Roberto Rossellini | Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy) / 1953

the unhappy couple

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vitaliano Brancati and Roberto Rossellini (screenplay, based on a novel by Colette), Roberto Rossellini (director) Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy) / 1953

 

Of the three films Roberto Rossellini made with his wife Ingrid Bergman in the early 1950s, the last of them, Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia) is usually described by his critics as his masterpiece.

     Like the two works before it, it concerns a woman suddenly encountering, for better or worse, a new world, which will be a transforming experience for her and, presumably, the sensitive viewer. But here the transformation does not necessarily lead outward, particularly as it did in Europa ’51, but ends in a kind of resignation, in the status quo.

     The English couple, Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) and Alex Joyce (George Sanders), have come to Italy to sell a small villa left them by her recently deceased Uncle Homer. The home, currently lived in by a happy couple, is absolutely stunning, and most of us would immediately be willing to exchange any British flat, no matter how commodious, for such a Neapolitan treasure. But the Joyce’s are not a typical couple: Alex is an acerbic womanizer, who has journeyed to Italy unwillingly and can’t wait to escape what he perceives as a common place country and return to his British homeland. Critic Paul Thomas describes him, aptly, as “disillusioned, sour, and cynical.” 

    Katherine, dispirited and almost always appearing slightly dyspeptic, if less abrasive, is nonetheless equally unhappy with life. Their voyage to Italy, we immediately realize, will also be a voyage within their selves—although it is also quite apparent that for Alex that will mean merely a kind of self-satisfied disdain for all else. One might argue that Alex, in his self-centered vision of the world, lives in a kind of perpetual stupor. As he himself proclaims, “One does sleep well in this country.”

      Both agree that their being together in this “strange” land is the first time they’ve truly been spent time alone since their marriage, and for Katherine it provides insights into the man with whom she lives. Noting on one evening out his deep engagement with another young woman, she notes: “How silly of me. I didn’t know you were interested in other women.” At another time, he observes of her: “Everything you do is utterly senseless.” So unhappy is this couple (and as Rossellini tells it, so was Sanders during the filming of this work) that we find it almost unbearable when they are together. Fortunately, Alex soon trots off to Capri—the most British and American spot in all of Italy—leaving Katherine on her own to explore various Neapolitan sites, as if her uncle were reaching out to tell her, like the ancient Homer, of another kind of voyage.

      The large part of Rossellini’s film, accordingly, explores not only the inward dissolution of her marital commitment (Bergman and the director were simultaneously drifting apart in their own relationship at this time) but a kind of tour of the local region, including the National Archeological Museum, Cumoe, the cave of Sibyl, the lava fields near Vesuvius, and the ruins of Pompeii. But Rossellini’s camera, fortunately, transforms these tourist spots into psychological landscapes filled with the grandeur, the horror, and the simple wonderment of human life past and present. Katherine is not always overjoyed to witness what she is being shown, but through Bergman’s intense stares and facial reactions, we do see her discovering something internally. As Thomas puts it:

 

 “Life is taken as if by surprise. The camera tracks, pans, and cranes, always beginning with what is being looked at and always ending—without a cut—on Katherine’s facial expression.”

 

    When Alex diffidently returns after his stay in Capri, both agree that they should divorce. But almost at the moment they attempt to leave, they are trapped in the car by a funeral procession. Abandoning the car, they are surrounded by a swarm of humanity and temporarily separated. Katherine quickly becomes terrified, as if suddenly awakening to the fact that she too is not at home in this very different world. At the same instant, however, we can only recognize that her sense of terror in many of the sites she has recently visited, has a great deal to do with the sudden realization of her own mortality. When the two meet up again within the swelling crowd, we see that he too has grown equally desperate, as each of them apologize to one another, clinging out of fear.

     For me, this ending, so unexpected, left me feeling that Rossellini had failed in his vision in this film. It is as if he were willing an ending which we knew was improbable. How could the curious beauty remain with such an odious, self-centered man? Of course, we do not know what will happen, just as we do not know what did before they sudden arrival in Italy. Through Rossellini’s “temporary” ending, we perceive that the director is offering us perhaps a more honest vision than we might have wanted. Not all searches end in revelation or transformation. Some people simply cannot make such radical changes as did Irene in Europa ’51. Like the wandering couple of Antonioni’s later film, L’Avventura, what brings people together is not always abiding love. Sometimes, perhaps more often than we would like to believe, people simply need someone of their own kind to survive.

     If I still prefer the transformative passion of his previous film, there is no question that in Voyage to Italy is has created something deeply troubling and profound.

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (November 2013).

David Lean | Blithe Spirit / 1945

between wives

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Lean, Ronald Neame, and Anthony Havelock-Allan (screenplay, based on the play by Noel Coward), David Lean (director) Blithe Spirit / 1945

 

I have watched David Lean’s cinematic remake of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit numerous times over the years (we own a copy of the film), and, admittedly, have generally enjoyed it. Coward’s wit, particularly in some of his songs, has always impressed me, even if I’ve primarily felt that his dramas, comedies, and musicals lacked great depth of meaning. Like the absurd “plot” of this sometimes silly “ghost story,” Coward’s best work exists on the surface, in the witty chit-chat of his mostly housebound figures. Even when his actors traveled the ocean as in Sail Away! they might wonder, as did his hero Mimi Paragon (played by Elaine Stritch), “Why do the wrong people, travel, travel, travel?” Dressed in silk bathrobe, a cigarette dangling from a long silver holder, both Coward and his characters were intended to stay put and make a pose.

      Perhaps that explains, in part, Coward’s dislike of Lean’s film rendition of his stage play. Lean dared to take the camera out of the Condomine’s comfy mansion, showing the car careening around dangerous corners through the Folkestone streets, for little purpose, one must admit, except to let the characters, for short periods, out of the house, as if walking the dogs. Cinematically, it has little effect; only Madame Arcati’s (Margaret Rutherford) boisterous bicycle ride seems to be a truly energizing event.

        Although critics praised the film’s Technicolor cinematography and Visual Effects specialist Tom Howard won an Academy Award, for me the specially “lit” appearance of the always green-skinned former wife and current poltergeist Elvira Condomine (Kay Hammond) slightly sickens my stomach every time I see it. If her husband Charles (Rex Harrison), the only one that can see her, describes her to his current wife, Ruth (Consntance Cummings) as having been good-looking, it’s hard to see why the troublesome house guest was brought into manifestation by more-than-eccentric Arcati for any purpose but to be a wise-cracking ghoul, who slithers up to the unsuspecting living only to blow air into their ears or to examine their “bad taste” in close-up disdain. Elvira may, at times, be quite hilarious in her observations—for example, when her odd-behaving husband seemingly begins to talk to himself, Ruth demanding that he come up to bed, Elvira responds “The way that woman harps on bed.”—but, after a while, she becomes more of a bore.

        Not that Charles minds it much. Clearly, he (like Harrison in real life if we are to believe the tell-all autobiographies and the tabloids) saw women less as serious companions than as entertaining diversions, amusing distractions to have around the house. Somewhat similarly to  

Coward’s play Design for Living, at times Blithe Spirit suggests that if one lover is fun, two are even better—if only the two of them could get on better. Much of the fun of Coward’s play, accordingly, comes from the double-talking of Charles as he abusively responds to his invisible wife, language misinterpreted as being directed at Ruth. Of course, he has also been abusing her, we soon perceive, living in a world in which he has been doted on by women throughout most of his life (again not so very different, if we are to believe Lilli Palmer, from the actor’s legendary relationships with the opposite sex, two of whose wives committed suicide). It is predictable, finally, that the two women—once Ruth is accidentally killed off in a car accident Elvira has intended for Charles—should join forces to find a way to “leave” their husband or, finally, to oust him from his own house.

      The sleep-inducing incantations by Madame Arcati to exorcise these spirits from human-like manifestations are not as significant to the play as the fact that they give an opportunity to show Margaret Rutherford huffing, puffing, skipping, jumping, and exercising her marvelously rubber-like face. In fact, this movie—which originally did not do well on either side of the Atlantic—is nearly entirely dependent on the shenanigans of Arcati, who transforms eccentric behavior to an absolute art form. At the ripe age of 53 Rutherford seems far spryer than her wonderfully dotty later performances as Miss Prism and Jane Marple. She is the one and only reason one has to see this film! Her delight in, a first, actually being able to conjure up a ghost and later at finding the real spiritual intermediary to be the servant girl Edith (Jacqueline Clarke), is almost sexual, as if she has finally found someone like herself, so different from the others who mock her existence. It’s almost as if the medium has discovered the “message” of her oddities she has been seeking all her life.

      Lean, meanwhile, seems not to comprehend Charles’ absolute delight that he now has the chance, at the end of this misogynistic and spiritually empty tale, to rid himself of both his now malicious ex’s. In the original play, Charles—on the advice of Madame Arcati—speedily leaves his home on his way to lone and long ocean voyage with his favorite sailing partner.

     To be fair to Charles, neither of his wives have proven to be a very loving woman: Ruth, unable to deal with her husband’s perplexity, turns spiteful and mean, displaying her selfishness most openly in her impatient dismissal of Madame Arcati. Elvira gradually reveals an unsavory past with other men that, given the period, might, one imagines, have led the film to be cut by the English censors (Charles’ line “If you’re trying to compile an inventory of my sex life, I feel it only fair to warn you that you’ve omitted several episodes. I shall consult my diary and give you a complete list after lunch,” did meet with the US censors which demanded it be cut).

     The couple’s evidently torrid sexual past may have been seen as somewhat predictable for gay relationships, such as those experienced by Coward, but would have been quite shocking for heterosexual couples in its day; one need only recall how reprehensible Maxim de Winter finds his wife Rebecca to be after her confession in Hitchcock’s film of only five years earlier, that she had been sexually active before their marriage: his reaction almost justifying her “murder.”

     

    Accordingly, to have Charles’ wives seek their comeuppance, as Lean does, by killing him off so that he might eternally be forced to sit between their incriminating cackles, quite misses the point of Coward’s somewhat metaphorical depiction of divorce, with the women —presumably in bilitis-like harmony—keeping the house, while the male is released into the rainy night! I suppose, what with Lean’s and Harrison’s propensity to marry—each had six marriages before they died—both director and actor sought an alternative ending wherein they could continue to be the center of female obeisance. In any event, while Coward releases him to “sail away” quite literally into the gay world free of female dominance, Lean brings him back into marital normativity, if you can describe living forever in a threesome with two harping ex-wives as being somehow normal. As Harrison has attested, Lean was not known for having a sense of humor.

       

Los Angeles, June 25, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (June 2014).

Bernardo Bertolucci | The Sheltering Sky / 1990

travelers without a destination

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci (screenplay, based on the fiction by Paul Bowles), Bernardo Bertolucci (director) The Sheltering Sky / 1990

 

Although I had seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1990 film, The Sheltering Sky when it premiered, I wasn’t truly looking forward to watching this rather long (138 minutes) film again. I had taught Paul Bowles’ original fiction several times at the University of Maryland, and I remembered the film as a rather plodding and straight-forward rendition of a work that, at least when I first read it, seemed far more suggestive and even mysterious. Bowles himself has written, “The less said about the movie the better.” As writer Frederic Tuten commented on my review, "Hard to make a film of that novel. Much of it is a gorgeous National Geographic film."

     Perhaps I should add that in Sun & Moon journal I published several small pieces by Paul Bowles as part of his "Points in Time."

       I knew something of the lives of the author and his amazingly talented wife, Jane, but I had not yet read all of their works nor quite perceived the extent of their open bisexuality.

      This time around I liked the movie much better, although I still found it, at times, a rather a flat-footed version of the original. But then, perhaps that was part of the problem with the original fiction as well, wherein the character Port Moresby is clearly a kind of heterosexual stand-in the homosexual Bowles and Kit, another heterosexual version of the lesbian Jane. Perhaps the author, writing in 1949, was simply trying to make his couple more palatable to the general audience at a time hostile to LGBTQ identity (long before there were even such a term). I feel he was also quite-reticent about his gay identity, particularly in the US, while he felt freer to express it in Central America and Morocco, despite consorting with major gay American and British figures—he was a music student of Aaron Copland and became good friends with Gertrude Stein, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal, while later drawing nearly every gay writer and poet to his residence in Tangiers, including Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Even my Spanish book agent joked that when she was young her mother would not allow her to visit the Bowles’ in Tangiers. My former agent is now dead.

    Perhaps his fiction was simply a kind of fantasy to play out the difficulties of this bi-sexual couple in a more simplistic context than their real lives allowed. Yet, in the novel there are all sorts of hints that something else was going on, while in Bertolucci’s film there are only a couple of occasions when the screenwriters suggest there might be something more here, as when Kit (Debra Winger), now attracted to their handsome traveling companion, George Tunner (Campbell Scott), declares that it is not her problem as much as it is her husband’s. Mostly, Bertolucci simply skips over any attempts at explaining what these “travelers,” as opposed to “tourists” are truly seeking.

       In short, I now feel there was something inherently dishonest in Bowles’ original work, which shows up in the Bertolucci film as a kind clumsy lie.

       But if you forget that there is anything even slightly autobiographical about this work, or that an openly gay man is writing about the collapse of the heterosexual romance, the movie actually works quite nicely. It is beautifully filmed by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (who won awards from BAFTA and The New York Film Critics Circle), who, after introducing the credits in a black-and-white paean to New York City—presumably to establish the period and the characters’ roots—turns his lens to tawny browns and yellows to establish the Moroccan and Algerian landscapes.  

      Moreover, the music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, combining Arab calls to prayer, North African music, and a lush Hollywood score, is equally memorable, winning him several awards as well.

       If at first I was a bit disturbed by John Malkovich’s deadpan portrayal of Port, I realized by film’s end that it was not, perhaps, so very different from the kind of high-cultured disdain of Bowles himself, who narrates a few passages (as an observing dinner guest in a hotel restaurant).

     Winger as Kit is a bit more problematic. In her perky, raspy-voiced characterization of Kit, she doesn’t quite fit the superstitious and problematic figure who, on some days, we are told, sees signs in everything about her, falling into bouts of inexplicable fears and depression. In this version she seems far more hardy and ready for battle than the character who Bowles describes needed Port to make all decisions so that she might not be responsible for life. Here, she becomes the far dominant figure, as Port moodily moves through the desert spaces, particularly after he begins to suffer the signs of Typhoid Fever. She, in fact, appears to be the far stronger individual in their relationship, and even attempts to nurse her dying husband back to health.

      Only after his death does she fall again into near passivity, flagging down a local Bedouin group, whose leader takes her on by dressing her up like a boy (another almost unobtrusive reference to Jane’s identity) so that he might sexually assault her. What is interesting about Bertolucci’s portrait of Bedouin life is that it is the men who wear the burkas, while the women openly expose their faces.

      In her passivity at the end of the film, it is almost as if Kit were allowing into her life all of the others whom Port (and she) had previously attempted to escape from, including Tunner, whom Port plots to send off to other desert frontier cities to keep him away from Kit, and the Lyles, the nasty British travel guide writer and her monstrous adult baby, Eric (the always wonderful Timothy Spall), who she keeps at her side by denying him money or any of his adult desires for drink and, presumably, male companionship. He represents one of the most notorious examples of a mamma’s boy outside of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? or Psycho.

      Yet, strangely, it is precisely these reprehensible people who this generally incompatible couple need: if nothing else the Lyles bring some comic relief to their unhappy lives, and Tunner provides (perhaps for both) some empty-headed romance, as well as some financial stability that Port and Kit might seek, particularly after being robbed of both billfold—although Port does retrieve that—and his passport, which he refuses to retrieve in order to escape further encounters with Tunner. One might almost argue, in the end, that the Moresbys' problem is that despite their adventurous personalities, they won’t dare themselves to hang out with all the wrong people, who could, in fact, bring them closer to one another. They want to be travelers without a true destination, making them, in fact, more tourists than the people whom they describe, “when they arrive somewhere immediately want to go home.” Tunner, indeed, in his attempt to reign in Kit’s almost mad wanderings, is perhaps more of a true world traveler than Kit and Port were ever destined to be. In the end, Kit simply disappears into thin air, while the handsome Tunner stands still as a testament, if nothing else, of himself and his jaunty American-ness.

      The reason The Sheltering Sky’s major characters both die and disappear is the fact, perhaps, that they simply cannot put down real roots. The images of Manhattan in the credits are all an illusion. They might have lived in that city (actually for a brief period of time the Bowles resided in a Brooklyn Heights house with other noted gays and open-minded artists W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Richard Wright, and Gypsy Rose Lee), but they could never stay too long in one place, which is really what Bowles’ novel and Bertolucci’s film is all about; endless traveling can ultimately look a lot like tourism, and wise Americans such as they were can easily become ugly.

 

Los Angeles, July 1, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2018).

 

Derek Jarman | The Garden / 1990

the antithesis of cold silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Derek Jarman (screenwriter and director) The Garden / 1990

 

Diagnosed as HIV positive in 1986, Jarman moved soon after to what might have been perceived as a retreat, to a seaside cottage in Dungeness, Kent, between a power station and a nature reserve. But instead of resting, Jarman built a garden there among the stones with hardy plants that could survive both the wind and the cold. Indeed, through several late cinematic works, the director built up a world there that came to stand almost for the end of the world, certainly his world, but perhaps also for the end of England considering what it had previously stood for. Just as in his earlier films, centered on major figures who lived their difficult and tortured lives in a world which set them apart of the rest of society, so Jarman’s garden in the midst of what looked like desert, offered a possible new vision for the society, like him, on its death bed.

    Now, in his fourth year of suffering from AIDS-related conditions, Jarman determined to focus on what that “garden” stood for, not only the lost world of Adam and Eve, but the lost opportunities of entire cultures which had rejected their often most vital and moral figures, by turning the moral lessons of religion and learning on their head in their perpetual miscomprehension of love and morality. The director himself had argued that, in fact, “I feel the moral high ground—particularly in the ‘80s with the AIDS crisis—was held by gay men and women. I feel that strongly.”*

  Jarman, like most others of  Britain’s gay communities, was even more disturbed by the British government’s lack of action against AIDS and even worse, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government’s introduction of Section 28, adding in 1988 to the Local Government Act of 1986, the clause stating: a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality of publish material with the intention of promotion of homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” The shocking demand to close all ears and eyes to homosexuality in the very midst of the AIDS crisis struck most of the LGBTQ community, Jarman among them, as not only perverse but as representing a kind of public abuse and murder.

      As “The Cinephile Gardener” nicely puts it (in his site devoted only to gardens in film): “The Garden is a howl of rage from a dying man.”

      In the film, the poem the director himself had written in his diary about AIDS appears at the very end, read by Michael Gough; but I think it might be interesting to consider the poem before approaching the film, a work which in some respects is the very opposite of Dylan Thomas’ insistence to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” yet clearly incorporates those sentiments. But here there is a kind of “cold”—the key word, along with “silence,” that dominates this work—objectivity of what is going on around him and will soon surround himself:

 

I walk in this garden

Holding the hands of dead friends

Old age came quickly for my frosted generation

Cold, cold, cold they died so silently

 

Did the forgotten generations scream?

Or go full of resignation

Quietly protesting innocence

Cold, cold, cold they died so silently

 

I have no words

My shaking hand

Cannot express my fury

Sadness is all I have

Cold, cold, cold you died so silently

 

Linked hands at four AM

Deep under the city you slept on

Never heard the sweet flesh song

Cold, cold, cold they died so silently

 

Matthew fucked Mark fucked Luke fucked John

Who lay in the bed that I lie on

Touch fingers again as you sing this song

Cold, cold, cold we died so silently

 

My gilly flowers, roses, violets blue

Sweet garden of vanished pleasures

Please come back next year

Cold, cold, cold I die so silently

 

Goodnight boys,

Goodnight Johnny,

Goodnight,

Goodnight.

 

     Given his fury that cannot be properly expressed, Jarman chose the most possible open-ended structure he could create. Unlike the objectivity of the poem, the film is almost entirely subjective, whirling around the director’s own private associations, his visions of other possibilities for a religious hagiography while including highly personal associations of place and friends (as in several of his films, actor Tilda Swinton is a major figure) as well as several comic, almost music-hall tropes that swing the otherwise terrifying and quite serious story of the crucifixion among other religious stories into joyfully comic satires such as the performance of Roger Eden’s song of fashion insanity (perfect for the Barbie film-days in which I am writing this review) “Think Pink” from the movie Funny Face (1957). Even The New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin recognized the work as a “virtually wordless 90-minute assemblage of turbulent images…a peculiar blend of reflectiveness and fury,” turning Jarman’s thoughts on AIDS, Christianity and intolerance, “into a feverish vision of far-reaching decay.”

      If you might think, however, that decades after the provocatively open-ended works of everyone from Antonioni to Fassbinder Maslin could make sense of the cinema, you’d be mistaken as she bows out of a full review by simply summarizing her exhausted emotions: “motivation, like everything else here, is rather too widely open to interpretation.”

      In fact, the motivation is the one totally clear aspect of this film, as I already have argued. Its form, moreover, if disjunctive is no more difficult to assimilate than a film by Resnais or Tarkovsky.

     Indeed, Jarman himself has rather nicely summarized some of its parts:

 

“The film is structured like a dream allegory, in a poetic tradition, rather like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The film is a dream allegory of the author, in this case, myself. I could have put somebody else into it, but really dreams are always in the first person, though people often invent proxies. I go to sleep and go on a mental journey. Sleep can take lots of side turnings and in turnings a lot of things can happen. …It starts off with the Garden of Eden, then it progresses through various moments in Christ’s life, again not in a particular way. …You have recognizable scenes like the Judas kiss or Pontius Pilate and the arrest. There is no problem identifying and knowing where you are. Then there is another whole level of my childhood memories. This kid—Jody Gruber—is in a way my childhood self. A strict schooling and everything else. The schoolmasters’ canes become the canes of the flagellation.”

      Indeed, early in the film the narrative makes quite clear that his is the story of Christ, beginning with his birth in Nazareth, and even citing passages from the Bible. What changes are the figures who perform those characters, how they are presented, and how famous Biblical scenes are transformed into personal associations very much the way the noted US dramatist Richard Foreman does in his plays and films.

       Highly formalized ways of perceiving events shift when recontextualized with contemporary contexts. For example, Tilda Swinton as the Madonna with child begins in the usual images art has long taught us to perceive them but quickly grow ludicrous as the paparazzi, their heads in  balaclavas begin photographing her, gradually disrobing both child and mother, and eventually, as they move in closer and closer to get their shot, almost hinting at an attempted rape, as she, going on the run, abandons her baby and finds herself, time and again, rolling under the crushing bodies of photographers in a manner that reads almost like a prophecy of what would happen to Princess Diana 7 years later.

      Judas hangs with an extended purple tongue while he attempts to sell credit cards on TV. The Devil (Pete Lee-Wilson) is a sleek leather daddy presenting his famous song-and-dance. Mary Magdalene (Spencer Lee) is a drag queen dressed in a blue sequined gown who is attacked and stoned by the members of the local community, mostly cis-gender women. The Twelve Apostles are imagined as the same number of women in babushkas sitting at a Last Supper-like setting as they run their fingers around the rims of wine glasses creating an ear-piercing hum.

     I have previously argued in discussing short works by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Peter de Rome of 1962 and 1972 that Yēšūa of Nazareth was the perfect homosexual. Obviously, Jarman agrees, turning his Christ into a gay man who finds a lover as a young local sailor (possibly even being a boy who he encounters on the desolate beach) the two eventually becoming a model gay couple, complete with baby. Together the gay Christ couple (Johnny Mills and Philip MacDonald) spend most of their time making love and simply standing in slightly moony poses, child-often-in-hand. It is in one of these scenes, as our pretty boy Christs are dressed in pink tuxedos that West End performer Jessica Martin sings her rendition of “Think Pink.”

     Jarman comments on his obvious religious desecration: “Putting the two young men in certain elements of the passion draws immediate attention and shows that this whole morality thing is topsy turvy. These people are the ones one should be admiring and actually listening to. … Though the most appalling things happen to them, the myth remains intact and they are resurrected in the end. In carrying the whole thing through by putting them in the position of being the Christ figure, you can say it’s a great muddle, but I can’t see how else one can deal with it. It is all too enormous.” One wonders whether such a movie could possibly even be made today without riots in the street. In the art-house world of Jarman’s day, the fundamentalists fortunately did not even notice. Today, this film might have shown up in the US Supreme Court, the majority insisting it stands against the original signers of the Constitution’s beliefs.

     We begin to realize, however, that their situation is becoming dangerous in the narrative of the film when, as they sleep, “three sinister Santa’s sing” (I’ve stolen Maslin’s lovely alliteration) each stanza of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" louder and louder until our sleeping Christs are rudely awakened.

     The court of Pontius Pilate looks more like the steam room out of Hollywood movies such as The Robe and Spartacus, with Herod and Pilate licking their tongues in lust as other cute boys are slowly massaged while our Christ couple cower together in the middle of the room.

      The soldiers to whom Christ and his lover are consigned are a mix of the standard Teutonic bullies, in this case first torturing the two by pasting chocolate Nutella all over their foreheads and hair before tearing apart their own uniforms to pull out the feathers in order to finish their tar-and-feathering torture.

      The brutal flagellation comes later, reminding us of the professor’s canes striking time and again upon the table where earlier on the young boy who joined Christ was attempting his lessons.

But here blood and pain are far more obvious, the Christ men suffering before their long walk to Golgotha. But along that slow march, Mary Magdalene, still in her blue gown, appears and bends to kiss both their feet.

 

      In and amongst these narrative tales are endless images of earth, air, wind, and fire along with the storyteller himself in this version of the Christian mythos. Yet as Pat Brown observes in the 2019 Slant review “…Despite being guided by a dream logic that’s nightmarish more often than not, the film isn’t oppressive. Jarman appears in a few roles, including that of a dreamer, asleep on a bed in a shallow sea as white-linen clad figures circle around him holding flares. … The film’s images burn, yet Jarman understands that fire can symbolize both destruction and creation. After all, one burns the vestiges of last year’s crops before replanting, and The Garden isn’t without hope that we can regrow a paradise.”

      The intent of this film is quite obvious, but the result, alas, remains in the hands of its viewers. Alas, I am afraid a lot of weeds of grown up in the garden Jarman—who died of AIDS in 1994—once planted, instead of the beautiful flowers he had intended.

 

*The comments by Jarman, which evidently appeared in the material published in connection to the release of the movie, were reprinted in on-line site, The Metropole.

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).