175: Performance

There are some things in life that I just can’t explain; things like biochemistry, astrophysics, the Dow Jones Industrial, and (to my wife) the legitimacy of the in-field fly rule.  Seeing movies like Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance (1970) makes me realize that I’ll never be able to explain the late sixties/early seventies to anyone either.  I wasn’t there.  It was before my time, and seeing films like this almost makes me grateful.  That’s not to say that this is a bad movie, quite the opposite indeed, but it is a film that cannot be explained.  I can think of few others which so abruptly change tone (maybe Full Metal Jacket; 1987).  This is a strength of the film to be sure, but it might appear as a weakness to many filmgoers on first inspection.

 As viewers we are conditioned to expect the first act of a film to logically set up the action to follow.  As we sit, we often think about the potential outcomes to the situations set-up by the early segments of films.  If our expectations for the movie are met, but not exactly as we predicted, then we typically think of the picture as a success.  This has almost no resemblance to the way that life this side of the screen works at all.  The choices we make leave almost limitless possibilities open.  Who’s to say that a man being chased on the street is suddenly safe when he finds a door to walk into?  What’s inside the door might be much worse than what he feared outside (see Pulp Fiction; 1994).

This is how a somewhat conventional gangster tale becomes an all-out bad trip in this 1970 offering.  One of my first thoughts while watching this picture came as some hard cheese to swallow.  Guy Ritchie, who directed two of my favorite films, 1998’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and 2000’s Snatch, is almost completely unoriginal.  If you’re a fan of his work then the first half of Performance should be right up your ally, as it appears to be the mold from which his best work was cast.  This doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of the two pictures listed above, but it does somewhat explain why Ritchie has done nothing original, or even all that different, since making them.

I was impressed here with the performance of James Fox, who for the second time in as many weeks has turned in a great showing on the list.  He is so different here than in his work in The Servant (1963), and yet I see why he was attracted to both of these roles.  Each film offers a glimpse of a world created inside of a London house that rejects the norms of the world outside of the front door.  I mentioned in my review of The Servant that it captured the time just before London began to “swing.” Performance is then the other bookend to that time, chronicling the last gasp before the party was over. 

Appropriately (and notoriously), the film costars Mick Jagger as the burned-out, gender bending and reclusive rock star Turner who Fox’s gangster-on-the-lamb encounters after a split with his underworld employer.  What makes the world he walks into, and eventually is trapped in so creepy is that, crazy as it is, it doesn’t seem implausible, especially with Jagger basically just playing an exaggerated version of himself.  The subtext here is clear after the Fox character claims to be a performer, a juggler to be specific, who is looking to rent the basement flat in Turner’s building.  The film is a meditation on image vs. true identity, as everyone in the house embraces the former while repressing the latter.     

Jagger’s presence here makes Performance ironically poignant.  Not only does it bring to light the image-driven and ultimately shallow lifestyle he and his bandmates were making legendary during the time the film was shot, but it also foreshadows the music video element that would come to forever change the music industry.  In the midst of a mind-blowing trip Fox’s character hallucinates that Turner is performing for his gangster crew, eventually inducing them into a homosexual orgy.  The scene effectively serves as an early Rolling Stones video, as Jagger sings directly into the camera, breaking the forth wall. In doing so, he subconsciously concedes the truth evident to the audience all along; to the rock star, image is everything.

Grade: 2.5 Stars

176: The Marriage of Maria Braun

I can’t seem to figure Fassbinder out.  It’s comforting to know then that no one else, even those who knew him well, could really figure him out either.  According to most, he was an enigmatic and energetic psychotic who lived a life marked by contradiction.  Openly gay, he was married twice.  Fervently opposed to oppression, he was a tyrant behind the camera.  One thing is for certain.  He had talent, and the potential to be a world class filmmaker.  Fassbinder’s career is often lamented over by those wondering “what if.” Much has been made of his tragic death by drug overdose at the age of 37, before which he managed to produce 23 feature films.  Though somewhat comparable to Kubrick in personal look and directorial autocracy, the pace at which the two produced pictures couldn’t be more different.

            In his brief time as an auteur Fassbinder worked like an assembly line, cranking out pictures at a rate of more than two a year.  It is a wonder then that some are as good as they are.  Admittedly, prior to seeing his The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) I’d only seen three other Fassbinder’s, none of which I loved, all of which I’d liked.  The 1001 list* prompted me to all of them, and this was the last of his films contained therein, but it won’t be the last of his that I see. 

Widely considered his most successful release, Maria Braun is also the best I’ve seen.  A fan and purveyor of melodrama, of which I’m not particularly fond, Fassbinder’s work can be painful to watch.  His The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972) is heart-wrenching in its depiction of a scorned lover, and his Fox and His Friends (1975) would garner sympathy from a stone.  One of his most celebrated works is Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974).  An adaptation of his hero Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows (1956), Fassbinder made that picture in 14 days, so quickly that Ebert writes that he “leaves out all the highs and lows [of melodrama] and keeps only the quiet desperation in the middle.”  In many ways Maria Braun is similar.  The woman at the center of the film is minus the melodrama at least, but her desperation is direct and obvious. 

Like many a war bride Maria has spent more nights thinking about her husband than those which they actually spent together.  Like everyone else in post-war Germany she’s struggling to find food and keep a fire going, but in the entire two-hour runtime of the film she never once appears to lose hope.  The closest she comes is when she decides to stop going to the train station to search for her husband amongst the returning survivors.  This scene would be played heavy for emotion in another film, full of tears and an (Oscar clip) speech, but here it is handled lightly, with a simple visual cue.  Maria doesn’t have time to cry, she has to hustle.  Thinking on her feet she quickly turns a couple of packs of cigarettes into a dress fit for a job interview. 

Working briefly as a hostess for American GIs in a makeshift bar, she hones her skills as a con artist and spin doctor.  When her husband finally returns, he interrupts a sexual interlude between Maria and a customer that quickly leads to violence.  After he’s sentenced to prison for the resulting crime, Maria continues her climb up the social later, seducing a businessman and convincing him to eventually give her a controlling interest in his company.  The irony of the film is that through all of her affairs and exploits, Maria remains fiercely loyal to the love of her husband who she barely knows.  This all plays out brilliantly, as her cold and exacting treatment of all the men in her life leads her to wealth and comfort.  Though she is drawn back to the bombed out buildings of the city, she is determined not to expire freezing to death in one of them.      

She gets her wish, so to speak, in what was apparently one of the most controversial endings in the history of the Cannes Film Festival.  From what little I know about Fassbinder, I think he delighted in this controversy.  Like his life, his ending was purposely enigmatic.

Grade: 3 Hats Off

P.S. Early performance here from the guy who played General Ourumov in GoldenEye (Gottfried John).

*The complete list in its current extended form is available at:

http://www.listology.com/flogged/list/1001-movies-you-must-see-you-die

177: In the Realm of the Senses

When you’re as far into the list as I am at this point you’re pretty much desensitized to gratuitous sex and violence.  As such, it’s rare that I’m grossed out or overwhelmed by these elements in films.  However, Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976) did the trick.  The film is notorious for its stark depiction of a passionate sexual affair between a former prostitute and her lover, and for its incorporation of actual sexual intercourse and felacio on-screen.  It was so in demand during its run at Cannes that thirteen screenings were scheduled.  But while many view the film as an erotic thriller, I felt that the sexual elements of the movie grew old and tawdry before the end of the first act.

I’m hesitant to call this film pornography.  Legally, it has been upheld as otherwise and I respect that decision, as I’m not sure that the intent here is to arouse.  Still, I couldn’t help thinking of the wisdom of UCLA film scholar and author Howard Suber and his musings on pornography as I viewed Senses.  Suber writes in his The Power of Film that the primary problem with pornography is “keep[ing] people interested in a film that begins with a climax” (2006; p. 295).  To me he was on point in regard to this picture as well.  Scene after scene is almost nothing but variations on sexual intercourse, which frankly can get boring. 

            This isn’t a love story, but sex story, and as such it flies in the face of conventional film narrative, which requires the audience to come to sympathize with a character as he/she spends several acts trying to “get the girl [/guy].”  Memorable films in which the primary romantic paring takes place and is reciprocated at the outset are rare.  In fact, I can’t think of any off the top of my head.  What becomes clear throughout Senses is that this relationship is not about romance, but about obsession.  When Kichizo (Tatsuya Fuji) says to his partner (Eiko Matsuda), “Sada, lets be happy together forever” he isn’t in love.  He isn’t even in reality, and by this point it’s clear that there is only one way for this story to end.

            As anger and jealousy begin to take hold in the relationship, death seems to lurk around every corner.  Kichizo becomes jealous when Sada is forced to take on customers to support their sex-filled slothful lifestyle.  Sada threatens Kichizo with a knife when he briefly returns to his estranged wife.  As their relationship grows violent, so do their sexual escapades, often leading to choking during intercourse.  I’ll reveal nothing else except to say that the film’s final scene forced me to hold a hand up to block the screen and utter out loud, “please, no more.” Never trust a girl with scorpion tattoo on her earlobe.

            In the 1970s the gap between pornography and legitimate film was as narrow as it ever was.  This film is yet another example of that time when it was culturally acceptable to talk about Deep Throat (1972) around the water cooler, but anyone expecting strait eroticism here be warned.  Of the films I’ve seen for this list, nay of all the films I’ve seen, In the Realm of the Senses falls short only of Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) for a disgust factor.  I challenge any man to sit through the final scene without squirming.

Grade: 1 Hat Off

178: Murmur of the Heart

           It’s been almost three days now since I’ve seen Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart (1971), and I’m still not quite sure how to feel about it.  I’m also not sure how to feel about the blog any more.  I’m questioning its validity, as absolutely no one has responded to any of my posts.  Is anyone out there reading this thing?  Don’t think at all from my despair that Murmur is a bad film.  It’s not.  In fact, visually, it’s one of the best films I’ve seen since I began this project, but thematically I just don’t quite relate.

            The story focuses on 14 year-old Laurent, living with his parents and two older brothers in Dijon France during the mid 1950s.  Though the home is happy and Laurent is provided for by his gynecologist father, he seems to have little in common with the rest of his family, save for his young mother who adores him.  His father’s profession is telling as sex is a bit of an obsession for Laurent.  He’s attracted to girls, but it’s clear early in the movie that no woman could live up to his ideal, his mother.  In other films, a child’s discovery of a parent’s marital indiscretions serves a major turning point, but Laurent seems to have forgiven his mother of the affair he uncovers almost immediately.  He doesn’t seem shocked or even particularly disappointed.  His love is steadfast.

            Murmur of the Heart is described as “coming of age” story by Netflix, but I don’t know if that’s really what’s behind it.  Certainly the arch of the story focuses on Laurent’s attempts to loose his virginity, and in a funny scene in which his brothers take him to a brothel he almost succeeds before his patrons interrupt.  Likewise, he spends several scenes smoking cigars and trying to hold his own when his brothers imbibe, but these are all secondary elements.  The heart of this film (no pun intended) lies in the relationship between Laurent and his mother.  She is his guiding force, and though he has his deceptions (as all teenage boys do) he keeps very little from her.  When she accompanies him to a clinic for treatment for his uneven heart palpitations the two are forced to share a room at their hotel.  This cramped arrangement is complicated when the mother (played with a lust for life by Lea Massari) plans a rendezvous with her lover. 

            Laurent’s views about sex seem both odd and understandable up to this point, but the plot takes an unconventional turn before ending up where few films (and film protagonists) should go.  I’ll leave this discovery up to you, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.  I can’t say that I didn’t like this movie because I did enjoy so many parts of it, but I’m still stuck in the middle with it.  Malle based much of his material here on his own experiences as a child (he had a heart defect just as his protagonist does), and this personal touch comes through in spades.  Watching the film I could feel his love for Laurent, but I’m not quite sure yet that I even liked him.

            He is a young man selfishly focused on nothing but his own ends.  At the film’s outset he is collecting change for wounded soldiers of the Indochinese conflict, but he seems to care less about the casualties than about appearing to be politically informed.  It doesn’t help that he steals a record, practically with the benefit can still in hand.  Throughout the film he is snotty and ungracious, even to those who help him.  I suppose it’s unlikely that I’d enjoy the company of any 14 year-old boys at my age, but spending two hours with Laurent wasn’t the worst thing I can think of.  He’s probably more like I was than I can remember at this point, but I’m sure it will come back to me someday, as it did for Malle.  

            I’m glad this wasn’t the first of his films that I saw, and it shouldn’t be anyone else’s either.  For that Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) or his US commercial breakthrough, Atlantic City (1980), are much better choices.  On an interesting side note, for this piece on Malle I looked over his filmography to find that he directed a picture in 1976 (Close Up) which only three people have ever seen.  It was commissioned by a private investor, and only one copy exists. Weird!  

Grade: 2 Hats Off 

179: Winter Light

When discussing cinema, there is an unspoken distinction which is understood by the elitist mentality that accompanies both Fanboy and critic alike.  There are “movies”, and there are “films,” and to use either term improperly is, to either group, tantamount to inadvertently admitting that your mind is an unclean cultural garbage disposal.  To these cinefiles the art of moving pictures is broken up into two categories bearing little resemblance to one another.  Movies are Hollywood- produced star vehicles which are driven by special effects, violence, and the potential for erotic, but rarely shown, sex, and have the vague possibility of being good, despite the fact that they are driven by merchandising crossovers and the blatant desire to make money.  Films on the other hand, are European-influenced personal artistic explorations of the human soul which are often boring and slow, but praised for being so.  They rarely make any money and are somehow better for not having done so.*

These distinctions are of course ridiculous, and while I understand them, and much of the reasoning behind them, I still use the terms interchangeably when I write about the movies because I like synonyms.  There is a ton of literature on the difference between these classifications, but it basically boils down to this.  We see movies, and we watch films.  These terms imply that movies are something we sit in front of to fill the voids in our meaningless lives, while films are texts that we actively engage in as we voyeuristically search for truth about the human condition.  (As to why we say that we “watch” television then, I’ll never know.)

Taking into account these somewhat arbitrary distinctions I can think of no long-working director, with the possible exception of Dryer, who made more “films” than Ingmar Bergman.  Having just seen the Swedish master’s Winter Light (1963) I must say that I’m in awe of his powers as a Director.  I don’t Love everything Bergman ever touched.  Of what I’ve seen, I feel Scenes from a Marriage (1973) dragged on for an eternity, and that The Seventh Seal (1957) is possibly one of the most overrated (but still worth seeing) movies ever made; a guaranteed inclusion on any pretentious “best of all time” list.  Of the Bergman films I do like (Wild Strawberries [also 1957 – you have to give him credit there]; Smiles of a Summer Night [1955]; Fanny and Alexander [1982]), each has affected me deeply, popping into my head at moments that seem strange, but are somehow relevant due to these pictures. 

Winter light I believe will fall into this category.  I loved it, mostly for reasons I’m still discovering, but primarily because it, like so many of Berman’s efforts, deals directly with subjects other directors would make little more than footnotes in their films.  Who else would have a character speak the contents of a letter directly into the camera for an almost unbroken six minutes? Even if they did, would it work? It does here in a scene that effectively rips another character to pieces with the written word.  The scene in which this act is reciprocated in person is one of the cruelest conversations I have ever seen on film.

This piece is the second installment in what came to be known as the “Silence of God” thematic trilogy, between Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and The Silence (also 1963; again with the credit).  Having seen, and enjoyed, that first film I understand the comment Berman biographer Peter Cowie makes in an interview included on the Criterion edition of the DVD regarding the different visual approach taken in this film.  Unlike in most of the work that preceded Winter Light, Berman and his longtime cinematographer Sven Nykvist chose to shoot here in dark and muted tones.  This decision perfectly reflects the darkness of the picture’s story of a pastor no longer able to feel the presence of God.  The film’s original Swedish title translates as “The Communicants,” referring to the attendees of the communion services which bookend the movie.  The irony of course is in the fact that though communing with God, these people are unable to communicate between one another.

Essentially, this is what Bergman made films about.  Potential viewers can be intimidated when they hear that much of his work centers on his own struggle in a search for faith, but his pictures were always about the people at their center.  The faith comes in later.  In this film it’s during a short conversation about the passion of Christ which absolutely floored me.  I love films about doubt vs. belief, but if you’re unfamiliar with Bergman, Winter Light might not be the best place to start.  This picture was beautiful, but much better suited for that purpose are Wild Strawberries or Fanny and Alexander, the closest thing he ever made to a “Movie.”     

I read once in an interview with Roger Ebert that Bergman shared an agent with only one other client, Charles Bronson.  Once, when the two met through the agent, Bergman asked Bronson how the blood packs used in filming so many of his movies exploded.  Bronson began to explain before stopping and remarking that Berman should know because he was a director.  Bronson didn’t realize that Berman didn’t make those kinds of pictures.  He was about as un-Hollywood as you could get.

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off

*For more info on the Movies vs. Films dichotomy see Kamp & Levi’s The Film Snob’s Dictionary (2006).       

180: Man of Iron

For some reason I seem to always be seeing Andrzej Wajda’s films in the wrong order.  I saw his Ashes and Diamonds (1958), which I enjoyed, before remembering that it is the third installment in what Criterion calls his “Three War Films” Trilogy.  While I’m under the impression that Wajda’s A Generation (1955) and Kanal (1957) are grouped with Ashes in what could be defined as a loose trilogy, I still feel I should have seen them first.  Though characters and plots in the film I did see might not have been directly affected by their counterparts in the earlier films, I believe the pictures are grouped together because of the thematic development that takes place throughout the progression of all three movies.

This same thematic development is the case with the work of many directors, and thus it can be beneficial from a film-going standpoint to experience their canon chronologically.  Though this approach to studying a director’s work can be valuable, it is rarely even a passing thought when beginning to explore any specific filmmaker.  This is only natural as few people are going to pick up Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss (1955) before being introduced to his later masterpieces.  Still, I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to digest a director like Scorsese chronologically.  While seeing his films in the order that I did certainly didn’t detract from their brilliance, reading through Roger Ebert’s book on the master director, seeing what he had to say about each offering upon its initial release, opened my eyes to the development of his commentary on the so-called Madonna/Whore complex that is central to each of his best movies.

I reference all of this as a preface to saying that I’ve done it again.  I saw Wajda’s Man of Iron (1981) before viewing its thematic prequel Man of Marble (1977), and perhaps I’m worse off for it.  Ashes and Diamonds stood alone as a good film, and though I was not familiar with the context in which it took place I related to its characters, needing not to have seen the movies which preceded it.  Man of Iron was a more difficult film to digest.  I don’t believe that any element of Man of Marble directly affects the later film, but perhaps I needed to be thematically primed to take this picture on. 

As the story of a violent and disruptive labor strike, and the men and women that have long suffered as a result of an oppressive system, Man of Iron didn’t exactly break new ground for me as a viewer.  Though it is specific to events which took place in Wajda’s native Poland and thus likely more relevant there, it pales in comparison for an American viewer to a film which it seems to beg comparison, On the Waterfront (1954).  Playing Wajda’s one-note labor striking lead, Jerzy Radziwilowics would seem flat here compared to any actor, let alone Brando.  Structurally, I was much more interested in the frame story of the strung out reporter trying to get an interview with the reclusive rebel.

I’m never a fan of criticism which pans films because they are “too long.” 
No film is too long if it fills its runtime with content worthy of its audience.  Films can only be “too long for their material,” which I’m afraid Man of Iron is.  At 152 minutes the experiences of these characters seems drawn out for the sake of inducing apathy rather than the dramatic building of tension.

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off                                                                                             

181: The Long Goodbye

A funny thing happens to me every time I watch a film based on material by Raymond Chandler.  I get caught up in the plot, trying to figure out whodunit.  This is of course ridiculous, as chandler himself admitted of his own The Big Sleep that he wasn’t exactly sure who killed a few of the characters.  After going over the plots of these films in my head time and again I’m inevitably struck with a thought which I can only assume is what Hitchcock would have concluded.  Events in the film unfold the way that they do for the simple reason that they are what are required for the director to tell his story the way that he wants or needs to. Nothing more. 

Now this same thing could be said of many bad films, particularly the bulk of those in which Kate Hudson (sigh, what a waste) appears, and it would be correct.  But in those films events happen the way that they do simply because the director doesn’t know how to put them together in any other way.   Conversely, we could make this same argument of narrative necessity when it comes to the work of David Lynch, whose films could be told no other way.  Now I am not a Lynch apologist.  I haven’t liked, nor have I seen, all of his movies.  But I am confident that David Lynch knows what Mulholland Dr. (2001) means and that that S.O.B. just isn’t telling.  On his deathbed he will release a tell-all book which explains each of his weird works, and it will be brilliant!

So when watching and discussing films such as The Big Sleep (1946) and Robert Altman’s take on Chandler’s detective hero Phillip Marlowe, The Long Goodbye (1973), it’s important to note that we see the things we see onscreen because they are what is meant to be seen.  The things we don’t see are not meant to be seen, and therefore don’t really matter in the context of the story.  What is to be revealed will be, in the director’s own good time.  Altman has been described by Elliot Gould, who stars as his Marlowe in this picture, as a director who “shows life taking its course,” and that seems to be just about the best way to put it.

Gould and Altman took a distinct approach to updating this early 1950s story into the early 1970s world.  They decided that Marlowe had been asleep for twenty years, and he woke up with his Fifties sensibilities in the world of flower power and yoga.  Indeed the film does open with Marlowe being awakened, by his cat, which only uses him as a food source and is picky at that.  This so-called “Rip Van Marlowe” approach serves the film well and adds to the iconoclastic nature of the movie.  Altman confesses in supplementary material on the DVD that when the film was first released and Gould was panned as “no Phillip Marlowe” it took him time to realize that these criticisms really meant “no Humphrey Bogart,” which was supposed to be the point. 

The film wasn’t poorly made, it was poorly marketed, and those who expected to see a tough guy rehash of 40s noir were mislead.  Gould’s Marlowe isn’t rubbing up against the world; he’s trying to come to terms with the way it has changed since we last saw him.  Gould’s excellent performance is supplemented by an outstanding supporting cast which includes the gruff Sterling Hayden, baseball iconoclast and author Jim Bouton, director Mark Rydell as an unforgettable loan shark, and an unaccredited early performance from a mustachioed Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Grade: 3 Hats Off