Something in the Air

“Apres Mai” is the title of the Olivier Assayas film shown in this country under the name “Something in the Air.” The French title refers to the student riots that convulsed Paris in May 1968 and Assayas’ movie is a portrait of young people living in the aftermath of that upheaval -- the story takes place in 1971. The movie is bright, agile, very pretty in an understated way, and populated by radiant young people. Everyone in the picture is between the ages of 15 and 25 -- we see a couple of scenes with the father of one of the young men central to the film, a high school boy named Gilles, but those episodes pass quickly, without much emphasis, and are basically inconsequential. The movie is the portrait of a world unfettered by any kind of authority. The kids are in revolt, but their revolution proceeds in a kind of weightless vacuum -- there is really no valid or oppressive authority against which they are revolting. The few adults that we see in the picture -- and we merely glimpse them obliquely, as if from the corner of our eye -- are ineffectual, embarrassed by their position of alleged dominance, and have lost all self-confidence: they don’t seem to know what they stand for any more than the kids rioting in the streets. Assayas starts the film with some quick and vicious street-fighting, lots of children darting through the alleyways pursued by other children, a free-for-all in which people are being beaten and gassed that is, nonetheless, a kind of sporting event, a lark for those involved. Three young men are the focus of the film, Gilles, Alain, and Jean-Pierre -- we see them initially in their High School, studying Pascal, and Assayas suggests that Pascal’s vision of life as an oasis between abstract eternities, an existential wager in the here and now, somehow animates and underlies the chaos that we see. The movie proceeds in a series of brief vignettes, little chapters that are two or three or four minutes long -- the kids debate politics in a callow and pointless way, scrawl anarchist graffiti on their High school walls and skirmish with security guards. At one point, the skirmishing gets out of control and Molotov cocktails are hurled; a security guard is badly injured resulting in some kind of lawsuit against Jean-Pierre, probably not even the boy who hurled the bag of concrete that wounded the security guard who is, himself, just another kid. Gilles and Alain aspire to be painters. Gilles’ girlfriend, the beautiful Laure, goes to London and later Ibiza with her hippie parents. Angry at her departure, Gilles goes to Italy to support some workers on strike at a factory. Alain accompanies him and meets an American girl. With the American girl, Alain goes to Kabul -- he is on his way to Nepal, but the kids only get as far as Afghanistan. Gilles has a brief romance with a girl, but doesn’t love her. She joins a troupe of radical film makers and, after a trip to sketch at Pompeii, Gilles returns to Paris. Everyone in the picture is radical in some way -- involved in incomprehensible political squabbling, either a Maoist or a Trotskyite, or an avant-garde film maker or musician: the sound track is vibrant with Captain Beefheart and Tangerine Dream. No one has to work and money seems magically plentiful; I think Assayas is imagining a world in which money is essential non-existent, a beautiful fantasy but a fantasy nonetheless. People have brief love-affairs and the picture is beautifully shot -- the scenes involving the young people at parties, particularly an episode involving a house-party where the beautiful Laure is apparently killed in a fire, are voluptuous and magical, lit with a gorgeous radiance that suggests nostalgic memories, recollection enhanced by psychedelic Technicolor. The people are all fabulously attractive and articulate and they seem to be completely free. Assayas films this all without any hypocritical remorse or condemnation, without passing any judgment on the characters and their milieu; the director is not interested in demonstrating the irresponsible stupidity of most of what we see -- instead, the picture glories in the fresh young faces, the enthusiasm of these children, their optimism and hope. The movie ends with Gilles in London working on exploitation films at Pinehurst Studios -- Gilles is obviously a surrogate for Assayas. Gilles is a gofer on a film improbably involving half-naked big-breasted girls, Nazis, and a dinosaur like the fire-breathing dragon in Fritz Lang’s “Siegfried.” After work, Gilles goes to a cinema, watches some short experimental films, and the movie concludes with a vision of the sylph-like Laure, impossibly beautiful, but a wraith, gliding toward the camera. Wordsworth in his great “Prelude” wrote about his own youthful adventures in Paris during the Revolution and said “Bliss was it to be alive in those days” -- a sentiment that Assayas conveys in this ambitious, complex, and ultimately unsatisfying film. The director’s point-of-view is observant, ostensibly objective, but fundamentally nostalgic -- the movie gestures toward politics but is really about the joy of being young, handsome and in love. There isn’t much to this picture but it is very beautiful and I enjoyed it a great deal, although, in the end, I can’t quite identify any reason that I would recommend the picture to anyone -- it’s a Utopian fantasy that doesn’t seem to know how untrue it is. Ultimately, a world without adults is no kind of world at all.

Arabella

Richard Strauss asked his long-suffering librettist, the Austrian playwrite and poet, Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, for a script that would reprise their success with the opera, "Der Rosenkavelier". The result is "Arabella," an opera premiered in Dresden in 1933, vexed from its outset by political misfortunes -- the Nazis were acceding to power and commencing their persecution of Jewish artists and musicians -- as well as a tragic backstory: Hoffmanstahl had sent a finished draft of Act I of the three Act libretto to Strauss, but, before he could open the composer's laudatory thank-you letter, Hoffmanstahl's son committed suicide and the writer, himself, died two days later from apoplexy. Strauss didn't revise Hoffmanstahl's drafts of Acts II and III as a memorial to his librettist, a fact, that some critics say, accounts for weaknesses in the opera's second half. (I read the libretto in the original language, unaware of this background, and didn't detect any noticeable flagging of inspiration or ingenuity in the second half of the play -- that is, the shorter two acts that exist only in Hoffmanstahl's rough draft form. But I should observe that the play reads better than it performs and there are some longeurs and repetitious passages in the latter half of the opera that, perhaps, Strauss and Hoffmanstahl would have eliminated under happier circumstances.) The finished opera, if it can be properly called complete under these circumstances, is not so much "Der Rosenkavalier" as the "anti-Rosenkavalier" -- the glittering and aristocratic milieu of the earlier success is not replicated in "Arabella"; rather, the play involves the family of a shabby genteel "Rittmeister", a former military officer who has lost his fortune gambling and his sordid plan to sell his beautiful daughter Arabella to an elderly roue to salvage the family's finances. Instead of the lavish balls and spectacular waltzes featured in "Der Rosenkavalier", Hoffmanstahl's story revolves around the "Fiaker-Ball" -- that is, a taxi-cab driver's ball (hansom-driver, I think is the proper translation), a seedy affair featuring a jodhpur-wearing dominatrix wielding a whip and various denizens of the debauched and impoverished Austro-hungarian nobility. The plot involves a "bed trick" (that is, one woman substituted for another in the bed of her lover), lots of drinking, cross-dressing, and a squalid family squabble that takes up all of the Third Act. All of this sounds more interesting than it plays on stage. Strauss is not a great inventor of melodies and the orchestral music, although always very intricate and "busy" is not particularly beautiful -- one expects that it is better and more ingeniously written than it sounds. There are no lavish choruses, no dance scenes, and most of the singing is declamatory, brusquely delivered at lightning speed to keep things from dragging too much. The "pant's" role of Zdenka, a young woman dressed as a boy because her parents don't have the resources to launch two debutantes into Viennese high-society clearly fascinates Strauss and affords him an opportunity to score several luscious duets between high soprano voices, a kind of music that seems to have some kind of sexual import for the composer -- there are several measures in the First Act that sound a bit like Strauss' heartbreaking and voluptuous "Four Last Songs" and so are very beautiful; unfortunately, these passages are short, seem abbreviated, and don't really develop. The opera ends with a long quasi-Wagnerian reconciliation and love duet between Arabella and her Serbian lover, Mandryka, and this climactic music is certainly imposing and majestic --the voices float on great surges of orchestral music with a strange, heavy, sometimes discordant bass-line striking emphatic notes below, underlining the words which sail above the opulent sound that the orchestra is making in the pit. It's impressive and reminds me of some of the love duets in Wagner's"Ring", an orgy of shame, humiliation, and anguished love that verges on the ridiculous and the tedious, but doesn't quite tip over into bathos. Arabella, who is cold, coquettish, and imperious, in the first Act inexplicably softens in the second half of the opera and, although at first she doesn't seem a prize worth all the "Sturm und Drang" becomes more and more convincing as a heroine as the show proceeds. The apparent moral of the work, which is cynical, very Viennese, and somewhat repugnant, seems to be that truel love requires infinite reserves of gullibility (or faith) and a seemingly infinite capacity to forgive since the object of one's affection is likely to humiliate or betray the other partner, probably within hours of plighting troth. The Minnesota Opera Company's production of this show on November 16, 2013, was willfully ugly. The sets, following an anti-Rosenkavalier design, were architectural fragments, more or less the color of soap or cheese that has gone off-quality. The heroine, sung by Jacqueline Wagner, was certainly beautiful, chilly, and graceful -- I think she sang well and the audience gave her a standing ovation. As always in Grand Opera, there were inexplicable lapses. In the final scene, a big family fight on the steps leading down from Arabella's bedroom (the place where the crossdressing Zdenka has just copulated with Matteo, Arabella's disappointed suitor), a group of kibbutzers stood outside the bedroom door in deshabille, night-shirts and trousers with suspenders loosened -- this gave the impression that this gang of men had just come from Zdenka/Arabella's bedroom, imparting a rather more lascivious tone to the already risque proceedings than I think was intended. (Rick Herreid who with his wife, Karen, attended the opera with us made this observation, an acute one.) How exactly little Zdenko persuaded Matteo that he was Arabella in bed is not clear -- the prima donna playing Arabella was exceedingly tall and willowy (she dwarfed the unfortunate Elemer, played by a very tiny man, an effect that seems to have been intended as comical) and was, at least, twice as tall as her sister, Zdenka. But in opera loves conquers all, including it seems biomechanical geometry.

Man of Aran

Eking out an existence in circumstances that are comically wretched, Michael Flaherty's "Man of Aran" often resembles a Monty Python skit. The documentary seems self-parody, a distillation of hoary man versus nature imagery that Flaherty perfected in "Nanook of the North" and, in this 1931 film, amplifies to the point of absurdity. The documentary shows stark, barren headlands battered by towering waves. Inexplicably, three fishermen are paddling a canoe on the turbulent sea -- the ocean is so violent that it seems impossible for the tiny corach to survive. The men make it ashore, observed by a woman and small boy, sheltering in the lea of one of the sea-side boulders. The men drag the little canoe ashore against a backdrop of waves detonating like car-bombs against the cliffs. Two of the seafarers vanish -- Flaherty's formula is to show a small family-group wrestling with nature -- not a team or a village or a community. The man has dropped his nets in the surf and the waves threaten to haul the tackle out to sea. So the fisherman, his wife and son venture out into the pounding waves and are buffeted by them spectacularly, each blow seeming to drag them toward the deadly waters. At one point, a huge wave topples over the family and they vanish into the chaos of white water. When the wave recedes, the man grabs the woman by the hair and hauls her out of the surf. Their nets retrieved, the family makes their way homeward, choosing a sea-side path so close to the waves that they are periodically inundanted and knocked down onto the sharp lava-rock beach. Flaherty films the fisherman's village as some saw-tooth gables, thatched with turf, and half-buried in a landscape that looks somewhat less inviting than the surface of the moon. The film shows the small family attempting to farm the stones on the flat-topped cliffs pounded by the sea. The woman goes down to the shore, gets drenched again by the waves, and, then, carries huge bundles of sea-weed up onto the cliffs to manure tiny plots of land walled in by heaps of shattered rock. Her husband swings a sledge-hammer against the boulders and, at one point, lays on his belly to wrest a handful of dirt from a deep crevasse where a thorn plant is growing. The man carries the precious handful of soil to his basement-sized garden and puts it down among the windrows of sea-weed that his wife is dragging, like a mule from the wild waters below. Sometimes, the fishermen go out to sea to hunt huge basking sharks, submarine-sized beasts that they murder with harpoons and drag out of the murderous water to render in big buckets suspended on the rocky shore. The last twenty minutes of the film features the tiny canoe battling 80 foot high waves to regain the shore while the boy and woman cling to one another atop the wind-lashed cliff in desperate panic -- the sea is so huge and deadly and the canoe looks so tiny and fragile that the effect is inadvertently humorous, particularly since the fishermen wear identical tam-o-shanter hats with little ball-shaped tassels atop their berets. The film is completely pure, a poetic depiction of people struggling against impossible conditions -- there is no notion of community, religion, nor is there any explanation for why these people put out to sea in deadly conditions, the nature of their economy or how anyone can possibly survive on a diet of potatoes grown in webs of stinking sea-weed. The film resembles Leni Riefenstahl's work -- ostensibly documentary, it is, in fact, a form of film-poetry of a particularly concentrated form, a sort "Blut und Boden" ("blood and soil") tribute to heroic, if brutish, peasants, and the titanic forces of nature. A documentary made in 1977, and showing some of the people featured in the film as they are today, shows that the movie is a fraud in every possible respect. In one sequence, the 1977 documentary imitates a panning motion in Flaherty's film that shows the desolate lunar landscape of the island with the houses huddled, as if in terror in the center of the frame. But, if Flaherty, had continued his pan for another two or three seconds, the image would have shown lush-looking pastures and gardens with many grazing cattle. Flaherty filmed the sea-sequences on the north headlands of the island, an area where, in real life, no one ever went because of the dangerous wind and waves. Many of the villagers are still bitter about him importuning them to venture out into those waters for his cameras. In a village meeting, a man and a woman quarrel violently about whether women, "in the old days", were used as beasts of burden. Both people are old and their memories poor and the man's sense of chivalry is outraged by the images of the woman hauling seaweed on her back from the rocky beach -- present-day images show this being done with mules and shetland ponies. Flaherty completely neglected the religious conflicts on the island, a struggle between the Catholics and Protestants that was still raging in 1977 when the second documentary was made. Apparently, Flaherty had to forge harpoons and teach the islanders to hunt basking sharks, a practice that they had abandoned as too dangerous and pointless a hundred years earlier. Werner Herzog observes that the greatest documentaries eschew literal accuracy in favor of "ecstatic truth" and Flaherty certainly was a pioneer with respect to this view of film-making (pronounced by the Aran Islanders as "fillum-making). In "Man of Aran," the deceit is so thorough-going and complete that the movie will always be, I think, intensely controversial. But the images of the tiny canoe battered by colossal waves, once seen, are unforgettable.

Hello Ladies & Eastbound and Down

Stephen Merchant’s “Hello Ladies” is a sit-com in the original sense of the genre. The show represents a series of variations on a single situation -- a tall, awkward and gangly Englishman is searching for sex in Hollywood. He sets his sights improbably high, hoping to date only super-models and starlets. These women are completely uninterested in the skinny Englishman’s sexual overtures and he suffers one humiliating rejection after another. This kind of comedy is the province of Merchant’s partner, Rickie Gervais, and “Hello Ladies” subjects Merchant to all sorts of cringe-worthy abuse -- indeed, the viewer’s dominant response to this material is less laughter than a kind of embarrassed shudder. Merchant’s character gets what he deserves -- he is startlingly crass and heartless in his single-minded erotic quest -- but the cruelty with which he is treated is sometimes unnerving. Cringe-comedy as the raison d’etre for an entire sit-com is a new development in TV-land. To keep the embarrassment from being overwhelming and unpleasant, the script must present the hero as fully deserving the shame and disgrace heaped upon him. TV comedy, often, functioned in this way for a moral purpose -- on “Andy Griffith,” Barney Fife repeatedly suffered indignities based on his overweening hubris and, from time to time, Ted Baxter or a buffoon on “The Bob Newhart Show” might get his comeuppance to exhibit for us what happens to those puffed-up with foolish pride. But those old TV series were primarily didactic and the embarrassment inflicted upon secondary characters was designed to show-off and highlight the virtues of a major character -- Andy Griffith’s patience and humble wisdom or Mary Tyler Moore’s spunky loyal kindness or Bob Newhart’s unassuming wit. In a show like “Hello Ladies,” the level of cynicism is much higher -- although the show satirizes the relentless and self-defeating horniness of Merchant’s character, his cringe-inducing travails don’t dramatize any moral except the post-Seinfeld proposition that people are cruel and egotistical and self-centered. Everyone acts poorly in “Hello Ladies”, the women are superficial and reject Merchant on the basis of his Ichabod Crane appearance; the handsome people sleep with other handsome people, but don’t much like their paramours -- everyone is cynically using everyone else. As the show has progressed, Merchant’s behavior seems to have become slightly less obnoxious with each episode and, it seems, that the narrative arc is aiming toward some sort of romance between his character and an attractive, professionally thwarted female roommate with whom he lives (and with whom he has chastely shared a bed in a couple of scenes.) Merchant’s horn-dog, for some inexplicable reason, can’t see the attractions of his lady room-mate (herself involved in an emotionally unsatisfying “fuck-buddy” affair with her callous agent). But, it appears, that his misfortunes may be gradually educating him for a relationship with this woman, a character, who is, after all, his friend. The show is populated with a many grotesque nerds, all of them hoping to get laid -- as it happens. the only sexually successful figure among these folks is a paraplegic who boasts that he can have sex but is unable to feel anything due to his spinal injury (this seems to sexually arouse the women that Merchant lusts after but so that the paraplegic can seduce them -- in one episode, Merchant carries the paralyzed man up flight after flight of steps so that he can bed a girl in which our hero was interested). If Merchant were a nicer fellow, his miseries would be unbearable -- but his nasty temperament and rage (he is a Barney Fife with his teeth always bared to bite) make the humiliation heaped upon seem merited and, therefore, something we can stand to watch. “Hello Ladies” follows “Eastbound and Down” with Danny McBride on HBO on Sunday nights. “Eastbound and Down” has perfected the idea that a sit-com can feature a morally repugnant and despicable hero and still be entertaining, indeed, even, sometimes quite affecting. in a weird, brutish way. McBride’s character is completely detestable but the brilliance of the show is that we always are rooting for him to succeed -- even though Mc Bride’s happiness is generally at the expense of some other character whom he mercilessly abuses. There is a crazy grandeur to McBride’s monstrous self-aggrandizing ex-baseball player turned drug addicted émigré to Mexico turned, in this year’s episodes, ESPN media super-star. McBride raises self-absorption to truly heroic levels -- he is completely blind to everyone else in his world -- but, at least, he’s not a hypocrite like the rest of characters in “Eastbound and Down” and there’s something exhilarating about watching him get his way -- he’s like Henry Miller in the opening of “Tropic of Cancer” bragging that he’s the happiest man alive. You are impressed by his chutzpah and hope the boast is true.

Nanook of the North

In the state of nature, apparently, there is much tugging and pulling. Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” features extended sequences of an Eskimo family struggling to haul a 2000 pound walrus harpooned in the icy surf from an undertow that threatens to suck the carcass back into the sea. Later, the Eskimos drag their sled over a purgatorial landscape of jagged ice turrets and trenches. Again and again, the sled gets stuck in the white badlands, dogs and men tugging as hard as they can to little or no avail. Then, Nanook spears an invisible seal through the animal’s funnel-shaped breathing hole -- as other family members rush to assist him, the hidden seal repeatedly drags Nanook down onto the ice, tossing him this way and that at the end of a tether the drops through the ice to the enraged animal. The effect is at once dire, and vaguely comical -- like a Buster Keaton routine endlessly protracted in a vast, indifferent wasteland of ice. For a long time, we can’t see the seal and so the Eskimo hunter seems engaged in a weird combat with some force threatening to drag him under the ice. Later, when the huge turd-shaped seal is extracted f through the tiny cavity hacked through the ice, we see that the animal is as big as an oxen -- again, there is much tugging, yanking, and pulling to get the carcass up into the light of day. Flaherty’s film features a repeated motif of things coming through improbably small holes -- at times, the picture seems a fantasia on constriction and birth motifs, most notably in the opening sequence, a sort of clown-car gag in which one Eskimo after another emerges from a small orifice in the tiny kayak that Nanook has just paddled across the bay up to the boulder-strewn shore where the camera is located. (This gag is improbable and, certainly, presents a spatial impossibility -- there is no way that the entire family of Eskimos with a couple of their dogs could be concealed within the little seal-skin bladder of the kayak; accordingly, this famous documentary starts off with an image that seems overtly false, faked, and, even, some kind of surrealist joke -- but the sense of constriction and confinement, the notion of hiding from brutal weather in a womblike cavity is integral to the movie and very disturbing.) When Nanook and his wife aren’t trying to haul huge corpses from the sea, they are butchering things and eating walrus or salmon or seal sashimi. Nanook and his wife clearly enjoy being photographed and they grin with delight at the camera even when their circumstances suggest that they should be desperate with panic. The Criterion disk supplements the famous silent (1922 ) documentary with an austere early TV era interview with Flaherty’s widow -- she is fantastically articulate, a Victorian figure in a long, archaic dress and she argues that “Nanook” is important because it was the first time that the cinema depicted real people, not acting, but simply “being themselves.” This commentary doesn’t ring true. The scenes showing the Eskimos bedding down in their small, improvised igloo are clearly staged. Obviously, the light in the igloo -- even with the pane of pack-ice Nanook excavates from the sea for a window -- would be completely insufficient for photography. Accordingly, it is evident that Flaherty has bisected an igloo, slicing it in half, like a museum diorama, to show the family huddled together, women bare-breasted with infants clinging to them and, at the center, the mighty hunter, Nanook, in the middle of a gamy-looking sandwich of animal furs. It’s remarkable to see Nanook fashion the igloo, sculpting it nonchalantly from snow, and, then, pausing to carve a couple of snow-drift effigies of wolves and caribou for his small son to practice hunting with a tiny bow and arrow. Nanook wields his walrus-tusk knife like a conductor’s baton, periodically polishing his bone tools with a glittering edge of saliva frozen to ice. Everything looks impeccably real, but the final scene, contrasting Nanook’s little family cozily ensconced in their igloo while a blizzard buries their long-suffering sled dogs in snow gives away the game -- the dogs and the Eskimos are contrasted, but the two packs (one human and one half-wolf) occupy a similarly straitened and brutish plane of existence. Flaherty’s Eskimos have no culture, no mythology, no social structure nor religion -- they are wandering nomads, staggering across the improbably desolate wasteland, a wholly isolated family surviving by its wits in the terrifying environment. Surely, real Eskimo are nothing like this and, indeed, we now know this to be true as a result of the great Inuit film, “The Fast Runner,” a movie that uses the same diorama-style bisected igloos (although for the purpose of showing incestuous sex scenes) and that depicts a complex mythology involving elaborate rituals and curses and a doom that pursues clan members through the generations something like a Aeschylus’ house of Atreus or Euripides’ Medea. Flaherty’s Eskimos are without culture, only a step or so above the animals that they hunt. They are scarcely more differentiated than their sled dogs, animals that seem to be forever slavering and viciously attacking one another. This impoverished view of life in the state of nature is genuinely nightmarish in some scenes -- in particular, there is one episode where the half-feral sled dogs fighting one another have tangled the reins of the family’s sled and Nanook has to untie the knot of seal-gut cords from the squirming animals while a blizzard approaches from the north. This is the stuff of bad dreams.

Gold Diggers of 1933

Four brassy showgirls conspire to marry wealthy men. The women are brash, gorgeous, and self-confident, but the Great Depression has brought them to their knees. In the film's second sequence, we see three of them huddled in bed together, apparently weakened by starvation (later, we learn that they have been reduced to stealing food) and too despondent to get up to face the gloomy world. A show in which they have chorus-girl parts has been closed for non-payment of debts -- goons waving a writ of execution appear in the middle of a splashy dance number. As it happens, the crooner across the air-shaft at their flat is the scion of a wealthy Boston family. Although his staid brother wants him to become a banker, he yearns for the bright lights of the Great White Way. With family money,the crooner finances a spectacular Broadway musical. When his brother and his plump bald lawyer appear in New York to bring the crooner to his senses, romance ensues and three of the showgirls end up married to millionaires or their retainers: the crooner, the bald, secretly romantic lawyer, and the sober, ferocious brother who has come to redeem the family honor all get lucky: the women are Ginger Rogers, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, and Aline McMahon; Dick Powell plays the crooner. (The women are unbelievably beautiful in the archaic silent film manner -- they have milk-white skin and enormous eyes and they act with their eyes -- this is evident in the opening shots of Ginger Rogers who rolls her eyes and darts them back and forth avariciously; she makes her eyes quiver and dance just as much as body.) The film is justly famous for the indescribeably strange and surreal Busby Berkeley dance numbers, lavish spectacles that seem to begin as transcripts of Broadway choreography but end at the very outer limits of cinema itself -- these sequences deploy hundreds of dancers across an apparently infinite space through which the camera swoops and glides and ascends overhead to show geometric patterns of undulating women. The comedy plot in the movie is filmed theatrically, against shallow Art Deco sets, and, although conventional, is sufficiently ingenious and well-acted to maintain the audience's attention between the episodes of surreal erotic fantasmagoria that Berkely designs. The interpretive difficulty that the movie poses, a problem as severe and baffling as anything in the avant-garde cinema, is the connection between the lavish and bizarre dance numbers that comprise about a third of the film and the brassy, screwball comedy plot appended to those sequences. The notion of sex and the Depression and wish-fulfillment may be cited, I suppose, to bridge the gap between the brittle comedy of manners that comprises the film's plot, overtly theatrical material that is almost Brechtian in its bitterness and sardonicism, and the choreographed spectacle that periodically erupts into the film -- but the connection is tenuous, at best, and the viewer should probably simply accept the fact that the movie fuses two styles and visual vocabularies that can't be reconciled. It is like Freud's notion of the unconscious coexisting with our egos -- the two systems of meaning are completely detached from one another and, in fact, mostly mutually inaccessible. "Gold Diggers of 1933" shows a velvety, orgasmic fantasy world that exists in parallel with our reality -- the two universes intersect in our imagination but don't necessarily comment on one another. The film begins with Ginger Rogers' platinum face hidden behind a huge coin. When the camera tracks backward, we see that she is naked except for strings of gold coins strategically placed on her shimmying body. She sings "We're in the Money," inexplicably performing one stanza and chorus in pig-Latin. The equation between sex and gold is established initially, but, then, the film retracts onto a stage-set where themes of poverty and desperation are dramatized. "Petting in the Park" is a pre-Code dance number that is explicitly about sex -- it is the best dance in the show because it features the manic Billy Barty, a dwarf playing a malevolent baby. The baby, who seems to represent the risks of sex, affords a "punctum" -- that is, a weirdly destabilizing point of interest among Berkeley's labyrinths of interlocked lovers and like Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" seems to stage-manage the sexual fantasy. The next dance number features columns of half-naked girls with neon-lit violins swaying and prancing on a huge Moebius-shaped stairway -- these images are almost completely abstract, vast close-ups poised against a velvet-black void. The musical concludes with the curiously proto-Fascist "The Forgotten Man", a dark number featuring legions of men marching in rain and fog, wounded soldiers limping from the battlefield and, finally, a series of huge concentric arches in which troops march and posture while the entire cast moves toward the camera, arms raised as if in a Roman salute. It's an image straight from the choreographed battles of labor and management in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and concludes the film on a curiously distraught note.

Les Revenants

“Les Revenants” is a stylish and beautifully staged French ghost story, shot for TV and, apparently, comprising eight or nine episodes, each about an hour long. The series looks like the Swedish vampire movie, “Let the Right One In” -- it’s locations exude an aura of wintry isolation and scenes shot at night are filmed with extraordinarily deep focus: we seem to be peering far into the corridors of the darkness, gazing down long autumnal passageways toward remote pools of light. The opening sequences is poetic and indelible: the camera tracks toward a case in which butterfly specimens are pinned to a white background. Suddenly, one of the butterfly corpses comes to life, flaps its wings, and, then, breaks through the glass, gliding with eerie balletic motion through the funereal landscape. A series of elliptically designed scenes shows us that a mountain village, high in the French Alps, has suffered a terrible tragedy -- a school bus full of High School students has plunged off a winding road into a gorge in front of an elegantly curvaceous and towering dam. A huge lake is impounded behind the dam and there are high peaks, draped in snow, looming over the still water. The scenes showing the dam and the lake are similar to images in Atom Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter”, a Canadian film also involving a fatal bus accident, and, also, look like images in Bill Forsythe’s great “Housekeeping.” We see a group of grief-stricken parents, counseled by a bright-eyed doctor, working together on a post-modern and ugly monument to their dead children. And, then, suddenly, the dead come back to life, at least, some of them. A teenage girl, Camille, clambers out of the fatal ravine and hikes down the switchbacks to town. In a matter-of-fact way, she goes to her parents’ house, encounters her mother, who is half-paralyzed with astonishment and joy, and, then, after ravenously, eating something, takes a bath. Parallel cutting shows us other apparitions -- a small boy with lemur-eyes named Victor, an angry young man, and a man in a hooded sweat-suit who viciously murders a woman in a tunnel under a busy roadway, a location similar to an ominour pedestrian subway in the Swedish vampire film. The teenage girl who has returned from the dead knocks on the door to summon her much older sister. But, with a shock of recognition, we realize that the two girls are twins; the reason one looks much older than the other is because the surviving child -- she feigned illness to spend the morning with her boyfriend -- has aged normally, while the ghost girl remains as she was when the bus accident killed her. The first episode of the series establishes mysteries that, presumably, the program will solve, or elucidate as the series proceeds: who is the strange little boy? Why does an old man try to burn a ghost-woman to death before committing suicide from the parapet of the huge dam? Who is the assailant of the girl eviscerated in the pedestrian tunnel? The second episode of the show invokes “Twin Peaks” and seems to me somewhat more conventional -- in fact, I fear that a staple of Cable TV, the serial killer plot, may erode some of uncanny strangeness in this show. The imagery is surrealist and sometimes witty -- a big dog trots down a flight of stairs to sniff at the disemboweled girl; a diner is improbably located at the foot of a sheer basalt cliff and houses are perched in remote hanging valleys among the peaks. The set decoration is extraordinarily clear and precise: glacial Le Corbusier-style homes tastefully decorated with abstract art and collages of polaroids and the landscapes have a numb, icy beauty like paintings by Magritte. A little girl seems to summon black water up from a drain and it swirls around filling a sink with inky fluid. Meanwhile, above the dam, workers worry that the water levels in the reservoir are mysteriously declining. At the edge of the city, there are desolate tracts of project housing and everyone, it seems, is concealing some kind of sinister secret. Camille wonders if she is some sort of zombie and, in one funny, but poignant scene, a bereaved woman who has remarried since the accident, encouraged by her priest to believe her fiancee's resurrection is merely a fantasy, tells the baffled ghost that she has "permission" to think about him, "permission" even to desire and embrace him. The ghost is puzzled because he doesn't know that he's dead. A religiously inclined psychiatrist thinks the revenants are a miracle. But others believe that this fleshy resurrection -- "the resurrection of the body," to be sure -- is some kind of grim and grotesque mistake. The series is languidly paced, employing long takes, and there are many ominous puddles and reflective surfaces and grim mountain landscapes. The people in the series look like real folks -- their faces are not particularly glamorous or handsome and they have pockmarked complexions but, almost all, are distinguished by radiant, huge, and gleaming eyes. This seems to be an excellent TV series and can be seen on Thursday nights at 8:00 pm on the Sundance Channel.