Girogos Lanthimos | Κυνόδοντας (Dogtooth) / 2009, USA 2010

a zombie is a yellow flower

by Douglas Messerli

Giorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou (screenplay), Giorgos Lanthimos (director) Κυνόδοντας (Dogtooth) / 2009, USA 2010

 

The Greek film Dogtooth begins with a confounding if somewhat comedic episode wherein the three children of the house, a son, older daughter and younger daughter, turn on a tape recorder which tells them of the four words they must learn that day: Sea, Motorway, Excursion and Carbine. "The sea is a leather armchair with wooden arms." "A motorway is a very strong wind." "An excursion is a very resistant material." "A carbine is a beautiful white bird."

     No, we are not entering a work by Gertrude Stein, but have entered instead a beautiful home with manicured lawns, in which, we soon learn, these nearly grown children have long been incarcerated. They have never been permitted to leave the property, and their lessons, home-taught by their parents, help to prevent them to comprehend anything of the outside world. Only the father (Christos Stergioglou), owner of a nearby factory leaves the house, the mother staying home to tend her children, occasionally telephoning her husband in a locked room, wherein the children believe she is talking to herself.

 

     Along with their strange lessons, come other bizarre tales which the children have been taught, namely that they have a brother who lives immediately outside the wall that surrounds the house, doomed to world behind their "paradise" clearly because of some infraction. Later, when the elder brother discovers a cat on their property, he is so terrified that he stabs the cat to death with a pair of pruning shears, the father using the opportunity to return in a blood stained shirt, telling them that their brother has been mauled to death by a horrible cat. The three are made to get down on their knees near the car gate, barking like dogs.

     Equally bizarre, the children are taught that the passing planes overhead are toys, and discover toy versions of planes planted throughout the property, with which, like much younger children, they joyfully play.

     If this all seems to be a story of a simple a bizarre alternative universe, a kind of Kafka-like reality, we soon discover the terrible implications of their isolation. Alone, the children play games of "endurance," testing which of them can keep her hands under hot water or how long they can remain under water in the swimming pool. When the brother temporarily borrows his sister's toy airplane, she cuts his arm with a kitchen knife.

    To deal with their son's growing sexuality, the father brings home, blindfolded for each leg of a trip, a security guard from his plant, Christina, the only character in this work with a name, who complaisantly agrees to have sex with him—presumably she is paid and, in any event, it would be difficult to say no to her boss—but she is soon bored with the boy's straightforward and uninvolving sexual activities; and, when he refuses to participate in oral sex, calls him a "zombie." Always ready to explain all things away, the mother (Michele Valley) answers the boy's question about the word's definition: "A zombie is a small yellow flower."

     Offering the elder daughter a headband she is wearing, Christina instead involves his elder sister in cunnilingus, introducing the girl into lesbian sex.

     On a second visit, Christina offers the younger sister some hair gel for the same pleasure, but when the girl refuses, she is forced to give up two film tapes instead. The tapes, obviously of Rocky and Jaws, effect the girl immensely, as she plays out scenes from the movies in family life. Discovering the tapes, the father beats her with the plastic tape boxes and later hits Christina over the head with a video player.

     Perceiving the error of their bringing a stranger into the house, the father shifts gears, allowing the brother to pick one of the sisters as a sexual companion, introducing the family into incest as well.

      

     The obvious comparisons between this family and the activities and the Austrian father Josef Fritzi, who for years kept one of his own daughters in hiding in their own home, fathering several children with her, is made even clearer as he see the parents' threats against their offspring. Desperate to bring home the dog he has given over to train from a "friend" to an "animal" who will guard their house and the secrets within, the father tells his children that his wife will soon bear two children and a dog, although the children may be eliminated if they behave.

     The children have been told that they may leave the house only when they shed their canine teeth. Uncomfortable with the sexual activities with her brother, the elder daughter acts out a scene from Rocky in response before smashing her face to remove the tooth, hoping to escape by positioning herself in the trunk of her father’s car.

     The last scene of this horrifying film, says it all. We see the father drive to the factory, leaving the car. But the trunk does not open; the girl does not escape. Whether she has already died or if she shall be long entrapped within before death we cannot tell. For it is there the story ends, while the appalling consequences of this failed utopia remain with us long after.

     Dogtooth was the winner of the Cannes Festival's award "Un certain regard," and was nominated for the 2010 Academy Award for a foreign film.

 

Los Angeles, March 21, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2011) and Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).

Josef von Sternberg | The Blue Angel (English version) / 1930

the angel meets his devil

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carl Zuckmayer, Karl Vollmöller, Robert Liebmann, and Josef von Sternberg (screenplay, based on the novel by Heinrich Mann), Josef von Sternberg (director) The Blue Angel (English version) / 1930

 

Alright, I will admit that Professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), the teacher of Literature and English at a boy’s Gymnasium, a college preparatory high school in Weimar Germany is not truly an angel. A strict disciplinarian not unlike the failed schoolteachers mocked in Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct, Rath cannot even protect his best and favorite student Hans, quite clearly a gay boy, from the bullying actions of the others. Apparently Rath cannot even properly teach, given the inability of some of his students to pronounce the English word “the,” as in “To be or not to be, that is “the” question. Since one student cannot properly pronounce the English word “the,” he forces them all to write it out 200 times. The only thing Rath can offer by way of learning is repetition.

 

     Hans, tripped by two of his fellow students, as he follows his professor out of the classroom, spills out all of his books in hand, including two photos of the famous cabaret singer Lola Lola. Shocked by even his best student having such postcards, Rath takes the boy home, who argues that they have been placed in his books as punishment for his not joining them in their nightly visits to the club, the Blue Angel, where Lola Lola sings. “They all do not like me because I do not go along with them at night!” he pleads.

      Rath clearly does not comprehend the libidos of his testosterone-filled boys, who are nearly all in love with the cabaret singer (an English-speaking Marlene Dietrich), and believes he can terminate their nightly trips to the local Blue Angel bar by simply showing up and gripping them by the seat of the pants.

    The not so clever Hans, accordingly, has initiated what from here on will be a sad basically heterosexual adventure, despite the fact that Marlene Dietrich, as Lola Lola, does her best to represent her female sexuality as being quite bisexually compatible. As Marybeth Hamilton has observed, von Sternberg and Dietrich based her look and performance on the Berlin kabarett clubs such as the Schall und Rauch, Café Grossenwahn, the Silhoutte, and the Eldorado, “where the sexual spectrum blurred (as one Eldorado dancer proclaimed when a patron demanded to know if they were male of female, ‘I am whatever sex you wish me to be.’).”  As Hamilton summarizes: “The costume she wears in the publicity still—a short black dress, silver top hat, black garters, and frilly white knickers—was one that Dietrich contrived herself after seeing it on a cross-dressed sex worker she regularly passed on the Berlin streets.”

  

    In his bourgeois bullishness, accordingly, Rath is a true innocent, a figure who at least believes in the highest ideals even if he cannot himself represent them. One of his few pleasures of life, the song of his caged bird, is stolen from him in the first scene in which he appears, wherein we recognize his absolute incomprehension of its death as he lifts the dead body into his hand in order to inspect it. His action immediately reveals his inability to perceive the world around him—throughout the film Rath is comically presented with unlikely objects (a pair of Lola’s underwear, a native monkey-doll, a postcard in which Lola is dressed in feathers, etc) that requires his spectacles before he can even recognize what he holds out before him. If he is a fool—and he is—he is a fool as Erasmus describes it, a saintly believer not unlike Christ.

      Similarly, in this English-language version of von Sternberg’s 1930 film—shot in both German and English, the latter version long believed to have been lost—Lola-Lola does at first not at all appear to be a “devil.” Certainly, she is a flirt, a woman aware of her powers over men, but in general she is far less course than her fellow singers, and even protects the ridiculous professor when he enters her room, defending him against the others, while gently toying with his confused state of mind. If nothing else, Lola is unperturbed by anything that happens in the comically-controlled chaos around her, and in that she is almost dispassionate, realizing her loving nature—not only being a woman in love, but always in need of love. But like so many Weimar beauties, she cannot connect her desperate need “to fall in love again” with any personal responsibility. Don’t blame her, she warbles, if men get burnt by her flame.

      In short, Lola’s gentle calm, even her somewhat incredulous agreement to marry Rath, does not emanate from any empathetic-feeling, but is aroused by her total selfishness. She is the center of her world, and Rath brings with him, despite his being fired from his teaching position, enough money to help her survive a few more months.

     In that sense, as a woman who demands her men give up everything at her shrine, Lola is a true devil. And Rath not only sacrifices his job, his sense of being, and his self-respect, but is forced by Lola and her players, fake magicians and clowns, to become one of them, an even greater fool, a man who tries to pawn a few postcards to customers and ultimately is transformed into a kind of absurd dolt in the magician’s routine, clucking like a hen while Kiepert (Kurt Gerron) pulls eggs from Rath’s nose.

 

    The shock of these scenes, beautifully played by Jannings and brilliantly conceived in von Sternberg’s great direction, is almost unbearable, with Rath playing both a kind of cuckold (Lola having simultaneously invited into her room the handsome strongman, Mazeppa) but representing a kind of sad Pagliacci, forced to play out his degradation in front of his hometown ruffians at the Blue Angel of the early scenes of the movie. Indeed, “the comedy is over,” as he lurches into Lola’s room, attempting to strangle her.

     At least that might have strangely redeemed his life. But in The Blue Angel, Rath, tied up until he calms down, is released—a release not just from love and its diabolical constraints, but a release from life itself. With no identity left and nowhere to go, Rath lurches through The Blue Angel’s expressionist streets to return to the school where he had once taught, ringing for the night porter and, pushing him aside, returning to his former classroom. There the caretaker discovers him at his former desk, dead, his icy hands already locked in a grasp of that desk as if reclaiming his rightful place in a world that he has abandoned for his irrational lust.. If Rath is not exactly an angel, he is, at least, a kind of tormented saint, deserving not just our pity but our respect.

 

Los Angeles, March 29, 2013, revised February 10, 2024

Reprinted from Nth Position (April 2013).

Béla Tarr | Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies) / 2001

normalizing violence

by Douglas Messerli

 

László Krasnahorkai and Béla Tarr (screenplay, based on his fiction The Melancholy of Resistance), Péter Dobai, Gyuri Dósa Kiss, and György Fehér (additional dialogue), Béla Tarr (director) Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies) / 2001

 

Released in 2000 for the Toronto and Chicago International Film Festivals, Béla Tarr's masterful Werckmeister Harmonies appeared (at least on US soil) the same year as the English language translation of Krasnahorkai's book upon which it was based, The Melancholy of Resistance.

     Although the author was very much involved with the film version, serving as the co-writer of the screenplay, Tarr has made, at least to my imagination, a very different work from the dark, broodingly metaphysical fiction. The film begins with one of the best scenes of all of literature, the appearance of János Valuska, who proceeds to take the drunken patrons of the soon-to-be-closed bar through the galactic patterns of a solar eclipse. Valuska, who plods throughout both the film and fiction about the small Hungarian town, with newspaper bag on his shoulder, face to the ground, is fascinated by the heavens, and explains the planetary motions every chance he gets. Like a mad dance choreographer, Valuska positions the men as planets, Sun, Earth, Moon, spinning them around each other with the patience of a theater director attempting to prompt children into synchronized movement.

“You are the sun. The sun doesn't move, this is what it does. You are the Earth. The Earth is here for a start, and then the Earth moves around the sun. And now, we'll have an explanation that simple folks like us can also understand, about immortality. All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness, where constancy, quietude and peace, infinite emptiness reign. And just imagine, in this infinite sonorous silence, everywhere is an impenetrable darkness. Here, we only experience general motion, and at first, we don't notice the events that we are witnessing. The brilliant light of the sun always sheds its heat and light on that side of the Earth which is just then turned towards it. And we stand here in its brilliance. This is the moon. The moon revolves around the Earth. What is happening? We suddenly see that the disc of the moon, the disc of the moon, on the Sun's flaming sphere, makes an indentation, and this indentation, the dark shadow, grows bigger... and bigger. And as it covers more and more, slowly only a narrow crescent of the sun remains, a dazzling crescent. And at the next moment, the next moment - say that it's around one in the afternoon - a most dramatic turn of event occurs. At that moment the air suddenly turns cold. Can you feel it? The sky darkens, then goes all dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds... the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then... Complete Silence.”

    This scene, the first of thirty-nine slowly paced shots, is totally magic, particularly in Lars Rudolph's boyishly sweet rendition of Valuska's actions. But while in the original novel, I imagined the scene to be in a dark, fire-lit bar crowded with revelers, Tarr presents us with just a few late drinkers within a rather clean room, awaiting Valuska's arrival. In the fiction Valuska is equally awaited, but is also taunted by some who see him, as do most the townspeople, as a fool, a mentally-disabled being who dreams of the heavens only confirms his idiocy.

     Throughout the film, Tarr—despite his grimly black-and-white palette—opens up and orders the landscape of this small town, which, in turn, normalizes it. The gigantic square, with only small groups of men huddled about it, seems far less foreboding than does Krasnahorkai's literary village.

     The relationship between Valuska and the noted musical theorist György Eszter (Peter Fitz), is much vaguer here, and the love Eszter feels for the boy remains unspoken in the film until the very end, which invests their friendship with a feeling more of master and servant, rather than mentor and loyal friend. When Eszter is forced to leave the house in order to campaign for his detestable wife, Tünde (here played by Hanna Schygulla) he is not in the least shocked by the filth and debris he suddenly observes; Tarr makes the place looks almost respectable, a town that in summer instead of the middle of cold winter, might possibly be a tourist destination. 

 

    Even the truck made of corrugated metal that carries the carcass of a whale into the square seems less menacing than mysterious. Because of the sparseness of the script, in fact, much of the menace and general grubbiness of this world is replaced by a sense of incomprehensibility. In Karasnahorkai's fiction the hidden figure of the Prince, who seems to be at the center of the violence soon to take place, speaks in a high-twittering-voiced, unknown language, but in Tarr's work simply speaks, quite normally, in another language. In short the continued normalization of the original often lends the film an even stranger quality. Why is everybody doing what they are doing? To what purpose? To what end?

   This is particularly true of the horrific would-be dictator of the town, Tünde Eszter, who in Tarr's hands seems almost, at first, like a slightly interfering auntie instead of the monster that she is. Her relationship with the Chief of Police is presented less as a disgusting coupling of drunkenness and sex than it is as a kind of quixotic romance. So vaguely is Mrs. Eszter realized in the film that we cannot comprehend what she has in mind by demanding her husband campaign for her causes; we have no way of knowing that it is she who has brought the terrifying circus act to town.

    What Tarr does brilliantly convey is the sort of plodding inevitability of the violent riot that takes place. Although he greats everyone cheerfully as he moves through the city, as if all but the strangers in the square were one large family, the heavy booted Valuska stumblingly marches through his days, just as did the drunken oafs in the bar, symbolizing the prosaic pace and beat of life in this place.

    When the riot does begin, Tarr portrays it almost as in a Brecht-Weill opera, with the hostile crowds marching meaninglessly through the streets en masse. Whereas in the author's fiction, Valuska himself is caught up in their horrifying actions and himself commits violent crimes, here Valuska simply disappears until after the brutal attack on the hospital and its patients—quite brilliantly depicted in Tarr's work—which literally wears out the assailants.

    Just as in the book, Valuska winds up in an insane asylum, but, whereas, in the original he seemed to be forever locked away out of Mrs. Eszter's desire, here the poor boy seems truly to have lost his mind in the violence and its aftermath. Mr. Eszter's visit to him presents him and the viewer with new possibility of redemption for the city and its people that did not exist in Krasznahorkai's fable.

    In making these comparisons, I am not necessarily criticizing the film. It is its own work in which the characters and their actions may be far closer to everyday life, and, accordingly, even more horrifying than the grotesques of the fiction. Whereas Andreas Werckmeister's harmonic principles were insistently declared to be wrong in the Krasznahorkai work, in Tarr's hands the harmonies might even be restored with the survival of the beautiful innocence of the town's sacred fool, Valuska, particularly if Eszter, as he promises, will again take him in.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2001

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (May 2011).

Jude Bourne | Keep on Climbing / 2022

you have to go home again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jude Bourne (screenwriter and director) Keep on Climbing / 2022 [26 minutes]

 

Eli (Joe Bruce), a boy from a small town in the provinces arrives in London and before he can even get his suitcase unpacked, discovers himself in a park, where two girls immediately invite him to join their group and to attend a party that evening.

 

    Eli may be a bit uncomfortable about the sudden activity, but on meeting Riley (Sami Sumaria), and particularly good-looking and fairly well-off young man, how can he resist—particularly when, after getting a look at Eli’s slumlord room, he invites him to stay with him. And meanwhile Riley initiates the newcomer in how to use makeup, do over his hair, and have a truly fun time.

     While Riley himself seems unable to find a job, Eli manages at least to help him create a reasonable resume.

     Riley also reveals how he was bullied as a young boy, but the act seems to be primarily about his missing out on the opportunity to have perfect school attendance rather than, as Eli makes clear, feeling that if he stays where he had stayed in his small home town he would never have been able to escape. Someone how the comparison between the two boys’ situation seems inappropriate, the one about an award for perfection, the other about the necessity of survival.

    A romance, however, quickly gets brewing, and all seems to being going wonderfully, that is until Riley discovers that the money Eli has brought with him in order to survive until he finds a job has been stolen from his mother. Eli insists that when he finds a job he intends to pay her back. But that isn’t nearly good enough for the permanently jobless Riley.

     It’s hard to imagine that Riley, who seems to live a rather wild and empty life, might turn out to be such a moralist. But he quickly demonstrates his anger about Eli’s lies and demands his friend return to the small town where Eli was, as he explains it, literally suffocating as a young gay man. When he asks how much of the stolen money Eli has left, he writes out a check for the missing amount and sends him on his way.

    Eli returns home, and evidently—although we never discover how—is able to get a job to return to the magic world from which he had been ousted. He returns to Riley’s house, but there is no answer when he knocks at the door, and we can only presume that Riley no longer lives there. The idea that he simply might not be home is never introduced, as sadly Eli is turned away and must now find someone else to help him make his way in his new life.

     The young couple, Eli and Riley, would have made a perfect pair; and British director Jude Bourne’s film is quite beautifully shot. But the narrative has the feeling of a moral fable more than a true gay narrative. It seems almost as if a church group might have funded this little work with its moralistic insistence that no matter how bleak one’s life is, one has to honestly earn one’s way to escape. The title says it all: life is a constant struggle to get where you want to go. Even a slightly suicidal kid from the sticks has to earn his way to get to the big city where he can truly discover his identity.

      I’d much have preferred for the new boy to take the money and run, and I might ask to discover who Riley really is and how he found his way into such a nice situation. It appears he must have come from a privileged Anglo-Indian family which makes his moral incantations sound rather hallow.

 

Los Angeles, February 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

G. W. Pabst | Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney) / 1927

confusions of history

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ilja Ehrenburg (screenplay), G. W. Pabst (director) Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney) / 1927

 

There’s something about G. W. Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney that is so inexplicable that, after watching it the other day, I wanted to break open the Netflix return folder, which I’d sealed after watching, to see it all over again.

 

    I didn’t, so my confusion and memory shall have to suffice—although I might argue that this is a film you might want to watch several times.

     That may be necessary, in part, because in this work Pabst combines so very many genres—an issue which those who have read several of my essays must know greatly attracts me. But Pabst, in the movie, attempts to blend a kind of Eisenstein sensibility to what will later be described as an Hitchcockian populist detective story, along with various sentimentalist dramatic tropes of the day.  

     Jeanne (Édith Jéhanne) is a kind of ur-feminist, determined to fall in love with the Bolshevik, possible murderer (Andreas, played by Uno Henning) of her father André Ney (Eugen Jensen), a French diplomat and political observer.

      With the death of her father both she and Andreas perceive that she must escape back to Paris to save her own life—and probably Andreas’ as well. But it is precisely here where this kind of dark Romeo and Juliet story gets confusing, as Jeanne is suddenly transposed back into a far less clear black-and-white reality of values into a world out of Hollywood melodramas, including situations that will be later played out in deaf-mute/blind girl films such as Johnny Belinda (1948), Peeping Tom (1960), A Patch of Blue (1965), and Wait Until Dark (1967). Without explanation, Jeanne’s detective uncle’s blind daughter, Gabrille (Brigitte Helm) falls in love with the Andreas’s evil colleague, Khalibiev, set upon marrying her so that he might kill her and inherit her fortune.

     Even further confusion sets in when Pabst and Russian writer Ilia Ehrenburg overlay their story with a truly Hitchcock-like tale of a stolen diamond that is swallowed by the family’s loving parrot—with shades, here, of the future James Bond entertainments.

     As much fun as this silent-film mulligan stew of stories is, it throws up too many barriers of logic for us to truly comprehend what is going on. Is this a love story, as its title suggests, a kind of muted horror film, a Soviet war story, a detective tale? We can never be certain—which is, obviously, also the film’s allure, and perhaps suggests Jeanne’s own confusion of what decision she ultimately needs to make.

     Pabst brilliantly contributes to this mix of emotional indetermination by offering us very few intertitles, forcing us to find the clues of his cinema in the images themselves. Two fish wrapped in newspaper, a handkerchief intended for murder revealing the missing diamond and the guilt of its owner, and the simple vestiges of these not so-likeable beings all help contribute to a vision of a world, so typical of the Weimer Republic era of Germany, which force us to question all our values, as well as those of the film characters and film-maker himself. Fassbinder must surely have relied on this film in conceiving his great Berlin Alexanderplatz.

     If, at moments, we love the feisty and independent-minded Jeanne in her determination of help and save her Bolshevik hero, we realize her naiveté, and her inability to perceive her own relationship with history. In her heart she remains a lover-secretary, without realizing the consequences of her political, or at least, social effects upon the society at large.

 

Los Angeles, March 7, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).