Hal Asby | Being There / 1979

being where?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerzy Kosiński with Robert C. Jones [uncredited] (screenplay, based on the book by Kosiński), Hal Ashby (director) Being There / 1979

 

Hal Ashby’s Being There, based on the fiction by Polish writer Jerzy Kosiński, represents several overlaying stories and genres. At its base, it is a fable about becoming an adult. The Father (a kind of god) dies, forcing the innocent son to go out in the world and become what he was destined to become.

     Chance (Peter Sellers), the “old man’s” gardener, however, is not just any innocent young man, but a near-idiot who has experienced the world only through the media. He does not even know what death means, and the television shows he watches are just things of moving action with utterly no narrative or meaning to him. He is, quite clearly, a permanent child, with little possibility of finding his way in the world; indeed, he does not even comprehend that the old man’s death might mean that he must leave the safety of the “house.”

       The fact that his adventures into the real world, despite his simple-minded skills at social interaction, quickly leads to living in one the wealthiest homes in the country and, soon after, an entry into the political world that involves giving advice to the President, turns Kosińki’s tale into a quite cynical view of wealth, white bigotry, and politics. Those at the top of the society are clearly the most gullible, filling in Chance’s simple responses with their own words and thoughts, presuming that his comments on gardening are metaphors predicting shifts in the economy and the quite literal “room above” is a comment on heaven.

 

    The fact that this fool’s life should be so blessed also transforms him into a kind of Christ, often described as the holy fool—foolish, in the sense, for Christ’s total commitment to belief and his inexplicable love for all mankind.

      By work’s end, he is seen, as in one of Christ’s most significant miracles, seemingly standing on water, while those burying the dead Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas) whisper about the possibility of helping to put Chance (renamed, by mistake, Chauncey Gardiner by Rand’s younger wife Eve [Shirley MacLaine]) into the White House.

 

     Because of Chance’s complete immersion in media—time and again he states, “I like to watch”—director Ashby, moreover, fills this film with images of ads, cartoons, news, and other daily distractions which suggest how most Americans have lost their ability to recognize the difference between idiocy and deep knowledge, allowing the film to function as a satire of modern-day American culture. One of the grandest mansions in the country—the Biltmore Estate near Asheville, North Carolina serving as the Rand’s home—sits next door to a dive-in Hamburger stand, suggesting that American democracy has failed to make distinctions between the meaningful and meaningless, between the exalted and the crassly commercial.

      Because the excellent cast, acting at top pitch, Being There, with these possible levels of significance, appears, accordingly to be a very entertaining myth: satire, fable, religious story, and even political commentary seem to come together effortlessly, particularly given the total convincingness of Seller’s character. As MacLaine has commented on Seller’s acting: "(Peter) believed he was Chauncey. He never had lunch with me... He was Chauncey Gardiner the whole shoot, but believing he was having a love affair with me."

      At the same time, he attends, quite amazingly an event at the Russian embassy where he not only enchants the Russian ambassador, who he convinces he knows the language and the writing of a quite famous Russian fabulist simply because he giggles and grins at appropriate moments, but also attracts the attention of a young gay US politico who wonders if Chauncey might join him in a gay sexual encounter. In his total incomprehension of all things sexual, our innocent repeats his enjoyment of watching, suggesting to the eager your gay man that he has found the perfect voyeur to enjoy his and his partner’s sexual engagement. How our empty-headed hero responds to their sexual escapades is never established.

      In fact, I have also felt, the many times I’ve watched this film, that there is something phony about its various messages, that in its total cynicism of the political, social, and sexual worlds—even though we might truly despise politics and politicians these days, fear for our social mores, let alone their social incompetencies—the comedy gradually turns sour. Can we really believe that the only truly sane people in this world are the old man’s black servant (Ruth Attaway) and the Rand’s personal doctor (Richard Dysart)? Perceiving that truth, how can the servant simply leave such a man, incapable for caring for himself, without telling someone?; why doesn’t the doctor, when he perceives Chauncey is truly a gardener, not a “Gardiner,” tell Rand’s widow, who apparently is planning to marry him or, at least, keep him as a permanent guest in her vast house?    

    When some of his students attempted to explain the last scene—where the hero appears to be standing on water—suggesting that perhaps he was walking on a submerged pier, film critic Roger Ebert responded: “The movie presents us with an image, while you may discuss the meaning of the image, it is not permitted to devise explanations for it. Since Ashby does not show a pier, there is no pier—a movie is exactly what it shows us, and nothing more.”

      I completely disagree. As Murat Nemat-Nejat has argued for photography (The Peripheral Space of Photography), the most interesting aspects of a picture are often what are just out of the frame or hidden within the image itself. So too in film: it often greatly matters what the writer or director does not say or show, what he didn’t mean to say or show, or didn’t even know he was saying or showing us.

      We know that a fable is not the same as a realist tale, but when this writer and director attempt to tell a fable through realist images, scenes from actual media broadcasts, and locations in very real place (in this case Washington, D.C. and environs), we naturally question the logic of inexplicable scenes such as the one above. We cannot help but wonder why Chance has been living his entire life in the old man’s house, and what was his relationship to the old man? Why does he believe that his bed faces in a direction other than it actually does? If he is allowed to wear the old man’s suits, what were his connection to him? Was he possibly the old man’s son? Even if we presume that the “old man” represents God the father, Chance being the Holy Son, how might we then explain God’s death? Is this work a secret Nietzschean commentary?

     And if we cannot answer those questions (indeed to answer them might erase the sense of this being a fable), how do we explain all the other inconsistences with the world we know and the one imagined in the film. Is everybody in Washington, D.C. equally deluded? How can such a flesh and blood idiot—and Sellers’ performance does indeed make him come to life*—happen to live in such a fairy tale world? It is, obviously, a highly constructed lie that, when played out in a realist context, helps to create the discontinuity we feel, and which, in turn, results in our laughter. Of course, this is not a real world; Being There is a satire dressed up as an experience close enough to “real” life that we recognize the near-truth of some of its targets.

     Yet knowing that only reinforces what I feel about this work and its dishonesty. It is, ultimately, a mirror game which has no possible basis in the reality it pretends. And it becomes increasingly impossible to comprehend everyone’s sexual and intellectual attraction to this character’s smiling but bland looking face. Gradually, the entire endeavor begins to fall like a house of cards. Even its title seems to be hiding something from us. We want naturally to ask “Being where?” And not quite knowing even where I have actually been by film’s end I am always left in something of a quandary; feeling a bit like the young lawyer who feels he’s been made a fool through his interview with Chance early in the film, I take my pleasure in this movie as a bit of a slap on the face.

 

*Apparently Sellers was opposed to the after-credits showing of an outtake, generally called the “Rafael episode,” in which the actor, in take after take, was unable to speak his lines in character, breaking out time and again in laughter as he attempted to utter his ludicrous dialogue. Although it’s wonderful to watch this, I can well understand his objections to it, for it reveals just how ridiculous was the “reality” of the film, and how broad the satire really was. The only thing that kept other such situations at bay was Sellers’ absolute dead-pan presentation of his lines.

 

Los Angeles, April 14, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2016).

Arturo Ripstein | El imperio de la fortuna (The Realm of Fortune) / 1986

russian roulette

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paz Alicia Garciadiego (screenplay, based on a story by Juan Rulfo), Arturo Ripstein (director) El imperio de la fortuna (The Realm of Fortune) / 1986

 

If there is one thing Mexican film director Arturo Ripstein brilliantly achieves—and fortunately, he is multi-gifted—it is to capture the character of Mexican and South American idiot-bullies who, living in isolated poverty, play out a machismo ethos that ultimately destroys all of those around them and, eventually, themselves. One might almost argue that such figures of destruction almost obsess Ripstein, as he returns to them time and again, a bit like the American writer Flannery O’Connor focused so many of her works on similar kinds of low-class hillbilly sham artists, rapists, murderers in her vision of the American South.

     At times, given the overwrought realism of Ripstein’s scenes, his films become almost unbearable to watch. Even if you can bear with the low-down dirt floor grittiness of The Realm of Fortune’s sets, it may be hard for the average film-goer to watch the central character, Dionisio Pinzon (Ernesto Gómez Cruz) drag his dead mother, wrapped in a woven wooden mat, around town, before burying her by hand (and later, digging up her body parts which, in the passage of time, have been dislocated perhaps by wild animals, local farmers, and natural causes).

     Later, Dionisio, who begins the film as a kind of town crier acquires a game cock, which demands we watch several brutal cock fights wherein, in each case, one of the cocks is decapitated or plucked to death. When the dead cocks are tossed out in a nearby alley, old women, obviously with starving families to feed, poorer than even Dionisio, quickly gather them up. Even Dionisio’s beloved winning cock, Blondy—whom he has saved from death—is sacrificed out of vengeance, the handler breaking the cock’s ribs before loosing him upon the fight ordered by the local “padrone,” Lorenzo Benavides (Alejandro Parodi).

     Throughout the film, in fact, death haunts this terribly common human being, who ignores the death of his servant-like mother (Socorro Avelar), while attending to his beloved Blondy. Indeed, wherever Dioniso goes, death seems to follow, without him realizing that he and his actions are behind it. Lured into the world of cock handlers and gamblers by Benavides, Dionisio suddenly finds himself with a little a bit a money and a life so transformed that he can suddenly imagine Benavides’ girl, La Caponera (the singer, stunningly portrayed by Blanca Guerra), might even be sexually attracted in him. The scene in which these two haunted beasts come together in the “backroom” warehouse of a tawdry bar is almost impossible to watch, particularly given the beautiful Caponera’s almost total abandonment to lust.

      Whereas the fool Dionisio once had nothing to his name, he now has a vulgar new bejeweled vest, money in his pocket, a casket decorated in ridiculously bad taste, and a “living” amulet in the form of his new lover. After a few more gambling wins, the birth of a daughter, La Pinzona (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez), and the purchase of a truck, he returns to the estate (formerly a Catholic boarding school) owned by Benavides in order to bet against his former teacher. He wins everything, including the building, entrapping his wife (just as had Benavides previously) within, a bit like the monster Bluebeard. Gambling each night away with local thugs, with la Caponera forced to sit nearby, he passes the rest of his empty life meaninglessly winning card game after game. His daughter grows up practically wild.

     In one final resolute attempt to escape, his wife takes her daughter to a local fair, hoping to link up once again with the small combo with whom she once performed. But in the years she has gone missing, they have taken up with another, younger singer, and sadly reject what they now perceive as an old woman with little charm. Like Mamma Rose in the American musical Gypsy, La Caponera quickly dresses up her daughter to replicate her younger self, but the girl—torn between her mother’s betrayal of Dionisio and the fact that La Caponera cannot ever truly leave her husband—refuses to perform, Dionisio quickly arriving to gather up his two missing “possessions.”      

     What this unimaginative and stupid compesino does not perceive is that in his attempt to hold on to all that he has amassed, he has been playing yet another game, this one similar to Russian Roulette. Time and again, in his abusive nights of meaningless amusement he has put an invisible gun to his head that threatens to shatter everything that might be of meaning.

     In one final long night, with his wife sitting on a couch nearby, Dionisio begins to lose— game after game after game. Slowly throughout the night he loses his vast wealth, and, finally, bets and loses his house. Only at the end of his self-delusion (reminding us of the death of his mother early on in the film) does he realize that during his orgy of gambling, the drunken singer has died. In anger, he kicks her, blaming her for leaving him just as he had previously blamed his mother.

     His amulet gone, he retreats into another room to shoot himself in the head.

     In the final scene we observe his now promiscuous daughter, raised upon a small stage just as was her mother, singing a song about roses. Despite the fact that we see in her actions that she, like her parents, is trapped in the world she inhabits, we also perceive through her beauty and the loveliness of her song just what her mother, La Coponera, proffered to the poor, ignorant beings of the villages she haunted.

     If Ripstein’s film has presented us with stereotyped individuals who seem doomed in their preordained behaviors, we also have been forced, by movie’s end, to lay aside what might have begun as dismissal and disgust as we now lament the death of such misled dreamers as La Coponera and the impoverished Dionisio. In telling their predictable story, accordingly, the director and his writer have also helped to redeem what otherwise might be perceived as empty lives. Dionisio, despite the lurid attractions of money and power which destroyed him, truly only loved two things he encountered in his life, his cock Goldy and his singing wife. If only he could have more carefully focused upon what he loved instead of being distracted by his culturally bred values. If only we could all say we loved so passionately as he did.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2014).

Roberto Rossellini | Francesco, giullare di Dio (God’s Jester) / (The Flowers of St. Francis) / 1950, USA 1952

perfect happiness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini (screenwriters), Roberto Rossellini (director) Francesco, giullare di Dio (God’s Jester) / (The Flowers of St. Francis) / 1950, USA 1952

 

Given many of the negative reviews when Rossellini’s Flowers of St. Francis after its 1950 premiere in Venice, it appears that many filmgoers simply couldn’t comprehend a religiously accurate text with humor. Marcel Oms, for example, described the film as “a monument of stupidity,” critic Guido Aristarco insisting it presented a formalist and, therefore, false reality. Even my beloved Time Out Film Guide, usually an embracing catalogue, describes St. Francis’s followers as a motley crew, suggesting that the film shares their qualities.

 

     On the other hand, François Truffaut described it as “the most beautiful film in the world,” and, although I wouldn’t go quite that far, I’d certainly agree with Martin Scorsese’ 2005 assessment of it, as a film filled with humor and grace.  The problem with most films about saints, argues Scorsese, is the issue of “reverence”:

 

                               The aura of reverence is almost always at odds with the way

                               the saints must have felt about themselves. It’s as if they’d

                               already been declared saints in their own lifetime, as if every

                               word out of their mouths had been pre-sanctified.

 

       Rossellini’s study of St. Francis and his followers belongs to a far earlier tradition, expounded by Desiderius Erasmus and his friend Thomas More, which described Christ as a saintly fool, a man who, despite the logic of daily needs and human conditions, gave himself completely over to his faith. Working with two St. Francis books, Fioretti Di San Francesco and Vita di Frate Ginepro, Rossellini and Fellini created a true believer, who, in the original Italian title, is also a kind of jester, “God’s Jester,” another kind of holy being.

 

    Using monks from the Nocere Inferiore Monastery to play the roles of St. Franciso and his followers, the director maneuvers his figures through the 9 marked tales in this lovely film, as if they were a herd of deer running through woods in an escape of bright lights. Indeed, the film begins with the Franciscans on the run through a rainstorm, racing to find cover only to discover that their small shelter has been overtaken by an interloper and his donkey, the old man insisting that his donkey remain. The monks, withdraw, only to take joy in their suffering.

     Many of the following episodes—and this film is deliberately episodic, as if it might have expanded exponentially to contain as many “tales” as the writers may have desired—are comic, others startlingly touching in their very simplicity. Most of the comic tales involve the near-idiot cook of the group, Brother Ginepro, who is so humble that he gives up his very robe twice, returning home naked. Even though Francis would give up nearly anything to the poor, he orders that Ginepro never again give up his tunic. At another point, left alone to his chores, Brother Ginepro tries to comfort an ailing Brother Amarsebello, who has fasted too often. The broth he tries to feed him is so disgusting that even Ginepro can hardly swallow it. And when he asks Brother Amarsebello what he might like to eat, the sickly man suggests a pig’s foot, which Ginepro gamely goes out on the hunt to find. Discovering a swine, he gently asks the pig for his foot, before chopping it off and returning with the treat to his fellow monk. The owner of the pig soon follows, demanding recompense. Francis orders Ginepro to apologize, which he does, but the farmer refuses and storms off. A few moments later, however, he returns with the dead pig, offering it up the hungry congregation, while warning them never to touch his pigs again.

      At another moment, Ginepro, tired of being left behind, cooks enough food to feed the group of two weeks. So touched is Francis that he allows the humble monk to go out and preach. That event proves near disastrous, as Ginepro crashes into the camp of the barbarian Nicolaio at Viterbo who, when his soldiers discover an awl and flint among the monk’s possessions, orders him to be hung. A priest, recognizing Ginepro as a Franciscan, begs for his release, which the tyrant is loath to do, facing the monk down with his tyrannical glare. Ginepro merely smiles, seemingly ready for whatever fate he must face. So amazed is Nicolaio by the man’s humility that he releases him, closes up his camp and retreats—a miracle of sorts.

 

       Three other episodes, among my favorite, may counter the hilarious mood of the Ginepro stories, but nonetheless reveal the whimsy of Francis’ doctrines. While praying a bird settles his shoulder, which he quickly picks up and sends away, declaring to the bird that he is busy trying to pray to God. At another moment, he meets a leper, most of whose face has been peeled away. He attempts to touch what he perceives as a soul in torture, but the leper pulls away. Again, Francis puts his hands to the leper’s face, and again the diseased man shoves Francis from him. Finally, however, Francis succeeds in embracing the suffering being. Scorsese writes of this scene, noting the startling directness of his confrontational love:

                             I’ve never seen another film that deals with this basic question

                             of compassion so eloquently.

 

      The most joyous episode of this film, certainly occurs when St. Clare and two of her sisters come to lunch with Francis. The brothers scurry about, as usual, this time carefully gathering up masses of flowers in order create a kind of carpet of blossoms where she might step. With the few tools they have at their disposal, they brush their hair, cut their beards and groom their filthy faces. When Clare arrives, they pray, eat and quietly talk—a fire, reports the narrator, igniting the sky.

     The last episode, like so many others of this moving film, combines the comical, the whimsical, and the profound commitment of these all-too human men to their faith. The time has come, declares St. Francis, in which the group must break up, the friars going in different directions to preach their faith. But the men are unsure which way to go. In response, Francis orders them to spin about in circles until they are so dizzy that they can no longer stand. Together they do precisely that, twirling like comical whirling dervishes before they fall, one by one, to the ground, each of them gradually getting on their feet to move off in the direction in which their head was pointing at the time of their fall, singing a chant as they travel off away from one another. With astounding simplicity, Rossellini recounts actions of such profound separation that we do not know whether to cry or laugh. But, of course, there is no either/or choice in this view of Franciscan theology: life is both horrible and wondrous. As Francis preached, the moment of most “perfect happiness” is “to suffer and bear every evil deed out of love for Christ.”

 

Los Angeles, March 10, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (March 2014).

Charles Walters | Lili / 1953

before and after

by Douglas Messerli

 

Helen Deutsch (screenplay, based on a story by Paul Gallico), Charles Walters (director) Lili / 1953

 

In 1961, at the age of 14, at a time when I was utterly infatuated with Broadway musical theater, I purchased the MGM Stereo disc to the musical Carnival, staring Anna Maria Alberghetti, James Mitchell, Jerry Orbach, and Kaye Ballard. Along with West Side Story, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (which opened that same year), and She Loves Me (which appeared a couple of years later), it quickly became one of my favorite of listening experiences. I haven’t heard that now quite-worn out record for decades.

 

    Although I listened to these recordings and numerous others that I had purchased with my newspaper monies I was supposed to be saving for college, I had seen very few musicals in person, and was forced to simply conjure them up through the extensive liner-notes and the pictures inside the album. You probably couldn’t have been able to convince me that I actually hadn’t seen these productions, so real did my imagination render what was missing. And amazingly, probably in about 1962 or 1963, a production of Carnival was produced in Cedar Rapids at Coe College, which must have been part of a traveling company or, more likely, a student production. To me, witnessing only my second “Broadway” musical (if you exclude high school productions; I’d previously seen amateur productions of the local Cedar Rapids theater company of Damn Yankees and The Boy Friend), it was almost as magical as the recording—although no one could sing Mira like Alberghetti (as I recount in My Year 2007, I later met Alberghetti at a Los Angeles County Museum of Art event) and there was no man so handsome and suave in my childhood imagination than James Mitchell as Marco the Magnificent! Had I been Lili, I probably would have also stalked his trailer.

     The libretto by Michael Stewart, was based on the movie Lili, with a screenplay by Helen Deutsch. For Christmas this year, I bought a DVD of that 1953 film which Howard and I watched on New Year’s Eve.

     Carnival is certainly a better version of Paul Gallico story. But there is still some charm, along with a great deal of syrupy sentiment in Charles Walters’ rendition of Lili. The story is so slight that it’s hard to imagine that it actually supports the 81 minutes of screen time. A young waif, Lili (Leslie Caron) suddenly appears in a small provincial French town, hoping for a job with a local baker whom her father had known. But the baker has apparently died since she has written him, and his shop is closed. The naïve girl, accordingly, has nowhere to go.

 

    A next-door shopkeeper momentarily takes her in, offering her a bed; but it quickly becomes apparent that he is determined to sexually abuse her. A local carnival magician, Marcus the Magnificent (Jean-Pierre Aumont), visiting the shop in search of handkerchiefs to use in his act, rescues her, and, she, amazed by his magic tricks and handsome demeanor, follows him, along with the carnival’s puppeteer, Paul Berthalet (Mel Farrar) and his partner, Jacquot (Kurt Kasznar), back to the location in which the players are setting up their stands.

     Unable to get rid of the likeable pest, Marcus arranges a job for her waiting tables at the carnival dining hall; but Lili is so inept at the job and so awestruck by Marcus’ performance with his sequined-gowned assistant, Rosalie (Zsa-Zsa Gabor), that she stops working, mouth agape in the wonderment of their performance, and is quickly fired.

      Depressed by her lack of future possibilities, the young girl is almost suicidal until nearby puppets, one by one, call out to her, and engage her in conversation. The young engaging boy puppet, Carrot Top, along with his friends, the thieving fox Reynardo, the cowardly giant Golo, and the vain ballerina Marguerite, engage Lili in a conversation, she responding so naturally and innocently to them that a crowd gathers round to watch their interchanges, the slightly bitter puppeteer realizing that Lili is a natural draw for his show.

     Paul and Jacquot offer her a place to sleep and a share of their sales; and after a few days she and the puppet show grows to be such a hit that agents from another show are drawn to visit the “act.”

 

    Over these few days of her employment, Lili gradually discovers from Jocquot that Paul is bitter because he had been a great dancer, whose career was suddenly destroyed by an accident which crippled him. Still, Paul, who spends much of his time drinking and sourly commenting on the world around him, frightens the young girl, who, like the child she still is, does not quite connect the fact the friendly puppets with whom she enjoyably communicates are actually being manipulated and voiced by Paul and Jacquot.

    A visit in Lili’s trailer from Marcus, clearly attracted to the budding young beauty, further infuriates Paul, as he attempts to explain to Lili that, in her innocence, she is encouraging a sexual relationship with the intruder. When he finds Paul wedding ring on the couch, he slaps the girl, insisting that she is determined to become a whore.

     Meanwhile, Marcus and Rosalie, to whom Marcus is secretly married, have been offered a venue elsewhere and plan to leave; Lili, now recognizing that he and his assistant are married, pays Marcus one last visit, apologizing for her childish infatuation with him and telling him that she now plans to leave the circus.

    Two impresarios, who have been watching Paul, Jacquot, and Lili’s performances, praise Paul’s talent and offer the puppeteer and his company a better situation. As Lili prepares to leave, the puppets attempt to lure her back. She briefly returns to them to say goodbye, but cannot be talked out of departing, and soon returns to the road, dashing Paul’s plans for a new life.

     As she leaves the city behind, she is suddenly joined by her four puppet friends, who have suddenly grown to adult-size creatures, each of whom dance with her in a ballet-dream sequence that reminds one a bit of a fantastical scenes out of Fellini films. In this final encounter with her imaginary friends, Lili suddenly realizes that what truly existed behind their words was a loving (but very human—sometimes selfish, vain, and even cruel) Paul. As a suddenly grown-up woman, Lili rushes back to the carnival.

   Even if we have been thoroughly engaged by the somewhat magical theatrics of this tale, and enchanted, at moments by Caron’s performance—which The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther lavished with adjectives such as “elfin,” “winsome,” “gracious,” “charming,” “vital,” etc.—we can’t help but doubt that, as a suddenly grown woman, Lili can again return to the totally innocence engagement with her puppet friends upon her return. It is the man behind them she now desires, and, in that fact, surely the magic spell of theater will have been broken. If she continues to enact her previous role, she will now do so as an actor.

     Will Paul, now that he perhaps realizes that his real gift is puppetry rather than dancing, be able to contain all of those contrary aspects of self (Carrot Top, Golo, Reynardo, and Marguerite) within him? Has Lili unmasked his personae, forcing him to now become simply the loving and kind man in is at heart?

     Now that the carnival has clearly gone out of business, will these individuals be able to continue such daringly genuine-seeming performances? We can only fear that that the element of utter belief and wonderment has been consumed by desire, that art has been replaced by life. And in that recognition, we also realize just how much pretense was necessary to move our hearts throughout this film from the very beginning. Art, in short, is consumed in Lili by the real. And reality, in turn, makes all that preceded it somewhat childish, awkward, gangly, even kitsch. Caron, with her saucer-large eyes reminds us at moments of the wide-eyed, crying Keane paintings of lowbrow collectors? There is something slightly embarrassing, accordingly, about the whole sentimental fable which we’ve just experienced. And all of this helps to reiterate those many uncomfortable moments when we sense that the men surrounding Lili are about to reveal the work’s pedophilic propensities, while the alcoholic rages of Paul hint at the possibility of a truly brutal abuse. Perhaps it’s no accident that we’re never permitted to witness Lili’s reunion with puppeteer and the figures he’s manipulated to get her love.

     And at that moment any reasonable moviegoer is forced to look back over what he or she has just experienced and suddenly can’t help but to perceive it in an entirely different manner. Fiction writer and general commentator John Weir, whose grumbling cynicism I’ve grown quite fond of, recently wrote that he too rented the movie and sat down to enjoy a film filled with sentimental memories, but found something in it that I realized only at the end of the picture—that what I had just witnessed was basically an attempted rape by three men of an underage child (at least given the definitions or many countries and numerous of the US states). Weir’s commentary is quite hilarious:

 

“I was ready to be moved by how touching Leslie Caron is, and she is indeed touching, she was 20 or 21 when the film was shot, though her character, Lili, is 16, and the first thing that happens to her… “She wanders into a provincial town somewhere in France, alone, with a suitcase and a drab green dress and silly green hat with a daisy on the brim ("She loves me, she loves me not"), looking for her uncle, who's dead, her father is also dead, no mention of a mother, or siblings, she's an orphan, with no one in the world, and a shopkeeper dude three times her age says he'll give her a job, and he takes her in the back of his store to feed her some cheese, and gets ready to rape her.

     She's in the back with the cheese and the rapist. She's screaming. We hear the screams from the front of the store when Jean-Pierre Aumont walks in, he's a magician in the nearby carnival, also a seducer, he was born—the actor was born—in 1911, so he's 20 years older than Leslie Caron in real life, and clearly at least 20 years older than Lili in movie life, he walks into the store as if her savior, she runs into the front of the store screaming and pursued by the storekeeper, Jean-Pierre Aumont has interrupted the rape, which, he'd have to be stupid not to know what he's walked in on, but he's unconcerned, he smiles at Lili, "Oh you pretty silly thing," rape is no big deal to him, she leaves the store, he leaves the store—and immediately of course she has fallen in love with him!

     We're meant to think he saved her from something, but it was only through circumstance, not from anything he did. She's in love with him, though, and follows him to the carnival, and he takes her into his trailer, she's 16, and he is clearly evaluating her sexually, he touches her hair, the side of her face, and thinks, "Not now, maybe later."

     And so now she's been sexually harassed by two men, the only difference between them that one's an old icky guy, and one's an old cute guy (old in relation to her), and then she wanders lost and alone for a bit, works as a carnival waitress in a skirt cut high enough to let us evaluate her buttocks, we're made complicit with the sexual evaluation to which the men subject her and she gets fired from the waitress job and decides to kill herself, but then another White Male Savior shows up, third in a row, and it's Mel Ferrer who's a puppeteer really tall and wounded he was "in the war" and got wounded like Jake Barnes in Hemingway and calls himself "lame" and limps around and hates the world because he'd been a famous dancer, but he can't dance anymore, because of his limp, but it turns out he's a genius puppeteer.

    And speaking through his puppets he saves Lili's life and falls in love with her and evaluates her sexually and slaps her hard because she doesn't want him and then Jean-Pierre Aumont grabs Zsa Zsa Gabor and says "We're out of here," and they flee, and then Lili flees, but in her flight she remembers that one of the puppets Mel Ferrer puppeteers with is a big sad bear-y puppet who's awkward and sweet and only wants love so—Spoiler Alert!—she goes back to Mel Ferrer in the last 30 seconds of the movie and now she loves him, and he doesn't have to slap her anymore.”

 

      Moreover, Weir argued something that had completely eluded me, that the dancer Paul’s friend, Jacquot, with whom he manipulates the puppets and appears to live with in the small circus trailer is a gay man, a kind of “pet gay” as Weir describes him, who obviously loves Paul and protects him from his worst instincts, including his general cynicism and his maltreatment of Lili. The two, Paul and Jacquot, live is such claustrophobic closeness that it is ultimately difficult to imagine Lili actually wedging her way between them when she returns to claim her “hero.” And how their relationship might be resolved upon her reentry presents the film’s probable ending with an even more improbable solution. 

     If the musical Carnival is a superior work, it is perhaps because the stage musical, in its presentation of the more lurid aspects of the carney-life—evidenced in scenes with the Incomparable Rosalie (Kay Ballard) and the circus proprietor B. F. Schlegel (Henry Lascoe) singing “Humming,” and in the hammy self-preening ballad sung by Marco the Magnificent (James Mitchell) “Sword, Rose, and Cape”—Bob Merrill’s musical displayed the seedy reality of this fly-by-night circus in opposition to Lili’s distorted view of it. In the musical we know, right up front, that, despite Lili’s desires for “Everything to be the same” as in her remembered childhood in Mira, everything thereafter will be different, while Walters Lili pretends things always stay the way they were before.

      The director, Charles Walters, a gay man, had also early in his life been a dancer who introduced on stage the remarkable Cole Porter numbers, “Begin the Beguine” and “Just One of Those Things,” performing in numerous musicals before becoming a director. This work, despite its many flaws, may have been one of his best, although there are some moments of Easter Parade that I still enjoy.

 

Los Angeles, January 2, 2015; revised February 1, 2024

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2015) and My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).