Carl Theodor Dreyer | Ordet (The Word) / 1955

faith in death, faith in life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kaj Munk and Carl Theodor Dreyer (screenplay), Carl Theodor Dreyer (director) Ordet (The Word) / 1955

 

Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet is a study in various degrees of faith. Certainly in Munk's original 1932 play that statement might suggest a kind of Ibsen-like dialectic, a stage-bound discussion of serious religious issues; in Dreyer's version, however, everything is honed down to the lives and  the works of characters, and, although, at times, the film does move toward the edge of the murky theological concerns behind the original work, for the most part Dreyer grounds these characters in their daily actions and their motivations in their struggles with faith have more to do with one another and the communities in which they live than in the abstract ideas behind them.

      That is not to say that Dreyer's work is not true to Munk's more polemical play, just that Dreyer has refocused the play, as critics have described it again and again, to its essentials. For Dreyer, the film's title, "The Word," matters less than the actions his characters play out in relationship with one another. For Dreyer, the human face is always at the center of his significant films, and it is the interconnections of the beings these faces represent that is of what is most importance.

      Even the sets are stripped down to their essentials. Well known is Dreyer's statement that he "made the film crew equip the kitchen with everything he considered right for a country kitchen. Then...set about removing the objects. Finally, only ten to fifteen remained, but they were just what were wanted to create the right psychological illusion." For the rest of his imagistic backdrop, Dreyer relied on the light and dark of his cinemagraphic images, which are so powerful we hardly need more "furniture." Similarly, the dunes of the small Jutland village, Vedersø, the same area where the Lutheran minister Munk lived, are perfect to convey the shifting sensibilities of family members and the neighboring town-bound congregations.

      Morten Borgen (Henrik Malberg), the patriarch of the Borgen family, has created a clean, well-run farm a ways out from the village, which seems to be rich in sheep, pigs, and other commodities. At the center of this rich-seeming life is his daughter-in-law, Inger (Birgitte Federspiel) who is a strong believer, but who nonetheless lives a rich sexual life with her husband Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen), as well, balancing her deep faith with an innocent and loving view of the world at large. In her daily acts of cleaning and cooking, advising and simply expressing her joy in life, she is at the center of Borgen existence.

      Mikkel, a born agnostic, has no time for religious faith. But Inger recognizes that he has something more important, a good heart, and she is happy in their relationship. The youngest son, Anders (Cay Kristiansen) seems to have no interest in the various relationships with belief that trouble his family; as a young man his whole attention is taken up with his love of a young village girl, Anne (Gerda Nielsen), the daughter of the tailor Peter Petersen (Ejner Federspiel).

 

     It is the second son, Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye) who most troubles the family. Sent to theology school, having the gift for philosophical thought, he has gone mad studying the works of the great Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, believing he himself is the reincarnation of Christ, and spending his days warning his family and neighbors of their errant ways for refusing to recognize him. Despite his father's deep-held beliefs, Johannes is now a sad embarrassment of all his hopes that he might raise a son who could bring the community at large into a deeper commitment with God. Ironically, that is what Johannes has done, but his "leap of faith" has also taken him beyond the understanding of these ordinary folk, and despite Morten's prayers that his son might return to normalcy, the mad son sneaks out of the house early in the mornings to preach to an absent audience from the cliffs of the beach. The whole ordeal has shaken Morten's faith as well.

      In and out of these events weaves the liberal-thinking new pastor of Borgen church and the scientific-thinking local doctor, who are even more troubled by Johannes' mad ramblings than the family itself.

      Only two major events, the search for love and a difficult childbirth, bring these various struggles with belief to a head. In his attempt to marry Anne, Anders begs that Inger and his brother Mikkel talk to his father Morten. As delicately as she can, Inger approaches Morten, who remains—at first to our way of thinking inexplicably—opposed to Anders relationship with the tailor's daughter. Despite Inger's gentle persuasion, the patriarch remains adamant.

      Meanwhile, Anders has been encouraged by Inger and Mikkel to talk to Anne's father about his love for her. That interchange is even more discouraging, as Peter not only refuses Anders his daughter's hand, but kicks him out of his house, insisting he is not worthy of her. What we discover is that Peter and several townspeople belong to a far more fervent religious sect who meet in his house for prayer revivals. They are what might be described today as "born-again" Christians, unaccepting of the other church-going locals.

      When Morten hears of Anders' treatment, he is outraged and, taking the boy in hand, returns to Peter's home, amidst a religious meeting, to talk to the girl's father about his behavior. The meeting ends badly, with Peter insisting that such a marriage could only take place if the Borgens convert to their sect, as Morten, refusing, outlines what he sees as the difference between them: his is a faith of life, while their's, he insists, is a faith of death. During this intense conversation the telephone interrupts to tell Morten that Inger is in childbirth, having a difficult time of it, demanding that he and Anders return home. Peter takes advantage of the situation to warn Morten that he must face great sufferings for his stubborness, almost implying that he seeks Inger's death. A fight insures, broken up by the families' children.

       Back at the Borgen manor, Inger is indeed very ill, near death. When the doctor arrives, he is forced to cut away the baby, their first son, dividing the body into four parts. But Inger has survived, and Morten and the children can only be joyful that she lives. Johannes, however, continues to see the angel of death cross in and out of the room, warning that Inger will die if the family does not join in prayer and accept his intercession.

       Angry, Morten dismisses his son. But just as the doctor leaves, what Johannes has foretold occurs: Inger suddenly dies, the family becoming devastated. Only Johannes insists that she can still be brought to life if they only hear the word of God. Frustrated, Mikkel takes Johannes into his bedroom to have him witness Inger's corpse, Johannes collapsing into a kind of trance. The next day, he disappears, the family unable to find him and return him home.

       A death certificate is signed, funeral notices issued, and, a few days later, a funeral is underway. Peter, reading his Bible, is suddenly struck by his own lack of Christian behavior to Borgen and the family, realizing his has failed "to turn the other cheek," and with his wife and daughter determines to attend the Borgen funeral.

     The long final scene is played out at the bedside of the dead Inger, where, despite Mikkel's despair, they await the parson to say a few words over the body before putting the cover over the coffin. The parson arrives, the words are spoken; Peter and his family arrive, the tailor offering Anders his daughter as apology for his behavior. Just as they are about to cover Inger, Mikkel breaks down into a tearful lament, arguing that it was not only the spirit of Inger he loved—which family and friends commend him to remember—but her body. He becomes resistant to even losing the sight of her.

     Suddenly Johannes reappears. He seems to have recovered his self, having abandoned the mad look of his eyes. But he is just as adamant in his denouncement of the whole community, not one of whom have prayed to God that Inger might be returned to them. He has convinced Inger's young daughter, however, that we will raise her from the dead, and she, a complete innocent, stands with him encouraging him to hurry with the act. With her faith beside him, Johannes prays, asking for the right word to raise Inger from the dead. Naming Christ, Johannes prays for her salvation.

     Throughout Inger has argued that miracles do happen, even if they are perhaps only little ones that add up to something bigger. Now, she is herself subject to a miracle, as she moves her eyes and, slowly, her hands, Mikkel bending to hold her and kiss her. Both Morten and Peter are reconciled, recognizing in the miracle their God of old. Even Mikkel finds new faith.

     Instinctively, I find something stagey about this ending, with a kind of deus ex machina intrusion that doesn't seem necessary given Dreyer's argument throughout for a religion of life. Yet these men and women of faith in such a provincial and isolated world, would have seen such an occurrence precisely as this. If we, like the Doctor, can dismiss these events as simply mistaken diagnoses, we are certainly the less fortunate for it. And it is precisely this miraculousness of the human spirit which the film throughout has so carefully detailed.

     If Dreyer's great film does not dismiss the beliefs of these tormented small farmers and townspeople, perhaps we should equally embrace their gentle wonderment, accept the miracles of their faith.

 

Los Angeles, August 28, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (August 2012).  

Charles Laughton | The Night of the Hunter / 1955

love and hate

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Agee and Charles Laughton (screenplay), Charles Laughton (director) The Night of the Hunter / 1955

 

Charles Laughton's only film has often been described as a kind of multi-genre work, a horror story that is also a fantasy, a children's tale that contains adult criminals, a period piece that often seems timeless in its images and methods. It has also been described as a rather old-fashioned piece of film-making that is highly inventive and even, at times, experimental in its presentation of images. I think that quality, in particular, can be chalked up to Agee's script—which originally consisted of hundreds of pages until Laughton insisted the poet-writer winnow it down—that tells this story of a self-justifying villain and two children in terms of dualities.

      Some of these are quite obvious. The central figure, Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) pretends to be a man of God while he goes about the south marrying windows and killing them for their money—quite similarly to Hitchcock's beloved Charles Oakley in Shadow of a Doubt. Powell is clearly a kind schizophrenic, a man who is obviously attracted to women but simultaneously disgusted by them:

 

                       Rev. Harry Powell: There are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-

                                smellin' things, lacy things, things with curly hair.

 

Even his hands are tattooed with an opposition that symbolizes the polarizations within the man: 

"Love and hate," which he explains to curious strangers as an eternal battle between good and bad.

     Powell is a sweet-talking, seemingly gentle man who underneath is surging with a violent hate, a misogynistic monster, who has no attraction to children either.

     Similarly, the two Harper children, Pearl and John, react to Powell and his sudden intrusion in their lives quite differently. Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) is attracted to the stranger, enchanted by him, while John (Billy Chapin) is terrified and rebellious. In part, of course, he recognizes that the "preacher" is attempting to get him to break his bond with his dead father by admitting that he knows where the father has hidden his stolen money. But he also knows that despite Powell's lie that Ben Harper had told him in the jail cell that he thrown the money into the river, that Powell is intent on finding the money through intimidation of the children.

     Even the Spoons, in whose store Willa Harper (Shelley Winters) works, are of opposite minds regarding Powell. Mrs. Spoon (Evelyn Varden) sees a strong and good man, a perfect companion for the widow Willa, while Walt Spoon senses something is wrong about him.

     The men and boys generally see through him while the women and young girls perceive him perhaps as something different from the country men to whom they are accustomed.

     The pattern continues, Willa becoming attracted to him at first seeks passion, but Powell rejects any sexual advances establishing the love-hate relationship he has with women further revealing the kind Jekyll and Hyde pulls he has within.

      Laughton plays these dualities out in a number of ways in his images. The small river city of the Harper world is quite isolated, while at the same time larger river boats bearing people and goods pass within waving distance. Life seems rich and solid in this small-town world, the Spoons passing out sweet treats to its young citizens, while at the same time the movie presents time and again a world wherein children are homeless and hungry, a justification for Ben Harper's robbery:

 

                       Ben Harper: I got tired of seein' children roamin' the woodlands

                               without food, children roamin' the highways in this here

                               Depression, children sleepin' in old abandoned car bodies

                               in junk heaps. And I promised myself that I'd never see

                               my young-uns had want.

 

      When the children are forced to escape down river, like Huck Finn they leave civilization such as it is and move into a magic world overseen by owls, foxes, rabbits, and other animals, and the film, suddenly desolate of social forces, becomes magical and frightening at the same time. Throughout, Laughton plays with light and shadow, particularly in the barn scene where the children have temporarily stopped for the night to sleep. As the boy awakens, just before sunrise, the light is juxtaposed to the dark shadows of the barn at the very moment that the menacing preacher passes by: Laughton and his cinematographer captured the oddity of the moment, the sense of a children's tale and a dark adult world surrounding, by using a puppet instead of a real man.

      The story overall presents a struggle between escape and discovery, endurance and passivity, innocence and knowledge, and, finally, life or death. A final showdown between forces is inevitable as the good and kind Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish) faces off with the evil Powell. When Powell insists that he is John's father, John reacts "He's not my pa!" with Rachel chiming in, "No, and he ain't no preacher neither!"—recognizing Satan as no one except the boy has. Despite her gentle ways, it is she who shoots him and calls the police, ultimately leading to the recognition that Powell is a serial killer who has killed the children's mother as well.

     But even here, in the horror of the central character's actions, Laughton finds a kind of duality, in part just by casting Robert Mitchum in the role, whose breezy diffidence makes the character almost comic at times. Mitchum at this time in his life had apparently given up caring about acting and Hollywood in general, and in The Night of Hunter he seems at moments to almost be sleepwalking through the role—that is until (evidently carefully coached by Laughton) he suddenly comes vividly alive as a potential villain. Two scenes will represent the many instances of this dark reawakening in the movie:

 

                       Powell: [to Pearl] Now just tell me. Where's the money hid?

                       Pearl: But I swore I promised John I wouldn't tell.

                       Powell: John doesn't matter! Can't you get that through your

                            head, you poor, silly, disgusting little wretch.

 

The first line is spoken with great tenderness and patience, while Powell's follow up seethes with rage.

      A short while later we see a similar transformation within a single line as the children plot their escape in the basement:

 

                       Powell: I can hear you whisperin' children, so I know you're

                            down there. I can feel myself gettin' awful mad. I'm out

                            of patience children. I'm coming now to find you.

 

The growing intensity of these lines cannot help but remind one of Mitchum's remarkable acting in the later film, Cape Fear, where he played a similarly deranged figure threatening a family.

     Finally, Laughton even demonstrates the flip side of the one thing that the young John Harper uses as a totem for his and his sister's survival: the memory of his father symbolized by the money hidden in Pearl's doll. Upon witnessing the police capture Powell, he is suddenly reminded of his father's capture, and in that encounter with the past the boy realizes the evil that he himself has participated in by keeping the money. Springing forward, he comes to life—in a role in which he has been forced to primarily play a stubborn and quiet child—throwing the money across Powell's body as if the man might be saved by getting what he has so awfully desired. In the end, the children "abide and endure" because through their innocence they perceive the numerous contradictions of adult life.

      If Powell is not truly a “gay” character—despite his hatred of women and the children they produce—he is most certainly is perverse, a concept which queer director Charles Laughton, whose wife Elsa Lanchester, having served perfectly in their lavender marriage, talked about his homosexuality several times over the years. Laughton himself was rumored to be very much attracted to young boys, loving them, whereas Powell was ready to destroy both children. Yet Laughton knew all about perversity and the other kinds of queerness his character represented and openly revealed his knowledge in a children’s horror film never again quite matched in film history.    

 

Los Angeles, August 18, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (August 2012).  

Eldar Rapaport | Steam / 2009

sex after death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eldar Rapaport (screenwriter and director) Steam / 2009 [15 minutes]

 

With some important similarities to Bruce Jay Friedman’s 1970 play, Steambath, as well as to the Norwegian short film, Shower (2012), Israeli-born Eldar Rapaport’s 2009 short film, Steam begins as a rather predictable gay sex film, with two men, a young cute “guy” (Scott Hislop), sitting next to an attractive, if far more serious-looking darker figure (Julie Zeitouni). Coming on to the more troubled man, the blond-haired figure moves closer, gradually reaching over to touch the other’s cock, and eventually giving him a blow job, the darker figure responding with full pleasure as if he has been waiting for the release forever, while only once reaching out to touch the more experienced blond who cums by himself after the other.

    If it would have ended there, we might only describe the short film as an erotic soft-porn flick—although we know something else has to happen, and we wait to see what that might possibly entail.

      Clearly the darker-haired figure is somewhat troubled, and begins to quickly demonstrate signs of great stress, particularly when he can’t seem to find the door the leave the steamroom, the other simply pointing to a spot, “over there.” But there doesn’t seem to be a way out, and we now wonder whether the work isn’t metaphorically expressing the fact that once he has entered into and participated with pleasurable sex that it might not be a statement of his discovery that there is now “no way out” of his sexual realization, that this sexual release has proven to him that he is, in fact, gay. And in that sense we might imagine it as a kind of coming out film. Although the dark-haired boy suggests they may be in hell, our fair-haired boy counters that it may, rather, be heaven.

     But soon, the fair-haired fellow also can’t spot the door, and although he remains calm while the other gets more and more disturbed and frustrated, we sense something else going on, particularly when, looking at the increasing hysterical behavior of the troubled man, he suggests, “Oh, you’re one of those.”

     Zeitouni’s character understandably demands to know what he means, Hislop’s figure responding “religious people,” hinting at the fact that the man with whom he has just had sex feels immediately guilty for having participated in something he still cannot fully accept. But that doesn’t explain the “no exit” situation, nor the counter response by the more troubled figure, describing the blond now as another type, in this case an experienced homosexual who has apparently seduced him.

      But neither accusation explains the fact that the men are beginning to become overheated and truly cannot find a way of escape. We soon begin hearing voices. Are others coming for them? But we recognize these are both males and females speaking in a public place. Zeitouni’s character finally asks the other what he does for a living, the fair-haired boy admitting he’s a writer, suggesting that, in fact, this might make a good story—if only he had something to write with. But then, as again the voices raise in volume, he suggests that he has the feeling that he has already written the story.

      And now we hear a female friend asking if he wrote anything or was just cruising the boys at the very moment when we begin to recognize the sounds of a coffee shop. He says he finished a story, but has also been cruising, pointing out a man who presumably is the dark-haired beauty with whom he has just had sex. But suddenly they see something in the dark-haired man’s hand and at the same moment Zeitouni’s character presses the trigger of what he realize is a gun which goes off.

       Whether this is truly a hell in which the darker man, through his homophobic act has just sentenced himself and the other he’s killed or whether it’s simply a metaphor of what happens in Hislop’s just-created fable, the result is the same. It has explained the terror of the other, desperate for a sexual encounter but so terrorized by the possibility that he must destroy the person to whom he is attracted as if he were the seducer, the cause of his personal emotional distress, often the situation behind homophobic acts. Such fear ends almost always in destruction, either figuratively or real.

 

Los Angeles, January 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

 

Caleb Cook | As the World Sets / 2023

calling back from the moon with regrets

by Douglas Messserli

 

Caleb Cook (screenwriter and director) As the World Sets / 2023 / [12 minutes]

 

Using a stop action animated toy figure, a space man on the moon, as the metaphor of a life chosen by character Jonah (J. Everett Reed), director Caleb Cook makes it quite clear that the young man, deeply in love with is friend Cal (Espen Brante)—like so many terrified young men who cannot accept their homosexual feelings—made the wrong choice in marrying his school girl friend Betty in order to finally please his father and family.

     In a long metaphoric verbal epistle from the moon and in a real letter sent to Cal, Jonah realizes that in giving up his own feelings he has, in fact, become a sort of plasticized action figure, an astronaut of the heart who has sent himself into deep space, preferring the symbol of young heterosexual lovers as an alternative to his darker and more frightening feelings for his schoolboy friend.

      By creating a cartoon-like alternative of the handsome young man we see at moments in this film, director Cook has made all too apparent what often happens when young gay boys refuse to listen to their hearts and attend to their real feelings, and instead attempt to enforce themselves into the constrictions of heteronormativity.

     Usually when they finally realize their mistake, it is far too late and psychologically impossible to communicate their failures back to the young boy they once loved. That act, moreover, as we seen from the telephone game played out in Mart Crowley’s play, The Boys in the Band, brought to cinema in 1970 and 2020, is a torturous one for both parties, the original loved one and the one who refused his love, that seldom results in a resolution of the situation.

      Queer film is filled with men who finally come out in marriages that end in pain for the wife and their children. The consequences of such a mistake, accordingly, are enormous, as we observe in this metaphoric short work when, as he watches the world he once loved from afar, his artificial body turns into skeletal remains.

      In this case Noah sits at the dinner table with his two handsome sons and beautiful daughter, looking at any moment as if he were about to burst into tears and leave the table, perhaps the saddest of family dinner gatherings I have observed in a long while in cinema—a vision of a Norman Rockwell family dinner from the other end of the telescope.

     Yet, as sad as it may be for Jonah (now played by Steve Aaron), it seems just as devastating for the lovely young children and his now middle-aged wife Betty (Margaret Thayer) to have to suffer the distance he feels for his youthful mistake. They life in a real world with a father who feels he’s on the moon. They cannot comprehend his distance as surely as he cannot recognize their needs to help through perhaps similar dilemmas in their young lives.

 

Los Angeles, January 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

Jean Renoir | The Diary of a Chambermaid / 1946

the upstarts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Burgess Meredith (screenplay, based on a fiction by Octave Mirbeau and a play by André Heuzé, André de Lorde and Thielly Nores), Jean Renoir (director) The Diary of a Chambermaid / 1946

 

I must admit, the first time I saw this film—one of the great Jean Renoir’s from his US period films—having already seen Luis Buñuel’s 1964 version, I was somewhat disappointed. While Buñuel accentuated the bizarre and dark aspects of Mirbeau’s eerie fiction, Renoir seemed to be trying the convert the perverse series of events that occur to an ambitious chambermaid, into a comedy. The casting of the light-hearted Paulette Goddard as Célestine, and the overt comedy actors Burgess Meredith (who had also written the screenplay) and Irene Ryan—both long-time American studio character actors—appeared to remove this work from any of the horror-like elements of the original. Renoir’s version, as most critics have agreed, looks forward to his later works in which artifice and theatricality definitely dominated. Moreover, The Diary of a Chambermaid often has the look and feel of a studio product. The French, in particular, perceived this Renoir work, despite the master’s reputation, as the product of an exile who had rejected the very qualities, the perverse, satiric humor, that the French literary work had made famous.

 

      Seeing it again on Netflix just this morning, however, I begin to see the logic of Renoir’s direction, which parallels the determined, pre-feminist young Célestine with the wonderful comic posturings of Louis (Irene Ryan)—who cannot even walk across the room without the bearing the weight of her sense of worthlessness—and the hilarious volleys of the mad-man neighbor, Captain Mauger (Burgess Meredith), who not only hates the Lanlaires, literary throwing rocks at their glass houses (the gardening sheds), but is proud of his ability to eat anything and everything. Captain Lainaire’s (Reginald Owen) occasional rebellions against life at the Lainaire estate, moreover, adds to the fun. They are perfect foils for the young Célestine’s innocent, yet ambitious attempts to move up the social ladder while simultaneously remaining in her position as a seasoned chambermaid.

      Throughout much of the film, the villain appears to be Madame Lanlaire (the terrifying Judith Anderson, a few years after her own frightening portrayal of a serving woman in Hitchcock’s Rebecca.) For much of Renoir’s film, the light-hearted, flirtatious chambermaid brilliantly plays out her mobile aspirations against these exaggerated types.

       The other figure of her world, the valet Joseph (Francis Lederer), hovers in the background. To Louise and others Célestine jokes that he is an “undertaker,” but his slavish obedience to Madame Lanlaire, and his refusal to reveal himself, seems to render him basically ineffectual. If, like Célestine, we blanch a bit when his method of killing geese is described—he pokes them in the neck with a long needle to prevent their loss of blood—he remains, nonetheless, a valet, something both Célestine and Madame Lanlaire insist is permanent in his personality.

       The return home, however, of the long-absent son, Georges, changes everything, as suddenly the monstrous Madame attempts to warm up to her chambermaid, having purchased expensive Paris gowns for her, demanding that she change her hair to fit current Paris fashions. Célestine remodels herself in Madame’s image with both delight and a great deal of hesitation, not unlike Madeline’s acceptance of Scottie’s remaking of her image, a few years later, in Hitchcock’s Vertigo; and at the same time, the film shifts, gradually transforming itself from a kind of gold-digger comedy into a story of almost surreal proportions.

     Despite all the of the enforced “acting,” Célestine proceeds to fall in love with Georges, even though his reaction seems inexplicably contradictory, as one moment he signals desire and responds to her gentle ministrations, and the next rejects the girl as an agent of his mother’s suffocating love. What the film reveals, but seldom speaks of, is that Georges is dying of tuberculosis; accordingly, he loses energy in the very moments of great stimulation and fears, worried, we later discover, that the young chambermaid cannot dare kiss him for fear of infection. That Renoir keeps this important aspect of their relationship covert helps to create a tension that the young, head over-heels-in-love girl, cannot explain. Does he love her or hate her? Does he, so manipulated by his overbearing mother, love women at all?

      Accordingly, Célestine is not only confused, but angered, as she is forced to look, in her aspirations for a way out and servitude and assurance of wealth, to the elderly neighbor or, in an even more frightening plot development, to accept the attentions of Joseph, who has secretly bought a bar in Cherbourg where he intends to implant his new wife as a draw for soldiers and sailors. Like Célestine, he is attracted to the Lanlaire vault of silver and other treasures they bring out only once a year to celebrate against the French revolution. Joseph sees the chambermaid, in her plottings and desire for upward mobility, to be of same kind of person he is; and, in some respects, he is right. Except she knows, in her heart, that he is perceiving only the worst of her instead of good girl, despite her misconceived aspirations, she has always attempted to be.

      Unlike Buñuel’s version, where the valet is an ogre whom the chambermaid attempts to reveal to the society at large, Joseph is a clever manipulator, willing to fulfill her demands of real cash with by any means available. When he is overheard by Madame Lanlaire in his plots to steal their secret cache, he determines to find another source, through the robbery of their feisty neighbor, Captain Mauger, who has money hidden away in his house.

       After having locked up his housekeeper-mother-lover, Rose (Florence Bates), Mauger has run off to the small neighboring town to meet with Célestine, where he plots to marry her in Paris. Returning home for his money, he is met by Joseph and murdered. Renoir’s light-hearted work has suddenly turned sour, as everything that was light and playful has become a desperate fight to the death. When Joseph reveals that he has raised the money, Célestine suddenly perceives, through the appearance of Rose, the criminal acts Joseph has committed, he, on his part, insisting that she is equally involved in the crime. The sudden shock of her unintentional entwinement in the murder tumbles Renoir’s film over a kind of cinematic cliff where what has been desire and flirtatiousness shift into deep metaphysical guilt, perhaps turning Renoir’s work, in some sense, into a more horrifying world than Buñuel’s. What follows takes the movie almost into the world of the absurd.

 

      A Lanlaire tradition is to have a late-night drink, in their anti-celebration of the Revolution, with the servants. The servants, including Célestine and Joseph, are toasted at the very moment when all emotions have come to the surface, including Georges', when he once again is made to face off with Célestine. Joseph announces that he is leaving—with Célestine, to which Georges responds with total disbelief. Can she really love this monstrous man? Demanding that she kiss Joseph to demonstrate her true love, Georges realizes, as she springs from the room, that she is not at all in love with Joseph, and chases after her.

       In one of the most disgusting pieces of human brokering, Joseph bickers with Madame Lanlaire over their cache of their silverware, plates, tureens, and even snuff boxes (studded with rubies and diamonds), in return for his promise to take Célestine away, in order to leave Georges in her arms. At first, we believe that she will choose the meaningless objects even over son, as she willingly gives up only a few tureens, a few tokens. He insists upon it all, she attempting to negotiate a split. He wins. The battle between the two is one of the most devastating satires of the linked interest of the wealthy and the aspirant upstarts ever committed to screen. Having won everything he has sought, Joseph now descends to the potting sheds, to where the real lovers, Georges and Célistine have recovered themselves. 

     Murder is clearly in the air, as Joseph beats Georges, Célestine intervening, again and again. Yet each time Georges, the natural weakling, rebounds to fight another bout. He loses, and his life is saved only by Célestine’s acceptance of Joseph’s demand to go along with him. Beating the horse, Joseph moves toward the station, but is stopped by the celebratory revolutionary crowds, who, once again, are happy to see Célestine among their midst. Taking advantage of the situation, the former chambermaid abandons the cart to offer up all their silver lucre to everyone at the event: she is no longer, clearly, interested in its financial worth or even its sentimental value. The crowd pushes forward, further impeding Joseph’s escape. When Georges shows up once more, a battle ensures, where Joseph attempts to kill, yet again, with the long needle he has stuck into the necks of geese and Captain Mauger. The crowd finally captures the villain; we are not sure whether or not he is dead. In a strange sense, the whole scene has appeared to be related somewhat to the crowd reactions in the movie Frankenstein, having finally captured the monstrous beast.

      The final scene restores the film's comic viewpoint, as leaving the territory via train, Georges tells Célestine how to close her diary—with the wedding vow. Even if he has somewhat regained his health, however, we know he is doomed, given the intensity of his illness, to live only a few years. But then, it is clear, the worthy Célestine will inherit all that Lanlaire wealth.

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (September 2012).