientist advises them that the radiation detectors that can be hand-carried into Chernobyl all max-out at 309 roentgens (that's where the scale ends) -- and, in fact, the true radiation readings turn out to be a thousand times that number. With a life-long party official (played the equally dour Stellan Skarsgard), the scientist flies by helicopter to the reactor still belching a plume of deadly radioactive smoke. Skarsgard's Communist official, at first, despises the scientist as defeatist, and, even, threatens to have him pitched out of the helicopter if he continues to insist that the explosion requires the evacuation of the nearby city Pritypak. But Skarsgard is a hard-bitten realist and he comes to understand that the catastrophe is far worse than anyone thought. The city is evacuated and, this is the point when the film starts to flare into a sort of awful grandeur -- the show's progression to another level is encapsulated by the big crowd scenes of people getting on buses and, then, a tracking shot of an abandoned German shepherd desperately racing through the crowds of demoralized but stoic Ukrainians filing onto city buses. There is a desperate effort to keep the melting core from contacting groundwater -- something that would poison millions of people. At first, we see three workers up to their waists in lethal water turning off the valves that provide coolant to the plant -- these men know that they dead men walking as soon as they accept the assignment. Three other men plunge into the darkness under the plant wearing anti-radiation suits with Geiger counters clattering out warnings -- they have to locate some kind of valve in the pitch darkness and shut it off. This sequence is exceptionally terrifying. Later, hundreds of coal miners are brought to the site to dig a tunnel under the core so that concrete slabs can be poured to arrest the melt-down. The tunnel is terribly hot and, since fans would merely blow around the radiation, the miners work stark naked -- a surrealist image in which the vulnerability of the naked bodies effects the viewer in counterpoint with harrowing scenes in the Moscow hospital where the burned plant workers are literally melting into pools of oozing gore. This sequence, very difficult to watch, involves the stoic pregnant firefighter's wife and Emily Watson, stout and dour, playing a nuclear scientist who interviews the dying men to find out what happened at the plant. (She's the third protagonist in the film.) The dying firefighters and plant workers are blind and their lips swollen up like balloons, bodies entirely flayed -- it's as if the men have been turned inside-out. From time to time, the program shows tense meetings in the Kremlin. Here the imagery is also borderline surreal (although perhaps accurate) -- the men confer in an ornate colonnaded corridor that ends with the famous and huge picture by Ilya Repin of Ivan the Terrible holding the son that he has just beaten to death in his arms (I see no evidence that the painting has ever actually been in the Kremlin.) At the end of the third episode, the caskets containing the deliquesced bodies of the firefighters and nuclear reactor technicians are enclosed in lead sarcophaguses, lined-up in a pit and, then, buried in concrete -- we see the pour of fresh concrete gradually lapping around and, then, covering the lead tombs.
The movie has deteriorated, mildewed look -- the Soviet provincial cities are dispiriting and everyone is constantly swilling down vodka. There is a palpable sense of doom investing the film's images -- no one looks like a movie star: Harris, Skarsgard, and Emily Watson, all look flabby, with pasty waxen complexions. The miners are burly with powerful shoulders and buttocks, but they are also mostly overweight. The series is matter-of-fact, generally clinical, and open-eyed about the horrible aspects of the Soviet system -- when Emily Watson's character denounces the nurses for allowing the pregnant firefighter's wife to enter the plastic shroud where her husband is dying to hold his decomposing hand, the KGB is called and she is promptly thrown into an underground torture chamber. She's quickly released but only because of her importance to the technical inquiry. The various bureaucrats all have their rationales for maintaining secrecy and many of them are very reasonable-sounding and, even, well-spoken. The KGB chieftain is sweetly eloquent -- he describes the secret police as a cozy "circle of accountability". Although the cover-up and negligence is appalling, there are no real villains. The film has an oddly uplifting aspect -- throughout the picture, we see people sacrificing themselves so that others can be saved. The miners, for instance, are a tough and sardonic lot -- they can't be motivated by patriotic speeches or party-loyalty or threats of violence: when soldiers point guns at them, they invite the troops to fire, coldly remarking that enough of them will survive to beat the soldiers to death. But when the true stakes of their assignment is revealed -- protecting the nation's water supply from being poisoned -- they unquestioningly agree to dig the tunnel under the crumbling nuclear power plant. While this is underway, the naked boss approaches Skarsgard and asks him if the miners "will be taken care of." Skarsgard has previously characterized the miners as "men who work in the dark and who see everything." "I don't know," Skarsgard tells them. Without a word, the mine boss returns to his deadly tunnel. Marshal Zhukov, or one of the other Red Army field marshals during World War II, used to remark before a battle that "there will be many heroes made" (meaning that some units would be sacrificed in suicidal attacks). Chernobyl shows many heroes and the horrifying cost of this heroism.
On several occaions
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
Saturday, May 18, 2019
Swing Time
Male vanity is a covert theme, although concealed in plain view, in George Stevens' musical Swing Time, a 1936 vehicle for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. At the outset of the film, Lucky (Fred Astaire) is deterred from attending his own wedding by a hoax -- one of his fellow hoofers tells him that his pants must have cuffs to be stylish. Of course, this is untrue, but Lucky sends the offending garment to a tailor to have cuffs installed and, then, lounges around with the other male dancers without his trousers, playing cards, while the pastor and bride wait woefully in an upscale mansion a few miles away. Of course, this thwarts the wedding. At the end of the movie, a Latin lover's planned marriage to Ginger Rogers' character, Penny, is thwarted when Lucky tells the debonair fellow that his pants need to be tailored with cuffs -- thus sending his rival on a wild goose chase so that he, also, misses his own wedding. The amoral moral of this aspect of the film is that it's more important to look stylish and sharp than to attend your own wedding -- notwithstanding the tearful bride waiting at the altar. This theme is demonstrated early in the film in a sequence in which Lucky woos Penny by taking dance lessons from her -- Astaire has to pretend to be miserably incompetent as a dancer. But this is simply beyond Astaire -- he demonstrates his incompetency not by stepping on Penny's feet or moving out-of-synch with then music: rather, he swirls Penny in circles and, then, balletically falls to the ground, swooning like a wounded swan. Astaire's vanity wouldn't let him look clumsy -- when he stumbles and falls, pulling down his partner, he does so beautifully.
Swing Time is a cheerfully anarchic RKO Radio Picture, lavishly produced, the kind of movie that imagines Manhattan as a secular paradise-on-earth. European surrealism of this era was all despair -- melting clocks and decomposition; by contrast, American surrealism is a merry venture, mostly visible in movie musicals from the thirties: everyone is unrealistically happy, energetic and, even when suffering plot reversals, wildly optimistic. Lucky, a dancer, moonlights as a gambler and the film posits his ability to raise large sums of money on demand as required by the plot -- he simply conjures cash out of card games and roulette wheels. Lucky's sidekick, Pop (Victor Moore), is a magician who also specializes in card tricks -- if need be, he can cheat fortunes out of the villains who are, generally, far too amiable to deserve that appellation. Pop, Lucky's sidekick, is played by a bizarre-looking actor -- the man has a protuberant rump and is shaped, more or less, like a grinning fetus. He seems to have a hydrocephalic head that makes him a dead ringer for Claude Debussy. (This fetal-looking Debussy has the sort of features that camera's love -- one moment he looks positively hideous, the next instant, he grins at the camera and seems to be almost movie-star handsome. He's completely fascinating and his dumpy, shapeless body is the perfect counterpoint for Astaire's suave and rail-thin Gestalt.) Ginger Rogers as Penny, Lucky's love interest is more than equal to Astaire, so wonderfully self-confident and gorgeous, that she can turn away from Lucky in a heart-beat if he disappoints her, effortlessly securing a marriage proposal from Ricky Romero, the dark and outrageously handsome Latin lover and band leader who is Astaire's rival. Like Lucky, Penny has a side-kick, Mabel, a gin-soaked divorcee whose role is to supply the sardonic and cynical wise-cracks that comment on the action -- of course, she is also on hand as a comic love-interest for that fantastical creature, Pop.
The plot is vestigial. Lucky's colleagues, hating to loose their poker buddy, hoax him out of attending his own wedding. Lucky's fiancée is the daughter of a wealthy man, a banker of the classically bourgeois kind featured in films of this sort (played by Eric Blore who specialized in these parts). The banker tells Lucky that he can marry his daughter if he goes to New York and earns $25,000. Lucky plays poker, makes a lot of money, but this cash is taken from him by his gambling buddies -- he has bet with them that the marriage will take place but, of course, it doesn't. Lucky with Pop hitches a train to New York -- he's still wearing his wedding tuxedo, tails, and has a top hat. In New York, Lucky encounters Penny, a tough, resourceful working girl. Pop steals a quarter from her -- they have literally no money. When Penny complains to the cops, there's a Brechtian moment when a police officer, surveying Lucky's natty attire admits that his job is to protect the upper class from people like this young woman -- she is, in effect, treated like some kind of rapacious streetwalker. Lucky is unhappy that Pop snatched the girl's quarter and so he tracks her to her place of employment, a crooked dance instruction business. There he tries to endear himself to her by asking for a free lesson. When the smarmy boss tries to fire her, Lucky and Penny perform an improvised pas de deux, the first of the show's dances. Obviously, Lucky and Penny perform spectacularly with one another. They audition as dancers with Ricky Romero, a Latino band leader, who performs in immense and lavish ballrooms high in a skyscraper overlooking Central Park. There's a breathtaking scene in which Lucky and Penny look through a wall of windows down at the park, snow glittering outside as it falls through the city lights. Of course, Penny and Lucky fall in love. But, Lucky deputizes Pop to keep him from showing his affection for Penny -- he's still committed to earning the $25,000 to marry his fiancée, the banker's daughter. The two couples (Pop and Penny's friend, Mabel, Lucky and Penny) go to an abandoned roadhouse, buried in the snow. Penny is obviously now in love with Lucky and hurt when Lucky rebuffs her advances. Back in the city, Penny and Lucky perform atop a skyscraper in a majestic nightclub, The Silver Sandal. Astaire performs a virtuoso routine called "Bojangles" -- it commences with showgirls rotating a huge black peanut with fat human lips. The peanut turns out to be the soles of the shoes of an colossal African-American giant -- Bojangles. Fred Astaire is at the vertex of the giant's legs, in minstrel-style blackface (he spreads his arms in declamatory fashion like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer). Astaire dances for six or so minutes, tapping his way through ever more elaborate and hallucinatory sets -- in the end, he dances with three huge shadows, mimicking their movements, until the shadows can no longer keep up with his increasingly intricate and accelerating dancing. The shadows bow out, having become fully autonomous -- Black giants like the figure that began the sequence. The film reverts, a bit wistfully, to its narrative. There are some misunderstandings. The fiancée shows up at an inopportune time. Penny gets engaged to Ricky Romero. But, as they say, all's well that end's well.
I'm not competent to comment on the dance scenes. People knowledgeable about this subject generally express awe at the beauty and complexity of the dancing -- it looks to me like standard dance moves (waltz, polka, ballet) that are adorned with high speed tap dancing embellishments. Stevens use a crane and dolly to shoot the dance sequences in sweeping continuous sequence shots -- there are very few cuts in any of the dance scenes. The Bojangles number, which is, at least, six minutes long is structured into no more than three shots. The sets are astonishing: topless prisms of translucent alabaster, ebony dance floors that are like vast black mirrors, cantilevered steps leading up the sides of vast glacial-white silos topped with dancing girls in ostrich plumes. None of these sets seem to have any ceilings -- the space is suggested to be like an Art Deco cathedral, soaring and majestic. Hotel suites are white on white with white settees against white walls where white end-tables support white phones and white lamps. One set for a dance scene looks vaguely like Schindler's famous set for the appearance of the Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute -- scintillating stars arch up into a pale grey and glowing void. Ginger Rogers is fantastically beautifully and dressed in timeless, elegant gowns. Sometimes, Fred Astaire, with his otherworldly bulbous eyes, looks like Stan Laurel -- he even imitates Laurel in one of his dances. The dialogue is fast, whip-smart, and a little like the repartee in a Marx Brothers movie. At the New Amsterdam, an abandoned country tavern buried in deep snow, Penny's sidekick tries to distract Pop from supervising the lovers, Penny and Lucky. She says: "Come on, let me show you where we once fished through ice." Pop replies: "But I thought you said you only came out here in the summer." She responds: "That's right. Let me show you where we didn't fish through the ice."
Swing Time is a cheerfully anarchic RKO Radio Picture, lavishly produced, the kind of movie that imagines Manhattan as a secular paradise-on-earth. European surrealism of this era was all despair -- melting clocks and decomposition; by contrast, American surrealism is a merry venture, mostly visible in movie musicals from the thirties: everyone is unrealistically happy, energetic and, even when suffering plot reversals, wildly optimistic. Lucky, a dancer, moonlights as a gambler and the film posits his ability to raise large sums of money on demand as required by the plot -- he simply conjures cash out of card games and roulette wheels. Lucky's sidekick, Pop (Victor Moore), is a magician who also specializes in card tricks -- if need be, he can cheat fortunes out of the villains who are, generally, far too amiable to deserve that appellation. Pop, Lucky's sidekick, is played by a bizarre-looking actor -- the man has a protuberant rump and is shaped, more or less, like a grinning fetus. He seems to have a hydrocephalic head that makes him a dead ringer for Claude Debussy. (This fetal-looking Debussy has the sort of features that camera's love -- one moment he looks positively hideous, the next instant, he grins at the camera and seems to be almost movie-star handsome. He's completely fascinating and his dumpy, shapeless body is the perfect counterpoint for Astaire's suave and rail-thin Gestalt.) Ginger Rogers as Penny, Lucky's love interest is more than equal to Astaire, so wonderfully self-confident and gorgeous, that she can turn away from Lucky in a heart-beat if he disappoints her, effortlessly securing a marriage proposal from Ricky Romero, the dark and outrageously handsome Latin lover and band leader who is Astaire's rival. Like Lucky, Penny has a side-kick, Mabel, a gin-soaked divorcee whose role is to supply the sardonic and cynical wise-cracks that comment on the action -- of course, she is also on hand as a comic love-interest for that fantastical creature, Pop.
The plot is vestigial. Lucky's colleagues, hating to loose their poker buddy, hoax him out of attending his own wedding. Lucky's fiancée is the daughter of a wealthy man, a banker of the classically bourgeois kind featured in films of this sort (played by Eric Blore who specialized in these parts). The banker tells Lucky that he can marry his daughter if he goes to New York and earns $25,000. Lucky plays poker, makes a lot of money, but this cash is taken from him by his gambling buddies -- he has bet with them that the marriage will take place but, of course, it doesn't. Lucky with Pop hitches a train to New York -- he's still wearing his wedding tuxedo, tails, and has a top hat. In New York, Lucky encounters Penny, a tough, resourceful working girl. Pop steals a quarter from her -- they have literally no money. When Penny complains to the cops, there's a Brechtian moment when a police officer, surveying Lucky's natty attire admits that his job is to protect the upper class from people like this young woman -- she is, in effect, treated like some kind of rapacious streetwalker. Lucky is unhappy that Pop snatched the girl's quarter and so he tracks her to her place of employment, a crooked dance instruction business. There he tries to endear himself to her by asking for a free lesson. When the smarmy boss tries to fire her, Lucky and Penny perform an improvised pas de deux, the first of the show's dances. Obviously, Lucky and Penny perform spectacularly with one another. They audition as dancers with Ricky Romero, a Latino band leader, who performs in immense and lavish ballrooms high in a skyscraper overlooking Central Park. There's a breathtaking scene in which Lucky and Penny look through a wall of windows down at the park, snow glittering outside as it falls through the city lights. Of course, Penny and Lucky fall in love. But, Lucky deputizes Pop to keep him from showing his affection for Penny -- he's still committed to earning the $25,000 to marry his fiancée, the banker's daughter. The two couples (Pop and Penny's friend, Mabel, Lucky and Penny) go to an abandoned roadhouse, buried in the snow. Penny is obviously now in love with Lucky and hurt when Lucky rebuffs her advances. Back in the city, Penny and Lucky perform atop a skyscraper in a majestic nightclub, The Silver Sandal. Astaire performs a virtuoso routine called "Bojangles" -- it commences with showgirls rotating a huge black peanut with fat human lips. The peanut turns out to be the soles of the shoes of an colossal African-American giant -- Bojangles. Fred Astaire is at the vertex of the giant's legs, in minstrel-style blackface (he spreads his arms in declamatory fashion like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer). Astaire dances for six or so minutes, tapping his way through ever more elaborate and hallucinatory sets -- in the end, he dances with three huge shadows, mimicking their movements, until the shadows can no longer keep up with his increasingly intricate and accelerating dancing. The shadows bow out, having become fully autonomous -- Black giants like the figure that began the sequence. The film reverts, a bit wistfully, to its narrative. There are some misunderstandings. The fiancée shows up at an inopportune time. Penny gets engaged to Ricky Romero. But, as they say, all's well that end's well.
I'm not competent to comment on the dance scenes. People knowledgeable about this subject generally express awe at the beauty and complexity of the dancing -- it looks to me like standard dance moves (waltz, polka, ballet) that are adorned with high speed tap dancing embellishments. Stevens use a crane and dolly to shoot the dance sequences in sweeping continuous sequence shots -- there are very few cuts in any of the dance scenes. The Bojangles number, which is, at least, six minutes long is structured into no more than three shots. The sets are astonishing: topless prisms of translucent alabaster, ebony dance floors that are like vast black mirrors, cantilevered steps leading up the sides of vast glacial-white silos topped with dancing girls in ostrich plumes. None of these sets seem to have any ceilings -- the space is suggested to be like an Art Deco cathedral, soaring and majestic. Hotel suites are white on white with white settees against white walls where white end-tables support white phones and white lamps. One set for a dance scene looks vaguely like Schindler's famous set for the appearance of the Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute -- scintillating stars arch up into a pale grey and glowing void. Ginger Rogers is fantastically beautifully and dressed in timeless, elegant gowns. Sometimes, Fred Astaire, with his otherworldly bulbous eyes, looks like Stan Laurel -- he even imitates Laurel in one of his dances. The dialogue is fast, whip-smart, and a little like the repartee in a Marx Brothers movie. At the New Amsterdam, an abandoned country tavern buried in deep snow, Penny's sidekick tries to distract Pop from supervising the lovers, Penny and Lucky. She says: "Come on, let me show you where we once fished through ice." Pop replies: "But I thought you said you only came out here in the summer." She responds: "That's right. Let me show you where we didn't fish through the ice."
Monday, May 13, 2019
Veep (final season)
If any additional evidence were required (and it is not) probative of the exponential rate of deterioration in American political discourse, HBO's Veep is exhibit A. Although I don't entirely remember the comedy series' first season, I think that the titular character, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, played her part, VP Selena Meyer, a bit like a starry-eyed, if exceedingly foul-mouthed, Mary Tyler Moore -- she was a little naïve, an attractive earnest woman surrounded by vicious political operatives of the opposite sex, always willing to use her physical appeal, if necessary, but, generally, pragmatic and well-meaning. The real villains were the manipulative men around her: sordid campaign managers and press secretaries, venal donors, and, of course, a menagerie of narcissistic, wholly self-serving politicians. There were some fairly dark episodes (in one show, Selena has an abortion and, then, claims her young female factotum, Amy, was the one who needed the procedure), but, by and large, the audience had the sense that Selena was ineffectual but not evil. The show's final season strips away any illusions that the audience might have about Selena's character and motives: she is shown to be a destructive, wholly unprincipled monster, a sort of female demon nakedly embodying the will to power and nothing else. This is dispiriting but, in accord, with our dysfunctional national politics -- Donald Trump is affirmatively evil and engages in criminal conduct; since Selena Meyer represents a caricatured female version of President Trump, then, of course she must also be flamboyantly evil and viciously criminal. Her character has hardened and her potty-mouth is now overflowing with extravagant and horrific vituperation. (The leading lady has been ill and, although this ungallant to note, Dreyfuss looks old and gaunt in some of the episodes -- her features are sharp as a razor.) The show's dialogue has always been highly stylized, a torrent of rococo insults and degrading characterizations of other politicians and, of course, the body politic in general -- Meyer customarily refers to her electorate as "morons" or worse. But, in these final shows, the level of invective achieves an almost Dante-esque fury -- vicious verbal assaults, including Selena spectacularly humiliating the mistress of an opposing politician, reach a thunderous level; the verbal cruelty amounts to soul-murder. Is any of this funny? Not really. Rather, the show aspires to a kind of lacerating Swiftian satire, not so much comical as simply horrifying.
In broad terms, the half-hour episodes in the final series involve Selena's quest to be nominated for President by her party. (Her actual party affiliation is unclear -- it's simply assumed that neither party has any real distinguishing characteristics and each are simply vehicles for the ambition of their monstrous political operatives.) Selena's lust for the nomination erodes what little remains of her moral compass. She colludes with the Chinese who hack into the vote in North Carolina and trades Tibet for Peking's support. In the final episode involving "horse trading" for nominating convention delegates, she agrees to abolish gay marriage and supports fracking on government lands in exchange for the votes of Western and Intermountain delegates. On a trip to Oslo to accept a secondary Nobel peace prize (based on her alleged support of Tibet), she inadvertently reveals that her regime has committed various war crimes with drone-assisted missile strikes. The International Criminal Court at the Hague issues a writ for her arrest and she has to seek refuge in the Finnish embassy -- the Finnish Prime Minister, an attractive hyper-competitive blonde, apparently is lesbian and lusts after Selena. When the American public learns that Selena has killed innumerable Afghans and Pakistanis with drone strikes, she surges in the polls -- Americans like cruelty (as witness Trump's success). With the assistance of an actual Soviet era war-criminal and torturer from Eastern Europe, Selena escapes the embassy and while flying back to the United States learns to her dismay that her popularity is now waning -- gun-camera footage of the drone strike on the Afghan wedding shows that the bombing also killed an elephant and the public denounces her for murdering the animal (not the people). Her opponents are no better. Her chief rival, Jonah, is an idiot from New Hampshire, a swine who sexually harasses everyone around him, is married to his own sister, and panders to the anti-vaccine crowd. When this candidate discovers that algebra was an invention of the Arabs, he denounces mathematics as "terrorist math." This earns him a huge following and, when a real terrorist shooter is revealed to be a trigonometry teacher, Jonah rises spectacularly in the polls. Selena has recruited for her VP a hapless, policy-minded Iraq war veteran whose legs were destroyed by an IED. (The show indulges in a series of fantastically cruel jokes about this man's disability -- this is cringe comedy at its most extreme and the show's screenwriters apparently feel licensed to indulge themselves in this sort of thing because the "witticisms" are uttered by characters defined as amoral and criminal.) On the basis of political expediency, Selena makes the wounded war vet nominate her for President -- then, she betrays him by naming Jonah as her running mate. In an earlier episode, Selena has been complicit in the murder of her ex-husband, a philanderer who has periodically appeared in the show to blackmail her with various requests for political favors and money. (Despite his disloyalty, Selena, who is sexually promiscuous, sometimes sleeps with him.) Among all of the self-serving and vain characters, one figure stands out for his unimpeachable loyalty to Selena -- this is Gary, Selena's "body man": he carries her purse with make-up, tampons, various sorts of pills and narcotics and remains pathetically loyal to his boss right up the show's penultimate shot. Selena rewards Gary's unconditional love with insults and abuse. At the show's climax, after Gary has just put on her lipstick, Selena delivers her acceptance speech -- she has pinned the murder of her ex-husband on Gary and, while she is speaking, we see FBI agents hauling him away. (At the end of the show, at Selena's funeral 25 years after the events chronicled in the series, the surviving characters all mock Gary for limping up to her casket and putting her favorite lipstick on top of its lid -- he's been in Federal prison for 20 years.) The final episode focuses not just on bad conduct but something worse: betrayal. Selena betrays the Dalai Lama who is counting on her to free Tibet; she betrays her lesbian daughter who is an advocate for gay marriage; she betrays her most loyal supporter, Gary, and, in fact, has him sent to prison. In the White House, we see her agreeing to use food as a weapon at the behest of the Israeli prime minister. For a moment, the camera lingers on her face before she takes the call from the Israeli leader -- she has a look of blank and total despair on her face, but this quickly turns to resolve and she's perky on the phone: of course, the Palestinians are always "whining", she agrees, and have to be punished by being systematically starved. In the coda, we see excerpts from Selena Meyer's funeral -- she's buried at her Presidential library, a vaginal-themed building to celebrate that she was the first female president. The pallbearers are confounded by the vulva-shaped entrance to the mausoleum and can't get the phallic casket inside: "It seems to be too tight," the media commentator says, "They're having trouble getting inside...oh, there...it's slipped right in." Unfortunately for Selena, Tom Hanks has died on the same day as her funeral and the air waves are occupied with tributes to the actor.
I don't know what to make of the show. One principle is that the more incompetent the character, the higher they aspire and the more successful they become. A nitwit African-American aid replaces a dog as the mayor of Lurleen, Iowa and, then, by a series of improbable events, rises to become lieutenant governor, then, governor of Iowa and, at last, the President of the United States. There are nasty wisecrack about places like the Carolinas, Iowa, and Montana. In the final season, one of Selena's operatives, Amy (now working for Jonah), has an abortion and the show strives to engineer the most tasteless and vile jokes about the process and the vacuum equipment used. The jokes are simply hateful -- they don't make any political point as far as I can see and they aren't directly relevant to any theme in the show. Once again, I suppose the show's writers would justify these jokes as being indicative of the soullessness of the characters uttering them -- but someone had to write these jokes and, presumably, felt they were entertaining or comical enough to include them in show. So the claim that the jokes are made by vicious characters and shouldn't be attributed to the scriptwriters is a little hollow. Someone is taking way too much pleasure in making exuberantly racist, sexist, and fascist jokes. The show's descent into pure political and moral nihilism is compelling, but it's not funny.
In broad terms, the half-hour episodes in the final series involve Selena's quest to be nominated for President by her party. (Her actual party affiliation is unclear -- it's simply assumed that neither party has any real distinguishing characteristics and each are simply vehicles for the ambition of their monstrous political operatives.) Selena's lust for the nomination erodes what little remains of her moral compass. She colludes with the Chinese who hack into the vote in North Carolina and trades Tibet for Peking's support. In the final episode involving "horse trading" for nominating convention delegates, she agrees to abolish gay marriage and supports fracking on government lands in exchange for the votes of Western and Intermountain delegates. On a trip to Oslo to accept a secondary Nobel peace prize (based on her alleged support of Tibet), she inadvertently reveals that her regime has committed various war crimes with drone-assisted missile strikes. The International Criminal Court at the Hague issues a writ for her arrest and she has to seek refuge in the Finnish embassy -- the Finnish Prime Minister, an attractive hyper-competitive blonde, apparently is lesbian and lusts after Selena. When the American public learns that Selena has killed innumerable Afghans and Pakistanis with drone strikes, she surges in the polls -- Americans like cruelty (as witness Trump's success). With the assistance of an actual Soviet era war-criminal and torturer from Eastern Europe, Selena escapes the embassy and while flying back to the United States learns to her dismay that her popularity is now waning -- gun-camera footage of the drone strike on the Afghan wedding shows that the bombing also killed an elephant and the public denounces her for murdering the animal (not the people). Her opponents are no better. Her chief rival, Jonah, is an idiot from New Hampshire, a swine who sexually harasses everyone around him, is married to his own sister, and panders to the anti-vaccine crowd. When this candidate discovers that algebra was an invention of the Arabs, he denounces mathematics as "terrorist math." This earns him a huge following and, when a real terrorist shooter is revealed to be a trigonometry teacher, Jonah rises spectacularly in the polls. Selena has recruited for her VP a hapless, policy-minded Iraq war veteran whose legs were destroyed by an IED. (The show indulges in a series of fantastically cruel jokes about this man's disability -- this is cringe comedy at its most extreme and the show's screenwriters apparently feel licensed to indulge themselves in this sort of thing because the "witticisms" are uttered by characters defined as amoral and criminal.) On the basis of political expediency, Selena makes the wounded war vet nominate her for President -- then, she betrays him by naming Jonah as her running mate. In an earlier episode, Selena has been complicit in the murder of her ex-husband, a philanderer who has periodically appeared in the show to blackmail her with various requests for political favors and money. (Despite his disloyalty, Selena, who is sexually promiscuous, sometimes sleeps with him.) Among all of the self-serving and vain characters, one figure stands out for his unimpeachable loyalty to Selena -- this is Gary, Selena's "body man": he carries her purse with make-up, tampons, various sorts of pills and narcotics and remains pathetically loyal to his boss right up the show's penultimate shot. Selena rewards Gary's unconditional love with insults and abuse. At the show's climax, after Gary has just put on her lipstick, Selena delivers her acceptance speech -- she has pinned the murder of her ex-husband on Gary and, while she is speaking, we see FBI agents hauling him away. (At the end of the show, at Selena's funeral 25 years after the events chronicled in the series, the surviving characters all mock Gary for limping up to her casket and putting her favorite lipstick on top of its lid -- he's been in Federal prison for 20 years.) The final episode focuses not just on bad conduct but something worse: betrayal. Selena betrays the Dalai Lama who is counting on her to free Tibet; she betrays her lesbian daughter who is an advocate for gay marriage; she betrays her most loyal supporter, Gary, and, in fact, has him sent to prison. In the White House, we see her agreeing to use food as a weapon at the behest of the Israeli prime minister. For a moment, the camera lingers on her face before she takes the call from the Israeli leader -- she has a look of blank and total despair on her face, but this quickly turns to resolve and she's perky on the phone: of course, the Palestinians are always "whining", she agrees, and have to be punished by being systematically starved. In the coda, we see excerpts from Selena Meyer's funeral -- she's buried at her Presidential library, a vaginal-themed building to celebrate that she was the first female president. The pallbearers are confounded by the vulva-shaped entrance to the mausoleum and can't get the phallic casket inside: "It seems to be too tight," the media commentator says, "They're having trouble getting inside...oh, there...it's slipped right in." Unfortunately for Selena, Tom Hanks has died on the same day as her funeral and the air waves are occupied with tributes to the actor.
I don't know what to make of the show. One principle is that the more incompetent the character, the higher they aspire and the more successful they become. A nitwit African-American aid replaces a dog as the mayor of Lurleen, Iowa and, then, by a series of improbable events, rises to become lieutenant governor, then, governor of Iowa and, at last, the President of the United States. There are nasty wisecrack about places like the Carolinas, Iowa, and Montana. In the final season, one of Selena's operatives, Amy (now working for Jonah), has an abortion and the show strives to engineer the most tasteless and vile jokes about the process and the vacuum equipment used. The jokes are simply hateful -- they don't make any political point as far as I can see and they aren't directly relevant to any theme in the show. Once again, I suppose the show's writers would justify these jokes as being indicative of the soullessness of the characters uttering them -- but someone had to write these jokes and, presumably, felt they were entertaining or comical enough to include them in show. So the claim that the jokes are made by vicious characters and shouldn't be attributed to the scriptwriters is a little hollow. Someone is taking way too much pleasure in making exuberantly racist, sexist, and fascist jokes. The show's descent into pure political and moral nihilism is compelling, but it's not funny.
Saturday, May 11, 2019
A Long Day's Journey into Night
A Long Day's Journey into Night is Chinese director Bi Gan's second feature film, completed in 2018 and shown at the Walker Art Center in early May 2019. The film is about two-hours and ten minutes long and exceedingly difficult. I don't pretend to understand the film and can't accurately summarize it's progress -- the film has a dream-like plot that can't really be paraphrased. In my estimation, the picture develops pictorial themes and techniques that Bi Gan demonstrated in his remarkable first picture, Kaili Blues -- and the film is set in Kaili, an apparently remote coal-mining and river town in something like theAppalachia of mainland China. The film's milieu is similar to that shown in Kaili Blues -- we seem to be dealing with alienated ex-convicts, shiftless young people, and sinister gangsters. Kaili Blues is a far superior film in my view because it has a form that remains tethered to some extent in the real world and recognizably human characters. A Long Day's Journey into Night (the title is perverse and the film has no connection whatsoever to Eugene O'Neil's play) is most similar to David Lynch's almost unwatchably strange and tedious Inland Empire. Lynch used the techniques and horror-film imagery in his experimental Inland Empire as a springboard to create the ineffably bizarre and fascinating Twin Peaks reboot. I think Lynch's series will be one of the decisive works of art in the 21st century and, surely, the program is one of history's great films. Therefore, I am confident that Bi Gan, who is very young (probably about 32) will make remarkable films in the future. Long Day's Journey... is dull and completely confusing, but it is a unique experience and, I think, a harbinger of great work to come.
Like Kaili Blues, A Long Days Journey... is constructed in two roughly equal parts. The first hour involves a protagonist who comes to Kaili to investigate his father's death. (I think the man's called Lo Hong Wu -- if I can trust notes scribbled on the back of a brochure in the supernal darkness of the WAC theater; I'll call him Wu for short -- although he really functions as an unnamed, inexplicable presence in the film, a center around which the film's dreamlike action revolves.) Wu's father, a petty gangster named Wildcat, has been found in a mineshaft, apparently murdered. Initially, the film resembles a strangulated version of a film noir mystery -- Wu encounters a femme fatale who seems to have been implicated in his father's murder. (The movie uses genre elements much like Bela Tarr's equally unsuccessful The Man from London adapted from a crime novel by Georges Simenon -- you sense the mystery movie components cubistically fractured and sort of randomly distributed throughout a picture that really has nothing to so with the genre that it invokes.) The femme fatale seems to have had an affair with Wildcat. It's not clear to me but she may have used Wildcat to kill her husband, the keeper of a disastrously decrepit hotel, the Pangmei Inn, a ghostly place where water drips and a big black German shepherd (as in Tarkovsky's Stalker) paces around uneasily. The woman (or there may be two women or even more) was like Scheherazade: when she ran out of money she earned her keep telling the hotel owner stories until he married her. She entices someone (probably Wildcat) to kill the hotel owner and, then, she (perhaps) has someone kill Wildcat and dump him in a mine-shaft. Wu has a "green book" that (perhaps) tells the story of two doomed lovers. The two doomed lovers may be Wildcat and the femme fatale or, possibly, the femme fatale and the doomed Pangmei Hotel innkeeper. (A female convict tells Wu that she and the femme fatale robbed a house and stole the "green book.") The lovers meet for trysts in an abandoned and flooded house where water is pouring down from the ceiling incessantly. Sometimes, Wu and the femme fatale have encounters in a greenish, gloomy tunnel. In one scene, we see someone flailing around in a car -- it's either a sex scene or a murder: we can't tell which because the vehicle is passing through a car-washer and covered with froth and soap -foam. People go on train rides in deserted cars. Wu claims to have seen his dead father's ghost on the train -- we don't see anything. Rain is predicted -- more rain since it is wet in every single scene in the entire film. There are mudslides. Sometimes, when someone is talking we hear an ominous low rumble of a mud slide, but we never see one. The incessant rain, mirror effects using specular surfaces that are corroded or covered with condensate, dark dripping corridors, detritus under the surface of turbid, polluted water, and a shot taken directly from Stalker (a train rumbles by causing a glass of liquid to inch it's way off the edge of a dirty table) all invoke Tarkovsky. But, other aspects of the film come directly from David Lynch's movies. There's a torture scene in which a nattily dressed gangster sings karaoke to a man suspended from an overhead pipe -- this is like Dean Stockwell singing the Sandman song in Blue Velvet. (Who is being tortured and why I couldn't decipher.) A Long Day's Journey... is the darkest picture I have ever seen -- the viewer literally can't decipher what is happening in half the shots. This is clearly intentional since Bi Gan showed himself a master of clearly lit and expository landscapes and city locations in Kaili Blues -- the director doesn't want you to be able to see what is happening. And this for the entire two-hour and ten minutes film.
After about one hour, the hero staggers into a bombed-out looking courtyard where some flames are flickering in barrels. People who like zombies are scattered around. Wu is looking for the femme fatale who appears and disappears mysteriously throughout the movie. A woman (who looks just like the mystery lady) tells Wu that the femme fatale will be singing "just before dawn" in a dive dimly lit at the other end of the courtyard. (And, then, joint will be demolished.) The hero goes to a movie theater to kill time. The film that he is watching is a 3D movie and, when he dons his dark glasses, this is a sign to the audience to put on the 3D goggles that viewers were handed at the door when they entered the auditorium. The movie projected on the screen is called A Long Day's Journey into Night -- the title appears one hour into the film. The rest of the movie consists of a continuous gargantuan sequence shot, seemingly without cuts (I think Bi Gan cheats a couple time but it's so dark you can't tell). This movie within a movie involves Wu finding himself in a dungeon-like room. He meets a boy wearing a minotaur's skull and plays him in a Ping-Pong game. The boy takes Wu to the edge of a huge amphitheater-like declivity and puts him in a sort of miner's bucket. The bucket then descends several hundred feet to place where various shadowy figures are moving about. It's a Karaoke contest and the woman Wu is seeking is supposed to appear last, just as the sun is rising at dawn. (We hear roosters crowing continuously during this last hour.) Wu plays pool with a woman who looks like the femme fatale. She is older however and she ushers Wu deeper into the huge cavity -- it's like a hell with concentric circles each deeper than the last. The woman takes Wu to where a man is confined in a cage. The woman says that this is her lover. They quarrel. Wu opens the cage and the older woman and man depart in a white pickup truck -- I have the sense that the man is Wildcat. Before they leave, the woman says that she and the man in the cage enjoyed many romantic trysts at a palace-house where the roof leaked. Wu goes back to the Karaoke contest. He encounters the mysterious woman in the dressing room. He gives her a watch, plucked from the cage where Wildcat was trapped -- "it's a symbol of eternity" he tells her. She lights a Roman candle and inserts it in a flower vase in her dressing room -- "It's a symbol of evanescence," she says. Then, she and Wu use a magic Ping-Pong paddle (I kid you not) to fly over the ramshackle brick compound in the hell-amphitheater to the palatial house where the lovers once met. But it's all burned out, just a ruined hull. The mysterious woman vanishes. Wu climbs out of the lower parts of this hell to where the Karaoke show is underway. There's some robotically performed songs ala Blue Velvet and, then, Wu goes back into the dressing room -- the camera focuses on the Roman Candle still flickering and casting sparks and, then, the film ends. The last 59 minutes can be explained, more or less, as a sequence of events but I don't have a clear concept what it means or why these things occur -- clearly, the movie within the movie, possibly Wu's dream, incorporates elements from the previous hour of the film. For instance, the femme fatale has asked Wu to get her a pomelo fruit. But it's winter and there are no pomelos to be found. In one of the amphitheaters in the black subterranean hell, a horse suddenly emerges, materializing out of awall -- the horse is carrying a load of fruit including pomelo. Wildcat's death has something to do with apples -- Wildcat was working as a street vendor of apples and his inventory rotted when he vanished. In the final hour, the hero seems to be continuously chomping on an apple. These correlations are obvious-- the apple seems to suggest Eve's temptation of Adam and connects to the femme fatale's role in triggering the murder of the Innkeeper and Wildcat. But other aspects of the hour-long final sequence are hard to interpret and, perhaps, can't be interpreted at all. Furthermore, if the film was dark before the last hour, it is impenetrably gloomy after the audience dons the heavily tinted 3D goggles -- several times, I lifted the goggles, which really did little but blur and darken the image, and found that the screen was much clearer and better lit without the glasses. But you are supposed to wear the glasses and some parts of the last sequence did feature very low-key and unimpressive 3D effects. The last hour is so dark that I often couldn't tell what I was seeing. (This final hour-long nightmare sequence is similar to the last ninety minutes of Inland Empire in which Laura Dern enters a black maze and literally melts away, sometimes turning into a doppelganger or a haze of electrons and encountering other monstrous apparitions -- she can't get back to the well-lit audition where the sequence began and the film ends with her trapped forever in Lynch's hellish fun-house.)
Ban Gi's movie is a failure and close to unwatchable. But it takes huge chances. The wager, which doesn't pay off, is enormous.
Like Kaili Blues, A Long Days Journey... is constructed in two roughly equal parts. The first hour involves a protagonist who comes to Kaili to investigate his father's death. (I think the man's called Lo Hong Wu -- if I can trust notes scribbled on the back of a brochure in the supernal darkness of the WAC theater; I'll call him Wu for short -- although he really functions as an unnamed, inexplicable presence in the film, a center around which the film's dreamlike action revolves.) Wu's father, a petty gangster named Wildcat, has been found in a mineshaft, apparently murdered. Initially, the film resembles a strangulated version of a film noir mystery -- Wu encounters a femme fatale who seems to have been implicated in his father's murder. (The movie uses genre elements much like Bela Tarr's equally unsuccessful The Man from London adapted from a crime novel by Georges Simenon -- you sense the mystery movie components cubistically fractured and sort of randomly distributed throughout a picture that really has nothing to so with the genre that it invokes.) The femme fatale seems to have had an affair with Wildcat. It's not clear to me but she may have used Wildcat to kill her husband, the keeper of a disastrously decrepit hotel, the Pangmei Inn, a ghostly place where water drips and a big black German shepherd (as in Tarkovsky's Stalker) paces around uneasily. The woman (or there may be two women or even more) was like Scheherazade: when she ran out of money she earned her keep telling the hotel owner stories until he married her. She entices someone (probably Wildcat) to kill the hotel owner and, then, she (perhaps) has someone kill Wildcat and dump him in a mine-shaft. Wu has a "green book" that (perhaps) tells the story of two doomed lovers. The two doomed lovers may be Wildcat and the femme fatale or, possibly, the femme fatale and the doomed Pangmei Hotel innkeeper. (A female convict tells Wu that she and the femme fatale robbed a house and stole the "green book.") The lovers meet for trysts in an abandoned and flooded house where water is pouring down from the ceiling incessantly. Sometimes, Wu and the femme fatale have encounters in a greenish, gloomy tunnel. In one scene, we see someone flailing around in a car -- it's either a sex scene or a murder: we can't tell which because the vehicle is passing through a car-washer and covered with froth and soap -foam. People go on train rides in deserted cars. Wu claims to have seen his dead father's ghost on the train -- we don't see anything. Rain is predicted -- more rain since it is wet in every single scene in the entire film. There are mudslides. Sometimes, when someone is talking we hear an ominous low rumble of a mud slide, but we never see one. The incessant rain, mirror effects using specular surfaces that are corroded or covered with condensate, dark dripping corridors, detritus under the surface of turbid, polluted water, and a shot taken directly from Stalker (a train rumbles by causing a glass of liquid to inch it's way off the edge of a dirty table) all invoke Tarkovsky. But, other aspects of the film come directly from David Lynch's movies. There's a torture scene in which a nattily dressed gangster sings karaoke to a man suspended from an overhead pipe -- this is like Dean Stockwell singing the Sandman song in Blue Velvet. (Who is being tortured and why I couldn't decipher.) A Long Day's Journey... is the darkest picture I have ever seen -- the viewer literally can't decipher what is happening in half the shots. This is clearly intentional since Bi Gan showed himself a master of clearly lit and expository landscapes and city locations in Kaili Blues -- the director doesn't want you to be able to see what is happening. And this for the entire two-hour and ten minutes film.
After about one hour, the hero staggers into a bombed-out looking courtyard where some flames are flickering in barrels. People who like zombies are scattered around. Wu is looking for the femme fatale who appears and disappears mysteriously throughout the movie. A woman (who looks just like the mystery lady) tells Wu that the femme fatale will be singing "just before dawn" in a dive dimly lit at the other end of the courtyard. (And, then, joint will be demolished.) The hero goes to a movie theater to kill time. The film that he is watching is a 3D movie and, when he dons his dark glasses, this is a sign to the audience to put on the 3D goggles that viewers were handed at the door when they entered the auditorium. The movie projected on the screen is called A Long Day's Journey into Night -- the title appears one hour into the film. The rest of the movie consists of a continuous gargantuan sequence shot, seemingly without cuts (I think Bi Gan cheats a couple time but it's so dark you can't tell). This movie within a movie involves Wu finding himself in a dungeon-like room. He meets a boy wearing a minotaur's skull and plays him in a Ping-Pong game. The boy takes Wu to the edge of a huge amphitheater-like declivity and puts him in a sort of miner's bucket. The bucket then descends several hundred feet to place where various shadowy figures are moving about. It's a Karaoke contest and the woman Wu is seeking is supposed to appear last, just as the sun is rising at dawn. (We hear roosters crowing continuously during this last hour.) Wu plays pool with a woman who looks like the femme fatale. She is older however and she ushers Wu deeper into the huge cavity -- it's like a hell with concentric circles each deeper than the last. The woman takes Wu to where a man is confined in a cage. The woman says that this is her lover. They quarrel. Wu opens the cage and the older woman and man depart in a white pickup truck -- I have the sense that the man is Wildcat. Before they leave, the woman says that she and the man in the cage enjoyed many romantic trysts at a palace-house where the roof leaked. Wu goes back to the Karaoke contest. He encounters the mysterious woman in the dressing room. He gives her a watch, plucked from the cage where Wildcat was trapped -- "it's a symbol of eternity" he tells her. She lights a Roman candle and inserts it in a flower vase in her dressing room -- "It's a symbol of evanescence," she says. Then, she and Wu use a magic Ping-Pong paddle (I kid you not) to fly over the ramshackle brick compound in the hell-amphitheater to the palatial house where the lovers once met. But it's all burned out, just a ruined hull. The mysterious woman vanishes. Wu climbs out of the lower parts of this hell to where the Karaoke show is underway. There's some robotically performed songs ala Blue Velvet and, then, Wu goes back into the dressing room -- the camera focuses on the Roman Candle still flickering and casting sparks and, then, the film ends. The last 59 minutes can be explained, more or less, as a sequence of events but I don't have a clear concept what it means or why these things occur -- clearly, the movie within the movie, possibly Wu's dream, incorporates elements from the previous hour of the film. For instance, the femme fatale has asked Wu to get her a pomelo fruit. But it's winter and there are no pomelos to be found. In one of the amphitheaters in the black subterranean hell, a horse suddenly emerges, materializing out of awall -- the horse is carrying a load of fruit including pomelo. Wildcat's death has something to do with apples -- Wildcat was working as a street vendor of apples and his inventory rotted when he vanished. In the final hour, the hero seems to be continuously chomping on an apple. These correlations are obvious-- the apple seems to suggest Eve's temptation of Adam and connects to the femme fatale's role in triggering the murder of the Innkeeper and Wildcat. But other aspects of the hour-long final sequence are hard to interpret and, perhaps, can't be interpreted at all. Furthermore, if the film was dark before the last hour, it is impenetrably gloomy after the audience dons the heavily tinted 3D goggles -- several times, I lifted the goggles, which really did little but blur and darken the image, and found that the screen was much clearer and better lit without the glasses. But you are supposed to wear the glasses and some parts of the last sequence did feature very low-key and unimpressive 3D effects. The last hour is so dark that I often couldn't tell what I was seeing. (This final hour-long nightmare sequence is similar to the last ninety minutes of Inland Empire in which Laura Dern enters a black maze and literally melts away, sometimes turning into a doppelganger or a haze of electrons and encountering other monstrous apparitions -- she can't get back to the well-lit audition where the sequence began and the film ends with her trapped forever in Lynch's hellish fun-house.)
Ban Gi's movie is a failure and close to unwatchable. But it takes huge chances. The wager, which doesn't pay off, is enormous.
Kaili Blues
Apparently, part of China looks very much like Appalachia: muscular green rivers flow in deep green gorges. Towns occupy river valleys and extend for dilapidated miles between the river and the steep, shaggy bluffs. The economy seems based on coal, but no one seems to have a job. Young men hang out in squalid pool-halls and ride motor-scooters that don't start reliably. There are even hillbillies of a particularly rustic sort, the Miao ethnic group -- people once renowned for their ability to play "Lusheng pipes", although this skill has been mostly abandoned: the kids favor second-hand electric guitars with battered speakers, traveling to gigs crammed into the back of old, dilapidated pick-up trucks. Train tracks snake along the river bottoms, frequently passing through long tunnels and there is an unsteady-looking suspension bridge spanning the bright green river. The landscape is like the terrain around Pittsburgh or Wheeling,West Virginia -- no one seems to have any money or any hope. This is the place where Bi Gan's Kaili Blues is set, filmed with such intensity that you can almost smell the sub-tropical rot and squalor. Released in 2015, Kaili Blues is a remarkable debut feature film for the young director -- I think he was 25 when the picture was made. The movie is an intricate puzzle picture: on second viewing, the broad contours of the enterprise are visible, but I'm still not clear what the movie is supposed to mean or, even, if the concept of thematic subject matter has any relevance to the picture at all. Throughout the movie, a voice intones poems, all of them written by Bi Gan, although attributed to the character named Chen in the picture. The short poems are surrealist in nature, very densely written, and hard to follow when spoken in voice-over. I'm not certain that careful study of this verse would yield any clearly articulable meaning -- rather, the poems seem comprised of atmospheric mists of words, striking evanescent images that don't exactly cohere in terms of any meaning that can be paraphrased. The film operates in a similar manner -- the images, often astonishing, are organized according to certain principles involving repetition, a sort of visual rhyming. But whether these images, taken together, coalesce into a meaning that can be paraphrased is unclear to me. The movie is visually beautiful and contains striking sequences and, so, it is pleasant enough to study. But, at the outset, Bi Gan offers a warning: there is a long citation from the Diamond Sutra that tells us that Buddha understands the thought of all beings because, in effect, there is no thought; this is because the thought that is past can not be retrieved, the thought that is future is not available to be grasped, and the thought of the present always eludes us in the moment. Obviously, this quote is an admonition to the viewer.
Kaili Blues presents more of a situation than a plot although the film is filled with occurrences of various kinds. (An example of these occurrences is the periodic appearance of white dog owned by someone nicknamed Pisshead -- in an early scene, the dog warily circles a fire-pit on a terrace at a medical clinic. The scene is bathed in deep colors and the orange of the fire is more orange than anything you've ever seen.) A sad older man named Chen works at a clinic. At first, we see him as a patient and there is a suggestion that he is infected somehow. Later, we find that Chen is a physician of sorts himself despite a background that includes nine years in prison. Through bits of dialogue, we come to understand that Chen has a half-brother nicknamed Crazy Face. Crazy Face has a son named Weiwei. The little boy is neglected, left alone at home with the admonition that he should do his homework. Chen is close to Weiwei and concerned that Crazy Face is going to sell the child to a local gangster called the Monk. When Weiwei vanishes, Chen decides to go to a place called Zhenyuan where the Monk has supposedly taken the boy. Chen also agrees to deliver a message from the elderly lady doctor with whom he practices. "Before the Cultural Revolution", she says that she had a lover named Lin Airen. She has lost touch with this man, but believes he lives in Zhenyuan. Chen agrees to deliver a shirt to Lin Airen -- it's a private joke between the lady doctor and Lin Airen: they agreed that whoever left Kaili first would be given a shirt by the other person. Through some half-overheard conversation, we learn that Monk owed money to another gangster. The other gangster cut off Monk's son's hand and, then, buried the child alive. Curiously, Chen accepts the justice of burying the boy alive, but can't reconcile himself with cutting off the boy's hand. It seems that Chen may have taken revenge on the gangster who mutilated and killed Monk's son -- apparently, this is why he spent nine years in jail. (The jail was a coal mine where workers were routinely beaten.) Chen and his half-brother Crazy Face quarrel over the upkeep on their mother's grave. There is a house in dispute between them. We learn that Chen's wife died when he was in prison. Then, at about thirty minutes into the film, the title appears: Kaili Blues.
The first part of the film is clearly and beautifully shot and makes a certain kind of elliptical sense. We hear poems on the sound track recited by Chen and there are strange images that can't exactly be reconciled to anything in the narration. A train seems to sweep by Crazy Face's hovel, projected on curtains -- it's not clear if this is a real train or some sort of hallucination. Chen dreams of his mother's slippers drifting away under water. (His mother abandoned him when he was a small boy and he was raised on the streets of Kaili -- the slipper sinking into the green river seems an image of the boy's abandonment). In a pool hall, there's a red table onto which water seems to pour -- an obvious homage to Tarkovsky and an image that signifies that what we are seeing is a memory. There's a tunnel in which a banana vendor pushes a cart sometimes toward the camera and, sometimes, away into the shadows.
Chen takes a train to a reservoir in the mountains. A man who was formerly a gangster drives Chen down to a place named Dangmai. (It seems to be a sort of roadside café.) Chen remembers prison and tells an anecdote about how he was beaten over a misunderstanding that now seems comical to him. A wild man seems to be out and about. (We learn this by a radio account) People are terrorized by the wild man. Before he vanished, Weiwei was afraid of the creature and thought it would attack him at home. The wild man has accosted a motorist and caused a terrible accident in which a bit of Batik tapestry was damaged. (There is a later inserted shot showing odd images on the Batik). At Dangmai, we see a young man with a motorscooter with blue buckets strapped to its back. A pretty young girl tries to get a ride with the young man but he can't get the motorscooter to start -- throughout the movie no one can get their vehicles to reliably start and there are periodic power outages. The scene at Dangmai initiates an extended take that lasts for 45 minutes, a single shot somewhat like Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark -- but, if anything, even more complex and arduous. The shot is made with a sort of fish-eye lens that slightly distorts the image, blurring it a little at the sides, and involves several extended motor-scooter rides and, then, tracking shots in Zhenyuan, a place that looks more or less indistinguishable from the wretched Kaili. Sometimes, the camera deserts Chen to follow other figures, including the pretty young girl who turns out to be a hair stylist and would-be tour-guide -- periodically, she recites facts and figures about Kaili, including annual rainfall, temperature range, and the size of the city (she is rehearsing for the tours she hopes to lead). The sequence shot includes an interlude with Miao people, an impromptu concert on the street in which Chen sings (poorly) a song called "Little Jasmine Flower". At one point, the pretty young hair dresser, Yang Yang, walks through some alleys, takes a ferry across the river (about a 100 yard ride over a turbulent-looking green river). She buys a whirligig and, then, crosses the river again on a swinging bridge to attend the Miao rock 'n roll show where Chen is singing the pop tune. The boy with the blue buckets strapped to his bike takes Chen back up the hill to Dangmai and the shot ends where it began -- 45 minutes later. On the way back up the hill, Chen says that "It's like a dream" and asks the boy driving the motorbike for his name. The boy says that he's Weiwei, now grown to be a teenager. Chen goes to a place where a wholesale banana vendor has a kind of mansion standing over what seem to be sugar cane fields and bamboo thickets. He learns that Weiwei is safe with the banana wholesaler who has bought the boy from Crazy Face and is raising him. The banana vendor may also be a watch repairman. This correlates to earlier scenes in which we have learned that Weiwei is obsessed with clocks, draws them on walls, and inks them on his wrist. In one uncanny shot, we watch a hand-drawn watch seem to tell time by a shadow cast from where it is nailed to a wall. I don't know if the banana wholesaler and the watch repairman are one or two people. (The people's faces all look alike to me because, of course, they are Chinese and so parts of the film were unintentionally confusing simply because I couldn't tell the people apart). It seems that Chen sights Weiwei as a little boy, looking at him through binoculars and, at one point, we see a procession of Miao people marching single file and playing hooked instruments that must be Lusheng pipes. Chen learns that the lady doctor's boyfriend has died about a year earlier. He leaves Zhengyuen on a train -- the train looks like the ghost train we saw passing Crazy Face's hovel an hour earlier. Chen falls asleep and the move suddenly ends.
The summary is clearer than the film and I will probably have to watch it several more times to understand all of the intricate cross-references between the single take tracking shot in Zhenyuan and the opening hour-long sequence in Kaili. The long tracking shot is a virtuosic display that, in fact, creates an indescribable sensation of disorientation and somehow seems to suspend time -- it's clear that the tracking shot somehow takes place in several different times (Weiwei is either a little boy or a teenager) and implicates different motifs from the Kaili scenes. Clearly, the film is similar to Tarkovsky's Stalker -- the hero enters a kind of "zone" when he leaves Dangmai on the back of the motorcycle. Time is "sculpted" to use the Tarkovsky phrase in the long tracking shot -- Chen seems to slip from one time to another encountering earlier (and possibly later) versions of characters that we have seen earlier. Curiously enough, the film reminds me most directly of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's unutterably mysterious short novel Pedro Paramo -- in that book, a man is sent by his mother on a mission to the town where he was born and raised. He reaches the town and interacts with its inhabitants and, then, gradually comes to understand that the town is abandoned, its buildings deserted and falling apart, and that the people that he encounters are all ghosts stubbornly clinging to vestiges of their tragic past. Kaili Blues has much the same flavor. The immense tracking shot also seems an allusion to Chinese landscape painting done on long scrolls -- the scroll presents a continuous panorama of mountains and rivers with small villages, Taoist immortals strolling near fairy tale pavilions and wild peaks and forests. We seem to traverse the painted landscape as we unroll the continuous scroll. The film engages both sight and sound -- an example is a scene in Kaili in which the protagonist is trying to start a motorbike; he tries to kickstart the bike several times with no success but, then, we hear an engine rev. But the bike still doesn't move. The camera slowly tracks to the side where we see that the engine belongs to a bright yellow front-end loader on a flat bed. The film then documents the bizarre way that the front end loader descends from the flat bed. When the camera tilts back to where the motorbike was located, the man and cycle are gone -- apparently, while we were engaged in watching the front end loader come down from the flatbed, the motorbike started and has been driven away. This is an odd sequence, basically a non sequitur, but curiously interesting and beautifully shaped. Kaili Blues is strange but not pretentious -- it's never dull and the mysteries that it presents are fascinating, although I'm not certain that they have any rational solution. Yet, unlike many films, the movie's astonishing beauty repays several close watchings even if we aren't sure exactly what we are seeing.
Kaili Blues presents more of a situation than a plot although the film is filled with occurrences of various kinds. (An example of these occurrences is the periodic appearance of white dog owned by someone nicknamed Pisshead -- in an early scene, the dog warily circles a fire-pit on a terrace at a medical clinic. The scene is bathed in deep colors and the orange of the fire is more orange than anything you've ever seen.) A sad older man named Chen works at a clinic. At first, we see him as a patient and there is a suggestion that he is infected somehow. Later, we find that Chen is a physician of sorts himself despite a background that includes nine years in prison. Through bits of dialogue, we come to understand that Chen has a half-brother nicknamed Crazy Face. Crazy Face has a son named Weiwei. The little boy is neglected, left alone at home with the admonition that he should do his homework. Chen is close to Weiwei and concerned that Crazy Face is going to sell the child to a local gangster called the Monk. When Weiwei vanishes, Chen decides to go to a place called Zhenyuan where the Monk has supposedly taken the boy. Chen also agrees to deliver a message from the elderly lady doctor with whom he practices. "Before the Cultural Revolution", she says that she had a lover named Lin Airen. She has lost touch with this man, but believes he lives in Zhenyuan. Chen agrees to deliver a shirt to Lin Airen -- it's a private joke between the lady doctor and Lin Airen: they agreed that whoever left Kaili first would be given a shirt by the other person. Through some half-overheard conversation, we learn that Monk owed money to another gangster. The other gangster cut off Monk's son's hand and, then, buried the child alive. Curiously, Chen accepts the justice of burying the boy alive, but can't reconcile himself with cutting off the boy's hand. It seems that Chen may have taken revenge on the gangster who mutilated and killed Monk's son -- apparently, this is why he spent nine years in jail. (The jail was a coal mine where workers were routinely beaten.) Chen and his half-brother Crazy Face quarrel over the upkeep on their mother's grave. There is a house in dispute between them. We learn that Chen's wife died when he was in prison. Then, at about thirty minutes into the film, the title appears: Kaili Blues.
The first part of the film is clearly and beautifully shot and makes a certain kind of elliptical sense. We hear poems on the sound track recited by Chen and there are strange images that can't exactly be reconciled to anything in the narration. A train seems to sweep by Crazy Face's hovel, projected on curtains -- it's not clear if this is a real train or some sort of hallucination. Chen dreams of his mother's slippers drifting away under water. (His mother abandoned him when he was a small boy and he was raised on the streets of Kaili -- the slipper sinking into the green river seems an image of the boy's abandonment). In a pool hall, there's a red table onto which water seems to pour -- an obvious homage to Tarkovsky and an image that signifies that what we are seeing is a memory. There's a tunnel in which a banana vendor pushes a cart sometimes toward the camera and, sometimes, away into the shadows.
Chen takes a train to a reservoir in the mountains. A man who was formerly a gangster drives Chen down to a place named Dangmai. (It seems to be a sort of roadside café.) Chen remembers prison and tells an anecdote about how he was beaten over a misunderstanding that now seems comical to him. A wild man seems to be out and about. (We learn this by a radio account) People are terrorized by the wild man. Before he vanished, Weiwei was afraid of the creature and thought it would attack him at home. The wild man has accosted a motorist and caused a terrible accident in which a bit of Batik tapestry was damaged. (There is a later inserted shot showing odd images on the Batik). At Dangmai, we see a young man with a motorscooter with blue buckets strapped to its back. A pretty young girl tries to get a ride with the young man but he can't get the motorscooter to start -- throughout the movie no one can get their vehicles to reliably start and there are periodic power outages. The scene at Dangmai initiates an extended take that lasts for 45 minutes, a single shot somewhat like Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark -- but, if anything, even more complex and arduous. The shot is made with a sort of fish-eye lens that slightly distorts the image, blurring it a little at the sides, and involves several extended motor-scooter rides and, then, tracking shots in Zhenyuan, a place that looks more or less indistinguishable from the wretched Kaili. Sometimes, the camera deserts Chen to follow other figures, including the pretty young girl who turns out to be a hair stylist and would-be tour-guide -- periodically, she recites facts and figures about Kaili, including annual rainfall, temperature range, and the size of the city (she is rehearsing for the tours she hopes to lead). The sequence shot includes an interlude with Miao people, an impromptu concert on the street in which Chen sings (poorly) a song called "Little Jasmine Flower". At one point, the pretty young hair dresser, Yang Yang, walks through some alleys, takes a ferry across the river (about a 100 yard ride over a turbulent-looking green river). She buys a whirligig and, then, crosses the river again on a swinging bridge to attend the Miao rock 'n roll show where Chen is singing the pop tune. The boy with the blue buckets strapped to his bike takes Chen back up the hill to Dangmai and the shot ends where it began -- 45 minutes later. On the way back up the hill, Chen says that "It's like a dream" and asks the boy driving the motorbike for his name. The boy says that he's Weiwei, now grown to be a teenager. Chen goes to a place where a wholesale banana vendor has a kind of mansion standing over what seem to be sugar cane fields and bamboo thickets. He learns that Weiwei is safe with the banana wholesaler who has bought the boy from Crazy Face and is raising him. The banana vendor may also be a watch repairman. This correlates to earlier scenes in which we have learned that Weiwei is obsessed with clocks, draws them on walls, and inks them on his wrist. In one uncanny shot, we watch a hand-drawn watch seem to tell time by a shadow cast from where it is nailed to a wall. I don't know if the banana wholesaler and the watch repairman are one or two people. (The people's faces all look alike to me because, of course, they are Chinese and so parts of the film were unintentionally confusing simply because I couldn't tell the people apart). It seems that Chen sights Weiwei as a little boy, looking at him through binoculars and, at one point, we see a procession of Miao people marching single file and playing hooked instruments that must be Lusheng pipes. Chen learns that the lady doctor's boyfriend has died about a year earlier. He leaves Zhengyuen on a train -- the train looks like the ghost train we saw passing Crazy Face's hovel an hour earlier. Chen falls asleep and the move suddenly ends.
The summary is clearer than the film and I will probably have to watch it several more times to understand all of the intricate cross-references between the single take tracking shot in Zhenyuan and the opening hour-long sequence in Kaili. The long tracking shot is a virtuosic display that, in fact, creates an indescribable sensation of disorientation and somehow seems to suspend time -- it's clear that the tracking shot somehow takes place in several different times (Weiwei is either a little boy or a teenager) and implicates different motifs from the Kaili scenes. Clearly, the film is similar to Tarkovsky's Stalker -- the hero enters a kind of "zone" when he leaves Dangmai on the back of the motorcycle. Time is "sculpted" to use the Tarkovsky phrase in the long tracking shot -- Chen seems to slip from one time to another encountering earlier (and possibly later) versions of characters that we have seen earlier. Curiously enough, the film reminds me most directly of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's unutterably mysterious short novel Pedro Paramo -- in that book, a man is sent by his mother on a mission to the town where he was born and raised. He reaches the town and interacts with its inhabitants and, then, gradually comes to understand that the town is abandoned, its buildings deserted and falling apart, and that the people that he encounters are all ghosts stubbornly clinging to vestiges of their tragic past. Kaili Blues has much the same flavor. The immense tracking shot also seems an allusion to Chinese landscape painting done on long scrolls -- the scroll presents a continuous panorama of mountains and rivers with small villages, Taoist immortals strolling near fairy tale pavilions and wild peaks and forests. We seem to traverse the painted landscape as we unroll the continuous scroll. The film engages both sight and sound -- an example is a scene in Kaili in which the protagonist is trying to start a motorbike; he tries to kickstart the bike several times with no success but, then, we hear an engine rev. But the bike still doesn't move. The camera slowly tracks to the side where we see that the engine belongs to a bright yellow front-end loader on a flat bed. The film then documents the bizarre way that the front end loader descends from the flat bed. When the camera tilts back to where the motorbike was located, the man and cycle are gone -- apparently, while we were engaged in watching the front end loader come down from the flatbed, the motorbike started and has been driven away. This is an odd sequence, basically a non sequitur, but curiously interesting and beautifully shaped. Kaili Blues is strange but not pretentious -- it's never dull and the mysteries that it presents are fascinating, although I'm not certain that they have any rational solution. Yet, unlike many films, the movie's astonishing beauty repays several close watchings even if we aren't sure exactly what we are seeing.
Saturday, May 4, 2019
Victamas del Pecado (Victims of Sin)
Victims of Sin (1951) reminds us that many "foreign films" are, indeed, "foreign" -- that is, based on narrative or genre formulae that strange to us and difficult to decode. The second shot in Emilio "Indio" Hernandez' Mexican rumbera shows a plump avuncular-looking fellow getting his hairdo touched up in a barber shop. (The first image is a moody nocturne showing half-comatose streetwalkers leaning against crumbling stucco walls, haloed by cigarette smoke, and a neon sign Changoo beckoning pedestrians at the end of alley -- it's spectacular, as good or better than anything in American noir, the work of the great cinematographer Gabriel Figuero.) The man in the barbershop spends a long time admiring his features while the grinning and obsequious barber waits to be paid. The man wears an oversized, flamboyantly checked Zoot Suit, trousers hiked up by suspenders so that the belt line is at the level of his nipples, and a broad silk tie, something like a cravat, that looks absurdly short. The grin on the barber's face momentarily melts away when the man pays him much less than he was expecting. But the barber then immediately resurrects his grin -- you don't want to be caught frowning at this guy. The elaborately dressed thug, then, strolls down the alleyway, passing under the white globular glare of the streetlights, to the Changoo nightclub. We don't know how to read our introduction to the pimp and criminal Rodolfo. Is he supposed to be comical? Is his weird uniform of boxy, oversized zoot suit and pants pulled up to mid-chest supposed to frighten us or is the man some kind of clown? In fact, it turns out that Rodolfo is a very bad hombre. a desperado that terrifies everyone around him. But, for an American audience not accustomed to the imagery in Mexican melodramas, it takes us awhile to get oriented.
Victims of Sin is designed to savage its spunky, indestructible heroine, Violeta, with as much suffering as any woman could possibly bear. Violeta is a much-admired mambo performer at Changoo and, apparently, a courtesan. One of the other girls working at the dance-hall has just given birth of the zoot-suited thug's son. Rodolfo doesn't want the whining infant around and he blithely tells Rosa, the mother, to throw "it" in the trash. After about 45 seconds of soul-searching, Rosa does throw the infant away, following Rodolfo right into the bloody robbery of a ticket-booth attendant at a movie palace -- the girl selling tickets is gunned down by Rodolfo. Violeta runs through the mean streets of Mexico City to the garbage can and retrieves the infant. This leads to a violent confrontation at Changoo between the women working there and both Rodolfo and the boss, a dour-looking miserly elder pimp. There's a riot when the Cuban mambo singer quits in protest over the boss throwing out Violeta and the infant. Changoo is trashed, Violeta gets savagely beaten and scarred with a razor-slash, and the girls have to become streetwalkers. (They don't walk too far, preferring to languorously line the sides of alleyway by the defunct Changoo, shopworn sirens waiting to seduce men who happen down this way.) The women league together to "squeal" on Rodolfo and gets sent to prison. Another absurdly tough hombre comes to the red light district. This is Santiago (Tito Junco), the proprietor of Cabaret La Maquina Loca, a dive that caters to railroad workers under a big viaduct. Santiago doesn't go anywhere without being followed by about 20 mariachis serenading him as he strolls among the brothels. Santiago goes into Violeta's crib, sees the baby and throws some money in his cradle. Violeta perceives Santiago as her potential savior and brings the baby to La Maquina Loca. She becomes Santiago's mistress and stars in his Mambo dance review. Santiago, despite his uber-tough demeanor is a good dude -- he has the baby baptized, marching to the church with his customary procession of two dozen mariachi musicians. The idyll is ruined when Rodolfo, the Zoot-suit pimp, gets out of prison and guns down Santiago. He beats the little boy (now six) to make him tell where Santiago hid his money. While he is thrashing the child, Violeta leaps through a window and shoots Rodolfo. She is convicted of murder and sent to prison -- this makes her adopted son homeless. The six-year old has to sleep on the streets, sell shoe-shines and newspapers to survive. For Mother's Day, he buys Violeta a pair of shoes, but gets to the prison too late to see her -- armed guards force him away from the reformatory. But, then, someone takes pity on his plight and, inexplicably, Violeta is released -- in the penultimate shot, we see the prostitute-mambo dancer and her adopted son walking through the twilight streets of Mexico City. The final image is one of Figuero's trademark shots of steam locomotives rumbling through the train yard by Maquina Loca, a grainy impeccably impressionistic study of mist intermingling with smoke among steel bridges and railroad tracks.
Victims of Sin zips along at lightning speed, the plot interrupted by about a half-dozen intricately staged dance and song sequences. (The first two-thirds of the film seem to be structured like a movie musical). The picture is a vehicle for the tawdry glamor of its leading lady, Ninon Sevilla -- she has the lean long-legged body of Cyd Charisse and features that can alternately seem very plain and even haggard or fantastically glamorous. (Figuero's camera loves her and he delights in rim-lit glamor close-ups). There are mambo songs with fantastically salacious lyrics, lots of erotic dancing and drumming, and, even, a song crooned by a Mexican lyric tenor. The scenes in which Rodolfo administers beatings to people are exceptionally violent -- he slaps Violeta about twenty times as hard as he can (it doesn't seem that a double was used and the actor doesn't pull his punches) and, then, disfigures her by slicing open her face with a razor. Figuero's photography is uniformly spectacular -- the cabarets look like picturesque infernos after the manner of the gambling dens and saloons in von Sternberg's movies, all smoky and built in deep atriums cut into the earth, pits lined by thugs and partly dressed women with a hordes of African-American drummers pounding away down in the depths. (When Rodolfo enters Changoo, we see in the background a cop literally hauling someone away -- the man, who is dead or drunk, is on the police officer's shoulder.) Figuero's photography of the train station with shadowy locomotives thundering around under clouds of black smoke is truly spectacular -- it's so gratuitously beautiful that it interrupts the action like the song and dance numbers.
Emilio "Indio" Hernandez, the film's director was one of the leading lights of the Mexican Golden Age of Cinema. He fought in army in the twenties to quash a rebellion, had to flee to the US, where he worked as a bouncer, waiter, boxer, and stone-mason (he reputedly built walls for Douglas Fairbanks). One legend about him is that he posed nude for the sculptor who designed the Oscar for the Academy Awards and that the statuette is based on his physique. In Mexico, he worked briefly as a cliff-diver at Acapulco. He directed about fifty films in Mexico and is supposed to have inaugurated the film noir movement in that country with exotic pictures like Maria Candelaria set in lagoons in Xomilicho. He made and lost several fortunes, forced the City Fathers in Coyoacan where he lived to name a street after Olivia de Havilland, a star that he worshiped from afar. (He was much closer with all the leading ladies in Mexican cinema and had a long affair with Dolores del Rio whom he shared with Orson Welles.) His personal life was chaotic with numerous affairs, wives, and legions of children. The great director can be seen in his old age in two films by Sam Peckinpah -- he plays the vicious General Mapache in The Wild Bunch and appears a El Jefe in Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
Ninon Sevilla was one of the four Queens of the Tropics featured in Mexican Rumbera films made between 1947 and 1960. Sevilla was born in Cuba and incorporated actual Yoruba and Santeria dancing into her act. A strikingly sexual dance sequence in which Sevilla struts and writhes with a Black male dancer is said to invoke Santeria religious rituals. Rumbera films involve much singing and dancing, mostly to rumba and mambo rhythms -- the pictures are set in idealized dancehalls and brothels and, generally, involve women who are forced into prostitution because of misfortune and poverty. On the evidence of Victamas del Pecado, these pictures are something of an acquired taste. The young Francois Truffaut liked these movies and published a detailed dossier on them. I can't exactly recommend Victims of Sin -- in some ways, it's a pretty awful picture, but it is certainly glorious-looking and, because so unusual, intriguing.
Victims of Sin is designed to savage its spunky, indestructible heroine, Violeta, with as much suffering as any woman could possibly bear. Violeta is a much-admired mambo performer at Changoo and, apparently, a courtesan. One of the other girls working at the dance-hall has just given birth of the zoot-suited thug's son. Rodolfo doesn't want the whining infant around and he blithely tells Rosa, the mother, to throw "it" in the trash. After about 45 seconds of soul-searching, Rosa does throw the infant away, following Rodolfo right into the bloody robbery of a ticket-booth attendant at a movie palace -- the girl selling tickets is gunned down by Rodolfo. Violeta runs through the mean streets of Mexico City to the garbage can and retrieves the infant. This leads to a violent confrontation at Changoo between the women working there and both Rodolfo and the boss, a dour-looking miserly elder pimp. There's a riot when the Cuban mambo singer quits in protest over the boss throwing out Violeta and the infant. Changoo is trashed, Violeta gets savagely beaten and scarred with a razor-slash, and the girls have to become streetwalkers. (They don't walk too far, preferring to languorously line the sides of alleyway by the defunct Changoo, shopworn sirens waiting to seduce men who happen down this way.) The women league together to "squeal" on Rodolfo and gets sent to prison. Another absurdly tough hombre comes to the red light district. This is Santiago (Tito Junco), the proprietor of Cabaret La Maquina Loca, a dive that caters to railroad workers under a big viaduct. Santiago doesn't go anywhere without being followed by about 20 mariachis serenading him as he strolls among the brothels. Santiago goes into Violeta's crib, sees the baby and throws some money in his cradle. Violeta perceives Santiago as her potential savior and brings the baby to La Maquina Loca. She becomes Santiago's mistress and stars in his Mambo dance review. Santiago, despite his uber-tough demeanor is a good dude -- he has the baby baptized, marching to the church with his customary procession of two dozen mariachi musicians. The idyll is ruined when Rodolfo, the Zoot-suit pimp, gets out of prison and guns down Santiago. He beats the little boy (now six) to make him tell where Santiago hid his money. While he is thrashing the child, Violeta leaps through a window and shoots Rodolfo. She is convicted of murder and sent to prison -- this makes her adopted son homeless. The six-year old has to sleep on the streets, sell shoe-shines and newspapers to survive. For Mother's Day, he buys Violeta a pair of shoes, but gets to the prison too late to see her -- armed guards force him away from the reformatory. But, then, someone takes pity on his plight and, inexplicably, Violeta is released -- in the penultimate shot, we see the prostitute-mambo dancer and her adopted son walking through the twilight streets of Mexico City. The final image is one of Figuero's trademark shots of steam locomotives rumbling through the train yard by Maquina Loca, a grainy impeccably impressionistic study of mist intermingling with smoke among steel bridges and railroad tracks.
Victims of Sin zips along at lightning speed, the plot interrupted by about a half-dozen intricately staged dance and song sequences. (The first two-thirds of the film seem to be structured like a movie musical). The picture is a vehicle for the tawdry glamor of its leading lady, Ninon Sevilla -- she has the lean long-legged body of Cyd Charisse and features that can alternately seem very plain and even haggard or fantastically glamorous. (Figuero's camera loves her and he delights in rim-lit glamor close-ups). There are mambo songs with fantastically salacious lyrics, lots of erotic dancing and drumming, and, even, a song crooned by a Mexican lyric tenor. The scenes in which Rodolfo administers beatings to people are exceptionally violent -- he slaps Violeta about twenty times as hard as he can (it doesn't seem that a double was used and the actor doesn't pull his punches) and, then, disfigures her by slicing open her face with a razor. Figuero's photography is uniformly spectacular -- the cabarets look like picturesque infernos after the manner of the gambling dens and saloons in von Sternberg's movies, all smoky and built in deep atriums cut into the earth, pits lined by thugs and partly dressed women with a hordes of African-American drummers pounding away down in the depths. (When Rodolfo enters Changoo, we see in the background a cop literally hauling someone away -- the man, who is dead or drunk, is on the police officer's shoulder.) Figuero's photography of the train station with shadowy locomotives thundering around under clouds of black smoke is truly spectacular -- it's so gratuitously beautiful that it interrupts the action like the song and dance numbers.
Emilio "Indio" Hernandez, the film's director was one of the leading lights of the Mexican Golden Age of Cinema. He fought in army in the twenties to quash a rebellion, had to flee to the US, where he worked as a bouncer, waiter, boxer, and stone-mason (he reputedly built walls for Douglas Fairbanks). One legend about him is that he posed nude for the sculptor who designed the Oscar for the Academy Awards and that the statuette is based on his physique. In Mexico, he worked briefly as a cliff-diver at Acapulco. He directed about fifty films in Mexico and is supposed to have inaugurated the film noir movement in that country with exotic pictures like Maria Candelaria set in lagoons in Xomilicho. He made and lost several fortunes, forced the City Fathers in Coyoacan where he lived to name a street after Olivia de Havilland, a star that he worshiped from afar. (He was much closer with all the leading ladies in Mexican cinema and had a long affair with Dolores del Rio whom he shared with Orson Welles.) His personal life was chaotic with numerous affairs, wives, and legions of children. The great director can be seen in his old age in two films by Sam Peckinpah -- he plays the vicious General Mapache in The Wild Bunch and appears a El Jefe in Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
Ninon Sevilla was one of the four Queens of the Tropics featured in Mexican Rumbera films made between 1947 and 1960. Sevilla was born in Cuba and incorporated actual Yoruba and Santeria dancing into her act. A strikingly sexual dance sequence in which Sevilla struts and writhes with a Black male dancer is said to invoke Santeria religious rituals. Rumbera films involve much singing and dancing, mostly to rumba and mambo rhythms -- the pictures are set in idealized dancehalls and brothels and, generally, involve women who are forced into prostitution because of misfortune and poverty. On the evidence of Victamas del Pecado, these pictures are something of an acquired taste. The young Francois Truffaut liked these movies and published a detailed dossier on them. I can't exactly recommend Victims of Sin -- in some ways, it's a pretty awful picture, but it is certainly glorious-looking and, because so unusual, intriguing.
Friday, May 3, 2019
Isn't Life Wonderful!D
D. W. Griffith is the great fons et origo of cinema. David Thomson calls him moviemaking's "scout" -- he showed the way to new lands. Griffith's influence on the Soviet school of agit-prop filmmaking in the post-revolutionary period is inestimable. His experiments with montage and close-ups are decisive in the history of cinema. Griffith virtually invented the close-up and acting techniques exhibited by his characters inspired imitation that governed the screen well into the sound era. A film like Orphans of the Storm establishes methods for creating suspense on screen that have not been bettered by Hitchcock or Spielberg. And with the remarkable Isn't Life Wonderful!, Griffith pioneers themes and techniques that would be reinvented 25 years later in Italian neo-realism. It's not clear to me that Rossellini or de Sica actually saw and studied Isn't Life Wonderful! The picture failed at the box office and I'm not aware of references to this movie in the context of Italian neo-realism -- nature and art knows instances of evolutionary convergence. But Griffith's scrupulously authentic and documentary-style filmmaking in this 1924 production seems incisively truthful in a way that eludes many of the director's other more spectacular productions -- in a way, the film represents the antithesis of what audiences expected from a Griffith picture. With Isn't Life Wonderful! Griffith makes an anti-Griffith film -- he seems to repudiate the more manipulative and lavish effects in early pictures. Indeed, a preliminary title makes this point directly, citing in a self-aggrandizing way, a favorable review that observes that the director has eschewed the spectacle that earlier made him famous.
Griffith had a tendency to work against his previous picture. The incendiary Birth of a Nation inspired hatred and revived the Ku Klux Klan. Stung by legitimate criticisms of bigotry, Griffith, then, made Intolerance in reparation for his previous intemperance in the Civil War film. Broken Blossoms with its gentle Chinese hero is a miniature -- a lapidary film also designed, in part, to restore Griffith's credibility as a progressive humanist. Hearts of the World is a viciously partisan work of propaganda contrived to inspire hatred against the murderous Huns -- it's W.W. I propaganda at its most extreme, a parade of rape and massacre. Griffith is said to have regretted the excesses in Hearts of the World and, therefore, made Isn't Life Wonderful! in reparation for that earlier film. (A similar pairing can be made of Griffith's domestic melodramas Way Down East and True Heart Susie -- the former film is aggressively mawkish and manipulative whereas True Heart Susie is modest, unassuming, and charming.)
Griffith shot much of Isn't Life Wonderful! in Berlin and its suburbs in 1922 and 1923. Many of the people on-screen don't appear to be actors. The film doesn't strive for obvious effects and is curiously understated. Most remarkable is the movie's subject -- stated simply, Isn't Life Wonderful! is a film about starvation. Hunger is the motivation for the characters in the picture -- love is an after-thought.
Some semi-apologetic titles establish that the film was made in Berlin and that riots over scarce foodstuffs, primarily potatoes, resulted in many deaths. American audiences may not have been willing to see a picture about a struggling German family in 1924. (By 1930 and All Quiet on the Western Front, the wounds had healed enough for a film featuring German soldiers to be produced; 1924 seems to have been too early.) The protagonists in the film are (somewhat evasively) said to be refugees from Poland, although they seem to be Germans -- presumably, they are ethnic Germans displaced from Poland when the war was lost. Isn't Life Wonderful! is a family drama -- the plot is intensely focused upon the refugees confined to two tiny cheerless apartments (consisting of three crowded rooms). The family consists of an eccentric old father and his wife, a grandma who seems always dying except when she rouses herself to make snarky and pessimistic comments, three sons, and an orphan girl, Inga, that the family has brought into their fold. Inga is in love with one of the sons, Paul, who has returned damaged from the war -- he's been gassed and almost suffocates in a harrowing scene early in the film. Paul narrowly survives and recovers sufficiently to return to work in a shipyard on the other side of the Berlin. The ship-workers are allotted tiny tracts of land and Paul plants potatoes, lovingly tending the plants with which he hopes to feed the family. At the same time, he has built a hut from ammunition boxes where he intends to live with Inga after he marries her. Mobs of starving men roam the streets, beating people up, and stealing any food that they are carrying. Inga and Paul harvest their potatoes and fill up a cart with the spuds, putting themselves in harness to drag the food through a daunting forest. The starving men see their women and children dying of hunger and are desperate. There ensues a frightening chase through the forest and a fight with the gang of food thieves. Paul and Inga are severely beaten and their potatoes are all stolen. At first, Inga is convinced that the unconscious Paul has been beaten to death. But he revives and this fills her with joy. Although they have lost everything, they still have each other. Inga points out the beauty of the moon shining on the still river and there's a fade-out. A tiny coda follows. We see Inga and Paul's little hut built from the ammo boxes with blossoms in the flower boxes: children are dancing in the alley. Inga enters the hut and a close-up shows us her bridal bouquet but also a hen tucked securely under her arm -- the specter of starvation has been held at bay, but the hen is still a decisively important source of food for the couple.
Griffith's audacity in this picture is to work directly against his optimistic title. As depicted in the movie, life isn't wonderful -- it's a morose struggle against starvation that makes most of the people in the movie into comatose zombies. Indeed, the film's whole premise -- love is better than a reasonable caloric intake-- seems highly questionable. On the other hand, Inga's dauntless resolve to make the best of the things after the film's awful and dispiriting climax is curiously inspiring. Griffith begins the scene with a soft-focus image of lovers seated on a river bank gazing across the picturesque and romantic stream to some hazy old-world castle walls -- it's a faded cliché nocturne. After Paul and Inga have been beaten and robbed, we see the same shot -- but now we notice that they are sitting on the sod next to their looted cart and the picture takes on an entirely different resonance. (The shot exemplifies that context is all -- in the opening of the film, the image is just programmatically pretty; at the end of the film, it's profound.)
Griffith organizes the last half of the film into three powerful set-pieces. In the first, Inga with 12 million marks in her purse stands in a long queue waiting to buy a pound of meat. Initially, the meat is selling for 9 million marks. But the line is long and by the time Inga gets to the front of the queue, the meat's price has increased (due to rampant inflation) to 15 million marks -- beyond the her ability to pay. She goes home to the family empty-handed. Her wages for the week, sufficient at mid-day, are no longer enough to buy more than a half-loaf of day-old bread. This sequence is cut for suspense and it is notably exciting -- Griffith shows us the desperate people in the food line, the family at home half-conscious with starvation, the butchers, and the clerk periodically changing the price on a blackboard. It's a classic and exemplary piece of film art. The second set piece involves one of the sons who has received a gift of a couple pounds of liverwurst by some wealthy, if indifferent, Americans at the café where he works. Inga's hen has just laid one egg and there are a lot of potatoes available. The family (they have been eating "horse turnips") feasts and one of the sons, who worked in Polish vaudeville apparently, plays the accordion while performing gymnastic stunts and everyone dances. It's pathetic, joyous, and indescribably weird to see the accordion-player in effect breakdancing with his instrument. Of course, the final set piece is the nightmarish chase through the woods with the mob in pursuit. (Griffith moves the camera sparingly, but here he uses several tracking and dolly shots that have enormous force.) Members of the gang seem to be played by real survivors of starvation and their desperation is frightening. At one point, Inga has Paul show the mob-leader his union card to establish that they are fellow working men. The mob-leader, a giant wearing clothing about four sizes too large for him due to starvation, looks at the union card, relents for a moment, but, then, remembers his wife finding that their foodstuffs are all rotten -- his face shows a horrifying mixture of rage, regret, terror, and shame. But he tears up the union card, beats Paul, and, with his men, loots the potatoes. Griffith's use of alley ways and tenement corridors is impeccable. You can almost smell the squalor on screen. Carol Dempster who plays Inga has a long, haggard face -- she looks like the victim of starvation with sunken cheeks and big, bulging bright eyes. Paul has a thousand-yard stare -- he's clearly suffering from serious post-traumatic stress. The minor characters are all similarly gaunt, staggering around like the undead in the horror films made in the thirties. It's a remarkable picture.
Griffith had a tendency to work against his previous picture. The incendiary Birth of a Nation inspired hatred and revived the Ku Klux Klan. Stung by legitimate criticisms of bigotry, Griffith, then, made Intolerance in reparation for his previous intemperance in the Civil War film. Broken Blossoms with its gentle Chinese hero is a miniature -- a lapidary film also designed, in part, to restore Griffith's credibility as a progressive humanist. Hearts of the World is a viciously partisan work of propaganda contrived to inspire hatred against the murderous Huns -- it's W.W. I propaganda at its most extreme, a parade of rape and massacre. Griffith is said to have regretted the excesses in Hearts of the World and, therefore, made Isn't Life Wonderful! in reparation for that earlier film. (A similar pairing can be made of Griffith's domestic melodramas Way Down East and True Heart Susie -- the former film is aggressively mawkish and manipulative whereas True Heart Susie is modest, unassuming, and charming.)
Griffith shot much of Isn't Life Wonderful! in Berlin and its suburbs in 1922 and 1923. Many of the people on-screen don't appear to be actors. The film doesn't strive for obvious effects and is curiously understated. Most remarkable is the movie's subject -- stated simply, Isn't Life Wonderful! is a film about starvation. Hunger is the motivation for the characters in the picture -- love is an after-thought.
Some semi-apologetic titles establish that the film was made in Berlin and that riots over scarce foodstuffs, primarily potatoes, resulted in many deaths. American audiences may not have been willing to see a picture about a struggling German family in 1924. (By 1930 and All Quiet on the Western Front, the wounds had healed enough for a film featuring German soldiers to be produced; 1924 seems to have been too early.) The protagonists in the film are (somewhat evasively) said to be refugees from Poland, although they seem to be Germans -- presumably, they are ethnic Germans displaced from Poland when the war was lost. Isn't Life Wonderful! is a family drama -- the plot is intensely focused upon the refugees confined to two tiny cheerless apartments (consisting of three crowded rooms). The family consists of an eccentric old father and his wife, a grandma who seems always dying except when she rouses herself to make snarky and pessimistic comments, three sons, and an orphan girl, Inga, that the family has brought into their fold. Inga is in love with one of the sons, Paul, who has returned damaged from the war -- he's been gassed and almost suffocates in a harrowing scene early in the film. Paul narrowly survives and recovers sufficiently to return to work in a shipyard on the other side of the Berlin. The ship-workers are allotted tiny tracts of land and Paul plants potatoes, lovingly tending the plants with which he hopes to feed the family. At the same time, he has built a hut from ammunition boxes where he intends to live with Inga after he marries her. Mobs of starving men roam the streets, beating people up, and stealing any food that they are carrying. Inga and Paul harvest their potatoes and fill up a cart with the spuds, putting themselves in harness to drag the food through a daunting forest. The starving men see their women and children dying of hunger and are desperate. There ensues a frightening chase through the forest and a fight with the gang of food thieves. Paul and Inga are severely beaten and their potatoes are all stolen. At first, Inga is convinced that the unconscious Paul has been beaten to death. But he revives and this fills her with joy. Although they have lost everything, they still have each other. Inga points out the beauty of the moon shining on the still river and there's a fade-out. A tiny coda follows. We see Inga and Paul's little hut built from the ammo boxes with blossoms in the flower boxes: children are dancing in the alley. Inga enters the hut and a close-up shows us her bridal bouquet but also a hen tucked securely under her arm -- the specter of starvation has been held at bay, but the hen is still a decisively important source of food for the couple.
Griffith's audacity in this picture is to work directly against his optimistic title. As depicted in the movie, life isn't wonderful -- it's a morose struggle against starvation that makes most of the people in the movie into comatose zombies. Indeed, the film's whole premise -- love is better than a reasonable caloric intake-- seems highly questionable. On the other hand, Inga's dauntless resolve to make the best of the things after the film's awful and dispiriting climax is curiously inspiring. Griffith begins the scene with a soft-focus image of lovers seated on a river bank gazing across the picturesque and romantic stream to some hazy old-world castle walls -- it's a faded cliché nocturne. After Paul and Inga have been beaten and robbed, we see the same shot -- but now we notice that they are sitting on the sod next to their looted cart and the picture takes on an entirely different resonance. (The shot exemplifies that context is all -- in the opening of the film, the image is just programmatically pretty; at the end of the film, it's profound.)
Griffith organizes the last half of the film into three powerful set-pieces. In the first, Inga with 12 million marks in her purse stands in a long queue waiting to buy a pound of meat. Initially, the meat is selling for 9 million marks. But the line is long and by the time Inga gets to the front of the queue, the meat's price has increased (due to rampant inflation) to 15 million marks -- beyond the her ability to pay. She goes home to the family empty-handed. Her wages for the week, sufficient at mid-day, are no longer enough to buy more than a half-loaf of day-old bread. This sequence is cut for suspense and it is notably exciting -- Griffith shows us the desperate people in the food line, the family at home half-conscious with starvation, the butchers, and the clerk periodically changing the price on a blackboard. It's a classic and exemplary piece of film art. The second set piece involves one of the sons who has received a gift of a couple pounds of liverwurst by some wealthy, if indifferent, Americans at the café where he works. Inga's hen has just laid one egg and there are a lot of potatoes available. The family (they have been eating "horse turnips") feasts and one of the sons, who worked in Polish vaudeville apparently, plays the accordion while performing gymnastic stunts and everyone dances. It's pathetic, joyous, and indescribably weird to see the accordion-player in effect breakdancing with his instrument. Of course, the final set piece is the nightmarish chase through the woods with the mob in pursuit. (Griffith moves the camera sparingly, but here he uses several tracking and dolly shots that have enormous force.) Members of the gang seem to be played by real survivors of starvation and their desperation is frightening. At one point, Inga has Paul show the mob-leader his union card to establish that they are fellow working men. The mob-leader, a giant wearing clothing about four sizes too large for him due to starvation, looks at the union card, relents for a moment, but, then, remembers his wife finding that their foodstuffs are all rotten -- his face shows a horrifying mixture of rage, regret, terror, and shame. But he tears up the union card, beats Paul, and, with his men, loots the potatoes. Griffith's use of alley ways and tenement corridors is impeccable. You can almost smell the squalor on screen. Carol Dempster who plays Inga has a long, haggard face -- she looks like the victim of starvation with sunken cheeks and big, bulging bright eyes. Paul has a thousand-yard stare -- he's clearly suffering from serious post-traumatic stress. The minor characters are all similarly gaunt, staggering around like the undead in the horror films made in the thirties. It's a remarkable picture.
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