Proverka...(Trial on the Road)

I purchased a Russian-made DVD of this 1971 war film by Alexei German with the expectation that the movie would be subtitled.  The disc provided a menu screen offering "Subtitels" but these were marked as "OFF."  Neither manipulation nor cursing nor direct corporeal punishment inflicted upon the unfortunate remote was sufficient to activate the "subtitels" and so I watched this picture without any idea what the characters were saying to one another.  Most likely the "subtitels" would have been funky and disorienting:  The menu screen said that the film's titles was Checkpoint on the Way -- people typically call this movie Trial on the Road.   German's first feature film, the movie is impressively shot in an extremely wide-screen format -- the letterboxed images show flat snowy landscapes through which columns of men move; often, the weather is bad and snow is falling or there is mist and mud -- some of the landscapes have the hazy, calligraphic beauty of nature shots in Mizoguchi or Kurosawa.  Most takes are long and there are relatively few close-ups or inserts.  Although the film is mostly an intimate combat drama involving small-unit skirmishes in snow-clogged woods and fields, the picture must have had an enormous budget.  Near the end of the film, we are shown vistas with thousands of extras, most dramatically an enormous barge packed with mournful-looking men with shaved heads and huge sad eyes like lemurs, apparently, a representation of a prisoners of war being transported somewhere on an immense river.  As far as I could determine, the film follows the adventures of a ruggedly good-looking soldier dressed in a darker, and markedly more elegant uniform, than the ragged partisans with whom he fights.  The other soldiers seem to distrust the hero and, part of the time, he seems to be a prisoner himself in the custody of a small group of fighters -- these guerillas include several women and old men.  The film shows people trembling in the cold and watching the picture is like taking a shower in icy water -- it is a very cold-looking and muddy movie.  In the opening scene, some peasants with runny noses watch as troops pour gasoline (I think) over a pit full of what I thought were potatoes -- perhaps, the partisans are denying the Nazi invaders forage.  A column of Germans, recognizable by their helmets, is ambushed and lots of people fall dead in the snow.  The well-dressed hero appears in a peasant's farmstead, frightening a woman -- a boy shoots at him and, then, seems to capture the man.  The Germans fire mortars into the village and the peasants flee, many of them stumbling and falling in the slush as the bombs burst around them.  There are a number of scenes in a dark log cabin in which the men seem to argue about something.  A young soldier embraces a blonde girl fighter.  The partisans ambush the Germans and some more fire fights occur.  Some scenes, including the sequence involving the hundreds of prisoners on the barge, take place in hot, bright weather (everyone is sweating) and seem to be flashbacks.  In the barge sequence, the partisans have placed explosive charges on a big railroad trestle spanning the river but can't detonate them for fear of dropping the bridge on the barge-load of Russian prisoners.  Later, there is a big-budget explosion that destroys the bridge.  At the film's climax, the well-dressed soldier imitates a German (I could determine he was speaking German) and with some guerillas infiltrates a railroad switching yard.  There is a battle in which the well-dressed soldier climbs into a watchtower and guns down a number of Germans but, then, dies himself in a counter-attack.  His machine gun is flung to the ground and the hot barrel melts into the snowdrift releasing a cloud of steam.  In what appears to be a flashforward or coda, huge armies of Russian soldiers march through a German city with white flags flying from the fronts of buildings.  Two survivors of the partisan fighting, now uniformed soldiers among the vast columns of marching men, meet accidentally at a crossroads.  In the film's final image, we see the survivors of the partisan fighting pushing a stalled tank forward, everyone's shoulder pressed to the great weight that they are nudging down the road.  The movie is very impressively staged, but seems quite conventional -- a story of redemption in which the well-dressed man acts courageously at the climax to kill a number of Germans while the partisans are (possibly) stealing a locomotive.  The film even has a patriotic  and emblematic conceit:  we all need to work together and push in unison toward each our objectives.  (An account of the film in Nancy Condee's excellent book The Imperial Trace:  Recent Russian Cinema tells me that the film was suppressed for 15 years and not shown until 1986.  The well-dressed man in the nice uniform is a Russian who has been fighting for the Germans.  After the assault on the column, he joins the partisans.  They suspect him of disloyalty but he shows his mettle in the final fire-fight in the switching yard of the railroad.  His knowledge of German is invaluable in setting up ambushes and allows partisans taught a few phrases of German to infiltrate the railroad yard.  The scene on the barge was shot with over 600 actual Russian convicts on loan from the Gulag.  The film was controversial because the role of Russians who switched sides during the Great Patriotic War for the Fatherland has remained problematic in that country.) 

The Way Home

The Way Home (2002) is an 88 minute Korean film "dedicated to all Grandmothers".  This is the movie's closing title and, perhaps unfortunately, it is sincere.  The picture is well-meaning, precisely observed, and shot in an unobtrusive, if pretty, manner.  The two protagonists are effectively portrayed -- a selfish, bratty seven-year-old, Sang-Woon, and his 75 year old grandmother.  Korean movies have a unique sensibility -- they commingle extreme violence and savagery with the most saccharine sentimentality.  In this respect, The Way Home, although very mild and PG-rated, is characteristic:  the movie is predictably sentimental, although in a very hard-headed manner that does not stint on representations of cockroaches, defecation, and rural poverty.  The premise of the movie is slight:  a 38 year-old career woman from Seoul, apparently down on her luck, brings her seven-year old son to the country to live with her elderly grandmother.  The old woman is shockingly crippled -- she walks with a cane and has a ninety-degree angle in the center of her spine.  The ancient crone seems far too old to be the cute career girl's mother -- rather, she seems like a figure from an immemorial, ancient past, something like the hag with the hoe who comes to the forefront of the mob of villagers to hack to death one of the captured bandits in Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, a living memento mori figure.  The old lady moves very, very slowly, her difficulties aggravated by the fact that she resides in a ramshackle log cabin at the very top of a rugged mountain.  To reach her shack, she has to navigate a steep, rocky trail with many switchbacks.  The old woman's house seems to have no electricity and no running water.  She carries water up the mountain, two buckets on a yoke that she bears on her hunched shoulders.  Of course, the little boy is horrified by the poverty and isolation.  When he begs her for "Kentucky chicken", she kills a rooster and boils it -- the little boy is appalled by the greasy-looking stark white meat floating in a pot.  "It's supposed to be fried," he whines. Worse, the old lady is mute -- although she can apparently hear, she communicates by pantomime.  The career girl leaves the boy with about 20 cans of Spam, something that the child apparently enjoys, and vanishes on one of the ramshackle buses that serve the hillbillies in their picturesque, vertical slum.  The rest of the film is predictable enough.  The little boy despises his grandmother, at first, but, then, comes to love her.  It's a Walt Disney premise, although played out with characteristically Korean harshness -- the little boy's mother pummels him when he talks back to her and the kid revenges himself on his granny by stealing her shoes (we see that her feet are mangled with toes sticking out in all directions) and breaking the one luxury item that she owns, a beautiful pottery vase.  There is a "crazy cow' that chases the local kids up a path and the little boy, Disney-style is, even, given a love interest, a similarly young girl that he tries to impress.  The film maker seems to have studied Bresson, particularly the French director's images of rural poverty in films like Mouchette, and much of the movie consists of silent, long takes showing people engaged in quotidian activities.  There's more to the movie than meets the eye and, as I summarize the film here, I recall a number of scenes more effective in retrospect than in actual duration on the screen.  There are all sorts of incongruities in the film -- first, I imagine South Korea to be technologically advanced and so the rural poverty that the film shows is startling: the old woman might be living in a film set among peasants in the 14th century.  Second, the relationship between the old crone and her daughter is hard to explain:  the two women seem to come from completely different worlds.  In fact, the career woman looks entirely unlike the fat, red-faced peasants, a group of Brueghel-like grotesques who seem to comprise a race and species very different from the svelte girl from Seoul.  Finally, the film's structure and form is weirdly inconsistent:  a Disney-influenced odd couple comedy is presented in an austere, minimalist style.  (For instance, the film's last image is a long shot of the old lady all alone and bent-double and laboriously climbing the rubble-strewn switchbacks to her shack, "the way home" of the film's title).  I would like to suggest this picture to my readers.  But, in fact, the movie is dull, at least thirty minutes too long for its slight premise, and, more or less, pointless. 

Nymphomaniac (Vol 2) -- further thoughts

There is a famous movie, made in 1989 for BBC TV, called Elephant.  The film, shot like a documentary, shows 18 murders committed during the fighting in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  The movie, directed by Alan Clarke, is based on actual police reports and the murders are staged as a series of Steadi-cam tracking shots, each culminating in a killing.  Neither the gunmen, nor the victims, are identified in any meaningful way and there is no plot and no back-story -- we see no motivation for the killings and the film offers no explanation for anything that we are shown.  (Elephant has been widely influential -- Gus van Sant appropriated the name for his 2003 documentary-like reconstruction of Columbine massacre; the recent film, '71 also mostly shot with a handheld Steadi-cam stages several sequences in a way that mirrors the earlier picture on the Irish "troubles").  The film's point seems to be that the act of killing may become prosaic, repetitive, and completely meaningless in certain contexts.  All of the graphic sex in von Trier's Nymphomaniac films is desensitizing (both figurative as well as literally for the title character), and the procession of sex scenes with anonymous men and groups of men is clinically portrayed as prosaic and meaningless as the killings in Elephant.  The problem exhibited by von Trier is that his enormous film doesn't have the courage of its own convictions.  The director attenuates his focus on the heroine's sexual pathology by trying to make the film about other things -- Fibonacci sequences illustrated in terms of the number of penile thrusts, the theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church, botany, fly-fishing, the racking action of an automatic hand-gun.  The movie's digressions ultimately seem desperate -- mere sex is not enough and von Trier wants the movie to be about something other than mere sex and a nymphomaniac.  Part of the problem, I suppose, is the picture's sheer and obsessive length.  A courageous study of Jo's life would require us to look at a meaningless and completely fungible series of sex acts, recognize that Jo derives enormous pleasure from those acts, and, simply, leave the audience with an enigma, an insoluble problem in psychology.  "I am a nymphomaniac," Jo declares, refusing to use the de riguer term, "sex addict." proposed by the therapist leading a polite and homely group of chubby nymphomaniacs.  With this expression, followed by von Trier in the title of his film (except his orthography shows the "o" as ()...), Jo seems to suggest that she is sacred and monstrous, a figure from classical mythology, something from an archaic, ancient, and radically irrational world.  But von Trier keeps lassoing her and dragging his nymphomaniac back into his 18th century universe of explanations, theories, and concepts.  In part, this tendency arises from Lars von Trier's very close identification with Jo.  At one point, Jo expresses sympathy for Hitler.  At Cannes in the course of an ill-advised press conference after a showing of his Melancholia, von Trier, who likes to shock people, said that he identified with Hitler.  Predictable outrage followed.  Seligman is similarly appalled:  censoriously, he notes that the heroine is a nymphomaniac who has shown sympathy for pedophiles, suggested that abortion is an evil, and, now, endorsed Hitler.  Pursing his lips, Seligman (Stellan Skarsgaard) says:  "Well, I suppose it had to happen."

In some ways, von Trier is bracingly honest.  He doesn't try to create any childhood trauma to explicate Jo's conduct -- in fact, he takes pains to show that she had a happy childhood and close, loving, and normal relationship with her father.  The only explanation for Jo's nymphomania is that she enjoys sex more than most people and is willing to sacrifice everything, husband, child, job, even her personal safety, for the sensation of orgasm.  This seems true in its way and convincing -- her conduct is a matter of a cold and logical economy:  if you like sex more than anything else, you will act in the manner that Jo acts.  If the film were built on this hypothesis, it would simply follow the model of Clarke's Elephant, one sex scene after another until the time allotted for the film (or its budget) runs out.  (A moralizing version of the Elephant scenario is Pabst's 1929 Pandora's Box -- in that film, the nymphomaniac heroine, Lulu, jumps from bed to bed until she encounters Jack the Ripper who brings her adventures to an end in a London alley.  Pabst is similarly clear-sighted about his heroine, but the constraints of his source material, Wedekind's late Victorian play contaminated by late Victorian morality, compel him to a tendentious ending for poor Lulu.)  Lars von Trier is fundamentally a moralist, however, and so he has to punish his heroine; her chastening "plots" a situation that is fundamentally "plotless".  First, he imposes genital numbness on her.  Then, he makes her into a masochist who has to be beaten bloody to experience any sensation; the relationship with the sadist is like something out of science fiction -- it makes no narrative sense at all.  Finally, he urges her into a love affair -- love defined by von Trier is "the combination of lust and jealousy" -- that results in Jo's horrific humiliation and betrayal.  In a bow to Pabst's Pandora's Box, Jo's is humiliated by her faithless lover, beaten half to death, and pissed-on, in a narrow, slit-like alley, exactly the location where Lulu is disemboweled in the German film.  In von Trier's imagination, sex is always accompanied by the specter of death, but, more importantly, by humiliation.  At its core, von Trier's problem is that his material is episodic and open-ended -- in principle, Jo can simply go from lover to lover forever.  But von Trier has to design an ending for the film.  So he brings in Willem Defoe to seduce Jo into working as a thuggish debt collector, a plot development that makes no sense of any kind -- indeed, at one point, Jo denounces her own narrative saying that this part of the story seems designed to "create one of those coincidences that you (referring to the rational Seligman) find so disconcerting and questionable."  This part of the movie is inflected with film noir notes -- a movie about sex becomes a film about violence, and, in fact, gangland violence.  This seems farfetched and dishonest and, worst of all , completely arbitrary.  Further, von Trier feels that he needs to portray Jo's soul in a definitive emblem.  And, so, he stages a scene in which the heroine climbs a tall rock to see a ancient, gnarled tree, tattered by the wind, clinging to a crevasse in an ugly black turret of crumbling, weather-beaten stone.  The scene is impressive but the emblem seems too reductive -- and, of course, one must ask this question:  in this carnival of sex and flesh, what makes us believe there is such a thing as the soul?  At the end of the film, the asexual Seligman has become aroused.  He approaches the sleeping, battered Jo and, exposing her buttocks, gropes for her.  The screen goes black and there is the sound of a gun firing and, then, after an interval, some other noise that I was unable to interpret but that is probably deeply significant.  In his customary way, von Trier has equated sex with death.  But Seligman's arousal is inconsistent with what we've been shown.  Indeed, upon recounting her life story, Jo renounces sex entirely and says that she will become like Seligman, an asexual being.  There's nothing in Jo's story that would lead a reasonable liberal man, the voice of reason and tolerance, to become like her -- if anything, the tale would lead to Jo's conclusion, that is, that sex is wholly meaningless and should be renounced.  So Seligman's attempted rape, although it brings the film to a conclusion that an alert viewer might have guessed three hours earlier, falsifies the rest of the film; it's not supported by the evidence that we have seen.  But von Trier needs an ending, and a movie in which a gun is introduced, requires that the gun be discharged at the climax, and so he contrives a denouement to material that doesn't intrinsically require an ending and, that, indeed, is inconsistent with the very concept of an ending.  Not all works of art need to "end"; reality doesn't admit the notion of "endings" -- things just go on and on until we become exhausted and look away or until some other force requires that we close our eyes. 

Nymphomaniac (Volume 2)

Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (Volume 2) in DVD form has occupied my shelf for six weeks at least, an obstruction clogging my Netflix queue with the sullen persistence of a bad conscience or an intestinal blockage.  The movie is 3 1/2 hours long, relentlessly obscene, and joyless -- apparently, the lot of a nymphomaniac is not a happy one.  There are a few amusing gags and, of course, the subject matter has a dour fascination, but the film, like most of von Trier's pictures, presents itself as treacherous and daunting summit to be scaled, less a film than an achievement like a marathon to be endured. The second half of a gargantuan and encyclopedic movie (the whole enterprise is more than six hours long), Nymphomaniac (Volume 2) chronicles a woman named Jo's further sexual adventures, leading inevitably, in the world-view of the censorious Danish provocateur to the heroine's degradation and doom.  As I have pointed out in my earlier review of the film's first part, Lars von Trier, no less than his mentors Carl Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman, is first, and foremost, a moralist.  Moralists tend to revert to Enlightenment imagery -- Stanley Kubrick, who can also be characterized as a moralist, used stark symmetry in his films and, whenever possible, set his stories in 17th and 18th century townhouses and palaces. (In his last picture, Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick featured orgies that might have been imagined by de Sade occurring in a stately and remote country manor.)  Similarly, von Trier's approach to his lurid material is scientific, digressive, derived, it seems, from Diderot and de Sade.  Jo, a exemplar of passion untrammeled by morality, narrates her sordid story to Seligman, a kindly asexual intellectual (the interlocutor's Jewish name means "blessed man").  Seligman embodies the values of the liberal Enlightenment -- he refuses to condemn Jo for her depravity (notwithstanding her repeated demands that he denounce her) and devises Freudian and other socio-economic, cultural, and psychological explanations for Jo's perverse behavior.  The crux of the film involves a long and spectacularly horrific abortion sequence, an eight minute travail that I was unable to watch.  Jo finds herself pregnant and demands an abortion.  The nameless and abstract society in which she lives -- it is a cold-looking Denmark (actually Rhineland-Westphalia) where everyone speaks English but with a variety of accents, an icy autumnal deserted place that we might call vonTrier-land:  this place, a schematic modern everywhere that is nowhere, von Trier's denuded utopia, is liberal like Seligman and anxious to facilitate the heroine's  abortion in a nice, clean clinic, but only if she will cooperate with a brief psychiatric consultation to determine that her consent to the procedure is legitimately "informed."  Jo refuses to provide reasonable answers to the questionnaire that the psychologist has asked her to complete and, in fact, expresses a radically purist pro-choice position:  not only is my fetus my own to destroy, you don't have any right to ask me any questions at all about my decision, a choice that seems motivated by Jo's frantic, hysterical rage.  When the clinic's psychologist pronounces Jo insane, and, therefore, unable to elect the procedure, she goes home and designs some gruesome homemade surgical equipment -- hangers with hooks, curved knitting needles, an improvised home abortion kite -- and, then, goes to work on her crotch, a kitchen-floor operation visualized in massive gynecological close-ups replete with spurting blood.  When she finally hooks the embryo with one of her tools, von Trier in his customary mode as Enlightenment philosophe cuts to an ultrasound image showing the fetus snagged on the hook and neatly drawn out the vagina -- scientifically perceived, this is what an abortion looks like, von Trier concluding his anatomical image with a horrific shot of the mangled corpse dragged out of Jo's vulva and deposited in gouts of blood on her kitchen floor.  Of course, Seligman is utterly appalled and tells her that she should not have described the procedure in so much gory detail -- "it will deter young women who require an abortion," Seligman says with characteristic liberal tolerance.  Jo argues that honesty requires that we plunge into, and wholly accept, the gruesome aspects of creaturely existence -- and von Trier obligingly cuts to a head-crushing forceps used in late-term abortions and slaughterhouse imagery of beef cattle being dissected in a packing plant.  This moment in the film, I think, is the key to the whole enterprise, a massive philosophical study of the ethics of representation.  Seligman thinks that certain things shouldn't be represented -- abortion should not be shown because the bloody imagery will deter abortions and the right to an abortion is a prerequisite to a liberal enlightened society.  Jo thinks that those, like her, who elect to have an abortion should have the courage to face the physical implications of their decisions -- positions get reversed in a dizzying way, and, for a moment, Seligman seems about to become a variant on Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor -- the values of liberal society must be preserved at all costs, even if this means torture and the cynical promulgation of untruths.  Similarly, a liberal society maximizes sexual freedom -- but isn't Jo the reductio ad absurdam of this concept?  if you want sexual liberation, von Trier seems to assert, then, I will show what this looks like pornographic detail.  Although I dislike von Trier's strategy, his philosophical motivations justify, I suppose, his use of the graphic, generally unwatchable, imagery showing the kitchen-floor abortion and his use of obscene, if generally emetic, sexual imagery.  If you want to talk about the politics and ethics of representation, then, I suppose it's legitimate to shove the viewer's nose in what can't (or shouldn't) be represented.  This is a key to the entire film.  Jo's nymphomania has resulted in clitoral and vaginal anesthesia.  In an effort to combat this syndrome, Jo pursues ever more extreme forms of stimulation.  She beats herself like a 13th century penitent and, then, picks up two burly Black men, brothers, it seems, who subject her to double penetration, the whole time bickering in some African language because their penises keep ramming into one another "through the narrow wall of tissue" as Jo describes this interlude to Seligman.  Like many of Jo's sexual encounters, this escapade ends with the two men engaging in a lengthy harangue that neither Jo nor we can understand.  Unhappily married, Jo sneaks out of her humble apartment from time to time to visit a sadist who ties her to a sofa and beats her with a variety of instruments lovingly filmed by von Trier's camera -- the director likes to show tools of this sort as witness his careful presentation of the home-make operating kit.  While Jo is being tortured, her three-year old toddler crawls out of bed and goes onto the balcony to enjoy a snowstorm, a scene that alludes to von Trier's previous nightmare movie about mourning, sex, and death, Antichrist (in which Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg make love, ignoring their small child who falls from a window to his death).  In Nymphomaniac, the baby doesn't fall, but Jo's husband (Shia LaBeouf -- can that possibly be his name?)  discovering the child on the balcony in the empty apartment, throws Jo out when she returns battered and bloody from her assignation with the sadist.  Throughout these proceedings, von Trier cuts away from the sex and violence to lengthy colloquies in a grim, sepia-toned apartment between  Seligman and the badly beaten Jo (he has literally picked her up out of the gutter) -- Seligman interrupts Jo's narrative with digressions about the difference between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholics, Freudian psychoanalysis, or the theory of knots (when Seligman digresses to tell Jo about a knot used in mountain-climbing and useful in bondage and discipline, Jo sniffs and says:  "That's your worst digression ever.").  The film's frame story involves Jo, like de Sade's Justine or Juliette, or like Scheherezad in the Arabian Nights, narrating her sexual history to Seligman.  Like Justine, Jo has been badly beaten and, as they say, has "been rode hard and put away wet" -- Charlotte Gainsbourg's performance as Jo goes beyond courage into realms of reckless self-abnegation and she spends most of the film looking haggard, her face bruised and her lips split, stringy hair that exudes grease drizzling over her features. (Interestingly, she has the same kind of nipples that made Farrah Fawcett Major famous.) The frame story is divided into chapters that take their thematic structure from objects in Seligman's Spartan apartment, the furnishings as it were of the asexual encyclopedist's mind -- an icon, a fishing lure, a stain on the wallpaper that looks like a gun, a battered mirror.  The film is a tour of the universe, portraying the world as a place in which the sleep of logic and reason, the encyclopedist's rational kingdom of knowledge, is afflicted by nightmare passion.  You can admire this film while detesting it -- and, I suppose, this is von Trier's intent.  I just wish the movie were less punishing and funnier.  There is a good gag in one of the sex scenes -- the sadist demonstrates what he calls the "silent duck," forming this hand into a beaklike fist and, then, probing Jo's entrails with it.  The waggish von Trier cuts a flock of loudly quacking ducks and, then, Seligman bemused:  "I'd hate to know what the 'quacking duck' would be like," he says with a poker face.        

Jinxed: the Life and Deaths of Robert Durst

This HBO series, a six-program true crime documentary, limps along in an unsatisfying manner until its penultimate and, then, final episode -- these last two programs deliver on the lurid promise of the material and yield electrifying revelations.  But the show's climax, and the attendant hoopla (including Robert Durst's arrest on March 14, 2014 the eve of the last episode) raise disturbing questions that threaten, perhaps, to overshadow the program's legitimate accomplishments.  The series is directed by Andrew Jurecki and Marc Smerling whose film-making style follows closely the work of a much more rigorous, and morally acute, documentary director, Errol Morris.  In Jinxed, Jurecki and Smerling address three apparent homicides, all associated with Robert Durst.  In the seventies, Durst's first wife simply vanished.  Her body was never found and everyone who has thought about the case assumes that Robert Durst murdered her.  In the film, Durst acknowledges telling various lies about his wife's disappearance but steadfastly denies killing her.  Around 1994, an ambitious prosecutor sought to reopen the investigation into the disappearance of Durst's wife.  At that time, Durst was close friends with a woman living in Beverly Hills, California.  Authorities planned to meet with this woman, a would-be screenwriter and the daughter of a prominent mobster, apparently for the purpose of probing what Durst might have told her about events involving his vanished first wife.  Just before the woman could be interviewed, she was killed execution-style in her home.  Again, suspicion focused on Durst, but no evidence could be found linking him with the homicide.  In 2002, Durst admitted killing his landlord, an elderly man named Morris Black.  Durst hacked the body into parts and pitched it into Galveston Bay.  Durst, then, shaved his head and eyebrows, donned a woman's wig, and fled dressed as an old lady.  A crooked as a dog's hindleg, Durst paused to shoplift a chicken sandwich and was apprehended.  Tried for the homicide in Galveston, he was acquitted of murder -- he claimed self-defense and, because the dead man's head was never found (and couldn't be forensically analyzed), he was acquitted of that charge.  (The prosecutors were outgunned by Durst's lawyer Dick Deguerin and botched their presentation of the evidence.)  This would be merely a sordid story with little or no resonance except for one important fact:  Durst is one of the wealthiest men in the United States, the despised heir to a Manhattan real estate fortune, and the brother of the man, Douglas Durst, who manages the Freedom Tower erected on the site of the World Trade Center.  Furthermore, although the documentary makers are circumspect on this point, the Durst family seems to have obstructed justice with respect to the investigation relating to the disappearance of Durst's first wife.  Robert Durst, a small wiry man whose face seems either classically patrician or strangely ferret-like depending upon the lighting and the camera angle, is estranged from his famous family.  After the death of his father, it seems, that other Durst family members concluded that Robert was potentially homicidal and retained armies of bodyguards to protect themselves from his depredations.  For reasons that are completely obscure and probably perverse, Robert Durst agreed to cooperate with the filmmakers, allowed them to interview him in depth for several hours, and, in the end, seems to confess, although in a particularly bizarre and shocking way, to committing all three murders.  A particularly irrefutable clue is unearthed by Jurecki and company in the last few minutes of the fifth episode and the sixth installment chronicles how, after a lapse of several years in the making of the film, Durst agrees to submit to a final interview with the film makers, with an outcome spectacularly catastrophic to him -- it's because of this final interview and its sequel that Durst is now in jail awaiting trial in Los Angeles with respect to the killing of the mobster's daughter.  (At the series' eerie climax, when Durst is confronted with seemingly irrefutable evidence of his guilt, the villain's features become spastic and he seems to gag, as if about to vomit on the camera -- it's as if his body is betraying the lies that he has maintained.  This sequence is similar to the terrifying last few minutes of Joel Oppenheimer's Act of Killing in which the protagonist's body seems about to burst apart under the nauseating pressure of the evil within.)

This is dynamite reality TV and so my reservations about the last two episodes require explanation.  First, Durst is trapped in the final scene and there is an unsavory element of betrayal about the way that the ambush is set for him.  Of course, Durst is a nasty fellow and, most likely, a serial killer and so it's difficult to be sympathetic to him.  But, nonetheless, Jurecki and Smerling lure Durst to the catastrophic interview under false pretenses and with a smiling show of deceitful friendliness.  The problem that their ambush poses to a morally alert viewer is this:  if Jurecki and Smerling are willing to lie to catch Durst, then, they signify that the ends justify the means.  And, if this is true, then, is their footage really honest, can you trust the images shown on the screen?  Second, and corollary to the first concern, is a mechanical question about how the incriminating sound-bite was recorded.  Earlier in the film, we have seen Durst muttering to himself unaware that his microphone was still "live."  At the end of the film, Durst goes into a toilet and makes devastating admissions to himself when he thinks that he is alone and isolated -- according to Jurecki and Smerling, the microphone was "live" when Durst entered the bathroom and, simply picked-up his bizarre schizophrenic colloquy with himself.  I don't buy this and don't trust the film maker's probity.  Indeed, I think the toilet was miked separately in the anticipation that Durst would talk to himself in that place.  Possibly, I am wrong, but there is something very peculiar about the way this sequence is represented on film.  Third, Jurecki and Smerling were in possession of incriminating evidence about a serial killer -- a man who, by their own statements, is dangerous and frightening.  But they didn't contact the authorities to disclose this evidence preferring to withhold the proof that Durst is a murderer until the last show of the six-part series -- that is, March 15, 2015, probably more than two years after the incriminating evidence was gathered.  (During this time frame, Durst could have killed another couple of people.)  Jurecki has claimed that he and Smerling were not aware that they had the taped admissions until six months or so before the show was broadcast -- their explanation for this surprising claim is that they were granted additional funding to hire an assistant to "go through and review" all of their footage and soundtrack information.  This seems very, very unlikely to me.  I think the most rational explanation for events documented in the movie is that the film makers knew on the day of the last interview with Durst that they had incriminating evidence, that, indeed, they devised the final interview to trap Durst and separately miked the toilet, and that they, then, intentionally withheld this evidence, notwithstanding shedding crocodile tears for the victims and their families so that they could make a big splash with the presentation of this proof on prime-time TV.   Here is my prediction for what it is worth:  Jurecki, Smerling, and their sound engineers are going to be in hot-water as criminal prosecution of Durst proceeds and, once Durst hires world-class defense lawyers to study the chain of evidence on the audio tape.  Probably, the issue is moot.  Durst looked frail and very sick in the final interview, images now more than two years old, and my guess is that he will die before standing trial. 

The Habsburgs (exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art)

A great art show must contain objects that are beautiful.  But this is insufficient to make an exhibition truly memorable -- after all, beauty is common enough.  Equally important, in my view, is the requirement that the show contain artifacts that are weird and, even, grotesque and, further, that the exhibition provide an occasion for thought.  (By these standards, most shows of impressionist paintings, almost always wonderfully beautiful, fail to meet my criteria for greatness -- the pictures are simply too pretty to be thought-provoking.)  The big exhibit of Habsburg paintings and assorted knick-knacks is a success by any standard imaginable -- the show contains gorgeous paintings, artifacts of jaw-dropping oddity, and, at least, one painting as profound and problematic in its own way as a Platonic dialogue.  It's expensive:  $20 for the general public, but, I think, worth the admission.

About half-way through the exhibit, the viewer encounters a small, rather unostentatious image -- a painting of a man on a rearing horse.  The image is more illustrative than painterly, a diagram intended to show the costumes used in an elaborate equestrian ballet.  The rider wears some vaguely floral armor and looks like a Magyar or Hun glaring out at the viewer under thick eyebrows and a droopy moustache.  His horse is spirited and kicks at the air with its forelegs although the animal is so heavily burdened with a shaggy, tapestry-like caparison that it seems astounding that the animal can leap upward at all.  The most amazing and bizarre aspect of the image is the rider's headdress - a huge plume of ostrich feathers arranged in three lobes sprouts from the cavalryman's skull; the ostrich feather plume is as big as the horse and rider together, the size and shape, it seems, of a small palm tree.  An explanatory placard says that the costume was commissioned for a horseback ballet commemorating a Habsburg wedding in 1667.  The theme of the equestrian ballet was a competition between the four elements (earth, air, water, and fire) to determine which of them could create the most perfect and lovely pearl -- the wedding involved Princess Margarita, a name that means "pearl."  This esoteric canvas embodies the strange appeal of the show:  an arcane meaning is conveyed by means that seem radically incongruent with the thematic message -- a wedding is celebrated with an horse-ballet illustrating alchemical principles.  (Viewing this painting, I recall that the most complete and gorgeous examples of Aztec feather shields now extent were exported to Vienna for the delectation of the Habsburgs who controlled both Spain and the former Spanish colonies -- the insane headdress worn by the rider seems something that a pre-Columbian war-lord would have admired.)

The mismatch between medium and message is evident in the first couple galleries -- we see armor and weapons engraved with delicate etchings, a filigree of ornamentation that, of course, the first blow delivered in anger would destroy.  One wall displays Durer's design for a triumphal arch in honor of Emperor Maximilian, an extraordinary, towering folly consisting of no fewer than 36 woodcuts pieced together to simulate an architectural edifice, a monument so baroque and intricately decorated that it could never be constructed, terraces frescoed with elaborate historical and mythological images, columns and piers swarming with satyrs and griffins, a paper structure of such insane excess that it calls into question the very glory that it celebrates -- if Maximilian is an Oz so great and powerful than why doesn't the engraved monument exist in real life?  In fact, isn't the fictional arch the symbol of some kind of grave inadequacy?  Throughout their history, the Habsburgs seem to have had a penchant for objects carved from rare and precious substances -- there are carnelian agate cameos, many delicately wrought ivory relics, an overtly sexualized goblet encircled with gay-looking satyrs cut from rhinoceros horn, a sorbet service made from gilded snail shells.  A walrus tooth carved in progressively more detail as it ascends symbolizes the progression from nature to art -- at its base the tooth is bone, then, a geometric form, than, a dainty chinoserie of the most intricately carved gods and goddesses.  There are alchemical medallions displaying the Habsburg family tree, an osculatorum, that is religious artifact made to be kissed forged from silver and gold looted from the kingdoms of the New World, glittering images of saints and the virgin, all manner of precious devotional objects. 

But the highlights of the show are the paintings.  The exhibit accumulates half-dozen world class canvases.  A Danae by Titian shows a languid courtesan with an elongated Mannerist body luxuriating in a shower of gold coins.  The woman's hair is blonde, bleached in urine, no doubt after the Venetian manner, and she is as gold as the coins showering her.  Self-evidently, she was an expensive prostitute, probably painted from life, with her snaggled-toothed procuress hefting a sort of basket to hoover-up the coins sliding out of the sunny sky.  The image is luscious and characteristic:  the Habsburgs liked high-class pornography.  In the Correggio painting used to advertise the show, Io is embraced by Jove as a cloud, his sfumato paw clasped around the goddess' creamy hip.  There is a subtle Velasquez portrait of a Habsburg maiden -- as a group, the Habsburg's were spectacularly ugly -- and an eerie, mysterious Giorgione, an oddly asymmetrical painting of three emblematic figures brooding over a shadowy landscape either at dawn or sunset:  one of the figures is an angry, leonine Oriental of the type in which Tiepolo specialized and the entire picture is strangely disturbing. A hyper-realistic Caravaggio of high quality is also on display, a brutal crowning with thorns in which the centurions wear cuirasses glittering in the chiaroscuro, armor of the same elaborate and showy type that we have seen in the first couple galleries. The Habsburg taste for the grotesque is evident in a picture of a little wolf-girl, a hirsute virgin covered in silky fur wearing a huge crucifix on her breast and there is an excellent and ingenious Arcimboldo, an allegory of fire with flaming hair and brass-knuckle eyes, matches and flints making up his throat and torso.

The most remarkable painting in the show is Tintoretto's canvas of Susanna squatting in her bath while two elderly, bald men peep at her.  The picture is extraordinary, an encyclopedia of emblems and motifs relating to vision:  Susanna gazes at her buttery nakedness in a mirror and we see her flesh reflected in the water -- there are various degrees of opacity and translucence in the image:  one of Susanna's limbs is displayed under water, that is, distorted by the liquid medium in which she bathes.  Seen from across the room, the elder in the foreground reads like a memento mori -- his bald, shiny head looks like a skull in the chamber in which Saint Jerome is translating the Bible or a symbol of vanity beheld by Mary Magdalene.  As the viewer approaches, the painting the skull resolves into the old man's head, viewed from a curious angle, and, then, the spectator, who stands in a place privileged to see all, discovers another old man perambulating in a garden in the background -- the panel of painting where the old man is walking seems flattened, a landscape crushed into the plane that is like a milles fleurs tapestry; there is something curiously artificial and unnatural about both of the elders and, as one examines the picture, a remarkable fact emerges -- the men's eyelines, that is, the angles of their gaze, don't intersect with the naked girl.  The men seem more to be nosing her, smelling her, thanlooking in her direction -- indeed, the elders are, perhaps, blind -- it might well be that prurient lust is a kind of blindness.  The entire image is replete with wonderful gem-like details, very subtly painted in a color scheme of the most exquisite delicacy.  The image is a compendium of ideas about sight and vision and it is one of the greatest of all paintings.

The show fizzles out with rooms full of carriages and gilded sleighs, impressive enough for a glance or two, but unwieldy objects lacking any real poetry.  There are some cases of elaborate Victorian era garments, an anti-climax after the spectacular things in the first four galleries, and the information on the wall reminds us of the sorry fate of the Habsburgs during the latter half of the 19th century:  Maximilian shot by firing squad in Mexico, Rudolph dead by suicide with his 19 year-old girlfriend at Mayerling, and the imperious, wasp-waisted Sisi hacked to death by an anarchist in Geneva.  The last painting in the show is a dying fall -- a pathetic image of four-year old prince stepping out of a gilded carriage in Budapest, the end of the line for the Habsburg royalty. 

I hope you will see this show.  

What we do in the shadows

Comedy is hard to review.  A comedy designed to make the audience laugh out loud either succeeds or fails in that endeavor -- but success can be problematic to define and not replicated with all viewers.  And success or failure is, also, a matter of taste and the viewer's inclination and mood -- some movies seem hilarious when watched with audiences loudly laughing at the gags on-screen, but might seem merely contrived and, even, desperate to the same viewer watching the film alone. And, even, a movie that might otherwise be very funny can be spoiled if seen when you are in a sad or sour mood or, in fact, if the audience laughs at the wrong times or too slavishly.  I thought What we do in the shadows (an elegantly stupid, quasi- Raymond Carver title) was very funny.  I laughed a lot.  I saw the film with my daughter who also thought it was funny although she had to close her eyes during some of the more gruesome sequences -- there is lots of arterial blood squirting around and, when the vampires maul their victims, we see close-ups of anatomically accurate throat wounds.  Three other people saw the film with us at the Lagoon Theater on March 14, 2015 -- as far as I could ascertain, these other spectators also laughed a lot during the film.  The premise of What we do in the Shadows is that a film-crew is making a documentary about a small coven of vampires living as flat-mates on the outskirts of Wellington, New Zealand.  The vampires are hapless losers who spend their nights quarreling about who should do the dishes, heaps of ancient crockery covered with gore, or bullying a group of equally hapless werewolves.  (The werewolves are nice boys who admit that they are condemned to spend moonlit nights sniffing at each other's genitals; their leader, the self-proclaimed alpha male, demands that they not use foul language -- it's an example of New Zealand "nice":  "we're werewolves, lads, not 'swear-wolves'," he says.)  The younger vampire roommates fancy themselves as lady killers -- and, in fact, they kill a couple of girls -- but they are generally regarded as nerds by the mortals around them:  they can't get into the more hip night-clubs in Wellington because of their antique clothing.  (The familiar and slave of one of the vampires -- we see her mowing the lawn of their gothic haunted house -- remarks that they "wear blouses for Christ' sake," She should know because it's her task to take their bloody garments to the laundry and clean up the blood sprayed all over their dining room and toilet.)  The film is witty and the characters are appealing in their own warped way and the movie is short, succinct, and funny from beginning to end.  At one point, one of the undead, a fresh kill who goes around boasting to everyone that he is a vampire, inadvertently lures a vampire-hunter to the boys' manse.  A fight ensues and Petyr, the senior vampire (he is 8000 years old and looks like Nosferatu) is killed, burned to ashes by the sunlight.  One of the vampires is disgusted that the documentary crew has filmed Petyr's fiery demise.  He approaches the camera in a snit and shoves his paw at the lens crying;  "Get that thing out of here.  Can't you see we're grieving this sunlight-related tragedy!"  This 2015 film is directed by Germaine Clement, who also plays one of the vampires, the star and co-director of the wonderful HBO series Flight of the Conchords.  The movie is not to all tastes, but I enjoyed the film and thought it was consistently funny and ingenious.