The Great McGinty

 A down-at-the-heels bum, Dan McGinty (played by Brian Donleavy) is shivering in the snow in a line for hand-outs at a Depression-era soup-kitchen.  He's hustled out of the queue and told that he can earn two-dollars if he votes for one of the candidates running for Mayor in the town.  McGinty is an enterprising crook and he manages to vote 37 times for the approved candidate.  When he presents his tab to the Boss (Akim Tamiroff), a mobster who is behind the mayoral candidate, there's a dispute about whether McGinty has actually earned his pay for the 37 fraudulent votes.  The gangster threatens him but McGinty isn't intimidated and, in fact, he slugs the Boss in the face.  The Boss is favorably impressed by McGinty's nerve and recruits him for his criminal undertakings.  This leads to series of events in which McGinty first wins an election for Mayor and, then, becomes governor of the State.  This is the premise for Preston Sturges' 1940 political satire The Great McGinty, an extremely witty but also strangely discomfiting film.  

The legend around Sturges' direction of this film, his maiden effort, is that he bartered the script to Paramount in exchange for the right to direct the movie.  (The story exists in several inconsistent versions which suggests to me that it is apocryphal.  Sturges was already a legendary screenwriter in Hollywood and had been famous since The Power and the Glory, one of his scripts turned into a Spencer Tracy vehicle in 1933. Several of his other scripts had resulted in very profitable films, notably Easy Living in 1937 and, so, it seems unlikely that Paramount didn't know Sturges' potential when he directed The Great McGinty.)  The Great McGinty was a success, won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and led to Paramount engaging the director to make an additional eight films -- almost all of them very successful, box-office dynamite, and regarded as among the best movies made in Hollywood during the decade of the forties.  (These films include Sullivan's Travels, The Lady Eve, and the two war-time comedies The Miracle at Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero!)  Within a couple years of the debut of The Great McGinty, Preston Sturges was third most highly paid man in the United States.

Sturges liked elaborate narrative structures and The Great McGinty begins in a sleazy saloon in the tropics, a "Banana Republic" a prefatory title tells us.  A drunk staggers around the bar in the company of a cabaret singer with not one but three hibiscus blossoms in her hair.  The man is morose and, apparently, tries to kill himself in the tavern's toilet.  The bartender stops him from harming himself and, then, seats the drunk at the bar with the chanteuse.  The drunk says that he's suicidal because of his fall from grace -- "I was once a bank president," the guy proclaims.  The bartender says that being a bank president is nothing -- "I was the governor of a State," he tells the singer and the drunk.  This precipitates a flash-back to the Depression and bum waiting in line at the soup kitchen in a city that seems to be similar to Chicago.  With several interpolations back to the saloon in the tropics, the story proceeds to show "dapper Dan McGinty" rose to be first Mayor of the city and, then, governor of the State.  Everything proceeds at breakneck pace -- the movie with all of its flashbacks and complicated action is only 82 minutes long.  

McGinty distinguishes himself collecting debts on behalf of the Boss.  (He operates mostly by persuasion and kindness but isn't afraid to bludgeon deadbeats into submission.)  The Boss admires McGinty's aplomb and, when the previous Mayor gets into a scandal and is indicted, he persuades his lieutenant (now involved in bribery and kickbacks for big governmental franchises) to run for Mayor.  Since women have the vote and are, now, expected to be an important part of the electorate, the Boss tells McGinty to get married since women "don't like bachelors."  McGinty's attractive secretary agrees to participate in a "marriage of convenience" and "in name only" so that the political candidate can appear before the voters as a married man.   Of course, the viewer immediately understands that the secretary will be McGinty's love interest in the film.  This woman is liberated -- she was previously married and lives with her Black maid, a dachshund, and two children in a nice apartment.  McGinty is surprised to discover that his wife has a previous family but, in fact, he comes to love the two children.  Nonetheless, McGinty is cheerfully corrupt and works with the Boss to steal as much money as possible from the City.  (McGinty's wife says that her father has written an economics book on the thesis that no corruption can possibly harm the people -- bribes are just injected back into the money circulating in the city and so graft doesn't do injury to anyone.  This may be her justification for falling in love with McGinty -- after all, his corruption, which enriches her, doesn't really harm anyone.)  McGinty is so successful at running the City that the Boss demands that he stand for office for the governor of the State.  There is a wonderful and, even, inspiring (in a Capra-esque way) montage of William Demarest, the Boss' loyal factotum, and the other (opposing) candidate giving parallel speeches.  The other candidate, who seems to be a well-meaning conventional liberal, says that McGinty had hundreds of public buildings erected and that he enriched himself off them -- they are all "monuments to his graft"; Demarest cries "he made your city beautiful."  McGinty wins the election and moves into the governor's mansion.  His wife persuades him to adopt a reform policy -- he is going to abolish "child labor" and engage in urban renewal to clear out the tenements.  (McGinty, we learn, was a child laborer himself and didn't think it was all that bad -- the factory where he worked when he was seven was "light and airy", better than his apartment, and he was proud to earn four dollars a week to support his mother.)  Shortly after coming into office, the Boss appears and demands his recompense -- he orders McGinty to build a dam since you "can pour lots and lots concrete into a dam" and "don't ever have to finish it" and, even, if it is finished there will always be "crack" requiring more concrete.  The boss says that clearing the tenements would be a waste of time:  he argues that the people who live there like the squalor and, if you give them bathtubs, they "will just fill them up with coal."  McGinty, gripped with reformer's zeal, defies the Boos and there's a big fight in which the gangster tries to shoot him.  The Boss goes to jail, squeals on McGinty, and, so, the governor is arrested as well and thrown into the hoosegow in the cell next to the Boss.  William Demarest, playing the Boss' loyal henchmen, busts the two men out of jail and they flee through a snow- and thunderstorm.  McGinty calls his wife and tells her that he can't come home since this would shame her and the children.  He explains where she can find a key to a strong box in which he keeps his slush fund (his "dee-duct box" to quote Huey Long).  This brings us back to the saloon in the steamy tropics where we discover that Demarest and the Boss are also in the tavern -- Demarest is acting as a kind of bouncer and the Boss is presiding over gambling.  There's a quarrel and for the third or fourth time in the movie, McGinty and the Boss duke it out.  

The film is very funny, provides amusing and detailed information about the various criminal schemes (including election fraud) in which McGinty participates, and has astonishingly witty and aphoristic dialogue.  The picture is also handsomely produced -- the smoky barroom scenes in the Tropics look like von Sternberg and there are some very impressive deep focus shots that seem to presage photography in Orson Welles Citizen Kane.  (One sequence rotating around a large vase in the foreground and showing the governor's mansion is very beautiful and, when McGinty lights a candle that is reflected in the facets of a big chandelier overhead, the effects is poetic and lyrical.)  There are many indelible minor characters and, on all levels, the camerawork and acting is superior. When McGinty escapes from jail, the footage of the speeding car, obviously a cut-out inserted onto rear-projection screens displaying torrential rains or snow, have a surreal effect consistent with feeling in the film that things are running off the rails.  The ending is very disquieting and emotionally unresolved.  It's surprising that McGinty simply abandons his wife and her children, giving up on people he loves, to return to his life of cheerful and vicious corruption like a dog to vomit.  McGinty is simply too corrupt to reform and his epiphany that he should act to make the world a better place destroys him immediately.  The world, after all, doesn't want to be reformed.  It is the way it is.  The commentary track on the DVD, Samm Deignam, is generally inoffensive and somewhat inaccurate and she misreads the movie -- but she's right in invoking Bertolt Brecht as a reference.  Systems of corruption and exploitation are so deeply rooted in American politics as to be ineradicable.  Sturges' directs broadly and paints with a broad brush -- the movie is bigger than life; the bursts of slapstick that punctuate the movie are immensely loud and destructive and the film is filled with torchlight parades, political rallies, and huge banquet scenes, no doubt saliva-inducing to audiences at the end of the Great Depression.  I don't know if The Great McGinty is the best film ever made about American politics (as some critics proclaim) but it makes movies like All the King's Men seem more than a little naive and maudlin.     

Vital Signs: the Visual Cultures of the Ancient Maya

What did the hummingbird say to the Old Wealth God?  "So many rabbits and all I got is this darned turkey!"  This is the punchline to a joke circa about 700 A.D. inscribed in glyphs on a  Maya pot.  The pot depicts a hummngbird (represented by a heron-like being with a long beak wreathed in flowers) in a colloquy with a turkey and the Old Wealth God, a toothless hunched figure with the profile of a buzzard.  Between the turkey and the hummingbird there are about twelve rabbits heaped up in a pile that rises both above and below the line representing the surface of the earth.  Glyphs hang in the air between the figures like cartoon speech-balloons.  Stephen Houston describes the pot in the sixth (and last) of his absorbing lectures on Maya visual culture, a series of one-hour talks presented at the National Gallery of Art in thge Spring of 2023 as the 72nd Annual A. W. Mellon lectures on the Fine Arts.  I enjoy the Mellon lectures -- you can watch some of them on You-Tube -- and try to acquire the accompanying books published, usually, about three to four years after the lectures by Princeton Press.  

Stephen Houston, a nondescript little man with a affable professorial style, is, probably, the world's leading scholar on the Maya.  He currently teaches at Brown University and has spent forty years excavating seasonally in the Yucatan.  He brings an easy-going, highly fluent style to his lectures -- the viewer has the sense of auditing a class conducted by an extraordinarily well-informed and articulate professor.  Houston speaks several languages (including Swedish, I think) and has mastered, at least, one of the Mayan languages in currency today -- one of the pleasures of the lecture series is his exuberant pronunciation of ancient Mayan glyphs, recitation that he accomplishes with zest using booming pronouns, guttural clicks, and half-aspirated consonants.  I own several of Houston's books on this topic and they are very interesting, highly readable, but, often, prone to conjecture -- nonetheless, he's an excellent writer and his lectures, although very wide-ranging (he uses comparative examples including modern graffiti, Chinese painting, and many medieval and renaissance European images to make his points), nonetheless generally quite coherent and well-organized.  There is nothing flashy about the form of the lectures which are overtly pedagogical -- he uses the standard two or three side-by-side slide art history lecture format to make comparisons between  images and flashes unusual words and technical terms on the screen so that his students (for that is the posture of those in attendance) can take accurate notes.  In fact, I felt that I should take notes on these presentations, although, ultimately, I more or less refrained from this useless indulgence.  (I hope I can buy Houston's book account of the subject in a couple of years and so notes, I think, would be superfluous.)   

Houston's initial lecture establishes his premise:  Mayan glyphs are things that are invested with life; they not only represent reality but have a vitality of their own.  This premise is supported by examples from graffiti and argues that Mayan writing often takes the form of a hyperglyph -- that is, a densely encoded pictorial cipher that can be read on many levels and that involves what Houston calls "toggling".  "Toggling" is an interaction between glyph as image and glyph as phonetic or syllabic sign.  Houston continues these themes in his second lecture.  The third lecture involves issues pertaining to size and scale -- that is, representations that are enlarged (monumental stelae), reduced (delicate etchings on conch shells and bones), and "commensurate" (that is, duplicative of the actual size of the thing represented.)  In this context, Houston also discusses sumptuary rules reifying class distinctions in Maya society.  The fourth lecture involves glyphs and images representing music and introduces the question of what Maya society sounded like; what sort of music was played at Court entertainments.  The following lecture, number 5, addresses Mayan glyphs signifying motion and provides images demonstrating how these people represented moving things.  Houston's method is presumably akin to his lifelong enterprise which has been the cooperative effort of deciphering the meaning of Mayan glyphs in the context of ethnography (modern Mayan languages and customs) and with reference to imagery, most typically on painted ceramics.  Interestingly, Houston doesn't talk about Maya urbanism or the spectacular temples and archaeological sites in the Yucatan nor does he conduct any systematic study of Maya religion -- there is nothing, for instance, about heart sacrifice and very little on the subject of the bloodletting that royalty inflicted on themselves to propitiate deities and achieve altered consciousness.  

Houston's last lecture, in many ways the most fascinating, is about humor and our "limits of empathy" -- that is, are we able to imaginatively reconstruct why the Maya found certain things funny?  (The answer is, mostly. no.")  Houston argues that Maya culture was highly authoritarian and, therefore, "agelastic" -- a word that means discouraging comedy, satire, and irony, species of discourse that might be politically subversive.  Simply stated, Maya elites don't smile and are never shown laughing.  Objects of humor were apparently animals acting like humans, various representations of defecation and vomiting (Mayan youths are, often, shown as drunk and puking),  unnatural couplings between women and beasts or between very old and randy gods and young girls,  Many of these visual jokes are captioned with glyphs on ceramic vessels, presumably for serving chocolate or pulque (chih in the Mayan language.)  Scholars are working to decade these "captions" as it were to the images but they remain very resistant to understanding.  In one image, a rabbit has stolen the clothes of the Old Wealth God, a sort of divine miser portrayed in a spidery line a bit like the drawing in pictures by Callot.  The glyphs say:  Look! Burn!"  But "look" at what?  And what or who is burning?  In one disturbing image, a human scribe is having his head sawn off -- next to this grisly tableau, we see a rabbit now acting as a scribe.  (Houston thinks the image has something to do with embezzlement -- scribes were the keepers of accounts).  One conch shell shows a deer receiving a sea-shell -- glyphs etched into the shell say "It is the great work! Offered for you!"  The Maya seem to have laughed also at prisoners being tortured (some are shown with huge genitalia), dwarfs and maimed people.  In the end, Houston doesn't venture any grand synthesis of his material on humor or on Maya culture in general -- he decodes some of their writing, explains some noteworthy images, and leaves his auditors to make their own conclusions.  We don't really understand humor -- even when it originates within our own culture.

In Tim Lawrence's sketch comedy show, I think You Should Leave (on Netflix), a skit begins in a corporate conference room where a boss with about ten lackeys is tediously going through some kind of loose-leaf policy manual.  At addendum 4, the boss gets up and leaves the room (presumably to go to the toilet).  One of the workers hops on the conference room table and pretends to surf.  At first, the other workers are disapproving or simply frightened to act on their own rebellious inclinations.  But someone starts humming surfer rock and roll and the girls pretend to dance; someone else mimes a shark and a guy spins two chairs saying that they are whirlpools.  Then, Lawrence's character jumps up, cries "It's a real big wave" and knocks over the table with the looseleaf notebooks and the surfer boy atop it.  People get hurt and someone says:  "What the fuck?"  Lawrence's character says he's sorry that he got carried away and that this always happens to him.  A few months earlier on his birthday, someone gave him "chode" pants and this put him into a deep funk. ("Chode" pants, it is explained, have a 57 inch waist and legs that are only ten inches long.)  Lawrence starts moping and says that the woman who gave him "chode" pants could have afforded a better gift for him.  "After all, your husband is loaded," he says.  Then, he remarks:  "He's not very attractive."  Distressed, the woman says that her husband is very attractive.  When she speaks these words, Lawrence's character plants his hands on his hips, pouts, and rolls his eyes.  I thought this was very funny but couldn't figure out why.  I suppose the story could be etched into a pot and, then, described in glyphic writing. Maybe, that would clarify things for me.  

I think you should leave with Tim Robinson

 Tim Robinson is a comedian from the Midwest, born and raised in Detroit, although he apparently now lives in LA.  Three seasons of his sketch comedy series I think you should leave with Tim Robinson are available on Netflix.  The show is disarmingly weird and, often, very funny.  As in all sketch comedy about two-thirds of the skits misfire, but, even, when the jokes aren't particularly funny, the show is effectively absurdist, fantastically inventive, and disturbing, even creepy.  The show is produced in 16 and a half minute programs, itself a kind of joke, it seems, and individual sketches, usually about three to five minutes long, are punctuated by psychedelic graphics underlined with rhythm and blues songs, a bit like the interludes on the old Rowan and Martin show Laugh In.  Many of the players are SNL alumni (Robinson was a writer on that show) and, now and then, big stars make cameo appearances -- for instance, there's a bit with Bob Odenkirk of Better Call Saul and Jason Schwartzman appears in a party scene in which an aggressive bully forbids him to talk about his kids with all sorts of awful and weird ramifications.  Comedy is very much a matter of personal taste and, frequently, verges on the uncanny.  My wife was terrified by Laurel and Hardy two-reelers when she was a child and has a visceral loathing for those comedians.  Among my earliest memories are recollections of watching the old Ernie Kovacs show with my father -- I still recall with a bit of anxiety the wreathes of cigar smoke in the barren black and white sets, the odd silence (even then we were habituated to laugh tracks) and the Nairobi Trio performing "Solfeggio" with a cigar-chomping gorilla playing drum riffs on the head of another primate wearing a pork pie hat. Robinson's show feels similar to me -- in fact, my wife found it too creepy and "cringy" to watch.  The skits have an eerie disembodied feeling -- they seem to come out of nowhere and end on disconcerting notes; this comedy seems to be happening in Hell.

I don't know any way to provide an impression the show without describing a few skits that I thought were memorably funny.  "Summer Loving" is a parody of a Reality TV show in which 20 bachelors vie for the affection of a single woman.  (Part of the joke is that the woman isn't really all that attractive, although this isn't chivalrous to mention.)  The woman calls two men to account who are going to be booted off the island, as it were.  One unfortunate (and extremely handsome guy) is dismissed because when he went kayaking with the heroine there were "lots of awkward silences."  The other guy, played by Robinson, is told that he is dismissed because instead of courting the woman, or scheming to possess her, he spent all of  his time gliding down the zip-line at the luxury hotel at the pool (we are shown this).  At meals, this suitor spent all of his time talking about the zip-line while stuffing his mouth in a disgusting manner.  During one colloquy with rival bachelors, this guy admits that he really just wants to be alone all of his life.  Confronted with this evidence of his romantic failure, Robinson's character accuses other bachelors of being drug addicts or perverts, darkly implies that something horrible will happen to him if he has to go home, and, finally, when dismissed struts around in a cartoonish way miming curmudgeonly disappointment -- he looks like a distressed caricature farmer in a Warner Brothers' cartoon from about 1950, the exact opposite his personae as a suave, cosmopolitan bachelor.  In another bit, Robinson appears as a bully TV announcer warning cable customers that the streaming service is about to cancel the viewers' favorite show, "Coffin Flop."  "Coffin Flop" involves pallbearers ashamed and amazed when the caskets that they are carrying fall apart, causing the corpse to flop out in front of the grave or on the church steps or sidewalk.  The announcer says that it's not his fault that one out of four corpses turn out to be totally nude and roll around exposed to the prurient view of the onlookers.  The horrible thing about this sketch is that if there were a show called "Coffin Flop" featuring thirty casket failures per episode, I would be the first to watch it.  The setting for most of these sketches is some nondescript hotel ballroom or conference room where some hapless instructor is providing training in corporate teamwork or motivation.  In another sketch, during training of this sort, a loud bang is heard.  Robinson as an employee of the company says that the noise reminded him of a volcano.  Everyone scoffs at this but a pretty girl sitting next to Robinson who complements him on his imagination.  Robinson, who always takes things too far, says that he thinks that the girl's red pen reminds him of a dagger and that a yellow highlighter looks like a "little pimp."  This outrages the other corporate employees and they tell the girl that under no circumstances should they compliment Robinson's character for being imaginative.  He becomes very morose but is comforted by the highlighter who has become a nattily dressed pimp in a yellow suit and, looking out the window, he sees a huge volcano erupting over the suburbs.  Robinson's sketches often set up a premise, complicate it, and, then, provide a sort of subplot, all in four minutes or less.  In one bit, at a party, Robinson forbids another guest from talking about his children.  Each times, the guest errs in this respect, Robinson's character shrieks at him and, then, distracts attention by making some outrageous gesture -- "Look! I'm riding this dog!"  or "Look! the dogs blowing me!"  The odd thing about the skit is that about six other sad sacks at the party imitate Robinson's gags with decreasing success -- in the end, he has a whole entourage of drunks around him pretending to have oral sex with the dog or whatever it was that he did to distract from the other partygoer's conversation,  (At the end of the skit, the partygoer says he felt wonderfully liberated from having to talk about his kids to others due to the bully's intervention.)  A final example will have to suffice to suggest the show's ineffable weirdness -- you will either love this program or hate it.  In a corporation's breakroom, an earnest HR director notes that one of the company's employees got a DWI after a recent party.  Robinson's character says that he doesn't drink and that he will gladly drive to pick up anyone employed by the company who has had too much and give them a ride home.  Cut to one of the company's salary-men coming out of a bar a little inebriated.  Robinson's character comes to his aid and the young man sits in the front seat as his co-worker drives him home.  But, along the way, Robinson begins making weird faces, moving his lips like fish gulping in water.  It turns out that Robinson has pasted a decal of a hat and a cigar on the side of his car window and positions himself so that passers-by will perceive that he is wearing the hat and smoking the cigar.  The notion is that he is the "Driving Crooner" and Robinson plays Big Band songs on the radio to which he lip-synchs while he drives.  The problem is that Robinson is trying to create a "Driving Crooner" franchise and plans to authorize others to drive around with decals positioned so they too can pretend to smoke a cigar and wear a stylish hat whilst crooning Big Band tunes.  (In fact, he wants to monetize the franchise.)  As the skit progresses, the hero grows increasingly enraged and paranoid, claiming that people are trying to strip off  his decals or plan to drive next to him in such a way that the decals on the window are not properly placed to simulate the "Driving Crooner" effect.  At a stoplight, some frat boys confront the "Driving Crooner" and say that they are going knock off his decals and kill him.  I have no idea what this skit is supposed to mean or how it is supposed to be funny and my wife found it appalling -- I thought it was one of the most hilarious things that I have seen in a long time.  To each his own, I suppose.  

Monpti

 Monpti, released in English as Love from Paris, is an ingenious and brilliantly directed romantic comedy.  Shot in luminous Bavaria Studios Agfacolor, the movie is opulently beautiful, cleverly edited, and, as befits a movie set in Paris, lavishly "painterly."  This picture confirms my belief that the director, Helmut Kaeutner, was one of the most gifted and distinctive film-makers working in the era from World War Two to the mid-sixties. I've seen three of his pictures, Monpti, Der Grosse Freiheit nr. 8, and Schwarze Kies (Black Gravel) and all of these pictures are extremely interesting and engaging.  Kaeutner was, apparently, very versatile -- Monpti is a melancholy romantic comedy, Der Grosse Freiheit nr 8 is a sort of poetic musical featuring the iconic Hans Albers (made in 1943 under bombardment in Hamburg) and Schwarze Kies is a savage, politically incisive film noir.  Of these three pictures, Monpti is the least important, but it is still fantastically well-crafted and very moving; the picture is also stylish and brash, a vibrant combination of wacky, cartoonish comedy familiar to Americans from the films directed by Frank Tashlin mingled with sequences in the style of Douglas Sirk's literate, elegiac technicolor melodramas. Kaeutner was highly cultured, cosmopolitan, and, also, had characteristics in common with Max Ophuls (although Kaeutner's mise-en-scene is much less showy than the Austrian's gliding aerial camerawork) -- it's not every romantic comedy that closes with a quotation from George Santyana.  The German new wave directors, with the exception of Hans-Juergen Syberberg who cast Kaeutner, who was also an accomplished actor, in his film Karl May (1974), didn't admit to much affinity with Kaeutner who was certainly the most gifted German filmmaker working between 1940 and 1965, possibly because several of his most important works were made under the aegis of Joseph Goebbels during the Hitler period.  But this is unfair; Kaeutner didn't make propaganda and his later films show that he can compete quite comfortably with someone like Fassbinder when it comes to perverse eroticism, political satire and cynicism (see Black Gravel for proof of this proposition.)  

Montpi is a very slight film, almost without a plot, and, because of its slender premise, the movie seems a bit too long -- it's 96 minutes and, probably, should be about fifteen minutes shorter. Kaeutner's intrusive direction, with an exceeding porous fourth wall, also demands the viewer's attention -- there's more here than there initially seems to be in terms of narrative -- and, so, the movie is a bit exhausting.  Kaeutner is a stereotypical German director -- he has everything worked out in complex detail and makes everything fit together according to his predetermined blueprint for the film -- it's an instance of German engineering.  In the opening scene, a rather sinister-looking drunk (or possibly someone with cerebral palsy) knocks over a fruit stand -- oranges fall to the ground.  Later, the female protagonist, Anne-Claire, buys three oranges at another open air market.  At the end of the movie, the dying Anne-Claire asks her boyfriend, the titular Monpti (for mon petite) to bring to her hospital bed an orange.  When Monpti sees that her bed in the crowded hospital ward is empty, his fingers go numb and he drops the orange on the floor.  This gesture is both symbolic and indicative of the young man's character -- he's clumsy and always dropping things; after all, for 85 minutes or so of its length the movie is a comedy with slapstick elements.  The movie is visually ornate -- images impose a secondary order of meaning on the film; consider, for instance, an undercurrent of menace in the movie:  the picture begins with an aerial crane shot of a car crash; in some scenes, vehicles careen toward the characters in a menacing way; when Monpti accidentally breaks a glass window in a door, horrifying lance-shaped shards of glass hang in the frame; later, in a dream sequence, Monpti slams his girlfriend against a mirror (he's being threatened by a pimp with a switchblade) and, again, we see ghastly shards of glass framing the girl.  Monpti lives in a picturesque artist's garret with a deep airshaft opening into a little courtyard and terraces below -- on several occasions, the hero leans forcefully against the frail guardrails on his terrace (they are about two feet tall) and, even, leans back over the precipice.  At any point, the film's imagery suggests, the story can come off the rails and someone might be horribly injured.  The movie is also decorated by supporting characters who have symbolic portent -- there's an American cleaning lady, a Black woman named Zaza, who represents the temptations of the flesh -- she lurks around Monpti's picturesquely squalid apartment singing the Blues, while dressed in a skin-tight, somewhat reptilian dress (it doesn't seem to well suited for maid duties); she tries to seduce Monpti, although a bit unenthusiastically, and is sleeping with the concierge in the hotel building where the hero lives.(We get glimpses of other people's love lives in the hotel building; the movie is drenched in sex.)  When Zaza is singing, she's accompanied by apparently non-diegetic banjo strumming, but, in a witty camera movement, we see that, in fact, an African-American man is sitting on a balcony below Monpti's apartment playing the banjo -- the film is full of effects of this sort that comment in a witty way on the action or that just ornament the rather slender narrative line.

The plot, such as it is, involves a Hungarian 22-year old artist living in Paris.  The boy is not really a serious painter but rather seems to live by producing ribald cartoons featuring naked women.  (His work is like the cartoons that you used to see in upscale men's magazines.)  The young man (Horst Bucholz) is more or less nameless for most of the movie, that's why I'm calling him "Monpti" although late in film we learn that his name is Istvan Vaszary.  (The movie is based on a novel by Gabor von Vaszary originally written in Hungarian.)  One day, the boy meets a beautiful girl in the Luxembourg Gardens.  The girl (played by the 18-year old Romy Schneider) claims to be a heiress to a great fortune, someone who shouldn't be fraternizing with penniless Hungarian emigrants.  But the girl, Anne-Claire, is also a liar; nothing that she says is reliable and she constantly contradicts herself -- at first, she says she's 17, then, almost 20, and, then, claims to be 19.  The boy pursues her and, after some difficulties, they begin a love affair.  However, the girl refuses to have sex with the boy, although she continuously teases him with erotic suggestions.  Probably, she is simply afraid to lose her virginity but, in any event, the plot is constructed around the girl's sexual invitations and, then, her demurrers.  (There are some startlingly erotic scenes:  in one shot, Monpti is kissing her on a grey, monumental stairway leading down to the Seine and the wind blows in such away as to expose a great expanse of her thighs.  Monpti chivalrously brushes her dress back in place, although a moment later the wind has laid her bare again.  In the background, we see a group of expressionless tramps, homeless men leaning up against the balustrade above the river.  (Paris is shown as very dirty and full of beggars.)  Ultimately, Monpti learns that the girl is as penniless as he -- she is an orphan from Le Havre, both parents killed in the war. Anne Claire pushes Monpti away and, then, tries to seduce him.  She finds some green panties in his rooms and accuses him of having sex with other women -- the panties were accidentally fished off a clothesline when the hero was starving and trying to hook a box of condensed dry milk off an adjacent garret roof.  (Anne Claire thinks that the panties belong to Zaza who, in fact, admires them and, in one scene, pretends to try them on.)  After promising to pose nude for him, Anne Claire chickens out and this leads to a quarrel.  She runs away from his hotel, gets hit by a car, and, ultimately, dies.  (She dies a virgin, so says the doctor who has examined her and her death is for the best as the physician says morosely -- she will never be able to walk "or make love" the doctor says.)  The scenes in the hospital are spectacularly shot, a symphony of whites and greys and cream colors; an image showing Anne Claire's shrouded body on a gurney next to some flowers is astonishing --  it takes your breath away.  And, indeed, most of the movie is shot in subtle pastels that mimic the palette of the great French impressionists; many of these scenes take place in a sort of luminous mist-- this is a spectacularly beautiful movie.

Three other elements require mention.  I've revealed that poor Anne Claire is hit by a car.  But it's not just any car.  The vehicle is driven by rich, spoiled courtesan who is married to someone that we never see named Boulboule.  The courtesan has two boyfriends as well -- they are a second, pompous and arrogant Monpti with whom we see her consorting and, then, another man named Jacques.  These people are polyamorous.  In one scene, the rich Monpti, after bickering with the courtesan, seems to take refuge in the arms of Jacques.  Kaeuntner constructs the film to contrast the upscale and jaded or decadent love affair between the courtesan and the other Monpti with the innocent, if heavily sexualized, romance between Anne Claire and the Hungarian cartoonist.  Kaeuntner works this out with considerable aplomb and stylistic elegance -- he carefully devises a more flamboyant and garish color scheme for the decadent lovers.  Second, there is a remarkable sequence in which the Hungarian played by the German Horst Bucholz (later famous in America for his part in The Magnificent Seven) is speaking to Anne Claire in German; she replies in broken German and French.  Kaeutner, playing the part of the world-weary boulevardier who narrates the story, says that he doesn't want his viewers to have to read subtitles but rather needs them to listen to the actors speaking in their native language -- at this point, the characters all begin to speak German; it's remarkable, witty, and a fascinating approach to the problem of a foreign language in a movie.  Kaeutner's presence in the movie is the third point worth mentioning.  He narrates the story and, in fact, appears on screen in the opening shots in which he compares a terrible car accident to a fruit cart being upset -- to the onlookers, such as us, both calamities are equal and equally forgettable.  At the end of the movie, Kaeutner appears again, smoking a cigarette at a sidewalk cafe.  he pronounces the film's moral -- Santyana's aphorism that life is inescapably lyrical, that is both comically tragic and tragically comic -- then, he drops his cigarette, snubs it out with his shoe, and the movie is over.   

Better Call Saul and Barry -- Endings

There's a curious conjunction between the final episodes of AMC's Better Call Saul, now available on Netflix and HBO's series Barry.  In both programs, the shows' directors, writers, and showrunners seem to have become exhausted and, perhaps, even contemptuous of their material and characters in these long-running shows.  I have often commented that the format for shows on Cable TV encourages narrative inefficiency and, even, overt padding.  (There are many instances of this dating back to Fassbindser's 16 or so episodes of Berlin Alexanderplatz made for German TV in   ; there are hour-long shows in that series in which literally nothing takes place -- people drink and quarrel to no end in supernal darkness on claustrophobic sets and that;'s about it; you can barely see what's going on but there's nothing to see because nothing is going on anyhow.)  Both Barry and Better Call Saul in their final iterations have a weird posthumous quality -- the shows seem to outlive themselves and continue in only a faint semblance to those qualities that made them popular and famous.  Because these shows were written and produced by world-class talents, these curious "zombie"-endings are not without interest.  Indeed,these shows remain brilliant and innovative but in a peculiarly desultory way -- in their concluding episodes both Better Call Saul and Barry veer into despondent surrealism.  It's a kind of insult to the audience. an action melodrama (or neo Noir) with bigger than life characters and plot lines that suddenly reneges on all the promises earlier made to the viewers and drifts into narrative limbo; it's as if Samuel Beckett were engaged to bring these popular and highly acclaimed shows to their conclusions, which are less conclusion than a sort of radical reject of every thing that came before.  I can't tell if this strangely disenchanted effect arises from an artistic impulse to subvert and question the gaudy violence and operatic melodrama of the previous seasons or if this ennui evidences some sort of laziness or, even, disdain for the viewers.  Nonetheless, both Better Call Saul and Barry morosely slip off the rails in a fascinating way that is very similar.

Better Call Saul, of course, is a spin-off of the brutal crime drama, a very dark Black Comedy Breaking Bad.  Saul Goodman (a slurred 'it's all good, man.') is crooked lawyer.  In earlier seasons, he has various adventures, mostly involving two narrative threads -- in half the shows, Saul (previously called Jimmie McGill) connives to thwart the "silk-stocking law firms" in Albuquerque where the show is set; these episodes are satirical, although highly realistic in their details about the legal profession, and they involve Jimmie/Saul inflicting various indignities on his arrogant, snooty betters (so they think) at the Bar.  These episodes feature a lot of inside jokes about the legal profession, the implicit point being that all lawyers are crooks of one sort or another and that it's vanity for one set of serpents to regard themselves as better than others.  The other narrative strand is a florid and violent account of the shyster lawyer's entanglement with warring Mexican drug cartels -- these shows involve high-stakes, huge amounts of money, all sorts of torture and coercion and dozens of bloody assassinations.  The two aspects of Better Call Saul are generally kept apart, although from time to time, the high comedy involving class actions and public defenders (and the harried prosecutor for Bernalillo County) intersect with the blood-and-thunder murders and vendettas in the drug cartel narratives.  In most instances, a 42 minute episode (the show had commercials when shown on AMC) will be equal part satire about the machinations of various Albuquerque lawyers (whom Jimmy outsmarts -- he's sort of a trickster figure) and the gruesome fighting between drug gangs competing for the market in southwestern methamphetamine (the link to the meth labs and crime syndicates involved in Breaking Bad)  

In the final 13 part season of Better Call Saul, begins with bloody fighting between rival drug cartels.  An attempt to assassinate one gang leader, Lalo Salamanca, goes awry and results in a dozen or so killings.  Salamanca survives and sneaks across the border seeking revenge on his enemies, the crime organization led by Gustavo Fring, a cultured and soft-spoken gangster who runs a legitimate business on the side, a chicken sandwich franchise called Los Hermanos Pollos.  Fring has hired a German engineer and crew of mining contractors to construct a vast underground meth lab, apparently a location featured in Breaking Bad.  Meanwhile, Saul and his wife, Kim, have contrived an elaborate scheme to frame another lawyer, the narcissistic and patrician Howard Hamlin (Saul/Jimmie's nemesis throughout the series); Hamlin controls a class-action originated by Saul and must be nudged into settlement since Goodman needs the fee-money.  The complicated and implausible frame-up makes Hamlin look like a cocaine-addled drug addict and Kim and Saul are successful; the class-action is settled with Hamlin  completely disgraced.  By sheer coincidence, (the show is cleverly scripted but relies all-too-often on improbabilities), the two plots converge and there are some more killings.  The noble, if arrogant, Hamlin and the corpse of Salamanca end up sharing a shallow common grave in the floor of the subterranean meth factor; Kim and Saul fall out over their successful plot to destroy Howard Hamlin -- although Kim, who is public-spirited and does pro bono work for the poor, has joined somewhat too enthusiastically in the scheme to humiliate Hamlin, she now repents and divorces Saul.  At this point, the show is hollowed-out around an absent center -- there is time-lapse of several years, apparently the duration of Saul's involvement with Jesse and Walter White in Breaking Bad in which the crooked lawyer apparently makes millions of dollars before the whole enterprise collapses and he has to go on the lam.  (The show simply assumes that its audience will know what happened in Breaking Bad -- I didn't watch the show and don't have a clue and, therefore, encountered all sorts of fragmented, dream-like imagery probably referencing events in the other series but incomprehensible to me.  Shows of this extended form represent a new genre on TV and this sort of novelistic and expansive narrative hasn't yet been fully debugged -- the creators of these shows rely upon viewers recalling minor details that transpires many hours earlier in the programs and this doesn't always work; although I could follow the general narrative arc, I wasn't clear on many details, probably because I don't know Breaking Bad but, further, because I couldn't remember clearly things dramatized earlier in the preceding five seasons of Better Call Saul.  I presume that as these kinds of cable shows become more prevalent, narrative problems of this sort will be solved somehow.)  With the end of the dueling lawyers' scenario and the climactic bloodbath in the gang war involving millions of dollars at stake, Better Call Saul, then, moves into some peculiar unexplored territory.  Some indeterminate amount of time has passed and Saul is hiding in a snowy Omaha managing a Cinnabon franchise.  Kim Wechsler has moved to Florida where she works as a clerk in a sprinkler company; she's either remarried or living with another man.  Saul is so inveterately dishonest and so addicted to thrill-seeking that he can't be satisfied slipping into oblivion in an honest trade.  Instead, Saul devises an elaborate plot to steal from an upscale department store in the mall where his Cinnabon business is located.  After five seasons of gangsters murdering each other over millions of dollars, Better Call Saul devotes an entire episode to what is, in effect, an intricate scheme to shoplift some suits and handbags.  It's profoundly weird and dispiriting; the show has become intentionally trivial.  (The Omaha scenes are shot in black and white, but they are, also, a species of delirium -- for some reason, Omaha is always covered in snow and flakes are always falling, but the trees seem to be in full summer leaf; in other words, everything about the Omaha sequences is eerie, disconnected to the rest of the show and visually baffling.)  After nearly getting busted for the shoplifting scheme, Saul cons an old woman, played wonderfully by a distraught, if intelligent and quarrelsome, Carol Burnett.  The show seems to want to depict Saul in complete decomposition -- he's still a crook and fraudster but his criminal schemes are now completely sordid, low-stakes, and, even, a bit uninteresting.  With a couple of dishonest Nebraskans, Saul begins to roll drunks and steal their credit cards -- this also goes predictably wrong and Saul is arrested.  This sets up the final episode which is also extremely disorienting.  Saul is extradited to New Mexico.  He lures Kim Wechsler to a court room where there are some baffling proceedings.  In the final show, the theme is regret.  Does Saul have any regrets or is he beyond any kind of redemption?  The thought-experiment in which the show indulges is that of a time machine -- if you could back in time what changes, if any, would you make to your conduct?  Would you try to repair the harm you have inflicted?  This is all bleak, wintry stuff, deliberately undramatic, a climax to the show that is intended to be anti-climactic.  (This has been done before, for instance, in the controversial last episode of The Sopranos, but never at such length and with such conviction as in Better Call Saul).  There are many nice touches in this material (the only color in the last episode is the tip of a glowing cigarette) but the narrative strategies are intentionally off-putting.  In fact, the title sequences for the last four or so shows in Better Call Saul involve a distorted parody of previous titles used on the program with stuttering stop-and-start video and a soundtrack that seems to be recorded on a dictaphone or something, ending with a subliminal flash of imagery from the upcoming episode, but all shadowy and almost impossible to see.  I think it's bold, uncompromising and innovative but I'm still trying to understand exactly what was intended here.  

Barry is a variant on the premise of The Sopranos -- that is, a violent gangster seeks psychological therapy for his depression.  In Barry, a violent CIA-handled assassin finds solace in attending acting classes led by the flamboyant and self-satisfied Henry Winkler, once upon a time, the Fonz in Happy Days.  The assassin played by SNL alumnus Bill Hader and Henry Winkler's narcissistic method-acting coach are both excellently performed but the show's combination of ultra-violence and acting exercises with improv always seemed a little precious to me, a bit implausible although the high-concept is intriguing.  In the final series, Barry has been arrested for the murder of the acting coach's girlfriend, a cop, and, with his former CIA handler, finds himself in a menacing and nasty hoosegow.  A subplot involving Chechen gangsters reaches a violent climax with a score of murders that leaves no one left standing to populate that story.  In prison, Hader and his handler both get tortured and beat up and spend most of the show pretty badly disfigured.  (The show features odd mise-en-scene -- direct frontal shots intercut with landscapes in very long shots; we see tiny figures in vast bleak deserts.)  There's a big slaughter during an attempt to murder Barry in jail (the assassins are led by Fred Armisen, a recipe for disaster) and, after some more killings the hero escapes.  And, at this point, the show replicates the curious anti-climactic strategies at the end of Better Call Saul.  Suddenly, the show shifts, without any explanation, to a vast surreal desert, an empty space barren to the horizon.  Barry is living here in an utterly isolated trailer house with his girlfriend, who is now his wife.  Barry and the woman are now clearly middle-aged and they seem to have a ten-year old son.  What has happened?  Is this supposed to be a real place or are we in some kind of surreal dream?  As in Better Call Saul, the show abandons operatic violence and, even, the melodramatic histrionics of the acting class for completely banal events; Barry's son gets in a fight with a neighbor boy (neighbor?  there's no one around for miles).  Barry's wife, like Kim Wechsler, has some kind of dull job and seems to be an alcoholic -- she's possibly having an affair with one of the morons with whom she works.  Barry seems to have become religious and won't let his son play video or computer games.  Back in Hollywood, Henry Winkler's improv and acting coach resurfaces; he's apparently been in hiding after paranoically gunning down a pizza delivery boy.  In the case of Barry's enigmatic final episodes, it seems, that ten or more years have passed without a trace from the prison-break and the massacre of the Chechen gangsters.. Imagery is intentionally disorienting and the sound-track takes on an autonomous quality -- in the desert place where Barry is hiding, the wind is always howling through the flimsy walls and screen windows; the radio plays sermons and, even, birdsongs have a tinny, amplified quality.  After several episodes poised on the brink of Waiting for Godot, the show reverts to form, ending with the slaughter of, more or less, all of its major characters.  The final two episodes show an odd feature arising occasionally in long-form cable or streaming shows -- that is, the spin-off that's not spun-off but remains embedded within the source series.  In this case, a feud between the Chechen gangster, older but not wiser, and "Raven" (this is Fuches, Barry's spy-master) sets up a confrontation that really has nothing to do with the main thrust of the narrative.  (For some reason that I couldn't make out, Barry's wife and son are kidnapped by the Chechens, but the ostensible basis for the vendetta is that the gangsters seem to have had Fuches (now the heavily tattooed "Raven") tortured continuously in prison -- what doesn't kill Raven makes him stronger and, with a horde of menacing thugs, he attacks the heavily armed Chechens led by Noho Frank (the ineffably weird-looking Anthony Carrigan -- he's completely hairless due to Alopecia Areata, and, so, sufficiently exotic to be type-cast as villains.)  In this show, the Chechens are like Apaches in old Westerns (or zombies in the contemporary TV and movies) -- that is, they are cannon-fodder whose main role is to be gunned-down in huge numbers.  Noho Frank is homosexual and circumstances forced him to have his much-beloved boyfriend assassinated -- the affable and gentle guy was going to squeal on the mobsters and, so, had to be eliminated.  Raven and Noho Frank exchange insults, there's a one-shot tightly choreographed gunfight that lasts about five seconds, and gets rid of both mobs.  Raven is unscathed; Barry's wife and son escape without injury, and Noho Frank dies melodramatically, a bit like Mimi in La Boheme, clutching the bronze hand of a sculpture of his dead boyfriend.  The mayhem in the last couple shows is motivated by acting coach Gene Cousineau's reappearance in Hollywood where, with his agent, he tries to quash a movie in development about the death of his policewoman girlfriend (she was murdered by Barry in the first series).  Cousineau's agent is played by the fantastic Fred Melamed, always type-cast as a very funny, self-aggrandizing and ultra-Semitic Macher.  Cousineau is the ultimate "ham actor" and he can be seduced into performing on the subject of his encounters with Barry; his real objection to the proposed movie is not that it exploits the memory of his dead girlfriend but that he can't really control the project.  After the massacre at Noho Frank's post-modernist enterprise -- it's all glass and vast ballroom-like floors with transparent staircases (it looks like a set for an upscale Thirties' musical) -- Barry, who is a religious fanatic (remember?), goes to turn himself in for the murder of Cousineau's girlfriend and, thereby, redeem himself in the eyes of his son and wife.  But things go disastrously wrong.  In the final six or seven minutes of the last episode, there's another fast-forward in time, signaled by another intentionally disorienting shot of amateur performers taking a bow.  Barry's wife has just finished directing a Community College production of Our Town (in an incredibly lavish theater); Barry's son, who is now in his mid-teens, goes to a friend's house to watch a movie called The Mask Collector, a fictionalized version of the series that we have just watched in which Barry is portrayed as a hero (not as the rather panicked and fidgety murderer that we have seen throughout the show's five seasons.)  On this "Liberty Valence" note, the show ends.  None of this is particularly effective notwithstanding various media critics who have hailed the last season of Barry as some kind of masterpiece on the order of Citizen Kane.  Rather, the show is chaotic and ultra-stylized in a disconcerting way -- we are supposed to take the brutish plot seriously, but the whole thing is tricked-out with distracting surrealist effects and shot in the manner of a movie (or cable show) by Nicholas Winding Refn -- that is, saturated colors, very long and often inexpressive takes, an inclination toward frontal symmetry (look at how Noho Frank dies, with the monument of his dead lover central to the composition, flanked on each side by crumpled dead gangsters), amplified discordant sound track and vast amounts of gloomy, dire-looking glowering -- people glare at one another to beat the band in this last ten or so episodes.  Bill Hader directed all shows in the final series and he imparts a uniquely stark appearance to the final season, but Barry's chief ambition seems to be to transform its affable leading man, perfectly suited to light romantic comedies, into a murderous, beefy and dead-eyed thug.  It's as if Tom Hanks were to play Al Capone or Woody Allen act the part of Meyer Lansky -- the thing can be done, but why?   

 

The Triangle of Sadness

 Western civilization is a sinking ship and its passengers are all sick unto death -- this is the premise of Ruben Ostlund's earnest and strenuously labored The Triangle of Sadness (2022).  Ostlund's movie won a big award at Cannes in 2022 and its highly regarded (as well as notorious for some nauseating scenes in its second act).  But I don't think the movie is as good as its reputation.  

Ostlund is well-known for his thesis-driven movies:  Force Majeure (still his best I think) argues that contemporary sexual politics can't eradicate primordial instincts about gender roles -- a hip young couple find their marriage imperiled when the husband and father fails to act with expected courage in the face of an avalanche at a posh ski resort.  In The Square, Swedish upper-middle class elites are forced to confront the limits of their liberalism in the face of immigration to their country and a banquet like the Nobel prize feast that is invaded by a literal cave man  -- the titular "square" is a conceptual artwork that imagines what it would be like if everyone were really accorded equal rights.  In The Triangle of Sadness, a shipwreck forces a Brechtian transformation of values associated with sex and class roles.  All three movies feature contemporary men forced to confront their failures to meet the standards of chivalry, courage and, even, fundamental competency that traditional values (thought to have been outgrown but still ruling with a dead hand) impose on masculinity.  After Force Majeure, Ostlund has become increasingly overt and ideological with the effect that his films have come to resemble rather tedious and didactic debates staged with interludes of provocation.  The Triangle of Sadness represents the nadir of this development and one wishes that that Ostlund would now devote his considerable talents to making a thriller or Western or romance picture less fraught with political and social implications.

The Tirangle of Sadness refers to the place between the eyebrows where furrows gather -- if you are a male model, your "triangle of sadness" should remain smooth and unblemished.  We learn this proposition in a prelude to the movie, an audition in which twenty or so pretty boys audition for a male model part.  They are supposed to look alternately fierce, depressed and bitter, and happy.  The sequence is funny and it introduces the male protagonist, a very cute, if dim-witted young man named Carl.  (Carl looks like an even more stupid and befuddled Ryan Gosling, an actor who, to my eyes, always looks very dimwitted.)  The film proper divides into three acts.  In the first, "Carl and Yaya", we see Carl fighting with Yaya, a model and internet "influencer", over the bill placed before them at an expensive restaurant, probably in Stockholm.  (The place is so upscale that there are no prices on the menu.)  Yaya, who repeatedly says that she makes more money than Carl, wants him to pick up the bill -- because they're on a date and that's what men are supposed to do.  He disputes this with her and they end up in a savage quarrel; Yaya is pretty smart and she clearly has the upper-hand on poor Carl, who knows he wants something quite desperately but doesn't know exactly what it is.  Act Two is called "The Yacht".  Yaya and Carl are on a super-expensive cruise with various forms of Eurotrash.  (They're  interlopers because they are traveling for free in consideration of Yaya posting pictures to promote the cruise lines on her Instagram account.)  The other passengers are nasty specimens of late Capitalism:  a munitions manufacturer, a Russian oligarch who seems to have two wives, a plump and bald tech wizard who has been stood-up by his girlfriend and wants to post pictures to make her jealous, a German woman who is paralyzed and can only speak three words, "In den Wolken" (that is, "in the clouds"), and several other travelers, one of whom is  obviously demented -- she keeps asking that the sails be cleansed but the ship has no sails and it "motorized" as stated by its Captain played in a performance that is more or less phoned-in by Woody Harrelson of all people.  The crew is equally repugnant, a group of eager-beaver stewards and stewardesses, more than willing to abase themselves for tips from the super-wealthy patrons on board.  They are led by a Nordic goddess with short blonde hair who struts around barking orders like a Nazi concentration camp boss.  Harrelson seems not to have been available for much of the shooting because he doesn't appear except for a fifteen minutes sequence at the middle of the film -- he's not in the movie's last half and doesn't appear on screen throughout most of the "The Yacht"; we hear him, obviously intoxicated, in his Stateroom, refusing to come out of his locked room.  The vicious rich people bicker and bully the crew and, at one point, make them all strip to their bathing suits and zoom down a water-slide into the sea. The Russian oligarch threatens to buy the yacht if his infantile demands aren't met -- a helicopter has come out to the ship with a case of Nutella for him since the yacht wasn't equipped with that stuff when it set sail.  Carl complains to the Nazi boss-lady about a Greek sailor who has taken off his shirt on deck and impressed Yaya with his physique.  To Carl's surprise, the sailor is immediately fired and, in fact, taken by speedboat to the shore.  At the base of this social pyramid, there are a dozen or so southeast Asian women who scrub the floors and maintain the toilets.  

The film's most notorious sequence is the Captain's Dinner, a meal that takes place during heavy seas and results in explosive, projectile vomiting on the part of most of the guests.  This sequence is repellent but funny and, of course, is a reprise of the Mr. Creosote episode in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.  As the perky crew serve bizarre haute cuisine to the guests, people start puking uncontrollably.  The ship is rolling and, at first, this is ascribed to seasickness, with the crew members strangely encouraging people to eat more and not less.  The dishes are cubist collages of atomized sea-weed and fragments of fish in hideous-looking sauces.  The floors get slick with vomit and the storm increases so that the ship rolls wildly back and forth and the guests ending up skidding around in the puke.  Then, the diarrhea begins and we are treated to scenes of guests shitting out their guts in toilets that tip back and forth spilling the excrement and the hapless travelers on the slick tile floors.  The oligarch and the sea-captain are engaged in a drinking game and end up reciting aphorisms about capitalism and socialism over the loud-speaker  By this point, the metaphors have taken over and the film has become a parable about the plight of western civilization.  Two warring ideologies (communism and capitalism)  are on display while the plumbing in the ship (the environment?) bursts and the staterooms and hallways are awash in a sea of shit.  The drunk captain tells the guests by PA system that the yacht is sinking and so they put on life vests and still spewing excrement from both ends stagger around on the vessel so that they are forcefully flung against walls and down steps where the people lay in depressed and motionless heaps.  The scene goes on and on, replete with disgusting special effects and, at last, it's dawn.  Mercifully, perhaps, some African pirates attack the ship; the British munitions maker and his wife pick up a hand-grenade and are blown to bits and the ship sinks. 

The third part of the movie is called "The Island".  Seven survivors have made it ashore to a rocky desert island.  None of them have any idea what do do.  The men are so feckless that it never occurs to them to explore the place to discover its resources -- in fact, the island has a big luxury resort a few miles away but this isn't discovered until the last five minutes of the rather long (two-and-a-half hours) film.  A lifeboat, a sort of sealed orange capsule, washes up.  In this capsule, there is an industrious and omni-competent Southeast Asian maid -- the manager of  "toilet maintenance" on the yacht.  She knows how to fish and start fires and quickly becomes the de facto leader of the castaways.  Of course, systems of oppression always replicate themselves after revolutions or shipwrecks and the enterprising maid exploits the other castaways, ultimately forcing Carl into sexual submission -- while having sex with her, he says "I love you.  You feed me fish."  The castaways have no water except bottled Evian beverages but they have plenty of aerosol spray cans that were advertised as soothing lotion but are really just water.  The Russian oligarch finds one his wives dead on the beach and weeps over her while carefully removing her jewels and diamond necklace. Later, he becomes good friends, as one might expect, with a pirate who has also washed up on the island.  Carl seems to fall in love with the Asian maid who now rules the castaways.  Yaya is jealous but she seems quite resourceful herself and decides to hike across the island to see what is on the other side of the mountains.  The toilet maintenance director goes with her and, together, they discover that there is a big resort just over the hill.  (We suspect this when an African mysteriously appears to the mute German woman and offers to sell her knock-offs of luxury Louis Vuitton and other bags -- it's a parody of Friday's appearance to Crusoe in Defoe's book.)  The castaways are reverting to paleolithic customs -- they murder a poor donkey, a beast whose braying has caused them to think that the island is inhabited by monsters; then, they paint their exploits on the wall of a cave.  

In broad form, the film follows the pattern of Lina Wertmueller's Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea in August, a 1974 film in which a man and woman become castaways on a desert island after an expensive yacht sinks.  (The film was infamous for its sexual politics, repudiating feminism it was thought -- Giancarlo Giannini played the Communist, brawny sailor who rapes the upper-class dame acted by Mariangela Melato.)  Wertmueller's movie, like Ostlund's film,implies that sexual desire operates according to apolitical, even anti-social paradigms that contradict our liberal assumptions about human nature.  Wertmueller's film was, in turn, a reprise of the 1957 Paradise Lagoon which remakes Cecil B. DeMille's silent film, Male and Female (1919) with Gloria Swanson playing the wealthy and pampered "rich bitch" shipwrecked on a desert island with a lecherous and enterprising butler.  And, of course, the immediate source for all of these films is J. M. Barrie's 1902 play, The Admirable Crichton, in which a butler assumes command over rich people and peers of the realm after a shipwreck maroons the castaways on another desert island.  Obviously, this plot is resonant on many levels and has attracted many versions of the story -- The Triangle of Sadness reworks Swept Away, which was remade unsuccessfully by Madonna in 2002 (with Adrianna Giangelo, the son of the star of the 1974 picture) applying a feminist interpretation to what was an originally a scandalous anti-feminist film -- in Triangle of Sadness, the lower class person, whose survival skills allow him or her to dominate the other castaways is an immigrant or guest worker woman from Thailand or Burma; she makes the pulchritudinous Carl into her "boy toy."  Unfortunately, Ostlund is becoming lazy -- the debate between Capitalism and Socialism prosecuted by the oligarch (who argues for Capitalism) and the Ship Captain (a proponent of Socialism) is conducted entirely in aphorisms extracted from speeches by Ronald Reagan, Lenin, and Noam Chomsky.  It's as Ostlund couldn't be bothered to write his own dialogue to make these points.  The movie is too long and too earnest -- it's fundamentally humorless.  (The film illustrates another feature that I've seen increasingly in European movies -- there are, at least, 30 producers who contributed to the movie including the Swedish Film Institute, BFI, and many, many Danish and German and French TV channels and streaming services.  It would be impossible to describe this film as Swedish or British or, even, really foreign since there is undoubtedly Hollywood money in the picture as well.  The movie's dialogue is English.) 

Ensayo de una Crimen (The Criminal Life of Archibald de la Cruz)

 Luis Bunuel made twenty movies in Mexico between 1946 and 1963.  These pictures included romantic melodramas, musicals, and comedies.  Many of these films await critical reevaluation and, perhaps, aren't very good.  Nonetheless, Bunuel's Mexican period produced several undisputed masterworks, El, The Exterminating Angel, and Los Olivados, among them and it's my guess that all of these pictures have scenes or interludes worth studying.  Bunuel's style is impersonal and direct; everything is lit brightly and the acting is often stylized and a bit wooden.  But the fact that a picture is directed by Bunuel imports into the viewing experience knowledge of the filmmaker's other movies and obsessions  --this means that even banal sequences that would be unremarkable in any other director's work have a peculiar urgency, tension, and visionary quality.  In an opening scene in Ensayo de una Crimen (1955), the camera shows us a still-life, a toy train on a circular track next to what seems to be a soccer ball -- for some reason, the image has a weird dream-like intensity.  In a later scene, a woman in tight-fitting dress encounters the hero who is inexplicably carrying a vase.  The woman claims to know the protagonist, Archibald de la Cruz, a wealthy, if somewhat smarmy, member of Mexico City's elite.  The two exchange words with the woman behaving in a strangely seductive manner; Cruz simply wants to escape her.  The entire scene is completely utilitarian in its structure and pacing and the camera is positioned to make everything maximally lucid and, yet, there is something awry about the imagery, something a little too avid and off-kilter.  The question here posed is this:  would we have this feeling of the imagery and dialogue being slightly off-balance if we didn't know that this was a film by Bunuel -- that is, would the effect be the same if the movie was directed by someone without a surrealist's filmography?  It's impossible to answer this question because, of course, we inevitably bring to Bunuel's films his entire ouevre  from Un Chien Andalou and L' Age d'Or to That Obscure Object of Desire.  

Ensayo de una Crimen (I'd translate this as "Attempted Crimes"), known as The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz in English-speaking countries is a staggeringly perverse black comedy about a man (Cruz) who earnestly desires to be a serial murderer but can't quite get anyone killed.  The picture is exceedingly ingenious and quite funny -- the movie plays like a warped comedy of manners always threatening to evolve into some outlandish grand guignol bloodbath.  The Spanish word "ensayo" means something like "Versuch" in German (to attempt) or "essay" in English in the old sense of attempting to accomplish something.  The Spanish title probably means something like "Essays in Crime."  Cruz's murderous impulses originate in his spoiled childhood (he's a bit like George Amberson in Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons); the year is 1913 and revolutionary soldiers are shooting up the streets of Mexico City.  Little Archie Cruz has been left in the care of his attractive young governess -- she hates the spoiled brat and longs to spank him, but, of course, this is forbidden.  While telling the little boy a story about a magical music box that has the power to grant homicidal wishes, the young woman hears gunfire outside, goes to the window, and is promptly shot dead.  She falls to the carpet with her bare thighs and garter belts exposed and blood welling out of her throat.  The child is sexually aroused by this constellation of stimuli -- the story of the wish-fulfilling music box (which sits on the table), the woman's exposed thighs, and the gush of blood.  This combination of images and ideas causes Cruz to feel omnipotent and to believe that it is his destiny to be "either a great saint or a great criminal"' he elects the latter and decides to become a serial murderer.  We next see Cruz in a sanitarium, attended by one of Bunuel's highly eroticized nuns.  Cruz menaces the nun with a straight razor and she flees in horror -- there are two oddly dreamlike and mismatched shots of the young nun in her habit running away from the camera.  Before Cruz can slash her to death, she falls into an open elevator shaft and dies.  Cruz seeks out a Judge and confesses that he is a murderer.  The Judge is rather disinterested but sits down to hear his story.  This motivates an extended flashback that occupies most of the film and that constitutes the confession tendered to the judge.  Cruz is shown preparing to visit his fiance, the virtuous Carlotta Cervantes.  While shaving, he cuts himself and, when Cruz sees the blood on his finger, he has a voluptuous vision of the dead governess with her plump gartered legs spread, the entire image oozing with black blood.  On the way to visit Carlotta, he encounters a sexy tramp named Patricia.  She knows Cruz from some gambling den that they both frequent although he doesn't seem to recognize her.  In any event, after visiting Carlotta who is praying  on her knees  to the Virgin in a chapel built into a niche in her house (Carlotta's mother supervises the visit), Cruz goes to the casino where the lecherous Patricia tries to pick him up.  Cruz rejects her advances but when she crashes the Cadillac owned by her much older, rather cadaverous admirer, the protagonist goes home with her.  Patricia has a wall covered with pictures of the famous men that she has seduced -- including, notably, John Wayne.  Cruz decides he will kill Patricia and gets his razor ready when her elderly admirer barges into the apartment interrupting our hero's murderous plot.  There follows a odd scene in which Patricia and her boyfriend say that they are living in Hell together and seem to extend an ambiguous sexual invitation for Cruz to join them.  Cruz instead flees and the couple apparently commit double suicide.  Cruz goes to an old convent that is now a kind of dance-club.  Here he meets Lavinia, a shop-girl who also works as a tour-guide for Gringos (Gringitos the dialogue says).  Cruz is intrigued by Lavinia who also seems attracted to him.  Lavinia gives Cruz the address of an expensive boutique where he finds, not Lavinia, but a full-scale mannequin that depicts her in very precise form -- perhaps, it is implied, it is even anatomically correct.  Cruz has had visions of Lavinia enveloped in fire and imagines her to be "his Joan of Arc" -- apparently, he intends to strangle her and burn the corpse in the oven in which he fires his clay vases (by avocation Cruz makes ceramics).  After some adventures and another encounter with the simperingly pious Carlotta, Cruz lures Lavinia to his elaborate mansion where he prepares to strangle her.  But Lavinia has invited her tour group to Cruz' rather gothic manor, apparently so that they can see a real Mexican nobleman's mansion, and a big, loud group of Americans and English appear just as Cruz is stealthily preparing to murder the girl.  As it happens, Carlotta is less pious than she seems -- she is carrying on a torrid affair with a married, somewhat toadish-looking, architect.  Of course, Cruz plans to kill Carlotta during their honeymoon.  But this plan is also thwarted.   Alone together, Cruz makes Carlotta kneel before an image of the Virgin and has her intone a prayer while he prepares to slaughter her.  But, before he can kill her, the architect bursts into the home and guns down Carlotta.  It's this event which apparently led to Cruz admitting himself to the sanitarium and the care of the beautiful and doomed Sister Trinidad.  Upon hearing this confession, the Judge laughs in a jovial way and says "I can't prosecute you for wishing someone's death."  And on this merry note the film ends.

This barren plot summary doesn't capture the bizarre imagery in the film.  Everyone lives in homes that are crammed with gesticulating carved saints, gory crucifixions, and gilt angels --  but, of course, no one shows the slightest trace of religiosity except for the morbidly pious Carlotta (who turns out to be an adulteress).  When Cruz is thwarted in his efforts to murder the tour-guide Lavinia, he drags her mannequin, which he has earlier been kissing and caressing, into his crematorium and melts it down in his fire.  On the way to the oven, the mannequin loses one of its legs --it breaks off at the plump thigh in a way that reminds us of Cruz' poor, dead governess.  We get gruesome close-ups of the mannequin's face melting in the fire.  Cruz has a drawer full of women's underwear that he has used to dress the mannequin and that he offers to Lavinia when she is at his home -- surprisingly, this doesn't bother her at all and she goes into another room to get dressed in the bra and panties Cruz has offered her (this is the costume in which he intends to strangle her).  Earlier at the casino, Patricia takes off her shoes and offers her high-heels as a fetish-object to the other gamblers -- people stroke and kiss the shoe.  (One of these shoes shows up in Cruz' house when Carlotta comes there after the wedding.  Cruz kicks the shoe under the bed before firing a revolver repeatedly into Carlotta who is clad in her white wedding dress -- this turns out to be merely fantasy because, of course, the architect bursts into the house a minute or so later to actually kill her.)  The movie is elaborately perverse but filmed for the most part like a Mexican telenovela or, even, a comedy.  When Cruz asks the Judge, who seems completely indifferent to the hero's murderous impulses, what he should do, the Judge says quite rationally, "Use an electric shaver."  

The film was scarcely visible before this reconstruction.  At last, it seems that the Mexican National Cinemateque has embarked on a campaign to restore films from the country's classic, or Golden Age.  Ensayo de una Crimen is a product of this effort and the film looks great and the soundtrack is clear and distinct.  The movie has an incredibly cheesy score played on a wheezing organ that adds to the film's bizarre charm.