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Sasameyuki (1983)
Four sisters struggle to find love and peace
Kon Ichikawa's The Makioka Sisters is the Seven Samurai of domestic melodrama. The dense relationship between four Osaka sisters foregrounds themes of familial responsibility, personal identity, class tensions and the burbling conflicts at home and in the history beyond.
All this is played against two backgrounds. The more obvious is the beautiful cycle of the seasons, centered on the spectacular.time of blossoming. Here nature and the women are at one. The second is the historic background. The periodic references to events beyond the family drama culminate in the specific date of the film's closure.
In the last scene the oldest sister accompanies her husband's move for a promotion to Tokyo. But her reluctance has exposed a sinister streak in him. The spinster third sister Yukiko seems finally settled into a relationship with a handsome young aristocrat who promises to keep an eye on the wayward young fourth sister, Taeko, who is happily committed to a penurious bartender.
But. The family relationships are not as secure as they may seem. The oldest sister may find teeming Tokyo a less amenable setting than her rule in small and familiar Osaka. The second sister may be relieved by her domineering sister's departure but with a lingering and sensitive responsibility towards the rebel youngest.
The two younger sisters remain less secure. Yukiko is finally in love and properly engaged - but to a playboy of dubious stability. Also, she has innocently captivated the second sister's husband, leaving him bereft, bleary and open to infidelity. And how long will the wild Taeko stay contented with her cramped domestica?
One more shadow falls across the happy ending. Some seven months later comes Pearl Harbour.
That is, just as the long saga of familial tensions appears to have been satisfactorily resolved, international hell breaks loose. Here is an epic drama about self-realization, aspiration, compromise, played out in one family in anticipation of its magnified replay around the globe.
This is a wonderful film.
Aku wa sonzai shinai (2023)
City slicks fail to harmonize with rural life/
Od course i paid admission hoping there's a guaranty. (There isn't.)
Evil does not exist. Nature exists. Mankind exists. What evil there is - or isn't - lies strictly among those elements.
But nature is nature. Outside the moral arena. The deer are timid, avoid humanity, but can be prompted to harsh reactions that may seem evil but - they're natural. They are self-preserving reflexes not calculated actions. Even at its bloodiest nature remains innocent in its primitive stirrings. "Red in tooth and claw," nature remains innocent of evil.
Not so humanity - "man" as non-gendered. Man has moral awareness, moral responsibility, so there lurks and springs the evil. Evil does not exist - except in man. So if there is evil it is in man, not nature.
That's the point of the opening and closing scenes. They open with a lengthy meditative view up through tree-veined skies, ennobled by the score. The first ends abruptly with little Hanna staring up at the skies. The end closes with her dead. As her handyman father, Takumi, bears off her corpse they disappear into the dark forest. They have returned to nature, dust to dust, leaf to leaf. They achieve a greater non-materiality than the skeleton of the gut-shot fawn.
Not so the city slick, the former talent agent is now touting the corrupt company's greedy plan to spoil the region and the village by developing a sophisticated camping site on the hill above them. The sewage like the water (and like modern corporate urban man) will inevitably run downhill. The moral antithesis to gravity.
At the meeting the company's two PR touts fail to win the villagers trust. The two are genuinely moved to pressure their boss to remake the project. Sent back with a hollow pretence to compromise, they decide to convert to the village life.
The woman is the likelier to succeed because she has a more realistic and honest sense of herself. She also survives her violent encounter with the greenery - a sliced palm, like another culture's stigmata.
Not so the man, who is still seeking a role he can play in life. He began as a marginal actor but converted to talent agent. Now one happy stab at log-chopping persuades him to take an even more dramatic life change.
But his instincts betray him. The climactic scene is harsh and elliptical. His and Takumi's search for Hanna seems to have reached a happy conclusion. But then Hanna walks toward the majestic stag. Takumi hangs back, trusting to the deer's natural gentleness. The city slicker panics and rushes to "save" her. That panics the deer, who fatally gores Hanna.
Takumi trying to restrain the hapless transplant wrestles him to the ground, even leaving him possibly dead. But he's too late to save Hanna so he carries her off, dissolving into the field.
The city guy seems to struggle back to life. But then he stumbles and falls, even now unable to merge himself into nature. Dead or alive he hasn't the self or sensitivity to be the "at one with nature" he deluded himself he could become. The loner in the human world remains isolated in the field.
Arthur Newman (2012)
Sensitive exploration of people struggling with identity
This is director Dante Ariola's dark psychological plumbing of the screwball comedy. You know, like Bringing Up Baby aka What's Up Doc? Uptight white male hero meets freewheeling femme whacko and it's love ... at the end of the disastrous trail.
Here the laughs are light. This is a sombre examination of identities, how we find them, why we need them, how we're both bound to them yet compelled to flee them. How we can/can't recover one.
Wallace Avery starts with a shattered identity. He was a very promising amateur golfer but fell apart on the pro circuit. His golf identity eroded his function first as a husband and more hurtfully as a father. Now he's a Fed Ex functionary with a one-way committed girlfriend. Cut off from his son, he created a room for him, a shrine the kid has never seen. The connection defines the distance between them.
When he can't live up to his role as golfer, dad, lover, businessman, what does a guy do? Make himself a Newman (pause halfway thru). Arthur J., to be precise. Wallace fakes his death - by drowning, aptly, for a drama about immersions as self - and drives off to a casually promised job as a Terre Haute private golf course pro.
He's barely on the road when he encounters Mike - a woman really named Charlotte, but you know how shifty identity can be. Clearly Arthur/Wallace and Mike/Charlotte have something in common and will hotly hit the sack before you can say QED.
Mike is introduced vandalizing her lover's wife's car, on some kind of bad trip. Gently concerned, Arthur takes her to the hospital and attends to her there. As they gradually adjust to each other their relationship continues but stiffly, with many jabs and no caresses. Turns out she's fleeing an identity too. With a psychotic mother and a psychotic twin sister (the true "Mike") , Charlotte is rootless, unfocused, driven, self-destructive.
This extremely odd couple then stumble into a mode of relationship that will finally get them into bed. Ok, to intimacy.
But it's only through their respective shields. Their sex happens only when they role play. They follow strangers, study them, then enter their homes, assume their unwitting hosts' clothes and identities and finally make the beast with two backs. Well, as they're playing others it's maybe four. They're themselves only when they're others so when they're just themselves they can't get it together.
Until the end. Even there the uniting is a separation. Both return to their abandoned identities because... well that's who they are. It's not like in the movies, where you can just play someone else when you feel like it.
Baby Reindeer (2024)
Tense drama of overweight stalker and damaged prey
You could call Baby Reindeer the Meet Cute Romance on steroids. Or a new chapter in Psychopathology in Everyday Life. I'll settle for a triple-threat introduction to genius. Richard Gadd wrote this series, directed it and stars as the failed standup comedian who discovers himself through a Wacko Other, the humongous Martha. That's about as impressive a triple-threat intro as Orson's Charlie.
In the beginning. The haggard Donny is a bartender who buys a needy woman a drink. He is then alternately tickled and tormented by her stalking him. What keeps him from firmly and finally shucking her is his own guilt/shame/insecurity that derives from his having been drugged and raped by a screenwriter who'd encouraged his hopes to crack the biz.
The stalker's intrusion into Donny's life and mind torpedo his romance with the lovely and generous trans, Terri. It also queers his relationship with his ex, Keeley, and her mother, who has let Donny live in her house until Martha's violence turns threratening.
The last scene finds Donny alone and miserable in a bar, sans Visa. He killed his standup career by spending his gig on a humiliating confession. That makes him a brief celebrity. But he has nothing and no-one. The handsome young barkeep pays for Donny's drink.
Now, there is an ambiguous ending for you. Will Donny revive his sanity, hopes and remnants of self-respect by invading the bartender's life as Martha did his? Will the stalked turn stalker?
Or is this revelation the necessary step for Donny finally to understand his nemesis Martha and to embrace her, perhaps even romantically, as radically kindred? After all, it was his first intercourse with Martha that finally freed him to make love to Terri. There's guilt in them that hills but also maybe hope for a prospector?
When he/we learn what her sobriquet Baby Reindeer means we see she is as damaged by a loveless childhood as he was. This couple lives second generation trauma. Martha's parents always fought. Donny's vulgar bullying brute of a father was only hiding from his own childhood abuse by a priest. Father and son finally embrace over their respective rapes. Emerging from those traumas, neither the round lawyer Martha nor the skeletal comedian Donny have an easy path to self-knoweldge and self-acceptance. But they're mad enough to try.
This dense, tense, shocking melodrama ultimately addresses an unexpected corner of our own humanity. It's remarkable. And in both Jessica Gunning and Richard Gadd gives us two amazing new stars.
Le piège d'Issoudun (2003)
Tragic meeting of two broken family survivors
To my regret, I lost touch with the work of Quebec actor/director Micheline Lanctot after her wonderful Handyman (1980) and Sonatine (1984). Happily, a dvd sale just produced The Juniper Tree, which she wrote, edited and directed. She also provided the music. It's a wonderful reunion.
Lanctot's familiar theme of two sensitive souls meeting across obstacles of class and culture here gets an operatic rendition. The film opens with a poetic reverie - both in word and in abstract imagery - about the savagery of archetypal motherhood. It closes on an operatic summation. In between we get two very dramatic stories about families fractured by passions and loss.
Lanctot intercuts a two-hand melodrama with an opulent fairytale production of a typically grim Grimm fairy tale. In the titular tale a stepmother beheads her rejected stepson and is eventually killed by the singing bird that has revived the boy's spirit. A macabre story of fatal passions finds a happy miracle.
In the main plot a maddened mother drowns her two young sons and is saved from a motor suicide by a highway patrolman. But he is as riven as she is. He's a reformed commune hippy who has found stability and purpose as a cop. But that career choice cost him his hippy wife and access to their two young sons. He deals with the maddened strange mother en route to visiting his sons to explain why he's gone. The brief encounter compels him to transcend his professional legality. This is itself an ending of fairytale extremity.
Leads Sylvie Drapeau and Frederick de Grandpre are unfortunately unknown to me, as I have drifted from Quebec cinema. But they are both excellent.
Wonderful to see the artist Lanctot at her sustained peak.
The Monk and the Gun (2023)
Family and social tensions attend introduction of democracy
The moral of this charming fable is loud and clear: Our bellicose international politic has lost all sense of humanity, responsibility, sense, justice. Man's ostensible progress has proved a disaster. Thus America, the democracy that leads the free world, is defined as "the land of Lincoln and JFK" - and by implication Robert K and MLK and all the other myriad martyrs to even domestic and playground gunshot.
Yet the film is also rich in subtleties. Its quiet narrative frame is Nature. Our young hero monk walks across a field of blowing grain in the first scene. In the last he walks away through an even richer field of flowers. There he leaves a dark lane in the field behind him. But that lane closes over as the flowers bend back. Nature survives man's passage. It even erases his mark.
In the subplot a little girl's lack of an eraser gets her a teacher's scolding and torn papers, as she tries to emend an error with her hanky. The election officer gifts her an eraser but it's returned because the girl sees the government has more need to correct their mistakes than she has. Out of the mouths of babes....
The child has also lost her playmates and friends because of her father's choice of politician in the looming initial election. The effect of the "modern democracy" is to fragment the formerly harmonious society, down even to the level of family. The wife is torn between her mother's politics and her husband's.
Of course the film's key "eraser" is the rifle, which the plot amplifies into AK-47s. The plot's focus on rifles and their escalation sets us up for a conventional Hollywood shoot-em-up. But here the Ugly American is just a Meh American, commissioned to find and buy a rare antique rifle.
When we expect the Lama wants his guns to shoot up the invading election system we expose our Hollywood mindset. No, this Lama comes to bury gunfire not to praise it. By the plot's ironic twist, the American falls into step. Bhutan earns the happy ending in its new post-monarchical beginning - preferring peace and harmony over mortal ambition.
La sconosciuta (2006)
Sex worker grows into effective nursemaid
This unflinching film about sex trafficking is as far from the sentimental nostalgia of the director's Cinema Paradiso as you could imagine.
"Hitchcockian thriller," quoth NYT on the dvd jacket. Sure enough, it has The Master's obsessive spiralling staircase, the jangling shrill violins and post-Frenzy sexual violence. The graphic sex has to be in that flashes of flashback format or it would be paralyzing.
Irena is a Ukrainian cleaner and maid in Rome. She's, trying to keep tab on the affluent young couple that has adopted one of the nine babies she has been forced to bear (in 12 years of sexual exploitation).
The film traces the horror and range of exploitation of women even in cell-phone contemporary Europe. At the mild end, to get the job she has to pay a percentage to the apartment manager who lands her work. That percentage rises to half to ward off his molestation (aka "I love you").
Irena's perils surpass any Paulines. To secure that job she has to paralyze the woman she has befriended to replace. The pimp she thought she despatched (and robbed) resurfaces more sadistic than ever, with murderous consequences. Even as she tries to toughen up her young charge Irena herself is propelled into unmotherly brutality. She's brutally mugged by two Santa Clauses!
Yet Tornatore manages a happy ending. Irena comes out of prison to meet the girl she tended, thinking her her daughter. The girl is beautiful - but in a taut, non-binary way. Instead of the curves the pimps would peddle she's taut, a warrior, her nursemaid's protege prepared for the harsh world that almost destroyed Irena.
Coup de chance (2023)
Chance overrules human malevolence
Coup de chance is clearly an 89-year-old's movie. If you're going to have a stroke, let it be "of luck." Filmed entirely in France - and in French - it's the slandered genius's possibly final assertion of his art and soul against the calumny he unjustly endures in America.
As well, the spectacularly autumnal forest in the dramatic conclusion evoke the golden age of the survivor. This is prefigured in the lovers' first meeting, accidental (fated?) in the street. There they quote some high school Prévert: "Dead leaves picked up be the shovelful. (You see, I have not forgotten.) So are memories and regrets."
So too the film's summary wisdom. Heroine Fanny reads from her murdered lover Alain's novel the philosophy by which he lured his high school goddess into an affair: "everyone's life was a miracle, everybody alive had hit the jackpot. It was important not to squander this miracle and she was prepared to take full responsibility for her choices. Still, it terrified her how big a part luck played in it all.."
In emphasizing the importance of hair-breadth chance Allen's Paris film specifically evokes his London film Match Point (2005). The latter opened with a tennis ball suspended in mid-bounce over a net. It could fall either way. This time it falls over, to score a point. At the end the killer throws a stolen wedding ring from a bridge to the Thames. It his a rail, bounces up and then - down to the ground. Unknowingly, the killer's intention has been thwarted.
But no. Another murderous burglar finds that ring, which ultimately frees the real killer from suspicion. In the later French forest an innocent hunter commits the fatal accident that the villain had planned for his own excuse. Fate, justice - it's all chance, all luck. That makes life neither comedy nor tragedy but "a farce; a black farce."
The new film also echoes the earlier one's romantic triangle, with variations. Fanny works for an art auction house and is married to a very successful but only "practically legal" investment counsellor, Jean. That harmony is disrupted when she meets and falls for the writer who adored her in high school.
Emily Morton's heroine Chloe marries Tom, a tennis pro promoted into her father's elite business. That marriage is threatened by Scarlett Johannson's struggling American actress, Nola ('alone' in reverse). Nola loses her engagement to Chloe's brother Matthew but falls into an affair with and pregnancy by Tom. In the Paris film the opening shot follows a blond ponytail which evokes Johannson but turns out to be Fanny. Plus ca change.... This time the killer doesn't get away with it. But neither husband is an innocent victim.
That's not the only cultural allusion in a film that ripples with pertinent French culture. The heroine's maiden name is Moreau - and she has a Jeanne Moreau mouth to match. Several names evoke French culture: Fanny, Camille, Jean, Sorel, Blanc, etc. Especially the auteur shadow of Claude Chabrol drops across the wealthy upper class family shivered by betrayal and murder.
The hot lovers fear turning into Mallarme's "swan frozen in ice." Alain buys Fanny The Secret Garden, a fantasy novel about a child's redemption. The title puts a cultural frame against all the floral wallpaper - pale leaves behind Jean's office desk, lively branches behind Alain's bed - and the autumnal forest where justice finally descends. In his refuge from America Allen luxuriates in his adopted French culture.
The auction house in passing provides an even more dramatic allusion: Caravaggio's painting of the boy David flaunting Goliath's harvested head. Goliath is famously painted as the adult Caravaggio, and David after his own youthful mien. Like that painting, here Allen is the old man hanging on the arm of his past.
One last touch. The charming but evil Jean exults in his colossal model train set. This opulent doodad grows out of some boyhood trauma. It reveals him still rooted in its insecurities and desperate for a power beyond even morality. Like the Caravaggio connection from the past to the present artist, this train evokes Mia Farrow's slandering of Allen, which crumbled on the implausibility of his alleged assault on their daughter in their attic, around a model train set. It's a quiet, personal reaffirmation of the aging artist's innocence.
The Zone of Interest (2023)
Nazi family ignores holocaust victims to enjoy the spoils
So in what zone do we focus our interest? Are we entirely self-absorbed or do we engage our views and responsibility beyond us? And how far will we range our commitment?
Hard to image a more dramatic example than this film, purporting to record the daily experience of the historic Rudolph Hoss family. They enjoy their plush garden and manor smack next-door to the Auschwitz concentration camp where Herr Hoss is the excellent Director.
Opulence, power, self-satisfaction, right smack dab against arguably mankind's most horrible exhibition of inhumanity. The Holocaust. You know, the unprecedented 20th Century German atrocity that the Gaza government tried modestly to emulate on October 7 in Israel.
Herr Hoss may be slightly troubled by this disjunction in his humanity. Perhaps that's why he rides a horse to work, so that "next door" might seem "distanced." His weird haircut can be read as his trimming of his hair (=self) to match his officer's cap (=role). Ironically, it could pass for the Jew's skullcap. It's another reduction of his self in wrong-headed discipline.
No such qualms for his Frau. She's a deft mistress of the house, sufficiently broad-minded to employ Jewish maids. "You have Jews in the house," her mother marvels. Frau Hoss even lets her maids choose some underwear from the loot delivered from the prison. For herself she saves the fancy fur coat, showing off secretly in her mirror.
Less happy, her mother still resents having been outbid on the curtains, when the rich Jewish woman for whom she cleaned had her possessions auctioned off. Somewhat consolingly, that woman is now in the camp.
But the matron is mercurial. Infuriated by news of her hubby's transfer away from that idyllic appointment, Frau Hoss turns sharply on one maid servant: "I could have your ashes spread on the garden if I wanted." The good woman knows what's going on next door, on what others' suffering her lavish comfort is based. It only enhances her delusion of power, her pleasure.
The film's brave premise assumes we too know what's going on next door and will be appalled by these characters' indifference, indeed explotation. The agents or instruments of that inhumanity carry on nonplussed. We hear some of the telltale sounds they hear but we pause to read them - and are appalled they don't.
The film's basic conceit is that we find cheap comfort in remoteness. Dramatizing this, the film characteristically shows us something that it allows to fade away, leaving us haunted by the lingering score.
That begins with the opening title. We read it, it fades away and we hear the music over a black screen for a spell - a spell well cast - before the plot opens on the Hoss family enjoying a sunny lakeside picnic. The framing music moves from sombre chords into a culminating scream.
So, too, an action is implied but not shown. A helpless young girl enters Hoss's office and routinely prepares for his use. Like the Auschwitz enormities, we don't see the sex. Cut to Hoss going into some deep downstairs for his shameful post-coital cleanse.
For her part, Frau Hoss invitingly gives a manly worker a fag and they stand eying each other. Her dog enters, knows what's happening so turns tail and leaves. So does the camera. But we're left knowing even in their marital intimacy these characters live on the edge of a reality they are determined to ignore. The Hosses sleep in small twin beds with no exchange of physical affection. Their marital ardour is as false as their affected honour.
Does it work?
It does insofar as the Hoss couple's comfort and career ambitions go. But we catch strains of failure. One of their sons has picked up the Cruel Guard role and tortures his kid brother in the greenhouse.
The oldest daughter lives another compulsive retreat from comfort in her sleepwalking. She hides in closets, as her family hides from the reality they serve in the day. Hoss's nightmare evokes the Hansel and Gretel story, the witch's oven an echo of the death factory and the Hoss family life just another Grimm tale.
The adults' self-deception may also be wavering. The visiting Frau Hoss's mother waxes exuberant over the luxurious house and garden. But when she can't sleep at might she peers into the darkness and perhaps sees and hears the deeper darkness. Impulsively she leaves. Her explanatory note is read by her daughter, then flung into the fire. As if that solves it.
That internal gnawing may also explain Herr Hoss's vomiting when he learns his transfer has been rescinded and he will stay in his happy home to supervise the Hungary operation. A medical operation found him hale. But now alone he vomits in the hallway, as if finally unable to contain the vile basis of his life and fortune.
In that scene the marble floor is a sequence of boxes within boxes, like prisons within prisons, or contexts within contexts. This elaborates upon the film's central theme - ignoring the tragedy outside your box.
As it happens this film is made poignantly pertinent by the current Jewish situation, with Israel's existential threat ramifying into a global resurgence of antisemitism. As the Hosses' moral condition is defined by their detachment from their context, so we can be read by our response to the Gaza attack on Israel and her response. For many responders to the current war, history begins on October 9.
As usual Keats springs to mind. Heard melodies are sweet; those unheard are sweeter. Holocaust imagery is harrowing, yet what we know is happening but refuse to witness or acknowledge is even worse.
In the Cut (2003)
Idealistic poetry prof stumbles into sordid sexual violence
As befits such a courageous woman director as Jane Campion, In The Cut moves star Meg Ryan out of the Rom Com fuzzies splat into the arena of toxic masculinity. That's as drastic a persona remake as one can imagine. Unfortunately it sidelined rather than justly advanced Ryan's committee.
Franny Avery (Ryan) is a college Creative Writing prof who moves through a world of poetry. Even beyond her classroom, her trips in the NYC subway provide snatches of poetry to beguile her. Her name suggests an ancestry in Salinger, with no Zooey here in sight to share her precocity and innocence.
Her snatches of poety veer into the sensual and sensational. Thus one: "The still waters of the water under a frond of stars. The still waters of your mouth under a thicket of kisses." That last phrase anticipates her cunnilinguistic seduction by the aggressively sensitive cop Molloy (Mark Rufalo), a dab hand at articulating sexual techniques himself. Molloy persists in interviewing her about the first woman's murder, the questioning segueing into courtship.
Instead of Zooey this Franny has a sadly hypersexual half-sister Pauline, whose aggressive luring of her doctor leads to her banishment and criminal charges. Pauline's sadistic murder is the second one Franny confronts. The first victims partial body was found in Franny's garden. Eden this NYC tenement ain't. This is underlined by the names of the working girls' job sites: The Red Turtle, Baby Doll.
Franny and Pauline pretend to a sexual agency that proves an illusion. Both remain trapped in the oppression of male authority. The fat pimp outside Franny's apartment may appear to be a caring guardian but he too sells women.
In particular Franny's poeticizing transparently fails to gloss over Pauline's sexual helplessness: "You're a poet of love. The lovelorn man who Sick in soul and of this Busy human heart aweary Worships the spirit Of unconscious life In tree or wildflower Gentle lunatic." That's BS. Lorca but in this sad case a fatal BS.
Franny equally deceives herself in her intimate warming towards one of her students, the large seemingly sensitive black man Cornelius. He won't carry her bag because that would be "an insult" to her Amazon bearing. She leaves it for him anyway. He obliges. Cornelius skips class, writes in defence of mass murderers and sadists like John Wayne Gacey and submits his assignments in blood-like red ink - or blood. When Franny admits a moment of intimate submission Cornelius shucks his professed gentleness altogether and proves as sexually violent as the literary subjects he professes to rewrite.
Franny at first denies any connection to the first woman's murder. But she accidentally witnessed the victim's earlier blowing a man with a telltale tattoo. Molloy's reflections on that sexual act - plus having that telltale tattoo - eventually convince her that her lover is the killer. The ultimate revelation may clear him but it only confirms the official empowering of the rampant male at the expense and exploitation of women. That dooms women from the brilliant prof down to the most helpless and least tenurable.
War Dogs (2016)
Greed undermines all in true story of US hustlers
The title refers to the low-scale scavengers who sell arms to the US military. It also evokes Marc Antony's line in Shakespeare's Julius Caeser: "Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war." That is, declare a state of chaos then go brutal. (That's the possibly unwitting mantra of Hamas.) Your declared chaos will excuse your savagery.
The film opens on hero David Packouz being beaten up by Armenia thugs - then goes back to trace how an ordinary, appealing young American massage therapist got into that predicament.
Skilled director Todd Phillips explains this true story on two levels. Psychologically, the young innocent was seduced into collaboration with a high school buddy, Efraim.
Jonah Hill plays him with Falstaffian vaunt and void. He has a raging lust for wealth, admiration, food - concentrated in his needing a cocaine high. His sense of love is someone to exploit. His sex shrinks to hand- and blow-jobs. This in contrast to David's disciplined and respectable profession of massage. Efraim can care for no-one else. He will eventually rub everyone the wrong way.
David is like Prince Hall charmed by that unyielding larger-than-life spirit. Their partnership provides David's new marriage with a flashy Porsche and apartment - but both only parallel Efraim's. David is no longer his own self. His new career compels him to lie to his wife - and to keep lying, until all trust is gone.
The story's psychological lesson is the destructiveness of Efraim's unbridled greed. Our lads are set up for a $30million profit. Efraim blows it by irrationally wanting more. He's angered by the revelation their bid low-balled the rivals by $53 million. Suddenly their windfall isn't enough. He ruins the deal by trying to cut out his two key collaborators and by failing to pay the Albanian box-merchant who had saved their deal and even increased their profit. Piddling savings both, that doom the operation. And inexcusable - a reminder of the self-destruction and madness in unharnessed greed.
Larger than the psychological reading, though, the social translates that character flaw to the wider culture: the destructiveness of unbridled capitalism. Our "heroes" personify the self-destruction and irrationality of a social system that allows such dramatic excess in the society's disproportionate distribution of wealth. The film's truth applies to the economic structure as much as to our heroes' character - and its loss. Aye, there's the rub. A happy medium would be the better massage.
Eileen (2023)
Suppressed woman doomed by assertive woman's mistake.
Aptly, this film about the stifling repression by the patriarchy focuses on two women working in a boys' detention centre. The boys live in a state of fragile repression, which can erupt even in a Christmas show. The female staff snap at their juniors, complicit in the principle of hegemony.
The drama centers on the power shift between two women who work there, The beautiful new Harvard Psych PhD Rebecca meets, liberates and is eventually overtaken by the mousey submissive functionary Eileen.
When Rebecca breezes into her new job she's introduced by Old School sexist jokes and dismissal. But her interest in Eileen draws the girl out of her repression. By film's end, Eileen has grabbed the power and initiative, leaving Rebecca in full retreat.
Rebecca initially warms Eileen by identifying as a fellow orphan. She has learned aggression as a way to survive in the male world. This she demonstrates when she cold-cocks a brute in the bar. Eileen is still smothered by her violent drunken father,. Denying herself any identity, she restricts her wardrobe to her mother's old clothes. For sexual release she indulges in masturbatory fantasies at work.
Eileen's father is the nightmare patriarch. The former police chief, retired in humiliation, survives as a violent, obsessive, helpless drunk. He disdains of Eileen for lacking the gumption to escape him as his other (unseen) daughter did. That's the no-win ethos of the patriarchy. You lose if you serve.
The other central male is another cop's son, jailed for having murdered his father in bed. Enigmatically, he has since refused to speak. Rebecca draws out his secret: His mother condoned his father's sexual abuse of him. Rebecca dumps her discipline of psychology and invades the mother's house, intent upon forcing her confession. In taking the woman prisoner Rebecca in effect ruins her own career.
During that woman's captivity Eileen shifts from unwitting accomplice to impulsive commandant. On impulse she raises the stakes from kidnapping the mother to killing her. At this unintended extremity the psychologist disappears. We watch Eileen's escape, as she hitches a ride with a trucker and joins a series of trucks - possibly tricks - hitting the highway. That's an ironic reassertion of the male power, on the road as in stasis.
The central women's relationship begins in kindred spirit, warmth and sensual attraction. It's shivered by Rebecca's inappropriately forceful initiative, then broken by Eileen's extremity. The patriarch is a prison that defeats anyone who submits to its strategy and hegemony.
Poor Things (2023)
Extremely rich, suggestive and circumspect revisioning of Frankenstein
In Poor Things the titles are wraiths of letters, floating, emaciated, fading away, like the beings that preceded and are then drawn out of the corpses under the doctor Godwin Baxter's knife and training. The letters suggest an ever-fading life and substance, the tension between man's skeleton through aspiration back to its reversion into bone. This theme recurs in the film's intermittent black-and-white evocations of Victoriana which casts the film both in our current times of colour and our stripped past.
The end-credits are too small to read. In context, they are the sign of the maker, the creator, at once stretching the limit of his art but falling short of fully realizing it. We aspire to spirit but lapse back into being things. The skeleton persists. The bone outlasts the spirit, however reborn.
Hence too the mutants that derive from Dr Baxter's craft and genius. Weird animals, like a four-footed goose and a pig-headed chicken, scuttle through the scenes, as if to normal to warrant a close-up. His steam-engine carriage pretends to be drawn by a fake horse-head, as if the industrial revolution were but an inflection of the idea that man stays beast.
Similarly hybrid is the genre-basis of the plot. A female Candide strides through the story of Frankenstein's bride against the urban landscape of a retrospective futurist Verne (the air balloons, that vehicle, etc).
The innocent afoot is Bella. Baxter created her when he took the body of a maritally oppressed suicide and implanted the brain of the baby in her womb. She bears his surname because he made her, in a non-sexual paternity. We watch the creature blossom syllable by syllable from impulsive inarticulate into the new, independent feminist. Given physical being by the mad scientist, she on her own discovers and asserts her humanity and rights.
Her "I must go punch that baby" anticipates her turning from impulsiveness to effective social order.
The doctor's seamed and resewed face evokes Dr Frankenstein's monster, whom Mary Shelley imagined and Hollywood multiplied. The Victorian context is reaffirmed by the latent William in Dr. Godwin's name. Like this Baxter, William Godwin apparently exempted himself from conventional sexuality, as Kara Hagedoorn has demonstrated.
The legitimate freedom of nonbinary sex is also exemplified by Bella's lesbian affair,. That begins in the brothel that also introduced her to the conflict and exchange of power in human sexuality. Those mutant animals and machines universalize this liberty in the nonbinary.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos's new feature is so rich, complex, probing and untrammelled that one reluctantly hazards any reading upon a single viewing. So I'll wait, this current venture my wraith, a presence but not fully bodied.
Kuolleet lehdet (2023)
Two lonely singles in Helsinki find quiet love
In Aki Kaurismaki's new film, men coming out of a rep cinema say Night of the Living Dead reminds them of Diary of a Country Priest and Bande a Part, respectively. Fair enough. Our film has its own apparently lifeless heroes in staggering tsearch of rebirth. Their heartening tale is conveyed through Bresson's skeletal aesthetic and Godard's (albeit way lower key) outsiders.
Anyway, Fallen Leaves reminds me of Ozu - a subdued minimalist almost static anatomy of a season as an emblem of the current human condition. As the title- and the closing song, with Autumn in for Fallen - suggests, we're in a chilly, bleak, tired world, sapped of colour and energy. But the heart beats on, especially those of our dulled central couple whose solitudes ache for their intuited connection.
The course of their true love is hobbled by Holappa's weakness - drink - and his accidents, whether losing her number or walking into a train. Meanwhile Anya patiently survives on her own. When she loses her shelf-stacking job for pinching a past-date pastry, she takes a drudge job in a pub. That ends when her boss is busted for drug dealing. Thence to a sheetmetal factory - the industry in which Holappa has his union card. He struggles on his own, with neither union support - until she recovers him at the hospital, retrieving him from a coma.
Anya's second job is dramatically masculine, sweaty factory work. It involves her in some heavy digging and some heavier carting. This balances - and saves from cliche - her larger woman's project, saving her man from his destructive weaknesses.
When she adopts a dog she demonstrates her generous impulse to care for the desperate, to add a relationship to her solitude. Having inherited her small flat from her godmother, Anya is a step up the social ladder from her working friends - and a ladder above her lover.
Amid the cold barren settings the backgrounds bristle with film posters. Cinema provides a rich escape denied these characters' real lives. Holappa waits outside the cinema in futile hope of meeting Anya again. A ring of cigarette butts tells her he had been there.
The last shot echoes Chaplin (the auteur not Anya's dog). The lovers walk into the sunset of a cold, heartless world. The factory scenes recall the dehumanizing sterility of Modern Times. And in the spirit of The Great Dictator the outside news world boils down to Russia's horrible barbaric attack upon innocent Ukraine. Not a saving barber in sight.
Six months later the soundtrack would have added the October 7 attack on Israel and Israel's response. No resurgent spring there either. But Kaurismaki's small, touching lives go on, in a carefully controlled simplicity. Elegance can also be stark.
You Hurt My Feelings (2023)
Adults learn to control their responses to possible offence.
Not often that a title so denies the thrust of a film. In this film's therapy-speak, accusing someone of hurting your feelings evades the reality: You choose to feel hurt. Partners in a successful relationship will assume responsibility for their own responses instead of blaming the other.
That's the point of all the family tensions here. The compulsion to be candid is embodied in Beth's title of her memoir: I Had to Tell It. She felt the compulsion to reveal her parents' cruel lack of respect of her. Excrement "for brains" was one of her daddy's sobriquets for her. Her candid memoir enabled her escape from the diminution it made her feel.
In her creative writing class Beth is properly over-enthusiastic about her students' attempts. But she's surprised and hurt that none have read or even heard of her book. They dutifully promise to correct that, but any insult is hers to take not what they gave.
Her response to her own son is diametrically opposed to her father's but equally problematic. In over-praising his potential and accomplishments she undermines his self-acceptance as much as her father did hers.
Beth's key "betrayal" now is her husband Don's praise of her new book, a novel. When she overhears his admission that he doesn't like the book she feels he has been lying to her.
But the husband's defence is solid. He wanted to support her even if the work was not to his taste. The second agent's sale of the book justifies Don's support. But Beth is immediately tested again when the blurb on her cover is trumped by a better blurb on the book beside hers. Who says what doesn't matter as much as how the subject chooses to respond.
When the couple jocularly recall their false appreciation of each other's gifts they are reminded that a close relationship may often depend upon such small tactful fibs. So, too, instead of declaring how ugly his facial surgery has left him Beth assures him he will look good when it heals.
The film closes on a perfect shot. The couple is together in bed again, starting to read their respective copies of their son's first play. We don't know how good/bad it will be or how supportive/candid they will be in response. But now they know the balance that's required and the understanding on both sides.
In a minor replay of the theme, when Beth's sister's boyfriend is fired from his play he resolves to retire from acting. Instead he apparently auditioned for another and enjoys success. Again, the firing isn't as significant as how he chooses to respond to it. As the bard put it, Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.
Don's counselling sessions work the same theme. Though he feels he is losing his skill and memory, the point again is that the responsibility to work lies with the client not the therapist. The longterm client who can't afford him anymore attests to Don's efficacy.
When the mutually hateful couple demand their $33,000 refund they indignantly reject his advice they separate. Their shared rejection of him saves their marriage when his patiently hearing them didn't. What he says or doesn't say is not as important as what they work out.
Perhaps the domestic theme's clearest exercise is in sister Sarah's interior design work. When she goes by her own taste her proposed lighting fixtures leave her apparently sophisticated client cold. But her desperate offer of a phallic grotesquerie works immediately. Here as in the psychological issues we can nurse our own abused feelings or try to understand the offending other's.
I don't know writer/director Nicole Holofcener's work. After this extraordinarily fresh, sensitive, witty intro I must watch for her more.
Golda (2023)
PM Golda Meir guides Israel through 1973 war.
This may appear to be the standard political drama. All the women are secretaries. All the leaders, bosses, even the panel of judges whose investigation frames the narrative are men.
But there is one exception - the eponymous hero, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
Between radiation treatments for her eventually fatal lukemia, the chain-smoking, conscience-driven woman negotiates Israel's skin-of-the-teeth survival of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
While the Jewish state's survival drama predominates there is also a compelling faith in the power a woman can wield in high office. She may recoil from the threat of turning its attacker Egypt into an army of widows and orphans. But that effective possibility wins Israel's fragile peace with Sadat.
Golda's effectiveness counters her disclaimer: "I'm not a soldier. I'm a politician." Success in the latter requires at least the possibility of the former. For all her grit and sinew, she remains a character of sentiment, emotion, empathy - keynote requirements so often forgotten in leadership.
In contrast to Golda's wisdom, with even her suppressed gut instincts validated over time, the nation's vulnerability is as due to the masculine entity as its military successes are. In particular, the nation's foremost military heroes are here demystified: Moshe Dayan and Arik Sharon. Their vanity clouds their judgment.
Unfortunately the film also rings true to Israel's current predicament. Golda may coerce Egyptian President Sadat into recognizing the state of Israel. But to today's arab world, especially to the genocidal Palestinian campaign with its global support, the target is "the Zionist entity." Not even lip-service respect is paid any "Israel," however legitimate and important an contributor to the world it has proved to be.
Finally, there is the issue of Jewface. Why wasn't a Jewish actor cast as Golda? Is this an affront to the Jews?
As if casting Helen Mirren could possibly be considered an insult to her subject. Simply, Mirren is magnificent. Her physical transformation - not just the face but the body, the legs, the motion - is matched by the subtlest nuances in feeling, perception, posture, expression. There has not been a better performance this year.
I gather Mirren spent three hours each day at makeup. Sarah Silverman would have taken twelve. The persecution rests.
Arguably the most touching scene is the newsreel clip of the real Golda and Sadat chatting with easy warmth over their peace deal. As she jokes, they're a grandmother and grandfather enjoying each other. They incarnate Golda's most famous line: "We won't have peace till the arabs decide they love their children more than they hate us." The line is famous enough not to be articulated here. But it drives that newsreel warmth.
As well, the Golda-Sadat harmony offers that illusory hope that the other arab nations might someday accept peaceful existence with the Jewish state. That, after all, has since 1948 been the crucial reason why the Palestinians have not accepted the statehood they were offered. They want to replace the Jews not join them. And the world won't rein them in. Today as in 1973, as in 1948, Israel cannot count on anyone but herself for defence.
Cookie's Fortune (1999)
Small town reveals falseness of racist stereotypy
In this undervalued 1999 comedy Robert Altman once again uses a social microcosm to anatomize contemporary America. The Easter weekend setting in Holly Springs casts a Christian framework around the seedy Mississippi small town setting.
That birth/death issue also drives the three central characters. Camille Dixon (Glenn Close)- blending Garbo and the Mason Line- is the classical Southern Belle pretending to purity. The director of community theatre tries to hide the fact that her Aunt Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (Patricia Neal) has committed suicide. Camille is so assured of her privilege that she runs roughshod over the police crime-scene tapes and assumes she will inherit her aunt's estate. She even claims co-credit with Oscar Wilde for her production of Salome. Camille falls from inherited privilege to madness.
As a result of Camille's vain machinations, the suspicion of murder befalls Cookie's closest friend and help, Willis Richland (Charles Dutton). Willis personifies the complexity and delusions of American racism. We're led to be suspicious of his every action, only to be disabused by his virtue. His night invasion of the mansion is to keep his promise to clean Cookie's guns. If he steals a mickey of bourbon at night he replaces it the next day. He has the knowledge to help Cookie on her crossword.
Indeed Willis refutes the myth of America's racial divide. His white grandfather sired a huge keyboard of children and grandchildren, a spectrum of whites and blacks. Willis's surname anticipates Camille's bequest of her estate to the most legitimate heir, this black man. He was to that manor born.
As Willis refutes the cliche of the shiftless inferior black, Ned Beatty provides an affable humane alternative to the Rod Steiger redneck stereotype sheriff. Beatty's Lester Boyle immediately knows Willis is innocent by his homespun wisdom. In fishing veritas.
The third central character is the most ambiguous. Emma Duvall (Liv Taylor) is a vagabond with an instinctive bond with Willis and an equally compelling antagonism both to her supposed aunt Camille and to her putative mother Cora (Julianne Moore). That bloodline proves as fallacious as the assumptions of Willis's difference.
Throughout, human instincts run athwart social expectations. Though Emma is an outlaw, of suspect character, her compulsive affair with rookie cop Jason (Chris O'Donnell) provides a romantic stability and bracing spirit otherwise lacking after Cookie's suicide.
Indeed if Camille was counting on getting the fortune cookie she assumed her due, that fortune is as ersatz as Cookie's fake necklace. The true fortune is the border-crossing relationships that dissolve the vicious faultlines we usually see in dramas around smalltown Mississippi. On this Easter the humane America is reborn - not least because a child saw and reported the gun hidden among the Easter eggs.
Le silence de Lorna (2008)
Woman reduced to enabling citizenship through marriages
Damn, the Dardenne brothers make fine films. Lorna's Silence is a placid recording of a woman's power - but mainly its restriction - with roiling turmoil beneath its surface. It's challenging to watch because no character invites - or even allows - our emotional identification. Even at the end.
Our obvious impulse is to side with Lorna. The Albanian woman paid the Belgian Claudy to marry her so she could gain Belgian citizenship. That established, she can now get a bank loan so she and her lover Sokol can open their own snack bar.
Still, they need the $10,000 a Russian will pay to marry Lorna to win Belgian citizenship himself. To rid herself of Claudy Lorna offers him $5,000 for a divorce and fakes his assaulting her as grounds. Despite the obvious tensions in their homelife she tries to help him break his serious drug habit. In one desperate intervention she gets him through withdrawal by having sex.
These citizenship finaglings are orchestrated by the wannabe gang bass Fabio. With his taxi driver front, we are not surprised to find him taking Lorna for a ride. While she only wants Claudy divorced, Favio rigs Claudy's murder as an overdose. The run of coarse love never does smooth true.
For all her power in marital citizenship Lorna is radically helpless. Not entirely unlike reality, here men wield the authority and compel the woman's silence. Fabio runs the show. Even her financial gains are illusory. Fabio retracts his payments when Lorna breaks the Russian deal. Worse, Sokol proves a false lover when he takes back his investment in their project and unconvincingly pledges to meet her in Albania.
For all her sympathetic efforts to dump Claudy by legal means, she feels guilty at his death. She declines to dispel the cops' assumption of suicide. Her silence has been an immoral compliance. Powerless in reality, she finds a moral peace in imagining she is carrying Claudy's child. That possibility shivers the Russian deal and breaks Fabio's support.
At the end his henchman is clearly driving her to death. When she flees him she ends up powerless, helpless, doomed - with not even her purse. She hides in an abandoned shack in the forest. Her fantasy of carrying Claudy's child is her only sustenance - and an expression of her will and moral responsibility that had been silenced too long. This final delusion allows her a cleansing her reality denied.
Indeed cleansing may be the film's underpinning metaphor. Lorna works in a dry cleaning business. The staff's uniforms are nurse-like white. Lorna uses the hospital setting to back up her domestic violence suit against Claudy. She buries her dirty money, then tries to cleanse it by giving it to Claudy's alienated family. Even the film's palette serves the metaphor, with its bright patches - whether the blue in the opening shot or Lorna's wardrobe reds - an arresting relief against the dark background. The colour feels bracing, like a mouthwash.
Indeed, isn't all that business about getting citizenship through marriage a political form of cleansing, a superficial legitimizing? Only in her final and fatal isolation, with that delusion of continuing Claudy through their imaginary child, can she feel finally "clean." That's her tacit scream against her lifelong silence..
Married Life (2007)
Betrayals abound in "innocent" 1950s American marriages
Two decisions determine this film's perspective on the duplicities and compromises that characterize modern American marriage.
Director Ira Sachs sets the film in the suburban and executive posh of 1949. That's the golden age of naive illusions about marriage. Peyton Place had yet to puncture the pretence to suburban innocence. The buoyant voice of Doris Day sets off the cheer, promising she can't give us anything but love, baby. Here the lovers dish out as much duplicity as love.
Hence the gloss and brightness in every domestic scene and the affluence of the business and club settings. Indeed the film evokes the bright style of the master of '50s melodrama, Douglas Sirk, attended by his detachment and satiric bite. Of course the historic setting still implicates contemporary marriage as well. Marriage is marriage.
Sachs' second decision is to cast as narrator the slickest and most dishonourable character, Richard (the ever-suave Pierce Brosnan). That's like Iago getting the direct addresses to his audience, which immediately poisons the viewer's perspective upon the saintly Othello.
Initially Richard confirms his opposition to marriage. He ends up marrying the chirpy Kay (Rachel MacAdams) himself. To get there he has to betray his prosaic best friend Harry (Chris Cooper), who's planning to kill his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson) so he can marry Kay. Richard also helps Pat conceal her illicit affair. Of course Richard serves mainly his own end, to win Kay for himself. Richard initiates the repeated bromide: "I'm not at all certain that one can build happiness upon the unhappiness of someone else" - especially not someone with our moral sense!
Despite being a war widow, Kay seems childlike in her wide eyes, glowing hair and smile, and her principal principle: "A woman needs to be loved, and that's true. But it's not the whole truth. She also needs somebody to love." That's the '50s sense of "the woman's place." She's as ripe for Richard's seduction as she was to salvage the lachrymose Harry.
The film ends on the neighbourhood's happy couples playing charades - an apt metaphor for the reduction of love and marriage to shallow performances. After all, as Richard confidently assumes: "Whoever in this room who knows what goes on in the mind of the person who sleeps next to you... please, raise your hand... I know you can't, not honestly." Finally, Pat and Harry move silently together cleaning up after the guests. Their harmony is as deep as ever, now built upon their respective abandoned passions. That shot - from outside, through the living room window - echoes the first: Harry's insubstantial reflection on his high office window, while his duplicitous best friend Richard introduces him and his tale.
Passages (2023)
Film-director's power prevents fully loving in life
With Passages Ira Sachs moves to the forefront of current American directors. (Memo to self: Go find his earlier films. Now.)
The narrative frame anatomizes Tomas Freiburg (Franz Rogowski), a German bisexual directing films in Paris. In the first scene he rudely directs a scene, especially nit-picking on a young actor who's not descending the stars as the director wants. The film chronicles the director's troubled descent off-(his)camera.
It ends on a full-screen profile of Freiburg bicycling furiously through the Paris streets. He has found he cannot control people in his love-life the way he directs them on film. As he cycles he's incongruously wearing the tux and bowtie he donned to prepare to take his film to Venice. All dressed up but now nowhere to go. He's furious because he has just been finally rejected both by the beautiful Agathe (Adele Exarchopoulos) and by his husband Tim (Ben Wilshaw).,
The closing music is a cacophonous amplification of La Marseillaise. That cultural nationalism places the pug-faced hero in the grand tradition of French romantic film stars: Gabin, Belmondo, Depardieu. These unhandsome men had a romantic force that transcends our ordinary schmucks' moral responsibility.
The passages of the title refer to the growth of the lovers who come to reject Freiburg. As Tim notes, Tomas tends to fall into an affair upon completing a film. Now he's hurt by Tomas insisting on describing his Agathe passion to him. Tomas leaves Tim, impregnates Agathje, then turns jealous at Tim's new affair with a black stud novelist Tomas persuades Tim and Agathe to attempt to manage a trois. Feeling marginalized, Agathe asserts her independence with an abortion. When Tim orders Tomas never to see him again the Venice honour pales before the director's isolation.
The cyclist's resolve and rage show he hasn't learned a thing. He still tries to bend his lovers to his will, as if he ruled the set offstage as on. He storms into Agathe's primary school classroom futilely to beg her to return, then extravagantly promises escapes of his desire not hers. He betrays both lovers by not telling Tim of Agathe's abortion, to exploit Tim's desire to raise a child.
His two love-objects are considerable characters in their own right. Tim is a very successful designer, running a large company. If the woman is, as usual, cast in a lower register, Agathe is still an obviously effective primary school teacher. Either could carry their own film so Tomas's dismissive treatment defines him not them.
Despite his role in the French screen tradition, Tomas is very much a modern lover. He is fully non-binary. There is contagious fervour in his bouts with Agathe. In his post-phallocentricity he gives her a manual orgasm. (Or in today's parlance is it Digital?). His intercourse with Tim is the most graphic I've ever seen on screen.
And that is the film's point: Even in this most modern sexually enlightened male there remain a selfishness and drive for power that precludes his genuinely loving. Indeed it's all in his name. The director has the voyeurism of the Peeping Tom but in his need for selfless submission in love he's the Doubting Tomas. That costs him the frei (freedom) in Freiburg. That last cycle through France is his solitary confinement.
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2003)
Mystery explores paradoxes of male sexuality
A Mike Hodges noir tends to be blacker and more cerebral than even the artsier end of the norm. Here he anatomizes the male ego in two respects: a man's compulsion to make one's mark and his sexual identity.
The former is expressed in hero Will's meditation that frames the narrative: "Most thoughts are memories. And memories deceive. The walk. The way he smoked a cigarette. Laughed. The dead are dead. He's gone. What's left to ever say he was here at all? Not much."
Clearly Will is a man of will. Fed up with his criminal life he suffers a breakdown, then disappears into the forest for a basic, solitary existence. Three years later his social life is reawakened when he finds a gang-beaten man in the forest. He takes him to the victim's address then returns to his monkish isolation. His brother Davey's surprising suicide returns him to his abandoned world. For Davey's apparently wasted life compounds Will's grief at having wasted his own.
Davey was a handsome, likeable, happy-go-lucky chap who dabbled in drug sales. Being "webbed up with all the beautiful people" brought him easy success. His wastefulness we read from the party scene where he locks himself in a bedroom with a rich beautiful girl - only to sell her drugs. He's too manly to indulge himself. Even money he dismisses as "a cunt's drug" - but he keeps a healthy stash. Will has no doubt about his brother's heterosexual bent.
But Davey's confidence, self-respect and will are destroyed when he's raped by Boad, a crime boss who covers his wealth by his front as a luxury car dealer. The macho Boad has a beautiful wife and estate and a macho swagger.
In explaining the rape to Will, Boad reveals a shivered masculinity. He describes following Davey through his nocturnal adventures. Boad's language is so full of disgust that he seems to be casting a moral righteousness upon his attack on the boy. But Boad is rather expressing his lustful attraction to him. His suppressed homosexuality compels him to destroy the spur and victim of his love. At the same time, Davey may have felt his own sexual identity undercut by his violation.
When Will banished himself to the wilds he turned away from his devoted lover, Helen. He tries to recover that relationship when he asks her to pack her back and run off with them. After despatching Boad Will speeds to get her. As his car rounds the bend in the last shot we know what's awaiting him. Helen is a gunpoint captive of an imported gunself Boad had hired to kill Will.
In this tangle as in the web of masculine sexuality there is no escape. Just the deceptive and fugitive memories.
Kansas City (1996)
Black jazz scene offers moral alternative to White politics
Robert Altman's Kansas City (1996) is effectively a twin of his Nashville (1975). Both use their titular cities to anatomize their respective music and political cultures. Both respond pointedly to their time.
In Nashville the Country and Music scene catches the tension between America's traditional political values - ostensibly democratic - and the confrontational spirit that grew out of the new individualism, personal and sexual liberty and protests against the Vietnam War. Michael Murphy plays a political go-between (aka hack) who dangles support for a governorship to win an influential musician's (Henry Gibson) presidential support. The only Black character represents Charlie Pride, the first African American success in American country. Our guide through the narrative is the callow Shelley Duvall flower child, rootless, passive and gormless.
In Kansas City there is a greater weight on the city's blues/jazz tradition, with correspondingly more attention to the tension between the white and black societies. Against the contemporary setting of Nashville, Kansas City revives the 1930s, recalling the roots of America's urban racial division.
As our guide through the plot Blondie O'Hara (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is Duvall's antithesis: a fevered, complex, impulsive, violent woman who stoops to kidnapping in hope of recovering her husband Johnny (Dermot Mulroney) from the clutches of the Black criminal gang headed by Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte).
Michael Murphy is again Altman's slick politician (as in his Tanner series, as well). His Henry Stilton is a big cheese in his state because he's an official advisor to President Roosevelt. Blondie kidnaps his wife Carolyn (Miranda Richardson) to compel Stilton to rescue her Johnny. The ostensibly legitimate White authority enlists the governor's deployment of thugs to intervene - too late.
Nothing of Blondie's passion for her Johnny appears in the Stiltons. Despite the white couple's erotic pet names - Heinie and Pussy - there is no ardor between them. Stilton does what he has to in order to save his wife - and prevent a scandal - but he declines to speak to her.
Indeed the White world is defined by this government's - shall we say? - pragmatism. Steve Buscemi, as Blondie's sister's husband (also, because these characters live in ruts, a Johnny), embodies the criminal abuse of democracy with his deployment of imported and multiple voters and his violence toward the uncooperative. However more stylish, there is also a telling bigotry in the ostensibly well-meaning but offensively condescending, naive, supercilious, colonialism that Carolyn bestows upon the black women in her continuous drugged stupor.
Blondie's loser husband is a parody of the White understanding the Black. He dons blackface to steal the money-belt of a black high-roller. In a twist on sexual stereotyping, victim Sheepshan is a huge, expansive Black enriched by his contract to plant telephone poles! Caught and facing death, Johnny preserves his dignity by facing up to Seldom Seen. To save his life he offers to become Seldom's slave, a historic reversal that appeals to Seldom's humour. "You have guts," Seldom smiles, respectfully. "Now they're your guts," vows Johnny. So Seldom carves them out.
The Black leader's very name asserts the film's rare presentation of a Black voice, perspective and moral structure. Such authority is indeed seldom seen. And even more rarely heard. As the gang leader, Belafonte is brilliant, a total opposite to his usual mellow voice and gentleness. Here he rasps his orders and his own firm and self-respecting principles. As he explains his commitment to Johnny's theft victim: "You have to understand Sheepshan. He's a loser. And losers've got to be respected. They're the backbone of my business. They're my customers, and I take good care of my customers." Such respect and responsibility are seldom seen in the film's white community. Despite having Blondie carried kicking and screaming from his club, Seldom respects at least one woman's authority: "If my mother was alive, she'd cut your balls off. Woman went right to the point. She never, ever missed a beat." (Further to his - and Altman's -credit, Belafonte wrote his own dialogue.)
The film's moral center may arguably lie in the frequent and extensive musical scenes at The Hey Hey Club. Without the explicitness of the Nashville lyrics, the jazz scenes provide the film's most powerful emotional address and affirmation of the Black spirit - and especially the harmony that lies in freeing the individual voice. To this end there are two extended scenes of dual jazz lead performers.
The first is postered as a "Battle" between two star soloists, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins. Their duel in alternating solos, of increasing inventiveness and strength, concludes with a handshake of mutual regard. There is a harmony even in this energetic rivalry. The film closes on another rich but gentler number that foregrounds two bassists - instrumentalists who are more commonly supports in the background.
All the musical numbers expressing the Black world emphasize harmony and the freeing of the individual voice. That integrity contrasts to the false hegemony and effects of America's racist power structure in 1996 as in 1935 - and, alas, even more so in 2023.
A Serious Man (2009)
Modern (1970 Midwestern) Job learns limits of faith.
In 1970 a Minnesota Physics professor, Larry Gopnick, suffers a Job-like accumulation of afflictions that challenge his self-respect and his faith.
But the film opens with a short yiddish drama set in a 19th Century shtetl home. The farmer exultantly tells his wife of his remarkable experience. When his wagon broke down in the blizzard a stranger appeared and helped him out. He invited the stranger home for a warm soup. When he gives the stranger's name the wife is appalled. That man died three years ago. The visitor must be an evil spirit in disguise, a dybbuk. Sure enough, the stranger - as befits the dybbuk - declines the offer of soup. He rejects the wife's claim that he'd died. When the wife impulsively stabs him in the stomach he doesn't bleed.
But then he does, a little. He asks for soup. Rather than wait, he stumbles outside. The couple fear they have killed a human being. Or have they expelled the dybbuk?
Now, the Coen brothers have stated that this amuse bouche was just an invention to set the mood. It has no more connection to the main story than the old Looney Tunes cartoons had to the features they attended.
Not so. Remember D. H. Lawrence: "Trust the art, not the artist." That anecdotal opening carries the heart of the film.
For one thing, its yiddish dialogue connects with the continuing theme song. "The Miller's Tears." There the turning of the wheels signifies the singer's fear of helplessly moving towards a solitary death.
In addition, the introductory short story exemplifies the rich tradition of Jewish folklore and narrative which Gopnick's woman friend recommends he turn to for counsel. As his marriage dissolves. The fact that she has braces on both legs prepares for the inadequacy he finds in the three rabbis he consults. The senior authority, Rabbi Marshak, with his remote authority and both natural and supernatural scholarship, even resembles the dybbuk by his forked beard and mysterious detachment.
Most importantly, the radical ambivalence of the farmer's initially beneficial encounter sets up the film's presentation of life as a matter of mixed blessings. Any hint of a silver lining opens into a massive cloud. Literally, at the end. Rabbi Marshak has returned the confiscated transistor radio - with the secreted $20 - Gopnick's son Danny can finally pay off his debt to the bully Faigle. There a dark tornado continues its advance. The young brute's name is a denial of the delicacy of Faigelleh, a common term for "little bird" or "gay." The film ends on an open note of various potential doom.
Like that farmer, Gopnick's apparent advantages all open into vulnerability. His two children are growing distant from him and from his faith. His daughter is stealing money to save for a nose job, which Gopnick forbids. Son Danny is focused on the poor antenna reception of his F Troop and getting stoned for/at his bar mitzvah.
Gopnick's marriage explodes when his wife Judy reveals she is leaving him for Cy Ableman and expels him to a motel, sarcastically and suggestively named The Jolly Roger. A Korean student whom he has failed leaves him a fat envelop of cash to buy a passing grade. Gopnick is up for tenure but he has no publishing record and the committee has been receiving anonymous letters about him, which obviously will not influence their decision, but....
Even when Gopnick's anger at the student causes a chain of traffic accidents that kills rival Ableman, Gopnick is not saved. His wife, amid her dramatic grieving, demands he pay for the funeral.
Eventually life improves for Gopnick. The TV antenna challenge provides a view of the beautiful neighbour sunbathing nude. That eventually leads to their sharing a joint - and Gopnick's fantasy of sex with her. Still, the other neighbour, a redneck hunter encroaching on Gopnick's property line, provides a balancing fantasy of antisemitic murder.
Then there is Gopnick's brother Arthur, at loose ends, living on the Gopnicks' couch then joining him in motel exile. Arthur's continual draining of a cerbaceous cyst on his neck is a grisly emblem of the film's major motif: life draining away. Arthur is a likeable but nightmare personification of the Miller's song. In his despair he blames God for not having given him anything.
Indeed, even beside Gopnick's tribulations brother Arthur is the most compelling challenge to the Rashi epigraph that opens the film: "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you."
Gopnick struggles to find meaning in his trials. As he advises his failed student, the physics major depends on mathematics to prove the theories that physics can observe but not explain. As the dream Cy puts it, "Mathematics is the art of the possible." The first two rabbis demonstrate the shallowness of religious explanations of human frailty. The first, very junior, rabbi offers as solace the vision of God in the parking lot. The second remains stymied by a congregant dentist's discovery of "Help me" etched in Hebrew inside a gentile patient's teeth.
Against these silly simplicities two complexities appear as if to test the Rashi. One is Arthur's notebook, his Mentaculus, crammed pages of scribbles and scrawls that he claims enables his power to predict. That helps him win at poker games - for which he attracts police attention. But it proves of no avail when he's busted for soliciting sodomy in North Dakota (!). To lawyer him up for the latter charge Gopnick abandons his principles, uses the student's bribe and raises his grade to a C-.
The second dramatic complexity is the huge blackboard Gopnick dreams of filling for his class that ultimately proves - "The Uncertainty Principle. It proves we can't ever really know... what's going on. So it shouldn't bother you. Not being able to figure anything out. Although you will be responsible for this on the mid-term." Indeed life is the mid-term in which we struggle to survive the inexplicable - and are best advised to steer clear from complicating things.
That's the essential simplicity by which we stumble through faith and knowledge alike, however fervid our need for delusion. Arguably the key rabbinic illumination is Rabbi Marshak's. Too aloof to counsel his adult congregants, he receives the bar mitzvah lads to bless them. At Danny's visit the rabbi steps away from his usual formula with a personalized simplicity, citing Jefferson Airplane.:
Stepping down into the boy's secular sphere the aged rabbi achieves the simplicity that is immediate, a connection, a true value. In that modest reality he one-ups even the dybbuk his chin-growth evokes.
The Gazebo (1959)
Hitchcock's scriptwriter harried by a difficult corpse
Add George Marshall's The Gazebo (1959) to the list of Best Non-Hitchcock Hitchcock films. It may not dislodge Charade but it ranks.
Glenn Ford plays Elliott Nash, a TV writer/director who's driven to kill a blackmailer threatening to publish old nude shots of his wife Nell (Debbie Reynolds), who's breaking into Broadway stardom. Her devoted ex-suitor Harlow Edison (Carl Reiner) is the cop hot on his tail.
Nash is trying to write a screenplay commissioned by Hitchcock, but his blackmail worries distract him. When Hitch phones him, Nash solicits his advice and how to get rid of a body without a shovel. The "fireplace" response suggests the body might be burned away but no. Hitch rather suggested deploying the fireplace shovel. Thus the film-world produces a miniature solution to the real/reel-life dilemma.
Hitchcock casts a more general shadow than just that scene. The whimsical imagery and music of the opening and closing title sequences evoke the tone of The Trouble With Harry (1955). So too the characters' assuming responsibility and guilt over a corpse they didn't kill and the burial and unearthing of the body. Both films offer a black comic version of Hitchcock's patented "transfer of guilt" theme. Cop Edison is a hedonistic and self-serving antithesis to sheriff Calvin Wiggs. But the antithesis is as clear a parallel as an equation would be.
When the opening scene moves from a classic noir murder scene into the mechanics of its TV presentation we recall the theatre/life fluidity in Stage Fright (1950). (See my discussion of that film on this site.)
A host of Hitchcocks - especially I Confess (1950), Dial M for Murder (1954), The Wrong Man (1956), etc. - lie behind the cop's line "It's amazing. How an innocent man can look so guilty." Here the wrong man is the corpse as well as the erroneously accused killer.
Unlike Suspicion (1941) here the husband who appears to be so guilty actually is that guilty - until a convenient heart attack renders him innocent.
Finally, the climactic intervention by the pigeon provides a prophetic link to the birds in Psycho (1960) - from the Phoenix setting to Norm's stuffing - and of course on to The Birds (1963).
As it happens, the film's source play, staged in London in 1958, was written by Alec Coppel, best known for his script for Vertigo (1958). He comes by his Hitchcock spirit legitimately. Indeed, Nash's fond description of the eponymous edifice may equally apply to the British Hitchcock: "a little bit of Olde England comes to Connecticut."
My thanks to Joel Gunz of the HitchCon gang for alerting me to this connection.
Asteroid City (2023)
Layers of fantasy revive atomic threat
As the end-credit song reminds us, "You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep." Wes Anderson's extravagant confection enacts the variety of dream-lives that buffer - yet illuminate - our "real" life.
The film is a nesting doll of performed fictions. The film we've gone to a theatre to see - so far - opens on a small-screen black and white TV image where the host (Brian Cranston) introduces playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) at work. He appears in a small box far away in the small screen. That's two levels already. His surname evokes yet another, the mythopoeic frontier lawman of the everything's OK corral.
A fourth is the stage presentation of that ostensible play, which itself moves from the stage to the backstage, inner-level of presentation. Then the three-act play is itself presented as a reel-life performance in the eponymous small desert town near the atom bomb testing site.
On that level, the preternatural bright colours and stylized action add yet another context: the animated cartoon. The "real" dramatization is heightened into blatant artifice. As if to confirm this context, an actual roadrunner appears briefly in the action and at length in the foreground of the last shot. The "meep meep" is implicit.
That layering of dramatic production embodies our dependence upon fantasies to guide us, especially in a world more than ever shadowed by the elaboration of that atomic threat. The periodic boom and mushroom clouds leave the citizens shaken but not stirred. As thematic luck would have it, among the trailers preceding this screening was that of the more historic reminder of the birth of the atomic threat, Oppenheim.
Against the cataclysmic paranoia of The Bomb, the film craves community spirit. So Montana defends the alien who briefly reclaims the asteroid that gave the set city its name: "I reckon that alien didn't mean no harm. No, he ain't American. No, he ain't a creature of God's Earth, but he's a creature of somewhere."
And aren't we all? Indeed all the film's characters are creatures of a somewhere not quite real but an entrance towards it. Actress Midge and widower Zack move from separate boxed frames into a passionate refuge from their respective tragedies. Zack's antagonistic father-in-law learns a lesson in humanity and respect from Zack's young triplet daughters, their mom transported in Tupperware.
With all this fictional layering we often miss the identities in the most star-studded cast since Altman's The Player. The likes of Cranston and Norton, Scarlet Johansen, Liev Schreiber, Tom Hanks, slip by virtually unrecognizable. Conversely, Jason Schwartzman appears usually in his bearded role as recently widowed father, then as the clean-chinned actor. This becomes another kind of layering, of the stretch between the real and the fantasy.
All these layers of performance draw us through the director's fantasy to remind us of the debt we, the debt that our science, the debt that our governments, owe - to humanity, not to their own advantage. A timely and tragic reminder, that really should wake us up but....