Ingmar Bergman | Gycklarnas afton (Sawdust and Tinsel) / 1953

standstill

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ingmar Bergman (screenwriter and director) Gycklarnas afton (Sawdust and Tinsel) / 1953

 

I was delighted yesterday after watching Ingmar Bergman’s early (1953) film, Sawdust and Tinsel, to discover that it is quite related to his 1955 masterpiece, Smiles of a Summer Night, even if at least one critic has argued this film has more in common with The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring. True, there is something desperate about the dying circus company at the center of this story, and its wagons do visually wind up-hill in a manner that can only call up the ghoulish dancers of death in the medieval-set The Seventh Seal. But Sawdust’s heart is set on love instead of death, and its’ very mortal characters have aspirations and dreams that are far more open and hopeful than the other darker films. This work, like Smiles and Wild Strawberries belongs clearly with his gentle ruminations of love and aging as opposed to his symbolic-laden discussions of moral values and existential meaning.

      Moreover, this early Bergman work seems to have far more of a relationship with Fellini and even Chaplin than any of his other films. It is a rather profound questioning of theatrical values that was later posed in both Smiles and the much later Fanny and Alexander: what is art? Can a circus be an artform; is theater superior; is film better yet? Of course, to the bourgeois townsfolk in which this film is played out there are definite hierarchies. These intruding circus folk are simply carnies, no better than gypsies suddenly intruding upon the upright townspeople’s well-maintained lives. 

      Even the circus head, Albert Johansson (Åke Grönberg) and his current young wife, Anne (Harriet Andersson) seem to want out of their endless wanderings, particularly since Albert’s tent world is on its last legs, with most of their costumes sold in order to survive, and with few animals other than a starving bear and highly overworked horses, some of which are confiscated by the local authorities when the group attempts to perform a circus parade in the manner of America’s celebrations (recreated in films such as Show Boat and Jumbo). Charles Ives even composed a song about such circus parades.

    But this Swedish rag-tag company is on its very last legs, as they arrive in this outlying community in the rain, every last one of them, men and women, struggling against the elements just to raise their tent. They cannot even imagine how they can perform without costumes, without animals, without any true spirit left.

     Silently suffering their complaints, the ringmaster suddenly has a burst of inspiration: he and Anne will go to the nearby theater where a famous director is featuring what appears to be an absolutely mediocre play titled Betrayal.

     Albert is clearly terrified of the encounter, but Anne dresses up in her only remaining formal dress and wows the aging theater-director, who goes along with the circus-owner’s suggestion they might borrow costumes from the theater’s wardrobe in return for a huge party after the circus event, which, of course, the high-bred theatrical folk will also attend.

    At this meeting, the handsome matinee idol, Frans (Hasse Ekman), also catches a glimpse of the beautiful Anne, and with whom, so he declares, he has immediately fallen in love. Surely, Anne is allured by the good-looking man, and why shouldn’t she be? He’s closer to her age, he’s—a least superficially—well spoken, and a truly romantic being. At one point later, he even gently advises her on make-up, suggesting she apply far less of it in order to expose her beautiful face. Who wouldn’t be pleased to have a handsome make-up artist ask you to share his bed—variations of this theme have been played out in nearly every Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers musical, wherein Rogers is lured into a possible marriage with the sissy clothes designer or another such effeminate being before finally realizing she truly loves the “manly” Astaire.

      Yet, Anne remains loyal to her lumpy, elderly man. It’s only when she perceives that they are visiting this backwoods town so that he might visit his ex-wife and his three boys, that she rebels.

     In fact, Albert is plotting to escape circus life by returning to his now quite well-off former wife, who freed from him, has bought several stores in town and made life for her children in a solvent and respectable upbringing. Encountering her formerly restrictive spouse, she not only cooks a breakfast for him, but offers him financial help. But she will not, she insists, allow him to return. For her, his abandonment has made her life better; and, in fact, if you subscribe to her bourgeoise values, she is absolutely right.

     Angry with Albert’s attempt to return “home,” Anne makes her own return to the theater and into the arms of Frans, who, after locking her in and promising her a gift of what he promises is his valuable necklace (another indication that this would-be ladies’ man might also be a closeted gay man), he basically rapes her.

     Visiting a local jeweler, she quickly discovers that the necklace is worthless, and that her attempt to raise funds for the failing circus has been pointless. Not only that, but Albert, returning “home,” watches his wife enter the jewelers, quickly perceiving what has occurred. Accordingly, as one character announces, “Everything now stands still,” as we recognize that events will have to be played out in hellish circles of the circus ring.

     Seeing Frans in the audience with yet another woman, Albert goes ballistic, particularly when Anne, who performs in an equestrian act, moves forward on her horse. Albert threatens the hierarchy and pretense of the actor. But as an older man—like the clown Frost (Anders Ek) in an earlier scene—Albert is beaten and nearly destroyed in the process of protecting his honor.

      Although Frans has temporarily won this bout, however, we now know that Albert and his ilk are beings of honor, representing a strange kind of mutual caring and respectability that none of the theater people nor the town’s church-going folk can ever match. And we know that, without or without makeup, the pretty boy Frans will very soon no longer be able to lure women into his bed, while Albert, who forgives Anne, still has a beautiful and loving woman at his side for, presumably, the rest of his life.

      

Los Angeles, June 13, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2019).     

Chico Lacerda | Estudo em Vermelho (A Study in Red) / 2013

reading red

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chico Lacerda (screenwriter and director) Estudo em Vermelho (A Study in Red) / 2013 [16 minutes]

 

This highly original short film begins with what appears to be a death, a man lying on the bathroom floor, blood leaking from underneath him.

 

     This appears to be the self-advertised prologue of the film’s subtitle: “A Prologue, Two Acts, and a Musical Number.”

      In the first act, a well-dressed young man, sits in a carefully lit room with paintings and drawings on the wall, reading from a book on how to care for a bleeding individual, the details amounting to several long paragraphs. Finished with that, we get a brief view of a car traveling through the city streets of a Brazilian town. In the open sun roof of the automobile, a man in drag, wearing a bright red dress, stands waving his hands as the car moves through the boulevards.

      We return to the young man in a suit now reading from a book describing what appear to be military maneuvers for soldiers on parade.

    Meanwhile, the car with the drag queen in red now drives through what seems to be a suburban section of the city and crosses a bridge.

   From yet another book about how to properly dine out with business colleagues, including the etiquette of proper subjects of conversation appears to be the third reading selection from the handsome young man, dressed in a red bowtie and sitting against the wall of art as he reads.

     The car with the lady in red, now driving a road with woods on both sides, continues to wave as if to an invisible audience, a bit like the Argentinian first lady and politician, Evita Perón.

 

     Our next reading lesson concerns how to prepare for meditation, advising, for example, “Stretch out your spine, head and neck before sitting down. Place your hands on your thighs and sit comfortably. Sit on a firm cushion, that gives you stability, be it in an armchair, chair, on the floor, anywhere.”

      There is now a break in the tape, as the screen goes black, presumably the beginning of the musical number. We are now in a quiet jungle spot, or a least a heavily wooded area. The drag queen appears as if my magic and begins to sing and dance a song in English, “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush, which begins:

 

                                 Out on the wily, windy moors

                                 We'd roll and fall in green

                                 You had a temper like my jealousy

                                 Too hot, too greedy

                                 How could you leave me

                                 When I needed to possess you?

                                 I hated you, I loved you, too

 

                                 Bad dreams in the night

                                 They told me I was going to lose the fight

                                 Leave behind my wuthering, wuthering

                                 Wuthering Heights

 

     Once more we return to the young man reading this time from Spinoza from a of philosophical essay: “If, quoting Spinoza, ‘one does not know what the body can do,’ only aesthetic experience allows us to perceive this ignorance, by promoting the expansion of its possibilities.” He continues in comparing daily life to the aesthetic experience. He reads about art being our major aesthetic experience, which causes a destabilization of our senses, “quite the opposite of mass culture, which functions through the reassertion of the shared practical meanings. “Instead of working through destabilization, mass culture takes place through the stabilization of the familiar, reinforcing the body’s imprisonment imposed by the utilitarianism. If the work of art gives the body access to

life’s possibilities, we may say mass culture works hand in hand with death.”

      The camera cuts, once more, to the dead body on the floor, blood now pooled behind his head. In the second act, a director off-camera calls “Cut!” and the body stands up, a towel put around his shoulders. The camera roves throughout a space with several crew members, actors, etc, at work, including our young reader, now dressed more casually, apparently waiting for the make-up artist. Nearby, on the terrace, a group of women are drinking wine and talking as people are wont do at cocktail parties. gossiping about a cute boy, while others suggest that it’s “too tacky for women to like soccer.” In a back room two people lie nude on a bed. A couple of gay boys are discussing on air their experience of openly holding hands in public in a small Brazilian town. We are presented with brief TV and movie scenes playing on a nearby screen, all ending again with our drag queen performing Kate Bush’s 1978 best-selling single:

                                          Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy

                                          I've come home, I'm so cold

                                          Let me in your window

                                          Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy

                                          I've come home, I'm so cold

                                          Let me in your window

 

                                          Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy

                                          I've come home, I'm so cold

 

    Writing on Letterboxd, commentator Wesley Pereira de Castro enthused about this work:

 

“I saw it by chance on TV and was taken aback: what a lesson in survival in the face of censorship, what a call for total resistance, what a resignifying firecracker of pain, what a marvel of daily militant work. With each movie, I become more in love with Chico Lacerda's work of extreme emotional and nostalgic conviction. Wow!” [translation from the Portuguese by Messerli]

 

      For me, however, Lacerda’s highly intelligent work had less to do with censorship as much as it explores the struggle between those aspects of culture which function under strict laws of control: rules, regulations, and unity of action as opposed to the personal, the eccentric, and even actions that destabilize or subvert—namely art in all its forms.

    Yet, as the director seems to indicate, even art, in its temporary illusions, can itself easily shift into a regulated social behavior as we see in the gossip of the female wine drinkers at the end of the work; the dead man that so moves us in a film gets up and walks away, the reader turns out to be a rather handsomely dressed young man in real life (although still reading while he waits for his make-up); the defiant drag queen transmogrifies momentarily into the good-looking performer Bush.

      If Cathy has severed herself from normative society because she is “too hot, too greedy,” by the end of both song and fiction, she comes home because she is “so cold.”

      What is read can turn into red blood, the hot blood turn back into mere words in a book. It seems to me that what Brazilian director is exploring in his Study in Red is the limitations and boundaries of art, realizing that in pushing the limits of what mass culture enjoys as art, the art itself can be turned into an illusion, itself a force of destruction and death. Censorship may be an anathema, but it also depends upon what the artist has to say and how he says it that truly matters.

       I have certainly gained a high respect for Lacerda’s work in the two short films I’ve now watched, this film and his later Virginity (2015).

 

Los Angeles, April 14, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).

Nathaniel Atcheson | Sombrero / 2008

why is there a sombrero on my head?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nathaniel Atcheson (screenwriter and director) Sombrero / 2008 [12 minutes]

 

For most of the ultimately silly movie titled Sombrero 12 minutes we experience a true theater of the absurd, which thoroughly redeems Dodge College of Film and Media Arts student Nathaniel Atcheson’s freshman effort.

    In a Mexican restaurant somewhere in Santa Ana, California (actually I’ve been there!), James (Michael Osborne) sits waiting for his date, a man who could not be more impatient, tapping his fork against the side of his plate, pounding his feet against the floor. Let’s just, for the moment, call him obviously nervous. 

       We soon learn that, apparently, James suffers several symptoms on the spectrum of autism, needing to vomit almost from the first moment that his good-looking date, Raymond shows up and he gives him an unexpected hug. If nothing else, the totally uncomfortable James self-consciously attempts to explain and justify his every act. For example: the fact that he’s been waiting for nearly an hour, not because Raymond is that late, but because he’s given himself “plenty of time, and checked the weather, and the traffic reports which were extremely misleading but he arrived here safely” nonetheless.

 

     On the other hand, Raymond seems laid back and, particularly given the circumstances of finding himself with such a freak on their first date, is seemingly forgiving and makes every attempt to make his constantly-squirming new friend feel relaxed. He orders a drink and, despite the fact that the most exciting drink James can find on the menu is a glass of water, Raymond orders up for his new friend a “Hurricane,” “a piece of candy, you won’t feel a thing.” The next moment we hands James a rose, which highly confuses the

fussbudget James.

     James confesses that he has no other friends and that he has a difficult time dealing with other human beings, while Raymond suggests he wants to meets somebody, settle done, and get a dog, James interrupting to say that he has fish—actually Siamese fighting fish that he has to keep in two tanks so they won’t kill each other.

     While James is in the toilet, Raymond makes a call to another friend describing James as “a total geek, but he’s pretty cute,” making it difficult for us to believe in just how open-minded this man is. He also catches the attention of the waiter, telling him that the guy he’s with is celebrating his birthday, ordering up a cake and a song to be sung to him by the restaurant’s singing caballeros.

       After his return from the toilet—where James does not vomit but tosses water all over his face, hair, and shirt, while also noticing a poster advertising that every Saturday is “Gay Night”—Raymond’s nervous date, sips carefully on his multifruit cocktail, truly enjoying it, Raymond telling him to go easy since the drink has a way of “sneaking up” on one.

       Meanwhile, Raymond has noticed another couple sitting nearby, nodding his head in greeting. And before he knows it one of the other young men is standing at their table and almost immediately knocks over James’ hurricane. He hurries back to his own table.

       But despite the mishap, James is feeling much better, describing his drink as astonishing and wondering why he hadn’t discovered it earlier.

       But James also wants to ask Raymond a questing, begging him to please not take offense, and apologizing for asking a question that is so unlike him, suggesting that the Hurricane is perhaps affecting his “whole grasp of reality”: “Are you gay?”

       At that very moment, the waiter arrives with a cake, putting a sombrero on James’ head as the two guitarists begin to play their song and sing.

       “Why is there a sombrero on my head?”

       “I thought it was your birthday?”

       “It’s not my birthday.”

       “Are you sure.”

       “Yeah, I’m absolutely positive it’s not birthday. Who do you think I am?”

       “Terry, my blind date. We’ve been chatting on line for a few weeks.”

       “I’m not your blind date. My name is James.”

       “Then who do you think I am?”

       “Robert, my fraternal twin brother. We were separated at birth.”

       “My name is Raymond.”

       And at that very moment both turn their eyes to the nearby table where are seated, Robert (Anthony Sherritt), the boy who knocked over James’ “Hurricane,” and a thin, handsome young man like Raymond, Terry (Christian Zuber).

       The wonderful weirdness of this charming film has come to an end, as they toss appropriate names in the air, finally realizing the mix-up of those they came to the restaurant to meet.     

       In the film’s last scene the four are sitting all at one table, having finally come to their senses, as the Mariachi singers perform in joy of order to which this almost classical comedy has returned.

 

Los Angeles, April 14, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).

       

 

 

 

       

 

 

Frank Borzage | Liliom / 1930

the circle and the line

by Douglas Messerli

 

S. N. Berman and Sonya Levien (screenplay), Frank Borzage (director) Liliom / 1930

 

The second movie I truly remember attending was at the age of 9 with my parents at a drive-in movie theater between our small town, where we were then living, Newhall, Iowa and the town near which we later lived, Cedar Rapids. I think my brother and sister, then 6 and 3 must have been left at home with our neighborhood babysitter. It was my first encounter with a version of Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom, this the Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s adaptation of the Hungarian playwright’s 1909 work. I was utterly enchanted with the Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae work, particularly given its remarkable dance numbers, which included the joyful “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” and the long Billy Bigelow “Soliloquy,” in which the carnival barker imagines the life of both his possible son or daughter and what they will be, which included long dance routines. I think this film not only made me love musical theater at such an early age but encouraged me to love dance as much as I do today.

 

     Although I loved much of this work, I could not swallow the corny conceit of Carousel’s first scenes. Although I had been raised fairly religiously, with regular attendance of church Sunday school, I couldn’t imagine a heaven like the one in which Billy Bigelow begins the film, polishing up plastic stars. And why, I later wondered, was he even allowed into heaven given the fact that, despite his deep love for Julie and his family, he had attempted a robbery, being killed in the process (little did I know that in the original he had committed suicide).

      Even if I didn’t all like the “heaven” scenes, I loved the errant hero, Billy, and his innocent wife Julie, and wished that everything had worked out for them, although even in my child’s imagination I knew it was not possible given his shady activities. If she was desperately in love, he was mixed up with that terrible carousel woman, Mrs. Mullin (Audrey Christie), as her loving cousin Nettie clearly perceived. But even in those days, I must have realized, love was simply something you couldn’t control, and that Julie was doomed simply because of her innocent infatuation. But, once again, even as a child I knew that once Billy had died, despite the last great ballad, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” that Julie and her daughter would very much be forced to “go it alone.”

      Reading of the great Broadway revival this year, how I wished I might travel to New York to see it, but recognizing that it was probably impossible, I was, nonetheless, delighted to find on Filmstruck had another this version of this work. I quickly downloaded and watched it.

      Sorry to report, it’s not a great film, but nonetheless it is very interesting, particularly given Borzage’s expressionist leanings. All of the musical New England trappings of the Rodger’s and Hammerstein piece are replaced with the dark shadings of a Budapest landscape, where the carousel and local amusement park’s lights are projected into whatever space Julie inhabits, including her aunt Hulda’s (Lillian Elliott) seemingly voluminous basement residence, where the entire carnival seems to come alive through her window.

      Although he continually resists the temptations of his friend, The Buzzard (Lee Tracy), we know that it is only a matter of time when that evil influence upon his life will insinuate itself, particularly when Liliom discovers that his lover is now pregnant.

       This version has none of the lightness and possibilities of the Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s production with the noted songs of “If I Loved You,” the June celebration number, and “A Real Nice Clambake,” and doesn’t even have the ruminative imagination of Liliom’s dream of how his child might turn out. From beginning to end, this is a very dark drama where, from the beginning, we know that in the attempted robbery Liliom has killed himself and is banned from heaven for 10 years, traveling via a modernistic railway to Hell, only after the allotted time to return for his one day return to earth—a voyage which he squanders once again by slapping his daughter’s face in anger—although she declares she hadn’t even felt it but simply heard the whirl of the hand against her face. Julie (Rose Hobart) assures her, as if she were asserting that abuse was natural, that this is what love is all about. The most I could praise this version for was that at least its hero was not busy polishing up the stars!

      Yet there is still something powerful about this dour version, as if it were a piece closer to a Carl Dreyer moral drama than the socially dismissive work where Julie’s friend sings of her love for the mediocre Mister Snow and wherein her stuck-up daughters later dismiss Julie’s child for her social inferiority. If Borzage’s drama is far darker than Carousel it may be better for it.

      And its insistent images of circularity, the carousel and Ferris Wheel reinforce the fate that Julie even knows, in her deep love for such a loser, she cannot escape. If Mr. Carpenter, a far better man than Liliom, tries again and again to help build up a better life for her, she rejects it, demanding an independent projection into space that may destroy her, but is, at least, of her own making. Both she and her now-dead husband have sought their alternative routes through a society that would have delimited those circular delights of the carousel. If nothing else these figures are not moving in a straight line, even if they are doomed by the repetitions of their mistakes.

 

Los Angeles, April 29, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2018).