Max Ophüls | Le Plaisir (House of Pleasure) / 1952

locked up in pleasure

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Natanson and Max Ophüls (screenplay, based on stories by Guy de Maupassant), Max Ophüls (director) Le Plaisir (House of Pleasure) / 1952

 

Max Ophüls’ 1952 film, Le Plaisir, is a three-part film, based on stories of the French writer Guy de Maupassant. Together they can easily be read as what price needs to be paid by the guilty pleasures of life. All three stories are easy summarize: the first, Le Masque, concerns an elderly man, Ambroise (Jean Galland), who despite living an someone impoverished life with his hardworking wife (Gaby Morlay), still insists on attending the grand dances at the local dance palace, hiding his aging face behind a mask. Despite his slightly clumsy movements, he still charms the ladies, particularly his dancing partner, Frimousse (Gay Bruvère). But on the occasion that this episode details, the old man suddenly collapses; a doctor is called, who takes him home, where Ambroise’s sad tale is revealed as told by his wife. Despite her husband’s unfaithfulness and his clearly delusional behavior, the wife still claims that she would prefer him as he was as opposed to a bed-ridden man nearing death.

     The best of these tales, La Maison Tellier is based on the famed story about a well-run brothel, owned by Julia Tellier (Madeleine Renaud) who closes down her popular establishment for a day, taking a journey with her workers to the country to attend the first communion of her niece. Suddenly, released from their cloistered lives, the women come in contact with and engage with nature and, during the communion service, begin to cry at the vision of the innocence of those around them, before somewhat morosely returning to their night-time lives.

      The least of these three stories is the last, Le Modèle, about a young artist, Jean (Daniel Gélin) who falls desperately in love with a model, Joséphine (Simone Simon), whose drawings and paintings of her turn him into a rich man. The two, however, almost immediately begin arguing, and eventually he leaves her, moving in with an artist friend (Jean Servais), who, although unspoken, has perhaps been jealous of the love Jean has focused on the young girl. When Joséphine finally discovers Jean’s whereabouts, he attempts to completely disavow her; she jumps from the top room of the building, breaking both legs, while in guilt and sorrow for his behavior he marries her and cares for her for the rest of her life.

 

      Unlike de Maupassant’s cynical tone in the originals, the German-born, but Austrian-centered Ophüls is far more sympathetic with his “sinners”; the director, through his connecting narrator (supposedly the voice of Maupassant) easily forgives characters without seeming to judge them as simply explaining the various kinds of entrapment in which they have found themselves as the price to be paid for the pleasures of the flesh.

      This is particularly obvious in La Maison Tellier for which Ophüls built a completely functioning set, which could have been used inside and out. Yet Ophüls’ camera views the comings and goings and even the nightly activities of the lovely brothel completely from the outside, peeping in through windows and doors high and low, suggesting that by simply watching this work, we ourselves have become sort of peeping-toms, placidly watching the illicit behavior of some of the town’s major leaders without ourselves being willing to participate. Those “inside” activities are only for those who are willing to pay the price, not only the monetary cost for a pleasant night in bed with a woman, but the cost such pleasures generally exact: the joys of simple family life and the beauty of even the nearby views Normandy ocean, which the customers only discover on the one night when the maison is closed.

 

     Madame Tellier’s retinue of beauties are well-taken care of, but they are a bit like birds locked away in a golden cage. Madame Flora (Ginette Leclerc), Madame Raphaële (Mila Parély), Madame Rosa (Danielle Darrieux), and the others she has hired, have paid the price of a closeted life for their enjoyments. And what better way to reveal this by allowing them their Renoir-inspired day in the country. In the small town where Julia Tellier’s brother, Joseph Rivet (Jean Gabin) lives there are wild flowers, rows and rows of growing crops, gentle and innocent girls and boys, and an almost deafening silence that both delights and frightens these caged women. The scenes at night are particularly moving, where the visiting guests find they cannot sleep, unused as they are to the quiet loneliness of country nights. Rosa even takes Rivet’s daughter and her doll into her bed just to have company.

 

     Their tears that infect the moving religious ceremony the next day are the result, as I previously suggested of sentimentality; but they also reveal these ladies’ own dissatisfaction for what they have paid to live their lives. And all of them, despite the insistence of Madame Tellier that they must rush to catch the train back, secretly wish they might stay on in the country village for at least one more night. Meanwhile, however, they have caused serious battles back in their town, as the visiting sailors and gentlemen both are set to male-to-male warfare without the gentle ministrations of their women friends.

 

    Several critics have pointed to Ophüls amazing use of the camera in this film, a camera that hardly ever stops its vast moving sweeps. For Ophüls, it is clear, the camera is not a photographic machine to “catch” images, but a roving being itself, like an eye that can transcend even what our human eyes might possibly witness. Horizontally and vertically, his camera is almost always, as film critic Robin Wood has written, “on the move.” Like a dancer itself, his camera is almost giddy in its attempt to take in the “pleasures” of life, whether that be a simple quadrille, a busy night of song and dance in the “maison,” or the everyday joys of jumping through a meadow in search of fresh flowers to bring back home. Even in the hushed cathedral where the children’s first communion takes place, Ophüls’ camera sweeps up with the angels depicted on the walls to the churches’ high vaults before spinning out to show the cathedral towers from the outside before it again descends with its angels back into the gathered congregation.

       Even on the train, Ophüls makes clear that the world he is depicting is about those who are either inside or out. The two local peasants who enter the car where the madames are gathered are only too happy to get outside into their own world again. And the lecherous traveling salesman, only too happy to be around so many beautiful women, is given an indecorous boot by the women when he tries to take advantage of the situation.

      As the film’s narrator makes quite clear, we, the audience, are also among those on the “outside.” Only if we can imagine the figures he shows us, intellectually and emotionally involve ourselves with their joys and plights, might we be invited in. Fortunately, this director is always happy to help us to find our way in.

        

Los Angeles, May 8, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2017).

King Vidor | The Crowd / 1928

a populist nightmare

by Douglas Messerli

 

King Vidor and John V.A. Weaver, (screenplay, based on a story by King Vidor and Harry Behn; titles by Joseph Farnham), King Vidor (director) The Crowd / 1928

 

Film director King Vidor was always been better in establishing his visual scenes and creating locale than he was delivering fully-developed stories. Particularly in early films such as the silent 1928 work The Crowd—his actors, in this case his newly-married second wife, Eleanor  Boardman, and the even lesser known James Murray—are simply unable to live up to the demands of Vidor and John V.A. Weaver’s screenplay, overacting in the style of Nora Desmond in some scenes, while diffidently portraying their characters in others. One might even argue that the final third of this film is such a hodge-podge of story genre and acting styles that by the time the movie comes to a halt (which, in fact, is the appropriate word) we almost find it difficult to sympathize with our hero, John Sims, a man determined to stand apart from the “crowd,” but who has been as destroyed by it as was Frank Capra’s later John Doe.

 

     Yet, the first two-thirds of film are so visually brilliant that today the film looks as if might have something close to a masterpiece if the author-director had simply found a way for his all-  American Yankee Doodle Dandy (born, like Jimmy Cagney’s character of the 4th of July) to return to his pursuit of the American Dream. Indeed, Vidor filmed two versions of the ending: a total unbelievably happy one and the disappointingly realist one, with the somewhat reconciled family joining the crowd in their laughter at a vaudeville show—which reminds one a bit of the  

desperately empty “he-haws” of Preston Sturges’ prisoners in his 1941 classic, Sullivan’s Travels, also a tale of populism gone wrong.

       Vidor is at his very best in representing the vast mobs of humanity at the beginning of the film when John determines to make it good in New York. He’s an eager young man insistent on the idea that he will rise up in his career, even taking night school to improve his chances. Vidor immediately clues us in to what he is up against by craning his camera over the vast street crowds filled with autos and overlaying those images with others as if to suggest, like the German expressionists, the nightmare quality of a never-ending multiplication of these zombie-like forces. His camera focuses in on a window-pocked skyscraper, panning up and up to finally move in on one particular window frame wherein, it is revealed, are hundreds of desks, each like the other, where clerks seem to be working in a kind of Elmer Rice-like nightmare such as his The Adding Machine, before singling out the desk behind which sits our still-likeable hero. If this sounds familiar, you might recall that Billy Wilder admittedly stole this amazing moment of filmmaking in the early scene in his own The Apartment.

      Soon after, again just as in Wilder’s populist comedy, the workers pile out of the elevators to hit the streets, each meeting up with similarly dressed women of men, ready for a wild night of celebration before their humanity is again stripped from them the next morning. Sadly, it doesn’t take long for the do-gooder John to be convinced by fellow worker Bert (Bert Roach) to join him for a night out with two chickadees.

     In a quite long sequence, Vidor splendidly documents the pleasures of the pre-Disney wonderland, Coney Island—which, incidentally, Donald Trump’s father, Fred, helped to dismantle in the 1960s. Many of the marvels of Steeplechase Park, Luna Park, and Dreamland are featured in The Crowd as, in a single evening, John and his date Mary (Boardman) fall in love and, before the night’s out, agree to marry.

      Even their comical train ride to Niagara Falls (from which, surely, Sturges also drew from for his The Palm Beach Story) and their idyll next to the Falls represent remarkable bits of filmmaking.

      But, from there on, as the couple move in to their tiny flat with a pull-down bed and regular visits from Mary’s poker-faced mother and disapproving brothers, the sentimental story takes over.

     Bit by bit, John and Mary’s relationship begins to unravel as, first, John, going out for some gin for his friend Bert, fails to return home (a weak man, we discover, he is swept into the arms of one of Bert’s woman visitors); he is unable, moreover, to move up any higher in the company for which he works. The accidental death of his young daughter—called in from the streets by her parents while they witness her being struck by a car—results in John’s complete breakdown.    

     He quits his job the very same weekend that Mary is preparing for a company picnic. Without a job, and stubbornly refusing to take a position in Mary’s brothers’ company, he ponders suicide before finally allowing himself to become a human sandwich-board ad man, a position he mocked earlier in the film.

     Perhaps Vidor, evidently on the brink of his own nervous breakdown at the very moment the country was about to slide into the Great Depression, was simply too honest. His common-man hero had very few choices but to become another everyday oaf, despite all of his early aspirations. Certainly, it was not a story that Hollywood producers like Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg could comprehend at that moment in time.

     Although the pre-depression audience made it a success at the box office, The Crowd could not match the sales of Vidor’s previous hit, The Big Parade. Today, however, the film is recognized as one of Vidor’s best, even if his quite spectacular career to some is a bit puzzling. Critic Andrew Sarris quipped: “[Vidor] has created more great moments and fewer great films than any director of his rank.”      In my thinking, there is a sort of dogged honesty in Vidor’s The Crowd that even his grandiosity, sentimentality, and moments of megaphone-like acting cannot corrupt. Vidor, unlike almost any director of his time, could make fiction seem, at moments, like a documentary, testifying to the times he was portraying. And, in that sense, Vidor, despite his being a wealthy man, who traveled to France with F. Scott Fitzgerald at his shoulder, never forgot his humble roots in the South. If John and Mary Sims may never find a way out of their dilemmas, they are, like the later Willy and Linda Lomans who suffer without being properly attended to in a culture of the crass masses, a folk portrayed again and again in American film and stage. We can attend to them, perhaps, only when they quietly disappear from the landscape to reappear over and over again in the ever-forgetful society in which we exist.

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2017).

 

 

Phillip Noyce | The Quiet American / 2002

failed suitors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan (screenplay, based on the novel by Graham Greene), Phillip Noyce (director) The Quiet American / 2002

 

Phillip Noyce’s 2002 adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American is a sensual film with a kind of “ugly American” backdrop.  While superficially Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) may be a quiet American medic who “accidentally” falls in love with British reporter Thomas Fowler’s (Michael Caine) Vietnamese lover, Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), by movie’s end we come to perceive him as very loud self-aggrandizing mass murderer, in charge of a mission to interject the American forces into the long battle between the French and the Communists in Viet Nam.

      While Pyle pretends to be a gentleman who claims to be able to speak only two words of Vietnamese, in truth he speaks the language fluently, and is secretly manipulating the self-proclaimed General Thé to create further havoc within the country so that the US will be forced to enter the political fray. And ultimately he usurps Fowler’s Phuong with the surety of a born conqueror.

       Yet Fowler, in his cynicism and passivity—he seems unable to imagine any alternative when his wife refuses his plea for a divorce—is also not a completely moral man; when we first meet him he has no moral point of view, he explains, and seems to send “reports” back to his London-based paper only sporadically (3 times in the past year). Many of his afternoons and evenings are spent by him and Phuong smoking cocaine. And, finally, Fowler is partly guilty in Pyle’s murder (Pyle is stabbed by Fowler’s office assistant on his way to dinner with Fowler).

       Phuong, herself, has lived many years as a prostitute, working for her sister, who runs a dancing-dining establishment.

 

      Although we come to see Alden Pyle as the most dangerous figure of Greene’s sad tale of the destruction of the Vietnamese nation and its people, there are no true heroes in his world. American advisors such as Joe Tunney and Bill Granger are presented as shady figures and drunks. Phuong’s older sister, far from being the “perfect saint” Fowler ironically describes her as being, is a manipulator, determined to have a sister marry a wealthy American.

       Even the Inspector who is investigating Pyle’s death outwardly disdains the American involvement in the country and appears too diffident to truly explore his suspicions that Fowler has been involved.

       Yet Noyce and writers Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan seem to want to redeem Fowler; after all he gets the girl by default and, through a tacked-on ending not in the original Greene fiction, we see a series on ongoing reports he makes in the years after as the war progresses.

       If the work has any true hero, however, it has to be Pyle. Even though he is severely naïve and destructive (forces that Greene commonly links and attributes to Americans), he is, unlike Fowler, a man of action and a person of beliefs. Furthermore, he saves Fowler at least twice in the film, the first time by suddenly appearing on the scene in a city the Communists have reportedly just attacked, and later, when the two are trapped at an isolated watch tower. Moreover, he gentlemanly tells Fowler of his love for Phuong before he begins to court her. And when he does win her over, it appears that he has all intentions, at least, of actually marrying her. Even after Pyle’s death, and knowing the truth, Fowler admits to the inspector that he had truly liked the man. 

     One might argue that there is a closer relationship between the two men, British and American, that either of the men’s relationship with the beautiful Phuong. If they could only marry each of their best qualities and leave behind their worst, they might become a single moral being: a man of action and belief who with the wisdom of age and experience seeks out the truth, reporting it to the world at large. In a sense their fight over Phuong is akin to the French and American battle for the heart of Viet Nam itself, with neither of them truly knowing her but merely wishing to possess her.

      But, obviously, the truth is that everyone in Graham’s world has nearly equal qualities of good and evil within them, with their interactions often ending in tragedy. Pyle’s longed-for “third force,” in fact, is neither the French colonialists nor the Americas, but, given the growing commitment of the US, the communists themselves who returned the country to a kind of wholeness that no outsiders could bring about.

 

Los Angeles, March 4, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2017).

Edward Rowe | Mab Hudel (The Magical Son) / 2022

gay love on the cornwall coast

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Rowe (screenwriter and director) Mab Hudel (The Magical Son) / 2022 [11 minutes]

 

Edward Rowe’s Mab Hudel is the first film I’ve seen in Cornish. But’s its story, nonetheless, is fairly familiar of sports film in which one or two of the players are closeted homosexuals.

     In this case the game is rugby at which Enys (Chris Jenkins) is a champ, evidently following in the footsteps of his father. The film begins with a celebration of a winning game.

      Enys hasn’t much time for celebration, however, because he makes his living as a farmer, working beside his mother (Mary Woodvine) and grandmother (Susan Penhaligon). It’s a messy job with cattle, chickens, and evidently some crops. Even the day after his celebration, he must rise early and get to work, despite the headache.

      But this morning he’s particularly nervous because the next team he will be facing will be captained by Hykka (Rick Yale), his secret lover. His mother, in fact, finds him mindlessly feeding chicken feed to his cows.

      Soon he on his way to see him, his mother and grandmother talking between themselves: “He is he off to see his fancy man?” “He certainly is.” “And he still thinks we don’t have a clue.”

     The scene with the two of them at the beach is quite beautiful. And commentator Chris Childs notes:

 

“Cornwall’s coastlines are beautifully shot, particularly in an emotional scene on the beach, where the characters swim in bright and dazzling waters. It’s refreshing to see the landscapes of the Southwest shown with such a luminous and dream-like approach, reminding us of the cinematic potential of such environments whilst placing the film in the tradition of similar ‘coastline-coming-of-age’ tales, like the works of Eric Rohmer.”

 

      I’m not sure the Cornwall coast looks as stunningly beautiful as Rohmer’s Mediterranean paradises. And even Enys complains of the cold water. But it is a lovely scene, in part because of the tension, despite their deep love, between the two of them, particularly Enys who seems much more closeted than Hykka, afraid of the public even spotting the rugby players together. As for the weekend, perhaps he is afraid that he cannot possibly be tough enough to his lover on the field.

       But when the game comes, he moves directly in for a serious tackle of Hykka, seriously roughing him up before he secretly kisses him before the entire stadium audience as he whispers, “I love you.”

       This is not a profound tale, but it is a lovely in its brute simplicity, and particularly important in helping push the Cornish language into the LGBTQ arena.

 

Los Angeles, April 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).

 

Jules Nurrish | Kiss Me / 2012

frozen between a violent punch and a kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jules Nurrish (screenwriter and director) Kiss Me / 2012 [11 minutes]

 

Much like the African-American homosexual welterweight boxing champion Emile Griffith—recently depicted in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Terence Blanchard’s Champion, which premiered in 2013, with the Met production occurring in 2022—Nurrish’s short film of 2012 features a queer latino man, Kid Vargas (Raúl Castillo) facing off with the Jonny (Javier Lezama), which ends in the latter’s death, mostly due to a taunt about his sexuality.

 

    Even before the fight gets started, Jonny has managed to whisper into Kid Vargas’s ear, “I know who you are Kid,” sending him into a spin of horror, not only because of his opponents purposeful demeaning of him but because of his closeted homosexuality.

     UCLA film student Jules Nurrish’s work alternates between the Kid’s return home to his wife and child after the fight and the incidents in the ring where he ended up knocking out his opponent, in the process also killing him.

     When his son asks if he won the fight, Kid answers, “Not really,” confusing the boy whose mother has told him his father beat him. The distress of Kid is evident, as he scolds his wife (Sylvia Vargas) for having told Manny that we won the fight. And in a furor the boxer leaves the house.

     In his long walk, he encounters two men kissing under a bridge, his long look back at them indicating his own fascination and desires as he moves forward to his old boxing club, but finding it closed, sleeps outside its doorway for the night, being awakened by the manager, his friend Benny (Hansford Prince).  

     After checking his eye, Benny suggests he should start training again the next week. But it’s clear that Kid has no intentions of returning. Benny assures him that what happened to him could happen to anybody, and Benny tells his own story of how he knocked out an Irish boxer long ago who went to the hospital with brain damage.

      But Benny’s sympathy doesn’t work, as Kid argues that he’s not fighting anymore.

     Benny insists he go home and get some sleep, talk to his wife Sylvia. But Benny hints that there’s something more to the story when he declares, “This ain’t got anything to do with Sylvia.” 

    After a few more frames of the fight scenes and the repetition of the taunt, we see Kid almost embracing another fighter, walking him around the ring as if they were in a slow dance.

     Sylvia is understandably furious with the fact that he has stayed out the night without letting her know where he was, and he awakens to the tromping of her feet, having returned from shopping. She’s been to the gym and Benny has told he of Kid’s intentions to quit fighting. The family is nearly broke as it is, and obviously she is terrified of the consequences. Evidently working as a maid, she wonders what makes him so special that he just walk away to return to bed.

      She attempts to interest him in sex, but he doesn’t even respond, as she pulls away, recognizing that there is a deeper problem between them. She challenges him by suggesting that other men look at her, other men want her, leading Kid to shout “Why don’t you go fuck other men!” their child being awakened in the fracas.      

      Back in the ring, the Kid relives the knockout, the realization that his opponent is dead.

    Unless this highly conflicted man can come to terms with his sexuality, there is no solution to his dilemma, and he remain a man frozen in space between a violent punch and a kiss.

 

Los Angeles, March 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).