Louis Malle | My Dinner with Andre / 1981

the world comes in quite fast

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn (screenplay), Louis Malle (director) My Dinner with Andre / 1981

 

My Dinner with Andre was a kind of perfect match between two friends working in the theater, since Andre Gregory was seeking a way to share his experiences and Wallace Shawn was looking for a plan that was structured around a dialogue, just two people talking. How that was transformed into a film—almost inconceivable outside the most experimental of film endeavors—with a well-established international director such as Louis Malle, is almost a kind miracle. And that the film succeeds, that we can sit back and enjoy this exhilarating conversation between the two men is even more astounding!

  

   Although the experiences that both are sharing come from actual events in their lives, the pair argued that they are not, necessarily, playing themselves, and that they would have loved to switch roles to prove that fact. Yet we sense a bit of exaggeration here, particularly in the case of Andre Gregory, simply because the experiences he relates, and evidently encountered, are so utterly original that it would be hard to link them with another person; and they are so brilliantly recounted that it is difficult to imagine another playing his role.

     For nearly half the film Gregory is dominant as, answering occasional questions Shawn poses, he explains why he had left a successful career in the theater and his own family, moving temporarily to Poland to work with the famed Polish experimental theater director Jerzy Grotowski. Asked by Gregory to join his actors in their seminars, Grotowski turns the tables and asks Gregory to run the seminar. The American agrees on the condition that the actresses consist only of 40 Jewish women who speak neither English nor French; Grotowski commits, and organizes a forest retreat in a Polish forest (although men are included in the group). The theatrical experiences and the descriptions of Grotowski's "beehive" reveal the elemental and spiritual changes that these actors undergo in creating a new kind of theater, one that alters the soul.

     Yet Gregory goes even further in seeking new enlightenment, joining an unusual agricultural community of men and women in northern Scotland, traveling to the Sahara desert with the Japanese monk Kozan in the attempt to create a play based on seemingly miraculous coincidences with regard to the fiction The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and being buried alive on Halloween by a theatrical group in Long Island. In short, Gregory's life is one of a search for enlightenment as many individuals attempted through the later 1960s and early 1970s. His vision is akin to aspects of the hippie movement, in which society was declared dead or destructive, and wherein personal possessions, cultural habituations, and political dogmas were perceived to have destroyed the individual, turning beings into robots instead of thinking and feeling people. Speaking of the culture of his time, Gregory notes:

 

“They've built their own prison, so they exist in a state of schizophrenia. They're both guards and prisoners and as a result they no longer have, being lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they've made, or to even see it as a prison.”

 

     In such an unfeeling world, the speaker summarizes, "I mean it may very well be that 10 years from now people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by 'something'." As Gregory notes, for a few moments during love one loses oneself, in a moment of ecstasy one is merged with the other, but then a few seconds later, the everyday routine of being returns, "the world comes in quite fast."

     During the second half of the film, the more nerd-like Shawn takes over, arguing that, although he comprehends what Gregory has been saying, the kinds of experiences that his friend has sought out are not available to most people, and that most people do not take Gregory's seemingly startling insights and coincidences in the same way. There is, he argues, a world of magic or science: although he might think twice about taking a trip after receiving a fortune cookie saying "beware of a voyage," he would still take the trip: "That trip is going to be successful or unsuccessful based on the state of the airplane and the state of the pilot, and the cookie is in no position to know about it."

     After Gregory argues that we have lost touch with the moon and the sky and the stars through our demand for being surrounded by things of pleasure, such as the electric blanket his friend has mentioned, Shawn speaks out:

 

 “Yeah, but I mean, I would never give up my electric blanket, Andre. I mean, because New York is cold in the winter. I mean, our apartment is cold! It's a difficult environment. I mean, our life is tough enough as it is. I'm not looking for ways to get rid of a few things that provide relief and comfort. I mean, on the contrary, I'm looking for more comfort because the world is very abrasive.”

 

     Ultimately, what Shawn argues for is simple, a cup a coffee, the presence of his girlfriend, Debbie.

     In his wanderlust the brilliant raconteur Gregory has surely convinced those of us from a generation who grew up after World War II of his moral position. Many of us might agree with h

is summaries of life in the latter half of the 20th century. When I shared this film, however, with a class of students, most of whom were born after this 1981 film was made, there was almost no sympathy at all with Gregory's activities. My students nearly all sided with Shawn.

     And why should they not? These are young people in a depressed economy who have paid hard-found money to get a higher degree to help them in their careers, and maybe, allow them to find a market for their creative endeavors. They are, despite the differences of their cultural experiences and perceptions, the character Wally Shawn portrays.

 

    In fact, Gregory himself later questions his mad search for a new reality, for a way of living outside of what he sees as the frozen world of dead thought. Who did I think I was? he asks of himself, outrageously comparing his activities to those of Nazi architect Albert Speer, a cultured man who thought the everyday rules of life did not apply to him. Gregory, despite his declared perceptions, seems to have returned to the groove of everyday life, living his wife Chiquita and dining in fine restaurants such as the one the men are sitting, dining on quail, drinking good wine.

     There is throughout the film, despite its serious philosophical questions, a slight sense of satire about the whole thing. Gregory, after all, could only undertake his immense searches throughout the world by having enough money to do so, although others sought out such international enlightenment with little more than a knapsack and thumb. He is, quite obviously, a man with connections and some wealth. In one of the earliest speeches of the film Wallace Shawn describes his own changed life: I've lived in this city all of my life. I grew up on the Upper East Side. And when I was ten years old, I was an aristocrat. Riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now, I'm 36, and all I think about is money." One does not necessarily need to know that Shawn was the son of New Yorker editor William Shawn and journalist Cecille Shawn to comprehend that he has undergone his own big changes in life. If theater has made Gregory successful, for Shawn it has made life difficult, forcing him to live at an almost impoverished level.

 

“The life of a playwright is tough, it's not easy as some people think. You work hard writing plays and nobody puts them on. You take up other lines of work to make a living—I became an actor—and people don't hire you. So you just spend your days doing the errands of your trade.”

 

     His girlfriend, Debbie, works hard at two different jobs. The wonderful dinner Gregory offers him of two quails, results only in Shawn's observation that he didn't realize that they would be so small.

    While Gregory hates what people call reality because it reconfirms the ordinary and deadening of life, Shawn argues that serious plays are about human alienation and help to make people aware of reality.

      Does our acceptance of the ordinary destroy our lives, turning what might have been the extraordinary into an inability to think, even to feel?

      These philosophical opposites have been at the heart of great, and not-so-great literature for centuries. From Plato's Cave to Lear's madness authors have created dialogues centered upon these very issues. It is less important to find a definitive answer to the questions these two viewpoints pose, I suggest, than it to ask ourselves these questions again and again. In the end, Gregory goes home, it appears, to what has now become a rather comfortable existence. Shawn, having the last word, observes:

 

“I treated myself to a taxi. I rode home through the city streets. There wasn't a street, there wasn't a building, that wasn't connected to some memory in my mind. There, I was buying a suit with my father. There, I was having an ice cream soda after school. And when I finally came in, Debbie was home from work, and I told her everything about my dinner with Andre.”

 

     And so the banal is linked to the sublime.

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2011).

Dušan Makavejev | Nevinost bez zaštite (Innocence Unprotected) / 1968

mother’s babe of steel

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dušan Makavejev and Branko Vucicevic (screenwriters), Dušan Makavejev (director) Nevinost bez zaštite (Innocence Unprotected) / 1968

 

Even the generally confident reviewer Roger Ebert had difficulty in describing Serbian director Dušan Makavejev’s 1968 film, Innocence Unprotected.  Makavejev’s film tells the story of a 1941 film Nevinost bez zaštite, in English, “Innocence Unprotected,” made by and starring Dragoljub Aleksić, a Yugoslav gymnast/stuntman who, during the Nazi occupation, attempted to film the first Serbian talkie, supported by the anti-Nazi underground.

      Needless to say, the film was never released, although some of the film’s figures, which include members of the original cast, claim that for a short while it was very popular; and its director proclaims: "Gentlemen, I assure you the entire Yugoslavian cinema came out of my navel. In fact, I have made certain inquiries, and I am in a position to state positively that the entire Bulgarian cinema came out of my navel as well."

      In fact, the film was rediscovered by Markavejev, who interweaves its absurdly melodramatic story with footage of Aleksić’s Houdini-like stunts, German Nazi parades and maneuvers, and a documentary-like discussion with the earlier film’s actors, part of which is recorded at a picnic lunch beside Aleksić’s grave.

 

     The story of the original film is itself a kind of unintentionally comic drama about a young girl who has fallen in love with the remarkable performer Aleksić over the objections of her cruel stepmother who prefers that she should marry a wealthy bureaucrat. She even punishes her daughter for going out and attempts to arrange for her daughter’s rape by the businessman, actions which bring Aleksić flying through the sky on a rope to save her.

     Markavejev presents the 1941 film rather comically, often tinting its frames and coloring the lips of characters in red. Yet, oddly, his love for the somewhat ridiculous film, made in opposition to the occupiers, becomes obvious as he includes scenes of various Serb, Croat, and other Yugoslav based dances with costumed actors.

 

     Strangely, some viewers of the 1968 film saw it as pro-Nazi, which is difficult to comprehend given Markavejev’s mocking of the censorship the original received, just as his own films were often unofficially banned from Yugoslav screens.

      And in the end, the “mother’s babe of steel” at the center of his tale is represented, despite his often corny self-aggrandizements and endless body posing, becomes a kind of innocent hero who, like the innocent heroine he tries to rescue from obscurity, is “unprotected,” a victim of a society that seems to prefer the mean and vicious divisions of its underlying cultures.

      By recontextualizing the original movie with its stars’ real lives, Markavejev gives the original film what might be described as a new life, and gently puts its hero into the folklore of Serbo-Croatian culture. The film won Silver Bear Extraordinary Prize of the Jury at the 1968 Berlin International Film Festival.

 

Los Angeles, July 24, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2017).

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Bolwieser (The Stationmaster’s Wife) / 1977, USA 1982

methods of escape

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenplay, based on a novel by Oskar Maria Graf, and director) Bolwieser (The Stationmaster’s Wife) / 1977, USA 1982

 

Filmed shortly before one of Fassbinder’s very greatest films, In a Year with 13 Moons, his 3 ½ hour 1977 television film, Bolwieser (The Stationmaster’s Wife) pared down to about 2 hours in the DVD version I saw the other day, may appear to be a much-more contained soap-opera given his next film’s almost hysterical comic and tragic scenes. Many critics, in fact, have described this work as a kind of provincial Madame Bovary.

      Certainly Hani Bolwieser (Elisabeth Trissenaar), married to the local stationmaster, Bolwieser (Kurt Raab)—a man she, herself, enduringly calls “Chubby,” despite his assertions that he is not “that fat”—is a woman easily swayed in matters of the heart. Although she appears to actually love her husband, and certainly has intense sex with him, she is also in love with the handsome village butcher, Frank Merkel (Bernhard Helfich), with whom she has not only regular sexual liaisons but, with her husband’s approval, to whom she provides a loan so that Merkel might buy and improve a local restaurant and dance club. Fortunately, the butcher is better as a businessman than he even is as a lover, and the Bolwiesers begin to see a healthy profit from the interest of their loan. Bolwieser, since he has interest in the club, is encouraged to visit the club at nights, but he clearly would rather stay home with his wife to engage in sex.

     One quickly perceives that the stationmaster is so obsessed with his wife that he is utterly impervious to the local gossips who whisper among themselves about his wife’s affairs. When, at a funeral wake, the patrons also “wake” him up to the truth, Bolwieser finally confronts Hani, who pretends such an intense innocence that her husband has no choice but to believe her; and ultimately she and Merkel join together to sue the gossips and win, despite the fact that Bolwieser himself stumbles over his own testimony, the fact of which later brings his downfall.

      Yet Hani is off to get a new hairdo, and begin yet another affair with the hairdresser, Schafftaller (Udo Kier), an even more handsome man, but one who might remind inveterate filmgoers of the clothes designer, Alberto Beddini (Erik Rhodes) in the Fred Astaire film Top Hat, a man more in love with himself (and, consequently, his own kind) than with the woman he is courting. In the small town of Werberg, unfortunately, which by the end of the movie we perceive is being infiltrated by Nazi supporters (including Bolwieser’s two incompetent employees at the station), that Weimer-like behavior is intolerable. And, when finally, Hani determines to overthrow her passionate marriage with her infatuated husband for the slightly more sophisticated charms of her hairdresser lover, Bolwieser has no choice but to admit his wife’s behavior and refute his own past testimony, which, after a short, dramatic court drama, sends him to jail.

      The cuckolded stationmaster simply accepts his fate, as the slightly, but only slightly sorrowful Hani moves on to the rest of her empty life. 

     It is easy to characterize Hani as a whore, a woman without any loyalty to her husband, and an open liar who destroys her men. But Fassbinder also shows us, quite clearly, her own torture by these men, who all claim her as their property, describing her body itself as evidence of their conquest. At least the slightly effeminate Schafftaller tempts her with a different lifestyle and a way out of the Werberg “empire” which, in the director’s metaphor, represents the future Nazi control of the German heartland. We can imagine, surely, that as much as she may try to escape the male-controlled world of the Nazi nightmare beginning to close in upon her, she will be unable to succeed.

     At least, Bolweiser, representing another version of Fassbinder’s memorable character Franz Biberkopf of his 1980 television series, Berlin Alexanderplatz, may survive simply because of his mental incompetence. Yet like Biberkopf, the naïve Bolwieser will obviously fare no better in the Third Reich. If nothing else, Hani may become a high class whore which might, at least, connect her with the people to help her get through the war—or utterly destroy her in the process.

      In the end, it appears, Fassbinder’s melodrama is simply another extension of his central concerns. How does one survive in a world determined to destroy and outlaw different forms of morality and perceptions of love that lie outside of what is described as the norm. The next step in this exploration was quite naturally to question the boundaries of what even a body was, and who might possibly define and control it: issues very much at the center of In a Year with 13 Moons. And, looking back on this film now, we can recognize its importance in Fassbinder’s amazingly productive career. I have not yet encountered, despite the equivocations of other critics, a film by this director that I could dismiss. And The Stationmaster’s Wife is clearly an important work.

 

Los Angeles, June 11, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2017).

Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska | Honeyland / 2018, USA 2019

hatidze’s bees

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska (directors) Honeyland / 2018, USA 2019

 

As one reviewer commented it is almost hard to believe that the new documentary Honeyland, set in an almost totally unpopulated Macedonian territory, is not a scripted art-film. But when you realize that the filmmakers Ljubomir Stefanoy and Tamara Kotevska spent three years with their subjects, working in a hut without any indoor lighting in the house of a middle-aged women (Hatidze Muratova, who looks alas far older than her years) and her dying mother, Nazife, you begin to perceive that the golden tones you are witnessing are those of firelight, of natural lighting, and the landscape itself.

 

      Much of the goldenness of this film has to do with the major activity of Hatidze, beekeeping. She attends to bees, always in natural locations (a hidden beehive high in a mountain pass, another in a local tree), the buzzing hives members almost seeming to recognize her gentle relationship with them: she takes, always, only half of their honey, leaving the rest for them to survive. Although she has a bit of smoke to protect herself, they never seem to bite her. Indeed, she, in her ochre blouse and deep green scarf, seems to take on all challenges with great aplomb, including the caregiving to her 85-year-old mother, who can no larger even sit up. As her mother, herself, realizes: “I’m not dying, I’m just making your life misery.”

       When she acquires enough of the precious honey, Hatidze bottles it, traveling by train to Skopje to sell the precious amber liquid, at a high enough price, evidently, that she and her mother can purchase what they need to survive on for several more months. Winter, when the bees grow dormant, represents a clearly difficult period for the couple, but during the spring, summer, and fall, this is truly a kind of honeyed-land.

        And it may have remained a land of “milk and honey” until the caravan of Turkish neighbors suddenly arrives, setting up camp next to her and her mother’s hut, with a passel of hungry children, a trailer truck, and an entire herd of scrawny cows.

        You might have thought that the quiet and secluded Hatidze might have met their sudden intrusion with fury, but instead she greets them with friendship, even taking one of the neighbor Hussein’s young sons into her confidence, explaining how to be an expert beekeeper by taking only half of everything they produce so that that they can survive as a colony. He is entranced by her gentle explanations and is almost ready to become the son she has never had.

        But his inattentive father soon brings in dozens of beehive containers, delighted when he suddenly finds, after selling some of the honey, that he can now properly feed his voracious family. But soon after, egged-on by a city speculator, he becomes determined to produce an almost impossible amount of honey, obviously saving none for the bees themselves who bite him and several of his children, quickly moving on to kill Hatidze’s bees.

       At one point, her new neighbor even cuts into a tree in which the bees have long inhabited, stealing some of the honey upon which Hatidze and her mother have counted to help support their meager lives. Without even having to speak, the film makes the dangers of inattention to nature and the greed of intruders in such a natural environment. I suspect that these filmmakers had not even imagined that their original movie about a sort of sacred creed with the natural world would turn into a moral lesson for those who have no respect for that world.

      Although the Turk’s cows begin to calve, most of them die, which Hussein claims is due to the inattention of his wife but is more likely a problem of the lack of sufficient corn and other foods with which he feeds them.

      Meanwhile, Hatidze and her mother, without their major source of living, are forced to eat the Macedonian version of gruel, which Nazife refuses to swallow, throwing her bowl to the floor, which their dog happily laps up, while Hatidze, herself now near starvation, attempts to sweep up the remainder onto her own plate.

       With the death of the neighbor’s cows, Hussein and his family quickly pack up and move on. But as winter settles into this outpost, Nazife also dies, and Hatidze is forced to bury her mother while, without obviously saying so, she is left with very little to eat. At one point we see her scooping up the snow for something to drink.

        As spring slowly returns, we see Hatidze return to the high mountain retreat with which the movie begins. Her bees have come to life again, as she carefully removing only one honeycomb, while leaving the rest. She eats half, sharing the other with her pet dog. She will survive, we comprehend, better off alone, or at least without her uncaring neighbors.

        This Macedonian film is clearly an unattended metaphor for our lives here in the US as well, except that it’s not the “outsiders” who threaten us as much as it is from those within our country. Bees are now dying throughout the world, and it is not only their honey that we are missing, but the flowers and other plants they pollinate. 

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2019).

Clint Eastwood | Mystic River / 2003

that childhood car

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brian Helgeland (screenplay, based on the book by Dennis Lehane), Clint Eastwood (director) Mystic River / 2003

 

Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River which, years after its original release, I saw for the first time the other day, is a complex movie based on a kind of standard trope: three young boys, close friends in a Boston neighborhood, grow up to become social and moral opponents in their lives as adults. It happens all the time, or, at least, that’s what testosterone-driven male directors would like you to believe—not only Eastwood, but Martin Scorsese, even the creator of melodramas Douglas Sirk have all done variations of this theme.

     Yet this film is far more complex than most such films. Afterall, the young boys involved, Jimmy Markum, Sean Devine, and Dave Boyle, seen playing street hockey in an early scene, behaving somewhat badly as they attempt to write their names in freshly poured sidewalk concrete, are suddenly accosted by a man pretending to be a police officer, who demands their names and home locations before pulling away, quite inexplicably, with Dave, demanding him to enter a car wherein sits a priest—the two of them abducting the boy for 4 days while continuously sexually attacking him—abuse is too kind of a word in this case of utter rape and sexual battery! That the equally macho Eastwood would even dare to take on this subject is quite amazing. But then this diehard Republican apologist has always been a rather surprising figure in the celebrity and film world.

    Pulled out of his native social community, Dave almost immediately loses contact with the world he has known, and as an adult, (performed by Tim Robbins), he remains an outsider—a person who as the simple representation of the death of his youth is shown through the closure of a window blind—remains haunted by his abduction. Not that his childhood friend Jimmy (Sean Penn) is much better off; he, now an ex-con, runs a local popular neighborhood grocery and liquor store, where he is still close in touch with Dave. Not only that, but by marriage, the two are still related, having married cousins.

     Actually, the two former boyhood friends are also related by their manias and sense of violence. Jimmy is obsessed with the fact that his 19-year-old daughter Katie (Emily Rossum) is dating a boy, Brendan Harris (Tom Guiry) whom he despises, for reasons that are not immediately revealed, but later we discover have to do with the boy’s father, who committed the crime which put Jimmy in prison. But the very fact that he is still attempting to control a 19-year-old child speaks a great deal about his macho persona. Certainly, his wife, Annabeth (Laura Linney) is equally unhappy in their relationship, but that doesn’t seem to be the same importance as Jimmy’s mania.

     In fact, women in this drama are nearly deleted, including Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), Dave’s wife, who suddenly is intimidated to help her husband to “clean-up” after a mysterious event wherein, he claims, he was forced to kill someone who accosted him.

     The same night Jimmy’s daughter Katie is brutally murdered, her body left mutualized after Dave has witnessed her in a local bar with her girlfriends.

     The plot of this mystery/murder film gets even more complicated when the third childhood friend, Sean (Kevin Bacon), now a police detective, becomes involved in the search for Katie’s murderer.

   In a sense, the different directions of these three boyhood friends now reveal their extreme differences, as Dave begins to suspect Jimmy’s involvement in his daughter’s death, while Sean, with careful deliberation, attempts to track down the murder(ers).

     The fact that the hot-headed Jimmy becomes increasingly convinced that Dave has destroyed his daughter, represents not only his mania, but his guilt for not being the one who was enticed into the childhood car.

       It is as if all three boys were so terribly abused that day so long ago that none of them can let it go. At least Sean, with his partner, Detective Sergeant Whitey Powers (Laurence Fishburne) work together to track down the true killers; yet Sean’s own wife, pregnant at the time, has left him, so we must recognize, as another failed lover, another destroyed member of this trio.

      Convinced of Dave’s guilt, Jimmy corners him and demands an admission of his activities. Hoping to free himself of Jimmy’s immediate wrath, Dave admits to the murder—despite the fact that the man he has murdered, in fact, was another child abuser, whom he had discovered in a car with a young kid. Yet Jimmy, convinced of his righteous revenge shoots the former friend in the head, releasing his body in the Mystic River of the title. In a sense, it is a revenge for his own lack of courage all those years earlier, a cleansing of his own guilt for not speaking out for his friend those long years ago, for not being the child the two villains chose.

 

     Finally, Sean reveals they have uncovered the real killers, two kids, one of whom was the son of the notorious “Just Ray” Harris,” the man who sent Jimmy to jail and the father of his daughter’s boyfriend, brother to Brendan, resulting in Jimmy carrying even more guilt and sorrow for the rest of his life. He confesses to his wife, and Sean seems to know that the disappearance of Dave has something to do with Jimmy. At the end of the film, it is unclear just how much longer Jimmy can survive.

      I might argue that Eastwood and his screenplay writer, Brian Helgeland, might have simplified their story, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane. But, obviously, that was just the point: the interconnected stories of these young men are just part of the inextricably complex and tortured tales of young men and women growing up in what Eastwood shows as almost sour sewer, the Mystic River flowing through Boston, which we later rediscover in works such as in Tim McCarthy’s Spotlight. That great Brahmin world of high ideals was never what it pretended to be.

     The children in Eastwood’s movie were just those kinds of abused kids that the news reporters shed their “spotlight” on in McCarthy’s 2015 film, boys who never could fully recover from their sudden abuses on the streets in which they were simply playing hockey and memorializing their names into the local pavement. They were innocents suddenly put into another world apart from their imaginations. Can you blame them for being failures as adults?

 

Los Angeles, September 28, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2019).