Thracian dawg's reviews

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Page contents:Hands over the City (1963) / The Elusive Corporal (1962) / In the Fade (2017) / Loveless (2017) / The Hit (1984) / The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) / In a Year with 13 Moons (1978)/ The Fire Within (1963) / Graduation (2016) / Jesus’s Son (1999) / Gurov and Anna (2014) / La Cérémonie (1995) / Orphan (2009) / Ismael’s Ghosts (2016) / Mademoiselle (1966) / Life is Sweet (1990) / The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (1967) / The Browning Version (1951)

Hands over the city (1963) - Rosi - B/W - 101 mins.

There was a crooked man in a crooked house

Some minor spoilers.

Hands over the City requires a little more attention than usual. It’s a talky foreign film which means your eye will be diverted to the bottom of the screen. The story may have taken as long as five or six months to unfold--- but the timeline is highly compressed to highlight the machinations of a real estate magnate. A lot of the characters are career politicians, who just love to grab a microphone and articulate and gesticulate for hours on end---at the same time--- never ever reveal the actual stakes at hand. And lastly, the film has two duplicitous events; an all- party political investigation into real estate speculation and an election.

The blue ribbon panel is supposedly unleashing the Dobermans of justice, whereas it’s constructed at the outset as a routine public relations exercise to assure the voters their city is corruption free. The election is also presented to the people as an essential mandate to legitimately defend and exclusively serve their collective interests. In reality, it is merely a smokescreen to keep the gravy train running back stage. Once re-elected, these same electoral crusaders will all simply retire to their offices and wait for those envelops of money to fall on their desks ---this collusion is nicely driven home by two roll calls in the film. The first one summons the poor to be officially evicted from their homes and the second one, calls the newly elected members of city council to vote in a new mayor--- rubber stamping a coronation that has already taken place back stage. Despite all this, the film is scrappy and energetic--- plus how can you not like a film where everyone talks with their hands.

There are only two professional actors in the film; Rod Steiger as Edoardo Nottola, the real estate magnate and Salvo Randone as De Angelis, the leader of the center party faction. The rest of cast is entirely made up with amateurs. The film seems to have only two characters who are not interested in wheeling and dealing and lining their own pockets; the charismatic De Vita, leader for the left-wing faction and Balsamo--- everyone else is a varying shades of dark grey. Doctor Balsamo has gone into politics for entirely altruistic reasons: getting decent infrastructure; decent schools; and decent places to live and play---the children’s ward would soon empty of patients--- their misfortune is the misfortune of poverty. When the blue ribbon panel interviews the various department heads—each official skirts the issue of responsibility by passing the buck to office down the hallway. First term Balsamo turns to the more experienced De Vita for explanations and De Vita points out how the system is rigged against the people at every turn.

I think I may have spotted the origins of a great scene from The Social Network, where the Winklevoss twins are getting some bit of news, sitting in a stationary training shell that is metaphorically going nowhere; while Zuckerberg pulls away from them. The head of the right-wing faction also has a stationary rowing shell hooked up to side of his swimming pool and has a morning ritual, where he likes to paddle off to Tahiti in his mind, before his busy day of moving papers around a desk and sharpening pencils.

Nice things? In one of the early scenes (the election campaign is gearing up) He is going through stacks and stacks of mug shots for his campaign poster--- apparently the camera has a problem with him, without just the right angle and soft focus---getting his smirk to resemble a smile is a monumental undertaking. “I look like a thug” he complains as he tosses another one aside. In public, Nottola is always just another face in the crowd, on the sidelines watching the great men. In private however, Nottola is the one pulling all the levers.

Nottola’s office reveals a certain megalomania; a map of the city covers the entire wall behind his desk---and one can walk right through it when it becomes expedient to do so. The bird’s eye view of the city down one side, and the wall opposite displays photographic trophies of his greatest achievements; and the Architectural model for his current development scam sits at the end of the room.

There is a great scene where Nottola tries to bride De Vita to come on board and be a team player for the city. He gives him a guided tour of one of his newly constructed high-rise apartments; an indoor flush toilet; you turn a knob and water comes out or in the kitchen a blue flame for cooking; you flick a switch and the dark is made light; all the windows are all equipped with the panoramic view---all of which is laugh out loud hilarious. Those selling points: the road and transportation systems, the lines of electrical, telephone and gas; the water and sewage systems are wholly bought and paid for on the public dime, but these are the exact things he promotes to the huckleberries as his unique and invaluable contribution to society--- which he as a businessman is getting at no cost.

Later in the film the right-wing leader meets him in his office in the dead of night to announce that he is finished. The scandal has become too big to sweep under the rug and they need a diversion to focus public anger and draw the attention away from the ruling party in power---their party, Nottola has been selected to play the fall guy. He stays alone afterwards, quietly pacing around his empty office contemplating his bleak future, wondering if he can piece together his life after he gets out of prison, wringing his hands about the unfairness of it all … well, don’t get out your handkerchiefs just yet. Nottola has already worked out his next five moves and simply goes to the finish line; the other characters (and the audience) doesn’t catch up with to him until the dust has settled somewhere near the end of the film.

What’s the film about? We follow one real estate scam from the pitch to his cronies in an empty field to the official ground breaking ceremony months later surrounded by all the city luminaries. The film shows how one smooth operator skates around the various legal obstacles to his goal, corrupting the entire system in the process.

Near the end of the film, the honorable doctor Balsamo meets with De Angelis, to tender his resignation---- He’s actually repulsed by the open corruption going on around him. De Angelis convinces him to stick it out, that he needs to ride the bench just little while longer. Evil men are like rotten fruit on the tree, eventually they fall away and die---then comes the time of greatness when they will get a chance to do everything that is necessary and decent. De Angelis actually tells him: Politics is the absence of morality.

The last scene in the film before the closing codas is a slow zoom out of the council room. De Vita has spent the entire film pleading, cajoling and demanding that morality (accountability) must be re-introduced into politics, otherwise every meeting merely becomes a question of what one can get away with and how much loot one can carry away without straining your back. De Vita harangues his fellow councilmen about their disgraceful behavior, his figure becoming small and insignificant in the distance. The shenanigans will continue because no one there is listening to him. However, we can hear his words if we choose to: there are simple ways of improving the world and your community. Back then as today, the way forward is and always be rule of law (as opposed to law and order) and empiric democracy. Far from being pessimistic, I think the film is rather hopeful.

Hands over the city -


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057286/?ref_=nv_sr_1





The Elusive Corporal (1962) - Renoir - B/W - 107 mins.

The dungeon of happiness

Some minor spoilers

After reading the blurb for The Elusive Corporal, I imagined I was going to see a chase film with a French Steve McQueen riding dirt bikes over hill and dale with the entire German army hot on his heels. Not quite. The film opens with a Vichy News reel announcing the French army has gotten its ass kicked by a superior German war machine---and an Armistice has been signed. Great! A French soldier in a temporary garrison packs his suitcase, and heads off back home--- only to be stopped at the entrance by the guards. He tells them the war is over. He has fields to plow and cows to tend back home, so move aside mongers of war. The guards with their rifles slung over their shoulders stand their ground and mock him until he retreats and slowly returns to his watery tent in the middle of a field. Most of the humor in the film is like that scene, low key; although the movie poster suggests a comedy there are no real big gags or slapstick here.

At the outset, out of all the French soldiers only the Corporal and his friend Ballochet foresee the great calamity about to befall them. Germany will simply keep them as slave labor. And since every master attaches symbiotically to his privileges---giving them up would mean his own destruction--- this will not be a temporary inconvenience but a permanent state of surrender.

Once re-located to their work camp deep within the heart of Germany, everyone scatters to find the best situations available--- grueling, back breaking labor being the choice of fools. They use a wonderful French word this: planque, all the prisoners are looking for une planque---which is a cushy, over-payed job, but could also mean a refuge or a hiding place. Ballochet finds the sweet spot in the system, where the rewards are so great for his collaboration, the most vexing problem each day becomes selecting the right wine to go with the night’s purloined feast. With all his intrigues and connections he constructs the ideal man cave within his personal quarters / office where the air is thick with cigar smoke and every night is poker night.

Any incarceration film will easily suggest the characters are symbolically trapped. Which is certainly true here; the barbed wire could be replaced with string and there would be no noticeable difference in the number of escape attempts. The Corporal is the only one with a burning desire to be free which mirrors the complacency of the other men. He is the only one who retains his anonymity---we never get his back story---whereas the other prisoners are personalized, have nicknames and quickly to retreat into a dreamy nostalgia about the present.

The tone of the film only allows for passing glances of brutality. When the Corporal returns from his first failed escape, he is given two months in a Nazi day spa as a reward. An armed guard hands him a packed knapsack to strap on---which approximates the amount of weight he will lose during his stay there. He returns to regular work duty on the verge of physical collapse.

During his escapes; the Corporal believes he is white on rice, jumping trains, evading detection, throwing the hounds from the trail. Yet during the quiet moment one-on-one moments, everyone immediately talks to him in French because he sticks out like a baguette. His success is dependent upon him crossing Samaritans of good standing who will help him along out of kindness instead of ratting him out---his fate is entirely out of his hands. A successful escape means not just jumping one fence, but thousands of them.

But the corporal is not immune to being seduced by comfort and illusion. His wake-up call comes when a German dental assistant says: what she admires most about him is he actually tried to escape---he doesn’t live on his knees like the other prisoners. Which is a slap in the face; he’s realizes with a shock---he has forgotten about returning home.

As the film closes, two men linger a moment on a bridge at dawn; One smells the roses, the other smells the manure that gives them their intoxicating hue. The streets are empty. The City of lights is still asleep. They make vague plans to get together after everything has settled but this fizzles quickly. One guy suggests they meet again in another life--- perhaps as brothers-in-arms in the resistance. They smile and shake hands on it and head off in opposite directions---the last time they will ever meet.

There are no real villains in the story--- the worse thing one could say about a character here is that he is overly zealous in his vocation. Renoir refuses to blacken the Germans and imbues them all with a measured portion of decency. This is the only hurdle in the film, zeroing in on this very complicated and specific world view, where sympathy and compassion are also extended to those we consider enemies and strangers.

The Elusive Corporal -


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055827/?ref_=nv_sr_1



Manhunter (1986) Mann

Reflections, mirrors and images


Manhunter ~ 9/10

Brilliant review and interesting insights into the writing and performances. This has been a fave of mine since I was 10. It's such a raw piece of filmmaking, but it's got all this glamour to it at the same time..it's like a perfumed salmon. Michael Mann was a genius. Great stuff!



In the Fade (2017) - Akin - 106 mins

Samurai woman

The main characters of the film are Katja (Diane Kruger); her son, Rocco; her husband Nuri; her husband’s lawyer friend, Danilo; and Katja’s best friend, Birgit. Well, let’s just get it over with.

In the Fade –


The title is wretched. It is never explained to the audience. Although if you listen to the Queens of the Stone Age song from where it came from, you may get some idea what they were aiming for---however the song itself supplies an even better movie title: Live till you die. The original German title is much more evocative: out of nowhere. Your storybook life is ripped from your hands and stolen from you---out of nowhere. Violent fundamentalist cells are emerging through-out the quiet countryside---from nothing. The English title is a real head scratcher.

In the trial part, the two defendants have been warned by their lawyers to never to look anyone in the eye---the rest of their lives depend upon it, and spend the entire trial staring blankly at the floor. Which is a great defense strategy: the moment you open your mouth in a courtroom---anything you say can and will be used against you; even a wise man becomes a blathering, sputtering moron under cross examination. After one tiny … let’s just say---Katja didn’t use her words to express her disapproval and revulsion with Nazi Girl. She is warned by the Judge: another outburst and she will be expelled from the courtroom, so she also adopts the zombie stare. Unfortunately, assembling the main characters within a courtroom is a huge dramatic mistake; it immediately removes the focus from them and our attention transfers to peripheral characters suddenly stepping up and assuming the vacated roles of hero and villain (although the malefic defense lawyer with the strange head wound is definitely a keeper). The director squanders whatever momentum he had built up at that point in the story and the movie begins to fizzle.

The titles at the end inform the audience that a number of (brown skinned) immigrants in Germany have been recently murdered in just this way by Neo-Nazis. But they don’t supply any context---like all this is just happening without anyrhyme or reason, like golf balls are just falling out of the sky. It’s a waste that they don’t make the connection between the rise of the violent fundamentalist groups within society and austerity programs “transfer of wealth scams” which shred the social safety net for the 99% and surgically target and brutalize the weakest of the weak, and the poorest of the poor. Indeed if you wanted engineer the legitimized destruction of democracy; tax cuts would be the ideal weapon to accomplish some serious throat cutting.

That said, there are some nice things in the film. They use a bit of make-up tradecraft in certain scenes; they part Katja’s hair off- center and pull it down to the right, creating an asymmetry in the shape of her face, this imbalance suggests a kind of desperation and vulnerability---add a wild eyed glare from the actress and she becomes emotionally volatile.

There’s also a nice shot where her husband’s parents come over and they park away from the house; they walk up the driveway tightly huddled together under an umbrella, which suggests an emotional distance or an estrangement. This is immediately confirmed once they enter the living room and sit down-- they don’t even wait for cake and coffee to arrive before blurting out their demands which confirms this estrangement. Later on in the film, her friend Birgit comes for a visit with her new born child, repeating the exact same shot--- only this time signalling Katja’s growing distance and disappearance from her life.

The film includes a clinical description of what a nail bomb does to a six year old child; the crackling of spaghetti thin bones; the dismembering of childish limbs; the liquid eyesmelt in the instantaneous furnace created by the blast. This is matched by the emotional obliteration of that child’s parents; for weeks afterwards, out of habit they still track towards to their bedroom to tuck them in and kiss them goodnight, only to stop at the foot of an empty bed forgetting that that part of their life has been permanently erased. All those deep tendons of happiness and the sinewy steels of love have been ripped from Katja. She lives a phantom life in a house of fading memories, dripping phantom blood at every wakening moment. Her grief even reaches to up to the sky and pulls down the heavens.

I think the film is about the dangers of marginality. Everyone should have universal access to the benefits of society based on the simple need, regardless of one’s social standing, without it; one’s quality of life begins to imperceptibly decline. But there are also devastating consequences for the larger communities; the great society becomes a sinking ship that routinely jettisons one by one old fashioned values and quaint ideas that no longer worthwhile: like Justice for all.

The sins of marginality in turn become a kind of stigmata. After the explosion; the police take one look at the crime scene and decide with typical cop logic that it was a settling of accounts—the victim must have been connected to the underworld. He must have been one bad dude. Instead of dressing in a smart suit and taking that corner office in a skyscraper; he deliberately chose to work in a sketchy part of town with the smelly people. He cobbled together three very unimpressive revenue streams; a travel agency, translation assistance and a tax consultant service, under a single store front --- He was certainly guilty of something. It’s not a mistake that the civilians in the film do all the heavy lifting. At the outset, Katja points the police in the right direction for their sleuthing and the father of one of the suspects, gift wraps his own son.

Katja may fall through the cracks of the judicial system not because the system is bent but because she is ultimately someone unworthy in it. The realm is no longer inclusive. The movie poster depicts Katja during one of her drug runs; as a student, she was a little bit of a week-end warrior, and now in the unbearable present she has turned to non-recreational drug use toalleviate her pain. Fentanyl is up to a hundred times stronger than street heroin. Anyone who uses contraband drugs instead of legally sanctioned opioids is a moral failure. Look at the other undisputable facts the film assembles about Katja. She married a jail bird immigrant. She dresses like refugee from the eighties. Instead of really uplifting hobbies like scrapbooking or needlework she prefers to collect ink. She speaks a foreign language---that’s a dead giveaway. Seriously, do people like this even deserve citizenship?

At the end of the film, Katja is a mirror image of the neo-Nazi woman at the beginning. She replays over and over again an old cell phone video from a previous vacation; Nuri and Rocco have run into the water and call her to join them. In her dark place, her refusal to budge from her beach towel becomes a deliberate abandonment and their joyous shouts: the water is great! The water is great! Begins to call her home to paradise. Ultimately the film is needlessly bleak. The film could have been easily improved with a few minor additions and adjustments to the story, changing the last moments of the film from mawkish self-immolation to heroic self-sacrifice.



Loveless (2017) - Zvyagintsev - 127 mins

The Searchers

This is another tough slough through cinema land, an extremely negative film; we are literally not looking at things, but the absence of them. The title is a negation. The missing child is wonderfully everywhere and nowhere in the film. This is not about the disintegration of a marriage because wife and husband have already moved on to busier and better lives. The parental unit reconstructs itself for the sake of decency only.

The increasing rarity of Zhenya and Boris being together in the same apartment means their child has clocked every conversation between them for the last six months or so. But they are just grinding it out over the final indignity---who gets stuck with the brat---but one with a certain emotional cachet because the winner gets to run victory laps around the loser for the rest of their lives. Alyosha has internalized their struggle and knows deep in his bones he ruined their marriage---but just what horrid thing he did to them remains a mystery. They don’t even notice his disappearance when their booty calls overlap, and a concerned teacher has to call to mention Alyosha been absent from school for the last two days. The film has probably one of the most horrifying door slams in all of cinema.

The film has lots of pattern similarities, at times with direct repetition. Despite the acrimony of their failed relationship, and being all lovey dovey in the current ones, there is a strong sense of been there, done that. Both men hold the purse strings but are emotionally subordinate to the women; one mother-in-law calls them small, dull children who are easily amused. Boris has important tasks in his new life like opening unopenable water bottles. One piece of flattery about his smouldering sexuality catapults him out of bed in the middle of the night to do chores like a trained monkey.

As for Zhenya’s new man, there is a scene where her beau is in the living room skyping with his daughter. He puts in a visit request and she immediately laughs it away. She is going to stay warm and toasty in Portugal, thank-you. Her greatest achievement thus far in life has been to escape Russia and she is going to have to be dragged back there kicking and screaming all the way. But their internet connection is rather sketchy, her low resolution picture freezes and skips. Maybe their emotional connection isn’t quite as excellent as the one he imagines? She closes the book on their conversation. We watch him walk the length of his motionless apartment and pour two cups of coffee in the kitchen. Failing a connection with his daughter he then walks back, stopping at the bed to the warm motionless rump beneath satin sheets that is Zhenya---one that is made further emotionally distant by being a mere reflection.

But Boris is never going to win the Father of the year trophy either. The dwindling signs of life for his son: a surveillance video catches him sprinting across a street; his jacket is found in a secret hideaway, and finally an anonymous ribbon waggling in the breeze (that only the audience knows was thrown by him) matches his own dwindling interest almost at the outset. During an early search he doesn’t even cry out for him, but stands a safe distance behind a stranger carefully enunciating those four magic syllables. In a later search, the urgency of that voice is already growing faint in the distance. Late in the film, his newly ambulant second son merits attention only when he blocks the television feed.

There is a nice bit of sleight of hand where the film concentrates on a few search volunteers which makes the whole operation appear much smaller and at the same time much longer then it really was; from beginning to end, the search clocked out at a single twenty-four hour period. I liked the evocative empty point A to point B spaces in the film; the line of phosphorescent orange volunteers combing through a search grid, tightening or expanding depending on the visual density of the terrain. The daily commute to work where one listens to talk radio alone or one stands head down in a moving crowd because the touchscreen is the only thing truly alive.

The methodical, tailored perimeter search for Alyosha echoes the precise perimeter search in the media, finding and displaying the daily dose of the dead and dying. For thousands of years the Church kept the pews crowded and the coffers overflowing with the end of day’s hoax. Mass media has simply borrowed their business model. Fear is essential to sell anything—whether you are pushing wholesale or retail ecstasy or agitating empty scarecrows in the media to stampede the population in the wrong direction. Fear is great for business. And on truly anemic days when there is no ground zero, there is always the biggest media cheat there is … the past. The past is a magician’s hat with an endless supply of dead bunnies ready to instantly divert any audience. Tomorrow is always the anniversary of someone’s great day of doom.


During one drive to work, Boris learns---according to the Mayan calendar, the world is scheduled to end in a couple of weeks. Bummer. Although had the Mayans been truly prescient, they would have foretold their own apocalypse, when their own civilization began to fall apart and was overrun with weeds. America’s annexation of the Ukraine, their march eastwards and the coming thermal nuclear conflagration with the west is front page news there.

I think we can rule out a withering portrait of Russian society. The setting, a high rise apartment could be downtown, anywhere. The same dysfunction and decay pictured here is universal. So who is the villain in the piece? There is a scene where some searchers pass by a forbidden zone, a satellite installation. The suggestion being maybe these towers of information are guarded against actual communication use; genuine bewilderment is the whole goal of the enterprise. The twenty-four hour news cycle crowds out any real reflection and imposes the business agendas, leading to the troubling disappearance of whatever … you name it; compassion, culture … common sense. The people are driven to distraction then begin to confound the distractions for reality. The media feed always orients the audience towards the single winning ticket within an ocean of increasingly alienated losers.

There is no emotional growth for Boris. Divorce is grounds for dismissal at his work place. So forget about big bad love, Boris is merely shoring up a job requirement at the office. When the search moves into its final stage, they ask for volunteers and Boris’ hand shots up energetically---showboating as the very first volunteer (completely out of character for him) This shows he is still playing games with his ex-wfe and still has the eye on the final prize, those coveted victory laps.

However Zhenya’s last words in the film-—her anguished screams that she never would have abandoned her child; suggests she hasn’t been an idle spectator and been fully present during the search. She looked up from her cell phone and actually saw Alyosha crying at the breakfast table. At the mother and daughter reunion at the kitchen table, she actually saw the invisible tears streaming down her mother’s face (raging at her own abandonment) which has now become hereditary. But unlike her mother and son, Zhenya has hidden pools of resourcefulness and resilience that allowed her to overcome that crippling annihilation. What we don’t get in the film is the moment when Zhenya concedes the Pyrrhic victory to Boris---and simply goes on with her life, taking up Alyosha’s hand in hers. The film ends with her running out of gas on a treadmill then jumps back several years to a missing poster on a nature trail, those advertisements wouldn’t have survived the first winter. But this is where she now lives, forever running after a broken child, freezing to death in the woods. Despite being pictured at her absolute worse through-out the film, Zhenya is a majestic heroine who tragically never got the chance to redeem her life.


Loveless _ _ ★★★





The Hit - (1984) - Frears - 98 minutes

The road to Paris

The film is a road trip where most of the story elements seem to have been erased then left outside to be bleached in the sun and forgotten. One of the characters is a professional hitman and at times it seems as if the film is deliberately channeling his mania to never leave a whisper of evidence behind.

The film immediately stands that perennial crime film cliché on its head: the last great score before retiring to the tropical island and the inevitable cockup that ensues. An armed gang assembles at dawn for a major crime later that afternoon which turns out to be not a bank robbery but a perjury. William “The Grass” Parker’s other gang has become such a menace to society that the authorities have decided to deal them away and end their reign of terror. There is a bit of clumsiness in William’s theatrical debut; he has to be led through the entire script with regular prompts to hit all the talking points. A pension for life; a rent free villa in the south of Spain; free visits home, his testimony is the capper to a successful career and a final job that is worth all the risks.

There is a kind theatricality in Terence Stamp’s characterization of William as a classic wheelman; quick eyes; quick reflexes but painfully unaware of the great dangers lurking just around the bend. As he exits the courtroom he’s stunned to realize he has also been assigned the role of the evil villain in multiple other plays. Out of anxiety at first then with growing intellectual curiosity, William began to fill bookcases in his dream house, although after ten years of going to bed early, he can’t help being excited when all the fury and drama of the old days returns.

One element in the film that has been suppressed is the comedy. William gets his first look at his executioners when the potato sack is ripped from his head and this delightful loon is staring back at him. But one immediately clueless, he thinks sunglasses protect your eyes from UV rays---they protect your identity. Myron would be great fun to hang out with and kill an evening or two, if you didn’t mind being chased by an angry mob with pitchforks or being arrested from time to time. He can’t appear in public without drawing attention to himself at best, or at worse having dozens of people phoning in his physical description to the police. As a career criminal he has almost no life expectancy. Over the film, Braddock develops Myron as his alibi and the very public face to the whole operation; in the gas station scene, this was Myron just being Myron.

Another hidden comedic element is they drop a trail of bodies everywhere they go; they are drawing a straight red line due north across the map of Spain that is leaving no mystery whatsoever to the final destination.

Apart from the muscular rock riff that opens the film; Paco de Lucia has scored the rest of it with some fantastic flamenco music, supplying emotional codas and energetic bursts of energy, but apparently Braddock was not a of the fan. In the last sequence Paco mistakenly leaves his guitar lying around and Braddock snatches it and smashes it to pieces, avoiding the final ignominy of being strummed out of the film.

Another hidden element is Braddock’s decline*. There is a bit of irony when William tells him he is happy they didn’t send rubbish after him, you know, second stringers who would botch the job; aim for the head but shoot him in the foot. But Braddock is in the twilight of a long career, an older journeyman somewhere down the list when everyone else has either been passed or refused the job. His inattentions and tardiness has been noted. He pads his own his meager bottom line by promising easy fortune to his young associates then kills them off to save expenses. Watch when Braddock identifies William in the car then before turning to a third party at the window---he puts his sunglasses back on---removing any chance of identification from even the slightest of glimpses from this stranger. This fierce tradecraft gives him the ability to improvise at the drop of a hat. Things like the executioner’s trick of giving someone an extra day is second nature.

Braddock is intimately aware of the five stages of grief, particularly the bargaining phase, where everyone begs him for his life. So he has placed Myron in the car as a driver but more importantly as the go-between; with himself removed from these delicate negotiations, William can only chip away at the second man hoping to drive a wedge between them, but Myron in all his cluelessness will simply tell Braddock just how far the wedge has been driven at each waking moment.

Likes? The dark sunglasses link the implacable wrath of Corrigan to his stoic, chain smoking hitman. Given the setting, there is a saucy allusion of Braddock being a matador, which would explain the relationship with Maggie. The scouted hillside cairn that marks the separation between France and Spain also delineates the line between the world of the dead and that of the living. During a scene when Myron complains about all the frigging castles, William tells him they are on the highway to heaven, a route traced by the crusaders, and the various invading armies marching off to pillage and plunder. How many fearless warriors over the centuries have taken a knee at that cairn and wept bitter tears knowing they would never return home again? This predator’s point of view percolates throughout the film with the countless long shots of highways and dirt roads reduced to ribbons in the distance which suggests ant people full of fury and laughter but unaware their last song has been sung. Death usually wears a balaclava, but given the logistics of the job, Braddock dispenses with this; meaning anyone who sees his face is dead.

So what’s it about? This is essentially a character study of some people horribly trapped---how they interact with one another; their differences and glaring similarities; their self-awareness (or not) of own their tenuous vitality. Surprisingly, the home field advantage in the car doesn’t go to the hitman, but to the girl. As a young woman surviving on the cruel streets she has learnt, the most dangerous place in the world is being inside a car with a stranger; she seizes the slightest slip-up and opportunity; she is always working from pure adrenaline and instinct.

I think the eponymous hit in the film refers to when Braddock went upstairs in the high rise apartment to kill Maggie, but in the gathering of a tray of brewskies she did something magical in that kitchen, the simplest of gestures but something so luminous and tender that it melted his cold heart and he lowered his gun. Right there, he couldn’t kill that beauty; Braddock is going to have to wait for another pass. His infatuation is only suggested; when he makes the snap decision to take Maggie with them, he pulls his gun on her but aims strangely low. In the badlands outside Madrid, when he places the gun against her head for the kill shot, she reaches up to protect herself and their fingers almost touch. At the waterfall rest stop when Myron squabbles over who is going to guard whom and he pulls his gun to add a little muscle to the negotiation---Braddock simply gives him his, but takes the girl and goes off gunless: deliberately provoking Maggie’s first and last escape attempt. And their final tussle, when he collapses on top of her and almost breathes out the word love---but recovers sufficiently enough to cover his tracks with massive understatement. On the other hand, his repeated gesture of not pulling the trigger is the gift that just keeps on giving. Only at death’s door does he respond to the wink that Maggie gave him earlier in the car, but consummate professional to the end, is he teasing her with something else?

The Hit - _ _★★★

* Most of these observations come directly from John Hurt’s character notes on Braddock from the commentary track.



The File on Thelma Jordon(1950) - Sidomak - b/w - 100 mins

Cigarette cases and other troubling knick-knacks

Spoilers

The film opens with assistant District Attorney Cleve Marshall about to drink himself into a stupor. He has returned to the office late at night and detoured to his friend’s office (where the whiskey bottle is hidden) after another failed mission to make his wife happy. His wife’s hidden cruelty is in her gesture of telling her father (the retired judge) exactly what she wants, then asking Cleve afterwards to try to procure the same gift. When he comes home later that night, she has left it in the living room still wrapped like a trophy to rub his nose in it. Although Cleve is a smart cookie, he will never understand that his beautiful wife will always be in love with another man … her father.

The film doesn’t start off slow with a meet cute and a growing attraction as a prelude to the dramatic bits---this prelude is the story. The film has been mislabeled as a film noir; instead, this is a tragic love story of two shooting stars that criss-cross in the night, but who are already trapped in dead-end trajectories with partners who will never love them back.

The story scintillates in a few places. Thelma says her aunt is delightfully eccentric; but this is not just idle talk, when the old broad goes downstairs looking for Thelma, she is packing heat. During an interview with Thelma’s lawyer, he tells her he doesn’t want to know if she is guilty because that might sabotage his defense of her, he may subconsciously begin helping the prosecution secure her a cell on death row. He burns the evidence of her anonymous benefactor’s instructions and drops it in the ashtray in front of her. She toys with embers---suggesting her own delicious subconscious acts of self-sabotage like placing the gun and the necklace where they would be easily found in the smudge pot; or choosing Cleve over the lead investigator; or even putting her own pretty neck directly into the hangman’s noose.

The director Sidomak dials up the tension in two great sequences. Rather than holding for the pregnant pause after the “is she or is she not-innocent verdict?” He prefers to reverse engineer the suspense; beginning in the women’s section of the jailhouse with Thelma being escorted through a series of locked doors, her escort doubles then triples, she’s swarmed by a crowd once she hits the pavement. Her attorney links arms with her in this gathering storm, as this seething mob rumbles down the sidewalk and up the courthouse steps. Even if you were just in the courthouse to pay a parking ticket you would have been swept up in all that turmoil and ended up standing in the back of the court room biting your fingernails with anticipation.

His strong visual sense is also stamped in the second sequence. The butler’s house is set away from the main residence and every phone call rings simultaneously in both places. Cleve stands on the second floor landing watching the phone begin to ring endlessly at the bottom of the stairs then it stops, he looks out the window behind him … one by one the lights go on across the way, upstairs, downstairs, the porch lights, then the butler steps outside. Cleve’s welcome in the main house begins to time out during the butler’s errand, his flashlight striking the foot path like a white cane; he becomes a moving shadow against the windows. Cleve uses every second available to him to set the perfect crime scene for his buddies who will show up later, then just as the butler enters the room, he dashes out a ground floor window.

I loved the duplicity in the film. Most of the characters aren’t quite they person they pretend to be on the surface. The film opens with the chief investigator telling Cleve to go out and cheat on his crummy wife---while he’s on the phone with her; it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Pam may be talking with husband number two at the very same moment.

The film does have a few plot holes though; like how did Aunt’s Vera’s Doctor psychically diagnose her with sudden death syndrome and phone her urgently in the middle of night to run the check list by her? Or that Cleve is being shadowed by a clueless private detective who manages to lose him every single night during the twenty minute drive from his office to the murder house. The biggest one in the film is---this is not some cold blooded machination planned down the millisecond and gesture by a femme fatale but the ways and means of the story hinge entirely on chance; fate is the phone on the night stand beside Aunt Vera’s bed that rings at precisely the wrong moment to awaken her from her sleep.

The big pay-off for Cleve and Thelma was only to be together. Once broken apart, Cleve immediately goes to the authorities and confesses his crime. Once she regains her freedom, Thelma hands over everything over to Laredo (her partner in crime) on a silver platter in exchange for him getting out of her life---unfortunately that looks suspiciously to him like a frame so Thelma going to have to remain by his side for a very long time as an insurance policy. That moment of clarity floats in the ether; he is now blackmailing her.

I think Thelma is the classic battered woman, who has been programmed to believe that she is utterly worthless. She was sent into the house by Laredo. She was getting the necklace for him. His mack daddy’s trick of always giving her a kiss with a slap in the face is evident in the getaway car when Laredo mentions how wonderful her money is---but she needs to get with to the peroxide and the silk dresses now because drab doesn’t look good draped on his arm.

But Thelma is no longer interested in the shiny life; she knows exactly what’s engraved inside the gold cigarette case. Even if we had that shot of Thelma emerging from of the darkness into the blinding headlights of Cleve’s car, she would have crooked her smile or hid her trembling hands with her sequined shawl. Nice guys don’t fall for dames like her. This is the takeaway from the film: Thelma’s tragic vulnerability: those haunting long shots of a lonely spinster holding a white flag of surrender, waiting for love by an empty road on a sultry summer night. Despite being in town for only a couple of months, Thelma had met not just one, but two tender souls and they both had fell in love with her.

The File on Thelma Jordon - _ _★★★




In a Year with 13 Moons - (1978) - Fassbinder - 124 mins

Kissing the frogs

Spoilers

The prologue explains the curse: a lunar year occurs every seven years; and people who have a strong emotional life will skew toward depression during these periods---great! This description narrows it down to about 99 per cent of humanity. However, a double whammy occurs if this same lunar period aligns in a year of 13 moons, this signals a time of great danger when personal calamities will be unavoidable for these people.

The film is a kind of demented fairy tale about a beautiful princess who has to rescue the handsome prince trapped in a tower (his lonely prison cell is always visible in the skyline) But the princess has a double curse, she is hidden within the body of an aging hag so getting it on with the prince is going to be problematic. Her second curse is far more time sensitive, she herself has to win a simple kiss, given out of love from someone---otherwise her heart will just stop beating. The film is also a dirge about the ravages of time; after a lifetime apart the prince and the princess could pass each other in the street and not even recognize one another.

The film is also an exercise in distanciation. This push back begins immediately with vivid lavender titles that block out the action happening on-screen. There is a time stamp that has nothing to do with the actual plot but refers to when the shooting schedule began for the film. The stated premise at first glance appears large and inclusive but the demographic at risk is only about the size of a thimble; a few unlucky moon children who had their emotional circuits scrambled during childhood which makes the clear emotional signals from other people nearly impossible to decipher.

Hollywood churns out these “I need you to love me” flicks every other week; casting two air-brushed gym bunnies who in a crazy, mixed up world take a couple of hesitant baby steps forward and bonk foreheads: “Uh, I didn’t see you there standing right in front of me!” Fassbinder takes this same template and gives it a serious mangle and a wretched twist making the identification with his lead character an unholy task for the audience as his main character is too naked in her desire to love and in turn to be loved.

During the opening break-up scene, her ex (amongst a torrent other clever, stinging insults) says that she has only jam between the ears, so I’m simply going to refer to the main character from now on as Lady Marmalade. Whatever her faults, Lady Marmalade is someone who gives openly. The quests in the film are not her own; but tasks she fulfills because someone she loves has asked her to. An interview she gave appears in a magazine containing some revelations about the murky origins of a business tycoon; Anton Saitz stands with one foot firmly planted in the political mainstream and the other in the criminal underworld. His ex-wife seems to think this interview could place their daughter in jeopardy so she tells her to go to the real estate magnate and apologize to him. Once upon a time, Lady Marmalade’s first act of love; when the trafficking scheme run by a brash, young Anton Saitz came crashing into the light was to take the rap for it and go to prison for him. He took all the loot he made from the scam and made the first in a series of lucrative investments. Christoph, her ex-lover tells her to take a cold hard look at her life and she does so in a series of disembodied monologues.

There’s a lot of humour in the film, but it’s all cruel, gallows humour that mercifully limps by unnoticed. Some of the happiest times with Christoph were when she would help him learn his lines for his acting gigs. During the post-mortem of their relationship, she splices in her impersonation of Christoph trying to be theatrical---it’s no wonder why his acting career died on the vine.

The second monologue from the old nun (who no longer studies the bible but grooves on Schopenhauer) contains the horrific revelation that Lady Marmalade would have grown up cared for in a loving home, but that life choice was taken from her for purely bureaucratic reasons. Her adoption papers were missing a single signature. When the loving couple was forced to abandon her, and she began to act out willfully, causing in turn the nuns to withdraw emotionally---first out of fear then out of hate from this wretched child. She began to thrive in this orphanage where everyone despised her. There’s a suggestion she may have recreated this same hostile environment as an adult.

The monologues reveal how badly she has misread the situations. The soul connection she thought she had her ex-wife, is revealed to be merely her escape from an abusive father. Lady Marmalade pours out her heart to the journalist, but he was merely fishing for dirt on Anton Saitz with no real interest in her.

Fassbinder nails it in simple things like the visual pairing of physically large man and a pixie. Red Zora’s feathery jacket suggests a kind of wingless angel. She is always on the prowl with her elevated strut or skipping towards a fallen comrade. She is always calling Lady Marmalade: my sweet little baby. And it’s in the late night television sequence where she clearly becomes a mother figure who guards over her hopes and dreams in the night, although if you haven’t been paying attention to the film, that is not going to end well. This is also the sequence where the bed in the film becomes a kind of sacrificial altar where the lesser souls are laid low and given to the strong as tribute.

There are simple, one sided compositions where a face is off to one side of the screen or the action takes place within a fragment of the visual space available. There is a recurring thematic alternation between light and dark---and the conversations go at times from a whisper to a scream. The opening coda where the Lady Marmalade is not seen by the others and has to suddenly “appear” before them, repeats endlessly in the film. These characters tend to be distracted and forgetful; but forgetting can be both a mechanism for delusion and survival.

The only caveat for the film is that it is dialogue heavy; a wealth of information can hang in a single word or phrase. Take Red Zora’s delightful bed-time story where the girl cannibalizes her little brother; during the backyard scene, a foreshadow is immediately announced when she admonishes her own daughter: Children have to eat!

There is a visual link between Lady Marmalade stripped to her lingerie (extenuating her vulnerability) during the fight at the beginning of the movie and Anton Saitz’ appearance later in the film in his tennis whites. There is something infantile in the way he has turned his security detail into a gang of playmates---who at the snap of his fingers, play games he can never lose. A former member of his entourage holds a permanent vigil across the street from his office after he was fired for simply becoming sick. But this is not an irrational fear for a child who survived a concentration camp: a slight tickle in the throat or returning from work detail with a limp was a one-way ticket to the showers. Life is a place where only the strong survive.

But Lady Marmalade wasn’t wrong about Anton Saitz; he isn’t cruel, he just wants you to spell his name right. Everyone remembers his famous retort, but few realize this was just a throwaway line from a moon child unable to respond genuinely to it. I loved those close, low angles on his face with his boxer’s nose ... genuinely bewildered by her kindness. During those taped interviews with the journalist Lady Marmalade confesses she has no idea what love is either.


In a year of 13 moons - ★★★★



The Fire Within - (1963) - Malle B/W 108 minutes.

Take my breath away

Le Roy (the King) is resting in Versailles (the palace residence) and travels to Paris for a single day. Alain Leroy hasn’t been there in about three or four years, so this is a homecoming of sorts, revisiting all his old familiar haunts to find the floating party of his youth, the “good old days” as it were. Unfortunately, the old gang has dispersed and their lust for life has been replaced with the various delusions of love, drugs or money.

The first old Parisian rogue Alain unearths has turned his back on the wild life and embraced domestic bliss. He has become an aspiring author, his idea of a happy day is to play with his wife’s children, knock off a few pages in his upcoming best seller about ancient Egypt and perform his husbandly duties later that night. As he says, he’s in hog heaven. The second rogue, after busy day hawking fine art to people with way too time and money on their hands, retires to artificial paradise of the opium den to self-medicate her pain.

The bored rich couple (Cyrille and Solange) has nightly dinner parties where the guests have been carefully screened for their ability to do or say provocative things; the smell of scandal and burnt gossip always lingers in the air. The guests are made of jet-setters who bounce back and forth between Paris and New York. Alain’s supposedly secret affair with her wife’s best friend Lydia is common knowledge there, as well as his impending divorce.

Alain also has unkind words to say about the forward escape into action. Despite having lost the war, his right-wing terrorist friends keep the flame alive with their bombing campaign knowing the traitorous government will tumble with the next blast and final victory is now within reach. Or the selective blindness of knowledge; his doctor ignores the facts his patient has plastered his wall with obituary notices, and a prophetic day is written in black maker and circled in his wall mirror---not to mention asking him to be so courteous as to provide the suicide note / final telegram to his wife. The good doctor declares him miraculously cured---but cured of what? Alain has stopped drinking, but drinking is only a symptom of his existential angst---a thing most people cast off with a shrug of the shoulders.

Alain sees hypocrisy as the natural affliction of others, but never taxed of that burden himself. And he does do some pretty spectacular 180’s in the film; during the opening sequence he is begging Lydia not to leave him one moment then the next---haughtily ordering her taxi (which she is paying for) away.

When he cashes in his final score, he is framed in the teller’s window as if this was his mug shot. He has always lived in that rarified world where rich women always leave their pearls on the night stand where they can be easily pilfered in the morning. The cheque Lydia slips into his breast pocket is quite a hefty sum---something like thirty thousand in today’s dollars. Lydia allows him the gift of his final curtain call.

He is aware of his decline. His power to seduce is slipping through his fingers; he has summoned his wife to his bedside but she still hasn’t put in an appearance. Children fly past him without a care in the world. Penniless, he has to hitch hike to Paris. He stumbles across the various pretenders to his throne: one who is already exhibiting mad skills; the lad can run flat out with a highball in his hand without spilling a single drop; he unceremoniously dumps the rich woman at the dinner party for being too clingy and knows that Queen Solange is beyond of his reach.

Everywhere Alain goes, he is always remembered as the brooding Adonis he was. A couple of old hens cluck over his presence when he strides into a hotel lobby. An older gay man at a café laments his passing---he would make hard men weak in the knees with just a glance; but look at him now, a beautiful derelict ruined by drink. Everyone has their favorite Alain Leroy story.

Likes? With this film, the signature Louis Malle shot emerges, that of an individual crossing a busy boulevard as if navigating an uncertain and troubled moment in their life---where a single misstep could spell tragedy. That jolt of adrenaline as one of the Minville brothers reacts to a police siren. Alain’s goodbyes are uneventful since they have always been without consequence. He has always had these periods of blue and everyone interprets them in their own way as his depressions, unhappiness’s or merely momentary pit stops before the next whirlwind of parties. When he stumbles towards his final destination---announced by the tolling of a bell, his rich friends put him in their own bed so he can recharge his batteries for that night’s cigarette and alcohol fueled performance.

But this is not at all a bleak or depressing film. Earlier on, he was pacing about his room waiting for a response from his wife, but he wasn’t listening---she sent him Lydia as her final parting gift. He also has quite a few subdural hematomas from all the life rings that have bounced off his head during in the film. His company is cherished. Everywhere he goes he is offered haven and a respected place at the table and the price of salvation is a mere pittance; he only has to pretend they alone have found the one true path to happiness. All these people will gladly lend him their broken wings for the chicken dance; whereas Alain knows deep down in his heart that life is about learning how to crawl.

This film could be a subtle retelling of the Icarus myth. Early on, we see him cutting a clipping out of a newspaper about a little boy who wanted to fly, but got tangled up tragically in the curtain cords and accidently hung himself. He is pictured numerous times before luminous white shrouds hiding the dazzle of the blue sky just behind it. The film captures that moment of Icarian flight when his progress stalls and he hangs there in the air and holds your gaze before disappearing.

The Fire Within - ★★★



Graduation - 2016– Mungiu – 128 mins

The dilapidated man

The film is about an outwardly decent family man, slowly revealed to be completely rotten to the core. The good doctor rales against the corruption in a country where queue jumping has been raised to an art form; but somehow he knows the secret knock that opens all the important doors.

The doctor’s ambitious plans for his own daughter are put in jeopardy when she is attacked and nearly raped in broad daylight the day before her high school finals---all the more horrific when they dig up surveillance footage and notice several people watched her being dragged off, but did nothing. With two scholarships already in pocket to two different British universities, the exams were a mere formality. But now she is a traumatized and maybe unable to compete. The heavy plaster cast on her writing arm has really leveled the playing field. At the first day’s test, she timed out with two questions still remaining.

The doctor goes to the principal’s office at night to fix his problem; and both men protest to the heavens they have never done anything (remotely wrong) like this in their entire lives, despite the principal revealing the functioning crook they are using for this year’s test. The fish tank behind them suggests both men are goldfish quietly nibbling those nugget-sized chunks of good fortune that just happen their way because they are just such jolly good fellows. Everyone in the old boy’s network is an honorable man and a team player who knows when to keep his mouth shut … and open. The test cheat itself is a masterpiece of simplicity, simply crossing out the last three words at the bottom of a page, guarantees a perfect score. But what if those last three words were: I was innocent?

The crucial scene in the film is when the doctor explains to the crooked politician that an organ transplant traumatizes the body and if you are going to die, it’s usually within the first twenty-four hours (great bedside manner, doc). This can be flipped and taken symbolically for almost all the situations in the film: a corrupt act has to be denounced and rejected within the first twenty-four hours; otherwise the body adapts to its presence and simply forgets it ever happened. Like when his daughter Eliza gives her statement at the police station; one can hear a pin drop when the interview enters into the salacious details, so the Commissioner empties the room of all the eavesdroppers including the doctor. A passing sketch artist takes full advantage of the hallway moment to ask if there is anything he can do for his godfather who needs a liver transplant. The police Commissioner points out that the same guy with Cirrhosis is the same guy all those years ago who helped them skip out of their military service---giving them a killer head start in their respective careers. The two men (who grew up together) put their heads together and quickly find out exactly who to call and bump their mutual friend to the front of the line.

So the doctor is exquisitely rendered in shades of grey. In his profession, he is the one with the magic hands, cutting out tumors and saving lives, he can afford to be magnanimous. But sometimes he can’t help tooting his own horn, like the secret short-cut he takes every morning on his way to work---suckers! He always shows up bearing gifts---usually exotic luxury items, like fresh fruit. There is a good reason why this guy is called Romeo---what a hound dog! His selfishness is most evident with the women in his life; he can move the finish line a little or a lot depending on his whims and he’s not above winning the debate with white lies or emotional blackmail. He’s quick to condemn others, but when he delivers his own daughter early to her assault to add a few more minutes of booty time with his mistress, it never occurs to him he should feel guilty over that.

But Romeo has his moments. When Eliza walks into the school sporting the obviousparaphernalia of a cheater (a cast allegedly crammed with the answers) she is refused entry; he has to throw his weight around to get her into the exam hall. He goes to the crime scene and does a visual walk-around---he’s the one who spots the surveillance camera. But then he goes too far. The old boy’s network allows him to demand and receive information from an ongoing investigation and he becomes a kind of vigilante trying to extract his own justice.

There is a scene late in the film where some anti-corruption investigators waiting in his office for him are transfixed by some trophy specimens of tumors in a glass display case: one guy makes a bet they are all fakes---they turn out to be genuine. A police sketch of his daughter’s aggressor is also pasted on the same display case, suggesting Romeo’s peace of mind by that time in the story is completely gone---he only sees rapists walking around town free as birds. Increasingly desperate: someone has to pay the full price for his daughter’s assault. Like when he goes after a participant from the police lineup for god knows what reason; he couldn’t open a can of whoop ass even if it had a twist top. The neon storefronts of the bus route give way to unlit back alleys and sheds. The director Mungiu opts for finesse, ending up with Romeo chasing shadows in a moonscape looking for someone or something before abandoning the hunt. A more mainstream version of this same sequence would have had him glimpsing a hidden figure lurking in the bushes and pushing through to discover his own reflection in a window … this is a minor Greek tragedy where the hero has quietly sown the seeds of his own destruction.

The film contains one master scene. During the police lineup, the director shows the action: the long arm of the law finally getting a hold of their man with its complete opposite; the hidden malignancy of the system. The reflections of the three people in the foreground project them into the same lineup of suspects. The two policemen overlap, the police Commissioner prompts his deputy chef inside the room who in turn prompts the suspects to bark like junk yard dogs. Eliza overlaps and blots out the fugitive from justice she is supposed to identify. The discovery the crooked politician was under active surveillance has caused the old boy’s network to immediately close ranks. Before the lineup, the police Commissioner just wanted to make sure Eliza’s version of the story matched theirs. She says she has no idea what he is talking about. So, now the wheels are turning: maybe the authorities have already gotten to her? Maybe she is going to turn them in? They use this opportunity to attack and bully her into silence. Probably the only moment where the film reveals the greater menace to society is not when a paddy wagon collides with a cement truck and several hardened criminals escape, but just people who walk around thinking they are above the law because of their higher place in society. This is a nice example of the costs of being an honest person, the dog eat dog world won’t applaud your integrity, they will attack you because you might accidently take away some their petty privileges with all your feckless crusading.

The film is also a nice illustration of the tendency of parents to fix those unbearable tragedies of their own lives through their children. Because their children achieve their most important goal, they can bask in the knowledge their life had purpose and meaning. Of course, once the children get to be their parent’s age, they will have their own bucket list of painful regrets and elusive dreams that just slipped through their fingers from the want of extra time.

There’s a wonderful follow up meeting with the anti-corruption investigators where Romeo is handed a bribe outside in the hallway---in a gift bag no less---before stepping into the room. He is caught red handed and he openly states that envelopes of money like this are social tumors that have to be excised, so cut away. He volunteers his mea culpa right then and there with the caveat they won’t involve his daughter. This is the moment Romeo hits absolute rock bottom---he is going to jail.

Romeo’s decline in the film is equally matched by his daughter’s largely hidden accession---being a wholly internal process. The third act largely consists of her big-footing everything her father has decided for her, and deciding for herself. Indeed, once his broken marriage is revealed, Eliza is the one who demands he assume the consequences. The important thing to underline is that, apart from a minor falter the first day, his daughter has always been perfect. She stands her ground and never gives an inch.

The last shot of the film, the class of matriculating children about to go out into the real world is truly hopeful. And Eliza and Matei (foxy boy) have a great future ahead of them. Although still in the body of a child, Matei sees the wickedness of the world all around him and he fearlessly doles out minor corrections to hypocrites even if they are four or five times his size. Then it dawns on you, throwing a rock through a window is not an instance of divine intervention from the gods but something a child would do. The adults here are getting schooled by their children.

The film leaves you with a really wonderful buzz of moral superiority and awesomeness compared to these poor European bumpkins too backwards and too dumb to financialize their society. They seem to believe people simply helping one another based on need is the way to go, instead of the western idea of putting a price tag on everything and letting the spoils of the country go to the highest bidder (who inherited all their wealth). Sure, the free market has staggering inefficiency and waste (all costs are simply dumped into the public domain then added to your bill somewhere down the line). Sure, once you add morality into the equation; so-called market efficiently has a 100% failure rate---it only funnels despair to real human beings. Sure, it conflates the infinitesimal exception one person making a financial killing as a personal success for everyone else on the planet, but hey, it beats socialism.

Graduation - _ ★★★½



Jesus’ son (1999) – MacLean

Touching the halos

The film began with our hero waking up at dawn on the side of the highway in Iowa with a busy day of hitch hiking ahead of him and only a wet blanket to keep him warm, then ends with him tramping down a dirt road in sunny Arizona several years later. The film actually corresponds to a moment of grace somewhere in the not-to-distant future----after the film ends----in another city somewhere down the line; when our hero rambles to the front of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting one night and he shares his story completely for the first time.

Before that raggedy AA meeting, one could throw a stone and hit someone who has gotten themselves into a hole so deep that the normality looks like the full moon on a starless night; people shouldering grief so soul crushing that forgiveness can’t even be imagined. Playing the game of hearts, out of respect, he opts for a breezy, conversational tone knowing that he doesn’t have to describe the smell of brimstone for the people in that room.

He keys on two men who started the addiction ball rolling for him; without these two jokers, he would have avoided all the mess. Stan, the first one used his VW as pull-out cot, but in exchange for the beauty sleep, lead him to an isolated farm house outside of town and the 24 hour party room. And the second man (Dundun, the birthday boy) paved the way to Michelle.

And theirs is a tempestuous relationship of chemically induced highs and morning after lows; the film always concentrates on the tail-ends of their bust ups where she throws him out in a huff and he wanders around getting into even more trouble. But getting out of the dog house with her is dead easy, he simply has to knock on the motel door with a fistful of smack and the cycle repeats.

The film gains from a slight distanciation. The two movie stars look too … unscathed to be druggies. Heroin has a natural appetite suppressant; a more realistic tone would have both of them about 30 pounds lighter with scandalous arms. Standing before someone and being punched in the face appears to be a recurring moment for him. The film also gains from the great gallows humor; most of his stories all have basically the same punchline … and they died.

But other than that, being a drug addict is fun; you never work, you party all the time, and you’ve got fabulous war stories to entertain the gallery. In this marginal world, death and life can be two sides of the same spinning coin. And depending on your stamina (or more likely, dumb luck), you can go for years before the bottom drops out until one morning the angel of death actually sits at your kitchen table … and you can either reach out and touch the hem of his snake-skinned jacket and become a grave man or bolt towards a decent life.

A lot of the power of this film comes from the crisp cinematography; Adam Kimmel (Never let me go; Lars and the Real Girl) does a great job here. There is a dominance of radiant blues----next comes orange as the symbolic color of his girlfriend Michelle. Followed by parade of other primary hues, the tiny highlights in certain scenes really pop; and the whites look like they came straight out of the dryer, all warm and fluffy. Our hero has a blue jacket which he always wears with one lapel turned inside out, inserting a ribbon of dazzling sky blue into every scene (and the metaphorical hope of a better tomorrow) These colors load the film with buoyancy totally at odds with the content.

The film is basically about him heading towards his undiscovered gift of empathy. He has a kind soul and has always heard the mermaid’s singing; his first real conversation with Michelle is eerily prescient. The stony path to recovery is littered in recurring images of failed births and dead chances. His last great high looks like a robin’s egg. In Wayne’s story, he takes it for granted that he can see a naked woman parasailing in the dead of winter----and that hallucination isn’t even his.

But his muddle doesn’t help. In the rest home, when the head nurse sees him dodging the residents like a jammer in the final minute of a roller derby she explains one of his job descriptions is that he has to reach out and touch the patients here; clueless, she then proceeds to show physically him the exact gesture of compassion.

The film becomes bleak only when Michelle becomes the desperate high he is chasing. Rock bottom is the flickering darkness of a rickety subway car in Chicago. The smell of her still lingers faintly in her knit toque and he presses it to his nostrils for a quick hit to conjure her out of the night and hear her voice one last time, although her question is slowly killing him.

The film began with a naming ceremony; how the kissing bandit got his nickname but it actually began a moment earlier with him standing before that AA meeting and saying: “Hi, my name is X, and I am a degenerate heroin user.’ Each time his nickname is mentioned during the story he is underscoring his hard fought sobriety and celebrating his stumble towards the light. The film is infused with a hope that tomorrow will be a little better, and a little easier than today.

Jesus’ Son - ★★★




Gurov and Anna - (2014) - Ouellet

Dressing for a funeral

The film opens with a quote from a poem that assures you that whatever current level of unhappiness in your life right now, right this minute, there is deeper level beneath this; a pitch black darkness once you wander into, you never return; so this is not going to be comedic romp. This is going to be a tale of two characters who want to give in to the darkness.

Right off the bat I would suggest reading the Chekhov short story: The Lady with the Little Dog before watching the film. It’s a great introduction since the characters have a hyper-awareness of the text. Mercedes the creative writing major and Ben the English professor can recite entire passages by heart---he calls it the perfect short story---but each character in the film interprets and uses it in their own fiendish ways. Ben’s wife sarcastically gives it two thumbs up.

Ben has gotten to that place where his life has split down the middle; an outer life of routine as the loving father and (bill paying) husband and the mild mannered English professor, accessible to anyone and everyone who knocks on his open door asking for help, and an inner life comprised of missed opportunities and secret heartbreaks known only to him. And each day he is tugged a little more asunder.

He has a collection of short stories to his name, but his literary aspirations have died a quiet, un-mourned death and he is being slowly eclipsed by all the women scribbling around him. These days, he only takes his aphorisms out for mawkish repartee over tea and strumpets. Instead he has put in the requisite years and rode the bench to claim that tenured prize; lord and master of the English department. Perhaps unbeknownst to Ben, he has morphed Mercedes into the character of Anna Sergeyevna; the only person alive who could possibly match his dissatisfaction and unhappiness. They could save each other. Together they would be amazing. Whereas, Mercedes clearly knows in this story, she is the one wearing the Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov pants.

It’s increasingly difficult to hide his anger and resentment; it simply spills out all by itself, he throws Mercedes’ class schedule at a faculty member who asked for something entirely different. He snipes at his wife, clearly unaware of the prohibition about unarmed men getting into battles of wit. She simply steps around whatever lame emotional snares he lays out for her when he grandstands as the tragic martyr. He reprimands her for writing bedtime stories for their two daughters; there are hundreds of perfectly decent stories out there already by “good” writers. It’s juicy irony that she will pen one for him that will turn out his lights.

His partner in crime is an easier read. Mercedes is introduced with a recurring loop where she takes a dream and her hurt, little wing for a bird bath at an ex-boyfriend’s condo after her latest sexcapade has gone full splat into a window. He has moved on because she is a little reckless with people’s hearts, but they remain close friends with benefits. She mentions in passing that she is thinking about dumping her psychiatrist---he is no longer providing insights---she wondered aloud if he was gay (and therefore inaccessible to her) during her last session then asked him point blank if he preferred men. Well? Her psychiatrist just blinked at her. So she climbed onto his lap and tried to initiate sex with him, after a moment, he angrily pushed her off and told her she had destroyed whatever bonds of trust they had established between each other. Next.

This is a world where everyone is articulate, even Ben’s young daughters know that only prol(etarian)s eat mac and cheese. Mercedes’ ex-boyfriend notices she’s got another grey name on her dance card just by reading the subtle changes in her apartment. Mint tea? Only cardiac cases get a buzz from that. Or the way Ben’s wife pieces together his affair (actually the director uses match cuts to illustrate this) from the oddness of his behavior; she slaps a flier of one of her literary soirées on the refrigerator door: hey stupid, don’t forget to say hi to your girlfriend. And indeed if you asked them to be lucid about what they were doing, they could explain it all inclinical detail. His soon to be divorced best friend pointedly warns him the philandering university professor---he is not; and almost immediately Ben becomes clownishly jealous and begins stalking her. He even scolds Mercedes once to stop jerking around pimply faced boys and concentrate on ruining his life.

The film remains hugely internal. When Ben returns from his first time with Mercedes (this is the part in a musical comedy when the hero with two left feet is handed a top hat and a cane and bursts out singing and dancing; here he looks like he is shuffling to the electric chair. This is a great borrow from Damage (1992) of which the film shares close parentage; one of the character tells of the honorable Doctor Fleming is that he is first seen walking, then striding resolutely, then finally running madly towards his ultimate triumph. Ben is always pictured walking slowly down snowy sidewalks locked in his secret world or standing on pitching public transit in his fur lined, ear flapped, Elmer Fudd cap lost in thought. He looks like the proverbial deer frozen in the head-lights before the moment before he is turned into road kill.

But there is a glimmer of hope for Mercedes. She is given a nice moment of despair, aware she is like some femme fatale trapped in a recurring drawing room farce and the puny emotional pay-offs for her acts of vengeance are worthless. Her eye is impeccable; she always gets exactly what she is aiming for … so why is she always crawling away from these emotional train wrecks? She doesn’t have the cutting tools needed to break this destructive cycle as of yet, but maybe one day she will.

Ben and Mercedes didn’t consummate their relationship the first time in her apartment. They are content to bask in the excitement of the “threshold” moment earlier, when Ben was standing outside the pebbled glass door to her apartment thrilled by the delay after he rapped a knuckle on her door, thrilled to imagine she was staring at him from inside quivering---quivering with excitement that at long last a real burly man had arrived. While in reality Mercedes was merely staring blankly at a shadowy outline from her past coming for a revisit. They remain frozen on the bed, staring dreamily into each other’s eyes in a moment of total misconnection; savouring the end game to come, and it’s going to be brutal.

Gurov and Anna - ★★★



La Cérémonie - (1995) - Chabrol

Cooking your own goose

The Lelièvre family is looking for a unicorn. They have this wonderful mansion in the country that needs cleaning and they are looking for one good charwoman who will make the dream complete. They don’t ask a lot: merely outstanding excellence, utter dedication and the rug burns to prove it.

The family is over stimulated over the arrival of the new maid; tittering about her vulnerability. She dominates the conversation like another toy that arrives in the house on the same day, a brand new, state of the art, big-screen satellite TV and it’s not a toss-up which one the family will spend more time obsessively watching.

If it was a simple matter of housekeeping, there would be no problem. Unfortunately, there is revolving door on the servant’s entrance and the eponymous title refers to the ripping good game of class warfare these serial employers are playing with their unsuspecting broom pushers. The family always selects their unemployables from the city several villages away. The isolated mansion is essential, if they were to try this game in town it would only last a couple of minutes or hours, the maids would simply quit the moment the family became insufferable. But out here in the country, the new hire has to re-arrange her life and commit to the job, extending the abuse to a several weeks or months.

The cranky one, the music lover in the family is the first to sour on the new maid pulling the others in his wake. Gilles calls his step-father “Gorgo” which is Greek for grim or dreadful; it also refers to the three snaked haired sisters (Medusa being the most famous) who could turn men to stone with just a look.

The maid’s office (the kitchen) is tagged with a fine art reproduction; a rabbit hangs limp about to be skinned which boldly announces her fate within the house. The ghetto equivalent of this would be spray painting a 187 on your front door. Two lanterns in the entrance hall hang diagonally from the wall like gibbets. When you enter the house from the servant’s entrance, you get a visual warning from three shotguns in the gun rack. The trees lining the driveway are clipped to a fine point like massive spears. They laugh about their teen-aged son creeping into the new maid’s room at night for a little extracurricular activity. This is the classic hostile working environment.

The family is magnanimous and gentle to a tee; her salary, driving lessons, glasses and other expenses are of course, all tax deductible. Catherine tells Sophie that she does the cooking and her husband George does the shopping. The push back begins almost immediately when Sophie is given these two additional chores. This is why one never works without a written contract; fault finding is child’s play if one can unilaterally declare something impermissible that everyone knew was permissible only a moment before. And if you are standing in one of the free fire zones in the house (indicated by chess board pattern on the floor) all is fair. It’s a simple game: they place the new maid on a pedestal then everyone begins to chip away at her imperfections, until at the end the old gal desperately clinging for dear life with one foot, then someone hands “Gorgo” a rock.

Catherine is clearly wiped out from her labours; finding a new maid is some kind of herculean task for her. No sooner is Sophie hired, then the family leaves on a pre-Christmas vacation; maintaining the rigid class divisions within society is hard work, but someone has to do it. And so begins a delightful comedy of errors, because Sophie is playing her own secretive game with them.

There are the two essentially hidden rites of passage in the film. Her parents have cut and chopped up their daughter’s food long enough and it’s time she took her place in the real world. There is a nice moment where George and Melinda slump conspiratorially on the couch, and old dad suggests getting the guns out one Sunday afternoon for her graduation ceremony. Together they will run to ground some small game and he will let her have the kill shot.

But Melinda’s clumsiness with her intended trophy is evident; when she is given the task to drive Sophie home after an eye appointment in town. She shows up late. She doesn’t simply pull alongside, but stops behind her in the street and punches her horn, making her walk back to her. Unaware that Sophie cements her relationships with the people in her life with a tea ceremony; Melinda places Sophie in the dominant position by serving her tea, leaving her completely bewildered. Sophie is never the driver in the relationship. Melinda calls her a slut immediately after this gesture of friendship and Sophie is stunned. After she discovers Sophie’s secret, she turns it into a frontal assault. Dyslexic is another slap in the face. To be illiterate must be the worse, since there is only one female doctor in all France can cure her of her filthy deformity. She backs Sophie against the wall and she comes out swinging merely to defend herself.

Melinda’s awkwardness contrasts wonderfully by the flawless control of her step-mother, when Catherine grabs Sophie it always comes off as a caress. On her first entrance into the house, she doesn’t allow Sophie into the kitchen until she has prepared the scene, Catherine sits on the table and positions herself in the most vulnerable spot in the room; Sophie always mirrors this placement. The only time Catherine’s mask slips is when she slides the stress in Sophie’s name from the first to the last syllable and snappish SO-phie becomes the sing-song so-FILLE (girl in French: where’s my little girl?)

The second hidden character arc is where Sophie becomes mistress of the house. Sophie’s gains are always done with sub-text, with each signing of a delivery invoice and each trudge home with bag of groceries; she gains a little more power. When Jeanne asks to see the place, Sophie gives her the royal tour, and at the end of it there are now two mistresses. There is a moment of almost black magic when Sophie assumes control of the house conjuring (from George’s closet) a secret passageway into the library whose grandeur is revealed for the first time as almost being cathedral-like, Sophie stands like a high priestess from the pulpit looking down on them and their puny books, their services will no longer be required.

As the length of her stay in the house increases, Sophie begins to appropriate the covert threats arrayed against her. The family’s last name is Lelièvre (hare) and each time a member of the Hare family passes in front of the picture in the kitchen this becomes an ironic foreshadow of their own impending doom.

The wall lanterns are visually tied to Sophie. After her first flustered appearance at the job interview she is re-introduced a couple days later; she stands with her back to the wall on the train platform behind two railway bumpers, the visual definition of an immovable object; these sharp diagonals echo the two hanging lanterns in the entrance hall. Where Catherine could have been watching her, but wasn’t on Saturday afternoon. The situations are now reversed on Tuesday morning where Catherine has now completely lost sight of her and Sophie is now the one observing everything.

There is nothing wrong with Sophie’s eyesight so there a little play-acting with the prescription glasses. Although Melinda and Jeanne draw the lines in the sand and encourage her; it is because she is actually looking and seeing all the micro-aggressions, the sublimated violence directed against her within the house that she begins to play their game and defend herself; I mean for cripes sakes, George has 25 rooms to choose from, why does he have to polish and clean his guns in front of her?

Jeanne is a little brassier because Sophie is always so self-effacing---spilling the beans in inherently messy. Jeanne never approaches house if the family is there, and respectively parks her car at the entrance to their property. When the family is away on vacation, Jeanne steals into the house through an open window like a thief, which will become her recurring larcenous motif. While waiting one Sunday afternoon, she uses the opportunity to poach a decent meal from their fields. She is a rebel without a cause but she defends her meager territory. When anyone tries to put her down, she rattles their teeth, gently in Sophie’s case, and not so gently when George strides into the post office with his I am the Lord and master of the house routine. Isabelle Huppert is given the spotlight scenes in the film and it’s wonderful to watch these acting bits.

And rather than a Sapphic connotation between the two; this is more of mother and daughter relationship. Notice Jeanne’s overlarge, deliberate gestures to Sophie, as if she was trying to get and hold the attention of a small child.

Nice things? Chabrol’s wicked sense of humour: there are a lot of blink and you’ll miss them moments. When George goes to the post office to give Jeanne an attitude adjustment, notice the old woman at the counter is turned away because the post office has run out of stamps. Sophie and Jeanne are harmless, but joined in tandem (always seen ascending the stairs) these women become sociopaths and the first indications of a violent worker revolution, whereas a gathering of the rich is merely a dinner party or a quiet evening at Davos. At the end when Jeanne sidles up to Sophie in the library for the trophy photo; one can almost hear the director laughing off-screen: ‘Izzy, why don’t you nuzzle her thigh with your knee”.

Chabrol’s craftsmanship is evident everywhere in the film with his little throwaways, like when a post office scooter meets Catherine and Sophie on the narrow driveway up to the house, and both of them speed up for the criss-cross which adds a little tension and foreboding … what did he just deliver to the house? The three shotguns in the vestibule perfectly encapsulate George’s first marriage. There are a lot of cuts before a gesture, so one is free to interpret the meaning (the breaking plate, the soiled handkerchief). At the end of the film, there is a prolonged two shot with Sophie putting on her coat beside the rabbit picture, the curse reverts to her once again but this time it’s going to stick.

Notice the perfect murder at the end; when one is never suspected of a crime, one can never be convicted of it.
“I turned the corner and there she was.”
“Hey, no problem father, accidents happen.”
If the cop was interested in tripping him up, all he would have to do is grab his binoculars and turn: “You mean that turn-off at the end of the road down there?” The road to their house was established as straight-away during the opening credit sequence.

As for the acts of solidarity in the film, charity merely reproduces the power structures already in place; it never challenges or changes anything. Your society is basically screwed if you are counting on philanthropists and job creators to come to the rescue; like termites they are going to eat you out of house and home then leave you the smouldering wreckage. A functioning democracy would simply prevent and repair the social destruction of capitalism.

The resolution is matter of fact, the family has been metaphorically killing their maids for years, and no one shed a tear for them, why should this be any different? Like gambling, the house wins all the time, and since ownership is nine tenths of the law, the power has shifted to Sophie. Unfortunately they are going to find out rather quickly that last tenth is a real bitch. This is why the rich enjoy the game, it is one they can never lose, all the weapons and ideological machinery are always on their side, even in death.

La Cérémonie - ★★★½



Orphan – (2009) - Collet-Sera

It was Mrs. Coleman in the Conservatory with a flashlight

The death of a child is usually the death knell for marriages that are not rock solid; they can’t handle the tsunami of grief that only pulls at the existing fissures in the relationship and carries the other person to the far side of the world. The film opens with a nightmare; recurring night terrors that Kate’s rickety marriage is falling apart; like her recent stillbirth, her marriage is giving phantom kicks of life. Her husband plays all the male characters in the delivery room scene; he is splattered with blood even before it begins.

Kate clearly sees him as being distant and removed from her suffering: he doesn’t do emotional mess. On the other hand, this is exactly why she loves the big lug; he is mister light weight flitting over the surface of their life together. After an outburst at the dinner table John has to mentally run down the checklist of his parental duties (both of them) there’s taking out the garbage and the other one is … oh yeah, combatting salty language: “Okay, that’s me.”

Kate is wonderfully fragile. She has it all under control in front of her step-mother but when the girls play on the pond again a couple days later she becomes completely unhinged. She was a college music professor who now looks forward to teaching Rachmaninoff to pianists smelling of peanut butter cookies. Her second child was born imperfect; she couldn’t manage to complete a third and the complications from that failed pregnancy has left Kate unable to have any more children. She has the great idea of a replacement child and John rubber stamps it as a way out of her funk. There is a wee suggestion that baby Jessica was also an attempt at a marital fix.

One of my favorite scenes in the film is when she feels her therapist and John are ganging up against her during a session that was meant to be all about dog piling her newly adopted daughter and they instead zero-in on her insecurities and problems, the therapist suggests she may be subliminally expressing anger towards her new daughter and Kate slides down the couch away from these two jerks. She sees him as moving away from her but not the other way round. Kate says there are no locked doors in her house except the one to her own heart, she confides exclusively to a hidden diary.

The high angle shots accentuate the vulnerability of the characters. The vast majority of Esther’s shots are always low angles looking up monumentally at her. There is a recurring visual motif of people waiting in front a window. There is a subtle borrow from Resnais: falling snow in his films is always an allusion to death and decay. I liked the bumps in the sound design, even when razor-sharp knives slice through snowflakes or cotton fabric they are always scored with a metallic zing. The mirrored medicine cabinet in Kate’s bathroom screeches like it comes directly from Philip Seymour Hoffman's estate sale. There is a neat schematic design to the Coleman home; the past, the present and the future are all clearly drawn. The windows in the front of the house frame an unforgiveable mistake from the past. The daily ritual of mourning is heading downstairs with a steaming cup of chamomile tea, pulling out the milk stool and a moment of quiet communion; Jennifer’s ashes were scattered over the urn of white roses in the Conservatory. The tree house in the back yard will be the setting of the next violent chapter in their lives.

The film does enter some sketchy territory; Esther rips her little black cocktail dress out of Mommy’s big dress and goes hunting for Da-dee. There is a shameless delight in putting an adorable, defenceless child in harm’s way, although the really questionable scenes are always two separate shots spliced together. Kate and John try to spice up their marriage by getting it on illicitly in a high traffic area of the house. Although Esther gives Kate permission to use corporal punishment; Kate chooses the worst possible moment (eye witnesses) to exercise that option: Kate air mails her daughter into a neighbouring postal code with a vicious roundhouse slap.

Esther is a complete fabrication. The reveal is always there. Leena Klammer is a horny, thirty-three year old Russian banshee with a great photogenic disability that can only exist in the movies, proportional dwarfism. Hypopituitarism---try saying that three times. The numerous fake “boo” moments in the film mirror all the “fake” confrontations with Esther. The great silliness of the film is that you could knock her (false) teeth out with a feather, but no one ever does and no one ever really tries to. The director uses this improbability as a kind of distanciation to impishly push the audience away from the intrigue.

And the moments of glorious, deliberate implausibility? Sister Abigail asks for medical and dental reports she has obviously never bothered to secure herself. After warning them that something may be wrong with Esther, Sister Abigail drives away from the house and the two little girls race across several snowy hills and a small icy stream to beat her to the far side of a bridge. Both to and from Esther’s appointment with the shrink, John and Kate drive past the orphanage’s station wagon abandoned at a crime scene. The film elides the moments when Esther’s snuggle scars would have been revealed---wouldn’t the emergency room doctor notice her wrist when they put on the cast? And that hospital emergency ward is lawsuit waiting to happen! Interns scurrying around with intravenous needles already primed and ready for the slightest emotional outburst; are they even allowed to knock out visitors like that? One little girl deliberately choosing to dress like little Bo Peep is no match for an entire student body hell bent on tormenting the school’s designated oddball; no offence, but in the real world she would be dead meat in those hallways. John uncorks the last (I have to give serious props to Kate here, the lady knows her reds) bottle in the house to drown his sorrows. Not only does it have off the charts alcohol content (the living room becomes a merry-go-round after one bottle) there seems to be some added hallucinogenic qualities where John notices there is something wrong with his daughter, either she is overdressed … or underdressed for bedtime, but he can’t quite figure out which one it is. During the gun scene they make a deliberate show of Esther loading a five chambered cylinder; and she busts every cap during the showdown, yet impossibly there is a sixth shot in the gun. Add the fact their place is on lock down and crawling with police, yet not a single cop hears the gun blast? The cheese factor here is off the fricking charts with plenty of laugh-out loud moments (usually Esther’s tantrums) but this is why I like this film so much.

Thanks to Kate emotionally purging in her diary every night Esther has the blue print to her insecurities. Breaking the arm of your child would have sent lesser parents spiralling down the rabbit hole. This is a huge body blow that sends Kate out into the night on a quest for fire water but she manages heroically to stave off a relapse into alcohol. What turns Kate around in her free fall is Esther’s clueing her in. Esther’s problem---besides being totally insane (and I’ll answer the film’s tag line here) is that she is a complete hot dog. Every time she stomps Kate down, she has to showboat each and every victory right in her face.

Surprisingly, Esther remains sympathetic all the way to the bitter end. She’s going about it entirely wrong; but even a hammer waving, gun-toting shorty needs a cuddle now and then. I was always rooting our little psychopath; after all, she just wants to be loved. When Sister Abigail shows up at the front door, she is genuinely frightened she is there to take her away. I loved Esther’s furtive glances through-out the film, gauging exactly what she is or isn’t getting away with. Women would be lined up around the block if she ever chose a career as a cosmetician; she can make two decades of hard time disappear from their faces with a few brush strokes. She plays a mean piano. She’s a master of Russian roulette; she can spin a bullet into the firing chamber whenever she wants. She messed up only at the end. If she had just rephrased her plea with more tenderness: “Kate, please don’t let me drown. I’m frightened of the dark water. ” Kate would have been morally obligated to give her a hand; instead she had to ham it up and set-up Kate’s action hero retort. Kate was only in the game to begin with because (boredom) Esther allowed her to be.

Kate makes a lot of emotional progress during the story. She jumps from her hospital bed and races home still groggy from the sedatives and only crashes once---into her own house (again letting out of some of that stewing resentment.) Whatever lingering anger she felt towards her Mother’s day gift is more than assuaged when she stomps through the glass rooftop and squashes Esther into a pancake right beside Jennifer’s shrine. That’s a textbook definition of closure, baby. Any lingering guilt over Maxine’s accident is resolved when Esther emerges from the pond almost as a metaphor of all her insecurities and Kate mule kicks this paralyzing guilt back into the primordial depths forever. Plus she gets her do-over; she saves her daughter this time. Not to mention her flakey husband pays the full price for not once being on her side for anything.

The resolution begins with a visual repeat of the fade to white opening: Johnny floats dream-like up to Kate in her hospital bed whereas the dream sequence is now a living nightmare. The marriage is over and he is keeping the kids with him. She has forty-eight hours to vacate the premises. All her fears have become true. The film is a wonderful retelling of a Cassandra myth where the character is helpless against the great calamity about to befall to her family---in addition to being pushed out of her home by the very person she is welcoming with open arms. A final shout-out goes to the director for not shooting the final scene (it was written in his contract there would never be a sequel) where the police dredge the pond, but Esther’s mangled, little body is never found.

Orphan ★★★★




Ismael’s Ghosts - (2016) - Desplechin - 134 mins

The prodigal daughter

The film is kind of like a chocolate chip cookie; the cookie part is a writer /director in the throes of writing his next screen opus and the chocolatey bits are the domestic scenes of a couple threatened with a permanent parting of the ways. We begin the film with the intrigue of Ivan Dedalus; a French diplomat who has gone missing. This opening segment is interrupted by a phone call and the writer puts aside his screenplay (the working title is A Murder in Vienna) and races across the city at three o’clock in the morning.

Bloom (his famous father-in-law) throws open his apartment door and says: “I think my daughter is dead!” Goodness gracious! Ismael enters to console him. Although it’s quickly revealed she went missing twenty-one years ago and Bloom has worked himself into a panic attack with copious amounts of whiskey and outsized wall projections of forty year old photographs of a child---moments frozen in time that bear no relationship to the woman she would eventually become.

Both men say they have never gotten over her disappearance; whereas, in fact both are egocentric bastards who have moved on quite nicely, incorporating her disappearance into their own personal mythologies. Her father-in-law is a heroic, politically engaged filmmaker who dodged bullets and bombs all his life but tragically lost both a wife and a daughter; he imagines his enemies kidnapped and murdered his little treasure to silence to him. We learn later on from Carlotta that when her mother died, she was shipped off to a boarding school at an early age so she was only a weekend daughter. As for Ismael, whenever a magnificent specimen of femininity in stiletto heels crosses his path, he makes a sad, puppy dog face and reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls (from the permanent stash he keeps there) one of his neon pink business cards with the embossed Indian ink lettering: widower/famous film director. He thinks Carlotta did this to deliberately mess with his head.

Most of the plot points in the film are outlandish; they play as drama but they have to be deliberately unpacked each time as being farcical. The first thing to be unpacked is this absolutely crazed portrait of writer/director. A great wreck of man who lives only for his career; he could drink Bukowski under the table. All the women in his life are in awe of his genius and see no difference between a desperate soldier charging across an open battle field towards the enemy armed only with a pair of scissors and Ismael feverously cutting and pasting away at his little writer’s table. The screenwriter as demiurge is pure hokum. Another important distinction is that this is not a film within a film; the espionage story we are watching only exists at this moment in his mind and we can chart the ebb and flow of its completion. A doctor mentions he grew up with his brother is the trigger for the Tajikistan (Ivan’s first foreign posting) sequence. Ismael appears shopping in a dusty Dushanbe market which looks like he has been magically transported into Ivan’s story; whereas in reality, Ismael is imagining these scenes from his backyard in Roubaix. This is the only shot in the film that revels in the exquisite delight of filmmaking; each visualized sequence is a piece of his narrative puzzle falling into place.

The film gains a lot with a familiarity of the director’s past work. Desplechin is an active recycler; he loves narrative digressions; recurring situations and themes like the dying patriarch; the inveterate black sheep of the family and the simmering sibling feuds. In a train ride to hell Ismael returns to Roubaix to have his own personal meltdown; whereas, a return to the family hearth in his films is always regenerative and salutary. In A Christmas Tale, the prodigal son donates the bone marrow that saves his mother’s life. Ismael returns home specifically to recharge his creative batteries. There is a scene where he fastens a flashlight directly to his head, making him look like an impromptu coal miner; a direct allusion to him digging in his past for inspiration. Desplechin also borrows actively from the visual arts and literature; Bloom and Ismael, how’s that for a literary pairing? The film-borrows should be the easiest to spot. A strange woman walks up to Sylvia on a beach and introduces herself as Ismael’s missing wife. Sylvia says to her: I think I’ve seen you before in a painting.


Carlotta Valdes was the ghost that drove Madeleine to suicide in Vertigo. Add in the suggestive little Bernard Hermann rifts in the score; Ismael actually plays a piano piece from Marnie as their romantic theme, and you have the director’s obligatory nods to Hitchcock.

Some of the attempts at humour misfire. Bloom jokes about blowing up the plane on a commercial flight. Ha ha. In the scene afterwards, they are handcuffed to their chairs in a secure room with other nervous flyers who failed the sniff test. Their fellow detainees are all nondescript, the director could have teased the humour out a little more if they had been given five o’clock shadows or even jihadi beards. During the tail end of the stay in Roubaix, the film lapses into slapstick.
But some of the exuberance and impish humour does work. Ismael is a classic unreliable narrator whose various statements of (hand to the heart) veracity (the best one being that his wife is gone) are revealed sooner or later to be erroneous. The way the Line producer (wrangler?) immediately goes into panic mode when his director is missing in action means Ismael has these episodes with each and every film. His wild eyed medical check-up in Roubaix; Sylvia is the other woman who only gets involved with unavailable men; technically she thinks she’s found a loop hole and is more than a little exasperated when the wife improbably shows up after an absence of two decades years to repossess him. A couple of guys contemplate Pollack’s Lavender Mist and argue that his work is representational.



As to the exuberance; I’ll mention two scenes. Sylvia turns a corner in their Parisian apartment near the end of the film and spots the camera and sits down and epilogues the story for the audience---the director immediately subverts this with a high close-up angle on her face while she still maintains eye contact and talks to the “camera” in the hallway but doesn’t notice the one hovering a few inches from her face.

The second one is the Roubaix park sequence where Ismael takes a moment to loll on the grass. A soccer ball rolls up to him. He rolls it back to the young family, then lays back to indulge in an extended fantasy. The actual subjective order of this is reversed. A father was kicking the ball back and forth between his two children, and one kick got away from them and rolled towards a homeless man … babbling to himself. The poor bastard was lucid enough to return the soccer ball but they don’t touch it for fear of being inflected with his insanity. Again, another moment of farce that has to be unpacked; the idea Ismael goes to the edge of madness to churn out his unimaginative John le Carré knock-off is complete nonsense. To be perfectly honest this screen character is basically only a self-portrait of himself with a brush cut; he even casts an ex-girlfriend to play the wife in the film.

There is only one tiny pinprick of reality in the entire film. His line producer skypes his brother (another resurrection) and tells him Ismael is having a little trouble completing his current film and it would be greatly appreciated if he could call and give some emotional support. Ivan points out that (note the full head of hair) he deals with real life and death situations every day, not fictitious ones. He pointedly asks who in the Vuillard family is Ismael going to libel this time with his cinematic dreck. When he finds out it’s his turn in the public spotlight, he simply hangs up on him. He doesn’t need the aggravation. And he’s right on the money. Ismael’s so called romanticized take on his brother bears no factual resemblance to him at all. He has presented him (rather scandalously) as a functional drug addict who uses the diplomatic pouch to smuggle his chemical highs and lows into the host country. He’s a layabout who spends most of his working hours sleeping on the couch in his office. And, oh yeah, he’s a traitor to his country. Ouch!



As for the eponymous title; I think it refers to the creative process. His motto is: Larvatus prodeo. Which is Latin for, I go forward masked, this could have some deeper philosophical underpinnings since it comes from Descartes. Sylvia is obviously responding to this when she says she is going to rip off this mask and make a decent human being out of him. I go forward … in delirium would adequately describe his process. Ismael willingly enters the chaos and reinvents himself again and again. I think his doppelganger signifies he has emerged from the tail-end of the writing part with a shootable screenplay. Ismael’s ghosts are his films.

Unfortunately, the film contains one huge story telling error. If you are going to have a character disappear in a film, they better have one hell of cinematic nail biter to reveal when they show up twenty-one years later. This could explain why the prodigal son isn’t a thriving movie genre: forgiveness is dramatically underwhelming. In Carlotta’s cubist interviews (different angles and ellipses) she tells parts of her story but at the same time withholds a lot, she only accounts for a handful of years. The film is also severely truncated; the two fine art paintings in the film boldly foreshadow a double pregnancy.

The romance part of the film is kind of thin; they are all quadragenarians who should probably know better. The thriller parts are of course, imaginary, so the story almost gets no marks. All the mojo comes from Desplechin’s storytelling chops. In the current draft of his screenplay as it’s presented in the film; a diplomat’s wife accidently gets her husband killed by inadvertently suggesting or revealing he is a double agent. The bizarre thing is, I’d go see that film.

Ismael’s Ghosts- ★★★



Mademoiselle (1966) Richardson

Night of the long knives

Society is only possible with shared prosperity; a chicken in every pot is the best way to hide a hard scrabble life; when the chickens start disappearing, the plucking begins. The film opens with a religious procession through the countryside with an old Priest marking his territory; but the parade immediately disperses at the tinkling of a bell, leaving only the holy man, his French maid and a few altar boys to trudge on alone through the fields without a single soul following in their wake. Ave Marias and Our Fathers are no longer useful magic against a committed pyromaniac with an endless supply of kindling and match sticks.

Like everyone else in the village, the new school teacher races to the fires, but she is forbidden to help. She is forced to stand idle and watch. She picks up a useful bit of dirt at the first fire when one of the women in the darkness says Hot Pants (the hunky Italian lumberjack) belongs to her and another woman quickly reprimands her and says he belongs to the village. The men bend their backs in the fields then bend their elbows in the tavern. The women divide their time between housework and the church. The lustier women are taking full advantage of his stay in the area to tear off a piece of earthy paradise whenever they can. It’s simply a matter of a nod and a wink, or in his case, a glance with or without the smolder.

And so, for days and weeks the school teacher has been hunting him and finally locates his current work location in the forest. We get half-way through the film before Hot Pants (Manou) and she finally meet officially at the snake belt scene in the woods. He apologizes to the school teacher for his son’s chronic tardiness (Bruno helps with the work) and is grateful for the special attention she gives his son, revealing why this Italian lunkhead is so damn irresistible; he is completely clueless. At that point in the story, Bruno no longer even shows up at school; her wanton cruelty has already driven him away. This meeting is then immediately intercut with a series of flashbacks that fills in the various backstories. The three main characters in the film are essentially outsiders that will never be allowed into this closed community.

During one flashback scene she tells a shopkeeper she didn’t know there were any (other) strangers in the village. But she is not being honest. She did spot Manou once last summer, coming upon him taking a cat nap during work on one of her many strolls through the forest, but being sexually repressed was too afraid to approach him. The long winter has emboldened her somewhat; she makes herself available to him (she isn’t whistling Dixie) by mirroring his cat naps in the woods. Manou notices her from time to time pretending to catch some zees, but never approaches her. In addition to her teaching duties, she is in charge of all the paper work at the mayor’s office / police station. She is the official stenographer (a typewriter is too complicated for the men) of the village; her pocket watch (a symbol of her twisted authority) is always visually askew; it never dangles free and is always clasped firmly or tucked chastely into a side pocket.

The second time the school teacher stumbles across Hot Pants is when he is returning from a tryst one night and she turns tail and hides behind a hay stack. Transfixed by his passing within a few feet of her, she unconsciously reaches out to touch him and drops her cigarette; this magnificent sensual beast ignites both her passion and the haystack she is hiding in. She doesn’t notice the flames until it’s too late. But this fire is Kismet; Manou returns to fight her blaze almost as if he was performing a private mating ritual for her. His breathless performance is an immediate catalyst for her transformation. At night, the tom cats begin to call to her just as she calls to him with her fires. We can see a kind of fetishism blossom within her when her carefully constructed alter-ego steps out into the darkness, rather than going out to burn some poor bastard’s home down around them while they sleep; it’s almost as if Ms. Mayhem going to visit to an underground sex club.

An important change for Manou is that brought his son with him this year and enough time has passed since his wife’s death that he is now fondly remembering the pleasures of domestic life, He would love to settle down again. The school teacher taking an interest in his son is the first sign of genuine acceptance by the community which he responds to whole heartedly. Manou puts a lot of effort into integrating into the community, even risking his life at the fires. The men dismiss this as mere showboating for the womenand there may be something to thatat the first fire in the film (which is already the third or fourth fire in the story) he’s grown so blasé about the whole thing, he runs in and out of the burning building with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

But Manou is between a rock and a hard place. The men never passed up an opportunity to make a gibe at the passing woodsman, but now this playful hazing is curdling into xenophobic rage. There is no evidence against him; half the village can place him at the procession during the flood but that doesn’t stop everyone from suggesting as a wily immigrant he can be in two places at once. Not one of his lovers will come forward to proclaim his innocence because that would reveal her adultery. The cops are interested in stitching up his son (being even more vulnerable than him) as the fire starter. Manou is simply low hanging fruit here.

Usually an old film from the sixties is clearly dated somehow, but this retains a lot of its original lustre in two key ways: the sound design recalls an ancient world without distractions. This shrieking cacophony of sound has become like a forgotten language for our modern ears. Once upon a time, each silence, each sound brought forth a specific image of a chirping insect, a song bird or a prowling beast and with it a swirl of orchestral connotations and meanings rooted in the passing seasons. Spending a night in the forest would be a truly scary proposition now; what kind of fantastic beasts would our imaginations conjure up?

Part of the flashback sequence containing the first fire

The second way is the graphic dissonance* which gives off a feeling of constant unease; the story always remains slightly impenetrable. The stark black verticals of the trees are visual obstructions and obstacles to the eye and to the characters. The lush foliage flattens the visual space. A lot of the film takes place at night in a village without street or porch lights which further reduces the images to two dimensions. Leaves of grass, stalks of weeds, blossomy boughs, and fields of flowers in the foreground produce hairline fractures in the image and obscure the action in the background. The figures remain subsumed to the landscape. The school teacher says that Manou has the most beautiful blue eyes she has ever seen, but this being a black and white film we’ll just have to take her word for it. And all this is all lensed with a precise framing from a camera that never moves and never judges.

Likes? At the sluice gate scene the sweat pours off her face, suggesting that part of the story is taking place during a heat wave, it’s hot and sticky and people are short tempered and cranky; a thunder storm would bring blessed relief. She is also metaphorically unleashing the flood gates of desire, but the difficulty she has cranking open the water gate suggests a certain sexual dysfunction. The men begin to huddle together in packs (a sign that they are afraid). And at the very first crime scene, the cops symbolically catch the criminal red handed, but being a lofty denizen beyond suspicion, they both release the evil back into their world.

There is a nice ending where the younger cop has waited for her car, then pedals like a schoolboy in a series of scenes through the countryside towards her one room apartment to breathlessly announce that her getaway car will soon be there. The younger cop was clearly sweet on the school teacher, but never dared to act upon it. This ends with him taking a breather in the village square and throwing an acorn at a local beauty. Idiot! Clearly transferring his romantic attentions to a better target; life goes on.

But the film doesn’t easily give up its scandalous betrayals. During date night, all the moral pillars of the village have gathered in a room and know exactly what is happening outside in the darkness. In the morning each one reclaims their position by officially condoning and sanctioning the mob; becoming a society founded upon criminality and hypocrisy. Bruno’s tarnished masculinity is only suggested faintly. There is a scene where she tutors him after school and she gets up and goes to the front of the class and leaves her undies on the chair next to him. Leaping Lizards! A veiled allusion that in addition to helping him bone up on his French, Ms. Mayhem (the defiler of all things wholesome and innocent) has also consummated their relationship.

During one of her patrols for Manou, a farmer in his field shouts up the hill to her going into the forest: “You’re on the wrong path Mademoiselle. If you go into the woods, you are going to find the wolf.” He busts a gut. He is of course totally misreading the situation, in this twisted fairy tale she is not the defenceless princess in the story, she is the evil stepmother and when she goes into the forest … ten minutes later, the entire cast of The Lion King comes running out. During one of their love scenes, she takes Manou’s St. Christopher’s medallion in her teeth and rips it from his throat, which is a mite too sacrilegious even for his taste (and quite possibly a fatal emasculation) with his talisman broken he is now at the mercy of his enemies. It’s clear that Haneke drew some inspiration from this film for The Piano Teacher.

There are visual bookends to the film: where the religious procession disappeared from the priest at the beginning, at the end the villagers swarm boisterously around Mademoiselle in her getaway car to loudly wish her goodbye, and just as quickly abandon and forget her the moment she leaves, never bothering to even learn her name. Bruno remains alone in the silent courtyard, orphaned and emotionally scarred by his stay in this village, no one to remarks his passage or wishes him well.

Mademoiselle
★★★

* An example of graphic dissonance would be the money shot in the Film Noir where the light through the venetian blinds slices across a character trapping them in a metaphorical cage of their own making or when a troubled character peers into a cracked mirror and their psyche is reflected in broken pieces.




Life is Sweet (1990) Leigh

Over the moon with happiness

Although Life is Sweet is referred to as Leigh’s break-out film when international attention was first lavished upon his work he already had a unique dramatic style out of the gate with Bleak Moments, his first commercial effort nineteen years earlier. Leigh’s work process consists of a lengthy rehearsal period with the actors, workshopping the themes and setting then hammering out a screenplay around these collaborations, which of course, isn’t exactly investor friendly. Without a screenplay to gauge the potential cost overruns, no businessman is going to risk his shirt on a filmmaker who swears seh* will simply deliver a blockbuster that everyone will love once the movie camera shows up. Lucky for Leigh he became his own cinematic brand as a director he is probably as financially challenged as the two chefs in this film. With the creation of Film4 (needing content) they simply supplied Leigh with the money to start making theatrical films again. No great mystery there.

The acting here almost becomes polished choreography. The three senior actors (Alison Steadman, Jim Broadbent, and Timothy Spall) are like professional athletes effortlessly whacking the hell out of this cinematic ping pong ball, the banter and the reaction between the characters is lightning fast. The visual gags fly by so quickly that sometimes the eye can’t quite register the humor within the dramatic context. When one of Andy’s pub buddies shows up he sees Nicola sitting on the living room couch then Natalie in the kitchen and shakes his head as if he was seeing double which tells the audience he is already three sheets to the wind early on a Sunday afternoon. When Aubrey’s head waitress abandons him at the last moment, Wendy offers to fill in and she suggests she’ll even dress up in a French maid outfit if he wants and Aubrey (at a drum kit) throws in a rim shot. Or later in the film, Natalie walks past the house when Nicola’s boyfriend is thereno wait that was a guy, a visual gag about Natalie the androgynous girl.

There is a visual motif of framing the scenes with door jambs, although this has less to do with stylistic concerns and more the actual nuts and bolts problem of shooting inside an actual house, with no space for the film crew to move around and shoot in these tiny rooms, the simplest solution would be to have the camera and crew in the one room and the actors in another. Leigh hides this great limitation with visual repetitions of the square aspect ratio in other places; the picture windows; Patsy and Andy are placed between wooden pillars in the pub scene; he sometimes frames characters with curtains, and in Aubrey’s restaurant Aubrey places two accordion boxes and frames (an inside joke) a wall sculpture made of rubber and cat fur.

The film is hugely internal with changes that are not visible to the audience. The dramatic thrust of the story comes from Natalie (her sister) and her mother (Wendy) overcoming their reservations about interfering into her personal life and confronting her. The first plot point in the film is when Natalie simply refuses to give Nicola any more money since she only wastes it on her midnight blowouts. Her mom finally drops her “happy-go-lucky” personality to have a serious go at her daughter’s ditsy quest for happiness.

There is a slight problem of register; all the other characters play natural and Nicola always has to play symptomatic. It is almost as if they were working from a menu for this illness and each one of her scenes is checking off another symptom, although I seriously doubt this is the definitive cinematic representation of bulimia. In a stage setting Nicola’s trembling arms would be a great character trait, but these gestures in a film are overlarge signs of distress (he has to always cut away from them) that no one seems to notice, making the characters all appear slightly thick in the process.

Plus the film is dramatically unsound; the heroine never changes. Nicola is simply bottoming out passively in a series of downturns which are in turn, abstractions nearly impossible to represent realistically. She is as thin as her pinky finger but she imagines herself lumbering around the little house with the heavy plod of a Russian shot putter. When Aubrey tells Nicola she is an attractive young woman she accuses him of being a liar. She imagines herself as passionate, whereas, her mother tells her in foot race between her and a spaghetti noodle, the limp strand of spaghetti would win. She imagines herself as articulate and intelligent but her boyfriend dumps her because she is incapable of sharing anything emotionally honest. In her delusional state of mind, Nicola imagines she is on the verge of being tossed out of the house and her mother has to tell her (silly girl) she is dearly loved by everyone. The emotional climax of the film is when her mother reveals to Nicola (for the first time shockingly) her brush with death, which throws the time line offif Nicola’s hospital stay was two or three years earlier; wouldn’t everyone in the house be hip to her condition and with eagle eyes counting each bite of food she took?

You can see some of the shortcomings of this work process where the actors most gifted at improvisation can score more screen time for themselves with flashier bits, all the male actors (except for one) swing for the fence with the difficult theatrical task of playing drunk. Aubrey is clearly clueless as a businessman. He fails to print out a menu. He prefers a trendy word of mouth for his fledgling restaurant rather than actual advertising. His food is exotic fare that only frat boys would only eat on a dare. But rather than being birds of a feather, the story would have had a more poignant twist had Aubrey simply internalized the capitalist template and stumbled ass-backwards into a thriving restaurant, contrasting with Andy the ne'er-do-well day dreamer.

Likes? Patsy the barfly is revealed in a single shot, flummoxed by the wooden gate in front of their house, he slips around it revealing his shiftiness and at the same time his shiftlessness; if a wooden gate is too complicated to unlatch, he is clearly no criminal mastermind. The legal problems in Andy’s future are telegraphed during Patsy’s sales pitch when he simply glances furtively over his shoulder, telling the audience the caravan is stolen. The shots looking out at the world from inside the house are all from Nicola’s point of view. The caravan is pushed right up to the front living room window visually imploring Nicola to eat. When Nicola’s boyfriend shows up, there is a great foreshadow where the blue of his car perfectly matches the blue of the food caravan (a metaphor for day dreaming) so their future as a couple may also be just as ethereal as Andy’s great plans for the future. The third act is signaled by a high angle pan of the backyards in the neighborhood before everyone sets off to work (a deliberate break in the unobtrusive camerawork in the film up until then) keying in the audience that the story is now heading into the final act and conclusion.

The film ends with two quintessential Leigh story beats. Beat one is when Nicola goes downstairs to the living room for a cup of tea, a gesture of her accepting a bit of chocolate would have signaled a positive change for her character, but she still refuses to eat with them. Her change is only faintly suggested by Andy rubbing elbows with her (the six to eight week convalescence period mirrors her own stay in the hospital) and when he is well enough to return to work Nicola will also venture back out into the work-a-day world, maybe, probably. And the second beat is that last conversation with Natalie where she reveals she didn’t really hash anything of consequence with her mother and still hiding her relapse from her parents. She is sitting inside Andy’s work shed, the place where all things go to be unfinished allowing the embers of the conflict to smolder.

One of the most exquisite delights in film is seeing your own stomping grounds and dreams portrayed up there on the big screen. The warmth of the color palette in the film reflects the loving atmosphere of this family where the greatest joys in life are simply spending time in each other’s company. Notice how Andy mewls for Nicola when he returns from the hospital. Wendy and Andy are going to be over the moon when her daughter’s start bringing home their boyfriends for family-get-togethers in the backyard (and in time, their husbands and their grand-children) which makes the chocolatey emotional center of this film kind of irresistible.

Life is Sweet ★★½

*seh a gender neutral replacement for he or she



Marat/Sade (1967) Brooks

The girl from Caen

This filmed play from the sixties (available on youtube) is complicated a little by being set in a historical period more than two centuries earlier, but this is ultimately not a deal breaker for a film which is cerebral and intoxicating/exhausting; they throw out more concepts and lofty ideas here than peanut bags during a major league baseball game on peanut appreciation day.

I think you only really need two bits of information going in. At first I took the bathtub boy (Jean-Paul Marat) to be a kind of sanctimonious sitting judge taking a spa day (he wears the swathing around his head like an official cap) and allows each and every citizen to exhaust every protection afforded them under the law and guarantees them the right to a fair unbiased trial in his courtroom before he hangs this gang of losers in the gallows behind his courthouse. Although it gradually dawned on me that Marat is merely a rabble rouser; a penman for the working class revolution and the only task he has each day is to churn out another opinion piece for his newspaper.

The second piece of information is the time period. Its fifteen years after the revolution and all the movers and shakers have gone and lost their heads. Society has done a 360 (nature abhors a vacuum) and reproduced itself with astonishing exactitude only this time the great man leading society is no longer a living God ordained by divine birth but a simple man of the people (divinely inheriting his millions) a baseball cap wearing; hot dog eating doofus like the rest of us. There’s a suggestive overlap where the play is set four years into the failed revolution and the actual time period is four years into the (then) current reign of Napoleon. The king is dead. Long live the emperor!

For the director of the institute, the strutting Napoleonesque Coulmier, the play is merely a propaganda exercise for his health facility that throws open its doors on special days to entertain the well-heeled and prosperous to show how gentle the reins are being tethered. In the past people suffering mental health problems were simply locked up and thrown away the key, but in the current day and age all these mental defectives can be returned to sanity through the wonders of modern science. Play acting is a major component on the road to recovery and financial success. Allowing the patients to bathe once in a while is called hydrotherapy. Those malingerers resisting progress can be forcibly locked inside a watery grave until they become docile prune people; and each time the inmates hold up these wooden bath grates to the audience this becomes a silent form of protest. The male orderlies are brutes. They bludgeon the patients unconscious so often their bloody cudgels are simply attached directly to their splatter aprons and dangle at the ready. The nuns have also been outfitted with Billy clubs, but these are carefully hidden within the folds of their robes. The devil sticks only come out during moments of enhanced interrogation when the deluded refuse to grovel before a forgiving kind-hearted God and try to stand on their own two feet: a clear sign of naked aggression and open revoltwhy stand when you can kneel comfortably before your superiors?

There is a game of vexation going on between Coulmier and De Sade because the playwright insists on scribbling, maniac that he is, beyond the bounds of decency. De Sade has pre-written cream puffs ready to be thrown at the director at moment’s notice to placate his concerns. He knows in advance that Coulmier is going to object to him broaching certain subjects and damned if the director is going to allow him a single pot shot at the savior of mankind and his personal hero, Napoleon Bonaparte. Coulmier only stirs from the comfort of his Louis the fourteenth chair (making him the de facto director of the play) when the criticism of the present becomes too obvious.

The master of ceremonies is quick to apologize and point out that our current enlightened period is no longer troubled by the cluster clucks of the past. Yeah the Church had a few rotten apples but no longer. Yeah some greedy businessmen openly gouged the public but no longer. Yeah a few venal entrepreneurs openly looted the state, but those kinds of shenanigans are over and done with in the present day. Tadministrationhose great men have seen the error of their ways and turned over a new moral leaf because a lot of those blackhearts (surprise-surprise) are in the current administration.

Likes? The color scheme is institutional grey and the flashes of color tend to pop; there is the dazzling image of the French flag (blue is freedom; white is equality; and red is brotherhood) being poured into a piss bucket. The discourse is routinely intercut with such catchy, hummable show tunes that when I went shopping the next day, I felt like banging my head against a lamppost to get “Poor old Marat” to stop repeating over and over in my mind. The inmates tend to project their madness into their characters to the point it becomes difficult to imagine they could have ever been sensible, intelligent people; for instance, Duperret (the sex fiend) was an elected member of parliament.

When the characters turn to address the camera, these intimate, conspiratorial asides always form in the here and now: pointing out the lack of any game in the people despite each and every newscast leading with the daily parade of corruption at the highest levels of society. In ancient times, it took some arduous machinations to maneuver a country into an armed conflict with another but this onerous task of tricking the population into a war can be done today with a few viral videos. War profiteering is such a safe bet (with the delightful invention of the permanent war against the terrorist boogeyman) that these scum lords are listed openly on the stock market as blue ribbon companies with a guaranteed quarterly dividend. The emperors are all mouldering in their tombs; long live the billionaire!

There’s some sneaky craftsmanshipin the film. When one inmate recites the devil’s prayer, it is the director of the institute that lays a comforting hand on his shoulder before he’s taken away and water-boarded. Charlotte Corday is a veiled reference to Marianne, a French symbol of liberty; she is usually rendered with a wardrobe malfunction. There is a nice visual juxtaposition; Corday is always the common criminal with her feathery knife; whereas, someone with the stroke of a ceremonial pen signs off on a thousand or a hundred thousand deaths is always the great man leading society towards prosperity.

The metaphorical cage (and Plato’s cave) is everywhere in the film and yet these cold iron bars are surprisingly transient; like Shoji Screens they can be shunted around to exclude at a moment’s notice. A lot of the scenes were they to have been shot realistically would have made the film unwatchable. The Brechtian framing hides somewhat what is actually being shown; for instance in one scene bits and pieces from De Sade’s back are flecked into the faces of the gathered mob by Charlotte Corday’s silky brown hair. The bestial reality always seeps in; the horror of mass executions; the clinical descriptions of a tormented soul still twitching before and after execution; the delirium and blood lust of the throng. Although Charlotte Corday so vividly describes the excitement of her first day in Paris curdling into horror; it’s a shame they didn’t open up the film to include that jaw dropping sequence.

Despite being set in the madhouse there is one individual who is completely lucid, I’ll give you a hint; at the start of the play he’s the only one restrained with a straightjacket. All his lines and scenes have been cut by Coulmier but he evades briefly his captors during lulls in the amateur play to rush forward and get his licks in. Jacques Roux has left organized religion in the dust and embodies the liberation theologian or the committed (ha-ha) Marxist even before those terms were coined. One particular stunning observation is that one could make a social marker for the poor in the here and now and return in a hundred years and nothing would be changed. For him, the only thing more tragic to any human being than pestilence and wars is living in ignorance of how the world around them (stripped of all the open lies and superstition) actually works. Roux agitates for democratic infrastructure (public education and universal health care) for the lower financial castes because without them social mobility is like being handed before each drawing of the mega-lottery a blank piece of paper.

Any film with a working guillotine obviously has to have some cutting humour. The film over-celebrates all of Marat’s hopes and dreams but ironically the whole purpose of the play is the clockwork re-enactment of his murder; he is introduced as a man resurrected from the grave and they are going to send him back there post-haste. Corday’s impending knife stroke is teasingly scored through-out the film; but when the great moment comes the inmate playing Marat can’t bear to be stabbed, he simply pushes the rubber knife away and in a moment of bad acting slumps over and pretends to be dead. It’s also set on the eve of the national holiday, so rain or shine the people will be out in the streets tomorrow celebrating … his death. It’s also highly amusing that Marat pens a few op-eds and believes he is leading the revolution from his bathtub. And the biggest joke is the film is exactly what it purports to be; the philosophical musing between two madmen in the common room of an insaneasylum arguing over the legitimate use of violence (there is none.) One fruitcake contends that lethal force should only be sanctioned for one’s personal gratification in the privacy of one’s boudoir/kill room and the other one believes mass murder should only be used advance narrow ideological aims in the national interest [quick joke: how do you say apple in Chinese?*] In addition, the bearer of divine wrath must be exempt from any and all prosecution and granted immunity of which the list of his crimes will be pretty clucking horrible.

Let me finish by saying by even allowing the great men in society to be played by mental patients, De Sade wins his audacious bet. From there it’s an easy equivalence that the fictional constructs of the master race or the exceptional nation are not empiric truths carved in stone but merely balloons filled with hot air. Making these illusions vulnerable to pricking by any caffeinated kindergarten class; therefore, these myths have to be policed by constant repetition and roving tar and feather brigades; all comments from the peanut gallery need to be disabled. Recall that Coulmier threatened to pull the plug on the performance if De Sade uttered one more word about pacifism. Every crackpot ideologue in every crackpot country in every crackpot statehouse instinctively understands that Patriotic symbols can only work if they are sacred and irreproachable. Mere questioning of official state narratives should be ideally punishable by either life imprisonment or death [Julian Assange]. All that is required of the masses is blind obedience and faithful goose-stepping behind the great men leading them nowhere.

Although Marat and De Sade believe mistakenly themselves to be men of action, there is one truly heroic person in this tale, Charlotte Corday. The only time the dreaded cage disappears in the film is her moment of compassion and empathy when she realizes the revolution has degenerated into mindless farce. She doesn’t need anyone to explain that a world where small children behead their dolls in toy guillotines is a world that has gone completely mad. She has to act. Marat must die. This insanity has to stop. She is the one who most approaches the simple philosophical truth; she is willing to remove evil from the world in a straight up one for one exchange (since all life is sacred) and sacrifice her life for the common good.

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade★★★½

* Huawei!



The Browning Version (1951) Asquith

Dead man walking

It’s the last day before summer vacation and all the young scholars in this private school can barely contain their excitement at the prospect. Conversely for the head of the classical languages department, Crocker-Harris, this will be his last day as a teacher here; he is retiring ahead of schedule due to failing health and this will be the worst day of his life.

The old Croc(odile) is kind of a dour, desiccated metronome marking time in this scholastic universe; you can set your watch by his plods in the hallways and quads. He designs the yearly class schedule for the entire school so each student heading off to class is literally a stroke of his pen. The Crock has such flawless control, with a few indications of a finger in his classroom; he can lift a student from his desk in the back of the room to the front of the class to share a joke with his fellow classmates. The story is filled with comparative moments and the Crock is always diminished by the comparisons; he is walking a kind of gauntlet where everyone is getting in their last kicks. He receives body blow after body blow during the day and accepts them stoically before the knock-out slug arrives in the form of a small gesture of unexpected kindness.

The play of Aeschylus echoes through-out and deepens the film with its suggestion of a Greek tragedy of great love metastasizing into murderous hatred. To expedite a victory against his foes, King Agamemnon expedited one of his three daughters (his wife’s favorite) to the gods and his wife has quietly sworn complete revenge because of it. In the film, his wife Millicent has sworn out a blood oath against her husband for publically disgracing her every single day of their marriage and for ruining her life. For goodness sake, the lower fifth was merely a starter job; like Tarzan in the leafy jungle he was supposed to swing from promotion to promotion all the way to the headmastership at Eton, then as a crowning achievement to his life receive a knighthood. Instead he languished there (teaching Greek and Latin to 15 and 16 year old boys) and she languished alongside him, waiting in the wings for her great curtain call that never came.

Millicent is a fabulous villainess; she could give the Queen a run for her money. The first hint of her cruelty is during the home tutoring sessionif the Crock were to stand and go to the window four feet away, he could watch his wife necking with her lover outside in the garden. Inside they are translating a passage from the play where the Queen drags the bloodied bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra center stage and exalts in her revenge. Whereas in the film Millicent has opted for a slow death of a thousand nicks and claw marks; a dressing down there; a belittlement here; an endless slew murderous insults which she then sprinkles with salt. The level of toxic hatred within their home is such that she even impairs the ticking of the clocks.

In order to endure his wretched home life the Crock has over time, grown a hard emotional carapace as a defense mechanism. He is always cracking wise in his classroom, yet punishes any student who dares to laugh at his witticisms; with barely concealed contempt he tosses around their pathetic scribbles. It’s here the film becomes the most tragic, the Crock reveres ancient literature and he can honestly say reading the Agamemnon was one of the most beautiful moments in his life, yet with his glacial exterior and excessive pedantry he deliberately poisons their young minds against the very thing he finds so intoxicating.

The film harks back to an ancient time when it was socially unacceptable to divorce and incompatible couples stayed together to avoid the great shame of a rupture. The key scene in the film is when Hunter (the science teacher) follows the Crock into his bedroom and implores him to ignore the hurtful thing that Millicent has just said to him. Downstairs, Hunter was shocked at her cruelty, but upstairs he discovers that Millicent punishes the Crock with a blow by blow description of all her extracurricular activities after they happen which is too vile for him to even contemplate. The Crock freely admits his wife has crushed his spirit and he only soldiers on out of habit. The scientist astonishingly suggests an immediate parting of the ways. What a radical concept. The Crock has complete faith in Millicent’s confidences: he believes she has never lied to him once and never will. His dramatic change is signalled by the tiniest of reactions he gives when he begins to notice her increasing moments of dishonesty; his character arc is hidden within his wife’s declension. At the dinner party at the end, her lying has become so outrageous that even the wonderful, gadfly head master (which is saying a lot) can spot her lies.

For all his many, many short comings, the Crock is intelligent and completely aware of his surroundings. His first bit of business in the film is catching (using his peripheral vision) a vacant seat being tardily filled during morning chapel. It takes astonishing gifts to be a great athlete, the level of hand-eye coordination it takes to repeatedly hurtle a ball through space with a limb or a stick with pin point accuracy is off the charts. However, the filmmakers know in the hierarchy of skill and achievement, the Crock towers above sweaty athleticism, something that takes the jock all his steely concentration and body to do; the Crock does with a flick of a finger. At the cold lunch at his house, Crock’s temporal correction is overlapped with the crack of a bat and the crowd leaping to their feet and roaring with appreciation before a grassy pitch. The easy win-loss paradigm of professional sport requires the attention span of a gnat. To understand a pun or an epigram in Greek and Latin improvised on the fly places one in a far more stellar, unpopulated realm. It’s ironic that his great strokes of wit in his classroom are always met with … crickets.

The Browning Version is relentlessly subtle; the Crock is dying (poetically) from a broken heart. Watch Michael Redgrave’s interactions with the Agamemnon; when he finds his version, something he had carelessly lost a lifetime ago, he pulls it to his chest in an involuntary embrace, he is almost on the verge of tears. He flashes the Browning book around until Millicent notices he is positively beaming because of it and she immediately poisons it in his mind and makes him throw it away in disgust. The oval mirror hanging above the fire place in the parlour seems to angle and tilt depending on the intrigues below.

The film only gets flashy in a few places. In the tea-tent sequence, the gulf between the couple is indelibly sketched in a few shots with the Crock always angled away from her projectile bile. After the dinner party, they go out onto the veranda and watch the coruscating remains of their marriage falling from the night sky. The roar of the crowd has been endlessly primed through-out the film, but when it came, I didn’t quite believe it. Although to be honest, this is tied to another bit of business in the film where a student has been asking the Crock whether or not he passed his class and the Crock always says that information will be relayed as always through the official channels, then gripping the lapels of his scholar's robe adds “My dear boy, you will get exactly what you deserve, nothing more, nothing less.” So the Crock’s parting address becomes a referendum on his time at the school, and one the Crock knows in advance he will flunk embarrassingly. He accepts their censure and welcomes their disregard because, dear lads, it is an obvious truth.

In conclusion the Crock is redeemed not by the small acts of kindness but redeemed in acknowledging and accepting them as legal tender; since the honey bees of kindness always surround you, you just don’t hear the buzzing. These tiny moments are like pin pricks of adrenaline that give a dying man enough strength to return to life. It’s tellingly that the “Crocker-Harris version” was never finished. It’s still unwritten. The film also makes not one but two celluloid short lists; cinema’s greatest zeroes and great epitaph moments in film.

The Browning Version ★★★