Friday, March 15, 2024

Ganushatra (Enemy of the People)

 In 1983, the great Indian director, Satyajit Ray, suffered a near fatal heart attack.  His recovery was long and apparently arduous.  In many of his films, Ray operated the camera, wrote the script, directed, and composed the music as well.  In his prime, he seems to have produced movies the way that birds sing -- that is, apparently effortlessly.  After his heart attack, Ray's physical faculties were much diminished and his doctors ordered him to severely reduce his cinematic exertions.  The result is that Ganushatra, Ray's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People is restrained and somewhat claustrophobic -- the movie is shot indoors, using only a couple of locations, and the camerawork is exceedingly prosaic:  shot and reverse shot with inserted close-ups for emphasis:  we see some reactions to events occurring in the film in big close-ups and there are images of telephones, vials of holy water, and a woman's hand touching her husband's hand when he is under public attack.  The movie is well-acted, but, if the truth is told, a bit of a slog.  Ray has produced a work that is essentially a record of a filmed stage-play -- some of the movie is memorable, but it's a disappointment, not as compelling as it should be.  To some extent, the fault may lie in Ibsen's source material, very freely adapted by Ray -- Ibsen is one of history's preeminent playwrights, but, as is often the case with Shakespeare, his intricately crafted theater works may read better than they play.  That is, stage-productions of Ibsen often pale in comparison with the effect experienced when you read his plays.  

In broad outline, Ray follows Ibsen's Enemy of the People closely although, ultimately, the effect of his film is very different from the ambiguous and radically unresolved theater-piece by the Norwegian writer.  In Ray's film, a kindly and self-sacrificing doctor (Dr. Ashoke Gupta) notes an uptick in cases of hepatitis and jaundice in the provincial city where he practices medicine.  Gupta discovers that the holy water dispensed by a local Hindu shrine is polluted and causes illness.  The doctor wishes to avert a health crisis by writing an article for the local paper, a so-called "liberal" and "progressive" periodical, warning the public as to this danger.  Unfortunately, Gupta's younger brother, a successful politician in town, opposes the doctor's cautionary efforts.  This politician, Nishin, seems to act from a combination of pious and mercantile motives; he says that by definition "holy water" from the shrine can't be impure and, further, the town depends upon revenue earned from pilgrims to the temple -- shutting it down would devastate the town's economy.  Nishin persuades the newspaper, operated by "crusading" journalists (who are, in fact, servile), to kill the story.  Frustrated, Dr. Gupta seeks another way of advising the public as to the clear and present danger presented by the polluted holy water.  A local theater group, a collection of young radicals, offers the physician use of their theater to make his case that the temple should be banned from dispensing its sacred water -- the stuff is doled out to crowds of pilgrims in small doses poured from tiny clay pots: people suck down the water or rub it into their scalps.  Nishin, with the cowardly newspapermen, appears at the lecture, turns the affair into a sort of public meeting at which his allies preside, and Gupta is prevented from making his case.  (The scenes in the theater are performed against a frieze of headless figures woven from sort of bamboo or other fabric; it's a weird backdrop for the speeches presented in that space and seems to have some symbolic significance that eludes me.)  The crowd of pious Hindus challenge Gupta's status -- "Are you even a Hindu?" someone asks -- and shout him down.  The next day mobs assemble at Gupta's house and throw rocks through his windows.  The doctor cowers inside with his wife and adoring daughter, fearful that their home will be overrun by the hostile crowd.  Their landlord arrives and apologetically advises that they will be evicted from the home and Ranin, Dr. Gupta's daugher, announces that she has been fired from her job as a schoolteacher.  (Dr. Gupta says he will start a school in his home where she can teach slum-kids.)  The mob advances and more windows are broken and just when it seems that an attack on Gupta and  his family is imminent, the doctor hears a counter-protest on the street outside.  The cavalry has arrived in the form of a crowd of radical young theater people and, as the film ends, we hear them chanting praise for Dr. Gupta's courage.

In broad outline, Ray's film tracks the much longer and more complex play by Ibsen.  But there are striking deviations from Ibsen's original theater-piece.  In Ganushatra, the doctor is much older than his brother, the politician; this inverts the casting in Ibsen's play in which the protagonist, Dr. Stockmann, is twenty years younger than his brother, the town's mayor, Peter Stockmann.  A devious old man who makes a spectacular appearance at the beginning and end of Ibsen's original (a greedy speculator named Morten Kiil) is entirely absent from Ray's version of the story.  (Ibsen likes down-to-earth details that involve stocks and promissory notes and contested wills; Ray has no interest in commerce of this sort and so Kiil who buys shares in the poisoned spa, with his grandchildren's inheritance, to blackmail Dr. Stockmann is nowhere in evidence in the Indian film.)  Most importantly, Ibsen's conception of Dr. Stockmann as a vainglorious, stubborn man, gleeful in his role as the gadfly subverting the town's economic well-being, doesn't translate at all into Ganushatra.  Ray's conception of Dr. Gupta is simplified and schematic -- the doctor is a kindly, rational man of science who stands in opposition to the religious bigotry embodied by the pious pilgrims (and their institutional supporters).  Ibsen's play is powerful precisely because of its complications and cross-currents.  Everyone in the Norwegian's Enemy of the People acts in their own self-interest and Dr. Stockmann's pride and Schadenfreude hurls him into an otherwise avoidable confrontation with his fellow citizens, a conflict that a more temperate and less vain man could have avoided.  These themes are absent from Ray's much simplified, and, somewhat, cartoonish depiction of the conflict as enlightened science versus benighted religious fervor.  Ibsen's play supports different interpretations of the nature of the fundamental conflict that the work dramatizes:  on one dimension, Ibsen's Enemy of the People is about science and reason in opposition to ignorance, but the play also supports readings in which the conflict is between commerce versus public safety as well as the "democratic" mob versus the elite enlightened individual and, of course, the clash between truth and lies (in the case of both play and movie, the "fake news."  All of these interpretations, and others are valid approaches to Ibsen's play which authorizes many and largely parallel (that is, not mutually exclusive) readings.  By contrast, those who seek to "adapt" Ibsen's work generally end up selecting one of the various meanings embodied by the play and developing their work along those lines exclusively.  (Arthur Miller in his adaptation from 1950 made the play about the 'democratic" mob in conflict with lonely hero who must defend the Truth to the death -- his version of the play was written in the shadow of the McCarthy blacklist )  Ray wants the play to be about the darkness of religious superstition versus scientific enlightenment -- Ray is working in the context of an India desecrated by pollution and mass disaster as exemplifed by the Bhopal catastrophe.  Ray's film, accordingly, is considerably less effective and interesting than Ibsen's play -- at least as it is read and imagined by the reader.  (It may well be a director producing Ibsen's Enemy of the People might have to elect in favor of one of the piece's various meanings in order to produce a coherent version for the stage.)   Ibsen's work ends with the mob outside Dr. Stockmann's  house threatening its inhabitants and more rocks hurled through windows.  Ray pits one mob against another to contrive a happy ending.  The mob of Hindu fundmantalists in Ray's vision is opposed and thwarted by the mob of Leftist theater workers -- in Ray's account, the theater (or cinema) saves the day.    


Feud: Capote and the Swans

 FX's Capote and the Swans is an eight episode TV show (limited series) that is perversely entertaining; although remarkably crafted, with prestigious performers, and brilliantly written the series ultimately falls under the rubric of a "guilty pleasure."  It's scandal sheet stuff, manufactured from Schadenfreude -- gist of the show is that the wealthy, beautiful, and socially elite have feet of clay and that their  upper class world is as rotten with scandal and betrayal (or more so) as any other socio-economic milieu on which you might wish to focus.  There's an element of Nietzschean resenttiment  to the show:  it exposes the foibles of the super-rich and convinces us that these elegant folk who consort with Presidents and royalty are just as  bad as everyone else.  This is a rather primitive point arousing a rather primitive response of titillation, moral condemnation, and, in fact, consistent with the show's broad theme:  Truman Capote betrayed his intimate confidantes by writing salacious accounts of their misdeeds -- in other words, he tried to profit from gossip.  This same interest in gossip underlies our interest in the show --that is, the show embodies what it is about.  As a narrative, there's not much to the story -- everything the program wants to say is on full display in the show's first episode and, thereafter, The Swans, simply repeats itself, or, more interestingly, indulges in essay-like meditations on its themes.  The show isn't a cliffhanger and can't really advance beyond it's premises except for certain quasi-philosophical ruminations on issues of class, race, gender, and privilege.  With these caveats, I have to admit that I found the series compelling, although I'm a little ashamed of my interest.  That said, the people who made this limited series are operating at the top of their game --Gus van Sant directs brilliantly, and the show has an all-star cast of notable female stars including Naomi Watts. Chloe Sevigny, Demi Moore, Calista Flockhart and others.  Tom Holland who plays the squeaky-voiced, bitchy, and doomed protagonist, Truman Capote seems to me pretty much pitch-perfect.  (I recall seeing Capote on the Dick Cavett show and, also other late night TV talks shows -- my dad liked him and always made us watch those programs when Capote was on-air; for a straight kid from Minnesota, Capote was like some sort of apparition from another planet -- you couldn't believe your eyes and ears, but you also couldn't take your eyes off of him and found yourself straining to catch his every word.  He always hinted a levels of depravity that might even astound him -- and he seemed to be the most depraved thing on TV.  I have no idea what my father, a preacher's son from rural Nebraska,  really thought about him -- I assume he admired In Cold Blood and Capote's eccentric contribution to the Bogart movie, Beat the Devil, a movie that he liked.)

There's not much plot to Capote and the Swans.  The show's premise can be explained in a couple of sentences:  a brilliant homosexual writer amuses a group of Manhattan socialites and wins their trust; the writer is an alcoholic and self-destructive and he's suffering from writer's block so he decides to exploit his intimacy with the socialites (the Swans) by writing a tell-all story about their sexual peccadillos.  There is a limit to noblesse oblige and the Swans, who have been harmed by Capote's writing, a short story called La Cote Basque, vow to revenge themselves on the writer.  In a gross over-simplification of actual events, the Swans end up ruining Capote and hastening his demise.  All of this dramatized in the show's first episode and so there's no suspense and no narrative energy after the first  hour -- the last seven hours of the show are, in effect, variations on the themes established in the initial show.  This gives the program a certain Brechtian effect -- it's not suspenseful and we're asked to attend to how things happen as opposed to engaging with any sort of plot.  A summary of the first episode suffices to describe the whole thing:  shifting back and forth in time between 1955 and a few days before Capote's death in 1984, we see how Capote served as "court jester" for a group of wealthy women whom he seems to have both admired and despised.  The women form a hyper-exclusive clique that include Babe Paley, the wife of Bill Paley the head of CBS, Slim (Lady) Keith, Howard Hawk's former wife and a peer of the British Realm, Jackie Kennedy's sister, Lee Radizwell, and Johnny Carson's ex-spouse, Joanna Carson among several others.  These women have already cattily excluded from their coterie another lady alleged to have shot her wealthy husband and evaded justice for that crime.  The women exude money, privilege, and, even, culture -- Babe Paley is an important art collector.  Capote, who has become a drunk, is between projects -- he is famous for In Cold Blood, but he hasn't found anything new to engage his talents.  He's also quarreling with his boyfriend, Jack Dunphy.  At a gay bathhouse, Capote meets a demon -- a man who has a large family but is a sexual addict and is slumming in the steambath.  (This guy is filmed like a monster -- he's large, violent, and has huge ears that stick out from the side of his head in a way that make him look like hideous imitation of Mickey Mouse.)  After a meal with the Swans at the Cote Basque, an encounter in which the women mercilessly mock Capote's erotic obsession with this man, the writer gets very drunk and, because he's out of money, has to go home on the subway with his date.  The monster tells Capote (perhaps as revenge for his mistreatment at the hands of the Swans) that he should write and publish a story about them:  he tells Capote that "answered prayers" cause more tears than those prayers that are "unanswered", giving Capote the title to the book that he tried unsuccessfully to write during the last two decades of his life, a sort of In Cold Blood about the jet-set.  Capote follows this advice, publishes an indiscrete story, a sort of roman c clef in Esquire and the Swans band together to ruin him.  All of this is very juicy stuff:  the woman alleged to have shotgunned her husband to death commits suicide a few days before the story is printed and Capote is blamed for her death.  Babe Paley's husband is a serial philanderer and gets tricked into having sex with "Happy" Rockefeller (Norman Rockefeller's wife) who has vindictively planned the tryst for the period of her maximum menstrual flow -- not a subject usually depicted on prime-time TV.  This results to a gory mess in Babe Paley's bedroom, an outcome designed by Mrs. Rockefeller to humiliate Babe and her ex-lover.  Babe Paley, who adores Truman Capote, and, in fact, seems to love him -- he's a witty, captivating, and cultured alternative to her rather brutish husband -- confides this sordid tale to the writer (who comforts her with caresses and barbiturates washed down with vodka.)  Capote puts this anecdote in La Cote Basque, his short story, and a huge scandal ensues.  The Swans close ranks and determine that they will destroy Capote.  Of course, Capote is already on a downward spiral and will die nine years after the story is published.  Babe Paley has lung cancer and she dies, after painful chemotherapy and radiation treatments, in 1978.  The seven episodes following the first show are simply exercises in working out variations on the themes of self-destructiveness and betrayal dramatized at the very outset of the series.  Two episodes stand out in this context for their stylistic boldness.  The third episodes is a quasi-documentary account of Capote's celebrated "Black and White Ball" in 1966.  The show is shot in the style of the Maysle's brothers (in black and white as well and implies that Capote had a sexual affair with one of the filmmakers).  This is a very innovative episode although it's not successful and, in fact, I think is the dullest installment in the eight show program.  The problem with this highly stylized and brilliantly made episode is that it establishes that by 1966, nine years before the La Cote Basque events that Capote was a ruthless manipulator, that he was keen to set the Swans against one another and that he was profoundly and indecently treacherous -- so, then, why are the Swans so eager to share their most intimate secrets with him and, more pointedly, why are they surprised when he betrays them?  The fifth episode. involving efforts by James Baldwin to dry-out the horribly alcoholic Capote, plays like a sort of My Dinner with Andre -- it's essentially a long debate  (or possibly a dream) between the two men in which Baldwin asserts that the Swans are particularly vicious exemplars of racism and White Privilege and that they deserve the indignities that Capote's prose heaps upon them.  This show doesn't advance the action --- there's no action to advance -but it's fascinating and very compelling.  There's even a slight whiff of horror about the show:  Capote commissions a chef to kill a swan in Central Park which he has butchered and served to him.  (Even the longwinded show about the Black and White Ball features some startling sequences -- for instance, Capote who has a vexed relationship with his mother, hallucinates her presence at the Ball (it's an early instance of the DT's) and dances with her apparition that no one else can see.)  In the sixth episode, Capote dresses his female protegee for a fashion shoot with Richard Avedon.  The theme of the program is that Capote is trapped in the past, obedient to fifties' paradigms of glamor and style.  Working in Palm Springs, he meets a young man with whom he has an affair -- the encounters with the handsome young man, a blue collar HVAC repairman have the sizzle of a low-budget porno movie (handsome handyman with older customer).  The episode mines a vein of pathos intrinsic in the material:  Capote is aging, drunk, no longer beautiful or, even, presentable.  If  you live long enough,  you become a relic and this is the existential crisis developed in this TV essay.  The sixth episode doesn't advance the action with respect to the feud and feels like its superfluous, although rather affecting.  

Both Capote and Babe Paley die on-screen in the seventh installment.  This episode is not exactly a barrel of laughs, a bit mawkish, although undeniably (and, perhaps, inevitably) gripping -- in long form TV, you can't behold the death of characters that you have watched for six hours or more without some emotional reaction; if nothing else, mirror neurons are triggered.  Feud has literally nowhere to go after this episode (both its protagonists are dead) and, so, the coda  the eighth and final show, seems superfluous and misguided.  In this last episode, Capote struggles to remain sober, but mostly without success.  He desires forgiveness and writes a series of anecdotes in which a writer, a thinly veiled version of himself, atones for his past misconduct.  On a granular level, this episode is beautifully written but it's wholly unnecessary and, in fact, exists, more or less, to besmirch Capote's memory -- the anecdotes recounted in the show aren't particularly compelling and the samples of Capote's prose on display seem banal.  The show is out of steam and it has to reprise the hero's death, shown, more or less, in the same shot-by-shot sequence that we watched in the earlier seventh episode.  In this interpretation of events, Capote destroys his manuscript for Unanswered Prayers, the roman a clef on which he labored in the last years of his life.  The author's alarming mother makes another ghostly appearance; her hallucination encourages Truman to drink himself to death.  In a macabre coda to the coda, Sotheby's sells Capote's ashes to the highest bidder for $45,000, an unbelievably crass transaction which I understood actually occurred.    

Feud:  Capote and the Swans is a febrile improvisation on themes fully developed in its first two episodes -- the last six shows simply repeat with decreasing assurance material presented at the outset of the series.  The acting is tremendous and the direction, more or less, flawless.  The problem with the series is its writing.  On a line-by-line, scene-by-scene basis, Feud is brilliantly composed.  But there is no convincing narrative arc and the material, bitchy gossip about socialites, is too thin to support the show's length and complex flashback structure.  In effect, Feud is about a peculiar unrequited love affair between an unhappily married and frigid woman of enormous wealth and a lonely homosexual. Interesting subplots flare up, provide a few minutes of amusement, but, then, sink without a trace -- we would like to see more of the monstrous Jack O'Shea, Truman's boyfriend who urges him to write the fatal story about La Cote Basque -- I don't know if legal problems precluded a more complete development of this character; he appears in the first few shows and, then, simply vanishes.  Similarly, Truman adopts O'Shea's daughter as his protegee and spends a couple of shows squiring her around, introducing her to his influential New York friends -- but she drops out of the show also, appearing, I think, for a moment at the gruesome end of the last episode but this doesn't satisfy our interest in her, or, for that matter, the relationship.  As a last example, Capote gets embroiled in a lawsuit with Gore Vidal which he refuses to settle.  We see his lawyer remonstrating with him.  But this subplot melts away as well and we never learn exactly what happened to resolve this catfight -- a part of the show that suggests a whole other possible series:  Feud:  Capote v. Vidal.  I have the sense that legal exposure may have limited the show's flamboyance in its final episodes.  Nonetheless, I suppose one can recommend this program on its own terms -- the veneer of sophistication and literacy is applied to what is, in effect, a guilty pleasure, that is, a spectacle of mostly prurient and voyeuristic interest, a bit like the Real Housewives of Manhattan but with artistic pretentions.  If the trashy premise of the show is accepted, I think, Feud:  Capote v. the Swans is a success.  

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Fallen Leaves

 Holappa, a courtly blue-collar alcoholic in Aki Kaurismaki's Fallen Leaves (2023), says that he is depressed.  He explains that he is depressed because he drinks too much.  "But why do you drink so much?" a friend asks.  "Because I am depressed," Holappa says.  Fallen Leaves advances, by implication, two theories for why many people are isolated, lonely, and hopeless:  first, blue collar workers are the victims of oppressive social systems that flatten their emotional affect and keep them in a perpetual state of impoverished unhappiness; second, coercive social systems make the proletariat particularly protective of their personal dignity -- in many cases, it's all they have -- but this very defense mechanism tends to make them suspicious, unduly reticent and reserved, and, further, aggravates their social isolation.  And, then, of course, there's alcohol.  This resume, I'm afraid, may deter my readers from watching Fallen Leaves.  This would be unfortunate because this little film (only 82 minutes long) is a charming dead-pan comedy and well worth your attention.  The movie exemplifies a certain romantic stoicism that exists in the comedies of Charlie Chaplin (who is referenced in the film) and the quieter parts of Buster Keaton's movies.  Fallen Leaves doesn't aspire to much, but it achieves it's modest objectives -- it's a low-key inconsequential movie invested with a palpable sense of silence and melancholy.  Kaurismaki is a modest filmmaker who makes highly stylized, poetic movies about everyday people -- his work stands at the antipodes to cartoon super-hero movies that dominate the market and, also, it should be said big self-important prestige pictures like Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon.  On this spectrum, I have to admit that I prefer pictures like Fallen Leaves to the big-budget movies that I have mentioned.  Fallen Leaves is made with so little money that it can't even afford, it seems, a license to shoot on public transportation in Helsinki, the place where the picture takes place.  After a couple of early shots, obviously made on an actual bus or subway train, the movie shows its heroine shuttling to and from work in what appears to be a waiting room of some bureaucratic office -- shadows rhythmically sweep by the unseen window and we hear rails rattling under the location, but the image looks nothing like actual public transportation: it's brighter, better lit, and much more spacious.  Kaurismaki is so assured as a film maker that we simply accept the convention that he establishes with these shots without really questioning it.

As Shakespeare reminds us in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the "course of true love never did run smooth."  This is comically obvious in Fallen Leaves.  Holappa, a laborer, lives in a storage container with some emigrants from an Arabic-speaking nation.  The boss lets his workers live in the storage container, about six guys to the little room, as part of their compensation.  Ansa, a middle-aged woman, works in a grocery store where she is under surveillance on suspicion of theft by a burly co-worker; he looks like the Golem and is less expressive.  The characters meet at a surreal karaoke bar (in keeping with Kaurismaki's aesthetic, the place looks nothing at all like an actual karaoke place).  This is Finland and no one speaks much.  Holappa's buddy, a vain older man, sings -- he thinks he's so good that he deserves a record contract.  He tries to flirt with Ansa's friend, a dishwater blonde, but she mocks him for his age.  (People are too polite to point out that Holappa's friend is a terrible singer.)  In this scene, Ansa and Holappa exchange glances and are obviously interested in one another, but neither acts on this attraction.  The Karaoke bar exemplifies Kaurismaki's expressive, yet completely impassive style of film-making.  We see the bar from only a couple of angles:  a bartender stands motionless in front of shelving where liquor bottles are stacked; the bartender looks like an elderly biker with long grey hair and he seems incapable of motion and doesn't even turn his head to look at the karaoke singers.  The performers stand on a tiny stage and sing in full-frontal shots under a little garland of Christmas tree lights:  Kaurismaki didn't bother to license rights to any sort of actual karaoke video and, so, we have to accept that this is a karaoke place simply because people call it that.  The singers perform rather eclectic selections -- there are show tunes, straight-ahead and infectious rock and roll, and, finally, someone sings a Lied by Schubert.  Holappa who drinks all the time -- he has booze stashed all over the place where he works sandblasting rusted parts so they can be sold as new --  runs into Ansa a little later and asks her to go to a movie with him.  (They see Jim Jarmusch's The Dead don't Die, a zombie picture -- during the picture Ansa says that there are too many zombies for the cops to defeat them; after the show, she tells her date that "(she) has never laughed so hard in her life" although Kaurismaki doesn't show her, or any one in the movie, ever laughing.)  Ansa gives Holappa her phone number but he loses the little sheet of paper on which she has written the information.  She wants him to call, but, of course, he can't because he has lost the number and neglected to ask for her name.  Ansa gets fired from the supermarket for taking home expired food that would otherwise have to be thrown in the dumpster.  She is very poor and has to shut off her lights to conserve electricity.  But she's resourceful and, after working as a "kitchen assistant", gets a job doing heavy labor in a foundry.  Holappa injures himself on the sandblasting job and, because he is drunk, gets fired.  He goes to work at a construction site and has to stay in a sort of homeless shelter -- the bed in his room is comically short given his lanky build (this is the kind of gag you would see in a Keaton or Chaplin movie but it's so understated that it doesn't register as funny.) He also drinks on this job and gets fired again.

When Ansa's job as a kitchen assistant ends -- the boss is fired for drug dealing -- Ansa and Holuppa meet -- offscreen we hear a brawl between the crooked boss and the cops who are arresting him; this is also characteristic of Kaurismaki's style -- dramatic events are implied but not shown.  Holappa goes to the Ritz Theater, a repertoire place, and spends hours chainsmoking and waiting for Ansa to appear.  Finally, she shows up and, after some guarded remarks, invites Holappa to come to  her house for supper.  (She has to buy two Dollar Store plates and a couple forks since she has been eating nothing but microwaved food from its store containers up to this point in the film.)  Holappa's jacket is wrecked and he has to borrow a coat from another homeless man.  At Ansa's house, Holappa wants to get drunk.  Ansa tells him that her father and brother died from alcoholism and she will not tolerate drinking in her home.  Holappa says that she can't boss him and stalks out of the house.  After awhile, Holappa gets sober and calls Ansa.  By this time, Ansa has acquired a dog, a mutt that was hanging around the foundry and half-starved.  Ansa agrees to see Holappa and he says he will come right over to her flat.  But on the way, he gets run over by a train.  (I kid you not.)  After being stood-up, Ansa learns that Holappa is in the hospital in a medically induced coma.  She visits him with her dog.  (Although I don't trust Kaurismaki's realism on this point, the film suggests that mutts are welcome in Finnish hospitals.)  Ansa reads to the unconscious Holappa.  When he revives after a few weeks, the two of them depart the hospital together.  She strides purposefully across a big park strewn with fallen leaves, walking very quickly so that poor Holappa, who is on crutches, can scarcely keep up with her.  The dog, named "Chaplin", trots alongside.  

Kaurismaki's touch is very light and his staging minimalist.  The film looks like a combination of Jim Jarmusch's Strangers in Paradise and some of Ozu's later pictures -- there is a stylistic disposition to film characters in full frontal shots and the movie has a ravishing sequence of so-called "empty frames" that is, shots of objects and landscapes without people that establish a sense of anomie and melancholy, lacrimae rerum, the tears of things.  The film features fragments of rapturous classical music, for instance, Tchaikovsky's Sixth symphony, pop songs including a Finnish version of a Gordon Lightfoot standard, that comment on the action.  The colors in the movie are precisely calibrated with Ansa's red garments a focal point.  The movie posters at the Ritz provide commentary on the action -- for instance, we see a poster advertising David Lean's Brief Encounter just before the couple are separated and can't re-connect.  (This is the kind of picture in which you suspect that the hangdog figures at the margins of the movie are all drinking buddies of Kaurismaki; at the Ritz, two dorky cinephiles comes out of theater and compare some unnamed picture to Godard  -- one guy says the movie reminds him of Pierrot le Fou, the other says "No, it was more like A Band a Parte.")  This is very precisely made, mindful and intentional movie in which every effect, or absence of effect, is exactly calibrated.  There's only one kiss in the movie; Ansa tries to kiss Holuppa but he's too tall and their lips miss one another.  (There are several production companies in the world of cinema that have appealing and distinctive names:  I like Spike Lee's Forty Acres and a Mule and Kaurismaki's Sputnik Oy.) 

Saturday, February 24, 2024

The Tourist

The Tourist is an Australian six episode thriller.  It's fun but inconsequential.  My notes on this show, appearing on Netflix, are intended to draw a contrast with the bombastic, pretentious, and confusing True Detective (Night Country).  

There's certainly nothing particularly remarkable about The Tourist; it doesn't stretch any boundaries and aspires to nothing other than to be a solid work of genre filmmaking.  There are no political messages encoded in the series -- it's moral principle is that kindness, courage, and loyalty are better than cruelty and betrayal.  Most effective genre works of this kind have a similar message.  The show's objective is to tell a conventional story with broad appeal.  When this sort of thing is done effectively and with panache, the result is sufficiently entertaining that the viewer stays engaged for the entire six hours and, in fact, even looks forward to each successive installments of the story.  The Tourist is easy in that the viewer isn't constantly fighting the narrative, fly-specking it for incongruities and absurdities; likeable characters and well-choreographed and plausible action sequences urge the narrative forward and, although the show has some flaws, they aren't enough to embitter the viewer.  The audience victims of Night Country were alternately hectored and insulted; the narrative was configured to make various ideologically motivated points, most of which, on inspection, were racist (the show was insulated from criticism because written and produced by a woman and, apparently, endorsed by the indigenous people represented in the program) -- if a White writer and director had "appropriated" the True Detective narrative that relies heavily on cliches about Arctic tribal people, the show would have been universally denounced.  The viewers of Night Country were also insulted by a plot that was told in a convoluted, perverse manner leaving numerous loose ends unresolved and rife with absurdities and blatantly ridiculous plot points.  The Tourist has a shapely, if well-trodden narrative -- the classic double-chase in an exotic and desolate setting -- and, because the audience sympathizes with the protagonists, the show holds the attention of its viewers.

A man is involved in a violent road-rage incident in the middle of "Whoop-Whoop",  Australian slang for the utterly empty desert of the Australian outback.  The man is injured in a collision caused by a semi-truck that has been driven to force him off the road.  He wakes up in a hospital in an outback hamlet with no idea who he is or how he got into this predicament -- the hero, called Eliot as we later know, is played by an Irishman, Jamie Dornan, who gives a well-tempered and appealing performance.  The man is fantastically handsome and appealing to women, but he has no idea how he had come to be injured in the remote outback.  A female constable, a chubby girl with an overbearing boyfriend/fiancee is enlisted to investigate the case -- she is completely inexperienced but a hard-worker and she's willing to take some risks to try to solve the mystery.  A killer with an American accent wearing a big cowboy hat and boots with curled toes comes to murder the hero in the hospital.  He escapes but only in the nick of time.  In Sydney, a famous inspector, who is dying of some kind of cancer, is dispatched to the Outback to capture Eliot.  At the same time, a Greek drug smuggler flies to Australia.  He has some kind of mysterious connection to Eliot and it's apparent that the hero used to be employed by the Greek -- apparently, as an accountant.  There's a bag of money, a poor bastard buried alive in a 55 gallon drum, and a series of car chases and shoot-outs that take place in vast, empty, and beautiful outback.  The show is carefully calibrated as to location and the events take place against a picturesque backdrop generally shown by beautiful, if standard issue, drone shots -- after a couple episodes, we come to recognize the aerial shots of the various places in which the story takes place.  The Hitchcockian double-chase involves Eliot pursued by the police for complicity in a homicide and the Greek criminal, a psychotic monster of cruelty, who is also chasing the hero.  The chubby girl is allied with Eliot and tries to protect him.  There's another woman who seems to have once been Eliot's girlfriend, a more conventionally beautiful girl, who is also involved in the action -- sometimes, she seems to want to kill Eliot; other times, she acts seductively and desires to renew their romance.  Everyone has secret agendas and, at one point or another, each of the main characters are taken hostage and menaced by the others. Everything is effectively juggled up to a convincing, if complex denouement

The Tourist's strong points are its interesting setting in small hamlets and dusty highways in the Outback.  There's never any traffic on these roads; you could picnic in the center of them -- we know this terrain a little from the Mad Max movies, although this part of Australia seems more varied: it has wooded hills, long stately ridges and, of course, lots of desert.  The climax is set at a place called the Nala Stone Men, big cairns of rock that look vaguely like human beings -- they have the appearance of similar cairns built by tribal people in the Arctic.  This is an impressive location for the final two episodes where things unexpectedly veer into the surreal and psychedelic.  There's obvious sexual chemistry between the leading characters; the plot involving the chubby female cop's involvement with the hunky hero has a classic wish fulfillment aspect and, I think, will be intensely appealing to most viewers.  The protagonists are complicated, fully rounded human beings that are neither wholly good nor wholly evil.  A good example of the show's fair-minded approach is the way that it treats fat cop's fiancee -- the man would be a grotesque in most versions of this story, but, in fact, the part is well-written and even sympathetically developed.  The story telling is crisp and the locations seem authentic (unlike True Detective which had Iceland stand in for the Alaskan Arctic).  The exposition of plot points is ingenious, indeed, to a fault.

This last aspect brings me to the criticisms that might be made of this show.  The complicated enigmas in the plot have to be worked-out in several long expository scenes.  To keep this from becoming too obvious or tedious, the hero's recollection of his past occurs during a long series of scenes in which he is hallucinating on LSD.  This is exceedingly clever in that plot points are made in a dream-like, elliptical manner, thereby, softening the effect of the exposition and involving the viewer in solving the mystery.  But this sequence is showy in its own right, goes on too long, and, also, seems implausible -- is LSD really an aid to memory?  Here the show's ingenuity, I think, works against it -- although the program does present an interesting solution to the plot problem of making an explanation sufficient to unravel some of the show's mysteries.  (This was also a big problem for Night Country:  True Detective in which long sequences had to be devoted to implausibly explaining various supernatural enigmas in the story.)  There's also a Sixth Sense subplot in The Tourist that seems unnecessary, although it is also thought-provoking and interesting. 

The second season of The Tourist airs on Thursday, February 29, 2024 and I will certainly watch.  Australian customs and standards for TV apparently requires that everyone wear seatbelts when riding in a car.  Most of the show's action takes place in vehicles of various kinds and, so, it seems that about a fifth of the program involves carefully observed shots in which characters buckle-up for the ride. 

Monday, February 19, 2024

True Detective (Night Country -- Series 4)

Spoiler alert:

An international team of scientists is working at a station in Alaska far north of the Arctic Circle.  The scientists have unlocked a "microbe in the perma-frost that can save the world."  There's only one catch:  to activate and isolate this microbe, the scientists must use a process that contaminates the water in the nearby Inupiaq communities, resulting in cancers and still-births.  A group of Native women work as janitors at the secret laboratory; one of them discovers that the pollution destroying her people originates at the high-tech ultra-modern station.  The scientists, including her boyfriend, murder her and, apparently, conceal her corpse in an ice-cave connected to the laboratory by a hidden passageway.  The dead woman apparently comes to life again in the ice-cave and manages to record her second, or possibly third, death on her cell-phone.  Then, a corrupt cop moves the corpse, neglecting, however, to deep-six the incriminating cell-phone video which later surfaces, inexplicably left, I think, in some sort of abandoned shack.  The other maintenance workers learn that their sister has been murdered and, armed with hunting rifles, raid the laboratory, herd the scientists out on the floe ice, strip them naked, and let the men freeze to death.  (The show condones and applauds this mass-murder:  there are eight scientists killed in this way although one somehow escapes, hides in a sea-bottom dredger, and haunts the action until he's caught, and, then, murdered by the corrupt cop who is, in turn, killed by a head-shot by his own son who is protecting a virtuous chief of police played by Jodie Foster.)  The solution to the mystery that I have now spoiled for you by this explanation is laboriously (and tediously) worked-out by two neurotic and border-line hysterical law enforcement officers, the local chief of police for the town of Ennis where most of the action takes place (Liz -- Jodie Foster) and a State Highway patrolwoman, Evangeline Navarro (played by the professional boxer Kali Reis).  Evangeline, like Liz, is mentally ill -- she suffers from PTSD as a result of combat experiences, witnessed her mother's murder as a result of domestic abuse and takes the case involving a "missing and murdered indigenous woman" personally.  She may also be traumatized as a result of being told by the ghost of her mother (who is hanging around on the battlefields of Iraq for some reason) that her indigenous name is Sucks-a-numchuck.  Navarro has frequent hallucinations, most of them, it seems, derived from other Netflix and cable TV horror shows (and derived in turn from Japanese horror movies like The Ring):  these visions involve mutilated corpses with white eyes and stringy long hair pointing as they howl vengefully.  The  two women are bound together by their complicity in another murder:  Navarro offed a handcuffed villain, a perpetrator of domestic abuse, in the presence of Liz, the two of them staging the homicide to look like a suicide.  This summary presents the tale in chronological fashion -- of course, the show scrambles the narrative and is afflicted by dozens of flashbacks usually grim sequences involving mayhem or grief.  Liz's baby son was killed in a car crash and she's become a sort of zombie, carrying around a stuffed polar bear that represents her little boy and ferociously demanding sex on occasion from the hapless older cop who seems to be her fuck-buddy.  (Navarro has a bearish boyfriend whom she sometimes rapes as well.)  In my review, I have made the plot seem relatively clear.  But, as dramatized, the story is totally obscure, involving all sorts of unresolved mysteries -- for instance, the action is triggered by the discovery of severed tongue on the laboratory floor (this is a reference to the amputated ear in Lynch's Blue Velvet) -- at the end of the show, someone acknowledges that no one cut out the dead woman's tongue and that, therefore, no explanation exists for the sudden appearance of this grisly relic.  Night Country is full of absurdities that would be laughable if they weren't so tedious:  a woman commits suicide (there are lots of suicides in the show) by walking into the icy ocean in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a month of darkness when the sun is hiding somewhere in the Arctic winter.  But the suicide is immediately discovered by the Coast Guard and conveniently announced by radio.  The natives can assemble when needed on the basis of the "Mukluk telegraph" -- that is, the Eskimo version of "hearing it on the grapevine."  But, when the plot requires people to remain ignorant of story developments, the "Mukluk telegraph" inexplicably goes silent.  In one idiotic scene, Liz needs to gather some clues and so she throws some kind of bioluminescent fluid on a hatch cover, barking out "get me a UV light."  Fortunately, like the fluid, a UV light just happens to be within arm's reach so a hand print can be visualized glowing on the metal.  Exactly how Liz deciphers the meaning of the handprint  how she figures out to whom it belongs is left completely unexplained.  The series' central mystery, involving a "corpsicle" -- that is, dead bodies frozen into contorted positions and all interlocked like some kind of Arctic Laocoon -- is never really explained.  At one point, someone claims that the grotesque and macabre artifact is the result of a "slab avalanche" -- exactly what this is supposed to mean is never explicated.  And, in fact, the show wants to have it both ways:  there's supposed to be a natural explanation for all the apparitions and supernatural enigmas, but the show, also, suggests that mystical and malevolent supernatural forces are also at work.  The result of this ambiguity is that neither the supernatural nor the rational explanations make any sense -- they just contradict one another and the viewer is left with a gruesome mess, a grisly melange that is like the frozen corpses, inert and impossible to decipher.  (On the basis of various specious explanations, the "corpsicle" is kept in a local hockey arena in the Arctic village, a spectacle that is presumably open to the public as the mutilated corpses gradually thaw while tormented characters mutter and jawbone over their bodies.)

There's nothing in the show that is even remotely original.  Everything has been done in other TV shows and films with much more authority and coherence.  For instance, the opening scene involving a Inupiaq hunter, a sort of Nanook of the North, shooting at caribou as the sun is about to set for the next month of darkness, is derived from initial sequences in John Carpenter's The Thing; the "corpsicle" is also an artifact cribbed from that film.  Every lame cliche imaginable about Arctic tribal people is dusted off and trotted out.  About every second episode someone (or some several) have to go into a haunted house.  Of course, the explorers of the haunted house can't turn on the lights and the Arctic winds are howling outside and tour heroines always separate so that they can each encounter the monsters lurking in the place each alone.  Haunted houses in the show include a haunted sea-dredge, a haunted ice cave, several eerie and abandoned shacks, and, of course, the haunted research station itself which looks like the setting of The Thing, a series of corridors and laboratories that is always dark, chilly, and full of hidden menace.  The show even shamelessly steals the "flattened time loop" theory from True Detective's first series, a digression, if I recall correctly, based on Nietzsche's idea of the eternal re-occurrence of the same, although dumbed-down for nitwits. Major revelations to Evangeline occur on the smoky desert battlefields of Iraq (or Afghanistan) where the poor woman consorts with gruesomely mutilated revenants.   

Night Country is a misfire.  It's surprising to see a post-George Floyd show featuring cops who torture people, murder them at will, and, then, lie under oath about mass murder -- all of this misconduct is supposed to be justified because the officers are portrayed as righteous, mostly, it seems, because of their exorbitant suffering and mental illness.  (I don't think these sorts of defenses would have availed Derek Chauvin.)  It's as if Dirty Harry were to justify his depredations by some hard knocks in his child hood. The program is vastly more incoherent and confusing than this review suggests and it would take pages to list the various plot developments that make no sense at all.  Faulkner, who was one of the writers on The Big Sleep, admitted that he had no idea who had committed one of the murders important to the plot of that film noir classic.  So, certainly, it's possible to make a sprightly and amusing crime show with so many twists and turns that the story can't really be reliably deciphered.  But The Big Sleep features Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall supported by a number of fine character actors in eccentric roles and, ultimately, the movie is witty, has some good hard-boiled lines, and doesn't wallow in misery.  By contrast, the equally incomprehensible Night Country goes on for six hours with dialogue consisting primarily of ominous, if meaningless, portents -- "we're all going to enter the night country now!" someone declare as if this makes sense.  The supporting characters in the show, for instance, the doughty pioneer woman Rose, play parts that are either completely gratuitous or rife with implications that the narrative never takes the time to explain:  why is Rose also haunted by a barefoot ghost?  who is he?  why is she expert at disposing of corpses in the icy sea water? why is she shown to be cleaning a long gun in the last episode, a weapon that is ostentatiously portrayed but never used.  Jodie Foster acts her heart out, in some shots displaying four or five emotions in quick succession or, even, simultaneously, but the part is derivative and poorly written.  Kali Reis is monotonously grim and violent; she just scowls at everyone.  

It's unfair to pummel this 60 million dollar production with reference to a far better story by Arthur Conan Doyle that has the same structure, the famous novella The Hound of the Baskervilles.  A demonic dog, acting according to an ancestral curse, kills people at a remote country estate.  Two detectives, Holmes and his sidekick, Watson, investigate the case and, ultimately, reveal a non-supernatural explanation for the apparently ghostly homicides.  This is similar to the Arctic moors in Night Country, the herds of ghosts and revenants haunting the place and the gruesome killings that have to be solved by Liz and Evangeline.  But the Hound of the Baskervilles is a classic, makes sense and remains entertaining to this day.  There's been a lot of controversy on the Internet about Night Country -- the show has been recruited for both sides of the culture wars:  some claim the series is too "woke" with its lesbian characters, pervasive themes involving domestic abuse and its endorsement of violence by Native peoples to protect their rights.  Some commentators explain the distaste for the show by the franchise creator Nic Pizolatto as evidence of his sexism or even racism.  When a program fails on its merits, Internet advertising tries to create a buzz about the show on the basis of polemical pros and cons that are claimed to have political significance; it's a highly "meta" approach to marketing -- if the product is no good, attack those who point out that it's no good on the basis of their supposedly revanchist politics.  (The same approach was used to create specious controversy about the very dull and inept movie Barbie -- liking the movie was a kind of virtue signaling against the reactionary political forces supposedly directed against the film.)  You can pretty much identify a turkey today by the amount of controversy that internet pundits labor to create about criticism of a show.  The more controversy, the less likely that the show or movie is any good. After the furor dies down, the fourth series of True Detective (Night Country) will be totally forgotten.

Issa Lopez wrote most of the episodes of Night Country and directed all six shows. 



 

Sunday, February 18, 2024

How Green was my Valley

 In John Ford's 1941 How Green was my Valley, there is a startling disconnect between the film's elegiac tone, wistful, melancholy, and romantic, and the rather stark series of tragedies that make up the picture's plot.  Ford invites us to feel nostalgia for a way of life that is shown to be cruel, isolated, and impoverished.  There is something similar at work in Ford's Westerns (the 1941 Oscar-winning film is set in a coal-mining village is Wales) but the ultimate emotional effect is different.  In pictures like My Darling Clementine and She wore a Yellow Ribbon, Ford celebrates tightly knit communities isolated by the deserts and mountains of the American southwest.  Terrible things happen in these movies but the doom or tragedy that hovers over How Green was my Valley is avoided by our sense that everything turned out for the best in the end -- the West was settled, civilization prevailed, women tamed the brutish outlaws and ranchers, the noble but unpredictably violent Indians were defeated; as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, gunmen and desperadoes gave way to lawyers and school marms and journalists. In America, at least, we in the audience are evidence that there was a happy ending to the events chronicled in these films.  Ford can't supply this happy ending in How Green was my Valley and, so, the viewer leaves the movie with a sense of terrible, pointless loss.  Obviously, audiences originally responded to the movie's apparently warm-hearted nostalgia, but an account of what actually occurs in the film will belie the notion that the picture is cheerful or happy in any way.

A village in the mountains of Wales supports a coal factory that seems to be the only enterprise (except for a church and a pub, The Three Pennies) in the town.  (This is similar to Ford's isolated ranches in Monument Valley and his frontier cavalry posts and hamlets -- usually characterized by a saloon, a grave-yard, and a clapboard church.)  The people in the town seem to be satisfied with their lot in life as epitomized by the Morgan family, the focus of the film .  The Morgan's consist of five stalwart brothers who labor alongside their father in the colliery, a beautiful adult daughter, and a small boy, the baby of the family, played brilliantly by the young Roddy McDowell as "Hue."  The family's religious and worn-out mother provides this clan with huge roast beef suppers and everyone eats well; although a family this large crammed into a row-house a few hundred yards from a purgatorial coal pit would likely be living in squalor, Ford shows clean spacious interiors, plenty of room for feasting and bible-reading and joshing around.  But, after a brief idyllic introduction, overlaid with scrumptious and poetic narration from the 1939 source novel, verse spoken in terms of remembrance of things past, things begin to go badly wrong.

The owners of the coal mine reduce workers wages arbitrarily.  This leads to the sons, who are firebrands, planning to form a Union.  But the father, played by Donald Crisp, opposes unions as "socialism" and tensions threaten to tear the family apart.  Two of the boys depart for America, despairing of a any sort of equity in the village.  When the father continues to oppose the Union, violence erupts and brickbats are thrown through the windows of the Morgan home.  The mother with Hue in tow attend a Union meeting in a driving snowstorm.  The mother fiercely says that if anyone harms her family she will kill the perpetrator "with (her) own two hands."  On the way home, however, she and Hue somehow fall through the ice in a creek and are left wallowing in the icy water for several hours.  Both mother and the little boy are badly hurt and the doctor says that Hue's legs, "frozen to the bone," will be paralyzed.  (The prediction turns out wrong and Hue gradually learns to walk again, encouraged by the local pastor.)  The labor unrest is finally brought to an end by the kindly preacher, Mr. Griffins, who endorses the Union as long as it plays by the rules.  The preacher is in love with the adult daughter in the family (Maureen O'Sullivan) and she requites the affection.  But, after the the strike is settled, the owner of the mine, Mr. Evans, sends his son to court the young woman who is the town beauty.  She marries Evans' son and departs for South Africa, blighting both her life and the pastor's romantic hopes.  One of the sons is killed in a mine accident.  Hue, who is a clever boy (and a surrogate for the author of the novel) does well in school, with the help of the preacher studies for exams, and is admitted to a nearby "National School".  Here the little boy is brutalized by bullies and savagely beaten by the fey, sadistic schoolmaster who despises him as "as coal vermin."  Hue is taught by a local pugilist to box and defeats the bully but, then, gets flogged by the schoolmaster until "the flesh is ripped from the bone."  The pugilist and one of his buddies then beat the schoolmaster senseless and leave him for dead in his classroom.  Hue, despite his intelligence, decides to follow the family tradition and goes to work in the infernal-looking black hole of the mine.  (The other two brothers have departed for Canada and New Zealand).  The family's sister returns  from South Africa as a rich, but miserable.  She understands that she has ruined her life by marrying the son of the colliery's owner.  She is apparently divorced, although this information leaks out only gradually to the complete horror and Schadenfreude of the local gossips (who seem to comprise the entire female cohort in the village).  Rumors about the sister lead to more strife and fist-fights.  There's a cave-in and explosion at the mine and the father is crushed to death in the debris.  His son, Hue, the pugilist who is now blind, a few other heroes search through the frightening flooded mine-shaft to discover the old man pinned in the wreckage -- this is a spectacular sequence filmed in the florid style of silent cinema.  The corpse is lifted out of the pit with other bodies on the elevator that serves as a visual motif through the film. And, on this note, the movie ends.  As if to underscore, the unhappiness that we have witnessed, Ford ends with a montage of the family together at a meal, then, the daughter courting the kindly preacher, and, at last, Mr. Morgan, the father, and little Hue strolling through a flowery meadow.  But we know that the meadow no longer exists; the slag heaps now have destroyed the valley.  (The movie, apparently, dilutes considerably the novel's pro-Union and socialist subject matter.)

The film is extremely beautiful and carefully constructed.  The set, a fish-hook shaped lane ascending a  hill on which a Golgotha of colliery works is silhouetted against the sky, is one of Hollywood's greatest creations -- the row-houses and the curving street are all beautifully depicted and the mine smoke against the sky lend a dramatic aspect to the vista.  The row-houses all have their own small yards, enclosed by white picket fences shown in perspective.  The visual aspect of the film often invokes D. W. Griffith -- pictorial space is clearly defined, rhyming shots establish place, usually in tableaux from the same perspective, and the interiors are all spacious, luminous with light, each household item where it is supposed to be, often outlined (or underlined) by shadow. (The impression that Griffith underlies many of the epic shots is strengthened by the fact that the father is played by Donald Crisp, a stalwart in the Old Master's movies -- he played the vicious brute "Battling Burrows" who beats Lillian Gish to death in the 1919 Broken Blossoms.) Everything in the picture is clean and tidy.  The platoons of coal-blackened men trudging along the lanes are like the workers in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, automatons in an industrial army.  There are innumerable pictorial effects -- for instance, when the daughter is unhappily married to the rich man's son, she wears a long white veil that balloons out above and behind her like baroque wings.  Everyone is always singing.  When the town's choir is invited to sing for the Queen, we see the men standing on stone risers, performing a chorale while the camera tracks discreetly to the side, showing the last two adult sons leaving town to go abroad, shadowy figures vanishing down the gloomy street.  A woman who has had an illegitimate child is accused by the hypocritical church deacon whose trembling, pointing figure is shot in huge close-up at the center of the screen.  In some scenes involving the strike and labor unrest, Ford imitates Eisenstein, showing us friezes of marching men, tilted upward by the sharp ascent to the colliery on the hilltop.  Music of all sorts abounds-- the narrator in his voice-over tells us that "song was in the hearts of the people like sight is in their eyes."  It's a spectacularly beautiful movie, exquisitely shot and imagined.  And it's certainly "adult" in ways more challenging and alien than many contemporary movies.  The viewer expects that the beautiful daughter will somehow be reunited with her lost love, Mr. Griffiths.  But this doesn't happen.  Griffiths gives a bitter speech about the small-mindedness and bigotry in the village, accuses himself of having failed to teach anyone the gospel, and, then, departs forever.  Presumably, the daughter will live out the remainder of her life, embittered and solitary, trapped in the big white house on the hill.  The lyric tone of the film -- it is intensely poetic -- doesn't match the parade of horrors that we have been shown.   

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Helen of Troy

 Strangely bland and uninteresting, Robert Wise's Helen of Troy (1956) has some good ingredients but they are combined in a way that makes the whole far less than the sum of its parts.  You can count the compelling shots on one hand -- there's a fine image of the Trojan horse amidst smoke, fire, and orange-black chiaroscuro; a couple of pictures of triremes plying the deep are memorable; there's an odd landscape near the beginning of the movie comprised of low cliffs topped with strange-shaped bulbous trees, and, in one love scene, the blonde sleek heads of Paris and Helen rotate mechanically about the pivot of their lips creating an interesting and metallic effect of gold on gold.  The sets are imposing although the matte work is pretty evident -- you can guess where the seam between the fortified city painted on glass and the actual photographic image. combine.  Some chariot sequences, filmed with unwieldy-looking bronze carts, are marred by terrible rear-projection.  The acting is uniformly wooden.  Helen, played by the Italian glamor girl Rosana Podesta, didn't speak any English and so she recites her lines mechanically -- she learned the part phonetically.  The script is middle brow and, therefore, doesn't really appeal to anyone.  The film isn't tawdry, but rather staid and solemn (it comes equipped with an eight minute overture by Max Steiner played to the accompaniment of a painted image of Doric columns and some sort of strange stanchion -- Steiner's music sounds like a mixture of Rachmaninoff and Debussy; it's okay but not memorable.)  The movie's script also falls between stools -- at times, the picture is sophisticated, requiring a working knowledge of Homer's Iliad and parts of the Odyssey; there are several allusions even to the thesis that Helen never went to Troy and that it was her eidolon (or "image") that stirred up all the trouble in the Eastern Mediterranean.  The movie depicts the Homeric-era Greeks as freebooters and pirates, a realistic approach to this material -- Odysseus in particular is little more than a vicious pirate as portrayed in the Odyssey  But this material subverts other aspects of the epic.  We are supposed to admire Paris, the Trojan responsible Helen's abduction, but this also cuts against the grain of the Iliad which is primarily about Greek (Achaian) heroes.  Most of the time, the characters speak in a sort of fortune-cookie diction, uttering quasi-poetic aphorisms -- the dialogue is too "poetic" for the popcorn crowd and too vulgar for those who know the source material.  The substance of the plot, an extra-marital love affair with tumultuous results, is pretty racy for 1955, and so has to be denatured into a series of winks and nods -- the adultery between Paris and Helen of Sparta is portrayed as basically accidental.  No one really has any culpability here.  This approach to the story could be managed if the gods were admitted into the epic.  But the gods, who in Homer control everything and even insert their thoughts into the minds the characters, are completely excluded from the narrative.  Thus, the defense that "some god" made me do this act -- a motif ubiquitous in Homer doesn't appear even by implication in this stolid and unimaginative rendition of the story.  

The movie starts in Troy, visualized as big city something on the model of Babylon in Griffith's Intolerance -- it has huge walls that are sixty feet high, vast temples and palaces, and acres of ornate buildings (painted on the camera-lens glass).  (I've been to Troy -- it's a couple of acres of knee-high ruins and broken crockery on a wind-swept bluff-top; I can't imagine the place ever looking like the images in the movie but this is probably a defect in my understanding.)  Paris is a devotee to the goddess Aphrodite; strangely enough, Pallas Athena is depicted as a scowling, witch-like war goddess -- something that seriously falsifies the Homeric text.  (We see Paris mooning about in city council chambers decorated with triple life-size monochrome statues of Aphrodite and Athena -- real Hellenic statues, of course, were polychrome with painted pink flesh and gemstone eyes.)  The backstory is weird but no doubt based on one of the lesser-known Homeric hymns.  The Greeks destroyed Troy once but it has been rebuilt into something called "New Troy".  Paris leads a delegation of Trojans to Menelaus' Sparta in an effort to establish a treaty with the Greek principalities -- the Greeks have been engaged in piracy on the high seas.  A tempest at sea intervenes and only Paris survives, washing up on shore like Odysseus in the Nausicaa episode in the Odyssey.  He is found by Helen, unhappily married to the belligerent Menelaus, and Helen's slave, Andraste (played by a young, winsome and innocent-looking Brigitte Bardot -- here she is a healthy strapping maiden ten years before her ascent into international stardom as a rather depraved-looking sex symbol).  Paris and Helen fall in love.  The Spartans catch them in a tryst and the couple have to escape by jumping off a sea-cliff and, then, being rescued by Phoenicians while the Greeks haplessly shoot arrows at them.  Helen wants to go to an idyllic island called Pelasgius as a sort of romantic retreat but the dutiful Paris has to go home to Troy -- so Helen agrees to accompany him.  Helen is, as they say, "liked but not well-liked" in Troy and her reputation suffers further when the Greeks appear in the  harbor with a thousand ships -- this is a pretty effective shot.  There's a big initial battle in which the Greeks are repelled although they do briefly breach the city -- this is the movie's big battle scene involving seventy-foot high ladders, lots of fire, and burning siege towers.  Everyone settles in for the ten-year duration of the war.  We are shown little snippets of the Iliad:  Achilles wrath at being denied Brisius, the captive slave, some skirmishes and, finally, Achilles dispatching Hector after the death of Patroclus; Achilles drags Hector's corpse around in some tight circles in front of the horrified Trojans.  By this point, Helen has been accepted as a citizen of the city.  Odysseus contrives the plot to sack the city using the Trojan horse.  (Helen says "beware Greeks bearing gifts" and Cassandra bleats out some sinister oracles.)  The Trojans drag the big wooden horse into the city and, then, have a giant orgy, complete with girls squirting wine into the mouths of their lovers, all this activity taking place right under the belly of the horse.  When the Trojans are all hungover, the ungentlemanly Greeks emerge, slaughter the bemused and mostly naked Trojans and yank open their city gates.  Ten-thousand Greeks storm into the citadel and kill everyone.  At the end of the movie, poor Helen is shipboard with her doughty, dim-witted husband Menelaus, heading back to Sparta.  Paris has been lanced in the back and, after some tender kissing, lies dead in the streets of the ruined city.  In a voice-over, we hear Helen bemoaning her fate but remarking that Paris will always be with her -- at least in her thoughts -- and that they will be re-united after death in Elysium.  

Robert Wise, after a strong start (he edited The Magnificent Ambersons and directed several brilliant films produced by Val Lewton during World War Two) had the singular skill of making everything that he touched dull.  He would have sank West Side Story except for Leonard Bernstein's score and managed to wreck The Sound of Music, also a picture with a fantastic musical soundtrack.)  The  1956 film is shot in big scale Cinemascope but Wise has no idea how to position the camera or use the broad aspect ratio -- the images are almost completely inert.  In the big battle scenes, Wise wants to show the audience the money and so he keeps the camera a long way from the action to capture huge masses of men and chariots swarming across the screen.  These shots are uninteresting, however, because Wise doesn't know how to insert details into the action -- it all looks remote and antiseptic.  Homer's epics are claustrophobic -- most scenes involve two or three participants in a sort of god-lit glowing enclosed space.  Even Homer's big action scenes have the effect of intimacy -- we see a few people in action but the rest of the image is empty or shown in close focus.  (This is a result of Homer's famous enargia, that is, his immediacy which as Erich Auerbach noted casts everything into the foreground.)  Wise' s approach is the opposite -- everything seems a long way from the camera.  Helen is attractive but not sexually imposing -- she's pretty and her clothes fit her well, but she doesn't have any particular charisma; simply put, she's no Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor (or, for that matter, Brigitte Bardot); Paris, played by Jacques Sernas has a oddly shaped head -- it's a sort of truncated triangle, huge at the top but bending inward to his rock-hewn square jaw. He looks pretty ridiculous and the love scenes between the couple have a automated effect; they are robotic and risible.